An Unremarkable Body

by Elisa Lodato

  ‘Did you ever see her again?’ I asked, looking down at my feet.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘No. I hear she lives in Connecticut now. So she may as well be,’ he said with a little smile.

  ‘I’m just so sorry. Where was your dad when all this was going on?’

  ‘In the middle of East-fucking-Nowhere on business. He only found out she’d left me the following day when the nanny phoned to ask when he was planning to return.’

  ‘That’s just so unbelievable.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did she ever try to get in touch?’

  ‘She phoned a few times and tried to explain. Said she loved me, that her and my dad were trying to work things out. Bullshit like that.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘Did they fuck. My dad wouldn’t go with me to the States, and she was adamant she wouldn’t set foot in the UK again. It went on for a long time, and I just grew up. Life happened, and she wasn’t a part of it. And then, when I was about nine or ten, my dad told me she’d remarried and moved house. She said she’d write with her contact details but never did.’

  I hung my head.

  ‘That was the end for me. She hadn’t taken me with her, didn’t want to come and collect me and then just forgot about me.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘And James? When was he born?’

  ‘In 1993. I was eleven. And you know, Monica’s nice. She’s more suited to my dad than my mum ever was. And by that I mean she’s more suited to being alone.’

  I’d met Monica once or twice. She came up at the beginning and end of term, collecting David and his things. She was glamorous in an effortlessly Mediterranean way, suffering her own youth and beauty as she inspected the time-worn buildings. ‘I can’t imagine life without a mother,’ I said, as much to myself as to him.

  ‘It’s pretty fucked-up,’ he agreed, dropping his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it. Quietly and firmly.

  I remember one warm afternoon towards the end of the Lent term in particular. We were reading Milton – lots of it – in preparation for a supervision at the end of the week. I had been reading the same five lines of Samson Agonistes for well over an hour. The words had become inscrutable, blurring and dancing before my slow-blinking eyelids. My head kept pitching forward, my mouth open in pre-sleep surrender until I felt the book pulled gently from beneath my fingertips.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You look like you’re having a stroke. You know you’re dribbling, don’t you?’

  I put my fingers to the corner of my mouth, defensive. ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Well, you were about to. All over this book. You were literally drooling over Milton. That’s embarrassing.’

  I stood up and stretched my arms above my head. I saw his eyes shift to my exposed midriff. ‘How am I going to write about Milton if I can’t stay awake to read him?’

  ‘You need some fresh air,’ he said, rifling through his pockets for cigarettes and a lighter.

  We found a bench in the sunshine and sat down. He pulled two cigarettes from the packet and put them between his lips. He lit them both in a swaying motion and, passing one to me, he said, ‘He was blind, you know.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘Milton.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I plan to crowbar that into my essay somehow.’

  ‘But even as he was writing, he was going blind. Imagine knowing that the thing you’re doing is the thing that’s going to destroy you. But you do it anyway.’

  I watched him lift the cigarette to his willing lips and considered voicing the irony of what he’d just said, but I didn’t want to interrupt his flow; smoking always made David earnest, whereas my reaction was more physical. It made my bowel twist. I clenched my arse cheeks together and tried to hold the bad air in. ‘As in, you keep going because you believe in a higher purpose?’

  ‘No. You keep going because you don’t know anything else. Even if it means losing something you love. I’m not explaining myself very well.’

  ‘You are. Go on.’

  ‘It wasn’t good for me. To just pretend my mum never existed. It was a kind of blindness.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I have you. And Sarah.’ He smiled.

  I inhaled too deeply, right at the end of the cigarette. My lower incisors felt hot and uncomfortable as I pulled the caustic flavour into my mouth. The cramps were lower now. I saw the goosebumps rise up on my arm as I thought of the toilet. Any toilet.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To the loo.’

  ‘Right.’ He forced a laugh and pulled another cigarette from the packet. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

  As the weeks ticked away, we grew closer. By the time the summer term presented itself as an indisputable fact, we found ourselves revising side by side in the library out of habit. If I got up from my seat to go and find a book somewhere in the stacks, I’d invariably return to find a giant cock and balls had been drawn on my notebook. He lent me CDs, books; sketched portraits of me in biro on the back of postcards and pinned them to my door.

  During the long vacation we wrote to one another. He went on his much-anticipated two-week break to Italy and, though he was careful to write about other things, I sensed his eagerness to return to Cambridge. I was at home in Surbiton, with my mother and Christopher, delighted every time a letter landed on the mat. My mother asked, only once, who was writing to me.

  ‘Just a friend from college,’ I replied with deliberate nonchalance, running upstairs to devour the ink on the paper he’d been the last one to touch.

  In the end it wasn’t the supervisions or the long library sessions or even the camaraderie of escaping with a cigarette that revealed the strength of the attachment. It was much simpler than that. One bright morning in September 2000, before many of the other undergraduates had returned from the long vacation, I saw him standing outside the Porter’s Lodge, tall and tanned. He’d returned to Cambridge earlier than planned and was checking his pigeonhole. I was wheeling my bike back into college, the chain clicking over the cobblestones, and stopped still the moment I saw him. The cessation of sound made him look up and his visible elation was unmistakable. That our friendship had been weighed down by deep attachment was clear. To both of us.

  But there was still the small matter of Sarah. Three years of undergraduate study were, for her at least, an inconvenient hiatus separating them from department stores and estate agents. I tolerated her because I loved her boyfriend. And I spent the first term of my second year waiting for him to break up with her.

  David’s room in the second year was at the top of one of the oldest staircases in college. He had little to do with the people he shared it with, and used their eccentricities as a well from which to draw amusing anecdotes he could deliver up to his parched friends. Sarah indulged him as a mother would a precocious toddler, smiling at his perspicacity but never laughing at his humour. He told me about Christina the vet who really cared about bowel movements. She commented on David’s irregularity one memorable morning as he emerged from their shared lavatory: ‘How are you doing, Dave? Eating enough fibre?’

  ‘Morning,’ and then, considering the matter, ‘I think so. Yes. Yes, I am, Christina.’

  ‘Just been in there a while, that’s all. I’ve got some insane laxatives if you need them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why have you got insane laxatives?’

  ‘To relieve constipation. In horses.’

  ‘And what the fucking hell would they do to me?’

  ‘I’m only trying to help, Dave.’

  ‘And I’m only trying to make sure I don’t shit myself away tomorrow morning. But thank you anyway.’

  Then there was Jonathan the natural scientist. He was fiercely Christian, academic and – according to David – sinfu
lly boring. Jonathan was the son of a rector from a small North Yorkshire village, had never been away from home prior to university and thought David, who was from London, unnervingly cosmopolitan. He once asked him what people do in London. David, who had been making a cup of tea in the kitchen at the time, replied warily: ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I just mean, do you go out a lot?’

  ‘Me personally? Yes. I go out.’

  ‘And what about everybody else?’

  ‘What? Sorry – are you asking about everyone else in London?’

  Jonathan’s face flushed as he realised his mistake. ‘I just mean, there must be something for everyone. I’d like to go one day.’

  ‘Yeah, you should definitely come. On a Wednesday we go to Buckingham Palace for a pub quiz and get shit-faced. All seven million of us.’

  I loved him. And that feeling only intensified the more time we spent together.

  One Tuesday evening in November, we arranged to meet in the courtyard just before ascending the cold stone steps to our supervisor’s room at the top of the tower. It was dark outside, and the college was preparing itself for evening; gowns began to appear in the cloisters, broad and black on busy shoulders hurrying along the ancient walkways.

  David and I had an hour on Robert Browning ahead of us. When we arrived at the appointed room it was clear the supervision before ours had overrun: we could still hear convivial laughter and the rustling of papers within. I turned to David and noticed the dark circles under his eyes. ‘What’s the matter with you? You look like shit.’

  ‘Thank you. Just having a few problems with Sarah, that’s all.’ I said nothing. And my silence encouraged him. ‘She wants to get married.’

  ‘What the fuck? Now? You’re not even old enough.’

  ‘No, not now. But soon. Laura, how old do you think you have to be?’

  ‘OK, I know legally you can. But Jesus, you’re not even twenty yet. What’s the rush?’

  ‘Her parents have offered to buy us a house. Here in Cambridge. And from their point of view, it would be better if we were married.’

  ‘That’s outrageous! You’re getting married because they want to invest in property? You can’t be serious.’

  ‘It’s not like that. They’re good, kind people, and they’re trying to help us out.’

  ‘Help you out how? By anchoring you to a county fifty miles from London where you can live in sleepy seclusion with their daughter?’

  He looked at me in surprise. Daring me to continue.

  ‘How can you even consider marrying her? She’s so boring. I wish you could see it.’

  ‘What, because she’s not cutting or witty? I know all that. But I also know that she’s a very nice person.’

  ‘I’m a nice person!’ I shouted, my mouth firing flecks of saliva into the air.

  He looked down at his trainers and clenched his jaw. As if I’d said something he was dreading. But the door opened and our professor’s busy and apologetic welcome made any more shouting impossible. We took our seats on the sofa, at opposite ends, and began pulling papers from our bags. Because of the hour, the darkness and the fire burning in the grate we were offered a glass of sherry and invited to unwind to the lines of ‘My Last Duchess’. I carried the discussion until we came to the lines, ‘“Paint/Must never hope to reproduce the faint/Half-flush that dies along her throat.”’.

  We waited for David to say something, but his silence appeared resolute.

  ‘I think the narrator glories too much in the sudden and violent nature of her death. It makes it impossible for the reader to believe he ever really loved her,’ I said, nervously looking over at David.

  ‘David?’ our professor said in polite encouragement.

  ‘With all due respect, Laura, that’s a totally moronic thing to say. Of course he loves her – throat flush and all – he just can’t control her in life, so it makes sense to kill her.’

  ‘I’m sorry, David, but that was unacceptably rude. Please apologise to Laura.’

  ‘No, please. Don’t worry. It’s fine,’ I mumbled, mortified.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, and stood up. He left the room, and his bag agape on the floor. It was such an impulsive and unexpected departure that we couldn’t piece the discussion back together. We agreed to reschedule for the following week, and that I would take David’s things back to his room. I picked up his bag and trudged across college and up the several flights of stairs to his room. When I got there the door was ajar and he was sitting on his bed, smoking a cigarette. I went in and dropped his bag on the carpet. ‘We’ve rescheduled for next Thursday.’

  ‘And? Is that it?’

  ‘And you’re a fucking dick.’ I turned to go.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I need her as much as I do.’

  I stopped, but didn’t turn back to him. ‘You don’t need her. You only think you do.’ And then I heard him stand up and walk over to me. I felt his fingers on my right shoulder. He’d never touched me, deliberately, before. He pulled me gently to face him. It was the most arousing moment of my life. I thought he was going to kiss me; my mouth braced for the impact of a longed-for act. But he didn’t. He leant in and pushed his body against mine, hard and heavy as though he were trying to knock me over. And then I felt the door slam shut behind me as he pushed my body up against it. He looked furious, his breath hot and rapid on my face. I kissed him gently on his cheek, provoking him. A teasing gesture of peace designed to open hostilities. After that there was no more distance, no more talking – he was on top of me. Pulling and pushing at me. Our frenzy made us ineffective, almost clumsy. The bed was too far and domestic for what we had to do. He lifted me off my feet and we fucked standing up, my body rocking the door in its aperture to the prevailing rhythm of his thrusts. We were without care, locked in a physical indulgence that hadn’t felt possible a year, a month or an hour earlier. Even as it happened I couldn’t believe he was inside me. I understood Sarah’s blind possession as I felt my own body cleave to his. And as I thought of her I became more reckless. I pulled at his hair, dug my nails into his neck and made him look at me. He flinched once but I grabbed his face and forced him to meet my eyes, just before he conceded.

  The pleasure we uncovered that evening was too primitive, too good to abandon. We continued seeing each other; our lack of discretion, coupled with the fact that none of David’s housemates liked him, meant our secret was soon discovered. Sarah was understandably hurt, but not enough to withdraw the promise of a life with her. She gave David a way out: stop sleeping with me and they could try again. But he wasn’t ready to go back. Our relationship felt like a destructive act from the beginning; for him, it was an attempt to disown encroaching security. But for me, I realise now, that because I’d grown up among shifting allegiances, I saw relationships as being more fluid than was perhaps normal.

  At the end of June, as the long vacation opened up again, David and I clung to one another with promises to meet up. He was meeting his dad, Monica and James in the South of France for a couple of weeks and promised to call me as soon as he got back.

  And he did. His voice was tight and cold, suggesting we meet at Embankment tube station. I was there early, nervous and excited. I’d managed to persuade myself that he’d probably been in the company of others when he called. That we’d find our way back to one another as soon as we were together again. But he was there even earlier than me, and didn’t take my hand when I approached him. He asked if I’d like to take a walk in the Victoria Embankment Gardens. I followed him, muted by the formality of his invitation and his unwillingness to touch me.

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’ I shook my head miserably. I knew something was wrong. We sat down on a patch of grass near the entrance. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t know how to say this …’

  ‘Christ. Just say it. What’s happened?’

  ‘I met up with Sarah.’

  ‘Where? How?
’

  ‘She drove up from Italy. We had lunch in Avignon.’

  ‘How splendid for you both!’

  ‘Please don’t.’ He hung his head.

  ‘Please don’t what? Express surprise that you met up with your ex-girlfriend?’

  He looked at me for too long. Gently challenging what I’d said.

  ‘And what? Are you back together now?’

  ‘We just talked through a lot of stuff. I think I’ve been afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what? A life with someone you don’t love?’

  ‘That’s not true. I do love Sarah. And I get on really well with her family.’

  ‘Why are you always talking about her family? What have they offered to buy you this time? A chateau? A royal title?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘No, you stop it. Stop being such a fucking twat.’

  He put his head in his hands. I pulled his hand away – our first physical contact in nearly three weeks.

  ‘They’ve made me feel like one of them.’ He lifted his head and looked at me, suddenly angry. ‘And maybe, deep down, that’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

  ‘Do me a favour.’

  ‘I was six, Laura! Six years old when I was left with a nanny whose name I can’t even remember.’

  ‘We all have our problems, OK? You’re not the only one to have had a difficult childhood.’

  ‘Yeah, and most kids have the other parent to fall back on. My dad’s solution was to give me some bullshit replacement and go back on his merry way.’

  I was determined not to feel sorry for him. ‘So Sarah’s parents are your adopted family now?’

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  ‘And they’re prepared to forgive you, are they? For cheating on their daughter?’

  ‘They don’t know about you. Sarah hasn’t told them.’

  I looked at the tourists milling around the gardens, taking photographs, walking slowly among the pigeons, some with their arms around each other.

  ‘Did you fuck her?’ I shouted at him with tears in my throat, garbling my question. He looked at me with eyes that were trying to cry.