Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  He would shower and prepare dinner wearing an apron while I gathered our clothes. While he was frying and boiling the various foods he’d bought from the Saturday market, I’d drift along with the smells of his cooking through his apartment, weak from hunger and physical exertion, wearing nothing except for one of his shirts that, liking the scent of him on me, I’d lifted from his laundry basket. I ran my fingers along the spines of the books he kept in every room. Recalling my stacking of Aunt Wanda’s books, I tried to make sense of the order he kept them in, but failed. I’d inspect the framed photos on his shelves and mantelpieces, carrying them to the window to better make out the people in them in the days’ dying light. Parents and siblings were easy to recognise under their mops of blond hair; he got his blue eyes and his looks from his father, his height from his mother. Maybe his confidence from his father too; it takes a self-assured man to have a wife a head taller than him. There were photos of friends in frames or just propped against books; some were of ex-girlfriends and, maybe, girlfriends. For all I knew, he had a different girl every day of the week. I had realised from the beginning, from the absence of the mundane, hackneyed interrogations that formed the grounding of most new friendships, that his interest in me and, maybe, in people generally was not expressed conventionally. He never asked me where I lived, who I lived with, where I was from and the other usual questions. And he only revealed a little of himself or, more precisely, of a small part of his unorthodox family history on one occasion when he caught me unawares, coming up silently behind me in his sitting room, placing a hand on my shoulder and saying quietly in my ear, ‘What do you think of the painting?’

  The room had pale green walls and two sash windows that framed a round pedestal table with wicker chairs either side of it. A cream sofa faced a long coffee table and the fireplace, either side of which were floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, and above which hung the room’s sole painting that I had been lost in contemplating when he had walked in. My arm was outstretched, my hand still holding the silver-framed photograph of his mother I had been in the act of replacing on the mantelpiece.

  The painting was dark and menacing, the wooden-planked patchwork raft, its occupants and stormy seas painted seemingly furiously in a curious act of self-defence. It reminded me of a scene in a children’s book Miss Crossbank had read to the class in which three children, gazing intently at a marine painting, get swept into the painting and its sea. I shuddered. The ragged shipwrecked crew appeared dead or nearly so, save the few whose supplicant arms were outstretched in signal to an invisible ship.

  ‘It’s a bit dramatic,’ I said. ‘Sad,’ and, looking for longer, ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Oh, it’s terrible,’ he said. ‘More than terrible. You don’t even know the half of it. Or maybe you do?’

  I craned my neck to look at him as if to say, ‘How could I?’

  ‘It’s my mother’s version of a painting that hangs in the Louvre. In Paris.’

  ‘I know where the Louvre is.’

  ‘Sorry. Have you been there?’

  ‘No.’ I didn’t add that I’d never been out of England except to go to Wales. ‘So your mother is a painter?’

  ‘Yes. She started by drawing and painting things from life, and then got it into her head that in order to improve as a painter and to become as good as the old masters, she should copy them first. She began painting – reproducing – famous paintings.’ He placed his other hand on my other shoulder and leant forward, and I could tell from the sweetness of his breath that he had been munching on raw vegetables as he had peeled and diced them. ‘And then, having done that for a while, she continued reproducing them but changing them, delivering the same image with an altogether different style from the original while ensuring the model remained recognisable. Like a cover of a song.’

  ‘Is this one like the original?’ I asked, my eyes having been drawn back to it, and up and down it with the movement of the sea and the ropes that held a listing mast in place.

  ‘Oh no. For a start, it’s a fraction of the size. I doubt the original would fit in this room, let alone above the mantelpiece. Then there’s the style. The original is in a classical style, while the kindest thing you could say about this is that it’s figurative.’ He laughed. ‘And then there’s a figure missing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘One of the figures in the original is missing from my mother’s version.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Now we come to the terrible bit.’ He parted my hair from my shoulder and kissed my neck. I could feel the slip of a tooth and a sliver of saliva cool on me. ‘My mother became fixated on this painting. She must have painted a dozen versions of it. And always with a figure missing. Not always the same one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The family story is that one of our ancestors was aboard the raft.’

  ‘Really?’

  He took me by the hand and sat me down next to him on the sofa from where we looked up at the painting, our feet placed simultaneously on the coffee table as though signalling an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t move from the sofa for a while.

  ‘The raft was constructed from the masts and timbers of a French ship that had run aground on a sandbank many miles from land. The incompetent captain and some of the ship’s company saved themselves in lifeboats, leaving 150 people or so to survive on the raft – it was some 20 metres long and not even half as wide. They had nothing to eat or drink to speak of.’ He kept his eyes on the painting as he spoke. ‘They were a rabble of a crew. They fought for the centre of the poorly constructed raft so as not to be swept overboard, and they turned on the officers and the officer class. By the end of the second day, half of them had been killed. By the end of the fourth day, the declining number of survivors resorted to drinking their urine and eating the dead. The fifteen survivors, who were picked up after twelve days at sea, told stories of hanging strips of human flesh on lines in order to dry it and make it more palatable. Of the ten who made it to Paris, only two withstood the intimidation and bullying by the ship’s captain and remaining officers who tried but failed to get a public exoneration. To my mother’s shame, our ancestor was not one of the two.’ He stopped talking and we contemplated the raft a while, silently, side by side.

  ‘So where does the shame lie? As far as your mother is concerned,’ I eventually asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, in both, I think,’ he replied.

  I looked at him.

  ‘Surviving – having done what it took to survive. And taking money to keep schtum. Presumably.’

  ‘Does it make sense to feel shame for something you didn’t do? Shame for someone else?’

  ‘My mother clearly thinks so. It’s as if she’s obsessed with painting him out of history.’

  ‘Is she a good painter?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. The fact that this is a copy makes me feel less capable of judging.’ I could feel the heat from his leg along mine. ‘Not that I think I’m a good judge of these things, anyway.’

  ‘She’s okay, I suppose.’

  ‘And have you never wanted to be an artist?’

  ‘Oh, but I am! Have you never seen me at work?’ He grinned and I stuck my elbow in his side.

  Mie

  I began to worry about the stagnation of my intellectual capabilities and the possible decline of my English faculties. The route to England seemed impossibly obscure from the perspectives of my desk and the trivial tasks I was assigned. Fubuki grew angry on a matter of principle. She followed me into the ladies’ toilets one day where she grumbled that she hadn’t signed up to be a shokuba no hana, an office flower whose role was to be pleasing to the eye in the execution of the menial but necessary tasks the department required. I hadn’t the courage to tell her that she made the most beautiful office flower – that, if that were indeed to be her role, she would acquit herself to perfection. As though she’d been overheard, we had no sooner resumed our seats than Mr S
aito stood, nodded at Fubuki and requested she follow him to Mr Omochi’s office, after which he returned without her as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. For me, this change in our routine was of seismic proportions, and I assumed it marked a first step into what could be loosely termed our – or at least Fubuki’s – career development.

  An hour passed agonisingly slowly before Fubuki returned, and another hour before she excused herself to Mr Saito to go to the bathroom. I followed, mumbling my own excuses as I stumbled after her.

  ‘What did you have to do?’ I could barely contain my excitement.

  ‘I had to take down a letter.’

  I felt a pang of jealousy. ‘What about? And then?’

  ‘You know, I can’t even tell you what it was about! I was so nervous. I haven’t practised my shorthand in three months. And then I took it down to the head of the typing pool who handed it to one of the typists who typed it out and handed it back to her boss, who proofread it and gave it to me together with its carbon copy to take back to Mr Omochi, who signed it and asked me to take it to the post room and to file the carbon copy.’ Fubuki examined her nails, as though to deny, out of consideration for me, I was sure, that she had had her most exciting day at Yumimoto to date.

  My agitation was such that I could think of nothing to say or, rather, I couldn’t think of what to say first. Why had Fubuki been singled out for this singular honour? When would my turn come? What were the typing pool and the post room like? ‘What’s shorthand?’

  ‘Shorthand?’ Fubuki trilled and looked at the backs of her extended hands. She had a way of reposing, of leaning back on the washbasin unit with her legs crossed at the ankles that made her appear relaxed and dangerous simultaneously. ‘Sorry. It’s why I’m here. I can take down what someone says very quickly, at the speed at which they’re saying it, so that I can take letters down or take meeting notes in real time, as it were. That’s why I’m here.’ My face must have registered my incomprehension. ‘While you’re here for your English, that much you’ve told me.’ She read my mind. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure your time will come. You’re reserved for greater things, I’m sure.’ This was said with a smile and, I felt, no small degree of condescension.

  Fubuki was proved right, but not before she’d had three more letters dictated to her by Mr Omochi and a good half dozen by Mr Haneda, who seemed to have discovered a zeal for letter-writing. I feared my resentment would show and threaten my nascent friendship with Fubuki, and I tried to keep my demeanour agreeable so as to avoid a negative bearing on my career.

  Sharon

  ‘How can options not interest you?’ Sebastian asked me over dinner one evening, and we laughed at the absurdity of the question and at the earnestness with which he’d asked it.

  He raised his eyebrows and a bottle of wine.

  I declined. I was drunk enough on a passion I wanted to enjoy for what it was, an infatuation that only one thing could defer and cool: Sebastian’s compulsive need to wash up immediately after dinner. I found his reluctance to leave plates and pots and pans dirty, to leave the kitchen until it was spotless, amusing. I watched him at the sink, my braless breasts sensitive to the rough cotton of one of his shirts and my bare bottom cool on the polished wood of one of his kitchen chairs.

  He dried his hands and pulled me up and guided me by the shoulders to the door to the second bedroom that doubled as a study: an entire wall was lined with books. The room was lit by one desk light that, I could see, would also serve as a bedside light for whoever occupied the bed.

  ‘I’ve watched you walk the length of these bookshelves,’ he said, ‘and you seem to have been reading the books’ titles but, other than a dictionary, I’ve never seen you lift a book off a shelf and open it. You’ve never picked a novel out.’

  ‘Yes.’ If there was a question there, I was unsure what it was.

  ‘Ever been tempted?’

  ‘To pick a novel out and open it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  His thumbs massaged my shoulder blades and his fingers applied pressure to my collarbone. His breath warmed the back of my neck where he had parted my hair.

  ‘When I read,’ I said, speaking slowly in order to make sure I said exactly what I meant and meant exactly what I said, ‘I feel uneasy. I become jealous of the book’s characters.’ Having Sebastian behind me and not having to look at him as I spoke made it easier. ‘I feel under threat. I feel that for them to live, I have to give away a little of myself.’ He couldn’t see me blush. ‘I’m afraid that they will leave me empty, with nothing. It’s a kind of spiritual one-way traffic.’

  His voice in my ear: ‘That’s a very interesting response to literature.’ I said nothing, and he continued, softly, ‘I don’t think that what you give of yourself is finite and that it has to be measured out sparingly. I would say, think of it like love.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘I mean, I understand. But I can’t think of it that way. I mean, it just doesn’t work like that for me. It’s like, I have hardly enough self for myself as it is.’

  His breath ruffled the hair on the top of my head.

  ‘You are a funny bird,’ he said. ‘If I am the sum total of every book I’ve read, what are you?’

  ‘You mean, if I’ve never read a novel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I must be nothing. Well, I’ve flicked through dictionaries. Maybe I’m just a jumble of words. I’ve read the plays I’ve performed in. Maybe I’m just an act.’ I reached behind him and me with both hands, pulling him up against me. ‘Is that really how you think of yourself? As the sum total of all the books you’ve read?’

  ‘Yes. More or less, and what I feel here, in you,’ he said, moving his hands down from my neck and shoulders, ‘is something far more substantial than nothing.’ And he led me, the two of us walking backwards down the hallway, to his bed.

  A joyous, guiltless voyage of self-discovery, the act of sex told me nothing of who I was, it just affirmed that I was. It wasn’t so much, for me, a fulfilment as a fillment, a filling, a completing, a providing of evidence that, if only for a moment, I existed if not for myself then at least for someone else. I liked the selfishness and the selflessness, the shared responsibility for contraception beforehand and the domesticity that came after, the rearranging of the bed sheets, the blushing and the affection, the kind, sleepily mumbled Goodnights.

  ‘Why,’ Sebastian asked, ‘are you changing the alarm?’

  ‘It’s so that we can, you know…’ I said, straddling him in order to replace the alarm clock on his side of the bed and unable to keep the twinkle from my eye and the giggle from my voice, ‘One more time, before we go to work. To see us through for the rest of the week.’

  He flung his arm across his tousled hair and forehead. ‘You’re insatiable! It’s all right for you. You don’t have to be in for seven. You can just go straight back to sleep. I’m going to be knackered.’

  Still astride him, looking down at him, I said, ‘Yes!’

  Mie

  Mr Omochi stopped in front of my desk. Surprised, I failed to comprehend that he had come for me and not for Fubuki and only just refrained from blurting out that her desk was the one next to mine. Mr Omochi extended a stubby finger towards me and then furled and unfurled it in lieu of a spoken request that I follow him, which I did, in a state of extreme self-consciousness and of mixed emotions, terrified that he might expect me to have shorthand skills and yet thrilled by the thought of movement, career progress, new challenges and skills.

  ‘Atashi-san,’ said Mr Omochi, indicating with a wave of his hand a tall stack of papers on a chair by his desk, ‘photocopy these for me by tomorrow. I thought that, as these documents are in English, you’d be best qualified to do this.’

  ‘Certainly, Omochi-san.’ I approached the pile and picked up what I could. ‘Please allow me to come back for the rest, as I can’t manage it all in one journey.’

  Mr Omochi sat dow
n behind his desk and played with his tie that failed to reach his trouser belt, leaving visible the buttons that strained to join the two sides of his shirt together. He already looked bored with his act of delegation. On both occasions of my return to his office he hadn’t moved, that I could tell.

  I spent a day in the windowless photocopying room, unstapling documents, photocopying the pages one by one and then stapling them together. I filled the photocopying machine with paper on numerous occasions and replaced the ink cartridge twice. By the end of the job, I was close to tears, not just because of the tedious nature of the job and because colleagues did little to hide their disgruntlement at my hogging the photocopier, but also because it had dawned on me, despite the initial boost to my self-esteem, that no knowledge of English was required to position sheet after sheet of paper on the photocopier’s glass, close the lid and press a button. If one photocopied each photocopy in turn to produce, to the naked eye, an immeasurably paler imitation of the original and of the preceding copies, how many photocopies would it take for the original to disappear altogether and to be left with a blank sheet of paper? I felt that only a few days spent in repetition of this would efface my spirit.

  Fubuki, whether out of a sense of commiseration or of curiosity, had waited for me before leaving for home. ‘I mean,’ I said to her after thanking her for having waited, ‘it would have made no difference if the document had been in Russian and I Chinese. Is he playing a game at my expense or does he really think that it made sense for me to photocopy those English documents?’