Why am I always so bastarding early? No one else ever is. It simply means that I turn up and then have to hang around for ages until it feels as if whoever I’m meeting is late and so I’m already pissed off with them, even if, when they arrive, they’re precisely on time.
She’s never on time.
Unless she’s changed.
I don’t want her to have changed.
Other than in a few particulars.
Like that I would like her to like me.
Liking—it’s not a big thing, it isn’t excessive or overly meaningful. It isn’t unlikely.
I stand under the awning of the cinema and then, as I promised myself I would not, I check my watch. I am aware that I now look like all of the other sad shits, hovering miserably to either side of me, eyes thumbing through the crowd for a sight of that anticipated face. Not one of us is managing to look as if this might be any fun.
I really do need a piss.
But if I nip in and take one, Maura might come by. She might see that I’m not here and go away again.
Or, equally, I might be wise to fuck off, take a leak and, meanwhile, imagine that she really is outside and trying to meet me and yet—due to this one unfortunate happenstance—she will be destined to fail completely.That would be better than standing and watching and having to realise she isn’t coming, that she will not come, that everything we agreed to was so easy because she never intended to come.
I consider leaving, waiting, pissing, putting my head through the glass pane in one of the doors, but actually do nothing which looks very much like waiting, but isn’t the same thing in any way.
“Nathan?”
She’s everything, you know? She is everything.
“It is you, isn’t it?”
All of my life.
“I know your face from the ... um ... magazines. Sometimes.”
She was why it made sense.
“And, anyway, you look like you.You always have.”
Maura leans in quickly, breathes a kiss near my cheek and steps away again before I understand that she’s truly here, that she’s kissed me, that I have gooseflesh suddenly.
She’s here.
She’s here.
She’s here.
She’s here.
She’s here.
“Nathan, are you all right?”
“Yes.”
I am quite completely all right.
And then we walk together, in each other’s company, side by side, as a pair, and find a café and then sit and drink grotesquely expensive coffee in varnished surroundings and watch fat rain begin falling and talk about Mary Lamb, our daughter.
“I’m glad she’s found something to do that she believes in.”
I can only look at Maura in snatches,“Really?” hoping to ease my way into longer views,“even if it’s writing?” while my trembling, restrained, gives way to a deep-seated rocking, a long ripple of motion that swipes me a little colder and more needy with every stroke.
“It’s what she wants to do.” Maura keeps going through most of the motions required to light a cigarette, but then stopping before the moment of ignition. “She was—that time she came to see me—she was obviously very fond of you.You’ve impressed her.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
Maura smiles and half shakes her head. “Don’t be silly, of course you did.” The memory of the gesture and its quick reality shudder in both of my lungs: the true one and the ghost.
I’m unsure of my focus on what we’re saying, some phrases lunge at me and, somehow, penetrate, while others skate by, leaving me virtually intact.
Must be careful of the legs and feet under the table—I mustn’t touch her by accident. Not when I want so much to touch her purposely.
Want is digging in my chest and I’m sure I’m being overbearing, far too loud, but it is really very difficult not to shout when she’s sitting there, so many years away.
I tell her how thoroughly wonderful our Mary has turned out to be, entirely neglecting to mention how much she resembles her mother. And Maura suggests that we may not have failed her quite as badly as we have probably both thought.
“Either that, or she’s simply resilient.”
“And a lot of it must be down to Bryn and Morgan. I couldn’t go to either one of their funerals. Just couldn’t do it.”
The conversation is dipping badly, Maura beginning to look very plainly depressed, and I wonder if she thinks I blame her for abandoning the child. I don’t. I genuinely don’t. We all only do what we can at the time. I know I had my faults, too.
Of course, I can’t tell her any of this—it would be inappropriately intimate—and I opt instead for the mildly strangled effort, “What d’you want to see? At the pictures.”
Maura is blank for a breath and then shrugs. “I hadn’t thought.”
“If you don’t want to ...”
Please want to, please want to, then you won’t have to go yet. Don’t go.
“No, I’d like to see something, I just wasn’t sure of what. Have your tastes changed?”
This slaps me in the heart so badly that I cough. “My . . . ?”
“Tastes.”
“They’re exactly the same.” I try to say this without undue emphasis.
“Well, then, there’s one about a kidnapping that goes wrong—it’s meant to be very clever and very dark. And funny.”
I nod, feeling very dark and very stupid and not funny at all, while the back of my head is yowling with delight.
She remembers my tastes.
First she says she’s looked at me in magazines and now she remembers my tastes.
The tastes that prove I’m still predictably sick and sad.
I manage,“Clever and dark, eh?” almost as if this were jolly news.“But you wouldn’t necessarily enjoy that. If I remember your tastes. Not that you’re not clever, obviously, you always were very ... I would just want to ... Would you like to see that?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“But what would you like?”
“There’s Breaking the Waves. It’s, maybe ... something about a couple and he ends up ... he can’t ... People say it’s good, but it might not be. For us.”
“Sounds great.” Not a couple, not a couple. No. “We’ll see that, then. Let’s go.”
“I’ll just pay for this.” She lifts up a handbag that looks, in some way, middle-aged, not like her. She’s still young—always was, factually, younger than me—but, even bearing that in mind, she is hardly changed. Still Maura, still beautiful.
“I’ve already paid.”
“Then let me give you something.” She searches in her purse for something.
“No. I’ve already paid.” And paid and paid and paid.
The dark of the cinema clasps about me and the advertisements gush by, all of them slightly too nubile, too knowing, hingeing too heavily on things I mustn’t contemplate. Not that the film is any better, in that respect.
Shit, I can’t watch this. It’s going to be sad, I can tell. And it’s going to be . . . all of the things I can’t watch. Shit.
I face strictly forward, but look at my knees, don’t lean on her armrest, and feel thoroughly ashamed, while the scent of her shimmers beside me: the limited notes of her perfume and the other fuller, more complicated melody of her self.
God have mercy, this is what I used to live in, sleep in, what I wore under my clothes, what I spent lunatic months searching out once she’d made us be apart. I kept that scarf of hers and the blouse, tied up in a carrier bag, and, almost every morning, I’d decide to get rid of it and, almost every evening, I’d take it out from my bottom drawer and open it and breathe her in: one breath each time, exactly enough to make me weep.
In the end, it faded. In the end, it went away.
And I know that, in this close, synthetic, indoor night, I wouldn’t be able to see myself and may conceivably be able to ignore the total lunacy of reaching out to find her hand.
Don’
t.
And don’t look at the screen. Not while, not while they’re ...
Christ, she smells gorgeous, smells of what I thought was us, although really it was only ever her. I never was properly part of us—never the genuine family man.
I make the attempt to coax myself from thoughts I shouldn’t start on. My thinking, naturally, punches back.
I’m going to miss her. At the end of the night. Dear God, I am.
And I feel myself fall in the chill of this, brace my legs and back against the soft plush of the seat and still keep falling while the screen blares out its patterns of terrible light.
This shouldn’t be happening.These aren’t new emotions, they can’t be, they’ve just kept on fucking growing in their grave like the fucking nails and hair on a fucking corpse.They are not new and so they cannot make me feel this way. I will not give them my consent.
But they still take it, anyway.
Then Maura gets up, dips in to murmur like brimstone close at my neck, “I won’t be a minute,” and goes away.
The space she leaves in the darkness sings beside me, burns, and I haven’t any words left and I know that I am lost. In the movie, I watch an actress and an actor both doing their jobs, pretending quite convincingly, moving into the shapes of unhappiness and sex, and I cry, the tears rolling back to my temples because of the angle of my head.
I’m glad Maura isn’t here to notice this. She’s already seen more than enough of my weaknesses.
I don’t understand how this happened and I’d say it was deeply unwise, but I’m putting up no resistance: in fact, I haven’t one word of complaint.Tucked up in a taxi with Maura and rocking along, there is no complaint I could possibly wish to make.
And this was her idea, her suggestion, she never got a hint towards it out of me.
We just shared a couple of drinks after the film—we’d both had a bit of a difficult time with it and were trying to close the evening gently in an equally bad choice of bar. I was going to lose my temper, I know, with all of the being jostled and having to shout, but then Maura suddenly asked me—almost yelling, her breath against my cheek—asked me if I wanted to come back now, to come back and talk, to come back to her place and open a bottle of wine and make this a more comfortable night.
“Why not? There’s nothing to stop us. Is there, really? Is there, Nate?”
And while my whole nervous system hooted and convulsed, I gave only a wide-eyed shake of my head, my tiniest smile, “No reason I can think of.” Then I drained the last sip of my drink, an ice fragment darting electrically in at my gum and, of course, this was no time to flinch, what with both of us sitting there, ready to leave, and slightly surprised at ourselves, but still quite happy, quite recklessly unguarded against the rush of hours ahead.
And, after all, it’s still fairly early. Or still not too late.
“You’re sure you don’t mind this?” The lock and jumble of city traffic is greasing against the cab windows, the rain still pressing down.“I mean, it’s ...” I’m going to say,“very nice of you,” but she stops me with a look: very straight and pensive in the fractions of passing light.There’s something else there too, it gives me the shifting impression that she is, in some way, uncer tain, or perhaps preoccupied.
“Of course I don’t mind: that’s why I asked you.” I imagine I can hear a frailty in her voice, although this might be nothing but an echo of the undoubted frailty in my brain.“The place is a bit of a mess, though.You’ll have to forgive me.”
“Of course I will. I’d have to give you much the same warning if we went back to mine.” The more warnings, the better, if you ever came back to mine.
“You still have somewhere in London?”
“Oh, yes.” And so that you know, “It’s in Dolphin Square.” So that you can find me.
“Very swish.”
“And about to get slightly fashionable, I’m afraid.”
Fuck, I sound like an utter wank. Look at her : smiling, but not in a good way: only giving that seeping grin you do when you tolerate a prat.
And I am that prat.
“Maura?”Trying to change the subject and not wonder in any way which side of the bed she sleeps on, whether it’s still the left.
Christ.
The sheer idea of her, ice-picking, scorchingly in.
Oh, Christ.
She’s looking at me, puzzled because I’m not speaking, because— probably—I am quite visibly coming unstitched.
“Nathan?”
“Uh, yes, I was just wondering ... wondering if I could ask you a question. Hm?”
And she reaches out her hand and takes mine, takes me, as gently and totally as death by drowning. “Of course you can.”
Maura sets a squeeze round my knuckles now, one that I can’t help returning, although I don’t know what I mean by this, what we mean by this.
“I’d have hoped you could ask me. . .” and I realise she wants to say “anything” but stops herself, reconsiders, “ask me whatever you want.” She’s being careful with her phrasing, but is also a little tipsy, I can hear it in her voice, and this raises in me several sleazy hopes. “Just ask.”
“Yes.Yes, OK. I will then.”
“Well, go on.” Another squeeze, before she frees me, leaves me cold where I’ve lost her touch.
Her hands are the same, precisely: they can still turn all my muscles to fucking sand. Sand and the beginnings of hot lead.
“Right, I’m going to.” If you only take my hand once more, once more before we finish the night, then, God, it’ll be enough—enough for the rest of my life.
Liar. Fucking liar.
“And?”
“Mm hm. Really.The thing is ...” I’m easing towards her hand now, searching my fingers out across the vaguely tacky undulations of the seat. “God, well ... I shouldn’t . . . no, forget it.”
“What?” And her fingers soothe in around mine again, a good, concerned pressure, neat against me. Both my vocabulary and my breath have gone, but she stays insistent. “Come on, what?”
“Would you, would you—it’s your decision and I would abide by it. But if I could ask.” My eyes are wet, but don’t quite pass the point of tears, for which I am thankful. “Maura, I want to tell her who I am.” I am both frowning and swallowing, but this gains me no self-control.
“You?”
“I want to tell Mary who I am.”
“Christ, Nathan ...”
And now Maura seems angry—as I knew she would be—and I shut my eyes and wait for whatever sort of impact must now come and perhaps my next inhalation isn’t managed all that well, perhaps it breaks, I’m not really sure. But then I find that I’m leaning further and further down towards my left and then her arm catches hold, quick around me, pulling in, and the side of my head lands awkwardly against her in a way that very slightly hurts my neck and she pats at me, awkwardly, near my ear and, all this time, I can hear her saying, “Christ, I thought you’d already done that. I really . . . I thought you must have. God, you didn’t have to ask permission.You’re so ... sometimes.”
She sighs and the heat, the motion of her sighing, this does things to my stomach and my scalp, the inside edges of my arms and thighs.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what, Nate?”
“I don’t know. Everything. I don’t know.”
And I make the mistake of shifting my head on her shoulder, only easing that tick in my neck, not meaning to nuzzle or to be affectionate, but— whatever my intentions—I’ve muddied the atmosphere.
We struggle apart, ungainly, any accidental contacts seeming faintly ugly and abashed. For longer than I’d like, there is silence.Then, “Nathan, you can tell her whatever you want to. She was always more fond of you than she was of me.”
“No, tha—”
“Well, however it was in the beginning, that’s how it is now.” She sighs once more, the sound parting and stroking the air. “I’d assumed that you’d told her. I thought that was why s
he’d not come to see me again—because I’d made you go away and then left her myself. And those are two very good reasons for her to hate me. But now you’re saying she just couldn’t be bothered.”
“I’m no—”
“Shit, simply meeting me one last time was enough to stop her doing it again. No more reasons needed. You know, that really makes me feel like a thoroughly attractive person.”
She breathes a kind of shaken laugh, tired sounding, and if I were any other man, I would be a comfort to her, I would kiss and reassure. Instead, I bleat, “If I’d told her, I wouldn’t have said it was your fault—any of it.”
“No. No, I know that. You’re not malicious.” She says this as if it’s an absolute fact. I find this astonishing. “Look, Nathan—if you don’t mind my saying, you should have done something about this a long time ago. Not that I should lecture, but I do know how badly wrong things can go when you leave them. It’s going to be very difficult. She’ll want to know—”
“Why I haven’t mentioned it before—my being her father. Why I never got around to it.”
“And?”
I don’t want to think about this. I don’t. I want to think of, I want to—
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
“I’ve tried to tell her.” I sound angry and don’t want to. “I have tried.”The cab turns a corner and tilts me nowhere near enough to Maura. “I got scared. She’s older now, she’s got a boyfriend, she’s well on her way to leaving, whatever I do—but,” it’s my turn to sigh, “in the beginning, when she first came, when we didn’t know each other, I got scared that I would make her go—that if she knew who I really was, it would make her go.This way, at least I’ve had a ...” And any sense this ever made dwindles in the grainy yellow of the street lamps and burns away.
“Oh, Nathan.” Maura nudges herself nearer, sets a small, rather formal kiss against my cheek.“Poor old you.” And I sit in this new hopeless, pointless proximity.
Sympathy. I could have borne anything from her but that.
We are close enough to brush shoulders, hips, at each stiff corner, dunting together and nursing our separate miseries. We say nothing more, attempt no further expressions of tenderness.
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