Written on the Body

  ‘Wasn’t I in mine?’

  ‘Yes. All the more tempting.’

  She had lit a fire in the room with the bed she’d called a Lady’s Occasional. Most people don’t have open fires any more; Louise had no central heating. She said that Elgin complained every winter although it was she not he who bought the fuel and stoked the blaze.

  ‘He doesn’t really want to live like this,’ she said, meaning the austere grandeur of their marital home. ‘He’d be much happier in a 1930s mock Tudor with underfloor hot air.’

  ‘Then why does he do it?’

  ‘It brings him huge originality value.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘I made it.’ She paused. ‘The only thing Elgin’s ever put into this house is money.’

  ‘You despise him, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t despise him. I’m disappointed in him.’

  Elgin had been a brilliant medical trainee. He had worked hard and learned well. He had been innovative and concerned. During his early hospital years, when Louise had supported him financially and paid all the bills that accumulated round their modest life together, Elgin had been determined to qualify and work in the Third World. He scorned what he called ‘the consultancy trail’, where able young men of a certain background put in their minimum share of hospital slog and were promoted up the ladder to easier and better things. There was a fast-track in medicine. Very few women were on it, it was the recognised route of the career doctor.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Elgin’s mother got cancer.’

  In Stamford Hill Sarah felt sick. She had always got up at five o’clock, prayed and lit the candles, gone to work preparing the day’s food and ironing Esau’s white shirts. She wore a headscarf in those early hours, only placing her long black wig a few moments before her husband came downstairs at seven. They ate breakfast and together got into their ancient car and drove the three miles to the shop. Sarah mopped the floor and dusted the counter while Esau put his white coat over his prayer shawl and shifted the cardboard boxes in the back room. It cannot truly be said that they opened their shop at nine, rather they unlocked the door. Sarah sold toothbrushes and lozenges. Esau made up paper packets of medicine. They had done so for fifty years.

  The shop was unchanged. The mahogany counter and glass cabinets had been where they were since before the war, since before Esau and Sarah bought a sixty-year lease to carry them into old age. On one side of them, the cobbler had become a grocery store had become a delicatessen had become a Kosher Kebab House. On the other side, the take-in laundry had become a dry cleaners. It was still run by the children of their friends the Shiffys.

  ‘Your boy,’ said Shiffy to Esau. ‘He’s a doctor, I saw him in the paper. He could bring a nice practice here. You could expand.’

  ‘I’m seventy-two,’ said Esau.

  ‘So you’re seventy-two? Think of Abraham, think of Isaac, think of Methuselah. Nine hundred and sixty-nine. That’s the time to worry about your age.’

  ‘He’s married a shiksa.’

  ‘We all make mistakes. Look at Adam.’

  Esau didn’t tell Shiffy that he never heard from Elgin any more. He never expected to hear from him again. Two weeks later when Sarah was in hospital unable to speak for the pain, Esau dialled Elgin’s number on his Bakelite sit-up-and-beg telephone. They had never bothered to get a later model. God’s children had no need of progress.

  Elgin came at once and spoke to the doctor before he met his father at the bedside. The doctor said there was no hope. Sarah had cancer of the bone and would not live. The doctor said she must have been in pain for years. Slowly crumbling, dust to dust.

  ‘Does my father know?’

  ‘In a way.’ The doctor was busy and had to get on. He gave his notes to Elgin and left him at a desk under a lamp with a blown bulb.

  Sarah died. Elgin went to the funeral then took his father back to the shop. Esau fumbled with the keys and opened the heavy door. The glass panel still had the gold lettering that had once announced the signs of Esau’s success. The upper arc had said ROSENTHAL and the lower, CHEMIST. Time and the weather had beat upon the sign and although it still declared ROSENTHAL, underneath it now read HE MIST.

  Elgin, close behind his father, was sick to the stomach at the smell. It was the smell of his childhood, formaldehyde and peppermint. It was the smell of his homework behind the counter. The long nights waiting for his parents to take him home. Sometimes he fell asleep in his grey socks and shorts, his head on a table of logarithms, then Esau would scoop him up and carry him to the car. He remembered his father’s tenderness only through the net of dreams and half-wakefulness. Esau was hard on the boy but when he saw him head down on the table, his thin legs loose against the chair, he loved him and whispered in his ear about the lily of the valley and the Promised Land.

  All this cut at Elgin as he watched his father slowly hang his black coat on the peg and shrug his arms into his chemist’s uniform. He seemed to take comfort from this regular act, didn’t look at Elgin but got out his order book and sat muttering over it. After a while Elgin coughed and said he had to go. His father nodded, wouldn’t speak.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ asked Elgin not wanting an answer.

  ‘Can you tell me why your mother died?’

  Elgin cleared his throat a second time. He was desperate.

  ‘Father, mother was old, she didn’t have the strength to get better.’

  Esau rocked his head up and down up and down. ‘It was God’s will. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. How many times have I said that today?’ There was another long silence. Elgin coughed.

  ‘I have to be getting on.’

  Esau shuffled back round the counter and dug in a large discoloured jar.

  He gave his son a brown paper bag full of lozenges.

  ‘You have a cough my boy. Take these.’

  Elgin stuffed the bag in his overcoat pocket and left. He walked as hard as he could away from the Jewish quarter and when he reached a main road he hailed a cab. Before he climbed in he dumped the bag in a bus-stop bin. It was the last time he saw his father.

  It’s true that when Elgin began, he didn’t realise that his obsessional study of carcinoma would bring more substantial benefits to himself than to any of his patients. He used computer simulations to mimic the effects of rapidly multiplying rogue cells. He saw gene therapy as the likeliest way out for a body besieged by itself. It was very sexy medicine. Gene therapy is the frontier world where names and fortunes can be made. Elgin was wooed by an American pharmaceutical company who got him off the shop floor and into a lab. He’d never liked hospitals anyway.

  ‘Elgin’, said Louise, ‘can no longer wrap a Band-Aid round a cut finger but he can tell you everything there is to know about cancer. Everything except what causes it and how to cure it.’

  ‘That’s a bit cynical isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Elgin doesn’t care about people. He never sees any people. He hasn’t been on a terminal care ward for ten years. He sits in a multi-million pound laboratory in Switzerland for half the year and stares at a computer. He wants to make the big discovery. Get the Nobel prize.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with ambition.’

  She laughed. ‘There’s a lot wrong with Elgin.’

  I wondered if I could live up to Louise.

  We lay down together and I followed the bow of her lips with my finger. She had a fine straight nose, severe and demanding.

  Her mouth contradicted her nose, not because it wasn’t serious, but because it was sensual. It was full, lascivious in its depth, with a touch of cruelty. The nose and the mouth working together produced an odd effect of ascetic sexuality. There was discernment as well as desire in the picture. She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.

  Louise’s tastes had no place in the late twentieth century where sex is about revealing not concealing. She enjoyed the titillation of sugge
stion. Her pleasure was in slow certain arousal, a game between equals who might not always choose to be equals. She was not a D.H. Lawrence type; no-one could take Louise with animal inevitability. It was necessary to engage her whole person. Her mind, her heart, her soul and her body could only be present as two sets of twins. She would not be divided from herself. She preferred celibacy to tupping.

  Elgin and Louise no longer made love. She took the spunk out of him now and again but she refused to have him inside her. Elgin accepted this was part of their deal and Louise knew he used prostitutes. His proclivities would have made that inevitable even in a more traditional marriage. His present hobby was to fly up to Scotland and be sunk in a bath of porridge while a couple of Celtic geishas rubber-gloved his prick.

  ‘He wouldn’t want to be naked in front of strangers,’ said Louise. ‘I’m the only person, apart from his mother, who’s seen him undressed.’

  ‘Why do you stay with him?’

  ‘He used to be a good friend, that’s before he started working all the time. I’d have been happy enough to stay with him and live my own life, except that something happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw you in the park. It was a long time before we met.’

  I wanted to question her. My heart was beating too fast and I felt both enervated and exhausted, the way I do when I drink without eating. Whatever Louise had to say I wouldn’t have been able to cope with it. I lay on my back and watched the shadows from the fire. There was an ornamental palm in the room, its leaves reflected to a grotesque outsize. This was no tame domestic space.

  In the hours that followed, waking and sleeping with a light fever that bore on me out of passion and distress, it seemed as if the small room was full of ghosts. There were figures at the window gazing out through the muslin curtains, talking to one another in low voices. A man stood warming himself by the low grate. There was no furniture apart from the bed and the bed was levitating. We were surrounded by hands and faces shifting and connecting, now looming into focus vaporous and large, now disappearing like the bubbles children blow.

  The figures assumed shapes I recognised; Inge, Catherine, Bathsheba, Jacqueline. Others of whom Louise knew nothing. They came too close, put their fingers in my mouth, in my nostrils, drew back the hoods of my eyes. They accused me of lies and betrayal. I opened my mouth to speak but I had no tongue only a gutted space. I must have cried out then because I was in Louise’s arms and she was bending over me, fingers on my forehead, soothing me, whispering to me. ‘I will never let you go.’

  How to get back into my flat? I telephoned the Zoo the following morning and asked to speak to Jacqueline. They said she hadn’t come in to work. I had a mild temperature and only a pair of shorts at my disposal but I thought it best to try and settle matters with her as soon as I could. No way out but through.

  Louise lent me her car. When I got to my flat the curtains were still drawn but the chain was off the door. Cautiously I pushed it open. I half expected Jacqueline to fly at me with the mincer. I stood in the hall and called her name. There was no answer. Strictly speaking Jacqueline didn’t live with me. She had her own room in a shared house. She kept certain things in my flat and as far as I could see they were gone. No coat behind the door. No hat or gloves shoved in the hall stand. I tried the bedroom. It was wrecked. Whatever Jacqueline had done the previous night she hadn’t had time to sleep. The room looked like a chicken shed. There were feathers everywhere. The pillows had been ripped, the duvet gutted and emptied. She had torn the drawers from their chests and tipped the contents about like any good burglar. I stood too stunned to make much of it, I bent and picked up a T-shirt then dropped it again. I would have to use it as a duster since she’d cut a hole in the middle. I backed out into the sitting room. That was better, no feathers, nothing broken, simply everything was gone. The table, the chairs, the stereo, the vases and pictures, the glasses, bottles, mirrors and lamps. It was blissfully zen. She had left a bunch of flowers in the middle of the floor. Presumably she couldn’t fit them into her car. Her car. Her car was locked up like an accessory after the fact. How had she got away with my things?

  I went to pee. It seemed like a sensible move providing that the toilet was still there. It was but she had taken the toilet seat. The bathroom looked like it had been the target of a depraved and sadistic plumber. The taps were twisted on their sides, there was a monkey wrench skewed under the hot water pipe where someone had done their best to disconnect me. The walls were covered in heavy felt-tip pen. It was Jacqueline’s handwriting. There was a long list of her attributes over the bath. A longer list of my disabilities over the sink. Pasted like an acid-house frieze around the ceiling was Jacqueline’s name over and over again. Jacqueline colliding with Jacqueline. An endless cloning of Jacquelines in black ink. I went and peed in the coffee pot. She didn’t like coffee. Staring bearily back at the bathroom door I saw it had SHIT daubed across it. The word and the matter. That explained the smell.

  The worm in the bud. That’s right, most buds do have worms but what about the ones that turn? I thought Jacqueline would have crept away as quietly as she had crept in.

  The wise old hands who advocate a sensible route, not too much passion, not too much sex, plenty of greens and an early night, don’t recognise this as a possible ending. In their world good manners and good sense prevail. They don’t imagine that to choose sensibly is to set a time-bomb under yourself. They don’t imagine you are ripe for the cutting, waiting for your chance at life. They don’t think of the wreckage an exploding life will cause. It’s not in their rule book even though it happens again and again. Settle down, feet under the table. She’s a nice girl, he’s a nice boy. It’s the clichés that cause the trouble.

  I lay down on the hard wooden floor of my new zen sitting room and contemplated a spider throwing a web. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Unlike Robert the Bruce I had no ingenious revelations only a huge sadness. I’m not the kind who can replace love with convenience or passion with pick-ups. I don’t want slippers at home and dancing shoes in a little bed-sit round the block. That’s how it’s done isn’t it? Package up your life with supermarket efficiency, don’t mix the heart with the liver.

  I’ve never been the slippers; never been the one to sit at home and desperately believe in another late office meeting. I haven’t gone to bed by myself at eleven, pretending to be asleep, ears pricked like a guard dog for the car in the drive. I haven’t stretched out my hand to check the clock and felt the cold weight of those lost hours ticking in my stomach.

  Plenty of times I’ve been the dancing shoes and how those women have wanted to play. Friday night, a weekend conference. Yes, in my flat. Off with the business suit, legs apart, pulling me down on them, a pause for champagne and English cheese. And while we’re doing that somebody is looking out of the window watching the weather change. Watching the clock, watching the phone, she said she’d ring after her last session. She does ring. She lifts herself off me and dials the number resting the receiver against her breast. She’s wet with sex and sweat. ‘Hello darling, yes fine, it’s raining outside.’

  Turn down the lights. This is outside of time. The edge of a black hole where we can go neither forward nor back. Physicists are speculating on what might happen if we could lodge ourselves on the crater sides of such a hole. It seems that due to the peculiarities of the event horizon we could watch history pass and never become history ourselves. We would be trapped eternally observing with no-one to tell. Perhaps that’s where God is, then God will understand the conditions of infidelity.

  Don’t move. We can’t move, caught like lobster in a restaurant aquarium. These are the confines of our life together, this room, this bed. This is the voluptuous exile freely chosen. We daren’t eat out, who knows whom we may meet? We must buy food in advance with the canniness of a Russian peasant. We must store it unto the day, chilled in the fridge, baked in the oven. Temperatures of hot and cold, fire and ice, the extremes under which we
live.

  We don’t take drugs, we’re drugged out on danger, where to meet, when to speak, what happens when we see each other publicly. We think no-one has noticed but there are always faces at the curtain, eyes on the road. There’s nothing to whisper about so they whisper about us.

  Turn up the music. We’re dancing together tightly sealed like a pair of 50s homosexuals. If anyone knocks at the door we won’t answer. If I have to answer we’ll say she’s my accountant. We can’t hear anything but the music smooth as a tube lubricating us round the floor. I’ve been waiting for her all week. All week has been a regime of clocks and calendars. I thought she might telephone on Thursday to say that she couldn’t come, that sometimes happens even though we’re only together one weekend in five and those stolen after-office hours.

  She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She’s refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.

  The sun won’t stay behind the blind. The room is flooded with light that makes sine waves on the carpet. The carpet that looked so respectable in the showroom has a harem red to it now. I was told it was burgundy.

  She lies against the light resting her back on a rod of light. The light breaks colours under her eyelids. She wants the light to penetrate her, breaking open the dull colds of her soul where nothing has warmed her for more summers than she can count. Her husband lies over her like a tarpaulin. He wades into her as though she were a bog. She loves him and he loves her. They’re still married aren’t they?

  On Sunday, when she’s gone, I can open the curtains, wind my watch and clear the dishes stacked round the bed. I can make my supper from the left-overs and think about her at home for Sunday dinner, listening to the gentle ticking of the clock and the sound of busy hands running her a bath. Her husband will feel sorry for her, bags under her eyes, worn out. Poor baby, she hardly got any sleep. Tuck her up in her own sheets, that’s nice. I can take our soiled ones to the launderette.