Written on the Body

  What then? That you, so recently dressed, lost your clothes in an unconscious pile and I found you wore a petticoat. Louise, your nakedness was too complete for me, who had not learned the extent of your fingers. How could I cover this land? Did Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas? I had no dreams to possess you but I wanted you to possess me.

  It was a long time later that I heard the noise of schoolchildren on their way home. Their voices, high-pitched and eager, carried up past the sedater rooms and came at last, distorted, to our House of Fame. Perhaps we were in the roof of the world, where Chaucer had been with his eagle. Perhaps the rush and press of life ended here, the voices collecting in the rafters, repeating themselves into redundancy. Energy cannot be lost only transformed; where do the words go?

  ‘Louise, I love you.’

  Very gently, she put her hand over my mouth and shook her head. ‘Don’t say that now. Don’t say it yet. You might not mean it.’

  I was protesting with a stream of superlatives, beginning to sound like an advertising hack. Naturally this model had to be the best the most important, the wonderful even the incomparable. Nouns have no worth these days unless they bank with a couple of Highstreet adjectives. The more I underlined it the hollower it sounded. Louise said nothing and eventually I shut up.

  ‘When I said you might not mean it, I meant it might not be possible for you to mean it.’

  ‘I’m not married.’

  ‘You think that makes you free?’

  ‘It makes me freer.’

  ‘It also makes it easier for you to change your mind. I don’t doubt that you would leave Jacqueline. But would you stay with me?’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘You’ve loved other people but you still left them.’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘I don’t want to be another scalp on your pole.’

  ‘You started this, Louise.’

  ‘I acknowledged it. We both started it.’

  What was all this about? We had made love once. We had known each other as friends for a couple of months and yet she was challenging my suitability as a long-term candidate? I said as much.

  ‘So you admit that I am just a scalp?’

  I was angry and bewildered. ‘Louise, I don’t know what you are. I’ve turned myself inside out to try and avoid what happened today. You affect me in ways I can’t quantify or contain. All I can measure is the effect, and the effect is that I am out of control.’

  ‘So you try and regain control by telling me you love me. That’s a territory you know, isn’t it? That’s romance and courtship and whirlwind.’

  ‘I don’t want control.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  No and you’re right not to believe me. If in doubt be sincere. That’s a pretty little trick of mine. I got up and reached for my shirt. It was under her petticoat. I picked up the petticoat instead.

  ‘May I have this?’

  ‘Trophy hunting?’

  Her eyes were full of tears. I had hurt her. I regretted telling her those stories about my girlfriends. I had wanted to make her laugh and she had laughed at the time. Now I had strewn our path with barbs. She didn’t trust me. As a friend I had been amusing. As a lover I was lethal. I could see that. I wouldn’t want to have much to do with me. I knelt on the floor and clasped her legs against my chest.

  ‘Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.’

  She stroked my hair. ‘I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you’ve learned, forget them. Forget that you’ve been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.’

  ‘How shall I prove it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you what to do.’

  The maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart’s desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in these unforgiving walls. Is that the test? I told you that Louise had more than a notion of the Gothic about her. She seemed determined that I should win her from the tangle of my own past. In her attic room was a print of the Burne-Jones picture titled Love and the Pilgrim. An angel in clean garments leads by the hand a traveller footsore and weary. The traveller is in black and her cloak is still caught by the dense thicket of thorns from which they have both emerged. Would Louise lead me so? Did I want to be led? She was right, I hadn’t thought about the hugeness of it all. I had some excuse; I was thinking about Jacqueline.

  It was raining when I left Louise’s house and caught a bus to the Zoo. The bus was full of women and children. Tired busy women placating cross excitable kids. One child had forced her brother’s head into his satchel, scattering schoolbooks over the rubber floor, enraging her pretty young mother to the point of murder. Why is none of this work included in the Gross National Product? ‘Because we don’t know how to quantify it,’ say the economists. They should try catching a bus.

  I got off at the main entrance to the Animal House. The boy in the booth was bored and alone. He had his feet propped on the turnstile, the wet wind pushing through his window and spatting his micro TV. He didn’t look at me as I leaned for shelter against a perspex elephant.

  ‘Zoo’s shuttin’ in ten,’ he said mysteriously. ‘No admin after five pm.’

  A secretary’s dream; ‘No admin after five pm.’ That amused me for two seconds and then I saw Jacqueline coming towards the gate, her beret pulled against the drizzle. She had a carrier bag full of food, leeks prodding through the sides.

  ‘Nite luv,’ said the boy without moving his lips.

  She hadn’t seen me. I wanted to hide behind the perspex elephant, jump out at her and say, ‘Let’s go for dinner.’

  I am often beset by such romantic follies. I use them as ways out of real situations. Who the hell wants to go for dinner at 5.30 pm? Who wants to have a sexy walk in the rain alongside thousands of home-time commuters, all like you, carrying a shopping bag full of food?

  ‘Stick to it,’ I told myself. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Jacqueline.’ (I sound like someone from the CID.)

  She turned up her face, smiles and pleasure, handed me the bag and wrapped herself in the coat. She started walking towards her car, telling me about her day, there was a wallaby that had needed counselling, did I know that the Zoo used them in animal experiments? The Zoo decapitated them alive. It was in the interests of science.

  ‘But not in the interests of wallabies?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And why should they suffer? You wouldn’t chop my head off, would you?’

  I looked at her appalled. She was joking but it didn’t feel like a joke.

  ‘Let’s go and get some coffee and a bit of cake.’ I took her arm and we walked away from the carpark towards a homely tea-shoppe that normally served the outflow of the Zoo. It was pleasant when the visitors weren’t there and they weren’t there on that day. The animals must pray for rain.

  ‘You don’t usually pick me up from work,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there something to celebrate?’

  ‘No.’

  Condensation ran down the windows. Nothing was clear any more.

  ‘Is it about Louise?’

  I nodded, twisting the cake fork between my fingers, pushing my knees against the underside of the dolls’ house table. Nothing was in proportion. My voice seemed too loud, Jacqueline too small, the woman serving doughnuts with mechanical efficiency parked her bosom on the glass counter and threatened to shatter it with mammary power. How she would skittle the chocolate eclairs and with a single plop drown her unwary customers in mock cream. My mother always said I’d come to a sticky end.

  ‘Are you seeing her?’ Jacqueline’s timid voice.

  Irritation from gut to gullet. I wanted to snarl like the dog I am.

  ‘Of course I’m seeing her. I see her face on every hoarding, on the coins in my pocket. I see her when I look at you. I see her when I don’t look at you.’

  I didn’t say any of t
hat, I mumbled something about yes as usual but things had changed. THINGS HAD CHANGED, what an arsehole comment, I had changed things. Things don’t change, they’re not like the seasons moving on a diurnal round. People change things. There are victims of change but not victims of things. Why do I collude in this mis-use of language? I can’t make it easier for Jacqueline however I put it. I can make it a bit easier for me and I suppose that’s what I’m doing.

  She said, ‘I thought you’d changed.’

  ‘I have, that’s the problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘I thought you’d already changed. You told me you wouldn’t do this again. You told me you wanted a different life. It’s easy to hurt me.’

  What she says is true. I did think I could leave with the morning paper and come home for the 6 o’clock news. I hadn’t lied to Jacqueline but it seemed I had been lying to myself.

  ‘I’m not running around again, Jacqueline.’

  ‘What are you doing then?’

  Good point. Would that I had the overseeing spirit to interpret my actions in plain English. I would like to come to you with all the confidence of a computer programmer, sure that we could find the answers if only we asked the proper questions. Why aren’t I going according to plan? How stupid it sounds to say I don’t know and shrug and behave like every other idiot who’s fallen in love and can’t explain it. I’ve had a lot of practice, I should be able to explain it. The only word I can think of is Louise.

  Jacqueline, exposed under tea-shoppe neon, wraps her hands around her cup for comfort but gets burned. She spills into her saucer and, while mopping at it with the inadequate serviette, knocks her cake on to the floor. Silently but with eagle eye, the Bosom bends to clear it up. She’s seen it all before, it doesn’t interest her except that she wants to close in a quarter of an hour. She retreats behind her counter and switches on the radio.

  Jacqueline wiped her glasses.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘It’s for us to decide that. It’s a joint decision.’

  ‘You mean we’ll talk about it and you’ll do what you want anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know what I want.’

  She nodded and got up to leave. By the time I had found the change to pay our host Jacqueline was somewhere down the street, going for her car I thought.

  I ran to catch up with her but when I got to the Zoo carpark it was locked. I caught hold of the diamond-shaped tennis netting and vainly shook the smug padlock. A wet May night, more like February than sweet spring, it should have been soft and light but the light was soaked up by a row of weary streetlamps reflecting the rain. Jacqueline’s Mini stood alone in a corner of the bleak paddock. Ridiculous this waste sad time.

  I walked across to a small park and sat on a damp bench under a dripping willow. I was wearing baggy shorts which in such weather looked like a recruitment campaign for the Boy Scouts. But I’m not a Boy Scout and never was. I envy them; they know exactly what makes a Good Deed.

  Opposite me, the relaxed smart houses built on the park showed yellow at one window, black at another. A figure pulled the curtains, someone opened the front door, I could hear music for a moment. What sane sensible lives. Did those people lie awake at night hiding their hearts while giving their bodies? Did the woman at the window quietly despair as the clock pushed her closer to bed-time? Does she love her husband? Desire him? When he sees his wife unlace herself what does he feel? In a different house is there someone he longs for the way he used to long for her?

  At the fairground there used to be a penny slot-machine called ‘What the Butler Saw’. You jammed your eyes against a padded viewfinder, put in the coin and at once a troupe of dancing girls started tossing their skirts and winking. Gradually they cast off most of their clothes, but if you wanted the coup de grace you had to get in another coin before the butler’s white hand drew a discreet blind. The pleasure of it, apart from the obvious, was depth simulation. It was intended to give the feel of a toff at the music hall, in the best seat of course. You could see rows of velvet seats and a rake of Brylcreemed hair. It was delicious because it was puerile and naughty. I always felt guilty but it was a hot thrill of guilt not the dreadful weight of sin. Those days made me a voyeur, though of a modest kind. I like to pass by bare windows and get a sighting of the life within.

  No silent films were shot in colour but the pictures through a window are that. Everything moves in curious clockwork animation. Why is that man throwing up his arms? The girl’s hands move soundlessly over the piano. Only half an inch of glass separates me from the silent world where I do not exist. They don’t know I’m here but I have begun to be as intimate with them as any member of the family. More so, since as their lips move with goldfish bowl pouts, I am the scriptwriter and I can put words in their mouths. I had a girlfriend once, we used to play that game, going round the posh houses when we were down at heel making up stories about the lamplit well-to-do.

  Her name was Catherine, she wanted to be a writer. She said it was good exercise for her imagination to invent little scenarios for the unsuspecting. I don’t want to be a writer but I didn’t mind carrying her pad. It did occur to me, those dark nights, that movies are a terrible sham. In real life, left to their own devices, especially after 7 o’clock, human beings hardly move at all. Sometimes I panicked and told Catherine we’d have to call the ambulance.

  ‘No-one can sit still for that long,’ I said. ‘She must be dead. Look at her, rigor mortis has set in, not so much as a squint.’

  Then we’d go to an arthouse showing of Chabrol or Renoir and the entire cast spent the whole picture running in and out of bedrooms and shooting at one another and getting divorced. I was exhausted. The French crack on about being an intellectual resource but for a nation of thinkers they do run around a lot. Thinking is supposed to be a sedentary occupation. They pack more action into their arty films than the Americans manage in a dozen Clint Eastwoods. Jules et Jim is an action movie.

  We were so happy those wet carefree nights. I felt we were like Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes. I knew my place. And then Catherine said she was leaving. She didn’t want to do it but she felt that a writer doesn’t make a good companion. ‘It’s only a matter of time’, she said, ‘before I become an alcoholic and forget how to cook.’

  I suggested we wait and try and ride it out. She shook her head sadly and patted me. ‘Get a dog.’

  Naturally I was devastated. I enjoyed our wandering nights together, the brief stop at the fish shop, falling into the same bed at dawn.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you before you go?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you know why Henry Miller said “I write with my prick”?’

  ‘Because he did. When he died they found nothing between his legs but a ball-point pen.’

  ‘You’re making it up,’ she said.

  Am I?

  I was sitting on the bench smiling soaked to the skin. I wasn’t happy but the power of memory is such that it can lift reality for a time. Or is memory the more real place? I stood up and wrung out the legs of my shorts. It was dark, the park belonged to other people after dark and I didn’t belong to them. Best to go home and find Jacqueline.

  When I got to my flat the door was locked. I tried to get in but the chain was across the door. I shouted and banged. At last the letter-box flipped open and a note slid out. It said GO AWAY. I found a pen and wrote on the backside. IT’S MY FLAT. As I feared there was no response. For the second time that day I ended up at Louise’s.

  ‘We’re going to sleep in a different bed tonight,’ she said as she filled the bathroom with clouds of steam and incense oils. ‘I’m going to warm the room and you’re going to lie in the tub and drink this cocoa. All right Christopher Robin?’

  Yes, with or without a blue hood. How tender this is and how unlikely. I don’t believe any of it. Jacqueline must have known I’d have to come here. Why would she do that? They’re not in it together are they, to punish me? Perhaps I’ve di
ed and this is Judgement Day. Judgement or not I can’t go back to Jacqueline. Whatever happens here, and I held out no great hopes, I knew that I’d split myself from her in ways that were too profound to heal. In the park in the rain I had recognised one thing at least; that Louise was the woman I wanted even if I couldn’t have her. Jacqueline I had to admit had never been wanted, simply she had had roughly the right shape to fit for a while.

  Molecular docking is a serious challenge for bio-chemists. There are many ways to fit molecules together but only a few juxtapositions that bring them close enough to bond. On a molecular level success may mean discovering what synthetic structure, what chemical, will form a union with, say, the protein shape on a tumour cell. If you make this high-risk jigsaw work you may have found a cure for carcinoma. But molecules and the human beings they are a part of exist in a universe of possibility. We touch one another, bond and break, drift away on force-fields we don’t understand. Docking here inside Louise may heal a damaged heart, on the other hand it may be an expensively ruinous experiment.

  I put on the rough towelling robe Louise had left for me. I hoped it wasn’t Elgin’s. There used to be a scam in the undertaking trade whereby any man sent to the Chapel of Rest in a good suit of clothes had the lot tried on by the embalmer and his boys while he, the deceased, was made ready for the grave. Whoever the clothes best fitted put a shilling on them; that is, the shilling went in the Poor Box and the clothes went off the dead man’s back. Obviously he was allowed to wear them while ritual viewing took place but as soon as it was time for the lid to be screwed down, one of the lads whipped them off and covered the unfortunate in a cheap winding sheet. If I was going to stab Elgin in the back I didn’t want to do it in his dressing gown.

  ‘That’s mine,’ said Louise as I came upstairs. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Do you remember when you and I were caught in that terrible shower on the way to your flat? Jacqueline insisted that I undress and she gave me her dressing gown to wear. It was very kind but I longed to be in yours. It was your smell I was after.’