‘Another cup?’ says Marion.
‘If you’re having one.’
Tom falls on to the floor by her feet. He pulls off her mules and wedges the smallest-sized bricks between her toes.
‘Thomas, would you like a juice?’
‘Don’t look at me,’ says Tom. It’s the rule when he wants to play with Nina’s feet, or hold her arm behind her back and probe its underside like a doctor, or remove mysterious instruments from her bag: an eyelash curler, a pair of tweezers, a nail file.
‘Still this little game, eh, you?’ smiles Nina. She makes light of it for Tom.
Marion shakes her head, bemused. ‘Only with you.’ She folds her arms across her chest. ‘Juice or milk, Tom?’
‘Milk.’
Nina knows already that Tom’s game is only for her. She knows he likes touching her, bending her. She knows he knows he shouldn’t and she wonders if she should put an end to it somehow, but she feels like his doll. A strange sort of yielding comes over her.
She looks down, studying him. He is poking the bare sole of her foot with a red Lego tower. He knows it hurts. He knows she won’t stop him.
‘Don’t look at me!’
‘All right, Tom,’ and Nina looks away as Marion enters the room with two steaming mugs in one hand and Tom’s milk in the other.
‘Little fascist,’ Marion declares under her breath, but she’s smiling. T love the way children touch you. I love his little buttocks climbing in next to me in the mornings. Sometimes, he’ll just lie there and play with my face and hair, won’t you, Tom-Tom?’
Nina thinks about the human brain, about what they said on that programme the other week – how the largest areas of its labyrinthine surface are given over to the needs of just the face, the hands and the genitals. She wonders if that is how children first perceive the human form: a full moon of a face with wide, cartoon hands and mighty genitals where the heart, lungs and stomach should be.
He is behind her now, on the sofa, crouching at her back. She can feel him, tight as a spring. ‘Tom,’ says Marion, ‘Nina has coffee. It’s very hot. If you bump her, it will spill. Why don’t you play on the floor?’
‘I’ll be very still,’ he says.
Marion looks sceptical but is distracted by the phone. She picks it up, turns away. Nina watches her in profile. Sees her face going taut, white. Hears her voice disappear in her throat. ‘I can’t, Pete. You know why.’
Nina signals to her. Do you want me to go?
Marion frowns and shakes her head. ‘I said I’m not. Don’t shout. No, I’m telling you, there’s no one here. Just Nina. We’re having coffee… Yes. Here. Where else? He’s playing with Nina.’
Behind her, Tom has Nina’s free arm in his hands. He twists her wrist and pins it to the small of her back. When she lets it slip, he presses it roughly back into place and she does not try to move it again. He understands now that she understands. Nina sips her coffee.
‘I’m just trying to be practical, Pete. If I did, I didn’t mean to… I know you’re his father…’
But now Tom’s small hand is burrowing below her, pushing pieces of Lego between the sofa cushion and her buttocks. Through the cotton of her skirt, she can feel the thrusting of his small fisted hand. And still, one hand is pressed to her back while the other negotiates her coffee, and Tom, at her back, works the pieces of Lego beneath her: hard corners and lengths of plastic.
Marion is rubbing her forehead with the heel of her hand. ‘I’m not lying…’
Nina looks down and suddenly finds Tom’s small hands at either side of her, reaching for her thighs. He grabs a bunch of her skirt in either hand and begins to pull. Hard. For a moment, she is startled by the urgency of it; by the force of his childish sexuality, as yet unsublimated by rockets, fire ladders and the knots of school ties. Tom is all need, and his small hands are pummelling the tops of her thighs, forcing her skirt up.
Marion puts down the phone, and Nina wills herself off the sofa. ‘Are you all right?’ she hears herself say.
‘I hung up on him. He wouldn’t stop. I just put the phone down.’ She remembers Tom. Turns round to him. Stares, glassy-eyed, as if nothing makes sense any more. He is standing on the sofa, a red Lego tower forced over the top of his small erect penis.
‘Tom, take that off right now.’
‘Don’t look at me. No one can look at me!’
‘I’ve had enough of this today. Take that off right now! If you can’t play nicely, you can play upstairs by yourself.’ She sighs and begins scooping up the Lego. ‘Sorry, Nina. I’d laugh if –’
‘I know. I should go.’ Nina hadn’t realized small boys could have erections. She imagined their testicles had to drop first.
‘I am tired.’
‘You must be.’
‘Say goodbye to Nina, Tom.’
But Tom says nothing. His face is red, primitive. The small finger of his penis points at her as she picks up her bag and disappears behind her sunglasses, traitorous.
Once a week, Nina and Mark meet for lunch or dinner. It’s a chance to remember one another for one another. A mutual kindness. These days, they both feel they are disappearing from the world.
They hug, closely. They order wine, bread baked in a wood fire, goat’s cheese tartlets, a rocket salad with two forks, grilled salmon for him and primavera for her. The waitress smiles as she reverses glasses and lays bright silver. She admires the deep red of Nina’s silk blouse. ‘Vermilion,’ she observes. ‘You don’t often see it,’ and, for a moment, she is intent on Nina, as if she is a Sign. Of a wound to come, or a passion soon to enter her life.
The waitress pours the Pinot Grigio and hears the man tell his companion that he has a new poem he’d like her to look at. She notices he bites his nails to the quick, which endears him to her as she eavesdrops. She might be sceptical about the poetry if it weren’t for those bitten nails, and his hands. He has generous hands. The waitress imagines Mark and Nina in an Umbrian villa in April; in a croft in the Western Isles at Christmas; at an intimate London club at New Year. Nina and Mark are the bright, transparent vessels of the dreams of others, still.
After talk of his family and the absence of each other’s books and her pension worries and the ache they each wake with, Mark says, ‘I need to tell you something.’
She looks up; takes the last sip of wine from her glass. She can’t bear the thought of him on the end of a hook. ‘Are you sleeping with her?’
He nods, looking at the remnant of salad on his plate.
‘It’s… good, isn’t it? You wouldn’t need to tell me otherwise.’
‘It’s early days.’
She thinks of his penis, a magician’s bouquet for this new woman. ‘We’ll still see each other sometimes?’ she asks.
He nods and remembers his voice: ‘Yes. Of course.’ Then he helps her into her jacket, lifting her hair where it is trapped at the collar.
Even now it is natural to her – like a musical ear or a green thumb or healing hands is natural to others. Nina brings people to life. She can show people the self they dream of being. She can return them to the person they once were. It has something to do with the quality of her attention. That which is inert, inanimate or impotent moves for her, like the loop of a snake in a basket.
Strangers fall in love with her easily for this reason. Both sexes. The occasional gay man. Her students. Distant colleagues she passes in the common room at work. Dusty men in paper shops. Old people longing in the twilight at bus stops. Breathless children. The man who came to fix her computer and lingered over its keys, as if her hands were still there. Telesalesmen who digress, listening for the lilt of her voice.
But there is something more to her gift, something primitive that requires an idol or a talisman – like when a door used to need a horseshoe before it was opened to receive the first guest. A horseshoe, not because it was a horseshoe, but a horseshoe because, upside down, it was black and of fire, and bad luck too but, with all those things, tho
se risks, it was also finally the shape of a woman inside. Even if long forgotten. Even if people nowadays prefer door knockers to horseshoes. Nina understands this, the force of the primitive. And wordlessly, she also understands that her gift needs the power of that single blind eye longing within her.
So she almost blames herself. Did part of her conjure the man on the side of the road that afternoon?
The WPC at her door is young, broad-hipped, reassuringly sturdy. On the phone earlier, they had asked her if she would prefer a WPC, and she had said, ‘No, I really don’t mind,’ but felt she’d disappointed them in some way. That really she should have preferred a woman. So she’d made sure the kettle was boiled and, as she heard the officer come up the path, she was poised to ask her if she’d like a cup of tea, because that was what they did on TV, and when she did, she was relieved by the officer’s enthusiasm.
‘And how do you feel now?’ WPC French studies Nina kindly between sugary sips.
‘Okay,’ says Nina. ‘I mean, I am now. Not that anything actually happened.’
‘All the same, it must have been very –’
‘Yes,’ says Nina, wondering if she still looks like she has been crying; remembering how the tears had started to well within her as she’d climbed into the Land Rover she’d flagged down; how the woman driver’s wide blue eyes had told Nina that she was not as composed, not as matter-of-fact, in her account as she’d hoped. ‘Sorry,’ Nina had said to her through the partially rolled-down window, ‘would you mind just taking me around the next bend? Sorry. It’s just that that man back there…’
The woman’s husband was in the back seat with a white bundle of a new baby on the seat next to him. Through the rear window, he looked warily at the unexpected vision of Nina in her sunglasses, shorts and tank top – there was never anyone on this road, only farm vehicles.
She tried again. ‘I think he was waiting there for me.’ She didn’t know how else to say it, to this solid Sunday couple and their baby, new as hope, in the back seat: ‘He had an erection. In his hands.’ She couldn’t let them drive away.
‘Before I forget,’ says WPC French, ‘you’ll be hearing from Victim Support. It’s part of procedure now. Just so you know.’
Nina nods. Am I a victim now? she wonders.
WPC French reaches for forms and a pen, and Nina rises from her seat to hit the light switch. The electric candelabra throws its three-foot penis shadows on to the walls around them. Then she is describing the black hatchback parked at the side of the green and winding lane, where she’d first seen it – seen him, he was only young – and how she’d felt a bad hum inside her, like a note struck on a cracked tuning fork.
‘It’s a three-mile loop, the walk I take,’ she explains. (The walk she takes to help fill up her evenings and weekends; to remember her body; to teach her bewildered brain that she is indeed alone.) ‘After he’d spotted me, he drove around the opposite way, I suppose to take me by surprise on the road up ahead.’
‘How many minutes up ahead?’
‘On foot? Ten, I’d say.’
‘And you recognized the car as you approached it the second time?’
‘Yes. It was parked again, facing me, somewhere beyond the last house in the village. At the crest in the road.’
‘So this is farmland now?’
‘Yes.’ And she remembers. The flayed fields. The harvest, gone. Only seagulls scrabbling in the turned earth for sudden worms.
‘And as you approached?’
She felt something was wrong, or about to go wrong; she carried on though because, ‘You think it’s just your imagination, don’t you?’ A car passed, an old banger, with a girl at the wheel and a young man next to her. They were laughing. She was pretty, with lots of dark hair. They looked like lovers on a Sunday drive as they passed both her and the black hatchback before disappearing around the bend.
She read the front plate of his car easily. And it seemed as if she had plenty of time to come up with a picture to match the three letters, to hear a certain music in the rhythm of the three numbers. It all seemed to be unfolding slowly and deliberately, as if she were walking into a scene she was inventing with every step.
She could see the top of his head now, behind the open hatchback. He was out of the car. Yet as she neared the car, not ten feet from him, she told herself not to be silly. He was only getting something out of the boot. A spare tyre. Or a bottle of motor oil. She worried fleetingly about the rise and fall of her breasts in her tank top. She never met anyone out here; had thought only about the Indian-summer heat that baked the road at midday.
She glanced his way, ready to nod, when he turned towards her. Seagulls in the field ahead swept chaotically into flight. She didn’t understand – thought, what is that in his hands?
‘I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but they’re all different, you know. Could you describe it? Any marks? Tattoos? Piercings? Was it big or small?’
‘Big. It looked very big.’ Nina feels like a child. ‘It was fat. Also.’ She tries to find appropriate words. ‘Thick. In circumference.’
‘Could you estimate its length in inches?’
Nina imagines an identity parade of erections. Big ones. Small ones. Some purple-headed. Some pinky white. Circumcised. Column-like. Club-like. ‘I’m really not very good on measurements.’
‘So he turned to you, was watching you, and…?’
‘He started rubbing himself –’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘He started rubbing his penis with one hand while holding it at the base with the other.’ Yes. Two hands around it, and him stoop-backed, as if it were a weighty offering.
‘And that’s when he started shouting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shouting or grunting?’
‘Moaning.’ Moans so loud, they filled up the emptiness of the fields as she walked away from him. They followed her up the road, insisting at her back; reminding her that there was no one there but the two of them.
‘A real exhibitionist.’
‘I guess so.’ But there was more to it. She has heard people through hotel room walls; once, from the echoing darkness of a waiting room on a train platform; and in films, of course, where men rarely cry out.
Nina knows and doesn’t want to know. She knows that he was making himself a monument to need; that his penis was tall and strong with it. That he became larger than life on that crest of road, crying out, mouthing himself into being between the laid-bare fields of September.
‘If I’d stumbled upon him, it would have been almost laughable.’ She imagines this is what a single woman of the world would say in these circumstances. She feels oddly two-dimensional. ‘What bothered me was the way he seemed to be lying in wait for me – not that he was waiting for me. Obviously it could have been any woman.’
She is lying. A part of her fears that, on seeing her, he knew it had to be her; that that single blind eye sensed her passing. Knew like Marion’s Tom knew. Like Mark never did. About the all-hole of her. The source. The deep wishing well within her.
WPC French is telling her they might contact her again; that they might have further questions; that she might be asked to testify in court. She asks her to read the statement she has prepared. She indicates where Nina is to sign at the bottom of each page and thanks her for the tea.
When WPC French is gone, she switches off the overhead light and sits in the memberless dark.
Nina still walks that wide, wide loop out of the village and through the open farmland. Sometimes she hears again the riot of his need filling the fields around her, but she walks on.
It’s September. An Indian summer. Still hot, even come evening. Today she is catching the last of the light. A walk after work. Before supper. Then, as usual, radio, book, bath and bed.
She knows every bend, every stray sheep, every broken bit of fence. She notices the box and tin cup are still tied to the rusty table at the end of the farm path. In the summer, there are border
plants here and home-grown tomatoes with a sign to put money please in the cup. But the box is empty now. She picks up the tin cup and dips a finger in the rainwater as if it might once have been water from a holy well and this, a place for offerings.
She has nothing.
It’s true, she and Mark still meet for lunch or dinner, and love one another as well as their new lives allow. She and Marion drink coffee, though less often now. Tom grows – taller every time she sees him. Occasionally, she feels the surprise of his little hand up her dress; he presses it to her bottom, quickly, as if her buttock is a hot stove. Marion has a new man. He laughs easily. He touches her as if he has always been touching her; as if he always will be. Marion looks beautiful.
Nina carries on, past the stables where a horse is panicking on the other side of the hedge; past the derelict bathtub at the corner of the field that the sheep use as a trough. She notices the sun falling from the sky.
She comes to the narrowest point on the road, where the young trees meet overhead to make a low, leafy bower. She passes under, moving into sudden darkness. It will be a minute yet before she can see through to the other side. She thinks, it is like when you know you are about to wake up but haven’t quite.
Then, through this lucid dream of green darkness, she sees them. Splashes of colour. Red, white, purple, blue, deep pink. She blinks as she emerges from the tunnel. Balloons. Dozens of them. Tied to a large gate, the gateposts, the nearby trees – and tied with wit. Pairs of big-nippled pink breasts bounce on the breeze. A long, purple, single-eyed penis nods to her from an overhanging branch, erect on a throne of twin testicles. She smiles.
From somewhere behind the adjacent house she hears a faraway salvo of corks popping and sudden raucous laughter.
There is no one in sight. She reaches high. One balloon, she tells herself, will not be missed.
By the time she arrives home, it is already dark. The evening star trembles above the cottage as she pulls the heavy door to – she likes its bad fit. And the heavy, ancient key. And the wrought-iron ring of a knocker to which she has just tied the single balloon.
Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Page 8