Crudo

by Olivia Laing

  OLIVIA LAING

  Crudo

  PICADOR

  For Ian, of course

  and for Kathy

  A complete list of quoted material can be found at the back of this book.

  The cheap 12 inch sq. marble tiles behind speaker at UN always bothered me. I will replace with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me.

  Contents

  ANYWAY

  KNOTS

  SWIMMING IN THE AIR

  NOT YOU

  PAPERS & PAINTS

  Something Borrowed

  Thank You

  ANYWAY

  Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York. It was 19:45 on 13 May 2017. She’d been upgraded to business, she was feeling fancy, she bought two bottles of duty-free champagne in orange boxes, that was the kind of person she was going to be from now on. Kathy was met at the airport by the man she was living with, soon to become the man she was going to marry, soon, presumably, to become the man she had married and so on till death. In the car, the man told her that he had eaten dinner with the man she, Kathy, was sleeping with, along with a woman they both knew. They had also been drinking champagne, he told her. They laughed a lot. Kathy stopped speaking. This was the point at which her life took an abrupt turn, though in fact the man with whom she was sleeping would not break up with her for another five days, on headed writing paper. He didn’t think two writers should be together. Kathy had written several books – Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School, I expect you’ve heard of them. The man with whom she was sleeping had not written any books. Kathy was angry. I mean I. I was angry. And then I got married.

  Two and a half months later, pre-wedding, post-decision to wed, Kathy found herself in Italy. She had been interviewed at the Register Office, she had not known her husband’s date of birth but nobody thought she, or he, were being trafficked. They were civil, they had chosen their songs, she’d insisted on Maria Callas because she didn’t operate via understatement. Now, 2 August 2017, she was sitting under a hornets’ nest in the Val d’Orcia. She could have sat in several other places but she’d become fond of the hornets. Yesterday, two of them had fallen on her leg, still fucking. It was a good omen, her friend Joseph said when she emailed him about it.

  She had a good routine going. First she swam twenty lengths, that woke her up. Then she drank coffee, then she arranged a sunlounger under the hornet tree. At ten she made her husband bring her more coffee. She hadn’t had a husband before but she knew how it worked. Was Kathy nice? Unclear. Kathy was interested in her tan, she was interested in Twitter, she was interested in seeing whether any of her friends were having a better holiday than her. Beside her, her husband was peeling off wet swimming trunks under a green towel. Everything was nicer than at home. Not a little bit nicer, but profoundly, like every material had been reinvented by a smarter species. Kathy and her husband had accidentally gone on holiday with the super-rich.

  They didn’t pass, obviously. They weren’t even trying. They ate their potato foam penitently, they spilled passata and plum-cardamom gelato down every T-shirt they owned. There was a laundry service but they were alarmed at the cost. Maybe they could wear darker clothes, or find a laundry in Rome.

  It was the brightest day imaginable. Something weird had happened to the sky, it wasn’t clear or cloudy but somewhere in between. The light wasn’t concentrated in the sun, it was everywhere at once, like being inside a halogen bulb. Kathy had a headache. The internet was excited because the President had just sacked someone. Got hired, divorced, had a baby, and fired in ten days. Like a fruit fly, some joker wrote. 56,152 likes. None of it was funny, or maybe it all was.

  Kathy had no parents, which didn’t stop them annoying her. She thought about them a lot. Her mother had committed suicide, her father had vanished before she was even born. She was an orphan, truly Dickensian. Her husband actually called her Pip, sometimes the Pip. He was a very nice man, indisputably nice, everyone liked him, it was impossible not to. I always felt we were friends outside the poetry circle, his friend Paul Buck wrote, congratulating them on the wedding that still hadn’t quite happened and continuing with an anecdote about how he and Kathy had failed to have sex once.

  It was getting hotter and hotter. 31 degrees, 36 degrees, 38 degrees. There were wildfires across Europe. One of them had been started by someone throwing a cigarette butt out of a car. Kathy stood neck-deep in the pool and thought about nothing. Wants go so deep there is no way of getting them out of the body, she’d written in the final paragraph of her last book. Her ear had become blocked by water and every hour or so it cleared for a moment and then quickly something rose up inside it like a thick wad of chewing gum, like a sock. It was unpleasant, the sense of something pressing at her interior, it dragged her down. In the bar her husband read a list of the hotel chef’s celebrity clients. Who’s Rachael Ray, he said, who’s Gloria Estefan, who’s Peyton Manning? She didn’t know who Peyton Manning was but she helped him with the rest.

  Here’s what they ate. They ate porchetta in rolls and porchetta on rocket. They ate a kind of yoghurt cream dusted with lavender and tiny meringues. They ate rack of lamb and black cod and picci with pork ragù. They were definitely getting fatter. Have you noticed, she asked him, how everyone has younger wives here? It was like the second-wife club. Personally she was a third wife, so on that level at least she fitted right in.

  What Kathy wanted currently was complicated to explain. She wanted three or four houses so that she could move between them. She was happiest on her travels, like a clockwork toy, maybe happiest unpacking or booking a train ticket. She liked to get in and settle down and she also liked to snap shut the door. She wanted to write another book, obviously, and she wanted to find a way of situating it nowhere. Nowhere like the interior spaces of the body, nowhere like the dead zones of a city. She was a New Yorker, she wasn’t meant to be in Europe, she certainly didn’t belong in a damp garden in England. The weeds were alarming, she was terrified of moths and mould. What she really liked was lizards, not just their tiny dashing feet but the way they were exceptionally dry. Kathy liked dryness, she’d always been the supplicant but now that she’d finally got things settled she was finding an abnormal talent for withholding, as if she’d finally become one of the many men she’d chased across Berlin, London, San Diego. In the 1990s, when she was young, she’d wept and sliced up her own flesh at the blink of an eye, she loved to get truly abject, but now she’d dried out, she was as cool and brown and flat as a piece of discarded toast, not appetising exactly, not desirable, but fodder for someone, a pigeon at least.

  Was this getting older? Kathy was worried about ageing, she hadn’t realised youth wasn’t a permanent state, that she wouldn’t always be cute and hopeless and forgivable. She wasn’t stupid, she was just greedy: she wanted it always to be the first time. When she thought about the people she’d populated her youth with she cringed. She could have made it so much more glamorous, so much more debonair, she needn’t have had a bowl cut, she needn’t have worn dungarees, the minutes were passing, she’d failed to get a death-grip on time. Now she was cool, but old; now she was hot, but wrinkled. My life is delicate (more delicate than my cunt), she’d written to a boyfriend not that long ago. I’ve had eleven abortions, she told someone else, which wasn’t even true. Kathy was always lying, she’d lied since she was a small child with unattractive red hair. When her hair began to fall out because of the stress of living with her mother she told the girls at school that it had been eaten by her rabbit. At that school they had a playground game where everyone tried to hypnotise themselves and then lift someone’s body with just their little fingers. The girl about to be lifted had to lie flat and everyone had to press on her a
s hard as they could. After that the lifting was easy. Weightlessness was another exclusive possession of the very young. Later on you started clanking around like tins tied to a car.

  What Kathy was supposed to be doing was planning her wedding. She did this by looking through pictures on Instagram and making unkind comments. That’s very vulgar, she or her husband would say. Chairs and tables, napkins, that’s very vulgar. At this rate they’d end up getting married in a car park.

  Kathy loved her husband. Last night they’d been forced to give a reading together, which wasn’t exactly her bag, and yet she’d found herself pleased to hear his poems, like someone wiggling a key in the lock of language, it’s jammed, it’s jammed, and then abruptly stepping through. For some reason there were three psychiatrists at the reading, one apparently very eminent and two from Sheffield, still in their swimsuits. A patrician man sat at the back and called out questions. There’s hope for us all, he said, inexplicably. At dinner that night Kathy found herself sitting next to him. Felicia, Felicia, he said, this is the writer. Felicia had the lock-jaw of the seriously posh. Kathy recoiled into her amuse-bouche, a fishy white sliver, and waited for the moment to pass.

  Tomorrow it’s going to be 41 degrees, her husband said. That’s 106 in Fahrenheit. So when people in India and the Gulf States have temperatures of 50 that’s very hot. No wonder they’re dying. Pretty much 30 degrees above normal blood temperature. He was wearing a pink T-shirt and his left leg, which he’d burned earlier in the week, had begun to peel. A drill had started up somewhere. Kathy was writing everything down in her notebook, and had become abruptly anxious that she might exhaust the present and find herself out at the front, alone on the crest of time – absurd, but sometimes don’t you think we can’t all be moving through it together, the whole green simultaneity of life, like sharks abruptly revealed in a breaking wave? Possibly her speeding thoughts presaged a migraine, possibly. On Twitter a Chinese photographer had gone missing. She’d last been seen at the funeral of her husband, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize and then spent the rest of his life in prison. Kathy had seen a photo of her, tightly wound in sunglasses. Anyway, she’d gone. And there’d been a statement from the government that had stuck in her mind, something about discarding the ashes in the sea, was that right. When the accusations about Jimmy Savile reached a pitch of plausibility his gravestone had been taken up in the night and ground into gravel and used to resurface roads. This too didn’t sound quite right but that’s how Kathy remembered it. The Jimmy Savile dust could be anywhere by now, sticking to car tyres and inching relentlessly off the island, no doubt especially on ferries. Evil was a subject of interest for Kathy, she wasn’t squeamish, she’d worked years in a strip joint in Times Square, she knew about appetite and dead eyes. She used to do a Santa Claus routine, anything not to be bored, releasing her flat little fried-egg tits into the eyes of the world. Nobody knew anything about life who hadn’t breathed a good lug of that pissy, spunky air, oh Kathy’d really seen it all. I want to know why a president is always a john and never a hooker, Zoe Leonard once wrote in a famous much-reproduced poem and Kathy felt like it was still a good question now, why some people always bought and never sold.

  She was forty. She’d had breast cancer twice, she’d barely ever not had some kind of STD, she spent more time in the GUM clinic than her own front room. She’d owned several apartments in several countries, selling and buying, trying to take advantage of shifts in the market, mostly failing. People took her photograph often, she’d ditched the old look, her head wasn’t shaved now, she was a true bottle-blonde. She had a thrift-shop Chanel suit hanging in her room, far too hot for that here, dumb to put it in her case even, though she had hopes for Rome. Is it hot in Rome she asked her husband and he replied with a grunt. So maybe the suit was a waste of space, so what. Tomorrow they were supposed to be going to dinner with a famous opera singer, right here in the Tuscan hills. The patrician man came past, slapping in his sandals. Not a bad life, he said. Insparring. He was hosting a toga party that night and was concerned about noise. Kathy had recently complained to the owner of the hotel about a drone some guests had been flying above her sunlounger. She didn’t like being watched and she didn’t like the sound, which at first she’d mistaken for an especially agitated bee. The owner agreed with her, he had many famous guests, names you’d know immediately, and he didn’t think drones had a place here. It struck Kathy now that she too was a kind of drone and that perhaps what she was doing, writing everyone down in her little book, wasn’t exactly gracious. Then again she liked the idea of herself up in the air with her compound eyes, hovering, havering, gathering data. There used to be bombing raids right here, her husband had told her. He was an expert on bombing but he had not, he said, known that the Americans had bombed civilians in Italy. I was surprised that the Americans had been so assiduous about bombing and strafing civilians, he said. And children. It was a fact that a great deal of people had been killed right here, of many different nationalities and political allegiances, partisans soldiers prisoners of war farmers refugees the starving people who walked from Rome and Siena and sat at the gates, waiting for food. A few days back there had been a wedding at the hotel, and Kathy had sat with a lunchtime beer and watched some florists from Florence assembling a complicated half-arch out of pink roses. Also watching was an elderly man whose father had been shot dead right there in the square, in the last year of the war. There was a plaque about it, which later the bride stood under for her official photograph. That was history, that was how it went, now they were tearing out all the 1970s ceilings and making it look medieval again, only with rainfall showers. It was hopeless, it was crazy, just the mess that time made. A little white road through the valley, that was the ground, but you could draw pretty much anything on top, bodies or children with tubas or a Ferrari being towed by a pick-up.

  At lunch, more pork, the patrician man and his wife were at the next table. Again, he leant over. Where are you getting married, he said. Kathy didn’t know how he knew she was getting married and frankly she wasn’t thrilled about it. Dick, she muttered under her breath. His name was Henry, she didn’t even need to ask, she could just tell. Henry chuntered for a while about shadow Labour ministers being thick as shit. She turned down the peerage Felicia said. I’m not surprised, she’d been passed over twice. Kathy liked proximity to people with information, she wouldn’t have been a good spy, it all went through her, like a sieve. She just wanted to nibble on it for a minute. Henry was handsome. He looked like an untrustworthy fox in a Disney film. A very short fat man came into the bar and greeted everyone by name.

  While Kathy was watching the preparations for the wedding she’d absolutely and completely forgotten she was about to have one of her own. She’d actually already purchased the dress, Isabel Marant, too short, no surprises there. Some people she knew, friends really, had expressed surprise and doubt that Kathy would be willing to share the spotlight for long enough to actually make her vows. She’d once physically pushed another writer off the stage and she had a lot of subtler moves too.

  Lots of things happened that night, 3 August 2017. For example Kathy met a major donor to the Democratic Party. As it happened this was the second major donor to the Democratic Party she’d met in two days. They know Hillary really well, someone told her. The donor had an extraordinary daughter called Dahlia, who was the most poised person Kathy had ever met. She was wearing a clinging dress that had been crocheted in several strong colours, blue and yellow and black, and she looked terrific, really lovely. She was nineteen, maybe twenty, and she ran the conversation like a world-class tennis player, serving generously, returning every ball. Nice she said fondly when an adult nervously volunteered information about their home life or occupation. Nice. Next! She told Kathy about what politics meant and also what engineering meant and the differing but similar ways in which they could change the world. Her mother leaned in to volunteer that she too was writing a book, though it was going quite slowly w
hat with living between LA, Tuscany and Israel and having several houses and working in the film business and giving up a year to volunteer for Hillary. What Kathy really wanted was for them to Dish about the victory night non-party, but that wasn’t happening. The conversation moved on to kosher food. At my brother’s bar mitzvah, Dahlia told Kathy, the hotel wouldn’t serve cake after meat. And we were like it’s a party and they were like it’s a kosher hotel. We got round it though. We got them to serve it at midnight. Yeah, we had to have cake.

  After this Kathy got into a ding-dong with an artist, a sculptor in leather sandals who had at some point in the evening cut his leg. Blood was pouring down his ankle, but nobody else seemed to have noticed, so Kathy kept quiet. They argued about Wordsworth and Europe. Kathy had really quite passionate feelings about what he was saying and why it was wrong. The rosé had got into her and made her snappy. She felt strongly and with conviction that British people had always hated Europeans. Like Anne Boleyn. Nobody liked that Frenchified bitch. She was also certain that the Field of the Cloth of Gold was central to her arguments though to be honest she couldn’t actually remember its purpose or participants. Anyway, her husband leant over the table and said not even very gently you are completely wrong, and since he genuinely did know everything she was quite happy to relinquish the argument and move on to another one, about publishing. Here she was on much stronger ground, though by now the alcohol had kicked in and everyone began repeating themselves and drawing irrational conclusions.

  They left early. They were meant to go to a serious dinner but her husband had begun to complain tragically and with feeling about a nausea he believed related to the lunchtime pork so in the end they didn’t attend, which made them both feel like absolute crumbs. Kathy didn’t sleep. She moved beds twice. A hornet was stuck on the inside of the insect screen. The air conditioning was revolving the air in the room without actually cooling it. In the morning her husband woke up and said I dreamt every time I rolled over I had to give you a little disintegrating box. It was hot, it was perfect, it was nearly right now.