I’ll have to tell Mary, eventually. Difficult to phrase it with delicacy, though. “By the way, we all go a little bit carefully with Lynda’s veg. We tend to be guided by shape—the carrots, zucchini, parsnips, Chinese radish, cucumber, yams—they’re generally the ones to watch. I mean, a cucumber isn’t a vegetable— of course—but then, Lynda doesn’t pay much attention to classifications, she mainly picks her ingredients for their dimensions, for their fit. You know what I mean . . .”
Except Mary won’t know. At least, I hope she won’t.
No, she will, of course she will, she’s not a child. Not any more. Of course she’ll know. Probably. She’s a grown woman, after all.
The removal of Mary, her theft, the whole years of her lost to him, made their usual incision and scored the bone at the base of his skull. He shook his head and changed his subject back.
What would be the best way to put it? Mm? The fatherly way. “Look, we tend to be a little bit hesitant with Lynda’s cooking because . . . because we know it all comes out of her smallholding, as it were. Not that her holding’s so terribly small, by most accounts. Really, rather well-used.”
I’ll sound like a dirty old man.
“Pretty much anything, really, she’ll have a go at it. Even with turnips and potatoes, you can’t be safe because what she can’t fit up her snatch at the first time of asking will end up trimmed and whittled until she can. She has no mercy. And no intention of not confessing her violations at intimate length—Lynda, the sly seducer of roots and shoots. I myself find our separate appetites are mutually exclusive. Although I have been known to gag down whole platefuls of carrot batons, just to spite her, just to stop her bullying. Or reducing us all to scurvy by sullying our access to Vitamin C.”
No. Why turn her stomach? She’ll only worry about what she’s already swallowed, unknowingly. And we can’t have her worried, not Mary.
Mary. The thought of her lips, of her mother’s lips, of his women’s lips, eating, closing over warmth, neat—it hurt him, hurt in his blood.
As did Mary’s current absence. Just now she was away from him, his only daughter, she was visiting her Uncles on the mainland. Her absence made him feel naked somewhere, psychologically exposed. It happened every time—she would make a little trip away and he would have to realise, all over again, how much she softened his reality. Everything seemed to sit more easily around him when she was there. She was his defence.
He sighed and leaned back in his chair, looked about the room.
“Why shouldn’t I be able to?” The Monthly Business Meeting was grumbling along without him: Ruth in especially whining form. “I have a right to say whatever I like about whatever I like.”
Nathan wanted to walk, let the lunch settle, be with his music for the rest of the day, let it sluice him down and get him away from Business. Business was one of the many things that could be guaranteed to niggle him into a rage. Nathan was not a person who took naturally to committees and processes involving compromise.
“Well, don’t I? Isn’t that the point of being here? That we’re all free? That we write what we want?” Ruth simply wouldn’t let her point drop.
He pressed experimentally at his raw digit through its layer of sticking plaster and was rewarded with a warming, jangling hurt. Nippy, but controlled enough to be almost pleasurable.
“Well, you’ve made your views very clear now, Ruth. Perhaps someone else would like to comment. Nathan, what do you think?” Joe leaned forward, his head showing dark against a window blanked out with white autumn mist. “Mm? Not like you to have no opinion.”
“He’s sulking.” Lynda grinned. “No little Mary to play with.”
“Fuck you. At least I still have recognisable emotions.”
No, don’t fight. You want to go for a walk, you want to get away. Shut up.
“And you have a daughter. I would have thought someone with recognisable emotions might have told her she had a father by now.”
“Well, you would have thought wrong.”
Joe was gathering himself to intervene while Ruth glared mournfully about her—no longer anything like the centre of attention. “Aren’t we forgetting—?”
Nathan lost his temper, felt it slither clear out of his grip and bounce away, nastily. “Aren’t we forgetting what, Ruth? Anything of importance? You, for example? The whole tragic fucking balls-up that is your tiny, tiny mind? What is it you want to do, again? To exercise your free speech over? Oh, yes, I remember—you want to write about the Price boy, you want to rummage around in his death, see what you can take.”
I’ll regret this, I will.
“You want to steal his life all over again, piss in his parents’ hearts and give his murderer a handy little volume to toss off with for hours at a time.”
But I don’t fucking care.
“This from a woman who fucked her way through the halt, the lame and the hard of thinking until no one would employ her except the sodding prison service—a woman who hangs out with rapists and murderers for a year, does a runner and then starts coughing up tacky verses based on confessions weaseled out of the incarcerated. Tell us, do—when did you decide to come here for the good of your art? Before or after the boys from Category A found out how to phone you at home? Mm? You’re not a writer, you’re a fucking body-snatcher. Jesus Christ.”
Oh, you are a bad boy, Nathan. Oh dearie, dearie me.
Oh, yes-in-deed.
Ruth was scrabbling in her pockets, Nathan guessed, for a handkerchief. Richard appeared to be grinning very slightly: perhaps amused by the spat, perhaps preoccupied with something else entirely as he reached for his wife’s hand. He seemed hazily surprised when she touched him back, pattered an investigation round the pale, fine fingers of his smaller fist. Lynda herself was watching Nathan, waiting to see if he’d drawn enough blood to be satisfied, to stop. She was, therefore, just as surprised as he was when Ruth halted the search of her pockets and threw two biting showers of hastily gathered loose change at Nathan’s face.
“Christ, ya fu—” He tried to sound adequately angry while maintaining a cringing position; he’d always had a particular fear of losing his sight at the hands of some random maddie, chucking things. “What do you—?” And now could well be the hour.
Ruth lurched to her feet and he braced himself for another, more personally projectile attack. To his left he could hear an unmistakable snuff of nervous laughter from Louis—that man had no bottle at all.
Not that you do. Look up and meet her eye, at least. You’re in the right, remember. You’re only saying what all of them think.
Ruth wavered above him, looking more than usually bloated—her doughy face marked with two little thumbprints of furious red on either cheek.
You hit the spot, then. Really pissed her off.
Tee hee.
And if you grin now she will kill you. She will snap your back, rip out your spinal cord and go skipping down the stairs with it. Do not even consider grinning, not even a hint at it.
Tee hee.
Sssh.
“Nathan,” she sounded tired, unpleasantly vulnerable.
Oh shit—she’s pulling that old trick, is she? So now I’m supposed to feel sorry for her. Fucking women—they always do that, bend things round until you end up hitting yourself. Well, not today.
“Nathan, I’m very happy for you. It must be great to have never made any mistakes in your life. You must be really happy and content. And you must love always knowing what people are going to do and why, always thinking the worst of everyone.”
She walked out of the room in exactly the kind of embarrassed, but vaguely impressed little silence that Nathan had known she would try to generate. Sure this was a bad idea, he nevertheless called after her, “That hurt, you know. Throwing things at people . . . that’s, that’s not . . . safe.” He sounded as much of a prat as he’d thought he might. The remainder of the Fellowship studied him.
OK, then. Stare at me, you fucks. I’m not storming
out. I’m staying just exactly here and when you start up Uncle Joe’s little psychic circle: all the good, wee writers united: all letting your brains flap out together in the rosy, cosy silence, well, I will still fucking be here and I will concentrate on nothing else but screwing up your vibes.
“Nathan.” Joe, sneaking out his best placatory voice, which actually was quite placating: not a stain of admonishment in it. “Nathan.” Calling him back to his better self.
Well, sod off, I don’t want to go. I’ve never liked my better self.
“I might suggest that our Business Meeting has concluded. Or almost concluded—what would you say? Nathan.”
I’d say fuck, wank, bollocks, Jesusfuckingchrist.
“I’d say whatever you like, Joe. Whatever.”
“Anything for a quiet life? That’s not like you, Nathan.”
Nathan could feel the room congeal around him—the audience all set for a turn or two of badger baiting and here he was, stumbling and growling: the mad, bad badger again.
“Not like me to be agreeable, you mean?”
Joe smiled, almost tenderly, “No. Not like you to compromise,” spun a glance across at Nathan and held it, glinting, testing him out, ready for a serious dig, a proper excavation of his head. “What would you have said to Ruth? What did you want to say? Really.”
“I said what I wanted to. I always do.”
“All right. Then what would you have said to Mary? About the Price boy.”
Get the fuck away from that, just get the fuck away from that—Mary is my business.
“Nothing. I would have said nothing. Talking about it upset her. I don’t try to make her upset.”
“But you must have prepared something. What would you have said, if you could? What would have been the principle of the thing?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
Joe didn’t even flinch, only waited, working to reel in the words he wanted from Nathan—his patience was tangible, like a cold stroke at the side of Nathan’s neck.
And Nathan dropped away from the grip of his intentions, acquiesced. Joe always got what he wanted in the end, so why fight? Why not let him shake out the last bloody syllable and be sure you were fully expressed—as if that were ever really a good idea. “Joe, I would have told her, will tell her, that she can never take away anything she hasn’t the power to put back. Writers write, they don’t steal—we make something. We only have the right to rob ourselves. Break the rules if you want to, but then don’t complain when they break you back. But I think,” he swallowed round a dipping swell of something terribly like pride, “I think she’s fine, I don’t think she’ll have any bother with that. I think she’s . . . fine.”
Joe watched on, still avid, still looking for another sliver on his pound of flesh.
All right. You want more, you can have more.
“Unlike me, Mr. Christopher, and unlike you, she is fine because she is still a normal human being. I mean look at you—look. You’re fucking insane. You keep it nicely covered, but we both know it’s true. Hauling out opinions, establishing principles—you still think it’s important, don’t you—what any of us thinks. You think it matters what you think. Because for all of those fucking-multi-media-prominent-opinion-forming-leading-British-fucking-novelist years, every time you had a really interesting new idea, every time you squeezed one out in the morning with the first crap of the day, you’d call up the fucking Guardian or Radio pissing Four and some stupid cunt would let you tell us all about it. We just had to know. As if a writer, as if a fucking professional typist, a cunting typist knows any fucking thing about anything. But you fell for it. They all told you that you mattered and so you believed that it was true. How long did it take for you to work out who was wanking who?”
Joe was wincing, only very slightly, but Nathan still knew he’d bitten him squarely on both Achilles’ heels. He allowed himself a grin while Joe swallowed, rubbed his thumbs against his palms. “Everyone matters. There’s nothing masturbatory about that.”
“But you wanted to matter more than most.”
“Yes.” Joe was never slow in admitting his faults. Nathan tried not to find this admirable, but usually failed. “It’s good you’ve reminded me. Yes. For a long time, I forgot my priorities. Lost perspective. You saw me do it, I know.”
“Our words are our right, but they’re also our privilege.” Nathan heard his tone soften the way it always seemed to in the face of honest regret. “Mm? You’ve said it often enough to me since.”
Joe smiled to himself: entirely, but self-effacingly, penitent. “Yes. So now I have no say. I’ve used all my words. That’s why I’m here—no more public statements, no more writing, no more of all that.”
A silence settled. Louis gently offered, “And our island would be the perfect place for that kind of retreat. Even when barely a trace was left of the monastery—Foal Island was seen as a place of sanctuary.”
“That’s a shame.” Nathan could feel himself snarling, which was never a good sign. “A leper colony would have been so much more appropriate.”
Joe only nodded mildly and reached out to take Nathan’s hand. As ever, his clasp was drily overheated. Nathan felt his fingers start to sweat, a pang of salt pain under his injured nail.
Shit.
He hated when Joe did this: hand-holding, waiting to meet the eyes and then scouring back through the uneasy charges firing in his brain.
“What do you want, Nathan?” Joe giving him that long, long look.
Not now.
This was the end of the Business Meeting and the start of the Meeting proper—Joe’s idea of therapy for them, or of bonding, or of worship, or of fuck knew what. Nathan didn’t like it—their sitting and waiting and being silent. It was too much like being alone with himself, like closing the door on all his efforts at peace of mind.
“Nathan, what do you want?”
The old refrain, Joe’s favourite enquiry, lobbed out precisely whenever Nathan had no wish to answer it.
“Nathan?”
Shit. Fuck. Shit.
Joe asked the others questions, various questions, questions of all kinds, but with Nathan it was always the same, the exact same one.
“Nathan, what do you want?”
“The unattainable. OK? The unattainable. That’s what I want.”
Never another question and never another reply.
Like holding a wary, edgy electricity, like walking on rice-paper, water, an unbalanced hope, Mary found her expectation of him shadowed her whenever she went outside. Jonno.
“Now, girl, we did think we should say,” Bryn had told her, Morgan nodding agreement, gently stirring his unsugared tea. “Well, you see, he’s left Gofeg. He’s working in Cardiff. Got a job there in graphic design.”
“Computers. You know Jonno and computers, loves them.” Morgan had bitten at his thumb, regretting his choice of verb and eyeing Bryn, who, in his turn, had looked to the fireplace and puffed out softly worried breaths.
“So he’s not here.” Mary had let them off the hook, cultivating, for all their sakes, a tone of something approaching indifference. This news of his departure had left her feeling simultaneously hollowed and freed.
Which now made walking unexpectedly difficult. She seemed noticeably lighter than she was used to being, more liable to topple or be blown adrift. A lock of tension had settled, triangulating fierily between her two shoulders and the tender vertebrae that moulded the give of her waist. She looked, had anyone cared to observe her, slightly sleepless, preoccupied: one hand intent on keeping her hair from her eyes when it fanned in the uneven breeze.
She kept moving, threading her observation along familiar streets.
Not yet, then. Not yet.
Mary was still waiting for that one trip she’d make back to Gofeg when everything would seem smaller and further away. The trip that would mean she had properly left, or properly arrived, somewhere else.
I don’t know why it hasn’t happened yet.
Home. Now there’s a word. Where the work is. Where the house is. Where the heart is. Difficult to pick.
She did this more and more, she’d noticed—gabbling away to herself, easing her nerves, or passing the time, or practising narrations she’d never remember or want again. This was, of course, a good way of avoiding any genuine thought, of dodging proper contact with the lick of chill that came when she paused at words like heart.
Hearts. Hearts and flowers. Broken-hearted. Broken. Broken down.
You don’t know when to stop. Do you?
Hearts and flowers. Birds and bees. Fucking.
You just don’t know.
The way he was.
She pocketed her hands more firmly and remembered to nod at the faces who nodded, to smile at the people who smiled, to look away when anyone gave her the small, brutal stare that was meant to make her feel ugly for having gone, got away from Gofeg to something better, or at least something else. And they blamed her for leaving Jonno, she knew that. She did, too.
Jonathan.
The taste of him ran at her, made her falter, stand considering a section of pavement, the base of a wall, the warm unfocusing of her vision. Her past broke against her while a part of her was finally, loudly bewildered.
This is Gofeg, he should be here. He shouldn’t have gone without saying where I could find him.
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