Clear

by Nicola Barker

  ‘Well that’s your problem,’ she snaps.

  ‘My problem,’ I hiss, ‘was spending five and a half hours, in mortal turmoil, reading Primo bloody Levi, on your instigation…’

  ‘God, you’re a lightweight,’ she says. ‘Shame on you. You have all the moral fibre of a feather.’

  I grab the Blaine book. ‘But you were right about the Kafka,’ I witter: ‘And here’s another thing…On the back page of his autobiography there’s this small black-and-white photograph of Blaine, in a short-sleeved shirt, and on the soft flesh inside of his left arm are a series of numbers…’

  I inspect the photograph again. ‘174517. Six digits. A tattoo. Like the ones they were given in Auschwitz.’

  I lean over and grab the Levi and start flipping through it. My eye alights, rapidly, at the bottom of page 33. An italicised number.

  ‘The exact-same tattoo Levi was given.’ I gape, ‘The same digits. I mean he wouldn’t dare do that if he wasn’t a Jew, would he?’

  ‘Must be a direct reference to the Levi,’ she begins to speculate, ‘or some kind of clue…’ (At last, at last, I’ve drawn her in), but then her subtle thought processes are interrupted by a persistent beeping on the line. ‘Urgh,’ she mutters. ‘Call Waiting…’

  And cuts me off.

  Thanks.

  Charmed.

  Hang on. That was my phone. A message.

  I play it back.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ an unfamiliar female voice growls accusingly. ‘I simply can’t believe that you’re doing this. It’s obscene. It’s so incredibly wrong. She’s confused. She’s not properly herself. She’s vulnerable. She’s sick. And if you have even an inch of decency you’ll leave her the fuck alone.’

  Click.

  The Vaselines, ‘Jesus Don’t Want Me For A Sunbeam’

  Classic eighties Indie shlock.

  God, I really, really love that track.

  And it is a ridiculous name, now you actually come to mention it.

  I replay the message to Solomon when he returns (extra-late) from some fantastic party at the Egyptian Embassy.

  ‘She must be ill,’ he says matter of factly, pulling off his jacket.

  ‘Who?’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘Let’s put all the clues together, shall we? Number One: the headaches.’

  ‘Migraines,’ I correct him.

  ‘Number Two,’ he persists, ‘the fact that she’s on first-name terms with a porter at Guys, when she doesn’t actually work there…’

  Ah yes. The hospital porter. Of course.

  ‘Number Three: her diet. She’s made healthy eating into an art form: low fat, low yeast et cetera.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what Jalisa said,’ I interject.

  Solomon scowls. ‘You just spoke with Jalisa?’

  ‘The other evening,’ I counter deftly. ‘And you utterly ridiculed her for it.’

  He merely shrugs. ‘Number Four: she’s plainly psychotic. She sits alone on a wall all night, surrounded by Tupperware, her eyes pinned, unswervingly, on to the recumbent torso of an International Illusionist (when any sensible person would simply invest in cable). She sniffs strangers’ shoes. She likes flashing her pudenda…’ He pauses (as if saving the best until last). ‘And she listens, voluntarily, to Premier Christian Radio.’

  ‘In short…’ He lets the dogs out into the backyard for a late-night piss. ‘This nutcase is quite spectacular girlfriend material.’

  Hmmn.

  ‘You think I should cool things down a little?’

  ‘No. I think you should set up home together. I hear the embankment’s very congenial at this time of year.’

  Ah.

  ‘Drop her like a hot brick.’ He opens the door and whistles. ‘Avoid the magician. Date that dumpy girl from work instead. The ginger girl with a silly name. She’s infinitely more suitable…’ He pauses. ‘More at your level.’

  My level?

  The dogs.

  One

  TWO

  Three

  –trot demurely back inside again.

  My level?

  What’s he actually mean by that?

  Two a.m. I’m frenziedly tapping away on my keyboard, surfing the www.

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe she’s ill. Maybe she’s very ill. The headaches. The constant hospital visits. The porter. The wildly overprotective ‘sister’ figure…

  Kidney failure.

  Must be.

  She’s on dialysis.

  I key frantically into Google.

  Dialysis…

  Ping!

  The Kidney Dialysis Foundation. Now we’re talking…

  So it transpires that the kidneys are a pair of bean-shaped organs located to the rear of the abdomen (6cm wide, 11cm long, 3cm thick, weighing in at 160 grams). They’re made up of one million nephrons (and the nephrons are made up of a million other things. But let’s not get into all that, eh?).

  The kidney’s main function is to remove toxins, waste and excess water from the body, but it also maintains the balance of salts and releases a variety of hormones…(Perhaps this could explain the mood swings?).

  Symptoms of a kidney disorder…

  Uh…A burning sensation passing water (Right. Okay). Blood in the urine (Yeah. Whatever). Puffy eyes (Her eyes are sometimes puffy, actually). Swelling of the hands, feet and abdomen…

  What?!

  (No wonder the boots didn’t fit. No wonder she felt ‘confined’. No wonder her waist’s so thick…)

  …and, breathlessness.

  (Breathlessness! The panic attack!)

  I read–at some length–about special diets (yup, yup, yup). Then about how regular dialysis can involve a patient visiting hospital for, on average, three hours approximately every four days.

  That’s it.

  Enough.

  The girl’s a goner.

  Her kidneys are fucked.

  Thank God I found this out now.

  That poor, sick creature. So brave. So alone. So proud. So beautiful. So mixed-up. So bloated.

  I lie in bed and plan how I’m going to dedicate every available minute from here on in to researching her condition, raising awareness, being helpful and encouraging and gentle and indispensable.

  I even consider donating a kidney of my own…play this fantastic little film backwards and forwards in my head for a while–the white hospital robe, the brave smile, the hospital trolley, the incredibly sexy nurse, the powerful anaesthetic…

  Drive the pigs to market.

  Wake up with the birds, unbelievably refreshed.

  Think about that sexy nurse for a few minutes.

  Then get up, get dressed, go out and buy an i-Pod.

  This is serious.

  It takes me a whole ten days to transfer the most vital constituents of my record and CD collections on to this marvellous piece of ‘cutting edge’ technology.

  I mean to have it all, right there, at your fingertips, whenever you want it.

  Hoo-wee.

  On the tenth day, Bly drops by.

  ‘It’s been two weeks,’ she says, holding her bag nervously in both hands as she stands behind the kitchen table and stares at the dogs (who are sitting in a neat row on the other side, and staring straight back at her).

  My level, he said. My level.

  ‘In dog psychology,’ I tell her, ‘the stare is generally associated with aggressive behaviour. Try and blink a little.’

  She stops staring.

  ‘There’s subterranean rumblings at the office,’ she says, gazing up at the ceiling (like Damon Albarn at the peak of his Britpop mania), ‘about giving you the old heave-ho.’

  ‘But I’ve had the flu,’ I whine.

  ‘I know. That’s what I said. But the flu isn’t really in vogue right now–for the flu to work, conceptually, everyone needs to be catching it–and two weeks is…well…two weeks.’

  She pulls out a chair.

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ I say.


  ‘Thanks.’

  She sits down. She tucks a tuft of flaming hair behind a small, white ear. She clears her throat. ‘So…’ she says, then pauses, worriedly. ‘Why on earth are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘You’re actually quite a show-stopper,’ I murmur (Well, underneath all that defensive blubber).

  She blushes, ‘Don’t be stupid’, and starts messing around with the pepper dispenser.

  ‘Pretty face,’ I qualify.

  Her eyes tighten. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘That you’ve got a pretty face, I guess.’

  ‘You think I’m overweight? Is that it?’

  ‘No. I just think you’ve got a pretty face.’

  (Jesus Christ. What’s it take to make a compliment work in this town?)

  She rolls her eyes.

  ‘But how heavy are you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘I’m a size fourteen. That’s an average size.’

  ‘Yeah. Of course. In the West.’

  Her brows shoot up (Nice brows. Personality-ful. Brows like Julianne Moore’s after a month in the wilderness sans tweezers).

  ‘What d’you mean, “In the West?”’

  ‘I mean that it wouldn’t be your “average” size in, say, Algeria.’

  ‘In Algeria my size would be an irrelevance,’ she snipes, ‘because I’d be dressed head-to-toe in bloody purdah.’

  I choose not to argue this point with her, but merely smile, sympathetically.

  ‘You’re actually quite skinny,’ she snaps, ‘for a man.’

  Then she pauses. ‘And short.’

  Then she pauses again. ‘And your hair…’

  But she runs out of steam at this point.

  (‘High styled’, springs to mind, ‘beautifully coiffured’, perhaps, ‘brave’, even.)

  ‘Five foot nine is average,’ I murmur.

  She shrugs.

  ‘Why the shrug?’

  ‘In this country, maybe, but in–say–Ethiopia…’

  She sighs. ‘It’s all relative, I guess.’

  ‘Well, this is nice,’ I mutter.

  Silence.

  ‘Blaine’s actually looking a whole lot thinner now,’ she observes.

  I merely grimace.

  ‘Why the face?’ she asks.

  ‘This is my face,’ I say (a delicate combination of haughty and apologetic).

  ‘So after weeks of analysing him into the damn ground,’ she muses, ‘suddenly Blaine is persona non grata?’

  I wave my hand, airily. ‘It’s a crazy old life, eh?’

  ‘What?’ she snorts. ‘Skiving off work? Downloading your record collection on to an i-Pod?’

  I shrug.

  ‘That’s not being busy,’ she sneers. ‘That’s just pointless duplication.’

  I shrug again (Is this girl entirely oblivious to all basic forms of body language?).

  ‘It’s just reformatting,’ she gradually builds up speed (Yup. Now we’re for it), ‘I mean how could Capitalism possibly survive without inventing a hundred different ways of doing the exact same thing?’

  ‘Interesting point,’ I demur.

  ‘It’s like life is a can of Coke,’ she points at an empty can on the table, ‘and instead of just drinking it we spend all this time and this effort deciding whether to have it in a glass or sip it through a straw.’

  I nod.

  ‘But it’s the liquid that matters, Adie, not how you consume it.’

  ‘Straight from the can, in my case,’ I aver (angling–unashamedly–after the purist vote).

  ‘I think you just missed my point,’ she mutters.

  ‘Well, if there isn’t a can,’ I say, ‘how the heck do you expect to hold all the contents in?’

  ‘I swear to God,’ she says (effortlessly sidestepping my fine, philosophical barb), ‘that you’ve only lost interest in Blaine lately because you’re scared he’s a gentile, and that’ll mean all your exciting little conspiracy theories won’t actually add up.’

  ‘Terrified,’ I scoff.

  She smirks at me.

  ‘I was never that interested anyway,’ I obstinately persist, ‘just momentarily diverted.’

  ‘But does it really matter what Blaine’s background is?’ she battles on. ‘Surely the important thing is what he chooses–consciously or otherwise–to “represent”, and how people respond to it?’

  ‘Of course what you are matters,’ I scowl: ‘You have to be legitimate at some level. Otherwise it’s all just bullshit. You have to walk the walk to talk the talk. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ she murmurs. ‘You were offended by Blaine’s use of Christian iconography, to begin with. Then you found out that he was a Jew, and because people were throwing eggs at him, that was just dandy…’ She pauses, frowning. ‘Although in my book, if he is a Jew, then using the Christian stuff in such an unapologetically self-aggrandising way strikes me as perhaps a little dodgy…’

  ‘Oh Great,’ I sneer. ‘Now you get all sniffy about it. But when I was getting upset about the Christian angle, I was apparently just “overreacting”…’

  She flaps her hand at this (like my words are just gnats). ‘You’re too literal,’ she says, ‘and that’s your problem. This is Art. It’s not about the person so much as the statement they’re making. It doesn’t really matter what his racial origins are…’

  ‘Try telling that to the people throwing eggs at him,’ I squeak.

  ‘That’s exactly my point,’ she jumps in, cackling exuberantly.

  It is?

  It is?

  I frown, confused.

  ‘The way I’m seeing it, there are two things that Blaine is obsessed by,’ she holds up a couple of fingers, ‘suffering and mystery. Fortunately (for him) all religions, all nationalities, all cultures can relate to those things in some way or other. His work has a universal application. It’s not about any particular denomination, but about the trials of humanity.’ (Work? Who does she think he is? Picasso?)

  I say nothing.

  ‘You’re just sulking,’ she says. ‘You were hoping to take the moral high ground over this whole Jew farrago, but the water’s suddenly risen and now you’ve found yourself stranded on some rocky little promontory, feeling like a complete dick. But the truth is, you can swim. You’re a good swimmer. So why not just jump in?’

  She leans back on her chair, plainly delighted with herself.

  The chair creaks.

  ‘You’ve simply got to include all that fabulous “inundation” imagery,’ I gasp (camping it up a little), ‘in the DVD extras for your motivational video.’

  She completely ignores this, simply laying both hands flat on to the table-top, delivering me a brilliant smile and proudly announcing: ‘Black Sabbath, Volume IV. “Under The Sun”.’

  Three seconds pass us.

  ‘Urgh, been there,’ I finally grouch, ‘done that.’

  Didn’t have her down for a heavy rocker, somehow.

  You think I was a little harsh?

  You do?

  Well, on Monday she texted ‘The Thrills, “Don’t Steal Our Sun”.’

  Tuesday: ‘Donovan, “I’ll Try For The Sun”.’

  Wednesday: ‘The Libertines, “Don’t Look Back Into The Sun”.’

  Talk about grabbing a baton and running with it.

  Then catching you up and beating you senseless with the damn thing.

  Again and again and again.

  And again.

  My level?

  Twelve

  Okay. I confess. I did go twice. Three times. But that’s all.

  And it was always completely spontaneous (a totally last-minute decision). And late. Always late. And I stayed on the bridge–well back, virtually invisible (just a few feet, literally, beyond the halfway point).

  From this considerable distance she was just a blob, a blur. But I could tell it was Aphra (It’s all in the posture, see? The tilt
of the head, the jut of the chin…).

  One night it rained–a steady rain–but she stayed on. She’d brought an umbrella with her (that particularly childish, transparent kind), and she put it up and just sat there. It would’ve made an amazing photograph (the light, the transparency, his transparency beyond her). But I hadn’t brought my camera along.

  Missed opportunity, eh?

  I got wet that night; stood in the lee of the second gate and it almost sheltered me, although on a couple of occasions (but not this one) bridge officials moved me on.

  Four times. I went four times. The fourth time I bumped into Punk’s Not. Or he bumped into me. He was carrying six steaming cartons of hot coffee over the bridge in a specially adapted plastic tray.

  ‘It’s three fifty-seven on a Thursday morning,’ he blared, tapping me on my shoulder, quite unexpectedly, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  (Almost having a heart attack, you fucker. Don’t just tap me like that.)

  ‘Late shift at work,’ I say airily, ‘just heading home.’

  (Then I turn and face the other way, like I’m right in the middle of my very important journey.)

  ‘What?’ he scoffs. ‘The mayor really needed some pencils sharpening and simply couldn’t wait until dawn?’

  ‘Backlog,’ I sniff, ‘I’ve had flu, as it happens.’

  ‘Hilary too,’ he says.

  ‘How hilarious,’ I quip smugly.

  (Ah, vengeance.)

  ‘So fucking funny he shat himself,’ Punk’s Not muses.

  ‘Yeah,’ I nod, ‘I had that symptom.’

  He offers me a cup of coffee.

  ‘Oh, Thanks,’ I say, and take one.