by Lucy Durneen
The woman on the bus had another stop to sit out all the lurching and ricocheting. We disembarked at New Square, the stop that was easy to miss since they renamed it with a generic indication that you were in the city now but not precisely where, not on exactly which street, uncertain as we departed whether our mumbled gratitude to the driver was an act of treachery or defiance.
The old madness and the sea
Murray had never been afraid to call a spade a spade. A rose is a rose is a rose Gina had said. But it meant the same thing, or at least, that was what he assumed. She told him she was a widow and he’d been prepared to believe it, but he didn’t take it for granted. He had never seen any photographs of a husband or family but then, neither did he carry a picture of his wife in his wallet. So it meant nothing either way. All he knew was that when he was with her he felt capable of a motion fluid and unstoppable, as if she were a delta and he the river flooding into her, and Murray didn’t want to stop too long to think about anything that might slow the movement down. He was an unremarkable man, and the thought of being an analogy was about as exciting as anything else that had happened to him in recent months. He had never considered himself to be in any way talented and suddenly here were two things he had discovered a gift for: telling a lie and getting away with it. It was hard to tell if that was a consequence of something else or if the capacity for it had always been there like an old cup or a fossilised bone, just waiting in the regolith of the earth to be exposed. He guessed a little of both. Yeah, that’s right, he wanted to tell Hazel. I know words like regolith.
He worked for a company that installed satellite television. A good majority of people who ordered some kind of minidish system made an impromptu decision at a supermarket or after reading a flyer in a lifestyle magazine, but when he started back after his second tour they sent him out on the door to door rota, where, divorced from an already cranked up, reckless need to spend, it was harder to convince people they wanted what he had to sell. And on the one hand that was a good thing because what Murray needed immediately was a routine challenge, although what he needed long term was something different, something that could alleviate that feeling of being caught in midstream, like an eel lost on unknown currents in its return to the Sargasso.
She lived on a street where the backs of the houses faced the sea but the fronts looked out onto an identical, faintly municipal terrace separated from the road by iron railings. Immediately Murray liked the illusion, the delay of the moment in which the sea revealed itself as some sort of magician’s trick. He had not looked at her face when she opened the door but away over her shoulder to the French windows and the bay beyond, saw the water vital and molten beyond the glass and made some sort of involuntary noise that didn’t even come close to being a word. She seemed appreciative. He struggled to reel off the standard lines, the request for just a minute of her time.
‘Normally I wouldn’t,’ she told him. ‘But as it happens, today I’m feeling rash.’ So he followed her inside, product information at the ready, with the trepidation of a fire-eater who knows his craft inside out but fears his knowledge will one day fail and burn him.
Everything about the room was geared up to an appreciation of the sea. The sky seemed a high mirror, brilliant and backlit. Even the light was tidal. As Murray stood there looking it seemed the sky and the clouds were in a constant bid to change places with each other and for no good reason he remembered lying on his back on hot white sand with a girl he’d once known who said that all things emerged from the sea only to spend their whole life longing to return to it.
He had few words to offer and none of them involved satellite television. ‘The sea’s pretty,’ was the best he could manage, in the first instance. She stared at him with an amused twist of her mouth. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does look pretty good from here.’
Murray had never previously engaged in shameless flirting and responded with a little flourish of his document case that he immediately regretted.
‘How about getting down to business,’ he said and then regretted that too. It happened, sometimes, that women – and it was often the divorcees but he didn’t want to generalise – would come on to him a little and he would shake it off, maybe throw in a joke or two just to keep the mood sweet and more often than not, a deal closed; there was something about signing a direct debit mandate that made these women quick to bare their soul. He wanted to tell her that she didn’t need what he was trying to sell, that staring at a screen all day robbed you of your thoughts and God knows, that was all you did, once you gave in and signed up, whatever anybody said about all those documentary channels being educational. But the living room wall was a lattice of books and he saw how the geometry of the water beyond the window cut strong, dazzling lines across the room, over the furniture and the two people standing in its luminous sweep, and looking into her bright face he could tell that she already knew better and whatever being rash meant, it did not mean subscribing to satellite television. She was older than Hazel and Murray had the ridiculous thought that of the two, this woman standing in front of him now was the more real, as if she were part of the sun and the water and Hazel was merely a reflection, a thought, temporary. He shook it off. Sat on the sofa, accepted the offer of coffee, got up again and walked back over to the window. Touched the bookshelves, disturbed the deep quadrants of light.
‘I had a friend who left a man because he hadn’t read D.H. Lawrence,’ she said.
When he turned around she was holding a mug of coffee, offering it out like a gift. He looked down to see his hand resting on Women in Love and guilty, Murray picked it up, thumbed idly from a scribbled message on the inside front cover to about half way through. ‘I’ve not read very much Lawrence,’ he said, apologetic.
‘Lady Chatterley?’
‘Yes.’
‘You just read the dirty bits?’
‘Yes.’
‘The folded warmth,’ she said, in what he supposed was meant to be a northern accent. ‘The secret entrances. Tha’s got the nicest arse of anybody.’
He was embarrassed to see himself in the mirror opposite, his face flushed an adolescent rosacea, the document case resting, protectively, against him in a manner that reminded him of being at school. He tried to think of what the Bank of England was supposed to be doing to interest rates, the crack in Azaria’s bedroom ceiling that might indicate subsidence, tulips. If it hadn’t been for the name badge hanging around his neck he would have had trouble recognising himself. The suit was particularly incongruous. Squinting, Murray saw a different outline, one wearing DPMs and a Shemagh, and suddenly he wished this woman could also see him like that, dark and dusty and alive, like Lawrence of Arabia. But she was treated only to this version of him, informed, predictable, the version that Hazel positively encouraged and tried to take with her to barbecues and National Childbirth Trust benefits.
He was about to speak, but she got there first, seeing his face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That was inappropriate. Sit down. I’m quoting, obviously.’
He should have left, or breathed a sigh of relief, but as soon as he didn’t Murray stepped into a different pool, one into which pretty much every other person he worked with had already dipped a toe and either basked or drowned, and one which suddenly he felt was his due.
In the quake of his grip against the wall she was reproachful. ‘You haven’t even asked my name,’ she said and for a minute he didn’t want to know, understanding that anonymity was like an armour and it was his responsibility to keep it shining. Still, there was an inscription on the inside of Women in Love and he couldn’t help whispering Gina, Gina, Gina, and as he said it, tipping her head as if to drink from her, kissing her full on the lips and then again in the pale valley beneath her ear, he felt the balance of her tension change as if he had unlocked her and dislodged some fundamental possibility, one where maybe love could come like this, at first sight and without asking. And he would have believed this, except his b
reathing synchronised with the heave of the sea outside and fucking her was just the relief of some submarine urge, not anything to do with love at all.
Murray didn’t feel very much to blame, if he was honest. He felt sudden gusts of entitlement to infidelity. He was no more than an aimless moon orbiting within a bigger system that made cheating possible, where no-one could afford to get the work they really wanted so you took what you could get and it meant you had to travel and you were permanently angry, and it was so easy to be able to say you had to stay at a motel because it made no sense to drive all the way home at the end of a long day. Yes, he said to Hazel, it was the company’s expense and no, he hadn’t really got a choice: these were not the right economic times in which to complain. To add to the veneer of authenticity he threw in an anecdote about having overheard a French girl talking on her mobile about le credit crunch when he was getting fuel. So there’s no translation, he said. That’s funny. And Hazel, who did not want to sound possessive, agreed that it was funny and reminded him that Azaria had her appointment with the paediatrician upcountry at the end of the week. She didn’t have to add that he should be there and he wondered again about that word imperative and why it was he had heard it so many times since his daughter was born.
Wasn’t that the dingo baby’s name? someone asked him once, but he was too young to remember that. Hazel chose it, was his stock response. It was unusual but he still didn’t know if he liked it, which made him feel bad, as if he was letting his daughter down just by having no opinion of what they had christened her. He had opinions of so few of the things they were supposed to share, he was beginning to realise. Some time the year before, Azaria had been to a party and the birthday girl’s mother had transferred a small, temporary tattoo onto the back of her hand. Predictably the appeal had rapidly waned and as Murray sat washing the tattoo away, patiently rubbing the soap into Azaria stroke by stroke, he wondered when he would feel the magic, when all this would become more than just washing ink off someone else’s skin and an experience that changed him from the core outwards.
He supposed it probably already had, but in ways that couldn’t be audited. When he phoned home, hearing Azaria’s breathy garble about school and friends, the way her sentences broke as the signal faded in and out and he had to make up what she was trying to tell him; those might have been the moments. He asked Hazel what was up and she told him little things, like the cat had brought in another vole and they were both coming down with something, summer flu maybe. Oh, and Azaria had written a poem that got a special recognition from the headmistress. ‘Listen to this,’ Hazel said. ‘I hated it when I saw a potato, but I loved it when I saw a swan.’ Murray sat in the car, windows down, dropping into a daze where all he could hear were the waves bashing at the seaweed line like a military battery, out of sight behind the dunes, but he told Hazel he loved it too, and she said she missed him and was proud of all the work he was doing, how hard he worked for the family.
He switched off his phone, made to walk back out into the warm night. He had no idea what the hell it even meant. I hated it when I saw a potato? For just a minute he stopped to crush a pinch of midges against the car window, picturing his wife making dinner, cutting vegetables and dancing, the superlative twist of her hip that always prompted their little joke: Hazel, you’re nuts. And then the midges were gone, part of the skin of his fingertips, part of him, and the feeling vanished, which meant he was just a man alone in the white moonlight with the sea roaring.
It was a simpler pleasure, lying under Gina’s coverlet looking up the light, marvelling at the way you could still see it through the cotton, diffuse and spluttering. At least once a week he would show up at her door and she would have him come in, make him coffee and they pretended it meant absolutely nothing, that she was still thinking about the different deals and whether a Film or a Sports package was the more appropriate way to go. He fell asleep to soft and repeated explosions of rain. Morning after morning he woke up to the pulse of hidden waves.
Murray hadn’t smoked since college but he didn’t say no when she offered him a joint, waving off the apology that it was poor quality, just the stalks that no-one wanted. There was a balcony that led off the main bedroom to look directly out onto the bay, and standing on it, stretching into the wind, he wondered what you did with a surfeit of beauty, like really, what could you do with it, and if he had to explain it to Hazel, would she understand that when others in his command had craved sex, a decent steak, all he had longed he for in the desert was the simplicity of rain. He wondered if this behaviour was the result of their inability to give that to each other: simplicity. Of them not having the money to buy this kind of life where all you had to do was get out of bed and look out onto the end of the land, the lights of the deep water, its animalistic seethe, where there was a chance that the velocity of the waves could cancel out a person’s own internal surge. But that didn’t seem fair, to hold this against her. The entire ocean. Their landlocked existence. Fuck, he thought, pitching the joint down towards the purple sand below. This is so fucked up.
Standing beside the bed, he looked at Gina’s face and although it made him happy to see her smile up at him, he saw also that something in its illumination was not just for him, and he remembered the time, visiting a cathedral somewhere down South, when he had stood in the coloured pool of a stained glass window, marvelling at the way it liquefied stone, his own skin even, until he turned and saw others behind him, caught up in the same, tired marvel.
‘Are you okay?’ she said. ‘You don’t look okay.’
‘No, no,’ he said, climbing in. ‘This is perfect.’
Some habits must have been persistent because once she asked him if he had been in the army. He shook his head. ‘Territorial,’ he said, like it made a difference.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘When they did that Shock and Awe stuff on Baghdad, I have to tell you I felt ashamed.’
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t like to speak of it much, failing to see the point in talking as therapy. Too often he felt fraudulent in his trauma, knowing he had not experienced anything like what could be described as the worst. He had a scar from shoulder to elbow on the inside and of course she was going to ask about it. The ridge of torn skin shone like a streak of paraffin wax; touching it reminded her of the sensation of handling cotton wool, which had always made her gag. ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t anything much.’ It wasn’t. He had caught himself on the door of an armoured vehicle, which had been embarrassing more than it was painful. But he resented how the mistake had altered the topography of his body in such a misleading way.
Before he sold satellite dishes, before Azaria, before Iraq, Murray had been a printer and his hands still released the sharp odour of ink when clapping or making any sudden, close movement. At inappropriate times the fume of the press would explode from him, turpentine, pitch resin, carbon, peach, the ink liquor contradicting other smells buried deep in his palms that gave him away, even if he didn’t realise it. More than once Gina reached for him and caught instead the scent of lavender handcream, and that was okay with her. It was just the two of them in the dark, where his skin was phosphorescent and she was happy to pretend it glowed just for her.
Still. Closer they drew to fairytales.
About two months in there was a night storm. Murray had already thought it was a bad idea to get high on a balcony but there was something in the violence of water on water. She made mojitos and carried them out on a tray, flipping her skirt at him in time to the music from a stereo indoors. Her body tried to rest against his, leaning in as if they were in their own parenthetical world, but he shrugged her off, standing straight to watch some fireworks on the other side of the bay.
Here’s something, he heard himself saying. As it flows into Mesopotamia, the Tigris draws close to the bank of the Euphrates like a twin. Bridges bind the two rivers like an ancient spine. This is where the written alphabet was invented, where words were sent out into the waters to f
low down to the cities, flooding the khans and the suqs until they emptied themselves into the sea, where they scattered and civilised the world. Words that flowed from the nation between the rivers.
It felt like something he might have read in a book; it was not his voice, although he believed it. ‘Gina,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it sad what we’ve done? Gina?’ But the rum was beginning to bite and in his head he had already moved on, wasn’t thinking about the Tigris or the Euphrates any more.
‘You know, my name isn’t Gina,’ she said, pushing the paper umbrella to one side of the glass as she sipped.
‘It’s not?’ He was a little stunned. ‘Then what’s the name in the book?’
‘I don’t know. Which book? I pick most of them up in charity shops.’
He tried to remember back to seeing the name in Women in Love that first time. ‘Why didn’t you say?’ he demanded and she just shrugged.
‘I guess I quite liked it. I don’t know when we’re going to start being honest with each other, but I thought it might be handy if your wife comes looking for me. Nobody round here is going to know a Gina.’
On the other side of the bay smoke drifted in lazy parachutes, rising and falling with the somnambulant motion of jellyfish, and Murray could only suppose she was right.