Clear

by Nicola Barker

  ‘Which was it?’

  ‘I don’t know…’

  (Fifty-eighth.)

  I clamber up on to my knees and adjust her leg so that now it’s lying across my shoulder. I can see her below me, stretched out on the sofa.

  ‘Hope my knickers are clean,’ she muses.

  ‘You’re not wearing any.’

  ‘Ah.’

  She yawns, ‘I’m a little claustrophobic.’

  Hmmn. Okay.

  I’m buttoning, now, above the knee. The skin is very soft here, and I have to pull the boot tight to contain its fleshiness.

  ‘Ouch,’ she mutters.

  ‘Anyway, so he’s finally cut free and he’s in terrible shock. Shivering uncontrollably, then every so often screaming out, in agony, like someone’s just stabbed him.’

  ‘That’s the cold,’ she says, with a shudder.

  ‘Frostbite. They take him to hospital in an ambulance, and the cameras go along with him. His girlfriend is there. I think she’s crying. He’s in and out of consciousness. It’s really grim.’

  ‘But he’s okay,’ she says, ‘isn’t he?’

  ‘So far as I can remember, I think his foot’s pretty fucked. He’s in bed for a month or so afterwards…Although that might’ve just been PR. But that’s not actually the important part. The important part is what happened when he was in the block. When he saw his girlfriend approach him and then walk away again.’

  ‘That feels very tight,’ she says, shunting herself up on to her elbows, inspecting her leg, which is stiff now, as if it’s been set into a pink pigskin cast.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, stroking the leather. ‘It’s beautiful. It’s meant to cling like that.’

  She frowns and tips her head, quizzically.

  ‘The point is,’ I continue, ‘Blaine says afterwards that when his girlfriend approached the block, he saw her, and he called out to her, but it was as if she hadn’t seen him. And he suddenly thought he was dead. He suddenly believed that he was dead. That he was a ghost. That she couldn’t see him. And that’s why he panicked.’

  On ‘panicked’, Aphra suddenly says, ‘You have to take it off.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  She slides the leg down from my shoulder, over the side of the chair and on to the floor.

  ‘Oh God,’ she says, scrabbling at the pigskin. ‘You must get it off. It’s frightening me.’

  I stand up, confused. ‘Don’t be silly. It’s just a boot.’

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t like it. It’s scaring me. I can’t breathe.’

  She puts her hands to her neck, gasping.

  I fall on to my knees and start unbuttoning.

  She’s actually crying now, hiccuping. ‘I just don’t…hick…like it…hick…I can’t stand the…hick…feeling…’

  As I struggle to unbutton, she’s pulling at the pigskin, frantically, which isn’t helping.

  ‘I must bend my knee,’ she says, and starts desperately trying to stand up.

  ‘Sit down,’ I say (loudly).

  ‘Shhh!’

  She puts her hands over my mouth, looking over towards the door, anxiously, then clasps her own throat, wheezing, horribly. She seems to be having some kind of panic attack.

  ‘Just calm down,’ I say, ‘and we’ll get it off.’

  But she simply stares at me, wheezing, her cheeks draining, her eyes glazing.

  So I slap her. She gasps, her eyes fly wide, she yells, ‘You fucker!’ then she slaps me back.

  (Ah. Just what I needed to sort out my sinuses.)

  It’s at this point I hear some kind of call from a bedroom. A quiet voice. A man’s voice. Aphra gives no sign of having heard anything. She collapses back on the sofa, covering her face with her hands, sobbing.

  I grit my teeth, and continue unbuttoning. She stops crying fairly rapidly and then just sits there, breathing heavily, holding her cheek, watching me, ruefully.

  It takes five minutes to get the bastard off. I finally pull it free and throw it back into the box. My thumb and index fingers are almost raw. I inspect them, scowling.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, peering up at me through her fringe, ‘I just really hate to feel constrained.’ We’re both silent for a minute, then, ‘Sometimes I feel like a ghost,’ she says, and holds out her two arms (like a pretty ghoul) and inspects them.

  ‘Ghost arms,’ I murmur softly.

  (They’re certainly pale enough.)

  She nods. She half-smiles. Then she grabs a hold of my hand (Good God that’s some grip) and pulls me down on top of her.

  Two minutes pass in a chaos of zips and elbows, then suddenly she freezes. ‘Are you crying?’

  (Crying? Me?)

  ‘Nope.’

  (Gasping a little, maybe.)

  She pushes me aside, sits bolt upright, puts her hand to her neck and says, ‘But you are…’ Then before I can respond she jumps up. ‘Fuck…it’s snot!’ she exclaims. ‘On my lovely neck.’

  (‘Lovely neck?’ Get her!)

  Oh dear. Oh dear. My nose has been dripping.

  ‘I’ve got flu,’ I stutter. ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘Perhaps you should go,’ she says, clutching at her temples.

  ‘The thing about snot,’ I try and reassure her, ‘is that it’s basically just saliva with extra flavour. Like a kiss with added salt.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ she says, then disappears.

  I hear her clattering around in the bathroom, then opening a couple of drawers in the bedroom. I hear some furtive muttering. Then nothing.

  Ten minutes pass.

  I inspect her tape cassettes. I look at her shoes, her books. I finish my tea (cold). I try to get the TV to work.

  Twenty minutes pass.

  Thirty.

  Is she ill? Asleep? Pondering the snot/kiss dichotomy? Waiting? Distressed?

  Does she want me to go?

  Really?

  Really?

  I give her an hour to change her mind.

  Okay. Ninety minutes, tops.

  And my flu–thanks for asking–has grown considerably worse in the meantime.

  Track six? Are you kidding?! Primal Scream. ‘Higher than the Sun.’

  Every time.

  God please forgive me, but I speed-read the Primo Levi as I compile the cassette (I can’t commit. I won’t commit. This is too Big. I just can’t own it). But every so often (just the same) the strong rope of its narrative lassoes me up, pulls me in and drags me along (spreadeagled, scrabbling for a handhold, bleating out my weak defence of terminal frivolity. I’m totally superficial, see? I’m inherently trivial. D’you have any fucking idea how hard that can sometimes be?).

  They’re full of ghosts, these two books, both living and dead. In the Author’s Preface (and even this isn’t a safe place) Levi says how for most people (and most peoples) ‘every stranger is an enemy’, but that this belief, this feeling, does not exist (in general) as the basis of any formal doctrine, but rather ‘it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts’.

  In Paul Bailey’s Introduction he snipes at ‘the artists who use the terrible fact of the camps for emotional and aesthetic effect’.

  So is Blaine doing that? Can we accuse him of this crime? Even if it was just a question of mentioning the Levi book in passing (like it was vaguely connected, in some way, to the ordeal he was undertaking)?

  I ponder this for a while.

  But the reference was an oblique one.

  Is Bailey right, then? Is the holocaust bigger than art?

  Is it beyond art?

  And is Blaine–through this strange, solitary gesture of his–simply pointing a small torch into the huge, black sky of history, and hoping that people might peer up and see–and pause, and remember–how very dark it is up there?

  Seven. Gotta be the Beatles. ‘Here Comes the Sun.’

  Doo-dun-doo-doo!

  At the exact midway point of the Levi (and remember I’ve got the two separate books published together here), I come
across this little kid. This 3-year-old kid called Hurbinek. In fact that isn’t actually even his real name. Nobody knows what he’s called. He doesn’t have a name. He’s just this partially functioning scrag of flesh perched determinedly in a grubby cot.

  Levi and his fellow survivors (the Germans are on the run by this stage and Levi is slowly recovering from scarlet fever in the camp’s infirmary) think he was born in captivity, but they aren’t entirely sure. He has no family. He’s simply been left. He’s utterly alone.

  Hurbinek’s disabled–his legs are just two pegs–and thin. Levi describes his face as ‘triangular’. Merely an amalgam of bones and skin. But what little skin there is on this tot’s tiny forearm is tattoed with those indelible digits of Auschwitz.

  But the eyes! Hurbinek’s eyes! Flashing and seething and alive. Furious. Blazing. Because he cannot speak. He’s never been taught. So he just sits in his cot, an ‘obsessive presence’, his eyes burning with this thwarted desire to communicate. And at first no one will speak to him. Nobody can face that indomitable 3-year-old gaze and bear what it might tell them. Except for one person. A boy called Henek. Fifteen years old. Hungarian.

  Henek begins to nurture the tiny, isosceles-faced Hurbinek. He speaks to him, hour after hour, slowly and calmly. He’s unbelievably patient and tender. Then, after a week or so, he approaches the other men on the ward and proudly tells them that Hurbinek–this incandescent scrap, this ‘child of death’–has spoken. He has articulated a word. The word (and it varies, slightly, with each faltering pronunciation) sounds something like ‘mass-klo’! Mass-klo?

  There are men from every corner of Europe lying in that ward, educated men, men who–between them–speak every European language, every tongue. But nobody knows what Hurbinek’s word means. People have their theories (certainly) but no one is entirely sure.

  And nobody finds out, definitively, because Hurbinek dies (as he surely must), without his word ever being clearly interpreted, without ever experiencing that reassuring thrill of being truly comprehended. And Levi–who has seen so much, and this is merely more–shakes his head, wisely, and in that sublimely understated way of his, murmurs, ‘No, it was certainly not a message, it was not a revelation…’

  It was just a word–two defiant syllables–which nobody understood.

  Mass-klo.

  Some things are beyond the reach of art.

  Some words are meaningful beyond understanding.

  It was Blaine. It was him. He made me read that book.

  Eleven

  It’s not a criticism of the girl or anything (well, not exactly), but don’t you just hate those people who automatically sympathise with the baddie in a book (or film, or play) simply because they think it makes them seem ‘multifaceted’?

  Of course they’ll provide you with some perfectly coherent reason for their deranged stance: ‘Oh no, I always loved the Child-Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I mean he’s so true, so rounded. And he was probably bullied by the other children at school when he was a kid because of his misshapen nose and his chalky pallor…

  ‘I bet he’s great to his mother. In fact I’m pretty certain that he’s a passionate supporter of Help The Aged’s “Sponsor a Granny” scheme, but he just doesn’t go public about it (He’s far too subtle, too self-deprecating for that). My sources tell me that he sends a very regular allowance to an isolated Nicaraguan octogenarian called Rosa Francesca Velasquez. A worn-out mother of twelve. She was destitute before he stepped in…’

  My God. But of course. Now I realise. You’re just so complex, so contrary, so intuitive, so fascinating…George Lucas certainly isn’t helping matters in this respect, now that Darth Vader’s suddenly been unmasked as Luke Skywalker’s father.

  ‘Yeah, so apparently Darth had a stutter as a boy, and it made him feel really socially inept…And then, when he had a kid of his own, he just couldn’t bring himself to express real love…’

  Why can’t a baddie just be bad? And why can’t a good guy just be better?

  The way I’m seeing it, the rot started at ground level: the British school system in the seventies; when they introduced mixed ability classes and abandoned streaming–

  ‘I’m very sorry Jimmy/Johnny/Jane, but you’re just going to have to sit quietly and read your books while I struggle for an entire lesson to get Smeg-boy here to hold his crayon properly.’

  Trust Aphra to find something appealing in the money-grabbing Fletcher. Maybe she’s doing it simply to provoke. I mean to refuse–point blank–to admire a hero who fills every page with effortless light and grace and colour, in favour of some wealthy absentee landowner who–for crass, financial gain–uses his hired hands to rough-up the law-abiding local folk? Can that be logical (or emotionally sustaining)? Has she no Social Antennae?

  Bly interrupts my musings by phoning just before she knocks off work, at five. ‘I was just on the internet,’ she says, her voice full of horror, ‘reading about how Vincent Gallo–the actor…’

  ‘I know who Vincent Gallo is…’

  (Best hair in the business, let’s make no bones about it. And biggest mouth, come to that.) ‘…Of course you do. Well, Gallo said that he wouldn’t have sex with Chloe Sevigny during the filming of Brown Bunny, because he didn’t want to catch Harmony Korine’s herpes…’

  As she’s speaking I’m lounging on my bed, gingerly trying to unfurl the well-masticated back cover of the David Blaine biography.

  Now hang on a minute…

  The back cover–which is virtually unsalvageable–has been gnawed away just far enough to reveal a small black-and-white photograph of Blaine himself (underneath a two-page, small-type insert entitled ‘Blaine’s Challenge’, where it would appear that the enthusiastic reader–by following a series of clues dotted throughout the text–might be able to treasure hunt themselves a fantastic $100,000).

  But the picture…

  ‘Isn’t herpes transmitted through the saliva?’ I interject distractedly.

  Bly muses on this point for a second. ‘I can’t profess to be an expert on the subject…’

  I hold the book slightly closer to my face.

  ‘Well, I’m pretty certain that the virus is related to the cold sore,’ I say. ‘Kind of like an older cousin or something. And if it is, he’s definitely going to regret that fifteen minute on-screen blow-job Sevigny gave him.’

  Bly groans. ‘That’s revolting.’

  (And this from a girl who thinks Harmony Korine’s genital health is an appropriate topic for conversation?)

  ‘Gallo’s revolting,’ I mutter, ‘and a legendary bull-shitter…Sevigny’s a babe. There’s no flies on her.’

  Short silence.

  Then three seconds later, ‘I’ve just thought of one,’ she yelps. ‘That lovely, catchy, pop/dance thing from the early nineties…uh…Zoe: “Sunshine On A Rainy Day”.’

  ‘Violent Femmes,’ I shout straight back (don’t ask me why–probably spurred on to new heights by her crushing mediocrity), “Blister In The Sun”!’

  ‘“Waiting for the Sun”, The Doors!’ she bellows.

  Hmmn.

  I quietly weigh up the pros and the cons. ‘Great idea,’ I cordially allow her,’ but a shit track. Sorry.’

  I mean whose themed mix tape is this, anyway?

  Two minutes later I’m on the phone to Jalisa.

  ‘Who gave you my number?’ she asks tightly.

  ‘So you fell a little short on that pesky Elders of Zion question, huh?’

  (Not that I want to dab vinegar on the wound or anything.)

  ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ she corrects me. ‘Do you have any idea what protocol is, Adair?’

  ‘Of course,’ I kinda, sorta, half-lie.

  ‘Well, if that’s actually the case,’ she informs me primly, ‘then you’ll fully appreciate how many you’ve just breached by ringing me today.’

  Pause.

  ‘I’m just worried about Solomon,’ I lie.

  ‘No you’re
not,’ she corrects me.

  Okay…

  ‘So I read the Kafka,’ I blurt out, ‘and it was fantastic. The Jew stuff’s really put this whole thing into perspective for me.’

  Another pause.

  ‘I just wanted to say Thank You,’ I gush.

  ‘You do realise,’ she says carefully, ‘that my entire diatribe the other night was simply for effect.’

  Longer pause.

  ‘You don’t realise that,’ she says eventually. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Effect?’ I eventually mutter. ‘What effect?’

  ‘To piss Solomon off,’ she sighs. ‘To out-sauce the King of Sass. To out-smart the Infernal Smart-Arse. To out-Jabber the damn Hut.’

  (Was Jabba especially talkative? I don’t remember the narrative featuring a sub-plot about how extortionate his phone bills were.)

  Before I can really respond to this bombshell, she adds, ‘Of course I have no concrete reasons for even believing that Blaine is a Jew.’

  Wha?

  ‘Yeah. Very funny,’ I mumble.

  ‘Well why should he be?’ she demands.

  ‘Because he must.’

  ‘But if he’s Jewish,’ she muses, ‘then why does he have a huge tattoo of a crucified Christ on his back?’

  ‘As a homage to Dali’s original painting,’ I say. ‘He admires Dali’s work.’

  ‘That’s just silly, Adair,’ she snorts, ‘and you know it.’

  ‘He’s a Jew!’

  ‘Why?’

  I’m clutching my head, derangedly. ‘Because that’s what makes sense. That’s how it all adds up. Because I like him Jewish. I understand him better as a Jew, and the hostility he’s generating.’