Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  Jerusalem, and if it were possible ...

  I can’t finish the thought, but it’s there, like a soft growth under the skin: the hope that I am—in spite of myself—a pilgrim, that I could have earned a pilgrim’s reward.

  Please, God, I’ve come here. Now take all the bad things away. Although, of course, one of the bad things is probably me.

  And I’ve hardly had a rigorous journey: free flight here and back again and a fee for a brace of readings and one lecture—as yet uninvented. A thoroughly cushy number, as penitential travails go.

  Except I paid for this before I came. I’ll go home to a house which is not my house, which has in it nothing left for me to love and nothing I know that can love me. You’ve taken my wife and daughter, God. You’ve made me live seven years without sight of them. I have paid, I have paid to the bone.

  I want to hope that if I’ve got here, no matter how, then I have made it and no questions asked—a deal’s a deal. I find myself surprised by my desperation and my willingness to believe even a fraction of the nonsense Joe Christopher’s tried to feed me for fuck knows how long: this being only a fraction of the nonsenses available that mention Jerusalem.

  Miss Mouthwash leaves me at my hotel after the usual courteous stammering around the check-in desk. I believe that she wanted to go with me into the lift, to check the room, to aid my unpacking and I don’t want to picture what else, but I was having none of it.

  Big room in the American pastel motel style, very reminiscent of a private hospital: aggressively concrete flooring underfoot and an air-conditioning bulkhead above the bed which will roar all night and keep me awake with din and dehydration. The bathroom is showily clean, the usual sachets of this and that. I have a great temptation to piss right around the circle of surgically sterilised tissue they’ve left on the toilet seat to defend my tender buttocks from leaping disease. Maybe on the day I leave ...

  I now have two hours to “be refreshed” before she will come and collect me and expect me to prove myself the performing bear I am.

  Why is it always two hours? Just long enough to get sleepy but not to get a sleep. Just long enough to discover the vital item you haven’t brought with you but not to go and seek out its replacement. Just long enough to feel abandoned, but not to find relief.

  In case of emergency, check mini-bar.

  2 midget kosher white wines and 2 red, 2 Beefeater gins, 1 Angostura Bitters (as ever, suspiciously caked and old), 4 Johnny Walkers, 2 Camparis, 2 (for God’s sake) baby champagnes, 3 Cokes, 3 beers, 3 mineral waters, 2 orange juices and 2 bottles of something vodka-looking called Silent Sam. 2 boxes of fancily smoke-flavoured nuts and 2 Toblerones.

  Which taste a bit soapy but sugar is sugar and that’s what I need. I will deepen my acquaintance with the rest of the range when I get back tonight, having feigned tiredness and avoided the clutches of my orally challenged chauffeuse. I feel she will proffer clutches at some stage and my refusals always cause offence.

  What I want now is a cup of coffee. Not in the bar or the restaurant or on a room-service tray, but made by me. After a run of cheap one-night gigs—distraction for the lonely man—I am still fixed in the B & B frame of mind. My expectations are based on the standard British triangle of second-class comforts and perks: the bed and the portable telly and the little nest of coffee powders, tea bags and UHT milks out of which will grow a kettle and perhaps two shortbread rounds. The tiny rooms and their tinier showers and their teeny admonitory notices and their total fucking lack of alcohol— the thoughts of a forthcoming audience to please when I can no longer remotely please myself—they break me every time to the brink of weeping.

  But, predictably, I miss them when they’re gone.

  Like everything else.

  Nathan pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes, sucked in a breath while the image of her hands against his pages unfurled in his vertebrae, along with the consideration that his words might speak in her mind, that his beat could take her breath and coax it out however he wished. He felt afraid to continue and desperate not to stop, as if there were someone palping each thought already, examining—or as if he had only this last chance to impress.

  But impress who? Who is this for, really—do tell? Not the daughter, surely? Not ever anyone but the wife. Maura—who never liked to read you, even when you lived with her, even when you weren’t tossing off formulaic gore—a bit of splat and trickle for the ladies. Even when you wrote proper novels, she never did want to know what you wanted to say, unless you were saying it. Sometimes not then . . . Why the fuck don’t you jack it in, Nate—there’s no one listening.

  Nathan considered smiling. At one time he couldn’t have let himself think this way. Now, he knew it didn’t matter what he thought. Understanding that he wrote without a purpose or effect had no power to prevent him from scrawling on and on; the alternative was being left alone inside his head with nothing to defend him from his memory, as it sliced and burned—his inadvertent homage to Hieronymus Bosch.

  But Mary will read me. In the end, she’ll read me and she’ll know what I mean, because we’re like each other. She’ll take in what I give her and she’ll add herself and we will fit.

  When I wake up all my skin feels gritty—too much MTV and hospitality, swilled down with the sterling Silent Sam. But I’ve earned my free day in the Holy City, the Centre of the World and, now that my ears are also conscious, I realise I’ve been roused by the sunrise call to prayer:the cheaply amplified wonder of somebody singing at God.

  I have already been warned that such apparently holy messages can be clandestinely vicious and subversive. Similarly, someone in the corridor, some woman I almost fell into on the long stagger back to my room last night, hissed that I should never eat Arab falafels because they’re cooked in the dirty oil the Jews force them to buy.This is a city full of genocidal gossip.

  But inside this city is the City and what I want. Or, perhaps what I want. I’m not sure now—if I ever have been. My need is not articulate, it is only need.

  In through the Damascus Gate, and the walls fold round me, charged. Under the puddled cobbles and behind the dripping stalls, there seems to be a press of credulity, certainty, insanity. Perhaps because it is something so little a part of me, I am sure that I can taste a haze of faith. Between the tang of damp leather souvenirs and kerosene stoves, there’s a nagging flavour of horribly long-standing belief, I can feel it roping in to shorten my breath.

  I find I am almost running in a kind of atheist alarm when, as they say, the heavens open and too much water falls out of the sky for me to continue. I wait things out in a clammy café, sipping sage tea and eating three pieces of something not unlike a sugary omelette with cheese. I am not hungry or thirsty, only anxious for something to do. I could buy a packet of cigarettes, but I have recently given them up and this doesn’t seem the time to fall from grace.

  Although I am trying not to, I recite in my mind Jerusalem’s map of agreed impossibilities: here an ascent into heaven, here the sweat mopped from God on earth, here prayers slipped into cracks in a wall like letters to Father Christmas, like notes to a secret love, expected soon. And I am afraid. I am a trespasser. An unbeliever lapsing back to superstition, because he can’t get what he wants any other way: I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be allowed.

  But you are here. So you might as well go all the way. And, by the way, you are a believer, remember? You believe you’re damned.

  My head is still delicate when I start my ascent, the previous evening’s excesses making my neck wince at every flux of beaten blood.The omelette is giving me a not unwelcome sugar rush.

  And on we go. “He who would true valiant be” . . . And so on and so on.

  Twice I miss the entrance and think of giving up, going back. Done my best, no point in pushing it, get down to the hotel bar, have a hair of the dog and then a kip ...

  I mean, you have no logical reason to be here.

  So who said there should be anything l
ogical about want?

  Doubling back yet again, I find the archway, the courtyard, the stack of abandoned crosses like a bad joke. This is, through the ragging drizzle, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the one place on earth where there might be a miracle, even for me.

  Through the doorway and I can’t believe the noise: the unsanctified crush, the puzzle of lamps and chapels, scaffolding, pillars and steps and, here at my feet, a plump girl kissing a stone. Everywhere, people are kissing, touching, rubbing special places already greased black with adoration. I let myself bounce and drift with the crowds, the backs of my legs sweating and my spine braced, as if I were balancing at the verge of some dreadful event. Around me, mass intoxication has boiled up over the years into forms I cannot recognise as Christian, they are too garishly eccentric, too admirable and devout.

  In the end I have to do it—what I promised myself I would—climb the stairs and queue beneath the baubled, crouching ceiling, unable to see the altar until that penultimate step when the woman in front of me drops to her knees and there it is: Golgotha, the place of the skull, overwhelmed by gold and marble.

  And then it’s my turn, the sweat on me really serious at this point, embarrassing. I kneel under something approximating a little fireplace, one hand already resting on a circle of polished metal surrounding a hole. I lower my head, my shoulders, and I actually do kiss something very cold, although I’m not sure what because my eyes are closed. I feel no pressure to hurry. Here anyone can do almost anything—we are all creating our own rituals as we go, every move has the weight of potentially supernatural prompting. Nevertheless I decide quite quickly that I will put my hand into the hole.

  There is nothing there.

  I clench and stretch my fingers in blind air.

  I don’t feel a thing.

  Stumbling now, hot, I scramble to my feet and dodge around the line of worshippers, sink into the crowd again.

  All you had to do was reach for it, touch it. But you couldn’t, you were scared.

  I lunge out into the thickening rain, lean against a wall of some antiquity and wonder if vomiting here will be considered blasphemous. A bell explodes into action somewhere above me, beginning a peal of raucous, dangerous clatters.

  What did you think would be down there? The grab of another hand? Teeth? God tugging the cuff of your shirt?

  I go back inside and climb to the altar, repeat everything as I have already done and make for myself the Ceremony of the Second Chance. And this time, this time I drive my arm all the way in and the palm of my hand hits Calvary: cool, clean stone.

  And I prayed that I could see her again for even only one more time. I asked if I could be with her, but I couldn’t use a name. Maura or Mary—any choice was a betrayal. So I hoped that God would understand me, that he would let me have them both. On my knees with my arm in a hole through the floor, I begged for that.

  Then the following morning, I remember, when I woke my clothes still smelt of incense and had perfumed my room. For a while I took this as a sign.

  “D’you know why people like tennis?”

  Jack Grace was trying a new line. Really, it was going to work best during Wimbledon Fortnight, but confining a goodish opener to only two weeks of the year didn’t seem an efficient application of intelligence. At least it didn’t tonight. Trouble was, the bloody club was so noisy—it made screaming de rigueur—and you couldn’t just bawl this kind of thing at a woman and hope to get a promising result. You needed to be able to modulate.

  His current target peered at him through the semi-darkness, possibly a little revolted, possibly a touch bemused, and then shrugged away to join the press of slightly less desperate guests. Now that he looked, she had a fat arse anyway.

  “And fuck you, dear.” He consoled himself with a perfectly unslurred enunciation of his favourite phrase, “Fuck you,” which evaporated inoffensively into the din.

  Out in the evening and two streets to the west, Mary was being surprised by Soho, but not in the way that she’d expected. In the dark it seemed remarkably unseedy: neon shivering across the pavements with every drive of powdery rain, the illusion of warmth from lit and misted windows flickering with diners and drinkers, the fact of warmth clasped in doorways, or sprinting for shelter. It was too early in the evening for anything more malign and, perhaps, too cold.

  Nathan padded beside her, quiet as he’d been since he’d taken her off the island. She’d fully expected him to be the kind of man who didn’t talk on public transport and he hadn’t let her down. Not that his silences were unpleasant, they were almost companionable in a way, peppered with bursts of instructions when he escorted her through transfers, took charge of her bag, paced off doggedly in search of sandwiches or drinks. He’d simply never really explained to her why she was coming to London—beyond suggesting what was going to happen here would be educational.

  She had allowed him to deposit her at an obviously pricy hotel and had then been uplifted again, two hours later, by a Nathan she’d never entirely encountered before. This was a man, rather carefully brushed and polished, dressed in a black suit just slightly too stylish to match his face. But, then again, even his face was a little different: closely, closely shaved and firmer, somehow, more confident than she’d known it. His very blue shirt made his eyes seem also very blue. This was the professional Mr. Staples, a person who actually looked as if he might be a novelist. Mary was glad she hadn’t met Nathan earlier—he would have been completely, instead of mostly, unapproachable.

  And now here he was, leading her into Soho. Here he was, unfamiliar, but gradually proving himself to be fundamentally unchanged. He stopped abruptly up ahead, turned, and then stared, slightly off balance, into his reflection in a blacked-out window stacked with explicit videos. With a little inhalation of impatience he twisted further round through all the degrees required to halt directly in front of Mary. He then frowned down at her with such intensity that she almost felt afraid—not for herself, but for him.

  He’s . . . what’s wrong?

  He seemed startled, concerned by something, but she couldn’t tell what. The slope of his shoulders under the rain seemed—ridiculously, in such a muscular man—frail. He was managing to form a range of vulnerable slopes.

  Nathan nodded, eased the tension round his eyes, lifted her hand, shook it and then set it loose again.

  “Congratulations.”

  “What?”

  “Congratulations. I was going to say this before, but then I heard about this party and I thought . . . I thought. Two birds with one stone is what I thought.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry.”

  He smiled, practically sniggered, and she realised that it would take only a few small, similar changes in his behaviour to make him seem unmistakably peculiar.

  Sorry about what, for crying out loud?

  “Sorry. I couldn’t think of how to tell you. Which means I’ve dragged you all the way to the evil city, dumped you in a strange hotel—”

  “It’s not strange, it’s just expensive.”

  “You’re not paying, so don’t fret.”

  “But I do fret.”

  “Well, don’t. Please.” He swallowed. “This is all part of the learning process. Sometimes . . . if you are a published author . . .” he grinned unguardedly, “people may—now and again—do things for you, buy things for you—food and drink mainly, as if you were a trained seal, which isn’t too far from the truth—and you will accept these things because they are part of the Great Good Cloud of Free Things that circles the world and discharges itself here and there, but rarely where it would serve any practical purpose. People—for example—who have no proper clothing are never given free designer suits. People who have too much clothing often are. All of which has nothing to do with us now. What is important is that you are now a published author.” His grin returned, obviously settling in for the night.

  “What?”

  “You can’t just keep saying what all the time.
Others who do not know you as I do will think you are simple-minded. You are published. Going to be, anyway. You know ‘The Lines of the Hand’? That story?”

  “My ‘The Lines of the Hand’?”

  “Well, of course, yours.”

  The shower was firming, also settling in for the night. Mary was aware they were getting substantially wet. And there was something else, a rushing in her skin.

  “My story?”

  “Yes. Which I sent away and which a magazine has said they want and if you want them to want it then you can write back and say so and all will be well. If you want. It’s your thing. You can do what you like with it. They’ll pay you.”

  “They’ll . . . You sent away something of mine?”

  The rush increased, seemed to rummage underneath her scalp and scamper round her larger arteries.

  Nathan swung to the shop window, peered, realised what he was peering at and swung back again, discomfited. “I know: I should have asked. But I thought, maybe, if you had no expectations that would be better than if I suggested that you should ... This seemed a way of ... This seemed—” He wiped an accumulation of water from his brow with one hand. “We are going to have . . . fun now. At a party.” A slight grimace signalled how unlikely he found this both as a concept and as a sentence he might pronounce. “You can come and look around—see where you’ll finish up. Once you’re a published author. If you’re very unlucky.”

  “We’re going to a writer’s party?”

  Her breath was altered now, thinning and speeding.

  “No. We’re going to a publisher’s party, that’s something completely diff— Well, you’ll see. It’s a place to visit. You don’t have to stay.”

  “Now we’re here, though . . .” She couldn’t think of how her sentence might end. She’d stopped listening to what she was saying. More and more of her attention was withdrawing, anxious to repeat what he’d told her, to whisper it inside the sudden racing of herself.