Sex and Death

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Sex and Death Page 12

by Sarah Hall


  ‘That’ll be the yeast,’ he said, as though the problem was familiar. ‘Whole place reeking of it, our kid. All that rising action. Stuff of life.’ The party was quieter than we’d hoped for and this wasn’t a conversation I wanted overheard. God had a voice that could project. It was an older crowd on the whole and the women had a strong commitment to knitwear. In the back room there were bald men with homemade guitars singing paragraphs of Foucault to a twelve-bar blues. We finished the punch and were halfway down the road before Tony thought to ask where we were going. God said there was a party in Headingley and we had time so we might as well walk. The evening was long and the shadows were longer and we had all the time in the world. We were lost and we had to cross a dual carriageway and cut through some woods. In the woodland there were three boys standing around a fire and two girls sitting on a mattress and nobody spoke as we made our way past. In a park James fell down a grass bank and it took a few minutes to get him back on his feet. This was how that summer went: walking around looking for the next party or gig, jumping on buses and trains, chasing rumours of lock-ins and open-mic nights and gallery shows and often this long veiled light of the sun going up or coming down. We never made arrangements but God always showed up. It was a long time before I even knew where he lived but I had started to think of him as a friend. I didn’t know if he considered me the same. We came into the leafy streets of Headingley and God put his arm around me and said maybe this would be the night I found my way to the bread-oven door. I must have looked puzzled for a moment too long.

  ‘Bush, our kid. Boggy hollow?’ I nodded, but he carried on. ‘Olive grove, mangrove, peaches and cream?’ I told him I’d got it but he persevered. ‘Lady garden? Garden of tears?’ X-Man said something in Greek which he later translated as secret harbour. I told them all I had got it, and God said getting it was exactly my problem, and as we came to the house where the party was he started singing ‘Like a Virgin’ to the tune of ‘Ilkley Moor Baht ’at’, and he was still singing as we walked through the door. God always liked to make an entrance.

  I didn’t know how lost I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to talk to girls but there were some things I just couldn’t say. Some of my best friends were girls and we talked a lot. I never knew how to get to where the talking would stop; if there were cues I was missing or questions I was failing to ask. At heart I assumed that no one would want me so there seemed little point taking the chance. The beds I slept in were all too big and I was kept awake often thinking of these things. The summer came to an end and the autumn was wet. I didn’t get the funding for my PhD and sometimes after work I went for drinks on campus with a girl who had. She’d been on my masters course and was writing a thesis on hypertext. These were the early days of the internet and I didn’t always understand what she said. Her name was Isobel and she had eyes that were hard to avoid. She had a way of holding a gaze. She’d ask what I was reading and my answers made her sad. One night she took me to a benefit gig for a group called Soldiers for Peace and before the music started there were people talking on the stage talking about checkpoints and demolitions. This was in the Wesleyan chapel in Shipley. One of the speakers was a woman who’d served in the Israeli army and she challenged the audience directly while Isobel took notes on her use of rhetorical device.

  ‘It’s nice that you came tonight,’ the woman said; ‘it’s nice that you are concerned and you care, okay. So what are you doing to change things? Who are you challenging? What good is your concern to us?’ She looked angry, and I noticed that her eyebrows were dark and incredible and how attractive she was in her scorn, and I knew if I didn’t get laid soon my politics would be lost in a haze of objectification. The band started playing, and when Isobel touched my arm to ask what I wanted from the bar it was the first time a woman had touched me for weeks. I kept my arm still so the sensation would take longer to fade. I saw God and Jimmy James talking to the Soldiers for Peace, reading their leaflets and signing petitions. Later when they said they were leaving I asked Isobel if she wanted to join us, but she had somewhere to be and for the rest of the evening I felt raw with shame for having asked her at all.

  There was a gallery opening in Saltaire, and a warehouse party in Manningham, and by the end of the night we were getting henna tattoos on our hands to raise money for the Zapatistas. The logic of these things wasn’t always easy to follow. At some point in the evening God told me he was adopted and I couldn’t work out how the conversation had begun. He’d never known who his real parents were but his adoptive parents were so good to him that he waited until they died before trying to find out. He told me this like it was something he’d read in a book. We both kept our hands very still. I wondered how long the henna would take to wash off. After the second funeral he went to the archives and looked out his birth certificate. He made it sound easy. The tattoos were done by then and we stood up but the woman told us not to leave until they’d dried. Wave your hands around, she told us.

  ‘When I found it there were no father listed,’ God said. This stuff just rolled out of him sometimes. We both stood there with our hands in the air. ‘But my mother’s name was Ruth Schalansky.’ He looked at me like I should know what he meant but it took me a moment to cop on.

  ‘So – God’s Jewish?’ I asked. He shrugged.

  ‘Who knew?’

  *

  One night in the spring we were thrown out of a party in Sowerby Bridge. I’d been talking to a concrete poet from Kingston-upon-Hull who had just started teaching in Tony’s department. She had pale eyes and freckles across her nose and a skirt that swung thinly around her thighs when she danced. She was dancing while we talked and I was trying to keep looking at her eyes. Once I realised how long we’d been talking I got nervous and ran out of things to say. She didn’t seem to mind. There was a silence between us. A shout went up from across the room. Jimmy James had fallen asleep in an armchair and wet himself, and the BBC producer whose party it was started shouting about the chair being genuine Eames. He tried pulling Jimmy to his feet, and we told him to get his hands away. Someone came through with a bucket and sponge, and the producer told us all to get out. As we were leaving the poet said something I couldn’t hear. I didn’t even get her name. When we came out of the house a drunk driver skidded on the corner and crashed into a row of parked cars. It happened with a chill kind of slowness and a great racket and by the time it had stopped God was already in the road. These things followed him round and he took them in his lengthy stride. He opened the door and snatched at the keys and told the driver to go ruddy nowhere. He pushed the man’s face hard against the steering wheel to be sure. We were away down the hill before the police arrived and at the station we had to carry Jim onto the train. By this time we knew Jim had a problem and his drinking wasn’t funny any more.

  The next morning I woke with a pain in my neck and the many faces of Noam Chomsky looking over me from the bookshelves above where I’d slept. There was an open patio door beside me and a cold wind coming up from the river below. The patio was thick with bottles and ashtrays. Past the patio the garden fell steeply away. I had a blanket around me but it was thin and I felt exposed. I was still in Mytholmroyd. We’d turned up late the night before and it looked like I was the only one left. It was the leaving party for a semiotics professor from Isobel’s department who wasn’t quite retiring but going on extended research leave. There’d been a restructuring. The party had been tense and most people had left by two. When I’d fallen asleep God was still out on the patio talking to Tony the Dutch about the Soldiers for Peace. I’d heard him say something about going to Bethlehem. It seemed far-fetched. The morning was bright and there was an elaborate smell of coffee. I saw the semiotics professor in the kitchen reaching for some cups, bending for the milk, setting a loaf and a knife on a board. Her movements were flowing and light. When I tried to stand I felt like an old man. She watched me creak towards her and said good morning. There was classical music. The coffee machine on t
he counter was beginning to steam and she asked if I wanted one. I leant on the counter across from her. My neck was so stiff I had to move my whole body when I tried to nod. She flinched. I said it was nothing and she talked about posture, and when she mentioned the Alexander Technique I thought she was talking about sex.

  ‘Imagine your head as a ping-pong ball, floating on a cushion of air.’

  ‘It’s more like a cannon ball,’ I said. She smiled, and reached over to put one hand on the back of my neck. The other hand pushed flatly against my chest. Her fingers were cold and smooth.

  ‘Let your shoulders fall,’ she said. She had her hands on me and we were listening to classical music and she was making coffee and instructing me and this was the closest to adulthood I’d yet come. ‘Let yourself really stretch,’ she said. ‘Keep those shoulders down.’ She was talking quietly because she was standing so close. She had faint lines around her eyes that looked like experience. I wanted her to experience me. It was true she was older but by then my parameters were broad. She asked if I felt any better. I wanted to say please don’t stop. There was the sound of a toilet flushing. A door opened, and God appeared before us.

  ‘Now then,’ he said. The professor dropped her hands and turned to the coffee machine. I asked if she’d been introduced.

  Later Tony surfaced as well and the three of us went looking for a bus. God asked outright if I’d nailed the professor and I told him I didn’t like his tone.

  ‘It’s objectification,’ I said. ‘It’s problematic.’

  ‘Problematic, my arse. You were objectifying her all night.’ He punched me lightly on the arm and it hurt like hell. God didn’t know his own strength sometimes. ‘You missed a chance there, pal. Body language were bang on.’

  ‘Signs and signifiers,’ Tony said. ‘She was signifying, for certain.’ I had no idea if they were winding me up or what they were saying so I asked what all the talk about Bethlehem had been in aid of. Tony looked at God and threw up his hands. God said he’d signed up to rebuild demolished houses in Bethlehem, and to take direct action against evictions. It seemed like a joke but it wasn’t a joke. I asked if he thought that would be safe, and Tony said he’d already asked all this. God didn’t reply. He had a face on him like he thought we were missing the point. There was a silence as we walked down the hill. I asked if he’d even be allowed into the West Bank, being Jewish.

  ‘Who’s Jewish?’ God said. ‘That birth certificate means nowt. I’m toto intacto down doors. I don’t even know when Passover is. And what about my father, anyway? He could have been a Catholic, or Muslim! He could have been a Palestinian, pal. Who knows?’

  ‘This seems unlikely,’ Tony said, and he had just enough of a smile on him to get God riled.

  ‘Fuck you know about likely, Dutchie?’ God grabbed hold of Tony’s collar and held his face close. Tony looked him in the eye. ‘Fuck you know about any of this?’ I stood and I watched and I didn’t know what to do. It was all falling apart. Tony apologised and God let him go and at the train station we stood on different platforms, waiting for different trains.

  *

  The parties dried up for a time after that. I was working weekend shifts to cover my rent, and X-Man went back to his parents’ house, and no one saw Jimmy James for months. God kept out of sight. Then came the news that Tony the Dutch was getting married, to the concrete poet from Kingston-upon-Hull. There was surprise and later there was complacency. We were too young to notice what this first marriage meant. The weekly whirl of gigs and shows and traipsing around looking for strange beds to wake up in was coming to an end. The pairing off had started in earnest. Soon the babies would come and the parties would stop. This would be it, now, until we hit our forties and the divorces started coming through.

  There was a stag weekend. Tony barely understood the concept but let himself be talked into a minibus with Jimmy James at the wheel, heading for the Lakes. Having Jim drive was the best way of keeping him sober. Everyone else was drinking as soon as we hit the M62. The first stop was a paintballing centre, which was a surprising choice. Most of us came from backgrounds of cooperative play, and this was the first time we’d held anything that looked like a gun. Within minutes of the briefing we were crawling through the brambles and the killing had begun. I kept getting taken down by a Peace Studies lecturer who hid in a thicket of birch trees and only ever needed one shot. He was a Quaker. He was very good at sitting still. At one point I got stuck in a ditch with Tony the Dutch, pinned down by two gender theorists from York St John. We sat it out and he lit a cigarette. He asked if I knew what my problem was. I asked were we talking about paintballing or something else.

  ‘You’re just waiting for something to happen, always,’ he said. ‘All these years I’ve known you, just waiting. Like you’re entitled.’ The smoke from his cigarette curled up into the air and a volley of paintballs burst against the trees overhead. ‘You won’t get the girl by standing around looking pale and interesting. You don’t look interesting enough for that.’

  ‘That’s nice, thanks.’

  ‘None of us look interesting enough for that, come on. All these years I keep hearing the no-one-will-want-me bullshit.’ This was starting to feel like advice. It was hard to take advice from a Dutchman in a face mask and a camouflage gilet. ‘It’s very safe for you. You never have to take the chance of being turned down.’ My face mask was starting to fog. What did he know. He had no idea. The paintballs were coming faster now and we could hear movements towards us in the trees. Tony and I had been friends since the first week of university and he’d never talked like this. He finished his cigarette and caught my eye and we ran from the ditch in a final desperate charge. We didn’t get far but we went down together.

  And then came the incident, which wasn’t planned although it must have seemed that way. It was the last rest break of the day and everyone was ready for a drink. The light was starting to fail. God was talking about the instructors only covering their backs with the warnings they’d given. ‘It’s nonsense,’ he muttered, running his hand through his beard, stroking the words away. ‘These pellets won’t break skin at any distance. That minimum range talk is a crate of guff. It wouldn’t do any damage. You could shoot a man in his hind-parts from right here and it wouldn’t do owt. Would be funny and all.’

  He was looking up into the trees as he spoke. He caught my eye for the briefest moment, glanced at Tony the Dutch, and looked back into the trees. Tony was bending to retie his bootlaces. I could feel the weight of the gun in my hands. As I shifted it the paintballs rattled in their hopper. I felt the tiny plop as one of them slipped into the chamber. Tony was taking a long time to tie his bootlaces. Almost as though he was waiting. As though the thing was ordained. The afternoon light filtered through the trees. The instructors were talking amongst themselves. God turned his back slightly, as if to say let it be so. I lifted my gun and from no more than six inches I shot Tony the Dutch in his hind-parts.

  There was a reaction.

  Tony dropped to the floor and roared something animal-like and unintelligible, something Dutch. The others gathered around to watch, and he looked up at us in a state of agonised continental disbelief, asking with his sad blue eyes how anyone could have done such a thing.

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ I said, knowing I sounded absurd. ‘God made me do it.’

  *

  The only reason I still went to the wedding after that was because I was Tony’s best man. It was awkward. We barely spoke and his wife didn’t look at me once. When they walked down the aisle he was still limping. I didn’t know how to make things right. At the reception I kept my speech short and I left before the first dance. It was a long time before I saw Tony again and our friendship was never the same. I blamed God and his habit of stirring up situations, and for once I took the risk of telling him so. He called me a gobshite and said I’d been acting on my own free will. He laughed and reminded me of Tony’s reaction, and I told him I didn’t think we could be f
riends for a while. He looked surprised. He told me we’d never really been friends. For a while I kept hearing about him and then he drifted away, and I’d given up feeling any regret about it until I found myself at another wedding the following year, standing by a buffet table and remembering our first meeting back in Hebden Bridge.

  This was the wedding of Jimmy James. I hadn’t seen him for a long time either and I was surprised to be invited. When I got there I couldn’t see anyone I knew. The ceremony was brief and there was a long delay before any drinks were served. When the photographs were taken I hid at the back and got talking to a girl who was hiding as well. She was on teaching placement at Jimmy’s school. She introduced herself and held out her hand and when I went to shake it she thumbed her nose instead. It was so unexpected that it took me a moment to remember her name. Marion. I didn’t see her again until after the speeches, when the wine was eventually served. I told her I thought she’d left and she said she was looking for someone, and when I asked who she gave me a look I couldn’t translate. She walked away to the bar and I could hear God telling me to do something. I could hear what Tony had said when we were stuck in that ditch. There was dancing and I found myself moving to the back of the room and running out of reasons to stay. I got stuck in a conversation with the semiotics professor from Mytholmroyd. And then somehow I made it through the crowd to the buffet table and Marion was beside me again.

 

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