The intractable belligerence of this – her memory – is what she’s come to hate. How it seems to insist on a future her past has already generated. No corrections. No deviations. Or, more concisely put: a coherent path for a conciliated self – for which she lacks sufficient new evidence to justify a change. She would have once – changed – practically on a whim. But that was before her hard-won victories over the excellent carnage of being young. Nowadays it’s just being again, and always again, as you always were. In bleaker moments she wonders whether her very last choice has already been made? And, whatever her disillusion with this, she cannot deny there was a stage when that was exactly how she’d wanted it. Now seems to be the time when she has finally grown tired of it: this entombment in more practical, replicable versions of herself, erected on the notion that her past is a secret. And it isn’t a secret. It just became the easiest version to be.
Oh he, the now long lost, wouldn’t approve if he knew. If he knew? This beats all. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything anymore and hasn’t now for years. Stop that! Too brutal, she recoveringly thinks – and whenever this specific thought combusts, her remorse is immediate. It’s a subtraction too close to be endured because in the molecules he left behind, which have enabled her to keep going, he is still alive. Mole cules though? For God’s sake, who says that? Since when has she thought ‘Molecules’ an acceptable way to describe … describe what? No, don’t start playing semantics with yourself when you know full well what you mean. And she does. So – if somewhat warily – she says it then; the place in which he is still alive is their only child. His solitary son. The person from whom she has most tried to run, and to never run.
How do you like them apples? Not so very much. But in a long world of unanswered whys the explanation behind this statement is, in many ways, clear. Relatively. And it seems to be: she has at times, perhaps frequently, found it harder to stare at that life than that death. Now would be an excellent moment to stop because ah ah ah death again. Only a word until it’s actually said. Then it strikes itself hard off both sides of the well, right down, all the way to the splash. But this is veering off at an angle, she knows, and therefore will not do. She’s far too keen to sit in her palace and make all the words, arrange them at whim then ultimately discover herself wondering what the hell is going on? So, she returns to ‘running’ and ‘tried to run’. Whereto is clear. Also, when. This appears to mean her suspiciously generalised thesis is: There’s a cruelty to watching the living live once intimately possessed of the verifiable evidence that all life comes to an end. That it can be suddenly, and at any time, stopped. Be shorn from any body. Leave any onlookers bereft and apprehensive ever after about the possibility of also … or again. Then trying not to but not knowing how not to because she has been changed.
Oh.
God.
Not that.
She refuses it.
She shakes it off.
She knows so much about these assaults and yet, seemingly, still cannot resist.
She scans her body for some distracting wound to press but it’s pretty well; even her mouth is not, currently, in need of a dentist. Her skin, despite her revels, bears not the slightest nick. Her shoes may be nondescript but fit so she has no grazes or blisters to attack. In short, she possesses no immediate means by which to hurt herself back into the clear. How she longs for that sky to be blue. But, ideologically opposed to her own despair, she contemplates a heavy blow to the wall instead. And the ameliorating effects of such an activity are: the gratifying click and bruise of knuckles. The pain shooting its ferns up into her arm. The slightly amazed exhalation, then the clarity behind. All very tempting, yet she does not permit herself this. There remains the matter beyond the door, and only with careful deliberation will she ensure it becomes appropriately resolved.
Yes.
More of that.
So.
While she may be sufficiently superstitious to think dwelling on death has the potential to curse, she has no intention of allowing that to determine her slightest move. She will think about whatever she likes. Whenever!
Better!
And now to revert to a dependable groove. On this occasion the ‘obdurate atheist’ she keeps well prepared should do. It works like a clean bill of health – if a clean bill of health is what you’ve sought in order to continue on as you were before. She knows this is roughly how it works for her and she’s made all manner of peace with that.
Do.
Does.
And here she is.
Once ensconced safely within, she vetoes the intolerable self-justification in her tone. And why, in the first place, had she allowed herself to get as far as that? Carrying on as though her life was an isolated incident. As though no one else had ever experienced this, the human condition’s most essential component: knowing someone alive, then knowing them dead. There. Done and dusted and yet … how much she felt it. How much she feels it. That much still remains true. Now as then. Now as when comforting their son on her knee. Now as him climbing in beside her, aged two or three, in the years just after, looking for him. Now as … now as … when the details mattered more. For instance, the how and when she first made the choice to look for who she had lost again, outside the region of dreams. Outside the ways she could remember him because the memories grew so thin that she didn’t want to wear them out. So, she looked for him. She looked for him. And that state has fundamentally remained the same. She just decided, after a few false starts, not to take up residence in the hunt. Not to invest any more than the body in it and, even then, to spare no more than the moment. Afterwards, quick extraction has been key. There’ve been a few slips but this has been her way and she is sure their son will find his. He’ll be an adult soon. Until he is, she’ll remain vigilant about not rubbing his nose in it and has no reason to believe she ever has. After all, the search has never ended up in their home. Absolutely not in their bed. Never anywhere in London where he might chance to witness it. But in saying all that, which ‘he’ does she mean? Unfortunately for her, both, probably. This is also why, now that in a few years he’ll leave home and has started expressing a wish for her to meet someone – she half suspects so she won’t become a burden – she … she … doesn’t know where to begin. Or how to begin. Or if to begin? Again.
It would be such a transgression, having been the very one she’s so carefully abjured. Every occurrence to date has remained hers alone, and private. Even the men involved have never been privy to more – perhaps especially. To this end, she has made no promises. She has told no lies. One could – in the main – eat dinner off the manner in which she has conducted her sex life. Which makes her position here – back pressed to the door, in an Austin hotel – seem all the more unlucky. One might even say, undeserved. How can a single, and not unguarded, indiscretion have escalated to such a level – not to mention aroused within her this unseemly degree of dismay?
Although never a great advocate of apportioning blame, she will not permit herself to shy away from asking why she has suddenly become so evidently careless as this. Reckless abandon may not have been it but, obviously, it was something … troublesome … and now something troublesome has dug in its heels. And she is unaccustomed to it. Not that there haven’t been other moments when the outcome might have been different, had she wanted it to be. Intermittently, she has been tempted to make life face the other way. Back on itself. Confronting again, just as she had in the bewilder of being eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. On. But how on earth – given her then wide-ranging state of confusion – had she managed that? With the aid of youth’s glorious absence of context … presumably. And then, of course, soon enough she’d met him – the perfect shoulder to cry at, the wall for her head to beat against, but also the altitude to which all his afterbears have yet failed to climb. She hates it but she knows it. He was the thing and – although he was also certainly his own type of challenge – that had been … that was love … and she has never been enticed
back to its brutalist mercies since.
Quite a bit to the contrary.
She’s favoured the painless elegance of leaving all those rooms, all those men. And if, in reality, it wasn’t all particularly elegant – especially earlier on – she had at least ensured she invariably left alone. It hadn’t come naturally either, not double-checking their pleasure was pleased. And accustomed to the opposite as she had been, the perfect grade of disconnection had taken some time for her to correctly calibrate. She had mastered it though and settled in. She’d stopped lying to herself about what she was doing and grown so adept at a mode of unspoken invitation that she never after missed a chance. This had proved, as he had once described it himself, to be ‘the knack’ – a manner of looking at someone which guaranteed they would always look back. It had worked well for her, yielded up all the possible dividends, and, as it wasn’t exactly nuclear fission, she’d never been much concerned with its toll. Why is it only now, long years after that chat, she suddenly re collects how he’d been unambiguous about it not being such a great trick to know? Not for him anyway, so he’d thought. But she doesn’t think she’s exploited it to the extent that he had. She’s left no trail of half-consumed bodies strewn about. No broken hearts bleeding. No one feeling taken advantage of, or certainly not to any degree that might make her conscience prick. She’s ready to swear there was never a single man left with any reason to expect an atom more than she gave. And she was liberal at night. Donated all to the cause. That was the deal. It was only in daylight that she never offered at all. Is that the truth? The whole truth? And nothing but the truth? So help her God, she still thinks it is. But … then … and in spite of all these prophylactics she’d considered set in stone, something has gone awry.
She stares into the carpet configurations beneath her feet. She imagines their purpose is to evoke Inca cities, or Aztecs. Her toes must wreak havoc on temples, or that is what she’d believe if she were a child again. She remembers it as a much-revisited game. Rendering big worlds from the small ones with which she could play. To those ants scuttling below me, do I seem to be God? Raising my hand against the sun, am I making their clouds? If I drop this stone, in this particular place, will it be the End of Days for them? And, when it occasionally crossed her mind, should I be cruel or kind? She opted for a radiant benevolence most of the time but whenever she chose to drop it, the second she saw it land, it became just a stone again. Those ants were just ants and she was just a girl with a completely clear conscience once more. When her real world grew, she let the game go – or so she had thought right up until … now. Which begs the question then, does she think of her life in these hotel rooms as laboratorially contained? Clearly the answer is yes, she has thought of it in that way. Each experience an experiment brought to culmination, data stripped, then labelled a failure or success. Is that really true? The answer is really yes: anthill – hotel rooms, ants as men. On reflection she can’t deny the similarities between these games and their, oh so conscientiously maintained, absences of consequence.
And now?
Does the ant bite back?
Is a real city to be rent in two?
Hardly.
There’s not even a dent in the door. True, she’s sweated into it like an invaded rampart but it remains structurally intact.
So, she summons the resources of her now decompartmentalised brain. There must be a fresh conclusion to be reached.
In the spirit of this, she breaks completely free. She turns back to the spyhole. She looks right through out of it and into the corridor. She sees him there, leant against the wall, picking the skin from a finger … waiting for her? Presumably he’s hoping she will make some move. Perhaps undo the lock and open up? He hasn’t pressed the bell again though. Chess or no chess, he doesn’t know her well and can in no way be certain her actions are being reassessed, or even if she would? She could, after all, have just gone back to bed. Or be in the shower. Or calling down to have her laundry collected. He does glance towards the housekeeping staff now and then. They give, and have, nothing to give away and, anyway, appear not to pay him the slightest heed. She imagines they’ve seen it all before. She thinks, however … God, the mess. And once more, how has it come to this? She doesn’t know, but she knows if she thinks the likely cause will emerge. In the meantime, she refuses to panic again and instead attempts to re-access the intellectual pragmatism that’s always served her best, before. In this precise moment, though, her palms only sweat too much and a rank incertitude reigns.
Decision. Indecision. Brain do your work. On her command then it flits over and back. It pinpoints her restlessness in this room last night. The jetlag and apathy at finding herself in yet one more anonymous hotel. The coffee didn’t help. The thought of the bar below. Although she doesn’t care for it, they might have a pianist at the piano? And it would do no harm to stretch her legs, especially after the length of that flight. Just the one then, she had decided, to help her wind down.
Avoiding the mirrors in the elevator. Avoiding her reflection in the door. Avoiding the eye of the pristine young soldier displaying medals across his chest. Ignoring the elderly couple thanking him for his service, and what she thought of that. The high, wide bar. The uneven spread of seats. She sat alone. The ivories tinkled. She inevitably thought about how everything could be different. But would not be. She hadn’t transmissionally sighed though. She hadn’t cast around for eyes. Even allowing for the antiquation which defines a woman alone in a bar as obviously offering something, she had continued to feel self-contained. And so it had remained, until she didn’t want to anymore.
That’s when he came to the bar. She turned her head. He saw her. They spoke. She bought him a drink. They talked. He was funny. This was something she liked. And she decided she wanted to. She then invited him up and he was willing to go. It was pleasant, more than pleasant. She had no cause for complaint and he also gave the impression of having enjoyed himself. If the earth didn’t move, that was never expected. It was not even desired.
It was afterwards that the damage began to be done, when they covered the smoke detector and lit cigarettes up – his brand, and only one each. That was vaguely pioneering. She had never done that before and will admit to relishing such teenage carry-on, for all the five minutes it took. In any case the alarm hadn’t gone off so, ostensibly, it was a foolish antic which had left no harm done – except perhaps for later on, somewhere on the bill. Anyway, they’d then decided on a mini-bar drink. Then on another and another cigarette and then done it all again. Yes, she thinks that was it, the moment of true catastrophe. The trouble was he was so easy to be with and she couldn’t remember when she had last laughed this much in bed. That had, she will somewhat grudgingly admit, made the earth – just a little – shift. But, once that round was up too, she supposes the combined effects of jetlag and alcohol knocked them both into sleep. If they had been in his room she would probably have left. But his staying in hers, under the circumstance, hadn’t felt particularly problematic – at least not in any way she had foreseen then.
The trouble dug in in the middle of the night when she awoke to find him still beside, eyes wide, and looking directly at her. ‘What?’ she thinks she may have muttered. ‘Can’t you guess?’ he had said and, from the way he’d smiled, naturally enough, she could. ‘Just let me do this then,’ she had replied and, reaching up somewhere above their heads, turned the air conditioning off.
Yes, in an evening of unusual slips, turning the air conditioning off was probably significant. She thinks she could, if she wished, lay her guilt squarely at the foot of humidity paralysis – if guilt is what she’s obliged to feel. It certainly caused the loose, warm muscles. The salt on their skin. It surely heightened the taint of the whiskey, or three, on their lips. Not that she was drunk, or even close. She’s relieved drink wasn’t the reason though. That’s a method of blunder she called time on years ago – once it had begun to make the mornings-after hard because harder wasn’t meant to be t
he point. Yet however useful this act of analysis is, can it provide a plausible theory for why, even whilst jammed in by this damned door, her body’s isolation still feels intruded upon by the memory of his all over it?
No.
It does not.
You’re going to have to do better than that.
Go beyond the body right to the mind because, she suspects, her pincer-like precision is about to become everything. It’s not simply that he was handsomer, funnier, better than most in bed. He did not remind her of the past – that strand too has been excised. He asked no more than any other man ever had and seemed every bit as satisfied with what he had received. In fact, if she remembers correctly, initially anyway, it was she who’d wanted more … Not that it’s of any consequence here. Now that the rogue element – the air conditioning – has likely been defined, she moves on to the idea of the closed door and its rightness. She won’t be backing down on that opinion any time soon. Although the question could be asked: backing down on that opinion to whom? No one is asking. No one cares and it’s not as if she really does either.
Which is not strictly true.
But.
She realises her critique of the experience is incomplete.
There was the other aberration too.
Yes.
In the morning they had, again. Her reservations allayed by his repetition of ‘Yeah, I should get going too,’ and ‘Yeah, I really have to get going now.’ But, ultimately, his not going at all and her not making him go. After that, seemingly having accepted he was going to be late, he had casually suggested they both get dressed and go out to get breakfast because ‘This hotel’s food is notoriously muck.’ ‘Somewhere in the city,’ he’d suggested – apparently, he’s been here a lot and therefore knows it quite well. She hadn’t argued at this stage but also hadn’t agreed. Did she favour it European-style though? Or could she handle it spicy? If so, he knew the perfect place. She’d like it. For him it tasted just like home. They could stroll across the river. No more than five minutes’ walk … maybe ten. Then, in the apparent absence of all reason, she’d heard herself say, ‘Yes,’ and that, in fact, she was well able for this alleged spiciness. As her words fell into the air she could scarcely believe it. He, however, had. He said he’d just need to fetch his coat from downstairs but, given both that she was Irish and the projected temperatures, he’d guess she probably wouldn’t need hers. Mercifully, if tardily, this brought her round. What the hell did he know about her and how dare he assume how she’d react to the weather and as for the taste of his homeland, well, why would she ever care about that? So, she assumed the position and cleared her throat. ‘Actually,’ she said. ‘On second thoughts, I won’t but thank you very much. Thank you for everything. It’s been lovely … a lot of fun but I’ve got to get on so … if you wouldn’t mind?’
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