So how does all this relate to the frankly less than Shakespearean histoire or imbroglio with which you have found yourself involved? My apologies, by the way, if you think such are required. (Are they? Didn’t you, in a sense, invite yourself in? Weren’t you, in a sense, asking for it?) Merely that there was a time when Gillian’s lustre made her the cynosure of all eyes, when Ollie’s flair—I put it no higher—carried the field before him, and when Stuart, if you’ll pardon the phrase, couldn’t get any if he paid for it. And now? Now Stuart can pay for it. Now it is Stu-baby’s todger among the drachmae. You find my Weltanschauung grown simplistic? But life does simplify itself, you’ll find, its grim lineaments do expose themselves as the years progress and disappoint.
Mind you, I’m not saying Stuart could pull Maria Callas. Were he to have yodelled ‘I Remember You’ at her, I doubt she would have responded with ‘Di quell’amor ch’è palpito.’
Stuart Do you know the phrase ‘Information wants to be free’? Computer people use it. I’ll give you an example. It’s very hard to get rid of information you store in your computer. I mean, you can press that delete key, and think it’s vanished for ever, but it hasn’t. It’s still there on the hard drive. It wants to survive and it wants to be free. The Pentagon says you have to overwrite information on the hard drive seven times before it’s obliterated. But then there are data recovery companies who claim they can get back data which have been overwritten even as many as twenty times.
So how can you make sure of destroying the information? I read somewhere that the Australian government uses gangs of beefy men with large sledgehammers to smash up their hard drives. And the bits have to be so small that they can be fed through a sort of grille with a really narrow gauge. Only then can the authorities be certain that nothing can be recovered, that the information is finally dead.
Does that remind you of anything? It does me. They’d have to get beefy men with sledgehammers to smash up my heart if they wanted to make sure. That’s what they’d have to do.
I know this is a comparison. But I happen to think it’s true.
18
COMFORT
Gillian It happened like this. Oliver managed to rise from his bed shortly before it was time for supper. He didn’t have any appetite—he doesn’t at the moment—and said very little as we ate. Stuart cooked a piperade. Oliver made some joke about it, which could have been hurtful, but Stuart wisely didn’t take much notice. We just sipped at a glass of wine—Oliver didn’t even touch his. Then he got up, made a vague sign of the cross over the table, said something Oliverish, and added, ‘Now I shall drag myself back to my wankpit so that you may talk amongst yourselves about me.’
Stuart stacked the dishwasher. As I watched him I drank half Oliver’s wine. He was realigning the plates that were already in the machine, which he always does. He once told me about maximising water flow, and I told him never to use the phrase again in my hearing. But I was laughing as I said it. Now he stacks in a sort of exaggeratedly deliberate way, frowning and pausing. It’s quite funny, if you can imagine it.
‘Does he wank?’ Stuart suddenly asked.
‘Not even that,’ I replied without thinking. And in any case, that was hardly much of a betrayal, was it?
Stuart filled the powder tray, closed the door and gave the dishwasher a pitying look. I can tell he wants to buy me a new one. I can also tell he’s holding back from mentioning the subject.
‘Well, I’ll just pop in on the girls,’ he said. He removed his shoes and set off upstairs. I carried on drinking Oliver’s wine and looked at Stuart’s shoes on the kitchen floor. A pair of black loafers, pointing out at an angle of ten to two, as if he’d just stepped out of them. Well, he had, of course, that was true—I mean, it was as if the shoes still had life in them somehow. They weren’t new, they were worn in, with creases across the top, and vertical wrinkles down the sides. Everyone wears his or her shoes in a different way, don’t they? Worn shoes must be like fingerprints, or DNA, to the police. And shoes are like faces, too, aren’t they? The creases where they bend, the crow’s feet that develop?
I didn’t hear Stuart come downstairs again.
We drank the rest of the wine.
We weren’t drunk, though. Neither of us. I’m not using that as an excuse. Do I want an excuse?
He kissed me first. But that’s not an excuse either. A woman knows how not to be close enough if she doesn’t want to be kissed.
I did say, ‘Ellie?’
He said, ‘I’ve always loved you. Always.’
He asked me to touch him. It didn’t seem much to ask. The house was quite quiet.
He began touching me. His hands on my legs, then under my knickers.
‘Take them off,’ he said. ‘Let me touch you properly.’
He was on the sofa, his trousers halfway down his thighs, his cock standing. I was in front of him, holding my knickers. I somehow didn’t want to put them down. His hand was through my legs, his wrist could feel I was wet and his fingers were on the base of my spine. He wasn’t pulling me towards him: I was the one who moved. I felt twenty. I lowered myself onto his cock.
I thought—no, at those moments it’s barely a thought, it’s more something that passes through your mind, something for which you’re hardly responsible—I thought: I’m fucking Stuart, and it doesn’t matter because it’s Stuart. At the same time, I also thought, I’m not fucking Stuart, because—if you want to know, if you must know—we’d never done it like that before, two hot kids in a kitchen, half-dressed, whispering, urgent.
‘I’ve always loved you,’ he said. He looked up into my eyes and I felt him come.
Before he left, he set off the dishwasher.
Stuart I’m sorry for people who are sick. I’m sorry for people who are poor through no fault of their own. I’m sorry for people who hate their lives so much they kill themselves. I’m not sorry for people who are sorry for themselves, people who are self-indulgent, people who exaggerate their problems, people who waste your time and theirs, people who think that not doing anything except cry into their soup for weeks on end is more interesting than anything you or anyone else might have done in the intervening period.
I made a frittata. Gillie thought it was a piperade. The ingredients are the same, but with a piperade you stir the egg mixture as it cooks. With a frittata, you leave it to itself until it’s cooked through, then put it under the grill. You don’t need to brown the top, just cook it until it’s solid, and then with a bit of luck, if you’ve done it right, you’ll find that it’s just a touch sloppy in the middle. Actually, not in the middle, but about a quarter to a third of the way in from the top. I got it right this time. I’d made it with asparagus tips, fresh peas, baby courgettes, parma ham and small cubes of fried potato. I saw that the first mouthful made Gill smile. But she didn’t have time to say anything because Oliver announced wearily, ‘My omelette’s overcooked.’
‘It’s meant to be like that,’ I said.
He pushed at it with his fork. ‘Looks more to me as if the law of unintended effect has been applied.’ Then, very deliberately, he began picking the vegetables out of the egg and eating them in an obnoxious way.
‘Where do the peas come from at this time of year?’ he asked in a tone of voice which implied that he couldn’t care less. He looked at the pea on the end of his fork as if he’d never seen one before. Personally, I thought he was faking it. Most of it, anyway. Just because you’re depressed, it doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to start telling the truth, does it?
‘Kenya,’ I said.
‘And the courgettes?’
‘Zambia.’
‘And the asparagus tips?’
‘Peru, actually.’
Oliver slumped his shoulders with each answer, as if air-freight were some international conspiracy bent on persecuting him.
‘And the eggs? Where do the eggs come from?’
‘The eggs, Oliver, come out of a chicken’s bum.’
&nb
sp; That shut him up for a bit at least. Gill and I talked about the children. I quite wanted to tell her about my possible new pork supplier, but for Oliver’s sake I thought I’d better avoid business. Sophie and Marie have settled into their new schools really well. I must say, it’s been for the best. You might have read about the educational task force the Government sent into the borough where they used to live. Not the actual school the two of them were at, but even so. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were next for the chop.
It was just a quiet domestic evening. I cleared the plates and brought in the rhubarb. I’d stewed it with some orange juice and zest, and made enough so that the girls could have some the next day, if they wanted. I’d just said something to this effect when Oliver got to his feet, leaving his bowl untouched, and announced he was going to bed. I gather this is par for the course nowadays. He doesn’t do anything all day, goes to bed early, sleeps ten or twelve hours, and wakes up tired. It sounds like a vicious circle.
I finished clearing away and looked in on the girls. When I came downstairs again, Gill hadn’t moved. Not an inch. She looked miserable, to tell the truth, and I suddenly had a horror of her falling into a depression as well. I don’t know if this is a recognised pattern. I know it happens with alcoholics: one person turns into one, and then their partner, even if they don’t want to, even if they hate the idea, turns into one as well. Maybe not straight away, but it’s a real danger. They say alcoholism’s an illness, so I suppose you can catch it, one way or another. And why not the same with depression? After all, it must be terribly depressing dealing with someone who’s depressed, mustn’t it?
So I put my arm round her and said—well, I can’t remember. ‘Cheer up, love,’ or something like that. I mean, you can only say simple things in those circumstances, can’t you? Oliver, of course, would find complicated things to say, but I really don’t regard Oliver as an expert on anything nowadays.
Then we comforted one another.
Well, in the obvious way.
However else?
Oliver Stuart bores me. Gillian bores me. I bore me.
The girls don’t bore me. They are too innocent for that. They have not yet reached the age of choice.
Do you bore me? Not exactly. But you’re not much sodding help either.
I bore you. Don’t I? It’s all right. You don’t have to be polite. What harm can another pinprick do to a burst balloon? Perhaps I might be interesting as a test case, a counter-example. Watch Ollie fuck up his life, go thou and do not likewise.
I used to think there was a point to being me. Now I’m not convinced any more. I feel bloated and stupid. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve retreated to some control cabin deep within me, and am only connected to the outside world by periscope and microphone. No, that makes me sound as if I’m functioning as I’m meant to. As if I’m a machine. Control cabin—nothing could be further from the truth. You know that dream where you’re driving along in a car, except the steering wheel doesn’t work—or rather, it works just enough for you to still believe in it, which is a big mistake—and the same with the brakes and the gears, and all the time the road’s descending and you’re going faster, and sometimes the roof starts pressing down on you and the driver’s door pushing in so that you can barely turn the wheel or reach the pedals … we’ve all had that dream, or some version of it, haven’t we?
I don’t talk much; I don’t eat much, ergo I don’t shit much. I don’t work; I don’t play. I sleep; and I feel tired. Sex? Remind me what the point of that is, I seem to have forgotten. I also seem to have lost my sense of smell. So I can’t even nose myself. Sick people smell bad, don’t they? Perhaps you can sniff me and tell me the news. Is that too much to ask? Ah, I can see it is. Sorry I spoke. Sorry I imposed.
This is all misleading. You probably think—if you can be bothered—after all, if I were you I wouldn’t bother to think about me—but were you to, you might come to the conclusion that as long as I can describe my condition with relative lucidity, then ‘things can’t be that bad.’ Wrong, wrong! ‘His condition is hopeless, but not serious’—who said that? Add memory loss to my list of symptoms. I can’t be relied upon to remember to do it myself.
No, that’s the catch in all this. I can only describe what is describable. What I can’t describe is indescribable. What is indescribable is unbearable. And made the more unbearable by being indescribable.
Don’t I make pretty patterns with words?
Death of the soul, that’s what we’re talking about.
Death of the soul, death of the body: Would You Rather? At least that’s an easy one.
Not that I believe in the soul. But I believe in the death of something I don’t believe in. Am I making sense? If not, then at least I’m giving you a tiny glimpse into the incoherence which enfolds me. Enfold: that’s much too orderly a verb for where I am. All verbs are too orderly nowadays. Verbs seem like instruments of social engineering. Even to be is fascistic.
Ellie Grown-ups are fuck-ups, right? And another thing, I hate the way they pretend you’re one of them for as long as it suits them, and then when it doesn’t you don’t exist any more. Like when I told Gillian about Stuart being crazy for her and she just gave that little smile to herself like I wasn’t there. Class dismissed.
I can’t stay in this house, working away like nothing ever happened. As I said, it’s not a problem. It was never a big deal with Stuart. But that doesn’t mean I want to watch him prancing around in his home decorator’s kit for the next few years. And watch her looking like a cat who’s about to get the cream. You wouldn’t stick around, would you?
Still, at least I’ve learnt some stuff from Gillian. And at least I didn’t fall in love with Stuart. That’s a comfort.
Mrs Dyer Do you see what he’s done? He must have been one of them cowboys they’ve been warning us about. He promised to fix the gate, and the bell, and chop down the tree for me and cart it away. So he chopped it down and left it lying there so I can’t get out the front door and went to get a van. He said he had to hire a van specially as the tree turned out bigger than he thought, so I paid him in cash and he went away and never came back. He didn’t fix the gate or the bell. He was a very pleasant young man but he turned out to be a cowboy.
When I rang the Council they said what was I thinking of, having a tree cut down without their permission and they wouldn’t be surprised if someone wanted to prosecute. I said you’d better come and prosecute me in the next world then. That’s the only place I’ll get any p and q.
Mme Wyatt I still want everything I said I wanted. And I know that I shall get none of it. So I take comfort from that well-cut suit, that sole off the bone, that book written with a good style which does not have an unhappy ending. I shall value politeness and short conversations, and I shall want things for others. And I shall always feel the pain and the wound of the things that I had and that I still want and that will never come again.
Terri Ken took me to Obrycki’s for a crab feed. They give you a little hammer, a sharp knife, a pitcher of beer and a garbage bag at your feet. I knew what to do, but I let Ken show me anyway. Crabs are amazing constructions, like some modern piece of packaging invented way back when. You pick one off the pile, flip it over, look for a kind of top-pop on the underside, insert your thumbnail, rip it off, and the whole package just breaks in half. Then you snap off the claws, flip out the crummy meat, break the remaining core in half, insert a knife, loosen everything up a bit, cut across it, then dig in with your fingers and eat. We got through a dozen crabs with no sweat. Six each: there’s a lot you throw away. I had a side order of onion rings and Ken had fries. Then to finish he ordered a crab-cake.
No, you don’t know Ken.
And you don’t need to worry about me from now on. Assuming you were.
Sophie Stuart came up and kissed us goodnight. Marie was fast asleep, and I pretended to be. I pressed my face into the pillow so he wouldn’t smell any sick. When he’d gone, I lay there thinking of all t
he things I wished I hadn’t eaten. Thinking how fat I am, what a disgusting pig I’ve become.
I waited to hear the front door shut. You can always hear it because it needs an extra pull. I don’t know how long I stayed awake. An hour? More? Then finally I heard it.
They must have been discussing Daddy. He’s seriously Down in the Dumps. Except I think we ought to call it by a grown-up name.
Stuart When I said ‘we comforted one another,’ that probably gave the wrong impression. As if we were a couple of old things, snuffling into one another’s shoulders.
No, the truth is, we were like a couple of kids. It was as if something—from years and years before—had finally been released. It was also as if it was still back then, when we first met, as if we were starting again in a different way. When you’re thirty you can be all sort of fake-grown-up. We were a bit like that, to tell the truth. We were serious, and had fallen in love, and were planning our lives together—don’t laugh—and all of that fed into the sex, if you know what I mean. There wasn’t anything wrong with the sex we had back then, but it was sort of responsible.
And I’d like to make another thing clear. Gillian knew exactly what we were up to, from the start. When I took off my shoes and said I’d just pop in on the girls, do you know what she answered?
‘You can pop in on all three of them while you’re about it.’
And there was a look in her eye as she said it.
When I got down she looked a bit moody and quiet, but I could feel she was all jumpy and expectant underneath, as if for once she didn’t know what was going to happen in her life next. We drank some more of the wine, and I told her I liked the way she’s doing her hair nowadays. She puts a scarf in it but it isn’t the way American women put scarves in their hair. It isn’t like a ribbon either. It looks artistic without being pretentious, and—being Gill—the colour of the scarf had been chosen to set off the colour of her hair perfectly.