He’s looking at me because I’m crying, and he’s wondering why I’m crying, she thought—or, she thought, as he disappeared from view, he did wonder it, just for a second. Dimly she remembered herself to have seen, it felt quite recent, a woman crying in the street. Daytime, where, Cornmarket? Yes, she remembered the incident, not recent at all. A lady in a headscarf, hand to cheek, distraught, ages ago. A young man had intervened.
‘All right?’ said Joe.
‘I mean, did you see how they looked at us—at me,’ said Kit, her voice rising petulantly. ‘The last thing, the last thing in the world—when I made myself go to a dance place; to end up being the man, strangely enough that was the last thing in the world I ever would have wanted. I didn’t even know it was an option. You—’
She got herself in hand. ‘Sorry,’ she said blankly, ‘I’ve had it.’
How wonderful, she thought, if I could magically click my fingers and find myself sitting in a bath, in a near-faint, shimmering but blitzed, on a slow clock, hidden away from the world, with clean sheets waiting, warm blankets, a decent pillow.
‘And you know, sod them, sod everything,’ Joe was saying. He sounded, not heated, but not indifferent either. ‘You don’t exactly belong around here. I hoped you’d have the nerve to be unorthodox. I wasn’t sure, though. You go somewhere properly cosmopolitan, no one would have cared. It started out, the tango, for example, immigrant workers in Argentina—it had to be men dancing with men because, whatever women there were, they weren’t allowed out by their fathers, unless you’re talking a bordello—’
Kit struggled to follow what he was saying.
‘—and it wasn’t considered effete, not at all. You learned to be a better dancer that way.’ He gestured impatiently. ‘And you know what? Nowadays, if you go to the right cities, not in England,’—he sounded so dismissive—‘it’s understood that it’s a sign a man is, I don’t know, strong, if he dances the following part; like he’s daring the world to say something, like those gangsters who carry pink-dyed chihuahuas. It’s understood that you can only behave like that if you’re ready to kill anyone who disrespects you. Lo and behold, the symbols of effeminacy are inverted and become signs of aggression.’
Kit, in a drained sort of way, was as much amazed by the fact of this speech as by its content—Joe, not so likely after all, she reflected, to be, say, a garage hand. ‘You don’t think that was what was going on with those two men in class?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Just now, you mean? No, no. Where do you think you are? No, those two? They’re gay.’
Kit sagged again, almost too tired to speak. She said, ‘You know them? They were good.’
‘I know who they are.’
Their conversation lapsed. Kit continued methodically to eat, washing down each dry mouthful with tea. She remembered when it had been her looking in at the people in Pams Cafe, looking in at the wasters, whom she had envied.
‘So what did make you come up here?’ Joe asked.
‘I wanted to be carried away,’ she said reproachfully.
‘So did I.’
Kit was discomfited by the expression on his face. ‘I hoped it might be, you know, mesmerising,’ she said, trying to explain. ‘I like to be mesmerised. Actually,’ she added, on thinking about it, ‘in a way, I was. I don’t sleep very much so I try to do other sleepish kind of things, or brain-dead, you know?’
‘And what other techniques do you have for going about this interesting pursuit?’
She checked, but he didn’t appear to be mocking her. Who else in the world, she thought, cared enough to ask her this question?
‘Oh, well, books, obviously,’ she said, ‘and going to the cinema all the time, and I guess listening to certain music, preferably loud; and I do five times as much work as I strictly need to, that’s probably the main thing; and I like beauty parlours, and, I don’t know, various things. The main one is probably walking. I feel like I’m at rights when I’m on foot, letting my thoughts work on their own. I dream about being somewhere so flat I could walk for miles with my eyes closed. When I’m indoors, to me that’s not exactly at home, or safe indoors, what have you, that’s the in-between bit between being myself walking along outside.’ She wasn’t sure that what she had just said was quite accurate; nor could she think why she was speaking like this to a stranger, unless it was for the very reason that he didn’t know better.
‘Beauty parlours?’ he said.
‘Well—’ Kit smiled. They had slipped into conversation. It was odd, but okay. ‘At the hairdresser’s,’ she said, ‘or having your face done, or even your nails, whatever, which I only have once, it allows you to lose yourself completely. I don’t think anything while I’m having my hair cut, or if you’re lying there in a back room wrapped in hot towels and stuff. It’s pleasantly tactile, but,’ she took a breath for a second, then carried on, ‘—I don’t lie there thinking, oh yes, that’s a great idea for my next chapter: when I get out of here, I must scribble it down. It isn’t like that. It’s just nothing.’
‘You could—well, yes. No.’
‘What?’
‘No, I was going to say something stupid. What music? I’m trying very hard to think what you might listen to.’
‘Diamanda Galás?’
‘Christ.’
‘You know who I’m talking about?’
‘I do, but I think it qualifies as left field, all the same.’
Kit felt inconsequentially miffed. She hadn’t listened to Diamanda Galás for well over a year.
‘You have these beauty treatments often?’ Joe asked.
‘Sadly, no. But if I were rich, ta-da, I’d spend all my time conked out in a beauty parlour, just lounging around.’ Kit smiled again to show she didn’t mean it, though she could have wished she did; that it would be just fine to surrender herself to a life of indulgence and extreme mental neglect.
‘Who needs sleep anyway?’ said Joe, with friendly absurdity.
‘Have you ever heard of Gurdjieff?’
‘Who?’
‘It’s nothing, don’t worry. I thought I’d ask. He helped kill Katherine Mansfield because he didn’t believe in sleep and she had TB. It’s not important. He was a famous Russian charlatan—Russian, I think. I can’t remember. He had this colony where people had to mow the lawn and no one was allowed any sleep. What do you do?’
‘I work for the university.’
That was all he said, but he said it in a tone to cast a pall over them both. Kit felt diminished by the picture of him in some mid-ranking, central admin post, and wondered now whether he mightn’t automatically be looking down on her as a lackadaisical student, if his job happened to be dedicated, in some tedious way, to keeping her sort going.
‘Not by any chance mowing lawns?’ she said, in the hopes he might find this funny.
His eyes did crinkle. It made him look kind. The end of one of his eyebrows was missing, she noticed. ‘Now that you seem a bit better,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t like to come back to my place and let me make you something decent to eat? I live off the Woodstock Road, up near Summertown?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I go that direction too.’
They barely spoke. They took a bus as far as the High Street, then walked through the city darkness. The rain that had threatened didn’t fall. In time, the shaky feeling faded out of Kit’s legs. As they went along, she was half-saying, in her head, the entire way, no; but half a ‘no’ was tacitly much like a ‘yes’.
Joe ushered her into a large brick house, up the neglected communal staircase, up to the top, where they stepped through his front door into an extraordinarily sleek flat, all chrome and dulled colours and expensive fittings, surely not the abode of a person in a mid-grade admin job. He turned the heating on. Kit was startled by the money implicit in everything she saw. It was also all disconcertingly tidy. She tried to guess whether his spells of maximum boredom took place here, when he was at home, or whether they happened elsewhere, away f
rom home.
‘Glass of wine?’ he said.
He’s making this easier for me, she thought. What am I doing here? Do I have to do this?—to both of which questions the answers were straightforward. It had been about a year, more than a year, since a man she found catchingly attractive had tried to sleep with her. That was what she was doing there, edged into his cold, glittery kitchen, feeling, on the one hand, hollow, and on the other, almost excited. I find him attractive? she enquired of herself; but it was a silly question. Going to his flat was admitting it by default.
And did she have to do this? Of course not.
She didn’t expect him to ask, exactly. They both drank a little, still standing up. He was staring at her hands but didn’t appear to see them. ‘I’m sorry I upset you,’ he said.
She wondered why he hadn’t said it before; glanced sideways at herself in a large, ornate, antique mirror that hung on the kitchen wall. ‘I know what they were all—’ she said. ‘Just because I was the boy, because I had control of you, it didn’t mean—and I was the only girl in trousers, and they obviously all thought I was—’
‘What does it matter?’ he said.
She looked back at him, saw that his gaze had become more focused. In another of his felicitous turns of phrase, delivered so that there was no possibility of her misunderstanding him, he asked softly, ‘Would it be good if we put things straight between us?’
Kit drank her wine down like water. The longer she stood before him, the more she felt vanquished.
‘Hey, I’m not going to jump you,’ he said, with a funny look.
‘You already jumped me,’ she replied.
This is going to ruin everything, she thought—though what everything? And so what if it did? How would that be different from usual? She felt nervously vague as she made a maladroit gesture of agreement.
‘Was that a yes?’ he asked, his lesser eyebrow raised.
Ah, the brink, she said to herself facetiously. What luck Orson had put ‘transgressive’ in his essay. Hurrah for pretty knickers and the lacy bit over her hm-hm.
‘I don’t have any protection,’ she muttered—and thought, against anything.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Joe.
‘Don’t worry—you’ve got it covered?’ she asked, wanting clarification.
‘Yes,’ he said, providing clarification.
So much talk. You’ve got it covered—dismaying, the phrase that had volunteered itself.
Joe smiled at her again, another kind look. For a brief moment, she believed he was letting her go; but an atmosphere of surrender propelled them onwards.
Perched on his bed, Kit noticed what an evil colour the sky was, its louring clouds underlit by the street glare from across Oxford. She had been brought up to believe, somehow proof against the common run of her thoughts, that it was unseemly to sleep with a man you hardly knew. And then, once her career in this regard had begun, once she in fact did start sleeping with men she hardly knew, she found that any vestiges of seemliness felt perversely the more important. It was too unpleasant, too awful somehow, to have to say to a man you hardly knew, ‘Not like that, like this’, so she never did, not even when, by some people’s standards, she was being assaulted.
She accepted that this was all very ridiculous, mad even. Nevertheless, she conducted such sexual encounters in a manner both superficial and disengaged, taking comfort from the thought that if she felt disappointed, it followed that she couldn’t have given up, and must still be hoping for better. She wasn’t always disappointed, either. Casual sex she considered a contradiction in terms, but pointless sex, she didn’t. Sex for her was generally an unsimulated fiction; however, sometimes it seemed to work.
As she lay there bathed in the ugly light that seeped through the bedroom window, Kit found that, although ordering herself not to do this, she was unstoppably chanting, in her mind: the parts he likes he treats considerately, he is not unkind to the parts he likes. And being inexperienced in the matter of saying, ‘not like that, like this’—she took it. He had said they would put things straight between them, so she let him and she took it.
Whatever they both thought they were up to, it was over fast. As Kit reorganised herself in Joe’s bathroom, she felt restless relief. She still couldn’t tell really what she made of him, or why she was there, why on earth she’d acquiesced. But what she did know, with baleful certainty, was that she hadn’t been much fun, and that it was all over, and that that was it.
It wasn’t that you couldn’t fake pleasure, she reflected, seating herself on the loo and trying to manage a trickle of pee not too loud. Supposedly that was the single greatest advantage women had over men, the ability to fake it, as much as you liked. But faking pleasure was one thing—even, obscurely, faking it to yourself—that was one thing. Having a stranger inside you was another, and not a business over which you could be very much deluded.
She wiped herself, pulled up her knickers, she didn’t like them any more, washed her hands, dried her hands, put on her trousers, put her shoes on, flushed the loo, glanced round the bathroom to check it wasn’t disarranged—it was possibly the neatest bathroom she had ever been in—then looked in the mirror and saw in the glass her freakishly lit-up face.
She had planned to go straight home, but he was waiting for her. He said, ‘Let me cook you something.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I don’t have to. Would you like an omelette, salad? I have some great olives. Or are you tired? You need to sleep?’
Kit stared down at her feet.
‘Anchovies?’ he said. ‘Fresh herbs?’
‘Okay, all right.’
‘And I have some great bread.’
‘Okay.’
‘Right. More wine?’
‘Sure.’
Well now, she thought, surprised, pulling out a chair from the kitchen table, which caused a cold scraping noise on the tiles—well now, at least I get a free meal out of this; kind of expensively free, but in a free kind of way.
She sat limply and watched. He was careful, when he cracked the eggs, to get the shells straight in the bin. When an olive fell off the spoon onto the counter where he was working, he wiped up after it at once. He arranged the bread in a pan in torn slices to warm it in the oven, but tore the loaf carefully over the sink. He hadn’t been like this in bed. As someone who wore skirts with moth holes, Kit was unimpressed.
He turned abruptly. ‘Okay?’
‘Could I have some water?’
‘Glass in there,’ he said, gesturing with an elbow at a wall cupboard. ‘It’ll have to be tap, I’m afraid. I don’t drink water so I don’t ever buy it.’
‘You don’t drink water?’
‘I don’t know, probably a glass every couple of weeks.’
‘You had a bottle at the dance session,’ said Kit.
‘That was given to you by a friend of mine.’
She was oddly dismayed by this answer. He’d had a friend there? Boy, girl? Who on earth?
‘I don’t sleep well either,’ said Joe, tripping her thoughts another way.
‘Oh.’
He laid mats down on the table: mats for the plates, a mat for the salad, two trivets, a silver salt cellar, Georgian—Kit’s grandfather had had one the same. ‘Some nights I feel like there’s hardly any point in going to bed unless there’s someone else there,’ he said. ‘Obviously you sleep so you’re in a fit state for the next day, but why give up on the day you’re in just to ensure the next one, when there’s absolutely nothing to choose between them?’
‘Don’t you simply get tired?’ she asked.
‘No. Well, yes, I do. But, like you maybe, I find it hard to fall asleep whether I’m tired or not. Alone, I find it hard to fall asleep.’
Don’t keep saying that, she thought.
‘Sometimes I go to bed,’ he said, ‘and then I get up again and go out walking, you know, three, four in the morning—and fast; fast.’
‘You do walk quickly
, I noticed,’ she said. ‘It’s pleasant to me, personally speaking, as someone with a long stride.’ She didn’t mention it, but often, when she walked alone, she sang.
‘No, but I’m talking fast,’ he said, ‘because then, when I’m going down all these streets and they’re empty, and the greater part of Oxford’s population is unconscious—although, you’d be surprised how many invitations I’ve received at four o’clock in the morning—’ He lost his thread. He was filling up her wine glass again, but she’d had enough. She was asking herself, not for the first time, how it was possible to kiss a person you didn’t really know; or rather, what that kiss exactly was.
Their talk turned, in dilatory fashion, to politics, the arts, subjects of the day, matters over which they had, if any, uninvolving influence: student misbehaviour, the city’s rat population, disasters in China. They despatched several of these topics between them as Joe cooked, before Kit said, ‘What about your work? I mean, about your work—what is it exactly that you do? You didn’t say.’
‘Don’t ask.’
He omitted to turn round this time, nor did he speak with emphasis, yet it was clear to her that he meant it: don’t ask.
Perhaps he’s a vivisectionist, she thought.
‘You?’ he said.
‘Oh,’ Kit pulled a loopy, apologetic face, which, with his back turned, he didn’t see, ‘well, I hate to say it, but my work is fantastically interesting and I don’t mind in the least being asked.’
‘Go on then.’
‘I—’ How to begin? She blundered about in her mind trying to formulate the right first sentence. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t answered this question before.
‘Give me a précis.’
‘You sure?’
He glanced round at her. ‘Give me a précis, woman.’
Kit said nothing.
‘Very well, what discipline are you in, and what are you working on at the moment?’
The Twisted Heart Page 5