Indelible Acts

by A. L. Kennedy

  Because you’re mine I will stand in the midst of clergy, stiff with the thought of your foreskin, bitten back. Because you’re mine I will be—with insufficient warning—simultaneously furious, beguiled, delighted, affronted, murderous and cheap. Because you’re mine I will watch you the way that I’m watching right now and remember that I can strip you full down to the pink, the quick. I know you at least as well as you know me.

  Because you’re mine. It’s a standard wording, not dependent upon truth.

  He’s pacing now, almost trotting, round the walls, being interested about foundations and seating arrangements and herringbone brickwork, as displayed in flights of steps. He has an enthusiasm for constructions that I find I cannot share. But this is not a problem—I can sit here and write my letter while he prods about. And I can look at him moving through shudders of heat, the firmness of his shadow stretching, snug beneath him. He should wear a hat, really; by this evening he’ll have burned. Laurie can be very cavalier about that kind of exposure.

  I tend to be more careful, because I have good skin. Most women of my age and younger have fine lines and visible wrinkles, but I don’t. I have elasticity and bloom. I catch myself sometimes in the mirror when I’m alone and there it is—my beautiful outside—the ghosts of his hands still across it from the afternoons and evenings he’s spent examining, testing flexibilities. I give him my best and he does appreciate it, he does take the time to say.

  I also give him my collaboration, my consent, my long Bank Holiday weekend to pack up and use in a curtained and mirrored hotel room, in the moist, ecclesiastical heat of Rome. Since we flew in last night we’ve transgressed without dispensation, hourly, perhaps because no one who matters is here to see. I could, for example, cross to him now, take his hand, stroke the blue push of veins at his wrist and wriggle our palms together in an unmistakably familiar, casual, mutually affectionate and incriminating way that any malign observer could use against us. But this is a safe city, we have left Greenwich Mean Time and entered anonymity.

  This makes Laurie happy, I can tell. His shoulders have a buoyancy about them I only normally see at night. In the dark he unfolds, relaxes, takes me outside, moves me up and down pavements we can’t share with any kind of comfort in open day. Or else, he goes out driving, and I choose to come along, be where he takes me.

  “Here?”

  “Why not?” That time, we were in a field—lots of fresh air, healthy. “It’s quiet, there’s no one around.” But his eyes still flickered across the windows, checking. Although he enjoys observing, Laurie never wants to be observed. He has a fear of being cornered, or forced into actions he won’t wish to take. “No interruptions, hm?”

  I noted the bluey green of sheep’s eyes, reflecting far off to the right. “It’s raining.”

  “So you’ll get wet.”

  He put on the handbrake and he turned the engine off and we sat in his car in the overcast dark of the field. No stars. On other nights, he might have picked the forest, or the underground office car park. I removed my mackintosh, kept on my shoes. High heels—impractical over the stubble of wheat.

  “Oh, yes. Just what the doctor ordered. Let me see, though. Let me really see.”

  Because I wished to do so, needed to do so, had waited to do so, because this is a choice that I can make, I stepped out and crossed the shorn rows to show him my skin. The bright burn of me flared in the headlamps, gleaming with drizzle and then moving, extinguishing under him.

  “You’re a very naughty, dirty girl.”

  Held safe between him and his car, I could feel his gloves against my spine, the thin chill of a zip, the tongue and groove of our mutual interest, of us being us together, our recoiling fit. I’d turned my head and could watch the blisters of rain on the bonnet shiver and split: a dim shining, level with my eye.

  He could have been anybody, “Lift your arse,” but he was Laurie, working me tight with a smooth negation of all other possibilities.

  I was glad of him, his cover, his cloth heat. My mother had often warned me against night air and stormy weather and being caught without a coat. Which made another reason to let Laurie catch me and—in a sense—lend me his.

  “Good girl.”

  Anticipation faded into the sink of earth, the vague scent of animal shit and wet wool. He pressed my breath into fits and starts and came, as always, silently in a ragged burst of motion and then stillness, withdrawal. He’s taught himself to be thoroughly secretive.

  Which is why I’ve learned to read his body and his things. This afternoon I can tell he is contented, easy: he doesn’t push at his hair too much, or tug his ears, and there is something liquid in his stride, a muscular amusement, a tiny swing of appetite.

  He’s dressed to be comfy, but not unattractive. I saw him, warm and freshly woken, maybe seven hours ago, picking the right things and strolling between the wardrobe and the bed, naked in a way that made my gums hurt, made the palms of my hands start to twitch. I am designed to experience these feelings, they are hard-wired through my whole anatomy. I consider types of insulation, circuit breaking, but every time, he trips the switch and seems to prove I couldn’t end this, that anything else would be inadequate.

  Today, for example, he has equipped himself to show that he is happy and to jump-start my skull: white boxers (the pair I bought him) and his oldest jeans, because we both know they hang well and make it look more than likely that he does, too. Add in the plain black T-shirt to set off the linen jacket for thumb-hooking over his shoulder and the Ray-Bans for making sure that he won’t need to squint and there he is, my Laurie, all tooled up.

  Back at home, he’ll leave clothes with me: accessories, bits and bobs: small records of his scent and shape. Leather is most eloquent; his belts roll where they’ve taken the curve of his back and notch to mark the measure of his waist, his shoes and gloves reform against his movements and his sweat. And, of course, I do the same. In his absence, the pattern of his previous needs sings out on me. He’s oiled into the grain of my fingers the way any habit would be. It is unsurprising that, at night, I can find his memory shunts me into sleeplessness.

  I haven’t tried to sleep in Rome, not yet. It has seemed unnecessary. Fatigue occasionally dives at me, unsteadies reality, but I won’t give in. I’m going to stay more than conscious, because Laurie is all here with me: leant over the railing, nicely taut and shifting: my encyclopaedia. Before we leave, before it’s over, I’ll know his arms by heart, from the short clip of his fingernails to the paler and paler tenderness of his joints, the soft rise of hair. Anyone can concentrate, stay alert, for only four days and three nights when they’re constantly accompanied by the body they’ve learned to miss. I am always greedy for what I know I’ll lack.

  Of course, this rationing and waiting will tend to breed intensity in us both.

  “Tell me where to aim it.”

  The accumulated discomfort of over-rehearsed desire.

  “Or I’ll just put it where I want.”

  In Rome, I’m moving from the bite of his imagination to his everyday coughs and whispers, his small breaths when he’s reading and the way he towels his hair. Each part of this is as addictive as I’d guessed, as hard to walk away from, or to fight.

  “I’ll put it where I want it. And you know where I’ll want …”

  I’m more used to the short nights when we’re trying to impress. They were when I pushed for something to stay with me while he did not, for marks, for brands in the memory, indelible acts. I have, in the past, been anxious to experiment with error and trial: squatting, or standing, or bending, or lying in my bath.

  “That’s where I’ll want. Right there. And there.”

  “Laurie …” The not unpleasant smell of it, slightly bitter, grassy, hot. “Laurie, could you—”

  “What?”

  “Well. It isn’t … erotic.”

  He was standing unfastened, braced. “I’m pissing on you, how can that not be erotic?” He rubbed through his fring
e with his free hand.

  “It’s mainly just warm—more relaxing than anything. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not erotic.” His flow relented, sputtered, stopped. “Not at all?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He sat on the edge of the bath with his back to me, set his hands on his knees to lean forward and away. “No, don’t be sorry.”

  “It was good to try.”

  “Yeah.” He looked at his watch. “I don’t really have time now for anything else.”

  I hate Laurie’s watch. Resistant to many varieties of highly unnatural shock and proofed against pressures and waters at hideous depths, it will most certainly outlive us. It pecks through our time together, unrelenting, it’s his conscience and my limit and I wish he’d agreed to just leave it in our room. I don’t want to be reminded of when we’ll stop. I don’t want to be sad yet and have to tell him why.

  I want to keep collecting and making his inventory complete without distractions. When I go home, he’ll have soaked my recollection, my blood will smell of him, I will think with his voice and be able to be alone, to be with other people, and to comfortably keep in mind all I’ll need of him.

  I do hope that, eventually, this could be true: that Laurie could come to be anyone, the next one, someone new.

  He’s craning over. He shouldn’t do that, it leaves the skin between his hair and his collar bared to the sun. He’s tender there, sweet to kiss, and this is not what he does: something repeatable, replaceable, easy to find again. This is what he is. This is the unrepeatable, irreplaceable, unforgivable man I have had to do without for years, holding on, numb between instalments of whatever his household arrangements allow him to give. This is the best he can bring me: it’s what should have stopped us becoming ridiculous.

  This should have prevented the evenings full of ice cubes and safety razors and fruit and all the other variations on our theme—a little sting of toothpaste, a little KY dip, escalating restraint.

  “Dirty girl.”

  “No, you’re the one that’s dirty. Dirty old man.”

  He only grinned, untying me, showing he’d taken no offence. “No, you’re the one and you’re going to prove it. Go and get that thing—I want to see. Show me how you’re a bad girl—playing while I’m away …”

  “The people at work bought it for me.”

  “But you use it.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  I fetched it through for him, still in the box, so that he could unveil it.

  “Fuck.”

  My implement was longer, fatter—unmistakably larger than his.

  Which should have been of no significance to him. At least a couple of inches were just there for grip, they weren’t a requirement, they didn’t establish a level of need.

  He turned it in his hands like a condensed adultery.

  “Fuck.”

  But I don’t think he ever considered not using it.

  “All right, then. All right.” The dark of his eye cold, mirroring my skin. “You always want things to remember … Well, all right.”

  And I do remember, absolutely clearly, the moment when the pain of his being there exceeded the pain of his having to leave me be.

  Laurie and I, we don’t discuss that night: it’s our other secret. We don’t tell.

  But I find, more and more, that I write out what happened, what happens, in letters I never post—letters to a wife I do not know. Although we must have a few things in common, that’s what I’d suppose. We must both look at him, walking in sunlight, and find him beautiful.

  Elsewhere

  This is where you end up, then, your last resort.

  It was the town’s eighty-seventh annual rodeo—which meant they’d been doing this in James Bridge for eighty-seven years. Somehow, that made it worse.

  “Big day for the Alberts. Biggest day of the year.” Francis Albert nudged her. “And front-row seats.” Grinning down at his programme: “She’s going to be a winner. Oh, yah.” He spoke calmly, softly, Francis Albert, always took his time, no matter what.

  This is where you end up. Sitting on a temporary rake of wooden benches under this long, flat afternoon, the edge of the seat behind her beginning to nag her hip. From Stirling, to Glasgow, to Sligo and then the big one—Montreal. And after that, you’re here, nowhere but here.

  The wind was busy, pawing at the dust. A new, snapping breeze veered to worry the heat from the sunlight and pick up another thin jolt of 70s rock—courtesy of the 70s speaker system—and shake it until its sense fragmented.

  Out in the ring, one of the many Alberts yelled to herself as she turned her horse, tight between barrels, threaded an imagined clover leaf over the sand, and then leaned up and forward into a sprint, one arm wide. Francis Albert also lifted his voice: deliberate, supportive: “Carla. Yes. That girl,” his manner so placid that he might have been murmuring, telling a stranger the best way to Round Lake.

  As it turned out, Carla’s time wasn’t the fastest, wasn’t even that close. “Well, who would believe it.” Francis Albert folded his programme—six sheets of photocopied typing and blurred ads—and pinched it into a cheerfully reproachful crease.

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s the luck I have, eh.” He was nodding to someone she couldn’t see, “You understand the luck I have?” chuckling at a point beyond her head, his sentences entirely tranquil, a clear, unruffled atmosphere about him, nothing that could ever have been touched by a misfortune. “Every time, a new disaster: you know?” He was enjoying this now, playing on the lie of his awful life—making it so plainly untrue that it couldn’t count as a deception. “Eh, Juney?” He wanted her to play, as well.

  But June didn’t. “I’m not sure.” She kept her expression quiet, close to neutral.

  “It doesn’t change …” He eased this out to her, making one last try, as she stood up, coughed.

  “No.” She studied the thin film of grey that had gathered on her hands; pause for any length of time in this wind and you silted up: you never just got air here, nothing so simple. “No, I suppose not.” She coughed again and tasted broken stone and a trace of the dirt of animals.

  “You headed off?”

  “I think so.”

  When she started to walk, she hunched down slightly, a concession to those whose view she must be spoiling, and Francis Albert said, “I’ll see you around, then,” in the same gentle way she’d heard him talk about her that Friday—I can’t see anyone riding her, bare belly. The two men he was with, their backs to her: everyone’s backs to her: had both given a small, damp laugh—That Juney Morris? I can’t see anyone riding her, bare belly—and then they’d discussed other women while she’d turned away and rounded the corner again, retraced the route to her house and sat inside it, breathless.

  Still, Francis Albert had meant her no harm. He’d just been making what was, for him, a factual statement when he couldn’t have known she was near. It wasn’t his fault if she made such an ugly fact, or if she felt angry and clumsy and naked whenever they met.

  And last year it hadn’t been true, not in the spring of last year. Four hours back along the road in another stupid, tiny town: driving in beside the man who’d brought her, who wanted to show her the family house, open it up for her—make them a new beginning in an old place.

  She’d stepped from the car with his feel still on her, the shape of him from when they’d pulled over because he had to fuck—the way he’d had to in the motel before that—had to. The heat in her had made the main street blink, turned her walk smooth and even. She’d helped him to feel young—he told her.

  Now sometimes she’d wake with the choke of his tongue in her mouth, his head in her hands with a tenderness they’d never really shared. It wasn’t a memory, more a joke. An old man getting heavy, getting scared by the difference between their skins.

  He went back to his wife. June didn’t get the chance to tell him that he’d been a compromise: her try at settling for comfort, for less than second b
est.

  Stirling, Glasgow, Sligo. Always west. West as far as James Bridge.

  Any further and she’d be in the Pacific, Russia, China: be washed right back to where she’d started, still a bad fit for her home.

  The space that she’d left on the bench was narrowing as people shifted and relaxed and the seam between whites and natives closed. It was nothing official, only the usual border that fixed itself whenever the town and the reservation met. Nobody was impolite about it: the groups would simply always separate: apparently friendly, but clearly defined. And, without intending, she would inevitably drift out to a margin, a place where the two incompatibles brushed in the crowd. After ten months in James Bridge, she wasn’t sure if she arranged this herself, subconsciously, or if both communities edged her into it, knowing she wasn’t a part of either one.

  A child watched her from the slope near the corrals, toddler-plump shins and bare feet planted beneath the hem of an adult T-shirt, everything ghosted over with the unavoidable ash brown. His only other colours were the blue in his eyes and the blackish line of wet dirt round his lips that showed where he’d licked them. She tried smiling, but he looked away.

  And then the dry tamp of boot heels closed to her left and brought, “Hey, Juney, you having a good time?” The question put with just enough incredulity to rankle.

  “Yes. I am enjoying myself. Thank you.” Her answer also lively with the sense that this was remarkably unlikely. “And how about you, Freddie?”

  Not that she couldn’t guess. Of course he was having a good time—if not a great one—she should never doubt it: he was Freddie Williamson, son of Freddie Williamson, who was himself son of another in a line of Christ knew how many other desperately unimaginative Freddie bloody Williamsons. The whole clan of them probably spent their winter nights together, reading the list of their forebears aloud from the family bible like one continuous, sad, baptismal stammer. The rodeo’s annual horse sports and beery sideshows must represent a frenzy of fun for any self-respecting member of the clan.