Vertigo

by Joanna Walsh

  And here she is, surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, unearthly, less substantial than she ever was, being the one who made the cakes but seldom ate them: a minute on the lips, a lifetime on … well that hardly matters any more. Mother is where we put things we don’t like. I must remember, I think, as always, to judge her less harshly this time.

  But I am looking at her buttons, not her eyes. She has been talking for a while and it has been difficult for me to look at her eyes all that time. I’m not sure what she’s saying. She might be talking about baking. Her buttons are white with a gold rim. There are five of them. This gives me more to look at. Her buttons glint but they do not look back.

  Wait, Mom, I have a question.

  I raise my hand.

  What was I going to say again?

  There is no bottom to the cake. I’m digging through the kind of soil that supports rhododendrons: it’s that dark. There’s a little ice-cream spoon shaped like a spade. I remember one from when I was a kid, when a sundae looked like a mountain (though only, always, for the first time).

  I cannot button her eyes.

  I think we eat what we need. I could eat the whole earth if you broke it down into pieces, if the pieces were small enough. I read one woman ate the wall of her house: she didn’t know why. “My body calls for it,” she said.

  THE BIG BLACK SNAKE

  We saw it under the road, in a ditch beneath the road that stretched under the road from one side to the other. The road was not really a road; it was more of a path. The path was so narrow that it was more of a bridge. The ditch under the bridge was so shallow that perhaps it was only a hollow. The snake was in the hollow, thick and black as a bicycle tire. We could not see its beginning, we could not see its end.

  Its head was hidden in some grass or a hole on one side of the hollow, and its tail was hidden in a hole or some grass at the other side. The path stretched over the hollow, and it stretched over the snake. There were four of us. We were all together. We could not decide which was the front end of the snake, and which was the back.

  The snake did not move, and we did not move. The sun was hot. We wanted to move out of the sun, to the other side of the hollow, but we did not want to cross the snake. We knew that there were poisonous snakes in this area, and we saw that the snake was so very big and black that it could only be one of the poisonous snakes. We knew all these things all together.

  Nevertheless we crossed the hollow.

  When we returned in the evening the woman who met us told us that the poisonous snakes in this area are thin and green, and that they will come upon you without your knowing, and that they do not lie in ditches in the sun, the size and color of a thick bicycle tire.

  And we knew that this thing about the snake that we had known all together was wrong, even though we had known it all together, and it was one time that we had known something all together, all four of us at once, the same thing. Though perhaps we had also known at the same time that what we knew was most likely unlikely, and that we had also known that even a poisonous snake would most likely not be disturbed if we crossed the hollow, and we had known that the snake, being so big, was most likely the kind that did not rise up. But it had been important that we agreed about the snake, and it had been important that we did not have to say this, but that we had known it at that moment, each and all of us, the same thing. Or it had been important, at that moment, to think we did. And maybe that was what it was all about, after all.

  AND AFTER …

  Let it be autumn.

  Let it be another town. Let the houses be lowrise, undistinguished, a mix of old and new. Let the doctor’s surgery in a terraced sidestreet be new sandbrick with a porthole window and double doors, and thick brightly colored metal bars at waist height to steady the entering infirm.

  Let the branches of chain stores in the high street be too small to carry the full range. Let their sales be undermined by charity shops selling just as good as new. Let there be other shops stocking nothing useful: handicrafts; overpriced children’s clothes; holidays on window cards, faded; homemade homewares. Let these shops be unvisited and kept by old women still peering from doorways expecting their ideal customer. Let fashion be something heard of somewhere else.

  Let there be backalleys for cycles hungover with brambles, with cidercans in ditches. Let these backways be quicker ways but let no one question the cars. Let these ways snake along the back of allotments and supermarkets and h-block schools on the ring road. Let the ways snake under the ring road. Let dogwalkers use them: let anglers use them, and junkies. Let these ways be deserted when the children are in school, except for the odd dogwalker or angler or junkie. Let each wear his particular uniform. Let no angler or dogwalker be mistaken for a junkie: let no junkie be mistaken for a dogwalker or angler. Let anglers only occasionally walk dogs.

  Let there be children and old people but few whose occupation is neither hope nor memory. Let there have been immigration at some point: enough to fill the convenience stores, the foreign restaurants, but let it be forgotten. Let the children be all in school, a breath held in, released at 3 o’clock across the park. Let the town’s rhythm be unquestioned. Let me be single: no children, no family. Let me not fit in.

  Let there be a college where art students dream of cities they do not leave for.

  Let art for the old people be something colorful and, for the young people, something black. Let their art be always things. Let the colorful things appear sometimes in the windows of the shops that sell homemade homewares. Let the art students sometimes fill an empty shop lot with black things. Let the old people go right up to the windows of the empty shop lot and squint and frown.

  Let there be a coffee shop next to a head shop where the art students hang out. Let the coffee shop serve bad coffee. Let it have only yesterday’s news and the local papers (let small crimes occur, and let occasional larger crimes, on the outskirts of town beyond the ring road, be personally motivated, down to nothing more than bad marriages, bad upbringings). Let me sit in the coffee shop and, while drinking bad coffee, hear the rumor that someone famous was to come to town but that the visit was cancelled. Let the woman behind the counter shake her head, her toweled hand continuing to spiral in the persistently streaked glass.

  HALF THE WORLD OVER

  I. FITZROY

  You look at your feet at the end of the bath. They are still quite plump and pink. You are waiting for the day blue veins will stick up from them, when a yellow knob will angle the joint of the big toe. That will be when you will have ended up. You have always wanted to be old. The rest, the unwrinkled plumpness, is a fake, a mere waiting.

  You have traveled to a conference where you are lionized, though no one in this country seems to know your work. You are put up at an expensive hotel where you are sad to find there is a gym but no swimming pool.

  Another disappointment: you wanted to buy your ex-husband a book signed by the keynote speaker, but it turns out she will not speak until after you have left. You spend your days working: panels, seminars, interviews. You have little free time.

  In your hours of leisure no sooner do you go somewhere than you want to be somewhere else; no sooner are you sitting than you want to be walking; no sooner eating eggs than you want to be eating chocolate. Always you wish to be in two places at the same time, always you want to be connected. Here it does not seem possible.

  In this city the streets are straight and cross each other at right angles. It is easy to find your way. The buildings are either very high or very low. The shops say what they are on their fronts, vans go by with signs like Tip Top Butchers, house numbers are prominently displayed.

  People tell you to take the tram but the distances they describe do not seem far to you. You walk and you walk.

  You shiver in your jacket and thin dress but you do not want to wear the other clothes you brought with you. You go into shops where the clothes do not suit you, but because you are not at home you do not mind—still you
do not buy anything. You walk some more, and all the time you walk you think you should be sitting.

  In the cafés you sit then shift chairs to get a better position, a new view. The girls here wear their hair in knots on the tops of their heads. This is just like everywhere else. It seems always to be time for breakfast. A man bends down to feed his chow a strip of bacon. Out of habit you order soup, the cheapest item on the menu. You return to the counter to ask for butter. You are always hungry, always a meal behind.

  You cannot communicate with your children, your ex-husband. To be connected you must stand very near a wall of glass.

  Outside the café a homeless man is shouting What happened? What was it? Does anybody know? Can anybody explain it to me? His face is bleeding. He cannot leave the circuit of these streets.

  But you like being here. At the hotel, where there is a restaurant at which you cannot afford to eat but where there is also a bowl of free apples in the lobby, the women behind the desk address you in French. On the 37th floor you sleep on your usual side of the bed.

  You walk out of town to a sea you have never seen before. You intend to reach down and touch it, which you have never done before, so when you return to your own country you can say you have touched it, but in the event it is too cold and smells of seaweed.

  All around events are advertised for children: they have given up on the adults. They have given up on everything here that is old: age is accelerated in this young country by the sea. Salt rots the ironwork’s optimistic balconies.

  You intend to enjoy walking along the pier but it is not possible. No one sees that you did not touch the sea. No one sees that you did not enjoy your walk.

  At the conference’s closing party you ask the head of a television network to show you the river. It is midnight and he has stood talking with his arm around you all night, but when you ask about the river, he says he is married.

  You mention a friend who once traveled here. When you say friend, say acquaintance, say how do you say ex-nearly-lover? You describe him and what he does without calling him any of this, hoping to see his reflection jump into your listeners’ eyes.

  A writer gives you a copy of his book, yellowed along the edges. There must be a stack of them at home.

  The man in the café wipes his chow’s mouth with a paper napkin. What happened? Can anybody explain it to me?

  You become worried that the head of the television network might have thought you wanted him for his power and his money.

  From the 37th floor at dusk you can see the lights going on below, snaking the gridded streets. And at dawn someone is swimming in a pool on a lower rooftop. Everything is so like what you would like New York to be like. Perhaps now you will delay going to New York in case it is not enough like this.

  Tap, bath, toe. Soon you will be going away. You will not see the writer or the chow or the homeless man or the head of the television network again.

  Luckily there are so very many new places in the world.

  II. NOTRE DAME

  Sitting in the café opposite, I am happy I am not one of the tourists flowing across the road to see the cathedral, but I am happy I can see them. They are wearing yellow trousers, emerald trousers, blue boots. They are wearing red heels; they are wearing turquoise flats. Having a limited amount of space in their airline suitcases, they have thought for a long time about what they would like to wear to see this place. They have thought about what the place would like to see them wearing, and what their fellow tourists would like to see them wearing and what I, sitting in this café, would like to see. And even if they discovered—as soon as they got here—that their clothes were wrong for the weather, the setting, the occasion, they’re stuck with them and they’re going to stick with them. The tourists are mostly women, or perhaps I don’t notice the men, who wear shapeless beige pants, shapeless beige hats. The younger women are all dressed the same, in the current fashion. The older women are dressed either more primly or more provocatively than the younger women, but always in reaction to them.

  The locals flow past the café and over the river in a stream of gray.

  I came to this café because it is not the café across the street. This is not the café I would normally come to. The café across the street is better but there are advantages here. From this café I can see the beautiful people in the café across the street: sitting at that café, I could only be among them. As I sit at this café I develop a certain affection for the people here, which makes me feel I might have chosen this café after all. They are not so well-dressed as the people in the café across the street, and more of them smoke. Their voices are more raucous, and especially their laughter. Their hair is not so expensive and is stiffer and comes in colors that are easily named.

  I resemble neither the people in this café nor the people in the café across the street.

  Despite being worse than the café across the street, this is not a cheap café, but I am getting good value. What am I paying for? The view of the cathedral (which is not so good from the better café)? Do the tourists worsen the view? I don’t think so. They make me sure the view is a view, even though sometimes they are in the way of it.

  A few hours ago I was on a plane. I have time to kill, too much time in the wrong place. The day has stretched and I have baggy hours that should be taken in, taken up. There is nothing to do with this time but put some alcohol into it.

  The tables in this café are close, very close. A man sits down at the table next to me. I wonder whether he is French, whether he is foreign, whether he is a tourist. I also wonder whether I could say hello to him, in French or in English, whether we would like each other, whether we could sleep together. Two days ago I was in a hotel that reached the sky: 37th floor, half the world over. My spine is compressed after the flight, my legs unwisely crossed. I have never felt like this before. It feels old.

  The man, who is older than I am and not particularly attractive, orders some food in English. On the plane I ate things I had never eaten before, things I didn’t particularly want to eat at times I didn’t want to eat them. The more of the things I ate, the more I accepted them, and the more angry I became in the times between, when they did not appear.

  I order. Madame, says the waiter, Mademoiselle (more of the Madame nowadays). I am careful to speak French with an English accent. It would be disrespectful to the waiter who wants to practice his English, to the foreign man at the next table, to show too much proficiency.

  The man’s order arrives quickly. It is a steak. Portions in this café are large; portions on the plane were small, but still I feel full. I can smell his steak. It is the steak I did not order, both for financial reasons and because I thought it might be too filling. He eats his steak quickly with no wine. I eat a croque monsieur slowly with a glass of wine that is not the cheapest on the menu. I drink so the scum of things rises to the surface. I spent my money on wine: he spent his money on steak. Who got the best value? He takes a bottle of Coca-Cola out of his bag and, when the waiter goes away, takes surreptitious sips. Perhaps he is economizing too.

  The man with the steak looks at my legs, which gives me permission to look at the message he is typing into his mobile phone. I cannot see it as the glass reflects. I feel cheated.

  I am tired and slightly drunk and still hungry. He is full of steak and Coca-Cola and, presumably, energy: enough energy to cross the road and walk up the steps inside the tower of the cathedral, which I have never entered.

  In a few hours I will travel back to the airport to take another plane. Sitting here I am already waiting to wait. I have had so many last times here, it is impossible to tell whether this will really be the last. Time, when it is limited, is more beautiful. My wine tastes of smoke, incense. How can I leave this place? How can I stop watching the flow of tourists across the road? (Look! That one dropped something. It catches the light, shines! A valuable or just a cellophane wrapper? She does not notice, does not return to pick it up.) I drink my wine. I eat my bread,
put Paris into my mouth. Look! Look at the bread, the wine, the tourists! I cannot stop looking at them.

  The man at the next table takes a large, black camera from his bag and photographs what remains of his steak with a lens so long he can he barely fit it between himself and his plate. The camera makes a soft expensive click. As soon as I hear this I know I could never talk to him. He finishes quickly, and quickly asks for the check. He gets up from his table and leaves.

  He has hidden the remaining part of his large steak under his napkin. Our tables are close, so close I can still smell the steak, so close I could reach across and take it, eat it.

  SUMMER STORY

  It’s the dry point of the year, and I’ve been waiting for an answer for some time.

  No one’s doing anything. There are not enough people left in town to eat all the fruit in the supermarkets. It piles up, 2/3 price, then 1/2 price, then finally returns to the back room on tall steel trollies.

  The night I slept with him, it rained. He wore a shirt that, although we’d only met a couple of times before, I felt was unusual for him. He wore a jacket with a mend on the elbow that spiraled in concentric circles. Then in the morning he looked not as he had looked the night before, but as he had the other times we’d met, and he smelled slightly of cigarettes and furniture polish.

  In bed he asked whether I wanted to do what I was doing every time I did it. As if he couldn’t tell without, as though he’d checked himself and remembered some rule. And he laughed small and inward each time I said something to him, each time he said something to me. At the end he said, wow, like someone smacking his lips after a meal.

  The next morning I told him I have children. And he said, oh, and he asked me their names, and that was all the mention of them, though the mention of them had been waiting, not insistently, all that time.