The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  Undeniable.

  His undeniable grin, looking up at the dreadful Rococo tondo of a naked Aurora amongst dawn-flushed clouds and tumbling cherubs in the ceiling of the restaurant.

  ‘Elle nous regarde, la rousse là.’ His undeniably couldn’t-care-less French.

  ‘Bien sûr, la belle espionne de Monsieur Ducasse!’ The sommelier poured for Christopher to taste. ‘On ne peut jamais être trop prudent!’

  ‘Il a des couilles, n’est-ce-pas, le patron.’ Christopher vulgarly weighed the imaginary Ducasse bollocks in both hands, grinning at the sommelier. Undeniably fishing.

  But already the man had this rumpled foreigner with the bad accent down as undeniable. A room full of people who creaked, they were so proper, so prudent, so well turned-out, not to mention so filthy rich. But Christopher left them for dead.

  Christopher with the magazine’s business card hidden in his wallet. His new trump card, saving it.

  The sommelier filled her glass with a saucy flourish and a complimenting nod to Christopher.

  ‘See? It’s you, Mary Pepper.’ That big louche grin. ‘That certain something. You’ve got them wondering. Who is this perfect pale flute of grand cru?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Christopher. Don’t be such a pretentious twat.’

  But it wasn’t her. It was undeniably him. Even though he didn’t tell the maître d’ about the magazine until they’d finished and he’d paid, slipping Bob’s business card into the embossed addition wallet along with a generous tip. And then making a mockingly self-deprecating show of their departure.

  ‘Can’t let them know we’re catching the train back to the slums, Pepper.’ Terribly pleased with himself.

  Or, perhaps, it was them. The two of them.

  This was a thought she tried out carefully. Began to try out.

  It was a little chilly when they left the restaurant. He put his floppy horse-smelly jacket around her shoulders as they walked to the station.

  ‘Got to keep Miss Pepper hot.’

  Was that flirting? Undeniably. Stupid, but yes.

  Was she flattered? Hardly – but a little bit of excitement was beginning to build up. She knew what was going on, they’d probably end up in bed together before the trip was over. Probably shouldn’t. Definitely shouldn’t. Probably would.

  It had been a long time since she’d enjoyed flirting with herself, for that matter. Teasing herself with her own hesitation. She didn’t kiss him goodnight in the dingy hotel corridor. In the pit of her stomach she knew what would happen if she did.

  But also that hint of mockery in his confidence. Which was compelling but repellent.

  In the little bathroom mirror she saw the half-smiling waif she knew, a loose lock of pale hair making her blink and shake her head – yes, no?

  The next day they went back to Le Louis XV. She took photographs of the empty dining room once the dinner settings had been laid – but with guests, jamais! Nev-er!

  She made an art-school joke – ‘Nev-er in Nevers!’ – but Christopher didn’t get it. He gave her a blank look. He was drinking an apéritif with Cerutti and making notes.

  Then they were more or less dismissed. Yes, she’d noticed. There she’d been, photographing the table-settings and the décor again, plus ça change. That was a bit gloomy.

  They went and drank a bottle of wine down by the marina. She saw his mood change. The night before he’d been an undeniable guest in the restaurant, impervious and confident. But the next day, back in the same place, he was just another food writer doing his job, and it was just Cerutti’s job to give him a little time.

  And later that day, at dinner, he made a complete arse of himself, ‘doing a competitive comparative’ in Monaco again, but at Robuchon’s Métropole Palace this time. Too much to drink before dinner, couldn’t find his confidence costume, got dreadfully sullen and defensive, failed to charm the sommelier, blew his food writer cover early, built a silly Voyager spaceship with his quail, had a vulgar screaming match with Cussac, was lucky not to get them thrown out.

  Oh yes, amusing up to a point, she even enjoyed it. But that night he wasn’t undeniable, he was mostly just a boor and a bore. And there was no nice roomy coat around her shoulders while he sulked all the way back to Nice on the uncomfortable train.

  He didn’t flirt, either. Not even one of those moist, winning looks. Sulk, sulk, sulk all the way to the grimy lift, and straight to his room. Boring.

  But then, the sleeper to Venice.

  But now, what was she expected to do with all this stuff? The memories that piled up, like the shambles of an after-dinner Christopher kitchen. Scraps, spills, discards, corks. Also the hangover, the gossip, the flirtations, the bad moods.

  But the undeniables.

  But now, the nostalgia tracks. Graham Parker, You try to reach a vital part of me.

  Three in the morning. The food is love hour.

  But.

  But back then they were looking out the train window at the sweet little French family squabbling over suitcases on the platform with the strings of coloured bulbs behind them. Somewhere like Spotorno along the Riviera di Ponente. Why wouldn’t you want to be there? Where his family came from. Somewhere around this coast.

  He was talking too fast. The little family reminded him of his aunt’s family that spent the summer holidays at his grandmother’s house on the seaside somewhere in New Zealand.

  ‘... always forming a little ruck so they could squabble over something ...’

  Ruck?

  And then in mid sentence he just blurted, ‘Fuck it!’

  She immediately knew why. He yanked the blind down as the train began to move, the compartment door’s blind as well, and when he turned around from doing that she already had her knickers off and her frock hoisted, his mouth fell open like a big kid’s and he let out a peculiar sound halfway between a cheer and a cry of pain, a kind of yodel. Probably she’d done something not dissimilar herself. Comical.

  But nothing to do with his confidence act. No bravado. You didn’t forget such naked moments – not in the sense of stripping off, it was more about dropping your guard than your knickers.

  The long, rattling night, the bottles of Rossese di Dolceacqua, the station at Genoa, the guard banging on the compartment door.

  ‘We have to come back to Genoa, Pepper, we have to eat a Cappon Magro. That’s just the kind of thing we have to do. That’s a my-people kind of thing. A my-kind-of-thing people. Us Ligurian Maoris, Pepper. Bloody old Bob can go to hell. Fuck him. It’s my shout.’

  His red, wet, grinning mouth.

  ‘What’s a Cappon Magro? What do you mean, shout?’

  ‘My treat.’ He was opening another of Bob’s sample bottles. ‘No, you’re my treat. Hot pepper.’

  His rather large prick, trying valiantly.

  ‘Enough, Christopher. Give it a rest, poor thing.’

  ‘Chris-to-pher.’ He was mocking the way she said his name, la-de-dah.

  Grubby, purplish dawn over the industrialised Italian farmland on the last stretch towards Venice. The gash in his elbow from throwing the wine bottle out the window into the fields.

  Of course all the signs were there. His up-and-downness and everything. The trick of his confidence and what happened to him when he couldn’t find it.

  But at the moments when she considered the pale little wretch in a hotel mirror, with the rather triste smile that only she was ever allowed to see, or admitted to herself that her feeling of slightly revolted apprehension at his cloddishness was the only grown-up reaction she should really be having to this affair – still, at these moments, she rebelled at her own boring common sense. She wanted that moment of utter nakedness again. His relish and naïve gusto, his delight, his life.

  His undeniableness. His right now-ness.

  Parker: I’ve been running around in circles.

  Had she ever encountered anything like this sensation? He made her laugh, then he irritated her, he was infuriating and a bore, the
n he was brilliant, and finally when she whipped her knickers off while his back was turned in the train somewhere between Ventimiglia and Genoa it was because he made her want to do it.

  Simple as that, he did it to her. That wasn’t hard to admit, nothing to be ashamed of.

  But before long there was the other aspect. A bit later, after the horrible row in Venice, his shitty behavior at the little risotto nero restaurant. And then his mouth like a squashed crimson fig, blubbering. What am I supposed to do with this ... feeling!

  Because at that moment it was also about her. She was beginning to be inside his undeniable perimeter, his faux confidence. The balance shifted. She was doing and she was also responding. Something like that.

  Taking photographs in the Rialto markets, the bright-eyed sardines and the rattling, salty cascade of mussels, Christopher’s anxious, swivelling head looking about for her in the crowd. At that moment she felt herself pause, and the nature of her participation shifted into another phase.

  She could go back there and replay the sequences as though they were song lyrics or the proof sheets of photographs. Pick her way through them. There. Or maybe there. That one.

  Play it again. I’ve been running around in circles.

  It wasn’t any longer a question of Christopher hastily pulling down the railway compartment blinds and his trousers, revealing his big eager cock. It was also her admitting that he’d woken her up again to her own ability to act. To do anything. To look.

  Clumsy, ridiculous, funny, undeniable Christopher, hairy and out of proportion. And herself, after Venice, Thé Glacé. Ridiculous, what a pair they then became.

  Beauty and the Beast, said Bob.

  But when was that moment? When he wasn’t any longer just having an effect on her? Waking her up? When did the two of us happen? When was it? When did that happen?

  Somewhere along the schedule between food is love at Le Baratin in Paris and the little fish place in Venice. Between the joues de boeuf and the risotto nero.

  Or was it between his pouty lips saying ‘joues de boeuf’ in Bob’s office in South Kensington and then spluttering ‘... this feeling!’ in the hotel in Venice?

  Or between her noticing her neighbour playing skank music and being an elephant to get his little girl to eat, in Wandsworth, and the horrid chill that made her seize up with fury when Christopher suggested she could be his column’s Thé Glacé, in Venice?

  Or between flushing away the remains of raspberry-coloured coke that would wreck her last chance, and finishing off the glass of turpentiney pinot grigio he’d sneered at?

  Around and around, the chorus that wouldn’t stop repeating. Yeah you left me in another grey area.

  After that, after whenever that happened, the two of them together, there was always a kind of tussle going on. Sometimes moody, sometimes fun. When it worked it was brilliant, brilliant.

  But when it didn’t work she just felt this ghastly claustrophobia. As if she could only ever amount to anything when they were doing their famous double act. Beauty and the Beast, Pepper and Hare, Thé Glacé and Rosenstein, for the love of God.

  And then there was another question and an answer she knew and sometimes saw in that wistful mirror.

  Had she ever encountered anything undeniable like this before?

  Of course she had.

  There was poor little Dan, curled like a parenthesis around the beginning of a time in her life that had seemed like an awful endless waiting to be closed off, finished with, got over, an endlessly deferred or failed or missed return to sensation. The billboards along the overland railway line out to Goldsmiths at New Cross: ‘Got Commitment Issues?’ ‘Time to Move On?’

  Yes, so pathetic really, how could she admit it even to herself when it felt almost shameful? But it was true, it was that big squalid parenthesis of Christopher curled against her back making little flubbery noises while he slept. Yes it was Christopher still asleep late in the morning after the huge ridiculous Cappon Magro in Boccadasse.

  Not food is love, but close.

  Mangiare è fare l’amore!

  It was Christopher who’d closed down the undeniable time of poor little Danny, and the long undeniable denial that came after him. Yes it was thanks to Christopher that she could bear to remember Danny again, after ten years learning not to think about him.

  Just started art school and she had her first taste, the lovely Israeli boy Dan very carefully tied off her pathetic little white arm and slipped the needle into her blue vein.

  ‘Just like lapis lazuli, Mary, you should see it one day, blue like in the Chagall windows at the Hadassah in Jerusalem.’

  How was she supposed to tell him she had? Been there, seen that? And Danny’s thin, tender face, leaning over her.

  ‘Okay Mary? It’s good?’

  Yes, it was, it was good, it was really, really good, and Danny was sweet, he looked after her very gently. When she was stoned, she was in a cocoon, a kind of time capsule, lovely.

  But then the day protest posters went up at Goldsmiths. About the massacre of Palestinians in the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps in Beirut, it was September 1982. The posters were all along the corridor by the canteen and the courtyard. They had a photograph of a pile of bodies in a narrow alleyway, with a blood-red text saying The truth: 2,000 dead civilians, and the next time she saw Danny his sweet tenderness had gone. He was walking up and down, up and down in his posh flat, he was all sinews and tears, crying and ranting.

  Saying over and over, ‘How can they say it was the Jews, it wasn’t us, it was those Lebanese Christians, it was those fucking Arabs doing it to each other!’

  But she could see he also knew what people were saying. That it was true, that he knew. His pain showed clearly that he knew the truth.

  At that moment, trying to hold his jangling, angry body still for a moment, she’d felt her sensation of Danny shift. It wasn’t any more just about him and his tenderness towards her with the heroin, and her need. It was also about her participation.

  It was about the fact that he knew what she knew. That was when she was able to go inside his undeniableness to where he wasn’t in control at all.

  Graham Parker, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, Joy Division – Ian Curtis, ‘Love will tear us apart’. As well as smack he turned her on to all that music.

  His favourite Joe Jackson songs. They say two hearts should beat as one for us.

  But she hadn’t known enough to see what he would do, finally. The little knobbly body discarded, the overdose clichés arranged like a dreadful didactic display. Not a lot of vomit, just enough to make the point, and the apparatus all there rather tidily.

  The thing she remembered vividly afterwards was that he only had one shoe on as if he’d been in too much of a hurry to get really comfortable. Poor rich little Dan. He’d always liked nice shoes and the one he’d taken off, one of his dressy chisel-toed Rogani Bruno e Francos was there, lined up all by itself on the floor outside his wardrobe, pathetic.

  At Goldsmiths, someone kept tearing the posters down while others put fresh ones up with even more horrible images. Then someone defaced the posters with swastikas and wrote PLO Nazis. Arguments broke out around the Red Crescent Relief Fund table in the corridor with the black and white tiles, someone was always tipping it over. There were students wearing keffiyeh scarves around their necks in solidarity with the victims of the camps.

  One day after Danny’s funeral all the tiles in the black-and-white corridor shifted into three dimensions, the black ones on the bottom and the white ones floating just above them. She fell over and couldn’t stand up again. The people who helped her out into the courtyard didn’t understand what she was telling them about the leafy tree there, how its swirly branches made her feel sick.

  She got out of the building and down Clifton Rise to the park, where she lay face down in the wet grass. Some Nigerians from the taxi co-op on the Rise found her there when they came down for a joint just after dark. They carried her up to the Mo
ntego Bay Spice Restaurant that Danny used to love. Its smell of fatty chicken made her retch. The owner sat her outside on a chair. Then the ambulance took her to A&E at Greenwich.

  When her mother visited the Serenity clinic in Camden she brought letters with reports rebutting the Shatila and Sabra massacres from her sister, Auntie Ruth, in Jerusalem, but what did she care? What difference did it make?

  Her father never visited, not that time or subsequently.

  ‘Dan shall be a serpent by the road, a viper by the path, that bites the horses’ heels.’ This was the little prayer she said for Danny in the weeks afterwards, over and over, her first time in rehab. The text was in a brochure from her trip to Israel, the Dan Window at the Hadassah had a serpent coiling up a candlestick, she remembered it.

  But she’d never told Danny that her parents had paid for her to go to Israel in the year before art school, to be with her mother’s sister and her cousins.

  And why was that, why hadn’t she told Danny? Because it would have reminded him that he wasn’t there, where he belonged, in Israel. In spite of everything he said about the place, the little rich boy, with his nice flat, his shoes, his drugs, he was just another rich brat, Danny, he was just like her. Except he looked Jewish and she didn’t, peaches and cream, whatever that was supposed to mean. Poor Danny-the-viper’s skinny little English shiksa, so he thought, with the lapis lazuli veins.

  But she was Jewish, at least her family was, how else did you know? When she was young her parents had famous parties, Bianca Jagger came to one. She sat on the stairs and smoked pot with another woman who kept shouting ‘No, no, no, you don’t get it, Janka!’

  Another time she saw David Hockney necking with a man in the kitchen while pouring a drink with his free hand. His owlish eyes behind his glasses were completely focused on the drink, not the man he was kissing.

  They didn’t observe Sabbath and didn’t go to synagogue but they did have a family party at Yom Ha’atzmaut to celebrate the independence of Israel. They’d phone her mother’s sister in Jerusalem, and her father would start a new fund-raising year with wine glasses raised around the table in a toast to the Jewish homeland.