Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  In a way, yes, thought E. He would be right. It was truly ghastly in here – windowless, stagnant, the air smelt like underwear, the noise level was actually painful and the kids were being schooled in commodified pseudo-violence. So why, E wondered, was she enjoying herself so much? Why had she been struggling ever since they sat down to keep a smirk off her face? It was Kidney of course. She was actually flirting with him, Nick Kidney, a relatively famous person. How surprising was that? It had been so long since her life had taken any unexpected turn that she had forgotten what it felt like. The sense of cheer, she realised, was crude and immediate, like eating a handful of Smarties. When he had called the week before to set up the talk her first reaction had been embarrassment. In hindsight, her offer seemed so preposterous, so blatant, so much the product of half a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, that her first instinct had been to furiously back-pedal – to point out, if nothing else, the incongruity of a Turner Prize nominee travelling for three hours to talk to a group of blasé seven-year-olds. But Kidney was not to be dissuaded. He pushed on, he enthused – he made it all sound quirky, interesting, fun. E was quite unused to enthusiasm, at least in this raw and articulate form. She found herself defenceless. As they spoke, she began to blush, burn (was it the pregnancy?), tingle. They made the arrangements, agreed expenses. E found the thought of him getting on the train, getting off the train, abnormally interesting. As she replaced the phone, she told Alison.

  ‘Is he safe with children?’ Alison asked. ‘We are legally liable you know.’

  ‘He has a son.’

  ‘Oh I know. You should hear Gloria on that.’

  She told Morris.

  ‘Next week?’ Morris said. He was strapping Molly into the back of the new Ford Focus. ‘It’s short notice. But maybe we can set up a one-off seminar, an “in conversation”. Art History could chip in. There’s money in the Aldershot fund.’

  ‘He hates universities.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Zoe.’

  Kidney was lolling.

  ‘That triple espresso,’ he said, ‘was an insult to the people of Italy, and a slap in the face for coffee lovers everywhere. When she pulled out the foil sachet I should have called a halt right there.’

  ‘You can’t fall asleep in here,’ said E. ‘It’s not humanly possible.’

  ‘Actually, I can fall asleep anywhere. I get it from my grandfather who nodded off during the Verdun offensive. Or at least that was his excuse.’

  A gravelly, God-like voice boomed over the fractious multitude: ‘Children with green stickers, your fun is over. Please pester your parents to come again.’

  After a small struggle, they decamped to the gaudy and only slightly quieter Chicken Cavern next door. The menu was large, chicken-shaped and monotonous.

  ‘They seem to have a theme going here,’ E said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s chicken. You know I have a theory that, in the popular imagination at least, the chicken is no longer really an animal. I’m thinking about the way it’s manufactured, marketed, packaged – the nugget being my most powerful piece of evidence. There’s no awareness of bone or blood. It now exists in that strange netherworld between fauna and flora, animal and vegetable. Its closest relative, I would argue, is the potato.’

  The children were scarlet and hyperventilating. Kidney ordered them both a giant Coke.

  ‘Will that really help?’

  ‘It’s kill or cure. As a parent I do tend towards the reckless I know – stop me when I go too far.’

  Kidney seemed to have found a second wind. He seemed oddly exhilarated by the Chicken Cavern. He was amused by the army of olde artefacts screwed to the walls: sewing machines, hot water bottles, golf clubs. He was intrigued by the shelves of glued-down books: a seven-volume biography of Nicolae Ceausescu, a field-guide for septic engineers. He joshed with a waiter in a foam chicken suit; he argued with Xavier about the nutritional value of ketchup; he arranged Molly’s French fries into the shape of a unicorn.

  ‘An original Nick Kidney,’ he said. ‘That’s probably worth a bob or two.’ Molly gobbled the hind leg with a grin.

  It struck E that Nick Kidney was actually making an effort. She was touched and faintly alarmed by this. Alarmed because had she wanted an affair (which she obviously didn’t), with the foetus-baby it was clearly unthinkable. The foetus-baby stuck out from her midriff like a buffer, a barricade, a fleshy rebuff to any untoward advances.

  ‘It’s really unthinkable sometimes,’ she said out loud.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The thought of a new baby. Another human being.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I’ve always been fascinated by pregnancy.’ (Was that it, E wondered? Was that what he was interested in? There was probably a name for people like that. Undoubtedly there would be specialist magazines.)

  ‘With Xavier the scan was my favourite part. I like that it’s in black and white, I hope they keep it that way. It’s like signals from another planet. That grey noise, that soupy swirl, then bits emerge – the spine, the hand, the heart. I felt like I was seeing something I shouldn’t see, like I was breaking a priestly taboo. Gloria didn’t want to know anything, didn’t want to look, she wanted to keep it all mysterious, but to me that’s just bad faith – I told her mysteries don’t need protection, it’s fact that’s fragile.’

  ‘She didn’t believe you?’

  ‘She left me for a curator. A man who writes wall texts.’

  ‘He’s terribly nice.’

  ‘Of course he is, but is niceness so important? Is niceness really enough? It’s necessary, I admit, it’s a requirement, but let’s not get caught up with niceness. If love is a whole year then niceness is about five days, ten max.’

  Xavier and Molly had visited the ice-cream lagoon and were teetering back with crude, top-heavy sundaes. They were giggling and, most bizarrely, holding hands.

  ‘Are we talking about love then?’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘To talk about?’

  ‘In general.’

  E remembered her poem. It was not actually her poem, it was Emily Dickinson’s, but it was the only one she had ever memorised. And even then she had done so inadvertently. She had read it once in her first year at college and it had stuck.

  That Love is all there is,

  Is all we know of Love;

  It is enough, the freight should be

  Proportioned to the groove.

  Once when she was feeling maudlin and crampy she had asked Morris to recite a poem for her and the best he could come up with was ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’. Later, to be fair, he brought to mind something by Yeats, but the moment had passed.

  Outside, the car park was damp. Oversized cars hissed past them. After kissing Xavier and Nick Kidney goodbye, she strapped Molly into the Ford Focus and got into the front seat. She was having trouble adjusting to the new car. It seemed so foreign – the metallic paint, the alloy wheels, the CD player. Morris loved it. He had beaten the salesman down on the price, which had astonished her almost as much as his initial impulse to take out a loan to buy it. The engine started with a near-silent whirr. She turned on the windscreen wipers and their quiet efficiency filled her with a sudden loneliness. Although only a foot or so from her, they seemed miles away, in a different world. She could feel tears gathering under her eyelashes, dripping down her cheeks. Hormones, she thought. Molly’s helium chicken balloon bobbed forwards.

  ‘Don’t lose my balloon!’ she shrieked.

  Sobbing, E gathered it in and clutched it to her breast like a child.

  Chapter 20

  It was worst immediately after orgasm. In that second or so of complete defencelessness and clarity, guilt would grip and squeeze him like a killer robot.

  ‘Uuuuuuuur,’ Morris growled out in existential agony.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Zoe. ‘Is the piercing a problem?’

  Morris shook his head. He looked down at Zoe. Her face, its childlike nakedness, pushed into him
like a tin opener. He oozed sadness.

  ‘Are you crying?’

  Morris flopped over and took a deep breath. He felt like a transplanted organ that was in the process of being rejected. It was not a pleasant feeling. He decided to distract himself by kissing Zoe’s breasts. They were firm, pointed and, suitably enough, non-identical. He kissed. Zoe purred. After a minute or two of that, Morris felt a little better.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I got a little overcome.’

  ‘It’s sweet. Really.’

  He nodded. It was Tuesday afternoon. He was the kind of person who committed adultery on Tuesday afternoons. There were several ways to look at that, Morris supposed. He tried to focus only on the more cheerful ones.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Zoe. ‘I can see the sun.’

  ‘No way.’

  They got out of bed and ran to the picture windows. Zoe opened the blinds. She was right. Through a crack in the omnipresent cloud, the sun was visible, yellow and glorious. The first sighting of the summer, always a big day in Coketown. In Corporation Square the buses had temporarily stopped; people were looking, pointing, stripping off their shirts. There was a smattering of applause. Inside the apartment Zoe and Morris stretched themselves and squealed like pagan devotees. Summertime at last! The jackpot of the academic year.

  ‘Will you go away?’ Zoe asked later over coffee and cigarettes.

  ‘I expect so: Brittany, Corfu, somewhere last minute. Last year we camped in Anglesey which was horrid – I want to avoid a repeat of all that. And I’ve got the book of course.’

  ‘And the baby.’

  ‘Yes, the baby.’ Morris rather wished Zoe hadn’t mentioned the baby. The thought of it troubled him. It felt like a trap waiting to be sprung.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Let’s see. July – Cairo, Frankfurt, Vienna. August, I’m doing last-minute lobbying for the Hub plus working up here for Donald on the Digital Faculty Proposal. Then a week in Goa before it all starts off again.’

  ‘I’m jealous.’

  ‘Of my itinerary?’

  ‘No.’

  Zoe leaned across the teak breakfast bar and gave him a long hug. Strange, he thought as he nuzzled her ear (she smelt of wet sand and vinegar), that as well as guilt, infidelity should offer also this remarkable sense of newness, innocence, beginning again. Or really, not strange at all, because why else would he do it? What else was in it for him, for anyone, except this reminder of how sweet things once were, of what, in a sense, you were betraying? When Morris clung to her there, amidst the Danish crockery, there was a sense, a real sense – and he wished to insist on this above all – that he was also clinging to E, to the memory of E, that all this was in some way a tribute to her.

  He explained his theory to Zoe.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Is it manageable? Does it convince?’

  ‘Are you asking the right person?’

  ‘I’m just kite-flying here. Work with me.’

  Zoe thought. She tightened her kimono and pursed her lips. ‘It’s quite Proustian.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘That would depend.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it would.’

  ‘You’re not actually thinking of trying it on E?’

  ‘On E? God no. It just struck me. I thought it might make an article, conference paper, something like that.’

  Zoe smirked. Morris remained unembarrassed, indeed these days, he always remained unembarrassed. Of all the changes effected by the untoward events, that was one of the more noticeable, as if the commission of actual crimes had relieved him at last from the shame of imaginary ones.

  ‘How is the Digital Faculty thing going anyway?’

  ‘In the bag apparently. Darian has already gone – Donald took Kapoor to one side and explained which side his bread was buttered on. He made a formal complaint about exploitation. QED. And with Bernard apparently it’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘Will he actually use the recording?’

  ‘He’ll make Bernard aware of its existence. The process of undermining has already begun. Actually, with Bernard it began in the early 80s, but never mind, the pressure will be increased, eventually something will give. Bernard will lose his rag, overstep a line, they’ll be a complaint (real or manufactured), Donald will arrange a meeting, there will be a thick file, the suits from Personnel will be there. Donald will refer obliquely to the issue of fraudulent marking, he will drop in phrases from your conversation, hint at knowledge he should not rightly possess. The resignation will come. That’s how it works.’

  Morris swallowed and frowned.

  ‘This isn’t Hard Times, Morris. He’ll cut a deal.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll crack.’

  ‘He’ll crack. The pension isn’t cut and dried.’

  Morris whistled and ate a piece of biscotti.

  Zoe stood up and began languidly to tidy. Morris found the sight of Zoe tidying extraordinarily sexy. It was so unlike her, he thought, that to see it suggested to him an intimacy far beyond the physical.

  ‘It’s brutal.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘It’s harsh perhaps, but on the other hand let’s not get carried away. This is really only a job, and not even a very good one. No lives are lost.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit literal?’

  ‘OK, try this one for size. It could have been you Morris, but you chose to act. Bernard and Darian chose not to. They’re adults, they’re professionals – that was their decision.’

  ‘OK, fair enough. Although choice is an odd word for it.’ He was thinking, of course, of the thump of Dirck van Camper against the death car, the traffic jam on Recreation Road.

  ‘Don’t backtrack Morris. You’re stronger than you think. You had the balls to change.’

  Morris dressed himself slowly, carefully, as if to savour the minutes before going outside, the temporary sense of himself he got from being with Zoe, the sense of his extraordinariness, his malleability. Soon, he knew, he would be back out in Corporation Square, with the diesel fumes and the clusters of dangerous-looking schoolchildren. Then he would catch the tram to the university, drive from there to pick up Molly and E, drive home, cook dinner, put Molly to bed, watch TV, sleep. As he mapped it out, the rest of the day felt in his imagination like being squeezed through a series of ever narrower pipes. When could he see Zoe again? If he had not become immune to embarrassment he might have been embarrassed by his neediness. There was the examiners’ meeting all day tomorrow. That was something he supposed. But then?

  ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ Zoe shouted from the glass-bricked shower alcove, as if in answer to Morris’s unspoken question. ‘I’m going down to London. I’m on Going Critical this week. Make sure you watch.’

  ‘Are you really?’ Morris was a long-time viewer of Going Critical. The weekly review show hosted by the porky and pusillanimous Adam d’Hote. The sensationalistic idiocy of most of the views expressed appalled and grieved him, yet he could not resist it. It was the critical equivalent of professional wrestling. The regulars, apart from the extraordinarily irritating Adam d’Hote, were the fiery and half-cut Welsh poet Geraint Davis and the ferociously cool style journalist and bestselling novelist Toby Royale. The final guest, who usually served as a sacrificial voice of moderation between the clashing contraries of Davis and Royale, varied from week to week. Sometimes it had been Deirdre Pluck. This week apparently it would be Zoe Cable.

  ‘Yes, it’s Deirdre’s gout. She gave them my name.’

  ‘I didn’t know you and Deirdre got on.’

  ‘Oh, we joust. I love that second generation stuff – it’s so maternal. Floppy breasts and wholemeal bread. Will you watch?’

  Zoe Cable stuck her head around the shower door in inquiry. Her face was clear and steaming wet, her eyelashes were clotted together in tiny black spokes, her beetroot hair was flat and foolish. Seeing her, Morris felt inside him a strange congeries of sympathy, protectiveness and lust. Was he falling in love? The
idea struck him as both simple and appallingly inconvenient. It made him shiver.

  ‘I always watch,’ he said. ‘It’s a compulsion of mine.’

  Chapter 21

  After dinner was over and Molly was asleep, they sat next to each other on the sofa. E yawned.

  ‘I should be going to bed,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’m always going to bed.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you do.’

  E picked up the TV guide.

  ‘Your programme’s on tonight: Going Critical 10.30–11.00 p.m.’

  ‘I know. Zoe Cable’s a guest.’

  ‘Zoe Cable, is she really?’ E looked more closely at the guide. ‘You’re right, she is.’

  There was a pause; the central heating roared on then almost immediately switched itself off.

  ‘Do you think she’s clever?’

  ‘Zoe Cable? No. Yes. You don’t really need to be clever for that programme, just shameless.’

  ‘So she’s shameless?’

  ‘She’s unprincipled.’

  ‘You make it sound like a compliment.’

  ‘It’s a conscious position. That makes all the difference. It’s not something she just fell into.’

  ‘You used to loath her.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘Yes you did. You described her once as a vicious careerist with the heart of an estate agent.’

  Morris burst into laughter. E stared at him.

  ‘You have a good memory,’ he said after a while.

  ‘Certain things stick.’

  E pulled her legs up on to the sofa and wrapped herself in an old brown car blanket.

  ‘I thought you were going to bed.’

  ‘I’ll wait a while.’

  They watched the news – train crash, arson, Siamese twins. As ten-thirty approached, Morris began wishing E would go upstairs. He had imagined watching Zoe on Going Critical as something personal, private. If TV watching could ever be private – which was in itself, he supposed, a mildly interesting question since the medium was itself so obviously public.