The Blue Book

by A. L. Kennedy

  And you’re beautiful.

  Again you’re by no means sure of this, but you do possess beauty and it can be something you ought to protect, if not celebrate. When you were younger you occasionally felt slightly muffled, you looked for ways to be expressed and – although you might not say this yourself – you wanted to let your beauty be expressed. You’ve allowed some of your plans for this to slip, though. They were over-optimistic. To be truthful, the creative side of your life has worked out unexpectedly – is still working out. You are not a disappointment to yourself, but equally you aren’t quite who you intended you’d be.

  And your excellent heart has been broken and since then you haven’t been the same. You came back from your troubles in some ways stronger and you don’t go on about it – you’ve had courage that no one can fully appreciate – but you were injured deeply. You can’t say you weren’t. You hope this has made you more patient, generous, but you’re aware that you can also be bitter and self-punishing.

  And these days you don’t walk into situations with your eyes shut, not if you can help it – you like to be forewarned and forearmed. It can amuse you to be cynical, before you catch yourself sounding ugly or someone corrects you, or questions what you’ve said. Then you can stop, take stock of what you do have, what is here for you. You undoubtedly have reasons to be grateful and when you are, you feel more comfortable – not in a pious way, you’d hope – only with this slight peacefulness about you, a content.

  There was a period when you might have attributed the good things in your life to higher powers: luck, God, willpower, effort, the stars, fate, the benefits of this or that philosophy, or system, your mental fibre or moral discipline. Now these kinds of simple assumptions seem rather naïve and you are less sure of your place in the fabric of reality – or if reality has a fabric, a pattern.

  When you were a child you found it easy to believe – were apparently primed to have faith in almost anything and anyone. This has changed, partly because by now you’ve been fooled too often, scammed and disappointed. You also believe less firmly because you keep learning: you’re open to new information and this can adjust your points of view. Your opinions aren’t set in stone. Nor are you changeable for the sake of it, or shallow – although everyone can enjoy being shallow now and then and it need do no harm. You are perhaps more flexible and, indeed, thoughtful than average.

  There have been television programmes and movies that you’ve watched ironically, or not at all, but you’re aware that others took them at face value and accepted what you couldn’t. You often read the papers and then hear their headlines repeated later, undiluted by an intervening thought, stale ideas in strangers’ mouths, and this can disturb you. You worry true believers are out there, like fierce toddlers needing to have their own way, hoping to turn their whole species their own way: to unleash the unbridled market, unbridled government, unbridled precepts from unforgiving gods. You suspect they want to mark you with mythical whips, prepare you in their stories, dreams, laws, so that you will bleed in this world and the next. Their posturing can seem ridiculous, but also a genuine risk.

  What you might call your current beliefs are complex, mature. God and death are changeable ideas for you: threatening, mysterious, blank, laughable, beyond reach: both of them can be odd comforts and bad jokes. You would like to inhabit a universe that’s intelligent and loving, but it has shown itself unwilling to be either. Still, you have consolations: animals, landscapes, natural phenomena, the song of birds, the continuity of genes and minerals – blue eyes begetting blue eyes, carbon in stars and bones – and so much, so much, so much music. These can be joys, whereas many of the rituals from your childhood no longer impress and there are days when you may feel disturbed if you consider them in any depth.

  And you aren’t superstitious.

  Habits and talismans of this or that kind can aid your confidence, that’s accepted, but you wouldn’t want to rely on them instead of proper preparation, instead of relying on your personal qualities. You’ll admit they can give you a boost during tense situations. You may read your horoscope in the papers, but that’s only a bit of fun – journalists make them up, they’re patently generic guesses, veiled compliments and less-veiled threats. Surely, if astrologers were genuinely insightful, they could have told everybody about those extra planets out there, circling the sun: Sedna, Eris, Vesta and the rest – surely they’d have mapped them long ago. Whole planets – they’re not like your spare keys, or your glasses – you can’t just mislay them. You don’t think that’s an unfair point to make.

  Under pressure, you may be a touch irrational and this can mean co-workers or family members may appear to be obstructive, or else your surroundings may seem malign for a while: the streets and traffic clotting, geography squirming away from available maps. Some days apparently have a grain and you can feel yourself going against it, but your anxieties do pass and they’re rarely so great that you can’t control them. Perhaps you do knock on wood, throw salt over your shoulder when you spill it – that’s more about keeping a culture in place, about practising something your grandparents or parents might have done. None of this means you’d be taken in by any kind of mumbo-jumbo.

  Although not everything has a rational explanation – you know that. You’ve talked about this over the years and found most people have one story, one place in their lives where the ground gave way and let them fall to somewhere else. They have been amazed. And the stories they’ve told you weren’t the usual, fragile rubbish: that someone came to mind and then that very person called them. (No one remembers the endless thoughts that are followed by no call.) Or else some scenario, object, animal, human being was very clear to them while asleep and was then reproduced, or near enough, when they awoke. (No one remarks on the visions, intuitions, portents that don’t come to anything.)

  That kind of nonsense is easily explained. What shakes a human being is strong magic, the apparently real thing: someone is stopped by a flower seller in a foreign street, or an old man in a bar, an old woman, an uncanny child – whoever and wherever they happen to be, they make some announcement, statement, which proves miraculously accurate or useful at a later date. Or objects, circumstances, actions collide with an insistent significance which turns out to be of material assistance in vital decisions, or trying times. Or someone goes to see a card-reader, palm-reader, aura reader, colour reader, I Ching reader, psychic, obeah man, medium, santeria wise woman, healer, crystal gazer, cyber-witch, someone who claims to be a gipsy on a seaside pier – however it happens, an enquirer is told something important.

  A magnificent force has touched them, sought them out, and a deep and golden fact is shown to them and it could never have been known in any ordinary way and it comes true – it is true, could never be anything but true – and it proves the pattern in reality, it unveils the threads and shows how they shine.

  For anyone this would be special and would make them special and you realise they wouldn’t like you to take it away.

  Because it’s happened to you, too – you’ve had your turn at being special. And you believed in it. It was made to be believed.

  A man standing in a doorway.

  It might have been something like that – an almost infinitely adjustable and eloquent bundle of words. It might have been something you’d heard before, or words not even meant for you, but still they hooked in and stayed with your thinking and spoke to you until you sought them out, began to search for their vindication.

  And when you look, you find.

  Beth looked.

  A man standing in a doorway.

  She’s good at looking, is doing it now, walking her way towards whatever a Grand Suite will turn out to be, to whatever the rest of her trip will turn out to be, to however, for fucksake, she may spend the rest of her life.

  No pressure.

  Only walking to Arthur’s suite. I have walked before and have w
alked to hotel rooms and suites before and he has been inside them before. This doesn’t have to be a challenge if I think of it like that – bite it into little pieces and then I can swallow it.

  And focus on the irrelevant and harmless – everything he’s not.

  So.

  It has its own name, like a pet: the Astoria Suite. Art’s staying in rooms with a name. Because things for important people can’t have numbers, they need to be personalised – the rest of us get the numbers.

  She winds herself up the stairs.

  ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ When he still did the platform work, he’d chuck in bits of Bible – enough to add ballast, but not provoke.

  Eventually, I learned them, too. I can quote fucking scripture like a fucking nun if I fucking have to.

  For a while it had been his favourite – seek and ye shall find – he’d used it too much, in fact, almost as much as a man standing in a doorway – and when she left him, the image of that left with her, lodged and watched until September 1999 – when she’d passed almost five years without him – and then it lit her, made her see.

  She had taken her mother for a break – Bank Holiday weekend.

  Can’t resist a Bank Holiday weekend.

  They’d got rooms in a spa hotel with nice toiletries and complimentary bathrobes and a selection of treatments and procedures guaranteed to be cleansing, or detoxifying, or relaxing, or just nice and hot tubs and a fucking swimming pool – as if this would be a sensible idea and as if they ought to be alone somewhere like that with too much time to think – alone because her father wasn’t with them.

  It was in Beverley – no reason to pick Beverley, but I did.

  Beth’s mother had walked the grounds when it wasn’t raining and read when it was and, although the rest of the spa’s suggestions didn’t suit, she got a haircut and a new perm and had her nails done – nothing garish, just a nice manicure and a little bit of shine. She’d explained to Beth how the ladies who did it all – who encouraged her into it – had been very outgoing and pleasant, they had made her laugh and first called her Mrs Barber, but then later they called her Cath, because she asked them to, because Cath is unchangeably her name and isn’t reliant on anyone else.

  Cath had come down to dinner looking pretty for nobody, hands holding each other, unwillingly self- contained. She wore her first new dress since her husband’s funeral as if it were a sin.

  Beth had paid what she couldn’t afford to for massages – face down and tensing more when they touched her, when they tried to let out what her muscles were barricading in: the thoughts and thoughts and thoughts. She’d guessed this would happen and wasn’t alarmed – she was only embarrassed when she got her money back for one session because she had started sobbing – full, jerky sobs – and that meant the masseur had noticed and stopped.

  It wasn’t unreasonable – guy by himself with an upset naked woman under a sheet – could be awkward.

  Everything stops for tears.

  As a general principle that would never work. Put the whole bloody world into gridlock, that would. It would send everyone chasing round boats to no purpose, set them adrift.

  No. I do have a purpose. It is a bad purpose, I think. I’m not sure. It may be the wrong way to do right.

  Beth has reached Arthur’s deck, which is Deck Seven – of course, it would be seven – and the light fitments are more aspirational here than elsewhere and the air tastes cleaner, subtly conditioned to please those who’ve paid for it.

  The scent of people faking it – Kings of Glasgow with looted pensions, Duchesses from Solihull who are blowing their redundancy money, couples who want to be twenty years ago and newly-weds – and they want to have white glove service and little sandwiches cut into shapes and their picture taken with the captain and dancing the night away and pretending that being British should mean you are running a loving empire, keeping the less-blessed and foreign in line and teaching them how to boil vegetables into submission and forget themselves and salute the Butcher’s Apron when it creeps up the bloody flagpole every morning.

  They don’t want to be ashamed.

  Or they just want to fake being film stars.

  And the Germans fake being Brits and the Americans fake being Brits and the Brits fake being Brits – fake it harder than anyone else so they can be imperturbable ladies and firm but fair gentlemen.

  The French stay French. They have their own problems. They have their own flag.

  Everyone has their own flag. How would you know what’s yours if you can’t stick a flag in it?

  Me, I’m flying a white one. For surrender and undecided – blank sheet.

  It takes her an effort to move along the passageway – going against its grain.

  Did he want us to be here because we’re both fakers? Did he think I would be at home in this many lies?

  And she’d knock on wood if there was any – Does veneer count? – she’d throw salt back over her shoulder in a trail if she thought it would help.

  It has the scent of a good hotel, that’s all – no need for me to get hysterical.

  Arthur is a collector of good hotels.

  It wasn’t unlikely I’d meet him in one. In, for example, sodding Beverley.

  In sodding Beverley, Beth had stalled outside her mother’s room, had missed the moment when they ought to kiss goodnight, or hug, should do something compassionate. Eventually Cath had thanked her again for the lovely time she clearly wasn’t having and had given a small, stiff nod.

  ‘You don’t need to thank me. I wanted to . . . It’s good if we . . . And the office has been busy and . . .’

  ‘You can’t work all the time.’ This only a quiet statement, not accusing – which naturally made it accuse Beth more and then widen to suggest a background of daughterly neglect, the waste of a university education in mindlessly administrative jobs, a consuming lack of positive direction that was clear to anyone – the usual themes.

  Beth was unable to explain that she wanted to be busy, not fulfilled: that chasing fulfilment would be dangerous, would wake her. ‘No, I think I can work all the time, actually. I think . . . Sorry.’ Beth watched her mother’s lips, the sadness briefly plain in them and then the irritation. When she spoke again Beth sounded childish, whining, ‘It’s what I do, Mum . . . Coping . . . Sorry . . .’ She had no strength to be kind and do better. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t . . . We should have breakfast late tomorrow – last day. Or in bed – you could do that.’

  ‘I’d rather have breakfast with you.’

  The need to have Beth around had never been there before; at least, not in this ravenous, sad form. It made Beth want to leave.

  So she did. ‘We’ll do that, then. And I’ll get off to bed. Tired. Sorry.’ No sitting up in her mother’s room and ignoring bad telly again, both reading to avoid being companions, or having a conversation. ‘See you in the morning. Sleep well.’ But they would have been together, nonetheless, which might have been bearable for Cath but Elizabeth couldn’t deal with it, not yet. She only ever saw her mother with her father. Now she can’t sit next to one and not expect the other, assume he’ll fluster in with apologies about a gig that ran much longer than expected, an awkward audience, a birthday girl who cried.

  I should be more help to her. But I won’t. As ever, not a jolly good fellow. But I can only stand what I can stand.

  And she’d headed upstairs to her own room, padded along the carpet between perspectives of calming, Zen-flavoured pictures, door frames, doors.

  Heard the noise of an opening door and I looked round. No reason to do so – I wasn’t expecting anyone.

  A man standing in a doorway.

  And I can’t recall being surprised to see him. I don’t think I felt anything – no dip in the stomach, no swing – it was only like being suddenly
in a wide, high empty space and having no breath.

  Arthur was standing in his doorway, barefoot in an upmarket suit – thinner than she’d remembered, paler, wearier, clean-shaven and with a poorhouse short back and sides. He was holding a Do Not Disturb sign, about to close up for the night.

  He looked at her.

  I don’t think he was feeling much, either. Although the sign shook in his hand. I noticed that: a jolt and then he made himself steady.

  And there had been something naked in his eyes, caught in the open for an instant and then gone.

  And I could have decided to think – ‘What are the chances of both of us staying at that hotel and at that time and of my passing precisely when he would be standing there and I could see him?’ I could have imagined our meeting was so unlikely it must be a sign of some larger intention at work – our destiny.

  But there are so many corridors inside so many hotels and so many people who have met – at other times and in other places – so many other people and there are so many nights when so many sleepers might wish not to be disturbed that the chances of somebody somewhere encountering somebody else – even somebody they have kissed in the past – those chances are quite high. Even though the greater the number of variables, the less likely the event, it’s still not that miraculous for someone, somewhere to see someone stand in a doorway – someone whose palms they have kissed, whose stomach they have kissed – someone they have kissed right to the root where he’s hard and sweet and clever and where he wants.