Wild Gestures

by Lucy Durneen

  Ramani asks me about the last conversation you and I had. She asks me to recreate it, perhaps even to finish it. This I can do. We have tried the telephone call I would most like to have and the letter I wish I could write, with little success. Strictly speaking it wasn’t a conversation, more a question left hanging because I could not answer it; did the Chandlery department of Mulligan’s sell candles or sailing equipment? Candles, surely, I thought to myself. Air conditioning raised up our hair. I rushed you, grousing, through women’s clothing, then Electricals. We were in Gardening. Then Toys. You were in Toys. First we were marching, then gliding, unencumbered. When I turned, knowing how the lack of effort was wrong, I could see the departments stretching back like a kaleidoscope, but you had gone.

  Terry towel shorts, I told the security guard when he asked what you were wearing. With little flowers. But I couldn’t remember the exact colour of your t-shirt or whether or not you had taken a hat with you. Later, when the police had finished up their preliminary work in the store I wondered if it would be all right to ask someone—was it boats? was it candles?—so that when you came home I could tell you the answer.

  The details are where you find the real anger. A chandler, I will be forever aware, is both a candle maker and a merchant of marine equipment. It is a city in Arizona south-east of Phoenix, a winter resort with a population of 241,000. Chandler is the emotionally stunted one from Friends. It is a word that derives from the Vulgar Latin candelarius.

  ‘Vulgar Latin?’ I ask Ramani. ‘Is that, like, Roman porn?’ I am trying to tell Ramani something else, but what I keep saying is the name of Paolo Alonso.

  She says, ‘But you don’t know Paolo Alonso,’ and fiddles with her pen, which appears to be inexplicably dry.

  ‘No.’

  At least… No. I don’t know Paolo Alonso. But I am no longer sure what knowing is. You know things and then the things you knew change, like the cloud I once saw in the shape of Jesus. I knew it was Jesus straight away, because of the beard. But it only took ten minutes to turn from the son of God to a map of southern Europe, minus Sicily. We see what we want to see, is what I want to tell her. It doesn’t even matter why.

  I tell Ramani how our conversation would go, how it would finish. You would say, I want some sweets, Mama, and I would say, with aching maternal frustration, Ada, do you never stop wanting things?

  From underneath the sour smell of the hawthorn at Ramani’s open window comes the scent of waiting rain, still vapour. There was a woman, I say—because the silence is worse than the words—there was a woman who saw the face of Marlene Dietrich in a piece of toast.

  Her bewilderment frightens me.

  My mother saw a ghost when she was five years old. Being five she wasn’t afraid; in fact she looked straight into its face and held its gaze. But a ghost doesn’t really have a gaze, my mother said, it looks through you and around you, but it doesn’t meet your eye. Some evenings I stand in the window for a long time. I wonder if maybe children will go home and tell their parents there is a ghost in the house at the end of the street, the one where the cats got into the bins two weeks ago and there are still roast chicken carcasses under the azaleas. Against the cold kitchen wall my thoughts ripple darkly, like the sea under a new moon. Things still have to be done, little things like closing the curtains in the spare room when the streetlamps come on. And such strange things; locking the door when I use the bathroom. In case the dog comes in?

  There is a lot of space in my apartment. I walk into a room and I feel the space, not the things that are there. Sometimes I have to just lie down and wait, the space feels so heavy. Slowly the objects move in to fill the gaps, like people entering a dark cinema. I smooth down the sheets on the bed. I arrange the toy animals in a line, biggest to smallest. How eager are all the little stuffed faces. I move the rabbit closer to the Disney princess doll, away from the Wile E. Coyote.

  I think I feel you behind me, but it is only the dog, again.

  After you leave the world, how long is it before it is like you were never there? What frightens me now: how long will it be until it is like I was never there?

  Yesterday I went to the coast. I took the train, skimming out through maize fields until just by looking at the sky you could tell you were getting closer to the sea. I read The Story of India by Michael Wood and ignored the conductor when he asked me to take my feet off the seat beside me. My shoes were clean. They were my favourite sandals, the black ones that are almost impossible to match with anything that seems appropriate for someone who has passed forty. Here is the question: what should I change? My shoes, or my life?

  There are little shops on this stretch of coast selling the kind of expensive shit that appeals to people like me, we who appreciate pretty things and have not much else to do but spend money acquiring them. But here is the problem: there are never enough pretty things to buy to make up for all the world’s ugliness. I bought olive bread and organic hummus from an artisan deli because it made me feel a better person than if I’d chosen the supermarket kind, and I ate it on the Palace Pier, with sand blowing into in my mouth and the sound of the Kash Kong brash against the humming sea. The rentrée the French call this kind of wind, a wind of beginnings and restorations. How quickly this time is over. How quickly the year becomes something finished. A speckled landscape of rain, no longer yet to be.

  The last time I came here, it was summer and the pier was full of tourists and final year students giddy with a sense of being released into a bigger world. The sky was wide and high, white clouds in brave symmetry with the water that swirled beneath ironwork arches. I visited the Psychic in her tent by the Super Booster, because this was before I had discovered Ramani’s office in the clinic on Great Eastern Street. ‘Don’t tell me how,’ I said, suddenly afraid the tangled woodland she could see might be real after all.

  Outside, I watched the Super Booster roar and dive. Suddenly nothing could engage me quite as much as the sight of people voluntarily handing over money to be suspended above the ocean in a tiny cage. Like animals they queued. For ten dollars you got to gaze down on the crowds, see the pier lights from above where they appeared pinpricks only, fragile little constellations that gave the illusion of being close enough to touch. The cage climbed towards the purple blaze of the evening. Then it plunged. There was no way of knowing if the screams were whoops of pleasure or fear as the cages rushed down to meet the pier. But the queues to ride didn’t get any smaller and the purr of the sea was constant, like the radio you don’t notice until it’s switched off. Such a funny hunger, was what I thought. To let go, to fall.

  When I said better, I meant more successful. When I say successful, I mean: someone who doesn’t pay forty bucks an hour for the privilege of recalling the worst things about their lives, I suppose.

  Ramani’s secretary asks if she can get me a coffee, flicking through the magazines that are meant for us, the clients. The hair style she is looking at won’t suit her. For a heart-shaped face you want a chin-length bob, or layers swept around the temples, even if they do block a clear line of vision and cause you to develop the nervous habit of flicking your fringe out of your eyes. I contemplate telling her this and then I think, save yourself the trouble, let her screw things up for herself.

  Years ago I was a nurse. I have heard a man told, at his post-operative briefing, ‘You are mistaking pain for the sensation of eating.’ I wonder if I am mistaking pain for the sensation of living. Is that what Arthur De Souza felt when he sat at his typewriter, plunging down the keys in a frantic bid to feel everything solid, because if he was to feel anything at all it had to hurt? There are people who sit in Ramani’s waiting room who rub at their scars lovingly, with longing. It is her job to cure them of the urge, but maybe they are better the way they are. Maybe they are the only ones who still know what it means to feel.

  The first moment I held you, wet and pink and squealing, I thought: you will suffer pain because I want you here. It is a mathematical certainty.r />
  Inside her office I look past Ramani and there I see Bianca De Souza in her nightgown by the window, the morning sun spilling across old Goa and down over her shoulders so that when Arthur rises from his typewriter he is momentarily struck by the impression that there is an angel at the balcony. I imagine Goa like you remember a dream. The sunlight is not gold but an old light, the colour of centuries. From some angles the world is bleached. The world is under six foot of perfect snow. It is the kind of light that reminds you that once Romans built roads across Europe under the same sun. Once my great-great-grandfather floundered in the Java Sea. Arthur De Souza sits under the Goan sun and looks at his wife in wonder, the way she shimmers just out of sight, there and then not there, like the lenticular images in his son’s picture books.

  I imagine Bianca to be such a beautiful woman, the kind that Arthur De Souza has been waiting for all his life. Love is not strange; the songs are wrong about that. Love is obvious. I don’t suppose Arthur De Souza has ever listened to the Everley Brothers, but what do I know? Almost immediately, something else occurs to me: ask a woman whether, if faced with the choice, she would save her lover or her child and she will say, without hesitation; my child. Ask a man the same question and first he will weigh up the options. A father’s love is a different thing. And so Arthur De Souza would throw himself in front of the bullet whose silent trajectory arced towards his wife. And so he would hold her back, screaming, if she made to do the same for her son.

  When they leave for Mass he will say a prayer to say thank you for bringing Bianca to him. But he will also ask God the question, why did you then take Paolo Alonso? Why is it that you put sadness in the very marrow of our bones?

  I hope he is at peace, I want to say to Ramani—Paolo Alonso. But instead I tell her something that I learned only yesterday, about how Portuguese names flood through Goa because of imperialism. Four hundred years ago Paolo Alonso’s ancestors came ashore from across the Arabian Sea, making love to beautiful Indian women, heading inland to populate the new settlement of Vasco da Gama. A city named for a discoverer and pillager of worlds.

  Somewhere in the world there is no longer Paolo Alonso. But until he had died, I didn’t even know he had been alive. Somewhere in old Goa, there is Arthur De Souza, heading to Mass, who will never know that tonight, walking home from Ramani’s office, I will go into the United Reformed Church on Trumpington and use all my loose change to burn a tea light in Paolo Alonso’s name.

  I look out of Ramani’s window towards where the rain sheets in from the west, which is where you find the old magic. I put out my hands, actually hold them out in front of me and see they are shaking, not the involuntary tic of a nervous disposition but wild, violent tremors that push dangerous vibrations through my chest. The sound of my heart is a waiting wonder, like a piano un-tuned and wanting. I feel as if I am about to fall.

  And then from somewhere dark in my throat I say– . I say–.

  ‘Okay, that’s good now,’ Ramani says, because perhaps this is the start.

  All the things

  Offer

  The time my heart froze over, I was not exactly surprised. It seemed as inevitable as cancer, especially considering I hadn’t heeded any of the standard warnings; I had not even bothered to protect myself with a layer of bravado, or lie on social media, which was what all the kids were doing. The man I had left was older, smarter, he liked his girls to be pretty, or nubile, and I was neither, though perhaps if I’d actually tried. At night I heard the disappointment in his voice like a birdcall at my throat. It didn’t help that in this man’s presence my own voice was non-existent, a frostbitten breath where once there had been words.

  When I gave the doctor my symptoms—a scratching inside my chest, a polar chill in rooms I had entered—it was hard to gauge her level of concern. Was this a thing that happened all the time? There were options, if I was unafraid of less conventional routes towards recovery. Therapy was fashionable, but scepticism was co-morbid of my condition, I learned. You do what is recommended though. You do what another person considers the appropriate thing for a life they have never inhabited.

  The doctor touched the hexagonal blooms of frost across my chest—breathe in!—and prescribed two things, heat and fire, writing it out on a notecard for me to take to the pharmacy. I wanted to ask her about doses, about how you’d know when you’d had too much. Could there be side effects? I wondered, anxious to get things right. ‘What’s too much?’ the doctor said, signing the card with a flourish of blue ink. ‘You don’t need to worry about too much until you’ve had enough.’

  Acceptance

  From the beginning there was administration; it was all about targets, success was only ever measured by quantitative means. I had no opinion of this. My heart is a block of ice, I felt like reminding the doctor’s assistant, who was in charge of the paperwork. It’s not like I have a gallstone.

  ‘What’s a problem for you?’ the assistant asked, matching her sympathy to a graph on the wall: an impression of care was considered an appropriate level given that my condition was in some camps seen as self-inflicted. I repeated my diagnosis, knowing this didn’t even begin to cover it, curious to hear what it sounded like when said aloud. I wanted to find some kind of explanation. I tried this: ‘I fix people,’ I told her. ‘I show them what’s wrong and I help them find what they’re looking for.’ What I did not tell her was the thing they were looking for was never me. I did not tell her that I was never the person who was fixed. When you know this is how it works, you put certain measures in place. You get pragmatic. You get cold. You see everything as a kind of contract. I wanted to tell the doctor’s assistant: pragmatism is the real problem for me.

  The assistant said before the doctor could assign the appropriate treatment I had to pick a verb, one verb to live by for a year. It was not a trick question, not a test. It was a symbol of doing something; unusual, but the first step was about trust, or belief in things whose outcomes you couldn’t see. ‘Two things I don’t have,’ I joked. But it wasn’t a joke. When I realised I was living with this as fact, I wanted to get my coat. I wondered if I could live for a year with anything, whether something existed that wouldn’t damage me if I had to spend every day with it, shaping my thoughts, pushing me in one direction or other. It seemed to be such an arbitrary thing, the possibility of living by a singularity of any kind.

  The assistant searched the contents of a tulipwood box on her desk. ‘Emerge,’ she said finally, unfolding the tight square of construction paper. We looked surprised. Our mutual confusion gave us reason to think, for a minute, we might be the kind of people who could enjoy a glass of wine together, if I could… if she wasn’t… Emerge?

  ‘I’ll try,’ I told her, but we neither of us knew if I was lying, if this was part of the condition or if it was something I could keep in front of me like a map. Later I realised: the word made no demands. It was me who was asking something of it, wanting it to have the power of a spell. ‘Is the treatment going to hurt?’ was all I really wanted to know. The language did not exist for how much I wanted to know that.

  By way of reply the doctor’s assistant gave me an advice leaflet, which I understood would answer those kinds of questions with the professional semantics of promising one thing while meaning everything else. I just wanted an approximation. A rough end of a scale. You could have brain surgery while awake and singing. If it would stop the thing that was stopping you, you would do it, I reasoned, you would take the pain, you would screw up your eyes and cry while they fixed you, even if it felt more like dying than living. The most likely point for significant discomfort was right at the beginning, the leaflet explained, before you had learned to normalise things. But this was a small price. It would be like laser eye correction. It would be like unlocking a dam and letting the bones of a desiccated valley flush with green.

  I read magazines in the foyer until the assistant returned. ‘Your treatment plan,’ she said, which meant more than just a way to ge
t well. ‘And if I could draw your attention to the small print...’

  Who reads the small print? When I stepped outside onto the street I could hear singing, because it was the summer we were all suddenly experts on football and the sky was white, the sun was veiled, suddenly we were seeing the far-away world up close, or as if from the other side of something, in translation.

  Intention

  The dream analyst was young, still absorbed in the labyrinths of his own night terrors; I couldn’t say my doubts didn’t show. I came straight from the office, distracted by the joke Luiz told me as I was leaving. ‘He’s flirting,’ my friend said.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’

  Here is what I know, I thought. It is impossible to explain loneliness to anyone when by definition, if someone starts to listen, you’re doing better than you were ten minutes ago. But this doesn’t mean the loneliness goes away. It is the opposite of seeing something that isn’t there. It is seeing nothing when there is a whole island in front of you that somehow all the world’s cartographers missed.

  I nearly missed my stop because after years the council finally cut back the yew trees by the cemetery and I didn’t recognise the street when viewed without distortion, as if every time I had passed through here before today I had been blindfolded, or as if I had never even known sight. I wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that for a long time I was wearing my hair short. I turned to the seat next to me. There was no-one there with whom to share my reasoning, to debate the validity of the article I read about the links between hair and sensory perception discovered during the Vietnam War.

  People do this thing in a therapy session, any kind of therapy, trying to make out they don’t understand why they are there. I looked confidently at the Dream Analyst, certain he would see past the evidence in my file if I talked fast. But still I couldn’t disguise it, my glacial murmur loud in the stone-smooth basin of his room. A pervasive and mid-level iciness was what the analyst detected, difficult to treat in as much as it required a trigger to begin the process; a flood could be expected but you had to wait, for spring, for the end of the world. ‘Bring it on,’ I said, long fascinated by apocalypse.