by Edward Docx
Oh, all right then. Perhaps there were signs. Perhaps I did succumb too easily to that soft benighting of the mind otherwise known as affection. Perhaps, after all, there were moments when I found her behaviour just a little unnerving, just a little strange; perhaps there were actions, gestures, expressions in which we can now see (as we gaze more deeply into life’s ever-widening rearview mirror) the fleeting glimpse of something false. But if we must pay due homage to Madeleine’s skill in the arts of sustained deception, we must also admire her talent for spontaneous guile. Because when – as I now see – the risks and traps lay all about her feet like so many landmines in the battle sand, she simply danced on, ever more assuredly the dervish.
Ring ring went the phone. Ring ring ring.
Though I had nothing in particular to fear, I confess my blood pumped a little harder through the narrow gateways of my heart. A late-night call is always alarming. My cool, however, did not abandon me: I asked the question in my best approximation of a not-unduly-worried-but-nevertheless-curious young man whose mother (if he had one) might suddenly call him out of the blue at three minutes past eleven, or, failing that, whose many and varied friends occasionally rang up on the spur of the moment when they needed to convey the particulars of some great personal enterprise: ‘Who, I wonder, could that be?’
Madeleine was now lying more or less on top of me; she twisted her head. ‘Probably one of your ex-girlfriends ringing up to tell you that, despite everything, they still hate you.’
‘Not unlikely.’ I eased myself out from under her.
‘Shall I pause?’ she asked.
‘No – it’s OK – just let me know what happens,’ I said, already heading for the hall. ‘I’m sure I’ll be able to pick it up.’
Madeleine hit ‘Pause’.
I lifted the phone.
Breathing. Very quiet – but breathing nonetheless. A woman’s lips hovering like uneasy butterflies above the receiver’s trap.
My brain scrambled from the smoky comfort of the officers’ mess, desperate to get airborne.
‘Will,’ I said, ‘Will? Will, is that you? I can’t hear you … no … where are you? Yes … it’s very noisy … no I’m just, er, hanging out with Madeleine. With Madeleine. We’re having a pizza. Can’t hear you … Will? You’re cutting out. Will? William? Are you still there? For fuck’s sake.’ I hung up.
Did my deceit pass unnoticed? I thought so – extemporaneous invention was, after all, my métier too.
‘Gone,’ I said, not quite to myself.
Madeleine was leaning in the doorway – Venus in boxer shorts. For half a second her expression was neither intimate nor inviting but keenly inquisitive. Intrusive.
Then her hands were on me.
‘Will?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Drunk?’
‘Yes.’
We fought. We fell. We fumbled. She pulled the phone wire from the socket and told me to present my wrists.
‘Jazz mate – you’re eating too much fucking fish.’ Roy Junior was standing in the kitchenette, chewing gum and grimacing while scratching his back with his left arm, as if attempting to remove a splinter from between his shoulder blades.
‘You think so?’ I regarded the two sea bass which lay resplendent on the wooden slab of my chopping board like gifts from guilty Neptune.
‘I know so, mate. First it was the salmon. Then you had the lemon sole. Then the mussels – not strictly fish granted – and now these bastards.’ Roy stood up straight. It was the first time he had been inside my flat, and he was determined to make the most of it.
‘It’s a phase, Roy, just like the mushroom thing last year. Be over before you know it.’ I felt oddly compelled to light a cigarette but resisted for the sake of the fish.
‘Well, I’ll tell you something, mate: my uncle Trevor is loving you. You’re buying more of his stuff than the new restaurant, which is – I have to say – going the way of everything else new on the Harrow Road – down the fucking shitter.’
‘Shame.’
He shook his head in the manner of dismayed locals the world over. ‘Have you been down the Harrow Road lately, Jazz mate?’
‘No.’
‘Have you seen the fucking state of it?’
‘Not for a –’
‘It’s a wank hole is what it is. Pardon the Frog.’ He curled his lip. ‘The small business man makes the effort to boost the local economy, to put some pride back into the place, to get things going … but he might as well not fucking bother. What’s the point? You might as well wipe your arse with fifty-pound notes. Jazz.’ He sighed. ‘I tell you: I was down there last night at ten to one – ten to one on a fucking Friday night, mind you – and what happens? I’m offered four blowjobs, three ounces and a couple of wraps – all in the time it takes me to get to the front of the queue at MFC.’
I shook my head.
Roy looked truly disgusted. ‘I’ve got my own dealer, mind, and I’m getting plenty of action thank you very much, but even if I wasn’t – which I always will be … Even if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t go down there and take a handjob off one of those filthy fucking tramps, never mind anything romantic.’
‘MFC?’
He nodded. ‘Maine Fried Chicken. New. Where Utah Fried Chicken was before.’
‘Maine Fried Chicken?’
‘Yeah.’
‘As in Maine with an “e”?’
‘Fuck knows.’ He frowned.
‘Maine is in the far north of America,’ I said.
‘And? Yes? Your point. Jazz?’
‘I thought fried chicken was a southern thing – like Kentucky or Tennessee or Louisiana. You know: southern fried chicken. Maine is all about seafood and … lobsters.’
He exhaled sardonically through narrowed nostrils. ‘Right. I’ll tell Span and Baz next time I’m in. “Sorry lads – you’re serving the wrong shit: should be Maine Fried Lobsters. There’s a bloke up in Warwick Avenue says so. Better fuck the chicken and go lobster.”’ He gave a schoolboy’s sarcastic grin before affecting a more philosophical air. ‘Anyway – listen to you – you’re obsessed. Jazz. I think this seafood thing is your new bird, mate. I think she’s making you soft. You’re not buying as much meat; you’re not going out late; and the old man says you waited to hear what song was on the radio the other day before you left the shop. Chris de Bastard Burgh – apparently. What’s happening?’
‘Hard to say.’
Roy lowered his voice and suddenly looked seventeen again. ‘She’s not here now, is she?’
‘No. She’s gone to her place.’
He nodded.
I reached out my wallet and handed over a ten-pound note.
‘Nice one.’ He took out his own thick wad of notes from his breast pocket and slipped the money into their midst. ‘Nice place, mate, by the way. Proper shag palace. Probably get somewhere very similar myself next year; mind if I have a quick wander?’
I had no real time to decide on an answer to this question since he was already disappearing into my studio. I shot another glance at the bass. Curious how the empty eyes of dead fish can beseech a person so.
Roy’s voice came through the door: ‘Very nice. Jazz. Very. Fucking. Nice. I had no idea. Thought it was just – you know – a bit of ink, a bit of pen, a bit of paper, a bit of a swirl, nothing special. But this is … fucking magic.’
My buzzer hummed. I walked over, pressed the button without lifting the receiver, and then followed Roy Junior into the studio.
He looked up. ‘No offence. Jazz mate. But this is really fucking nice. Respect.
‘Thanks.’
‘How much for one of these?’
‘You’re looking at two grand right there, Roy.’
‘Fucking bastard.’
We stood together staring at ‘The Legacy’. Roy found a scholarly tone somewhere in his portfolio. ‘No offence, mate, but mind if I say something?’
‘Shoot.’
‘What the fuck does i
t say?’
‘What does it say?’ Mentally inserting the missing blank versals, I read the poem out loud:
When I died last, and, dear, I die
As often as from thee I go,
Though it be an hour ago,
And lovers’ hours be full eternity,
I can remember yet, that I
Something did say, and something did bestow;
Though I be dead, which sent me, I should be
Mine own executor and legacy.
I heard me say, Tell her anon,
That my self, that is you, not I,
Did kill me, and when I felt me die,
I bid me send my heart, when I was gone;
But I alas could there find none.
When I had ripped me, and searched where hearts
should lie;
It killed me again that I who still was true,
In life, in my last will should cozen you.
Yet I found something like a heart,
But colours it and comers had,
It was not good, it was not bad,
It was entire to none, and few had part.
As good as could be made by art,
It seemed, and therefore for our losses sad,
I meant to send this heart instead of mine,
But oh, no man could hold it, for ‘twas thine.
Roy nodded slowly. ‘No, mate, I can read what it says – just about – I mean, what does it say?’
‘You mean what does it mean?’
‘Yeah. What does it mean?’
‘Well,’ I paused, ‘there’s this guy telling this woman about how he dies every time he leaves her – also, by the way shoots his load –’
‘What? Spunks himself?’
‘Yeah … but that’s sort of a secondary thing. Forget that. Forget about the orgasm stuff.’ I took a brisk break. ‘So, anyway, there’s this guy telling this woman about how he dies every time he leaves her; then he remembers that the last time this shit happened –’
‘The last time he spunked off or the last time he died?’
‘Both. But mainly the last time he died. Obviously, Roy, this guy is pretty fucked up.’
‘Obviously.’
‘But anyway … the last time this guy left this woman and died – because every time he leaves her he dies – the last version of his dead self made a promise to make sure that he became his own executioner (and executor) next time – rather than let her keep killing him – okay?– but, of course, now the present dead self realizes that he has failed in this promise because it really is still her fault that both the selves are dead again. The woman, by the way, is also referred to as ‘my self’ because the speaking self reckons that the two lovers – man and woman – have become one – and so he is she and she is he, my self is her self – which is kind of the point … although maybe there’s a wanking gag somewhere in there too … And, anyway, then one of the dead selves starts getting the fear because he goes to check up on the actual real dead self and finds out that the main dead self hasn’t got a heart, which is a real bastard because this heart – his heart – is what he promised to leave to the woman who killed him as his legacy to her – right?– but now it looks as though this heart – his heart – has been stolen (by her: as in ‘she stole my heart’) and replaced by this other dodgy heart, which he decides to send anyway, because there’s fuck all else he can do in this situation – except that the dodgy heart is sort of too slippery and impossible for any man to get a hold of – because – of course – it actually turns out to have been her heart all along – which, tellingly, he has been harbouring unwittingly in his breast – except harbouring it wittingly too because, after all, he is the guy who constructed the poem in the first place knowing full well that he was heading for this heart-switch pay off – although there’s also an issue here about the speaker of the poem becoming confused with Donne himself – and another issue about which of the dead selves is actually talking because it’s unclear where the speech marks should close – if indeed you are going to open them after that “say” at the start of the second verse – but the bottom line, Roy, is that, dead or alive, everyone’s heart gets fucked up.’ I sucked my teeth. ‘That’s pretty much it.’
Roy considered further, his thumb coaxing the faintest beginnings of what might one day be a goatee. He drew a deep breath. ‘No offence, mate, but that really is absolute fucking bollocks.’
‘I probably didn’t explain –’
‘No. I’m following you Jazz – and I appreciate you have to stick up for the geezer. I’m not saying what you were saying is bollocks. I’m saying the actual thing itself – the poem – is absolute fucking bollocks.’
‘You may have a point there, Roy. I’m not going to –’
‘I mean,’ he opened his palms – a reasonable man, ‘I know you can get a long way up your own arse – we all can, Jazz, mate, that’s humanity’s condition – but even so that poem there is a pure 100 per cent bollocks.’
‘They’re not all that bad.’ Madeleine was laughing. ‘Some of them are beautiful.’
We both swung round.
I smiled. ‘Hi. Madeleine, hi … er, this is Roy: he works in the shop and he’s just brought the fish for tonight and –’
‘I know – we’ve met.’ Madeleine was wearing her work shirt and scruffy painting jeans – in which, of course, she looked like a million freshly laundered dollars. ‘How’s the gardening going, Roy?’
Roy blushed, a rare and comprehensive crimson. ‘Great, actually, cheers.’ He turned away to glance out of the window as if to confirm the news. ‘Sorting it out.’
Madeleine winked at me.
‘Anyway,’ Roy kept his back to us, ‘I’m due in Keele in a couple of hours. Got stuff going on.’ He half-turned. ‘So, er, nice one.’
Madeleine fingered a button on her shirt and said (rather breathily, I thought): ‘Well, I’m going to take a shower.’ She disappeared into my bedroom.
I let Roy out.
‘Gardening?’ I asked him quietly on the stairs.
‘Yes, mate.’ Roy winked.
Everybody was winking.
From late July onwards, because her flat was without hot water for a few days and then without electricity and then without any water at all, and because there was paint and plaster and pipes and piles of paper everywhere, and because there were grinning gangs of workmen forever queuing to beat off surreptitiously in her bedroom, Madeleine spent more and more time at mine. I wouldn’t say she had moved in permanently. Not quite – sometimes she went out in the evening and slept back at hers; and, after our first fortnight lying around, she was out most weekdays at the British Library, writing her book; plus she spent one long weekend staying at her father’s flat (‘he hardly ever uses his London place, so it’s nice and quiet and I could really do with getting my head down and finishing this chapter on Aleppo before it finishes me’). But, if pressed, I daresay the casual observer (having forgiven us for telling him to fuck off) would probably have said that we were, to all intents and purposes, living together.
Most of the time that we were not working (me in the studio, she tapping at her laptop in the other room) we sat in the garden – enchanted still – or hung out, watching the tennis, drinking, talking, preparing food, checking out films, making cocktails, playing cards, generally fooling around. I suppose those few weeks felt a little like the kind of summer that everybody remembers from childhood – seemingly endless, unworryingly aimless, lived in, rather than lived through. I even started liking Miles Davis.
And no, I didn’t really think about it going wrong. Of course not – nobody worries about the end in the beginning. (Not even God – clearly.) There’s too much going on and too much to find out. So I just relaxed and enjoyed her company and, yes, I suppose, my feelings gathered strength all the while. We never had any crass conversations about whether or not we were ‘going out’ or ‘dating exclusively’ (as they say in American sitcoms, the poor bastards). Natural
ly, I assumed that she wasn’t seeing any more of Phil or anyone else. And she didn’t need to ask me since – quite obviously – there weren’t any female callers to my flat, either in person or by telephone. That one last, random, forlorn phone call proved to be poor Lucy’s last.
I think I had only one other significant appointment during that entire month: lunch with Gus Wesley. My celebrated client had flown into London on business – to buy a few digital television channels apparently. That same Friday that Madeleine went to her father’s place to sort out Aleppo, I set off to the Savoy, expecting at least three courses of impassioned and intimate Donne-related artist-benefactor chit-chat and mutual reassurance. But our catch-up session turned out to be non-exclusive: he had invited me to some newspaper awards ceremony: lots of ageing journalists, admiring each other over chicken chasseur. I was given only a few hurried minutes of table-time with the great man himself.