by Glen Duncan
The need to hurt her, now, sitting in distress across the table from me, is overwhelming. Not physically – Gunn hasn’t got it in him, whatever his fantasy life might think – but with the mouth’s unstinted repertoire, the complete arsenal, the maximum yield.
Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt. The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jewelled with tears. She holds her own mouth on a tight rein. Remembering – it makes a frightful mess of the human face. I’ve seen it a billion times.
Now Penelope.
And the overwhelming desire and need is to hurt her. The words – Gunn’s words – swarm on my tongue as if some inner smoke is driving them from the head’s hive. But – (oh yes, but) – when I’ve got a plan I stick to it. Unlike some. If this is Limbo’d Gunn’s distant broadcast (note to self: summon bloody Nelchael for a long overdue progress report), he’s reckoned on too passive an audience. This isn’t about what cuckolded Declan wants – no matter how loud and clear his carcass shouts its absent soul’s mass of demands. It’s about what I want. Thus, stepping around it, so to speak, as one might a sensitively alarmed sculpture in a narrow gallery space, I reach out and take Penelope’s hot, tissue-clutching hand by its knuckles. She’s a good, strong, guilty girl, so she looks me in the eye.
‘That’s not what I came here for,’ I say, imagining Gunn tearing his incorporeal hair out, wherever he is. Penelope looks tired and all but irresistibly human – but I’m determined, now. (Besides, if I decide to stay – ha-ha – I might want her to be the mother of my children . . .) ‘I came here,’ I continue, dropping my glance to the mug-ringed table top in the manner of a person who, through a great and near-fatal struggle, has learned the virtue of kindness and humility, ‘to tell you . . . to tell you . . .’
‘Yes?’ The air-speech of the grief-ravaged larynx.
‘To tell you that . . . I . . . forgive you,’ (the words come with a strange ease once I’ve got that ‘forgive’ out), ‘without expectation of any kind. It was a betrayal, yes, but I’d betrayed you first. My fucking vanity. My idiotic, deluded vanity. If you wronged me, my love, it was because you were provoked by my wrong. I’m sorry for what I did, for what I became, for how ugly and false.’
I look back up at her. Her eyebrows have gone up in the middle and her lips are pursed. She doesn’t know what to do, what’s going on, whether she loves Gunn all over again, whether, even, this might not be a ruse, the opening device in an emotional booby trap. She’s (I like this word) flabbergasted.
‘I’m asking for nothing,’ I say, getting slowly to my feet and unwrapping my jacket (it’s been a wrench, I don’t mind telling you, slipping out of the Armani, the Gucci, the Versace, the Rolex, back into Gunn’s excruciatingly dull threads – but there was no point in complicating things) from the back of the chair. ‘This isn’t a request, or a plea, or a gesture that requires response. It’s just that I want you to live the rest of your life knowing that as far as I’m concerned you’re forgiven, and loved. The whole thing was my fucking fault.’
‘Declan . . . Oh, God, Declan I –’
‘Don’t say anything now. I just want to feel clean and right for once. We’re not stupid; there’s no point in talking about being friends or anything. I think we were too much to each other to be satisfied with that, now.’
I’m in two minds about the next bit – but it feels right, so I turn her hand over in mine and bend forward to leave a chaste kiss in its palm. She’s utterly astonished. (And would you believe it? A thought breaks through in her like a sunbeam: My God, I was right. My instincts were sound. He’s grown – but you have to have the potential for growth . . . Maybe . . . maybe . . .) But I’m gone. Out of the kitchen and down the hall while she’s still scraping her chair in getting up from the table. I deal with the front door myself (’Wait . . . Declan please wait . . .’) pull it shut behind me, then stride briskly away down the street. I feel her, of course. She comes to the door, opens it, looks out, sees the purposefulness and speed of my step, understands that now it must be left to germinate, that more words will ruin it. (Indeed they’ve ruined things enough for me, already, one way or another – but I’ll come to that in a moment.) Nothing has prepared me for how I feel. I flag a cab and fling myself into its gloom, barely capable of muttering a destination (’. . . station . . . Piccadilly . . .’) before feeling overwhelms me and I pass away into a terrible dream.
The first terrible part of this terrible dream was a merciless assault on my body. The train journey was bad enough (the train journey’s bad enough even if you’re tickety-boo in the health department, I’ll grant you): shivering, cold sweats, hot sweats, tommy-gun teeth, blood flecked with peppercorns and glass fragments, the fever taking and releasing me like an equivocating molester, every bone a bruise, flesh as if stripped of its dermis – you wouldn’t think, would you, that a mere seat cushion . . . A murmur in my ears like a Wimbledon crowd between games. Mere consciousness a terrible interrogation. By the time I staggered into my room at the Ritz it was all I could do to chug down a fifth of Jameson’s and collapse onto the imperial bed. I believe I tried to speak. Not English, you understand. No. My own language. A very bad idea. I was seized with convulsions. My tongue swelled and burned. I hurled myself from the mattress with the intention of crawling (slithering would have been more likely, ha very bloody ha) to the enormous bathroom with its cooling spirits of basin, bowl, bidet and bath. Another bad idea. I hit the deck to discover I was paralysed. My tongue detumesced and my guts fired out a spectacular arc of sulphurous vomit. Now I’m familiar with this sort of thing – you don’t get through the average possession without the odd gastric fiesta – but previous chunderings were picnics compared to the . . . the surrealist free-for-all to which I gave myself over that evening in my bathroom. I tried getting out of the body altogether: nothing doing. A wave of panic that sent through me, you can imagine. (S’all right. I’ve done it since. Must’ve been a temporary blockage on account of my . . . on account of what I was going through.) Things progressed. A chain-gang of fevers. Me babbling, incomprehensibly. I wouldn’t’ve believed myself capable of moving – let alone writing – but, since I have the sheet of Ritz stationery to prove it . . . Not that it makes any sense. Handwriting’s pretty atrocious, too. I can barely decipher it. 5%ityas 3insevvse££3 666666666theyiii ho yo hurthurtyoulove6$$$and evenb thetgloryisn’t you!!!!1youthought isn’tyouisn’you%$$was te of????y ou£££rexis 10sveig rof3”1””””!t ogoh$£$£ome
That’s my best guess.
It stopped as suddenly as it had started. The madness, I mean, the terrible dream. Or rather, switched its assault from the body to the mind. In actuality, no doubt, I was lying supine in a state of unflattering partial dress on the unjudgemental bathroom floor. In the terrible dream, however, I was back at Penelope’s gaff in Manchester with the words ‘forgive you’ opening me – how can I describe this? – separating my ribs and filling them with unbounded, mentholated space. Space. Can you be filled with space? Is it just me? I could see the inside of my head. It was an area big enough to seat every being in the universe, an infinite amphitheatre overarched by . . . well, a sky, I suppose, one of icy and sunlit blue, going on, as you might expect, forever. Vertigo? Sort of. The vertigo of bliss. (Gunn should make a note of that for a title. The Vertigo of Bliss. That’s got to be a title for something. Not this, obviously, but something.) In any case nothing I’ve felt before, angelically or otherwise. Still at the Manchester table, still observing the concrete particulars – Penelope’s bare feet up on the chair next to her; the coffee rings and half-done Guardian quick crossword (14 Down: To forgive? (6); she’d fill it in later, no doubt); the open back door with its colour-riot and smell-festival; the buzz of a passing bluebottle; my own hand, the Marlboro with inch-long ash smouldering between first and index – still, as I say, there. But released, too, simultaneously, as it were, into a realm from which it was possible to both feel
what I was feeling and observe myself feeling it. And what I was feeling is water to this language’s net, evidently. Hugeness. Internal hugeness. Room inside for . . . well, one hesitates to say this, but, for everything. Is there any other way of saying it? Bear with me, I’m searching . . . Searching . . . Nope. Room inside for everything. The discovery of infinite inner space, belonging to me and in which I ceased to matter. In this terrible dream my fingers grip Penelope’s table edge, my feet hook around its mock Queen Anne legs – I’m convinced that without such precautions my own infinite lightness will see me carried up, up, passing immaterially through Penelope’s ceiling and the floors and ceilings of the three flats above, up, up into the blue, filled with space, emptied of all but terrible bliss, permeated with the knowledge that I am both nothing and everything, a minute speck with the capacity for infinite expansion . . .
Wearing, isn’t it. And that’s just hearing about it. Meanwhile, back at the actuality ranch, I was very much regretting having turned the bathroom’s lights on. Inset halogens surrounded prone me with interrogative stares of piercing brightness. It would have been lovely – it would have been absolutely the thing – to have got up and crawled or staggered back to the unlit bedroom with its forgiving shadows and soccer-pitch sized window filled with London’s dusk. It would have been just what the doctor ordered. Instead, wide-eyed and inert, I lay on the bathroom like a mute patient unable to tell the approaching surgeon that the anaesthetic hadn’t worked, that when the buzzing blade entered, I would, actually, feel it.
Nor was that the end of it. Oh dear me no. Betsy – yes, Betsy Galvez – stands in her bathroom gripping the rim of the sink and staring into its large, bulb-rimmed mirror. Her eyes are raw and her make-up is fractured. Tears, you see. Every now and then a part of her rises up and looks at the other parts with contemptuous clarity. Downstairs, her eighty-three-year-old mother sits in her chair with bits of her mind abandoning her by the hour. There’s a home help during the day – but Betsy handles the evenings and the nights. And it is evening now. Mr Galvez wants the old girl out and in a home. Ridiculous, he says (the smell of piss and medicine, the deteriorating mind, the ice cream in the handbag, the idiotic and impotent rages), since they have the money to pay for the best. But Betsy (would you believe it, our Betsy) is wedded to caring for the old woman because . . . Because . . .? I don’t know.
‘I don’t know!’ I believe I screeched out at the bathroom’s brilliant eyeballs, trying, at the same time, to get to my knees – failing.
In any case, there’s Betsy at the mirror. Her mother has just slapped her across the face. Betsy doesn’t know why. ‘Why’ is a concept sliding into irrelevance in relation to her mother’s behaviour. The old woman, Maud, had dropped dessert all over her blouse. They’ve tried getting her to wear a bib, but she won’t have it. Therefore these mealtime messes. Banana mashed with clotted cream and sprinkled with pungent ginger. The old woman will eat virtually nothing else. (Betsy gags, these days, preparing it, having seen it far too many times in other form at the end of its journey through her mother’s bowels. Mr Galvez won’t even be in the room when the old woman tucks in. Betsy understands. . .) Anyway. Bending to mop-up her mother’s blouse, Betsy received a stinging slap across her mouth and a look of purest hatred from the still piercing octogenarian eyes. I hate you. Maud had said. You’re a dirty thief. You think I don’t know where all this money comes from? You’re nothing but a thief. You’re wearing my cardigan. D’you think I’m blind? And Betsy, for once, had been unable to bear it. Unable, for a moment, that moment, with her mouth bloody from Maud’s in-turned garnet and diamond cluster, to bear it. She had run upstairs, on fire with hurt and choking on unswallowable knots of tears, until, safe behind the bathroom’s locked door, she had taken her place before the mirror and let herself weep.
Without much surprise, by the way, I found that I was weeping myself, right there on the bathroom floor. No flailing or wailing, just strangely cooling and continuous tears. Somewhere in the back of myself, I remember, panic was politely trying to get the rest of my attention.
‘As long as I have strength,’ I find myself saying, in Betsy’s wobbling voice. ‘As long as I . . . Oh, Mummy . . .’
‘Who on earth are you talking to you insane man?’
Harriet to the rescue. Thank Hell.
‘You’re sick’ she said. ‘Your head’s on fire. We should call the doctor. Let me call the doctor.’
‘No doctor,’ I said. ‘I don’t need a doctor.’ Get her to take her clothes off, I thought, as a fresh wave of fever broke over my bad-tempered flesh. Get her to strip and – and – just anything to blot this rubbish out.
‘Is this what it’s going to be like?’ I said to those blazing bathroom bulbs. ‘Things you didn’t know? The three faces of Eve and so on? Sybil?’
‘What?’ Harriet asked. We’d made it to the bed and she’d managed to get my bespattered trousers off. ‘Declan darling I’m afraid you’re rambling.’
Indeed. Each image opened yet more space in the already limitless arena. The blue sky doming it stretched on, endlessly clear. A sudden flash – something that should have been entirely subliminal: One naked man and one naked woman standing in a warm evening mist looking up into the boughs of a fruit-heavy tree; a look at each other; a hand squeeze; a grin . . . I wanted it to stop. Oh I wanted it to stop.
But there’s Violet (it’ll be Harriet next, I thought, with dread and fascination) in sudden hot tears because on a crowded and sullen Northern Line tube she’s just bought a stupid keyring from a deaf-and-dumb woman every other passenger in the carriage has stonily ignored. The tears because when the deaf-and-dumb woman (sixties, watery blue eyes, a furred mole above her top lip, the anorak and old butter smell of the poor) has smiled and said something incomprehensible, Violet, not wanting to engage beyond the mechanical charity, has responded with a look of puzzlement and okay-I’ve-bought-your-shit-now-please-go-away-and-leave-me-alone. Then, the woman turning away with a look of threadbare weariness, Violet’s realisation that the garbled phrase was ‘God bless you’. It holds her for a moment, this translation, poised on the brink of a shocking grief. The woman’s last look: You can’t understand me because I can’t talk properly; you don’t want me to talk to you because you’re afraid that I’m going to want something more from you – money, love, time, your life; you just want me to leave you alone; that’s all right, I know, but I was just saying thank you. All Vi’s childhood rushes up into her heart – the kids they made fun of, the tiny cruelties, the horrible guilt – all her adult excesses too, and thus with her heart full she looks down at the mute’s keyring. Its gimmick is a little sign language chart in clear plastic. On the reverse, it says: Learn my language and we can be friends! And this, this more than anything hitherto pitches her over the edge and she finds herself in tears, publicly – not discreet weeping, either, but audible boo-hooing and visible, body-shaking sobs . . .
We’re going to show you a familiar object seen from an unfamiliar angle. For ten points we’d like you to name the object . . .
I didn’t want to name any of them, believe me. The mixture of expansive bliss and barely contained panic had me flipping and flopping around on the bed like a landed fish until Harriet – Hell preserve her – got me still by climbing on the bed and lying on top of me.
At which point – shshsh, she kept saying, its all right, shshsh – at which point I’m afraid I capped the entire performance by shitting my pants and bursting into tears.
Hydra is a small island in the Aegean, south of Poros, northeast of Spetses, three hours out by thudding ferry from the sun-and-diesel headache of Piraeus. No cars on the island. No motorized traffic of any kind, in fact; just long-eyelashed donkeys and seen-better-days nags, standing patiently or in existential nullity in the sun by the dock, or clopping in no rush up the pink and silver cobbles, carrying deliveries, tourists, luggage, their burnished haunches sexy as an oiled stripper’s, thin shadows tacked and rippling at their hoov
es.
You get there, you’ve entered a different time zone. Local population’s less than 2,000. The harbour’s a long crescent inlaid with a single row of jewellery shops and restaurants, with a museum fort at one end and a sprawling cocktail bar at the other. Boats wobble and nod in their moorings. Sunlight bounces off the water and marbles their hulls. The sky is a high, stretched skin of pure ultramarine. Occasionally, stratos clouds. Very rarely, hilarious thunderstorms. In summer the heat and the silence form a tangible conspiracy in the air around you; you can close your eyes and lean on them, drift into blankness or dream. Nothing is required of you. One nightclub in the hills serves touring youngsters and desperate local teens (trapped in paradise, dying to get out), but in the harbour it’s gentle bars with elastic hours and capricious prices where you can talk without ever having to raise your voice. They go in for complex cocktails served like desserts in glasses the size of soup bowls. There’s an open air cinema – a roofless yard with a rattling projector and roll-down screen, where, under the wings of Cygnus and the skirts of the Pleiades, you can watch Hollywood’s spectacles six years after the rest of the world’s stopped talking about them. Intermission’s an indecorous halt at the film’s guessed mid-point (mid-scene, mid-sentence, mid-syllable); then coffee as thick as mercury in plastic thimble cups, a leg-stretch, a Marlboro. All the kids here run around unsupervised into the small hours. Unfortunately, nothing happens to them.