What Becomes
Page 8
‘Are you . . .’ The waitress steadies and adjusts, ‘Happy with your meal?’
‘Yes.’ Elaine nods to underline this. The laugh has spun in at her, is winding, drilling, it is making her spine seem fibrous, tinder dry. ‘Yes. And some more, some more tea and we’ll have a dessert.’ Why not? This was costing them fifty dollars each already – fifty, fifty thousand, what’s fifty? – they might as well get a dessert.
Tom feels he should be explanatory and adds, ‘We lost . . .’ and then can’t begin to say what. Not that We lost doesn’t pretty much cover it. The waitress nods softly and he believes that he likes her and she likes him and that he needs to grasp these moments, collect them.
Empathy.
Elaine dabs at the back of his hand for a moment and news of this travels slowly up his arm.
‘Do you think you’ll want a pudding?’ She pats his knuckles. ‘Tom? Might as well. I will if you will.’ There’s a flare of motion she doesn’t expect and then her hand is caught between both of his, held in a hot, damp pressure. She faces him, blinks, ‘Have to build you up – then you’ll be worth more.’
And this sounds too likely and too close, so they keep their hands stacked on the table, a confinement they find reassuring.
Elaine even wonders about adding to it, completing the set: hands, two pairs, any reasonable offer will be considered.
Tom feels very slightly as if he has sprung across at her fleeing some unspecified peril and is now clinging.
For dear life.
He could let go. At any point. Just not this one.
We’ll need to stay with her parents – bloody Edgbaston – it was bad enough living there by ourselves – arsehole bloody schoolkids hanging around – little pothead wankers and skinny, horsey tarts who throw up all the time. And their arsehole bloody parents.
And her arsehole bloody parents. You’re from Cumbernauld? Oh, well.
Can’t go and stay with the Ma, though. All settled in Brodick – sea views and Dad scattered on the beach. Worked himself hollow to buy me an education, the start of a life where this shite wouldn’t happen. Oh, well. Can’t even tell the Ma how things turned out. America? It all went tits up. Oh, well. Government bailed the banks out, but not us. Oh, well. First hired, first fired, crucifying fucking mortgage and not citizens. Oh fucking, fucking, well.
No swearing, though. And positive. We won’t be homeless.
We’ll be in Edgbaston.
They let each other go when the waitress clears their table and returns with plates of minute rectangular desserts – two pink, two cream, two chocolate brown with a brush of gold leaf on the top.
‘We should scrape it off and save it.’ Although saying so makes Tom feel hemmed in rather than jovial. ‘Gold – the only stuff that’s worth anything. Should have bought shares.’
Elaine slowly puts her fork into the pink, lifts up a beautiful fragment and eats. ‘God, it’s wonderful. Sort of a mousse, or something. Very strawberry.’
They both manage the pink and the cream and softly agree they were ridiculously, unnecessarily fine and then they stare at the chocolate and the flakes of gold.
‘Confectioner’s gold. Is there such a thing?’ Elaine remembers she read somewhere that the secret way to win your man is by asking him questions and not knowing answers, deferring to the wisdom he wants you to prove he has. But Tom isn’t like that.
‘Well, if there is, we’ve got some.’
Elaine hears his voice getting thinner, stressed. Tom her man, Tom who’s snuffling and wiping his face with the heel of his hand, who’s too much a boy. She tells him, as if this might cheer him up, ‘I bet people come in here all the time and just order it. Plate of gold, please.’ Tom the boy who is a lecturer, letters after the name and a Dr in front – Tom who is still always waiting to be found out – she never has made him any more secure than that. ‘Plate of gold. Like eating money.’
‘Like eating something better than money.’
Tom clears his throat, readies his forefinger and thumb, flexes, picks up the soft chocolate between them and puts it all into his mouth, lets it warm, melt, cloy. He doesn’t chew, only swallows and so tomorrow he’ll be partly gold. He’ll incorporate it, never let it go.
Or else this is just a waste. An intolerable waste.
There’s something like fright in him, vertigo. He watches Elaine’s face, something about her expression which is brave: small and courageous and enough to make him bleed, shout, touch her, although he does none of those things, only watches as she picks up the last of their meal, repeats his gestures, studies the shape and then eats it, swallows gold.
Afterwards, they head for the park, the sun dropping fast through the afternoon, already striking fire in the highest windows of the mountainous apartment blocks. Elaine sees her husband tread across a tangle of long shadows, then lean against the tree that cast them. He appears to be almost relaxed. The size of him – almost clumsy, but he never is – and the line of his back: when it softens he can seem like he used to be, the last three years driven off, cured. Maybe this is the secret way to keep her man – never look at his face.
Almost clumsy.
Sometimes completely clumsy. I used to think I’d say something – that there are nights when he’d want to please me, but he already had. Anxious fingers. Insisting. Too much.
Big hands.
He has stupid, magnificent, big hands.
And he isn’t clumsy any more. Isn’t anything.
Maybe this is the secret way to keep each other – never look and never touch. Never meet.
They wander in among the leaves and American robins, the flicker of sparrows, and then they deliver themselves to increasingly wider paths until they are easing along beside the road, heading out to the dimming streets. The light is bitter and behind them a bright haze of red is rising to finish the day.
By the time they get back to their borrowed apartment they are both a dead cold, slurred with exhaustion. Tom considers running a bath and then decides against it. Elaine makes them someone else’s excellent coffee in someone else’s excellent mugs and they sit on someone else’s excellent sofa and stare out at someone else’s excellent rooftop view, the wild shapes the city hides up against the sky: bell towers, temples, pinnacles, farmhouse verandas, nunnery gardens, buttresses and battlements: the fantasies that money conjures and maintains. The sunset leaps and gilds a tower block downtown and off to their west, makes it burn so sharply that it leaves a numbness when they turn away and marks wherever they look.
In the morning, they have to leave here. They don’t want to go.
WHOLE FAMILY WITH YOUNG CHILDREN DEVASTATED
This was yesterday.
No, this was earlier today. This was 2.56 in the morning and I was brutally awake and very much unable to remember asking anyone to phone up and make me listen to their house.
That’s all I could hear, just their house – the sound of their furniture, perhaps, a room with ornaments and carpet, the kind of space that wouldn’t raise a din: muffled, cosy, none of that messy background you’d get from a mobile, or a late-night place of work, this was the noise of a person waiting in their home, not moving and not speaking, not a word.
And I imagined this person standing, sneaking their breath out and maybe their free hand weighted at their side, hanging – or maybe both hands dropped and the receiver pointless, as if they can no longer think what they should do. They were already making me feel compassionate.
An aeroplane worried distantly off to the east. Far and high.
I had no memory of reaching for the phone, which meant that had happened while I was unconscious. I was already aware that, like many people, I can perform complex series of actions without myself. This is handy.
I believed that I hadn’t spoken and positive that he hadn’t, either – or she hadn’t – the person. There was only this concentrating silence that tunnelled in along the line, dragging a sense of my possible counterpart and their receiver, the c
url of their fingers, a suggestion of their sweat. Late-night calling always does suggest some kind of sweat, the symptoms of personal emergency, unpredictable elements: pain, fear, failure to halt appropriately, removal of comforts and dignity, sex.
Something in those areas.
That was my guess.
And by this time I should have hung up, or shouted hello with increasing alarm, the way people do in horror movies when the killer has cut their connection, when there will soon be a murderer in their house. Instead I smiled.
I don’t believe that smiles are audible.
But as soon as I happened to make one, the line snapped shut.
I rolled over and dipped back into sleep, stretched out my arm to catch at it, grab the doze, the ringing doze.
Which wasn’t sensible, wasn’t possible – a ringing doze, that was a source of confusion.
The telephone ringing again.
And I needn’t have answered.
But I had this idea now of the person standing, someone who might need something, might need me – and that sound in itself, the ring, is intentionally demanding and who was I to think I should resist? Plus there was a more than average chance the call might even be for me, the start of a proper conversation.
So.
‘Hello.’ I made a point of speaking loudly. I was abrupt in my manner.
‘Ah . . . I’m sorry.’ A man’s voice, muffled with a kind of indecision, but no more dramatic emotions than that.
There’s this other voice, too, shrill and hacking up behind his words. ‘Go on. Tell her. Her.’ A woman is shouting, ‘Go on! Try it – as if . . .’ She’s at a slight distance, ‘as if!’ although not so far away that she has to shout. ‘Go on! You called her, you tell her, you just fucking tell her.’ She is plainly screaming because she wants to, because her emotions are dramatic and are leading her that way.
And the man – who may be stunned by his situation – murmurs in with, ‘Ah, yes . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to –’ and then he stops.
‘Bastard.’
I have to assume he is pondering what he should say. Clearly he’d like to prove for the screaming woman that he doesn’t know me, so he can’t simply offer, ‘I didn’t mean to call you.’ That implies former acquaintance. He may also wish to seem incapable of sustaining an interaction as sophisticated as an affair – and he has succeeded – as far as I can tell – in sounding quite stupid. If I were him I might reel off sorry for as long as I could, but then would that mean I was sorry for getting caught rather than sorry for inconveniencing a stranger? It would be hard to tell.
Half asleep, I can’t think of suggestions which might be useful and, in any case, it’s 3 a.m. and someone who knows this man – someone who sounds like a wife – is screaming at him in his house. No advice could save him at this point.
He starts again, ‘I was the wrong number. When I rang a few minutes ago.’
‘Bastard. You think I believe –’
There is the sound of some object dropping, perhaps breaking, in a way that is violent and yet unclear. ‘Fu-cking. Bas-tard.’ The woman’s voice sheers off on her final syllable and subsides.
The man is whispering by this time, ‘I am very sorry. I didn’t . . .’ His voice seems to huddle in close.
And I am immediately very sorry, too. ‘Yes. Yes, I know.’ Even though I have been inconvenienced, I do want to show solidarity.
‘Do you?’
There’s an odd shade of innocence in his question which makes me need to reassure. I try, ‘Well, I . . .’ and run out of gentleness after two syllables.
‘Fucker!’
Another object, undoubtedly glass, hits an unforgiving surface with audible results and I say, less kindly than I might have hoped, ‘I’m going to hang up now. Goodnight.’
Of course, I shouldn’t have said goodnight to him. I should have said good morning.
Ten minutes later, he made his third call. Or else, I supposed it might be the screaming woman this time, whoever she was: pressing redial, wanting to scream at me now and badger out a vindicating truth. So I raised the receiver and slapped it down again at once.
The phone rang repeatedly after that, but I ignored it, let it drill and drill, not giving up, until I had to disconnect it at the wall, listen to the milder nagging from the kitchen and the living room. In the end I unplugged the whole lot, silenced my home as an intruder might. Then I crept through and watched my television.
The twenty-four-hour news was reviewing some survey: an occupied population soon happier with lowered death tolls, but worried by abductions and also rapes. Mutilations up 15 per cent. Degrees of normality returning, expectations readjusted, many officials pleased. Pictures of sand and litter, a low house with something uneasy about it, out of kilter – I don’t see it long enough to find out what, because I change the channel, because I don’t need to be depressed.
Getting by, that’s my aim, locating and holding on tight to whatever will bowl me along. I value fitness, sanity, a pattern of healthy and restful nights, survival. And when I can’t rest, I watch the call-in shows. They help.
They also make it wonderfully clear that people throughout the country are wakeful as I am and ringing up strangers – television’s friendly strangers – and they’re paying to call and guess out mysterious things: what names might be included in a list of celebrity chefs, or prominent adulterers, or which fatal diseases can be spelled within a thirty-letter grid, or what could have been blanked out from famous headlines, popular proverbs, debt collector’s letters, rules of engagement – the details don’t matter, the sleepless are eager to take part. They’ll try roulette, they’ll chat about their relatives, they’ll buy jewellery, adjustable ladders, craft supplies, they’ll call psychics and spend warm, expensive minutes hearing the news from tarot cards, rune stones, star signs, the I Ching – they’re happy to be game for anything. As long as there’s somebody inside the screen talking back like a loud relation – or maybe not someone that close, more likely a visitor from a local church, or perhaps a nurse – as long as the sense of being cared for is filling up their room. I can understand that.
Last night I watched a woman with an honest face – dyed hair and a caring manner – she extrapolated karma and future events from birth dates and vocal auras. She talked quite slowly, comfortingly, didn’t badger, ‘Love and light to you, Leo girl, and what I’m getting here is that he’s afraid. I know you haven’t heard from him, not for six months, but that’s because he’s afraid. Men, we know men, they have to work out their feelings and sometimes it’s difficult for them to confront, to deal with them, the way we have to. I do see, my love, that he will be coming back to you, there is a past life connection there and he will be coming back to you in either June or July. And there’s something here that you had a very strong physical connection, too, quite kinky, even – because you have that passionate side to your nature and you’ll want to nourish that and enjoy it. All right? Call back again if you need a longer session and to all our callers, if you want a longer session then you can give us your credit-card number and that will mean you’ll be able to go beyond the twenty-minute limit.’
If she made jokes they were self-deprecating and never cruel. She giggled with another lady who wore large rings and a thick red cardigan and was also a very gifted psychic and had been all her life. Both women looked directly at the camera and smiled just enough. ‘Samantha here, she was spot on, spot on. I was having trouble with a relative, quite a lot of worry and it was giving me pain in my back and my shoulder – and she told me all of that before we’d been even introduced. Didn’t you?’
‘And I’ll be giving confidential readings for the next hour if you want to call in, if these little short readings aren’t enough for you and haven’t just got the detail that you need to really look at a situation and resolve it.’
They were people you could take to.
I watched for a couple of hours: the betting, the answers, the questions.
Anyway, last night is why I am currently exhausted. I have no other plausible reason. And today is the first Sunday after the clocks are adjusted for spring. So you lose one hour of the sleep you didn’t get and you alter your watch and your alarm and never mind the dusty leftover on your mantelpiece because it doesn’t work and you can’t be fussed to get it mended – it’s more to look at, like a clock-shaped ornament – and after that you sit in the garden all afternoon and think there is too much light, more than an hour’s worth of extra light, which is intrusive. And you spend a significant period with your self neither dreaming, nor free of night, only caught in some gap. A gap of light. The birds sing wickedly in the hedge until you bang a stick along it and send them off, the blackbirds scattering with those hard little chips of alarm, like somebody hammering at slate. I think there are nests hidden in the privet, several, and even if I am mistaken I know that the birds will return, unstoppably.
There is nothing for it but to leave the garden, the house, take a walk – for health and fitness – and in the street that loops around my garden wall it is even more clear that the new year is rising, gathering strength. The air is softer, moister, the distances changed by oncoming growth and – as you might say – the breath of seething earth, which is enough to make you feel grubby, interfered with, claustrophobic.
But I’m canny enough to avoid that and rush for the shoreline, choose the lane by the ploughed field which is barely stirring yet – the quiet, clotted one, seeds perhaps dead in it, or unwilling – and I will reach the sand and be with freshness while I pad along the beach. Silly to live so close by the sea and not take advantage.
The town catches me first, though. It’s riddled with Associations and Committees, folk who set up hanging baskets for competitions, who impose their aspirations upon others. This is a place where we are supposed to think well of ourselves and of our fellow men and women and to expect the best. Which is why every lamp post I pass has a picture taped to it. Someone has lost a dog. Someone imagines that I will help them look for it, give it back if I have stolen it, apologise if I have made it into gloves. On either side of the road for as far as I can see, they’ve set up pictures of their missing dog.