Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  I had only just had my first-year appraisal. Jonathan and Mr Self had barrelled me into the conference room off the trading floor and had been very complimentary. They had said that I had surpassed all expectations, that my performance had been error-free and that I brought good cheer to the desk. I was a pleasure to work with. I would get a pay rise.

  ‘Why on earth are you crying?’ Jonathan had asked.

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ Mr Self had said, whether to me or Jonathan I wasn’t sure. ‘This happens quite often, you know.’

  Jonathan had reached onto the sideboard behind him, grabbed a box of tissues and slid it across the table to me. ‘Quick! Dry your eyes,’ he had said in mock panic, ‘before people think we’ve fired you!’

  ‘Thank you,’ I’d said.

  ‘For the tissues or the pay rise?’ had asked Jonathan.

  For the kindness, for the words, I had wanted to say, but I hadn’t trusted my voice enough to reply.

  I had left the meeting room and snatched a trading slip from a waving Curtis without breaking my step.

  ‘So, what’s up?’ asked Sebastian.

  For the second time that morning, I was speechless.

  ‘Your eyes seem to have that extra sparkle this morning.’ He leant back in his chair and surveyed me critically, maybe even approvingly, openly and confidently.

  Sebastian’s sudden, unexpected attention, his having noted my mild emotional agitation, his bright, bright blue eyes, the unexpected flash of a canine tooth when he smiled, the mane of fair hair, the long fingers that held trading slips out to mine – something about him threw me. I was, all of a sudden, the young girl I had once been, the girl who wouldn’t say no to boys, the girl who was eager to please.

  I slalomed back to my desk, swinging my hips as I skirted the chairs, desk drawers and gesticulating people that formed a gentle obstacle course, Sebastian’s eyes on my back like two hands on my hips, steering and warming me.

  Isabella

  I took two cups of tea to Freddie and the man in her bed and one to another man who lay propped on one elbow on the sofa, his pale hair tousled and his yellow smiley face T-shirt crumpled. A girl lay curled in an armchair, her chest rising and falling gently, a smile on her face.

  ‘Thanks. I’m Buzz. That’s Johannah,’ he said. ‘I’m from Chicago,’ he added, seemingly finding it necessary to explain his accent.

  In the evening Buzz took Freddie, Johannah and me to a club behind Kings Cross, a vast warehouse space filled with sound and strobing light and packed with people who moved as though to their own music despite the persistent deep bass that infused the building with a pulse. From the club entrance, looking down, the floor was like a sea of surf and counter-currents, raised bare arms waving like fronds on a murky sea bed only gaining definition as we descended, the strobe light like a full moon’s rays through water.

  ‘Here. As promised,’ shouted Buzz above the music to Freddie, who grinned at me impishly as Buzz handed us a pale yellow pill with a smiley face each. ‘First roll, right? This one’s on me.’ Freddie and I nodded and held our pills between thumb and forefinger tightly in anticipation of popping them soon, as Johannah had done hers. Buzz wagged his finger at Freddie and me to indicate that we should wait. ‘Follow me.’

  We pressed our way through hundreds of young people who stood dancing from the shoes up, keeping their feet rooted but moving their waists, arms and shoulders extravagantly in a state of delirious happiness. ‘This is the water station. Drink.’ I could feel Buzz’s hot breath on my ear. ‘Drink a lot. It’s free. It’s important, okay? Drink, and each of you make sure the other drinks.’ Wide-eyed with anticipation, Freddie and I popped our first rolls. ‘Good!’ shouted Buzz. ‘Do you see the chill-out rooms?’ He ran a hand through his hair and indicated some rooms I hadn’t noticed, doorless doorways that led to rooms with low seating and low ceilings, soft furnishings and mood lights. ‘Hang in there for a while. Get used to things. And don’t forget to drink!’

  Freddie and I stood by the safety of the water station for a time, held there as much by indecision resulting from our desire to be in a chill-out room and on the dance floor simultaneously as by paranoia with regards to the effects of our first Ecstasy pill. We stood close, touched then clutched each other, her hair tickling my bare shoulder and arm, the sensation of it bright, electrifying, a caterpillar playing the marimba up my arm. The music, that had been one pounding wall of noise, grew clearer by degrees until I could see each soft brick in it, each note crisp and distinct with its own smell and colour. Colours grew primary – I could see the reds and blues in the purples, the blues and yellows in the greens, the vibrant colours in the T-shirts, the make-up, the skirts and the shorts and sneakers. My mind was a radio, tuning and fine-tuning, a spectrometer, releasing the enprismed primaries. Sound and colour melded. I knew that I wasn’t hallucinating but that my powers of perception had simply become extraordinary and clear. What I saw was there and what was there I saw. Colour patterns warped and pulsed; I could make Johannah and Buzz out among the hundreds of other people whose names I didn’t know but whom I felt I knew, whose essences I knew. Names were an irrelevance, a trapping, a distraction. Freddie’s mouth was moving, the redness of her lips near-overwhelming, her words visible on the escalator that was her tongue, the tongue that was the launch pad for her words, the coloured words that carried more than their dictionary designation: she spoke of the chill-out room and of water and I saw those ragged words take flight and swoop and embrace and enlace us in the finest and warmest of cloths. I heard love and friendship. The idea of the unconditional love that was possible between friends swelled me with happiness. Freddie and I hugged and kissed, there on an ottoman in a chill-out room, not as lovers but as friends in love with love and with each other and with everyone. Her touch sent me into raptures. I dissolved with the sensation of her fleshy tongue against my inner lower lip as love, kindness and humanism washed over me. With tremendous clarity, I understood that what I saw when I looked at her was not her but the relationship I had with her; that, really, that was all she was to me and I to her. And I knew that what did the seeing was not my eyes but my mind and soul and intuition too. The urge to move, to dance was irresistible. The air above the dance floor filled with the unfiltered joyous truths of the distillation of people who held the essence of their selves before them like masks at a Venetian festival and then, suddenly as if on a collective whim, flew them like kites on a string. I marvelled that all these beings did not alight on others’ bodies and inhabit them out of mischief, for innocent fun: an unwritten social, metaphysical code for life on earth respected from the goodness of all of our hearts. Echoes sounded of Papa and his friends citing Berkeley’s notion that only ideas in the minds of perceivers exist – if only as barriers between us and material objects – if material objects exist at all. How right Berkeley had been! The intuited revelation that Berkeley had taken Ecstasy was sensational – I wanted to share it with Papa. Papa! I loved and forgave him. He loved me too but had not known how to show it, had gone about it the wrong way. The joy I felt at forgiving so unreservedly and at understanding was immense, filling the booming cavern with its bright, white light through which lasers strode and tickled. I am love.

  ‘Drink!’ commanded Buzz, lifting a water bottle to my lips while Freddie reached to lick the tears of happisadness from my eyes, a cat lapping my cheeks with a tender tongue.

  ‘May I hug you?’ asked a stranger with what I considered excessive politeness.

  ‘Yes!’ I cried with genuine enthusiasm, afraid he might dissolve in a puddle of tears if I declined.

  Our hug was exquisitely warm, thrillingly friendly, universal. I am energy. I am music. My body was the music, the music was me and I was everyone. I had been born to dance. The rhythm was my heart’s and the city’s and everyone’s. The bass was in my feet and the trebles were in my fingertips. I experienced epiphany after epiphany and the irritation I felt at immediately forgetting what they w
ere of evaporated when I realised that I had grasped the profoundest truth that I and we all were stars, our places in the universe fixed, clear and clean. My cheeks hurt from incessant smiling and my teeth and gums grew sore from ceaseless chewing, but the distant discomfort wasn’t mine alone; it was shared in a great community spirit of unity and companionship. Buzz presented me with a gift of a stick of chewing gum, such generosity reducing me to emotional extremes of gratitude. The mint in the gum was a pinprick of cool in my mouth that gave birth to a butterfly, to me, a rebirth, a butterfly of multihued wings that soared among the disco light dots of mauve and red and blue and among the disco light-mauve, -red and -blue butterflies. Naturally, one of them was mine or I was one of them. I was delirious with the joy of being me again. The butterflies were us all. We danced and fluttered, never touching despite always coming close. Mama’s butterfly was there but she couldn’t hear me, of course, of course she couldn’t, she was dead. And Gaia. The issue of my stillborn baby sister, of how I should come to terms with a sister who had died before she had lived, had been too difficult for me. I had quite consciously placed her, or the notion of her, in a recess of my mind, the idea of her still as stillborn as she had been. It was all so clear to me now. There was music, love and forgiveness in the air. There were butterflies masquerading as coloured disco lights, mine, Mama’s, Papa’s, Gaia’s and Freddie’s.

  ‘Do you see?’ I shouted above the music to Freddie.

  ‘Yes!’ she shouted back, still moving, moving, dancing.

  *

  The dawn air was cool. Stars and a pale quarter moon were visible despite the light sky. Puddles reflected two police patrol cars’ flashing blue lights in imitation of the disco lights in the nightclub we had wearily climbed up from, and an assembly of policemen and -women watched us disperse. A grey-haired man in a velvet-lapelled overcoat stood next to a Crombie-wearing, capped chauffeur by a gleaming saloon car. He smiled genially as an elegant younger woman chatted to Freddie and Johannah, having given them and me business cards of a sort and urged us to call. I remembered her from the dance floor where she hadn’t been dancing so much as observing, assessing.

  Buzz had buzzed off.

  Johannah yawned.

  Freddie shouted to me, ‘He’ll give us a lift home.’

  I shook my head, which failed to clear of the music we had danced to. My arms ached from having been held aloft for so long and my breasts and nipples were sore from having persistently chafed against my bra. I wanted to walk in order to retain the sense of communion I had with the city and its inhabitants without the diluting intermediation of a car’s upholstered seats and its insulating rubber tyres, in order to hold onto Gaia, to not ever let her go again. I walked down Gray’s Inn Road still slick with the night’s earlier rain, past buses that disgorged the day’s early commuters at their stops and swept the night shift cleaners up in exchange, past office blocks and town houses now settling down, adopting their customary, distinct facades for the day. As wonderful as the experience with Ecstasy had been for me, I knew that I would not want to repeat it. Alone, still exhilarated but exhausted now, more bumping along than flying, I could see that I needed a grounding for my body, not separation from it. I feared that, given my predisposition towards disengaging mind from body, I might never regain the connection. Is that what death was? I didn’t want to encourage it.

  Left onto Holborn, past Holborn Circus with the early sun in my eyes and then – and then a green-veined white! A butterfly, in London, in April! Elated, I followed it to a freshly rain-watered flower box at the foot of a small gatehouse that fronted a cul-de-sac where it and I rested a while, it sipping and folding and unfolding its wings and I giggling and gawking, and then on, through an open iron gate, down the cul-de-sac of terraced brick houses, following it with my eyes as it bobbed, dipped and rose, ascending ever higher. I lost it and turning around and around on the spot found myself before a recessed terraced church.

  ‘It was so unexpected. Then two men walked past me, not together, one after the other, and one said good morning and they both went in by a side door and I just followed them in.’

  Freddie had asked me what I had got up to and where I had been, but no sooner had I started replying than I sensed she had grown bored and impatient to interrupt. ‘He gave me and Johannah a lift back. And Jemma. She was with him – is with him. Well, I don’t know for sure that they’re together but she works for him.’

  ‘I just sat there. People came and went. Prayers before work. It was so peaceful, so full of being. Of presence. No one spoke. And the stained glass windows! So beautiful and clear. Like the lights on the dance floor in an understated way.’

  ‘Wasn’t it amazing? The E! Amazing!’

  ‘Amazing. It was. Amazing.’

  ‘I felt I could feel the colours, you know? And the love!’

  ‘Yes! The love. The colours! The colours of the stained-glass windows. When I finally turned to leave, there’d been this huge stained-glass window behind me all the time, the fleshy cuts of pinks and reds of Christ like a carcass on this cross, so bright, like he was looking down at me but he wasn’t there, on the cross, but all around me, in the church and all so real.’

  ‘And the music!’

  ‘And then, it was so strange, it wasn’t him but my mother, you know, my mother there, hanging there, happy in my forgiveness of her, knowing I’d forgiven her before I knew it myself and it felt – oh, all so real!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I told you! The church I went into. The Christ was so real. The body of him there in the window and the spirit of him filling the church. And suddenly, it wasn’t him but my mother, you know, she sacrificed herself for me, for Cosmo too, like Christ did for us all, and I’d never really understood that before, the selflessness of her action, not really really.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. But last night. And now, it’s like we’re all better people. Like, everyone should do it. If the whole world did it, it would be amazing!’

  ‘Yes! That’s exactly what I thought! That, I remember, I can’t remember, someone I know must have done it. Or something.’

  ‘Yes. I wished my mother and father had done some E,’ said Freddie and fell about laughing at the thought.

  Johannah, pale under the light from the window on the padded bench that served as a window seat, slept undisturbed. Did she live with us? I was no longer sure.

  ‘What was that about your mother?’ asked Freddie.

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied.

  The effects of the Ecstasy having mostly worn off, the impulse to candour had gone too, and I felt I needed time alone to follow my chain of thought. I felt altogether less forgiving of Papa, not least because I didn’t consider it my place to forgive him for his abuse of Cosmo. Cosmo and I telephoned or wrote to each other regularly, monthly at least. His letters were brief, pretexts for the dark, complex and twisted drawings that would accompany them and that I would pin to window frames and doors and examine for clues to his state of mind with regards to his private, hidden history.

  Freddie fingered the card Jemma had handed her and said, ‘Jemma was so nice. She said we were the best dancers. Natural. Johannah and I are going to do it. You’re going to do it too, aren’t you, Izzy? The money’s amazing. And we can do it as little or as much as we like.’

  ‘Melanie,’ said Johannah, her eyes still closed. ‘Melanie.’

  ‘What?’ asked Freddie with a giggle and a frown.

  ‘Jemma said we had to choose a stage name,’ said Johannah, opening her eyes and lifting her head to rest it in the palm of one hand. ‘Mine’s going to be Melanie.’

  ‘Oh yeah!’ exclaimed Freddie. ‘And mine’s going to be Frederica.’

  ‘Frederica? But that’s your real name!’

  ‘Freddie’s my name and Frederica will be my stage name,’ said Freddie with an air of finality. ‘It’s like I’m running back to who I was or I don’t want to run away from who I was. Or something like that,’ she a
dded, embarrassed. ‘Anyway, it’s Frederica. And you, Isabella, what’s your stage name going to be?’

  *

  Frederica, Melanie and Gaia presented themselves for work on a Monday afternoon.

  We were admitted by the chauffeur who, I could see, doubled as a doorman and were welcomed by Jemma who was more officious, as she allocated pieces of skimpy clothing to us and informed us of the house rules, than when she had recruited us in the early hours of the morning the previous week. She introduced us to the grey-haired man and club owner, Pierre, whose interest lay chiefly in helping us adjust G-strings and bikinis, and to Wanda, Pierre’s accountant, who required us to complete forms, sign disclaimers and relinquish National Insurance numbers and passport details in order to prove that we were 18 years old or over. We were each placed under the wing of a veteran dancer who, over the course of the coming weeks and months, improved our dance styles, raised our confidence levels and taught us what house rules could be broken as well as how and when to break them.

  My feelings about the club were mixed. It grew to be home, of a sort: neither the plush velour bar at ground level, nor the downstairs dance floor (seedier and tackier in the naked white light the cleaners laboured under during the day than when intermittently lit by the night’s mauve and yellow spotlights), but the girls’ changing room, furnished with ill-matching lockers, theatre dressing tables, hanging rails and comfortable armchairs, where the girls dressed and undressed, preened themselves, gossiped and bickered.

  As in the care home, the girls were discreet. No girl asked another why she chose to dance near naked for a living, but listened sympathetically when the information was volunteered, usually by degrees as trust grew. Melanie was candid: she wanted the money. She had fallen in love with a builder and the two of them wanted to build a future together. Frederica’s motivation was more complex. I would have said – albeit never to her – that she had something of her mother in her or that she wished either to discover her mother in her or, by behaving like her mother, so understand and forgive her. She, more readily than either Melanie or me, broke the house’s first and second rules of not seeing punters outside of the club and of not accepting gifts or money in exchange for sexual favours. As for me, Gaia, I could cease to be Isabella, the prepubescent girl who, ignorant, misled, flattered and intoxicated by turn, had danced naked for her manipulative father and his conniving friends and be, instead, the seducing Morgiana who held her future and fawning, smitten men’s hearts in her hands. I could assume control, wrest it back from Papa, not only by dancing knowingly and sexually aggressively in a way in which I couldn’t have as a child, but by going even further and assuming my sexuality, feeding my sexual appetite in a refusal to suppress it.