by Simon Ings
‘Yet you fucked me.’
‘I did.’
‘I’m glad you did.’
‘Not as glad as I am.’
This, at least, raises a smile. ‘And Michel?’
‘It’s all right. You think I’m going to say something? I’m not going to say anything.’
She says nothing to that.
Christ.
‘Will you? Tell him?’
Hanna waves her hand, of course not. ‘Things happen.’
This is such an accurate echo of my own internal dialogue, I can’t help wincing at its vacuity. No. Things do not just ‘happen’. This is more than chance – this is choice, this was choice. ‘I wanted you.’
She looks at me.
‘I still want you. I know we can’t, but there you are. Because you’re gorgeous, Hanna. You’re gorgeous. Among your other qualities.’
Your tiny breasts. Your small brown hands. Your wit and your stupidity wound round each other like a mechanism set to shake itself to pieces. Little kisses and spread thighs. The drama in you. The impatience. The bloody life.
Bone-thin boats carve the cold green water under Mandy’s window as she dictates ideas into her laptop. I imagine her discussing her injuries on public radio, in sprung rhythm, wedged between a folk singer and the COO of a hospice charity.
Hanna, luckily, is much more interested in what I think about Michel. Whatever else you say about infidelity, it does bring problems into focus. And here they come, a whole parade of them. Has Michel always written? Will his writing find a market? What will a writer do aboard a boat all day? Will it be good or bad for his writing, this voyage they have planned? The more Hanna talks, the more anxious she becomes. She is as doubtful as I am about Michel’s commitment to their voyage. ‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘I can’t handle that boat on my own.’ She’s couching all this in practical terms, but the image I’m getting of her is of a woman already abandoned, as her man sails away on an ocean of his own invention.
Oh, let go, fool. Let go and float. Pay attention to the things of the present. Hanna’s small feet. Hanna’s small breasts. Hanna’s small mouth. Make it smile. Make it gasp. Again. Seize the day. Seize her. This moment will not come a second time. I reach over and stroke her neck, hit the button of her shirt, hold it between my thumb and finger, daring her to let me, daring her to say ‘Again.’ ‘When will Mick be home?’
She moves towards me. ‘How will he get home?’
She has a point. I undo a button. Michel’s among friends, and he will be able to cadge a lift eventually, but this place is hardly on anyone’s way anywhere. Most likely some roads are completely closed. A button comes free. He might not get here for hours. For days. The entire beach is cut off. A button. A button. The mainland has sunk. Here’s all that’s left. She shucks her shirt for me. I hold her hands. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘He’ll turn up eventually,’ Hanna says, without worry, without enthusiasm. I lie her down on the floor. She barely moves, and then, feeling me draw near to my climax, she paddles against me, wriggling clear. I won’t have it. I won’t. I come down on her, hard, her bone a hot bar across my erection as I fill her again. Her eyes are glassy with an emotion stuck uselessly between anger and hunger. I grip her, fixing her, and kiss her lips.
At last her mouth comes open.
And, after a minute or two of this, here they come, the bloody words. Too soon, too soon – I am still just about inside her, for heaven’s sake – yet I cannot help but vomit them up. ‘I know you want me to apologise.’
‘No,’ she whispers, hushing me. ‘No.’
‘It’s all right. I’m not bloody going to.’
I roll off her and she staggers to her feet – I have been very rough with her – and she goes to the window to study the sky, her figure outlined against the boat, the half-finished ketch that will, finally and forever, take her away from me.
And him. If she takes Michel away, I may never see him again, either.
‘Come see.’
I stand beside her, resting my hand on her hip. ‘Around here,’ she says, ‘the sea comes up higher than the land. You can see it sometimes. Some tides.’
So it is true. Last night – the swollen green dome of the ocean, rising above the shingle like the top of a monstrous head – it was not just a trick of the light. The sea impends here, and the land is a bowl, waiting to be tipped, to be dipped, to be filled with the sea. It doesn’t make sense, how the land bends here. Not falling away. Falling up.
The first line of Michel’s novel reads:
Why run off to sea when the sea will come for you?
NINE
Occasionally Michel came home with me for tea after school. Dad wouldn’t be home until six-thirty, and Mum was busy upstairs, so we pretty much had the run of things. The kitchen staff were old hands, they knew what they were doing, so at this time of day the hotel looked after itself.
Out the front, the hotel made a big display of its picket fencing and ornamental dry-stone wall, but round the back the grounds abandoned all pretension and blended with the surrounding farmland. The fence separating the hotel garden from the river track was rickety and loose. I held a strand of barbed wire for Michel to duck under. ‘Mind the ditch.’
The lawn needed cutting.
‘Now I see why you come to school looking such a mess.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘You look like you’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards.’
I didn’t argue. Knowing Michel he probably had photographic evidence. Michel’s love of photography caused him a lot of trouble at school. One of his community service clients had phoned up to complain.
In an effort to stem his voyeurism, the school had told his mother. Now Michel was without a camera and lived with the constant threat of having his photographs discovered. ‘I’ve got them hidden.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll show you sometime. They’re wrapped in plastic. They should be all right.’
‘I mean, it’s not as if you were taking photographs of them in the bath or anything.’ I wanted to show willing, to be outraged on his behalf.
‘I did, once or twice.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Michel.’
‘I’m joking,’ he said.
Now Michel spent his Thursday afternoons helping out the school caretaker. Of course it was impossible for the school to impound every photograph he had taken. He still had his collection, buried away: ancient faces caught unawares, flesh rilled against the bone, and how the weight of life and time bore down on every dusty room.
I led him round by a crumbling brick path to the conservatory. Sunlight bleared over panels of dusty glass, framed in dark green wood. When the hotel had regular guests, this had been our breakfast room. Now it was Dad’s workshop. The heating was turned off. The pipe that ran around the circumference of the room was no longer the scalding-hot hazard it had been. (We’d lived in terror of a guest’s child one day getting a hand stuck behind it.) Now Dad was getting by with a bottled gas heater that made an obscene lapping sound whenever the bottle started to empty. Three cement stairs led to the house proper. Dad’s vests were hung up on pegs beside the door. A black padded chair sat in the middle of the room. A medical examination lamp leant over the chair, perching on shiny tripod feet. A workbench ran along the long wall.
The floor was strewn with explicit magazines. Dad had been cutting pictures out with scissors and sticking them on pieces of A4 card. A plastic bulb of paper glue had been left to harden in the sunlight.
‘I should explain.’
‘This’ll be interesting.’
‘They’re for our guests to stick up over their beds.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Erotics were a part of the visual world Dad worked to restore. The trouble is, below a certain resolution, the most explicit image loses its erotic charge. Dad’s vests offered his soldier-patients, at best, a twenty-by-twenty pixel field of view. ‘Then there’s the edge detection
problem.’
‘Keep going. You’re funny.’
‘One serviceman complained that Dad kept showing him pricks.’
‘You really think you can talk your way out of this?’
‘Oh, what’s the use?’ I threw up my hands. ‘We’re a family of pornographers. Dad straps schoolgirls to his desk and I violate them with this.’ I waved an ophthalmoscope around.
Dad’s researches into prosthetic vision – a spin-off from his constant tinkering – had brought him into contact with a loose, international network of hobbyists and junior researchers – men and women he met only as stuttering ghosts on his computer screen. For them, or for the brand they represented, he stitched fabric and webbing and copper lugs into visual vests for blinded servicemen.
Michel and I tooled around with Dad’s kit. Michel took off his shirt and put a vest on, and a pair of black goggles to hide the world from his eyes. The camera mounted on the side of his goggles plugged into the vest. ‘It needs turning on . . . There.’ I reached to touch the switch. It was hidden by a curl of hair over his ear. ‘Okay?’ I drew away, fingers tracing his temple. I went to the switch by the door and turned off the conservatory light. It was just about dark enough, a summer evening. The setting sun had fallen behind a line of trees. There was a torch in Dad’s desk drawer. I swung it around a few times in front of Michel’s goggles.
‘I can’t make any sense of this,’ he complained, his vest chattering, his eyes hidden behind the big, blacked out lenses of his goggles.
‘You’re getting there.’
‘How?’
‘You’re turning your head to follow the torch.’
‘I am?’
‘Yes.’
Like everybody else, Michel imagined that once you invented something like this – something worth an article or two, a local headline – then a grateful world would see to it that you were properly recompensed. Michel thought Dad’s work explained how we’d ended up running this sprawling hotel.
But the hotel – this great, absurd shell, vanishing year by year behind walls of tangled and untended green – had been Mum’s waste of money, not Dad’s. The guests didn’t have too bad a time of it, but the rooms we lived in were cold, draughty and uncomfortable and there were too many of them. There were rooms no-one went into from one year to the next – rooms Dad warned me to stay out of because of some newly discovered dereliction: faulty electrics, or spreading damp.
We put Dad’s gear away and I led Michel upstairs to my room. Michel paused on the landing, looking up the stairwell at the light escaping from Mum’s apartment at the top of the house. The light was strange up there: pools of taupe and rose spilling from desk lamps draped with hand-dyed silk. Mum was flirting with arson again. We heard furniture being shifted around.
‘Who’s up there?’
‘That’s Mum. She’s sorting out her stock.’ Bags of cosmetic-grade glitter. Clear plastic boxes full of sequins. Rolls of cloth. Reams of hand-made paper. Boxes of ribbon. An easel. Bags of unopened paints. She was saying she was going to sell it all. I couldn’t imagine how.
She was going off to the protest camp again – the third summer in a row. Her ambitions for it were more realistic this year. At any rate, more muted. She no longer expected the camp to transform her life. She no longer imagined that it would ever save the world. She just wanted to see her friends.
The militants, on the camp’s other side, had been edged off their narrow purchase, their tents and shelters grubbed up, and boulders dumped between the trees to stop them reoccupying the space. They had adopted other causes, other interests. Squats and demonstrations. Agitprop. The women Mum camped among were too remote to matter much, and the authorities had left them alone. They were not as doctrinaire as they had been. ‘You can come and see me,’ Mum had said to me – as if I could ever be persuaded to go there again.
‘Jesus,’ said Michel, entering my room. ‘Is this all yours?’
‘Well, it’s my room,’ I said. ‘The furniture belongs to the hotel, really. Apart from that.’ I pointed at the dressing table – the mirrored table Dad had bought Mum as a wedding present. This was the table which was supposed to make Mum feel like Gloria Swanson whenever she sat at it to make herself up for evenings of parties and premières. Life takes its own path, of course, and now the table was mine. Mum didn’t want it any more. Since her hospital spell she had lost her liking for mirrors.
The dressing table drawers opened stiffly, crammed to jamming with photographs in yellow paper wallets.
While I rifled through them, Michel waited on the white-painted bench that ran round the bay window. It was massively uncomfortable to sit on. The cushions slid about on the paint so that you were always slipping off. Still, visitors here invariably headed straight for it, suckered, I suppose, by the novelty of the thing. Squirming for purchase, determined to enjoy his window-seat moment, Michel studied the photographs as I handed them to him.
‘Here they are.’
The water meadows captured in our family snaps were buried now, beneath the asphalt and paving of the housing estate. There, in their perfectly square bungalow, under its red-tile pyramidal roof, Michel lived with his mother.
Michel wanted to know how ground water had moved about the meadows, before the builders canalised it, piped it, buried it under chicanes and driveways and mini-roundabouts. He wanted to know what the land would look like once the estate fell apart, as it surely would one day. The End Times were on their way. He was convinced of this. He was trying to work out what life would be like here, after the Fall. He liked to imagine himself preparing for disaster, steadily, calmly, over years. He imagined himself holed away in some brake in the woods, his life made rich and strange by its privations and narrow compass.
Still, after Michel’s recent run-in with the school, I couldn’t altogether shake off the suspicion that, as he worked through our photographs, he was actually studying me. My bobble hat. My pantaloons and pushchair. Mum’s hand in mine, pulling me to attention. ‘I’d better start cooking. Dad will be home in half an hour.’
We went downstairs and Michel sat at the kitchen table, watching me chop vegetables. He had this intense look – you’d think I was performing surgery. ‘You can cook,’ he said.
Dad had one of those Japanese knives; the weight of the blade did all the work. You just had to mind your fingers. It was the easiest thing in the world to cut up a few vegetables, throw them in a tray and bung them in the oven. The fish went on top about fifteen minutes before we sat down to eat.
‘You cook fish,’ he said.
‘Do you like fish?’
‘Sure.’
It felt good to have found something I could do and that Michel couldn’t.
Dad walked into the kitchen and dropped his briefcase by the piano. ‘Hello,’ he said, in the voice he used with our guests, and gave a reserved-judgement smile. The photographs were spread out on the dinner table. ‘Goodness. Conrad. You’re showing off your baby pictures?’
Mum came down to eat with us more or less when I called her. She wasn’t usually so accommodating.
Dad asked her, ‘What time is your train tomorrow?’
‘After eleven.’
‘After eleven?’
‘Quarter past eleven. Eleven twenty. Eleven twenty-one at the third beep.’
‘I can run you down in the car, but you’ll be waiting there a while.’
‘You can run me down in the car?’
‘I can run you over.’
‘You can run me over?’
‘Do you want me to give you a lift or not?’
‘No, Ben, it’s okay.’
‘You’ll have to make your own way to the station then. I need the car. I’ll be leaving around eight.’
I said to Michel, by way of explanation, ‘Mum’s off on a protest.’
‘Sara,’ Dad said, ‘is going to get herself cold, wet, scared, arrested and very probably beaten.’
‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’
/> ‘Certainly kettled. Hosed. Maybe gassed.’
Mum joined in, mimicking him. ‘Blinded. Blown up.’
There was an awkward silence as Mum and Dad remembered, far too late, what I’d told them about Michel’s family.
Michel looked from me to Dad and back again. ‘What? You want me to say “beheaded”?’
‘Let’s all calm down,’ Dad said.
‘Let’s not,’ said Mum.
I said, ‘Let’s just eat the fucking fish I caught.’
‘Caught?’
‘Cooked. Let’s eat the fucking fish I cooked.’
‘Does this sort of thing run in the family?’ Michel asked Mum, trying to jolly things along, to give as good as he was getting, to join in.
Mum said, ‘You wouldn’t believe the things that run in this fucking family.’
‘Enjoy your tent that I paid for,’ Dad said.
‘I bloody will, Ben. Thanks.’
When he left (by the front entrance, off to the housing estate and his widowed mum’s bungalow) Michel said to me, with admiration, ‘She’s quite a character, your mum.’
The following morning I traipsed after Mum to the station, ‘helping her with her bags’, breathing in her second-hand smoke. She had no time for my preferred, round-about way into town. ‘I need to get going.’ She had us cut straight across the estate.
Our hotel used to have a view. I remember clover. Watercress. (Peppery – it made me sneeze.) Now even the water was gone: canalised, buried deep, a maze. I remember them lowering big concrete pipes into the ground. Diggers and pile-drivers and drills. Lakes of mud.
The housing estate was made of all the same shape of bungalow: small, square, with roofs of red tile. The roads were curved, generating fractional differences in the sizes of neighbouring gardens. Because the bungalows were all exactly alike, the people who lived in them had each tried to make their own bungalow stand out from all the others. The walls were clad in a smooth render, and each house was painted a different colour. Eggshell blue. Sand yellow. Moss green. The driveways were different. One had tarmac newly laid. There were marble chips in it. It looked like a cake. Others had laid various grades and kinds of gravel. Someone had laid bark chips. Each bungalow had a garage, and each garage had a different kind of door. Some were metal. Others were wood, with little windows. On and on like this, your head ended up full of this junk: how some verges were well-tended, as though for a game of miniature bowls, while others were overgrown, a mass of weeds, dandelions and clover, and still others were so bare and dusty they looked new-sown. On and on and on. Mum had told me that places like this matured; that new trees would grow. But here she was, going away again. For all her efforts the world had yet to be saved; and the estate looked as raw and as ugly as it always had.