The air was still and sticky-hot. The street lights cast bars of light through my Venetian blinds and across my bare arms and legs. I lay awake, listening to the blue electric sizzle of mosquitoes as they hit the bug-killer in our backyard. I couldn’t sleep. I rolled over, twice. I pulled the sheet up, then off again. I turned myself wrong-side up, so that my feet rested on my pillow and my head lolled over the end of the bed I had outgrown. Blood rushed to my face. A bar of light caught me across the eyes and shattered into purple and gold as I closed them. I was thirsty. My tongue felt thick in my mouth. I thought about the glass of stale water on my night table, up at the other end of the bed, but I never made it. Before I could shift my feet from the pillow, I was bolt upright in bed and charged like a lightning rod. My spine was rigid; my jaw, locked.
I waited – for I don’t know how long – my fists gripping the sheet. I waited for the awful hush that filled me up to break, to crack open, to let go of me. Something was pushing and swelling in the dark of my throat, and I was scared.
Part of me was saying, this isn’t happening – a ghost of a voice inside my head that I could hardly hear. It was saying, whatever this is, it doesn’t happen in the suburbs. I could hear a dog barking a few streets away, but I couldn’t turn my head. I could hear the thrum of traffic from the distant highway, but I couldn’t swallow. I wasn’t myself. Not at all. And if I wasn’t myself, who was I?
From the corner of my eye, I could just make out something in my bedroom mirror. Something flickering, purple and orange and yellow and blue. It was a single tongue of fire, sitting on the darkness like an optical illusion. For a moment, I forgot about everything: the sizzle of the mosquitoes and the charge between my vertebrae and the fearsome silence in my mouth. I just watched that wavering tongue of fire. It had started off small, but it was growing, feeding on the still air. It was the size of a fire-eater’s meal when I smelled hair, my hair, burning. That flame was hovering just over my head.
I grabbed my pillow. That’s what I remember next – my arms moving again, and my voice yelling ‘Fire!’, and the power of my own voice almost winding me. But the fire wouldn’t be put out.
The fire chief told my father we were lucky. ‘Mostly smoke damage,’ he said. ‘Could have been worse.’
My father was still rubbing his eyes. He looked like a man trapped in someone else’s dream. ‘How did it happen?’
‘Well, we’re investigating, sir, but if you want my opinion…’
‘Please.’
‘Looks to me like a case of a faulty teenage girl. Somewhere I’d say between the ages of twelve and sixteen. I’ve seen it before.’
I left the shelter of the garage where my mother and I huddled in our nightgowns. I ran into the driveway, pushing myself between father and fire chief. That’s me,’ I breathed. ‘The girl.’ My father hardly looked at me. It was all too clear who I was. ‘I can explain every –’
‘You gotta be careful,’ said the fire chief, ignoring me. They’re touchy as touchpaper at this age.’
‘But it wasn’t like that!’ I cried.
Breakfast was burned toast and sausages. My mother was crying again. My father told her it was time for the priest.
It was cramped in the confessional, but my mother insisted. She stood with her back against the door and prompted me.
‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ I repeated.
‘Yes, Rosie,’ came the voice of Father Pater from the other side of the mouldering velvet curtain. There was no such thing as anonymity in our town. ‘What is it you would like to confess?’
Silence.
And more silence. My mother kicked my ankle.
‘I stink of smoke. Three guesses.’
‘I did hear about the fire last night. Were you smoking in bed again?’
I hesitated. ‘Do you want the truth, Father?’
‘Naturally.’
My mother bit her lip.
‘I received the gift of tongues. Pentecostally speaking, that is.’
‘I see.’
He didn’t. I could tell. The air in the confessional was stale and warm. Sweat gathered on my forehead. I tried to breathe. There was a flame, above my head. And my voice, it was big, in my throat.’
‘A flame, you say?’
‘Yes, Father.’
Father Pater inhaled loudly. He was taking my air. ‘Well, if that was the case, do you know what this means, Rosie?’
‘No – no – I don’t.’ I was starting to hyperventilate.
‘It means hellfire. It just might mean possession. In short, it means you’ve been a naughty girl.’
‘And her penance, Father?’ asked my mother, chiming in.
‘Well, it’s debatable, of course, but I’ve always said, mortify the flesh, save the soul.’
‘BUT I’M STILL DEVELOPING!’ I screamed. I clambered to my feet and heaved on the door, sending my mother flying into the pile of hymnals outside. A pair of altar boys whistled as I ran out of the church, gulping for air.
I ran and I ran as fast as I could. I ran until I made it to Buddy’s Ice Cream Parlour on the edge of town. Buddy Junior, who lived on the wrong side of the old railway tracks, was scooping ice cream.
‘Make it a double, Buddy,’ I panted.
‘Sure thing, Rosie.’ I watched his muscle scurry up and down his arm as he carved out two scoops of Chocolate Sin. He smiled at me through the glass. ‘You’re looking really hot today, Rosie.’
‘I ran all the way here.’
‘Glad to hear it. This one’s on the house.’
I smiled back and took a seat on one of the spinning stools at the counter. Then I licked my cone clear way round its creamy circumference. Buddy leaned across the counter. ‘Nice to see you again, Rosie.’
I went on licking my cone. He couldn’t take his eyes off my tongue.
‘Talk to me, Rosie.’
‘Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. But I’m not saying anything, Buddy, until I finish this cone.’
‘But, Rosie,’ he sulked, ‘it’s a friggin’ double whammy.’
I licked a dollop of chocolate off the end of my nose with the tip of my tongue. I finished in my own good time. Then I spun round languorously on my stool a few times. At last I said, The truth is, Buddy, I’m all talked out. Why don’t you just go ahead and kiss me.’
Buddy hurdled the counter, and it’s true. My tongue was a wonder in his mouth. It moved like no other. It ran circles round his. It did somersaults, backwards and forwards. For a little while, it danced the rumba. Then it disappeared in a game of hide-and-seek. Finally, it reappeared and did a loop-the-loop in mid-air. Buddy was the first boy I’d met who could hold his breath for as long as me.
We might have been there for hours if my mother hadn’t walked in. ‘Rosie, you will take your tongue out of that boy’s mouth this instant!’
Buddy leaped back over the counter and hid.
‘How could you, Rosie? How could you just run off like that?’ She took a seat on the stool next to mine, spinning dolefully. For a time, neither of us spoke. Then my mother let out a great sigh and slumped over the Formica counter. ‘Rosie, I have not said this yet, but I am saying it now. I am at a loss. I am at an absolute loss. You have stuck your tongue out at a doctor. You have set fire to your father’s house. You have bedevilled our parish priest. How, Rosie – can you tell me this? – how do you expect me to go on shopping in this town?’
I said I didn’t know. Buddy appeared from behind the milkshake machine and said he didn’t know either. My mother and I spun on our stools for a little while longer. There was nothing for it. I’d have to concede something. ‘Mom, we can wear our mother-and-daughter sweaters again on Sundays. Would that make you happy?’
‘No, Rosie, that will not make me happy. It’s too late for our sweaters now. I just want – and this is all I want – I just want you to learn to hold that tongue of yours till you’re twenty-one. Is that really too much to ask?’
I looked at my mother’s pressed lips.
I looked at Buddy Junior’s wide worried eyes.
‘No,’ I replied, my tongue discovering my cheek, ‘of course not, Mother.’
Life and Soul
After Sam Taylor-Wood’s Third Party
We met in the uncompanionable darkness of Sam Taylor-Wood’s Third Party.
I knew no one. I had not been to the first party or to the second. Had there been a first or a second? Or was time trapped on Taylor-Wood’s flickering video loop? I was about to leave the gallery – I wanted daylight, air, I remember that – when I turned and found myself standing before the oracular, wall-to-wall face of Marianne Faithfull.
Her lipstick was wrong, make no mistake: a burgundy matte gone dry. Beneath it, her lips were a fissured landscape. Her mouth – how many feet wide across the wall? – was parched and lean. An abandoned place. Badlands. No wonder she did not speak. No wonder she kept her own counsel.
She knew better. She watched. She sipped wine. Might it have been then that I noticed you? For already you were there, an inadvertent party-goer in the humming, chattering expanse of the room. Toujours déjà. It is difficult to think back. I remember the dark gravity of Faithfull’s gaze, its ancient pull. And I remember she stared through me, as if it were I, and not she, who wasn’t really there.
Modern art, eh. Snort, snort. Or sheesh, as the Americans say. Sheesh.
Overhead the lenses of the many projectors stared into the darkness, unearthly as the myriad eyes on an Old Testament angel’s wing. I tried to look above, beyond. The ceiling was low. Too low. (And getting lower? Why hadn’t I noticed?) Which is why the air was stale. Which is why my breath was shallow. Could I ask the gallery attendant for a paper bag?
The party. Return to the party. There is every reason to celebrate. To be part of something and not nothing.
I stared at the girl with the swingy hair who – famously now, I believe – would not stop dancing. By herself. For herself. It has to be said she scared me, like clockwork toys and escalators and the spinning wheels of fallen bikes scared me as a child. I turned away and, like you, was drawn to the familiar haunt of the smouldering ashtray. A video mirage, like everything else. We were among ghosts, and here, at this house party, the ghosts were bolder, more self-possessed, than either you or I.
You were no good at small talk. You should have talked about the Millennium Bridge, like everyone else on the South Bank that day; how it had swayed in the high winds like a ramshackle fairground ride on your way over the river. Were they going to close it again? you might have wondered. You should have wondered. But commonplace decencies eluded you.
– Or the Eye. Why did you not ask me if I had been up on the Eye? Perhaps I had seen the advert with the car in that pristine capsule at the very top of London’s night sky? We might have mutually conceded its sixty-second glamour. One of us might have mentioned Baudrillard, the loss of the Real. The other need only have nodded. Paper-heart kindness. We might then have gone our own way.
Instead you told me how the universe might suddenly turn inside out, how a black wave might sweep over the world. I could barely see you. You had to be either a paranoid depressive or a Christian fundamentalist. But I listened anyway. Your voice had a discordant music in it, and here, at the party, there was only the usual, urgent futility of spent words. Literally, a soundtrack already familiar.
It was unimaginable, you said. You’d read about it in the Independent. News out of CERN. ‘The electrical force of the world that we take entirely for granted,’ you said, ‘might suddenly give way. The whole universe could just switch off.’
‘Wonders never,’ I said. Next to you, I was cool, composed. I needed you to stay.
‘You don’t understand. Everything – Big Ben, the sun, the moon, me, you – could go dark.’
‘But not before the Jubilee, surely.’ At a party, I was the urbane woman in the little black dress, like the one behind me who wanted to have it off with that ginger-haired actor whose name I could never remember.
‘You think I’m off my head.’
‘You don’t have what my mother would call a sunny disposition.’
‘I haven’t explained things very well.’
‘Perhaps not.’ I reached for the cigarette resting on the ashtray’s brim. My hand came away, disappointed, as it does when your Tube ticket is eaten by the station’s exit machine.
‘Every particle of matter has a heavier “dark” counterpart. Try imagining yourself recast in pure darkness. I’m not joking. A swap could happen at any point in the vacuum of the universe.’
‘And spread.’ I wasn’t stupid. That much I’d have you know.
‘Exactly. Like a rip in the fabric of matter.’
I wanted then to grab your hand. Where had matter gone? Had you noticed too? Is that why you were talking like a social misfit? In here, in here we were no longer solid. The Third Party was a slow, inconsequential death but a surprisingly easy one, and I realized I didn’t want to leave. Chit-chat and half-lies made small rubble behind us, and I wanted to pick my way through it. To mix. To mingle. Was the dark, brutish man on the Conran sofa staring at me? Was it Ray Winstone? Was it a Conran sofa?
You were still talking, I realized. You were saying you didn’t have much longer. Here in the gallery? In London? Time was running out apparently. I’d missed something, a transitional sentence between the cosmos and you.
You were terminal.
Suddenly I felt drunk. I assumed cancer. I had to ask you to repeat it.
‘I won’t see another party.’
Lord. You were gauche. Burdensome. Who would do this to a complete stranger? ‘My God. I’m so sorry,’ I said. I wanted to go back to the party.
I was the first person you had told. Yet you didn’t know my name. You couldn’t have sworn to the colour of my eyes or hair. Was the elegant woman in the black dress actually with Ray Winstone? Could she be? Or were they only sleeping together? Who would have thought? I blinked. I tried to focus. You were telling me how you’d struggled to believe it wasn’t a failure. You knew it was out of your control, yet you felt you’d let yourself down. You’d realized too late, you said. For treatment, I said. It was the knowing, you said. That was the hardest, I said. Completing your sentences like this, like a lover, made me brave. I touched your sleeve – a gesture from a film.
You were still coming to terms with it all. That’s why you’d come here, to the Third Party. That’s why you hadn’t been able to leave. ‘Couldn’t death be to life,’ you said, ‘what negative space is to a piece of art? Do you see? Couldn’t it be something and not nothing?’
I glanced over my shoulder. I needed a glass of wine.
‘The space is the thing, not simply the art. Here, we have what looks like gallery-floor space. Of course, it also looks like standing room for this unbearable house party, so we the viewers are also, we are to understand, party-goers. There is an immediate collapse of the textual and the extra-textual. Which of course we are wise to.’
I forced a smile. I’d been trapped by the party bore. Yet I didn’t leave. I didn’t lose myself to the shadows. In the dark, you smelled of roll-ups and Persil.
‘But all this emptiness is about more than that. It says there is a beyond – something beyond, not only the work of art, but, by implication, also the art of life. It says there is something beyond our futile efforts to know the beyond. Do you see?’
‘Yes, of course.’
You were ransacking your intelligence. You needed affirmation. How could I tell a dying stranger, this is it, baby? This is all there is. Get used to it. Stop talking. You don’t have time to waste.
You had been here all day, in this room, at the empty heart of this eternal ten-minutes of party. No one had asked you to move on. No one, you said, even seemed to know you were here. And, almost in spite of myself, against my better judgement, against type, my hand found yours. My hand found yours even as Faithfull raised her glass – not to us – her eyes smudged and inscrutable over its rim.
As we lay down to make love, I worried fleetingly for the many coats that were not, in fact, beneath us.
‘Is she still watching?’ I could feel the buttresses of your ribs yield to my breasts and breath. Did I weigh too much? Did you like a woman on top?
‘She watches everyone,’ you said.
‘Have you always wanted that? You know – someone watching.’
‘No.’ I could barely see you in the flickering dark.
‘A public space then?’
‘No.’
‘My breasts are small.’
‘Yes.’
‘Schoolgirls? Britney? That video? This blouse? Is that what this is about?’
‘Why are you so nervous?’
‘You’ve taken off all your clothes.’ But I let myself rest my cheek against your goosepimpled chest.
‘That’s nice.’
I started to relax. ‘Why are we doing this?’
‘Because I told you the world will turn off?’
‘A line. I’ve heard better.’
‘Because no one’s said we can’t? Shift down.’
‘I mean, do we even like each other?’
‘Better. Couldn’t say. But disliking someone is, arguably, a neglected form of intimacy.’
‘You dislike me?’
‘No. Is that nice…?’
‘Yes.’
‘With my hand?’
‘The heel of your hand is better.’
‘Take off your skirt.’
‘Now?’
‘When if not now?’
‘Some time we don’t find ourselves on the floor of the Hayward Gallery.’
Your hand moved under my M&S knickers. ‘You’re beautiful.’
‘You can hardly see me.’
‘Inside then. You’re beautiful inside.’
I didn’t want to ask. Did you mean beautiful inside as in beautiful in spirit – had you gleaned something rare in the darkness between us? Or did you mean inside inside? Did you mean the negative space of me?
I didn’t know then that the distinction was a false one. Surface, spirit. Spirit, surface. I am not used to an undivided world. There is so much I must unlearn.
Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Page 17