Collected Stories (14 page)

Billy goes in to take a shower and I watch him go. I don’t like being separated from him. I hear the shower start and I sit down and throw the papers aside. I go downstairs to Nadia’s room and knock on her door. Wifey is sitting there and Moonie is behind her.

‘She’s not in,’ Moonie says.

‘Come in,’ Nadia says, opening her door, I go in and sit on the stool by the dressing table. It’s a pretty room. There is pink everywhere and her things are all laid out neatly and she sits on the bed brushing her hair and it shines. I tell her we should have a bit of a talk. She smiles at me. She’s prepared to make an effort, I can see that, though it surprises me. She did go pretty berserk the other day, when we came out of the kitchen, trying to punch me and everything.

‘It was an accident,’ I tell her now.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘But what impression d’you think it made on the man I want to marry?’

‘Blame me. Say I’m just a sicko Westerner. Say I’m mad.’

‘It’s the whole family it reflects on,’ she says.

She goes to a drawer and opens it. She takes out an envelope and gives it to me.

‘It’s a present for you,’ she says kindly. When I slip my finger into the flap of the envelope she puts her hand over mine. ‘Please. It’s a surprise for later.’

Billy is standing on the roof in his underpants. I fetch a towel and dry his hair and legs and he holds me and we move a little together to imaginary music. When I remember the envelope Nadia gave me, I open it and find a shiny folder inside. It’s a ticket to London.

I’d given my ticket home to my father for safe-keeping, an open ticket I can use any time. I can see that Nadia’s been to the airline and specified the date, and booked the flight. I’m to leave tomorrow morning. I go to my dad and ask him what it’s all about. He just looks at me and I realise I’m to go.

Hello, reader. As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I, Howard, have written this Nina and Nadia stuff in my sock, without leaving the country, sitting right here on my spreading arse and listening to John Coltrane. (And rolling cigarettes.) Do you think Nina could have managed phrases like ‘an accent as thick as treacle’ and ‘But the curtains are well and truly pulled here’ and especially ‘Oh, oh, oh’? With her education? So all along, it’s been me, pulling faces, speaking in tongues, posing and making an attempt on the truth through lies. And also, I just wanted to be Nina. The days Deborah and I have spent beating on her head, trying to twist her the right way round, read this, study dancing, here’s a book about Balanchine and the rest of it. What does she make of all this force feeding? So I became her, entered her. Sorry.

Nina in fact has been back a week, though it wasn’t until yesterday that I heard from her when she phoned to tell me that I am a bastard and that she had to see me. I leave straightaway.

*

At Nina’s place. There she is, sitting at the kitchen table with her foot up on the table by her ashtray in the posture of a painter. Deborah not back from school.

‘You look superb,’ I tell her. She doesn’t recoil in repulsion when I kiss her.

‘Do I look superb?’ She is interested.

‘Yeah. Tanned. Fit. Rested.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ She looks hard at me. ‘I thought for a moment you were going to say something interesting. Like I’d changed or something. Like something had happened.’

We walk through the estate, Friday afternoon. How she walks above it all now, as if she’s already left! She tells me everything in a soft voice: her father, the servants, the boy Billy, the kiss, the panties. She says: ‘I was devastated to leave Billy in that country on his own. What will he do? What will happen to that boy? I sent him a pack of tapes. I sent him some videos. But he’ll be so lonely.’ She is upset.

The three of us have supper and Deborah tries to talk about school while Nina ignores her. It’s just like the old days. But Nina ignores Deborah not out of cruelty but because she is elsewhere. Deborah is thinking that probably Nina has left her for good. I am worried that Debbie will expect more from me.

The next day I fly to my desk, put on an early Miles Davis tape and let it all go, tip it out, what Nina said, how she looked, what we did, and I write (and later cross out) how I like to put my little finger up Deborah’s arse when we’re fucking and how she does the same to me, when she can comfortably reach. I shove it all down shamelessly (and add bits) because it’s my job to write down the things that happen round here and because I have a rule about no material being sacred.

What does that make me?

I once was in a cinema when the recently uncovered spy Anthony Blunt came in with a friend. The entire cinema (but not me) stood up and chanted ‘Out, out, out’ until the old queen got up and left. I feel like that old spy, a dirty betrayer with a loudspeaker, doing what I have to.

I offer this story to you, Deborah and Nina, to make of it what you will, before I send it to the publisher.

Someone bangs on the door of the flat. I’ve been alone all day. I’m not expecting anyone, and how did whoever it is get into the building in the first place?

‘Let me in, let me in!’ Nina calls out. I open up and she’s standing there soaked through with a sports bag full of things and a couple of plastic bags under her arm.

‘Moving in?’ I say.

‘You should be so lucky,’ she says, barging past me. ‘I’m on me way somewhere and I thought I’d pop by to borrow some money.’

She comes into the kitchen. It’s gloomy and the rain hammers into the courtyard outside. But Nina’s cheerful, happy to be back in England and she has no illusions about her father now. Apparently he was rough with her, called her a half-caste and so on.

‘Well, Howard, you’re in the shit, aren’t you?’ Nina says. ‘Ma’s pissed off no end with you, man. She’s crying all over the shop. I couldn’t stand it. I’ve moved out. You can die of a broken heart, you know. And you can kill someone that way too.’

‘Don’t talk about it,’ I say, breaking up the ice with a hammer and dropping it into the glasses. ‘She wrote me a pissed-off letter. Wanna read it?’

‘It’s private, Howard.’

‘Read it, for Christ’s sake, Nina,’ I say, shoving it at her. She reads it and I walk round the kitchen looking at her. I stand behind her a long time. I can’t stop looking at her today.

She puts it down without emotion. She’s not sentimental; she’s always practical about things, because she knows what cunts people are.

‘You’ve ripped Ma off before. She’ll get over it, and no one reads the shit you write anyway except a lot of middle-class wankers. As long as you get paid and as long as you give me some of it you’re all right with me.’

I was right. I knew she’d be flattered. I give her some money and she gathers up her things. I don’t want her to go.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Oh, a friend’s place in Hackney. Someone I was in the loony bin with. I’ll be living there. Oh, and Billy will be joining me.’ She smiles broadly. ‘I’m happy.’

‘Wow. That’s good. You and Billy.’

‘Yeah, ain’t it just!’ She gets up and throws back the rest of the whisky. ‘Be seeing ya!’

‘Don’t go yet.’

‘Got to.’

At the door she says: ‘Good luck with the writing and everything.’

I walk to the lift with her. We go down together. I go out to the front door of the building. As she goes out into the street running with sheets of rain, I say: ‘I’ll come with you to the corner,’ and walk with her, even though I’m not dressed for it.

At the corner I can’t let her go and I accompany her to the bus stop. I wait with her for fifteen minutes in my shirt and slippers. I’m soaked through holding all her bags but I think you can make too much of these things. ‘Don’t go,’ I keep saying inside my head.Then the bus arrives and she takes her bags from me and gets on and I stand there watching her but she won’t look at me because she is thinking of Billy. The bus moves off and I watch until it disappears and then I go inside the flat and take off my clothes and have a bath. Later. I write down the things she said but the place still smells of her.

I used to like talking about sex. All of life, I imagined – from politics to aesthetics – merged in passionate human conjunctions. A caress, not to speak of a kiss, could transport you from longing to Russia, on to Velazquez and ahead to anarchism. To illustrate this fancy, I did, at one time, consider collecting a ‘book of desire’, an anthology of outlandish, melancholy and droll stories about the subject. This particular story was one, had the project been finished – or even started – I would have included. It was an odd story. Eshan, the photographer who told it to me, used the word himself. At least he said it was the oddest request he’d had. When it was put to him by his pub companion, his first response was embarrassment and perplexity. But of course he was fascinated too.

At the end of the street where Eshan had a tiny office and small dark room, there was a pub where he’d go at half past six or seven, most days. He liked to work office hours, believing much discipline was required to do what he did, as if without it he would fly off into madness – though he had, in fact, never flown anywhere near madness, except to sit in that pub.

Eshan though he liked routine, and for weeks would do exactly the same thing every day, while frequently loathing this decline into habit. In the pub he would smoke, drink and read the paper for an hour or longer, depending on his mood and on whether he felt sentimental, guilty or plain affectionate towards his wife and two children. Sometimes he’d get home before the children were asleep, and carry them around on his back, kick balls with them, and tell them stories of pigs with spiders on their heads. Other times he would turn up late so he could have his wife make supper, and be free of the feeling that the kids were devouring his life.

Daily, there were many hapless people in that bar: somnolent junkies from the local rehab, the unemployed and unemployable, pinball pillocks. Eshan nodded at many of them, but if one sat at his table without asking, he could become truculent. Often, however, he would chat to people as he passed to and fro, being more grateful than he knew for distracting conversation. He had become, without meaning to, one of the bar’s characters.

Eshan’s passion was to photograph people who had produced something of significance, whose work had ‘meaning’. These were philosophers, novelists, painters, film and theatre directors. He used only minimal props and hard, direct lighting. The idea wasn’t to conceal but to expose. The spectator could relate the face to what the subject did. He called it the moment of truth in the features of people seeking the truth.

He photographed ‘artists’ but also considered himself, in private only, to be ‘some sort’ of an artist. To represent oneself – a changing being, alive with virtues and idiocies – was, for Eshan, the task that entailed the most honesty and fulfilment. But although his work had been published and exhibited, he still had to send out his portfolio with introductory letters, and harass people about his abilities. This was demeaning. By now he should, he reckoned, have got further. But he accepted his condition, imagining that overall he possessed most of what he required to live a simple but not complacent life. His wife illustrated children’s books, and could earn decent money, so they got by. To earn a reasonable living himself, Eshan photographed new groups for the pop press – not that he was stimulated by these callow faces, though occasionally he was moved by their ugliness, the stupidity of their innocence, and their crass hopes. But they wanted only clichés.

A young man called Brian, who always wore pink shades, started to join Eshan regularly. The pub was his first stop of the day after breakfast. He was vague about what he did, though it seemed to involve trying to manage bands and set up businesses around music. His main occupation was dealing drugs, and he liked supplying Eshan with different kinds of grass that he claimed would make him ‘creative’. Eshan replied that he took drugs in the evenings to stop himself getting creative. When Eshan talked about surrealism, or the great photographers, Brian listened with innocent enthusiasm, as if these were things he could get interested in were he a different person. It turned out that he did know a little about the music that Eshan particularly liked, West Coast psychedelic music of the mid-sixties, and the films, writing and politics that accompanied it. Eshan talked of the dream of freedom, rebellion and irresponsibility it had represented, and how he wished he’d had the courage to go there and join in.