“Isn’t that her choice?”
“No.” The cream was out of control now—a huge slaver of it landing between two dishes and spattering.
Jism. On the quilt. Blue quilt. Shins still bleeding. That fucking awful bastard night in the flat.
Your daddy’s lovely hobbies, Mary. Your sad fuck dad.
“No, it isn’t her choice.” Brandy and fruit juice dribble had suddenly, inexplicably, coated his hands. God, he was making a pig’s ear of this. “Nobody chooses that kind of thing. Nobody would. It’s just how they’re made. They can’t help it. They have no choice.”
Yes, yes, all right, she gets the message. The subtext, she will not understand. Just grow up and shut up and don’t go on. Always the melodrama, isn’t it, you cunt?
He abandoned his spoon, the trifle subsiding, lubriciously aquiver. “I’m making a terrible mess of this. But if you hadn’t put the bowls on the trays first, it might have been easier.”
She looked at him.
“I mean, eventually, everything goes on the tray . . .” She was still looking, not the right way. He was correcting her again, even though he knew she didn’t bloody like it.
Enough, you stupid shit. Enough.
He attempted to salvage something, said sentences almost at random, but in a more jovial tone. “But when you’re putting stuff out . . .” She kept on looking, eyes blank mahogany. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. Not really, I was only . . .”
Shut up. Fuckwit, fuckwit, fuckwit.
“I mean, I’m making the mess. Obviously.” He made another grasp for the spoon, but lacked the will to carry the gesture through. Then she spoke, softly, softly, every syllable washing him into fears he didn’t want to have.
“Nothing I do is ever right for you, is it?”
“I wou—”
“I do try. I have tried. But nothing ever makes the grade.”
“Tha—”
“I’ve been here for months. I’ve been here since November and you haven’t let me write a word. And the things I do and the things I say and the way I think—it’s all wrong.”
He made a particular effort, didn’t correct her choice of verb. “No, no, it’s—”
“WHY DON’T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE!”
She screamed. She actually, literally screamed at him: the full, hoarse punch of that. They both started, apparently equally amazed.
“WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH ME?” A lacerating yell now, even louder than the first. “WHY WON’T YOU LET ME WRITE!”
He felt absurdly ready to run away. She breathed in an uneasy rush of air and he braced himself for another onslaught, another unbearable question, but she stayed quiet, folded her arms, frowned past him, head low.
“I . . .” His voice sounded tiny, shabby. “I have never intended to make you feel that . . .”
That what? What? Shit.
He began again, with slightly more hope, “I’ve said . . . I did say earlier—you’re doing well. I’ve told . . . Well, the thing is that I’ve told lots of people other than you, which was—I realise—a mistake and I should also have made sure you understood . . . I’ve . . . I’ve . . . I have meant to help.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake.
“Y, Y, Y—” He’d stammered at school, only ever at school, not since, this was an old, old nervousness. “Yes, I see that now. If you’d . . .”
If she’d what? Told you earlier? Go on, try to make it her fault—pass the buck and be the man.
“I think I’ll just . . .” He sat on the floor, his back against the table leg. This made things better, this seemed to let more blood get to his head. “Look, I’m sorry, Mary. I’ve never done this before—this mentoring thing. I was doing what I thought would be the proper stuff and I haven’t got it right. If this is the way you feel, then I’ve ballsed it up. Sorry.” From the dining room next door, he could hear—he was certain—only the eerie quiet of group embarrassment, of a crowd forced to overhear what they’d rather not know.
Please God, let no one come through.
“Nathan, do you . . .”
He turned when she spoke and was hugely, grotesquely flooded with the certainty that being here and lifting his eyes to her—being compelled to gaze up at her—was something he could spend weeks doing, if she’d only like him a little bit.
“I mean, do you want me to not be here? It seems . . . I mean, I don’t have to know about you, but now you know every fucking—”
He loved the way she swore—so cleanly—didn’t sound like swearing at all.
“—thing about me and I hardly know more about you than your name. Three times, you’ve been away, Nathan—you haven’t said why or where. I think everyone else knows, but I don’t. I know I’m only the, the—”
She fumbled for the proper word and the quick of his nails ached with love for her.
“—the student here. But do I not count?”
“You count.” He heard himself squeal. “Of course you count. And you’re not—I don’t mean to correct you again—but you’re not the student, you’re one of us. Whether you would want to be, I don’t know, but you’re one of us. If anyone’s said any different . . .”
“Nobody’s said anything.”
“Well, good. Because I would have set them right. Would you, ah . . . ?” He craned up again, for a soft instant found her eyes, tried with a tick of the head to say what he couldn’t in words. And she understood, walked nearer, and then sat cross-legged beside him to his left, unknowingly close to his hungry arm.
Thank you.
He stared at his shoes—Sunday best, black shinies—odd how he played along so much with Joe’s need to have a tidy family, once a week. Maybe he wanted the same thing, maybe that was it.
“Well, then, Mr. Staples. Did you want something? It’s a bit uncomfortable down here. Not my first choice for a seat.” But she wasn’t complaining, not really. There was the touch of a grin in her voice.
Terrifyingly, he listened to his voice become playful in response. “At least it’s clean. Joe keeps the place spotless. Not many kitchen floors you could sit on and feel so invulnerable to disease. Anyway . . .” Somewhere in his head, a frightened little man was shredding papers and burning books, destroying all he could find marked Cancer. But he did have to tell her, because she had asked. “Yes, anyway. The reason I go away.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I was mainly making a point.”
“No, you’re right. I know about you and you don’t know about me. I had you talk so much . . .” Her hand was near his, near enough to be held, taken. Not that it would be. “It’s good for a writer to know her own voice—that’s what I thought. Anyway . . .”
Fuck, how often am I going to say anyway?
He could genuinely taste burning paper, far at the back of his throat. “I go to visit the hospital in London where they removed my lung. They took it away because I had cancer—well, it had cancer.” He didn’t hear a reaction from her, more like a deepening of her silence. Although that could have been imagination. “It’s a simple . . . they take out the lung through your back, between your ribs. I lost the right one—that’s the biggest, because the heart is to the left and it needs, naturally, a bit of accommodation. Of course, then they move the heart over, in the hope that your left lung will grow—which it does, surprisingly. The heart doesn’t like to be touched, though, so it stops. You die for a while.”
“Jesus.”
He heard her and felt his heart kick alive, alive, alive.
Thank you.
“But they started me up and running again. I would guess. Something’s ticking away in there . . . so I can’t be dead. In fact, I’m OK. In remission. They like to test. They like to check. For re-occurrence of . . . of growth. Every three months, I get an MOT.
“Manage to stay above ground for two years and you’re doing well. I nearly have, so I nearly am. After that, I’ll have six-monthly checks and then yearly and then . . . I don’t know. If I
can put in a decade without falling under a bus, then I’m probably clear. Of that, in any case. Plenty more things to die of. Obviously.”
There was enough stillness now between them for quite small, distant noises to ease in, a gull mew, the sea’s rush, a blackbird in the garden chiming up at some alarm. She touched his wrist, her fingers cooler than his skin, her thumb brushing over the suicide’s favourite place: the shy ribbing of tendon and vein and blood, all threaded neatly under the thinnest skin. Her movements seemed, somehow, enquiring. But his scar there was slightly higher, she wouldn’t find it without knowing where to look.
“So that’s why I go. By the way, thanks for minding Eckless. He likes you.”
“Well, I feel like a horse’s arse.”
A barking squawk of laughter coughed up through him. “Oh.” He glanced at her—now she was looking at his shiny shoes. He couldn’t avoid a grin. “A whole horse’s arse? I mean—you’ve just had your lunch. You must have an extraordinary appetite . . .”
She didn’t smile until sweat had pearled down the length of his spine, but then she wonderfully, wonderfully did.
“There’s daft, you are.”
Another parrotty guffaw. “There’s Welsh, you are. I keep forgetting.”
“I wasn’t born there.”
“Whatever. D’you want to know the Second Rule?”
“The—?”
“The Second Rule. It’s time you knew it.”
“Oh, right . . . the rules for writing.” She shook her head, indulging him. “At least, I mean, now? You want to tell me a Rule now?”
“Oh, yes—this is the perfect time. Really. The Second Rule . . .” He leant in sideways, woozy with terror and delight. “No one can stop you writing.”
“What?” She didn’t take her hand away from him, but gripped, beginning a little thrum of strangled circulation, a little pain.
He persevered—nothing but all of everything to lose. “ No one can stop you writing. That’s the Rule. No one has the right. Not me. Not even you.”
“You w—” She held him with her other hand now, too—leaning over him, squeezing and shaking at his arm, but he pressed on.
“No one will ever have the right to take away your voice, or muffle, or change it, or do anything other than help it to grow. Ow!”
“Nathan, you—” She was genuinely wrestling at him, hauling and twisting and fighting him.
“No, ssh.” Trying to ride out the tugging—the grabbing at his neck— the feeling that she might be going to hit him, if she worked a hand free. “People die for this.” But he didn’t know if she was angry, or something better than that, or something worse. “To let your life speak, to let Life speak.” She had a good lock on his neck, a close hold. “This is your right. If I ever—ow—if I ever—oh, now, fuck off with that—”
They were knee to knee now, her one hand doing something unnatural to his ear while he pulled at her wrist, his hungry arm curled around her, restraining or embracing, or restraining. He’d never seen her face so close before, the line of his own mouth there, but made finer, better—her eyes fierce, her breath against his throat. She was a surprising thing, this Mary.
She jabbed at his ribs. “You swore.”
“I do.” He jerked sideways and was rewarded with a little more throttling.
“You swore at me.”
He could fight back in earnest. “You were—you are hurting my fucking ear.” He was stronger than Mary. “Among other things.”
“I’ll stop if you will.”
He didn’t feel he should fight back, though. “I didn’t start it.” He didn’t feel he could.
“I’ll stop if you will.”
“All right.”
“Go on, then.”
“You first.”
“All right.”
They loosed each other, unbalancing slightly, perhaps rushing too much to be on their feet, to be dignified, separate.
When he straightened his tie, a shirt button fell to the floor.
She picked it up, “I’m sorry,” with an unapologetic grin.
“Yeah, of course you are.” Her hand lightly against his again, setting the button in his palm. He made a show of sternness, “The youth of today . . . picking on invalids . . . Still, you do see . . .”
“Mm?” She’d moved to the table, “See what?” and doled out the last of the trifle, lifted one tray. “See what, Mr. Staples?” She stood, hair still unsettled, but her face completely serene. She nodded to the other tray and he trotted to pick it up as if comfortably shared little tasks had been something they’d always known. She glanced at him, amused by something— probably the mess he was in.
He stood beside her, the two of them all set to face the dining room without any attempt at explanation. “Your words are your words. It hurts to have them taken from you. So you look after them now.” He kissed the top of her head.
“OK.” She seemed slightly puzzled by that, but pleased.
Listen to her, changing her whole way of life in two easy syllables and she doesn’t even know it.
How could I let any child of mine be a writer? When it’s such a filthy, fucking lunatic job?
Then again, how can I stop her? When she won’t make the same mistakes as me. I’m the one who’s the filthy, fucking lunatic, after all.
They walked out into an empty room: plates and cutlery piled up ready to be taken away, but no diners remaining. Nathan supposed it was probably kind of them to have gone, left him and Mary. He thought he heard a murmuring from Joe’s study and guessed they were all in there—near enough to lend a hand if screams and crashes had broken out. And, of course, the serious drink was in the study—they’d be having a something and soda to round off a curious afternoon.
Which I wouldn’t mind doing myself.
“What should we do now? Nathan?”
Eckless woke from under the table, came yawning and wagging up to head-butt Nathan’s thigh.
“You set out the pudding and I’ll clear this junk away. Then we can call them through. If it’s safe . . .” He waited to see if she’d laugh at that.
She smiled, nodded and made to start work, but then cut a half-turn back to face him. “This is all right, isn’t it? There won’t be a problem— about us . . . having . . . ?”
There’ll never be a problem again. Not ever again.
“No, no, it’ll be fine.” He rubbed his neck and found tangibly, delicately raised, a tiny scratch that one of her nails must have left there. Something near his brain stem opened, smiled. “They’ll just have thought we wanted some privacy. There’s no problem at all.”
And they went about their tasks: calm, steady, together. Nathan holding on tight round the foghorning joy in his chest.
Oh, Nathan, Nathan Staples.
Goodboyhappyhappygood.
Two in the morning after Sunday night, a phosphorescent silence round the island, nothing in the air but the mild hum of his own pleasant fatigue. This was the way he’d first written: stepping out of other people’s time and into his own and then setting down the press of ideas, the excess of emotion, when both were still remarkable, still welcome gifts.
If he rubbed at his face, he could feel the good bristle of masculine concentration: the romantic, important disorder he’d imagined he might grow up to as a boy, watching John Mills pushing that ambulance through the desert, Ray Milland losing his weekend, Paul Newman eating hard-boiled eggs.
Nathan had always been unathletic and shamefully studious: only lying and smoking, drinking and stealing successfully and therefore undetectably, without the usual attendant popularity or praise. He’d watched the other boys, living their lives in public: running and kissing, laughing aloud, and he’d known, entirely understood, that his proper excitements were secret, sleepless, interior. In the privacy of paper he didn’t just imagine the desirable disorder, the attractive torments and extremities of his heroes—he felt them, made them, perfected them. He could close his eyes and kiss women, whole women,
be coated in their gratitude and expertise, have his, in reality, untouched-by-female-hands bollocks clench with the breathless complexities of day-dreamed sex and real ejaculation. From the very start, his mental application produced more than its own rewards.
And he’d always realised, somewhere, that he would come to this: the solo sweat through the small hours under a cone of gently enquiring light: man’s work being done. Not for the first time tonight, he let his collar chafe very slightly at the scratch on his neck, the wonderful seam where Mary had drawn his blood. It felt just right—he felt just right. Palm and knuckles beating time along the table, pulse flirting fast and high, he could find not a flaw in his fabric, not a loose thread, not a doubt, only his delight in the making of something out of nothing, out of himself and what came to get him, what came and asked to be expressed.
Nathan hadn’t worked this way in years, but he’d fitted his mind to its disciplines, its charms and shocks, like a hand into water: like a man intoxicated within a revenant’s strange embrace.
By now, he’d slammed at his keyboard for more than the usual day’s hours, been dutiful in producing the horrors that J.D. had come to expect: the woman who ate her lover’s wife and children to keep him from losing his family when he abandoned them for her, the wife who anaesthetised her faithless husband and then engineered his slow awakening at the hands of a hard-core sadist who tied him and flogged him and strung him up while he bucked into ball-gagged awareness of every nerve before his pubic hair was plucked with eyebrow tweezers and his glans was slowly sanded to a cherry tomato of outrage and blood. The usual stuff.
And now Nathan was at liberty to do what he liked.
Here and here only, Nate, you get to do exactly what you want. Aren’t you the lucky fucker?
Yes, indeedy. Sssh.
He was up and running, safety catches off and too tired to speak: just like the old days, just like being young and incautiously happy, being wholly alive.
So.
A little line or two for Kiddo. For the girl.
Pangaea
“In the beginning there were no words.” I know she isn’t listening, but I tell her anyway. One never knows.The most unlikely items have been known to trickle in—by accident and sideways, there they’ll go. I am resting, heavy in my deckchair, comfy with afternoon beer and I am thinking in the garden of the knowledge of good and evil, here we are. Standard Issue Fatherly Moment, here we are.
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