Striking a Balance

by Curtis, Norma

  He back-stepped to the girl at the door and turned to James curiously. ‘Have you been here before?’

  James seemed surprised that he should have asked. ‘Ye-es,’ he said. He put the beer bottle on the bar.

  Larry could see that there was a general movement, a general stirring, an air of something about to happen. He finished his beer with a grimace, and realised that was what the stirring had been — people finishing their drinks.

  James was moving towards another velvet curtain, and he was getting his wallet out again. There was another girl behind that curtain and she took the notes and jerked her head at Larry, who followed James through into the deeper dark.

  In this thick, smoky murk that made the previous bar seem floodlit, Larry could make out a few tables, because some dark red light overhead was reflecting off their polished shine.

  ‘Another beer?’ James asked.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ He could see the stage, they were practically on top of it. He looked around for another table, wary of possible audience participation, but already they were all taken. The room was warm and cigarette smoke swirled above their heads like dry ice.

  James returned and put a bottle in front of Larry, just as the music started. A singer, wearing a tight, red rubber dress, came on singing about spring. The curtains opened and suddenly a line of girls danced on, their skin dazzling in the spotlights. They were almost naked — they seemed to be wearing green leotards on back-to-front, because their breasts were exposed and so was their pubic hair. They were wearing head-dresses of yellow feathers. Spring, Larry thought, pleased, as though he was at Sadler’s Wells and had just made sense of it. Two of the girls caught his attention; one of them had very short, bleached hair (reminding him, he thought, of Megan again) and she danced with her chin up and her head held high. She was so defiant, brazen, almost, in her dancing, that she seemed to be clothed. The other had dark hair, caught up in a pony tail behind the feathers. She had her head down as she danced, and looked up coyly; she seemed more naked than the others, although of course the outfits were the same.

  He was suddenly aware that James was looking at him. ‘Which do you go for?’ he asked.

  ‘The blonde with the short hair,’ Larry said.

  James grinned; Larry could see his teeth in the dark.

  Spring gave way to summer: back-to-front swimsuits and beachballs thrown, bounced on, embraced; and summer gave way to autumn: brown see-through gowns and a great deal of swaying; and winter was lively again: white leotards and red air cuffs. And then the lady in rubber came back and sang once more and Larry felt himself relax with relief. It had been fine. Fine? He’d even enjoyed it. The point was, he hadn’t shown himself up in front of James. They were men of the world together — and his reputation was intact. He would soon see Bill again. It was an amusing enough way of spending the time. Dearer, he decided, thinking of the notes that had come out of James’s wallet, than Sadler’s Wells. It was no wonder James couldn’t afford to eat.

  The stage lights went off and the dim lights went on. The clapping had been desultory and there was no encore.

  Larry finished his drink and got up slowly, as though reluctantly, but James told him to sit down.

  ‘Got a surprise for you,’ he said. ‘What would you like in the world right now? No, don’t tell me. Stay there.’ He went to the bar and came back with a bottle of champagne and four glasses.

  More for something to do than out of curiosity, Larry tried to read the label in the dark. ‘Hey, this is Sainsbury’s champagne,’ he said. ‘How much did they charge you for it?’

  James laughed as though Larry had made a joke.

  Larry stared at the four glasses. Everyone knew that topless (and bottomless) dancers were only dancers after all.

  He saw them emerge, pale figures, from the direction of the stage and come over — how they could make them out in the gloom, he didn’t know. James solicitously arranged the chairs for them, then tucked them in under the table, as though they were grannies on a day out. He asked them if they wanted champagne or something else and they said they would have champagne. The blonde was on Larry’s right and a redhead with long legs was sitting on James’s left.

  James smiled at the blonde. ‘He likes you,’ he said to her, as though Larry was an elderly dog who had briefly lifted his tail. ‘You remind him of his wife.’

  She laughed.

  ‘This is Mandalie,’James said to Larry with the same exaggerated courtesy.

  Larry nodded, and attempted a smile. ‘Unusual name,’ he said.

  ‘My real name’s Mandy but Mandalie sounds nicer, doesn’t it? It’s after one of the actresses in Brideshead Revisited.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Or something. I heard someone say it once and I liked it.’ She still had her head tilted up and she looked, as far as he could make out, as brazen fully clothed as she had naked.

  ‘And mine is called Serena,’ James said.

  Larry nodded at her. Mine, he thought, registering the word. But he was safe for the moment. Mandalie — yes, he too liked it better than Mandy — was firmly tucked under the table still. Like Bill at mealtimes.

  James poured the champagne carefully, filling each glass accurately each time. ‘To us,’ he said, raising his.

  ‘To us,’ they echoed. Even Larry said it. Then he looked at his watch in a panic, wondering how long they had been there, but it was only three o’clock. Three o’clock in the afternoon, he said to himself. Soon he would be stepping out into bright daylight, squinting in the sun, picking up Bill; what a beautiful excuse, what a reason to leave. He felt light-headed with the thought of a legitimate escape. He drank some champagne.

  ‘What time do you have to leave, Larry?’ James asked. Nothing escaped him.

  ‘I’m picking Bill up at four,’ he said, trying to make his voice apologetic but not too apologetic, not so that they would try to be helpful and start thinking up excuses for him.

  ‘Better get going,’ James said.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ He could afford to be generous. ‘I’ve got a bit of time, yet.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Time that could be better spent having fun,’said James. ‘Come on.’ With a scraping of chair legs they got up, both girls and James. James picked up the bottle. Larry looked up at them.

  ‘They’ve got rooms upstairs,’ James said.

  The two girls started talking, heads together. They seemed happy, unruffled, cosy in the gloomy room.

  Larry imagined stopping it now by not getting up. Or, getting up and going upstairs and stopping then. Getting undressed and stopping then. Getting into bed and stopping then. Not stopping at all. Or stopping now.

  James was looking at him. And so were the girls.

  Larry looked back at them. Flick, flick, flick, an image change, man in a convertible to man on a bus to a man in a fight. Businessman to father. Lecher to husband. He wanted to be the man in the convertible, the businessman, the lecher, he wanted to be that man; he wanted to be him so fiercely that he heard his will scream it out silently in the dim smoky room, but he watched the two girls and he knew he wasn’t. He was just an ordinary man. A man with a wife.

  ‘All the more for me,’ James said softly, reading his thoughts. ‘Be what you are. Goodbye, mate.’

  The word was curiously wistful.

  ‘No, don’t say that.’

  ‘For an hour I can be myself. I won’t be lonely. I’m going to have fun. I’m going to live. I know what I am,’ James said, his voice as soft and heavy as the velvet curtains. He looked towards the girls. They were waiting and he left Larry and walked up to them and they parted for him to walk between them. The redhead put her slender arm around his neck and the blonde put her left hand in his and Larry could feel them, the arm and the hand, could feel how it would have been. Still could be.

  He stepped forward and then they were gone, behind some musty red velvet curtain somewhere where some other woman stood, bored, waiting to take the money.


  He felt alone, totally alone.

  No matter what the cost, he wanted Meg back.

  48

  On Monday morning, awakening with the sun shining determinedly through a crack in the blush pink curtains, Larry put his hands behind his head and wondered, not for the first time, what Bill had made of the day-long outing with his mother.

  He had volunteered nothing except that they’d eaten duck. There had been no mention of whether he’d been glad to see his mother or sad to leave her, but Larry had noticed that he’d been quiet all evening; tired perhaps. Tired at best.

  Megan had seen Bill back and left straight away, giving him no time to do all the things he’d wanted to. She’d waved at them, smiling, before she’d got into the car.

  Larry moved his head. The pure stream of sunlight was burning his brain and he moved to a cooler part of his pillow which was in shadow, and against the blood red of his eyelids, now maroon with yellow and red discs, he tried to remember Megan’s smile. He thought of her smiling a brave smile, her chin trembling; and of her getting in quickly before they saw the tears. Bill had hugged him and bent and kissed his knee all of a sudden and put his hand in his. It had felt a very small hand, he thought, as he reacquainted himself with it again after a day’s absence.

  Thinking of her made him want her. He listened for signs of movement from Bill’s bedroom and imagined her lying in the bed beside him as she’d always done, curled away from him, making it easy for him to get close to her, to put his arm around her and rest his palm on a small breast. He would hear her make a quiet, satisfying noise in her throat, one of the noises of lovemaking. One of the noises of their lovemaking, anyway; theirs was always wordless, always had been, no yes-yes-yesses, no oh-nos, no crudity. Their bodies were their language during those times. He remembered when he’d first realised the intimacy of silence, soon after they’d first made love, and the variety of the aftermath, tears or laughter or more silence or quiet words, came, too, as a surprise. He re-membered the revelation of the first ‘I love you’, and the newness of her in the light of it.

  He felt sick, suddenly, in the sunny bedroom, from wanting her and he rolled over with a groan and rolled himself out of bed.

  He went to the window and looked out. There was a day to be lived. They wouldn’t go to the playgroup, they’d have a change. He might have to get used to missing Megan. His wife had not been gone long and she might be gone for ever.

  He wouldn’t think of that.

  *

  When he came out of the shower, making wet footprints on the carpet, he shouted, ‘Bill? Where’s the bath mat?’ Bill was awake and the sound of Cartoon Network gibbered happily from the sitting room.

  ‘It’s a sheep,’ Bill called back.

  ‘Oh, right.’ The carpet had, by now, dried his feet anyway. Bill was sitting on the floor watching Popeye. Larry sat on the sofa and watched him too. All those years of pipe-smoking, he thought, and he was still going strong. ‘I thought we could go on a picnic today,’ he said.

  Bill didn’t even look up from the screen. ‘’kay.’Suddenly the message appeared to have got through. ‘Where to?’ he asked, with a sudden flare of interest. ‘To the seaside?’

  ‘Well, we haven’t a car, so no, not to the seaside, but to the Heath. It will be nice to have a picnic there, won’t it?’

  Bill looked at him with the air of one waiting to be convinced. ‘What will we take?’

  ‘What will we take? Sandwiches. Crisps. Drinks.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘And what else?’ It was things like this he used to find tricky.

  Not any more, though. ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Bread for the ducks.’

  ‘Just what I was thinking. We’ll take a picnic for them, too, what do you say?’

  Bill looked at him and giggled. Then he looked at Popeye and giggled.

  ‘I’ll go and get dressed,’ Larry said.

  *

  For a four-year-old, the Heath was a long way from the tube. It was very hot and Bill was grumpy even before they got to the outskirts. The green parkland seemed to steam in the heat. And they still had to walk, because of the promised ducks. Larry found himself carrying Bill in one arm and holding the picnic hamper with the other. His t-shirt began to stick to the sweat on his skin. He wondered what had possessed him to bring the hamper when a carrier bag would have done the job just as easily, and then he thought, I don’t want him to think we’ve gone downhill since Megan left — which was a pretty deceitful sort of argument compared with the poverty of being without a mother and a wife.

  There was so much food in the hamper that he could have set up a stall and sold most of it and still had enough for himself, Bill and the ducks. ‘You’ll have to walk for a bit, now,’ he said, and put both Bill and the hamper down, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ Bill asked in a thin voice.

  ‘Yes, I think so. There’s a kind of bridge with arches which is built over the pond. You’ll like it.’

  ‘I’m hot.’ A fly buzzed low around his head and he flinched. He was dusty and his face was already begrimed. The hair on his forehead was damp and his face was flushed.

  ‘We can stay here if you like,’ Larry said, ‘we can sit in the shade.’

  ‘I don’t want to stay here.’

  ‘I’ll carry you a bit further,’ Larry said. He picked Bill and the hamper up with an effort and began to walk. His muscles were screaming and the heat was beating on his head and the light began to dapple in his eyes. He stopped and blinked.

  ‘Are we there?’ Bill asked.

  ‘No, not yet. ’He took a few more steps and thought of heatstroke and of what would happen if he collapsed. What would Bill do? He considered asking him, but thought better of it. Don’t want to frighten him. But this is some walk, up a bank, careful not to slip.

  And there it was, like an undiscovered Monet, all blues and greens and reflections and ripples, and tiny flies lifting out of the grass in a cloud and the surface of the water dinting under insect legs and the arches bestowing a grey shade for fish of a more delicate disposition. He put Bill down and Bill flopped backwards into the grass, arms and legs outstretched. He shut his eyes and smiled. ‘I’m never going to die,’ he said.

  Larry put the basket down and leaned against it and looked towards the water. ‘Nor me.’ He liked the arching of the red bricks on the bridge high over the water. People were walking across it, looking down, looking at themselves, seeing themselves being a part of it.

  He moved the hamper away from his head and lay next to Bill. He could feel the dry seed heads of grass tickling his face in the breeze; oh where had that breeze been when he’d needed it? It ruffled the hairs on his arms like a ripple. A hum vibrated near him and faded. There was a small splash like a stone hitting the water. He felt himself drift. Never going to die.

  *

  The ducks ate very little of the picnic in the end. They weren’t given much and what they had they nibbled reluctantly and without enthusiasm, having partaken of people’s picnics all day.

  The only thing that restored them to any sort of vitality was a black Labrador with religious delusions, who amused Bill and Larry no end. He’d start off like some cartoon Muttley, reach the edge of the land and keep walking and when with alarm he found himself sink he’d swim with head up to the bank, study the water, and try again, eyes fixed on the bored common shovellers, and be shocked to his bones to find himself wet.

  This, to Bill, was funny enough. And Larry had begun laughing at Bill’s laughter, which was infectious.

  But the dog was determined and undaunted. Once it realised that its legs didn’t float, it leapt at the ducks with its legs splayed out as if intending to belly-flop on them. They swam out of reach with increasing alarm as the attempts got more frequent. And then to Bill’s disappointment, the dog gave up and lay panting in the sun not far from them.

  ‘Is there any more juice?’
Bill asked.

  ‘I think so. Could you pass me the flask, too, please?’

  It wouldn’t be so bad going home in the cooling afternoon, the basket empty of food and the flask empty of tea. Why was it he could never throw flask tea away, he wondered. Sometimes it stayed in there from one picnic-time to the next, to be rediscovered in the kitchen, reconstituted as a thin gruel of tea and a thick layer of cheese. And why was it that flask tea always turned grey? He would have asked Megan. It was the kind of thing they talked about on lazy days. They had talked of nothing, very happily, making each other laugh.

  ‘Time to go home,’ he said. ‘Will you pass me that carton, please, and is there anything else on your side to take?’

  The walk back was easier; mostly downhill of course, and the breeze refreshed them.

  The tube was busy but it was with a sense of weary contentment that they walked from the station to their home.

  As they returned, Larry narrowed his eyes to look at a familiar figure loitering near the gate. The street was in shadow and he realised that it was Emma, dressed in her polka dots. ‘She misses us,’ he said to Bill with a laugh but he knew that she had seen them and now he could see that she wasn’t laughing back. Her face bore the set mask of the bearer of bad news. Damon, he thought, and began to run towards her.

  Bill couldn’t keep up, and Larry swung him up into one arm, the picnic basket hitting his leg. He was breathing hard when he reached her and she gave him a lop-sided smile.

  ‘You two been having fun?’

  ‘Damon?’

  She smiled. ‘He’s all right. Bit of a headache, that’s all.’ She crouched down to look at Bill. ‘And how are you?’

  ‘I’ve seen a dog.’

  Emma was smiling as she looked up. ‘Look at his freckles. You’ve had a good day,’ she said.

  ‘It’s been beautiful, hasn’t it?’ He put the hamper down on the pavement, feeling in his pocket for his keys, and looked at her quizzically. Not that you’re not welcome, but why the visit? It looks serious.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Come on in.’ He went up the path and unlocked the door and pushed it open with his foot. Bill dashed in through his legs, pleased at the arrival of the unexpected guest.