by Edward Docx
‘Really? Wow. What kind of music is it – I mean, violins and clarinets and stuff?’
‘No, no. Not really clarinets. Although – actually – yes, some violins. Mainly it’s bin lids and penny whistles and stuff you can find in the street. But they perform serious long pieces now – you know, with movements – and critics go to all the shows. A lot of rhythm-driven dance-type stuff too. I thought it was just bums-aid bullshit when Will told me about it but, I have to admit, they sound pretty good and they’re very, very popular – for lots of reasons. They get involved in all kinds of events – the fiestas in Spain, and loads of things in the States, plus Notting Hill Carnival and Glastonbury and all that circuit back here. The music world loves them. The Government loves them. William exploits the situation to fund more hostels.’
‘You know, I think I’ve heard of them.’ She frowned. ‘Or maybe I saw one of their adverts on the Tube. I didn’t realize they were anything to do with William.’
‘No reason why you should.’
She sipped her wine. ‘How about you; do you play anything?’
‘Nope. You?’
She pouted. ‘For many years I was an internationally celebrated concert pianist but I gave it up because my Japanese-owned record company kept insisting that I take all my clothes off for the album covers.’
‘Understandable.’
‘In what sense exactly?’
‘I meant that it is understandable that you should have given it up if you were coming under such unfair pressure.’
She smiled and glanced towards the table by the window.
I pre-empted her: ‘I think you left your cigarettes in the kitchen.’
‘Oh right.’
I was going to get up and find them for her but she unfolded herself too quickly and, without putting her sandals back on, she went to fetch them.
In another ten minutes it would be dark, I thought.
Her voice came over my shoulder. ‘So aren’t you going to show me round?’
Enough. I had made up my mind. I rose to my feet.
At the very last, though, I think it was John Donne who seduced her. To him at least must go the credit for that final, irrevocable strike. Disregarding the trifling hindrance of the four hundred intervening years, he put aside his hungry restless mind and won her at his first attempt with the easy charm and skill of a genuine master.
I was moving fast, it’s true. In another ten minutes, in the bedroom, no doubt, I would have beaten him to it. But he was always ahead of me: the great professional showing how it’s done.
‘Is this where you work?’ She looked around in the semi-darkness.
‘Yes.’ I flicked on the sidelight.
‘My God. I didn’t realize you actually used quills. And all these paints and inks – and gold stuff.’
‘It’s gold leaf – for gilding.’
She glanced sideways to where I was standing in the doorway with my glass of wine and then advanced towards the window. ‘This is your easel?’
‘Yes, sort of. It’s a draftsman’s board.’
‘What are you working on at the moment. Can I see?’
‘Sure.’ I walked over and carefully turned my board around so that she could look at it.
And I swear I swear I swear it was complete coincidence that ‘The Good Morrow’ was on there. Inwardly, I flinched. I wanted to make some remark to deflect from what I knew she was about to read – or at least to lessen the awkwardness. But, in the moment, my desire to let her see my work overcame my embarrassment about the poem itself and I lifted back the covering sheet.
‘Jesus, Jasper.’ She was truly shocked. ‘I had no idea. It’s beautiful. Really beautiful.’
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.
And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of –
‘It’s an aubade,’ I said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘That it is a poem written for the dawn.’
Probably I kissed her to prevent her reading any further. I could not bear the self-consciousness of us both standing there in silence moving down the lines.
She met my lips with hers.
But all credit to Donne, she read him through to the end before she made love to me.
PART FOUR
18. The Dream
Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream,
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy,
Therefore thou waked’st me wisely; yet
My dream thou brok’st not, but continued’st it,
Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreams truths, and fables histories;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought’st it best
Not to dream all my dream, let’s act the rest.
Welcome to the new me!
Cancel all that stuff about me being weird and normal life getting me down. That was terrible crap. I think I must have been mad or something. Jackson’s syndrome – it’s a killer – it screws with your sense of perspective, it messes with your mind …
Amazing what a woman can do for a man!
Truly staggering. But there you go, you never know how it’s going to feel until it happens. And when it happens … oh boy. I am just sorry for all those people who might never meet that special person. Imagine that. Poor lambs.
And guess what?
Despite everything, it turns out that I too am a Regular Guy. That’s right. After all that fucking around back there it turns out that J. Jackson Esq., notorious gainsayer and epicurean, actually wants in on the whole package – all that modern life has to offer: girlfriendpluscarwithcoolsoundsystemdesignerglassesbaseballcapsundaysupplementsbrunchonbank holidaysdinnerpartiespromotionwifepregnancyawarenessclasseskidsbiggerhouse goodschoolsprofessionalrecognitionneighbourhood watchareapensiongrandchildrensecond honeymoonnicequietdeath.
I know, I know. This all came as a big shock to me too. But everything was different now. No more did the calligrapher sup with artists or the disaffected; get thee hence dissenter, rebel and subversive; away atheist, anarchist and protester; hie me fast to the chubby bosom of convention. Never again shall the breathtaking banality of western liberal capitalism steal away my will to live. Nope. Pass me the paper: let’s see what’s going on in this little old world of ours.
What was going on? Me, Her, It. That was what was going on. And no mistake. Twenty-four seven. Me, Her, It – and mainly It. What can I say? It was long. It was short. It was slow. It was fast; It was sensitive and caring. It was impolite and carnal; It was deviant, It was straight. It was dressed up, It was dressed down; It was planned. It was impromptu; It was action-packed. It was lazy; It was addictive, It was manic, It was obsessive; It was compulsive; It was abusive; It was riveting. And It got in the way of everything else. But who really gives a shit about everything else? You don’t. I don’t. Nobody does. When it comes right down to it, everything else can go fuck itself.
Yep. For several weeks following, I freely admit that getting out of bed became a problem for me. It wasn’t so much that I was having trouble waking up. No, the problem was that whenever I became conscious, I became conscious of her.
There I lay, just another guy, cast up from the deep of dreams upon the rocky shores of wakefulness – a yawn, a stretch, an opened eye and Jesus Christ: there she was. Undeniably beside me in all her beautiful actuality.
Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreams truths …
Hand on bruised but still beating heart, I’m not sure ‘happiness’ came into it all that much in the beginning. (And anyway, as adjectives go, ‘happy’ is surely one of those most often employed retrospectively – unlike, say, ‘angry’ or ‘upset’.) Looking back, however, one thing I can say – and with some assurance – is that there were very few (if any) early signs of Madeleine’s true nature.
OK, right, so there were the violent sexual assaults. In particular, Madeleine liked to attack me at four-thirty in the morning as I struggled, half asleep, back from the blindness of the bathroom’s bluish light, a man at his most vulnerable, weak, dry, lost. At such times, I was made painfully aware that what I was about to receive was not so much the physical expression of affection and mutual respect but an all-out punishment beating. And yet a man can take a lot of that sort of punishment before he starts complaining – or even realizes he’s being punished.
No, there were not, I submit, any obvious indications. We were excited, engrossed, absorbed. We behaved as all new lovers behave. We ignored our friends. We didn’t get out much. We didn’t really care that we didn’t. Because we enjoyed one another’s company. And in these besotted circumstances, I could hardly have been expected to guess mendacity from a few moments of misgiving.
Three weeks after Hampstead Heath, on a long Friday at the start of July, we woke up at precisely the same moment: seven-thirty. We had been asleep since going to bed at four, earlier that afternoon. We stared deep into one another’s eyes (see the swirling colours and the faraway stars) and found ourselves (no words were needed) to be in profound spiritual agreement: tomorrow we needed – badly – to do something. Anything. Leave the flat, for example.
I made some serious coffee and then, businesslike, we sat up together in bed and drew up a valiant list of bracing and useful Saturday-like things to do: I was going to purchase my first mobile phone; Madeleine was going to buy a proper double bed for her flat; I was going to write a letter to my grandmother; Madeleine was going to go through her boxes and file all her old articles; and we were both intending to spend the evening together at the Globe Theatre watching Cymbeline (because neither of us had ever been or knew anything about the play).
But when Saturday morning arrived (late, of course), instead of setting about our allotted tasks with the vim that the Christian world has come to expect, we found ourselves struggling against a strange zone of extra-strong gravity that refused to loosen us from its grip.
At ten-thirty, I did actually make it into my trousers but then committed the (foolishly naïve) error of taking Madeleine her coffee in the bath and attempting to read to her while she lay with the saucer balanced delicately on her chest taking prim little sips whenever I looked up.
Around twelve I rose again and had another go (and even optimistically readied a pair of shoes for active duty) but within seconds I had to rush barefoot to her aid because she said that her back hurt, and even though it was meant more as a report than a request I couldn’t stand idly by and refuse her the relief my dutiful palms might provide.
The final effort – some time after three – was hardly much more convincing: she vanished into the sitting room while I went through the clothes on the back of the chair, bravely looking for my shirt and shouting back to her that her music must be in there somewhere until, a minute later, she appeared in the doorway pronouncing that if I had lost her Birth of The Cool then she was going to rip my head off and why didn’t I have anything she could listen to – at which juncture I realized that she had my shirt on and I noticed that the white tails fell exactly midway between hip and pretty knee. And that was it.
Thereafter, we abandoned any plan to escape the flat as an ambition too far. The shiftless afternoon deliquesced slowly into yet another early evening. At seven o’clock I was still in bed, reading an introduction to a new old edition of Donne’s poems that I had bought – ‘It may be inferred that whether his affairs were few and protracted, or – as seems more likely – many and short-lived, it is obvious that he knew women of various characters, from the shallowest to the most sensitive …’ (What an odd tone these old critics strike and how easily they slide from ‘inference’ to what was ‘obvious’.) Madeleine, meanwhile, was sitting at my writing desk by the window, leaning back in my chair with one leg crooked up in front of her, chin resting on knee, painting her toes and making the room smell of nail varnish despite the open window. The largo ma non tanto from Bach’s concerto for two violins was playing. Miles Davis remained safely uncontactable where I had hidden him.
After a while, she asked: ‘Do you like my toes?’
‘Let’s see.’
She swung around in the chair and flaunted an irrefusable leg in my direction.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I like your toes. What colour are they?’
‘Pink. Idiot. Can’t you tell?’
‘Yeah. I just thought that colour might have a special name – you know, look-at-me-cerise or dramatically-different-damask or something.’
‘No.’ She scowled as if to dismiss the office jerk. ‘It’s just called party pink.’
‘Well, they look great. Really … partyish.’
She nodded to herself as if satisfied and then got up and prowled across the bottom of the bed, keeping her toes up behind her so as to let the varnish dry. ‘So, now that you have trapped me here all day, what are you going to make me for my dinner? Or am I to starve?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Anything at all; but not something which takes ages.’
‘OK, that’s quite specific. How about I nip down to see Roy and –’
‘Actually, you know what I really want?’ Now she came right up to me, a smile of certainty in her eyes. ‘I want a pizza.’
I put down my book. ‘You mean go out to Danilo’s or something?’
‘No – order one in and watch a movie. It feels too nice to go out. I think we should just – you know – curl up here and stay awake all night watching movies.’
‘Is there something good on?’
‘No. I mean we should get a film from the store.’
‘A video?’
‘Yeah. I could send you out and you could ring me and tell me what’s new and I’ll choose. Otherwise you’re bound to come back with something that is totally unwatchable. I am too weak to traipse all the way there myself or I’d come with you.’
‘I still don’t have a phone. If you remember, we didn’t really do any of our jobs today.’
‘You can take mine. I have to be in charge of choosing.’
‘And I don’t have a video recorder.’
She collapsed on to her back and rolled her eyes in despair. ‘Jesus Jasper, what the fuck are you on?’
‘I know.’ I grimaced. ‘I did try to buy one a couple of months back but the guy in the shop said there was no point because visual technology was moving so fast that the minute I got it home, it would be out of date. I asked him what he recommended I do about it, and he said that my only real option was to sit tight and wait for the next Dark Ages, when he expected that home entertainment facilities would all slow down for a few centuries and I could buy something without fear of it being rendered instantly obsolete by progress.’
She sighed. ‘You’re such a freak-boy.’
‘Sorry.’
‘OK, so, there’s a DVD player at mine – still in its box. So I guess I’ll go get it.’
Galvanized, she swung herself off the bed and began looking for her clothes. ‘You’d better remember to take some ID with you to the video store because you’re going to have to join. And they’re funny about it these days.’ She hopped one leg into her jeans. ‘Oh yeah, and I want a meat feast pizza with extra corn. You have, a pizza delivery number, right?’
‘Of course.’ I looked suitably insulted and put my faith in the recycling bin downstairs.
Talk about becoming a Regular Guy! I loved it. You would have loved it too. My conversion was swift and zealous and the resultant life-change rich and ful
filling. And what a relief. No more unnecessary thinking for one thing. Nothing beyond the here and now – films, food, magazines. Plan for holidays and the kids, of course, and pay the mortgage; but no more thinking about the future in the sense of whither humanity? No more despair at the awful harrowing misery and death that our sordid and grotesque religions visit on the millions they have enslaved. No tearful reveries at the sheer loneliness of Planet Earth putting a brave face on things out on the edge of oblivion, with only a pair of over-washed and thinning Y-fronts otherwise known as the ozone layer to protect its modesty. No tongue-biting horror at the sheer implausibility of a species, that cannot last a single minute without oxygen, taking on an entire universe that specializes in very large scale not having any. None of that. Oh no no no …
Instead, there I was, parked up on a Saturday night next to my girlfriend – yes, I think by July we could call Madeleine that – parked up with my girlfriend (girlfriend!) in front of the television, DVD (dvd!) spinning patiently through the latest thriller (chicks kicking ass, which is all they seem to do these days; hey sisters, no more getting laid, we wanna kick butt instead, right? damn right), parked up with a pizza spread before us. Diet Cokes effervescing at our elbows, no worries and no fear of interruption. Unbelievable. There I was, hanging out on the sofa beside my girlfriend (now wearing a T-shirt and a pair of my boxer shorts) as she gently encouraged reluctant toppings from the squelchy trenches of their deep-pan battlefield and guzzled depth charges of drink between satisfied mouthfuls. There I was, indifferent to the plaintive lament of the brutalized tomatoes (as they keened for the balm of fresh basil), unheeding of the film’s many and relentless savageries against art and humanity, deaf to the mournful entreaty of a spurned Chablis (half-full and getting warmer by the second). There I was, impassive in the face of the world’s least convincing actors visiting torture, mutilation and assault on their already mentally retarded script. There I was, popping back into the kitchen to reheat the garlic bread. There I was, wielding paper napkins. There I was, curling up. There I was cuddling. There I was when the phone rang.