by Helen Smith
I usually explain the late nights I spend following unfaithful lovers by telling my friends I work in a club. It doesn’t even really bother me that none of them have ever been curious enough to ask which one or where. Sometimes I tell people I’m a researcher in TV because it’s one of those jobs that isn’t well paid but means you’re making an effort. People think you’re interesting enough to talk to in a bar when you tell them what you do, but won’t expect you to buy all the drinks. I can talk about the people I meet as if I’d been interviewing them for a documentary.
Taron suggests we meet up in a bar on Coldharbour Lane to talk about the research. She’s about my age and looks like Belinda Carlisle circa 1985 or 1986 when the Go-Gos broke up and she lost a little weight before embarking on a solo career. Taron puts all her energies into advertising her beauty and fragility so that you want to protect her. She puts so much care into what she is, she’s almost perfect. I find myself telling her my theory that all truly beautiful women have long, arched eyebrows, and we get tipsy on strawberry daiquiris made with real fruit in a liquidizer at the bar. Perhaps I’ve been living on my own for too long. The mixture of daiquiris and confession is intoxicating and leaves me feeling that I’m more insecure and phoney than she is.
‘Are you seeing anyone?’ she asks.
‘There’s a guy I sleep with but it’s nothing serious. If I want sex I just call him up and he comes over. We know some of the same people so sometimes we meet by chance and we don’t even have sex. That way, each time we go to bed it’s like a wonderful idea that’s suddenly occurred to us and we’re delighted by it. Otherwise I think it would be too clinical.’
I haven’t really talked to anyone about him before. I want Taron to see the sex the way I do, as something luminous and exciting, but as I’m telling her about him I’m thinking maybe some days he isn’t playing a delicious game, he just doesn’t want sex. ‘I suppose, if it seems I’m not interested, instead of surging with electric sexual excitement he simply thinks he’ll shag me next time. He probably thinks I’ve got a bad mood or a heavy period.’ I imagine him weighing the pros and cons of a tumble under my duvet, supposing my thighs to be slippery with dark blood, not understanding that sex is a shining thing I’m protecting elaborately by playing hard to get. Taron, who has quite small teeth, smiles at me as I think about it. Irrationally, I blame her for puncturing my dream.
We get a cab to my house so we can talk some more. Taron pulls a record cover from my collection and balances it on her knees so she can chop out two thin white lines of coke on it. She doesn’t consult me about this. The lines taper at either end. She bends forward and sniffs one of them through a rolled-up note, stopping halfway so she can sniff through the other nostril. She tucks her hair behind her ears to keep it out of the way, even though it isn’t long enough to fall on the record cover and trail in the coke. She sniffs and pinches her nose, handing me the record cover and the note. Taron has small paws for hands, with her nails kept short like a child’s. She takes less care in maintaining her hands than her clothes or her personality. My aunt used to tell me, ‘You must take care of your hands, they’re the first thing a man notices.’ Taron, with elfin features and a bewitching personality, doesn’t need to bother.
‘Shall I tell you about my mother?’ she asks. ‘My mother’s a witch. I’ve known it ever since I was a child, so it doesn’t seem strange. She told me that you must never tell people your given name, otherwise someone who knows how to use it will have power over you. A person who keeps their name secret can be very powerful, but the most powerful of all would be an abandoned baby, who would never know the name its mother had chosen for it and so could never tell anyone.
‘Lately my mother’s become depressed and ill. She’s losing the battle against the forces of evil. She says that evil has become organized and power brokers using modern tools are playing into the hands of men with evil powers. She’s bought a PC.’ With the vision of Taron’s mother spending hours in melancholy correspondence with other witches on the Internet, I bend my head and sniff.
‘If I can find an abandoned baby, it will help her. It can be her apprentice.’ Taron pauses because I’m looking at her oddly, powerless to prevent my eyebrows from drawing up into my hairline. ‘I feel guilty. I’ve never been involved in what she does because I have no power.’ She doesn’t know that I’m reacting less to her story than to the realization that the record cover says ‘Crazy Horses’ and I’m wondering whether she’s noticed.
‘Apparently, babies born with the sac still intact from the womb are protected from drowning. Sailors touch you for luck. I should have been born like that because my mother went into labour without her waters breaking. Lots of midwives are witches, and the one who was with my mother must have been a bad one. She produced a glass rod and pierced the sac so her waters broke and I was robbed of my powers. She’s told me this story often enough so I’m afraid of water. She used to write me notes to let me off swimming at school because I was sure I’d drown.’
I sniff and taste a bitter flavour on the back of my tongue. I see Taron’s mother on a narrow hospital bed, looking like Belinda Carlisle, making small, ineffectual movements with her hands as if to tuck her hair behind her ears, struggling against the pain as her womb contracts to expel a child whom she will warn never to reveal her given name. I see a midwife with big arms step up to the bedside in the poor light with a glass rod in her hands like a wand. I hear her screams of terror and regret as the warm, bloody water flows between her legs and her womb contracts so fiercely that she can see it moving independently under the weak wall of muscles in her belly.
I sniff again. My head is very clear. I feel like a wineglass, with my neck for a stem and my head so clear and round that you could flick it and it would go ‘ting’.
‘What is your real name?’ I ask Taron.
I live in an upside-down house. It’s my proudest achievement, something I’ve wanted since I was a child. Can something be an achievement if someone else builds it and you just buy it from them? The bedroom is on the ground floor, opening onto a small garden. You have to choose between having few visitors or few secrets because you can only get to the garden through the bedroom. The sitting room and the kitchen are upstairs. I’ve embraced minimalist chic by painting everything white, but the day Taron visits me the room feels empty and soulless. ‘Cool,’ she says, when we go inside, which makes me feel worse, not better. The tumbling mountain of white pillows in the bedroom looks like a teenager’s. I hope she sees that my bleeding heart picture of olive-eyed Jesus on the bedroom wall with his gentle, oval face and flowing, centre-parted hair is supposed to look funky, not pious. I’ve always thought the driftwood, salvaged from the sea, casting spiky shadows in its final resting place against the stark white walls, looked as if it were twisting in an effort to reach back to the ocean I took it from. Now it looks so…eighties. ‘Cool,’ she says, her little hands resting for a moment on the smooth wood that now seems to have forgotten about the sea and to be reaching for her as she wanders past to look for a record cover.
The wooden deck floor of the bathroom is painted white; I’ve slapped white paint on the tongue-and-groove wooden walls, and the window is round like a porthole. You’re supposed to believe you’re setting sail on the Mediterranean in the bathroom. I can hear Taron clattering about in there, rifling through the bathroom cabinet as I make a cup of tea for us.
When she comes back, I tell her I’ll charge her twenty-five pounds an hour for the research. ‘Good,’ she says, ‘that’s about the same as the fortune teller is charging me.’
The garden is in darkness. I open the French windows and light citronella candles and put them on the table outside because I want her to see the flowers. I have marguerite daisies and roses in tubs. Tiny, heart-shaped flowers drip from the lateral stems of bleeding heart plants in the borders. I grow celandines next to them, less for their beauty than for the charm of the story that alchemists once used to try and distil gold fro
m their yellow sap. Petals from the apple blossom are scattered on the lawn like confetti.
‘I was married once,’ Taron tells me. She’s smoking Camel Lights. I’m chewing gum and smoking Marlboro Lights. I don’t know anyone who smokes full-strength cigarettes anymore.
‘It was summer so it was warmer than this. I was wearing a cream-coloured dress. He’s French, so beautiful he could have been ripped from the pages of a magazine. He was wearing a cream suit. The fabric made his skin look like mocha chocolate. Confetti caught in his black hair like petals. I didn’t realize how much I loved him until after the wedding. I started to worry I’d lose him.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Oh…’ She waves the words away.
I told Taron about the man I have sex with, but I didn’t tell her about my love interest, as it’s private. The love is one-sided, all on his side. He’s my neighbour and lives in the basement. He says he chose to live in a basement even though it’s damp and dark because he’s an inventor and it’s the proper location for an inventor, in the same way that an attic is the place a starving writer should choose to live. His inventor’s mind is the kind that pays attention to very small details, and he expresses his love for me in details, particularly domestic ones.
Sometimes he sits in my kitchen and exudes love for me from every pore while I read out the things in the paper that make me laugh. One day I read that lots of cases of food poisoning are caused by birds pecking at milk bottle tops on doorsteps, so he made me a bottle cover and bird deterrent and left it on my doorstep with a daffodil in it. When I had worked out it wasn’t an ugly vase, I had to get up earlier and earlier for a couple of days until I was early enough to catch the Unigate man and ask him to start delivering.
Being loved is a huge responsibility. I think that he was already filled with love before he met me and he just needed a recipient. When he saw me he decided I’d be the one. It’s as if he were bewitched in his sleep so he’d fall for the first person he saw when he woke up.
When I get up the morning after Taron comes to the house, I see that he has left me another poem.
THE ICING ON THE CAKE
Some people eat the icing on the cake
and discard the marzipan
But I never do
The hardened crust
Of sugar dust
Too sweet for me
The almond paste
Richer in taste
Is softer too
Some people eat the icing on the cake
and discard the marzipan
But I never do
I prefer the marzipan
It makes me think about you
I put it with the others. There are times when his poetry makes me want to put on an apron, cook up a storm and hug his brittle body in my womanly arms. This is one of them, but I’m not very good at cooking so I usually just give him cornflakes sweetened with condensed milk. I don’t hug him, either; I only touch the fine hairs on his knuckles very gently and wonder if he has hair on the rest of his body or whether his skin is smooth. I don’t like men with hair on their body. I have taken him a cup of tea downstairs and used it to sort of lure him out of the basement and into the light and air in my house where I set the cup on the table and cluck over him for a bit to show I don’t think he’s weird for leaving a poem for me.
‘Jeff,’ I say, not mentioning the poetry, ‘so what are you working on at the moment?’ His sallow face lights up and he talks animatedly.
‘You know how when you watch an advert on TV or see a billboard and you’re not sure if it’s for a Range Rover or the Marlboro Man or for chewing gum or Diet Sprite? And you know how cigarette companies have had to get so cryptic they don’t even mention the product, you just know what they’re selling because of the colours they use?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it would be possible to distil the essence of every advert into one that could represent just about any product. It would be so powerful that everyone who saw it could want to buy a different product.’
‘One advert would advertise every product in the world?’
‘Yes.’
We think about this idea for a while. I reach out and touch the hairs on another of his knuckles, very gently.
‘Won’t the people in the advertising industry mind?’ I ask, but I know it’s an irrelevant question. Jeff invents things to solve a problem, simplify life or eradicate unnecessary labour. He dreams of a world in which none of us have to work, without realizing that we only do it because we have to get money somehow. I look out of the window at the early morning sunshine and share his utopian dreams for a moment. I wonder if he will ever be able to invent something that will make my job redundant.
‘They could get work in a related field,’ he says. ‘They might want to go into films.’
‘So what will your ad be like?’
‘I’m still working on the formula, but I think you can work out the elements that it needs, the way you can for a song. It has to haunt you. When you watch it, you have to feel there’s something missing in your life.’
‘When I was little I used to spend ages chasing the reflection of the sunlight on the kitchen floor. It didn’t matter whether I ran fast or stalked it or tried jumping, it still stayed just ahead of me.’
‘Elusive.’
‘Yes. You have to want the product as much as I wanted to catch the sunlight. You need background music that moves you. Something from the past. You need one of those anthems that they use on the Levi’s ads.’ I warm up and start to get excited. So everyone in the advertising industry may have to take a very long holiday if Jeff succeeds. So who cares? ‘When that beautiful man dives through all the swimming pools and the song is “Mad About the Boy”, I’m so consumed with desire that I don’t know if I should buy the swimming pool or the music or the jeans or the advertising agency.’
‘I’m going to choose something from the seventies or the eighties. I’ve got Annie Lennox in mind because her voice is pure and her songs make me feel sad. I like the one about the angel.’
Sometimes I think Jeff and I reveal too much about ourselves in these chats. Now he knows about the sunlight on the kitchen floor and that I get turned on by a half-naked male model in a swimming pool, and I know he’s sentimental and gets sad when he listens to Annie Lennox. I wonder if he’s gay and then I remember he’s in love with me. His emotions are very delicate. I’m glad I’m the first person he saw when he woke up after being bewitched.
‘What are you going to do today, Ali?’ He usually calls me Ali. I suppose you could spell it Allie, Ally or Ali, but I prefer the version used by the boxer and I spell it that way in my head when I hear the word.
I tell him I don’t know, I think I will take it easy today because I have to start temping next week. There is an emotion that crosses his face too briefly for me to be sure whether it is a look of suffering. When it’s gone he’s frowning in sympathy. He knows I hate the work.
I like being a detective because I don’t want to work in an office, but I sometimes go undercover as a secretary to spy on men who are having affairs or to check the security of information in a company. People who work in offices are crazy, and they create an environment they hate, write rules they want to break, cast each other in roles they despise. It’s like they’re sixth formers in an end-of-term drama acting out the agony of everything they fear most in their life, but they forget to end the play. ‘How I hate working here,’ they say. ‘How lucky you are to be a temp. I work such long hours but I never get paid for it. I never see my family, I can’t relax on holiday, my hair is falling out, and I’m getting fat.’ Why don’t you stop, then, if it makes you unhappy? I wonder. Call for someone to turn up the house lights, blink from the stage and step off into a new life. Do something that interests you. Sometimes I think that perhaps they enjoy their work, and the language they use is a shorthand for expressing their happiness. Perhaps there is an argot t
hat I haven’t got the hang of, like when people on children’s TV say ‘wicked’ and ‘bad’ when they mean that something is good. When people in offices say, ‘I work such long hours but I never get paid for it,’ perhaps they mean, ‘I’m really valuable to this company, people can’t manage without me.’ Or if they say, ‘I never see my family,’ they mean, ‘See how attractive I am, my wife still loves me even though I ignore her except to talk about work.’
A common language is very important in social situations. People use jargon at work to impress each other, but they also use the same catchphrases as the boss so that they will fit in. Sometimes they mimic the boss so much that I think they’re taking the piss and I get frightened and awed and giggly when the boss is in earshot until I realize they’re just sucking up. Then I come home feeling empty, and I talk to Jeff for a long time until I feel filled up again.
Today we talk about some more about advertisements. There’s a print advert for a pregnancy testing kit that shows a couple in a rowing boat looking overjoyed. I say it always makes me want to have a baby because of the emotion they’ve captured in the photo, and that’s clever because usually people only buy the kit when they’re worried about whether to get an abortion. We both like the Tango ads, although we don’t drink fizzy drinks. I only really like water and Jeff drinks a lot of milk, although that’s linked to my arrangement with the Unigate man.
‘Brixton invaded by Japanese knotweed,’ I read from the local paper. ‘A plant controlled by law in Britain because it grows more than forty millimetres per day between April and August, destroying plant life, roads and pavements, has been spotted in the Brixton area. A task force has been mobilized to tackle the problem, and people are urged to report further sightings to Brixton’s senior park ranger.’ I note down the number before I throw away the newspaper. Jeff and I are quiet for a while, quiet enough to hear the rustling of the voracious knotweed if it were growing nearby. There is only the distant sound of a plane, taking the scenic route along the Thames as it comes in to land at Heathrow. The day is clear enough for the passengers to be able to make out the flowerbeds at the roundabout near Battersea Park, if they are looking out of the window. I look up out of my window and watch the white trail the plane leaves in the sky.