What Becomes

by A. L. Kennedy

  With me.

  Need a new wallet now.

  ‘You all right, chief?’ Tim peered down the stairs, still seeming concerned, attentive, which was an irritation.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You, ah . . .’ He crept a few steps lower. ‘You’re . . .’ He pointed, apparently embarrassed by something that Peter had done, or else something he was.

  And Pete glanced down, realised his thumb was bleeding, a chip cut into it, not too deep, but messy. ‘Bollocks.’ He’d have to sterilise the cutting surface, throw out the swedes.

  ‘I can clean up, if you want.’ Tim saying this, as if he’s facing an invalid. ‘You could just . . . you know. Wash your hand.’

  Peter paused, blood dripping.

  I am an invalid. Tim, Fintan, everybody: they saw me be well, be with her. They saw me burning.

  Now all we do is remember what I’m not.

  I should sack them.

  His thumb only started hurting when he noticed it, once he understood what had gone wrong.

  ‘I’ll . . . Yes.’ Peter finally moved to the muddy sink and the first-aid kit. ‘If you could clean up. Yes.’

  He ran the cold tap over his thumb, washed and washed, the water staying slightly pink, no matter what.

  Party.

  She’d been going to a party – somebody’s birthday in a pub – and we’d never done something like that, been together in front of her friends.

  Saturday evening in Edinburgh and you bring her flowers on the train, mind them for the whole of the journey so they’re still nice.

  Handing them over and she’s on her doorstep and wearing make-up – night-out kind of make-up and this thin dress, silky, because it’s summer, and she’s still in stocking feet. Maybe tights – you don’t know yet – but that’s not how you say it – you say stocking feet, that’s the accepted phrase. Her flat is behind her and you do not know it well, because you never can quite get a grip of it, because of watching her and gladly suffering the way the kitchen tabletop hurts a little under your hands, being covered in her using it and having breakfast and sitting at it to maybe read a book.

  You wanted to sit a while, too, but she was smiling at the flowers and hurrying them into a sink full of water because she couldn’t find a vase and then she’s searching for her shoes without you and you’re looking at her bookshelves and you mainly would like to just stay here and not go out and maybe your jeans aren’t right and your shirt is silly, too young, but she takes your arm and kisses your cheek and that’s the taxi sounding its horn in the street.

  The pub is in a basement, lots of woodwork, bare stone and leather sofas: the heat in it already a bit much. Out at the back, there’s a kind of garden and you fix yourself up there with drinks for both of you and she goes about and says hello to her pals and the birthday girl. That doesn’t take long.

  You meet three or four of her friends – four of them – and they seem pleasant and not surprised by you and she pats your arm while one of them is watching.

  Peter dabbed his hand dry, fumbled out some antiseptic ointment and a plaster. Tricky to do a proper job with his hands unsteady.

  It hadn’t been a bad evening. A bit dull when they talked about places you hadn’t been to, a past you didn’t know. But then they mentioned Amanda’s school, what she’d been like as a girl and that made her blush and unfurled the sum of you, rocked you.

  And you missed the third-last train and the second-last and then you have to let out the five words boiling in your chest, ‘I won’t be going home.’ You were quiet, but she heard you.

  ‘No, Peter. You will be going home.’ And her grin came a breath too late to stop me shivering.

  Blood made a small stain through the dressing, as soon as he set it on straight. Small – nothing bad.

  And you said, you truly said, you let yourself say, ‘Well, I could get the bus. There’s a later bus that goes to Glasgow, isn’t there?’

  But then you saw her, all over again saw her, like a new first time.

  ‘No. You’re going home to mine.’

  In a whisper.

  Like she’s slapped you.

  Whisper that runs down your neck and you’re puzzled, you’re knocked, you’re split – there’s this wonder yelling in you and all the outside of your face can do is frown, stare while she moves off into the room.

  ‘No. You’re going home to mine.’

  She told me that and went away.

  Saying goodbye.

  She did a lot of hugging. I saw. And eventually she came and got me.

  Leaving together. Thick and friendly and curious air around us, we pair.

  There’s more hugging just as we go – strangers also hugging me, because I am with her – and then we walk – Amanda in heels, but she wants the air she says, she can make it as far as we need to. Just that far.

  A little bit drunk. Both of us.

  And we go.

  We take me home.

  We go home.

  Only a few bright windows as we pass: high, grey, empty streets.

  And I can’t remember, but I do, and I won’t remember, but I do. Her hands on my back, as if she was listening to me, reading.

  Holding each other so much we could hardly undress.

  Her eyes closed.

  Stockings, not tights.

  Flat stomach.

  Goldenish cunt.

  Sweet word and it fits.

  He squeezed the place where the bloodstain was, did it again, started climbing the stairs. A part of him hoped that he might faint soon.

  Fits the line and shape and promise of all my life.

  All my fucking life.

  Up in the shop it was quiet, almost closing time – the final half-hour when the ceiling would slowly grind down towards Peter and his skull would throb.

  You slept for a while, but then woke without knowing why.

  Amanda sitting on the edge of the bed and her skin cold, shuddering, makes you flinch when you move to touch her. So you wrap her up tight with you there in the sheet.

  Wanting to fuck her again, reaching round to her breast, but it’s sleeping, the nipple stays dull and her back is hard against you, unhappy.

  She’d begun with, ‘I’m sorry.’ Which is not a good beginning, but he’d tried to welcome it.

  ‘That’s all right. I don’t mind.’ He’d been holding her hand, kissing it. ‘But what’s –’

  She’d shaken her head and worked away from him and this took the rest of his sentence.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Although she didn’t sound it – was more bitter, perhaps, angry, his thinking panicked across possibilities.

  ‘There’s no need to be sorry.’

  ‘I do care about you. I think about you all the time.’

  Already the silt in your blood, the closing down.

  ‘There was somebody at the party that I knew. That we used to . . . And I hugged him goodbye.’

  Trying not to understand her. Trying hard.

  ‘I . . . when we came back, I could still . . . I’m sorry . . . I could smell him on my clothes, on me – and then while we . . . it was like it was him.’

  I think about you all the time.

  ‘I do care about you.’ And she’d brushed his back.

  And I do love you.

  ‘I just . . . this is a, this is a mess. I’m not what you . . . I don’t want to hurt you.’

  But you did.

  ‘I don’t think we can.’

  But you fucking did.

  ‘Could we just leave it for now.’

  You fucking did.

  Dressing himself had been difficult, because of his numbed hands. ‘I’ll call you. To see how you are.’ Death starting with the hands.

  His fingers delicate as ash.

  A woman came into the shop: social worker type and wanting to talk when it’s time to close, when it’s time to give up and go away. She had leaflets.

  ‘It works on the principles that all life is connected and this energy, it
goes between us, there’s a flow.’ Knitted hat, shoes made from recycled tyres – the usual.

  ‘We’re not all connected.’

  Pale enough to be a vegan and a funny shine on her skin, greasy. ‘Once you become accustomed to the idea you begin to feel it, you begin to be able to work with the energy.’

  ‘We’re not all connected.’

  ‘It chimes in with quantum physics very nicely, but of course the philosophy is very ancient.’

  ‘We are not all connected. We are bags of skin. We are all separate bags of thinking skin.’

  Her mouth gave a tiny jerk. ‘I’ll just leave the leaflet.’

  ‘You give me a way to stop thinking – I’ll paper the whole bloody place with your leaflets. How about that. I’ll give you the shop.’

  She didn’t look at him and didn’t set down her leaflet.

  ‘I meant it. You just let me know.’ Shouting this at her back as she scurried to the door, escaped.

  ‘You let me know.’

  Then he sat at the till and rubbed his forehead.

  He did that for a long while.

  He wanted to go to Edinburgh.

  SATURDAY TEATIME

  So.

  My head will keep on racing throughout this, I have no doubt.

  Racing and running away.

  Louping.

  Breenjing.

  Going a game with itself.

  Which may well be a sign of weakness. Before I turned up I did need to consider my weaknesses and strengths, how best they’d be accommodated. In here I will have to be able to second-guess myself, but that won’t be a problem – I’ve been doing it for years, because it is the key to any comfort.

  Given that I want a happy time.

  This is the general rule – people seek their happiness. Even if they’re masochistic, when they find their perfect pain, it should make them happy.

  And who doesn’t like being happy? Happy’s why I’m here. I am trying something new that should increase my happiness. This time it’s flotation and relaxation. I’ve walked in and bought an hour of both.

  At least, I suppose the flotation part is the one that’s guaranteed and whatever relaxation I get will be down to me.

  Quite possibly less than an hour of that.

  And thereafter I’d expect an amount of happiness will ensue.

  Anyway, I am predicting this is something I’ll enjoy: floating, relaxing, unwinding, enjoying the benefits of salted water.

  Whatever they are.

  I’m not quite clear.

  It feels slippery, somehow, the surface – slippery and thick. Not truly unpleasant and not exactly nice. Mainly neutral.

  I did foresee the absence of distraction will leave me alone with me, which isn’t always wise, but I’ve done what seemed necessary, sensible – I didn’t bolt and clamber into this at once, there was no rush. I waited, pulled the door wide to let in the light and checked very thoroughly everywhere: each shadow, every corner, not forgetting above.

  I am all that’s here.

  Leastways, there is me and there is here – which is a Flotation Tank – and, to be perfectly accurate, this isn’t really a tank. Not anything like one.

  I’d expected a tank.

  Flotation Tank.

  As advertised.

  This is more of a room, a cupboard, in fact – a Flotation Damp Cupboard with Light-proof Door. A cupboard right down in the basement, as if they suffer persistent floods and have taken advantage.

  No attempt at something futuristic, not a capsule and not a fancy casket affair, heavy lid on a watery grave.

  Claustrophobia probably an issue with those options.

  I’m just lying in some brine in a warm, wet cupboard.

  Who’d have thought.

  But a warm, wet, safe cupboard – I’ve made myself entirely sure of that – just me and the four peaceful walls and the innocent ceiling, some water. Not even too much of that. Inches. Barely shin-deep.

  And that’s good, because now the door’s shut it’s as dark as nasty thinking and I’d rather not end up imagining any possible cause for alarm. I’m naked and lying with something I don’t know – with the dark – and this must seem only snug and homely, buoyant: no overtones of drowning, suggestions of creatures that rise from unlikely depths, hints of noise underneath the silence, eager.

  Which is more than enough of that.

  Plus, it’s thirty quid a session – stupid to waste it. Embarrassing as well: running upstairs to the hippy at the till after eight or nine minutes and saying you’ve had to chuck it because of the monsters you brought in with you, as if you’re a kid.

  Well, I can be definitive when I state there are no monsters.

  Not here.

  I checked.

  There’s only myself in a peaceful setting, peaceful cupboard, with an hour to reflect on the knowledge that I must have more money than sense.

  More money than sense – there are so many meaningless sayings we pass between ourselves.

  Don’t trust him as far as you can throw him.

  There are always two sides to the argument.

  He’s not slow in coming forward.

  She’s no better than she should be.

  This is the way to the flotation tank.

  Sometimes, when you hear people talk, you’d imagine that we are in some way obliged to take part in each other’s dreams, just plunge into lie after lie and wallow about. You could think that on the inside we are mainly fantasy.

  Word dreams.

  No internal organs, just a mass of unlikely excuses for their absence.

  And no way to stop the words.

  No, there is, though.

  There is.

  I am in charge here.

  That’s right.

  And nodding my agreement rocks the heart of everything.

  Which is myself. For an hour.

  They said doing this would make my head race.

  A side effect of the floating.

  Sensory deficit: not enough left of feeling to slow me down. Sleepy heart rate, skin quiet, almost disappeared, reality loosened and tepid, at body heat. I’m increasingly unclear about my edges, may have misplaced, or forgotten where I stop. I could, in fact, be seeping out into the water, could be washing away.

  Best to take an inventory of what I am not.

  Blinded heat. Scent of wet wood. Oddly substantial presence beneath the limbs – it now feels like a sofa, a mattress, a nothing that lets you hover, tip, spin. Gliding through your own little piece of outer space. No stars, though. Blanket blackness. Numb.

  Not that I’m actually moving. At least I don’t think so, I can no longer tell.

  Need to be cautious about that.

  Oh, and now I’m remembering that kid at the party last week.

  Why not? I can let that happen.

  He was scared of me at the start – I was, after all, an unknown visitor – but then we chatted and made faces and then he wasn’t worried any more, was forgetting himself, giggling. He brought his hamster down to show me – Benny, Benji, Billy, doesn’t matter.

  He wants to go up your shirt.

  Precocious idea. I mean, not sexual, but experimental. And I wasn’t going to fight the child off – because that’s how the hamster gets murdered and then there’s hell to pay – and the rest of the room was both crushingly middle-aged and viciously tedious so I’d no prospects of anything better to do and under the shirt goes the hamster.

  The boy’s seven, six, has purely innocent motivations, a generous impulse, and he sets the thing down on my stomach, gives me a sensation that he has already relished – the tiny paws and whiskers, scampers of fur across skin.

  Lovely.

  Weird and lovely.

  That frantic ticking of breath – I’d known it before, years ago, and here it was back again: repeating, rattling along above its echo – because of course, I had a hamster when I was his age and of course I’d fed it into my own sleeves, my jumpers. It was somethin
g like sliding a panic inside my clothes: that scrabbling and vulnerability. I couldn’t have said if I was reading its fear, or it was reading mine. The whole procedure was an adult kind of pleasure, complicated: anxiety and fun and loss of control and maybe the chance that I’d hurt it without meaning, or that it would hurt me.

  I remember watching the boy’s face and thinking that I ought to forget more, clean things out.

  And then I picked up his hamster, held it firmly in my hand – that whole body reckless with life, the wild and tiny heart, everything about it too fragile.

  The boy’s eyes were happy and then less so.

  I could feel his will between me and shutting my fist, the way he might be brave.

  He looked, a loud look, and he was right to. He was a small, good-hearted man.

  And then I gave the hamster back.

  No harm done.

  Not anywhere.

  And none intended, not a breath.

  But, let’s be frank, a lousy choice of pet. Hamsters are almost impossible to love. They have the brains of a wind-up toy, or possibly a potato. They are bonsai rats and smell much worse than all that should imply. They’re unconscious when you want to play with them, then berserk through every night, and they live for about a week. Flush the body down the toilet and buy another, I presume – it’s not as if they cost a lot.

  The kid’s father was the sort who’d find that appealing. I was stuck in a corner with him for some truly geological slab of time while he maundered on about this probably mythical trip he made to Italy when he was younger and single and he took great pains to pronounce each Italian word as if he were a waiter in a sitcom and he leaned in tight and kept constructing these laborious smiles which I think were designed to imply that he was a dandy youngster and blade about town and could be that way again with no more than a cheap motel room and a free afternoon to spur him on.

  He’d be the cheap motel breed of adulterer. Not for interesting and perverse reasons – just to save cash.

  Fair enough, his wife is a dead-eyed, organic hummus-producing marionette with a whispery, creepy laugh – but he’ll have made her that way. And she’ll have made him a sticky-handed fraud reliant on alcohol, golf and non-threatening porn. They are every excuse they could ever need to abscond and yet they’ll stay and, having ruined themselves and each other, they will grind on and on and their son will be worn down and hollowed at seventeen – a self-harmer, criminal, crackhead.