A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  THE LIGHTING OF THE LAMP

  Ben Okri

  Artwork by Marco Palmieri

  THE LIGHTING OF THE LAMP

  Ben Okri

  ONE

  The room watched her. It was nine o’clock.

  She had been trying to sleep. In the dark her mind seemed a vast space. Sleep seemed only a tiny thing. She was oppressed by the weight of her imaginings. Her body felt heavy in the night.

  She stared at the dark shapes of flowers in their pots. She had taken much care in their arrangement round the room. She had wanted the leaves of the potted plants and the trailing vines to catch the street lights and create intriguing patterns on the walls at night. While contemplating the mysterious shapes cast on the walls, she often drifted off in pleasant musings. The shapes reminded her of magic lanterns.

  Sometimes in the shapes she saw mountain ranges and the red horde of warriors on horseback. Sometimes she saw lovers whispering in a glade. Often she glimpsed furtive adultery in a grotto. At times she saw dancing nymphs on Arcadian plains. Once she saw a murderer creeping away in the dark, and she cried out at her own vision.

  Every night these forms and figures were different. Every night their narrative grew and changed. She thought of them as the perpetual autobiography of her imagination. They were lives she dreaded, lives she would like to live.

  She never dreamt at night. If she had dreams she never remembered them. This was her form of dreaming, eyes wide open in the night. She was not sure if she were normal or a little mad. Maybe a little mad. Yet she had all the good fortune in the world.

  Many friends had complimented her on her plants and flowers and their delightful fugal configuration about the room. The compliments had brought her a secret glow and made company more pleasurable. But now, unable to sleep, neither the evocative patterns of the plants, nor the praises they drew, could make the spaces within her any more comfortable.

  TWO

  In the darkness she watched the patina of the street lights on the goldfish bowl. Earlier she had discovered that one of the fishes had died. She had changed the water. She had given the goldfish a fitting funeral. She washed the slime off its tiny body and took the fish to the bathroom and let it sink to the bottom of her bath water. Perched on the toilet seat, she re-read passages of Hamlet. She intrigued herself by thinking that the death of the goldfish somehow illuminated Ophelia’s suicide.

  She had a herbal bath with the fish in the water. When she finished she dried herself and performed a funeral rite over the dead fish, singing a Lou Reed song. Laughing quietly, she mused at how wonderful it was that in a room of one’s own any whim can become a reality. Later she threw the goldfish into the dustbin.

  THREE

  Staring at the goldfish bowl, she allowed herself to become sentimental. There were two goldfishes and now there was only one. She was slightly afraid.

  FOUR

  On the wall facing her bed there was an abstract painting. The painting was often a portal into musings. A friend had given it to her. One evening, over a bottle of Muscadet, they had an argument about art and life. The abstract painting was his reply two days later. For her it put an end to the possibility of a refutation. She could not remember what the argument was about, but the painting was its definitive conclusion. She had an acquired awe of art. She believed it conferred meaning on life even if the meaning eluded her. A work of art was not hers to decipher. Three years at university had given her words, classification, and instruments of criticism. But these had only served to deepen her awe, her incomprehension. She liked to think that art was inexhaustible. The fact that her friend, the painter, was now in a mental institution conferred on the work an iconic authenticity, an extreme intelligence.

  FIVE

  Lying on the bed, she had an illumination of sorts. The meaning of the painting came to her. It invaded her from the fear of sleep, the disembodied footfalls in the street outside, and the demise of her precious goldfish.

  Death, she thought. That’s why he went mad.

  SIX

  She felt better now. The understanding brought a sense of security. She could now allow her mind to wander, to experience the aesthetic pleasures of unbridled thinking.

  SEVEN

  There were footfalls of someone coming down the inside stairs. She tried to give the footfalls a face. The person was silent for a moment and then burped. A door opened and closed.

  She listened, waiting.

  Somewhere in the distance the shrieking of cats circulated in her mind. They are having orgies, she thought.

  Then the shrieks transfigured into shapes on the wall. They became wailing figures of women racked with anguish, their hair streaming wildly about them. They rose in rough waves, rising from the floor, and when they bore down on her she gave an involuntary shriek. She turned over on the bed, shook her head, and changed her mind about the meaning of the painting. It must be anguish, she thought. The anguish of the numberless.

  EIGHT

  Perturbed, she permitted herself a literary meditation touched with the metaphysical. She allowed herself a combined vision of T. S. Eliot’s Eumenides on window panes and fragments of Dante’s Inferno. And damned sleepless urban nights.

  She decided to get up. To act. To do something to dispel the dark mysteries of the mind.

  NINE

  Her mouth tasted sour. She smelt her breath. It smelt of stale wine and garlic and stale vegetables. The odour of wilting plants and cigarette ash came to her as she made her way to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth and then flossed. By the time she had finished she felt restored to that sense of self-satisfaction that comes from conforming to an ordered, accepted way of living. She felt a little more at ease among her assorted objects and artefacts. She felt she held her place in the modern universe.

  She combed her hair, brushing it backwards, and applied a hairspray which kept it tinted in the front. The rest of her hair was artificially blonde. The brilliant light bared her features in the mirror. I am finally beginning to rust, she thought.

  On the way back to the living room a mass of air turned in her stomach. With a half-guilty sense of freedom, she modulated its expulsion.

  TEN

  Across the street people had gathered. They were squabbling about something. She watched them for a moment. As she took her eyes away she made out, in the margin of her vision, that they had begun fighting.

  Two women who looked very drunk and two men who were blind drunk were beating up a younger man. The women smashed their handbags on his head repeatedly. The men kicked his ribs and threw wild swinging punches at his face and neck. The younger man doubled up on the floor, screaming and waving his arms uselessly.

  When she turned back to see what was happening the scene had changed. The younger man was tearing across the street, zigzagging between parked cars, shouting abuse. The others bounded after him like maddened thugs. A moment later all she could hear was the violence of their voices as they disappeared from view.

  A few lights went on in rooms across the street. Timid-looking couples peered out of their windows. They looked up and down the street. Seeing nothing they lowered their windows and their blinds.

  She extracted a musing from her observation. The Eumenides on window panes and in the streets and no one notices.

  She felt like some wine.

  ELEVEN

  She brought out a bulbous wine glass and poured herself a full glass of cheap red wine which she bought by the litre from the Italian shop round the corner. She rolled a stick of cigarette, trembling lightly. Gliding about the room, embracing the air, rearranging her work table, she drank steadily.

  She made a note in her diary. She fingered the potted plants and turned the lampshades so the light shone more obliquely on the wall. She wanted the dreamy atmosphere of certain movies of the forties. She began to sway. Serenity flowed through her. The wine loosened her and her movements became more elaborate. She lit the stick of tobacco and smoked languidly. The lights touche
d all she saw with a hint of fantasy. She was getting a bit drunk.

  TWELVE

  Feeling elated, she went to her wardrobe and changed into a pair of clean silk underwear. The sensation of the material spread a sensual tingle through her body. She toyed with the sensation in her mind. She drank steadily and lit another roll of tobacco. She searched for her address book and rang a few friends. Most of them were out. While talking to the ones who were in, her voice was uneven, with a barely controlled intensity. She was more forward than usual. She made accusations where she might have made barbed comments. Her bristling remarks left the voice on the other side laughing nervously and wishing her goodnight. She was angry that they wouldn’t come over. She felt slightly humiliated that she had to resort to jibes at their manhood and that it didn’t work anyway. She slammed the phone down on the last one who refused to come and have a drink with her. They were scum anyway. Next time we meet they’ll see. They know what a verbal terror I am. They’ll see.

  THIRTEEN

  The bottle was half-finished. She’d been trying to re-read Dante in the OUP translation. It was nitrogen to her sense of life. Reading it brought back her university days. Suddenly the flat filled with gloom. The place seemed to shrink. The tobacco gathered a nauseous taste at the back of her throat and the wine all of a sudden tasted insipid. She felt a wave of panic rise in her.

  She moved round the room and touched the kettle, her books, and the newly installed work bench. She washed the dirty plates with yellow plastic gloves on. She cleaned the kitchen table and then she wore the new pair of jeans she bought two days ago and went out.

  FOURTEEN

  It was cold outside. She tightened her coat about her. The street was quiet and she was not particularly afraid. She had never had any trouble and having lived in the area for so long made her feel safe. There were lights on in isolated rooms. Music pounded the pavement from a basement flat. There was a party on and she didn’t know anyone down there.

  She passed the block of tenements that was being demolished. Many houses were being torn down. At the road junction she was surprised that the pubs were still open. She never owned a watch. She felt a watch would limit her sense of life, determine her sense of time. It was an attitude she had kept up from her Oxford days.

  Strange faces confronted her in the pub: faces of old men with old women, faces crumpled and squeezed. One of the men had a clotted eye. They all stared at her. She had been feeling old but in that moment she was almost wickedly pleased that she would never be as old as any of them.

  She bought herself a glass of red wine and sat at a table. She drank and smoked and wandered amongst the memories the jukebox music aroused in her.

  Not long afterwards a black man in his late forties came towards her.

  FIFTEEN

  He came with a pint of lager in his hand. He smiled knowingly, almost cheekily. His overcoat emphasised his swagger. He carried himself well, which was what she expected. Smiling to herself, she sipped from her drink. She was determined not to say a word or make a gesture that might betray her uneasiness.

  SIXTEEN

  He struck up a conversation which consisted of slurred questions. She could not make out much of what he said and could not bring herself to say pardon so many times. She replied to him from what sense she could make of isolated words. In fact she answered questions she would have liked to have been asked, questions that his words lent themselves to: she answered an echo.

  ‘What do you do?’

  For a long time he did not reply.

  She filled his silence with many speculations and rather liked his silent occupations. She looked at him. He was broad-shouldered. Though on the short side, he gave the impression of a certain monumentality. His face, revealing little, was of a solid cast, giving way to sharply defined lines. She thought him an abstract sculpture. She thought him full of character. His silences spoke more than the forced wit and the facile conversations of most of her friends.

  She found herself laughing for no particular reason; there was something funny about him in an obscure way. She found his presence relaxing, undemanding, comforting.

  She still could not make sense of him, but he was like a mountain she had grown up with, that was just there. He seemed to ask nothing of her except that she follow her whim and be herself, whatever that self happened to be. It was a feeling she hadn’t experienced before. It was simple and uncomplicated and it made her dreamy.

  SEVENTEEN

  When the pub finally closed she asked him if he wanted to come back to her place for a drink. This was partly due to her sense of freedom and her cultivated directness. He had been reciting lines of Rimbaud in drunken French which she took to be incantations in a mysterious language.

  They staggered out into the street, where she began singing a Leonard Cohen song. Realising her desire for closeness, she urged him to sing with her. He sang too but they were songs she had never heard before. The songs conveyed to her a vision of islands and sun and sea. He was singing a made-up melody to Rimbaud’s final words in ‘Une Saison en Enfer’. They were Rimbaud’s last published words before he set off in exile to a life in Africa: ‘Mais pourquoi regretter unéternal soleil, si nous sommes engagés à la découverte de la clarté divine.’ He had been mixing his own words with the poet’s words and was happy in his improvisation. He had found the melody in the company of this friendly, laughing woman.

  Somewhere in her mind, as she sang and listened to him singing his ancestral songs, his freedom songs, was the sense of a sanction that to love a black man was an act of imagination, a kind of solidarity. They both seemed happy as they stumbled down the street, singing.

  EIGHTEEN

  In her room she offered him coffee, to which he said thank you. She brought out her packet of Indian coffee and two tiny coffee cups.

  ‘Do you take it black?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  He sat in monumental serenity in her sunken cane chair.

  ‘You have a nice room.’

  ‘I painted the walls myself.’

  ‘You painted that?’ he asked, pointing at the abstract painting on the wall.

  ‘It was a gift from a friend,’ she said proudly.

  Then after a moment she said:

  ‘He is now in a madhouse.’

  He stared at the painting a long time and said nothing. She was not used to that quality of silence. He looked around the room. As he looked only his eyes moved. His face betrayed nothing. He looked at things as if they had just come into being.

  The innocence of his looking fascinated and bothered her. It seemed so pure. It was as if he looked at things without assigning them words or contexts in his mind.

  She tried to fill the silence with words. As she spoke little bogeys of doubt crept up in her mind. Things she had heard. Fears lurking in the whispered rumours of the race. But she shrugged them off. He wasn’t her first. The others though had been younger and eager and showy and shallow and she understood what they said.

  NINETEEN

  He came closer to her by a soft kind of magic. She did not object. They touched hands and she withdrew, not knowing why. She asked about his coat and he took it off. She noticed how interesting his form was underneath. She felt herself becoming dreamy again.

  She got up and switched off the lights and was surprised to find that she was undressing herself. She liked her nakedness in the dark. This was new to her. Something about him made her like her body. It was all silk, all sun-kissed, all cream, all river, all undulating landscape, all the sexy songs she had ever heard.

  TWENTY

  Her body began to sing. This was new to her. She did not recognise this body of hers. It had felt under-used, under-noticed, under-looked-at, under-desired.

  In the dark she saw that he was undressed as well.

  His body seemed to give off the pure simple glow of an uncomplicated desire.

  She jumped slightly when he touched her breasts. Not in fear, but in astonishment
at how so simple a touch could create so complex a sensation.

  TWENTY-ONE

  He was experienced. She could tell. It was the little things. It was as if he were a woman, as if he were her, in a way. He had great strength and power and force of personality, but did not use any of it. His restraint almost drove her mad.

  The vigour was hers; hers too were the sinuous movements. The depth of contact was her acceptance, the sensations were her awareness.

  He moved gently and sensitively and she had to hold her breath to catch the tender stars that opened out of the darkness and rushed past to another darkness in the vast universe in her head. She found herself suspended in a state of pleasure so complicated that she wanted to scream. She was no longer aware of what she was or wasn’t doing; and because all this was new to her she felt the need to talk, to think, to rationalise, and to follow a habitual route to her destination.

  She wanted to get there quickly and he was delaying her and it was a kind of punishment too sweet and intolerable to her wilful nature.

  She told him what to do.

  She told him to stop stretching her out this way, that she couldn’t bear it, and wanted a swift resolution.

  It was her cultivated directness all over again.

  Touch me here, she said. I can’t get there your way. Touch me like this, in this way, round like this, indirectly, avoiding and yet not avoiding the swelling point. Yes, like that. Much better. That’s it. I’m enjoying myself tremendously. I’m much more used to this, oh, this. What’s the matter? You don’t think I am a freak, do you? Do go on. Yes, like that. It’s perfectly perfectly nor . . . normal you know, and lots lots of wo . . . women feel that way, the only way, yes, yes, yes, no, I mean, heavens, yes.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Then she lost what she was saying and was slurring in the dark. She was slurring and singing in the silky dark in a body that had passed into the dark, leaving behind only vast empty spaces in which a happy emotion flowed. Her tensions were all gone into the dark. She felt now that she was glowing.