Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  Published.

  Nathan continued, “Really, we can stay as long as you like. Until it gets ugly. Not that it absolutely, necessarily will. Obviously.” He swabbed his eyebrows free of water. “You look nice. Did I say?”

  “What?”

  “You will have to stop that. Really.” He bleared at her through the damp—not exactly relaxed, but certainly more jolly than she’d imagined he could be. “It makes conversations very tiring and you know I’m not fond of conversing in the first place. Come on. It’s too wet to keep waiting about.”

  Nathan gave her his back and squelched a few steps up the lane while she closed her eyes and exhaled, enjoying a shudder of something new.

  Published.

  “Mary. Mary?”

  She tried not to smile when she faced him, but couldn’t manage, her delight oozed out. It was tapping at the underside of her fingernails, almost lifting them with a kind of fuzzy heat—the same heat that seemed to be smoothing something in her head, then moving it somewhere better, more suitable, opening an unexpected room.

  “Mary.” He was also trying, and failing, not to smile. “You’re like a cow looking over a dyke.”

  “I’m?”

  “A wall—a cow looking over . . . it’s an expression . . . one with little or no heterosexual meaning outside Fife and, therefore . . .” He folded his arms and then shook his head at the pavement. “May I assume that you are happy?”

  “Yes.”

  Oh, yes.

  “Good.” Quickly, entirely serious now. “Then I am happy, too. Come on.”

  PUBLISHED. Oh, yes.

  The street outside the club was full of music: there was no room for it anywhere else, the interior pressure of voices being too great. Melodies drizzled down three storeys of gaping windows in layered attempts at Latin abandon, finally washing away to ribbons in the pavement cracks.

  “Is this it?”

  Nathan nodded. “This is it.” One high, terraced house, picked out from a squeeze of others by rebarbatively colourful paintwork. “This is, absolutely, it.”

  And do I really want to bring my only daughter here? My only lung? My only anything? Too fucking late to balk now, though, of course.

  Subsiding from the head of the stairs, taking two at an unsteady time, came a short man: another man, much taller, draped across his shoulders like a python with rubber false arms. As they stumbled through their descent both were talking softly, but not to each other.

  Nathan took his daughter by the elbow and steered her into the first available room. The usual fog of anxiety and cigarette smoke, fear and cleverness, rolled him in its twitchy embrace as if he’d never been away. Part of him loved it: the pale faces in the dark, the drive to be warmed, incautious, helpless, connected and accepted before the drink and the time and the sympathy ran out.

  Sssh. You’ve been here before, you know how it always ends—less Byronic, more moronic—and weepings and gnashings of teeth pretty much guaranteed. You’re not fit for it, remember? They can scent it on your skin, the sweat of your particular weaknesses—man holding emotional fire sale, stand well back.

  He concentrated his attention on shaking off the nevertheless inevitable buzz, the wily desire to drop into it all and disappear.

  Not tonight, though, not tonight.

  Tonight he was going to be responsible, but not heavy-handed, letting Mary circulate, while still keeping his attention inconspicuously edging round her, just for safety’s sake.

  Which doesn’t stop me feeling like a fucking puppy-killer—leaving her alone in all of this. And Jesus, did she have to dress like that? I mean lovely—really, truly lovely—but she’s far too attractive: too much like blood in the water after dark, calling up the appetites with the tide.

  He introduced her to a safe, gay, untalented poet and meanwhile thought of all the things which should be said by a proper parent when in charge of an innocent child, but which couldn’t be, for fear of said parent then losing it utterly and for fear of said parent also creating unpleasant fears in aforementioned mainly fearless child.

  Or, let’s be fair, I might just as easily make her laugh. When I tell her to look at them: their sweating, their fumbling, their imperfect secrecies. When I tell her to remember what they’re like, so that when they offer her the nice lies, the convincing flatteries, she won’t recklessly accept them, won’t believe them the way I did. The way we all do, always, because, having sold off our dreams, having raised them up for slaughter and printing, we want to think they can still be wonderful and living and our own. We don’t want the truth: to feel lost and cheap and emptied and superfluous.

  If I could, I’d just say to Mary, Examine those stares, those taxidermist’s window stares, those kisses that are not kisses and those smiles that do not smile and consider that most of these people used to love words and now they only try to own them, which is not at all the same thing.

  But absolutely above every other thing, I want to tell her: Never fucking ever trust a man who works with his mind all the day, fiddling at punctuation and shoving his imagination tight up moistened clauses: you cannot imagine how hungry his body gets. And he will not be well, he will not be healthy, I can promise you that. I mean, what the fuck can you call an obsession with founts and paper prices and leading, for heaven’s sake, except twisted, pathological, perverse?

  Take it from me, they are monsters. I am their kind of monster, so I should know. I should explain that they will want to be witty, polysyllabic and well read, amusing, charming, delicate, clean, urbane, but most of all they will want to be wearing the gusset of your knickers across their mouth while they fuck you from behind and prove unable to remember your given name.

  His mouth swam with nauseous saliva while he fought not to picture anyone, anyone at all, anyone remotely female with her mouth opened, anything opened for any kind of penetration, for anything.

  No, no, no, no. This is just paranoia. Nathan, you are being paranoid. She can look after herself. And they’re not all maniacs. Fuck, there are even women here. Not many, but enough to dampen down any overly laddish tone. Almost.

  But lots of them are maniacs. Him, for example.

  His stomach cramped with fatherly despair.

  Him especially, the fucker. That cunt takes more than half a pace towards her and I’ll squeeze his eyes out slowly through his arse.

  “Nathan. Good Lord.”

  Nathan found himself clamped in a humid embrace before he could recognise Jack’s voice.

  “You old bastard. What are you doing here? Not exactly your scene.”

  “J.D.?”

  “ ’Course. Why’re you here?”

  “Brought my girl to see the animals at play.”

  My girl.

  A dab of proprietary vertigo tambourined between his shoulder blades.

  That’s right, my girl.

  Nathan felt the thick, sweet breath of long-term alcohol use curl at his neck as Jack chuckled.

  “Girl? You?”

  “Daughter. Mine. Remember?”

  “Aah. Of course, Sport, of course. I do beg your pardon.” J.D. relinquished him with a parting slap at his kidneys. “Fuck. Good to see you. Bit too drunk to enjoy it.” He nodded severely. “But, all the same . . . Nice to have company with whom one may actually converse.” Managing a conspiratorial glance about himself, “This is all shits and slappers tonight. But then, was it not ever thus?” He darted a hand to his inside pocket, “Know the secret of modern editing?” and reached out a dark, stubby bottle, apparently full.

  Nathan supplied the punchline, such as it was, “Designer jackets and designer beer.”

  “Oh.” His wine glass swayed with disappointment. “I told you.”

  “You did.”

  “Well, whenever I said it, it’s still true. They’re in it for the business, for the pissing contests, for the—most of them can’t even fucking spell.”

  “Whereas you can’t even fucking read.”

  “No, currently
I probably couldn’t, ’s true. But I can rise to the occasion, if asked politely.” Left hand occupied with its glass, Jack deftly employed his right in manipulating his bottle and unscrewing its top. “Now then . . .” Frowning with determination, he lightened his glass by a generous mouthful and then topped it up with a reddish, syrupy liquid from his personal supply. “Mm. Surefire winner.” He swirled the concoction, downed it in one. “Nectar of the gods, that.” He bared his teeth in a spasm of satisfied pain. “Port and Benylin.”

  “Doesn’t that kill you?”

  “One can but hope.”

  “You’re off the wagon, then, can I presume?”

  Jack’s mouth narrowed with controlled distaste. “I was never on the wagon. Not this time. I’ve been in treatment. And now I am cured. And I am not—apparently—an alcoholic.”

  Nathan listened for traces of irony and found none, “Really. That’s good to know,” but didn’t entirely manage not to offer some himself.

  “Yes, I thought so.” J.D. ignored him, keeping it straight. “I only have a compulsive and addictive personality, so I’m told. The experts say I can drink as much as I like without worrying. Or anyone else worrying, which was always rather more the problem. My counsellor said she couldn’t believe I drank so little—given the amount of tress, that is, stress under which I am forced to be creative and endlessly fucking flexible.”

  “She couldn’t believe? They gave you a female counsellor.” Nathan watched a low burn of mischief start in J.D.’s eyes. “Jack . . . you didn’t. Not with your counsellor . . .”

  J.D. laboriously tapped the side of his nose and winked while repocketing his bottle with a shoplifter’s élan. “My counsellor, a fine lady, very fine, good lips—both sets of them, very good . . . she chose to resign for . . . ah, personal reasons at precisely the point when the clinic and I also parted company. She has sought employment at another fa-cil-i-ty—shit, that’s a difficult word late at night—facility. I have no facility for saying facility.” He seemed about to drift beyond his train of thought, but then he gave Nathan a smirk and reined himself back in. “I graduated as a non-alcoholic cum laude and then I . . . hum . . . I chose to buy her a ver, ver, very nice goodbye dinner, before saying goodbye. All’s fair in love and therapy.” He seemed to search his memory for something slippery, then, “And now I have to, um . . . recharging the glass should now take place. Don’t you go too far away, though, because you are my friend here, my dear, dear and only friend.”

  Nathan watched him swing back for the bar, announcing firmly to a neat young man whose drink he’d spilled, “I intend to be unpopular. That is my aim.”

  His dear, dear friend, that’s me. I don’t know which one of us that makes the sickest bastard.

  But it’s true. Who else around here do I actually really know? It’s been a while since I walked out on literature, or since it walked out on me, but—even so—where have they all gone? There are maybe fifteen people here I recognise, the rest are—

  He caught sight of Mary, her hair taking what little light there was and glowing with it, glistening; her shoulders slim under the dress and minorly tense, but elegant, womanly, unmistakably beautiful.

  The rest are just as they always were, only younger. Different people, different faces: but the bankrupt eyes the same as ever. But my Mary, she’s something special. Yes, indeed.

  His jaw clenched as he watched. Maura, her likeness, the form of the woman she’d been, threatened to breach at any moment in a smile or a gesture of Mary’s and to finally make him fall on the floor and howl out loud. But the resemblance never locked entirely, only shimmered at him, gave him gooseflesh and the taste of pain.

  Patronising buggers. Everyone in black, everyone smelling of money, of London, of knowing each other too well. That’s it—they all smell the same, like one thing. Thing being the operative word.

  Mary was not exactly having fun.

  And where are you from? Wales. Oh, dear.

  And what do you do? I write short stories. Ah.

  Confessing to short fiction was obviously even more distressing than having to be Welsh. So, as the evening progressed, she began to lie.

  I’m an undercover meat inspector.

  I design sanitary towels.

  I’m having an affair with that man over there. No, that one. No, that.

  Which had worked twice, but then she’d tried it on a lady key accounts manager, who’d squeezed her hand and told her a number of frankly nasty reasons which explained why that particular liaison could never have taken place.

  From somewhere upstairs a cheer erupted and then shattered into bursts of stamping. The voices around Mary faltered and, at her shoulder, a man began to laugh, producing a small, dark sound, taken on the inward breath—when she turned to him, it seemed as if he were eating his own amusement. He glanced at her, evaluating, then shrugged and glanced away as the room came back to itself, re-establishing a level of noise just high enough to knuckle lightly at the bones of everybody’s skull.

  “D’you know why people like tennis so much?”

  A soft weight nudged her side and she spun to face a wetly smiling figure, sweat gathered in alarming patches across his forehead. Having brushed against her, he now stood, completely motionless, deep in the statuary stage of intoxication.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He blinked, puzzled, as if he’d only just noticed her and then spoke again. “Have you ever wondered why people like tennis so much?”

  “No, actually. I haven’t.”

  “It’s bec—” His eyelids drooped further into a lazy wince. “You’re new, aren’t you. Tonight, I have to be cautious with new people, but I have, at present, misplaced why.” He was directing his voice painstakingly at a point several inches below her chin. “You wouldn’t be kind enough to divulge your name?” Quick as a slap he looked directly at her, eyes as sad as a basset’s, moist with an undefined hurt and a tiny, tiny flirt of pleasure, just a tickle that slipped away. “Would you?”

  “Lamb. Mary.” She wasn’t sure if she wanted to talk to him or not—he seemed both almost harmless and almost interesting.

  “Mary. That’s . . . that’s very melodic. How are you finding literature’s great and good? Mm? We could play pin the tail on the novelist—if we could find a proper novelist. Or we could just slip off to somewhere else.” He grinned a grin which almost managed to suggest this is so sad and so obvious, so much a mid-life crisis type of play, that really it must be something different, more intelligent, more fun—or at least an occasion that we both can rise above.

  Mary grinned a grin which said nice try. “I’m here with someone else.”

  If Nathan qualifies as someone else. Or even someone.

  Time was, I could have been really here with someone else. Time was, Jonno. Time was.

  “I don’t see him with you now. And I really do have to go now—these occasions have a very limited tolerability.” He beat a clear path through tolerability by slowing to a quarter of what was already a creeping rate of speech. “This is what hell will be like, you know? In heaven there are many mansions and in hell there are many houses—all of them publishing.”

  “Publish and be damned.”

  You’re a tosser, but you’re a nice tosser.

  “Yes, I’d heard that, too. Shall we go?”

  A determined tosser, but don’t get annoying—or I’ll get annoyed back. I’ve met better than you back in Gofeg at the Nelson, trying their luck before stop tap and trotting off home to the wife.

  “No thank you.”

  “Not even to another room? If I say please.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  But, fair play, you have certainly managed to be drunker than I have seen anyone get and stay standing.

  Something about him was forensically compelling. She noticed she wasn’t the only one watching him as he acted out his own little martyrdom.

  “But we could . . .” Just what exactly they could tumbled out of his grasp
—she could almost see it drop. “I’m so sorry, but your name . . . ? Was . . . ?”

  “I’ve told you once already. You said it was melodious.”

  He sighed. “Sorry. Really—I’m very sorry.” He dabbed her shoulder with his finger-tips and then recoiled elaborately at such an unseemly physical excess. “Sorry. Slightly inebriated. But the mind has not yet . . . deliquesced. Splendid word, that—deliquesced.”

  “Descended into liquid form.”

  Nobody beats me on vocabulary, even if I’ve had a couple myself. Not that a couple would make any odds, not tonight.

  She hid her thinking in a longer than average blink.

  Published.

  It felt like silver and the moment before a kiss.

  “A liquid descent, yes. Wonderful idea.” He tried a roguish smile, but had to settle for a quickly extinguished leer.

  Oh, fuck off.

  “Look, my name is Mary Lamb and I’m not going anywhere with you—I’m here with Nathan Staples.”

  “Oh, Christ.” He simultaneously drained his whisky glass and dragged his unencumbered hand viciously through his hair. The already disturbed mass of grey settled into an even less happy disarray. “Oh . . .” A wet cough. “Dearie, dearie me.” He sucked in air through his canvas-coloured bottom teeth.

  He’s blushing. After all the shady moves he’s tried to pull, he’s blushing now? Men really don’t make any sense.

  “I . . .”

  His glassless hand was extended to her stiffly. She accepted its vaguely gluey warmth, its unhealthy peeling away.

  “I should introduce myself, Mary Lamb. My name is J. D. Grace and I’m a friend of your fa—friend . . . a friend of Nathan’s.”

  “Oh, you’re Jack? I should have known.” She watched, helpless to prevent Jack colouring further and, despite the gloom, achieving a highly apparent and rather worrying shade of damp cerise. She touched the back of his hand, she hoped reassuringly. “Not because of what you tried . . . that is . . . he hasn’t really told me about what you . . . with women . . .” Mary could feel herself slithering towards charges of manslaughter by shame as Jack swayed away from each tactless syllable. She rushed out a final anodyne effort, “You publish him.”