And sometimes we almost really touch, but never quite.
We get theatrical instead. We waste ourselves. We don’t hold each other and catch light. We never rest, enjoy the peace of ourselves. We are never properly naked. We do not ever truly fucking meet.
I miss him. And he misses me.
We are stupid enough to wreck ourselves at heart.
From which I should digress.
And there are very many varieties of digression.
In word, in thought, in deed.
My digressions involving the wrongly fair-haired and imperfectly tall – the spidery, washed-out imitation Arthurs and my being unable to like them. Clambering into stupid situations in case they might be feasible – trying to be under someone and to touch them but not that much – proving I’m alive and capable without Arthur and being with whoever else, but not that much. They don’t quite exist – are just someone who isn’t Arthur.
Like Derek.
Don’t know what was I thinking. Then again, that’s what I aim for – to not know what I’m thinking.
And so it’s closing the eyes and lying – in every fucking sense lying – and holding whoever’s shoulder as loosely as I can – imagining there’s a lace doily, or a napkin laid between us, something insulating and polite – and closing my eyes and needing to feel the better man, but he isn’t there because I settled for safer and stupider and less. Again.
It passes the time.
Christ.
Beth puts the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, because Derek has promised that if Mila comes into their cabin again while he’s trying to sleep he will glass her in the face. He’s in no condition to harm anyone and isn’t a violent person, but he may make a scene, insist on indulging in complaints.
Mila leans on her trolley – her luxury Porsche trolley – which rattles with each surge and is laden with nice clean facecloths that no one will get and pillow mints that no one will eat and shampoo that no one will have the strength to use. ‘He needs dry food. Like toast. Like biscuits – the way you have biscuits in the lifeboats. When we have lifeboat drill there is biscuits in the boat and water only and they say someone will give you two pills when you come in – I don’t get sick, but I would get two pills, because in those little boats you will be sick and then everyone else will see you be sick and will be also sick – more than thirty people in a little boat, being sick, that would be such a terrible thing.’ Mila is, no doubt, audible to Derek, and Beth is not remotely attempting to move her away along the corridor. ‘I can fetch dry biscuits and give them to him, but not now – if the DND sign is on the door then we cannot knock even, we can do nothing.’
‘I think nothing is what to do.’
‘You are sure?’
‘This evening, we can give him water and dry biscuits. He’s had the injection and I think he’s sleeping.’
He isn’t sleeping – he’s flat on his back and venomous and staring, he’s turning himself into something I can’t love, can’t like.
I used to be able to like him. Liking is OK.
Settling for less. Settling for decent and reliable and normal.
Which is less.
‘We drill all the time, have exercise for when the ship sinks.’ Mila says this happily, confidently, and it is plain that she would be equally sanguine in a lifeboat – her liner going down by the stern, its harpist perhaps still playing on the ever-more-slanting deck, and Mila quite content, asking after everybody’s health, handing out biscuits and perhaps one or two of those mints. ‘Look at this today, this morning – the whole way is DND and DND and DND . . . I will have to make report, say why I don’t go in and clean . . .’
It’s true: the passageway is thick with plaintive Do Not Disturb signs that swing from the handle of each door and indicate distress within. Elizabeth walks past them along the press and give of carpet, the perspective dipping, twisting ahead. She moves through the section that rattles like walnuts in a tin, the section that whines like a metal-on-metal puppy, the section that constantly bathes in a mild howling, and then she ascends, staggers round and round the stairwells. She wants to be outside: not on the circumnavigating deck, still haunted by a few mad walkers, brisk and smug in their waterproofs, clocking up miles – not where Arthur leaned at the stern, where the stain of him leaning will be by the handrail, a salt and judgemental shape – she’s heading higher, high as she can, up until she runs out of ship.
Fucking Arthur – who is more, rather than less – too much and indecent and unreliable and abnormal and I didn’t love him at the start. He did that to me – I think – he made it happen – I think – or I did – or we both did. We saw something in each other, something bad, and then chased it and it didn’t run away.
Lying – again in every sense – by myself in bed after the party – after that first night. And I’d broken that sodding glass abomination and I wanted to anyway, but I know that I did it so I could tell him later – which will have to mean seeing him again. I already want to see him again, but I don’t fancy him – it’s definitely noticing, not fancying.
Only I want to be near him again and that leaning against each other thing was nice and hand-in-hand was nice and maybe this makes me nice – my sudden fondness for small and friendly gestures.
I could be nice about him.
It’s not as if I really want a wank.
A wank would be rude. And the fact that it’s rude and to do with him is not in any way another layer of attraction.
Dear God, the utter rubbish you tell yourself.
When really you just want a wank.
When your mind’s already out and predicting, sketching how he’ll be, playing the cheap psychic, the way we do with everyone we love – building how they are when they’re without us, how they’ll be when they come back.
Habit of a lifetime.
And he made it worse.
Arthur there at arbitrary parties, at some and not others – nobody seemed to invite him, but he’d get in all the same – and seeming to know which pubs I went to and being about the place, then elsewhere, more tangible when disappeared.
Be available, then not: make your appearances random, a long tease – it never fails.
He would have realised that, but I never did feel he was playing me. He felt reassuring, let both of us be unwary in this gently hungry place. It was almost like friendship, as comfortable as that.
While – absolutely and of course, this would have to be the case – I’m studying MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.
You couldn’t make it up.
That was the subject for my thesis – great conversation-stopper, not bad at emptying rooms: simply tell them you’re learning how to get a population of sane and ordinary people to be happy with MAD and convinced they could survive any conflagration – convinced they’d want to survive – how to make them optimistic enough to believe we can change, or survive anything.
Survive anyfuckingthing. Protect and Survive: take your doors off their frames and hide in underneath them, shove your head in a brown paper bag – as if you’re a pound of apples. I spent months with all of those lies: the Public Information films, the plans that were no kind of plan. The bad spells, shoddy enchantments.
And then I’d come home and maybe Arthur would be there, or I’d go out and maybe Arthur would be there – and maybe he happened to be in my living room while a bunch of us watched the Berlin wall come down and were happy for other people and for a good change, an achieved change – and this was history and when I remembered it, I was going to remember him also – it’ll make a nice story for the kids, the kid, the puppy, the cat: that while we weren’t exactly dating, the world turned wakeful, tender, changed its dreams.
We kept ourselves unerotic for so long – which is almost more erotic than anything else – and maybe that’s what he intended for those nights when I’d go t
o my bed alone, the nights after we’d chatted, leaned a bit – maybe he knew the condition that I would be in and was lying in his own bed and hypothesising, breaking a sweat. I was certainly thinking about him and I was a grown-up and at liberty and it’s not unusual or peculiar to touch yourself on somebody’s behalf – you know them a bit, but not like that, but not exactly not like that – actually, you know them just enough to make this awkward and yet lovely – if you imagine them being aware of what you’re going to do – may do – could do – will do – why fool yourself: the pausing is preamble to a definite end – it’s what you will do – you’re going to fancy yourself enough as their replacement to make yourself come – but you feel naked, shamed, extraordinary, if you think of them knowing, of informing them: yesterday, I wished my hands into your hands and improvised from there – then it’s almost too uncomfortable to continue.
Almost.
But when we were together we digressed, we made distractions. He took an interest in my work: found me descriptions of mass shelters, their lists of provisions, amounts of fuel stored for running generators, the rules for admission and denial – survival not always the kinder option – some things intended to be unfuckingsurvivable – your wife dead outside, your kids dead outside – kid, puppy, cat – your life dead outside. No doors on the toilets in case you hid in them and tried to top yourself.
We listened to Patrick Allen being the last voice we’d ever hear: all his announcements – sensible and inevitable wartime advice with this stink of a hell underneath it. That shouldn’t be sexy. But it was.
Me full of mass casualties and damage and him full of I had no idea what – man in gloves, magic man, quiet man, man who works in a florist’s sometimes, who can build things for you: cabinets, bookshelves, makes little boxes with sliding panels, private places – handy – secret – whose aim seems to be elsewhere and as yet unrevealed.
He didn’t tell me what he really did for months. Took off his gloves and held my face and told me, kissed. And why not try it together – give the wounded their dead together – Mutually Assured Eternity – bombproofed.
And it made sense. It did. It seemed a beauty.
Although I was not exactly at my most coherent: lack of sleep – presence of love.
And next I’m stealing my dad’s secrets, palming them, adapting, learning my new lessons on most nights – clean nights.
Leastways, they stayed clean until I was alone. Then less so.
But I could have just had sex with him – it’s not as if we couldn’t have started if I’d asked. I believe that’s the case. But I waited. I didn’t try for months. No obstacles then, and nothing wrong with me, not especially – I was only angry, justifiably, furious about things that were appalling. I cared about him, but also about strangers. I wanted to help. I was getting my education so I could help.
And I knew – start love with Arthur and it wouldn’t be controlled. I’d get lost in it. We both would.
Ecstasy.
Nobody actually wants that.
So we restricted ourselves to lessons and structure and practice – hands with hands and hands in hands and thinking leaned in against thinking.
And we had the code – the simple one – our first code.
1 – Please listen
2 – Man
3 – Loss
4 – Child
Easy.
When she reaches it, the door to the upper air feels locked, there is such a weight of gale against it. Beth has to lean in, shoulder the glossy wood, manage a final shove when the pressure eases and lets her barrel into a merciless space. For a moment she can’t see, can’t breathe, is simply held – the shock of weather, its beautiful offence prevents thought – and then this joy comes, this immense, horrific pleasure in every gust that comes at her like a big dog, that flattens her clothes to her body in a knock, that maddens her hair, that can hammock around her in any direction, every direction, and push her, draw her, stumble her where it likes and the sky is above her and swooping to each horizon, a howl of blue: a tall, fierce ache of blue and its clouds in lines, in streamers, banners, dazzles, flares – it is all alive and makes her laugh.
Better.
Best.
In the end, you seek them out – your ecstasies. The ones that you can bear.
The deck dry underfoot and light, shining as if it’s been bleached by sheer speed and the shuttering sun.
She stands and rests against it all, turns her neck to let it be touched, closes her eyes.
5 – Help
6 – Betrayal
7 – Love
8 – Accident
The useful words, they had to be numbered to let us work them as we’d wish. Five steps, eight breaths, six seconds of silence after Art steepled his fingers together – we had endless variations. A word could repeat and repeat and repeat and give you loss underneath its own meaning, a stranger’s little gift. Whatever we said, thought, did, the numbers ran through it, illuminated, were additionally generous, complicated.
In the end, I’d wonder how people spoke without them. As if we were normal and everyone else was too small. And both of us in the same beat, in this invisible motion. Can’t think of the hours that we spent in his bed-sit counting – silent and marking the time until we were always synchronous.
As if we had one pulse.
But anyone can do it, if they want to be peculiar enough.
9 – Pain
10 – Now
11 – Fear
12 – Work
13 – Sex
And on and on and on and you don’t get Woman until 20, up with the reassurances and compliments – Brave, Artistic, Honest, Forgiven – the treats.
We did give them treats.
We.
Us.
We were the people who understood: 1 is Please listen – and later we made it Look At Me – but also it was the first thing to think of which is death and a passage of time – in time we all do get our death and then time passes beyond others’ deaths – and fuck me, the pair of us started to operate like this, we had to, hopping about from thought to thought for the punters, from word to work to number to symbol to – time is a watch – you may be getting the code for watch, so you’ll imagine it in your hand, coddle it in the mind’s fingers – or else announce its status as a messenger to your audience, if required – or picture it pointing to particular numbers, if you’d like: it can mean you’ll remember them, group them together, a set of coded details you fit to an enquirer, something to keep you steady through a long sitting, or in case the punter ever comes back – for another sitting, that is: you don’t expect to hear from beyond their graves – or else you can allow it to be just a watch, the enquirer’s own watch – so many people have a watch – even if they use the clock on their mobile phone, that’s like a watch – you can tell them about their watch – or their phone – or their kitchen clock – or how their years are passing – or their loved one’s, lost one’s watch – as you talk to them, you can feed them anything, change, qualify, redefine – and watch is also Now, can you . . . slip in ‘Now, can you . . .’ – Arthur can tease any sentence apart and make it fit – and he’ll mean a watch – and 1 is the symbol of a man standing in a doorway and, ‘I’m seeing a man standing in a doorway. Does that mean anything, can you think?’ – an eloquent image to start, adaptable, the punters will interpret it to please them – and my whole head packed with this, streaming with, ‘A dream of rising upwards and a door number which is important and has a 2 in it and a death, a passing that took place on or near to a special occasion, that happened close to something like a birthday or an anniversary . . .’ Frowning into the middle distance – the place where observers assume all this shit is stored.
And on
And on
And on
It doesn’t go away – my head’s still
caked inside with the arithmetic of lying.
The deck isn’t empty, not completely. There’s a woman in a flying raincoat standing behind the funnel, a couple attempting to walk. Everyone, Beth included, is grinning.
Weather junkies. We love it, want the shake, the being so kindly defeated by what could kill us – it doesn’t know us, doesn’t notice, but it feels like playing, like something big taking an interest in us, paying attention – as if we could influence nature by catching its eye. It makes us comfortably tiny and hugely important, both at once – like being kids again.
We’re up here, leaning against nothing we can see and willing it into more than physics: inventing a story – a scene where we rough and tumble with an attentive and jovial reality. We’re people, and people do that: we live in stories.
I have the story of my family, my mum, my dad, my health, my shameful and redeeming and unforgivable acts – the story of who I am and wanted to be and could be and never will and never tried and failed to be.
I have the story of my good, clean, honourable country where I live – not perfect, but what’s perfect? – not perfect, but not the purgatory in newspaper horror stories – not perfect, but not the shallow paradise in television wealthporn stories – not perfect, but not the comforting, smothering, jealous and noble stories of the fucked-up past – not perfect, but not the threatening, beautiful, beckoning, stupid, pain- and death-free stories of the fucked-up future that anyone will tell you if they want you to do something for them: to buy, to vote, to die, to kill, to believe, to torment beyond believing – not perfect at all.
I have the story of my present: the here and the is: me on a patch of somewhere arbitrary and the hugeness of each unprotected moment under its racing sky. A beautiful and terrifying story.
All fucking stories: what makes us nice, what makes us talk, what lets us recognise ourselves, touch others, be touched ourselves, trust loves – the fucking stories.
And they’re what works the magic: the hard-core, bone-deep, fingers in your pages and wearing your skin and fucking you magic – that magic. Inside and out.
The Blue Book Page 19