The Blue Book

by A. L. Kennedy

  Flare in the skin where it works and knows and learns and wants and parts and she bites, doesn’t know where she bites him and he shudders while she does and then speeds, is driving, arches his neck before he catches himself, soothes back, is sly at her cheek while he feeds her his fingers, lets her taste herself, ‘Which is gorgeous – the way you taste.’ He draws in a breath between his teeth, ‘Oh, makes me want to fuck you. Makes me want to screw you so much. Makes me want this. Making love. Makes me want making love.’ His pace lifting for a thought before, ‘You’re quiet, though, Beth. Why quiet? Leave my fingers.’

  Which keep the mouth from speaking, from going wrong, from everything.

  ‘Leave them, Beth – ’cause it’s turning me on too much . . . And I need to think. I think I need to think.’

  Almost unsurvivably arousing, the tiny idea of calling him darling.

  ‘Speak to me, Beth.’

  If my absence would please you, I’d disappear.

  I’d have to go.

  But I can’t go.

  So she says to him, ‘Darling.’

  He flinches. Happy flinch. ‘Good word. Like that word. Can I kiss you?’

  ‘’Course.’

  And he does, licks the taste of sex under her tongue. ‘You happy?’

  ‘Yes.’ Blurring into him, flexing to meet the clean length of his body, how he is opened and home, and she fits her legs close round his waist, catches him and the way he’s himself, is the whole of Arthur and delivered and here. And she whispers – simpler to say when it’s smaller, ‘You make me happy.’ She whispers so they can dream each other and not be disturbed, ‘And you’re my darling.’ They could walk off the boat in New York as a couple: true and changed and joined. They should be able to do that. ‘I dream you. I dream this, I dream all kinds of . . . I dream you. I learned you, Art. I learned you and I dreamed you and when I’m away – when I was away – I kept you. I could feel you.’

  And here’s the leap in his spine, this delight in him – milksweet thing – that’s fast and faster and deep in his lungs and the hook and the kick and the cleverness of his hips, and when he whispers, ‘D’you want to come, Beth? D’you want to come with me in you, because this is me in you, this is me right in you, this is my cock and it’s in you and I love you and come with me. I do love you.’

  And you know his sweat, new sweat, and he knows you, he allover knows you, knows you wet and you know him dancing, know him inside naked and here and here and here and here and here and he’s here and you’re here and here and here and here, you’re fucking here, you’re fucking here, all here.

  They shiver after.

  Slowly the ship’s din coming back and the swing of the bed and who they are and not being each other, only themselves, but also each other, this excellent bewilderment.

  He curls in behind her and is dapper, nuzzled. He allows himself a sigh, reaches and winds his arm around her and under her breasts. ‘I love you, Beth.’

  The ridiculous, naked, ridiculous things we say.

  ‘And I love you.’

  And Beth is certain that he should have and see and know everything – all that’s left. The whole story.

  Everything.

  True.

  True.

  True.

  Put it in his wonderful head – give him what’s ugly, what’s me, like hitting him, like making him bleed.

  Ssssshhh.

  My darling.

  I can’t.

  I can’t do that.

  So I shouldn’t take his hand and shouldn’t kiss him.

  I can’t have what I don’t earn.

  ‘I love you. I love you, darling. I love you, Art. I love you, Arthur Lockwood. I love you.’

  Burns in the mouth, burns like fuck. Never said it so much and it burns me.

  But I do take his hand and I do kiss him.

  Ssssshhh.

  There’s a boy sitting outside his bedroom, leaning against the wall, one knee bent high and his other leg extended across to the opposite side of the passageway. He is staring at his shoes which are off-white Converse All Star Hi-tops. He bought the trainers for himself and enjoys them – the way they seem cool and also seedy and also laughable: when he wears them he gets close to being all those things on purpose and can own himself. Before, when he was really a child, people would peer down at his feet – his long, long feet – and say, ‘You’ll grow into them, then.’ And he got tired of it. This is better – being his own joke – tall and getting taller, bigger, like a threat.

  The boy is quiet, perhaps listening, hands loose on the carpet to either side of his hips as if he is consciously controlling them, not making fists. Inside his room there are the sounds of his mother breaking things.

  This happens.

  It is not his fault.

  It is not her fault.

  Every six or seven months it is now simply necessary. She has to destroy as much of what he has as she can find.

  So he tries not to acquire belongings, or else makes them disappear, slides them under floorboards, buries them in taped-up boxes – but the best is not to bother with them in the first place. For some reason, she doesn’t damage what he wears and carries with him. And the stones he has kept from the island she only throws about and hasn’t broken, although his favourite is always in his pocket, just to be sure – the one with the brown and mauve and sepia wood grain, the beach agate. For luck.

  He is waiting for her to be finished. Then she’ll go and cry in the kitchen and he’ll tidy up.

  He takes the pebble and holds it like a wish. He lends it his heat.

  He doesn’t know that in thirty years’ time he will be in Pimlico and it will be raining – will have poured all night – and these days he will be mainly Mr Lockwood, not so much Arthur and almost never Art – only one person will call him Art and she will not be with him.

  And he will be standing in a sodden jacket at the pavement’s edge, his feet in amongst all the wandered colours of the shop signs, the confusions of light, and he will be holding a jar, lending it his heat – dark blue enamel bands laid around turned brass that shines vaguely as it tilts in his hands – it looks like a prop, a suspicious container for onstage skulduggery. But Mr Lockwood will have no audience, no one to see when he unscrews the lid and empties the jar into the gutter and the fast, thick flow of water and of darkness.

  It won’t make Mr Lockwood happy to tip her away and then set down the urn, wait until the rain has washed his hands a little and then walk, leave her. He may have the sense there is something troublesome he needn’t carry any more – but it might only be that he’s rid of the urn: heavy thing and awkward, solid metal, respectful option, quite expensive.

  Coddling the stone warm in the heart of his palm, the boy shouldn’t know this – it would scare him. It’s nothing he ought to be able to predict.

  If this book had been with him, could be with him – company for him and the blue of it resting faithful against his skin – then he couldn’t be allowed to read it, not yet.

  So naturally he would want to read it, because forbidden things are always best. Looking under the cloth, the sheet, behind the curtain, to see and find the tricks of things – he can’t resist that. Human beings love to look and he is a human being.

  Last time his dad came back they’d make trips to a wax museum – not a good one – a dusty, small place – the clothes on the models didn’t fit, and everywhere had this sour, strange smell that almost suggested the use of remains: true body parts, hidden beneath the wigs and unconvincing surfaces.

  The room for horrors was most popular, the fullest on Saturday mornings: it had a guillotine equipped with victim and operator and an Inquisitionist and there was Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd – all these glint-eyed figures who worked with death, could treat it with familiarity, let it in. And beyond them was a curtained
doorway – greasy red velvet and a sign that said no one should pass through it unless they were over eighteen.

  The boy is not over eighteen.

  So his dad wouldn’t let him go in – avoided that corner on each visit. But then the old man fucked off again, his goodbye very final, desperate, and accompanied by sad offers of money and advice and Arthur not happy about this – except that he spent a bit of the cash on his shoes and afterwards he went to the museum by himself and slipped in behind the velvet and was where he should not be and got educated.

  He’d guessed it would be about shagging, whatever was being kept from him, and he wasn’t quite mistaken. He stepped inside to face rows of bleached-out medical models: elucidations of sexual diseases, the pitfalls of pleasure: blisters, rashes, pockmarks. It was disappointing and repulsive – the worst of what human beings could be, their destroying. The worst he knew then.

  ‘I went back, though.’ Arthur Lockwood with Beth and telling her the waxworks story and there’s full, grey day at the suite’s windows and outside in the corridor the speakers are carrying their captain’s last announcement – Manhattan tomorrow and it’s been such a pleasure having them aboard.

  Beth and Arthur have turned on the lights so they can see: blushed skin and busied and pulled and stroked hair – resting now – and lovers’ faces – still almost the faces they had in dreaming – and plain white sheets, surrendered sheets – and Beth beside the man who is not being Mr and not being Arthur – who is being Art for her and here and over eighteen and stretched across his bed, in his bedroom, in his suite – which she supposes has become their bed and bedroom and suite and which is balanced on the ocean’s skin, swaying on almost three miles of water that’s relentlessly beneath them while she looks at him.

  We love to look.

  ‘I went back.’

  ‘I know. You would.’ And Beth not long awake and Art having laid himself flat, setting the back of his head just below the finish of her ribs. His weight and his thinking press at her breath.

  ‘Of course you’d go back, Art. Can’t leave well enough alone, you . . .’

  ‘You weren’t saying that earlier.’ He glances along at her. ‘You weren’t saying anything of the kind earlier.’ And he reaches his hand out to be held.

  And she holds it. ‘Earlier is why this bit gets to be romantic. I think. Maybe. All new to me.’

  ‘Not really my area, either.’ He repositions his shoulders slightly. ‘This is romantic. I would say. Because I would also say – am saying – that having to look is almost always like that – at least disappointing : you go past the curtain, or you lift off the cloth and there aren’t any wonders – the secret’s no use, or it doesn’t exist, or it’s terrible and you shouldn’t have to see.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I know you do . . . But your secret – under that sheet – not that you currently are under that sheet, but there were rare occasions when you have not been completely naked or covered in me . . .’ And he shifts his head so that his cheek is by her hip, blows softly, lends her his heat. ‘What was I . . . ? I got distracted again.’

  Although she has her own heat: ‘No mental discipline, Art – that’s your problem.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ He pushes out a dry breath, his almost-laugh. ‘That’s my problem . . .’ Then he turns back from her. ‘My point was . . . there are occasions when you are very covered in very many ways . . . But I have worked out your secret . . .’

  Ssssshhh.

  In his lazy voice, early morning voice, unprotected voice, ‘Which is that you’re more beautiful than you’ll let anybody know.’ He squeezes his hand round her fingers, ‘But I found you out.’ Meeting her eyes directly, plainly.

  Ssssshhh.

  And she’s the one who sits up to stare across at nowhere, a numb wall. ‘No.’ While she thinks that she wants to save this afternoon, loop it and stay in it and never move on to what comes next. ‘The secret is that you have no idea what I’m like for the rest of the time. You only ever see me when I’m with you.’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Yes. And often I have not been . . . but I’ve been all I could . . . I mean, I’ve been uglier elsewhere.’

  ‘And elsewhere, ugly is all I can be.’ He sits up in the nice wreck of their bed. ‘Sorry. That’s . . . That really isn’t romantic . . . It’s just that – in Pimlico I didn’t feel anything. I feel with you. I always feel with you . . . it hasn’t always been . . .’ He goes for the diplomatic choice, polite as a stranger. ‘There has always been feeling available even if it hasn’t been positive. But there was nothing then. For my mother.’ He says the word as if it comes from another language: a strange, demanding country. ‘Nothing at all until I was – sorry to . . . but I’d gone to London for work . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to keep apologising.’

  He twitches his head, but doesn’t contradict. ‘Anyway. This guy had got hold of my number – I’m still not sure how – and he kind of didn’t want me and he also kind of did.’ Art taking her hand again, keeping it. ‘His name was supposed to be Drazan . . . I have no idea if that was true – didn’t seem it – and he kept telling me that he had a ghost. And what exactly I’m supposed to do about a ghost, I can’t imagine . . . wave a bible at it . . . This is not stuff that I do. And his ghost lived in his flat in Talbot Road – it didn’t break things, it didn’t move things, it didn’t appear – he just knew it was there – and his girlfriend had left him because of it . . . Naturally . . . I nearly couldn’t be bothered, but I was in town anyway, so . . . We meet in a pub opposite his building and he’s fucking me about immediately. It’s a quiet and early pub – all bleach and last night’s piss – and he’s fucking me about in it, nearly giggling and talking shit, very nervy and clearly a wanker . . . but I also know . . . I know . . . he does have a ghost. He’s telling me, but not telling me and he doesn’t need to tell me, because of his face – what it’s saying – because I have the same face – his ghost isn’t a child, or a man, or his sister, or a lover, or a friend – it’s his mother. His mum. I know what a bad son looks like.’ Art’s thumb fussing, thrumming over her knuckles, back and forth. ‘He didn’t like her and then something happened and he’s not sorry, except he is – because he knows what happened, what killed her – doesn’t need me to tell him, doesn’t want me to tell him, because it was shameful – it was so bad that he thinks it shames him. He was a narcissistic bastard. Like me . . . He kept me there until lunchtime, till the place was full of punters – not our kind of punters, just . . . punters. Eventually I just said, “It’s your mother. They shouldn’t have done that to her. It was wrong, it was absolutely wrong.” That’s all I said.’ The colour of his professional tone there, authoritative and gentle – the most effective blend – a flicker of who he can make himself be – and then it’s gone and he’s only Art, sheets gathered at his waist, thin shoulders, the long arms and their sensitivities, their tensions.

  If you weren’t sensible, didn’t study him enough, then he would probably seem weak. But he never is. Things hurt him because he allows them to, because he wants that.

  Doesn’t mean I should help them to hurt.

  Ssssshhh.

  He waits, heaves in a long breath, then. ‘I’ve had other Bosnians, Croatians, some Serbs . . . of course – anywhere like that and eventually, I get them, get the grief – but I wasn’t up to speed – mainly because I didn’t want the job and I didn’t trust him and I didn’t like him, so I hadn’t prepared. I intended to be unimpressive, but then he’s . . . it’s like this . . . this rancid taste that’s . . . it’s permanently there – it stains what he eats – I can see it on him – and he’s so angry and so scared and so disgusted with himself and it can’t be touched, or cured and . . . and it’s not unfamiliar.’ He closes his eyes, then gives her their blue when he opens them again. ‘And I bounced him those three sentences – banal sentences – and he let g
o – spilled the lot. I was there until bloody dinner time. This woman he hated and hadn’t seen in years, but he’s found out they took her away from her house in Donji Grad – I remember, you know I remember, I have a mind that keeps the details – and she was held in the rape camp at Doboj, in the Bosanka factory. And the rest is self-explanatory. And it also lives in his flat . . . She was called Merima . . .’ Art frowns at the air ahead of him, seems absent, or forsaken.

  So she pulls him in and down with her until they are lying again, but he turns on to his back and faces the ceiling and, ‘I was home and clear of him, clear of it by the end of the week – on the island. On the first day back I headed over La Coupee, kept on and then into the Pot – it’s this tiny, closed-up bay and it’s my place – it’s mine. And all the way there along the cliffs the sea was unnatural – was beyond stillness, so flat you could see the grain of the water, its true nature – like an agate, all these blues, and every boat that crossed would leave this trail, this mark like a finger writing on glass. You could see all of where they’d been – they wrote it out for you to read.

  ‘But you weren’t there, Beth. And I dropped into the bay – it has these big walls – and then went out through the new gate – I call it the new gate. There used to be a single tunnel that let you leave, but a fresh one’s opened since I was boy. There’s been an additional collapse. It was a low, low spring tide and I ended up standing on the shore where there should have been feet of water, was way out amongst things I never should touch. I ought not to be able . . .’

  There’s no particular change in how he’s resting, how he speaks, only this knowledge that he is, somewhere, fracturing and no longer minds. He will be undone with her and expects her to be kind.

  ‘And the ravens are complaining at me – there’s a pair that nest round there and they’re up and shouting, grumbling – and the sun silvering their backs and I don’t want them worried, because they’re my favourite – not ’cause they’re underworld birds, the Other Dimensions thing – because they’re clever and like small, flying people – and they worry the way that people do and so I sit – and when they settle down and stop talking – they do almost talk – I can hear them flying. It’s so quiet that I can hear the air pulling through those fingers at the tips of their wings. I’m up on my best rock and sitting and then they’ve settled too – they’ve landed and mewed a bit longer to each other, but now they’re satisfied and the only noise that’s left is in my head. It’s this impossibly wonderful morning. And you’re not there. You’re not beside me and not saying how hot the stones are, or looking at the glitter in the quartz, or . . . and why should you be . . . There was no reason for you to be there.’