The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Ricky sat up against the black pillow with white edging he angled against the wall behind him, and half-echoed: ‘I am twenty-six and old beyond my years and although I don’t say “love” very much, I can tell you hand on heart there is nothing like this in my past.’

  They said little else as the late summer evening lengthened and then it seemed there was ash falling silently across them, and she pulled the duvet to cover her shoulders and he slid down beside her, tossing his pillow to the side of the bed and across the radio that was always set on Radio 4 when he arrived and Capital FM when he dressed to leave. It was the strangest, closest feeling these summer evenings when they lay and sometimes talked about home, and the green light at the window facing the square very gradually faded and the corridor past the bathroom and into the tiny kitchen became dark and lost all sense of dimension. When he said St Heliers and Herne Bay and Beachhaven, it was not in daylight that she thought of them, but imagined they were lights that flickered in the distance, and she saw them from the harbour as she sailed past. Although it was quite different for Ricky, who said he could almost smell the melting tar on the road as he walked down barefooted to the warm sand at Shelly Beach.

  Some nights he stayed with her, but most evenings his work took him all over London, to small clubs and student gigs, and sometimes even to Manchester or Newcastle. He wrote on new bands and rock concerts and trends and gossip for several small publications, and occasionally was asked to stand in for a friend who had a column in the Guardian. Apart from the big newspaper he was paid sparingly. Once or twice when his cheque was late Rachel insisted that she lend him enough to get by, which he paid back on the dot. She asked him once, ‘Why don’t you ask me to one of your gigs?’, knowing as she said it that the word did not sound right.

  ‘You’d hate it,’ he told her. ‘A lot of it’s shit but I’m obsessed with it. That’s my only excuse.’ But he did take her to a small dark club where no one seemed to have heard of the new non-smoking law, and his prediction about her not really enjoying it was dead right. He assumed it was the Goth group that would never get further than it was tonight, the yellow fugged air, the nose-studded clientele. She did not tell him that none of these things actually bothered her. She was fascinated with the novelty of it, the deals that were so blatantly done, the intense inward privacy of wherever it was the musicians entered once they began to play. They were interesting specimens, something she had never really seen this close before, these cool young men with their curved shades, the girls, some of them with shaven heads and sullen remoteness and long black gloves like torn webs. She wondered what they were like, these people, in their daylight working lives. A tall girl with white make-up said to her in the restroom, not to her in particular it seemed, yet there was no one else facing the dark mirror in front of them, ‘Beata. What a cunt of a name.’ All that was quite diverting. What bothered her was Ricky as another person, as though a twin she had never met had come in his place. His easy slowness, his thoughtfulness, those things about him that she so liked, replaced by a sharpness, a quick flickery energy as he moved about talking, laughing, offering a cigarette although she had never seen him smoke, steadying a stranger’s wrist with his own hand as he leaned into a proffered match-flame. Part of the scene. He used words she had never heard as he called out to those who passed their table. When she told him the one group she liked listening to he said, ‘Indie rock, Rachel, Jesus! If you like that you like anything!’ But he said it good-humouredly, leaning towards her, placing his lips against her hair. She said when it was already past one o’clock, ‘I don’t know what I’ll turn into if I don’t go before the clock strikes.’

  ‘But it hasn’t begun!’ he said, his hands held in front of him, cowering away, a comic turn of the male hectored by a demanding mate. He stood outside the club with her until a mini-cab slowed down and coasted in to the kerb. He tapped the roof of the car like a frenetic drummer before it drove off. He stood back on the pavement and raised two thumbs as he leaned down towards her window and she watched him slide back into the night.

  Rachel told him several things so it would not become a big deal. She said, ‘I’m just too out of my depth to appreciate it, that’s the truth of it, Rick.’ She said, ‘Well, I like reading novels and that doesn’t come between us does it?’ She said, ‘Our seeing each other is the best thing in my life, you must know that.’

  And Ricky explained to her all this stuff when he was on the job, it was like dressing up and carrying on when you were a kid, that’s all it was. If you wanted to cover the scene that was how you did it, or people wouldn’t take you for real. ‘If they think I’m on something that doesn’t hurt either.’ Whereas the fact is, he said, the fact is that if you want to write decently about it your mind had to be ice-clear. You listened pure and undistracted. ‘I’m getting good at that. Looking one thing, being something else.’ He laughed and told her it was no different from a beekeeper putting on a hood before he went to work, no worse than that. And they began to play one of their games, each saying something even more absurd than the remark before.

  ‘Than an astronaut in that outfit before he takes off?’

  ‘A doctor slipping his gloves on before he interferes?’

  ‘What’s that thing?’ Ricky’s fingers circled above his head. ‘A mitre? What the Pope puts on before he sings “G’day”?’

  She was happy then and they knew they were closer now they understood each other better. It was even exciting to know how the man you liked being with most, who was so content to be with you, could really be someone different with other people. She called him Mr Kent after Clark in the Superman movie, which they had watched together the week before. He phoned her at the V&A and asked for Lois Lane in the library. The woman on reception asked, had someone new been taken on? But the six years between them, which meant not a thing when they were together, made her think when they were apart that the gap seemed even more. She dreamed once that she sat in some place like a bare parish hall, her father beside her. They were watching an old minstrel show on a grainy screen in black and white, while a heavy metal band cracked the walls next door. A partition opened, and in the strobe-laced shaft of light a man with a caricature mask and Michael Jackson legs danced and laughed and danced away. As her father used to say at breakfast when her mother recounted a tedious dream, ‘You don’t need to be Freud …

  Rachel knew—it was the only point on which she held a high opinion of herself—she knew that she was a realist when it came to matters of the heart. She knew how happy she was when she and Ricky were together, most often at her own place; and even happier those few times at his tiny, brightly painted, extraordinarily neat two rooms above a betting shop a twenty-minute bus ride from Liverpool Street. As the sky lightened in the mornings she could see from the high window the cranes on the skyline beyond the far stretch of roofs, where work for the next Olympics was under way. On the table beside Ricky’s bed were the exercise books where he kept performers’ names and details of even the most fugitive of bands. He entered them neatly late at night, which is why he preferred writing by hand to using the computer. His articles he typed up next morning, sometimes before it was even light. He told Rachel, and it was utterly true, that she was everything he never met anywhere else. But she was sad all the same when she sometimes saw him only once a week, and thought more than she should have of what after all was only six years.

  Paris, though, was entirely because of Ricky. He had been asked by Vox Moderna, a tongue-in-cheek high-brow rock quarterly founded by two smartarses from Cambridge, was he willing to cover an obscure mid-winter festival in Cologne? They would stump up the lot—tickets, hotel, a decent fee, even an expense clause in his contract for what was wittily listed as ‘fruit and flowers’. As the already twitchy young editor said to him when they sat in what was not much better than a rat-hole in Dean Street, a signed photograph not of any muso but of Shirley Temple for fuck’s sake on the wall above a filing cabinet, ‘It’s good of y
ou to go. I know people who wouldn’t get into bed that time of year in Germany for twice the price.’ He looked up with wet shining eyes. He must be the last person on God’s earth, Ricky thought, who still wears those squitty John Lennon glasses.

  He explained to Rachel. ‘I’ll come back through Paris instead of straight to London—the Cologne fee will more than cover the lot. And if I’m held up or anything, it is Paris, after all. Not as if you’ll be bored.’ Laughing, kissing her, putting the bottle of wine he had brought with him in the fridge, then returning to ease her down on the settee, while he knelt in front of her on the floor. He said, ‘You know with that red hair of yours and your perfect whiteness you make me think of a candle in a church. Wonder why I thought of that.’ Rachel surprised herself, for usually she was not in the least sardonic. She said, ‘Maybe you’re wasted, love, just writing about music?’

  Minutes after she stepped down from the Eurostar and walked through the crowd in front of the huge panneaux where details of arrivals and departures clacked their constantly changing information, Rachel stood on the steps at the front of the Gare du Nord, delighted as she had been that morning ten years ago with the man she thought she would be with for the rest of her life. She looked out past the taxi queue and the swirl of traffic to the flinty blue-and-grey spread of the city, the smudge of bare winter trees, the symmetry and soft-edged precision of the streets. She had been here once since then with her sister, soon after her brother-in-law had left his family for a Fijian law clerk. Not much from that visit stayed with her. Fiona had hardly been much fun. One evening, though, they had dined at a restaurant in Montparnasse where ninety years before a famous Scottish painter watched recklessly handsome women in huge hats and painted them in bold, brilliant colours—a fact she knew only because the week before a reader at the V&A had ordered everything there was on him.

  Two pleasant young men had invited them to a bar in the Marais on a Sunday afternoon, but her sister cried on the Métro and the young men drifted off. Now here she was in Paris again. Tomorrow she would look at galleries and stroll by the river and walk, if the weather held, the bald February paths of the Luxembourg, although the carousel she had so loved watching that first time with Eamon would no doubt be stacked away, its gilt-reined horses stabled somewhere under canvas. Then in the evening, or even earlier, Ricky would arrive. She turned and walked back through the station and lifted her light wheeled case as she descended the stairs to the Métro. The names, so familiar once she saw them again, flicked past on the illuminated map above the carriage door. Yes, there was St Sulpice as the train slowed and stopped and started up again, and it was no time at all until she left the train at Mouton-Duvernet. She came up the stairs beneath the green wrought-iron arch that surely made you think of Paris more almost than anything else. And there was the hotel she had booked, directly across the road.

  The middle-aged man at the desk, his bald scalp reflecting the lights above him in two bright dots, leaned towards a screen to check her booking, and handed her a key attached to a strip of brass. She recognised the print of a famous painting as soon as she entered the room. At the long windows that opened to a narrow balcony, she moved aside the floor-length white curtains to see it was already dark. In that little time since she had crossed the street. At a window opposite her own a woman read a magazine beneath a tall standard lamp, and through another window beneath that Rachel made out some kind of office. What looked like piled directories were stacked on a filing cabinet behind an empty desk. She turned to catch the serious, rather attractive woman glancing back at her from the mirror. They said to each other, knowing of course how juvenile they were being, ‘I am in Paris, waiting for my lover.’

  The message handed to her at the desk had said he would phone at seven. She slipped off her shoes and put her feet on the shiny gold fabric of the bedspread. The low burring of the telephone woke her at seven-thirty. She heard the rush of talk from Ricky’s own hotel. She was reminded at once of the night she hadn’t liked at the small dark club where the Goth band played. There was the same sense of hyped excitement, the words she could not quite follow. He sounded boyish and self-absorbed as he told her how the dude from the Scotsman, a famous columnist he was surprised she didn’t know, had OD’d the night before, the guy would pull through but would she believe it he’d been offered his column, McLaren’s fucking column! He said, ‘How does this sound?’ He read her his opening par about the disappointment the Germans could always be relied on to provide, yet a Munich-version of Southern soul (Gott im Himmel, what next?) was saved by brilliant lyrics. Something too about a group whose angst was so infectious he expected they’d all come down with it before the week was out. He had sent it through only minutes before he talked with her.

  She asked, ‘Did you say another two days?’

  ‘At the outside,’ he said. ‘A chance like this, Rachel, hell!’ She thought of the satin underwear she had bought at Anne Summers, the black-and-cerise flimsiness that now made her feel more foolish than disappointed. He said when there was a moment’s pause, ‘You’re enjoying Paris, though?’

  ‘I’ve just arrived here, Ricky,’ she reminded him.

  ‘How could you not, is what I mean. Paris versus Marble Arch. No friggin’ contest!’

  Rachel walked down the flights of stairs to the lobby with its striped yellow-silk chairs and the table with the day’s newspapers held between narrow strips of wood. She turned left at the doorway, as the concierge had advised her, passing a toyshop and a matronly clothes store, and another shop with a pyramid of books slanted in its window. The canvas awnings of the shops were folded back and made her think of reefed sails on sailing ships she had never actually seen. Gusts of wind tugged at them. No wonder people huddled as they passed her. She leaned forward a little herself against the wind and the skirl of dust it raised ahead of it. Surprising too how much traffic there still was, even this time of night; lorries and vans that made her think this must be an important road. She said no, as kindly as she could, to a dark young woman who offered her twists of frail, small white flowers, and then walked on without answering her ‘bonne nuit’. She came to a café with cane chairs and round black tables inside its long glassed-in veranda that made her think of the deck of a ship closed in like that—she must have seen it in a movie. Then as the waiter in his long white apron drew back the door for her and held up his opened palm like a wing, she felt almost as if she did this kind of thing all the time. She was shown to a table drawn so close to another that her thighs brushed against the edges of both as she took her seat. A man raised his head and folded his newspaper in half, and edged his table aside. She told him she was sorry for disturbing him.

  It was nothing, the man told her, there was always so little room. She supposed he was much the same age as her father. He wore a brown corduroy jacket, and a thin silver pin ran across his dark green tie, just below the knot. There was a small dark stone in the middle of the pin. His hair—it was that, she supposed, that reminded her of her father—was no more than stubble. As he smoothed his hand across his paper and returned to it, a glint of silver ran across his head.

  She ordered a salad niçoise and a glass of Sancerre. As she waited she looked out to the wet street and the naked branches of the trees. Lights beyond them splintered and jigged in the movement from a sudden gust, as though they were decorations on the trees. She thought of Ricky and his phone call. If it ended now at least she could say she was sad and upset but not distraught as her sister had been, but then that was a husband, and there was no Fijian, surely, holding Ricky up. Her sister had told her she was lucky she would never suffer as she did, she was simply that much tougher. Fiona’s way to compliment herself. Then Rachel knew that if she didn’t think of something else she would begin to cry. The man who looked like her father saved her from the shame. He suddenly stood up, edging as awkwardly between the tables as she had done fifteen minutes before. ‘My turn,’ he said, ‘to apologise, mademoiselle.’ He took a folded cap
from his pocket. He stood for a moment in the café’s entrance adjusting it before he stepped into the street. He caught her eye through the glass and tipped the edge of his cap with one raised finger.

  It was still too early in the evening for the tables to be busy. The young waiter watched her and, as he removed the emptied glass and slipped the coins beside it into a leather wallet, said to her in English, ‘He has gone to watch his dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ she asked. She must have misheard him.

  Without turning he nodded towards the street. ‘But the catacombs,’ he said. The waiter’s smile was condescending to the man who had left. To herself as well, Rachel thought. She knew he expected her to ask him more, which she certainly would not do. She said she had heard of course of the catacombs, hadn’t everybody? She knew they were supposed to run for miles under the city and thousands, millions, of bones were stacked there, neat as supermarket shelves, she had once heard someone say. The waiter said not everyone had heard of them. Americans sometimes looked upset and Australians did not believe it. ‘Perhaps no one dies in Australia.’ He was trying to flirt with her. She told him she was not Australian anyway and no, she would not have another glass of wine. Complimentary made no difference. But he seemed not to mind. He held the door open for her as she left and smiled, and told her not to worry. The bones never moved.

  Ricky rang again, early in the morning. Was there a time difference, she asked, between Cologne and here? As if he’d go to bed, he said, with a scene pumping like this! They say Germans don’t know how to have fun but holy Jesus, Rachel, some of the stuff he was listening to over here. He’d changed his mind completely. Condoleezza’s Kinder, he said, are we ever going to hear more of them! Then, ‘Uno momento,’ he said. She heard muffled voices as he held his hand across the receiver. Then he told her there was this guy he’d become friendly with, an Italian with his own by-line in La Tribuna, not that the Italians are really with it, he said, not the kind of grunt going on here. ‘Remember I told you a while back about the Libertines? Wrote a piece on them for Disco? There’s a Berlin group last night’d knock the arse off that lot.’ He explained again how you simply had to be here as long as here decided you needed to be. Oh, she quite understood that, Rachel said. Before he dashed he asked her, ‘But you’re having a good time?’