by Mark Watson
It was one of the first evenings of September, which had put a soggy summer out of its misery. There were memorial concerts planned for London and New York; my computer was reading me ‘one year on’ articles. We walked along arm-in-arm. I no longer worried which direction was which, or how far anything was: I would have walked to Land’s End as long as she kept hold of me.
I trusted her even when, at the park gates, she made me do a series of loosening exercises, standing on one leg, swivelling my ankle and stretching my calf.
‘Are you sure this doesn’t look stupid?’
‘Listen to you, all interested in what things look like suddenly.’
At first it was barely more than walking, then she coaxed me into a sort of walk-trot, then a trot-jog. ‘Just keep going. We’re not going to hit anything. You’re not going to fall over. It’s the same principle as walking.’
The first fallen leaves were already dying at the bases of trees, she said. You could smell the damp of them, and bonfire smoke in the air, and the shock of a clear sky losing its light. They were seasonal smells, I supposed, but I’d never noticed seasons before. I could hear Kathleen’s breaths and the squeaking of her shoes, and my senses conjured up the rest: her muscled backside tensed in Lycra, an expression of studious concentration. I allowed my breathing to slip into time with hers. Others trotted by harmlessly, like trains on parallel rails. I was a tiny speck in the universe.
The atrium was warm and homelike as we walked arm in arm across the echoing floor. Of course, it had always been like that. Howard, returning, never failed to take exaggerated breaths in and out as if newly arrived in a restorative mountain retreat; Mike Swan, in his guide, had written about the way all your problems seemed to be shut out when those big doors closed behind you. It was part of what people came to the Alpha for: the impression it gave of being another country from the cold, tough one they might have found outside.
But it was only now that I was really starting to understand how cosy it was to return to the hotel: now that I’d mastered the task of leaving it. The atrium murmured with its usual good-spirited soundtrack, glasses clinking and intimate voices hatching plans. Howard, from the area of the bar, called out a jokey welcome: here comes Seb Coe. I threw back some remark about his smoking. In Room 25, Kathleen set the shower running.
‘Going to stand there watching me take my clothes off, pervert?’
I peeled off my things and followed her into the sound of the water, pressing myself into her shiny scent before it was all washed away. I grew hard against her as the water pelted us and she covered us both in sweet-smelling gels. I liked showering together, but the best bit was always the moment before, when I could smell her day all over her, all the bodily exertions.
There was nothing better than breathing her in, all the secrets of her skin. I smelled her when she arrived sticky from the Underground, I stood by as she peed with aggressive force in the echoing bathroom, I let her throw me suddenly onto the bed only to flip me over and ask me to take charge. When she was on the phone to editors or interviewing subjects in strange parts of the globe, I let my impatience boil deliciously into excitement. I was the only one who could win. None of these people with whom I was forced to share Kathleen could know what she whispered in my ear and what her body told me as I held her in her sleep.
But there was always something or someone waiting to steal her. Though we might fall asleep together, she always seemed to have woken up before me. There was an anti-war march somewhere, she was booked onto a lunchtime flight, she had to go – ‘I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after,’ she’d say, kissing me on the forehead, slipping out of the door. If she left in the evening, the routine would be drawn-out and painful. She’d take a long shower, brush her teeth vigorously, zip up her overnight bag, and the innocuous sounds would plunge me one note at a time into sadness. The airport car would be waiting, booked by Graham with his postcode joke. I always tried to kiss her a final time, but she liked to keep the partings brief.
‘Don’t. Or I won’t go. I’ll just end up coming back to the room and getting back into bed with you.’
‘Well, yes. That’s what I’m aiming for.’
After she’d gone, her absence was huge in the room. It stood between me and my keyboard; it lay in the cold bed. I would pace the corridors, hearing from behind identical doors the whispers of strangers’ nights: low voices, drinks poured out, TV chatter, anguished monologues. I tried unsuccessfully to immerse myself in my work, writing copy for an army recruitment campaign. Nothing was as important as wanting Kathleen back. ‘Tomorrow or the day after.’ As if there were no difference, which for her there barely was. Her days were brief units of time, eating themselves up as she raced to squeeze out of them what she wanted. Mine, without her, were edgeless again.
How had I come to need her so much, so quickly? Probably the need had always been there. Only now did it have a name and a shape and a smell.
I dreamed about her moving through strange landscapes, calling me to come after her, and when I woke I would have to check my talk-out-loud phone and email and then ask someone to look up flight arrivals on the Internet to be absolutely sure she still existed.
Late September threw us a surprise series of sweltering afternoons, and Kathleen marched me out to do some shopping for winter clothes.
‘But it’s baking hot.’
‘Yes, but as the year goes on it will get colder, you see. I thought you were blind, not an idiot. Oops.’ Our joined arms, swinging back and forth, clipped a passer-by.
‘Hey, watch where you’re going!’
‘He’s blind,’ Kathleen shouted after him. ‘Did you say you hated the blind?’
We went spluttering with laughter down the escalator to the Tube. This was the second time, for me. The train hammered its way into the station with a rush of air in our faces, and Kathleen waited for the bleep-bleep of the doors’ sensors, the thud as they came open, and helped me inside. I liked the feeling that everyone was as blind as me here, with nothing but dark outside.
She talked to me in pictures back up to ground level. ‘There are ads all along the side of the escalator. Just a massive jumble of crap. West End shows, very thin women in shoes. Speaking of West End shows, we’re now behind about two thousand old ladies who’ve been to a matinee. Oh! And there’s another blind guy. Being helped along by an Underground man in a blue cap.’
Kathleen steered me into a shop. Noises lay in wait like caged animals: throbbing music, the whine of an alarm, the hiss of a security guard’s radio. Nothing made me flinch. ‘A few minutes actually on a train or in a shop,’ I said, ‘is better than a lifetime of theory.’
Her kisses were surprise attacks, swooping out of nowhere and hitting like a stun-gun, putting my brain out of the fight so that I was just a body. She clattered me along Regent Street towards Piccadilly and we stood with people piling past us like sound waves.
‘What can we see?’
‘We’re right beneath the famous screens, the adverts. Pigeons everywhere. Buses and cabs keep looking like they’re going to crush them all, then the pigeons fly away at the last second. The buses are incredibly red when the sun hits them. Red like in a tourist brochure. Actually, the whole place looks like a tourist brochure today. The sky’s a fantastic blue. The … is this weird for you?’
‘Is what weird?’
‘Is it unhelpful for me to talk about red and blue?’
‘No. I feel like I know what red and blue are, with you. I feel like I know what everything is.’
Her hands climbed, in their unapologetic way, across my waist and gave an almost vicious squeeze to my crotch.
‘Presumably lots of people saw that.’
‘Oh, yes.’ She laughed. ‘This is one of the most public places in the United Kingdom.’ A kiss stung my lips. ‘It’s such a shame we can’t have full sex. But there are policemen and so forth. Any more tourist guide stuff I can help with?’
‘What do I look like?’
‘Despite the funny bits around my eyes?’
‘Including those bits. Which, in fact, are hardly visible. Your mouth curls in a wicked way when you make a joke. You are a perfect height, now that I’ve cured your appalling posture. Your penis is aesthetically pleasing … ’
‘Aesthetically pleasing. Yes, I thought that’s what you were saying last night.’
‘ … as is your bottom.’
‘Well, I sound absolutely delightful.’
That night, as we made love in Room 25, we pretended it was still Piccadilly Circus and people were walking by, watching us or affecting not to notice. It was a fantasy, but it was also reality. Reality was what we said it was.
We lay on the rumpled sheets afterwards, her breathing fierce on my chest. A trolley rattled by outside; there was a loud knock and an answering cry and we listened as the bellboy took the tray inside. He would ask for a signature and leave the tray on the desk, or maybe the bed, and the guest would eat the meal and look out over Fitzrovia and the BT Tower. Kathleen and I could lie here and everything else could go on without us.
‘Do you know who Agatha Richards is?’ she asked.
It was as unexpected as her kisses, as the way she sometimes disappeared in the morning.
‘Yes. She used to work here. She left. Ages ago.’
‘Why’d she leave?’
I experienced a trace of discomfort almost too fine to be detected. ‘I don’t know. Another job or something.’ My tongue came out and touched my bottom lip. ‘Why?’
‘It’s just the couple of times I’ve been on the net in the IT room, there’s a lot of searches for her.’
A pause played itself out.
‘She left at the same time as Ella,’ I said, ‘my old tutor, who was, apart from you, the only person who … Anyway.’
‘And you never asked why either of them left?’
‘People were never that keen to talk about it.’
‘You can’t not talk about stuff,’ said Kathleen, ‘because people aren’t keen to.’ She slid off the bed and began to walk around as if working up to something. The mood in the room had shifted rapidly into something spiky and brittle. ‘Did you ever see – I mean, you know … ’
‘You can say “see”. See what?’
‘Did they ever show you the medical records on you? Like, after the fire, the surgery you had? Or anything about your father, any of the paperwork … ’
‘No. None of it. Why?’ The post-sex warmth was intruded upon by a deeper, unpleasant blush. ‘Why would I want to see all that shit? Why would it matter to me?’
‘Well, don’t you wonder about your dad from time to time?’
‘What is there to wonder about?’ I felt a vein in my neck pulse with sudden anger. JD told me that normal people sometimes saw faint shapes in front of their eyes, or spots of light, when they shouted. There was something similar happening to me now: a hazing and shifting of the dark, only just perceptible, perhaps imaginary. ‘He’s gone. He’s dead, or he’s nowhere around. And it doesn’t matter. Howard is my dad. Why would I think about someone who never came to see me – ’
‘You wouldn’t. I’m sorry.’
‘ – when there’s someone who’s been here nearly every day of my life? Who has done everything for me?’
There was a silence. She came softly back to the bed and touched my face. ‘Chas? I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine.’
There was a pause, and she went into the bathroom. The water bellowed from the metal jets and I heard her exhale as it hit her skin. The dissonant moment had passed quickly for her, like all her moments did. Kathleen was a journalist, she was bound to seek out intrigues, she was accustomed to firing off questions.
I thought about the fact that someone had been looking up Agatha online. It had to be Howard or Graham. I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask myself why, or to think about how angry Howard would be if he’d heard Kathleen’s questioning. Kathleen stayed in the shower for a long time. When she came out, it was as if this first little argument between us had never happened. But the tension lingered, all the same, in the effort we made not to acknowledge it.
A nightclub in Bali was attacked that October. Kathleen had written a piece just weeks before about the risk of more terror attacks in the wake of 9/11. A Melbourne paper now took up her article. It began to get hits on her site as others linked to it. We went to dinner and there were a thousand; when we came back, it was four thousand. ‘Shit in my hat!’ shouted Kathleen, grabbing my hand in excitement. ‘Three thousand hits in an hour! Fuck me twice!’
‘I’d be delighted,’ I said. But she was already on the phone to someone; she’d already begun another conversation. I would be lucky if we did it once. And that was how it was, at the moment. She went to Madrid and Berlin in the space of a single week. There were going to be demonstrations everywhere, she said. She had also become obsessed with the Olympics being planned in China for 2008. They were frantically whitewashing their civil rights record, she gabbled at me. They were bombarding us with propaganda. The Olympics was a filthy business, she told me, flying off to Beijing on a November night.
‘Four days. Four or five days. That’s all.’
The Olympic Committee was corrupt, according to Kathleen, but Howard and Lara were entertaining their members every other week in the Alpha Bar, planning London’s bid. Kathleen said the war in Afghanistan was a terrible idea and an Iraq invasion would be worse still, but many of its architects and supporters were welcome in our bar; they were Howard’s friends, they engaged in calculated flirting with Lara. Come the new year, I was on the recipient list for a government email detailing ways we could play down the importance of the coming Iraq protest. Ten hand-spans away from me was somebody who would play up its importance as much as she could.
For a long while we acted as if the clash didn’t exist. I listened to my headphones and we talked about which songs I liked best and ate in restaurants where she read out the menu with ironic commentary. I kept tapping away at my press releases, she at her articles. When she talked on the phone to other anti-war writers, I turned the music up and sat at the keys like one of the pianists they hired to play romantic tunes in other hotels: fingers moving mechanically, droning out a message that had nothing to do with them.
None of this would work forever. I’d come a long way with the notion that the world was now virtual and could be experienced from my room in the Alpha. World events, though, were not virtual; the world was still real, this war was real. The problem it created for us was also real.
By now I could trot along behind her in the park, as long as she never speeded up unexpectedly or went so far ahead that I couldn’t reach out and touch her. I was still less like a training partner and more like a skittish animal, but then, not many track athletes were people who’d been unable to leave their house for twenty years. Afterwards she always told me how brave I was, and how proud she was of me, and in the shower she would generally do things to me which didn’t happen every day even to a gold-medal winner.
One February afternoon, when we went out at three, the grass was already slippery and the air carried the threat of chill. We had been running for about twenty minutes, and Kathleen’s breathing had ramped up gradually in speed and intensity so I could follow her now like a drumbeat. Conversation, by this stage of a run, had to be conducted in snatched sound bites. I chose this as my moment.
‘Hey … ’
‘What?’
‘This protest. The march.’
There were a few breaths, a few seconds’ worth of padding footfall in front of me. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you going?’
‘Of course.’
My own heart was thudding away. I took a gulp of air. ‘I won’t. Be able to.’
‘I know.’
‘Because of Lara.’
For what could have been a whole minute, it was just my breathing and her breathing, and the thin air
, and the park’s silence.
‘Lara would never … let me … do something in public. Which would … compromise the agency,’ I managed to get out.
‘I know,’ she said again.
‘But.’ I ran on a little way. Squelch went my shoes over the muddy turf. A dog yapped an order to its owner somewhere out on the breeze. ‘But you don’t approve.’
‘Of course I don’t approve.’
I ran on. She ran on. Her words jogged between us.
‘I think the principle involved … ’ she said. We ran a few steps more. ‘ … is more important than any job.’ The rest of her verdict arrived in a single rush. ‘It’s an illegal war. That’s being proposed. By our own government.’
I had one card I’d been saving up. ‘It’s the day after our anniversary. The day we first met.’
‘I’ve already … ’ she panted. We were both panting. I craved the slowdown that normally came around now. ‘I’ve already booked. A restaurant. The march is the next morning.’
When we finished our circuit and stopped at the gates, all either of us could do was rope our respective breaths back in. I reached towards her voice and my hand landed on her arm, singing with sweat in the way which zipped through me as always like an electric current. I yanked the arm towards me and, without resisting outright, she stiffened and inched backwards. I felt her touch fall away from me.
‘It’s cold,’ she said, and we began to walk back to the Alpha.
For a couple of hours on Valentine’s afternoon, Howard made the Wellness Suite unavailable to the public and we had it to ourselves. Kathleen took me into the female changing room, which smelled of wood and spice, and undressed me to a soundtrack of whimpering pan pipes. Below the hot tub’s water-line she touched every part of me, breathing hard in my ear. We showered together and I dressed in a new shirt she had bought me. Graham drove us across town to the restaurant.
‘Carpaccio of long-line-caught yellowfin tuna flavoured with a lemon and dill garnish. Right, “carpaccio of tuna” means “bit of tuna”. “Long-line-caught” means they didn’t scoop it out of the Pacific with their bare hands. “Flavoured with” means “with”.’