All That Follows

by Jim Crace

  Tonally, today the house is like the sky, grayed out and smudged. The weather is contagious, showering the suburb in gloom. The street seems washed of energy, and muted. The afternoon is deepening as what little light there is sinks behind the rooftops. No bulbs are burning in the hostage house; all lights are doused, nor are there any in the evacuated neighboring and opposite houses. There are no moving window silhouettes or twitching curtains. Behind the barriers the television crews have been downgraded, and the remaining journalists are mostly juniors detailed just to keep an eye on things and then call for more experienced backup should anything kick off. Restricted by the police to one small area, they pass their time sitting under their fishermen’s umbrellas, texting, smoking, drinking coffee from their flasks, watching palm sets. Except for one wall-perched cat, wondering why nobody is passing to stop and rub its back, and pigeons on the roof, the hostage house is not worth looking at. The only sounds are the drones of distant traffic and, occasionally, a dog barking.

  Leonard and Francine walk twice across the street, hoping perhaps to catch some sign of life inside the house, but see nothing to detain them any longer.

  “It looks more interesting on the television,” Leonard says. He feels he needs to apologize, as if somehow the scene’s lack of energy is his responsibility. “What do you suppose is going on in there?”

  “They’re watching television,” Francine says. “That’s how it works. That’s the deal. We watch them, and they watch themselves. It doesn’t happen on the street. It only happens on the screen.” Leonard nods but does not meet her eye. She’s said as much before to him, and meant it as a criticism. She thinks he watches television far too much, that the remote console is well named. He is consoled by it; he is unreachable.

  “I’ll mend my ways,” he says, though that is what he always says. He rarely acts on it. He cannot pretend to share his wife’s gadget nausea or sympathize with her refusal to engage with any of the bloatware he has downloaded to their systems.

  “But now let’s wend our ways.” She’s evidently in a punning, merry frame of mind. Her time with Nadia has cheered her up, illogically. Their hearts have been emptied and their troubles have been shared. They’ve promised that they’ll stay in touch. They have agreed, as Leonard thought they would—his wife’s persuasive when she wants to be; she will have swept Nadia’s qualms aside—that Lucy should be allowed, until Monday anyway, to enjoy her adventure, unbetrayed, and that Celandine is bound to show up safe and well in her own good time. Both women leave the cafeteria less burdened. Excited, even.

  “Back home?” says Leonard.

  “No, let’s break the mold for once. It’s your birthday, isn’t it? I haven’t even kissed you yet.” She pecks his chin. “Let’s find a pub or restaurant. Let’s have champagne.”

  It is the second time that Leonard walks the streets between the hostage house and the suburb’s row of shops with its one restaurant (not open yet) and the same pub—the Woodsman—that he and Lucy visited two days ago. They do not go into the yard. No need for that. They are no longer smokers. Instead, they find a table in what is called the Parlor Bar & Bistro, where there is waitress service and a sundown menu of appetizers. They order poppy bread and olive dip, vegetable wedges, fried garlic and haloumi, and a whole bottle of champagne. They are the only customers. It’s intimate: table lamps and easy chairs, a corner, dusk. They drink and talk and reminisce self-consciously.

  “You realize I didn’t mean half that stuff this morning,” Francine says.

  “What stuff?”

  “You know …” She beams at him. “‘You selfish bloody idiot.’ That stuff.”

  “So what half did you mean?”

  “None of it—well, hardly none of it. I only mean it at the time. It doesn’t last.”

  It lasts for me, thinks Leonard, not quite managing a beam in return. “Decaf!” he says eventually. “That got to me. It sounds like impotent. In all its ways. And cowardly.”

  “I didn’t mean you’re always cowardly … no, take that back.” She pegs her mouth playfully. “I’ll be careful. Timid is the better word.”

  “Depends who’s saying it and who’s accused of it. Timid’s not a word I like that much, to tell the truth.”

  “Squeamish, then.”

  “Oh, this is so much fun when you’re being more careful! Squeamish, am I now? Hell, Frankie. Get out the thesaurus, why don’t you? How about inhibited … repressed—”

  “You have a point. I’m teasing you.”

  “You’re bullying me?”

  “It’s good for you. You know it is. No, what I’m saying is … sometimes I think it’s just as well I’m here to bully you, because if I wasn’t breathing down your neck some of the time—”

  “And prodding me.”

  “And prodding you, then you’d just sit back and Google your life away. Admit it, you’re a screen slave, Leonard. I prefer it when …” She hesitates, wanting to strike a loving, hopeful note before it’s too late. She loves him, after all. And she is in a brighter mood than she has been in for months. For eighteen months. (Nadia has cheered her up. That daughter talk. That safe and well.) It’s time to end hostilities.

  “You prefer it when what?” he asks.

  “When we have fun.” Fun, as Leonard knows, is one of Francine’s favorite words, but one she hasn’t used much recently. It is her greatest compliment, to say that someone has been fun. “I’m going to hold my tongue from now on and be all sweetness and light, the perfect loving wife on hubby’s fiftieth. Because everything has started to turn out well today, hasn’t it?” she says, almost in her classroom voice. “I shouldn’t admit to this, I’m being bad, but it’s the truth. Dodging those awful goons back home. The drive down. Hunting Nadia in the shopping mall. Meeting one of your old flames—”

  “Let’s not exaggerate.”

  “Going to the hostage house. Drinking bubbly here. It’s been enormous fun. And you’ve been bouncy, haven’t you? We’re always better together, don’t you think, when you show a bit of swing?”

  “Like on gigs, you mean?” Her glass is empty. He looks down at the bottle. Almost empty too.

  “No, not only with the saxophone. That was mean of me. Let’s see …” Now, here’s an opportunity. “Remember that ECM Jazz Gala in Budapest about six years ago?”

  “I do.” They had sex every night. “We made love every night.”

  “Do you remember flying out?”

  He does. He’s never been that scared since. The gales were so turbulent across the runway that the pilot was forced to abort his landing a meter from the ground and toil into the storm again. They had to circle, jettisoning fuel in cyclone winds, for forty more minutes before being cleared to try again. Leonard’s terror was so excessive that it rendered him powerless, motionless, expressionless, and mute, hardly able to breathe, let alone scream. He still remembers with unnerving clarity how the luggage lockers in the cabin all dropped open in one deafening clunk and how the coats and cases stowed above their heads dislodged and fell into the aisles. Outside, beyond the streaming window glass, the skyline of Budapest tossed and seesawed like a ship.

  “I was absolutely sick with fear,” Francine says. “But you were totally calm. And comforting. Boy, you hardly raised a sweat. The only one on board. I thought you were so cool that day. And hot! That’s why we tumbled into bed so much.”

  “Not quite the Mile High Club.”

  “Now there’s a thought.” Francine wraps her hands around her champagne glass and stares into it, smiling self-consciously. “Truth or dare,” she says finally. “Did you make love to Nadia? With Nadia?”

  “When?”

  “Not in Maven’s, obviously.”

  “In Texas?”

  “Yes.”

  “The answer’s no.”

  “Before that, then?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You go blotchy when you’re lying, Leonard.”

  “I’m blushing because I’m tellin
g the truth. Because the answer’s no again. Another failure. We exchanged slogans but no fluids.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you had. She must have been dramatic then. She still looks good. Don’t you think? Leonard, look at me. I’m asking you.”

  It is the alcohol. They’re giggling, like people half their age, and Francine is reaching out to hold his hand across the table, not in the way she reached out for Nadia’s, stroking it to comfort her, but flirtingly, meshing her fingers between Leonard’s and lacing her legs round his below the tabletop.

  “I always admired your hands,” she says, rubbing his palms and the backs of his fingers. “Long and strong. Sexy hands.”

  “That’s from playing scales for more than thirty years.”

  “I always liked your throat and cheeks and lips as well. From the first time I set eyes on you. You still look good. No sign of sag.”

  “That’s blowing for a living. It gives you muscles in your face.”

  “I’m sagging everywhere.”

  “You’re not. In point of fact, you’re lovelier than you have ever been. I was watching you only today. In Maven’s cafeteria. With Nadia.”

  “I saw you watching us. Bad boy.”

  Leonard does not look at her. “Well, you were looking … fabulous.”

  “Let’s not go home tonight. Let’s find a hotel,” she says.

  “I’m okay to drive, I think. I haven’t downed as much as you.”

  “No, Leonard. Let’s find a hotel now. I want to go to bed with you right now. A little birthday treat.” She twists around toward the bar hatch. “Let’s ask if they do rooms.” She laughs. That pealing, mezzo, Brighton laugh. “We don’t have to stay the night. An hour ought to do it, don’t you think?”

  “Jesus, Francine, what are they going to think? We haven’t got any luggage, even.”

  “Couldn’t give a damn what they think.” She’s standing up already and leaning over the bar, calling for attention—“Hello? Hello? Customers!”—while Leonard watches from the table, fearful and aroused.

  The room is on the upper floor, an attic space with sloping ceilings and a tiny shoe-box sink. It isn’t clean and it isn’t comfortable. The mattress has been compacted by five years of heavy salesmen. The pillows smell of beer and other people’s scalps. Francine and Leonard do not notice any of this until they have tumbled onto the bed, pushed off their shoes, torn at each other’s lower clothes, and, in the words of a song from Leonard’s repertoire, Gotten so familiar with each other, So fervent and familiar / That what they feel is similar / To floating on cloud nine. They’ve not made love like this, so thoroughly and so spontaneously, for years. The champagne was a genius idea. It helped them find the reckless courage to make love in this unlovely place, and now it helps them try to rest, half naked in each other’s gluey arms.

  Francine—once she has found a cleanish towel to put between the pillow and her face—is soon dozing, though fitfully and shallowly. She’s breathing heavily. Her day has been exhausting and exhilarating, packed with more drama than any term at school. It’s started with a police raid, and now it’s ending in a low-rent bed with sex. It has taken years off her. It is not long, though, before she begins, both in her episodes of consciousness and in her dreams, to regret the bottle of champagne and this grubby room. Now that she is sobering and submitting to sleep, all its imperfections shout at her. The furnishings are soiled and dirty. She has not been able to brush her teeth. She does not have deodorant or a change of underwear. If her car was a little longer, well, twice as long, or they had traveled in Leonard’s gig van, she might have suggested making love in some dark field, closer to home. Then she would’ve woken up tomorrow morning in her own clean bed, with Leonard bringing Sunday breakfast on a tray. Naked if he has to. That’s okay. Anything is more okay than this. Nevertheless, she stretches out. Any restlessness will not survive for long. She’s used to sleeping well on Saturdays. She stores her tiredness for the weekend and then she gluts on it.

  All nights are the same for Leonard at the moment, now that he is nursing his bad shoulder and has no gigs to tire him out. His sleep is patchy at best. On this thin mattress, he’s wide awake at first, in fact uncomfortable, but not even trying to fall asleep. Hoping not to, actually. He wants to think about their lovemaking, and then he wants to run through his encounter with Nadia Emmerson and his clandestine phone call before considering what could occur to Lucy between today and Monday if Agent Rollins does not pick up his messages over the weekend. He sinks into a shallow doze, dreaming madly, bruising dreams, but waking often, stirring to the night sounds of the street or to adjust his body to the shoulder pain.

  He’s almost glad to be rescued from the dreams by disturbances below the room, late or maybe early departures from the bars downstairs and taxis sounding their horns. He’s sleeping in his underpants and shirt and feels the cold. His cock is caked and sore. He turns his back against the room and hugs himself, looking at Francine’s sleeping profile just a few centimeters from his own face. She looks warm and peaceful in the strip of street light wedged across the bed. Still a handsome woman, even now that his sexual appetites are pacified. Leonard will not wrap himself round her, however. She should not be woken before she’s fully rested. She might push him away. So he slips out of bed to find the jumper he abandoned so hurriedly only a few hours earlier. As he pulls it on, he turns toward the old sash window of the room and its bottled nighttime silvering of glass and stares beyond the gables on the far side of the street to what are either the first signs of a fragile, dawning sky or the ambient light of the city center. In the other directions, the sky is still huge and salted with stars. He can’t decide the time of night. He’ll wait until he sees some evidence—an early bird, an early van, an early dog walker, some winking aircraft lights, perhaps—before he crawls back into bed. At least he’s warmer now, and while he is standing here he can let his shoulders drop to ease the ache.

  Two vehicles drive idly past the pub, almost in convoy. The first is a dark gray personnel vehicle with blackened windows. So is the second. Leonard does not wait to see the third, or more, although they’re on their way. He guesses at once what’s going on. The siege is coming to an end. The troops are moving in.

  “What are you doing?” Francine asks, an edge of weary irritation in her voice. “Come back to bed. You’re waking me.”

  “I’m trying not to wake you. That’s why I’m up.”

  “Well, you are waking me. I need to sleep. I don’t want to be awake in this dreadful room. Not for one minute. We should have driven home last night.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Don’t say that, because it’s true? I haven’t even got a toothbrush here.”

  “I’ll go and get you one.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. What time is it?”

  “I’ve no idea.” Leonard holds his wristwatch up to the window but can make out only the circling phosphor of the second hand—and then the headlights of another dark gray vehicle. It’s clear he has to go back to the hostage house. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what the time is,” he says impulsively. “We have to get away from here. I agree. It’s horrible. You get some rest. I’ll get the car. I’ll make it quick. Drive home, okay?”

  14

  ACCORDING TO THE ONE-ARMED CLOCK in the pub’s lobby, it is 4 a.m. or thereabouts, early hours, still the trenches of the night when even sleepers are too deep to dream. The city road where Leonard abandoned his car on his first encounter with Lucy is unusually busy, and not only with the tail ends of Saturday’s club traffic and the first Sunday tram, but also with slow, determined vehicles that exit from the townway into Alderbeech.

  Leonard hurries, runs almost, toward the waste ground and the Buzz, tracing the steps that he and Francine took late yesterday afternoon, hand in hand. Now he is striding down the street like some jilting adulterer or skirt owl who’s abandoned his prey half feathered and half awake in creased and grubby sheets. He hopes he doesn’t look a
s furtive and transparent as he feels. Can everybody tell from his own creased and grubby appearance—he hasn’t washed or shaved for almost two days; he’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes, he’s slept in them; he hasn’t cleaned his teeth; his mouth is bruised and furry from the kissing; he smells of many things—that he has all too recently bolted from a woman’s bed? In chilly retrospect, the ardors of last night could seem a little sleazy. Not that that will bother Francine in the least—well, not the Francine of old. “Sleazy does it,” she once said in her Brighton days, on the one occasion she persuaded him to help her to a climax in a cinema. She is not the sort to care if the lustier parts of her nature are disclosed and acted on, the parts that need sensations and encounters. He was surprised by last night’s lack of inhibition, though, and this late revival, this flaring up of Francine’s younger, raw-boned self. No wonder he feels sore and bruised. And no wonder he is already planning ways of being sleazy with his wife again. As soon as possible. Next weekend, if he can engineer it. Hire another shoddy room for sex. Extemporize. Experiment. He must remember to stow emergency toothbrushes in the glove boxes of their cars.