Too long.
Just hold his hand and give him the summarised version.
‘You were blinding. Sort of blinding.’
‘That doesn’t seem likely.’ But he lets her close the distance again, ghost a contact, an invitation, hip against hip and when she smoothes her hand across his back Arthur’s spine is audible through his shirt and the bite of it, its kind of exposure, catches her – he is habitually lean, but now he’s thin, harrowed – and this is in some way utterly appalling. Too much of his structure is showing through.
And there’s his heat, his intention beneath her fingers – muscle, ribs, thought – it’s labouring, slowing, adjusting, before, ‘Sorry, Beth. Sorry . . . I . . . I like your stomach against my stomach. When we danced . . . That’s a clumsy way to say it, but . . . In my stomach is where I get scared and when you . . .’ But he changes his direction, retreats, ‘We’re all done by kindness – it’s never ineffective . . .’
‘Come to bed.’
‘I don’t want to come to bed, I don’t want to be near a bed, I don’t want—’ And he hugs himself around his shoulders and drops his head on to his arms.
She does not kiss the back of his neck where it is pale and soft and burning, because this would be impractical. She leaves him be and says, ‘I know. And I don’t want. Not that.’
‘I was going to take ice cubes from round the champagne and make your nipples hard with them – numb you up then suck you – some kind of crap like that – the usual . . . We make plans, you see – people make plans and they are the wrong plans, so they are laughable – but you shouldn’t laugh because they can’t . . . can’t help it and they hurt. They hurt everyone.’ Mumbling into his Jermyn Street shirt and then failing, stopped.
The horizon soars and shakes and Beth waits.
Takes as long as it takes – five minutes, ten minutes – until he’s calmer. But he’s mine now – all opened, all ready. And listen to his breath – smoother and smoother – he’ll be able to hear and we’ll begin.
‘I worked out why you take the ships, Arthur. I understand. On the first night, I realised and it made me . . . When you lie down in your bed and the boat moves – the tiny rock – the tiny flicker in the mattress, the give – it’s like when you were a kid and somebody came in and sat on the side of your bed – it’s that kindness again – it’s the best – it’s . . . nobody’s ever going to do that who doesn’t . . . It would be someone at least looking after you . . .’
‘Has he touched you today? Derek. Did he touch you?’
‘Ssssshhh.’
‘Has he touched you?’
‘No.’
‘Why the fuck not?’
‘Christ, do you really . . . ? Because he doesn’t want to, because I am being a bitch and inexcusably cruel to him, because he is ill, because I wouldn’t be able to let him. He hasn’t really touched me since dry land. The first night on board we were just very sleepy and ever since . . . Arthur, the pills I’ve been giving him aren’t for seasickness. I break those out of the pack and palm them and take them myself – he’s been eating . . . it’s a homeopathic remedy for sinus infections. Does sod all. Won’t harm him. But it also won’t stop him being iller than anyone should have to be.’
And no one but Arthur would find that romantic – but he will – he does – there he is, my boy – looking at me like he’s waking up.
But she takes care not to smile. ‘You didn’t make me do that – I did that, it was my choice.’ This is a confession and therefore serious. ‘It is not to do with you, but I might not have done it if you hadn’t been here.’
‘No. You would have got engaged.’
Which is the last little fence that he’ll throw at her and so she ignores it, ‘He might have asked me to – I couldn’t have. With or without you, I wouldn’t have done that . . .’ The ship swooping and reeling with her when she realises she’s supplied herself with the perfect cue – an accident, so it should sound genuine. ‘With or without you – Arthur . . .’
If you’re being honest it’s all right to sound flat, jangled, amateur. So aim for that.
‘Arthur, can I be with you? Please.’
‘He kissed you. I saw him.’ This isn’t an objection, it’s an invitation.
And my boy gets to be my boy, my own boy.
‘And so will you.’ And she gets up, slides her hands under his ears and holds him.
When they walk to his bedroom they are exactly as unsteady as they should be.
My boy.
And Arthur climbs on to the goldenish coverlet like a very orderly boy, simply lies down across it, curls away on his side, faces out to the balcony and his dangerous view.
Beth sits on the side of the mattress, lets it give, give, give, then swings, moves, rests herself up against the headboard, the pillows. She slips her hand in under his skull, his cheek. She is glad of his weight.
‘I go on marches, Beth.’
He’ll talk now and I’ll let him.
And she’s glad of the shape of his voice against her fingers.
‘You’d be proud of me. Maybe.’
She doesn’t imagine the craft lying thick in his mind, the darknesses and strategies and lies. They have a weight and a shape and are beating in him, too.
And I have my own and today I don’t save him from myself.
He rocks his head back and forth, warm and away and then warm and then away and, ‘I think you would be proud. Not because of . . . I mean . . . I met these soldiers’ mothers – in the way that I would meet the mothers of dead sons – I’m sorry, I know you hate it, but I have to say and . . . but I . . . What do they have apart from me? Their boys, they were teenagers and they wanted free driving lessons and a fucking job and they looked smart with the haircut and the new dress uniform and people talked to them about loyalty and self-respect and discipline and they got very good at pressing in regulation creases and bulling their boots – I do know a bit about it – the research – some of it I read about and the people, relatives, other fucked-up soldiers with other dead – with dead friends – they told me some of it and it doesn’t, in this context, I believe, matter what I was doing – or what the reality of that was – I still have the right to be fucking outraged, fucking beyond it, that they went off with minimal training to a country where they never should have been and were killed for predictable and fucked-up reasons, because that’s what happens, always, when people pay no fucking attention to each other. Always. All neat and kissing you goodbye and photos in the post and emails and, after that, home in a box – how do you make sense of that without me – you aren’t going to get apologies, or justice, or an undertaking that the recruiters won’t hang round your shopping centre, your scheme, your school, and pick up more boys and use them to make more dead and . . . You know what they used to say? – in the First World War? – in that one? Believe me, I know my wars – half of my job has been learning fucking wars – they used to say there was one time when a king would have to salute a private soldier and the soldier could ignore him – which is when the private soldier is dead. I get tired of all the respect being given to the dead. I respect the living. The living – the ones who have to live, keep doing that – they’re the ones I work for. And I march with them.’ He pauses for a breath, presses his face against her hand. She holds where he’s frowning. ‘These women, they’re different now: they’re not just bereaved, they’re activists – they’re not the way women in housing schemes are meant to be – they don’t just shut up and take it. And I’m there with them sometimes – no particular use in that context, but I’m there, I want to be there – when I can be, where I can be – and people come round on the demos and give you signs, placards – usually the faces of hurt kids, dead kids, and you carry these dead kids with you and I walk behind the mothers and they wear T-shirts, they wear these T-shirts with numbers on them, their sons’ serial number
s – because their sons were numbers, are numbers – everything they did and cared about and trusted and all that’s left is these T-shirts and a number each – women wearing their sons. And I march and I give them money because my job makes me money and I try to fucking help. I try.’
He stops to let her contradict him, rolls on to his back and gives her his hand, makes the grip tight. ‘On the last march – because I do as many as I can, because you get to know the . . . it’s not just research – the organisations, they tell you about more and more and more of this shit – this death shit – and the last march I was on was for refugees, asylum seekers. Three of them had killed themselves – my government, your government dumped them in a block of flats where no one could live – no one – no one untraumatised, no one without ghosts – the flats, they’re just an invitation to top yourself – if you looked up: lousy balconies, rotten wood, shit paintwork and the whole place is just telling you, Why don’t you piss off and die? There’s this guy there and he’s just a punter, he’s local, has all these relatives – cousins, pals – and they’ve jumped – they weren’t refugees, they just lived there – which is being another kind of refugee, isn’t it . . . and the guy, he’s telling me this stuff and he’s not playing me, he doesn’t need me – I’m just listening – and it’s clear, more than clear, that anybody sane would jump. They would jump to not have to be in the normal blocks of those flats – and inside the block for the refugees . . . they’re not allowed washing machines in their flats – there are four fucking washing machines in this one little utility room – that’s all there is among Christ knows how many in the whole block and half the time the machines don’t even work – and no door locks that the concierge can’t open – and checking you out and checking you in – that’s not a concierge, that’s a jailer – Christ, we’ve got prisons with children in – refugee prisons – and what have they done? They’ve been the weakest of the weak, so we put them in prison – it’s all . . . it’s because we don’t see each other, we don’t even try . . . So there’s this family in the high flats, they kill themselves – patch of the grass with some flowers on where they landed – covers up any indentations, I’d suppose – cheap flowers – and these people, concerned individuals, they turn up – call goes out and they’re there – and me – and we march – with some of the guys, the asylum seekers from the flats, and eventually, you know, there’s a quite a lot of us under way, we’re off and we’re filling the street and we’re coming into town, from where the thrown-away people are to where the proper shops are and the good buildings that aren’t trying to kill you – where the respect is – and these refugees, these human beings from nowhere, from hell, from nothing they can stand to remember, they’re walking down the middle of the road and holding up traffic and being guarded by police – escorted and looked after by the police – who are behaving themselves – and the refugees, they’re not allowed to earn, they can’t vote, the Border Authority can do what they like with them at any time and no one seems to care, but today they have policemen helping them to be a parade – and there are total strangers there to prove that someone gives a shit – not just politicals: couples and kids and students and whoever – and it’s not practical, not really, it’s just giving up a bit of a Saturday morning to prove a point and not achieve, you might say, anything much – but the asylum seekers they’re so bloody happy about what’s going on – the almost-nothing that’s going on – that some of them are dancing, they’re singing – ’cause it seems like they might exist, they might be real again and in the world, might be able to have a bit of it, and I am absolutely certain I could help them, what I do could help them and it would cost them nothing and I could have helped that family, they needn’t have tied themselves together and walked off the edge of their lives. They had nothing, Beth, and nothing is the code for nothing – for fuck all – and no one should be left with that.’
And the sound of this seems to frighten him and make him want to pretend he wasn’t suddenly thinking of himself and of small problems – she can see him blush, consider the largest options he can muster. ‘I just . . . I’m not the worst specialist in death – I do not personally, directly make anyone dead, I do not earn my money by killing, or by allowing other people to die, I also do not go through my life under the impression that my everyday decisions aren’t murdering people I’ll never meet and I make an effort to be responsible in my behaviour and I do expect – I insist on expecting – that other human beings might try that, too. Thirty years ago – I can’t get this out of my head – thirty years ago – what’s 30 again? 30 was sport, wasn’t it? Something sport related . . . inappropriate . . . Thirty years ago, the UN promised that every member country would give 0.7 per cent – which is the mathematical way of saying fuck all – of their Gross National Income to stop the poor dying, so that mothers and kids and other ordinary normal members of our species wouldn’t just cease to exist for no good reason – wouldn’t be executed by the nature of their lives . . . in 2009 – this is research I do for me, it’s for nobody but me – it’s not practical, it’s because I like people and I don’t want them to need me and it’s only when your dead have gone the wrong way that you need me – and because I do the research I know that in 2009 five countries were actually giving 0.7 per cent. Five – out of all the UN countries – five out of 102. Sweden, Denmark . . . none of them amazingly big countries with huge resources, just merciful and civilised.
‘Five from 192 – that’s code for almost everyone being a cunt. Or for the people who represent almost everyone being cunts.’
‘Sorry for the word – as a thing and a place, it’s . . .’ He lets his breath struggle in his chest for a moment. ‘You know what I mean. We are not well served by the allegedly great and the allegedly good and the powerful.
‘But I can say, Beth, I can tell them. Because of my job, I can tell the people – some of the people – who would otherwise spend their surpluses on medieval tapestries, or jade, or German armour – who would otherwise gather over-priced shit with dodgy provenance, or no provenance, or fakes – the people who want their names chiselled into everything with gold inlay because it’s classy – I can say to them, “Collect lives. Why not?” – I would say save lives – but collecting, that’s easier for them to understand. They can keep a running total on a collection. They can turn up in tropical gear, fresh off the Lear jet and meet kids who’ll remember their names for ever, no gold inlay necessary. The kids will be able to remember and have lives, because the people with more money than sense – me included, that would include me – did something to help – did more than they thought they could to help – or just stopped doing things that harmed. I can get people to collect other people being happy because apparently their dead will come back and suggest it, demand it, because the afterlife can be merciful and civilised if we would like. It can be what this life is not. And quite possibly never will be. The dead – the ones I bring back – the ones that I say I bring back – I can get them to tell anybody you’d like the truth: that there is inexhaustibly more and more damage to undo, more pain, and I’m tired and I’m tired and I’m tired, but I’m . . . I try to do things, I . . .’
And Arthur turns to find her and she lets him cling as if they are falling, as if he is falling, as if he is angry and afraid and the bed gives and gives and gives and he is her boy, her soft, sore boy being taken into silence.
Here now.
Here now and you can sleep and everything you’ve said can be true and everything you’ve done can be acceptable, forgivable, normal and we can be together.
I can believe that.
If I believe it, then it isn’t fake.
Your book doesn’t understand belief, it can only tell you what it sees: a hotel lounge with a duck egg and caramel carpet, fat chairs and the quiet of hospital waiting rooms. Beth is sitting in an armchair opposite her mother and staring at a magazine filled with snapshots of people she doesn’t know having parties
, and true accounts of horrible diseases and assaults and accidents – also with snapshots. Everyone pictured appears to be having enormous fun, regardless of whether they’re toasting an over-dressed table or undergoing skin grafts.
Sodding Beverley, the morning after.
There is a grandfather clock in the hallway knocking out the time and further away, in the dining room, breakfast crockery is being cleared and places are being set up ready for lunch. The meals here are both unremitting and niggardly – neither woman is sure how to wear away the hours that are left between them. Beth can’t have another massage. Cath can’t have her hair cut again.
Up in the rooms there is cable television, there are pay-per-view movies, but Cath would think watching a film would be wasting the day. And probably it wouldn’t occupy her mind enough. Particularly not today.
Today is her wedding anniversary, but she can’t be married any more.
That’s why they’re here. This is the first time Cath would have spent the day alone – first in more than forty years.
Beth would be relieved to go upstairs and lie down, but that would involve abandoning her mother and she’s been doing that too much.
Beth is stupid with exhaustion and vaguely tearful. For little minutes she drifts into numbness and then she snaps alert, glances at her mother and, once again, wants to cry but doesn’t. And Beth’s clothes don’t seem quite able to drown out the memory of Arthur and finding him. The rediscovery.
Sodding Beverley, the morning after.
Outside there is drizzle, so it would be unpleasant to stroll. There are tall Victorian trees in the grey distance across a lawn, planted to climb artistically up a hillside and Beth studies them, heartily admires them to prevent herself from feeling where she has been bitten and where she was most touched and how unwise it would have been to sleep with Arthur, to give him that trust, and how terrible it is that she didn’t.
The Blue Book Page 23