by Paula Guran
“This is wild!” she laughed, the plum gash of her mouth halving the pallid remains of her face, once so fleshy and pinkish; at once she looked both like the most alive and the most enervated person and in Camden that was saying something. She looked synthetic, the skin too tight, as if it might split and waft the smell of plastic toys over me. But her eyes had lost their initial vagueness, fastening on individual blurs of color as it all streamed past us, like a hawk tracking is dinner. The whites were so clear they were almost blue.
We tooled up and down the main drag, trying on sunglasses and hats. She fingered jewelry and squeezed the arms of thick sweaters, which made me feel even hotter. I pointed out the egg-tipped folly of GM-TV and she scoffed when I told her it was a listed building. I showed her where I’d seen Adam Ant handing over some coins to a charity collector as we crossed the walkway over the Grand Union Canal into a tight knot of stalls and alcoves. The heat was building up here; candles were sagging on their displays and the drifts of antiques shone dully in a solid mass of bronzed light. Every time Louise brushed against me or held on to my arm, I sagged, as if she were transmitting weight through her touch. At such moments, she would perk up and become animated, trying on hats or mugging in smeared mirrors, laughing as my face grew greasy and pale.
The stream of people was endless. The pavements were so obstructed, pedestrians spilled into the road, slowing the traffic which began to trail back toward Mornington Crescent Tube. The crowds seemed to be swelling, like a single bloated body, inflated by sore tempers and the ceaseless, airless heat. I pulled Louise into a café, worried by a mild panic that had transmitted itself into an hallucination of us crushed beneath a stampede of bodies as they attempted to escape their stifling skins. I bought cappuccino, hoping I could relax sufficiently at the counter before she noticed my discomfort.
When I turned round, Louise was bathed in sunshine. Because of the angle of her chair and the way the sunlight was blocked by the weirdly squashed conglomeration of buildings, only she was favored by its color. It invaded the thick pile of her hair, seeming to imbue each filament, like one of those carbon fiber lamps. It moved across her face like thick fluid and, somehow, seemed of her too, picking out the configuration of her bones slouched inside their fleshy housing, curled into the chair. A comma of wet sunshine touched her lower lip and I found myself wishing I could kiss it away. I still wanted her, even after such a long time had passed. No time at all. Everyone around her seemed to diminish, shadows on the wane, growing sluggish like figures trapped in tar. And then she looked at me. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what kind of fire it was that filled her eyes, certain only that it wasn’t human but then the moment passed, and she smiled and everyone was a component of the greater animation around us once more. She just seemed like a willowy girl, lost in the scrum. Unremarkable.
“Get this down you,” I said, pushing across her coffee. “It’ll put hairs on your chest.”
“This place, Camden that is, reminds me of my last few years,” Louise said, furring her top lip with the froth of her cappuccino. “I don’t know why, really. Something about the way everything feels sad and unreal but is all disguised by movement. I bet this place seems more like its true self when the shops close and everyone pisses off.”
“What have you been up to these last few years?” I asked that, when all I wanted to know was how she’d turned up in such a state on my doorstep. Now she looked in some semblance of control, I was finding it hard to believe that I’d seen her like that, in extremis.
“It felt like I was being followed. No, that’s not right, it felt like I was being hunted. I had to keep moving or I felt I’d be consumed by something so big I couldn’t even see it. Just an aspect of it, I saw, usually in sleep, moving furiously, like an engine part well-oiled, pistoning and thrashing around. It belonged to something that was vast and after me. Hungry for me.” She took another drink of coffee, then reached over and tapped a man in a vest and combat trousers on the shoulder. Asked him for a cigarette. After he’d lit it for her, she turned back to me and spoke around a mouthful of bluish smoke.
“I left Warrington just after we finished . . . after you finished with me. I got a job with a waste disposal firm in Keighley.”
“Keighley? Why Keighley, of all places? Middle of nowhere.”
“No, I was the middle of nowhere. Anywhere, everywhere else was a grip on something real. I was on Temazepam by this time, for my depression and insomnia but it wasn’t working. The doctor gave me Prozac, and that was better, for a while, until I wanted to do nothing other than sit in front of my window and watch the litter being blown across the street. I kicked all that but it was like the feeling had settled into me and wouldn’t go away, I slept late, ate less, became constipated. I began to appreciate a particular kind of darkness I found in the loft. There was a cat, Marlon, his name was, that would sleep up there. Made his way over the roofs and climbed in through a hole in the eaves. We’d curl up together, flinching whenever a bird’s claws rattled on the tiles. It was almost magical. I felt safe; that thing that was looking for me wouldn’t have me here. It was just me and Marlon and the dark. Holding on to Marlon’s fur kept me real and sane. If he wasn’t there, I think I would have just . . . well . . . ”
“How long were you in Keighley for?” I asked, sensing a dangerous moment of self-disclosure if I let her carry on.
“Not long. I hitched a lift to Scarborough and did some work at one of the hotels. Cleaning rooms in the daytime, serving behind the bar at night. I liked it. Days off, I’d walk along the beach up to the amusement arcades. I met boys there. When it got dark we’d go behind the generators and I’d just let them do what they wanted to me. I went with this really gaunt, ill-looking boy called Felix. He was half Croatian. I sucked him off and when he came—”
“Jesus, Lou—”
“—when he came, there was blood in his semen. He blamed it on me, said I’d infected him—some nonsense like that—and he tried to strangle me. I didn’t fight him off. I was struck by how beautiful he looked in the thin light rising from the harbor behind us. I think he got scared when I smiled at him. He left me alone. I like to believe you were thinking of me at that very moment. My Guardian Angel rescued me with some attention.”
I laughed nervously. I didn’t like anything she was telling me. I was jealous and I was resentful of her for keeping a hold on to me. My letter hadn’t been a cry for reunion, it had been a friendly endeavor to find out what was happening to someone I cared about. But I found myself hooked on her story. “And then?” I asked, my voice dead, resigned.
“I stayed in Scarborough for some time. A year or so. Things changed. I found that I seemed to be waking into thick air. Walking, blinking, breathing—it was all such an effort. Things weren’t right while somehow keeping a surface of normality. I’d see something odd, but everybody else’s reaction would be non-existent and it might be hours or days before I told myself that no, it was not right but by then I’d suspect that it happened at all.”
“What kind of things? What are you talking about, Louise?”
“I’m talking about the skeletons of fish on the beach flopping around, trying to get back into the water. I’m talking about sand castles that didn’t dissolve when the tide touched them. A couple kissing under a streetlamp whose heads melted into each other.”
“Tcha!” I said, rocking back on my seat and attracting a few glances from the punters sitting nearby. She’d drawn me into her story so effectively that this nonsense had spat me out, like a newborn, unable to cope with the sudden influx of normal sensations. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. She wouldn’t give up on it though.
“A dog smoking a pipe. A parrot on a smiling tramp’s shoulder picking his brains from a bleeding eye socket. Burning children playing leapfrog on a lawn.”
“Stop it, Louise.”
“I was there. I saw this happening.”
“In Scarborough? I’ve been to Scarborough. The strangest thing they have there
is a ghost train that squirts water at you.”
“Yes. But, although it was Scarborough, it could have been anywhere. I was drawing these things to me. I was in some kind of midway. A lost soul.”
I necked my coffee. I could feel myself bristling under her expectant gaze. She’d always been like this, pushing the envelope of provocation and gauging my reaction till I exploded. “If you’re trying to make me feel guilty for finishing with you, you’re doing fine. Not that you’re one to hold a grudge.”
“I don’t blame you for this, Sean. I did at first. I spent all my time thinking of you. Thinking of how our child would have been two, three, four, five. You laughing and having a good time. Fucking lots of women. I played the whole victim thing. I wanted you and hated you in equal measure. I needed you. But then I realized all my misery was externalized, too. It got so bad very quickly that I didn’t even notice things had changed until I started paying attention to the outside world rather than my puffy face in the mirror.
“The coming of daylight seemed to take longer than it ought to in the mornings. I’d see weather forecasts predicting rain or shine but there was a constant haze, like the sun trying to force its way through mist. It never changed. I’d visit my parents and they appeared to talk through me, looking at my face but somehow misdirecting their focus as if they were talking to someone standing behind me. And then this awful sense of something coming, gravitating toward me . . . ”
I noticed that I was holding her hand but I couldn’t recall reaching for her. Her casual referral to her pregnancy had shamed me. I couldn’t say anything.
“And you wrote to me. It was salvation. There was no longer a sense of me being consigned to limbo. Does this sound silly to you? Because there are others. I saw one or two, drifting like me, pale and withdrawn like flames that can’t quite catch upon what they’re supposed to be burning. People who were dismissed from somebody’s life. People who had an umbilicus disconnected. God knows what would have happened to me if you hadn’t written. I think I’d have faded away. Winked out. There’s still something missing. Something I need in order to give me a sense of being replete but I’m buggered if l know what it is.”
It was a lot to take in. I wasn’t convinced by a great deal of what she’d imparted but I had a handle on her dislocation. I’d been gearing up to ask her how long she planned on staying but it didn’t really matter if she stayed a few more days, if it meant she’d get back to full speed.
“A party,” I said, lightly, trying to dispel the intensity that had drawn in around us. “There’s a party tonight. Why don’t you come? It will do you good to kick out and relax.”
She appeared briefly reticent but agreed, her eyes hankering after some morsel of encouragement as we held each other’s gaze for longer than necessary. It was a look I’d once suffixed with a kiss or a touch of my finger against her neck. Don’t get back into that, I thought, pushing away from the table. I couldn’t understand why she’d want to get involved with me again if there was even the shred of threat she might return to the dire illusions of her mind.
The party was at a friend’s place in Hammersmith; we were to meet by the bridge at one of the pubs which snuggled up to the Thames. Benjie was there to greet us, a tall affable lad who didn’t care if he was thinning on top as long as there was a beer in front of him. One of those people who needs only the most rudimentary of introductions before getting on well with anyone, Benjie soon had Louise feeling comfortable and interesting; she soon relaxed into the evening. A fine evening it was, the sun losing itself to the strata of color banding the horizon. Great jets would lower into it as they nosed toward Heathrow. We stood and watched them halve the sky till it grew dark and cold.
For my part, I felt better now that Louise was being shared around a dozen or so other people. I could allow my anxieties to shrink within alcohol’s massage and see Louise as someone more than a chipped and faded signpost to my past.
Benjie lived in a first floor flat on a wide avenue behind King Street. When we arrived, stopping off en route to buy beer from a twentyfour-hour inconvenience store that didn’t sell Beck’s or Toohey’s, there were already around thirty people stuffed into the kitchen and living room. Overspill meant that the landing and stairs were occupied too, by flaky looking individuals wadded into sheepskin coats with excessively furred collars. They probably looked furtive because they’d crashed the gig; not that it mattered; Benjie was hospitable to all. I followed him into his room where a hill of coats and plastic bags swamped his bed. A couple were leaned across them, kissing each other with such fervor that it seemed his mouth must engulf the entirety of her lower jaw. His left hand violently kneaded the pliant spread of her right breast. She could have been dead. I sensed Louise stiffen beside me and squeezed her hand, understanding her revulsion. The union was void of any tenderness. Perhaps Benjie noticed it too, because there was a needle in his voice when he asked them to move over. They simply stopped kissing and staggered from the room, lobotomized expressions all round. The woman was wearing six-inch rubber platforms and a black cat suit. An exterior white leather corset battled to keep her chest in situ. She hadn’t even bothered to take off her heart-shaped satchel with its blunt rubber spines.
“Kids, eh?” said Benjie, plonking his sweater on the pile. I followed suit but Louise reused to take her coat off. “Actually,” Benjie continued, gesturing after the zombies, “that was Simon. Top bloke. Known him since school. Spacecat. Does a bit too much of the wacky baccy to keep him compos mentis but you can’t hold that against him.”
So, the party. Which was as punishing as any party I’d been to before.
We drank. And then there was a spot of serious drinking. And a post-drink drinking session and then a long stretch of complete and utter drinking.
Benjie’s windows in the living room had been sealed shut by whoever had last painted the flat. It grew so stifling that the ceiling eventually shed a thin, bitter rain of nicotian moisture. I ranged around the room, trying to find the door so that I might lose some of my own fluids but it appeared that someone had painted that in too. I started laughing till panic hovered but rescued myself by simply pissing my pants. It proved an excellent sobering technique. I poured what was left of my Budweiser on to my jeans and made like I was the clumsiest arse ever, but nobody cared a toss. I found the door where I’d left it and spilled on to the landing. Someone was playing Nirvana—“Drain You”—with the volume turned all the way up to eleven. I yelled a line from the chorus and dived for the toilet only to find a queue which, in all probability, was the longest toilet queue in the history of clenched bladders. I had the last laugh, though, when my brain caught up with the fact that I’d already been.
Simon’s disembodied head loomed in front of mine. “Where the fuck is the rest of you?” I almost shrieked, but it was all there, just slow in arriving. God, I was spannered. He grinned, showing off a gold pre-molar. He smelled of beer, smoke, and CK One but then, so did everybody else. His skin possessed a greasy olive hue; up close I could see that his lips were rugose and discolored. His rubberized partner, I guessed, was being trampolined elsewhere.
“Highayemsimon,” he said. “Hooeyoo?”
“Me no speaka your language,” I replied, suddenly cottoning on to his flighty Scots burr. I barked laughter and slapped him on the arm. “Sorry. I thought . . . I thought . . . oh, cocks to it. I’m Shhhhhuh . . . ean. Benj told me you were Simon but it’s good to have it confirmed.”
“Hoowazatlassyacuminwi ?”
“Her name’s Louise.” I came right back with that one, getting into the swing of it.
“Shizaspankinlassyamtellinyi.”
“Too right.” I sensed he was waiting for me to continue. “She’s not with me, if that’s what you’re wondering.” If I’d had my brains in properly, I’d have asked him to be tame on her; she wasn’t ready for some fast-talking shagmeister bundling her into his bed. Talking about Louise reminded me that she was here. I caught sight of her standing
on the edge of an intense circle, watching the interplay. She looked—God, strange word to use but it summed up her appearance—she looked ripe. Her face was jutting and beautiful, her eyes hungry on everyone. Having finally divested herself of the coat, her breasts hugged the deep collar of her blouse like loaves in an oven besting their tins. No longer the ingénue I’d staggered into adulthood alongside, she appeared confident and armed with secrets, like a soldier returned from a killing field.
But that could have just been the alcohol, twatting around with my head.
I started toward her, eager to let loose some of the thoughts with which I’d been so circumspect that afternoon. I wanted to draw her into the crook of my arm and tell her I’d missed her. Tell her I was sorry.
But then Simon was locked on to her, their bodies flush with each other as they traded words. I watched them flirt, dipping heads against ears so that lips brushed lobes. Yoked together, I watched the tethered jewel at Louise’s throat move with each undulation they created. Violence spread through me. I wish I could have let it come. Louise’s capitulation and Benjie’s hand on my shoulder prevented me. In that moment, Simon was condemned.
Black out.
I surfaced from a terrible dream in which I’d been kissing a woman whose lips were sticky, whose tongue, whenever it emerged to roil against mine, was coated in a clear membrane. She worked my mouth with spidery endeavor, knitting it closed with her adhesive spit. Black eyes burning into mine. When she wrestled with her clothing, to reveal that yawning part of her which would dissolve and ingest me, I lurched away, opening my eyes to dawn as it drizzled the curtains. Bodies were sprawled around me. I hauled myself upright, shuddering with cold and the mother and father of all hangovers. The Fear unzipped its dark little bag and teased me with its contents but I couldn’t remember anything beyond Benjie, me, and a bottle of vodka. My jeans felt stiff against my legs. There was a smear of lipstick on the back of my hand.