Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  And why not? OK, Morris was straight (in every sense) – but he was also guilty of a serious crime. He was both less than she had imagined and quite a lot more. She thought of him sitting outside at their food-spattered table, his eyes half-closed, his sleeves rolled up, his gardener’s forearms exposed to the world. He had almost killed someone, she thought, and no one else knew it but her. Not even, she was sure, his own dear wife.

  The mirror gave back a look Zoe knew well. It was the one she always tried to capture on her book jackets – gaunt, windblown, black-and-white – a look that spoke equally of intellectual vehemence and vast erotic hunger. She began to reapply her purple lipstick and disarrange her tri-tone hair. Morris Gutman, she thought, for all his hidden depths, did not have a clue what he was in for.

  Chapter 15

  Morris reclined his seat. There was a squeal of pain from the African lady behind him but he was determined to ignore it. It was a detail, and one thing he had learned during the three days in LA was that certain details, especially ones relating to other people, deserved to be carefully ignored. It was a question of boundaries. He pulled a notebook and pen out of his carry-on. Note to self – A paradox – the dissolution of false boundaries/difference (physical, sexual, emotional) allows the discovery of true boundaries/difference. He read it over to himself several times, changed ‘discovery’ to ‘ecstatic discovery’ and smiled. A week before, the African lady’s squeal would have filled him with guilt. He would have returned his seat to the upright position, apologised and suffered for the remainder of the flight under a mixture of fury, resentment and lower back pain. No longer. He felt a new sense of surety and power. His needs (in this admittedly trivial case, the need to recline) were real, he ‘owned’ them. More than that, he actually rather liked them. His needs, so he had discovered – sex, power, fun – had both a classical simplicity and a gawkish charm. He felt towards them a quasi-paternal warmth.

  Morris pulled down his sleeping mask and closed his eyes. He could hear the hollow rumble of the aircraft and the continuing hisses of the African lady – he paid attention to neither. Zoe was up in business class. She had just brought back a miniscule jar of caviar. ‘My seat goes completely horizontal,’ she had whispered, ‘the possibilities are enormous!’ Then she spotted someone else and disappeared.

  Zoe was always disappearing, he realised. That was her greatest charm, her greatest skill: the way she left. Just when you were most expecting her, she wasn’t there. At first Morris had found this disconcerting, even upsetting. The day after their Polynesian triste, for example, she was nowhere to be seen. He later discovered she had been holed up all day in a radical juice bar with Firenze Beach, drinking mango smoothies and plotting. She broke into his room at 3 a.m. the next morning and felt him up. She was drunk. All day he had been writing speeches in his head, explaining what he thought about the night before, laying out their options. She filled his mouth with tongue, she stuck an index finger up his bum. She came at him like a combine harvester. Afterwards, pieces of him were scattered across the mammoth bed like the aftermath of a high-speed crash. ‘Now, was that so awful?’ she asked. When he woke she was gone, but he had rarely felt less lonely.

  It was 11 p.m. LA time, 7 a.m. in Coketown. They were due to land at nine. Morris lifted his mask and stretched. The little screen in front of him was showing a map of the North Atlantic. The small blue plane tilted imperceptibly but unstoppably forward along the dotted blue arc like the minute hand of a clock. LA to Coketown – six thousand miles, a little under ten hours. The temperature at Coketown International Airport was 9°C, with drizzle. For the first time in four days Morris felt a pinch of fear. There were children in the plane. He had not noticed them before but now he did, yawning, whining, running up and down the aisles. At LAX he had bought Molly a stuffed Goofy and E a bottle of Scotch. He remembered now that she couldn’t drink while pregnant. He could give her a Queer Caucus T-shirt. Would she find that funny? Perhaps not. The thought of their house worried him like a dog worrying sheep. Molly’s eczema had flared up again, E was putting her in cold wraps at night. As the plane gradually lost altitude he felt he was descending into an ocean of guilt and shame. He could hardly breathe. His heart was pounding; he looked manically for the sick bag. An attendant asked if he needed help.

  ‘Yes, I’m having a panic attack. I need to sit in business class!’

  She frowned and looked suspicious.

  ‘You think I’m angling for an undeserved upgrade?’ he shouted. ‘We’re about to fucking land. I need to sit with my friend in business class.’

  She led him forward and sat him next to Zoe. The seats were leather and absurdly large. He felt immediately better.

  ‘Way to get an upgrade Morris,’ Zoe said. ‘Although this is a little late in the day.’

  Morris gripped her hand.

  ‘Are you scared of flying?’

  ‘No, just of landing. Actually, not of landing, more of what comes after.’

  She turned off her MP3 player, removed her sunglasses and looked straight at him. She smelt of linseed oil and sangria.

  ‘Morris, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Everything has changed. You kicked ass at the LABC.’

  ‘I didn’t give a paper.’

  ‘That’s fine. You’re a bottom-up phenomenon. You’re word-of-mouth.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’m telling you. Firenze is keen. Hank’s on board.’

  Morris nodded.

  ‘And by the way, it’s perfect for the Research Hub. Associate Fellow Morris Gutman. Your salary will double and you will never teach again. Ever. Give me your foot.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Shiatsu, Morris. Fear is just a blockage of energy. Take off your sock.’

  Zoe studied the sole of his foot for several seconds then pressed with astonishing force at a point one centimetre south of his middle toe. A sudden halo of heat shot up Morris’s spine and through the top of his skull.

  The plane banked to the right and a tiny but exact model of Coketown slid into view. Despite the blurring veil of rain, Morris could still make out the Coketown Ship Canal, the Museum of Artificial Fabrics, the rose-hued and grandiloquent Beigewater Centre. Wrapped around them all like the grey rakings of a Zen garden were row upon row of wet slate roofs. One roof, he knew, was his roof; one out of thousands. But why should it be his, he thought? Why should it be him? There was no logic to that (he realised giddily), no necessity. One life was like one word – just an arbitrary cut into experience. It was too easy to imagine that all of it was real, natural – the wife and child, the house, the job, the constant aching fear – when it was just a collision of contingencies, a whimsical although far from random exercise of power. But he had learned that power was reversible, unstable, prone to crumbling, desiccation and collapse. You could tunnel beneath it or chop away at its edges. He was no longer exactly himself. The hit-and-run, the plagiarism, the adultery – these were clearly not the acts of Morris Gutman. He was becoming deframed, reimagined, remade. Morris Gutman the long running character persisted, but now he was played by a quite different actor. The change, as he saw it, was quite blatant, rather ridiculous, but that was the trick: like a truly terrible wig, it was just too big to draw comment, it had to be ignored.

  They dropped down over the ruinous and crumbling Galsworthy Estate, the noxious spools of the Port Stanley sewage farm. Zoe Cable held her nose and blew. Sucking on a boiled sweet, Morris remembered involuntarily, but with the force of a revelation, the plummy purple swell of her labial piercing. They hit the Coketown runway with a scream.

  Chapter 16

  E gripped the sides of the toilet bowl and, with a roar and a heave, renewed acquaintance with her morning muesli. God, she thought, the smell of one’s own vomit – is there anything quite so ghastly? And lately, just when her sense of smell was heightened, there had been so bloody much of it. Having to eat at all was bad enough, but then being forced to confront the nuts and bolts of the digestive process
… If it happened to men, the drug companies would be on to it in a flash. There would be charity balls, celebrity appeals, the whole paraphernalia. Although, in fairness, Morris was being quite good: he cooked and cleaned, patted her on the back as she blurted out his fettucine and then wielded the toilet brush with rare equanimity. The new job had made a big difference. She had hardly ever seen him so happy as that week after he got the news. It was like travelling back in time. Once more he became – as he had been when they first met at Bangor – young, enthusiastic and highly sexed. He chased Molly around the house, making her squeal and scream. He held E’s hand in the supermarket; they made love every night. The future, for once, seemed not a dark and violent necessity but a place of hope and humour.

  E rinsed out her mouth, spat into the toilet bowl and flushed. She looked in the mirror. Her face was the colour of skimmed milk. Her hair was thinned and frizzy. She put on some lipstick which made her look vaguely clownish. Oh well. Nearly four months – the baby was six inches long. She measured six inches roughly with her thumb and forefinger, looked at it, then placed it against her bump. One thing she had never understood about Morris was the vulnerability of his happiness, its tendency to crumble and retreat at the first sign of woe. It was as if he didn’t really believe in it, as if joy were some kind of fakery or fiction which might be enjoyable for a while but could never last. They were opposites in that. After that first week, for instance, she had noticed hairline cracks, tiny reversions. He snapped at Molly once or twice and sat up late reading books he didn’t care to talk about. As though happiness were some great effort that he couldn’t be expected to keep up.

  9 a.m. in Coketown, 1 a.m. in LA. Morris would be asleep; he was flying in the morning. She hoped the trip had done him good. That’s why she had agreed to it, even though it was at the worst time, what with work, vomiting and Molly’s continual ailments. Surely it would perk him up again, give him another boost. The Bangor incident had been such a blow to his confidence. Now, with hindsight, E could see that more clearly than ever. She had never trusted the bastard Underseel. He had struck her from the off as creepy and abusive. Morris didn’t notice anything, of course, or if he did he complicated his qualms out of existence. Literary critics were no good at judging character, that was certain. They were far too hesitant, too keen on complexity and ambivalence to see the simple things.

  Nine thirty: it was time to leave. How would she prise Molly from the television? She could hear from downstairs the demented cries of Daybreak TV. And how, after that, would she get her into the car seat? Without Morris to play bad cop, bribery was her only option. She went downstairs and rooted in the cupboard for chocolate. As she approached the television, E held a Cadbury’s Button between herself and her daughter the way a lion tamer might hold a wooden chair. Molly’s eyes locked on.

  ‘Raincoat, then chocolate,’ said E, raising it at the last moment, just beyond her reach.

  It was a mile or so from the nursery to the art gallery. Fifteen minutes’ walk. The route passed through the university’s new Nanotechnology Research Village, a pedestrianised pickle of interlinked glass domes, cubes and pyramids. Its construction – which had cost tens of millions of pounds and had involved an armada of governmental, educational, quasi-governmental, commercial and non-profit bodies – had, E knew, generated a tidal wave of furious if unheeded resentment in the Arts Faculty, where, as one of Morris’s colleagues put it, the toilets didn’t get cleaned from one decade to the next. There had also been a letter from Darian Cavendish in the South Coketown Advertiser denouncing the architectural vulgarity of the village (‘footling and weak-minded’) and questioning the ethics of the research (‘hubristic and sinful’) which would be undertaken there. E, on the other hand, felt rather taken in by the playful gaudiness of the place. The buildings were like giant children’s toys scattered across the rubberised and colour-coded pavement. The transparent tunnel which linked them glowed magically green and blue in the Coketown gloom. Whatever the economics of the construction, however dubious the manipulations that would occur within, it cheered E up in the morning to see something so whimsical made real.

  Just before the gallery came into view she heard the faint sound of chanting from round the corner of Rudeboy Street, a vague collective plaint which came and went amidst the aural brew of buses, trams and ancient lead-emitting student cars. She stopped for a moment to listen. Could it really be a student protest? How many years had it been since she had heard one of those? 1985? 1986? The spring of ’85 she had thrown eggs at the Home Secretary; Stella had been arrested as a flying picket. It was like hearing the call of a bird you had assumed was long ago extinct. She rounded the corner and there they were, outside the gallery gates: a small, surprisingly well-dressed group holding placards and golf umbrellas. Their chant came gradually into focus: ‘What do we want?’ ‘Proper respect!’ ‘When do we want it?’ ‘Now!’ The signs were even odder: ‘Stop the obscenity’, ‘Hands off my corpse’, ‘Death porn, no thanks!’

  Then E remembered that tonight was the opening of ‘Radical Taxidermy’, the Nick Kidney retrospective. Nick Kidney had been running around all week setting up his bottled foetuses, his patchwork skin art, his paddling pool of bobbing and plasticised brains. They had a new curator who was keen on controversy. This was his first and, many secretly hoped, last major show. Out with Europe’s leading teapot collection, in with ‘Gutta-percha’ – a visual satire on colonie irrigation. Nick Kidney, who had first come to public attention with ‘Big Cum’, a work which involved a lawn sprinkler and ten gallons of patiently collected human sperm, was, at forty-one, the latest enfant terrible of British Art. Getting the retrospective for Coketown was a coup (although it helped that the curator was married to Nick Kidney’s first wife, Gloria, and that Kidney had grievously offended the directors of all the major London galleries).

  As she passed them, a grim-faced protestor handed E a flier. E glanced at it; it began with a passage from Genesis. The protestors smelt of mothballs and embrocation. She said hello to Godfrey, the foyer guard, who glanced at the protestors, raised his eyebrows and grinned. She avoided the galleries and walked straight to the Education Department, where Alison was already in a tizzy. As she sat at her miniscule desk, the baby flipped and jiggled inside her.

  ‘Have you walked through it?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Not yet.’ E felt a bubble of nausea rising up her oesophagus. She reached for a Rich Tea.

  ‘It’s a nightmare. Worse than my worst imaginings. There are real body parts out there. He has some kind of chemical process.’

  ‘I read that it involves silicon.’

  ‘You may be right, but is it legal? Are we sure of our legal footing? I doubt it. We’ve got Orpington Primary coming in on Friday. What am I supposed to tell them?’

  E picked up the exhibition guide and read.

  ‘“Nick Kidney’s work explores the untidy edges of human corporality – the fleshy lumps, the noisome fluids, the cystic danglings that make us who we are.”’

  ‘That’s bollocks.’

  ‘It is bollocks.’

  ‘Ha-bloody-ha. I tell you, we can kiss goodbye to Lottery funding after this. It’s a slap in the face for the ordinary art-goer.’

  E switched on her computer.

  ‘Ordinary art-goer? Alison, sometimes you sound like the Daily Mail.’

  Alison went red in the face. E realised it was going to be one of those days.

  ‘I believe in Art,’ said Alison. ‘Damn it, I believe in impressionism. I’m going to talk to Tony about this now.’

  At noon, E decided to walk through the galleries. If nothing else, she thought, the show would distract her from the terrible realities of her lunchtime sandwich. When it came to art, E was a hard nut to crack. Although she had never completed her dissertation, she had not spent four years boiling her head in Bangor for nothing. She knew, both literally and pragmatically, which end was up.

  ‘Half-baked Duchamp,’ she muttered to h
erself, gazing at the stainless steel bedpans and carefully arranged stool samples of ‘Guttapercha’.

  ‘Second-rate Fluxus,’ before the paddling pool of brains.

  ‘Yoko Ono did all this much better,’ the nasty (if not Nazi) ‘Skinorak’.

  Although the flayed dogs were occasionally amusing, E was largely unimpressed. As a whole, Nick Kidney’s work struck her as overwrought, underweight and immature.

  She swallowed the last bite of her tomato sandwich and was about to return to her desk when she noticed a darkened room that she hadn’t explored. With a silent hiccup and a long, subdued belch, she walked in unoptimistically. A motion detector clicked as she entered and the far wall lit up with what looked like a home video. Children were playing in a back garden. There was a climbing frame and a bouncy castle. It was a party of some kind. The image was abnormally large: it filled the entire wall and as a result the figures were life-size or even larger. E watched and waited for something clever or ghoulish to happen, but it didn’t. All the faces were fuzzed out except one – a little girl, six or seven, with brown curly hair. She was wearing a swimming costume, shorts and jelly sandals. She was running and squealing. She disappeared from the frame then came back panting and rather theatrically holding her ribs. She said something to another fuzzed-out child. A plastic football flew over her head; in the background children ricocheted off the bouncy castle. She saw the camera, waved, laughed and shouted. She pushed her hair behind her ears. The dark shadow of adult fingers returning her wave passed back and forth over the bottom of the frame. There were voices but they seemed either slowed down or speeded up – long, trawling words without consonants.

  The video stopped abruptly and then, a second or so later, began again. It was a loop. E watched again. Above the turrets of the leylandii hedge, the sky was pale blue with a chalky crisscross of aircraft trails. The girl again ran round, squealed, disappeared. Her run was high-kneed, lopsided. Her hair was cut in a bob, her lips were red with artificial colouring. What was this, E wondered, where had she seen it before? On the news? Crimewatch? The fuzzed-out faces made it look like something released by the police, but perhaps it was just a knowing parody of that. The girl held her ribs, the adult fingers waved. Behind the bouncy castle, a man in a T-shirt was drinking bottled beer. A naked boy ate orange cake while hanging upside down from the climbing frame.