by Rob Palk
‘Hello.’ Her voice had that morning softness to it. Unguarded, ungirded.
‘Just wanted to say hello.’ I don’t think my voice was nearly as soft. I tried my best to change it.
‘It’s early,’ she said. ‘I nearly asked you if it’s early where you are too. Like we’re in different countries.’
‘Feels as though we are.’
‘How are you?’
‘I’m awful. I want you back.’
‘Look, I still care about you a lot. I just know that I have to do this.’
‘I know.’ I felt that being understanding was the smartest move to make. If I kept on being supportive she would eventually start doing things I could support.
‘I thought about you, you know. In the middle of the night. I’m staying at Irene’s. You remember Irene? I went downstairs about one, to get water. And in her garden there were these two baby foxes. Completely still, with eyes like lamps. Just looking through the window until somebody came. And, I don’t know, I thought about me and you.’
‘Come back. It is important that you come back.’
‘I can’t come back.’
‘It is ridiculous that you are not in bed with me right now.’
‘It does feel ridiculous. When I wake I expect you to be there. Farting or snoring. Or Malkin knocking your book pile off the shelf. How is Malkin?’
‘He prospers. Except he misses you. We both miss you. Come back.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Did I ever tell you I dreamt about you? The night before my op? The big op?’
‘You didn’t.’
‘I was in the ward. I mean really and in the dream. And you came to me. You were wearing, you know, your fake leather jacket. Which I assume is okay because fake. Although if someone sees it and likes it they might go and buy a real one. Anyway that was it, you hadn’t anything else on and you had shaved your, you know. I guess as some kind of a treat. Or maybe my unconscious is just porn, I don’t know. But you had. I mean, I’m not someone who is fussy about that. It’s not necessary. But it was the thought of it, I think, and you were standing by the bed. And I remember thinking, Christ, I want to live. I want to live so much. Because of you.’
‘Because of my vagina?’
‘I know that doesn’t sound great, or maybe it does now, I don’t know. Should we just not have got married? Was getting married the mistake? Was moving in the mistake? You aren’t really a wife. Who wants a wife? You could be my girlfriend. I could come over once or twice a week, at night or on unexpected afternoons, and we could kiss and then fuck on the floor. That’s what we should do. That’s really all I want.’
There was a long time without speaking, just the sound of her breath down the line.
‘That isn’t what I wanted,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be a wife. I wanted to be a mum. But you want this girlfriend now.’
‘It’s the same fucking person.’
‘And now there’s the cull to fight. I can’t be all the people you want me to be and sort out the cull as well. I’ve found where I need to be now. This suffering, I can’t stand it. I have to try and help.’
‘Where does Henry fit into all this?’
‘He’s been very supportive. He knows a lot about animals. He’s making me read Peter Singer. I’m learning from him. I’m interested in animal rights and he encourages that. You want this girlfriend. And I’m not that any more. I’m not sure I ever was. I’m interested in badgers now. Animals. You’d get bored of me, as a badger wife, rather than this cool actress girlfriend you’ve invented. I’m not that. I never was that.’
‘I want you back no matter what you do.’ Now that I’d said this she might come back and start acting again, doing it a bit better this time before it got too late for her, and the badgers would soon be extinct.
‘Henry, we talk about badgers, but he asks things about me. And not what did I think of the book he lent me or whether I like the thing he wrote himself. He asks me about my day.’
‘What you had on your sandwiches.’
‘Yes. I like that. It’s nice. It’s how people are supposed to talk.’
‘What did you have on your sandwiches?’
‘I had hummus.’
‘Did you like me asking you that?’ Come back and I will ask you about sandwiches all day. Come back and I might even listen, the first few times.
‘I did. But, Stuart, it’s really too late.’
‘Is this, I read your play, your play thing. Is this because of that? The thing with the chair?’
‘The play, the play. I don’t know. Maybe that was a metaphor. It did scare me, that day.’
‘Because I haven’t got this anger you describe. I am not an angry person. I am, maybe, angry if I stub my toe. But I don’t stomp through life being angry. I am peaceable. I am known for my amiable nature.’
‘You are mostly very nice. It wasn’t the chair. I just, oh god, I just have to.’
‘I felt it was a little overwritten. Promising but it needed serious work. You’ve gone quiet.’ In her silence, I told her the basil plant was doing well. It was now twice the size it had been and when I pulled a few leaves off to sprinkle on my food there were always new ones the next day.
She seemed to appreciate this.
‘Ahoy!’ roared Alistair. He had wandered down to the forecourt, arms outstretched to greet us, although not to help with any bags. ‘Welcome aboard.’
My mum and dad liked Alistair. I think they would have liked anyone who seemed to want to look after me. As for Alistair, he seemed near ecstatic. His beard exploded out around his smile. My parents helped me lug boxes up the stairs, and managed not to notice the general mess. Mess was something they liked to notice but my troubles had led to a slackening of standards. Alistair made a fuss of them, offering cups of tea until it turned out he had no milk and not enough clean cups and only one teabag. They seemed to appreciate the offer. Once I was in they set off to a Travelodge and left me ‘to settle’. I said this might take a while.
‘We’re going to have the best time,’ said Alistair, as soon as they were gone; ‘We’re going to live how we always should have. Do you still write?’
‘Not much. I’ve been distracted.’
‘Mate, look at this.’ From behind a sofa he pulled out a vintage typewriter with a ribbon wrapped around it and smiled and nodded a lot. ‘A present,’ he said. ‘For your writing. I’ve got one myself.’
‘Two lots of keyboards hammering all night,’ said Raoul, who was darting round with a cloth, trying to find and polish surfaces.
Alistair took his hat off revealing a red-rim, a tonsure, of indented skin below.
‘Ignore Raoul,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t really get it. There’s a sensuousness to a typewriter, isn’t there? You feel, how can I put it, connected to the page. Oh, never mind. This move will do you good, Stu. Productive.’
‘I am curious about your kitchen.’
‘What makes you curious about it?’
‘I am curious as to how neither of you are dead. There are things in it. Baleful things.’ Food furring on piles of broken plates, carrier bags lining surfaces, each one a makeshift bin. The sink half full of slushy yellow rice. The salad trays in the fridge were flooded with a rusty and nacreous ooze.
‘When Lucy left me, Stu, I made a vow to myself. Do you want to hear the vow?’
‘You’d stop washing up? You would never go hungry again?’
‘I’d live how I wanted to live.’
‘Is this how you want to live?’
‘It is. Come on. We’re going to have a great time.’ He certainly seemed to be happy enough. I had never seen a man so blissful and content in proportion to the facts of his life.
Raoul shrugged, muttered something about always having to be the adult and shuffled into the kitchen where he began a brave attempt at cleaning it all up. There were crashes and a silence that sounded as if it wanted to be filled with swearing.
‘Should we help him?’ I asked.
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Alistair winked at me and started assembling a spliff. I had the strong impression it wasn’t his first of the day. ‘Don’t worry about Raoul. He likes doing good things. It’s part of his whole Christian thing, he gets to butter up his god.’ My cat, who had been padding nervily around the carpet, glanced at Alistair, hissed in a way that left no room for ambiguity and hid behind the sofa.
‘She’ll come round,’ said Alistair.
‘He,’ I said.
‘Hey man,’ shouted Raoul. ‘Did you know we have a dishwasher?’
I spent the afternoon listening to Alistair. It was hard to do anything else. Doing exactly what he liked seemed to involve a great deal of self-assertion. He existed in a happy world of anticipatory success. I think he was mostly living off rent contributions, his parents having bought him the flat some years before. Aside from this he was writing a hundred things at once and had publishers interested in all of them. A novel ‘about twenty-first century urban living’, a play in which an everyman figure is put on trial by a jury of banshees for reasons I didn’t quite follow, ‘at least one really good aphorism’, the libretto for ‘an actual space opera, I mean, an opera set in space’ and, he concluded, ‘an epic poem’.
‘Tell me about the epic poem,’ I said. I had to say something. And it was all good practice, this listening. We were stood out on the balcony, the wind rustling my hair and the space where his had been. From this vantage point, we looked out over the neighbouring flats, the back of a waterworks and a patch of grass obscured by abandoned furniture.
‘It’s all about masculinity,’ he said.
‘Of course it is.’
‘Masculinity in crisis. Partly inspired by the end of my marriage.’
‘Crisis, eh?’
‘Oh, I say it all in the poem. I think I’ve just about sorted masculinity.’
‘A strangely neglected topic.’
‘Yes! Some people, you know, they act like it’s all been said, but you, I knew you’d get it. Do you want to know what it’s called?’ He had a beam on his face like he’d just invented orgasms and remembered to sort out the patent.
‘Tell me.’
‘Rage!’ He stood as though he were demonstrating republican virtue in a history painting. ‘With an exclamation mark, you know.’
‘You should,’ I said. ‘You should call it R-Age. With a hyphen. Works as a double meaning that way, you see. Our Age.’
His beam, already fulsome, grew bigger. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think that works. This is why you need to get back on it, Stu. Remember those nights in Greenwich. When we thought we’d own this place? We still can,’ he said. ‘We still can.’
I wasn’t so sure about that. I remembered those nights. We’d leave our student halls in Deptford and stroll through the echoing foot tunnel, embarking on a walk through the empty streets. Standing by the cold black Thames across from the empty Dome. The things we planned to do. I was studying English and Art History combined and was hungry for culture, swallowing novels and racing to exhibitions as though I’d been starving all my life. Alistair was always confident that we’d both of us make an impact. He’d grown up knowing this stuff, I thought, and it was only later I came to suspect he didn’t know it so well.
When I met Marie I’d remembered it, my early thirst for culture. Sitting in her Regent’s Park house, with all those pictures and books. I’d finally got where the art was and I wanted so much to stay there.
It would be fun living with Alistair and Raoul, if it was only to be temporary. They both seemed pleased to have me.
That night Alistair announced he was cooking a meal. A welcoming meal, he said. I thought of the state of their kitchen but tried hard to overlook it. I spent the afternoon arranging my little box room, putting up pictures and books. I put a photograph of Marie next to my bed.
There was a knock on the door. ‘You eaten?’
It was Raoul. He stood in my doorway, like a Transylvanian inn keeper who feels he ought to put in a word of warning.
‘Alistair’s cooking.’
‘Eat,’ said Raoul. ‘Eat something first. Say you forgot, I dunno.’
‘Does he not cook much?’ I said. Raoul glanced to the chest of drawers. I put the picture of Marie face down before he could see it.
‘No, he cooks a lot. But the food is . . . It isn’t . . . I don’t want to say anything bad.’
‘I’m vegetarian,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Raoul. ‘That won’t work. He’s vegetarian too. You’ll need something better than that.’
‘I actually am vegetarian,’ I said.
The chickpeas sat on the plate, sullen and grey. There were breadcrumb-covered orbs next to them, from a box. A sad scrap of lettuce sat wetly on the side.
‘I actually ate in my room,’ I said. There was a moment when disappointment clouded his face. The beard seemed to droop. The dome of his forehead rumpled. But a smile dispelled it all.
‘Just means more for me,’ he said, his fork pronging an orb.
Back upstairs, I thought about Marie. There was no way I’d be staying here for long. And the way back had to be badgers. They were my main rivals, counting Henry as a sort of honorary badger.
I began to think of tactics. Now you don’t get rid of rivals, amorous rivals, by making them look bad. I wasn’t at all sure I could make a badger look bad anyway. I had to borrow some of their brightness. Marie loved badgers? I would love them more.
The next day I went down to Kirkdale Books and bought a second copy of Badgerlands, Marie having taken her copy in the move. I read up on the animals and tried my best to like them. It wasn’t as hard as all that. They were impressive, resilient beasts. They were known to bury their dead and hold strange badger funerals. They were unappetising to eat. They had inspired a really good poem by John Clare. It was more than I’d ever done.
Rupa, my colleague and best friend at the office, insisted on coming back with me from work that week. I’d tried not to tell anyone there about all this, but she had somehow guessed, stomping over to my desk to ask me what was up. I tried hard on the phrasing. I told her I was fine, that I was going to sort things out. Now she was here in my new home.
‘This place is very—’ she shook her head ‘—manly.’
‘I’m not going to stay here for long,’ I said. ‘I just need to sort things out with Marie.’
‘And what happens if you don’t? What happens, Stuart, if chasing after Marie is a really bad idea? Look, I like Marie. She’s very nice. But you were married four months and she left.’
I smiled. It was hard for me to ignore how into me Rupa was.
‘Then you’ll be stuck here in this dirty place. Weird men in their thirties pretending to be students. Only students without the conversation, without the appetite for learning new things. Jaded students. Tired students.’
She had walked out on her own marriage back home when she moved here. Her ex was understanding, available for late night Skyping, Spotify swaps. It had done him no good at all. She was living in Bethnal Green. There was a philoprogenitive librarian who kept rubbing his hopeful fingers on the maternity dresses in shops, but she was keeping him at arm’s length.
We went out on the balcony, so I could watch her smoke. She said, ‘The problem is, there’s this whole weight of being told you’re selfish. Why haven’t you had kids yet, how can you walk out on such a nice man, do you really mean you’d rather read books than watch telly – cos that’s the main difference between being alone or with someone isn’t it, you read instead of sit in front of a screen? How can you be so selfish? Me doing what I want is selfish. Them telling me what I want, that isn’t selfish at all.’
I asked her what she wanted.
‘I don’t know, do I? I know I’m not going to find out unless I try. Your Marie, she spent years making you happy. Even now she’s left she’s trying to save the planet.’
‘And what are you doing?’
‘I’m working Stuart. Not just showing up
like you. I’m living a life. I read a lot. Sometimes I think about ditching the librarian. There’s these nice dopey boys at the Buddhist Centre who are very well behaved. They won’t be fussing at me to move in with them and make little versions of themselves.’ She pulled a white cigarette out from a silver case and let it roll between long fingers, without bothering to light it. ‘Trying to give up,’ she said. ‘The second one, I just hold. Listen, you and Marie, you were great. First time round yours I called Saleem, you know, I said I’ve finally found a couple who got it right. I was excited, I thought, these two have cracked it. I’m glad somebody has. But you hadn’t. You hadn’t cracked it at all.’
I smiled, tried to agree. I didn’t tell her I was booked to go down to Gloucester that weekend.
Seven
The thing about my Marie – aside from all the other things, the nerviness, the acting hopes, the feeling she had of not having quite got started, the literary parents and the urge, never satisfied, to create a family of misfits around her, friends who had no other invites, a cat that bit everyone’s ankles, even, I suppose, a husband who might not live the rest of the year – the other thing about Marie was this: she had only saved my life. It seemed unfair of her to leave me, after that. Wasn’t there an obligation to stick around, after you’d rescued someone? A debt owed by the rescuer?
I’ll zip back a bit. Our flat a year or so earlier, minus all the plants. A few less books perhaps. It was just coming up to Christmas. Marie and I had been living together two years. It had been going well, I thought. We’d taken on a cat, which always implies permanence. The odd disagreement, yes, the occasional bit of bickering, but for the most part we were okay. Everyone seemed to think so and I tended to concur.
The night before it happened we’d gone to see a play with her parents. Frank was friends with the playwright, obviously, and Judy had been in the play, or inspired the play, or had the original idea for the play, back in the seventies. Maybe it was written about her. If there had ever been any tensions about this they were all forgotten now.