by Olivia Laing
*
Breakfast. Three triangles of watermelon, one cup of coffee, one pot of yoghurt, one small jar of honey. That’s how it went. Other people ate strawberry crostata or wholemeal croissants or heaven forbid eggs five ways and a selection of meats. The toga people were emerging, hungover and victorious. Hello Harry, hello Lordy. I woke up and I’ve got a stye. Bloody painful. No I’ve never had one, how have I bloody well got one today. They had conducted their festivities in a tent on the terrace. It was still there now, empty and doleful, poles festooned with ivy and small pale flowers. They were talking about the tower block that had burned down. I was coming along the Westway and there it was, all blackened said the stye woman. How many people died, eighty, eighty-five. But they don’t know yet. Fire that hot you don’t get bodies. What about bones. I think they do it by the teeth. Kathy’s husband pushed several grapes into his mouth at once. He was listening to a different conversation, between a guest and an Italian lawyer. I was brought up Catholic, Opus Dei, I know what it’s like, the lawyer said. Mafia, the guest said and the lawyer shrugged hugely.
On a sunlounger a few minutes later, Kathy assessed her life choices. Not bad. She was forty, she had a small diamond on her right hand, she was looking at a mountain, no one currently was in her way. She was completely alone, but utterly surrounded. Last night, before going out, she’d had a serious conversation with her husband about marriage. I don’t like proximity, she told him. But why he kept saying. What’s the source of that feeling. It wasn’t a feeling that had a source, except in the way the source of hay fever is flowers. It was just she kept sneezing, it was just that she needed seven hours weeks months years a day totally alone, trawling the bottom of the ocean, it’s why she spent so much time on the internet. So you like talking but you don’t like it when people talk back her husband said rudely, but that wasn’t quite it. She just didn’t know how to deal with someone else being there, especially asleep. She was right on the edge of the bed, she was doing her best. In two weeks she’d make official promises, in language as embarrassingly hewn and potentially hubristic as the Labour manifesto Ed Miliband had had carved into stone. Where was that stone, she wondered. Had it too been turned into tarmac? Were all the roads in England composed of memorials that had become publicly toxic? She looked on the internet. The EdStone was in the garden of the Ivy. I promise to control immigration, I promise homes to buy and actions on rent, with this NHS I commit to time to care, I wed a country where the next generation has higher living standards than the last. How long did they think it could go on for. Kathy wanted the NHS forever obviously, but she was fairly certain that by the time she was an old lady they’d be eating out of rubbish dumps, sheltering from a broiling impossible sun. It was all done, it was over, there wasn’t any hope. The week before she left Britain an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off the Larsen C ice shelf and floated away. The Gulf of Mexico was full of dead fish, there was a trash heap circulating in the ocean that would take a week to walk across. She tried to limit her husband’s addiction to the tumble dryer, she never flew to anywhere more than eight hours away, but even lying here on her back she was probably despoiling something. What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, living at the end of the world, but then she couldn’t help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest.
Because she’d dreamt about him, Kathy had emailed her previous lover. She kept it light, she wanted him to know she was having a good time. Hot in Tuscany she said sunnily. Come see us when you’re back. Last time she’d seen him was in the bar of a cinema. She’d drunk beer, he’d drunk coffee. I have to go he said, I’m having tea with the King of Spain. She was suspicious but when she got home she Googled and the King of Spain was definitely in town. That had been several weeks ago, and her email was only two sentences long but nevertheless her ex responded as if she’d been ceaselessly badgering him for the past three months. He expressed ignorance about her region of Italy, concern about the wildfires and then told her he would see her in the autumn. Disappearing now, he concluded. Kathy had made a career an entire life an art out of continual disappearances and she was incensed at being upstaged. I’m IN ANOTHER COUNTRY she shouted to her husband. I HAVE ALREADY DISAPPEARED. Why does he always try and OUT-DISAPPEAR ME. She really was angry. Why are you so feverish about Sébastien, her husband asked reasonably. She tried to explain, it wasn’t that she missed him exactly, or that she liked him exactly, more that she felt continually outmanoeuvred. She’d once made a film with a man with whom she was/wasn’t having an affair. It was called Blue Tape. She had been a paragon of invincibility she hadn’t given a half a quarter an eighth of an inch. She’d had all the cards, she sucked the man’s cock while he stuttered and stumbled and then she directed him through a passable hand job, not like that, not like that, faster, higher, more precise. At the end he was a wreck and she sat on the couch composed and triumphant, that she thought now was a successful relationship.
Power and ice, their similarities. Maybe her edges were melting, maybe she was being subsumed, maybe she should grow up, maybe this is what adulthood was supposed to be like, a glacier toppling into a bath. Why do you need to win everything Kathy, why do you think it’s such a fucking race. She had gone to a very exclusive private school, she was always a little smelly, she was the cleverest girl bar two. Who were twins, imagine, with extremely wealthy blonde hair. The place sucked, the place blew, she wanted to be the absolute best especially since nobody liked her or even talked to her much, but the twins the twins were extraordinarily talented and naturally gifted, also they had that multilingual good manners veneer that only comes with money. Kathy’s family was rich too but in a more chaotic withholding way, like actually her grandmother held the purse-strings and her mother was pretty much a hobo, a Barneys and the Plaza wreck, she went to the sort of stores where French boys would purse their lips and say non, disgusting to the first outfit and aiaiai madame to the second, no matter what it looked like. Her mother bought it, she always bought it, this was the 1980s, she bought it Every Single Time. It’s Alaïa Kathy, it’s Comme Kathy, it’s a white cowl with bat sleeves Kathy, I’m wearing it to lunch. Later Kathy would take it from her closet and wear it to school, chew the sleeves in maths class, get an A but not the best A, consider her future. This wasn’t exactly the future she’d considered, but after the Times Square years she knew it could be a whole lot worse.
What had happened to her mother is that she’d cut her wrists in the bathtub. What had happened to her mother is that she had checked into a slightly rundown once quite exclusive still pretty nice hotel, tipped the bellboy, chatted to the night staff and then OD’d in the bedroom, not paying the bill. Kathy had spent maybe two days maybe two weeks hysterical, calling all the hospitals, trying to track her down before the rest of the family thought to tell her. They were that kind of family, estranged, huge upholstered couches of absolute silence between them. When her grandmother died a few years later, of natural causes, Kathy thought she would inherit a fairly substantial whack; indeed many people thought she had inherited a fairly substantial whack but that was quite wrong. She lived off hustle and her books and she got by, but the days of being wealthy though behind and all about her were not in fact ongoing.
Her husband leant over at that moment and said did you hear those people at breakfast? They said where’s David? David’s in his room looking for his passport and money. Every time he stays in a hotel he hides them in a different secret place and then he can never find them again. I’m putting the tickets at the back of my red notebook, her husband continued. I want you to know that. He’d spent the entire morning at reception, attempting to buy their train tickets to Rome. It had been quite successful in the end, it had necessitated several phone calls in multiple languages, he held the printout proudly.
The afternoon went slightly downhill. They ate and then waited under the hornet tree for their ba
gs to be moved from their third room to their fourth. The third room had been quite ordinary, just a regular apartment, but in the fourth they were restored to the pinnacle of luxury. The room was constructed like a New York loft that had been placed under exposed Tuscan beams and roof tiles. The bathroom was enormous and had a glass door. I confess I was rather unsure about that too her husband said when she pointed it out. Kathy fell asleep and woke to what she thought was thunder but was apparently more bags on the move. She picked up her laptop and leafed through the internet. Almost immediately two things annoyed her. One was an article about a painter she liked by a critic she hated. The other was a profile in an American magazine about a novelist. What especially annoyed her was a comparison between the novelist’s latest book and an oral history of Chernobyl. But her imaginary oral histories are exquisitely attuned to the ways in which humans victimise each other, it said. Kathy’s least favourite word on earth was exquisite. Kathy found nuclear war a considerably more seemly subject than nuclear families. Kathy was avant-garde, middle-class-in-flight, Kathy did not like the bourgeoisie. It was too fucking hot, she had better things to do than read about the window frames in other people’s houses. She lay on her back and stared at the tiles. What, exactly?
Her husband had begun a soliloquy about Oat Krunchies. They were little bits of oats like a pillow with air in the middle so when you bit on them they went crunch and collapsed. They weren’t very nice, not really. Oh go away you stupid thing. Britain indeed. Sorry, it was just pointing at something on Twitter I didn’t like. Well now I have a photo of your extended neck, that’s nice. She loved it when he began to ramble. Sometimes she’d catch him at home doing a complicated task, maybe baking bread or making a sauce and speaking to himself in a low confiding tone, offering exhortation and encouragement, like a small boy only not at all ridiculous. If this was love she’d take it, lying next to him naked, both fiddling with their phones. Earlier, he’d ordered ice cream in an Italian accent and couldn’t believe it when she told him he was speaking English. He could speak Italian, he’d just gone off on the wrong foot.
Everyone had a husband here. She’d never spent much time with heterosexuals, she didn’t know there were so many of them, and all so similar. White people, men older, women younger. She’d met one woman in the bar, made eye contact, possibly said hi and the woman had seized upon her and began to speak unceasingly, as if she was being interviewed for a documentary exclusively about her life and times. She told Kathy about her daughter’s school, her son’s school, she told her about her tiny little house in Sloane Square and her estate in Warwickshire, so nice, she articulated clearly, for the children to have room to run around. She bemoaned parents who hired tutors for their children and then she described her son’s tutor quite a different kind of tutor, who had advised them to let him be exactly as he was. She looked like a little doll, like a little pleased girl with well-brushed hair, it seemed impossible that she might be a mother, but there they were, her children, drifting into disaffected view. Kathy had the same shoes as the daughter but in a different colour, it was embarrassing, it didn’t make a bond. She had so clear a sense of light coming through an oak tree that afterwards she thought the woman had described it, but no, it was just the emoji the visual read her brain pulled up when someone said Warwickshire. The woman’s husband was called Boris, he’d quit his job, sometimes Kathy saw him around on the way to the pool and she’d bob one finger and smile. Rich heterosexuals, landed, entitled, when she said husband she didn’t mean that.
*
It hadn’t always been like this. In New York in the spring, Kathy had stayed in a railroad apartment in Bushwick. There were no doors between the rooms, and before she went to sleep each night she unknotted two strips of indigo fabric to screen off the bedroom from the kitchen. The light still leaked through, but the real obstacle to sleep was the small grey cat, the apartment’s permanent official resident. It was a street cat with skinny flanks and a bobtail like a rabbit. From the beginning the cat took against her. It expressed its displeasure by crying and smashing glasses, and eating the invitation to the Comme des Garçons press preview at the Met. One night it put its front paws into its water bowl and smashed it repeatedly into the kitchen cupboard. It’s not like Kathy was doing much of anything, except meeting friends and talking feverishly, but she still wanted to sleep at night. This went on for five days. It threw up on the rug, it kicked granules of piss-soaked litter all over the floor and then walked them into her sheets, it covered her clothes and laptop in fur and dust. Was it sick? Its coat had lost its sheen, its flanks were hollow, it woke her at 2 and 2:30 and 3 until she was so tired she walked into walls and trapped her finger bloodily in the shower stall. Everything was dirty, mould in the grout, grease around the cooker, New York dirt, no big deal, just eight generations of people living in the same small rooms. The wardrobe key jammed and Kathy had to take the door off its hinges with a kitchen knife, then the front key snapped off in the lock as she was coming home. Bodies: hers wasn’t feeling good. Everyone was in town for Frieze, she kept running into Matt, she saw Charlie and Rich. She saw people she hadn’t seen in years, London people, art world people like Tom and Nicky. It felt like all the doors were open and she could pass into practically any room, she was so happy and so tired, a crop of spots by her mouth, drinking too much coffee, getting caught in a storm on 1st Avenue, running up the street jumping puddles in rain so hard it took her shoes two days to dry. In the end the owner of the flat arranged for a friend to take care of the cat. All Kathy had to do was deliver it in a cab. She assembled its arsenal of possessions, its litter tray and litter and biscuits and bowls. She tucked a chewed toy mouse in and looked around for the cat. It was sleeping on a shelf. She climbed up on a stool and lifted it down, claws flailing. In the cab it vomited noisily in its carrier and then howled with despair. Crawling across the Williamsburg Bridge in pouring rain, the driver kept talking about his friend’s pitbull while she wanted to weep with misery for the cat’s unhappiness, its soiled state. When she got back she scrubbed the floors and took all the bedding to the laundry and that night she slept on clean sheets like a Kushner, like a king.
Everyone was there, it was a village, it was truly great. Kathy went for eggs with Sarah, Matt came in, they walked together to Abraco to find David. Charlie was at the Standard with Paul, you’re all talking British the other Matt said. Joseph was early, it was his early stage, he kept beating her everywhere. 3pm, he texted. Read it and weep. Is New York different, people kept asking, do you feel like it’s changed. She hadn’t been back for a year, the longest spell she’d ever spent away. It was the week Obamacare was rolled back, everyone was talking about pre-existing conditions. David was wearing a ski jacket zipped to the neck. I don’t even have a body, I’m so fat. David and Kathy had once spent an afternoon discussing how they’d kill themselves in elaborate detail in a borrowed apartment on 46th Street. They were both so unhappy then, it was like a touchstone to know there was a way to stop it. But here they still were. The line of stubble along his jaw was white, he still walked on tippy-toes like a little boy. There were white hairs in Kathy’s bangs too, a white stripe. She cut her own hair in the bathroom, she took out the trash.
She was walking down 1st Avenue when the Comey news broke. 9 May 2017, early evening. Carl texted, Twitter’s ABLAZE gurl. Everyone was saying it was a banana republic, at dinner Jim said what blows my mind is that we’ll be talking about this in years to come, what we were doing, but we’ll know how it panned out. They ate Chicken Zsa Zsa and salad, they ate foie gras, they drank beer and Riesling, they laughed all night, that was the night the President fired the Director of the FBI, they were scared and sick, Jim said he’s taking a giant shit on our nation. It wasn’t quite warm, earlier she’d bought mint ice cream from a bodega and the Chinese guy behind the counter hadn’t understood the word plasters, you mean Band-Aid? Her feet were bleeding from new trainers, new Nikes she’d bought in Barneys that afternoon. The weather
was never hot enough, though when Marc lovely Marc said it was the most beautiful spring he’d ever seen she’d agreed, it was, it was so green and excessive, so floral and bosomy and bedecked. Everyone talked about politics all the time but no one knew what was happening. This is what it’s like in dictatorships, Alex said, people only know what’s happening because of gossip. Alex was Russian, his grandfather had been Stalin’s chief bodyguard, he knew what he was talking about Kathy figured. This was 40, she’d thought in her little bed over Ireland, upgraded as previously mentioned, this was the whole fucking trip.
*
It was their penultimate day in Italy. 5 August 2017. Her husband had been on the terrace, he relayed a conversation with the eminent psychiatrist. I only give second opinions, he’d said. I work on a knife-edge, I have to get it right. The people I see are wealthy, autocratic, psychotic, used to complete control – oh look there’s the lizard. Her husband loved lizards. This one was green, like an elegant crocodile, its legs moved like someone riding a bicycle. Periodically it stopped, lifted its head and sniffed the air. Now it was looking back over its shoulder, exposing a paler belly. Her husband was rapt, he looked bewitched. I just love it he said. Whole minutes of lizard watching are so rare. It’s coming back over here. What’s he doing now, behind the tree trunk? Probably hiding back in the flower bed now, don’t you think?
Kathy had always had unsatisfactory relationships and her current unsatisfactory relationship was with sleep. Sleep was a withholding lover. She lay there and waited for it, hot and itchy and uncertain. Was enough written about sleep. It was so delightful, the bit when you were just toppling over the edge. A butterfly with markings like piano keys came past. She’d been lying face down on her lounger, her cheek jammed into a damp towel. She wanted to drift off but instead she kept remembering troublesome things, like the paedophile who’d been moved into a house on her old road. She was going out with Sébastien at the time, it was him who’d found out about the paedophile and really it was him who’d kept her abreast as the case developed. At first it seemed that something small had been blown out of proportion but later like something big and seriously unpleasant had been hushed up, which is to say that the paedophile was still living happily or not in the same house and riding about Kathy’s own streets on his bike, a little rumpled and sorrowful but very much at large. The last time Kathy had seen Sébastien he’d given her an update, I hadn’t thought about it for weeks he’d said, but I knew I was seeing you so I looked it up. It made Kathy feel uneasy, that they’d been so linked in his mind, but then it had also made her uneasy when Sébastien used to lean against her window giving her larky reports on where he thought the paedophile might be. It occurred to her that she might have bad judgement about people. The problem, she knew, she’d actually written it down, was that she liked liars and evasive people, she liked seeing what they’d say, she liked being continually shocked surprised disappointed by the way they were never where she thought they’d be, it was the same exactly as how she felt watching a lizard vanish into a previously invisible crack or cranny, something in her applauded any instinct for freedom, however personally inconvenient to her. The paedophile however she wanted locked up, she was opposed to prisons in 99% of all cases the exception being this. She was for any expression of sexuality whatsoever, nothing shocked her except an absence of consent, not when there were a million at least people who wanted, who really got hot about acting out no consent, there was no need. Just images, some people she knew had said in the paedophile’s defence, as if the small bodies depicted weren’t real, somewhere, hurt.