Planes thundered above us, rattled fittings of the plastic dashboard, thrummed in my ribs.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it does.’
‘Good.’
I looked at her. I looked at the planes angling in to land, the planes roaring into the sky. And then, just as I had with Jenni the day before, I leant across the seats and kissed her.
Was kissed by her.
CONSIDER THE SIZE OF the planet and the number of people on it, two people twenty streets from one another on the same island seems very close. The night after the day I discovered where Segur lived, Kay slept twenty blocks from where I did.
Except there was a husband between us, an obstacle equivalent to a continent.
And did omitting Jenni from this geography mean I’d already banished her from my world? No, I told myself. No. Or was this denial my conscience, convincing me that by searching for Kay I was just investigating a feeling, an enigma? Yes, I argued, that was it. This infatuation is a test, galvanizing my love for Jenni.
And thinking back on this counsel I offered the plotting adulterer, I’d contend that the greatest lies told to the most gullible people are the lies we tell our fallible selves. Because after I’d watched Segur waltz past his doorman with that bouquet of flowers I’d immediately set about scheming my way into the building and finding out which was his apartment. Which apartment he shared with Kay. Once my plan hatched I walked over to the East Village and hunted down a courier’s shirt and matching cap. In Kinkos I bought a large brown envelope and printed off a label for a Mrs Kay Segur. After Chris had gone to work I’d stride past the doorman and ask the receptionist for Kay’s apartment number, blaming some jerk in the post room for not typing out the full address.
Before going to bed that night I stood facing my reflection in the bathroom mirror, my baseball cap and brown work shirt. I looked like a courier. I practised my shtick. ‘How are ya? Letter for a Kay Segur. I need it signed, though. Do you have an apartment number?’
No ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ seemed suitably New York, but I was still an Englishman. This time I repeated my lines, changing ‘Do you have’ into a ‘You got’ and turning the ‘t’s into ‘d’s. It sounded authentic enough, but when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see an American. Walking Manhattan I could spot fellow countrymen and women before they even opened their mouths to ask directions for Times Square or the Empire State Building. Language, food, genetics, our general attitude, shape of faces and bodies. Pronunciation sculpts jawlines, different muscles for different sounds. And here, in the fructose corn syrup society, where a false smile and gleaming teeth are essential make-up, I was an alien. We may share a common, or thereabouts, tongue, but ultimately we’re foreigners, the ‘special relationship’ akin to the good friend from school whose life took a tangent in the opposite direction.
Yet Kay seemed countryless. As I’ve always felt, too. I might cheer at a rugby international, boo the Aussies during an Ashes series, but I’m not weeping to ‘God Save the Queen’ or draping myself in a St George’s Cross for a World Cup.
I rehearsed my lines one last time, aware of how ridiculous I looked and no doubt sounded. But not aware of how askew these very actions were, of what I was actually doing.
WITHIN A MONTH OF meeting on her doorstep, Siobhan and I were fighting as often as we were having sex. She’d drink a bottle of Buckfast before we went out, then match me pint for pint the rest of the evening. We made love in pub toilets, on a train to Coventry. On a central reservation wooded with sapling trees snagged with rubbish.
When Siobhan talked about Armagh, I thought Nottingham was some kind of urban paradise. Beatings, bombs and shootings. Executions. I was never quite sure if I believed the story about a murder in her street. ‘My first memory,’ she swore. ‘I was out playing with my sister when three men pulled up in a car. One of them says, “Get inside, girls.” Och, we should have listened. They dragged our neighbour on to the lawn and shot him. Right there. In his own garden.’
But I had no doubt she was a quarter Moroccan.
‘That’s for Mammy to tell, not me.’ That’s what she said when I asked about her grandfather. ‘Good things can come from terrible men, put it that way.’
While Jenni passed off my university girlfriends as no more than flings, Siobhan grated on her, perhaps challenged her.
‘Why did you fall out?’ she’d ask.
I didn’t help her irritation by shrugging my shoulders. ‘I don’t know, it just came to a natural end.’
‘You got bored of wild sex?’
It was powerfully physical magnetism, I couldn’t deny that, but contended it was an older woman fling at just the time I needed one. Mid-twenties and lost. My mother gone.
And what Siobhan also said about good things coming from terrible men. Not that I was such a bad man. Then.
The first thing I did was quit selling windows. Siobhan said that with every pane of glass I tricked someone into buying I lost a part of my soul.
What would she think if she knew that I designed systems for banks who evicted defaulting homeowners? Banks that kicked families on to streets?
But then, degree or not, jobs in Nottingham were rare. I was lucky to be moving radiators in a plumbing supplies warehouse. Eight hours a day at minimum wage. Break times I sat in the car park with a guy named Tegsy, a lanky stonehead who talked conspiracy theories and UFOs. Alien intervention, he believed, was the only reason a fuel card he stole from a van driving job a year ago still worked.
‘Fucking year,’ he said with disbelief, cannabis smoke fogging his car. ‘And I’m still getting free petrol. I’ll fill you a can for a fiver.’
I told him I didn’t have any wheels, not since losing the Escort. Luckily my commute was twenty minutes along the canal to Siobhan’s. I’d walk the bridle path over the weir thinking about what she’d have planned for that evening. Because she worked at the theatre she had access to the costumes. I didn’t know what scene or period drama we’d be re-enacting until she answered the door. The bone corsets looked fantastic, but all the unlacing could get a bit tedious. If she left them on she’d have to explain the sweat marks and the stains. One night she dressed as an American policewoman, and when she put that plastic gun to the back of my head and cuffed me to the bedpost, I was genuinely a little nervous. Until she climbed on top. She’d tell me to try to fuck her off, and I’d thrust until the neighbours hammered on the walls and Siobhan would crouch down and bite my neck to muffle her screams.
If I’d known then that a good thing could be as damaging as something bad, I might have finished it all there and then. I definitely should have finished it when she said, ‘You know I’ve kissed girls before.’
I told her I didn’t doubt it.
‘You’re not shocked?’ She was getting dressed, stepping into her jeans, no underwear.
‘You love coming too much to be selective about who’s pushing your buttons.’ I thought I was being clever, but she didn’t like my saying that. She thought I was calling her a slag.
‘There’s a difference,’ she nearly shouted, ‘between being horny and fucking around.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’
‘I like to work on someone, get inside them.’ She was sitting on the floor thinking about putting her socks on.
‘You’re inside me,’ I told her.
She looked very serious, those nearly black eyes. Loosely she dropped her mouth open, the way she would, like a cat scenting the room. Then she lifted her bare feet up and told me to pull her jeans off.
‘Now hold my ankles.’
I did.
‘And push my legs as far apart as you can.’
We’d have sex, throw ourselves at each other, then drink and usually have a ‘wee smoke’, as Siobhan would say. I’d wake an hour before I had to get up for work, and slip inside her, the two of us drifting in and out of dreams, each other.
After her special breakfast of French toast and tomato sauce, I’d walk ba
ck along the canal to the warehouse, past the swans and ducks, the occasional heron creaking through the sky like a pterodactyl.
If I was sly about it I’d catch a nap in the stockroom, curling up in one of the bubble-wrapped baths for an hour before Tegsy would rouse me to load another lorry with radiators and bidets, faux gold taps and shower heads. At lunch I’d sit in his car trying to resist getting stoned. I watched him exhale smoke so long and hard that I wondered if he’d actually set fire to something in his lungs. It was after a particularly dragon-like plume of breath that I decided not to tell him about how Siobhan was on a mission to set up a threesome.
She’d slink the dance floor, looping her arms round the waist of whoever she fancied before leading them into a dark corner. And perhaps a kiss before the look-over, the proposition.
‘You have to look less masculine,’ Siobhan would say. ‘Be a bit more subtle than standing there and sticking out your chest.’ This was the kind of conversation we’d have walking home, just the two us, because number three had said no. In fact number three had usually said piss off.
Again, limbs flopped over the edge of the bed, I realized the whole escapade was beginning to drain me. Well, so I presumed. Because each time I thought this Siobhan would picture what the three of us would do together, who would be where and doing what.
‘Imagine this,’ she’d demonstrate. ‘Her legs like that, your mouth here, and me sitting on top.’
And the rush would return, that tingle in the veins. What I guessed shooting heroin might feel like.
But then the come-down, the fear of losing Siobhan to someone else, man or woman.
Marissa worked in an antique shop on Wollaton Road, her dad’s place. She was pale, red-haired and slight. Not that I was thinking about her body when I took in a photo of the grandfather clock I was hoping to sell. I just wanted a decent price for a damaged Victorian antique I’d found by the canal.
But the clock had nothing to do with it. Not once Siobhan sat Marissa down at the table in that narrow kitchen, stirring a milky tea while her father priced up my find. They were chatting about a thousand words per second when Siobhan reached out and stroked her hair. ‘God,’ she said. ‘It’s gorgeous.’ She trailed her fingers, narrowed those very dark eyes.
‘Natural shampoo,’ Marissa said. ‘Smell.’
Siobhan did. That close they could’ve kissed there and then. I was standing in the doorway with one eye on her dad peering into the back of my clock, and the other on the electric scene charging up the kitchen.
‘Strawberry,’ Siobhan confirmed.
Then Marissa’s dad came from the lounge with his glasses perched on the end of his nose. ‘The movement’s fine,’ he said. ‘But the housing is irreparable.’
While I was helping him cart the clock into the back of his Volvo, Siobhan was inviting Marissa round for a drink later.
‘Sure,’ I heard her respond. ‘Why not?’
Once I’d pocketed the fifty pounds and pulled the front door shut, I could smell the strawberry shampoo. As could Siobhan, standing at the window watching Marissa get into the car. She had the net curtain hooked back with a single finger. ‘Isn’t she a delicate wee thing.’
We got stoned in the afternoon because we were winding ourselves up about what might happen that evening.
‘I tell you,’ said Siobhan, leaning into the mirror and painting her eyelashes, ‘she knew what I was thinking about.’
‘I hope so.’ I was lying on the bed with a hard-on I was trying not to touch. I thought about asking Siobhan if she loved me, but the word seemed wrong in the context of what I was picturing. So I told her not to get jealous.
‘Me?’ She looked at my reflection. ‘You’re more likely to get funny about it.’
Her dark hair fell about her shoulders, a frame for my favourite dress, the blue one printed with tiny white flowers.
‘See.’
She was stunning. A seductress. Almost a witch. She twirled and lifted her hem to show that she had nothing on, that she’d shaved herself bare.
‘How are you going to compete?’
And what more should I say than yes, another woman came to the house and drank wine in the narrow kitchen. That we got pissed and had a smoke and opened up the whisky. That Siobhan thought it’d be funny if I put on one of her dresses and paraded before them, fooling around until she volunteered Marissa to show me how it was done. And Marissa did, pulling off her top, intoxicating us with that strawberry shampoo, her little red bra.
Not long after that we were upstairs. Arranging limbs how Siobhan had planned. Legs here, mouth there. Tangled. Strung out on hormone.
But what does all that matter?
When I walked naked to the bathroom I thought I was some kind of Greek god. I had a barefoot piss with both my hands resting upon the cistern. Then I went back to the bedroom and they were kissing, entwined. The pale skin of Marissa burning on the dark flesh of Siobhan.
I was no longer that Greek god. I never had been.
I was a man who’d lie to old ladies to sell a pane of glass.
A man who’d fly across the Atlantic to court a married woman, while his future wife planned their wedding.
This.
FROM DAWN I SAT in a cafe on the north side of 23rd Street, waiting for Segur. With a plastic fork I pushed an omelette round a plate watching for him to leave for work so I could see his wife. I did have second thoughts on what I was doing. In fact I had third thoughts, but felt with the effort I’d made on the courier outfit I should at least see the plan through.
Such practicalities to absolve guilt.
It was just before seven o’clock when he swooshed through the revolving doors. Instead of turning left or right he walked to the edge of the sidewalk and looked left and right before, to my horror, jogging straight across to the very cafe where I was sitting.
I scrambled on my jacket to cover the courier shirt just as he opened the door. While he ordered coffee, I reached for, and dropped, the baseball cap.
‘What the hell are the chances?’ he bellowed as he turned and recognized me.
‘No way!’ I cried. ‘Chris Segur!’
‘You bet.’
I stood. We shook. I tried to mirror his surprised face at this seemingly remarkable happenstance.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I could ask the same.’ I laughed, almost hysterical with nerves.
‘Crappy as it is,’ Segur began loudly, so the girl behind the counter overheard, ‘it’s the closest place to get a cup of Joe.’
I didn’t care where he got his coffee. But what I did discern from his reaction was that Kay hadn’t confessed to him about the field, the kiss.
‘What brings you to the neighbourhood?’ he asked, ripping open a pack of sugar. ‘Sitting in my coffee shop at dawn.’
‘I’ve been put up in Hell’s Kitchen.’
‘And you’re walking twenty blocks for breakfast?’
I laughed, longer than his joke deserved. I laughed to buy time because I had no answer. None until my subconscious fired one out for me. ‘Jet-lag,’ I said, or rather a deep deceptive entity within me did. It was as though I’d just laid an ace on the table.
‘You got to walk it off, huh?’ And Segur folded his hand by finishing the lie for me. This was my chance to jump in, waffling about work, how I’d practically been put on the plane to New York by my boss, star man to run workshops between merging banks.
‘He knows you’re worth the air fare,’ Segur complimented me. ‘Well, hey,’ he said, stirring his coffee before checking his watch. ‘Why don’t we swap numbers? I’m going to repay that favour by taking you to a Giants game.’
I said he didn’t need to feel obliged, and that crashing on the way to the airport was hardly an act that needed reciprocating.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You got her there on time.’ I nearly asked him how she was, but let him go on. ‘And I’ve got a box at Meadowlands. Besides, I want to hear you eat
your words about rugby when you see some real tackles.’
We exchanged numbers, I muttered some comeback about rugby.
‘Give me a call next Friday.’ We shook again. At the door he turned to say, ‘Have a good one.’
When I bent over to pick up the baseball cap I saw I’d left the fake Kay letter face up. What if he’d looked down and read the address? I’d like to know how my subconscious could have saved me from that one.
I WAS SPOOKED, TAKEN by surprise, the followed had turned upon the stalker. When Segur walked into that cafe I felt like a schoolboy caught stealing, the thief arrested with his hand in the till.
On the walk back to Hell’s Kitchen, more than ready to change back into my suit and lose the courier garb, I resolved to stop the charade, the spectacle even, of a man chasing a married woman. We’d kissed, yes, and felt some undercurrent of emotion sweeping through us that day. But perhaps it was the crash adrenalin spiking a high that neither of us knew what to do with.
In an office tower on Sixth Avenue, on a desk with nothing but meeting agendas and diagrams of the bank’s staff laid out like family trees, I was the diligent employee. Not knowing any of the New York consultancy particularly well, I could bury myself in work, once again allow myself to be carried through the day on sums and spreadsheets, the phone conversations of professional bullshit that were as far from emotion as twirling figures and calculator punching.
However, the workshops between vice presidents of the various departments were akin to warring generals deciding on terms of surrender. I had always believed that company mergers were more like the give and take of a relationship. What you bring to the other and what you lose of yourself, good and bad, ultimately decides identity, who you are in this two-into-one process. The acquiring company, the one with real command of how operations will now run, is the true power broker. Not that the acquired company doesn’t have a say. The production lines don’t whirr without the willing workers. But, whether the new company is a success or failure, identities change.
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 7