‘Death and sadness?’ Kay waited for me to turn to her. ‘I think we can do better than that.’
I nearly leant forward, pressed my lips to hers, but she took my arm and led us towards the Great Lawn. ‘Let’s get out of the shadow. It’s cold.’
Then she took my hand. I felt like a boy. We walked into the low autumn sun, past a group of kids pinging baseballs into the cloudless blue, all of us focused on the arc of stitched leather hit skyward. I had a flashback of playing cricket in the park years ago, the simplicity of a struck ball falling back to earth.
Then Kay suddenly stopped, and we both stood very still.
In the middle of the Great Lawn, beneath that dome of city and space, we were like two figures in a Manhattan snowglobe. Kay turned. ‘You didn’t cross the Atlantic just to talk to me.’
I hadn’t.
‘So?’
So very slowly I moved towards her lips. She took a deep breath, so did I. And we kissed, very gently at first, as if testing the water before diving in, submerging our bodies wholly in the other.
THE ETERNAL HOMELESS FEELING I carry in my bones has nothing to do with a roof over my head, possessions. I know this because I have a home, things, objects that I bought in a shop. They all meant nothing in my rented bedsit, my rooms and flats. Nothing until I moved in with Jenni. For the first time ever, I felt a sense of place. That our bedroom looked on to the roof of a Chinese takeaway, and that mice scampered about the kitchen, meant nothing because we had each other.
So when did I once more feel that twitch in my toes? As if the floor beneath my feet, the carpet and polished tiles, could fall away with each step I took. A year later? Three years? A day in August on a wooded hillside?
Or in the middle of New York when I stood in a park?
Because we kissed.
Because we kissed and I believed again that if a home could be found anywhere it was in the heart space of another.
WE STOOD VERY STILL, embracing in the centre of that expanse of grass, set square in the middle of the city. If I’d been asked my name I couldn’t have answered. Mute to who I was because I already wanted to be part of someone else. A woman who could reach into my soul and grab hold of it with both hands.
‘Hug me tighter,’ she said.
I pulled her pelvis hard against mine.
She bit my neck.
I traced her eyebrows with my thumbs. She hooked her hand behind my ear and pulled my hair, pulled me back to her mouth.
We were on view to the whole park, but screened by distance, I presume. Because if any of the joggers, strollers, or mothers with pushchairs noticed us I didn’t notice them. I looped my arms round her waist, felt the small of her back, slipped my hand under her top and followed the knobbly contours of her spine. She broke away from our kiss, studied my face, trailed a finger over my cheekbones, my nose.
‘You owe me your story,’ she said.
‘Which bit?’
‘A truth,’ she said. ‘Something that hurts.’
Something that hurts, I thought, letting the words choose the memory.
‘When my mum and dad were married, when my mum was pregnant with me, they were out of work and renting a run-down house in Nottingham. An Indian family lived next door, Sikhs. One morning their little boy came round with a tiny black kitten wrapped in a towel. He begged my dad to take it. His own father had said he’d kill it if it was still there when he got back home. Reluctantly, my dad took the kitten, worried they couldn’t afford to feed it.’
‘Are your mom and dad still together?’
‘They split when I was three.’
‘You lived with your mom.’
‘And then my stepdad.’
Kay shook her head. ‘I know something about them.’
‘Till he kicked me out.’
‘But your mom, you still get along?’
I used the words passed away.
‘Oh, Sam. I’m sorry.’
And then I told her how long ago and nothing else, quickly carrying on, not wanting the story to turn into my mother’s.
‘Before we moved the cat lived with us, me, my mum and sister. But once she met my stepfather the cute kitten was long gone. Dinx was mean. Hissing, scratching and biting. She wouldn’t come in his house. She caught birds and drank milk from a bowl outside the back door. Anyway, my dad would take us out every other weekend, parking out front, never knocking on the door. Just sitting till me and my sister got in the car. This one Saturday morning he saw Dinx on the path and got out. When he went to stroke her I warned him he’d be scratched, but he scooped her up like a baby. She was purring like a kitten, transformed in that single cuddle from my father.’
I’d told the story staring into space, through the scenery of Central Park all the way to an estate in the Midlands. When I checked to see if she’d been listening it was as if she was standing on that pavement with me.
‘That’s sweet,’ she said. ‘But what hurt?’
‘After that she was the cutest cat ever. What hurt was she’d been angry all that time, when all she needed was a single moment of affection to change.’
‘I want more,’ she said. ‘You. Tell me something else.’
I did. Between hugging and kissing I told the abridged story of what I thought amounted to who I was, the weekend dad, a stepfather counting down the days till he could kick me from his world.
‘That’s tough,’ said Kay. ‘Being thrown out, and then losing your mom like that.’
She was kissing my jawline, talking softly into my ear. We eased our faces apart, looked at each other. I focused on the rust-coloured flare in her iris, a tiny, iridescent flaw. Scars and blemishes. Physical and psychological, but she was richer and more beautiful for them.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, tracing my fingertip over the line of her eyebrow, a healed score of lighter skin.
‘Another time,’ she said abruptly. Then she looked beyond me, beyond the Manhattan skyline. The moment she turned away I felt alone.
‘Hey,’ I said, gently putting my palm under her ear. ‘Just here.’
When she raised her head she was crying. Tears magnified her eyes, drops streamed down her cheeks.
‘I should go,’ she said. ‘I have to go.’
‘Why?’ I asked, feeling her body recede from my grip.
‘We both should.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, looked at me once more and turned.
‘Kay,’ I called, as she walked away, hearing a voice seemingly not mine. At least until I said her name a second time, when she did look again, briefly, walking backwards as I watched her get smaller, falling into distance. I had a terrifying thought that I’d never see her again. That I’d be nailed to this spot for ever. When she disappeared beyond the pine trees at the back of the museum I turned and walked in the opposite direction.
I went back past the Delacorte Theatre and the Swedish Cottage, taking the path alongside the edge of the lake we’d looked at from the rock. Long shadows stretched over the water, trees and rooftops. It was cold now, and the people we’d seen had gone, the dog walker and the woman reading the book. I overtook a man pushing a pretzel cart and followed the road round to Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon memorial. The black and white mosaic spelling Imagine was ringed by fresh flowers. Tourists took photos of each other. A Spanish couple asked me to take a picture of them in front of the tributes. But I apologized, backed away. I’d had enough of the park and headed for the exit on to 72nd Street, between the stalls selling Lennon memorabilia, photos of him and Yoko, the I love NY T-shirts and circular sunglasses.
From the gate I recognized the Dakota apartment building where he was killed. Shot dead by a man obsessed.
FOR TWO DAYS I was a zombie. By this I mean that I walked and talked, functioned in my job, sat at my desk and performed sums, read business reports and digested statistics, yet I was numb. The living dead. Numb to the world, my own life.
The kiss, Kay walking across the park, her hands, playe
d on in my mind. Too vivid to be called memory. Two days in the past, yes, but if reality is how we make sense of it all, how the brain transforms information and understanding into whatever a self is, then the very fibre of who I was now contained that day, her.
When she didn’t reply to my third text I rang. Hearing her voicemail I hung up, with the thought that Segur could discover my message.
I wondered if she’d heard my story and changed her mind. Decided I wasn’t worth the effort. I could think up a thousand different reasons why she walked away, but was still no closer to why she’d slipped from my grasp the way she had.
And I was daydreaming this when Lucas came up and asked for the agenda for his communications workshop, a plan, I suddenly realized, I’d been detailed to write up.
‘No bullshitting, Sam. This is a big one.’
I was supposed to have an outline of how he was going to help the banks announce their merger to both media and employees. The timing of this was crucial, as stocks and shares could rise or fall on a press release. It was similar to a plan adulterous lovers might make for when and where to finally tell their partners.
‘What the fuck, Sam?’
He wasn’t happy. My slack work meant he had to wing a workshop the consultancy had been handsomely paid to carry out. I apologized, swore at myself.
‘You can curse all fucking day but it won’t change my meeting now.’ With that he shook his head, looked at the clock and stormed off, no doubt mentally preparing the memo that would be sent to the London office.
When I caught the train out to Park Slope to join Ruben and Miyuki for an ‘Election Party’ I was hardly in the mood for socializing, getting excited about a presidential race I was ineligible to vote in anyway. Obama and McCain had ruled the news networks for days, and bubbling optimism among the New York democrats was palpable on the streets, in the bars and train carriages.
‘That’s not the attitude, bro,’ said Ruben when I told him I was having trouble being enthusiastic. ‘If you’re President of the US, you’re practically world leader. This affects you too.’
He handed me a bottle of beer. There were about twenty people in his apartment, drinking, glued to the results coming in on the TV and high-fiving when a state came in blue.
‘I can’t tell you how bad that sounds,’ I replied to his ‘world leader’ tag.
‘McCain in charge?’
‘Presuming you’re planet boss if you run the US.’
Ruben laughed. ‘We’ve got to get it while we can, because this recession is going to bust whoever’s balls end up in the White House.’
I sat on the sofa, chatted with his friends, young professionals, some out of jobs, some waiting to be told they were out of one. But none were gloomy about the prospect. A house full of Democrats on that particular night was about to be ecstatic, the cheers and whoops getting louder and louder as more blue states flashed on to the screen.
When the count put Barack Obama in the White House, firecrackers rippled in the streets only seconds after his face appeared on television sets across the nation accompanied by the words, President Elect.
The room exploded with streamers, popped corks ricocheting off the ceiling. The party quickly spilled into the streets, mostly the young Brooklynites bouncing with chants of ‘O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma’, while older residents watched from their stoops.
‘Yes we did,’ bellowed a flag-waving black woman.
‘No more Bush,’ called a guy wearing a jacket covered in Obama badges.
A crowd gathered at an intersection between two packed bars, manically cheering when a pair of hands hoisted a lifesize cut-out of Obama above their heads. A crowd hero-worshipping a man who looked as if he were walking on air, and perhaps that night actually could have.
I saw Ruben and his friends dancing in the road. More fireworks crackled above the rooftops, amplifying the cacophony of car horns and cheers.
I stood in a doorway, oddly detached, as if it were all occurring on a news network and not the actual street I was watching from. When the joyous came past looking for high fives I had no choice but to reciprocate. Awkward and English. A fraud. A fraud in the celebrations, in my own life. Somewhere in my locked heart I was happy Obama had been elected, but perhaps too selfish, too wrapped up in my own drama to care about an entire country’s.
I slipped away, walked to the subway. More flag-waving Obama supporters and honking carloads came noisily into the night as I descended into the station, a text buzzing my phone seconds before I lost the signal.
If I were a praying man I’d have prayed it was Kay.
Wow! Must be amazing for you to be in the US tonight! You enjoying yourself at Ruben and Miyuki’s? Call later. xox
Not Jenni.
So if indeed I were a praying man that would mean I believed in God and that God could see my stained soul.
THE DAY AFTER THE election I walked to work between a parade of Obama faces staring out from the newsstands, T-shirts and badges. The buzz on the sidewalk was a black man in the White House, as if the historic election had put a spring in the national step of my fellow commuters, Democrat or not. Even the staunch Republicans in the consultancy managed a sense of pride when the rest of the world was thanking the US for finally making the right decision. Others – well, mainly Lucas – warned that Obama was a ‘Commie bastard’ out to steal tax breaks and bonuses. ‘Kiss the USA goodbye,’ he bitterly predicted.
I was hiding from his bullshit at my desk, trying to catch up on a multitude of tasks I was getting behind on, when Segur rang. I let the phone rattle on the desk, paralysed by fear when I saw his name flash on the caller ID.
Then I answered.
‘Hey, Sam. Catch you napping?’ His voice was as sparky and snappy as usual.
‘Working hard, working hard,’ I fired back. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘Well, fucked economy or not, we got this swanky awards dinner for financial securities tonight.’ From his tone I presumed he knew nothing of Kay and me in the park.
‘A black tie do?’
‘Black tie. Champagne, you know the scene. Listen, a guy at my table bailed out on me this morning and I need someone not part of the company to take his seat. You in?’
‘You need a man off the substitute bench.’
‘The seat was for the husband of an area sales manager. Turns out he’s off with some secretary, yada yada, we know the story. Anyway, free champagne, and save a lady from feeling uncomfortable sitting next to an empty name tag.’
I said yes.
I said yes because I guessed Kay would be there, too. Seated across the table. Whatever she wanted, or didn’t want, from me, I needed to see her.
‘The Ritz Carlton, Battery Park. Seven o’clock. Get yourself a dinner jacket, shine your shoes. You’ll enjoy it.’
For the rest of the day I sat at my desk and made mistakes, divided by decimal points when I should have been calculating with hundreds. Not the pressure of work, but the pressure of her. Come five o’clock the sun beamed into the midtown office with all the fiery intensity of a dying star about to consume the world. I had the thought that if we all went up in flames at the same time it wouldn’t be so bad.
Then that star dipped, set behind towers of steel. Downtown Manhattan looked like a silhouette cut from paper and pasted on to the sunset.
I thought of the phone call I’d promised Jenni after work.
‘WHY DOES IT FEEL like a million years since I’ve heard your voice?’ I was sitting in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library. Jenni had the phone to her ear as she cooked up a late Italian meal for one in our Maida Vale kitchen.
‘Sorry, sweetheart.’ And I meant it. ‘I’ve been busy as hell. You know how it is over here.’
‘You’re missing the cats growing up.’ She laughed. ‘God, listen to me. Talking about them as if they were our kids.’
‘Can’t you starve them a bit?’ I joked. ‘Keep them the same size for when I get back.’
; ‘Aaah, don’t be cruel.’
‘You know I don’t mean it.’
‘I’ve had a bugger of a day,’ she said, triggering the two of us swapping complaints about work, colleagues and clients. ‘And the more dippy CEOs I meet, the more convinced I am that women will run the world sooner rather than later.’
I told her I didn’t doubt it, that men were only clever enough to know what fools they were next to women.
She laughed. ‘Well, knowing that much is a start.’
But in the humour she heard a fade in my conversation, a distance.
‘Are you missing me?’ she suddenly asked, a waver to her voice, a doubt that struck me with sadness.
‘What a question to ask,’ I said sharply. ‘I don’t want to be here. I want to be sitting down in our flat, a glass of wine and one of your Italian specials.’
‘I should hope so. New York has nothing on me.’
Above the park, a rash of starlings swirled.
‘It hasn’t,’ I lied.
‘Shit,’ snapped Jenni. ‘The pasta.’ I heard the hiss of water on the hob. ‘We’re bubbling over here.’
‘Don’t burn yourself.’
‘It’s your fault,’ she said. ‘Mr Distraction.’
Just as she was turning the hob down, stirring the spaghetti and balancing her phone to her ear I said, ‘You know I love you.’
‘Who the hell burns pasta?’ She hadn’t heard me. ‘What a mess. What were you saying, darling?’
‘Nothing, just mumbling. Do you want me to call back?’
‘After the inferno. Might be better. Are you going out with colleagues or anything?’
I didn’t want to mention the black tie do with Segur. And Kay.
‘Possibly.’
‘You don’t sound that keen.’
‘Sitting in some sports bar drinking bad beer.’
‘Well ring me in the morning. We can talk properly then.’
We said our goodbyes, the habitual ‘Love you’. I snapped the phone shut and watched the flock of starlings set down in the bare branches above the park, screeching and jostling with one another before flowing back into the sky like a swirl of smoke.
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 10