And now we’ll be able to talk to each other from anywhere in the house. No interruptions, no one to intervene.
“You be good until I’m back and then we’ll see what happens.”
“I’m always good.”
“Except when you’re not good, I know. Get on with you to bed now. Scoot.”
I hung up, feeling—as ever—a minute but unmistakable pang of amputation.
Still, it’s get on with me to bed now, or places to that effect.Yes, indeed.
The bathroom is huge, all chipping gilt taps and sepia faux marble with a bath which I hope and believe could accommodate two.
I creep in.“Hiya?”
Maura’s head is resting on the lip of the tub, her body, stretched and glimmering under the peat-stained water. I’ve drunk too much of that stuff on the hills today, I notice, my mouth tastes of smoke and iron—like whisky without the kick.
“Maura?”
I wonder if she may be sleeping and if I may be able to wake her gently, perhaps by kissing the curve of each breast where they’re proud of the water, coyly buoyant. But then she turns and looks at me, fully awake, and makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have worn a dressing gown. I wish I had pockets, then I’d know where to put my hands.
“I’m almost finished.” She’s seen that I’m slightly risen, slightly hard, but she doesn’t smile, doesn’t meet my eye again.
I feel I should say something and manage,“I’ll be . . . outside, then. Obviously,” without sounding too ill at ease. For the first time since we’ve come away, I can smell our house. I can smell the fug of all the arguments we hiss at each other like baffled lizards, pretending we’re making sure that our daughter won’t hear.
I start to go, the bathroom seeming bigger, cooler than before.
“No, don’t. I want to talk to you.”
I can’t currently think if this is a hopeful sign. My stomach winces in any case.“You want to ... all right.”I kneel by her head. My already dwindled prick pats the side of the bath and shrivels completely at the chill.“Is there something wrong?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, of course there’s something wrong.That’s why we’re here.”
“But we’re here because we want to work it out.”
“No. We’re here because you’ve finished your fucking book and you felt like a break and a bit of a ride.”
“You know that’s—”
“I’ve had enough, Nathan. Enough. Jesus, you couldn’t even bear to be near me on the walk. What were you doing? Making notes for something else?”
“I’m a fast walker.”
“Well, now I won’t be there to hold you back.”
“Maura, please.You know I’ll do—”
“Anything but change.This is it, Nate.”
My knees are aching against the floor, but I can’t move. I’m staring at my wife, my wife naked, the everything I know about that, the redness of all of her hair—she can’t be leaving, I’m here with her naked. She can’t be leaving, she’s my wife.
She stands up: suddenly, numbingly streamed and fluted with water, makes a long, arched step out, level with my face.
If I kiss her. If I kiss her, if I kiss her cunt, if I remind her, if I hold on to her, beg. If I tell her that I’ll die.That I will die.
She wraps herself up in one of the bathrobes that came with the room—two of them, a robe for each half of a pair.
“Nate?”
I think I’m curled over, I may well be bent right over with my forehead on the wet linoleum.
“Nate, I do love you.”
Something in my head bursts.
She sounds as if she may be crying. “But where’s the point in that?”
I realise that I am crawling, squatting, hugging my shins.“Maura.” I can’t tell if I’ve said this or only thought it. “Please. I mean, what about Mary?”
“I can take care of her. I usually do, if you’d ever notice.”
“I’ll have to ...”
My Mary. If I see her, then I see you. If I see you, we can start again.
“I’ll have to ... I can’t not ...”
Mary. How will we tell her. Christ. How can we tell her what we’ve done.
“We’ll have to work out times when I can see her. Maura?”
“No.”
What?
“Or you can—”
“No.”
“Well, then how—”
“You won’t see her. You’ll go away before her birthday and you won’t come back.”
“What?”
In my chest. Something must be bleeding in there.
“You’ll go away and you won’t come near us. After a while we’ll move— move away from London.You won’t find out where we’ve gone.”
“Maura, are you fucking crazy?”
“I can’t see you, Nathan. I love you. If I see you, you’ll get back. I know you. And we have to stop.”
“But Mary—”
“You’re not the way you should be with her, she isn’t an adult, she isn’t a writer, she isn’t in one of your plots. Why can’t you just leave her alone? I have to make sure she grows up . . . like a little girl. I’m sorry, I should have done this before.”
“This is a fucking joke, right?”
“If I don’t do it this way, I won’t be able to leave you at all.”
“Then don’t!”
“I have to look after myself, Nathan. And her. And I have to be able to breathe.”
I’m standing now, quite close to her—I don’t remember how I came to be here.“I’ll take you to court.You can’t do this. No one would let you do this.”
Her hands are shaking—one holding the other and both shaking. “You’ll let me, Nathan. Or I’ll tell them you’ve . . . with her. I’ll say . . . I’ll tell any lie it takes to get us free of you.”
“I would never, you know I would never do anyth—”
“Of course I know. So don’t make me say that you have. Let us go, Nathan. Let us go.”
I hit her now. I watch the long swing of my hand, before it compacts in a jarring blur and I hear her breath come—a terrible, hard sigh of breath—and then she is screaming and running and crashing the door and I am saying sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry. Back on my knees again.
I wait and rock until there are no more sounds from our room and then I wait more. I understand that she has gone and I do not expect her to return, I am just waiting, I don’t know for what.
Please.
In the end, when I walk to the bed, the clock dial is shining out 01:23. I want to ring Mary, ring my neighbours, ring the police and say there has been an emergency. But I don’t. It’s too late, entirely.
This isn’t true. None of this is true. Please.
I go back to the bathroom and lie in the cold of the water that Maura left. It makes me cry.
Then I dress and go out through the quiet hotel.The night is clear, at the edge of a frost, and I’m shivering very deeply, helplessly. I cut over the grass and then trample across a flower bed, crush out the last of the late blooms, I don’t know why.
And I come to the palely blue-painted curl of their swimming pool and scramble in. It’s warmer down here, peaceful: the floor all soft puddles and scatters of last year’s leaves. I work my way past hazy, graded markings from the shallow end to the deep and then I stand. I can feel the ghost of drowning, closed over my head.
Sophie was watching him, Nathan wondered why.
“What is it, love? Mmm?”
“Are you all right? Have you finished?”
He glanced down at his paper, his story, and then remembered, couldn’t help but sit and keep quiet while the memory of it all jolted out in him, broke. Working these things through, forming them for other eyes, it never helped.
And you say you want to write a proper novel—get one last crack at legitimacy. Some fucking hope.
“Uncle Nathan?” She slipped her hand into his and he knew she would find his palm unpleasantly clammy, greased with unhe
althy thought. “Are you . . . ?”
He was disturbing her—no doubt looking almost as desperate as he felt.
Shit.
“I’m only—I was thinking about losing things. That’s all. What time is it?”
“Time to go for Lunch.”
“God, already? I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have worked while you were here, it’s made me go and forget the time. Sorry. Go and have the Lunch, then.”
“You should come.”
“I can’t—Mary’s going.”
“You used to like her.”
“I still do like her. We’re just not speaking, so it’s easier for everyone if we go on alternate weeks.”
“Joe says it is counter-productive. And he made me look up Pyrrhic in the dictionary and said it would help me to understand what you’re doing.” She reproduced an adult look of exasperation. “I don’t think it did, but I know that he wanted me to tell you about looking it up. So I have.” She nudged her head against his arm. “You shouldn’t hurt yourself.”
“Well, I want you to tell him that you’re going to go back and look up inappropriate.”
“I already know what that means.”
“I know.” He tried to grin, but a tremor started in his lips and he had to cover them with his hand.
“Is it Mary you lost? Because she isn’t—she does still talk about you. If you wanted to know what she says . . .”
Oh, Christ, just go, just go away, you don’t want to see the way I’ll be now. Just go.
“Yes. No. I mean, I’ve lost lots of things. Her, too. But lots of things.”
Hold it together. Say something, say any fucking thing to get through the fucking time until she goes. Don’t go to pieces on her—talk.
And so Nathan talked, talked until the veins stiffened near his temples, talked until he almost believed himself. “I’ve lost, I’ve lost—no, we’ve lost the way it should be. You know the Aztecs thought paper was sacred? Amatl—it was an offering for the gods. And in ancient Egypt, the word was the deed, it was powerful in itself. The naming of life, it’s in the Bible, it was man’s first duty. All this was ours and we lost it. The life we lived in ourselves, the power of that, the way we made it speak, it was taken away.”
He could tell she wasn’t understanding this, wasn’t even sure that he was himself.
“Nothing means anything any more—the less we know the better, the less we can shape our future, remember our past, the less we can be free, the more everyone seems to like it. We get fed tiny, tiny pieces of monstrous, monstrous facts and fantasies to fill the space between them. But real fantasy, real fiction—the kind with power, the kind that we’re born with, that’s our right—we’re not supposed to want that any more—we have to be helped with our minds, we have to be prevented from letting them go too far. You know, I have a friend, Jack, and I used to think he was wrong about life, but he was right—the only way to do it now is drunk, stoned, as far away from feeling as you can get. Be easy, be malleable, be interested in your substances and nothing else—let anyone do anything and don’t give a . . .” He caught her eye before he swore. “Don’t care about anything as long as you get your stuff. That’s the way. The only way.”
Sophie hugged his arm and he knew his first choke of pain was rising and that he should have kept his fucking mouth shut.
“I could not go to Lunch, if you wanted. We could go for a nice walk.” She frowned at him, worried.
“Not at all. You have to eat, or you’ll grow up as silly as me.” He swallowed, made a tentative, floundering breath. “Off you trot. Go to Mary’s house and she’ll take you—you know the arrangement.”
“I’ll tell Pa to come and see you.”
“Don’t worry him, it’s OK.” He nudged at her, trying to reassure.
“No. I will tell him and he will come.” She considered him, very serious, thinking her words through. “He is responsible for you. That’s what he says. You are his responsibility.”
Nathan only nodded, accepted her kiss at his cheek, waved and fussed her away, his ribs clenched.
And when she had closed his door, it all came bad, all fell away— his life, pissing blood before his eyes. The hurt of it beat through him, noiseless and tight: not a release, only another demonstration of his powerlessness.
God, what the fuck do you want from me?
God, enough. Just enough, enough.
I miss her.
We haven’t spoken for a fucking year now. A year. I wasn’t at her twenty-first birthday, I won’t ever get that again. We won’t.
A year. One whole blank, fucking year. It’s enough.
Why let me have her near and then take her away? Why only bring her here to hurt us?
We’ve never done anyone any harm. She’s never done anyone any harm.
This is enough.
Please, God, let it be enough.
1994
“Nathan. Nathan!”
Nathan had hoped that, as his swimming got better, his sleeping would, too. The lunging out into gluey sweeps and dips was the same in both cases. There were similar treacherous depths.
“Nathan. Please!”
And, every night, syringing in under his better judgement, came his will: the witless drive that made him strike out through every dream to dive for traces of Maura, Mary: Mary, Maura. Sometimes—
“Nathan!”
Sometimes he’d break his head above unconsciousness, the last fish gasp of his mind still glistening with Mary’s voice.
“Jesus, Nathan. Come on.”
He sat up, his mind following a moment later, the room wheeling as he squinted about.
Thank you again, God—You never can resist the chance to kick me while I’m down and out.
Waking into disappointment, the stealing away of dreams, he was used to that. But then he blinked and swallowed, shook his head and stared and stared at the genuine, real-life hand tugging at his shoulder. It really was Mary: Mary’s hand dunting him awake, her breath near his temple, flurrying, and naturally, absolutely, of course, her voice, all mashed up with Abbey Road—he’d kept the CD playing on repeat next door to keep him company, like an audible nightlight.
“Hmffu?”
“Nathan, I need you. You have to come now.”
She was standing by his wide-awake bed, plainly, but softly illuminated by the dawn glow that was creeping along his windows, January pale. His skull thrummed with blurry alarm.
“Are you all right?” He didn’t know whether to pull up the covers further and hide himself, or to simply sit there, obviously rumpled.
“Yes, yes. But Ruth isn’t, come on.”
“Well, that’s,” if he’d thought this was going to happen, he’d have changed the sheets, “that’s . . .” changed his pyjamas, taken off his hideous cold-weather-in-bed sweater, “yes, I’ll come.” Jesus, he must just seem to be nothing more than one great lump of shoddy, male neglect. He bleared up at her, “If you could . . . perhaps step into the other room.”
And out of this one—away from the lonely man’s bed.
“Oh. OK.” But she didn’t move, only looked at him, enquiring.
“Ah. Ah, yes.” And he realised that he’d reached out, caught her arm and, no doubt, also treated her to an inadvertent waft of bedding-flavoured air. “Uhm, nice to see you. It’s . . . it’s—” The less reliable portion of his brain began to shudder but he thumped it into shape. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes.”
He tried to read her expression and failed.
“Yes, it has,” and she left him.
He grazed and stumbled his way through dressing.
She said, “ Yes” . . .
through his living room, Eckless following . . .
“Yes,” that it was nice to see me . . .
through his kitchen, Eckless following.
Or “Yes,” that it’s been a while, because it has been a while, it’s been a fuck of a long while, but that’s OK, it’s OK, she’s talking to me, she’
s back now—she’s outside, she’s waiting for me, I hope she’s waiting for me.
And then, with his dog beside him, he battered outside to meet her, stepping and grinning straight into a still, hard cold that stripped him down to the skin again in seconds, made his eyes sting—lack of sleep, there was almost nothing like it for making you raw.
As soon as they were all together, his daughter, his Mary, his own and only daughter Mary, simply beckoned and ran ahead, Eckless beside her now, barking just a little. So Nathan ran too, catching up: heart clanking, breath ducking and plunging against gusts of light-headedness.
“What’s the . . . What’s wrong? Something’s happened to Ruth, did you say?” His pulse was slamming his blood far beyond what he felt were its healthy limits. Lack of sleep and lack of caffeine, that was the problem. If he’d drunk even one cup of coffee before they set off, he would have been sprinting like a deer. Or, more likely, just wallowing along beside her, exactly the way he was now, feet jolting and sliding stupidly, as the shock of her, the lovely shock of her, wrecked his co-ordination wonderfully. He tried another wheezy question, “What’s happened?”
“I said—it’s Ruth.” She was only a little out of breath—quite fit, his girl. “Louis found her clothes in a pile at his door this morning. He said that she’s tried swimming across to the Head. He came over to my place and now he’s on the way back there to keep a lookout.”
“To look . . . ? Oh, OK.” He was coming to slowly as he pounded along, “And did he . . .” gradually feeling almost unpleasantly aware, “did he suggest that you came to, to me? Louis?”
“We both thought that I should.” She upped the pace, sighting Louis’s form moving with surprising speed up ahead.
“Uh hu, uh hu, makes sense.” On his left side, his hungry side, he could feel her presence, her sudden return, scalding into him, neat, like antiseptic on a wound.
“We both thought it. I just said it first.”
Nathan could have sworn that she almost smiled as she spoke.
They caught Louis up and hurried three abreast over the tussocky grass. As they went, Louis explained the situation, gleaming with excitement, his arms milling and flapping about, until he might almost have been a rather portly boy, running and scaring up crows. “I saw, yes, indeed. Saw her quite clearly. In the rocks at the foot of the Head. Just above the high tide line. She saw me and waved. Waved, for goodness’ sake.”
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