Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  The bar was a long way from us, well at the other end of this long, low-ceilinged room as if viewed from the objective lens of a telescope, and it all felt very private, very intimate. Godehard was speaking to a punter while the other girls looked on without interest. I felt very pleased to have you and imagined the conversation I would have with Sharon when I saw her next.

  ‘So,’ you said, looking around you. ‘This is an interesting place.’

  ‘Have you never been here before?’ I knew you hadn’t.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Ever to a place like this?’

  You shifted in your seat. ‘In Japan – well, they’re different there, the geisha bars.’

  ‘Sharon told me you’d been to Japan.’

  You asked, ‘So, how does this place work, exactly?’

  ‘Didn’t Godehard tell you?’

  ‘That chap at the door? I didn’t really take anything in that he said, frankly.’

  I placed my champagne flute on the table and rearranged the top of my dress to better explain. ‘Like this. We can sit and chat for a while, but then we can go into one of the private rooms for a dance that’ll last a couple of songs.’

  ‘And then?’ you asked.

  I could see my outstretched legs and feet in their glass shoes through the smoked brown glass table-top and waggled my toes.

  ‘And then you go home with me. Come on,’ I said and held out my hand.

  You stood and indicated the champagne flutes. ‘Shall we leave them here?’

  I said you could take yours if you wanted to. You buttoned your jacket, middle button only, then took your champagne flute in one hand and my hand in the other, allowing me to lead you back the way we had come.

  We weaved, you, me and our dull reflections, through the brown sofa suites, along the once polished floor to the bar area and to the adjoining private rooms. The lights were low and flattering to both the girls and the rooms themselves: they hid the dirt on the floor and on the benches’ worn mauve plastic upholstery, rubbed bare by the clenched arses of so many punters. The seating area was horseshoe-shaped and surrounded by mirrors. You closed the mirrored door behind you and there we were in the pink gloom: hundreds of yous and mes: a stripper and her punter reflected to infinity from the waist up with hundreds of disco balls rotating slowly above us, duplicated and reduplicated past and future images of a man and a woman.

  You said something and I replied automatically without taking in what you had said; I was thinking of what dance to give you. I invited you to sit down, then stepped in between your legs and moved them apart with mine. ‘You must be comfortable and relaxed,’ I said, and I ran my hand through your hair as I looked down at you. It gave me a strange sense of satisfaction, messing up your already ruffled hair. I held my hand to my nose and sniffed. It smelled nice, of apple and something else. Your hair and my hand were the only things that smelled nice in that room. You sat there, palms down either side of you, looking up at me expectantly. ‘I said, relax,’ I said. I swayed gently in time with a pop song.

  ‘I said, this is all too weird,’ you said.

  I danced long and well. With the right person, a clean and courteous man, I could escape, withdraw into a song and into my body and so leave it and the moment. Away, I became more desirable. I could touch you but you couldn’t touch me. I maintained contact throughout, my knee against your knee, a caress, my hand on your shoulder, the brush of my hair in your face, my bottom perched on your lap momentarily, fleetingly, full of promise that failed to deliver. You closed your eyes and opened them. You parted your lips and licked them. You shifted in your seat. We entered our fourth song and I knew that Godehard would be watching me closely on one of the monitors behind the bar by now; when the song came to an end the lights rose. We were both perspiring. The look on your face as you sat looking up at me was of a child coveting a sweet.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ you asked defensively.

  ‘Nothing.’ I swept your hair back with both hands and patted it down. ‘I’ve ruffled you.’

  You stood and ensured your jacket was buttoned. ‘That was, that was…’ you said, lost for words.

  I excused myself in order to towel down and to fetch a shawl, the worst thing about my job being the constant passage from cold inactivity to perspiration and back; there was always a girl with a cold in my place of work.

  ‘The worst thing?’ you queried.

  ‘That and the lack of sunlight,’ I said.

  You said, ‘Look, as you’re going to get dressed anyway, why don’t you get dressed once and for all and we can just, you know, move on? I’ll settle up in the meantime.’

  *

  ‘So, tell me about Sharon,’ I requested, taking your arm with one hand and clutching my coat around my neck against the night air with the other.

  ‘Sharon,’ you reflected. ‘She’s a lovely girl. There. That’s about it. You probably know her better than I do. How can you walk in those?’

  ‘It’s not far.’ I kept flat shoes in my shoulder bag but stiletto heels allowed me to totter, to lean on my escort and to bring out the beau in him.

  It was midnight and the streets were quiet. We made our way from pool of light to pool of light, Farringdon’s streetlight-lit stepping stones. We stopped at a red pedestrian traffic light.

  ‘That’s a hive of activity up there,’ you said, looking ahead. We started across the road.

  ‘That’s the meat market.’

  We made our way through the press of traders and butchers, through thickets of pending carcasses and sides of meat.

  ‘This place is fantastic!’ You marvelled at the buzz and bustle, the lights and the shouts, the slabs and parcels of animals, the energy and the geniality that the meat market radiated. We stood to one side so you could look around you. ‘It’s like a cathedral.’ You looked up at the ceiling, at the roof supports, struts and girders. ‘A Victorian cast-iron cathedral built in veneration of meat.’ A side of venison on a running porter’s shoulder obstructed your face from mine for a moment, a purple brush across my field of vision. ‘It’s frenetic!’

  ‘You should have seen it before it was modernised,’ I shouted. ‘All this’ – and I indicated the new overhead meat rail system – ‘wasn’t here then. It was a riot.’

  ‘It’s worse than our trading room! Or maybe I mean better. It’s like your strip club. Flesh – meat on display. Fresh meat for sale! Sorry,’ you added, but seemed too enthralled to really care that you might have offended me.

  *

  ‘Here we are,’ I said.

  As Frederica had observed, our punters rarely passed more than a cursory glance around our sitting room, whether out of courtesy or lack of interest, and, even when they did, I was indifferent to them, to what conclusions about the apartment’s inhabitants they might draw. However, Sharon’s introduction had changed the nature of our encounter; you were the friend of a friend. You wandered around, picked items up and examined them closely before replacing them; you admired the view that you guessed rightly would be of even greater attraction in daylight.

  ‘You live here alone?’ you asked.

  I told you no, but that Frederica had met a man and was more out than in, so it felt to me as though I did.

  ‘How lucky,’ you stated, leaving me unsure whether you meant for me, generally, or for us, for this evening, specifically.

  You declined a beer and a tea but accepted a glass of water.

  ‘This is the second time today I’ve been in a girl’s apartment,’ you said to the window.

  ‘Did you not get what you wanted the first time?’ I asked your reflection coquettishly. I stood by you and we looked out over the London skyline, our reflections hanging in the night sky above the meat market in parody of the pigs on butchers’ hooks being shuffled from lorry to stall below.

  Turning from your reflection to you, I made a mental note to ask Sharon what had done it for her, what she had seen in you, to discover whether she had fallen for the obviou
s in you, your symmetrical features, your mane, your height, the perfectly straight nose, or for the defects that rendered you human: the slightly overly large ears, which was presumably why you wore your hair long, and the canine tooth that rested on your lower lip when you hadn’t quite closed your mouth, that made you look boyish and cheeky, more endearing than frightening and more goofy than frighteningly good-looking.

  ‘Shall I help you out of your coat?’ I offered.

  ‘It’s a little chilly,’ you protested.

  I insisted. ‘It will be warmer in the bedroom.’ I removed your coat and hung it on the back of the chair. ‘It’s this way.’ I pulled you by the hand but you resisted, kept your feet rooted so that our reflections in the window appeared arrested mid-dance.

  ‘Should we, you know, agree terms or however you put it?’ you proposed determinedly, as though intent on overcoming your timidity.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. Money doesn’t come into it. Not at all. Come,’ and I pulled you into the hallway and into my bedroom and closed the bedroom door behind us.

  ‘Hold on,’ you said, and paused to consider Cosmo’s pencil drawings that I had tacked to the doorframe. ‘You?’ you enquired.

  I shook my head. ‘My brother.’

  You nodded approvingly. ‘Very good.’

  No one had ever remarked on Cosmo’s art to me and I was overcome with lapping waves of pride and gratitude.

  You looked at Cosmo’s pictures more closely and then at me, as though assessing me in a new light. ‘Really good.’

  I kicked my stiletto heels off.

  ‘The same wonderful view,’ you noted, ‘and, yes, you’re right, it is warm in here.’

  Our reflections had followed us in.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking down at the cast-iron radiator that ran the length of the window that took up the entirety of one wall. ‘We don’t even need curtains.’

  ‘Doesn’t the daylight bother you?’

  ‘No! I can’t get enough of it. And there’s no one to overlook us. Anyway, it’s night now.’

  You sat on the bed and I knelt to unlace your shoes. ‘I can do that,’ you said quickly, embarrassed.

  *

  I hadn’t stripped provocatively but had undressed with my back to you and hung my clothes in the wardrobe and yours on the back of a chair. We lay in bed side by side with the duvet pulled up to our armpits as I imagined virgins might on their wedding night, or a married couple many years after theirs. From our low vantage point at some remove from the window we could no longer see Smithfield Market’s roof but office blocks, silhouettes of irregular shape and height that bordered the river, St Paul’s dome, the flashing lights of the radio masts in South London’s more elevated suburbs and, before them all, our faces, hovering disembodied in pools of soft light and each framed by the massive window’s vertical and horizontal crossbars like a diptych. I felt for you under the duvet and found your thigh and then your hand and held it.

  ‘You’ll forgive me if my mind is spinning,’ you said, turning to look at me and laying one forearm across your brow. ‘I’ve had two options expire out of the money and now.’ You stopped and started again. ‘I’ve had two rejections and now this. Not to mention extreme sexual provocation in two clubs, culminating in a dance stimulating enough to drive a man to commit an act of unspeakable savagery.’ You squeezed my hand, I assumed, to convey the humour that your eyes failed to communicate.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and then, ‘Well, your luck is in!’ and I wriggled a little closer to you. We lay not quite touching, fingertips to fingertips was all, and yet I could feel the heat that emanated from you all the way down my right side, down my thigh, calf, ankle and foot. ‘So who was foolish enough to rebuff you?’ I asked, flattering you.

  ‘Sharon, you know,’ you replied. ‘But I understand. To return to an old flame is a retrograde step. And besides,’ you added ruefully, ‘I didn’t exactly try to woo her with flowers and charm this evening.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I think I expressed all the subtlety of a caveman. If I could have hit her on the head and dragged her home after me, I would have.’

  ‘How do you find her? I mean, what’s she like in the office? I’ve always struggled to picture her there.’

  ‘Much as she is elsewhere, I would think. Anyway, we don’t work in what I would term a conventional office. It’s more like the market down there. She’s guileless, friendly, enthusiastic.’

  ‘And the other? There was another rejection?’ My little finger, as I held your hand, traced little circles on your thigh.

  You flared your nostrils and grimaced, your mouth down at the lips, the tip of your canine on one side just visible. ‘She’s Japanese. A colleague of ours. She is the opposite, come to think of it, quite the opposite of Sharon. Everything that Sharon isn’t intellectually and nothing that she is physically. She is as rigid as Sharon is pliable, as frigid as Sharon is warm. To think,’ you sat up a little, ‘to think I had to visit her bedroom to learn that!’

  ‘So your ideal woman,’ I teased, ‘would have a little of your Japanese girl in her and a little of Sharon?’ Tracing circles on the inside of your thigh now.

  You responded by turning to me and burrowed your face in my neck, inhaling deeply. ‘That bit, that bit behind a woman’s ear, the smell and taste of it, that’s what I love,’ you said.

  ‘You kinky thing!’ I exclaimed.

  You turned fully, your right leg over mine now, your arm around my shoulder and both our hearts beating faster. Your head still buried in my hair, you clutched me hard. ‘Your dancing,’ you said, ignoring my teasing. ‘I have never had to exercise such self-control. Are men really expected to behave when tormented so much?’

  I laughed and stroked your hair. ‘You’re flattering me!’ And flattening me. I adjusted my weight under yours in the language of slight body shifts, movements, touches that all lovers understand. I raised my knees and was surprised, of all the touches and sensations, to be aware of my big toes against the backs of your knees, as though they had been made to fit those tendon-edged hollows, and I looked into your eyes to read if you had read the amusement in mine and was overwhelmed by the intensity of their blue. I had the impression of swimming up to them, the bedside light filtering through the hanging, curling locks of your hair that tickled my cheeks and my neck, up from ultramarine depths, up, up into your eyes and through, higher yet, flexing and inflating forewings and hindwings, slowly but strongly, purposefully and evenly, the night’s warm draughts carrying me higher, higher and out.

  What do we look like to birds, bees and butterflies, seen from above? We look alike as we come together, separate, travel side by side for minutes or years, move in contra-direction, evade one another, lie side by side, lie on top of each other. Our identities blend, they change, they interchange, in intercourse they interchange and change back and change again; the coincidence of our bodies with our selves is striking, wondrous – miraculous. We lose and find ourselves at a steady rhythm. We are lazy: it’s that much easier assigning one self to one body, that’s all, it’s less confusing and easier to follow and to keep tabs on, it’s easier to advance the existence of, to have flourish, every little parcel of cells that comprise each one of us than to admit of the self as a fiction, as an essential and efficient narrative that enables the persistence of us, of Life. We are wired for deception, for Life’s anabasis, advancement and promulgation, for our blind faith in Life. It is the flesh on our bones, It is the sugar in Mama’s bonbons, It is the air in St Ethelreda’s Church, the hanging Jesus Its best salesman. We congregate in villages, in towns and in cities where we hide in full view. Deception by numbers. At the meat counter in a supermarket in Paderborn, a red kidney-shaped ticket dispenser spewed numbered tickets out to Oma and me that we exchanged together with money for packets of offal, chops and sausages that Oma would have me carry home in cloth carrier bags, stained brown at the bottom from years of leaky meats. Look after the package. Don’t drop it
. Guard it with your life! Don’t you know? You are the package you carry with you. Mama, I forgive you. Papa, I forgive you. You were wrongly wired, overzealously wired, your urge to multiply and go forth was too great, out of control, it was misplaced, misdirected is all. Mama, I cannot forgive you. Papa, I cannot forgive you. You haunt my every waking day, my every move with every lover. You crept into my garden and into my bedroom; you stole my innocence, poisoned my apple, corrupted my happiness, you severed me from my body as a baby’s umbilical cord to its mother is cut. You made it impossible for me to love and to be loved without my seeing your face and hearing your hollow endearments. And those of your friends. You sold me too cheaply, Papa. That you were pinned to the worktop by Grandpapa as you pinned a butterfly to its board is no excuse, Papa. I must see your face, feel your breath, bear your weight: you colour my life not in pastels but in ochres, crimsons and blacks. You pushed and you shoved, there’s pushing and shoving and then, only then do I arrive at a liberation of sorts: my butterfly, the butterfly I am, me. But now I tire of myself, that me that is not the true me, not me in my entirety.

  *

  ‘Are you sleeping?’ I repeated, a little louder.

  ‘Not any longer.’ You had fallen asleep on your back so you had only to open your eyes and turn your head a little to look at me, the tip of your side tooth just visible on your lower lip irresistible; I lowered my head and kissed it, kissed your lips, gently.

  ‘What do you believe in?’ I asked you quietly.

  ‘Really?’ you asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘Give me a clue,’ you requested. ‘Tell me what you believe in first.’

  ‘It’s not so much what I believe in, just more what I believe.’

  ‘What do you believe?’

  ‘That there’s more than this and that there’s nothing. That I’m nothing and everything. That I’m not just mind and not just body and that I’m not any more than either or the two of them combined. That you can’t step in the same garden twice. That everything I have ever done or said was said or done by different versions of myself. That the selves I’ve left behind are more strange to me than strangers. What’s so funny?’