Indelible Acts

by A. L. Kennedy

  Well, how do you describe your love to anyone, let alone a child—and please let us not quite mention that all of this need for Elizabeth removed any erection that I might have still kept for my wife. Nothing doing there for her now, not a thing. Love is like the best surprise you can think of every morning, licking right over your skin. Which probably means that Malcolm thinks love tickles—although that wouldn’t really disturb me, as long as he knows it’s supposed to be good.

  And it is. My face in her hair, yes: being there for the heat, the intention, that lights her face, our hands making every clasp and slip I can imagine, every one, and the first time she opened the seal of her mouth, yes, and easing and setting and pressing my body against hers and trying to think away our clothes, yes—this is mine with Elizabeth, but there is nothing more. We only have love, we don’t make it.

  So I can’t fuck my wife—domestic impotence—and, with Elizabeth, although I’d be very much able and want to and need to and could at a moment’s notice, or possibly less, it never does happen, not quite. In accordance with my wishes and against them—either way, I just no longer fuck.

  This hurts me, if I think of it. And I think of it a lot.

  Once, for two whole free periods we sat together in the boiler room. Elizabeth’s class were at the swimming baths without her—drowning in the care of others, for all that it mattered to me. That gave us an hour and a half in powdery, dimmed light, warmth flexing in the pipes around us, and nothing to do but talk about ourselves and what we liked.

  There was more to do than that—it was perfectly clear there was more—but we didn’t do it. Tugged her in at the side door, I’m not even certain she knew it was there, but she didn’t complain—stepped right down and came with me, holding my hand. And then facing each other, whispering, we traded our details, the places, the ways: her first—and once in a park with her boyfriend when she was twenty—the crowd I always dream will catch me—my first—and that, every time, I want to stay inside, even after, to be inside, feel everything.

  “So you’re demanding.”

  “No.” The air was felty, dry, it kept making me cough. “I’m not. I’m very easily satisfied, but what I like, I like very much.”

  I’d hoped that she might say the same thing back, or something similar, but she didn’t and you would suppose, wouldn’t you, that you’d describe these things to each other as a couple, because you intended to both make each other comfortable, happy, fucked. Your conversation would not be entirely purposeless.

  That is what you might reasonably suppose.

  I ended the afternoon unable to move. She kissed the top of my head—the only time we touched that day—and then she rushed the stairs to be ready for her lift. I stared at the pipes, the storage boxes—full of old sheet music for some reason—and I read the instructions on the fire blanket, over and over again. Something was going wrong in my bones, I realised that, and it seemed I was ill in a number of ways now, or would be soon. My scalp ached where her lips had rested on my hair.

  Did you know, the man who invented the in-car cigarette lighter, the one with the little element you plug into the dash, he was a magician. He’d needed to set things burning, unseen, and that was his solution to the problem: very neat. The way I’ve heard the story, a big car company took the idea and the magician never got a penny for it and no credit either. Stuck in the basement until my legs could bear my weight, I thought about that.

  Do all the work and then you get nothing, not a sign of fucking hope. Anticipation with no future, you know what that is—a definition of despair.

  And I had long enough there to consider that, if she didn’t love her husband and she had started this love with me but wouldn’t finish, then perhaps I had opened a door for her and somebody else entirely had used it to slip in.

  Do all the work and you get nothing.

  I made it across to one of the boxes, crawling, and threw up on multiple copies of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

  Poor Malcolm, he didn’t get to sleep at his proper time for quite a few nights after that, although I wasn’t keeping him up with stories: I hadn’t the heart for Ted, much less for his lady, or his love. I kept to facts. Mal never does seem to be lonely, but I hope that knowing practical information may help him when he’s with the other boys. I’ve let him use a soldering iron—with predictably lumpy results—he can rewire a plug and understands pulleys and gears. I do want to help my son. So, for example, I sat on his bed for those evenings after the boiler-room incident and told him why stars twinkle and why a fire engine’s siren changes as it passes and what is inertia. I tried to do the right, the paternal thing, even though I was glad in the deep dark of my heart that Malcolm was so isolated: the frightening janitor’s son: and that this meant the shouting matches and screamed comments about my prick were caught firmly inside my house with my family and, equally, any minor mentions of Elizabeth out in the world were kept at bay and I was safe—safe to do very little, but even so.

  Malcolm, remember when we drove last summer? On the road there was water you could see, but never reach, because it wasn’t really there. It seemed to be magic, but it was only the way the world works.

  Sometimes I didn’t know if he understood me—he would look puzzled, or else tired, and it was hard to tell between them.

  Light—I’ve told you about light, the way it comes in little pieces and also in long lines, both at the same time and never mind if that’s impossible. Well, light always knows the quickest way to go. It’s slower through water and cold air, so it avoids them. When we drive, if we’re up in cold air and so is the sun, but down on the road there’s some warm air in a dip, then the sun’s light will pick out the quickest path to our eyes, ducking down through the warm air and then up again. So we see sky light, coming from the ground and it looks like water, reflecting the sun, although there isn’t any water there at all. The light always knows what to do, like magic.

  This was the point where I started praying: nothing very formal, just requests for help. I am not religious, never have been, my father was a communist, but thinking hadn’t helped me and nor had planning, wishing, avoiding her, seeking her out. On a Saturday afternoon, my wife caught me—at prayer. I had to pretend I was looking for something I’d dropped under the bed. Don’t ask me why I’d used the bedroom in the first place—Christopher Robin with his elbows on the quilt, or the place I associated most with a need for divine intervention, nothing was clear to me any more—but that was where I’d ended up. I glanced round and my wife was standing, quiet, behind me, I felt as if she’d trapped me stealing from her, or having a wank, and she gave me a look as if she wished she had. I only spoke to God in the bathroom after that.

  And prayers get answered, they do. My sole, repetitive effort certainly got a reply.

  “I’m going.”

  She mentioned a primary school on the north side of our town while my breathing stiffened to a halt and then panicked back in, too fast.

  “Bill’s already there.”

  Bill, her husband, was a teacher, too. I’d watched him from a distance—he dressed badly and you’d have sworn that his mother still cut his hair. “Well, is that good? Do you want to be …” I was going to finish with both in the same school, in a voice which suggested it would give rise to tensions and many other kinds of hell. But we already knew about that, so I didn’t bother. I sat on the lip of her desk, afraid. “Oh.” I couldn’t remember being so wholly afraid.

  “Once I’m settled, I’ll call.”

  When we kissed I drew her tongue hard into my mouth, hoped it hurt a little, let my hands slide to her arse and hold her as I hadn’t often attempted to, for fear of getting nowhere and then going insane.

  I am a janitor, I am not a man that women call. No one, ever in my life, has called me, not that way.

  I went insane, in any case. Nothing spectacular: I think I was the only one who knew. They were supposed to have a leaving do in school to send Elizabeth off in st
yle, and I was meant to go along and contribute a few tricks. But I wasn’t well that week and I think, even before, they’d changed their minds and settled for a pub night out.

  On the Monday morning, people talked about their hangovers and said they’d had fun, and walking across the playground was something I avoided for a while, because there was no more Elizabeth Harrison. I tried not to hate the supply who turned up to replace her. Supplies these days, they know nothing, they’re what we get instead of teachers.

  I kept praying for about a week, but it seemed to bring on no additional effects. Mrs. Campbell, who deals with the dim half of Primary One, is mad enough to consult the I Ching before she makes any decision and is also mad enough to say so. I borrowed her copy, bided my time, and then sneaked with it upstairs, bolted the door, and threw out the little sticks provided to make their pattern on the toilet lid—this not only guaranteed my privacy, I thought, but seemed completely appropriate.

  He cannot help whom he follows and is dissatisfied in his mind. The situation is perilous and the heart glows with suppressed excitement.

  Those were the only bits that made sense. Except that it did also highlight the bones in my legs that now seemed to feel thinner, raw. It closed with there will be good fortune but then I supposed that most predictions would end that way, just to keep you consulting. I wanted to believe it, though: knew that I shouldn’t, because good fortune doesn’t happen to a man like me.

  “John?” She’d phoned my number in the bothy, had to call three or four times, “Hello? Is that you?” until she found me in and, as it happened, alone. “John, it’s Elizabeth.”

  As if I hadn’t known.

  “Yes, yes, I … Hello.” That soft pool was yawning for me and I jumped, sprang at it like a happy suicide. “Are you, ahm … are you well?”

  “Yes. You?”

  I couldn’t find an answer. Elizabeth didn’t wait for one, she only had a minute before she needed to get back, but she wanted to see me, Thursday night, the bar of a hotel I’d never heard of, away on the edge of town.

  A hotel.

  That week I steered Malcolm and Ted through a barrage of trials and monsters, but I kept them away from the castle. A hotel. If Ted had got near to his lady, I couldn’t have been responsible.

  A hotel.

  My wife got a different story—that I’d run out of good window mastic, but Steve over at St. Saviour’s said he’d got some, I’d go over and pick it up, have a drink. Steve enjoys a drink and decent mastic is, occasionally, hard to find. I would have believed me.

  And I stepped out on Thursday in nondescript trousers but, underneath that terrible anorak, I wore the good jacket, my nicest shirt—I don’t really have many that aren’t white—and the best tie. In one of my tiny, stupid, zippered pockets, I had two condoms for no reason.

  Not to use, I don’t think I’ll use them, not one of them. But if I did need them and I hadn’t got them, Jesus.

  I ought to have known. Primary One’s I Ching said: The situation is perilous. No movement in any direction should be made. And she is Elizabeth and I am this man and not another and so I should have understood what I could expect.

  That she would smell fresh from a bath: those different little perfumes: the quiet, clean evening taste of a woman whenever you breathe in, swallow: and the scent of her skin: her reachable skin that you kiss on her cheek and near her lips, brush with your hand—slowly, seriously, the way it should be done, finding your lady. And you want to see her tonight completely, everything, to break her sweat against you, to howl and race and shiver until you are happy, both of you.

  But when we meet, it doesn’t make us happy, it just makes us want to be.

  I realised, as soon as I saw her face, that she hadn’t booked a room, that we would stare at our dinners together in the broad, mainly sand-coloured restaurant and that I would drink slightly too much and then would take coffee—I know it seems unlikely, but I think six coffees—to make the meal last.

  If anyone had seen us, the way we were, we’d have been in just as much trouble as if we had gone upstairs together, as if we’d fucked across the table while the waiter brought over our eleventh and twelfth complimentary-with-coffee mints.

  We stood in the foyer for too long before we left, the porter was edging looks at us, anticipating the final agreement, the turn, the mumbled request for a double room. He didn’t know what we’re like. Our hands patted and dabbed at shoulders, forearms, and nothing connected properly. Quietly we wished each other the good night we weren’t going to have and walked out to separate cars in the dark. I shouldn’t have been driving, but then there are lots of things I shouldn’t do and I wouldn’t be myself without them.

  This is love. This terrible feeling. This knowing I would rather see her than be content. Even the way that we are is so near to being enough. This is love.

  This is love as I understand it. I could be wrong. I would rather not talk about it, I do imagine that would be best. Malcolm, though, whenever I think he’s moved on, he’ll sit up in bed and want to hear about it. In the end, he always has to ask. Perhaps he realises that I probably need him to, that without him I would come back from February’s restaurant, April’s cinema, May’s hotel: from each of my unconcluded meetings with Elizabeth: and I wouldn’t know what to do.

  Although it won’t ever be anything other than inappropriate, I would like to tell him, to really say:

  The best love is a little like light. It is unremitting, cannot fail to find you, to take the shortest, surest way, as if that were marked out as part of your nature, the line where you and love are made to meet. It is your law, the physics of your life. It will move from somewhere to nowhere and back again and it will make you lost. It is beautiful and terrible and blinding and you will never understand the trick of it.

  For Shelby White and Leon Levy

  How to Find Your Way in Woods

  The thunder had battered and turned above the house for most of the night and they had stayed in their separate bedrooms, Sarah watching the woods cracked open, stripped out of the dark. The grass, the trees, the bushes, everything was trapped for uneasy seconds beneath a sudden, lilac sky and then the window glass would shrug back into secrecy and show no more than her reflection, shivered in the roar of aftershocks and pale.

  That bleached face in the pane had surprised her, the narrowness of its mouth, an almost untrustworthy shift in the eyes as they’d looked beyond her and to the charged edge of the clearing. She had seemed to be slightly older than she was and, literally, more shallow: someone who really, in some way, had not lived a good life. There was nothing definitely evil or unpleasant there, just a sense of being insubstantial, second rate. This had only been to do with the light, the strangeness of the light, but still she felt uncomfortable in the morning, as if she’d misplaced a belonging she was fond of.

  “God, it was terrific. I nearly went outside.” Twenty past nine and David was leaning in the kitchen doorway. He looked tired, as she supposed she must, but he seemed contented, too, relaxed. “Did it wake you?” For the first time, she imagined that he might be glad he’d come.

  “Of course it woke me.”

  When David passed her, she noticed he smelt of himself and of the privacy of sleep. He sat at the table and stretched, easy. “You weren’t frightened?”

  He hadn’t shaved yet. She wasn’t used to seeing him with bristles, or in a dressing gown, for that matter. Sarah liked to wait until her first few coffees had kicked in before she changed out of her night things. She hadn’t seen a reason to behave any differently just because David was here, but for his part he’d been careful, on each of their previous days, to appear only once he was fully groomed and dressed. However he’d intended she should feel about this, it had struck her as defensive, a tiny but unmistakable rebuff with each breakfast they shared.

  “Well, were you …? Frightened?”

  “Did you think I would be?” It wasn’t as if she couldn’t be trusted not to leap on
him.

  “You don’t get that kind of storm in Britain.” His voice was lower this early, had a delicacy to it that was new.

  At least she thought it was new. “But we get them all the time over here.” And he wasn’t that attractive, she’d have said. Not any more. “Some use you’d have been, if I was scared.”

  “I’m good at making people not scared.” He said this lightly, but still made her remember that she didn’t especially know him now, that more than enough time had passed to leave them distant.

  “Well, I’d have to take your word for that.” She hadn’t fully intended to sound sour, but knew she had, in any case, and so she made an effort to smile next. “I could have been paralysed with horror. You didn’t rush through to check. You didn’t even saunter through to check …”

  David widened his eyes for an instant and then took her glance, drew it, and lit a live pause in her before he blinked away. He’d always used to do that, make the look—we are together, whatever we say. Her smile receded, unsure of itself. In bars, at parties, when they were having Sunday dinner with his mother—wherever, really—the look had meant they’d be alone soon, part the last air between them, no more interruptions, only picking up each other’s time again, touch after touch. They would kiss on their way, impatient in the crook of stairs, in corridors, the car—wherever, really.