by Nick Laird
‘Jesus Christ, James, you’ve just met her.’
‘I know, I know that.’
The indicator ticked to turn left. The dog in front was watching them attentively with its moist sad eyes and David looked away, finding it unnerving. The huge billboard to the right was an advertisement for chocolate or washing powder; or perhaps the brilliant whiteness was the beginning of some subtle teaser campaign. Then, with a small embarrassed shock, David realized the billboard wasn’t postered white; it was blank.
What all these people did
He heard from Ruth, finally, on Monday morning, during his A-level class on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. At the start of term in September he’d made the mistake of reciting some of the prologue aloud and now had to pretend to a working knowledge of Middle English; this involved him reading a few lines in a kind of strangulated Glaswegian lisp at the start of each lesson. He had just begun this charade when his mobile beeped. No one had noticed, he thought, until he finished declaiming and Clare murmured something about inconsistency in phone policy. He sighed sadly and said he was waiting for news from her probation officer, which got enough of a laugh to shut her up. After giving them a gobbet to paraphrase and parse, he opened Ruth’s text. He could feel the sweep of twelve sets of eyes over him and adjusted his face to its death-mask setting, breathing through his nostrils and biting his cheeks. The message, in its entirety, read:
Thanks for Thursday! We must talk. X
Big deal. Big sodding deal. He was her Pandarus, her pimp, and at the end of his usefulness. When the lesson finished he rang her, and discovered there were new ways in which he could serve her. She wanted details: what had James and David discussed, what had James been doing? He knew his replies sounded slightly short and explained that he was hurrying, that another class was arriving. How well he managed to disguise his real feelings he didn’t know, but she was probably fizzing too much to notice anyway.
By the time David and Ruth met the following night in a wine bar in Old Street, Glover had rung her and she was playing everything cooler. When he asked whether she thought they were actually going to have a relationship, she angled one eyebrow and said, ‘Oh, David, don’t be silly, he’s a child. He’s practically the same age as Bridge! It’s just fun. I’m entitled, aren’t I? Isn’t everyone?’
Then a grin rushed her face as if she’d remembered something and she sipped from her wine. David necked two glasses to her one and they left for an opening nearby.
It was a German artist living in London. He’d photographed passers-by in the street and then followed them, without their knowledge, to their homes. The snatched portraits were displayed alongside the shots of the dwellings. Scores of these pairings covered the walls of the small gallery.
‘This is very interesting,’ David said as they stood and looked at a young Asian boy in a school uniform coupled with a graffitied blue door beside a dry-cleaner’s. Ruth didn’t reply. When David was very young and his family drove anywhere, he’d grow overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of people in London. He’d ask his parents what all these people did, all these people who lived in all these flats and houses, all these people on the pavement, all these people in the cars and buses. His father would look at his mother and then give a terse assertion that people did everything and anything, that they were teachers and chippies and dentists or worked in shops or were on the dole. It didn’t answer the questions David’s emergent consciousness was really asking: How can these people, who aren’t me, exist at all? Who are they? What are they for? The exhibition reminded him of that astonishment he’d felt. Here were hermetic lives unsealed, here was offered proof of other people. He stared for a long time at a photograph of a Jamaican pensioner in a large green felt hat, and the entrance sign to her estate, Brookville Gardens. Ruth joined him, peered at the picture doubtfully.
‘Garish. One trick repeated.’
David walked her back to the Barbican afterwards, disappointed that she hadn’t found the photographs as moving as him. They were passing a closed department store and he was shocked at the disparity of their reflections. He hulked along, shapeless in duffel, whereas Ruth was fawn-like, her legs elegant and particularized in tight black trousers, the heels of her ankle boots forcing a graceful, straight-backed stride.
‘Do you know how sweet James is? He’s like something from before colour TV.’
She was a child, a child who’d been given a present, and he wondered how soon it would be before she was bored with it.
‘I would say that he’s as sweet as…as sweet as one of those mai tais.’ They’d been serving three different cocktails at the opening, all of them astonishingly saccharine.
‘Oh, much, much sweeter. He told me that he wants to wait, before we have sex. He said, “It’s important to get to know each other.” Why didn’t you tell me he was a virgin?’ She clutched David’s hand and swung it. Then she took the time to look at him, and realized his shock and her error. Immediately, David released her from any obligation, doing the stupid mime with the pursed lips and invisible key.
‘Please—yes. I didn’t realize that he hadn’t…He’s had a difficult time. His father was very religious and cold, I think. And he was an unhappy child, very overweight. He has no idea how gorgeous he is now. When he finds out he’s going to be…Well, maybe less of a romantic.’
David was wondering how he hadn’t realized it before. Glover was as dissembling as the rest of them. He’d never actually talked about ex-girlfriends but he always left the impression that he possessed at least a minimum of knowledge. He didn’t lack for attention. They were at a crossroads where the bulb in the lamppost flickered and crackled, and Ruth said, as if to let David share in her joy, ‘You know, my studio’s just up there. Would you like to see it? Shall we drop in?’
Street led on to narrow street and they reached a large steel padlocked gate. Ruth drew a single key from the hip pocket of her jeans and, after some expert wiggling, the padlock’s jaw dropped open. The gate swung out with a rattling scrape—David looked down to see a perfect sunken arc in the pavement, engraved over years by the bottom bolt—and they entered an unexpected cobbled courtyard, with several glass-panelled doors leading off it. The visit felt somehow illicit and David was waiting for a torch to shine, a voice to boom. Ruth strode to one of the doors and unlocked it; it opened inwards and she tapped at the wall until strip lights, resentful of the late hour, came on with a whine. The roof was at least five metres away and three Veluxes showed the city sky outside to be a formless black, bruised in one window’s corner by clouds. Crates and boxes were piled everywhere. Three trestle tables were erected against the far walls, and in the middle of the floor was a yellow easel.
There is something about two people in a large space that makes the experience oddly intimate. It works on a reverse scale to the size of the venue: in a lift, two people, even if they’re talking, face forward and avoid eye contact; in a room, the people tend to remain relatively stationary, catch each other’s eye occasionally but still focus on something else, the television, say, or the dog; in an empty warehouse, though, or a studio, two people revolve around each other.
‘I almost started to put this on.’ She held an apron, white originally but splattered dark with colours, and hooked its string back on a nail by the light switch.
‘I spent the last three days sorting those pieces into size…’ Ruth gestured to one of the tables, where hundreds of glass shards were spread over plastic sheeting. What David assumed was a polishing machine—two buffing wheels, protective shield—sat alongside them.
‘Amazing place,’ he said, and was irritated by the false note his voice struck. He was interested. He tried again. ‘What are they for?’
‘A glass heart. I made one last year in bottle-green but this one’s going to be clear glass and a lot larger.’ She trailed a finger through the stones, leaving a wake of polythene. ‘I found them along the banks of the Hudson. They’d been smoothed down by the water. There’s som
ething harmonious about found objects. Look.’
From a shoebox padded with newspaper, Ruth lifted out a misshapen frosted lump, which, as she gently turned it, resolved itself into half of a glass heart. It was a beautiful thing, far from cliché. It was constructed from dozens of tiny polished pieces, soldered together in spidery, vein-like seams. It was the proper shape, bulky and lopsided like the pig and cow hearts David’s dad would get in the shop. But though the shape was real, the material was metaphor. This heart screamed, I am brittle; I will break; I was put together tenderly with the utmost care. She laid it back in its box. It left David strangely breathless. She saw he was still staring at the heart and said, tracing a hole in the crystalline latticework, ‘Just here’s where the aorta’ll go. It’ll come out for a few inches and then down here…’ She tried to pick a speck of something off a panel of the heart, then bent over and blew at it. Her blonde fringe swayed with her breath and separated into strands. As her jacket rode up, a raised freckle came into view on the pale skin above the red patent belt of her jeans. David was tingling. He had an urge to reach out and place a fingertip on it. He was Aladdin in the cave. Look all you want but touch nothing.
There was a sink in the corner and a kettle on the sill of one of the long windows that faced into the courtyard. Just as he was about to suggest having a cup of tea here, while looking at her work, maybe even talking about their project, Ruth glanced at her ancient black Casio and tapped its face, saying, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta scoot. I don’t want James to arrive back before us.’
Was this to be the routine? He would spend the evening entertaining, like a eunuch, and then Glover the Sultan would arrive to take over, and take Ruth and her body to bed. Half an hour later the buzzer of her flat went, and he appeared in the living room, tired, unshaven, swinging a bottle of wine by the neck. He gave her a slow sideways look and then kissed her hello. David watched as she inclined the other cheek upwards but by then he’d turned away from her. The flatmates shook hands with an odd formality while Glover scratched at his stubble sheepishly. Ruth carried on talking about an exhibition that she’d visited in Amsterdam last year.
‘And I went in having seen most of the paintings before, and having loved Rembrandt all my life, but honestly I left convinced that Caravaggio was the greater artist. In comparison his pictures seemed so stringent, so sharp-edged and distinct…’
‘James might not agree with you there. He’s still very much a Rembrandt man, thinks Caravaggio’s use of light’s a little obvious.’ David was smiling broadly. Glover gave him the look he deserved.
‘Piss off, David. I know who Rembrandt is.’
‘He doesn’t just make toothpaste.’
Ruth put on a pained expression. ‘Don’t be so mean, David. James has plenty of time to find out about—’
‘Fucking hell,’ Glover said evenly, ‘I know who Rembrandt is. All the self-portraits. Big potato face.’
‘There, so we all know. You want me to open this? We have a bottle of Chianti on the go.’
Glover connived a smile and nodded to the bottle of white in her hand.
He left them half an hour later. Ruth said she had to get up early, so David gathered up his satchel and duffel coat and caught the tube. They weren’t exactly finishing one another’s sentences, but still he was surprised by how relaxed they seemed around each other. At one point Glover mentioned his mother breaking her wrist, and Ruth interrupted him to say, ‘This was before you moved to Felixstowe.’
‘Yeah, just before.’
Ruth nodded seriously, filing the information somewhere. As David waited for the lift to sigh into the ground floor, he imagined they’d already stripped off and were having sex on the carpet or the sofa or the dining table. Why would they wait, feeling as they did?
All about frustration
Glover lay in his default position, horizontal on the sofa. Midday winter sun poured through the window, filming him sleeping. One of his hands was tucked up inside his T-shirt, across his chest, exposing his level stomach; a line of black cedilla hairs ran from his waistband to his navel. Newspaper supplements were spread round the room, covering the available surfaces so thoroughly he might have been prepping the room for decoration. Glover seemed so at home in the world, so placed, that David felt he’d intruded into his own flat. Then the sleeping body shifted, taking an imaginary step, and squinted at him.
‘Hey.’
‘Hello.’
David had grown a little awkward round him.
‘Everything cool? Haven’t seen you for a few days.’
A magazine slid off his leg and landed on the floor.
‘Since Monday. Yeah, everything’s fine.’ David hoisted a bag. ‘Got some things for the house. Toilet roll, tinfoil, disinfectant.’
‘Superb,’ Glover said, making no move to get up and help him.
‘So, how’s things? How’s Ruth?’
‘She’s great. She said to say that maybe you two could do some work together this week.’
‘Sure. I’ll text her or something.’
He went through to the kitchen and Glover shouted after, ‘I’ll be seeing her later, so I could tell her when suits.’
‘No, it’s fine. I’ll need to check…’
What? Nasdaq? The weather forecast? David didn’t want Glover as his intermediary. He’d ring her himself. James padded into the kitchen, rubbing his eyelid so hard it made a ticking sound. He stood there and watched David unpack the bags.
‘And your mum rang. Wanted to know whether I was still coming over. She said’—he adopted a high-pitched Scottish burr—‘“Will you still be gracing us with your presence on Christmas Day, Jamesss?” I said I’d definitely go, even if you were too busy. She loved that. “Och, James, sure you’d be more than welcome to come on your own.’”
‘I can see your face if I didn’t…’
‘What are you talking about? I’d love it. I could hear about your difficult adolescence again.’
David stepped round him and slid a new kitchen roll onto the holder. ‘It might help you get through yours.’
David was concentrating. It was birdsong at dawn; then a door slammed in his face. It was the tinkling of tea into china; then an engine starting, a farmer’s shout. The pattern was repeated ad infinitum: plinkety-plink high notes tickled by the right hand; then a span of keys thumped in the lower register. He noted from the programme that the piece was entitled Disinhabited. Both Glover and Ruth had shut their eyes, so he did too, just in time for the piece to conclude. The composer, a tuxedoed Chinese-American with a black mohican like a circular saw, strode slowly to the front to take a deep, pensive bow. David was at his first piano recital, the night before Ruth left for Christmas.
The three of them sat in a shabby, high-ceilinged room in the Canadian embassy, in the third row of orange plastic chairs. No one had mentioned to David that it wasn’t classical music they’d be listening to, and when a brawny Nordic in a black collarless shirt swaggered up to the shiny grand piano, sat down and started banging the ivories at random, he’d almost laughed. It was funny. He could have done it himself. With one diving flipper and a wooden spoon. He glanced behind to see if anyone had notified security, but the rest of the audience was pretending to be rapt. This was the recital. David watched the pianist’s anvil jaw jerk above the keys for the next forty minutes, and he tried. He really did. He even quite liked some of it, particularly a kind of shunting jaunt that couldn’t have been written before the industrial revolution. That was followed by Six Preludes—which each seemed to David the spasmodic and overlong death throes of a trapped animal. The problem was each piece strove for profundity but at its best brought to mind the incidental music from a Hitchcock movie. A wardrobe slowly swinging open. A chase scene. Ratcheting of tension and shrill revelation.
Still, the emotion must go somewhere, must take on some colour, and David knew the argument that the music was about disharmonic tension, about disjunction, about mechanization. The repetitive commute and
dialling tone and automatic doors. At the end, to show he could, the Nazi lumberjack played the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and the quality of the clapping changed, grew gleeful and relaxed. It was over. Even though David thought a tiny part of each of them had changed, had been changed, he couldn’t quite stop himself. It was too easy to disparage. As soon as they stepped outside, onto Westminster Council’s pavement, he turned to Glover and winked and whispered, ‘That was one long hour.’
He should have known better. The days of solidarity were past. Glover’s face was joyfully apologetic. ‘I have to say I loved it, actually.’
‘Oh, you have to say that, do you?’
‘I’m not doing it to annoy you, David. I really thought it was great.’
Ruth appeared beside them, winding a stone-grey silk scarf round her neck. ‘I loved Ease by David Jermann. Wasn’t it graceful? The dropnotes.’
‘I liked that one too,’ Glover said.
‘I’m so glad we came. I’d no idea the music would be so interesting.’
‘May you listen to interesting music. It’s like a Chinese curse.’
‘Oh David, didn’t you like it at all?’
‘No, I did. I did. I just missed melody.’
‘But modern music—I mean what about Glass—surely you get an affective response to him—you must feel something…’
David couldn’t face a discussion. ‘I feel like I could eat something large and dead. Any thoughts about dinner? I’m too tired to walk into—’
Ruth caught his wrist. He felt his pulse pass under her thumb. ‘No, go on. Say what you felt about the music…’
David let himself sigh heavily. ‘I suppose I missed the lack of progress. I found it frustrating.’