by Ian McGuire
‘Yes and yes,’ she said. ‘Hold on a second.’ She pulled off her smock and unhooked her bra. Her breasts, oh God they were huge, but not, she felt sure, in a good way. Perhaps it was best, she thought, not to actually think of this as sex, but rather as something similar, a cover version of sex.
‘Um,’ she looked around as if selecting a place to pitch a tent. Kidney followed her gaze.
‘Can I help at all?’
‘No. I mean yes, of course you can. I just have to find a good spot.’
She found one, but it involved some rearranging of the furniture. ‘Sorry to be so workmanlike,’ she said.
Kidney stripped off: the iridescent Bermuda shorts, the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ T-shirt, the hamburger watch. His ardour had clearly survived.
His body, she noted fondly, as he shuffled into place, was as tufty as his face. He looked, overall, like a badly mown lawn.
The only light in the living room was from the muted TV. It flickered like the surface of a stream over the sofa cushions, over Molly’s scattered, half-clothed dolls. E could still smell dinner – cumin, Marmite, frizzled sausage.
The phone rang. They ignored it. Cars went past. E forgot for a moment who she was. She was just a body with another body inside her, and then another body inside her. It was both complicated and simple. Too complicated, too simple. She stopped trying to think.
There was a thump as Kidney keeled over on to the carpet.
‘Blimey,’ he said.
E flopped beside him. There was that smell.
‘You forgot to howl,’ she grinned.
‘No, you forgot to howl.’
She kissed his neck, his clavicle, she had always liked that bit. It was semi-public. Semi-public was nice. She felt full of smiles. She giggled for no reason.
‘The baby’s moving.’
Kidney watched it move.
‘It’s like a shark,’ he said. ‘Like a submarine. That moment before they break the surface.’
‘That’s right,’ she said.
He found a blanket and a beer. E took a sip. She turned up the volume on the television. It was Going Critical. She started to turn it off then decided not to.
‘That’s her,’ she said. ‘Zoe Cable.’
‘Mmm,’ Kidney looked. ‘Should I make denigrating comments about her appearance?’
‘I think that would be helpful.’
‘So what’s the deal with that hair?’ he said. ‘It should be bolted to the back of a Ford Fiesta, not attached to someone’s head. Does she moonlight in a Flock of Seagulls tribute band? And the Muffin the Mule thing doesn’t work, it’s too studied. She’s trying much too hard, the whole persona reeks of urgency and effort. To me she looks strained, terribly strained.’
‘And utterly false,’ suggested E.
‘And utterly false, yes,’ agreed Kidney. ‘And she’s much too thin.’
‘Whoa!’ said E.
‘Gaunt, I mean,’ Kidney corrected himself. ‘Gaunt and unhealthy.’
‘She actually does look a bit gaunt,’ said E. ‘I wonder if something’s wrong.’
‘What could be wrong?’
E shrugged. She cuddled up to Kidney. His body felt new and unexpected, like something she had just taken out of its box.
‘That bloke next to her doesn’t look too chipper either,’ said Kidney. ‘Look at his eyes.’
E looked.
‘Bloody hell,’ she straightened up. ‘It’s Conrad Underseel.’
‘Who?’
‘Conrad Underseel. Morris’s Ph.D. supervisor. He’s really dreadful. He topped my most-hated list for three years in a row.’
‘You have a most-hated list?’
‘Beware – it’s constantly updated.’
‘Does he always look as bad as that?’
‘Actually no. He’s terribly puffy isn’t he? I wonder if he’s on steroids.’
‘Next on the menu,’ said Zoe Cable, ‘is the much-awaited new film by Yugoslav wunderkind Dragoslav Rankovic. Since the success of the neosymbolist allegory, The River and the Mountain, Rankovic has become, one might say, the Britney Spears of the East European arthouse cinema.’
‘Except without the lip gloss,’ heckled Toby Royale.
Zoe Cable grinned and carried on. Underseel, E noticed, looked like a mole-faced monument to misery.
‘The subject of his latest film has been a closely guarded secret. It was only revealed two weeks ago that Rankovic has, with characteristic wit and audacity, chosen to make a costume drama based on The House at Hough End, a little-known work by the obscure Edwardian novelist Arthur Alderley. Alderley, who was English, wrote twenty-seven novels and innumerable essays, stories and letters. While he enjoyed modest success in his own lifetime, upon his death his reputation, in this country at least, dropped out of the sky like a low-cost airliner.’ Underseel coughed loudly. Zoe continued. ‘So why has he now been plucked from the landfill of history by Dragoslav Rankovic? Why is there talk of an Alderley revival? Who exactly was Arthur Alderley?’ She swivelled to face the large video screen behind her. Kidney’s television filled with a montage of sepia head-shots.
‘This is incredible,’ shouted E. ‘There’s going to be an Arthur Alderley revival. Arthur Alderley – that’s Morris’s thing.’
‘Why are you getting angry?’
‘Because this is Morris’s thing. On television. He’s been working on it for years and people have laughed at him, mocked him. People like Zoe Cable. And now look: Conrad Underseel’s on Going Critical; Rankovic has made a film. This is it. This is what he’s been waiting for. It’s just incredible.’
She dropped back into the sofa and shook her head. She thought of Morris Gutman, convicted plagiarist, in his Rumps-wick bedsit losing his mind. She thought of him patrolling the liquor aisle at Sir Savalot. He was, she thought, whichever way you cut it, a deeply unlucky man.
‘He should be on there,’ she said, pointing disdainfully at the television. ‘It should be him, not Underseel.’
As she said it, a padded, shadowy version of Morris appeared on the screen in front of them.
‘Fuck me, that’s him,’ she said.
‘No it isn’t,’ said Kidney, who had seen pictures.
‘Yes it is. It is. They’ve done something strange to him – the lighting, the hair – but it’s definitely him, look.’
The words popped up in the corner of the screen – Dr Morris Gutman, Alderley Scholar.
‘He looks a bit like Klaus Kinski,’ said Kidney.
‘It’s useful to think of Arthur Alderley,’ Morris was saying, ‘as ideologically and personally polysexual. In imagining his heroines, the tomboyish Helga Cabbage for example, Alderley is engaging in an obvious if highly convoluted textual cross-dressing. He’s a woman trapped inside a man who is projecting himself on to a man trapped inside a woman.’
They cut to a sepia clip from The House at Hough End: Helga Cabbage dressed in jodhpurs standing on a ha-ha, explaining to the local tenants her radical plans to turn the house at Hough End into a syndicalist co-operative. The dialogue was in Serbo-Croat with English subtitles.
‘Is it meant to be black-and-white?’ said Kidney.
‘What?’ E was still reeling from the sight of Morris – he looked like an after picture, but after what?
‘Moj čin nije čin velikodušnosti, već nadoknade,’ said Helga. ‘Kolege, ja ne mogu izbrisati zločine moje porodice ali se mogu odreći, i to i činim, svog prezimena. Više se neću zvati Cabbage!’
Morris came back.
‘Any Alderley revival,’ he opined, ‘will surely be founded on a wider appreciation of the radical vagueness of his major period. In his late novels, his life-long wish to be all things to all men is transformed from a fractured monument to failed liberalism into a cri de coeur for pan-sexual utopianism. Hence the final orgiastic croquet game in The House at Hough End.’
A cut to the Rankovic version of the croquet game – a mallet’s eye view which struck E as anything but orgiastic. There was a
final platitudinous voiceover then back to Zoe.
‘I think he’s ill,’ she said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘His face,’ she said, ‘in particular his nose. He’s definitely ill.’
They looked at each other. E felt for Kidney’s hand. Their nakedness struck her suddenly as peculiar and dream-like. Kidney sighed, finished the beer, kissed her. She tasted carbonation then tongue.
‘You’re upset,’ he explained. ‘You’ve been thrown by the sudden quasi-ghostly appearance of your husband on television with a new haircut and a striking resemblance to Klaus Kinski, only a matter of minutes after the rather spectacular conclusion to what could, in strictly legal though definitely not moral terms, be described (but I would never ever do it myself, no fucking way) as an act of infidelity.’
E nodded and sighed.
‘It’s understandable,’ he said.
She smiled, and touched his cheek, twisted a tuft of facial hair.
‘I think I should talk to him,’ she said. She couldn’t help it. The sight of Morris had shaken her. He had looked like a maltreated hostage; she had half expected him to hold up a copy of today’s Beirut Times. The things he was saying, perhaps they made sense in themselves, but they seemed in their self-conscious cleverness so much at odds with his bodily weirdness – that couldn’t be his own hair – that she couldn’t help thinking something had gone badly wrong for him. That this brief TV debut, this small foothold in the putative Alderley revival, had been purchased at a severe cost.
E gradually stood up.
‘Haven’t you tried phoning him before?’
‘I think I should try again.’
Kidney nodded and began to re-dress. E pulled her smock back on. In the TV light her belly gleamed like a well-polished bowling ball.
Hobbling towards the kitchen phone, she felt a line of warm wetness roll down her inner thigh. Kidney, she thought, smiling. ‘Big Cum’ indeed. She turned into the downstairs toilet, tore off a handful of gingham-print toilet paper and sat down. As she did so, the line of wetness widened into a stream then became suddenly, undeniably, a gush. There was a sweet, sperm-like smell and a quarter-pint of amniotic fluid splashed into the stainless-steel bowl.
E took several long, deep breathes. Tears filled her eyes.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘All right. Here we go again.’
Part Four
Chapter 33
Morris opened his eyes and saw himself from above. He was lying asleep on a narrow, pine-effect bed. The room was small. Around its edges were a toilet, a basin, a desk and a chair. There was a smell of floorwax and, from beyond the uPVC window, a faint wail of wind. Morris hovered near the ceiling in puzzlement. Below, his body sniffled, farted, resettled. Where was he? He reviewed the room for clues. It was too small for a hotel but too big for a hospital. On the desk was a transistor radio and a packet of soluble asprin. The furniture was new but institutional. Had he gone back to college? Was he on a youth-hostelling holiday? On the wall beside the door he noticed a framed list of fire instructions. He zoomed in to look more closely: there were dos and don’ts, a diagram of the fire exits and gathering points; it was signed Herbert Splang, Governor, Flat Hill Open Prison, Lincolnshire.
Whoooooosh. Morris roared back into his body with the force and sound of an aircraft lavatory. He sat up straight and blinked. Now he remembered. Three months in jail – Underseel had been unrelenting – one night down, ninety-one to go. He felt a clench of terror and then, remembering what he had just seen, a swathe of salving numbness. He was just meat and bone. He was a body on a bed, in a room, in a prison. That was how it would have to be, he realised. That was how he would survive.
‘This place is like a lay-by,’ he said to the prison psychologist who wore jumpers and smelled like a dentist. ‘I mean, it’s neither here nor there.’
‘So what is real, Morris?’
Morris looked at him. They were sitting in a circular consultation room with floor-to-ceiling windows and smoky glass brickwork. The Flat Hill open prison was very well-designed. It had won an award.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said.
‘Perhaps I’m not.’
Morris decided he didn’t like the psychologist – he didn’t like his jumpers, he didn’t like the way he smelled.
‘You think I’m not clever enough to understand you,’ said the psychologist. ‘Don’t you?’
‘That would be absurd. I’m sure you’re very well-qualified.’
‘Are you worried about hurting my feelings?’
Morris looked out of the windows. The grounds were landscaped. There was a low brick wall and beyond that dark, chocolatey farmland. Flat clouds nudged across the sky like ice floes. The cylindrical room was murky and cool. He wished the psychologist would turn the lights on, ask another question, do something.
‘So you’re suggesting this is it?’ he said.
‘For a while, yes.’
‘And then?’
‘Something else I suppose.’
Morris looked again at the psychologist. His green eyes were twinkly but motionless – he had the inert readiness of a machine on standby. He was here, Morris realised with a shock, by choice.
‘I’m sorry,’ Morris said, ‘but that really doesn’t work for me at all.’
He travelled down to London on day release. E met him in the tea house in Regent’s Park. Molly wouldn’t talk to him at first, she swivelled away and sucked her orange juice at an angle. E blushed.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘She’s just overwhelmed.’
Morris was more worried about E’s embarrassment, which made him feel uncomfortably separate and new. He peered into the pram. Hedda’s face looked like something that had been carved into the handle of a walking stick and rubbed away over years. He had seen her once before, in the hospital. He had been staying in a bail hostel in East Acton and had just been to visit his solicitor. On that occasion, lying in the transparent Perspex crib, she had struck him – in comparison to the technicolor virulence of his woes – as pale and nothingy.
‘Can I pick her up?’ he asked.
‘You’re the father.’ The tone was factual.
He picked her up. She was weightless, lighter than air. If he let go, he thought, she would bob upwards and away on the steamy vortices of frying and frothing.
‘She’s tiny,’ he said. ‘You forget.’
E smiled tightly. ‘I know. You do.’
‘She makes Molly seem so big.’
‘I am big!’ Molly shouted without turning around.
Morris ordered a bacon sandwich.
‘How’s the food?’ E asked.
‘In jail, you mean? Well it’s free, that’s the best way to look at it.’
Hedda started squawking. Her body tightened like a muscle; she turned bright red and began to vibrate, as though battery-powered.
E took her off him, hitched up her shirt and began to breastfeed. There was a small struggle and then rhythmic slurping.
‘I am sorry about what happened, Morris. Underseel’s just astonishing.’
‘It’s not so bad.’ Morris bit into his bacon sandwich. Molly, he noticed, was trying to sneak a look at him over her shoulder.
‘Do you have time to write?’
‘Yes,’ he said. (He had not read or written a thing.) ‘Yes I do.’
E looked down and readjusted her shirt. Morris could still see a triangle of areola. He winked at Molly, and Molly covered her face with her hands.
E looked up suddenly, her cheeks were reddened and her eyes actually wet.
‘Oh God, Morris,’ she said. ‘It must be really awful. I can’t believe you’re in jail.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ he repeated.
‘But you’re locked up.’
‘Yes, there’s that. There is that.’ He winked again at Molly. Molly giggled. E was looking at him expectantly, there was a crease between her eyes, she seemed deeply, off-puttingly concerned.
Morri
s steadied himself, picked a crumb of soft-hard bacon fat from his plate.
‘I miss you,’ he said. ‘All of you.’
She leaned back. The crease disappeared; she seemed mildly unimpressed. Morris realised belatedly that he had made a mistake – jail was his trump card, he should have stuck with that. E didn’t know anything about jail, but she knew all about marriage, their marriage anyway.
‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ she said. ‘Being in jail? It doesn’t seem to bother you very much.’
‘It bothers me,’ he said with a sense of back-pedalling. ‘It bothers me quite a lot. But it’s just …’
‘Just what?’
He shook his head. He didn’t know what to say. ‘Just that now everything, even this, feels so carpeted, so lagged, so rubberised.’
‘I would have thought you liked that,’ E said. She seemed annoyed. Morris realised that if he had come (as he may have come, he wasn’t sure) with a plan of winning back E, it wasn’t going well.
‘Why would I like it?’
‘You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to deal with anyone. Isn’t that what you really want?’
Morris wondered whether she was right. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Pudding!’ shouted Molly. ‘Ice cream!’
Morris looked at her, the pastel planes of her half-sized head. Seeing her was like being sutured, the same strange sense of internal tugging. He picked up a menu and ordered the chocolate bombe.
After dessert they walked over to the playground. Molly ran on ahead. In the pram, Hedda squealed like a bicycle brake.
‘Are you still staying with Kidney?’ he asked.
‘We’re living together.’
‘Living?’
‘We’re involved, Morris.’
‘Involved?’
Morris could feel something move, break inside, like an old mercury filling giving way.
‘Do you still hear from Zoe?’
‘Zoe and I were never involved,’ he said. ‘Never attached. It was more …’
‘Accidental? Yes, I remember you saying that.’
‘Distant,’ he said.
‘Well, I’m sorry for you then,’ E said. Molly waved from the top of the climbing frame and they both smiled suddenly and waved back. ‘Sorry that you would want to exchange our marriage for something like that.’