Ménage Page 10

  ‘No, not at all.’ He was flattered, but still reeling from her onslaught.

  ‘Anyway, I’m just worried that when broadband gets good enough they’ll just stream all my stuff and I won’t have any FedExing to do any more and I’ll be out of a job anyway . . .’

  Dot! he wanted to say. Hello Dot, can we just slow down, say hello and start again? She seemed drained by all the talking and reached for his hand.

  ‘Can’t we just go snooze?’

  ‘Ah . . . really? Sorry?’

  Still there had been no addressing of the question of the years. No ‘I forgive you’, or ‘I hate you’.

  ‘I’m whacked . . . I’m so . . .’

  ‘Sure . . . but where?’

  ‘Home.’

  She laughed as she touched his hand, burped, then giggled, covering her mouth in that way she used to.

  ‘Sorry, I mean . . . my place.’

  On the taxi ride to Notting Hill he picked up more fragments. It was an affluent des-res town house, a full three floors in a trendy tree-lined street, but as soon as he stepped inside he cracked his knee on a packing case and with every step there was even more mess. Dot was fussing, trying to apologise, explain.

  ‘ . . . and what with the commute to the studio . . . for fuck’s sake I’m supposed to be selling this place. Bastards – I mean, it would save so much time in commuting and then I’d see more of Molly and . . .’

  He nodded when it felt appropriate and made it past the obstacle course of scattered cuddly toys, books and CDs and found his way to the lounge. The windows were immense; the floor of beautifully Victorian pine, but barely an inch of it visible beneath piles of clothes and more teeming packing boxes. Dot was in the open-plan kitchen area; the units had expensive aluminium splashbacks by some exclusive Italian designer, a full selection of hanging Le Creuset pots and pans, but then in the middle of it all an incongruous bottom-of-the-range white plastic Argos microwave spattered in sauce. Dot’s Post-it notes practically covered every surface.

  ‘ . . . and Consuela can’t travel with me, cos, well . . . I only found out . . . she’s not got a real passport . . . Venezuelan . . . Molly adores her . . . a political refugee . . . but she’s so sweet, you’ll love her . . .’

  He was struggling not to laugh as he tried to find a seat that was not covered in kiddie stuff. There was what seemed an authentic Bauhaus chair, sitting on top of a kitschy seventies vinyl black-and-white-spotted rug. And a cheap Ikea clothes rail teeming with designer dresses right in front of the antique seventies sci-fi-looking TV. A dead yucca was covered in last year’s fairy lights and handmade tinfoil angels.

  ‘ . . . but I mean I really need to get Molly into a nursery so she can get socialised . . . Montessori would be ideal, there’s a good one in Camden, isn’t that funny? . . . I mean, really I should be living over there . . .’

  She uncorked some wine, took a slug and fussed around looking for glasses in the cupboards. She opened one and it was full of plates, another and it was stacked with DVDs. Above her head, stuck to the glass of what seemed an authentic Warhol of Jackie Onassis, was a kid’s crayon drawing of a house with a big smiling yellow sun. It was like she was some magpie student squatting in a stately home. The look could have been called deconstructive if it had been deliberate.

  ‘I have to go east . . . I got gazumped . . . so I’m in a kind of holding pattern right now . . .’

  Finally, she handed him the wine in a kid’s plastic tumber, kicked some books from the floor and sat cross-legged in front of him.

  ‘What would you do?’ she asked.

  So Dot, so Dotty. He couldn’t hold it back. The laughter.

  Over a dinner of takeaway pizza and a tour of the other rooms, largely stuffed with packing boxes, Owen put together the entire story.

  As she spent so much time touring her art abroad, she really needed one big single space that could be artist’s studio and crèche, that she and Molly could call ‘home’. Really close to a good nursery because she was going to have to let Consuela go. She’d been about to move to a big warehouse in Camden, but the exchange of contracts fell through because of the housing crisis and now nobody was buying so she couldn’t sell. So she was stuck, half moved out with no time or energy left to find a new place.

  These are the burdens of the international jet-setter, Owen thought as he watched her sitting barefoot by his feet, rubbing her neck. In the silence that followed he sensed it was finally time for what they had been avoiding.

  ‘So how’s –’

  ‘I heard you were –’

  ‘You go first . . .’

  ‘No, you . . .’

  ‘Married, yes, not for long and you . . .’

  ‘No.’

  The tentativeness, the second-guessing.

  ‘I assumed. Molly’s father . . .’

  ‘Oh no, he was really a . . .’

  ‘ . . . a bastard? A . . .?’

  ‘No, a sperm donor . . . Sorry.’

  They laughed.

  ‘He sends cheques but he’s in New York now. But you . . . married? Owen. Who’d have . . .’

  ‘Well, classic mistake stuff, thought it would . . .’

  ‘ . . . make you a better person?’

  ‘Ditto, but you . . .’

  ‘Well, I have Molly . . . How about you . . . do you . . .?’

  ‘No, no kids. I was a bit of a let-down on that front. You know.’

  But of course she didn’t know. He tried to change the subject.

  ‘Must be convenient, with Molly, having your folks in town?’

  She was silent then.

  ‘We don’t talk any more.’

  ‘Oh . . . of course. Sorry.’

  Her father and the hospital. He’d been a fool to say such a thing.

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  Dot placed a hand on his knee.

  ‘You look so . . .’ she said. She smiled. Thank God.

  ‘Different?’

  ‘No, no, well, sort of, but . . .’

  There was some discussion of exactly what about Owen was so changed. Dot said he might have filled out, had he been to a gym? He laughed and said it was fat, not muscle. Then she was trying to remember something.

  ‘What was it he used to say about gyms?’

  ‘Sorry, “he” . . .?’

  ‘Saul. He used to . . .’

  The sudden mention of Saul threw him but he thought it his job to try to recall.

  ‘The cult of health is a sickness?’

  She shook her head, so he tried again.

  ‘A gym is a gulag one pays to get into.’ She laughed, lifted her hand from his knee.

  ‘Never heard that one, it was something about push-ups.’

  ‘Ah! His definition of sex.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doing push-ups till you’re sick!’

  She rolled about with laughter and hugged his knees.

  ‘So have you . . .?’ she asked.

  ‘Had sex?’

  ‘No, silly – heard from him? You were so . . .’

  ‘No, no, nothing.’ Silence then. He reached for her hand, her fingers quickly intermeshed through his and relaxation flooded in. He resisted the urge to kiss her. She leaned her head against his knee.

  ‘It was just, well, someone told me about a guy who got thrown out at my opening night, a tramp, they said . . . you don’t think . . .?’

  ‘No, I’m sure he’s fine . . . you know him and his cult of the Übermensch, he’s probably living in a cave by now.’

  ‘Screaming at the hypocrisies of civilisation.’

  ‘With a hundred disciples.’

  ‘Poor Saul.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It had maybe been the wine, or the nostalgia, or the way that one sentence fed the next, or some need to stop talk of the past and end the many questions with the touching of lips.

  Molly was having a sleepover with friends, so he could stay, she said, as she
pulled away from his kiss and pulled her T-shirt over her head.

  ‘By the way, you don’t have to meet her, she’s a nightmare, I love her to bits.’

  She led him by the hand to the bedroom and finished undressing before him. Her breasts had shrunk and there were stretch lines round her darkened areolae and across her stomach, but she seemed to him more perfect than before. She slid under the covers and he turned his back to her as he undressed, then reached back and pulled the sheets to hide his sex. There was awkwardness as their bodies touched. He tried to kiss her lips but his forehead bashed her cheek and there were apologies. He ran his hand over her pelvis but she said it was too ticklish. She touched his cock and he was nervous about how the nervousness had made it flaccid.

  ‘You can open your eyes,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to bite.’

  They were eye to eye, her fingers round his cock and his circling her clit. He lowered his gaze first. ‘Sorry,’ meaning sorry for what he couldn’t say, sorry for everything.

  ‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘I know, me too.’

  And so they agreed not to fuck but to sleep, back to back. But over the dark hours in half-waking their breathing rhythms came into sync and their mouths were urgent to dissolve into each other. In his many years since her, it had not been like this with a woman, opening himself as if he was the one penetrated. In between the endless cycles of it, in momentary rest and craving for sleep, he tried to explain it away; told himself it was mercy fucking, just nostalgia, sad really, two people old enough to know better, fucking with their past, mad to open themselves to such naked need. But in the seeping dawn light, her eyes in shadow were over him again, whispering his name as she encircled and pulled him deep inside.

  *

  The sounds were of objects being thrown, furniture falling over, screams, laughter, what seemed to be dancing, and fluids being spilled – like a murder or a science experiment. It had ceased to be anything that could be recognised as the sounds of coitus and often had me tiptoeing the corridor to Saul’s keyhole to see if they were OK. Every night this horror would wake then reawaken me just when I though it was over. For three long weeks I had endured it. I had made plans to leave before Christmas.

  To add insult to injury, in the many mornings after, they would pretend that nothing was happening between them. Did they think me deaf or a dummy or did their deception arouse them further? I was not spying, but I could not fail to glimpse their many stolen intimacies: their fingers touching in secrecy beneath the table; the little smiles in the kitchen. The way they fell silent suddenly when I entered his room and sprung apart into grinning silence. Even more galling was the way they made a special effort to keep me included in everything. And so we watched a movie ‘together’ – another Bergman – but I did not see a single frame, as I was too busy trying to avoid the sight of their fingers finding each other beneath the duvet.

  They went to Edna’s again and I was not invited. In spite, I went into her empty room and stole a pair of her panties. Back in my room, I sniffed the stained crotch and came violently into the floral fabric. Overcome with shame I told myself I was not becoming sick, it was they that were sick, sick and weak – the Übermensch and his Überwench. As if to prove how weak they had become, she had even invented a love name for him: Sozzle. — C’mon, Sozzle, let’s have a drink. — Where are you, Sozzle? — Oh, Soz, you look fabulous. How low the mighty Saul had stooped. The sound of that name made me puke.

  I tried to plan an escape but needed money, much more than the scrawny fifteen quid I was getting from the Hoxton Advertiser for my weekly book or album reviews. As soon as I had enough money, and paid Dot back the two hundred I owed her, I’d get the hell out and leave them to their squalid secrecies – that was what I thought. Finding work was tough though, there had been more strikes at the main newspapers, and it was Wapping all over again. If I could have filled in an application to be a scab I would have. But I was caught in another catch-22 – I’d have to invest in some new respectable clothes just to get a job, and the contract, being freelance, would probably only last a few weeks, after which time I’d have earned enough to pay back the debt on my new clothes.

  It was the recession, I told myself, not my fault, and kept searching: telesales, trainee recruitment consultant, more telesales. Call centres, more call centres. I found a flyer from a car windscreen: ‘EARN £50 TO £500 EXTRA PER WEEK WORKING FROM HOME.’ It looked hopeful so I called the guy. He kept on about what a unique opportunity it was and asking for my name and details. I could hear him typing, filling in a form. I worked out he was getting paid for getting my details – that was his job. It was even more surreal when I finally found out what the job was he was selling – it was putting round flyers and taking calls like mine. I had to have him clarify – wait, so, the job is getting other people to put round flyers for a job that is getting other people to put flyers round, for a job that doesn’t actually exist? He hung up.

  ‘BUDDING ENTREPRENEUR? – CONSIDER RECRUITMENT.’

  I was stuck, without the finances to move out, and trapped also in a horrible déjà vu. Exactly the same thing had happened to me years before. When, after four months living with Debs, our love turned sour and we were trapped in daily animosity because neither of us could afford to move out. Almost a year of livid hatred. Some sociologist one day had to document this living hell called London.

  After another night being awoken by Saul and Dot’s orgasmic giggling, I prayed to the dead God to visit a plague upon them both.

  I felt almost guilty for how swiftly my wish became real. Within only a month of their initial union their passion started failing. One morning, from along the corridor, I heard her trying to get him to rise.

  — C’mon, Sozzle, get up. Let’s go shoplifting. You can’t just lie there all day and do nothing.

  — Oh but I can. Procrastination is an art I practise without hesitation! he groaned in reply, for his nth time.

  Her high energy or the force they’d expended sexually had exhausted Saul and led him to a state of regression, sleeping late, becoming sullen and foul-mooded in the morning wakings that soon turned into afternoons. She made the same mistakes I had long before, attempting more inventive and exciting enticements.

  — Let’s go to Harvey Nicks and spend five hundred. I’ll put it on my mum’s account.

  — I have no enthusiasm for people who are enthusiastic, he replied. — It is all cheerleaders and bombs in Palestine.

  — Get up!

  — This lady’s not for turning! he shouted, quoting Thatcher.

  Even though I resented their coupling, I couldn’t help but pity her. The closer she got to him, the more she tried to motivate him, the more he froze her out. This was maybe why he vowed never to have a woman again. A certain emotional (and financial) dependence had been exposed in him and he resented it. The big chill had started. I knew because he had gone back to playing his Wagner.

  — Penises are everywhere! Dot declared as she sprang through the front door, as was her way in the days that followed. She’d just been to the City Racing opening; it was an old betting shop, near the Oval, turned into an indie gallery. All very trendy, she said, artists exhibiting objets trouvés – a basketball and an electric bar fire and 365 used lottery tickets. She met this guy called Pierce and he was doing another show next month and he liked the sound of her video art. She was so excited. I had not the heart to remind her that she hadn’t actually made anything resembling art yet.

  She was running around the flat, trying to wake Saul. The Revolting Cocks were gigging that week, she announced, and she’d bought us both tickets as a surprise. She’d pay for taxis and everything. Of course, Saul wanted nothing to do with it. I’d been in the kitchen and overheard the whole thing. (I spent rather a lot of time in the kitchen in those weeks. It was between his room and mine. How many hours had I spent staring at the mould on the Artex and the warped Formica and the aluminium pans with burned bases while trying to work out if I should
intervene to save them from each other?)

  — But you love the Revoling Cocks! she protested.

  — I never said I loved anything; besides, like certain women I know, they are both repetitive and predictable. She kept on, thinking her enthusiasm would win. I went to the doorway edge and peered inside.

  She was throwing clothes out of his wardrobe, trying to get him to sit up and get dressed, shouting then about Sarah Lucas, she’d met her, she had a kind of art shop with Tracey Emin in Bethnal Green and they were lovely and they wanted her to come and hang out. They were putting on a ‘happening’ in the next week – everyone had to wear fake beards and do life drawings of a naked man. Wasn’t that great? They should go. And there had been this photo Sarah had exhibited, like a bowl of soup but there were things floating in the soup – penis heads, photos of dick heads. And then it was Jake and Dinos Chapman, and their child mannequins with vaginas for mouths and dicks for noses and she’d been reading a story in the paper on the tube about the Operation Spanner trial. It was all very exhilarating. A group of sadomasochists had been arrested for committing violent acts against themselves.

  — Penises, you see, they’re everywhere! We could make cock art, she said as she tried to pull his foot from beneath the sheets and put on his socks.

  — Sex destroys art, Saul said. — There is only so much energy one can ejaculate from oneself. It’s the same with love, us real artists have no energy left for it. Please unhand my foot!

  — But can’t you see, she shouted, — we’re so happening? Can I film your cock, Sozzle?

  He stared at her impassively, and pulled his bared foot back inside the covers.

  — My dear, you are so open-minded that all of your thoughts simply fall out of your fucking skull. I suggest you analyse the etymology of the word dickhead.

  She gave up and marched out. I hid myself in the kitchen as she passed.

  Two hours later and her drunken voice screamed from beyond my door.

  — Fuck you. I’m getting out of here, going clubbing!

  — Fine, fuck off then.

  I could hear them out in the corridor. It was well past 2 a.m.

  — Just me and Owen, you’re not invited.