Collected Stories (35 page)

He said, ‘It’s never going to be frictionless between men and women as long as they want things from one another – and they have to want things, that’s a relationship.’

‘Sophistry!’

‘Reality!’

She said, ‘Self-deception!’

He got up. It wouldn’t take him long to get home. He could carry a low chair out into his new garden, on which they had recently spent a lot of money, and read and doze. Six men had come through the side door with plants, trees and paving stones; he and Lolly couldn’t wait for nature. It wasn’t his money, or even Lolly’s, but her American father’s. He wondered if he knew what married but dependent women must feel, when what you had wasn’t earned or deserved. Humiliation wasn’t quite what he felt, but there was resentment.

He had met Natasha one Mayday at a private party at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, just down from Buckingham Palace, in sight of Big Ben. He would always drink and smoke grass before leaving his flat – in order to get out at all; and he was chuckling to himself at the available ironies. Apart from the Soviet invasion of Hungary, there couldn’t have been a worse time for socialism. Certainly no one he knew was admitting to being on the hard left, or to having supported the Soviet Union. ‘I was always more of an anarchist than a Party man,’ Nick heard as he squeezed through the crowd to the drinks table. A voice replied, ‘I was only ever a Eurocommunist.’ He himself announced, ‘I was never much of a joiner.’ His more imaginative left-wing acquaintances had gone to Berlin to witness the collapse of the Wall, ‘to be at the centre of history’, as one of them put it. ‘For the first time,’ Nick had commented.

It was easy to sneer. What did he know? It was only now that he was starting to read history, having become intrigued by the fact that people not unlike him had, only a few decades before, been possessed by the fatal seriousness of murderous, mind-gripping ideologies. He’d only believed in pop. Its frivolity and anger was merely subversive; it delivered no bananas. If asked for his views, he’d be afraid to give them. But he was capable of description.

Like him, Natasha usually only worked in the morning, teaching, or working on these theses. They both liked aspects of London, not the theatre, cinema or restaurants but the rougher places that resembled a Colin McInnes novel. Nick had come to know wealthy and well-known people; he was invited for cocktails and launches, lunches and charity dinners, but it was too prim to be his everyday world. He started to meet Natasha at two o’clock in a big deserted pub in Notting Hill. They’d eat, have their first drinks, talk about everything and nod at the old Rastas who still seemed permanently installed in these pubs. They would buy drugs from young dealers from the nearby estates and hear their plans for robberies. Notting Hill was wealthy and the houses magnificent, but it had yet to become aware of it. The pubs were still neglected, with damp carpets and dusty oak bars covered in cigarette burns, about to be turned into shiny places crammed with people who looked as though they appeared on television, though they only worked in it.

He and Natasha would take cocaine or ecstasy, or some LSD, or all three – and retire for the afternoon to her basement nearby. When it got dark they pulled one another from bed, applied their eye-shadow in adjacent mirrors, and stepped out in their high heels.

Now she took his hand. ‘You can’t walk out on me!’ She tugged him back into his seat.

He said, ‘You can’t pull me!’

‘Don’t forget the flowers you came at me with!’ she said. ‘The passion! The hikes through the city at night and breakfast in the morning! And conversation, conversation! Didn’t we put our chairs side by side and go through your work! Have you forgotten how easily you lost hope in those days and how I repeatedly sent you back to your desk? Everyone you knew wanted to be a proper writer. None of them would do it, but you thought, why shouldn’t I? Didn’t I help you?’

‘Yes you did, Natasha! Thank you!’

‘You didn’t put it in the book, did you? You put all that other stuff in!’

‘It didn’t fit!’

‘Oh Nick, couldn’t you have made it fit?’ She was looking at him. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’

‘There’s no way out of this conversation. Why don’t we walk a little?’

‘Can we?’

‘Why not?’

‘I keep thinking you’re going to go away. Have you got time?’

‘Yes.’

‘My sweet and sour man I called you. D’you remember?’ She seemed to relax. ‘A fluent, creative life, turning ordinary tedium and painful feeling into art. The satisfactions of a self-sufficient child, playing alone. That’s what I want. That’s why people envy artists.’

‘Vocation,’ he said. ‘Sounds like the name of someone.’

‘Yes. A guide. Someone who knows. I don’t want to sound religious, because it isn’t that.’

‘A guiding figure. A man.’

She sighed. ‘Probably.’

He said, ‘I was thinking … how our generation loved Monroe, Hendrix, Cobain, even. Somehow we were in love with death. Few of the people we admired could go to bed without choking on their own vomit. Wasn’t that the trouble – with pop, and with us?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘We were called a self-indulgent generation. We didn’t go to war but we were pretty murderous towards ourselves. Almost everyone I know – or used to.’

‘But I was just going to –’ She reached into her bag and leaned over to him. ‘Give me your hand,’ she said. ‘Go on. I got you something.’ She passed the object to him. ‘Now look.’

He opened his hand.

*

On a dreary parade in North Kensington, between a second-hand bookshop and a semi-derelict place hiring out fancy-dress costumes, was a shop where Nick and Natasha went to buy leather and rubberwear. Behind barred windows it was painted black and barely lit, concealing the fact that the many shiny red items were badly made or plain ragged. The assistants, in discreet versions of the available clothes – Nick preferred to call them costumes – were enthusiastic, offering tea and biscuits.

Wrapping themselves in fake-fur coats from charity shops, Natasha and Nick began going to places where others had similar tastes, seeking new fears and transgressions, of which there were many during this AIDS period. If couples require schemes, they had discovered their purpose. It was possible to be a sexual outlaw as long as there were still people who were innocent. They pressed each other on, playing Virgil to one another, until they no longer knew if they were children or adults, men or women, masters or servants. The transformation into pleasure of the banal, the unpleasant and the plain unappetising was like black magic – poor Don Juan on a treadmill, compelled to make life’s electricity for ever.

Nick recalled walking one night onto the balcony of a vast club, seeking Natasha, and looking down on a pageant of bizarre costumes, feathers, semi-nudity, masks and clothes of all periods, representing every passion, every possible kink and kook, zig and zag. Natasha was among them, waiting for him with some bridled old man who worked in a post office.

Nick wondered if everyone involved liked participating in a secret, as they recreated the mystery which children discover by whispers, that what people want to do with one another is strange, and that the uncovering of this strangeness is itself the excitement. Certainly there were terrifying initiations, over and over. They were the oddest people; he learned that there was little that was straightforward about humanity. But what appeared to frighten them all was the mundane, the familiar, the ordinary.

Like actors unable to stop playing a part, as though they could be on stage for ever, he and Natasha wanted to remain at a dramatic pitch where there was no disappointment, no self-knowledge or development, only a state of constant, narcissistic emergency and a clear white light in the head.

In order to consume their punishment with their pleasure, which some might call a convenience, they were stoned. Nick remembered a friend at school saying – and this was the best advertisement for drugs he’d heard – ‘If you are stoned you can do anything.’ Why was living the problem? If he looked around at his friends and acquaintances, how many of them were able to survive unaided? They sought absence until they had become like a generation lost to war. Those who survived were sitting in shell-shocked confessional circles in countryside clinics. He suspected they had left success to fools and mediocrities. By midnight he was rarely able to see in front of him; he and Natasha held one another up, like the vertical arms of a staggering triangle. Sobriety was a terror, though they couldn’t remember why, and their heroes, legends, myths, were hopeless incompetents, death-soaked tragic imaginations.

He saw people going to heroin like a fate; imagining you could shun it was arrogant or solemn. Nick had wanted to find like-minded people; he turned them into his jailers. He recalled people in rubber masks, coming at him like executioners. It was arduous work, converting people into objects, when he had not been brought up to it.

Midday one morning he woke up at her place. He rose and lumbered about, reacquainting himself with an unfamiliar object, his body. He had been whipped, badly; his face and hands were grazed, too: he must have fallen somewhere and no one, not even him, had noticed.

Somehow she had gone to work, leaving him a note. ‘Remember, Remember!’ she had scrawled in lipstick.

Remember what? Then it returned. His task was to withdraw three thousand pounds from his bank account, which, apart from his flat, was all he had and buy drugs from a man who sold everything, but only in large amounts. It would save them the trouble of having to score continually. In two hours he would have the drugs; minutes later the cocaine would be working, stealing another day and night of his life. Natasha would return; there was a couple they were to meet later; there would be cages, whips, ice, fire.

There had been the death-laden ways of teachers and employers, and there had been rebellion, drugs, pleasure. No one had shown him what a significant life was and the voices that spoke in his head were not kind.

And yet something occurred to him. He walked out of the flat and kept walking through his pain until he reached the suburbs; at last he fell through fields and fields. He never returned to her place. The rest was a depressing cold abstinence and mourning, sitting at his desk half the day, every day, repeatedly summoning a half-remembered discipline, wishing someone would lash him to the chair. Those characters in Chekhov’s plays, forever intoning ‘work, work, work’. How stale a prayer, he thought, as though the world was better off for the slavery in it. But boredom was an antidote to unruly wishes, quelling his suspicion that disobedience was the only energy. He had to teach himself to sit still again.

After a freezing month he rediscovered capability and audacity. Even the idea of public recognition returned, along with competitiveness, envy, and a little pride. He made her leave him alone, and when they met again, tentatively, his fear of any addiction, which had saved him, but which was also the fear of relying on anyone – some addictions are called love – meant he could not like her any more. What could they do together? It wouldn’t have happened to the ideal, desirable Natasha. 

*

She had pressed a small envelope into his palm.

‘There.’

He glanced down.

She said, ‘You’d be making a mistake to think it was the other things I liked, when it was our talks and your company. You’re sweet, Nick, and strangely polite at times. I can’t put that together with all you’ve done to me.’ She touched his hand. ‘Go on.’

‘Now?’

‘Then we’ll walk.’

In the park toilet a boy stood in a cubicle with his trousers down, bent over. His father wiped him, helping him with his belt, zip and buttons. Nick went into the next cubicle and closed the door. He would open the envelope, have a look for old times’ sake, and return it. She had had the day she had wanted.

His hands were shaking. He held it in his palm, before opening it. A gram of fine grains, untouched. Heavenly sand. His credit card was in his back pocket.

He returned to her.

He said, ‘I took the parts of you I needed to make my book. It wasn’t a fair or final judgement but a practical transformation, in order to say something. Someone in a piece of fiction is a dream figure … picked from one context and thrust into another, to serve some purpose. A tiny portion of them is used.’

She nodded but had lost interest.

They walked by the pond, the cascade and the cricket pitch. Children played on felled logs; people sketched and painted; on pedestals, the heads of Roman emperors looked on. Nick and Natasha stepped from patches of vivid sunlight into cooler tunnels. The warm currents had turned chilly. As the sky darkened, the clouds turned crimson. Parents called to their children.

She started to cry.

‘Nick, will you take me out of here?’

‘If you want.’

‘Please.’

She put her dark glasses on and he led her past dawdling families to the gate.

In his car she wiped her face.

‘All those respectable white voices behind high walls. The wealth, the cleanliness, the hope. I was getting agoraphobic. It all makes me sick with regret.’

She was trembling. He had forgotten how her turmoil disturbed him. He was becoming impatient. He wanted to be at home when Lolly got back. He had to prepare the food. Some friends were coming by, with their new baby.

She said, ‘Aren’t we going to have a drink? Is this the way? Where are we now?’

‘Look,’ he said.

He was driving beside a row of tall, authoritative stucco houses with pillars and steps. Big family cars sat in the drives. Across the narrow road was a green; overlooked by big trees there were tennis courts and a children’s playground. During the week children in crisp uniforms were dropped off and picked up from school; in the afternoons Filipino and East European nannies would sit with their charges in the playground. This was where he lived now, though he couldn’t admit it.

‘We are thinking of moving here,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

‘There’s no point asking me,’ she said. ‘Everything has become very conventional. You’re either in or you’re out. I’m with the out – with the weird, the impossible, the victimised and the broken. It’s the only place to be.’