She tries to bully me into fixing it.
‘How many wires can there be?’ she asks indignantly (when I try to tell her that this electrical lark isn’t really my forte). ‘I mean there’s just a big, fat one at the back. How complicated is that?’
‘I could get you a takeaway,’ I offer.
She turns and looks at me, furiously. ‘What do you know…’ she splutters, and then suddenly, the stress in her face simply falls away and she just grins.
‘Adair Graham MacKenny,’ she says, holding out her arms (as though expecting me to jump into them, like an enthusisatic young pup). ‘Long time no see, eh?’
She kisses me, with tender ceremony, on either cheek.
(No hard feelings about the other night, then?)
Even through the immaculate veneer of her sudden cheerfulness I can tell that she’s exhausted. It’s only been a week or so, but she looks thinner. And the whites of her eyes are pinky-red. She seems a little high. Medication? Stress? Exhaustion?
‘But what will I do?’ she asks, pointing towards the chaos on the counter.
‘I have an oven,’ I say, ‘at home. We could jump into a cab and hightail it on over there.’
‘How far?’ she asks.
‘Five minutes, tops.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Okay. Let’s.’
Part of me thinks she might be upset by it. She might be sensitive (invalids can sometimes be funny like that), but she isn’t. Not remotely. She’s fine. In fact she’s beatific.
We’ve dumped three bags of provisions (and one of Tupperware) on to the kitchen table, she’s growled at the dogs (and they’ve fled) and she’s followed me downstairs, quite willingly, into my lair.
I put N*e*r*d on the stereo- ‘In Search Of…’
First thing she does is open a window.
‘Air,’ she gasps, then glances up towards street level.
‘How lovely for you,’ she murmurs, ‘to see everyone’s shoes…’ She pauses, ‘And up everyone’s skirts, too.’
Then she sits down on my bed and I show her the pictures.
‘The eyes,’ I say (the way Blaine does in the text), flipping between the two images.
‘Good gracious me. I get your point,’ she murmurs.
‘The way I see it,’ I say, my own eyes drawn inexorably towards her shapely bare thigh, ‘Houdini’s like Blaine’s inspirational father-figure.’
She tips her head slightly. ‘Okay…’ she says, tentatively.
‘We know nothing about his relationship with his actual dad,’ I continue, ‘except that he died when Blaine was young. It’s entirely conceivable that he might’ve been obliged to watch him suffer, as a boy, and magic–this strange and mysterious world of wands and tarot–was an escape for him. A release.’
Aphra says nothing.
‘At one point in the book he talks–at some length–about this recurring dream he has as a child. In the dream he suddenly finds himself standing inside this amazing room crammed with countless magical devices and huge, ornate glass display cases. He says that the room made him feel inexpressibly happy. It was a refuge. He would enter this room and he would feel magic all around him. In fact he would enter this room and he was magic.’
I pause. ‘These two worlds were probably entirely separate at first. But then one day, in the library, the 5-year-old Blaine accidentally happens across this extraordinary image of the great Houdini. And it’s when his eyes connect with Houdini’s eyes that those two initially disparate sides of his life suddenly forge together. Houdini was the unifier, see? When he saw Houdini’s eyes, maybe–at some fundamental level–he recognised his own eyes (and through them, by extension, his own dead father’s eyes). Through the terrified gaze of this master magician, Blaine suddenly experiences this powerful sense of a unity of suffering. And magic was the facilitator. Magic brought everything into relief. Magic brought his father and his suffering back to him. But through a filter. In an accessible way, a distanced way, a controllable way.’
Aphra stays quiet, presumably digesting my diatribe. I quietly indicate towards the little straps and bolts on the baby Blaine’s leg.
‘God bless him,’ she gasps, and leans down to kiss the picture. ‘God bless him.’
‘But what about his mother?’ I murmur. ‘His mother always supported him, he says, no matter what. She was his rock. But part of me can’t help thinking that maybe she supported him too much. And maybe that’s because he’d lost his dad, but maybe it was also because he was actually sick himself, and she really needed to nurture him. He was in pain, so she indulged him.’
Aphra has fallen down off the bed on to her knees. She has crawled forward slightly and is inspecting a line of my shoes by the wall as she listens. Her skirt just about trims the back of her buttocks.
‘He says at one point, when he was in his teens,’ I blabber on, trying not to stare too much (but still staring), ‘that he locked himself into his bedroom cupboard for two entire days. He can’t remember why. But she didn’t object, she just brought him all his food in on trays. And at another point he says how he slept on his hard bedroom floor for a whole year because he became obsessed by the idea of mites in his bed linen.’
She picks up my yellow trainers and sniffs them.
‘You love black olives,’ she says.
‘He was very obsessive, very compulsive,’ I continue, ‘he used to challenge himself to do things–like climb a tree or cross a road, and as he grew older the challenges became more risky, more dangerous, but he convinced himself that if he didn’t do them straight away then something bad would happen…’
‘We’ve all done that,’ Aphra mutters.
‘I didn’t.’
‘Well you’re the exception, then,’ she says, grabbing an old pair of Patrick Cox’s and inspecting them quizzically. ‘Adair Graham MacKenny,’ she sighs, ‘so well adjusted. A shining example to us all.’
A quick sniff later she murmurs, ‘Mints. Terrible for male fertility.’
I simply gaze at her.
‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?’
She crawls over the floor towards me on her hands and knees (I can see her breasts, hanging down, through the V in her sweater, partially confined by some kind of bizarre, crocheted bright pink bra top). She reaches my legs, pushes them open and shoves herself between them. She stares into my face.
‘Hello,’ she whispers, then starts adjusting the collar on my shirt and tucking my hair behind my ears (in an irritating way, in a false way, like I’m some scruffy kid she’s preparing for his first day of school, or an ancient invalid uncle). I grab her hands and restrain them. Then I kiss her. She bends back on her knees under the pressure. The harder I push, the more she gives. Eventually I’ve moved a foot forward and she’s arched into a lithe, girlie Z. I feel her teeth against my lips and tongue. I open my eyes.
‘What’s so funny?’ I ask.
‘Everything,’ she says. ‘You.’
I grab her shoulders, yank her forward and kiss her again.
‘Ow,’ she says afterwards, falling back on to her heels, touching her bottom lip, scowling, ‘that hurt.’ Three long seconds pass. Then she looks up, sees my concern and laughs.
She’s vicious. Careless. Wildly provoking.
I let go of her shoulders (What to do next? How to contain this mischief?), and in that same moment she puts her hands down to her sweater, grabs the fabric at the waist and pulls it over her head.
Wow. She suddenly looks like a cover shot from one of those slightly sordid Summer In Ibiza albums. Very pale. Slightly dirty. Several pins drop from her head on to the wooden floor. Scraps of hair fall loose.
Slowly she rises up again and leans her weight in against me. Her hands are behind her back. I can see her fingers twisting lithely together as her chin rests on my shoulder. Then she turns her head and kisses my neck. I start to move my hands and she stops. I stop moving my hands and she starts again.
Her lips are soon at my ear. ‘Remember th
at bit,’ she murmurs, grabbing my lobe between her teeth and pulling slightly, ‘when they’re trying to dig up that old tree stump–Shane and the kid’s father…?’
Her hands are on my knees, moving up slowly towards my thighs.
I nod, my breathing irregular.
‘And they’re just chopping into it, hacking into it, one after the other?’
She draws a deep breath, tickles my ear with her nose, moves her hands up past my hips, under my shirt and on to my stomach.
‘But it’s incredibly hard work, and hot,’ she sighs, ‘and they’re just dripping with sweat…’ She pushes me back, flat, on to the bed, lifts my shirt up, and slowly slithers the top half of her body over my groin and my stomach…
‘Do you remember that?’ she whispers.
I nod again.
She tweaks a nipple. ‘If you must know…’
She suddenly sits bolt upright and her voice returns to normal. ‘I actually found the writing throughout that entire section incredibly laboured.’
I open my eyes. She’s gazing down at me, grinning. A hairclip falls on to my neck.
That’s it. I grab her and toss her down on to the bed. She doesn’t protest. She’s just laughing, really loudly, as I sit astride her.
‘Stop laughing,’ I command roughly.
‘I can’t,’ she pants. ‘Your face. It’s just so…so funny.’
Her arms are over her head. I half-look for marks there (the kind of marks I saw in the diagrams on the internet) but I don’t see anything, so I push my hand firmly under her crochet.
Astonishing nipples.
Her back kinks at my touch and she laughs even louder.
I push the other hand down between her thighs where the skirt has ridden up. She whoops.
At the sound of her whooping two of the dogs shove their way through the dividing door from the kitchen (Oh great) and come careering down the stairs. Jax and Ivor. Jax begins barking when he espies me astride her.
She’s laughing so loudly now I think she might be sick.
‘Oh God,’ she roars. ‘No more weight on my stomach. It’s killing me. I think I might be going to vomit.’
I climb off. I try and force the dogs back upstairs. But Ivor has grabbed one of my trainers and is shaking it around in an orgy of furious sexual hysteria.
‘That’s my best fucking trainer,’ I bellow, above the cacophony.
Five flights with an erection. I finally retrieve the trainer in the bathroom, covered in saliva, with at least three–count them–serious puncture holes in the fabric around the toe area.
When I return downstairs again she’s hard at work in the kitchen, chatting away, animatedly (skirt, sandals, crocheted bra top) with a delighted-looking Solomon. They’re getting on like a house on fire.
Oh.
So apparently they have this wonderful acquaintance in common. Some queer silver designer called Tin-Tin who has a holiday home in Alaska which they’ve both actually visited over Christmas before (‘I was ninety-nine, when were you?’, ‘Didn’t Yasmin Le Bon go that year?’). Tin-Tin is a source of unbelievable fascination to them…
‘Thinks he’s the new Leigh Bowery…’
‘Lost two stone in one hour…’
‘Oh my God. The guest-room linen! It’s antique. He got it at this fantastic house sale in Turin.’
‘But did you notice how his eyebrows have grown back ginger?’
‘What do you think about his new lover? Total cunt? Me too.’
‘Wasn’t all the stuff with Jennifer Lopez just utterly fucked up?’
‘I know. It’s absolutely inescapable. Cardamom is quite literally the base scent of everything.’
‘Don’t you fry the onions off first? What?! But why not?’
‘Love the Scholls. Seriously. Screw those tight-arsed pricks at Birkenstock.’
‘Jagger? The mystery ingredient? Gives it that musky quality? Really?’
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Hello? Hello?
Anyone here actually remember me?
So she cooks and they gabble away, non-stop, for over an hour. Then she fills Solomon a plate, piles the rest of the food into Tupperware and spirits herself out of there.
I follow behind, dragging my shoes on, bleating something about her jumper.
Thirteen
Prepare yourselves.
(Oil your brakes, check your pads.)
The gradient gets pretty steep from here.
I’m chasing Aphra up the road (remember?), and she’s trying to flag down a cab. But it’s after eleven on a Sunday evening and her chances of catching one now aren’t looking too spectacular. So she decides to walk. I’m staggering along behind her, stopping, every so often (to try and tie my laces), but whenever I do, she dashes determinedly onwards.
I eventually draw level. She’s put her jumper back on (Thank God) and she’s making great time. She’s obviously in a hurry (Heaven forbid she should be late for Mr Blaine, huh?).
I try and grab a couple of the bags off her, but she knocks me back. ‘Go home,’ she says irritably. ‘It’s late. I’ll be fine…’
The Highway is still busy (don’t get me wrong), but it’s not really the ideal kind of place for an attractive woman (attractive? Did I say that?) to take a late-night stroll in Scholls and a miniskirt.
‘Let me at least stay with you until the Tower,’ I wheedle. ‘The way’s much better lit from there.’
‘You’re a damn pest,’ she scowls, finally (and very regretfully) passing two of the heavier bags across.
‘So what a coincidence,’ I murmur jealously (the crisis duly averted), ‘You and Solomon having that friend of yours in common–’
‘It’s sad, don’t you think?’ she cuts in. ‘That he took all those risks as a kid, supposedly to guard against anything bad happening, and then his mother’s diagnosed with cancer?’
It takes me a second or two to catch on.
‘Oh. Yes. Yes. I suppose it was.’
‘Life’s a bitch,’ she whispers.
We cross The Highway together.
‘He had a very crazy time of it in his mid-teens,’ I say. ‘Did you ever see the film Saturday Night Fever?’
‘I love that film.’ She grins.
‘Well remember the bit when John Travolta’s character…’
‘Tony,’ she sighs.
(Wow. She does love that film.)
‘Yeah, Tony. Remember when he drives to the Brooklyn Bridge with his gang of friends and they climb up on it and fuck about, and basically almost kill themselves just pissing around and showing off?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Boys will be boys, eh?’
‘And there’s the sad one with the bad shoes and the silly afro…?’
She frowns.
‘The little one, who everyone despises, who gets his girlfriend pregnant and doesn’t know what to do about it?’
She finally catches on. ‘Oh, you mean the little one…’
(Didn’t I just say that?)
‘Exactly. And if I remember correctly he’s the nervous kid in the group, and he never usually joins in when they climb, but towards the end of the film, when he’s especially desperate, he clambers up on to the bridge himself. He wants everyone to look at him–just this once–because he feels so bad and lonely and ignored. Then his foot slips, and he falls.’
‘Bloody platform heels,’ she growls.
(Uh, yeah…)
‘Well Blaine used to do that.’
She turns to look at me. ‘Really?’
‘Yup. But not the falling part, obviously.’
We walk a little further.
‘Don’t know which bridge it was,’ I say. ‘Somewhere in New Jersey, I guess. That’s where they moved when his mother remarried. I get the feeling he doesn’t look back on those times especially fondly…’
I pause. ‘But he used to pull the same stunt. He’d just stroll over these crossbars on a bridge, hundreds of feet up, with all the cars below honking the
ir horns in total panic. He was wild. And like they used to say in those nike ads, he’d “just do it”. He didn’t care.’
She shakes her head, slightly shocked. ‘Always hated those ads,’ she mutters.
‘In fact one time he was pulling a similar kind of stunt on a cliff-top. He was right on the edge of this precipice and he slipped, lost his footing, and just went hurtling down this dead drop…’
‘Then what?’
‘That’s the weird thing. He thought he’d had it. He thought he was going to die. But by some bizarre miracle–which, to this day, he still doesn’t entirely understand–he survived. A huge fall, and barely a scratch on him. After that all his friends used to call him, “the cat”.’
‘Nine lives…’ Aphra’s frowning. ‘Well that hardly sets the greatest precedent, does it?’
‘Why?’
‘Because he thinks he’s immortal. But of course he’s not. Nobody is.’
I shrug. ‘I suppose we could say that he lives a “charmed life”.’ Well…charmed in some ways, but definitely not in others. He’s seen everyone he truly loves slowly die around him, but he’s survived. Part of him, I’m certain, wants to punish himself for living on. And another part–a Messianic part–probably believes that he’s pretty much indestructible.’
We’re standing and talking by the Tower, now.
‘I’ve gotta go,’ she says, and takes the two bags from me.
‘I had a happy time tonight.’ She smiles. ‘Thank you.’
Then she kisses me, softly, on the cheek, turns and heads off into the light.
I follow her.
Obviously.
I mean, wouldn’t you?
She doesn’t know I’m behind her. She never looks back (Nope. Not once), not even when she first takes her leave of me (when most normal people actually might). And maybe part of me thinks (to begin with, at least) that she will, and if she does, then I’ll be able to turn resignedly around again (tongue-lashed and scalded), head off home, have a quick nip of Jim Beam, fall into a warm bath, a soft bed…
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