by Lucy Durneen
‘They say that men fall in love three times,’ she said accusingly. ‘The first is puppy love, the second is the one you marry. The third time is the deathbed bride. Which one am I?’
He said nothing, still mesmerized by the jellyfish. But she was agitated now and he dug into his back pocket and pulled out a sweaty resin sphere.
‘Slow down small pony,’ he whispered into her hair. She walked inside to change the music, put on Bob Dylan’s historic Halloween concert at Philharmonic Hall and he then pulled her back into the cave of his chest, letting them both disappear in the dark.
She took a phone call later in the evening. When she came back to the balcony there were tears in her eyes and Murray saw it there again in her face, the sun-stripped light that made her unknown to him. ‘That was my daughter,’ she said. ‘She just had a little boy. Oh God, I’m a grandma.’
‘Jesus,’ he said. He hardly knew where to look. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thank you. Thank you. He was only dinky. Six pounds. I can’t believe my baby just gave birth. Shit, that makes me feel old.’
Murray rubbed his temples, shook his head as if he had just stepped out of a swimming pool. She looked put out. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, pulling his hand away. ‘I’m just trying to get my head around this.’
‘I guess I never mentioned my daughter, did I?’ she said. Amongst other things, he thought. He felt mildly unwell.
He blundered through polite phrases. He asked if she would go to visit them.
‘No, no. I don’t travel.’
‘You don’t—?’
‘Not since my husband died. I haven’t left this house in, what, I guess eight years.’ She crossed her legs and rearranged herself to look out across the water as if tracking some distant boat over the horizon. ‘Public transport gives me the jitters. I see a rucksack unattended and—never mind. It’s fine. They’ll send me photographs. God bless the Internet.’
‘Well this is new,’ he said, lost.
They must have sat for half an hour, not talking. A jazz of lights flew into the sky and fell back into the water like fire. He imagined it was a birthday, or a wedding, at one of the fishing villages along the coast but it looked for all the world like flares asking for help. One or other of them made another batch of mojitos. Finally, for something to say, she volunteered, ‘Aren’t the fireworks pretty.’
The fireworks were pretty. Pretty and distant like diamonds in a deep mine or something else he could describe but had never seen. The lights died down and the sky became perfect again. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said. ‘But I for one am hungry.’
He went into the house, blind in the absence of the searing sea gleam, and made a snack out of what he could find in the refrigerator, some kind of egg fried rice with bacon and tinned sweet corn. ‘They’re naming him Ben,’ she called from outside. ‘It means precious son.’ But he could hardly hear against the sound of the bacon cooking and Bob Dylan and the waves. And in the dark he enjoyed the dizziness of his high and wondered about Azaria, whose name meant blessed of God, the sort of name you would expect to find in a Dylan song, the guitars playing over it and over it. Azaria. Gitttar. Gitt-tar. An hour later he was still there, in the kitchen, spooning the last of the rice into his mouth, thinking how sweet, how painful music could be when you shouldn’t be hearing it.
They woke up shy, in damp, white half-light. The clock said 4.30am and she tasted a little drunk still. He waited until she drifted off again, memorising the motion of her sleep for the time when he wouldn’t know her.
Outside the morning felt clean and unfamiliar, as if he was on holiday, which in a sense he was. A paper boy curved across the junction into her road, satchel slung so low on his back it almost touched the rear wheel of his bike and Murray felt the sea all around him like a second skin. Minus the water and plus a whole lot of sand it was almost like how it had felt in the desert, when he’d wanted to be at home. Of course when he was home he wanted to be in the desert, a pressing, contradictory urgency which he imagined was how it perhaps felt to be a snake ready to shed. And most of it he was okay with but there was a boy, one boy, who he couldn’t shake out of his head and he supposed he must have died on his way home from school because he was still holding an exercise book, his face perfect as if no more had happened than he had been overcome with tiredness and had just stopped to rest by the road. Except his leg was missing. Murray had never before understood what was meant by a missing leg. Missing implied that it could be found, returned, but the hole reached right up into the boy’s pelvis and beyond so the lower ribs hung back down into the space like gentle white hands trying to re-sculpt what was lost.
He rubbed his nose on both sleeves, thinking about it now. The boy’s leg, a total absence. As if it had never been.
The boy on the bicycle was fifteen, maybe. Azaria was barely five so his experience in assessing the ages of children was limited to pre-schoolers and he didn’t like to do more than hazard a guess. Everyone looked so old from one angle, so young from another. Murray could not reconcile the idea of his own aging, feeling himself unchanged at some deep level, a level he suspected would exist even at sixty, at eighty. The regolith. He recalled a documentary where some comedian went to New Zealand and had a Samoan give him a tattoo. When Samoans tattoo their faces, he learned, they are recording marks in time. You would never cover your face in one go. The lines would be captured bit by bit until you were an old man and the stories of your life were painted on your skin, looking out. To illustrate yourself in this way could only be a beautiful thing, an art, not a monstrosity.
The engine fell into a smooth start and he shifted gears, sank his foot onto the clutch. The car smelled of warm sleeping bags and Tupperware. He switched radio channels and looked up to see a cloud of birds ascend into an almost perfect arrow before forging ahead on some unseen thermal. Swans were kind of cool, he thought. He liked that Azaria had identified with them in some way, though what she had against potatoes he couldn’t imagine.
He heard the car screaming to a halt before he registered the boy in front of him, the bicycle wheels locked into the perpendicular, his own head mashed against the airbag. He sat for a minute, listening to his heart going. The last of the birds rose from the dawn chorus and either settled across the telegraph wires or sheeted into the sky. He couldn’t think what he was doing there on that street at five am. The light poured into the bay like it was flowing through the neck of a bottle and a tiny sound came from his throat.
He had only gotten a few blocks away. He thought of the sleeping woman who was not called Gina, if she was awake yet, if she was expecting him to come back, or if she had ever really assumed that he would stay. He was wondering if going back was even possible now. The small things seemed so distant. The tight spiral of Azaria’s curls; Hazel combing them.
He looked up. The boy flipped him the bird and backed off, skimmed out into the street. A caesura, broken softly.
Countdown
The thing she had, the affliction, the syndrome, was like nothing the best minds in medical science had seen before. In the foyer of A&E they lifted her like cloth sacking from my arms, gurneyed and triaged her; no she had not fallen, vomited, taken anything. Her temperature was pushing fever point, that was the most they could say. ‘Do we have her notes?’ the nurse wanted to know. She kept asking, even when the notes were in her hand. ‘These are from geriatrics,’ the nurse was shouting. And then; ‘Does anyone else hear ticking?’
What I heard when I pressed my ear to Catherine’s heart was the rage of memories, a shudder of years collapsing in. I picked up her hand and kissed its sudden smoothness, the tiny adolescent pearls of her nails. ‘Look at this!’ she said, her voice soft as fur, and we looked as she slipped from the bed, cartwheeled to the nurse’s station. ‘I haven’t done that in years,’ she said, hip-height at my side, giddy and breathless and young.
There were rumours, the specialist in experimental diagnostics said, of isolated cases like Cath
erine’s, usually in remote areas, the places time forgot and then remembered, over-compensating. Cases of what? was all I wanted to know, watching the hours flood through her, lightning-fast.
‘Was it catching? Was it curable? Can we get this place quarantined?’ the specialist said looking through me to the picture window and the famous view that tourists flew for a whole day to come and see. ‘And get her back in bed. Do we have any books? Puzzles? What do kids play with these days?’
I took Catherine’s hand, kissed her, let whatever it was that was happening to her enter me too. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said, crying, and I picked her up, rocked her in my arms, tickled her bare feet while the nurses took blood, swabs, measured the amount of time she had left. ‘Tell me a story,’ she said, and I told her the one about how we met, which seemed more like a fairytale than a thing in any book I’d read.
The corridors telescoped away into darkness but all I could see was Catherine, retreating. Midnight came and there was only one place to go. I took her up to the hospital roof, stared out into the wide night sky. Something to do with the clock was the theory, leaking out with every chime, every tick, every new moment, the fall-out seeping into the Thames, pulsing uptide, into estuaries, out to sea, to everyone. A pandemic, sighed the specialist, falsely stoic.
I pressed myself to Catherine’s sweet baby-smell, rested my head against the place where her sternum was a bridge between her body and mine. Then I started the countdown, listened for the quiet stroke of the remaining hours in her chest.
Let it out
This is the thing that happened to you and Claudine L. two summers ago, when you were on international exchange in Buenos Aires. Your Drama and Movement Therapy year. You weren’t going to talk about it, ever, but what the hell. The first thing to say is that even now you have no idea whether or not Buenos Aires looks like Paris. You think it is almost a criminal offence that your parents never took you to Paris so that you could make these comparisons for yourself. Someday you will go there and all you will be able to think is; this is like Buenos Aires. Except by then Paris will be the poor relation. It will be the blind date that never showed up leaving you to drown your sorrows with the average-looking guy at the bar. You don’t actually mean that Buenos Aires is average. You mean: this is your parents’ fault. By this you mean: everything.
Your father says Drama and Movement Therapy is not something you can study but a way of talking shit at his expense, and to this you say: he is an engineer and just doesn’t understand the way the body can be healed through the creative imagination. When you think of your father you feel like a globe of ink plummeting to the bottom of a glass of water. It goes without saying that Drama and Movement therapy involves a lot of talking, a fact of which you would have no doubt been aware sooner had you signed up for your degree based on appropriate talents and not opportunities for subsidised world travel. You have recently had the delayed epiphany that your temperament is better suited to working with inanimate objects, like books or motors, but those students do not visit Latin America to learn about psychoanalysis and the therapeutic power of art. Here is an irony your father would enjoy: you are just not comfortable talking about some things.
For instance, what happened to you in Arrivals at Ministro Pistarini International Airport. Or what your father did with the Polish cleaner on your mother’s Chesterfield the year before you left for college. You could have kept quiet about that, but because you wanted the neighbours’ kids to like you, you leant over the fence to describe the frantic motion of your father’s penis above the Polish cleaner’s pale thighs in such exquisite detail that none of them could look you in the eye all holiday. It is ideologically rather inconvenient that you have reached this conclusion: sometimes not talking is the better option.
This need to be liked is something you might call a problem. Personally you are uncertain of the boundaries between like and love, although professionally you call it erotic transference and own text books telling you where to draw the line. For this reason you worry that people will think this story is just the consequence of loneliness, or drug abuse, when it was neither of those things, although you had just started to experiment with marijuana. But for you this is not even a story. It is an actual thing that happened in an actual place, ergo it was real.
You should point out that you didn’t know Claudine L. before this happened. Claudine L. was a Spanish Major from the Sorbonne who lived upstairs from you in a student residence in the Jewish Quarter, not far from the Plaza de Miserere. She was born in Avignon but this fact was learned at an ice-breaking party hosted by the building’s concierge and does not represent the establishment of early intimacy. Whenever you think of Claudine L. today you imagine Picasso’s demoiselles; you imagine her savage and angular with a glowing nakedness that your own body could never achieve. You imagine her skin like oil. It is not a coincidence that her face always seems to be masked. You are thinking of her now and you are outraged by what love can do. You are thinking of Claudine L. bathed in the green light, and how even though you were scared you were also thrilled, because the threat of potential global extinction brought you as close as it was possible to be to the only thing in the world you could not live without. All the time people claim to be unable to live without a great love, or cigarettes. But it is different for you. Claudine L. is somehow, inexplicably, wired directly into you, into your heart. Or maybe your liver. The Romans prized the liver above the heart. If your liver was examined right this minute the omens would all point to one thing, that you could not live without Claudine L. and you would laugh out loud with relief that even the organic matter of your body understood this.
You realise you have not yet mentioned the green light and this might make things confusing. It might seem that you are trying to talk about Claudine L. when this story is really all about the green light. You are almost ready to talk about it, but you have to build up to these things. Memory sets its own pace. This is what you tell people now you are a qualified therapist. The only way to tell this story is to go back inside it. This is called Playback, a legitimate dramatic technique used to enhance individual spiritual development. Give me your pain, you tell your patients; I will turn it into theatre. Yes, really. You recognise that some people will be sceptical; you may have to give some sort of practical demonstration to prove how this works. It’s a myth that you have to use a watch on a swinging chain to relax people into confession. You just need to say the right things. You need to find key words; literally, words that are keys.
For example, to cure loneliness, you might have to take a person back to the place where they were most alone and show it to them, like a mirror, through improvisation. Give it a go, right here, right now. Where was the place you were most lonely? For argument’s sake say it was Buenos Aires, city of fair winds. This might be represented with a dance, with scarves to act as the wind. Now you’d describe the specific environment. It’s a studio with a balcony, although that is just a way of disguising that you have to eat, sleep and shit in the same room. This you might reflect through miming the closed body, arms hugging your shoulders, restricted, contained. O that this too too solid flesh would melt! You have always found Shakespeare an effective tool in your therapy classes, but whether or not you make use of the Bard is wholly dependent on your patient’s intellectual capacities.
Move on. Go inside the studio, not in reality, in your mind. Open the door. What can you see? Do you smell anything? This is a really important question because so much of our memory is based on scent. You smell stale fried food and something sweet, like hashish smoke. You smell the cold night air. You smell the strangeness of Tipa trees, old rain, the ancient must of cholera ridden streets, the southern hemisphere. You go into the bathroom and turn the tap just to see if it is true that the water swirls backwards down the plug hole. It is not.
It is from this room that you saw the green light, first bright and then almost immediately exhausted by its own act of shining. Light like an arrow. Not
an earthly light, an aquatic glimmer from across the galaxy, reaching into your room as if to say, we are here. You instinctively felt that the light was plural, and sentient. Not a dream, just light. Not just light—communication. You want to add that there was no music accompanying the light, no interstellar chimes. That would be ridiculous.
Wait! You see what’s happened here. The way you switched roles. If this were an actual patient you could be in real trouble. But the essential principles are demonstrated well enough. Through art you transform the past. From the new past you alter the present. You imagine your father shaking his head saying, ‘What the hell was wrong with popping a Prozac?’
Fuck him. You are beginning to realise that this story involves Claudine L. in some elemental way that you could never have anticipated, like when scientists say that life on Earth as we know it wouldn’t exist were it not for a series of catastrophes, although you are not sure who is the catastrophe, you or Claudine L. Loving her is what it means to be damaged. If you were to look up damage right now, in a thesaurus, there she would be. Probably not smiling, she didn’t smile much. You haven’t mentioned the mole on her cheek. That incredibly complex braid in her hair that your mother would call a French plait, but to Claudine L. would be just a plait, the same way as in Mumbai no-one calls up for an Indian takeaway.
You only had one conversation with Claudine L. before you saw the green light. You might have said something simple like ‘Hey!’ or it might have been that a look, one look, replaced all the words you were trembling to say, but immediately you knew you had made a poor impression because one of the laws underpinning civilised society is that a book is almost always judged by its cover.