by Louise Dean
‘We went down to that rubbish dump place where you and I used to go camping and we just blazed right through it, and the sun came down on me, it was amazing, like it was just on me, it shone on my head, and I felt this energy inside of me reaching up, you know like a snake or something. It was cool. And guess what, Dad?’
‘What?’
‘They let me drink Coca-Cola at home now.’
Richard put his hands on his hips, hung his head, blew out, like a striker who’d flunked the goal.
‘Wow. Well, what can I say? As long as you’re happy.’
‘Yeah.’ The boy’s face fell as if he’d seen something else in his mind’s eye. After a minute he came to. ‘Jeff ’s got “Grand Theft Auto II”. It’s violent. It keeps me safe though. I mean it keeps them safe to keep me busy.’
‘Yeah? How do you mean?’
‘What time is it?’
‘Two thirty. Any chance of you sitting down or something? Or taking your coat off?’
Max sat on the bed, a finger in one ear, pondering something, his eyes looking towards the window, an expression trying to form on his face.
‘So I’m here for twenty hours?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I’ll play chess on your computer then.’
Richard wondered how the paternal love thing was going to work out as his sole motivation for continuing to exist.
Chapter 47
With her red hair floating in an electrostatic halo, due to the acrylic sweater, Maud gave her mother a small electric shock as Rachel went to smooth down the school uniform. She put a hand on the girl’s egg-shaped tummy and Maud straightened. Her breath was of stale milk, her eyes green and her skin pale coral, and Rachel thought she was the most beautiful child alive and told her so.
‘I sometimes wonder if I exist,’ Maud had said to her at bedtime the night before.
‘Yes, I used to think about that when I was little, I used to think everyone else was a robot,’ Rachel said, putting her covers around her chin.
‘I hope Daddy will be all right,’ and she gave Rachel that very grown-up look of both doubt and resignation, and finished with a shrugging smile, as if to say: But what can we do?
She took Maud to school across the bridge on the red bus, upstairs at the front, with the smell of steel still on her hands from the handlebar when she left her.
Within a month she’d collected England past and England present. She went to her local pub there most days at eleven for her morning latte and pomegranate juice with a celebrity gossip magazine that she grabbed from the newsagent’s next door, her attention usually diverted by the headlines of the top shelf — Top Brit Clit had her in a wide-mouthed grin as she handed the old man her five-pound note. You could get anything you wanted in this country now.
She listened in the pub, lingering till lunchtime, to builders talking like aristocrats with their long-winded parenthetic conversations and formulae, ‘I suspect that . . .’ and ‘swapping paradigms’.
The British seemed to have the best of everything. She was proud of her greedy little country packed with foreigners practising plumbing. Big girls exaggerated around a trestle table outside the pub, enjoying the Indian summer, with their lower-back tattoos in ethnic patterns signposting acres of backside for development, fur on their collars, baubles on their bags. Passing them by, she paused to appreciate the black in their language. She had the sense of being evicted from her time, she had no idea whether she was ‘stylin’ or ‘wack’, ‘dope’.
She was meeting an old friend for lunch. They were at school together; sixth form college in Hove. It was seven years since they saw each other, when Binda came to New York to stay with her and donned a builder’s white mask to tour the neighbourhoods. Lemons and boiling water to start the day, and the pained anticipation that Binda might just sanction the moment to eat as being one without greed as its motivation, as they sat with hot plates of food going cold.
‘Are you and Jeff the only ones who use this shower?’ she’d asked imperiously one morning, quivering in her camouflage pyjama bottoms and ribbed vest, the hairs on her arms standing out on goose-bumps.
‘Yes.’ Jeff had looked up from his cereal.
‘Because I found a small shit in it.’
‘That would be something to do with our cat.’
‘Oh. Well. I didn’t know you had a cat.’
They’d laughed about it, she and Jeff, they’d laughed so loudly in bed that night that Binda told her the next morning she could hear every word of it. She said she’d come for some sympathy. She was going to leave her husband. She wanted to be heard, not mocked. She hadn’t brought the right shoes, it was a shame Rachel hadn’t told her about the hills. No one expected to come to New York and find hills. It was not a good stay and Rachel was glad when she went. But that was a long time ago, and now Binda was divorcing number two.
A cabbie sat outside, head against the window of his vehicle, scrolling through messages on the mobile phone. Flipped open it was like a powder compact of old. She asked him to take her to Speakers’ Corner. She was going to walk along Oxford Street to meet Binda on Duke Street.
She sat in the cab with a strange foreboding. Binda knew her when she was shabby, or at least shabbier. No one else in her life knew the extent of it. The men. All the men she’d loved without being loved. She’d not been able to understand why they didn’t love her so she didn’t accept it, no matter the evidence. She had ignored their failures to turn up, the nothing for her birthday, the other women, their deprecation in front of friends. She saw handsome men where there were none, she invented for them a future magnificence and a past glory, she told them so, she helped them sober up or get drunk, find their socks, eat their dinners and she let one literally piss on her. Don’t leave me. Do you love me? It was a shabby business and she couldn’t get away from it. Jeff was the last in the line of naked emperors who’d proved she was ugly, common and worthless.
She got out of the cab, swapped a pound tip for being called ‘darling’ and stood a minute watching a Socialist Workers Party
speaker holding a small happy crowd in his thrall. She was pleased to see the romantic old fool.
‘They’ve told you you’re ordinary. You’ve accepted that. But the fat cats, the people who think they’re powerful, they want you to believe that.’
The crowd withdrew, gingerly, individually, one by one: We are all fat cats now.
She dawdled through Selfridges, passed along perfumery, looking at the veiled Muslim women, fingering the perfume ‘Insolence’. The word ‘luxury’ was stickered on every surface and people must be pampered and titillated, such that a coffee éclair was an erotic promise.
When she was a girl, there were still people who died in their homes after living in them all their lives, possibly being born in them, certainly being bored in them. People still made diary entries of two to three words pertaining to the weather. There were reliable seasons, the cuckoo in May. The smell of currants in the larder. Home knits. Moth holes. For dinner — mince, mince, mince. Square ice creams in square cones. Rice pudding with a leather skin. The advent of the aubergine and the mystery of how to cook it, how to eat it and why. Mother being anti-men, the lesbo-wok days, short hair and brown rice, broccoli. All the gay boys postered around girls’ bedrooms and kissed goodnight. When a pierced ear on a chap was something to write home about. Fear of credit cards. The Filofax, the mention of the wine bar, something French. How they shoved grapes and cheese in sandwiches, then they shoved foreign cheese in foreign bread and it all went haywire. You never threw out knickers. You walked like a duck at the time of the month. Before they went over to panini and panty liners. Then they began to invest in having better things that would last longer, that was the idea. Going upmarket on the escalator and finding the mezzanine, cold and stark and lonely. Everything in aluminium or steel. Industrial, built for the last hoorah, the triumph of the machine age. Stone flooring. Wood not plastic. The excuse for the expense; it will
last. It will outlive me, that kitchen. As if that’s a good thing or worth anything at all, the idea that your kitchen will outlive you. Incest in books and on the telly, brothers doing sisters, then upping the ante with your auntie and, when it all fell apart, dads doing daughters. Such a shock, such a terrible shock to the system and rife; everyone at it like knives.
She went to work as a temp, and she went out every night on the same basis, going to strange places with amorous lively men who turned to stone in the morning. Then she went to the same house twice, with a different man two years after the first time. Though her maths was poor she understood the probability of this, that the odds were long and her chances uneven, so she decided to leave London, to leave all of that behind and never to go back.
But now she was back, and now she was a mother and Maud was her talisman. Maud made her better, not Jeff nor God but Maud.
Binda was waiting for her in Carluccio’s, squashed between a stack of festive cakes and a wire rack of jars of pickles at eleven quid a pop. She rose to give non-contact kisses.
‘I don’t know if it’s sencha or just green tea, but I’m buzzing.’ Binda had married a banker and she was so over money. She wore an array of friendship bracelets around her wrist, a vest and loose parachutist pants, with a shiny silk bomber jacket. She had some illegible script tattooed on her neck. She looked beautiful. Her forehead was lined but handsome, her eyes bright, her skin was tanned and her hair pale and short.
If Rachel was going to tell someone about her husband’s affair, a nearly twice-divorced friend seemed a good choice.
Binda began; she had spent the last ten or fifteen years on her self-development. They ordered antipasti and water. She barely mentioned her husband, in fact she mentioned no other person at all.
‘Life is not personal, nothing is personal, if someone says something to me, a criticism, it is not personal . . .’
‘No, it’s more about them,’ said Rachel quickly, thinking this might be a two-player game.
‘There are three rules for living,’ Binda went on, ‘the faithful word, absolute honesty, and the present moment.’ She would elaborate.
A half-hour passed or more and Rachel sought desperately around for clocks, craning her neck to see their neighbour’s wrist. The bastard was having a glass of red wine and chocolate cake. Binda never took sugar, it was an addiction and all habituated attachment is bad. Binda’s soon to be ex-husband lived a deluded life, his head full of trivia like money, ambition, and he lied, he lied to himself, and so of course he lied to everyone. Binda never told a lie. ‘I know that it makes people uncomfortable to be around someone pure. They see themselves reflected like in a mirror. It makes people very nervous.’
Rachel could see that. She wondered if this was how she’d sounded at her high point, on her high horse. She wanted to go.
‘I’m not perfect, Rachel.’ Please God, thought Rachel, do not let the next word be ‘but’. But Binda was better than buts, and much, much more long-winded. The bill came. Binda paid with Amex and Rachel put in a note and fiddled for a tip. She might have said: Listen, love, my husband’s screwed my next-door neighbour, I’ve moved country and I’m a single mother to a five-year-old girl who cries for her father and I’m broken-hearted that the family I made is dead, but I’m fine thanks. But there never seemed an opportune moment.
The next time they met they would talk about Rachel. Binda said life was great when you learnt to let go.
‘Be like a child.’ She had no children; she considered them exemplary. ‘And be honest.’
‘I am!’
‘No, I mean in general. Live an honest life. Be true to yourself.’
‘Oh. That.’
Honesty seemed to be a luxury afforded by people who didn’t have to work for a living.
Binda’s T-shirt bore the slogan Nobody’s Perfect. ‘And another thing . . .’
Shit.
‘. . . Enough with the “love” stuff. It’s such a delusion. It’s to keep people from really living their lives as fully actualized persons, the whole concept, Barbara Cartland you know. It’s a silly thing really. For spiritual cripples.’
‘Wow.’ One religion or another, different name, same game; consolation. ‘Hey, Binda, do you still have the cactus-shaped travel dildo?’
* * *
With Maud watching telly that night, she drank a couple of glasses of wine. Then she lit a cigarette and stood outside in the communal courtyard, smoking it, watching her neighbour through the window arranging cereal packets in her surgical gloves. The woman paused to cry out, ‘The disgusting smell of cigarettes.’
She looked at Maud sitting so devoutly at the TV screen, a primrose in her yellow pyjamas, sucking her thumb, her small blanket in her grip, and felt lonely, and then she felt guilty at feeling lonely with her lovely girl right there. Why isn’t it enough? What’s wrong with me?
‘I am a bad mother. I am a terrible mother,’ she said to herself.
She began to cry, sugaring herself in self-pity. ‘And no one’s going to rescue us.’
While she was putting Maud to bed, too heartsore for story time, making an excuse, downright lying in fact — ‘I have things to do, sweetheart,’ (like crying or watching Extreme Makeover) — the phone rang, and for a minute she thought, she hoped, under the influence of the wine and the cigarette and the tears spilt, it might be Jeff. She was not a spiritual warrior. She took the stairs two at a time, the noise of her descent telling her all she needed to know.
‘Rachel. It’s Richard Bird.’
‘You sound so formal! Is that your phone voice? Richard Bird. I know who you are. Oh, I’m so glad to hear your voice. I’m feeling like shit.’
‘Well, you’re not alone.’
‘Oh, good. Good. God, it’s good to hear your voice. Are you
OK?’
‘Yes. OK. I got your number from Simone. She said you called her.’
‘That was weeks ago, just after we left. To explain things a bit. So how are things?’
‘Bad.’ He laughed. ‘My wife’s a nightmare. I can barely see Max at all. I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing here. It’s weird, but I can’t fucking stand the place now, or the people. The people are shocking when you get to know them. I’ve been losing my temper. Shit, what am I even pretending for? I’ve been losing my mind. And you? How are you?’
‘Oh, OK. Dreadful. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I was thinking about you today.’
‘Were you?’
‘Yes. I was thinking you were right about me, you know, that I wasn’t to be believed with the God thing, that I wasn’t up to it. I suppose if I’d never gone to Africa, if Jeff hadn’t had his thing with Valérie, I might have gone on with it. I might have thought I knew something. Anyway, now I know you’re right. And I feel a total failure.’ She gave a short laugh.
‘You shouldn’t.’
‘Well, I do.’
‘There’s so much I would like to say but now I’m on the phone
I can’t seem to think.’
‘Oh. I wish you would. Extreme Makeover’s finished.’ She laughed again.
‘Did it go well?’
‘Yes, she gave the twirl, you know, hands-on-hips-look-at-my-tits. She looked just the same as they all look.’
‘Well, I suppose we all have the same fantasies.’
‘Yes. We do.’
‘Rachel.’
‘Yes.’
‘Rachel.’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you having a glass of wine?’
‘Could you hear my elegant slurping?’
‘Yes. I wish I was there with you.’
‘Like the good old days,’ she said drily.
‘Rachel . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘I miss you.’
‘I miss you too.’
There was a pause. Rachel took in the stairwell with clouded eyes. She was done with it there.
‘What’s your email address? Do you have one?’
‘I wanted to write to you. It’s easier, and less embarrassing.’
‘Give me yours. I’ll work something out. An internet café or something. Go on, spell it out slowly, letter by letter, no I missed that bit, start again.’
She wrote it on her arm in big black Biro letters and when they finished speaking, she sat looking at it.
Chapter 48
They ate in silence; Valérie, Jeff and Max. Sometimes Jeff would take head of table, other times he’d abdicate and sit slightly apart, off to one side, his chair back from the table. He had bad table manners, he’d sit with his fork in the right hand, no need for the knife, he cut his food with the back of the fork, a crust of bread in the left hand, elbow on the table, drearily picking through the plate as if going through litter, and he’d leave his fork as it fell just before he lost interest and get up and saunter off, mid-thought supposedly.
She suspected his ‘creative’ impulses were a way for him to do as he liked. It turned out they had little they liked to do in common, besides sex. And the sex was taking longer and reaping fewer rewards. She liked to go shopping; Jeff disdained it and one of his pet quotations was: Shopping is not creating. ‘So what?’ she asked him and he had no answer for that. She went alone, wandering, thinking underwear, thinking she could lose weight, thinking she could have her breasts done.
Maxence sat ready for the meal even while she was still chopping the vegetables, watching her. She had a glass of wine next to her, doing no good. She was slicing the carrots roughly, she noticed all the faults of her work, the lack of care, the dirty peel on the dirty chopping board going in with the slither of the garlic’s outer coat, the root of the onion and a piece of its brown wrapping.
‘I saw a man in the house. Going about the place, picking up things and putting them down,’ said Max. He helped himself to some peanuts from the saucer on the table and ate with his mouth open, looking at her.