The Best New Horror 6

by Stephen Jones

  The worst thing you can do at the beginning of something fragile is to say what it is. The night I drove her back from Queensborough Road to her little house in the gentrified East End, things were very simple. For forty-eight hours all she would do was wail and sob and throw up on me. She refused to eat, she couldn’t bear to sleep. If she dropped off for ten minutes, she would wake silent for the instant it took her to remember what had happened. Then this appalling dull asthmatic noise would come out of her – “zhhh, zhhh, zhhh”, somewhere between retching and whining – as she tried to suppress the memory, and wake me up, and sob, all at the same time.

  I was always awake anyway.

  “Hush now, it will get better. I know.”

  I knew because she had done the same thing to me.

  “China, I’m so sorry.”

  “Hush. Don’t be sorry. Get better.”

  “I’m so sorry to have made you feel like this.”

  I wiped her nose.

  “Hush.”

  That part was easy. I could dress her ulcers and take care of what was coming out of them, relieve the other effects of what they had done to her in Miami, and watch for whatever else might happen. I could hold her in my arms all night and tell lies and believe I was only there for her. But soon she asked me.

  “Will you live here again, China?”

  “You know it’s all I want,” I said.

  She warned: “I’m not promising anything.”

  “I don’t want you to,” I said.

  I said: “I just want you to need me for something.”

  That whole September we were as awkward as children. We didn’t quite know what to say. We didn’t quite know what to do with one another. We could see it would take time and patience. We shared the bed rather shyly, and showed one another quite ordinary things as gifts.

  “Look!”

  Sunshine fell across the breakfast table, onto lilies and pink napery. (I am not making this up.)

  “Look!”

  A grey cat nosed out of a doorway in London E3.

  “Did you have a nice weekend?”

  “It was a lovely weekend. Lovely.”

  “Look.”

  Canary Wharf, shining in the oblique evening light!

  In our earliest days together, while she was still working at the aerodrome, I had watched with almost uncontainable delight as she moved about a room. I had stayed awake while she slept, so that I could prop myself up on one elbow and look at her and shiver with happiness. Now when I watched, it was with fear. For her. For both of us. She had come down off the tightrope for a while. But things were still so precariously balanced. Her new body was all soft new colours in the bedside lamplight. She was thin now, and shaped quite differently: but as hot as ever, hot as a child with fever. When I fucked her she was like a bundle of hot wires. I was like a boy. I trembled and caught my breath when I felt with my fingertips the damp feathery lips of her cunt, but I was too aware of the dangers to be carried away. I didn’t dare let her see how much this meant to me. Neither of us knew what to want of the other any more. We had forgotten one another’s rhythms. In addition, she was remembering someone else’s: it was Alexander who had constructed for me this bundle of hot, thin, hollow bones, wrapped round me in the night by desires and demands I didn’t yet know how to fulfil. Before the Miami treatments she had loved me to watch her as she became aroused. Now she needed to hide, at least for a time. She would pull at my arms and shoulders, shy and desperate at the same time; then, as soon as I understood that she wanted to be fucked, push her face into the side of mine so I couldn’t look at her. After a while she would turn on to her side; encourage me to enter from behind; stare away into some distance implied by us, our failures, the dark room. I told myself I didn’t care if she was thinking of him. Just so long as she had got this far, which was far enough to begin to be cured in her sex where he had wounded her as badly as anywhere else. I told myself I couldn’t heal her there, only allow her to use me to heal herself.

  At the start of something so fragile the worst mistake you can make is to say what you hope. But inside your heart you can’t help speaking, and by that speech you have already blown it.

  * * *

  After Isobel and I moved down to London from Stratford, business began to take up most of my time. Out of an instinctive caution, I dropped the word “medical” from the company description and called myself simply Rose Services. Rose Services soon became twenty quick vans, some low-cost storage space, and a licence to carry the products of new genetic research to and from Eastern Europe. If I was to take advantage of the expanding markets there, I decided, I would need an office.

  “Let’s go to Budapest,” I said to Isobel.

  She hugged my arm.

  “Will there be ice on the Danube?” she said.

  “There will.”

  There was.

  “China, we came all the way to Hungary!”

  She had never been out of Britain. She had never flown in an aeroplane. She was delighted even by the hotel. I had booked us into a place called the Palace, on Rakoczi Street. Like the city itself, the Palace had once been something: now it was a dump. Bare flex hung out of the light switches on the fourth-floor corridors. The wallpaper had charred in elegant spirals above the corners of the radiators. Every morning in the famous Jugendstil restaurant, they served us watery orange squash. The rooms were too hot. Everything else – coffee, food, water from the cold tap – was lukewarm. It was never quiet, even very late at night. Ambulances and police cars warbled past. Drunks screamed suddenly or made noises like animals. But our room had French windows opening on to a balcony with wrought iron railings. From there in the freezing air, we could look across a sort of high courtyard with one or two flakes of snow falling into it, at the other balconies and their lighted windows. That first evening, Isobel loved it.

  “China, isn’t it fantastic? Isn’t it?”

  Then something happened to her in her sleep. I wouldn’t have known, but I woke up unbearably hot at three a.m., sweating and dry-mouthed beneath the peculiar fawn fur blanket they give you to sleep under at the Palace. The bathroom was even hotter than the bedroom and smelled faintly of very old piss. When I turned the tap on to splash my face, nothing came out of it. I stood there in the dark for a moment, swaying, while I waited for it to run. I heard Isobel say reasonably: “It’s a system fault.”

  After a moment she said, “Oh no. Oh no,” in such a quiet, sad voice that I went back to the bed and touched her gently.

  “Isobel. Wake up.”

  She began to whimper and throw herself about.

  “The system’s down,” she tried to explain to someone.

  “Isobel. Isobel.”

  “The system!”

  “Isobel.”

  She woke up and clutched at me. She pushed her face blindly into my chest. She trembled.

  “China!”

  It was February, a year or two after we had met. I didn’t know it, but things were already going wrong for her. Her dreams had begun to waste her from the inside.

  She said indistinctly: “I want to go back home.”

  “Isobel, it was only a dream.”

  “I couldn’t fly,” she said.

  She stared up at me in astonishment.

  “China, I couldn’t fly.”

  At breakfast she hardly spoke. All morning she was thoughtful and withdrawn. But when I suggested that we walk down to the Danube via the Basilica at St Stephen’s, cross over to Buda and eat lunch, she seemed delighted. The air was cold and clear. The trees were distinct and photographic in the bright pale February light. We stared out across the New City from the Disney-white battlements of Fisherman’s Bastion. “Those bridges!” Isobel said. “Look at them in the sun!” She had bought a new camera for the trip, a Pentax with a motor-wind and zoom. “I’m going to take a panorama.” She eyed the distorted reflection of the Bastion in the mirror-glass windows of the Hilton hotel. “Stand over there, China, I want one o
f you, too. No, there, you idiot!” Snow began to fall, in flakes the size of five-forint pieces.

  “China!”

  For the rest of the day – for the rest of the holiday – she was as delighted by things as ever. We visited the Zoo. (“Look! Owls!”) We caught a train to Szentendre. We photographed one another beneath the huge winged woman at the top of the Gellert Hill. We translated the titles of the news-stand paperbacks.

  “What does this mean, ‘Nagy Secz’?”

  “You know very well what it means, Isobel.”

  I looked at my watch.

  I said: “It’s time to eat.”

  “Oh no. Must we?”

  Isobel hated Hungarian food.

  “China,” she would complain, “why has everything got cream on it?”

  But she loved the red and grey buses. She loved the street signs, TOTO LOTTO, HIRLAP, TRAFIK. She loved Old Buda, redeemed by the snow: white, clean, properly picturesque.

  And she couldn’t get enough of the Danube.

  “Look. China, it’s fucking huge! Isn’t it fucking huge?”

  I said: “Look at the speed of it.”

  At midnight on our last day we stood in the exact centre of the Erzsebet bridge, gazing north. Szentendre and Danube Bend were out there somewhere, locked in a Middle European night stretching all the way to Czechoslovakia. Ice floes like huge lily pads raced towards us in the dark. You could hear them turning and dipping under one another, piling up briefly round the huge piers, jostling across the whole vast breadth of the river as they rushed south. No river is ugly after dark. But the Danube doesn’t care for anyone: without warning the Medieval cold came up off the water and reached on to the bridge for us. It was as if we had seen something move. We stepped back, straight into the traffic which grinds all night across the bridge from Buda into Pest.

  “China!”

  “Be careful!”

  You have to imagine this –

  Two naïve and happy middleclass people embracing on a bridge. Caught between the river and the road, they grin and shiver at one another, unable to distinguish between identity and geography, love and the need to keep warm.

  “Look at the speed of it.”

  “Oh China, the Danube!”

  Suddenly she turned away.

  She said: “I’m cold now.”

  She thought for a moment.

  “I don’t want to go on the aeroplane,” she said. “They’re not the real thing after all.”

  I took her hands between mine.

  “It will be OK when you get home,” I promised.

  But London didn’t seem to help. For months I woke in the night to find she was awake too, staring emptily up at the ceiling in the darkness. Unable to comprehend her despair, I would consult my watch and ask her, “Do you want anything?” She would shake her head and advise patiently, “Go to sleep now love,” as if she was being kept awake by a bad period.

  I bought the house in Stepney at about that time. It was in a prettily renovated terrace with reproduction Victorian street lamps. There were wrought iron security grids over every other front door, and someone had planted the extensive shared gardens at the back with ilex, ornamental rowan, even a fig. Isobel loved it. She decorated the rooms herself, then filled them with the sound of her favourite music – “The Blue Aeroplanes” “Yr Own World”; Tom Petty, “Learning to Fly”. For our bedroom she bought two big blanket chests and polished them to a deep buttery colour. “Come and look, China! Aren’t they beautiful?” Inside, they smelled of new wood. The whole house smelled of new wood for days after we moved in: beeswax, new wood, dried roses.

  I said: “I want it to be yours.”

  It had to be in her name anyway, I admitted: for accounting purposes.

  “But also in case anything happens.”

  She laughed.

  “China, what could happen?”

  What happened was that one of my local drivers went sick, and I asked her to deliver something for me.

  I said: “It’s not far. Just across to Brook Green. Some clinic.”

  I passed her the details.

  “A Dr Alexander. You could make it in an hour, there and back.”

  She stared at me.

  “You could make it in an hour,” she said.

  She read the job sheet.

  “What do they do there?” she asked.

  I said irritably: “How would I know? Cosmetic medicine. Fantasy factory stuff. Does it matter?”

  She put her arms round me.

  “China, I was only trying to be interested.”

  “Never ask them what they do with the stuff,” I warned her. “Will you do it?”

  She said: “If you kiss me properly.”

  “How was it?” I asked when she got back.

  She laughed.

  “At first they thought I was a patient!”

  Running upstairs to change, she called down:

  “I quite like West London.”

  Isobel’s new body delighted her. But she seemed bemused too, as if it had been given to someone else. How much had Alexander promised her? How much had she expected from the Miami treatments? All I knew was that she had flown out obsessed and returned ill. When she talked, she would talk only about the flight home. “I could see a sunrise over the wing of the airliner, red and gold. I was trying hard to read a book, but I couldn’t stop looking out at this cold wintery sunrise above the clouds. It seemed to last for hours.” She stared at me as if she had just thought of something. “How could I see a sunrise, China? It was dark when we landed!”

  Her dreams had always drawn her from ordinary things. All that gentle, warm September she was trying to get back.

  “Do you like me again?” she would ask shyly.

  It was hard for her to say what she meant. Standing in front of the mirror in the morning in the soft grey slanting light from the bedroom window, dazed and sidetracked by her own narcissism, she could only repeat:

  “Do you like me this way?”

  Or at night in bed: “Is it good this way? Is it good? What does it feel like?”

  “Isobel – ”

  In the end it was always easier to let her evade the issue.

  “I never stopped liking you,” I would lie and she would reply absently, as if I hadn’t spoken:

  “Because I want us to like each other again.”

  And then add, presenting her back to the mirror and looking at herself over one shoulder:

  “I wish I’d had more done. My legs are still too fat.”

  If part of her was still trying to fly back from Miami and all Miami entailed, much of the rest was in Brook Green with Alexander. As September died into October, and then the first few cold days of November, I found that increasingly hard to bear. She cried in the night, but no longer woke me up for comfort. Her gaze would come unfocussed in the afternoons. Unable to be near her while, thinking of him, she pretended to leaf through Vogue and Harper’s, I walked out into the rainy unredeemed Whitechapel streets. Suddenly it was an hour later and I was watching the lights come on in a hardware shop window on Roman Road.

  Other times, when it seemed to be going well, I couldn’t contain my delight. I got up in the night and thrashed the BMW to Sheffield and back; parked outside the house and slept an hour in the rear seat; crossed the river in the morning to queue for croissants at Ayre’s Bakery in Peckham, playing, “Empire Burlesque” so loud that if I touched the windscreen gently I could feel it tremble, much as she used to do, beneath my fingertips.

  I was trying to get back, too.

  “I’ll take you to the theatre,” I said: “Waiting for Godot. Do you want to see the fireworks?”

  I said: “I brought you a present – ”

  A Monsoon dress. Two small stone birds for the garden; anemones; and a cheap Boots nail brush shaped like a pig.

  “Don’t try to get so close, China,” she said. “Please.”

  I said: “I just want to be something to you.”

  She
touched my arm. She said:

  “China, it’s too soon. We’re here together, after all: isn’t that enough for now?”

  She said:

  “And anyway, how could you ever be anything else?”

  She said: “I love you.”

  “But you’re not in love with me.”

  “I told you I couldn’t promise you that.”

  By Christmas we were shouting at one another again, late into the night, every night. I slept on the futon in the spare room. There I dreamed of Isobel and woke sweating.

  You have to imagine this –

  “The Pavilion”, quite a good Thai restaurant on Wardour Street. Isobel has just given me the most beautiful jacket, wrapped in birthday paper. She leans across the table. “French Connection, China. Very smart.” The waitresses, who believe we are lovers, laugh delightedly as I try it on. But later, when I buy a red rose and offer it to Isobel, she says, “What use would I have for that?” in a voice of such contempt I begin to cry. In the dream, I am fifty years old that day. I wake thinking everything is finished.

  Or this –

  Budapest. Summer. Rakoczi Street. Each night Isobel waits for me to fall asleep before she leaves the hotel. Once outside, she walks restlessly up and down Rakoczi with all the other women. Beneath her beige linen suit she has on grey silk underwear. She cannot explain what is missing from her life, but will later write in a letter: “When sex fails for you – when it ceases to be central in your life – you enter middle age, a zone of the most unclear exits from which some of us never escape.” I wake and follow her. All night it feels like dawn. Next morning, in the half-abandoned Jugendstil dining room, a paper doily drifts to the floor like a leaf, while Isobel whispers urgently in someone else’s voice:

  “It was never what you thought it was.”

  Appalled by their directness, astonished to find myself so passive, I would struggle awake from dreams like this thinking: “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” It was always early. It was always cold. Grey light silhouetted a vase of dried flowers on the dresser in front of the uncurtained window, but the room itself was still dark. I would look at my watch, turn over, and go back to sleep. One morning in the week before Christmas I got up and packed a bag instead. I made myself some coffee and drank it by the kitchen window, listening to the inbound City traffic build up half a mile away. When I switched the radio on it was playing Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman”. I turned it off quickly, and at eight o’clock woke Isobel. She smiled up at me.