Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  Worse than the rope.

  But this was where the radio telephone lived and, although he wouldn’t talk to Joe, he was going to speak to someone, to get at least his voice free and off the island, away.

  It was too early in the day to try the work number, so he chanced calling J.D. at home. The receiver was fumbled up in the customary, haphazard way. A cough. A sniffed inhalation. A noticeably paranoid “Yes?”

  “Where were you?” Nathan, as a rule, felt it right to encourage irrational fears in J. D. Grace with ill-defined, but possibly menacing questions.

  “Hm?” It was definitely Grace, the voice sounding newly woken, unhappily dry. “Nathan?”

  “Yes.”

  A snuffle of relief crackled in all the way from London, in concentric laps of sound.

  “Where were you last week, Jack? Nobody seemed to know.”

  “I had to go to hospital, actually.” One violent cough cleaned the voice, brushed it up into dapper BBC. “Rush job. No time for messages.”

  “What?”

  “Testicular cancer. Unfortunate, hn? Careless, even.”

  “What?” Nathan wavered at the brim of compassion.

  “And I wanted to know—I wouldn’t normally like to ask . . . Once I’m dead, Nate . . . you’d come and see me, wouldn’t you? Just a quick visit? Flowers? No? Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. I’m fine now anyway.”

  “Jack—”

  “But I have both my balls in a jar.”

  “We were talking about your health, Jack, not your hobbies.”

  “Callous bastard,” J.D. enunciated impeccably.

  “Where were you? Truthfully.”

  “Ah . . . truthfully . . .That would be tricky, actually.”

  “Not again, Jack.”

  “No, not really again. It’s just all only a tiny bit unclear. But not too bad. I know for sure that I surfaced in Greek Street on Wednesday, but apart from that . . .”

  “You haven’t a clue.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. In fact, probably batter—or even better. I’m breaking these teeth in for my dog—they don’t make a word of sense.”

  “You don’t have a dog.”

  “See what I mean? Oh, yes, and I was—it’s gratuitously alleged—in the Poetry Society at some point.”

  “My God. Poetry and Earls Court.”

  “I know, these are the depths of humiliation to which the drinking chap must drop. Then again, some malicious bastard could have slipped me a dodgy clue. They do that, you know. They tell me lies, they spread rumours, they fill my pockets with books of matches from places I could never have visited. They set out quite deliberately to confuse me. This business is full of evil fucks.”

  “Try checking your credit card records.”

  “Ah, well.” He assumed a tone of solemn dignity. “That would currently be slightly difficult.”

  “You’ve never considered that your drinking might be quite irrelevant— that you just have pre-senile dementia.”

  “Not at all—I simply believe in energy conservation. If two people witness the same event, then why on earth insist that both remember it . . . Did you want something, by the way? Or were you calling as an arbitrary expression of your friendship?”

  “You know me better than that, Jack. For one thing, I’m not your friend.”

  “Well, thank God for that. I feel heartier already—even if there isn’t a full bottle in the bloody house.”

  “It all depends on how you look at them—positive thinking—half empty, half full and so on . . .”

  “No. No, no, no. A completely empty bottle is a completely empty life—I mean, bottle. And that’s that, I’m afraid. Maintaining anything else would be severely delusional. Which, of course, I am not. You do want something, though, don’t you? I can tell.”

  “A couple of things.”

  “Fire away, then. And I will remember them. I even had a solid breakfast this morning. I am in my very finest operational state.” An audible, liquid swallow pressed between them. “Tea. In case you wondered. Earl Grey. With Jif lemon. Bergamot, fake citric acid and lovely limy London water. Mmmm . . . the taste of home.”

  “I don’t want to tour any more.” A faintly rushing silence answered him. “Jack? I’m not going to do it again.”

  “Well, that’s your choice, obviously. Might I ask why? Not to dissuade you, simply to enquire.”

  “I don’t mean to cause you problems, but I can’t do it any more. No more promotional tours. I’ve exhausted my life’s supply of diplomacy. No more pastel hotel suites with nursing-home prints, no more fucked-up flight schedules and snow-bound trains, no more ignorant, ignorant, pissartist fucks that I have to smile at and not eviscerate. No more people who really believe I want to know even the tiniest thing about them, that I’m listening, that I’m not kneading the bar stool beside me into papier fucking mâché to stop myself flocking the walls with their blood and hair. No more. It is not worth it.”

  “Well, I can hear that you’re not happy. The last time was . . .”

  “It made me ill. The last time made me ill.”

  “No.” Grace seemed to hear himself being too vehement, gave a dry little sigh, surprised at himself, and softly began again. “You were ill, I realise that . . . but it wasn’t because of . . . that would have been there before and then you had the X-rays and . . .” He struggled between sympathy for Nathan’s lost lung and professional self-defence. “Look, we did make you work too hard, it was too much, it was unnecessary. We agreed that. I made a mistake, I thought we should show the flag a bit, get you out and about . . . it was nervousness on my part . . . I’m . . .”

  “Mm hm?”

  Grace’s cup jittered against the receiver. “What?”

  “Say it, Jack. Go on—I’m sss . . .”

  A brief exhalation cuffed out—the closest Grace could get to a laugh this early in the morning—“I’m cccertainly not going to say that I’m sorry— you know perfectly well I never say that—one has to have rules. Otherwise I’d be apologising all the bloody time. It would be absurd. If not actually humiliating.” He waited to hear if Nathan wished to comment. “But you do know that I am . . . sssorry.”

  “Well, so am I. I’m endlessly sorry about all sorts of things. And I’m sure you’d try to make things better next time, but I won’t see it—I won’t be there. No more book tours.

  “I do not intend ever again to be paraded through cunting book shops full of maddies who have dribbled in out of the rain for the booze and for the quiet seat where they can wank themselves off in the warm. And I won’t do those wall-to-wall-Jaeger English Guildhalls: or the muddy, poncey, shabby, fucking festivals. Jesus, I look down from every platform and the air is shivering, moaning with middle-aged, married frustration: all those neat, insane well-washed ladies, shifting and sighing above the slightly moistened M&S bikini-style briefs they will never even try to show me, but—fuck—the need they’ll show instead: the bloody awful lives they’ll reek of, which I couldn’t do a thing about, if I even wanted to.

  “My life, my bloody life . . . Nobody gives a toss about my life.” Nathan halted, wiped his mouth. He’d made an agreement with himself that every time he lapsed into full-blown self-pity he would sign a cheque for one of three charities. He was already pretty much committed to another serious donation, it would be foolish and tedious to go on. “You get the idea.”

  “There’s nothing at all to enjoy any more?”

  “The good people are still good. But who wants to meet good people on the run, or standing up and screaming in a pub, or stupefied with weariness, or drunk. You wouldn’t know about that last condition.”

  “No, indeed—quite unlike the home life of your own dear editor. And speaking of matters editorial—you won’t mind if I don’t inform my Gauleiter of your decision, just yet. Not that I think you’ll change your mind—one simply has to go carefully in these times. Harmless readers and copy-editors are being defenestrated, even as we speak. We live in
interesting times . . . fascinating, in fact.”

  “Fascinating sharing the same root as fascism . . .”

  “How kind of you to remind me. Oh, shit!”

  “What?”

  “I’ve just seen the time. I have half an hour before I’m supposed to welcome number one wife and talk about number three son.”

  “Ah, the Charlie Chan lifestyle of the literary Londoner—number one son, number four wife . . .”

  “No. Number four wife goes with number two daughter. Bet you’re no good at Happy Families.”

  “You bet right. I am no good at them.” Nathan couldn’t help it—that sounded as heavy as it felt. “I just type about sex and murder. In the absence of either one. I concentrate on making acts of love seem realistic while other people concentrate on enjoying them—it’s a lousy job, but some fucker’s got to do it. I beg your pardon—some non-fucker’s got to do it.”

  Somewhere in Islington, in the kitchen of a house with dirty windows and a bald, abandoned lawn, J. D. Grace sucked his teeth. “Sorry, Nate.” His mind changed gear audibly, neatened out his consonants. “Honestly I am.”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not—you’re pissed off. Perils of the drinking vocation—you will always seem to piss off the people of whom you are quite fond. And I really haven’t done too well this morning, have I? First, I give you the cheap crack about cancer when you’re hardly—”

  “And then I get the man-with-no-visible-family knee to the groin.”

  “My unerring instinct for hitting the Achilles’ heel, if that isn’t too mixed a metaphor.”

  “Achilles’ leg. Except it’s not too bad this morning—only hurts when I breathe. As we authors say.”

  The connection waited while they thought of points to raise which would not be sentimental. J.D. first.

  “Fine pair we make, hm?”

  “We could fuck up for our respective countries.”

  “And—to be perfectly honest for once—life at the office is genuinely not good. I could really rather do with being fuck-up free. For example, our illustrious Editor of Editors has just hired his current bit on the side in a mysterious capacity which is intended to be editorial. Although I have known many, almost mythically stupid, self-obsessed and venomous women—number three wife among them—this Medusa, this Ineptitude Event Horizon, this . . . she is beyond even my capacity for blasphemous insult. I pass her office and there she is, squatting inside, gleaming and pulsing like a huge, ripe pustule full of Tipp-Ex and lost manuscripts. If I simply look at her, I am seized with the siren desire to grab her by the snatch and then tug up smartly with both hands until I’ve turned her absolutely inside out. Then I’d staple her labia over the crown of her head and kick her along the corridor, ribs and entrails flapping as she goes.”

  “Mmm. I’m sure I once saw a Fabergé egg that captured the lyrical essence of just such a scene.”

  “The late, last Czarina’s favourite, I believe.”

  “And they wonder how she came to be late and last . . . She must have got such a kick out of Ekaterinburg.”

  “You twisted bastard.” Grace tried for a mouthful of tea and choked for a moment or two, quietly and politely. Then back to the narrative. “Of course, I don’t have many dealings with Little Miss Hump-U-Like . . . Conversation is almost impossible—she talks so quickly, she sounds like a fax. Still, they’re all crawling round her—Parkinson especially. It’s always struck me as appropriate that he’s named after a disease. My God, he really is a human suppository. Although, naturally, a suppository would have the good grace to dissolve once it was tucked away in an especially receptive executive colon.” Grace paused and Nathan heard a thoughtful snuffle. “You’re not laughing.”

  “Yes I am. Inside.”

  “Can I ask?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “The second thing—you said there were a couple. Is it . . . are you still letting her come? Mary?”

  “She wants to come.”

  “You’re letting her.”

  “I’m not dealing with it: Joe is. But we did both change our minds a little. We decided it might be better if she came this year instead of next.”

  “There’s barely anything of this year left.”

  “Two months—you can do a lot in two months. Anyway, it’s not about the timing, really. We thought it would be good to test . . . well, not exactly to test her, but to try and find out how determined she was to come. If we suddenly changed all the plans and said she had to turn up early and—”

  “Ruined her Christmas and generally played with her mind . . . dearie me. What’s that really all about them, hm? You just couldn’t wait any longer to see her, could you? Hm?”

  “Joe thought it was a good idea.”

  Nathan listened while Jack cleared his throat, renegotiated his terms, produced his best voice: the gentler, closer one, more scholarship boy than pure-bred public school, more concerned than disapproving. “Are you going to be all right? With her there? With being a teacher? Have you thought what you’ll have to teach?”

  Nathan almost let himself think about possible answers to the above before his heart began to shrivel and chill. There were some things it did him no good to consider.

  “Nathan?”

  “It’ll be fine.” His tongue woolly, somehow, unconvincing and unconvinced. “It’ll be fine.” If he had managed to die, this would have been someone else’s problem. “It’ll be fine.”

  Mary’s bed wasn’t really big enough for a couple to get much sleep. Mary had found a kind of rest, once she and Jonathan had giggled and rocked to their conclusions, but her mind had stayed open behind her eyes. She’d wanted to enjoy their lying and being coated in each other, sticky and slick, the sheet she tugged back over them quickly translucent with sweat.

  “Here you are, then, tea.”

  The feel of being looked at—she’d known, for the first time, how very much she liked that. Drowsing now, she imagined she heard voices, but shook off the thought, the idea of being currently observed.

  Nobody here, no bodies but us.

  “Tea’s the best thing, really. Isn’t it?”

  Any movement divided her from Jonathan uncomfortably, parted new adhesions, so they clung still and healed together, flesh to flesh, in one hot graft from their ankles to their scalps. Under the stone weight of Jonathan’s arm, his thick breathing, her mind had shuddered with recollected skin, with the thought of the feel of fucking him.

  Jomathan. Sleepy Jonathan. Sleeping Jonathan.

  “Yes. Tea’s best.”

  Those voices . . .

  Silly boy, sleeping and speaking. Daft. Lovelydaftlovelyshaftlovely.

  “And cake.”

  Recognisable voices.

  “From Barr’s—the good stuff.”

  Goodlovelyshaft.

  A little stirring of the house, a give in the mattress and Mary’s heart bumped towards something more lively.

  “Battenberg. Fresh.”

  Her blood leaped, warily, but then eased back to let her picture the first dive of Jonathan’s head, the stroke of his breath and his newly barbered hair, the pleasant re-aligning of her hips.

  “Mary?”

  Yes. That’s me.

  “I think she’s still asleep, Butt. Will we leave it?”

  “And he’s asleep, too.”

  Fuck.

  She realised. She understood.

  Fuck.

  The Uncles were here.

  They’d padded into her unbuttoned room. They were here with her now, speaking. Finally, their reality yanked her dumb awake.

  “Ah, there now, Mary. What should we do?”

  They stood, Morgan holding the tea tray, Bryn’s hands holding themselves, and each man gently but plainly alarmed by the way they had chosen to proceed. Still, they were trying to do right by Mary, to let her feel at home and approved of, loved. She lurched up and opened her eyes to Bryn’s face: his puzzled eyes fighting to
not seem lost.

  “What do you think? About where to put the tea? Oh, or Jonathan?”

  Jonathan came to in a scrabble of panic, first trying to spring out of bed, then recoiling to cover himself with a small whinny of fear. Morgan set down the tea tray on the bedside table, obscuring—perhaps intentionally— the two sloughed condoms lying there.

  Everyone paused, unsure of how they might continue, and fell to staring at the willow pattern saucers and cups, the lumpily knitted tea cosy, the slices of buttered gingerbread and Battenberg. Each of them swallowed. Each of them tasted bedroom air, thick with the low-tide spatter of protein and the sweet, shellfish surfaces of Mary’s privacy.

  Bryn nodded through a carefully presented smile. “We thought you might want a drink. Or a little to eat. We find that we do.”

  “Afterwards.” Morgan drew away from the bed and back towards the door.

  Mary and Jonathan lay rigid, sheet drawn to their chins, eyes dumbfounded, like a pair of bad Staffordshire figures—The Lovers Apprehended.

  “It’s as if . . .” Bryn pondered, also moving for the doorway, “you’d been on a bus trip for a long time, so you’re peckish. Something like that.” He blinked at Jonathan, his voice wavering, perhaps at the verge of laughter, perhaps only made unsteady by the strain of the occasion. “We do wish you well.”

  “We do.”

  Mary finally found herself saying, “I didn’t know—”

  “We were here. No.”

  “We weren’t. We had gone out. But then we came back.”

  “Because you might need us.”

  “You know.”

  “We were here in case.”

  As if they were taking their leave from royalty, Bryn and Morgan backed respectfully away.

  “Mary?” Bryn waited until she turned to him, gave him her proper attention. “We just wanted you to be comfortable. And, um, proud. Your first time should be something to be proud of, because you’ll remember it. Perhaps this wasn’t the best . . .” He huffed. “Drink your tea, now, before it gets cold.”