Louise, meanwhile, oblivious of or uncaring about Thomas’s withdrawal, continued to convince.
‘Imagine the lost female dynasties,’ she was saying, ‘all for the want of a sharp blade and the hatred of sons. If only these royal women had looked into their daughters’ faces and seen possibilities for the future.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ agreed Skyboat. ‘In the medium term, there would have been a lot fewer Englishmen hacked to pieces.’
Louise is dark-haired, big-lipped and slightly plump. She has freckles and an appealing nose. She is witty and still naive. I like her little round belly. I like the clothes she wears, her failure to appear casually dressed, her unavoidable aesthetic preoccupations. I like her social concern, her constant letter-writing to government officials and the newspapers. I really, really wanted to sleep with her, and I could feel the adrenalin moving in my throat, if it was adrenalin, because I knew it was physiologically impossible for it to be my heart in my mouth. I had the hope, but I had often hoped to sleep with Louise in the past and never had.
Previously, Louise had conveniently or purposively misinterpreted the preambles to my attempted seductions. Unfortunately, she thinks I am her good friend and confidant. From time to time, she tells me whom she has her eye on, which I do not like at all, but what risk-free thing could I say to discourage that? When she tells me of her attractions, I do not like it, but I listen with determined calmness. I do not say ‘I’ve heard from his former lover that X is a very bad man’ or ‘X seems okay to me’. Both these strategies are too chancy and too revealing. Grand strategies should always begin with tactic number one: conceal the strategy’s existence. In practice, I acknowledge that I have heard what Louise has told me, and say little more. I cannot honestly encourage and have not wished to appear to discourage relations or interactions against my own interests. Overtly, my interests and my overarching personal interest remained undisclosed (to the best of my ability). Sitting that close to her, I was deciding whether to declare my attraction to her. Later that night was a possibility I very much favoured, it being my birthday, especially by delaying her at the evening’s end and so, as one might have called it during the time of the women kings, ‘pressing my suit’ when no one else was around to make either of us self-conscious.
In the midst of this potential major planning initiative, I had not forgotten Helen. I did not know where Helen had gone, or exactly why. I mean, I had a fair idea of why, but no details of the evening’s particularities. Generally, I imagine relationships, sexual or social, or formerly sexual (or antisocial?), as full of complexities and mutual misunderstandings. With Thomas, however, I was prepared to assume that he was completely in the wrong, that he was malicious and unfeeling towards Helen, and jealous of my centrality for the evening. That pretty much covered the ‘why’. What exactly he had said is probably irrelevant. In any case, I never found out.
Helen likes me. We’ve kissed a few times. One day in the middle of the day she said to me, ‘Let’s kiss when we’re sober, like now.’
Helen is nice to kiss. She puts her hands under my shirt and strokes my shoulder blades. I put my hands up the back of her shirt, and rest them under her bra-straps. I like Helen, too. Unfortunately, I think she is my good friend, so I try not to sleep with her. Sometimes she tries not to sleep with me and sometimes she wants to. We take turns saying, ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Let’s just hold each other for a while.’
We also take turns saying, ‘Why shouldn’t we? We both want to, don’t we?’
When it’s her turn to do the gentle rejecting, the moments of sexual agony are mine. Sometimes, though, it is a relief to be with Helen rather than Helen-the-woman; at these times, it’s Helen-and-me, the oldest, best friends in the world, who can walk miles together side by side, arm in arm, on our way to nowhere special, talking about everything we can think of or staying in a comfortable, easy silence. I don’t know if we’ll ever have children together. If we do, it won’t be for years. It won’t be until we’re in our mid-thirties and gravity draws us back to each other.
Teresa was still alone when she recrossed the restaurant. She returned to the table and said to me, ‘I can’t see her anywhere. She’s probably gone straight home. She seemed a little upset when she left, but I’m sure she’s okay.’
Her saying it like that got me worried, whereas before I had merely been concerned. Teresa doesn’t have the same intense connection with Helen that I do. She may not have sensed the depth of Helen’s crisis, even though she had been sitting beside her and I was three seats away on the opposite side of the table. She may not have cared enough or been worried enough to look properly. She had only been gone a few minutes, and she didn’t have the appearance of someone who had recently expended a great deal of energy. In no time she had immersed herself in an argument with Pete – who is a journalist, someone I went to journalism classes with who actually found a job – about why journalists write so many articles about other journalists. She had plenty of energy left for arguing, I noticed.
I decided to search for Helen myself, even though seeking hopelessly through city streets at night is usually something only desperate lovers do and reminded me of certain episodes from my own middlingly recent past which I was not that anxious to recall. Thomas was talking to Louise again, rocking slowly from side to side as if he was deciding which item of her clothing to tear off first, but Bruno was in an entirely separate conversation with Carol. This was very bad. Bruno had unwittingly let me down. I felt twitchy and could not be sure if it was my saviour reflex or pure selfishness.
Carol’s presence at my birthday dinner even though we once slept together showed that we were friends before we were lovers. She was the one woman at my birthday dinner I had slept with. I still like her very much. Sometimes I think I would like to sleep with her again. We both enjoyed the experience. I know I did and she said she did. We planned to get together again the following week (and probably used that expression) but other lifestyle obligations (work, family, simultaneous attractions) delayed us until the impetus was no longer there. I don’t think I want to sleep with her any more, though one can never tell what attractions or intersecting love-orbits lie ahead. For the present, I can look at Carol and feel nostalgic, sweet sadness. I can simply wish her well, no complications, no jealousies.
Bruno and I work the same shifts in Ye Olde Greene Parke Gueste House’s functions kitchen. He’s the most decent person I’ve met there, the only person who resents the management structure, the diners and the generally twee atmosphere as much as I do. Frankly, he’s my only work-friend. We call each other ‘comrade’ when senior management are around. Bruno told the head waiter, who is a total white-shoe-licking fascist, that we were the core of a red nest the hotel was unwittingly harbouring. That guy still gives me dirty looks three months later. Carol and Bruno are each unique: that’s what they have in common. Probably they were having a ‘so how do you know the birthday boy?’ conversation. I knew it would be my personal triumph if they went home together, having met at my birthday celebration. Also (or because) it would be great for both of them. It would be terrific for everyone, but I’d have preferred them and their potential attraction to delay concretion until later in the evening. I wanted them between Louise and Thomas.
Two events ameliorated this delicate situation. First, the main course arrived. Although seduction can be advanced with comments like, ‘This Malay kofta is one of the best I’ve ever had’ and ‘I’d really like some more chutney. Shall I order enough for you too?’ it does tend to proceed more slowly than between courses.
Second was my own subtle intervention. Everyone knows that being the host of one’s own birthday dinner is a complex and sophisticated tactical web. I couldn’t think of a pretext to join Bruno and Carol’s conversation with Thomas and Louise’s, so I excused myself to Thomas, drew Louise aside, and quietly told her I was going to look for Helen. In this way, I planned, she wou
ld realise that Thomas was not looking for Helen and was not a person with whom to become involved. I looked into Louise’s astonishing eyes while I told her this, watched them flick tiny distances left and right while she concentrated on my words, the flicking indicating her concern and her recognition that my concern was the proper response. There is nothing to like about Thomas, I did not quite tell her. I left without turning back. Neither had I said to Louise, ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you,’ the something a repeat of another conversation with someone who actually looked very similar to Louise.
I made my way between the other, smaller tables, the tables-for-two section, every diner studiously intent on the person opposite. I was thinking about motives. I was thinking strategy. The larger groups, like mine full of drunken potential, were at the back. Perhaps people looking in from the street are more likely to enter a restaurant full of intimates than one full of revellers. I vaguely remembered waiters seating a girlfriend and me in the window: it felt like years ago. Ah, to be an advertisement again. The lovers conscientiously avoided looking up at me. They must have been too busy telling one another about how open he is with his feelings, how the men he knows become embarrassed when he talks about how strongly he feels, but he can’t help it: he’s always been so sensitive.
I passed through the restaurant air-conditioning barrier and out the door. The urban night was a shock of brightness. I was surprised at how dully illuminated the restaurant must have been. I blinked a couple of times, deciding which direction to turn. Streets were everywhere. Pieces of litter gathered light from the streetlamps, magnifying themselves and, through some logic of scale, enlarging the city and my task. It was cold, but I had a purpose. Left or right? I was frozen outside the restaurant while, behind me, a group of my closest friends celebrated my birthday without me. To the right was the tourist district and the crowds. Helen would have gone left. Perhaps some of my friends were asking, ‘Where’d he go?’ I turned left and started walking.
After all my psychology-of-the-escapee theorising, I found Helen easily. She was two doors away from the restaurant, in an artists’ café, sipping a soft drink. I made a mental note: Teresa may not be the right person to send on future searches. I waved enthusiastically through the window, certainly betraying my relief.
‘How’s it going?’ I smiled when I got to her place at the counter, trying not to imply, ‘Oh you poor woman’ and taking the stool next to her.
‘I’m okay,’ she said. Her brusqueness directly answered my lack of implication. ‘I just wanted to get out for a while and have an orangeade.’
‘You’ll come back to the restaurant?’
‘In a minute.’
‘I’ll wait with you.’ I’d tried to state it, but she took it as a question anyway.
‘Sure. If you feel like it, that’d be good.’
I made myself stop asking questions because she hardly had time to get the straw between her lips and sip. I left pauses after my comments, long enough for her to swallow, clear the throat and reply. I realised I had no idea what her mood was.
‘He’s never been a nice person,’ I informed her. It made no difference that I’d known Thomas less time than she had.
‘I don’t care about niceness,’ she said. As she spoke, she leaned towards me, nudging me with her shoulder. She had obviously not been crying. Sitting at the counter, I didn’t have the courage to ask her what he’d said to her. Later on, she refused to tell me, saying, ‘It wasn’t what he said’ but not telling me what it was in his tone or connotation.
‘Oh sure,’ I said, about the niceness.
‘I’m working hard on my indifference.’
‘You’re too sensitive for that to come off,’ I told her, not too sincere yet not teasing.
I almost wanted to kiss her now. I seemed to see her lips in microscopic detail: the vertical creases, a hint of lipstick (from her day at work?), a tiny fleck of spittle in the left corner.
‘He’s not even charming,’ I added. I didn’t expound too much about Thomas’s lack of charm, though, because the object was that Helen return with me to the restaurant and participate further in the celebration of my birthday, which actually was that day. I thought for a moment that even that little dig had been one too many when Helen didn’t reply immediately. It wasn’t.
After a while she offered, ‘You go back. I’ll be back shortly.’
‘But I want the credit for your safe return,’ I protested. ‘Watching you drink fizzy drinks is an act of heroism.’
Helen laughed with her mouth open and I saw her tongue was stained orange. She became decisive, something for which she is famous – that is to say, mocked – in our circle: she put the straw to one side, lifted the glass to her mouth and drained it, unclipped her brooch (a silver rat, would you believe), pinned it onto my waistcoat, left two dollars on the table for the orangeade, stood up and took me by the arm. We were back in the restaurant in one second, and I was bemedalled with the Order of the Rodent.
As we entered, Helen gave a generalised wave.
‘Where’d you go?’ Louise asked, sympathetically.
‘I was drinking orangeade,’ Helen told everyone.
‘Aah,’ said Louise. More sympathy in the nod. I was sure Thomas’s reputation with Louise was taking a dive.
Bruno had gone to the bathroom, vacating the seat beside Louise. I sat there. Bruno returned. The remaining seat was between Thomas and Helen. Bruno looked at it dubiously.
‘Do you think this is safe?’ he asked me, in a very audible mock aside.
‘Don’t expose your ribs,’ I advised him, glancing intimately at Helen, who smiled back. Carol was now three seats away and I realised I should have tried to manoeuvre him beside her. It was too difficult to organise this shift immediately. I would have to have moved Helen further away from Thomas first. Carol was following Simon and Skyboat’s conversation, nodding along to it but not participating centrally. They were probably talking about Taiwanese package design. They are interesting people unless they’re talking to each other, and Carol was trapped, brave but trapped. Probably, she would soon say something to Skyboat like, ‘I love your name. How did you get your name?’ and Skyboat would reply, in her somewhat over-practised manner, ‘My father was an aviator and my mother a hippy. It was 1969 and she really wanted to understand him, to give him something.’
‘That’s so-o nice.’
Simon would have been sitting there slightly impatiently, waiting to return the discussion to technical configurations in the economics of paper management, about which, to be fair, he is the most transfixing arguer I have ever heard.
I contemplated this first major hospitable gaffe of the night. There was no way to rectify it diplomatically for at least five minutes and even then I would probably have to break into a conversation with a ‘someone I’m sure you’d like to meet’ gambit.
There were more empty than full bottles between the food stains on the tablecloth. This was very good, and we had yet to order dessert. Perhaps Bruno and Carol would yet go out together for more wine, and take overly long to return. The ‘trusted stranger’ syndrome set in and my friends began to confess details to each other:
‘I used to think English flowering plants were called “anglosperms”,’ Pete was telling Helen. ‘The first couple of times I saw “angiosperm” I thought it was a typo.’
‘I once fucked an English sailor – gee, what made me remember that …? Ha-ha. In the morning he spent half an hour ironing his uniform,’ Helen contributed. ‘What was his name? “Abel” or something …’
In the midst of my almost-solved dilemma about Carol and Bruno, the restaurant lights went down and the waiter carried a cake in, with candles and sparklers. A chef stood in the doorway behind him. Everybody sang a rousing, slurring version of ‘Happy Birthday’, and a few people at other group tables joined in for the three cheers. I made a very short speech
: ‘Twenty-four is going to be great!’
I was trying to appear to catch Louise’s eye unintentionally. I cut the cake and made my too-obvious wish. I saw Louise was looking straight at me, so I sat down beside her again and reached for her hand. Our fingers wove together and our palms pressed tightly against each other as my friends passed the uneven wedges of cake around the table. I could heard Thomas muttering to Teresa, ‘Orangeade? No one calls it that any more,’ and they shared a confidential laugh.
Part III
Rock Platform
Distant thunder and Nat picked up her pace across the rock platform, around Dove’s Head, though she was uncertain of the path’s navigability on the western side or if a path to the top even existed. Maroon-tinged sky, clouds ringed her. Nat didn’t like it because ‘O’ for ominous. No one about. She could’ve turned around. Didn’t. She was the riskiest person on Earth. Big toe bled from stubbing on some bloody shell. Dammit. Or maybe a rock. She sniffed at the air like a frigging horse. Scent of rain? No idea, she thought. Who can even tell until it’s falling on you?
The rock platform narrowed around the point, and Nat timed her traversal between sets of waves. Almost timed it. Quite good, but still got slightly splashed. Not really. She miscalculated completely, was decisively soaked. Kind of funny, so she kind of laughed. Anyway, she made it around. Platform got broad again, and she felt safer but wet stopped being funny. Plus, toe hurt.
On the western side of the point, the cliff-face appeared almost artificially smooth. Thirty metres ahead, or maybe twenty-five or forty, she saw another human, a plastic-pale man in a rock pool, not moving as the sky grumbled, still as bleached coral, continuing not to move as she felt tugged towards him. She was maybe fascinated by the intensity of his torpidity – not reciprocal, he didn’t turn.
When I Saw the Animal Page 14