by Tor Udall
Under the streetlamps, she is older than he imagined, perhaps in her late twenties. Her short black hair reminds him of a pixie, her fringe asymmetrical as if she has cut it herself.
She celebrates their escape with a wry smile. ‘Thanks. I’ll see you around.’
‘Got far to go?’
‘Dalston.’ Her stare stretches down the street. She scratches her leg, perhaps stung by those nettles, then begrudgingly asks, ‘Do you know a café I can wait in?’
‘It’s well beyond midnight.’ He blows into his hands. ‘None of them will be open.’
She gazes down, suddenly fascinated by the dimple in her tights, the way they sag around her ankle. He grabs the opportunity to take in this urchin. She has a boyish figure. Uninviting.
‘I guess I’ll wait for the bus.’ Gathering her plastic bags, she looks for somewhere to perch.
‘That’ll be hours.’
He can’t leave her out here, prey to the cold or worse.
‘I live a few minutes away. I could put the kettle on. No funny business.’
‘No.’
‘You’re freezing. There’s a comfy sofa. Heating. A bathroom.’
That clearly interests her. She stares at his hands then lifts her head defiantly.
‘Won’t your wife be at home?’
‘What? No.’ He glances down at his wedding ring. ‘No, no chance of that. I’m widowed.’
‘Oh.’
Here it is again, the embarrassed silence. Warily she mirrors him, stuffing her hands in her pockets.
‘My name’s Chloe.’
The streetlamp catches the glint of a dare in her eye. He tries to match it.
‘Would you prefer tea or coffee?’
His flat is filthy. There is grime in the sink, shrivelled peas in the cracks between the floorboards, piles of books half-read, the debris of nights not sleeping. As Chloe disappears down the hall, he worries about what she will think of the broken door then hears the flush of the cranky cistern. A minute later, the girl reappears.
‘You play?’ She juts her chin towards the piano.
‘A bit. Not really.’
As she rubs her arms, she takes in the many photographs of Audrey: walking duffel-coated in the woods, chatting at a dinner party.
‘How long ago did . . .?’
‘Last May.’
Jonah puts the kettle on while Chloe studies the shelves, her fingers trailing along the books’ colour-coded spines. As he turns to stare at her, he remembers that he’s out of Zopiclone. The lack of sleep is making him queasy. he watches his guest through a smeared lens. Her scrawny body looks like it holds a library of experiences, as if she has been touched by many things – or many people. but he tries not to think of her as his latest sleeping aid, a little human pill. She has taken off her shoes and wears a thrift-shop dress that doesn’t quite fit. It is only when she moves into the lamplight that he realises her skin is as pale as a ghost’s. It contrasts with her eyes, a cornflower blue . . . and what would it hurt? He has never run his fingers through shorn hair, or kissed a mouth that is almost too wide . . . a reckless mouth, as if anything could come out.
‘I think I’ve seen you before.’
‘What?’
She is staring at him curiously. ‘It is you. I’ve seen you at the lake – at the spot where we met. You’re there all the time.’ She pulls a face. ‘You usually wear a brown suit.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing.’ Then she laughs.
He had thought that he was invisible out there, that his suit was retro . . . He clears his throat.
‘So – you make origami?’
‘I’m an artist. I’ve been working with paper for a while.’ She chews on a cuticle; among the bitten carnage of her hands is one long nail. ‘I’m hoping to be commissioned by Kew. Next year there’s going to be several artists making installations.’
‘So that’s how you earn your living?’
‘Nope. Temping pays the bills. Usual office stuff . . . administration. But sometimes I give workshops – “Art for Alzheimer’s” – or pottery. What about you?’
‘A music teacher. Most of them don’t give a damn about Beethoven.’
She sits down on the sofa. Seducing the others was as easy as practising scales; but it’s harder since they left the Gardens. There’s just the stark reality of the strip-light in the kitchen.
‘Your flat’s a mess.’
‘I’m a mess. Sorry. How many sugars?’
‘Two.’
He stirs the coffee, the clink of a spoon.
‘I haven’t been able to sleep,’ he tries. ‘I’ve got restless legs syndrome. There’s very little to help. Sometimes touch. Massage . . .’
‘You must be lonely.’
‘Yes.’
Her glance is too intimate. Jonah is accustomed to being the one in control but the way her gaze is stroking his . . . He becomes aware of his Adam’s apple, swallowing.
‘You know,’ she teases, ‘you’re not very good at this.’
‘What?’
‘Seduction.’
He realises he is smiling ironically. It doesn’t sit comfortably on his face, as if his features have been intruded upon.
‘Women seem to like this kind of thing,’ he admits. ‘Being needed.’
‘It doesn’t look right on you.’
He wants to ask how she’s such an expert, this waif who holds herself in a way that states she is unlovable. It’s in the slant of her shoulder, the inward turn of her feet. But there is something explicit about her awkwardness, as if her body is trying to contain some ruin or triumph. Her elbows rest against her crotch, her hands gesturing . . .
‘So what does come naturally? Music?’ She picks up his guitar. ‘Why don’t you play something?’
The frets are embarrassingly dusty. He has slapped that soundboard a thousand times, the cedarwood battered from encores and bus journeys.
He scratches his shoulder blade, his T-shirt riding up, exposing his out-of-shape waistline. ‘It’s not tuned.’
The last time he touched it was before the funeral. She is still thrusting the guitar his way; his ticket, perhaps, to getting laid.
He reluctantly accepts the instrument. As he sits down on the sofa, Chloe has to make herself smaller to accommodate him. Tuning the guitar, he’s surprised to find there’s some comfort in the wooden body, the strings that may or may not comply with his whims. He feels its familiar weight on his lap, its curves adapting to the crook of his elbow, and hesitantly he begins to strum and pick. His fingers are rusty, but there is the vibration of sound against his belly, the chords appearing like the ghosts of old friends. They begin to form around one of his songs, but he doesn’t sing the lyrics. They describe Audrey browsing the bookstalls at the South Bank – her day described in Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3. For the chorus, he stole from Emily Dickinson: Hope is the thing with feathers . . . It sings the tune without the words – and never stops at all. And never stops at all. His fingers easily find the bridge. He becomes lost in the contrapuntal melodies, the ragtag rhythms, the slipshod beat.
Jonah stops, his eyes wet. Her gaze is set on him. Blue in every sense.
‘You know how to touch that, at least.’
She leans forward and wipes the tears from his cheek, then pauses, as if tasting the distance between her mouth and his. The initial kiss is raw and blue; a grazing of lips. Such a fragile gesture, Jonah wonders if he imagined it.
The second kiss is full of earth. The uncrossable space between strangers caving in, his tongue discovering the inside of her cheek. Here is the consolation of touch, the solace of skin. When he undresses her, he discovers the cool white of her stomach, her flat chest that seems naïve.
In the bedroom, Chloe straddles his hips. With her back facing him, he discovers the tattoo travelling from her coccyx. It stretches up her spine, and he traces her undulating back as if he could read the Braille of the black outlines. Spiralling up her
vertebrae are three sheets of paper, a fourth with wings, a fifth with a beak, then two birds flying away.
She changes position, her heels digging deep into his kidneys. She dictates the rhythm, her muscles expressive, greedy. As natural as a baby sucking its thumb, it seems like she is compelled to fill up the whole of her sex, so she can feel complete. He thinks he might drown in her, this devouring surge, and when she comes there is an animal shriek, a primal piercing. It overwhelms him, his own body shuddering, releasing, and now, after the doubt and the thrill, there are just the two of them, breathing.
When Jonah wakes, Chloe has gone. For the last few months it has been the same. There are the usual signs that the woman has been looking at Audrey’s photos; a frame on his shelf is wrongly angled. He rolls over to see the slip of paper on the pillow – a phone number with the words: CALL ME. It’s like a guitar riff that repeats again and again, a looped comedy of manners, but today there is an anomaly in the pattern. It is 11 a.m. and Jonah has slept for nine hours.
Beautiful Collisions
When Jonah has been here, Harry has kept away. Now he runs his hand along Audrey’s bench, debating the choice of wood once again. It weathers well, naturally resists insects and decay, but is relatively soft, risking dents and scratches. Not for the ecologically minded, redwoods grow slowly. The fact that it is made from his favourite tree disturbs him – it is horribly perfect.
It no longer holds its just-out-of-the-factory glory. Nine months of weather, and the weight of Jonah’s bottom, has worn down the slats, and there’s a splattering of bird droppings. But still it enjoys a special view, and Harry turns to take it in – the lake, the islands – then he nurses a nagging feeling that Jonah might appear from behind the dogwood. Wishing to divert such a crash, Harry walks around the lake to the other side of the water where he can still see the bench. Ageing gracefully, it looks almost the same as the others; but, for him, each individual seat is a request. They ask him to remember the thousand moments the dead have lived. How they too celebrated the gleam of sunlight on water, two planes leaving a kiss of vapour in the sky, or the minutes they stole to contemplate the shapes in the clouds. The world is bulging with memories. I was here. I lived.
Taking out his notebook, Harry flicks through a page on the endangered succulents from Madagascar, a memo about a leak found in the roof of the Princess of Wales, and a misnamed plant in Duke’s Garden. But he can’t stop fretting about what he’d overheard earlier: a foreman had been telling ghost stories about the Gardens. His colleagues admitted it was easy to get spooked at night, especially in a Victorian glasshouse. The panes rattle, a lizard unsettles a twig, a bullfrog jumps out of nowhere. But however hard he tries, Harry hasn’t seen any phantoms.
He looks for them now, in the daylight. He imagines them gazing up at the trees – as if they’ve forgotten something, or mislaid a part of themselves in the woodland glade. Or maybe they’re sitting on these benches right now. Unable to release their grip on life, they grasp on to beauty. In their laps are invisible things and dead stories. Hold on, they say, hold tight.
In the library, Harry’s discovered an entire shelf dedicated to grief and the afterlife, most of it bollocks, but one passage suggested that people are trapped here if their deaths are sudden. So Harry watches Audrey’s bench, waiting for a change in the air, a shadow, then he angrily scribbles: Stop it, Hal. You’re just a gardener.
His seat commemorates the couple that founded Kew Theatre, and along the way is William Dyson, ‘An American who often walked these paths’. Harry aches to see him, but there’s only a woman with a pram. As they pass, the baby gives a toothless grin and Harry waves back. When he finally looks away from the lake, he realises it’s not the kind of day to be morbid: Kew’s visitors are flirting among the daffodils. Harry bookmarks his page with the usual photo – a woman’s skirt, a brick wall, a net curtain – and putting on his hat, he wanders over to the Minka House, where two strangers are on a first date. He can tell by the way they shuffle around the conversation, trying to lessen the gap. What will it take for them to reveal themselves, to halt the pantomime?
Twenty minutes later, Harry is noting down more than the language of flowers. After years of observing plants, he has extended his repertoire to preserving people; one day, these visitors, too, will be extinct. Pressing down each passing moment, he writes about two gents in their seventies lightly touching fingertips as they admire the old black locust. Then there’s the young couple lying on the grass. It’s clear he wants to speak but she is reading the final chapter of a novel.
The
last
page
of
a
book
is
a
sacred
space
that
even
lovers
respect.
Harry stops so suddenly he breaks the lead. Jonah is strolling towards him. The woman beside him has boyish hair, sticking up in tufts. Her hand is tucked inside the waist of her jeans. It looks both comforting and sexual, but before he can investigate further, Milly arrives, holding a fistful of flowers.
‘I thought I’d make a daisy chain.’
When she follows Harry’s gaze, her mouth drops open; but it’s not the bearded man she’s interested in. She is staring at the woman with a wistful expression.
‘What is it, luv?’
The couple are moving closer . . . closer still. Harry pulls the child away.
‘Can you tell me which cedar this is?’
Chloe sits on the grass, her cropped black hair framing her pale face. Beside them is a carpet of blue flowers called glory-of-the-snow, but they look more like a shimmering sea, the flowers the same colour as her eyes. Jonah turns away from them.
‘So you know you’re free to do whatever you want?’
‘Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’ She scratches out some mud caught under her toenail. ‘It’s OK for me to sleep with other people, just like you do.’
‘Good.’
She sears him with that petal-blue gaze. ‘So is it true – the nights you’re not with me you don’t sleep at all? I’m your Temazepam?’
‘Kind of.’
She peers out from under her fringe. ‘So – you’re using me?’
‘Exactly. Is that OK?’
After Jonah dialled Chloe’s number, he made it clear he wasn’t ready for a relationship, but she seemed nonplussed. All she wanted was to come to his flat and have sex with him, and afterwards Jonah slept all night. This woman is made up of sleeping dust, his very own sandman.
For the last few weeks they have been keeping each other company, playing their own version of Catcher in the Rye. Falling through the air, they hope to be caught by that pitcher glove, at least for a while. Sometimes they eat together or watch a movie. At night when he can’t sleep, he reads to her or she reads to him, small acts of kindness. Her lovemaking remains unabashed. Their encounter may only be a passing sympathy, but it’s been impossible not to discover that Chloe has just turned thirty, and her favourite food is sushi.
Jonah is uncomfortable sitting on the ground – his back hurts, his legs unwieldy. In contrast, her body is compact and nubile, her elfin hair trendily messy. Leaning back on her hands, she is staring up at the sky – cerulean, seamless, stretching for miles.
‘It must have fingerprints behind it.’
Such an abstract statement. She’s grinning mischievously, as if she’s put an exotic fruit in front of him and daring him to split it open.
He dutifully asks, ‘What?’
‘Creation. I just don’t believe an accident can be this beautiful.’ Her London accent is a little tatty; a puckish mix of rough and whimsy. ‘I mean, look at these flowers. There’s no way I’ll be able to make anything as majestic, as simple.’
She’s already told him that she’s received the Kew Gardens commission. She’ll be one of several artists. Even though the exhibition is a year away,
he can see her panic.
‘You know this place well, for an East London girl.’
‘I’ve been coming for about eighteen months . . . sketching stuff, taking photos.’ She hesitates. ‘Come on. I could murder a cuppa.’
At the Orangery, Princess Augusta’s coat of arms graces the classical white façade. Jonah and Chloe sit behind the opulent arch windows, sharing a pot of tea. She fidgets, fiddling with her paper napkin, biting her nails down to the quick. It irritates him.
‘So – when did you first study art?’
‘A foundation year in Ealing. Back then I was building installations: dresses ruined with footprints, a series called Elegies. That one featured bird skeletons.’ She shrugs bashfully. ‘Birds seem to have become a theme. Freedom. Flight . . .’
‘And origami?’
‘Since I was a kid. But it was only as an adult that I took it seriously.’
‘What about that tattoo on your back?’
‘It’s a copy of a wood-block print by Katsushika Hokusai. It has a snappy title: A Magician Turns Sheets of Paper into Birds. It’s only part of it, though. In the original there’s a man in a kimono sitting cross-legged, throwing the sheets into the air.’
‘I like it.’
‘Thanks.’
Jonah takes a swig of tea.
‘I once thought of getting a tattoo. But Audrey worried. What it would look like when I was eighty?’
‘At least your corpse would be unique!’ With both hands, she bangs the table. ‘Did you know Houdini practised origami? It’s a magical science: pure geometry and make-believe. It’s all about the patterns, you see.’
She clears a spill of sugar, then takes a folder of paper from her bag. She creases one square into a triangle.