by Paul Tomkins
“What were you like as a child?” I ask, contemplating whether or not to stroke her hair. I decide against it, for now, and listen to her talk.
“A bit overweight. Very shy, and awkward… Very sensitive. The plight of other people really upset me. I think I had an excess of empathy. There was a disabled girl at school – she could walk, but with crutches – who the others used to tease, and I just wanted to hug her. I also used to go and put flowers on the grave of a girl who was a similar age to me, who was also a Suzanne. It was a really old grave. Those around it were well kept, and still had visitors. She was forgotten.” She pauses, sighs. “I really don’t know what happened to that little girl.”
“How she died?”
“No – I mean me. I don’t know what happened to the person I was, where she went.”
“It’s so weird how we change,” I say, laying my body back, so that I am now fully reclined on the balcony, staring up at the night sky. “As a kid I used to know the order of all the planets, from the sun to the edge of the solar system. Now I just know us and Mars. I’ve forgotten the order of the others.”
She mumbles something, showing just enough interest for me to continue.
“My life is so insular, so Earthly these days. I used to notice the stars, when I was young. Now, if I happen to see them at night, it’s like, shit, when did the stars get turned back on? And the planets – I guess they’re there, amongst the specks of light. But when do you ever get the chance to think about stuff like that? The future, the Space Race, men on the moon – it’s all the past. It’s like the Big Bang. The universe has been constantly expanding ever since – until the point when it will stop expanding and start contracting. It just seems as if our appreciation, our outlook on the universe, is already drawing in.”
“I can’t get my head around how insignificant we are,” she says, in a gentle, pleasant drone. “We’re nothing.”
I look across at the Palace Pier, now silent and dark. “I spent so much of my childhood on that pier, in the arcade. I’d go there with a few two-p pieces – maybe even ten-p pieces too, if I was lucky. I’d put them in those coin-drop machines, where you watch them slide down the chute, and onto a ledge, and a buffer comes forward and pushes them down onto the lower level – kinda like a coin waterfall, I guess. You know the ones I mean?”
“Uh-huh,” she murmurs.
“The coin would fall just right onto the lower level, yet when the final pusher came forward and forced my coin into the others it failed to tip this huge cluster over the edge – what seemed like a small fortune just hung there, suspended. Yet the thrill if some did fall was huge. I might spend as much as a pound, just to hear the sound of falling coins. I’d get back maybe fifty pence, yet leave feeling like a winner.
She nods, and I continue. “I remember when they got their first Space Invaders machine. I’d go and stand nearby to watch over the shoulders of older kids as they played . They were like these Zen masters or something; at one with the machine, their fingers a blur of movement. I’d only dare have a go myself when no one else was around to watch. I wasn’t very good. Most of the time I just lurked, lost in a semi-circle of silent onlookers. I think I spent hours at a time, just watching these tiny little sprites go from side to side.”
“I liked Pac-Man,” she says, then laughs, softly.
I laugh too, mirroring hers in tone and duration, although in truth I never really cared for that game. I find myself staring out at the tiny lights of a tanker on the horizon, a leviathan passing in the night. “There was this one time – I must have been about twelve – when I went on the waltzer at the end of the pier. I don’t know why, as I hate fairground rides, always have. As it gained speed this attendant guy started spinning my carriage. It was horrible, and I was screaming for him to stop, but he just kept on spinning, spinning, spinning, and I’d catch sight of his face with each rotation, and see him laughing at me – laughing harder the more upset I got. I left the ride in tears. I was at that age where I was trying to learn not to cry but hadn’t quite mastered it, and it kinda just blurted out. He found it hysterical. I got off and puked over the side of the pier. The bastard.”
I look at Black, laid across my thighs, as she mutters something indiscernible in reply. And then, for a moment, she falls silent. She brings her hand to her mouth, to stifle a yawn. Slightly chapped and cracking, she holds a finger up to those dry lips, tracing a line across the skin. As she parts them a tiny bubble of saliva expands and explodes.
She is perfect.
And that perfection is a double-edged sword. It pulls me in, and then says Who the fuck do you think you’re kidding?
But this is the story of my life. Like a heat-seeking missile I am drawn, with unerring precision, to the explosive outcome.
You do not casually walk away from a woman like Black, be it of your own volition, or at her – or police – insistence. Even now, just hours into our acquaintance, I fully understand that. Men possessed of greater virtues, better looks, superior intelligence and more unshakeable self-belief could not get out intact. There is something almost hypnotic: the light that universally draws the moths, time and time again, no matter how durable the species; the mistake they always make, no matter how they evolve.
Everything in my life, be it advertising, television, music, books or the movies, has told me that a woman like Black represents happiness, excitement, fulfilment, completion. Winning her affection – having her say she feels the same way about me – could be the prize that finally confirms my true worth; the elusive, all-pervasive thumbs-up that nothing can overrule, not even my propensity for self-doubt. Being with a woman this alluring, this breathtaking, will plug the pockmarks of my self-esteem. It will elevate me to some new dizzying height. Dazed and in a constant trance of ecstasy, I will thank my lucky stars every morning upon waking beside her. She, and she alone, can solve my problems. She is my happily ever after.
That is, until I run an alternative, non-Hollywood scenario through my mind, playing the advocate of my own devil. What if it is too crippling, too paranoia-inducing, to be with a woman whom others – Adonises, alpha males, millionaires – will not be slow to pursue? Even if Black declared her love for me, could I ever allow myself to believe her? Even my fantasy is not permitted the chance to run smoothly. I’m already scared of losing her, before I have even come remotely close to winning her.
I know all of this – and yet I cannot correct myself. Maybe I am less heat-seeking missile and more Kamikaze pilot, experiencing moments of consciousness as the plane throttles towards its target, the outcome avertable by one movement of the joystick but my mind unwilling to force that evasive action.
Black can validate me; and in a weird way, only Black. Now that I have met her, I have set in stone the mandate that excludes all others. Maybe she is the most elusive and unobtainable woman I’ve ever had the fortune – or misfortune – to meet, and spend genuine, intimate time with. You never get to meet the film star, the pop icon, so she remains unreal; but if you had the chance to spend several hours alone with her you’d conceivably stand some kind of chance. You’d exist on her radar.
I exist on Black’s radar.
TWENTY-ONE
Cluttered, chaotic, but full of welcoming light during the morning hours, Genevieve’s room lured me over the threshold. I knew I shouldn’t be there, but when left alone at the cottage I felt unable to resist trespassing. The sweet minty aroma of patchouli only added a further pull. Only here for the summer, she had brought, and accumulated, so much stuff. I wanted to know her; who’d she’d become but she wasn’t telling.
Her room would.
I’d always enjoyed art, and earned good marks at school, but Genevieve was the first person I’d met with an inspiring talent. For a while it was all she cared about, and, somewhat inaccurately, the only thing she felt any good at. Having turned 16, she began considering abandoning her education for her new passion: music. Neither Kitty nor Alice were aware, but I’d overheard he
r talking on the phone about how she wanted to be in a band. The new wave of art-school groups popping up at the time were an influence, although she was still too young for college, and no longer saw the need to follow that route. I could already see that she wouldn’t look out of place in a band like The Human League; she had the look, the attitude, and that seemed to be what counted.
The walls to her room were lined with a dozen posters, including reproductions of artworks that were far darker and harder to grasp than the likes of Magritte and Dali (who were about as obtuse as anything I’d hitherto studied). One print – of a painting by Francis Bacon, whose work I’d never previously encountered – hung above her bed. Entitled ‘Triptych May-June, 1973’, its three separate panels depict a seated man in some kind of small dark cubicle, his face and body seriously distorted, as a sinister black shadow bleeds across the central canvas. Genevieve must understand stuff like this, I concluded. It just left me uneasy and unnerved. It made her all the more untouchable.
I walked carefully, on tiptoes, over the littered carpet. Fanning out across the floor by the record player in the corner were a collection of long play records, with Songs of Leonard Cohen at the top of the pile, its vinyl snug on the turntable; another artist whose work felt beyond me. So dark, so foreboding, although from my room, with her door closed, I could never clearly hear the words; just menacing melodies and a bruisingly deep voice that caused the cheap speakers to rattle and the floorboards vibrate.
Having imbibed such weighty works, it perhaps came as no surprise that Genevieve had clear artistic talent; learning from the best. I’d rifle through her scrap books and cartridge pads, poring over expressive illustrations and doodles, etchings and sketches. She had a lightness of touch and a freedom with her strokes that left me both inspired and dejected; admiring the art, but with my own talent put firmly in the shade. However, it infuriated me – the sheer waste – that she had no great desire to do anything with it. In her future she saw only the supposed freedom of life in a band. She lived in the clouds.
I continued to root around. On her bedside table I found a book about old black-and-white films, the kind in which I saw no appeal. It didn’t seem to fit with the rest of her taste, although it did go against the grain of contemporary mainstream culture. My obsession with Indiana Jones, and the Star Wars movies, with their vivid colour and bombastic action, contrasted starkly with Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, Brief Encounter and Hitchcock’s classics.
Her underwear, some of which lay loose on the dresser top, was almost exclusively black. That in itself seemed incredible – it had never occurred to me that such items could be anything other than white, or the off-grey and beige of Kitty’s strapping undergarments pegged like lifeless torture victims on the washing line. I opened the top drawer, to find more lingerie. I couldn’t help but take a set, even though I had no idea what to do with it. They had not only touched Genevieve’s flesh, they had done so in the most intimate of places. It felt as close as I could realistically get.
I had gained access to her inner sanctum. But her possessions, and the obfuscated meanings behind them, left it feeling more like an exclusion. A short corridor, but a world away. How could I ever understand this girl? How could I ever be suitable?
* * *
A sultry Saturday night of freedom: Kitty away in London ahead of the royal wedding, staying with Alice in a hotel for the week, the pair planning to line the Mall as Charles and Diana passed by. Genevieve, charged with looking after me, did not show the slightest bit of interest in the task. Of course, I didn’t exactly need babysitting, and cared even less for the embarrassing notion that she might believe I required it. At nine p.m. I told her I planned to head to the cinema with school friends, to see a showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark that wouldn’t finish until almost midnight. I’d already seen the film twice. I said goodbye to Genevieve – interrupting her hair-drying, from which she barely batted an eyelid – and made my way to the Cinescene on North Street. I met with Tony and Steve in the foyer, but once the film started I began to feel tired and feverish, and before long, a little nauseous. I just wanted to get home and lie down. I whispered my excuses, and snuck out.
The last throes of twilight faded as I walked home from the bus stop; yet the night remained blissfully warm. None of the cottage lights were on when I got back. I let myself in, and walked upstairs in the dark, to my room at the back of the house. I shut the door behind me, collapsed onto the bed. I’m not sure if I’d actually fallen asleep, or just hovered on the edge, but my ears pricked at sounds outside.
A boy – no, I’d say a man (in the way that, contrary to now, boys in their late teens seemed like fully-formed adults) – stood upright in the lake, at a depth just above his waist. Standing on the bank: Genevieve, dressed only in skimpy black underwear. My heart began to pound, my mouth filling with saliva; aroused to instant alertness, as if inhaling smelling salts. Her skin lit by an irradiant moon, I couldn’t avert my gaze.
The man began to splash water in her direction, and Genevieve began to shriek and yelp as she took evasive action. She displayed a certain lack of grace in the way she ran in panic, accentuated by her near-nakedness; I was used to seeing her fully composed and in control. She seemed a different person to the one I knew; having fun, and, for once, clearly not the boss of the situation.
The man – she shrieked the name Darren! – then crawled out of the lake and began to chase her around the perimeter; she slipped, squealed, and he dragged her toward the water, with an alligator’s predatory ease and efficiency. Her yelps grew more frequent, like a child being tickled, and when her body hit the water she yelled at the top of her lungs, before both sank below the surface. They emerged in each other’s arms, her legs wrapped around his waist. She was facing the house, but unaware of my presence. In one quick movement with his right hand Darren unhooked her bra – to me, a kind of magic trick – and she was totally naked. She began to ride up and down, and I felt this incredible excitement matched by a sense of disgust and anger – betrayal, even – and my nausea returned. Dizzy, I turned away from the window and vomited into my hands, holding them close to my mouth so that the sound didn’t give me away. I made for the bathroom to wash away the sick.
As much as part of me wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to look outside again; I just lay on my bed, hearing the splashes and moans, even with the sheets pulled tightly over my head. Tears filled my eyes as I willed my mind to switch off, to bring silence, and the blessed relief of sleep.
TWENTY-TWO
There is one other important woman in the story of my life, the link between Genevieve and Black in a chain of fascination.
A glorious summer Saturday in 1985, in the right place at the right time. She fell, and then I fell. We were strangers, sat next to one another on the curved concrete balustrade of a Trafalgar Square fountain, seared by the sun; each unaware of the other, and the fact that we were about to become acquainted. It all hinged on one small gesture. Without thinking I casually threw my crust to the pigeons. They reacted with such fast, fluid belligerence; their movements as a mass apparently so chaotic, yet they never once collided. They did, however, dart and swirl about the girl beside me, and in panic she leant back and that was how she fell.
My fall was less literal, but it began with hers.
I jumped up, swivelled round and leant over to help her out, as Japanese tourists viewed the impromptu street theatre. As I eased her up – she took my hand with no hesitation – my eyes were inescapably drawn to her delicate white underwear, which popped vividly against the lightly tanned skin beneath a clinging cream dress. I’d seen prettier girls, but she had a certain something. Quickly I pulled from my bag a cotton tracksuit top, handed it to her. Once she’d wiped her eyes she realised her dress was no longer particularly concealing, and quickly wrapped the top around her midriff. And then, with a clear French accent, she thanked me, warmly.
“I hope you don’t think I just tried to drown you?” I said,
trying to sound nonchalant; pleased that the words came out as the right sounds, in the right order.
“Of course not!” she said, with the broadest smile. “Unless you are owning the birds?”
“The swans belong to the Queen. I own the pigeons.”
“I’m Isabelle,” she said, laughing, offering a straight arm.
“Patrick,” I replied, brimming with excitement as I shook her hand; careful to attain the right level of pressure for feminine fingers. I’d just turned 18, and this was the first time I’d introduced myself to an alluring stranger; doing so in the heart of London, to a French woman, felt so grown up. She was 20, and perhaps more accustomed to such behaviour; I was, by contrast, a mere novice. She was the first woman I fell for, and in a way it reminded me of the awe I felt for Genevieve.
We sat on the plinth in the shadow of a black lion and talked, then went for a stroll, stopping at a couple of pubs with outside seating. In the evening she invited me back to her half-deserted halls of residence in Battersea, and we barely left her bed for the next three days. It was established right at the start that I was due to attend art college in Glasgow in just six weeks, and she was a few weeks away from returning to France, with her year in London almost up. There was a strict time limit, and we both knew the tryst could not last beyond August. That gave it an added frisson; we both wanted each other, but equally, we were keen to get on with our lives in other areas.
For once, I didn’t even dream of more. I lived in the moment, and enjoyed every precious minute of it.
TWENTY-THREE