Blind Date (4 page)

Celebrity
. Heroine. Fool. You add insult to your own injury, letting yourself in for this, ticking the box, giving permission to be arranged so carefully on a trolley, paraded like a corpse at a state funeral. She was bidden to lie as still as if the couch was really a coffin. Reclining at the moment, with her back to the audience, spine exposed. Dream on, for a minute. Please, give me another minute.

…
Miss Kennedy, resourceful ex-police officer, is currently indisposed after her outrageously courageous pursuit of an armed robber, who had terrorized the neighbourhood … She floored him after a desperate pursuit, alone, unaided, unarmed, despite his knife … then she dived into ice … Our heroine on the mend … We are proud of her.

Elisabeth interrupted her own daydream. Her mother would have liked this version, too.

The surgeon coughed, clearing his throat. “As to the cause of these injuries, ladies and gents, well, a sad tale. Elisabeth here was coming out of a pub, at the end of a birthday celebration. She took a short cut on her way home. Possibly not paying a great deal of attention, eh Elisabeth?” He patted her rump. “She tripped and fell. Unfortunately, there was at large at the time a madman who had taken to attacking young people of the district with various kinds of acidic fluids. In this case, caustic, which he either threw at or over Miss Kennedy. Her injuries are the more severe because she had fallen, because she was unconscious and therefore lay in this liquid for some time …”

Don't say
it, she pleaded silently. Don't say, she was
drunk.
As a skunk. Going home alone after an argument in a pub, tripping over … going to sleep in acid, because she was stupid drunk. Unable to remember much after. Failure.

“She lay on her right arm and hip. Her chin also had contact with the caustic, but thankfully, movement of the head has minimized injuries here, while the elbow was burnt to the bone, with considerable inroads made into the flesh to the rear of the hip. Well, we couldn't mend that with skin grafts alone, could we now? So what we're talking about here is rebuilding that muscle with muscle of a similar type.”

With loving care, he traced the long, puckered scar which led from the left of her mid-spine, into the left buttock.

“So we took it from here … and here. The skin to cover it came from the inner thighs … Here, and here.”

She was sitting now, as guided, legs wide apart on the edge of the trolley, the gown bunched modestly, revealing no more than two expanses of purpled flesh. Healing: almost healed, but still as sore as if she had been dragged over gravel, and despite the modesty of the gown, the pose was faintly indecent. Then, again as instructed, she lay back, holding the right arm, temporarily freed from the sling and the bandage, across her chest, keeping her eyes to the ceiling, refusing to look at her own, reconstituted flesh. To think she had ever worried about her weight.

“The damage to the ribcage and the neck have been slow to heal and resistant, up until now, to any kind of graft. The skin of the inside upper arm can be ideal for the neck, and at last, we seem to have succeeded.” He stood behind her, holding her head in both hands, turning her profile to the audience. The photographer took another picture, like a man fascinated by patchwork.

“There are
always problems with mending the jaw and the neck, because it must remain mobile in order for the patient to eat, to communicate. The patient is always anxious to communicate, isn't she, Elisabeth?” He laughed. “Of course one wants a patient to eat and smile, but in this case, one didn't wish to encourage laughter, ha, ha.”

Bastard.

One would have prefered it if the patient had at least wanted to smile. Rather than the screaming, the swearing, the corrosive, articulate anger, the tuneless singing and latterly, the constant flow of hot, furious tears. And the language, good God, her language. No fishwife was ever so fluent. The whole range of emotional responses was hers, excluding gratitude.

The photographer came back, slipped away again. Elisabeth adjusted herself to lie, fairly comfortably now, on her left side, with her head propped up in her left hand. In this pose, she surveyed the audience as the doctor continued, on and on and on in a fluent delivery which seemed to her a remarkably self-satisfied postscript to her humilation. Then she noticed it, a fresh, pink rose, placed close to her hand, so sweet smelling it made her want to cry. And then, laugh.

Staring out into the darkness, Elisabeth lowered one eyelid in a lascivious wink. She had tried the gesture in front of a mirror, making Matt giggle, aware of how absurd it looked from a face which seemed as if someone had taken a bite out of the neck, mended it with play-dough and put it back crooked. The faces out in the black sea of the audience were doubtless perfect, but invisible, barred from her scrutiny. There was the sound of a high giggle, quickly suppressed. Mr. Ryman, a surgeon with a future and a paper to prepare, stood at the end of her couch; talking, gesturing, explaining a point, little glasses trembling on the end of his nose. With the clawed fingers of her right hand, Elisabeth pulled the material of the gown above her knees, winked again, extended one foot, wiggled her toes, bent her knee and extended her right foot until her big toe could stroke the cleft of his backside. It was a friendly, lascivious gesture which he did not notice until he jumped, with a ridiculous meow of alarm, the half-moon glasses clattering to the floor, the noise of that drowned in a storm of laughter. Elisabeth lay on her back and closed her eyes, aware of the camera again. She raised her good hand in a two-fingered salute, curled the other round the rose.

Deciding
it was better to join in the laughter, the surgeon swept his glasses off the floor and put them back on his nose.

“As you will see, ladies and gents,” he announced jovially, “the patient is making an excellent recovery. But it has been, and will be, a long process …”

Drunk again, Miss Kennedy. When will you ever learn?

If only that were all.

Are you intelligent? Do you hurt? Are you a failure?

Yes, yes, yes. And whose fault is it?

My own. I have never done a brave thing or a wise one.

S
teven was waiting outside.

“What were they laughing at?” he asked.

“They're going to sell me at a discount,” she said. “Put me up for auction. I should've painted my toenails.”

“Car's outside. Can you manage the walk?”

He was deliberately brisk, because she seemed to be in danger of crying again, which he did not want. He was always slightly awkward with emotion, trying to hide it, as if she noticed.

“I don't see why you should pay and display if you're parking a car in order to carry a patient, be one, or visit one,” she said distinctly as they crossed what felt like a mile of concrete, the urge to weep suppressed with every toddling step. Being drunk was never as bad. The urge to talk, more prevalent, was impossible to resist once she was settled into a seat and he began to manouevre the car, his own, nice, commodious piece of Eurowedge, out of the Exeter traffic. She longed to be able to drive herself, but none of that desire diminished the pleasure of being driven in a car where everything worked.

“I've got
to go home, Steven. Got to, got to, got to. Soon.”

“Yes, yes, I know, don't worry, we're on our way. Home soon.” He missed the point.

She was scrunched up in the passenger seat, the whole of her throbbing with anger, holding the arm in the sling against herself, her feet braced against the dash, one foot tapping a rhythm. Her shoes were in the well of the car, somewhere. He disliked the sight of her thin, bare feet, raised to the level of her face as she sank down.

“Home?” she yelled, so loud he almost took the car straight across the roundabout. “Fucking home! No home of mine.”

He was silent, smiling slightly, endlessly tolerant.

“I want, dirty, filthy, cold-blooded London,” she continued. “I want muck in the street. Litter. Dead plants. Neighbours who do not give a shit. I want Patsy and all the rest who have better things to do. What an ambition. I want to be in a place where the natural behaviour of the people is rudeness and lack of curiosity.”

“They won't look after you,” he said.

“I should hope not. Why the hell should they?”

He drove.

“Do you remember Patsy?” she asked, her mind slipping into a different gear.

He had met her once or twice. In those far off days when Steve and her sister Emma and she all lived in London, inhabiting their different planets. Steve and Emma, the gilded couple with their baby son, living on the outskirts but upwardly mobile, Elisabeth in the middle, living in a series of flats before she found the belltower. She would entertain them from time to time with her own version of street wisdom, and even to Steven's untutored eyes, she seemed unlikely to make it as an officer of the law. He and Emma had talked about it, often. This is not what my sister should be doing, Emma had said, a policewoman, for God's sake; she only does it out of middle-class rebellion. I worry for her. Emma worried for everyone: it was part of the sublime sweet nature which made her so phenomenonal. Steven struggled, in a rush of conflicting memories, trying to find another face from the same era. Patsy.

“Yes. I
think. Glamorous. Something in magazines.”

“Well, she wrote to me the other day; it was like getting news from another world. She'll come and fetch me back, couple of weeks. I want to
hear
about people having good times; I want to be around people who do the things I want to do …”

“Listen to the good times?” he asked, feigning understanding.

“Patsy and Emma,” she said dreamily. “Either of them. All I wanted to be.”

He was inured to her insensitivity, and drove on, relieved that she had removed her bare feet from the dash and looked sleepy. The better profile was turned towards him, not as flawless as her dead sister, but the same perfect skin from this angle where the twist to the neck was not apparent. Those were the days, when he had driven them both home for weekends, his wife and her sister, as different as they could be in manners, and only, oddly similar in the quality of their skin. The children of different fathers, although both of them had only known the one.

“You didn't
really want to be like Emma,” he said.

Of course she had. Serene, undemanding, possessed of a handsome man who adored her. She straightened in her seat, ashamed. No-one would ever have wanted to be Emma if they could have predicted how short her life would be.

“Why do you have to go, Lizzie? We need you. You could stay on, get a job.”

“It isn't my home, Steven. Matt thinks it is, but it isn't.”

“Oh.” He did not want to talk about that.

The car sped down the narrow hill which led to the outskirts of the village. Through the trees which dappled them in shadow, there was a glimpse of sea. The sky had dimmed to the deeper blue of early evening. He watched her watching the parade of shops as they passed. Mrs. Audrey Compton was watering the flowers outside her antique and bric-a-brac shop: he waved. She waved back with furious energy. Thank God she had taken in all the rubbish which littered the pavement by day. There it was, peace, tranquillity, order, and all Elisabeth Kennedy wanted was the dark comforts of metropolitan chaos. Plus shallow, clever, successful friends like Patsy.

“You can't go back yet,” he said gently as they came to a stop. “You aren't really well enough. You won't be able to climb the steps. The place will be filthy.”

“No it won't. Father Flynn keeps an eye out and Patsy said she'd look over the place.”

His dim memory of Patsy did not accord with a comforting image of a woman at home with a duster.

T
he din was
terrific and the light varied from a ghastly blue through all the shades of the rainbow, obscuring faces into sharp angles devoid of distinction. The men kept their eyes on the girls, registering bodies long before faces. What they did with their bodies and their hair on the dance floor; the way they smelled with their sweat inside tight clothing and the sheen of it on their foreheads, raising the contours of less than perfect skin. Dancing close or the distance of embarrassment; whether they wriggled, pressed, writhed; small boned, big bosomed, big-headed: Rob could look at the bodies like a buyer in an auction ring, he and his mates fixing the prices. He failed to understand, as he jutted his own hips to the music, that the process of observation was equally brutal in his own direction. Even in this light, someone had noticed his white socks and over-shiny shoes. There were three girls who were prime among other girls for sticking together and making a noise, men drawn towards their circle, and there was a conspiracy percolating between them which he was slow to fathom. They were blocking him from the one he wanted. The one he wanted, probably wanted his friend, Mike, but Mike was being aloof, acting superior, as if he didn't care who liked him. Looking as he did, why should he worry? Mike was the enviable one. Regular features, melting eyes and amazing thick hair, nice build for an average height, although he always looked taller than he was. The hair added a charisma they all seemed to lack. Owl and Joe were shuffling about somewhere; Joe's damn pony-tail making a big man look like a wimp, and the Owl's huge specs the only feature which made his presence memorable. Neither of them was much competition, as far as Rob was concerned. They couldn't sell themselves, and if you can't do that, what can you do?

So bold
Rob ended up buying drinks for all three girls, one round after another, taking some time to realize he was being outwitted because, after the third dance, the one he liked had pushed him away playfully, as if he had been getting too close, and he had followed her back to her gang where, by a process of nods, winks and patting of seats, they arranged themselves and neatly placed him as far away as possible from her. The sweet little blonde who was the one he had spoken to first, the one he wanted.