The Blue Book

by A. L. Kennedy

  They are doing their best.

  But they’re interfering, too, they are making her a spectacle and she wishes they would not.

  She really does like her privacy, Beth.

  No, she loves her privacy.

  She wants bolts.

  She wants boxes that open and swallow everything, hide it, close, lock, and then seem innocent and portable as ever. She wants to be safe in the blue box with the silver stars, which will be prettier than her to stare at and peaceful.

  And she believes it will be good if she can box her joys, control them – no more of her birthday money exciting her more than snow, or wishes, or the seaside, or fruit growing on trees – just growing, straight out of trees, or even little bushes – and more than ice cream with bits in, or big dogs – no more of these things being able to make her laugh, whoop, run to burn off the so much wonder of reality, the pleasures she expects, the escalation of delights.

  In a while, her mum will come through with a cake – it will be big and have Orinoco Womble on it in colours of icing and Happy Birthday – and there will be more singing and her dad will fetch his camera – which is called a Polaroid Square Shooter – from the table by the door and he will take her picture and everyone will look at it while it develops – because in 1976 self-developing photographs are exciting. They will watch her conjured out of nowhere and she won’t even be involved.

  Beth will keep the picture with a number of others in a box under her bed – under her succession of beds. Eventually, when she looks at it she will see a blaze of cake, gone faces, a record of dead faces – her mother slightly blurry, but smiling in a mauve paisley patterned dress, skin warm with the candles’ shining – her father not there, already not there, but only because he is holding the camera, tilting the image slightly to the left and down, which was a habit, is characteristic, makes her feel his fingers, still holding on to the edges of everything. And she will see an inrush of silences and a small girl who was petulant, frowning: who was wrong – joys controlled aren’t joys at all, that’s why they are so terrible.

  ‘Cloudberries.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’ Beth is sitting and frowning up at a tall, nervy man in a pebble-dashed jacket and bad shoes. He is standing beside her and is someone she has never seen before.

  It’s 1989 and not Beth’s birthday; close, but this is just a party – one of her own making and in her own flat. At least, it’s in the flat she shares with two other students, both of whom are slightly dull. She picked them for their dullness – uninvolving Sarah and boring Elaine. She wants to get her PhD – which would please her dad: she doesn’t have to please her dad, but she would like to – and Sarah and Elaine will not be a distraction. She has shared accommodation before and been through the shouty boyfriends and strange compulsions and sad compulsions and haphazard mental collapses of too many strangers and acquaintances and very-much-former-friends to expose herself again. She is tired of being a student: of bar jobs and waitress jobs and telesales jobs and learning the words and numbers of what seems a pointless game. It doesn’t feel as she’d hoped: like owning secrets, like enlightenment. And she’s older: this sad case the campus can’t shake, because where else would she go? At least she’ll have peace with Elaine and Sarah – if both of them exploded, burst into flames, they still would be proudly unable to draw a crowd.

  ‘I said cloudberries.’

  Beth is tucked at the top of the stairs, just inside the dim quiet of the landing – no lights on up here, guests being encouraged to stay below, keep tidy and not creep off for sly shags in or on other people’s beds. The man must have crossed the landing behind her soundlessly and is, in a minor way, an intruder. The idea of this is disturbing. She doesn’t know where he’s come from and had assumed she was alone – meaning that, for a while, she has been defenceless.

  He drops to sit beside her, knees high to his chin. ‘Like when you were a kid, isn’t it?’ And he is, all at once, companionable, easy. ‘Up late and peeking at your parents’ noise.’

  But he is not her companion and shouldn’t be easy so Beth tells him, ‘You can’t peek at noise. You can’t see it at all. In fact.’ She feels he may be uninvited – he certainly isn’t Sarah’s or Elaine’s style – long blond hair and a fussily shaped beard, a sense of intelligence about him.

  Which he’s probably faking.

  He looks like General Custer – so he can’t be that bright.

  He looks like a fake.

  He doesn’t look like a part of her future – a long, fluttering tear in years and years and years. She has no prediction in her pocket which reads On the 4th day of the 3rd month in 1989 Elizabeth Caroline Barber will meet Arthur Peter Lockwood and they will be bad for each other, ever after.

  She doesn’t even fancy him – not especially.

  He sits as close as he can do without touching and there is something hot and interfering about the empty space he leaves against her. He is hard not to notice.

  She doesn’t fancy him – she notices him.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Beth wondering why people say this precisely when they want the other person to be sorry and when they are themselves not sorry at all.

  He repeats, ‘Cloudberries.’ And peers down through the banisters as if he has never watched flirting and drinking and smoking – the slightly pompous passing of spliffs, poor dancing to Sarah’s disastrous music, relationships thriving, changing, being knocked out of shape. It seems these things are lovely to him, almost hypnotic. Then he peers at her, his face mainly in shadow but clearly enjoying its own curiosity. ‘Cloud. Berries. You wanted to know.’

  ‘Oh.’ And she wishes that she was more sober, could deal with him effectively and get away. ‘Yes.’ He gives the impression of being safe, if eccentric, but it strikes her that no one should actually be able to seem that safe, that quickly – it’s not normal. ‘I see.’ But meanwhile he is right: Cloudberries is the answer she was after. Downstairs in the living room Beth had been passionately describing – she can’t think why – her long-ago Orinoco Womble birthday cake. This had led her to realise – with four or five glasses taken of Elaine’s disturbingly bluish-green and very sweet punch – that she couldn’t remember what Wombles used to eat. And Beth had been a big Womble fan – read all of the books and had an Uncle Bulgaria doll and everything. At that point in the evening her knowledge of the usual Womble diet became important, even vital – she had been loudly distressed on the subject, only slightly joking when she tried to explain that who she was, who she really was, might be wholly bound up with being certain she could feed, should she ever have to, all of the fictional animals who had softened and blessed her youth.

  But by now the information was less precious, almost irrelevant. ‘Yeah . . . Wombles ate cloudberries.’

  She hadn’t been aware of the man when she was talking about cake, hadn’t seen him, which indicates that he is good at sneaking, listening, that he makes it a habit. It may suggest – although she doesn’t think of this – that her need, her dismay, were why he listened, what brought him, what gave him a chance to catch her mind slightly opened – like slipping his finger inside a book, keeping his place.

  ‘Hi. I’m Arthur.’

  Arthur the spy.

  But you can’t have a spy called Arthur, that wouldn’t suit – like Hilda, or Bert, or Mavis – none of them names for a spy.

  ‘Call me Art.’ This said with the air of someone trying to set his first nickname, make it a good one.

  Don’t want to call you anything, thanks.

  ‘Well, Art . . .’ And Beth gathers her forces to leave. As she does so, he places his palm firmly, briefly, over the back of her left hand and smiles before letting her go, turning his head back towards the banisters and his study of her other guests.

  She doesn’t really want to go downstairs, sink into the muggy crush and fumble. Something horrible and Eur
ovision is playing when she would like the Kinks or Cream, or any other at least plausible musicians from a period when it was cool and influential and dignified to be a student. She was a toddler in the 1960s but she’d swear she still knew they were springing up nicely, being magnificent, and understood that her own generation would be dogged by mutual disappointments. She can remember, is keen to claim, her early-onset nostalgia: small, earnest five-year-old Beth in a range of handmade cardigans telling people, ‘When I was four . . .’

  Plasticine and blunt-nosed scissors and a gold star every day for being middle-aged . . .

  Beth doesn’t examine the back of her hand for maybe half an hour, doesn’t notice BETH written there in purplish letters between the knuckles and the wrist – not until an engineering student pal of Sarah’s points it out. ‘Worried you’ll forget your name, are you? Is that it? Worried you’ll wake up in the park? Yeah? Is that it? I woke up in the park last summer . . .’ He sniggers and spills some snakebite down the front of his rugby shirt.

  Beth misses any further exciting details of the park incident, because she is working her way round to face the landing.

  It must have been him – call me Art – just what I need, more bloody nonsense – amateur magic.

  Art remains compressed in a bony crouch at the head of the stairs. She waits for him to raise his head.

  They’re always the same, the ones who like to play: once their trick’s been started they have to see its end.

  But he doesn’t move, gives every appearance of being densely, absently relaxed.

  So he makes her climb to him, seek him out.

  ‘You transferred the pigment when you touched me.’ Beth sits beside him and when their legs brush, he retreats just enough to avoid the contact, compacts himself further. ‘Overheard my name?’

  He lets her take his hands and lift them, see that he’s now wearing gloves.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  Art keeps placid, quiet: tugs off his right glove, shows her his palm, the purple mirror-writing, her name in smeary block capitals. He clears his throat and says carefully, ‘Isaiah 49: 15–16 . . . “Yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee on the palms of my hands . . .”’

  ‘Does that work with anyone?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I don’t know – you’re the first time I’ve tried it.’ And then he mumbles, struggles his glove back on. “Thy walls are continually before me.”’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That bit doesn’t help at all . . . the walls . . . and I think it sounds too religious.’

  ‘Quoting the Bible? Yes, that might sound religious.’

  ‘Too religious?’ He’s smiling, his mouth seeming soft and bewildered by itself, by what it might start saying. It’s hard to tell if this is more of his act – being disarming.

  ‘Maybe.’

  And he leans for a moment against her, shoulder to shoulder, gentle and then away.

  ‘Do you want me to ask you about the gloves?’

  ‘No.’ The smile again, aimed at his knees. ‘No, you’d better not.’

  ‘Then I will. Why are you wearing gloves?’

  And he takes this small, inward sip of air – fish out of water – fish liking a risk – and begins, ‘Because I wear gloves almost all the time. I sleep in them.’

  ‘Almost all the time . . .’

  ‘Yes. I just said that.’

  ‘In the shower? In the bath?’

  ‘You’re being silly.’

  ‘Oh, of course—’

  ‘I wear rubber gloves for that.’

  ‘Oh, even more of course.’

  He leans against her for another breath, face deadpan, voice earnest. ‘It helps me feel. I sleep fully dressed and in the gloves, I keep covered and then when . . . It makes me feel better.’

  ‘I should go.’

  ‘If I take off my gloves and hold your shoulders . . .’ His voice changed, revealed, somehow at work. ‘Then you’ll tell me your favourite person here – or which is your bedroom – or what you think is your household’s ugliest ornament – that one isn’t fair: it’s the big glass seahorse sculpture thing in the living room which belongs to the blonde girl who likes it, but you want to break it: tonight you’re going to break it and blame a guest – you ought to blame me – or you could tell me which is your bedroom, could lead me to it.’

  ‘You’ve already said that.’

  Tiny voice now, factual. ‘It was an example.’ And he takes off both his gloves – dark, thin leather, lined and creased and folded with use, like the skin of other hands – and he puts them in his pocket and he sets his fingers on her shoulders. And he eases the words in again, is himself – what she already, mildly, thought of as his genuine self. ‘You simply think and let your shoulders tell me. Think what you want me to know . . . Yes, I’m an arse and quite sad and quite sleazy, but not that . . . Thank you. Think that your name is Beth. Thank you. Think that you’re not called Sarah, because then you would sniffle and mouth breathe in a deeply irritating way – bad sinuses . . . and why are you with them, both of them? They don’t suit – you must want them not to suit . . . but that doesn’t matter – why not think of your favourite person here, of the one who interests you the most – thank you – let yourself tell me that – thank you – let me know that. Your favourite person. Thank you, Beth. Thank you very much.’

  Thanking her and thanking her – as if she is slipping money inside his clothes.

  She feels that he may be smiling – that she can feel him smiling in his touch and in the pressure of his side, the rise of his breathing against her back – and then he lifts the contact, removes it.

  They sit for a while in silence with the party beneath them.

  Art withdraws, replaces his gloves, winds his arms round his knees.

  And Beth hears herself say, ‘That’s a lot of effort.’

  ‘Which you’ll remember.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Oh yes – you’ll always remember how we met – it’ll make a nice story for the kids, the kid, the puppy, the cat . . .’

  ‘Then again, maybe it wasn’t enough effort.’ Beth deciding to worry now that he has her address – is currently at her address – that he may be more peculiar than he looks. It would be hard for him to be more peculiar than he looks.

  But he keeps on hugging himself, staring at people who are not her, troubling Beth only with little sentences, murmured in. ‘Probably. I don’t know. I’m guessing. I saw you tonight and guessed . . .’ He rubs his chin against his forearms and she hears the rasp of his ridiculous beard. ‘I am of the opinion that you should have efforts. I can’t guarantee their results.’

  Two or three hours later – afterwards she won’t recall how long she waited – she will go downstairs through the party wreckage and half-dark and knock the big glass seahorse sculpture thing off the mantelpiece, smashing it irreparably. No one will hear her do it and she will blame Arthur for the loss.

  ‘How are you this morning? Good morning?’ Mila is the stewardess for Beth and Derek’s cabin. Mila is weatherproof and cheery, her conversations melodiously penetrating. ‘Your husband? Three days ill, four nights ill, that’s no good. He is a little better?’ Mila’s interest in her charges is both heartfelt and exhausting.

  Beth no longer tries to explain that Derek is not her husband, that he did, until quite recently, want to become her husband, but this is almost undoubtedly no longer the case, that he is currently barricaded somewhere surly and disappointed inside his head. Their room feels like his skull, somehow, like being locked in an uneasy skull, wearing itself smooth from the inside out – rabbity and stale. ‘No. He isn’t better. Not really.’

  He isn’t the better man – only looks like him. Bloody depressing to think of how often I’ve gone for the tall and the
blond and then been sorry, spent all manner of awkward coffees, dinners, clammy nights, with the sense that I’ve misplaced something, that I’d glance away, turn back and see what I want.

  Who I want.

  And is that because of Arthur, or is that because of me: am I someone inclined towards wanting things like Arthur? Men like Arthur. Is he a genetic weakness, like diabetes? Or does some part of me harbour Nazi cravings for blue eyes and blond hair? And something broken.

  Does he mean I’m a racist?

  He does mean I can’t think of him for long without distracting – he’s too much, otherwise.

  It’s not that I wouldn’t love to concentrate – Jesus, please – to be clear and single-minded, but not about him, it can’t be about him – because then it turns out that I’m not a bigot, I’m alone. And I don’t crave a type.

  It’s just that I know how to learn things and I learned a man, but I can’t have him, because in person he’s a toxin. I keep him in my skin and I don’t forget, but I can’t be with him. Even when we’re together, we’re not real: I’m not me, he isn’t him.

  And this is my finest time – what he doesn’t get. Back when I had the skin, the bloom, the sort of ease, I wasn’t ready: it’s now we should be together, when I think I might have found the start of what we need to do, how we could be.

  It’s different with men and women, I realise – I did read the manuals: Female 45–55, Male 50s Professional, Immigrant Female 30s: I memorised the classifications, the life paths, studied what to tell enquirers.

  Gentlemen peak early and ladies are late.

  But that’s a very incomplete story.

  Gentlemen peak early, but then they can find out who they are, how to apply themselves.

  Ladies peak early and then can keep peaking. This can be a conflagration or a tragedy, a wound.

  When I came in my twenties it seemed significant: today I could bang my elbow and find myself more deeply moved. I have capacities I barely understand.