Chris looked at Richard, eyes wide, and he groaned inwardly.
‘Well, things between Chris and I haven’t been so good lately...’ he tried, and got a laugh from both of them. Kate wasn’t to be deflected, however.
‘I’m serious,’ she said, holding up her own hand to demonstrate. ‘Someone tries to attack you with a knife, what do you do? You hold your hands up. And so what happens is the blade will nick the defending hands a couple of times before the knife gets through. See it all the time in Casualty. Little cuts, just like those.’
Richard pretended to examine the cuts on his hand, and shrugged.
‘Maybe Kate could look at your ribs,’ Chris said.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing she’d like better,’ he said, quickly. ‘After a hard day at the coal face there’s probably nothing she’d like more than to look at another piece of fossilized wood.’
‘What’s wrong with your ribs?’ Kate asked, squinting at him closely.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just banged them.’
‘Does this hurt?’ she asked, and suddenly cuffed him around the back of the head.
‘No,’ he said, laughing.
‘Then you’re probably all right,’ she winked, and disappeared to get a drink. Chris frowned for a moment, caught between irritation at not having got the bottom of Richard’s rib problem and happiness at seeing him get on well with one of her friends. Just then a fresh influx of people arrived at the door, and Richard was saved from having to watch her choose which emotion to go with.
Mid-evening he went to the gents and shut himself into one of the cubicles. He changed the dressings on his penis and chest, and noted that some of the cuts on his stomach were now slick with blood. He didn’t have enough micropore to dress them. He would have to hope that they stayed manageable until he got home. The cuts on his hands didn’t seem to be getting any deeper.
Obviously they were just nicks. Almost, as Kate had said, as if someone had come at him with a knife.
They got home well after midnight. Chris was more drunk than Richard, but he didn’t mind. She was one of those rare people who got even cuter when she was plastered, instead of maudlin or argumentative.
She staggered straight into the bathroom to do whatever the hell it was she spent all that time in there doing. Richard made his way into the study to check the answer phone, gently banging into walls whose positions he still hadn’t internalized yet.
One message.
Richard pressed the play button. Without even noticing he was doing so, he turned down the volume so only he would hear what was on the tape. This was a habit born of the first weeks of his relationship with Chris, when Susan was still calling regularly. Her messages, though generally short and uncontroversial, had not been things he wanted Chris to hear. Again, a program of protection, now no longer needed.
Feeling self-righteous, and burping gently, Richard turned the volume back up.
He almost jumped out of his skin when he realized the message actually was from Susan, and quickly turned the volume back down.
She said hello, in the diffident way she had, and went on to observe that they hadn’t seen each other that year yet. There was no reproach, simply a statement of fact. She asked him to call her soon, to arrange a drink.
The message had just finished when Chris caroomed out of the bathroom smelling of toothpaste and moisturizer.
‘’ny messages?’
‘Just a wrong number,’ he said.
She shook her head slightly, apparently to clear it, rather than in negation. ‘Coming to bed then?’ she asked, slyly. Waggling her eyebrows, she performed a slow grind with her pelvis, managing both not to fall over and not to look silly, which was a hell of a trick. Richard made his ‘Sex life in ancient Rome’ face, inspired by a book he’d read many years before.
‘Too right,’ he said. ‘Be there in a minute.’
But he stayed in the study for a quarter of an hour, long enough to ensure that Chris would have fallen asleep. Wearing pajamas for the first time in years, he slipped quietly in beside her and waited for the morning.
As soon as Chris had dragged herself groaning out of the house, Richard got out of bed and went through to the bathroom. He knew what he was going to find before he took his night clothes off. He could feel parts of his pajama top sticking to areas on his chest and stomach, and his crotch felt warm and wet.
The marks on his stomach now looked like proper cuts, and the gash on his chest had opened still further. His penis was covered in dark blood, and the gashes around it were nasty. He looked as if he had collided with a threshing machine. His ribs still hurt a great deal, though the pain seemed to be constricting, concentrating around a specific point rather than applying to the whole of his side.
He stood for ten minutes, staring at himself in the mirror. So much damage. As he watched, he saw a faint line slowly draw itself down three inches of his forearm; a thin raised scab. He knew that by the end of the day it would have reverted into a cut.
Mid-morning he called Susan at her office. As always he was surprised by how official she sounded when he spoke to her there. She had always been languid of voice, in complete contrast to her physical and emotional vivacity — but when you talked to her at work she sounded like a headmistress.
Her tone mellowed when she realized who it was. She tried to pin him down to a date for a drink, but he avoided the issue. They’d seen each other twice since she’d left him for John Ayer; once while he’d been living with Chris. Chris had been relaxed about the meetings, but Richard hadn’t. On both occasions he and Susan had spent a lot of time talking about Ayer; the first time focusing on why Susan had left Richard for him; the second on how unhappy she was about the fact that Ayer had in turn left her, without even saying goodbye. Either she hadn’t realized how much the conversations would hurt Richard, or she hadn’t even thought about it. Most likely she had just taken comfort from talking to him, in the way she always had.
‘You’re avoiding it, aren’t you,’ Susan said, eventually.
‘What?’
‘Naming a day. Why?’
‘I’m not,’ he protested, feebly. ‘I’m just, busy, you know. I don’t want to say a date and then have to cancel.’
‘I really want to see you,’ she said. ‘I miss you.’
Don’t say that, Richard thought, miserably. Please don’t say that.
‘And there’s something else,’ she added. ‘It was a year today when...’
‘When what?’ Richard asked, confused. He knew that they’d split up at least eighteen months ago.
‘The last time I saw John,’ she said, and finally Richard understood.
That afternoon he took a long walk to kill time, trolling up and down the surrounding streets, trying to find something to like. He discovered another corner store, but it didn’t stock paté either. Little dusty bags of fuses hung behind the counter, and the plastic strips of the cold cabinet were completely opaque. A little further afield he found a local video store but he’d seen every thriller they had, most more than once. The storekeeper seemed to stare at him as he left, as if wondering what he was doing there.
After a while he simply walked, not looking for anything. Slab-faced women clumped by, screaming at children already getting into method for their five minutes of fame on CrimeWatch. Pipe-cleaner men stalked the streets in brown trousers and zip-up jackets, heads fizzing with horseracing results. The pavements seemed unnaturally grey, as if waiting for a second coat of reality, and hard green leaves spiraled down to join brown ashes already fallen.
And yet as he started to head back towards Kingsley Road, he noticed a small dog standing on a corner, different to the one he’d seen before. White with a black head and lolling tongue, the dog stood still and looked at him, big brown eyes rolling with good humor. It didn’t bark, merely panted, ready to play some game he didn’t know.
Richard stared at the dog, suddenly sensing that some other life was possible here, that he
was occluding something from himself.
The dog skittered on the spot slightly, keeping his eyes on Richard, and then abruptly sat down. Ready to wait. Ready to still be there.
Richard watched him a moment longer and then set off for the tube station. On the way he called and left a message at the house phone on Kingsley Road, telling Chris he’d gone out, and might be back late.
At eleven he left The George pub and walked down Belsize Avenue. He didn’t know how important the precise time was, and he couldn’t actually remember it, but this felt about right. Earlier in the evening he had walked past the old flat and established that the ‘To Let’ sign was still outside. Probably the landlord had jacked the rent up so high he couldn’t find any takers.
During the hours he’d spent in the pub he had checked the cuts only twice. Then he’d ignored them, his only concession being to roll down the sleeve of his shirt to hide what had become a deep gash on his forearm. When he looked at himself in the mirror of the gents his face seemed pale; whether from the lighting or blood loss he didn’t know. As he could now push his fingers deep enough into the slash on his chest to feel his sternum, he suspected it was probably the latter. When he used the toilet he did so with his eyes closed. He didn’t want to know what it looked like down there now: the sensation of his fingers on ragged and sliced flesh was more than enough. The pain in his side had continued to condense, and was now restricted to a circle about four inches in diameter.
It was time to go.
He slowed as he approached the flat, trying to time it so he drew outside when there was no-one else in sight. As he waited, he marveled quietly at how different the sounds were to those in Kentish Town. There was no shouting, no roar of maniac traffic or young bloods prowling the streets looking for damage. All you could hear was distant laughter, the sound of people having dinner, braving the cold and sitting outside Café Pasta or the Pizza Express. This area was different, and it wasn’t his home any more.
It was time to say goodbye.
When the street was empty he walked quietly along the side of the building to the wall. Only about six feet tall, it held a gate through to the garden. Both sets of keys had been yielded but Richard knew from experience that he could climb over. More than once he or Susan had forgotten their keys on the way out to get drunk, and he’d had to let them back in this way.
He jumped up, arms extended, and grabbed the top of the wall. His side tore at him, but he ignored the pain and scrabbled up. He slid over the top without pausing and dropped silently onto the other side, leaving a few slithers of blood behind.
The window to the kitchen was there in the wall, dark and cold. Chris had left a dishcloth neatly folded over the tap in the sink. Other than that the room looked as if it had been molded in an alien’s mind. Richard turned away and walked out into the garden.
He limped towards the middle of it, trying to recall how it had gone. In some ways it felt as if he could remember everything; but in others it was as though the sequence of events had never happened to him, but was a tale told by someone else:.
A phone call to an office number he’d copied from Susan’s filofax before she left.
An agreement to meet for a drink, on a night Richard knew that Susan would be out of town.
Two men, meeting to sort things out in a gentlemanly fashion.
The stalks of Susan’s abandoned plants nodded suddenly in a faint breeze, and an eddy of leaves chased each other slowly around the walls. Richard glanced towards the living room window. Inside, it was empty, a couple of pieces of furniture stark against walls painted with dark triangular shadows. It was too dark to see and he was too far away, but he knew all the the dust was gone. Even that little part of the past had been sucked up and buried away.
He felt a strange sensation on his forearm, and looked down in time to see the gash there disappearing, from bottom to top, from finish to start. It went quickly, as quickly as it had been made.
He turned to look at the verdant patch of grass, expecting to see it move, but it was still. Then he felt a warm sensation in his crotch, and realized it too would soon be whole. He had hacked at Ayer there long after he knew he was dead; hacked symbolically and pointlessly until the penis which had slipped into Susan had been reduced to a scrap of offal.
The leaves moved again, faster this time, and the garden grew darker, as if a huge cloud had moved into position overhead. It was now difficult to see as far as the end wall of the garden, and when he heard the distant sounds from there Richard realised the ground was not going to open up. No, first the wound in his chest, the fatal wound, would disappear. Then the cuts on his stomach, and the nicks on his hands from where Ayer had resisted, trying to be angry but so scared he had pissed his designer jeans.
Finally the pain in his side would go; the first pain, the pain caused by Richard’s initial vicious kick after he had pushed his drunken rival over. A spasm of hate, flashes of violence, wipe pans of memory.
Then they would be back to that moment, or a few seconds before. Something would come towards him, out of the dry, rasping shadows, and they would talk again. How it would go Richard didn’t know, but he knew he could win, that he could walk away back to Christine and never come back here again.
It was time. Time to go.
Time to move on.
Author Of The Death
Finally I decided I’d had enough and I wasn’t going to put up with it any more and it was high time something was done the hell about it. My father was a vague character at best but there’s one way in which I evidently do take after him. Once he’d decided to do something, apparently, that was it. That thing was going to happen, and it was going to happen now. As soon as I realized I was clinically fed up with the situation, compelling verbs were required — and there was only one immediate course of action I could think of. I grabbed my coat and looked for my gun, but I couldn’t find it. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not, and probably it wasn’t such a great idea to take it anyhow. I had a mission, a simple goal. I didn’t need a weapon.
I needed focus.
I knew tracking down a writer wasn’t going to be an easy task. They’re everywhere but yet nowhere, too — a state of affairs I’m sure reminds some of them of one conception of deity. (Is it called ‘Pantheism’? I can’t remember. I probably shouldn’t know anyway). I have only ever been in New York, except for a couple of short chapters in a small town nearby called Westerford. It was never clear to me how I even got to Westerford, however — as I was just cut there and back on chapter breaks — so that idea was a non-starter and to be absolutely honest I suspect he just made the place up anyhow.
Bottom line was that I was stuck with looking for him in the city. If I’d believed he knew the place very well then this would have been a very daunting prospect — NYC is a hell of a big patch of ground even if you stick to the island and don’t start on the other boroughs. I had reason to suspect that his knowledge was limited to Manhattan, however, and far from comprehensive even there.
I made a list of locations, the places I knew well, and got out into the streets.
Six hours later my feet hurt and I was getting irritable. I’d looked everywhere. Everywhere I could remember having been, or where scenes with other characters had taken place, or that I’d heard described by other people — finally washing up at the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central Station, a bar surprisingly few people know about. I’d been there once for a meeting about a job that got derailed. The meeting had always felt to me like filler, but I’d liked the venue. Dark, subterranean-feeling, dirty light filtered through a big stained glass window. It looked and felt exactly as described, and so I thought it likely the guy had actually been there, rather of merely having read about it. He wasn’t there now, though.
I had a drink anyway and left and started to walk wearily back down 5th Avenue, cigarette in hand. It was mid-afternoon and starting to get colder. I’d had plenty of time to consider whether what I was doing was a good
idea (and if it even made any kind of ontological sense), but something I evidently inherited from my mother (much better fleshed out as a character than my father, featuring in two long, bucolic memory sequences and a series of late-climax flash-backs) is that once I’ve embarked on a project, it does tend to get done.
So I walked, and I walked some more. Instead of cutting over to 3rd and down into the East Village — which is where I live, for better or worse — I went the other way, switching back and forth between 6th, 7th, and 8th, down through Chelsea, back over to Union Square, then over and down into Meatpacking, though only briefly, because I didn’t seem to know it very well.
No sign of him, anywhere. I didn’t know what I was expecting, if I was hoping I’d just run into him on a street corner or something, but it didn’t happen.
He evidently didn’t know what was going to happen next, how to get me onto the next series of events.
The short paragraphs were a giveaway.
He was treading water.
It was a hiatus.
So I made my own choice.
I was down on the fringes of Soho when I spotted another Starbucks. I’d already been in about ten. He is forever dropping a Starbucks into the run of play — situating events there, revisiting recollections, or having people pick up a take-out to engineer a beat of ‘real life’ texture. Each was well-described, as though he’d actually been there, and so I’d taken the trouble to seek them out. This one was new to me, however.
The interior was big enough to have three separate seating areas, and looked comfortable and welcoming. It smelled like they always do. There was the harsh cough of steam being pumped through yet another portion of espresso. Quiet chatter. Anodyne music. People reading Letham and Frantzen or Derrida and Barthes.
Weird thing was, it felt familiar.
Everything You Need: Short Stories Page 16