After Everything

by Suellen Dainty

  He flung the telephone on the floor and strode back out onto the deck, slamming the door behind him. It was almost dark now, high tide. The clouds had disappeared and a greasy slick covered the water. He told himself again that Penny didn’t know anything. He should never have called her. A tourist boat sputtered along the river. Passengers clustered on the deck and clicked their cameras before passing under the bridge.

  Time for a drink. No. Time for something else. He checked his wallet, thick with cash, put a pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket and began walking towards Lots Road, past the auction houses, crossing through the streets of dinky renovated workers’ cottages until he reached the small park between the New King’s Road and the river. It was always quieter here, still enough to hear his own footsteps, hear himself breathing. He halted outside the public toilets, smelling the urine, mud and stale beer rising from the pile of stained quilts and sleeping bags pushed against the wall.

  There was a time when he might have told himself he was getting some exercise, or pondering the scope for a Chelsea Harbour type of redevelopment, or just seeing how other people lived. There was something to be said for changing one’s environment to concentrate the mind, to see things from a different angle. He didn’t bother with that anymore. It was a waste of time.

  The girl looked like the others, scrawny with flickering eyes and long sleeves to cover her arms. He asked if she had a light, then offered her a cigarette. It was easy after that. A bit of chat. The offer of a drink, something to eat back at Cheyne Walk. Inside the Jezebel, he gave her a glass of cheap wine and watched her glance around as she gulped it down.

  ‘I think you know a friend of mine. She mentioned a guy with a boat.’ Her voice was flat and sly.

  ‘It’s not my boat,’ Jeremy said quickly. ‘I’m just staying here for a bit, minding it for a friend. I don’t live in London anymore. I live in …’ He paused. ‘I live in Hong Kong.’

  The girl was walking around, picking up books, putting them down in the wrong place. She ran her forefinger along the cabin wall, brushing against the mantelpiece and the bottom of the Ruscha. She stared at it, moving her head from one side to another, like an inquisitive bird.

  ‘Funny picture,’ she said. ‘Was it very expensive?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He sat down, hoping she would do the same. All his things with her fingermarks on them. It made him queasy. There was that odd full feeling in his stomach again. ‘As I said, it’s not my boat.’

  ‘Whatever.’ She lit a cigarette, drew in hard. He hated anyone smoking inside the cabin, but he was loath to take her onto the deck. Someone could see them. She could change her mind and make a fuss. He was suddenly fearful of all the things that could go wrong. He’d never thought that before and, even as he did so, he told himself it was a ridiculous notion. He didn’t keep any cash here. Kids like her wouldn’t know the value of the Ruscha, or some of the first editions. They could barely manage joined-up writing. Even if someone saw him, someone he knew, he could lie, say he was telling a stranger not to trespass on the jetty.

  ‘So?’ Her question cut across his thoughts. ‘What now?’ She stood with one hand on her hip, her head angled to one side like an old-fashioned courtesan. ‘Let’s make it three hundred, okay?’

  It irritated him that she was taking control. But he nodded anyway, and motioned for her to undress. This was the part he liked best; the memory of grainy internet images flickering through his head, feeling his balls tighten, his cock grow thick and hard as he told them to take their clothes off, and the way their breasts jiggled as they pulled off their T-shirts and he breathed in their stale mushroomy smell.

  But then this one smirked as he rubbed himself. She thought she had the power over him. She was nothing. A nobody, a dirty kid with a need for quick money to feed a lowlife habit. He unbuckled his belt and snapped it at her thighs. She yelped in pain. He pushed her over and fucked her from behind. It was always better when he didn’t have to look at them. He pushed harder, deeper, watching her buttocks quiver, ignoring her whimpers.

  Afterwards, she didn’t get up. He thought she might have passed out. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth where he’d pushed her against the coffee table. He pulled up his trousers. He worried about stains on the rug, and then how to get her out.

  ‘Jesus,’ she muttered, wiping her mouth. ‘You didn’t have to do that, you didn’t have to be so fucking brutal.’ She sat up slowly and gathered her clothes, began to get dressed. Angry welts had sprung up on her thighs.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ she repeated.

  He shrugged. More than anything, he wanted her to leave. The sight of blood made him nauseous.

  She stood up and walked to the door. He had the cash, plus a bit extra, ready to give her. He saw she was holding something with one hand as she took the money with the other. On the deck, with the money safely in her pocket, she opened her other hand. He saw one of his business cards, engraved in black Baskerville Semibold on thick cream paper. It must have fallen out of his pocket.

  emily.ellison@gmail.com

  To: mattman5@hotmail.com

  Sorry bro, don’t forget pills for the runs. A friend (?) emailed to say she saw you looking pretty wasted last week. Hope she got it wrong. I’m not going to be your keeper over here, remember that. Let’s talk when we see each other. Heard from Mum lately? She sounds pretty damn cheerful.

  Chapter 27

  Sandy picked up the telephone. No, he was not interested in solar panels. He didn’t even own a roof. He slammed the receiver back onto its cradle, and continued his online search for employment suitable for someone his age. So far he’d considered teaching music (a crowded field, he’d discovered), mediating between divorcing couples (the computer test found him judgemental and impatient) and delivering groceries (not fit enough for the inevitable stairs).

  He poured his fourth cup of Rooibos and drank it as he considered the dishes congealing in the sink. The odds of keeping sober, giving up smoking and remaining solvent would increase if he found some kind of a job. The idea had been to keep steady, not to explode in rage and spray-paint the deck of Jeremy’s boat.

  It was an invincible Sandy who strode away from the jetty, imagining that divine retribution would follow, that Jeremy would fall and Sandy would rise, that somehow Jeremy could be made accountable. But nothing happened. No one cared. After tossing the can of paint into a garbage bin, he’d called Peter who mentioned fine print and the matter of damage to property. Sandy hung up and called Tim, who asked why Sandy had expected Jeremy to save him.

  ‘What are you on about?’ Sandy shouted into his mobile as he waited at the pedestrian crossing along Cheyne Walk. A Filipina nanny standing beside him jumped and ran off, her buggy veering from one side of the pavement to the other as the baby inside wailed.

  ‘I didn’t expect him to save me. I merely expected, as my oldest friend, that Jeremy would not throw me to the wolves.’

  ‘But that’s just what I was talking about,’ said Tim.

  ‘Thank you and fuck you.’ Sandy jabbed a button to end the call. His hands were shaking. He tried to stay calm and think logically. All he felt was pure fear, like an animal cast out from its pack. He was overreacting. He had survived the breakdown of a marriage, the decline of a career and growing alienation from his children. By comparison, this was nothing. But it felt like everything as he began walking back across the bridge. Swirls of brown froth slapped at the river’s edge. Low rain clouds misted the horizon. It seemed to him that the sky and the earth were moving closer together. Soon he would be crushed between the two into nothing.

  A female jogger pounded past. He moved to one side, clutching a metal column. The sense of betrayal and loneliness was exhausting. Why did he mind so much about Jeremy? Penny had once called it emotional homosexuality. It hurt just thinking about her.

  For the first time since he’d left the hospital, he took his old route home, the one passing the Majestic store on Queenst
own Road. He bought two bottles of marked-down New Zealand Pinot Noir and hurried back to his flat, as if he was scared someone might see him with the telltale carrier bag and hear the clink of the bottles as he walked.

  Just the one glass, he promised himself, then he’d empty the rest of the bottle down the sink. The remaining bottle could stay on the shelf, in case someone dropped by. It was just a drink, and he wasn’t a proper drunk. Wasn’t that what Justin had said? Or suggested? Sandy couldn’t remember. All he knew was that he wanted something warm in his stomach, a bit of a haze, just a tiny little bit, and it tasted so good and he felt so remarkably sober that he poured another glass, put his feet up and considered his revenge.

  He imagined Jeremy’s reaction when he saw the spray-paint on the yacht. He fantasised about running into him somewhere public. Jeremy would try to apologise, say he was pleased to see him. Sandy would stand very straight, because if he did that he was taller than Jeremy, and deliver the most coruscating speech without hesitation and Jeremy would feel like dirt while everyone around them cheered for Sandy.

  With delicious but unaccustomed alcohol swilling in his empty stomach, he indulged in the fantasies again and again and then somehow the bottle was empty, then most of the second bottle and everything in the room blurred as he passed out on the sofa. It was not a good night. He would not, could not, do it again. He told himself repeatedly. He had to find something to do, some kind of daily routine to keep at bay the occasional eruptions of anger, the sense of abandonment by Jeremy, Penny, Emily and Matthew.

  At night he dreamed of Emily running to him in the park, of Matthew’s small plump body in the bath, the smell of his innocent skin. Yet he’d never bathed Matthew, never taken Emily to the park. It was false, he knew. He was inventing a family history for himself. Still he dreamed, often so clearly that he woke with their voices pealing in his ear, his arm reaching out across the empty bed.

  He had to find something to do. A week later he was still looking. But even the dogs’ home had a waiting list for volunteer walkers. Then he remembered when Emily was about seven, her best friend’s father lost his job in the city and immediately found another driving London buses. He took Sandy’s fare once on the Number 90 and told him it was the best place he’d ever worked.

  Sandy decided to apply. London Transport might be pleased to have a songwriter and an Oxford graduate behind the wheel, a person who, although somewhat worn, must still count as being more intelligent than most. It would be another reason to keep sober and earn some money at the same time. Empowerment. That was the word he was looking for.

  He signed into the Transport for London site. Good. There was no age limit for applicants and there was an online test, which had to be a breeze. The first trial question required him to work out the direction of arrows in a series of diagrams. The arrows ran vertically and horizontally, but he couldn’t decide on the sequence. After staring at the screen for more than a minute and noting the seconds ticking away on a clock at the bottom of the screen, he made a guess. He was wrong.

  The second question presented a series of shapes in either dots, solid black or narrow lines, with one blank rectangle. What was the correct choice for the rectangle? Dots, solid black or narrow lines? He stared at the screen, put his head one way, then the other. With three seconds to spare, he opted for solid black. Wrong again.

  Just what were the job requirements to become a bus driver? Would the next question be on string theory or particle physics? He clicked to continue and saw with relief a comforting multiple choice about petrol consumption. The correct statement was obvious. One out of three. It could only get better.

  He was pondering an unnecessarily complicated question on American pizza consumption, and why a bus driver needed to know such a thing, when the telephone rang again.

  As he reached for the handset, he fumbled and it fell on the keyboard. The screen went black. Although the idea of driving a bus across London had palled increasingly as he answered each of the questions, the interruption was infuriating. Now he’d have to start again.

  ‘Yes,’ he growled. Silence. The telephone was halfway back to its cradle, when he heard a cough that sounded familiar in a way he couldn’t immediately decipher.

  ‘Who is this?’ he asked, nervous. Another silence.

  ‘It’s me, Carolyn,’ said the voice.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. What to say next? He wasn’t up on the etiquette of greeting someone who’d shared details of a traumatic abortion after they’d had sex together on her conservatory sofa.

  There was another silence before she spoke again, in a breathy voice.

  ‘I’ve just walked across the bridge, through the park,’ she said. ‘Sorry about the silence. I can’t work out this new mobile. How about a coffee?’

  Sandy turned off his computer. His job application was over for now anyway. He offered to meet her in the café on the corner of a nearby square.

  ‘Actually,’ she said with one more syllable than necessary, ‘I’m right outside your building.’

  He looked into the sitting room, the scuffed matting, the sofa with more stains than pattern. He shifted his focus to the unmade bed. A younger Sandy would have loved this, the flattery of a woman knocking uninvited on his door, the idea that sex might follow. But he wasn’t so interested in sex anymore and he didn’t want Carolyn to see how he lived, the tackiness of it all.

  ‘I’ll come down to let you in,’ he said, taking the key from the hook by the door and descending the stairs slowly. She might change her mind and walk away, he thought. She hadn’t. She was standing on the pavement, wearing an expensive looking trench coat over jeans and a crisp white shirt. Food wrappers skittered in the gutter behind her.

  Her sunglasses were pushed back on her head. She looked so glossed and clean, as if the pipes in Notting Hill gushed with special quadruple-filtered water that made skin softer, hair more lustrous. He kissed her on both cheeks, regretting not shaving that morning as he told her to mind the hole in the stair carpet.

  Then they were in his flat. He could see Carolyn trying not to look around, not to notice what could only be termed as bachelor squalor. Her former mousy housewife aura had disappeared. There was no more anxious pulling at her neck. Standing in his kitchen, she exuded confidence and wellbeing.

  ‘I just thought I’d drop by,’ she said. ‘See how you’re doing.’

  There was an ominous prickle at the back of Sandy’s neck. What did she want from him? She must know he had nothing to give her.

  She had a Wholefoods canvas bag with her, which she unpacked on the kitchen table. There was a loaf of bread shaped like an exploding hedgehog, a wedge of weeping brie, three perfect plum tomatoes, some saucisson and Parma ham encased in thick waxed paper.

  Sandy’s mouth watered at the rich aroma from the large circles and rectangles of meat glistening with small jewels of translucent fat and dotted with plump green peppercorns. This was food with provenance, not mean little strips encased in supermarket plastic from mystery destinations in Eastern Europe. Her one bag of exclusive charcuterie probably cost more than his entire week’s shopping.

  ‘Do you think we should eat something?’ she asked with a smile. ‘Everything is better after food.’

  Chapter 28

  Jeremy unwound the towel from around his neck and wiped his face dry. Almost immediately he felt beads of perspiration re-forming on his face. He lay back on the bench, closed his eyes and inhaled the moisture-laden air. He imagined all the microscopic specks of urban dirt, the dead flakes of skin, the oil and sweat from his scalp leaving his body, dripping onto the floor and flushing down the marble-covered drains into the sewers of London. If he lay completely still, he could actually feel the steam opening and purifying every part of him, loosening his muscles, calming his jangled shoulder tendons.

  These early mornings in the Royal Automobile Club’s Turkish baths were his balm, his time spent on winning battles before they were fought. His Sun Tzu strategy. Above him taxis
and buses rattled up Pall Mall, their windscreens spattered with summer rain. People scuttling to work looked up to the sky and frowned. Below the hubbub, wrapped in towels, obscured by dense fog and surrounded by giant slabs of marble, Jeremy felt safe. No one could get to him down here. Not the clients and not Sandy. Not the girl either. He shouldn’t have lost control like that, but he had no real remorse. It was a transaction of sex and money, nothing more, and it had been fixed. There would be no repercussions.

  He rewound the towel around his neck. This was the time he liked best, when he had the place to himself. Jeremy especially liked the last ten minutes of his half-hour sessions, where he tried very hard to think of absolutely nothing. He had planned his moves for the week (sell gold, buy rice futures) and was lying with a warm towel draped across his eyes when the door swung open. Someone cleared their throat and sat down, their feet scuffing on the floor. Jeremy rearranged his towel and tried to capture that pure safe feeling again. There was the sound of towels rustling, more scuffing and then a voice.

  ‘Sorry,’ came a broad Australian accent. ‘Could you tell me something? I’m a bit confused about the order of things.’

  Jeremy removed the towel from his eyes and slowly sat up. On the bench opposite sat a slight, balding man about his own age, skinny freckled legs protruding from underneath a huge towel. There was something childlike about him.

  ‘I can’t work out all the pools,’ the man said. ‘I mean, which ones I’m meant to go into – the hot one, the big one, the narrow one. All a mystery to me.’

  Jeremy explained, with what he thought was very good grace considering the interruption, that any member or guest could go into any pool, but it was recommended to shower first.

  ‘Right. Got it. Thanks. It’s more complicated here than the place at home.’

  The two men fell silent. Jeremy tightened the towel around his waist, gave a small wave and walked out towards the showers and the swimming pool. Halfway through his customary twenty lengths, he dropped his legs down at the shallow end for a brief rest and saw the skinny balding man emerge from behind one of the marble columns surrounding the pool. Jeremy was about to push off, but the man plopped in beside him and greeted him like an old friend. One polite question, Jeremy thought. He’d ask one polite question, wait for the answer and start swimming again as quickly as possible.