What he gave me – the power to be in other people’s stories.
Something I took to as hard as he did.
He didn’t make me, lead me astray. I adored it as much as he did and as much as him.
And the raw air screams, sings, cries, rocks her in place, keeps her looking at the furrowing ocean, the ways it breaks and mends and breaks and mends itself. Stare long enough, you see things: heads, rocks, wreckage, darknesses, fins.
First time out and doing a platform gig I wasn’t scared. It was a way to be us – I could be him and he could be me – and, just before we started, Art turned as he stood up from the table and he faced me – back to the audience and shielding me, and he let us look, have that serious look – here we are and working, nobody like us when we’re working, when we’re hot as fuck – and he almost smiles, parts and might begin to lick his lips, but doesn’t quite because this is about different satisfactions.
Christ, he was really something.
And so was I.
This woman – Sally – looked bored, chilly, a bad choice, but still I’d picked her and that seemed not incorrect, not entirely unwise, and I’m throwing her names and getting no hits and the minutes are winding by and the room apparently sagging and my voice getting quiet, dry and smaller and I’m vamping with stuff about her being off-colour and maybe not taking care – hardly a wild leap to say so: she was puffy, self-punishingly fat, cheap haircut, unloved skin – engagement ring, wedding ring, probably early forties but seemed older – and she’s giving me no signs, has been taught by domestic circumstance, by close experience, that you shouldn’t give signs – I want to tell her ‘Your husband is a bastard. He is almost undoubtedly a bastard and everyone dead and here with me would like to say so’ but other than that – which is impractical – I’m close to having nothing left, to giving up.
Inexperience.
Arthur behind me, but I know, I am aware, that he’s unconcerned, so I lean in harder, insist – she can’t have come here for no reason.
Which is when she gets angry – wonderfully, silently furious – she’s close to shouting that she thinks I’m crap – I can see it – and it’s because she’s scared – these frightened eyes – so fucking scared. No one who isn’t terrified needs anything like as much bitterness, as much rage, as that.
She’s hiding inside it.
I pace – and I know that Arthur’s sitting with his arms crossed – softly, gently – both hands visible, the fingers, but I can’t break contact with Sally and really check – I think he’s showing three fingers and four – that’s his opinion and I agree – didn’t tell me beforehand, so it may be a guess or a detail he forgot – except that he never forgets – three and four and that’s Sally, her story – she lost a child.
I’m sure because of one glance – one tic of the head down and to the side and when she faces me again, raises her eyes, she’s younger – for a flinch of time she’s younger and just at the start of that fresh tenderness, mother tenderness, and already it is purposeless – stolen away – the woman that she had intended to be is disappearing.
A day when the world jumps up and tears out everything, but lets you live, makes you live, leaves you here to stay without the everything you needed.
They didn’t take care in those days, the hospitals – not much better now – so you edge what you describe into some sense of difficulty about seeing, you say that she was in hospital and wanted to see someone.
And then you watch her break, a whole woman harrowed down to sobs. They didn’t let her see the baby – and no grave – speed and corridors and numbness and never knowing – fuckers – she never knew – fuckers – she never knew her child, or started or finished or had any help – they abandoned her to this.
‘Little clothes, talking to your mum about pink or blue . . .’ Pink gets a hit, a sign of laceration, her shoulders tense – so a girl then, a dead girl. ‘Your girl knows you had a name for her and she hears you say her name.’ It’s a risk, but the mouth is such a soft place, so used to speaking that it’s an easy bet: if I set her thinking, then I’ll set her speaking in herself – and she does, she starts to say it in herself – she permits it – the unnameable name. ‘Pa- pa . . .’ I decipher her lips – doesn’t have to be precise. ‘I’m getting . . . It starts with a P.’ And the mother speaking it out loud then, like a love, a pride, ‘Pam.’ She can’t manage any more, has to grip the hand of someone to her right – she doesn’t know them, just holds on for fear of falling, being drawn into the place that’s always there and always hunting for anything good, that takes it away.
I risk the possibility of mentioning a graveyard – she went without her husband, of course, because he’s a bastard, as previously established – she’s somehow in a graveyard – she didn’t quite mean it but there she is – not at her daughter’s grave, she has no idea where her daughter is buried – may simply have been dumped in a communal pit, but that’s what we’ll never mention, I’ll only imply that Sally’s looked and couldn’t find – and in the graveyard she’s at one of its edges, an untidy place where they’ve grouped the untimely dead – a line of memorials, fading toys and playroom colours, cheap and obvious and sentimental and clawing you down by the legs, by the hollow in you where she grew, until you’re in the turf and sinking and gone to that place – she’s felt it, has often thought of the permanent numbness, the blank she doesn’t want to think is all there’ll be when she runs out over the edge of her life – she has wanted to leave and go to her nearly kid – she has wanted to leave and be nothing.
And when she swallows I do too and I am in her, I am her.
I am out of myself and in the miracle.
And if she believes that her child still sees her – knows, accepts, forgives and loves and loves and loves – then she’ll be altered.
Better.
Maybe.
The deck here is painted ready for sunshine and games, shuffleboard, quoits.
But that isn’t why I did it.
I did it because it was wonderful. I enjoyed it.
Cupboards rattle against securing ropes, filled up with summer chairs, cushions, toys to keep little ones occupied when they’re not in the paddling pool.
Love to paddle, kids.
Love all sorts of things – love their mothers – and they are loved.
She tries to focus on the sky, the way the clouds seem so languid, while everything here screams.
It was a thing we were good at – that I was good at – not as good as he turned out to be, but nevertheless we were something. And we felt like nothing ever has or will.
She angles her face to the cold sun.
Arthur and me, we could get tight up inside somebody’s story – we could make them invite us in.
I’d start with a name, any name – doesn’t matter – certain ones imply ages, nationalities, religions, others are more neutral – play it safe, or take a risk, I could pick – the enquirers are the ones who do the work. If the name gets a hit from the hall, if people claim it, then I keep with it, move on with it – switch in through descriptions – one detail, two, three – until I’ve knocked down all the possibles amongst my audience to a handful of enquirers, a couple – my woman, my man, all mine – I narrow and narrow what I give them until only their love fits. They think that I’ve found them, become more and more precise, when all that I’ve done is allow them to identify themselves.
And Christ, they do want to identify themselves.
The process is sly and irresistible and cheap and it will always impress, because enquirers have no understanding of probability: they don’t know how very likely it is that somebody else in a relatively modest gathering will share your birth sign, or will believe in birth signs, or won’t like opera, or will have a scar on their right knee, a bad back – get enough people together and someone is bound to qualify for any competent opening descriptio
n – and then they’ll get to be the heroine, the hero of a story, not just an also-ran. And they want as much for their departed – who maybe had a chest condition, bad legs – or someone they knew had bad legs – or forget it and slide on, keep talking – they had blond hair, wanted blond hair, had a friend with blond hair, had hair – they worked indoors, in an office, in a serious office, like a legal office, they were important, good at their job, they made a difference, didn’t go on about it, not really, they worked there many years, had a send-off to mark their retirement and a gift, at a bit of a loose end after that, although still with interests, sometimes they’d say that they couldn’t imagine how they’d found time to have a job.
The more is known, the more it’s possible to guess, the more it’s possible to know, because close in the places where we think we’ll be unique, we are anything but – we have first jobs we got through a bit of a fluke, an element of luck, and something happened when we were children that was nearly fatal, that gave us a scare – gave other people, the ones who cared for us, a scare – involving water – and when we are with our loves, we can be clumsy and worried and happy and scared and sometimes racy – we can surprise ourselves – and we can get so happy and so complicated and also simplified in our pleasures that we sometimes wonder how the fuck we could ever be this lucky and we also don’t know why the fuck we have ever been this hurt, this marked, this damaged, so that anyone who knew about it would wonder how we move, how we can stand – only nobody does entirely know, they would have to be psychic to know, they would have to be in possession of strange gifts and able to see us in our deep, sweet, bleeding places – to go further than love.
Except no gifts are necessary: in the deep and sweet and bleeding, that’s where we are the same. In the heart of us, we are together – joy, hurt, fear – if we paid attention, just held on, we would feel it beat.
Beth stays on deck until her head aches, her cheeks, until she is mortified, shivering helplessly.
And when the gig was done, I’d go back home and be without him, but next to the Arthur I’d built from his absence, I’d lie beneath the weight of that. I made him irremovable with too much thinking – didn’t mean to – I was just scared – and rehearsing – and scared – and I thought the story of him would be more controllable than his skin, his mouth, his fingers – I didn’t want to spoil what we seemed to be.
Thinking their name when you come – you shouldn’t. You’ll always want to make it true, summon your love so they can hear it – your spell.
Working towards the nearest doorway seems an absurdly elongated process and very distant. She observes herself fighting her way back inside, yanking, jolting the door until she is finally accepted, lost in a deafened, broiling stillness.
Francis sees her in the café before she can avoid him, before her hands are ready to gather a bland warm drink from the many bland-warm-drink-dispensing machines.
‘Now.’ He rises and marches at her briskly, Bunny waving, staying where she is. ‘For goodness’ sake – you haven’t been outside?’
‘Yes.’ Beth’s mouth almost incapable with cold.
‘Mad woman.’ But he grins. ‘Was it very exciting?’
She nods, because he wants her to nod and because it is true.
He takes her arm and wheels her round, ‘You will sit with Bunny and tell her all about it – exaggerate as much as you like – and I will get you a hot chocolate, because that is the only thing that will do. It will be extremely sweet already, but would you like more sugar in it?’
She shakes her head and lets him father her, mother her – there’s no harm in it, the ways we can adopt each other and this time he won’t make her cry, she is too cold to cry and too suddenly settled in her mind.
‘Bunny, here’s Beth again – obviously. You’d have to have had a funny turn not to remember.’
Bunny, tired perhaps, but shaking her head in a manner which is pointedly contented, ‘Just ignore him. I always do.’
‘I’m going to get her hot chocolate and also cake. She isn’t eating enough. Look at her.’ And he hands Beth into her seat, is briefly and tenderly grave when he looks at her. ‘Is there any type of cake that you don’t like?’
‘Um . . . No. I . . .’
‘I think she has hypothermia, should we tell someone?’ Stroking his fingers against his wife’s neck, intent on her, hungrytender.
Bunny inclining to the touch, ‘Go away.’
Which Francis does with a kind of bow.
‘He’s an idiot.’ As Bunny examines her husband’s back, its retreating, mildly self-conscious line, its resilience. ‘Now tell me about the waves and tempests – I can’t get out in them myself, he won’t let me. And we’ll have a nice afternoon tea together, if you’d like – it is the afternoon, isn’t it? Every day I change my alarm clock and my watch – except for today when I shouldn’t have . . . I think. The ship’s magazine said I should, but it was mistaken, apparently. Or else I am. And we do nothing but eat and sit and wander about and eat and then dress up and eat . . . most disorientating. I have a suspicion it may be Wednesday, is that right?’
‘Yes. It’s Wednesday.’
‘Well, that is a relief.’ Bunny pauses, checks on the patisserie area and then on Beth. ‘I was in a slough of despond because I missed the Napkin Folding Tutorial this morning – honestly, does anyone attend half the things they suggest we might like?’ She pauses again. ‘Sloughs of despond are unpleasant, but we overcome them, don’t we?’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘Strange situation – the ship, the crowds, the bobbing about, the dreadful couple from Windsor with whom we’ve been forced to eat dinner every night – they’ve only been married for fifteen years and clearly want to kill each other – amateurs . . .’
‘You don’t want to kill Francis.’
‘Not often. Not lately. We’ve had our times.’ Patting Beth’s arm for a second as she raises her hand to beckon him in.
‘Stop flapping at me, woman.’ Francis, arriving perilously with a laden tray – three mugs of chocolate and a variety of cakes, tiny cake forks, plates, napkins, the whole weight and balance of it slithering and clinking until it’s set down at rest – or as much at rest as anything aboard seems likely to get. ‘I can see you perfectly well.’
‘No you can’t, I’ve got your glasses in my bag.’
‘I can see you perfectly well enough.’ Smiling at Beth so she’s in on the joke. ‘I’d know you anywhere.’
And they sit and they have what Francis declares an illegally early tea and they talk about the storms – the good and bad weathers they have seen. They spend an intentionally pointless hour.
And Francis and Bunny tell Beth a story, give her an image of Bunny running in a downpour, chasing across a field and Francis there and also running, holding a newspaper over Bunny’s head until it’s no longer a protection, only this heavy, tearing thing, and so he throws it away and they stop hurrying, are dignified and – by the time they reach a little village – they are stately and do not mind that people laugh at them, because the rain is warm rain and they are together. Together and soaked.
And it is difficult to leave them.
Once she has, Beth doesn’t return to her cabin, doesn’t discover if Derek feels better, or worse, or the same. She goes to the Purser’s Office and makes an enquiry – slightly bored manner, no commitment, even faint irritation – delivers it well: ‘Excuse me. Mr Arthur Lockwood . . . He’s in one of the Grand Suites . . . I think that’s what you call them. Could you help me with that?’
She no longer knows what else to do.
‘I am expected.’
And this is when your book can tell you about the man and about the woman and how they’re both young and in a cold town, rainy, scent of dead industry thick in the breeze as they walked from the railway station this afternoon.
It’s dark now and th
ey’re tired because all evening they’ve been concentrating and remembering and talking to strangers about other strangers and watching them cry. It is beautiful, but also tiring to watch strangers cry.
They lean in to each other while the rain flusters and link arms, working their way back to the hotel – station hotel, Victorian monster of a thing: big rooms and draughty and patches on the curtains that the sun has faded, patches where rain has caught the cloth and stained it, weary carpets, chipped tiles and thin towels in the bathroom, potentially fatal electric fires. The man and the woman don’t mind the mixture of grandeur and shabbiness, it amuses them, is part of a world filled with pretending.
Although they don’t have an umbrella, they almost amble, not speaking, past the ugly town hall and the emptied municipal flower beds, the brightness of shops. It takes them a long time to make a little journey and they even pause before they mount the hotel steps, as if they might wander further on.
But they do come inside, grin at each other as they stroll across the foyer, their clothes clinging. The man’s thumb leaves a damp mark when he presses the button to call down the lift and when it arrives and the doors open, they already know that his room is on the third floor and hers is on the sixth, because they are good at keeping hold of numbers. And a stranger who’s wearing a grey mackintosh trots up – he has this jerky, trotting step they will both recall very clearly – gets in with them, smells of cigarettes and Brut and some kind of dark stout. They grin at him, too. They love that the stranger is here and let him stand between them, flurry and heat the absolute truth between them which is that they will both go to the woman’s room and they will undress in the quiet and chilly dark and then they will climb into her bed and find themselves there and waiting with the story of who they are and want to be and could be and never will and have to try.
There are so many things you ought to know – for your safety, for your happiness – and your book would like to tell them all to you. It sees that you do love your friends, but you don’t trust too easily, your intimacy needs to be won and sometimes you can seem inaccessible and this is unsurprising because you’ve trusted and been hurt before. Although keeping yourself too solitary can become abrasive, there have also been individuals, personalities that you’ve sidestepped and you had every right to, because they meant you harm. Others have simply been easy to forget. It’s slightly embarrassing to acknowledge that there are people you went to school with, worked beside every day, and now you don’t have their numbers or a current address. And there have been occasions when you’ve told your problems, even the large secrets of your self to total strangers – you’ve let them look clear into you, and this has been surprising, but also liberating. And after they’d heard all you could say they were nothing but compassionate, affectionate, humane. They owed you no courtesy, yet you inspired it. This is because you have a good heart, a quite excellent heart. And you’re interesting; sometimes you doubt it, but you are. You know how to tell a story and when you do people listen. You can make them laugh, which is relaxing and a tonic – they appreciate it.
The Blue Book Page 20