Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  ‘I’m not laughing at you,’ you said defensively, still laughing.

  ‘Oh, no?’ I poked you in the ribs and you caught my hand and held it. We were still naked under the duvet. ‘What do you believe in, then?’

  You raised your head and rested it on your hand, looking straight at me, serious all of a sudden. ‘I thought I believed in everything you said to begin with. I believe in choice. I believe in me. And I think I believe in you.’ You released my hand and traced my lips with your fingers, inserting one in my mouth. I bit on the dry knuckle and held it. ‘You can bite harder,’ you said.

  I did.

  ‘Do you think that by eating me you can –’

  ‘I can what?’ I mumbled, sucking your finger.

  ‘Acquire my power? My knowledge, my essence and charisma?’ You spoke ironically.

  I bit harder yet.

  ‘Ouch!’

  I released you.

  ‘I liked that,’ you said, as through surprised at yourself, examining and then rubbing your knuckle.

  I could tell. ‘Tell me what else you like,’ I added more quietly, moving constantly a little besides you, to and fro.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you? Do you really want me to tell you?’ and parting my hair with your tooth-marked finger, tucking a lock of my hair behind my exposed ear you whispered in it, breathed into it, nibbled my earlobe, licked it.

  ‘Oh, that!’ I laughed. ‘That! That can easily be arranged!’ and I threw the duvet back with one hand while feeling for you with the other.

  *

  I have thrown back the duvet and face the end of the bed, the window and beyond. What do you and I look like from above? I know, as I flutter by. The duvet lies puckered, half on the foot of the bed, half on the floor. The tops of my feet touch the soft cotton of the sheet either side of your head, your blond hair radiating from you as though electrified. My knees are by your shoulders and my elbows are either side of your hips. The mattress is firm but yielding, soft but supportive of me in this act of supplication. Up, up I fly and around and around. I am dizzy with titillation, with excitement, elation and exhaustion, with liking and love for Sharon, for you and for me. I suffer a revelation, an epiphany of sorts so sharp in the joy it delivers that it’s as much a source of pain, the learning that I can love myself, that if I don’t love myself no one will. I’m airborne, carried higher on draughts and by winds. At intervals, I rest and breathe. I feel the tips of each of your fingers and thumbs distinctly on my buttocks. The pale hairs on your legs are the finest of seaweed, your knees the rocks that shift and shape over eons, the reefs that protrude from the seabed at the lowest of tides. We came up out of the sea and the mud, apparently. Grandpapa told me that butterflies pre-date Homo sapiens by tens of millions of years. Up, up and out I fly, floating in giddy happiness higher, higher. Out of the muck and the clay came the villages, the towns and the cities, few as big, as throbbing with self-importance, as London. There are the lanes, the streets and the avenues and there are the budding gardens, the bushy parks and the leafy commons; there are the houses, the shops and the offices with their stairs, escalators and lifts and the building sites with their elevator shafts, their pulleys and rising platforms and their cranes; there are the monuments, the columns, the spires – there are the gushing, pulsing fountains. The flooding river and its trickling tributaries are there. There its ponds and pools and drying puddles and there the city’s gutters and drains and the sewers’ stench surmounted by the smells of sap, of spring, of Life, of birth and rebirth. A hand alights on a bare shoulder; it’s the touch of a stranger. The city exhales and rests before tilting at the rising sun. I push up on my hands now and straighten my arms, I inhale and lift my head. If I close one eye I can align the nipple of one reflected hanging breast to sit just above St Paul’s massive pink-lit teat in the early dawn; they touch, my pendent nipple and the dome’s Golden Gallery, a mirror image at the horizon plane. I respond to the light touch of your hand on my thigh and swing one leg over and pad on hands and knees to the edge of the bed where I sit, looking out. You sit up and join me there: we are superimposed on London’s morning sky, side by side, impassive, reminiscent of Henry Moore’s King and Queen. Together, suspended, floating above the now-quiet market, we look down over the city and back and in at the two of us framed by the giant window on a bed in an apartment in a city, the bedroom dimly pink-lit too and warm-looking. I look closely and am delighted to see your hand in mine. I can hear your heart beat along with mine, in time with mine and with the city’s so that all pulses merge and I no longer know which throb is whose, yours, mine or the city’s or all of ours, just that it’s there, this rhythm, and that it’s all of ours, it’s the blood coursing through our veins, it’s the commuters spilling and streaming in their thousands from their homes, from the Underground’s tunnels and London’s double-decker buses into schools and shops and offices. The busy sun warms our faces and streams through your halo of golden hair on the way to lighting our bedroom. I look again and see our hands have become wings that we flap and dry in the unruly sun and, leaving us behind in the warming bedroom, beat purposefully so we rise along with the city’s millions of other waking butterflies.

  There is a riot of bright, transparent colour there in the sky where we flutter and swoop, flutter and swoop and whoop, We are one!

  Epilogue

  It’s like this. I am an options trader. This means that I see everything in terms of time to and probability and nature of outcome – in my personal as well as in my professional life. The one has leaked into the other. I tried explaining this to Sharon once and she kind of got it.

  ‘So Pascal’s bet,’ she had summarised, ‘is that you lose nothing by believing in God, whether he exists or not.’

  To which I had said, ‘Yes.’ About to elaborate, I realised she had fallen asleep.

  But Mie had really got it after she had stayed silent a moment and reflected. We were in a taxi in, of all places, Pascalstrasse, just north of Hamburg. ‘It’s not just that you lose nothing by believing in God but that you stand to gain an infinite amount if you gain everlasting life by believing. The argument is that from a risk and reward perspective one would be foolish not to believe.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I had said. ‘No risk and infinite reward.’

  And yet, yet, I didn’t believe because, actually, the risk that I saw was one of personal obliteration, the evisceration of the very thing that made me me. We must consider not only the probability and the size of the outcome but the stake too.

  From my study window, I look out over the garden and onto Isabella’s butterfly pavilion. We’re in the third year of her breeding butterflies here. That first summer, I was lying on my back in the grass playing with Sky when I looked up to see Isabella standing above us, a kaleidoscope of butterflies around her head. I reasoned then that if I remained married to her it wasn’t because I had committed to so many years previously but because I wished to on that very day as I hoped I would on every day.

  I can see Isabella move from breeding cage to breeding cage, observing, tidying. A butterfly has alighted on an eyebrow; she juts her lower jaw forward and blows it off. Others garland her hair, like, from a distance, a straggly daisy chain. She moves gracefully, despite being seven months pregnant with our third child.

  Sky is at nursery school, Jess is asleep in his buggy by the pavilion door. Isabella is possessive; too much so, I believe: she never lets the boys out of her sight when they’re at home. I think to myself that I should show more understanding and not take offence.

  I don’t like the names she has chosen for our children but, now that they are our children’s, I like them more. I hope for a girl, now, after two boys, but need to have Isabella understand she must choose a name other than Gaia, a name that has different connotations for me than it does for her. From the start, Isabella insisted that we would have three children.

  I trade from home now and Isabella works part-time as an art dealer, having begun with her broth
er’s pictures and demonstrated a remarkable capacity to price a painting just where a purchaser will buy it. We go into London once a week or so, me to lunch with other traders or former colleagues and Isabella, when Sky is at school, to catch up with Sharon in the gallery, taking Jess with her. Once a month, we go in as a family and show Sky and Jess the sights and the museums, keen that the wonderful city be accessible to them. Its avenues and streets feel like the arteries and veins that comprise us. The human proportions of its buildings and public spaces reflect us and refine us, our humanity, our aesthetics, our relationships.

  Occasionally, Sharon will join us; she knows all the short cuts through London’s parks and the most secluded places. While she and Isabella chat, I entertain the boys, reviewing, all the time, my facile assessment of Mie as mind and of Sharon as body and of Isabella as person, perfect fusion of the two, and conclude, every time, that I’m being unfair to both Mie and Sharon.

  Very occasionally, Kimberley joins us, when, by the end of the afternoon it will be me deep in conversation with her and Isabella running after the boys. Kimberley teaches English literature in a London university now and has a depth and breadth of reading I envy and find breathtaking. ‘You can find the solution,’ she says, wheezing, ‘to most of life’s important questions in a novel,’ to which I nod vigorously, while Isabella only smiles.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to my wife, Adriana, and my children, Gabriella and Ludovic, for rejoicing when I sought to retire from gainful employment in order to write my first novel, for their love and support. My thanks to my friends and readers for, variously, their encouragement, their too kind and often detailed feedback and their contribution to my Unbound promotional video – Neil Burgess, Dido Crosby, Annie Eaton, Catherine Evans, Caroline Harding, Takeshi Imamura, Judy Luddington, Sophia Neville, my mother Amy Noble, Helene Schlichter, Laura Williamson and Nadia Williamson. My thanks to Amélie Nothomb from whose Stupeur et tremblements I ‘borrowed’ the cast of Yumimoto and to Chris Whiting for his tour of Robert & Edwards (butcher’s).

  My thanks to Xander Cansell who accepted this book onto Unbound’s platform, to Annabel Wright and to Elizabeth Cochrane, my merciless structural editor. I’m also grateful to Gillian Holmes and Dan Smith, my diligent copyeditor and proofreader.

  My very special thanks to my supporters – to those generous friends and strangers who funded this book and made its publication possible. It wouldn’t have happened without you.

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