by Trevor Eve
*
Clarissa he had met while swimming.
And he saw her every Saturday for weeks at the Porchester baths before they actually spoke, which wasn’t at the baths, but around the corner at Planet Organic, squeezing avocados, and he realised she was there, next to him, also testing the avocados for ripeness. So they spoke, unsurprisingly, about avocados, then they decided to sit there and have a coffee; then that progressed. The following week they had lunch and then he recalled their first official date.
He was still sweating and wondered if he had a fever, as he wiped the sweat with the sheet and returned to his thoughts of Clarissa, going through them as if repetitive thought would eventually give him a greater insight into what had happened. Of course it never did. There was only one reality, one truth, and he knew it. But it helped him to see his part in the process. Although he knew it was an exercise that he did and he always came to the same conclusion. That it was his fault, his brain again.
They went to eat Indian at the Malabar restaurant at the back of the now closed Coronet Cinema in Notting Hill. That was their first official, evening date. He smiled recalling that they ate so much food and drank so much beer he had to take a piss twice on the walk back to Oxford Gardens where she lived; then Clarissa was also forced to piss. So by the time they reached her flat the intimacy barrier already seemed to be broken. Her flatmate was away and they stayed in bed the whole of the next day, being a Sunday; the physical attraction that they had both felt proved to be unquenchable. They made love and never left each other’s arms for twenty-four hours. She had no embarrassment or shyness about her body, about the pleasure it gave and could receive. And he felt, he remembered, a little embarrassment at first about this physical freedom.
She had a degree in psychology, from Birmingham University, and was now finishing a PhD in addiction counselling. She always talked freely about her previous sexual encounters, something he didn’t want to hear, and her first love, a musician, a classical musician: a violinist and, more stuff he never wanted to hear about, the violinist’s deterioration through addiction. Heroin. So it appeared obvious as to why she pursued the line of work she was in.
The woman had now moved on to a cream that took away dark circles under the eyes, and he could see the difference immediately as they just banged a load more light on her when the cream had been applied. She looked like a blank. No lines, just a couple of eyes that could barely stay open through the glare of light, staring out of a bright, white face.
Clarissa never wore make-up, she was from Liverpool with a strong and determined accent. Kirkby, to be exact, which she always described as a shithole that every year got shittier. That’s town planning for you.
The woman’s neck, however, looked no different, even with the searchlight on her face. He was now looking at her, feeling annoyed, and wondered if anyone else was watching this.
Their parents never met, because of his mother’s complete obliviousness to any world, thought or emotion that wasn’t about her, and his father was living in Los Angeles, and, Ever thought at the time, doing fine: painting. No, please don’t go there, don’t punish me with that guilt pain as well…
He was talking to his grey cells, which rarely listened to his instructions, which was why he was trying to occupy half of them with face-tightening creams, and now, lo and behold, the application of a mascara that must have some special quality, but he didn’t know what, he couldn’t hear anything.
Neither of his parents came to the wedding, but Clarissa’s did, committed Liverpudlians both, to Liverpool FC and the city and stony broke, had been all their lives and now lived on their state pensions. With a little help from him and Clarissa after the marriage, gladly given, like for holidays and attempts at improving their flat. Which, bless them, didn’t bother them either way. After years of living where they did, their environment, the quality of it, lost significance in their lives. Clarissa moved into his mews house in Bayswater and started counselling at a residential rehabilitation centre in Hammersmith, Hope4. Their lives couldn’t be more different; he earned a lot more money than her and didn’t help people other than those who had more than enough money anyway; she helped people who were basically fucked.
The mascara, he gathered, was waterproof, so how the hell did you get it off? Cream, his semi-focused brain eventually settled on. Cream. Sure enough, one eye was receiving water, the other removal cream. The wet cloth didn’t make the slightest smudge on her face, but her eyes looked sore, and he wondered how much she was being paid for this.
What he was doing now, not sleeping, had been his problem since he was eight, but it was Clarissa who tried to wean him off the sleeping pills that he took with a recklessness that in her mind classified him as an addict; his mood changes and depression and wall-staring she diagnosed as a chronic sleep disorder, the result of a lifetime, a short one, of pharmaceutical abuse.
It was after the first really bad crash that his doctor put him on his first round of antidepressants. The brain-frame mashers. Prozac. They made everything worse, probably because he carried on with the sleeping pills, refused to quit wine in the evenings, and the more-than-occasional cocktail, and the benders every now and then. He never told his doctor about his intake of substances. Why should he? Hell no, don’t be ridiculous, he wasn’t an alcoholic.
Clarissa, he could tell, lost a certain admiration that he supposed, well hoped, she had had for him once, maybe, although his work as a lawyer for a hedge fund company, analysing and guaranteeing the legality of certain acquisitions, she had despised from the start. What was legal, she would say, about buying assets, companies, stripping them of everything, people losing jobs, restructuring and selling on. And making more money in the process than the entire wealth of many countries. He had no defence: most of the time his brain could only take in what he had to do at work. The consequence, the conscience aspect of it, he forced himself to ignore. He was becoming increasingly distant, his mind would skip, and his focus would blur, on just about everything but the thing that paid his bills. The money.
Ah, now the woman was stripped of all the creams, and mascara; the lights were dimmed, to make her look worse. Ever thought she looked better. Fresh and definitely younger. Was she the same woman?
He wasn’t very good with faces, Clarissa often accused him of having face blindness, which she called – oh what was it? She used the technical term. He couldn’t recall it right now, as he was questioning whether it was the same woman.
After a few months on his medication, he lost all desire for doing anything, hated his work and talked to his father on the phone every day, to get advice, help, anything really; he didn’t know what to do, but he could no longer turn to Clarissa, who more and more frequently would go to see her parents at weekends. The violinist, Adam, was playing with the Liverpool Philharmonic. But he didn’t know that at the time. Then the big crash happened. The one when they put him inside.
Prosopagnosia, that is what it is, the word for face blindness, that is what Clarissa called it. He was thrilled at his ability to recall the word. And repeated it out loud to the television.
‘Prosopagnosia I have you see, so I don’t know who the hell you are.’
He had to stop the Prozac as all he could think of was killing himself, had a brief return to wanting Clarissa and for a short time he felt she liked him again, but then. Then out of the blue it all went black. The wall came down in front of him, he couldn’t see round it, and it all went black. It was when he came out of the mental institution that she gave him the news that she was pregnant, and he wept with relief that they would now have a child to bond them. But the pregnancy changed Clarissa and he put it down to hormones, like men do, it’s simpler that way. That and periods. It excuses them from thinking that there is any contribution they can make that might be of value.
They were now selling a cleaning substance, that cleaned everything from grease on stoves, to cars, to windows, without the need for water, just pollute yourse
lf with this killer chemical. What did it clean out of your lungs?
And instead of growing closer, they grew further apart, after Jacob was born; Clarissa seemed to lose interest in her job, which she quit, and in her relationship with him. Post-natal depression, it was put down to. She was competing with him in the brain stakes. No contest. Ever, although still taking the pills, found himself doing everything with Jacob, and somehow it made up for the soulless immorality, yes, he had started to feel that now, of his work. She looked after Jacob in the day, but was more than happy to do nothing the minute Ever returned from work. And then came The Black Wednesday. His own personal Black Wednesday.
The price on the left-hand side was not dropping so rapidly for the cleaning product, as there were only ten, seven, two. All gone. Clean out of cleaner. Ever felt he should have got some, felt a pang of disappointment that he had missed the opportunity.
*
Ever wanted to speak to Clarissa and Jacob.
In a moment of intense isolation and fear that they would be lost forever and that he would never see them again, or he would fail to recognise their faces. A completely irrational thought but what if his face blindness, whatever the fuck it was called, he’d forgotten the name again, what if it worsened into a permanent state? He looked for his phone on the bedside table and then with the dawn coming up he could see the detail of the room forming like a polaroid coming to life and searched for his trousers, pants as they called them. He was in pants country. He could find nothing. The sweating returned, they had robbed him, stolen, taken his belongings, he had no contact with the world, he saw the phone by his bed, the landline, and tried to dial Clarissa’s number but couldn’t make it through: some idiot voice telling him that his call could not be completed as dialled. Was it an incorrect number? She offered him the option of trying again and he did try again. And then the panic truly set in. He leapt off the bed and stormed out of his room.
*
The man stood in the centre of the big brown room.
The Los Angeles dawn was taking the cold desert night away and warming the air with the first glow of sun, drying the damp that covers the world outside; he stood naked in the room. Cold, both from temperature drop and anger. He was screaming, screaming about his phone and how they had stolen it from him, and he was trapped, and his voice was developing the break of sadness that now joined the anger.
It was the ictal phase of a seizure.
His body movements were contorted, he was biting hard on his tongue, blinking rapidly, his eyes moving upwards, his body, the parts of his body, felt alien to him and appeared to have a different shape and structure; he was observing them as though they were not his limbs, he was intensely pale, unable to swallow the saliva build-up in his mouth that poured out like he was spewing water, and he had an intense feeling of embarrassment. Yes, embarrassment.
Two women emerged from separate ends of the big brown room, both in dressing gowns of different quality, one was silk, in a dark shade of blue, and skimmed the floor; the other was a pink robe made from towelling that hovered unevenly over the knees of the wearer. Knees that had been heavily knelt on in their life. Both women were standing in silence as the screaming and now sobbing was reducing the man to crumple his body down towards the polished floor; the exhaustion of his emotion made the sounds decrease in volume, now the crying was the dominant force, replacing the anger, the repetition of why have you done this to me becoming the main accusation. An accusation directed at these two women but without the need to move towards them or even look at them. He felt colder and started to shake at first, a shiver, then uncontrollably, a full-blown shaking, a kind of paroxysm that took over and his crying was now a whimper and his whys turned to please, you mustn’t do this to me, please, and then even those words started to peter out into my boy, my baby boy, and by this time he was curled on the floor, trying to make himself into the tiniest ball of human that he could possibly become; the words stopped and the sobbing decreased and he pissed himself all over the floor and that brought a silence, he remained shivering and wet in his own urine. The two women were still stood, the blood had gone from their faces, and their look was of both a horror and a sympathy and Lomita was crying.
Manita disappeared and came back with a blanket and some cloth and went towards the now inert Ever and wrapped him in the blanket. He was aware of its soft warmth but could feel even in his moment of isolated epileptic seizure that it must be cashmere, his skin crawled; he let the dark beige blanket fall to the floor. Manita started to mop the urine with the cloth, a cloth that was wholly inadequate for the job. Lomita was stock still and the crying was silent now, tears making tracks down her cheeks forming their own decision about destination, where they would end up, how far they would travel.
He was now in a postictal phase.
Becalmed. This was the tableau that could be seen from above by God and from the left and right and centre by the human element. Ever broke the silence and said,
‘Sorry.’
Lomita came forward, with all the strength that her pained body could muster she helped him to his feet, they walked into her bedroom, the urine dripped off his body, she took him to her shower and turned it on, he walked into the storm of water, she followed him in to offer support in spite of her fragility, her robe was immediately darkened by the stream of water.
Her tiny frame held him, the water washed them both as one, and made their understanding of each other be as one.
His erection returned for her and he lifted her around his waist, her robe parted and without a willingness or a resistance from her, he entered her, and she cried and cried. Neither of them moved a muscle.
The water was washing away the sins of the world; they had both been more sinned against than sinning.
He came inside Lomita.
Chapter Twenty-two
Emotional exhaustion had taken them into a morning sleep.
That they were now awaking from, the positions of their bodies were the same as the last time they lay together, side by side, adopting their own independence, yet grateful for the proximity. He lay flat out on his back. When they came to, she just said, matter-of-factly,
‘When exactly is the Basquiat exhibition? And when would you like to view your father’s work?’
He could say very little, except,
‘Two days’ time and as soon as. Thank you.’
And then,
‘When did I tell you about it?’
Her story would take a retelling.
*
She stood from the bed and felt his sperm dried and sticky.
It had trickled from her vagina onto the inside of her right thigh and a memory returned. This was only the second time she could remember being filled with semen. The first time, so overpowering in its horror, took away any potential joy this might have held.
She went into the bathroom but before wiping between her legs with a wetted towel, immersed her fingers into herself and smelt them; the smell produced no sensation in her; she then tasted her fingers and an intensity of memory returned.
The taste.
This was such an emotional experience for her that again an objectivity kicked in, a cut-out button, and turned the act into an almost solely practical event. Clean and protect. She walked calmly out of the bedroom to the kitchen, with an announcement regarding food that received a response in the negative from him.
He was unaware she had been crying; she had found it difficult to be entirely practical. She had wanted his sperm, it had been taken with love, for the first time.
She would have wanted it, she couldn’t imagine how much, if the time had been right.
Another time: out of place with this one.
*
He needed to go about the duty of communicating with Miss Money-Root.
And Lomita’s thoughts for the day needed to go through the process of being centered on making sure he was sufficiently relaxed and medicated with the diazepam. He was still sweating. Th
eir life now had a mutual intention, to get him on his way back to recovery – his fitness. There on a chair in the corner of the bedroom were his neatly folded and ironed clothes; placed with purpose by Manita. Top of the pile – his cell phone.
The horror that struck him halfway through constructing the email to Miss Money-Root was that he had made love to Lomita.
Unprotected.
And he did not know the status of his condition. That, in addition to everything else, was something he couldn’t even contemplate coping with, so made no attempt.
He had had an epileptic fit. It was slowly dawning; he had commited those to history, to his childhood.