by Tor Udall
‘The book I’m reading at the moment is crinkled with bathwater. There are coffee spills, a greasy stain – perhaps mayo—’
Chuckling, Harry tucked the notebook safely away into his back pocket. ‘So your own life has become part of the story?’
‘Yes! You should see the novel I took to India. A squashed mosquito, dirt from a motorised rickshaw . . .’
They held each other’s gaze for so long that Milly began to fidget. There was something about the two of them that made her itchy. Just do it, she silently implored, scratch it.
Harry rubbed his stubble. ‘Do you write yourself?’
‘I try. A bit of poetry – no, it’s not even that.’ Audrey clapped her gloved hands together but they didn’t make a sound. ‘One day I’d love to translate a novel. One of the greats: Tolstoy, Turgenev . . .’
‘Why don’t you write an original?’
‘Christ, I couldn’t do that. Come on, it’s too cold to sit.’
As they passed the Japanese Gateway, Milly could see them in the distance, their heads bowed together around some delicious thought. She might only be a kid, but even she could see how their bodies bent towards each other like lovers, or like questions they didn’t yet dare to ask.
A Piece of String
The sky is sweating. Jonah and Chloe overheat outside a semi-detached house, trying not to listen to the shouting within.
‘Graham? Can you open this damn jam jar?’
Jonah is about to ring the bell again when his friend, Kate, opens the door and greets them fondly. Two kisses or three? In the shady hallway, Chloe collides with a child in a dinosaur costume. When she enters the kitchen, she wishes she wasn’t wearing cut-off jeans; the other women are in shift dresses from Boden. Chloe hands Kate a bottle of vodka but it soon becomes obvious that the main drink of the day will be tea.
On the kitchen table is an array of cakes at different stages of completion. A couple of women beat butter icing while children, anticipating sugar, hover around them. In the corner, a baby bounces in a chair, unaware that she is the day’s focus.
‘Hello, little monkey.’ Jonah squats down to meet her. ‘Oh, Kate, she’s a beauty.’
Chloe peers over his shoulder to see the rash-covered cheeks.
‘Yes. Lovely.’
Jonah stands up and gives Chloe’s arm an encouraging squeeze.
‘Well, I’ll leave you in the safe hands of the girls.’ Then, as a parting joke – ‘Play nicely.’
He walks into the conservatory, joining the men, who apparently have no part in the minutiae of creation. Liza, a chic woman with silver hair, asks Chloe if she’s local.
‘No. Dalston.’
She tries to hold her posture as elegantly as Audrey, but in straightening herself, she knocks over a box of icing sugar with her elbow.
‘Fuck me! Sorry.’
A child giggles.
‘That’s enough, Lily.’
Chloe gets down on her knees. ‘I’m so sorry. Here.’ She tries to sweep away the spill with her hands, but a crawling T. Rex is already licking his fingers.
Kate drags the boy out from under the table. ‘It’s chaos in here!’ Behind the hastily applied make-up, her face is wan, her exhausted eyes longing for adult conversation. ‘It’s silly to be cooped up,’ she says, in a sing-song voice she uses with her children. ‘Why don’t you sit outside? It’s such a beautiful day. We’ll be out in a minute.’
On the lawn, children are amusing themselves with two footballs. There’s a book of philosophy on the garden table and Chloe picks it up, estranged from the ambitions of these cake-decorating women. As she finds a seat, she leafs through the wily words and big ideas then worries that others might complain she’s not helping. But perhaps they’re happy making and gathering, moving from kitchen to garden as they carry out steaming pots of tea. Maybe it’s only Chloe who is embarrassed that she isn’t proficient at baking, or nursing a child – and did she ever hug Emily Richards? Chloe can almost feel the little hand in hers, the trusting weight of it. Every boat needs water. Please.
A woman walks into the garden. She has strawberry-blonde hair, a delicate nose and wide hips: a pear-shaped figure that Chloe imagines in wellington boots, digging up vegetables. In her arms is a wriggling infant.
‘Hullo,’ she says. ‘Jonah’s just told me what he’ll be doing this summer – teaching music at a community centre? Apparently it’s all down to your contacts.’
‘He started two weeks ago.’
‘Great.’
The woman shields her eyes to survey her. Chloe becomes conscious of her exposed, white legs.
‘He said you give art workshops?’
‘Yes.’
Chloe rubs the sunburn on her arm, wondering if they’ve already been introduced. Should she know the woman’s name?
‘Apparently he’s working with refugees? No, darling, stop pulling Mummy’s hair. All different kinds of music. African, Baltic?’
‘I thought it might be helpful to explore different clients—’
‘And they’re actually interested! He told me about some lady desperate to learn the piano, and he couldn’t stop talking about this rapper called—’
‘Diesel. His lyrics are great.’
‘Well,’ she smiles energetically, ‘good for you.’
Chloe cocks her head. ‘He’ll be back at school in September. It’s just a holiday thing.’
‘But it’s great to see him getting out of the flat. We all think you’re good for him.’
We? Who’s we?
The woman juggles her toddler into another uncomfortable position. ‘Has he – has he found that bench of his?’
Chloe rearranges her surprise. ‘He’s only looking for it every now and then. Kew’s a big place.’
The blonde scoops the infant’s bum up to her face, then sniffs. ‘Oh crap! Do you mind keeping an eye? The nappies are in the car.’
Before Chloe can say anything, whatever-her-name has left her child crawling among the daisies, unaware of the danger she has put him in. Any moment the boy could crack his head on a ceramic flowerpot or pull the table leg and that scalding pot of tea will fall. If only these women knew what Chloe was capable of. She doesn’t even know how to hold him.
She glances towards the conservatory for reassurance and there he is, chumming with men who look like they work in advertising. There are no children tugging at his trousers, and Chloe’s stomach flips as she imagines what these gatherings must have been like for Audrey.
Behind the safety of her sunglasses, she watches Kate venture into the conservatory and stroke Jonah’s elbow. Her head tilts compassionately, as if asking how he is. But he is the one to hunch down and hold her. Their stillness contrasts with the chatter around them and Chloe wonders what secrets she and their hostess hold in common. Perhaps later, as they clear up the leftover cake, she will have the courage to ask, ‘Who is Harry Barclay, Kate?’
Chloe has finished the diary. For two months, she’s futilely tried to bridge the missing connections. For the first time in her life she has someone to protect and it makes her nervous. She crosses her legs, her denim shorts sticky with sweat. Shit. The kid is eating a clump of grass. She rushes over, yanking it out of his hand so fiercely that the toddler begins to cry. As she scoops him up, the others are coming into the garden en masse. A couple of guys have that self-satisfied smirk, as if they’ve just been ribbing Jonah for pulling a younger woman. Their wives have undoubtedly rolled their eyes at the predictable choice of a middle-aged man. Chloe is trying to pull out a blade of grass from the child’s mouth, her finger rooting around his toothless gums. She then thrusts the bawling kid into Jonah’s arms.
‘My saviour,’ she says drolly.
Swinging the child on to his hip, Jonah leans in with a conspiratorial whisper. ‘What’s up, Dylan? You been eating mud again?’
The boy stops crying. He turns to glower at Chloe, his face tear-tracked with dirt.
The relief in her shoulders
is palpable. ‘You have the knack.’
Jonah grins bashfully then strokes the boy’s hair. ‘How are you doing?’ It takes a while to realise that the question is directed at her.
Her eyes prickle, but she erases herself with a goofy shrug. ‘Fish. Out of water.’
‘Me too.’
He looks pretty comfortable to her. She squints up at the sunshine, trying to delete the image of him and the toddler, but, with his spare hand, Jonah pulls her towards him. The size of him always shelters her – the smell of wool and sea – but she’s in the wrong picture. Her feelings are strangely violent. They make her lie and covet, do things she never dreamt of, things that don’t make her proud. Perhaps she’s not so different from Audrey. As Jonah presses his mouth against her cheek, Chloe is haunted by the dead woman’s words. The lies inside my kiss.
As Chloe helps to clear away the dirty plates, Jonah sits in a deckchair. A mum is trying to clean chocolate off a girl’s face with some spit and a paper napkin. A man pushes a pram up and down the lawn to the rhythm of wailing. Jonah taps his foot, his large brown shoe hesitating as he listens out for the next line of the song, perhaps a key change. But what’s the point composing something new if Audrey can’t hear it?
He leans forward to watch a boy and a couple of dads play football. Then he bows his head and hunches over the edge of his deckchair. Closing his eyes, he holds the ghost of Audrey’s hand. For just a moment he feels her breath on his face, the sureness of her arms.
‘Watch out!’
Jonah glances up to see the football careering towards the conservatory. Chloe, carrying two teapots into the house, manages to steer away the catastrophe with her elbow.
‘Oh, well done, lovely.’
As two grown men applaud her, Chloe makes an awkward curtsy. Her physicality is fluid one moment, self-conscious the next; a constantly changing thing that pulls his eye, makes him want to describe it. It’s a run of quavers, unexpected rests, a shift in time signature; but then she returns to the cool of the house and Jonah is left staring at some trampled daisies.
He returns to his previous position, the sun scorching his neck. Where was he? He tries to put his arms around the soft muscles of memory. Perhaps on both sides there is an attempt? He imagines Audrey and he touching through the veils, across the impossibility of physics, both of them grappling with the question of what death is; but the truth is he can only see the grass beneath his deckchair and a bit of discarded cake. Teeth marks, icing nibbled off . . . Jonah tilts back into the slump of canvas, feeling the heavy heat on his face. He’s heard other people talk about it – that reaching across the divide. It’s visceral – the weight of their head on your pillow, a touch on the underside of your arm. The sensation leaves, is rationalised away – then it happens again, as mysterious and fathomless as before.
It is easily mocked. But perhaps ridicule is easier for him to face than finally admitting that someone he touched no longer exists – is nothing, deleted. All that is left is the yearning and the echo.
On that airless evening, neither of them can sleep. All the windows are open, and, wearing only his underwear, Jonah teaches her an easy version of ‘Ave Maria’. Sitting at the piano, she copies his hands, trying not to be distracted by the comforting solidness of his forearm. By midnight, he is showing her the basic principles of composition. Chloe is surprised that there are only twelve notes. Once she realises that music shares the restrictive principles of origami, she finds it simple to play with the patterns. She approaches chords like a mathematician, curious to stretch the limits of what is possible. As her fingers strain to reach a key she notices a burn on the creamy surface and asks, ‘What is this?’
‘An F.’
‘No, I meant . . .’
‘Audrey used to sit here when she was on the phone. I’d point out the length of her ash, but . . .’ He shrugs. ‘There wasn’t much music then.’
How can she tell him that she already knows? Look at him, now, being so patient and funny. He seems to be enjoying her clunky, amateur delight, as if there is some safety in having them both on this stool. They share the habit of making art through the night, but as she conjures up sound and nonsense, it feels strange to have the immediacy of Jonah’s response, to not create alone.
As he shows her how to play a different inversion, she can sense that he, too, is wondering how much he can trust this . . . their relationship . . . his music. She finds herself listening to his glances, the things he doesn’t say; then she listens to his kisses, an entire language in itself.
An afternoon in Victoria Park, reading. The words in Jonah’s novel begin to blur and he has to use all his willpower to stop his shoulders heaving. But still the tears come. When he looks up, Chloe is staring at him, over the top of her book, her own eyes welling up.
‘What’s the matter?’ they ask in sync.
‘Nothing,’ she shrugs. ‘You felt suddenly heavy. I couldn’t see your face but I knew you were upset. What were you reading?’
‘It’s not important.’
She rubs her eyes with the heel of her hand, grinning. ‘I just felt what you were feeling, that’s all.’
In music, he would call it resonance. Or something only a wife can do. As she holds his gaze, he can feel a mesh of empathy thickening the air, but what is he getting himself into? He turns his book face-down, embarrassed that he has been so sentimental. Not now. Not in public.
‘I need to piss,’ he says and goes off to find the nearest toilet.
When he locks himself inside the grubby cubicle, he expects the catharsis of sobbing over the death of a fictional dog. But instead he sits very still, wondering how he’s forgotten what it feels like to have someone know his feelings before he does.
Chloe sits on a stool in a man’s suit. Her naked toes are painted in aquamarine, and a large paper bird pokes out of her breast pocket like a handkerchief. In front of her is a mirror. As she draws her self-portrait in charcoal, the oversized clothes look clown-like, as does her red-crayoned mouth. It is stuffed full of secrets.
It is a humid afternoon, the streets full of fumes and overheated motorists. The large sash windows are misted with dirt and there’s the noise of sewing machines spewing thread, a baby crying, a lovers’ tiff upstairs. She wonders if this couple also heard her yelling during her final night with Claude. They had gone out for sushi. As always she enjoyed the mystical elements of Japanese cuisine, the intricate folding of food. But at the end of an evening that was blander than the rice, she refused sex, saying she had her period.
‘You gave the same excuse last week.’ Claude lifted his chin. ‘Perhaps you’re spent from all your time with Jonas.’
‘Jonah.’
‘I mean – what are we doing here?’ He had already started putting on his jacket. With one arm in, the other out, he gestured towards her walls. ‘Looking at this, anyone would think you were broody.’
‘God, no!’
‘No, you take the pill religiously every morning. But, for Christ’s sake, when are you going to grow up? You reckon you’re this modern, independent woman, that as long as all your lovers know about each other it’s cool. But that Jack guy . . .’
‘Joe.’
‘Well, he’s leading you on, and in the meantime I’ve . . .’
‘Got Natalie.’
‘She’s my sister.’
‘Oh.’
His reddening, freckled complexion made Chloe think of a little boy, in tears, running off a football pitch. She really didn’t want to spend the night alone, but still she said, ‘I can’t, Claude. I’m sorry.’
‘Goodbye, Chlo.’
She stops drawing and tears out an empty page from her sketchbook. After making a phoenix, she unfolds it and begins an orchid, but the paper resists, the original pleats stubborn. The creases remind her that Jonah’s body has been used, that someone has already travelled the terrain of him and left her mark, ruining him for anyone else. Chloe’s only defence is to make cities of paper, build
castles of pulp. She rolls her neck, hoping to find the motivation to work.
The week before, she had visited the vast chilled room in Kew’s Economic Botany archives. The drawers were filled with four hundred specimens of paper brought back from Japan in the mid-nineteenth century by a British diplomat. Some of the paper had been treated with a paste made from a plant root called kon-niaku-no-dama that produced a durable, waterproof cloth. Chloe studied the shoes that looked like leather, the hats and umbrellas, the woven ribbons that felt like silk. Many of the products were made from the inner bark of the mulberry tree and Chloe considers the patterns in its leaf . . . then the spirals of a shell. Her own thumbprint.
She watches the movement of her hands across the paper, wondering if the real magic of origami is in the doing rather than the end product. How can she translate this into her work for the Gardens? It’s easy to fold the sails of a boat; but can she learn how to represent the creases in life, the words unsaid, the people that are missing? She hitches up her trousers and searches the warehouse for a ball of string. Once she has found it, she takes a wooden frame that has been propped up against the wall, empty for a year. Tying the end of the string around the wood, she begins to weave a web. She studies the holes between the mesh.
How to Not Say I Love You
Milly asked Harry if he was falling in love.
‘We’re friends. That’s all.’
It was night, February 2004, and they were lying among the redwoods, listening to The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on an old CD Walkman. Harry, intimidated by Jonah’s musical knowledge, wanted to impress Audrey. Having spent hours in Richmond Library, he had chosen to start with Baroque: three collections of Vivaldi, and this. Under a canopy of branches, Benjamin Britten broke down Purcell’s Abdelazer Suite into different sections: the woodwind, the brass and strings. The narrator explained about the fugue and its variations, the restating of the theme.
‘But I want to know about Audrey.’
Harry peeled off his headphones and explained how the bark they were leaning on, as red as Audrey’s hair, was steeped in history.