Asylum Road

by Olivia Sudjic

  I was an indigent student, art historian, he continued, slurring. I should let him get this. He might have added I had minimal self-respect, for I had little desire to break my bondage.

  The funded PhD was part-time, and so I made some income transcribing audio, mainly for a medical company, which I could do from home, writing dissertations for one of those essay mills (of which both Luke and Christopher especially disapproved) and tutoring – which also made me ashamed. It meant travelling all over London and into people’s homes, often seeing how very wealthy people lived and how I helped perpetuate that wealth by getting them into elite schools and universities, even winning them scholarships. Among the children I preferred were the ones who could not have afforded those places otherwise, usually first or second generation immigrants. It weighed on me that their parents were throwing all the money they had on private tutors. Of these, my youngest was working toward the seven-plus. Her family had recently arrived from Bulgaria. The father was a cardiologist and had moved the family to an apartment in a high-rise near Canary Wharf without ever having seen it. They seemed pleased that someone like me had ended up at such a prestigious British university. I was, they said, a good role model for their daughter.

  It made me feel good about myself certainly, but I also liked that child. I admired the way she approached verbal reasoning. Such as: should parents and teachers treat boys and girls the same? Answer: no, because you would not hug and kiss your teacher and your parents should not be too strict.

  She was the age I was when I found myself transplanted to Mosspark Primary, learning to recite poetry by Robert Burns. That was where my desire to study humanities came from, I used to say on those personal statements and funding applications where you were asked to explain such things. I could have talked more truthfully about what Mira had read to me in the basement, but instead I cited the first Burns poem I’d learned. The one he addresses to the mouse – whose home he’s just destroyed with a plough.

  Despite what I wrote, it had not affected me because of ‘the power of language’ (I had barely understood it) but due to a physical experience. As I read the line: Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! I had my first experience of what I later understood to be vertigo. The room spun violently to the left. Panicked, I tried to move with it, or rather against it, hurling myself out of the small plastic chair and onto the floor of my new classroom. In shock at hitting the ground, I began to sob uncontrollably.

  For a few years, I’d also earned money working at a bookshop, but this coincided with the online rating of the bookshop going down. It was clear, Christopher said, from some of the customer reviews, that I had been the cause. One simply read: the girl at the counter is elitist.

  When the waiter came back with the card reader, Luke returned to his side of the table and handed over his card. I reached my hand across and he held it while the machine whirred, looking, I felt, at the ring.

  Let’s go, I said. Let’s walk.

  But walking took too long, and I started to feel the good mood draining. I ran ahead, pretending to be someone free-spirited. By the time we reached our doorway and he’d fumbled with the key, which required pulling the handle toward you with exactly the right force, we’d separated again. I wasn’t sure whose fault it was, whether I’d created the tension with my false gaiety or simply detected it and then tried to paint over it.

  Upstairs, I undressed, the way I would alone, not willing to give up though not willing to take the lead. Sometimes I worried my body had grown too familiar to Luke, and that was another good reason to keep it from him – the laws of supply and demand. But after a moment of stillness, Luke stayed my hand, slipped from the edge of the bed to the floor at my feet, pulling my underwear to one side and lifting his tongue into me. To steady us, his other hand travelled behind my thighs. I leant against the wall, tipped my head back, raised a heel onto his shoulder.

  He was never rough. I suppose he thought I was extremely fragile. I faked a climax every time, hardly even aware I was doing it. If I did think about it sometimes, remembering my only boyfriend at university, I felt frightened. As if there was a dark void I might fall into without warning. But when I opened my mouth just then, the shuddering sound was something different.

  I looked down at the top of Luke’s head. I put my hand on it to check that he was really there – my surroundings in the strange room now surreal. Far away from where the day had begun, the night spent on the bathroom tiles, the acid taste of bile. His head tilted so that his eyes met mine and I found the door to the place I usually only find as everything’s ending. Normally that feeling means I start to back away, pretend I’ve already come so he’ll move on and concentrate on finishing. This time I didn’t. I couldn’t stand any longer and moved around him, lowering myself onto the bed, unsure of how I wanted the next part to go. Something like this, like the music heard through the open window – this other, unmapped level of the game – would turn out to be illusory, or happen only once, which was the same thing really.

  No, he said. Not that.

  No, I repeated.

  I lay back and felt myself shrink beneath him. The shine of his collarbone level with my eye. Bird-boned, the same dizzy lightness I’d had all day but good now, spreading.

  Inside me, I commanded.

  As he pushed inside I went through another door, and I found myself smiling at how fast it was happening, how easily, as if I’d expected it to be locked but in fact it was open. The room began to turn. Rippling like it was fabric. Not a void, but I felt hollowed out, so that I became the air in the room as well as both bodies in it. The feeling was of expansion, lines melting away rather than emptiness, like I would black out if I stopped thinking.

  I reached my hand around his arm for its solidity, the stability of him generally, and again, from some deeply worn groove, the reflex for thought over annihilation. But just as I pulled back, I felt his body respond, his chin turned in, lifting off a little so he could see into my face.

  I love you, he said, you know that?

  I’d woken up first. From the short coma that follows sex if you haven’t had it for a long time. The thud of sleep like a rebound that comes before real sleep. Waking in confusion to a room with the lights on.

  His arm was wrapped around me but I needed to pee. I lifted the arm and slid out from under then scuttled to the bathroom, breaking into a run. Though it was a half-level down from the bedroom and sound barely carried, I reached forward and ran the tap out of habit. I towelled the insides of my legs, brushed my teeth, removed the smudges of brown mascara under each red eye. Staring at the face above the sink, thoughts returned to me. Like: I’d missed my pill that day. The previous day’s was likely purged in the sink at home.

  Fuck, I said to the mirror. Fuck.

  When I woke again just before dawn, the room was dark but for a blade of light which marked the doorway and a blue line at the bottom of the windowpane. I’d been having a complicated dream and my first thought was to write it down as I usually do, to separate it from reality. Then I remembered the black rectangle that signified the missing notebook. I groped for the complimentary pad beside the bed and felt my way outside the room, closed the door gently and turned on the light, writing up the main points of the dream while standing naked in the display kitchen, pad pressed against the wall, until Luke gave a moo of irritation.

  Back beside him, I couldn’t sleep. My brain had returned to its fractious state.

  It’s the rich food, he said sleepily. We ate too late.

  I thought of Luke’s blood sausages and potatoes fried in oil.

  I lay there and pretended to be sleeping but then a repulsive memory surfaced. The memory of my mother in a strange bedroom I’d been put to sleep in when I saw, through the slits of my eyes, her climbing astride a man – my father? – him pushing her away.

  In the morning he sat half-dressed, the same corner from where he’d watched me undress the night before, now searching for a pharmacy. I paced the room the
n went to the fridge and ate both pieces of halva. He called out an address.

  What time does it open? I called back.

  Oh, wait, no. Ignore that. This one’s old . . . Like a seven-hundred-year-old-apothecary. But we could go there? After. Might be fun? Europe’s third-oldest working pharmacy . . .

  At the counter I spoke in English. In case the pharmacist turned out to be religious I thought it would be better to feign ignorance. He looked confused. I took out the Airbnb pad.

  Woah, Luke said, woah, woah. What’re you going to draw this time?

  I ignored him, forging a condom in one smooth line, then adding a jagged one to indicate a split, then a dashed, determined one, heading toward a circle. I crossed through the dashed line with a flourish.

  Noli me tangere.

  The pharmacist’s posture stiffened but he went into a back room and returned with a silver packet of Escapelle, putting it straight into a bag for me. Luke handed over 200 kuna from a plastic wallet and then we turned, mission accomplished, pushed the door and walked briskly toward the steps of St Blaise.

  While I sat on the top step and waited, Luke went to buy a bottle of water. I opened the box and toyed with the contents – a silver spaceship-like dish in which a single white pill had been sealed as though it might itself grow into an alien baby. My hands itched, I realised, for my phone. I toyed with the blister package.

  I wondered if Christopher would be worried about me. Though I’d only been without it for twenty-four hours, this was perhaps the longest we’d gone without some form of contact in several years. In many ways I already had a husband, the kind Luke would never be, and I wanted to tell him about the previous night. The possibilities it had suggested.

  Sitting on the church step, waiting for Luke to return, I relived the moment we first met:

  After the ceremony. The glare of white stone. Us sitting on the wide, shallow steps leading to the church. The square before it a relief after the alleyways, dead ends and sudden drops. Neither of us really knew anyone. I had been struggling, feeling low in confidence, and we were waiting on the edge of a gang of braying family friends for the last boat in a wedding flotilla. No cars meant we’d started out even, at least in that regard. Neither of us knew it was bad luck to go to Venice together before marrying. I don’t know if it’s the same if you meet there.

  When the boat arrived, a boarding school clique in damp linen suits crushed together. There wasn’t room for the last four of us so Luke hung back. The other couple said they’d had too much sun anyway and would see us at the reception. We sat on the edge, spray from the Adriatic against our legs, looking at the deepening green of tide bands on the stone beneath us. The step’s heat seared through the silk of my dress. I cast it in a circle around me. When he asked where I was staying, I laughed and said the cheapest hotel from the ‘cheap’ section on the website. That was our first joke. The wedding website. The cheap section. It kept us going in the early weeks, evolving quickly into shorthand. When something was unreasonably expensive it was from the cheap section, and when something that was supposed to be simple (like planning where to meet) got over-complicated, that thing got its own website. I did not realise then that he had his own flat his parents bought him. Luke did not think of himself as wealthy because he had some working-class relatives. His dad was self-made as he often told me. Besides, he was not a banker and had gone to his boarding school on a scholarship.

  Later we saw the seating plan had us together again. Diagonally across on one of the long tables under strings of orange paper lanterns. As the sky turned green they glowed like sea creatures. A conga line started. Rowdy but affectionate Italians. I assumed Luke, who’d so far operated on the fringes, whispering savage commentary into my ear, would hold back, but he pulled me into it. Then, once our section came loose, I guessed the idea had been to reduce the intensity of our sudden pairing, to make ourselves available again to other people at the party. I thought we’d maybe circle each other awkwardly then lose each other half-intentionally on the dance floor. But soon I found myself hanging limp with my arms around his neck, both of us swaying gently.

  In the boat going back from the reception, I watched how the dark, compact seaweed that hung from the walls of the buildings transformed in our wake, expanding, floating upward in bright clouds of green from the submerged brick, drunkenly convinced it was the perfect metaphor for our meeting.

  The next day we nursed each other, eating only gelato. Hips pushing against the clicking turnstiles, my stomach fizzing and empty, head an ecstatic balloon. We tried to follow the blue dot but there was a delay, so following the map only sent us down wrong paths. There were no right ones it seemed anyway – everything was crooked and led back to the same square. I didn’t care where we went, I said. Whatever he suggested was what I wanted. Pliable instinctively but also because the whole place was something to see, wasn’t it? I’d studied its artefacts as a sixth-former but never in person. I hadn’t understood, in the physical sense, that the city was stone on water, a sinking museum. I was mesmerised by the erosion of grandeur – monumental palazzos where the doorways had rotted and the rising water left the ground floors uninhabitable. To save battery, Luke had a book for learning Italian that had been free with a newspaper, evidently from years ago. It followed an English couple, Tom and Kate, around Italy, and referred to prices in lire. Tom worked with computers and Kate had been a teacher for three years but now worked for Rover. We quoted the lines they spoke to each other before painted altarpieces in dark churches. These were not the stock phrases I’d been expecting, but how a real, intimate couple would converse while navigating acqua alta. It was intoxicating, role-playing Kate, with her nice English boyfriend and middle-class tastes. I kept everything, every souvenir. All the tickets bearing reproductions of tiny details from paintings of heavy-lidded saints.

  Noli me tangere, Luke read aloud, is the Latin version of the phrase spoken by Jesus to Mary – touch me not – when she recognised him after the resurrection. The original Greek is better translated as stop clinging to me or stop holding on to me – the attempt to stay joined together as an ongoing action rather than a single moment.

  We stared at the returning Jesus, brushing away his mother’s arms.

  At sunset we went to another island. I was keen to let him know I was reading Jan Morris. That I was considering a masters in Art History.

  I started to tell him when we sat down. Talking fast, my eyes darting up to his face. Falling for him already. In those days my brain was always brimming with real things, facts, and I had to find ways to halt its progress for an audience. I found it so much easier to concentrate, to retain information. To use it to my advantage somehow. How the monks were expelled from their monastery by the Turks, then granted asylum on this island. How Venice was founded by refugees, forced to become seafarers. Half western, half eastern, half land, half sea.

  On the morning we were due to fly home – separate airports, one expensive, one cheap – I’d woken to Luke’s first disappearing act. From the open wardrobe, I heard the empty hangers sounding in the wind like church bells or far-off goats. I realised I was alone in the bed. I felt the damp air rising up the staircase and knew the door to the room was open. I aimed my gaze at the ceiling, lay still as if I’d been stabbed. The heavy yellow plaster sagged between the beams.

  I got up and sat with my back in the sun on the small Venetian balcony. A couple, Italian, were arguing in a narrow street below, beside the canal. The woman was becoming hysterical. I leant over between the laundry lines and terracotta pots and saw them. The woman had sunk to her knees and the man was trying to pull her up. She seemed to be in shock. He tried to drag her along the street and she would not let him, but when he tried to walk away without her she screamed at him to come back. Finally, he gave up and walked away and around a corner so that she cried out again, louder. I’d closed the window, there was something about the scene, her helplessness, that had made me imagine her body, or the discovery
of it, drowned. I remember thinking I would never let that be me, that woman and her body, her loud, inhuman screams.

  Luke returned to the church steps holding a glass bottle and unscrewed it for me. I sliced into the silver foil and gulped the emergency pill down with ice-cold water.

  6

  Early on Sunday he went running. When he got back we drove from Dubrovnik to the Bay of Kotor, a place I knew I had once been to from a hazy memory augmented by photographs. The last holiday as a family, though we didn’t know it then. Dan Republike. Daria, Drago and me sitting on an upturned fishing boat and beyond us the water, which I’d thought of as a lake but was actually an indented part of the sea.

  Luke and I sat in a square with small glasses of bitter coffee. I wasn’t in the mood for walking or looking at Venetian fortifications anymore and drew my fingernail back and forth along my chin. He took out his phone and started registering me with a company that specialised in locating personal property lost in international airports, asking for the details he needed in the same coaxing tone he used on animals he was trying to move.

  The Escapelle had left me feeling unstable, or that was what I’d said, and I knew he was being kind to me because of this. After a short wander which made me worry we’d run out of things to say already, we drove on, arriving at the restaurant before Mira.

  The hotel occupied the whole of the island, tethered to the beach by a narrow stone causeway. It had been a fishing village – simple stone buildings with red-tiled roofs, white shutters, cypress trees and pines set on top of the rocks. A woman at the reception desk escorted us along narrow cobbled lanes which climbed toward the centre and a table; the only one laid in an otherwise deserted courtyard presented to us as the piazza. Mira, the waitress said, had requested this specific table.