Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  ‘A true story?’

  ‘Oh, yes, a true story of a Japanese man who had, well, what would you call it, identity issues, gender issues? Anyway, he decided he would have a sex change but, not only that, he would cook his amputated private parts and serve them for dinner to six paying guests, and he put an advertisement in a newspaper to that effect.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And he did it?’

  ‘Yes! He underwent his operation and sold six tickets for this dinner. In the event, only five diners showed, but about twenty journalists did, so this is well documented. Now, the authorities weren’t too happy about it but they could do nothing to stop him going through with it. However, they felt they had to arrest him for something, and they did so: for indecent exposure!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes!’ He drank some tea, clearly still amused.

  ‘How did he cook it? His, you know?’

  ‘His meat and two veg? I don’t know! Coqauvin perhaps?’ He looked at me as though he found me curious. ‘That’s a question it would never have occurred to me to ask.’

  The to and fro on a subject for which I had little enthusiasm, feigning an interest I did not have, had tired me. My shoulders sagged. I looked around me. I was irritated by Sebastian’s comments about cannibalism and Japan; I couldn’t decide whether they were simple observations or pointed in some way.

  ‘I didn’t mean anything by that, by the way. It’s just, well, peculiar, I suppose. You know, it’s funny seeing you out of your work clothes.’ He looked at me appraisingly. ‘I mean,’ he added hastily, ‘in clothes that are not your work clothes!’

  ‘I know. I had the same thought about you,’ I said, hiding ineffectually behind my raised teacup while reappraising my day’s rather plain wardrobe of jeans, boots and a large woolly jumper.

  We didn’t go Dutch, as the English call it, warikan, as the Japanese do; Sebastian paid for both of us, for which I simply thanked him. While he waited for his change, I toured around a huge pine table on which were laid ill-assorted, second-hand sugar spoons, cake forks, fish knives, cruet sets, sherry glasses and cooking utensils.

  ‘What have you found?’ he asked, once again standing just behind me and breathing over my shoulder. Placed like boxes within boxes, like matryoshka dolls, were three slightly rusty, different-sized but otherwise identical steel cookie cutters. ‘Cookie cutters,’ he said. ‘For gingerbread men.’

  I was struck by the fact that these cookie cutters had precisely the same proportions as Takumi-san’s silhouette of the filleted man, as though that outline had climbed off the poster and down the wall and followed me to London with his wife and child where, shrunk by the long journey, he had rested on this old kitchen table waiting for me to find him. Dizzyingly, momentarily, the café and bric-a-brac receded and my nostrils filled with the smells of sawdust, congealed blood and bleach.

  ‘You’re not going to buy them!’ Sebastian exclaimed, and I realised that while I was supporting myself on the table with the outstretched fingers of one hand, I clutched, in the other, the largest of those three steel-edged figures – so present, solid and, to my imagination, certain of themselves that I envied them. ‘But you can get new ones – clean ones – at any department store!’ he said as I paid for them.

  Once home, I washed and dried my cookie cutter men and stood them one behind the other on the window sill above the kitchen sink. I had moved into my own apartment, the top-floor flat of a large Edwardian house on the north side of Clapham Common. I knelt, my chin just by the sink, so that, from that low angle, I could see through the gingerbread men’s outlines in silhouette against the edges of an anaemic sunset. Their straight and fisted arms and solidly planted feet amused me; their posture echoed that of an obstinate child. There I was, the closest to me, my mother behind me and my father behind us. I rested my forehead against the cool sink. I should have called them today. I stood, considered my reflection in the window a moment and set about tidying my already tidy kitchen in a desultory way before ironing the blouse I’d wear tomorrow.

  The day had unnerved me; Sebastian, I saw, risked disappointing me. Physically and professionally, I had long admired him, impressed by a manner more genial than slick with his colleagues and more capable than ingratiating with the bank’s clients. When I had first known him, I had respected and applauded the extent to which he appeared to value his privacy and maintained his social defences – he didn’t give himself away cheaply. I knew where his politics lay (little different to most other bank employees), which films he enjoyed (more mainstream than Taka, David and me) and which authors and genre of books he favoured. Here, he was different to most City employees who, to my surprise, read little that was not work related. Jonathan, leaning back in his chair and looking over his shoulder whenever I happened to be depositing my handbag’s contents on my desk, would exclaim, ‘A novel! Another novel! Now, what I want is facts!’ in an unknowing caricature of Mr Gradgrind.

  ‘Jonathan says he only wants to read facts,’ I had told Sebastian.

  ‘Good for Jonathan. He can stick to non-fiction books. They may deliver facts but novels deliver truth,’ had said Sebastian, who, on every plane and train journey I made with him would read a novel, rarely by an author I knew. I had continued my literary education in England so that after a decade I had read all I could find of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, George Orwell and E. M. Forster who, particularly, touched a chord with me in contrasting the English with the foreigners around them. Sebastian approved, once patronisingly telling me that he would let me know what I should be reading once I had finished my self-imposed syllabus. So I knew about him, but did I know him? I didn’t know. I decided I would say as much to him.

  Isabella

  I never did tell Sharon why I had left Pierre’s club and I suspected that Wanda, for reasons of pride, had never mentioned the incident with Pierre to her either. Instead, I had bemoaned the increased regimentation and commercialisation of the old place and talked favourably of the new club I was dancing at.

  It billed itself as a modern strip club and not as a Victorian gentleman’s club. Overt sexual provocation replaced seedy gentility and hypocrisy. Customers were encouraged to take the girls home, with the house taking its cut of the girls’ earnings, and touching was not verboten. Its owner was an enterprising young German who mucked in with his staff, not a French letch who lorded it over his. Its location in increasingly gentrified Farringdon suited me better than the West End.

  Godehard reminded me of my mother with his perfect English, just the odd German word peppering it here and there. He was slim, a quality disguised by his wearing trousers and shirts a size too large for him, the latter unbuttoned to reveal a silver egg on a silver chain in a nest of curly chest hair and with its cuffs never done up. A large, expensive-looking watch was on show on one wrist and a copper bracelet on the other. He wore his light brown hair straight with a side parting and black-framed glasses that the NHS had made so familiar to my generation, but that he insisted had been tailor-made for him by a specialist glasses manufacturer in Hamburg at great expense. Where Pierre had sought to exercise his droit du seigneur underhandedly, Godehard propositioned the girls he employed openly in a commercial transaction with no strings attached. He dispensed advice on the importance of managing one’s money, on saving, on shares and other investments and bemoaned the fact that no one listened to him. He did the same on the subject of sex, too, advising on the importance of general hygiene, frequent exercise, a good diet and plenty of sleep, of the use of condoms and of regular health checks at the VD clinic, and he would listen sympathetically to the girls who told him about their gynaecological problems. He was, within the scope of my experience, American in his open and frank attitude to sex, but he spoke of himself as European in contrast to English. ‘What is it with you limeys?’ he would say to the English girls, and would stand to attention and do his shirt top button up while grimacing in what we understood was an at
tempt at stiffening his upper lip. ‘So stuffy! So repressed! Hey, sex happens!’

  *

  Godehard guiding me by the elbow, the two of us clutching our coats at the throat despite our scarves, we crossed the road to Smithfield Market where we ordered tea and bacon sandwiches in The Hope. We had it to ourselves; at 2.30 in the morning the butchers and tradesmen were still at work. We sat at a table in the bay window watching, through the clear glass above the frosted frieze, the unloading of vehicles, admiring the industry of the steaming tradesmen as cow halves were hurried from the dark backs of trucks through flapping rubber and Perspex doors to the bright lights of the glimpsed butchers’ stalls for further, final dismemberment. I found something contemplative in the repetition of the actions of the men in the backs of lorries and vans and of the men in chiaroscuro who dashed from vehicle to the market and back as though on a loop, the cumulative recurrence of which would deliver meaning. When not running, the men stamped their feet and blew into their hands, their breath forming speech bubbles in which everything had been left unsaid. I knew many of them by name. I had slept with some of them. Some stood in the half-dark, smoking and drinking from hip flasks by the doors, jollying their colleagues along. I could tell those who had been butchering lambs, that were placed on a block and cut towards the butcher, by their bloodier, grislier aprons.

  ‘Heaven or hell?’ asked Godehard of the scene.

  I only smiled in reply.

  We ordered more tea and another round of bacon sandwiches from a pale, wordless waif of a waitress who appeared, while corporeally intact, to have been filleted fully from her personality in partial counterpart to the massacred carcasses across the street.

  ‘You’re half German, I hear,’ Godehard said to me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Wunderbar!Welche Hälfte?’

  I bit into my sandwich.

  ‘Now, tell me,’ he continued, the smile leaving his face and his eyes looming large in their television-like frames. ‘I’ve never seen you so unhappy. What’s wrong?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You’ve always been the cheerful one. Boyfriend problems? Money problems?’ probed Godehard encouragingly.

  ‘No boyfriend and plenty of money.’ I smiled weakly. My knees against the old, clunking iron radiator were warm and my stomach, mouth and fingers, where they held my teacup, were hot; everything else was cold. When I had thought that I’d been answering London’s call, it felt to me now as though I’d been running away from Oxford. When I had thought that I might have been running away from my father, I now had to accept the possibility that I had been running away from myself. There is a paradox about the self that when you try to grasp it you change it, that the unreflective self is no longer such when reflected upon. I failed to see the connection between me and the excited girl who had climbed the stairs to a rented apartment with Freddie all those years ago, and I could only just recognise the girl who had gone from fun-loving sexual encounters to prostitution at around the time Isabella had become Gaia. The change went deeper than a name, however; it carried with it a sense of shame, of latent disappointment not by my own lights but by those of my mother and her family and of society at large. But shame is born of pride, and what pride I possessed fed my revolt against what shame I felt. ‘But I enjoy sex!’ I wanted to proclaim; and that, to me, was sufficient justification for it before I even contemplated hiding behind the ready incestuous abuse excuse that well-meaning social workers had seemed so willing to allow me. Again, I grasped for that understanding of myself and wondered if one could ever be sufficiently honest with one’s self to look where one knew it was hidden. I forced myself to look my reflection in The Hope’s window in the eye and to admit to myself that I had enjoyed the consensual sex that had nurtured my butterfly in adulthood, that had unlocked me from within, liberated me, permitted me my orgasmic, cosmic escape. Latterly, though, sex had become perfunctory and had rooted me in the physical, in my body, leaving it invested with an inhibiting consciousness. Isabella’s pale complexion looked back at me from The Hope’s window. I missed Mama and Opa. And Gaia who I hoped would have forgiven me the misappropriation of her name. I missed Oma, Cosmo and Uncle James with whom I maintained occasional contact and who, I hoped, missed the me I had once been and who didn’t know the me I had become.

  ‘Hel-lo,’ said Godehard, reminding me of his presence.

  ‘Everything’s fine, really,’ I said. ‘I’m just a little tired, I suppose.’

  We made small talk about Paderborn that Godehard had once visited and about my grandmother.

  Expressing surprise at the hour, Godehard stood to go. ‘Take care,’ he said.

  I ordered a third cup of tea in the hope of regaining my earlier pensive, meditative state of mind.

  Shoppers – butchers and retail, in their cars and in their vans – replaced the wholesalers who drove their lorries elsewhere, back home or to the railway depots. The animals that had gone to market as recognisable as they had been dead now left it amputated, disjointed, smuggled out in indistinguishable packages of plastic wrap.

  Mie

  Sebastian and I had taken a late afternoon flight to Hamburg from London City Airport and were the only people in business class. Our proximity, the small size of the plane and the dimmed cabin lights engendered an intimacy that I welcomed. As I leafed through the following day’s presentations, double-checking for typographical errors and making notes of the contributions I would make in the margin of my copy, he read yet another book I hadn’t seen him with before.

  ‘I Spit On Your Graves. That’s an interesting title.’

  ‘It’s an interesting book.’

  I closed the presentation. ‘What’s it about?’

  He closed the book. ‘That’s a good question. Ostensibly, it’s about a young American who is one-eighth black and seven-eighths white, but looks quite white and who seeks to revenge his brother’s death on “society”’ – he described inverted commas in the air with his fingers – ‘by killing a white upper-class society girl.’

  ‘Why, what did she do, that girl?’

  ‘She may have been implicated in his brother’s death but, really, her only “crime”’ – those fingers again – ‘was to befriend him and, so, to patronise him – at least, that’s what he feels.’

  ‘So you know the end already?’

  ‘Yes, I’m rereading it. I first read it ages ago, as a teenager, for its sensationalism.’ He looked down at the book on his lap. ‘It occurred to me recently that I’d missed something, that there was more to it than the schlock and horror.’

  ‘Why? How does he kill her?’

  He rolled his eyes and puffed his cheeks out and looked at me. ‘Oh, you don’t want to know that!’

  ‘Why not?’ I held my nose and swallowed in order to combat the discomfort of the barely pressurised cabin.

  ‘Well, it’s not very nice!’

  I turned in my seat to better look at him. ‘Try me.’

  ‘Well.’ He looked back down into his lap. His eyelashes, seen from my perspective with the soft overhead light, seemed extraordinarily long for a man’s. He looked at his watch as though a specific time or event that was due to happen at a given time would relieve him from a difficult moment. ‘Well, he forces himself on her. He pursues her into a field where he commits a sexual act on her in the process of which he bites her… out.’

  ‘He bites her. Out.’

  ‘Yes.’ He flared his nostrils in remonstration. ‘He bites her in a very sensitive place and she bleeds to death.’

  We left the North Sea behind us. From my window I could see the night clouds lit from above by the moon and occasionally, more weakly, from below by the lights of industrial and coastal towns in the Netherlands and in north-western Germany. We commenced our descent to Hamburg that, so Ursula had lectured my fellow pupils and me, was Germany’s largest port despite its being over 100 kilometres from the North Sea thanks to the magnificent River Elbe.

  ‘
So if that is what the book is ostensibly about, what is it really about?’ I asked him.

  He breathed deeply, as though relieved to be able to move the conversation on to another plane. ‘It’s about identity. About conforming to stereotype. The ironic thing is that, while he sees himself as black, his white friends don’t and yet he ends up conforming to a stereotype that he assumes would be assigned to him because of his heritage, if it were known. Something like that.’

  Through the plane window’s triple-glazing, I saw, superimposed on the night sky and twinkling traffic and city lights, this poor dead rich girl with blood weeping down from her panties and over her thighs and, standing over her, an albino negro, with a blood-covered mouth and dripping chin; a trashy image from a B-movie poster. ‘So, something like, are we who we choose to be or are we who people decide we are?’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’

  I liked. I looked at the book in his hands. It was by Boris Vian. ‘Vian means meat in French, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘That’s viande.’

  We dumped our bags at our hotel and asked for directions to the nearest restaurant; we fancied neither the hotel’s bland, tired dining hall nor a long walk under the one small umbrella we had. Side-stepping puddles and giving passing cars a wide berth as they drove through the ponds that collected around blocked gutters, we fell down some steps to the basement Italian restaurant we had been directed to. To scowls from a lugubrious waiter, we hung our sopping coats and umbrella on the hangers provided and watched as he removed the umbrella from its hanger and dropped it in the pool of water at the bottom of the umbrella stand.

  ‘Ein Tisch für zwei, bitte.’

  I had explained through my blushes, once when Sebastian had complimented me on my German, that I had felt obliged to do my best when learning the language in order to make up for how nasty my fellow pupils and I had been to Ursula.