Nearly 11. Still nothing from Sue; for as he had been looking in the fridge she had walked out with Charlotte along a canal frontage created in the mid-1980s by one of the privately funded regeneration schemes so typical of those years; and as his pasta water had boiled the two young women had arrived at the bar of a fairly standard place that called itself ‘The Sitting Room’, with ‘Everyone Back to Ours!’ scrawled on the doors to differentiate itself from the other fairly standard places all around; and as he sat, forking food into his mouth and thinking of his father, Sue and Charlotte were sitting with cocktails waiting for their salads and a side-order of chips to share.
‘I like it here,’ Charlotte was saying, ‘because it’s so utterly basic.’ Sue looked around and heard the music of was it Cheryl or Nicole? – and saw sturdy wooden chairs at sturdy wooden tables; worn floorboards; loungy areas with shiny sofas that were in fact just like the one at home or rather in the rented house at The Willows; a fish-tank room divider; a long bar with spirit bottles glittering behind it.
‘Because if you go next door but one to, say, Armando’s, they want you to think you’re doing something special. They want you to feel you have to speak genteelly and quietly and pick more delicately at their food. But when this whole area was built twenty years ago it must have been just, like, lot 53 along from lot 51 which was this one. They must have both been labelled “Hospitality and Catering” which just means places to eat and drink. And what I like about here, is, that’s what it is. Because so much of the rest of my life isn’t. Isn’t basic. Isn’t . . . if I say it isn’t honest I don’t mean what you think I mean. Don’t worry, I’ll explain. I’ll explain! So that when I come here, and just eat, and . . . drink, and get the chance to have a really good natter, I really appreciate it. Because’ – she was draining her glass: ‘Do you ever have the feeling of becoming someone, or having become someone, you don’t really want to be?’
‘I don’t,’ said Sue, feeling like the target for something; ‘not really.’
‘Shall we move on to wine?’
‘Yeh I’ll get it. White?’
‘No let me.’
‘You got the cocktails.’
‘But this is my . . .’
‘No I can do it. I mean I do feel frustrated sometimes,’ Sue said, standing, moving away with a look that said we’ll carry this on in a minute. She waited assertively at the bar, ignoring some fat guy on a stool who was shifting his bulk, he must be looking at her, his mouth half open, getting ready, she knew, to say something if she glanced at him; only she didn’t: she got the bottle and the glasses and turned away from that fat guy, who was now – ha ha – deflating, and went back to Charlotte, and sat, and poured, and said:
‘But I do basically think of myself as being the person I want to be.’
‘It goes back to my upbringing,’ Charlotte said. ‘Of course,’ she added, in louder groaning tones. Then she carried on more quietly, in explanation: ‘It was a house in the country. Fields around it. I had ponies, for Chrissake. I went to gymkhanas. I had two big brothers and climbed trees with them. I was my parents’ little flower. Dad was working in the city and sometimes he was away. But not very often because he’d done that thing of making his pile and basically semi-retiring. Mum didn’t work but she was busy with, oh, church fêtes, being a volunteer for the RSPCA. There was a woman from the village who looked after me when my parents weren’t there. And she was pretty indulgent. So what I mean is: it was so secure. It was like Paradise, really, in that everything was thought of and arranged.’
‘And also pretty nice, it sounds like.’
‘Yes. I can’t deny that it was.’ Charlotte leaned forward, lifted her glass, drank. Then she propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her folded hands. Her wide, plump face was angled downwards and a veil of straight blonde hair fell across. ‘Then’ – her eyes were focused on the bottle in front of her – ‘I went away to school and that was basically much the same. I mean bigger, obviously. But the feeling of security, and of everything being organised, and of a channel to follow, you know, a kind of person you were meant to become – that was what was still the same.’
‘And what’ – Sue asked brightly, making an effort to be sympathetic – ‘was that kind of person?’
‘Oh.’ She looked up at Sue through the dangling strands. ‘A healthy attitude to life.’ She moved her eyes away again, focused in mid-air as on an autocue. ‘Active, but also feminine. Particular in one’s tastes, but never making a fuss. Able to appreciate the finer things, but not reliant on them. As at home on safari as in the Ritz. Having a social conscience, of course; but not allowing it to blot out everything that’s good in the world.’ She was sounding sententious now: ‘A thoroughly modern girl. The values of ladyship, adapted to the challenges of today.’
‘Gosh.’
‘It really was like that. So anyway, then I went to Brookes to do History of Art’ – but now their food was being put down on the table, the waitress asking if there was anything else, the two of them unwrapping knives and forks from the real cloth napkins. They dug in.
‘Which went along,’ Charlotte carried on through her munching, ‘just as you’d expect. Until one day . . .’ she said dramatically.
It really was quite charming, this turn into self-parody Charlotte took from time to time. It was actually what made her bearable.
‘We were doing a studio visit for a module on contemporary art in practice. There was this artist there whose work was all about repetition. She had a little sandpit. She was sitting in front of it cross-legged, reaching forward: I remember being amazed by how lithe she was, how far she could reach, she was rocked forward so as to be balanced really on just her knees and toes. Anyway she had a camera rigged up above it on a tripod pointing down. What she was doing was basically just doodling in the sand. After each doodle she’d take a shot. She had a remote for the camera so she could do that without getting up. And I was standing in the doorway, watching her.’
Charlotte took another mouthful of food and glug of wine. The place was louder: the music had toughened up a bit – Rihanna – and people were shouting above it.
‘I really felt,’ Charlotte enunciated clearly and firmly, ‘that I was with her, you know, that I was understanding her. I could see how the work was referencing Jackson Pollock and that it was all about being less grandiose. Each doodle in the sand erased or disrupted the one before. The marks made by the artist were transient. What was being recorded by the camera was the erasure of something just as much as the creation of something. The one entailed the other. You know it seemed to me’ – she said, starting to sound a bit indignant – ‘really strong work. I was standing there, rooting for it.’ She looked around her, harassed. ‘Let’s go outside. I can’t shout this. We’ve paid for this haven’t we? Let’s go outside.’
So they did. As Philip was dumping his plate in the sink and checking his phone and turning and walking through the room and switching off the light and climbing upstairs to bed, the two women went out onto a balcony over the canal. It was warmish still; or rather, the surprising warmth of the day was still in the process of fading before the chill of deepening night. The sky was clear black; a bulbous – no, what was the right word – gibbous moon shone bright above and picked out swirls and circles on the water. Even through the orangey haze of the city lights, a few stars and planets shone.
‘This is embarrassing,’ said Charlotte. The two women were leaning on a railing, looking down into the water, or across it, or to one or other side. ‘All she did was glance at me. If she’d said something it might have been different – I could have replied. If she’d said something enquiring I could have given her my response to the work. If she’d said something rude, even then you know I could have said something rude back, I could have asserted myself, I would have been strong in the feeling of being me, you know, in combat. But it was such’ – the water slapped suddenly loudly against the wall beneath – ‘a little thing.’ She
paused and they listened to the water sluicing and rippling. ‘Just a glance,’ she said as though airily. And then, determinedly: ‘The glance said that I was negligible, and irritating, and not worth speaking to, and basically an intrusion. No actually, as well, more than that: that I was obviously a type she knew through and through already and so totally wasn’t worth bothering about.’
‘Maybe,’ Sue ventured, ‘that wasn’t what the glance actually said. Maybe that was just how it seemed to you.’
‘I know, I’m sure I over-interpreted. But what you need to ask then is: what was causing the over-interpretation? Do you see? I’m not saying this unknown artist could suddenly magically see through me. What I’m saying is what matters is what I made of it, how it struck me. And it released this completely different . . .’
‘From someone who was probably having a bad day and not thinking about you at all.’
‘Yeh, I know, I know. But it nagged at me. It . . . gnawed me. It was like an illness spreading through me until every bit of me was rotten. Or actually, no. I was the same me, I was clearly the same me: but I just looked different to myself – changed from duck to rabbit, or, I dunno, swan to ugly duckling.’
‘A perspective that suddenly switches, from sticking out to sinking in.’
‘Yes I suppose. Yes that’s quite a good image for it.’
‘Contour lines that could be going either way.’
‘It was really surprising. As I looked back into my memory, everything was different. Even, for instance right back to even when I was a little girl. It was my birthday. There was a table of food. I had gathered a whole heap of it in front of myself. A whole slag heap of jam roly-poly, and chocolate muffins, and . . . And I was sitting there grinning, and it seemed to me, it must have seemed to me at the time and it kept on seeming to me when I looked back, I mean it used to, that everyone around was smiling indulgently. But now when I remember it’ – her voice was cold – ‘the faces are strained. They are the faces of people who are putting up with an insufferable little brat. And the terrible thing is, after that glance from the woman at the sandpit, that’s how my whole life looked. It was really’ – her voice was fracturing into a breathy, sad laugh – ‘a bit of a shock.’
‘Gosh.’
‘Do you see’ – her voice was shrill, about to weep – ‘all the smiles that had been happy, became ironic. What was cosy, became cloying. Everything I’d achieved seemed flat. Days of happy activity turned into just basically mechanical ways of passing the time. Can you imagine’ – she was speaking more calmly now – ‘how strange that is: to look into your memory and find that all the colours have changed from harmonious to blaring, grating. You know I’m not’ – she was taking deep breaths, her head back, looking up into the height of the sky – ‘fat, I haven’t ever been.’
Though you are quite big-boned, Sue couldn’t avoid saying to herself.
‘But now when I looked back into my memory, in all the vignettes there, you know in all the little scenes from plays that make a memory, I’m this enormous oily blob. So, I suppose, that’ – now at last she was breaking down, her face scrunching up, the tears starting to come – ‘was an episode of depression.’
She had stopped speaking, stopped being able to. She was leaning on the railing, looking concentratedly downwards, holding herself in. Sue could feel that Charlotte felt like just collapsing, just howling, whirling, spattering, dissolving. But Charlotte stood there, leaning out, massy and still, quite still. Sue reached her arm across nervously, touched the edge of Charlotte’s shoulder blade, rubbed forward along the bumps of the backbone, moved further up to probe the top of the neck, the back of the base of the skull. Charlotte leaned backwards into the pressure of Sue’s hand. Then Charlotte was leaning towards her, turning, and the two women were in a hug, Charlotte’s arms under Sue’s arms, her hands gripping her back; Sue’s arms around Charlotte’s, one hand still at the nape of the neck, the other patting the back of her ribcage. Then they came apart.
‘Thanks,’ Charlotte was saying.
‘Oh it’s,’ said Sue.
‘Are you cold?’ said Charlotte.
‘No I’m alright,’ said Sue.
The balcony was an oblong box sticking out from the wall of the bar: one side was the French windows; railings formed the other three. Now Charlotte had her back to one of the shorter sides, leaning on the railing. Sue was opposite. The balcony had become the corral where the conversation was going to continue to its end.
‘I got through it. I spent’ – there was that breathy, blackly humorous tone in her voice again – ‘about a month in a darkened room. I worked out that you can’t magically change into another person. No that’s not right,’ she said, faster, louder, in scorn of herself; ‘that doesn’t have to be worked out. That’s obvious. What I mean is’ – she was speaking more quietly now, wearily – ‘I accepted that I couldn’t magically turn into another person. So I just let myself carry on. While, while sort of standing a bit to one side. I inhabit,’ she declared, ‘an invisible helium balloon that floats’ – she lifted her hand to half a metre above and to the side of her head – ‘about up here. And that’s what’s’ – the voice fell again – ‘I don’t know . . . did you ever look at me and think: how automatic she is! You know, how, sort of into the job, absorbed into the artworld, you know, just a person with wholly predictable responses?’
‘No.’ Sue didn’t know what else to say. Until: ‘Anyway these last few months, with Elton Barfitt and everything, you haven’t been like that at all. If anything you’ve been a bit . . . out there.’
‘I know. That’s completely it. Because Elton Barfitt really call to me. Because in a sense I’m doing the same as them. Or, you know, the same as Orlan, or Gilbert and George. Except Elton Barfitt are the ones who most appeal to me. Because of their vehemence. Their hostility. The way they seem so powerful. They are obviously performing an identity, and it is powerful. Whereas I am trapped into performing an identity. And it feels weak, so weak. And nobody knows about it’ – now her face was stretching sideways, like rubber, like a clown’s – ‘and the idea for the exhibition they described to us, it was so, it so touched me, and I really wanted to be involved with it, I really thought’ – the tears had come again – ‘that it would help.’
Sue was holding her hand. She said: ‘I know about it. Now. And maybe – look. Do you know what we can do? This show we’re going to do, we’re going to try to do together. Let’s, why don’t we try and connect that to what you’re talking about, just as Elton Barfitt connected. Make your analysis, your self-analysis, a source of it, or part of it, of what it’s about. Because what you’ve been saying really connects with, I think could really connect with, the way it’s coming together.’
‘Do you think?’ said Charlotte, jolting, half-hiccuping.
‘Yeh,’ said Sue, squeezing her fingers. ‘Let’s try, anyway. Let’s try tomorrow.’
‘Yeh, let’s.’ Charlotte’s hand came away from Sue’s. ‘Thank you,’ she said, dragging her fingers under her nose, then wiping them on her trousers, then pressing the tips of them to her cheek, forehead, other cheek.
And then she carried on, sounding lighter after so much declaration: ‘In some ways it’s been quite convenient. No shame, you see. All I do, me personally, is raise an eyebrow. As Charlotte’ (her voice put inverted commas around the name) ‘I’ve shagged a lot of people. Having Charlotte here’ – there was something manic in her voice now – ‘is convenient for venting Charlotte’s dark desires.’ Then: ‘I was Charlotte when I shagged Omar.’ She let the words float away from her into the air over the water, knowing they would shock.
‘I didn’t know you’d . . .’
‘It was a long . . .’
‘I’d assumed he was gay.’
‘So did I at the time. I was pretty pleased with myself. But it turns out he swings both ways: always has done. So it wasn’t’ – she spoke through a sardonic grin – ‘a great achievement after all.’
Sue didn’t say anything; and this not-saying-anything took on the quality of a question.
‘Oh,’ Charlotte answered, ‘I was young. About where you are now. Recently started the job. And I thought: what would Charlotte do? So we did, Charlotte and I. Omar just took it as a droit de . . . thingy, you know, His Lordship’s Right. He clicked his fingers a couple of times afterwards and Charlotte came running, as she would. But it wasn’t anything really. We never mentioned it.’
‘So you don’t feel any particular . . . loyalty towards him?’ – Sue asked. She was suddenly worrying about the project.
‘God no. Obviously not. The opposite. Anyway’ – Charlotte had her hands in her jacket pockets now, shoulders raised so her body was straight up and down – ‘it was nothing.’
Then she softened and said, mildly, appearing to be losing energy: ‘Do you know, the funny thing is I probably feel most enjoyably alienated from myself – because that’s the word for it, isn’t it, that’s the cod-psychological diagnosis – I mostly enjoy it quietly in the evenings. When Charlotte comes home to Charlotte’s flat. You must have noticed that,’ she pitched at Sue, suddenly vehement, ‘what a Charlotte flat I live in?’
‘Well I did . . .’
‘It’s completely conventionally cosy. Nothing idiosyncratic in it at all. Charlotte comes in. Puts on something like Dido. Has a low-fat ready meal from M&S. Watches a bit of telly. You know, just totally fits in to her magnolia and taupe interior. And I find it really very restful to be associated with her.’
‘OK.’ said Sue.
‘Yes,’ said Charlotte. And then: ‘Well, anyway . . .’ And then: ‘Who knows – after our show it all may change.’ And then, pertly: ‘Shall we go?’
‘OK,’ said Sue.
So the two women stepped back into the noisy bar which was getting towards the end of its late evening. They stepped out again onto the pavement that had been constructed by a workgang consisting of Des Davies (56), Kwaku Owusu (26), Bebe Phipps (40) and Damon Keer (19) using a Probst laying machine to lay bricks that were edged with nibs to create a permeable surface so that the large expanse of pavement would remain safe even on the wettest days. Not that it was at all wet as the two women walked on, between the two-hundred and forty-three-year-old canal and the twenty-seven-year-old retail and residential apartment units by which it was now lined. On they walked, in the midst of that great city of roughly 997,000 inhabitants lodged in 327,961 households; a population of many and varying ethnicities, younger, on the whole, than the national average, and equally divided between the male and female sex. Christian, Muslim, No Religion, Sikh, Hindu, Religion Not Stated, Buddhist, Jewish, Other were the religions professed by the population of this city. On they walked, Sue and Charlotte, covering only 843 yards of the 2,967 miles of pavement that this city contained, and passing under only 27 of its 94,603 streetlights. Among its 93.4 square miles they trod only that narrow shortish line, plus the variable distance they could see on either side: 12.7 metres across pavement and wall and canal and wall and pavement to the front door of what was actually a Georgian lock-keeper’s cottage opposite; 138 yards over a bridge along a road where streetlamps and traffic lights and Belisha beacons winked and shone. All around them many, many people were awake; and more were sleeping. All around them were the sounds of cars and radios and hairdryers and flushing loos and central-heating boilers and computer cooling systems and singing and conversation and sneezing and breathing, all of which added up to less noise than by day and so seemed to Charlotte and Sue to count as quiet. All around them, through wires and cables and circuit boards and switches and resistors, electricity sped and slowed and was stopped and flowed again.
The World Was All Before Them Page 15