Enduring Love (25 page)

“So where are the intellectuals?”

Johnny winced and made a downward-pressing movement with his hand, as though to stuff my words back into a bottle. He spoke in a near whisper as we approached the door. “I’ll give you some advice you might be grateful for. Don’t make fun of these people. They haven’t had your advantages, and they’re, uh, not too stable.”

“You should have said. Let’s go.” I pulled at Johnny’s sleeve, but with his free hand he was ringing the bell.

“It’s cool,” he said. “Just watch your step.”

I took a pace back and had half turned away, thinking I might walk off down the drive, when the door snapped open and habitual politeness constrained me. A powerful odor of burned food and ammonia rolled, or blared, out of the house, momentarily silhouetting the figure who stood in the doorway.

“Johnny B. Well!” the man said. He had a shaved head and a small waxed mustache dyed with henna. “What are you doing here?”

“I phoned last night, remember?”

“Yeah, right, we said Saturday.”

“It
is
Saturday, Steve.”

“Uh-uh. It’s Friday, Johnny.”

Both men looked to me. I had been reading up on the restaurant attack and the newspapers were in my car, all over the back seat. “Actually, it’s Sunday.”

Johnny shook his head. He looked betrayed. Steve was staring at me with loathing. I guessed it wasn’t his two lost days, it was my
actually
. He was right, it didn’t sound good here, but I met his look full on. He spat something white into the nettles and said, “You’re the guy who wants to buy a gun and some bullets.”

Johnny had located an object of interest in the sky. He said, “You inviting us in or what?”

Steve hesitated. “If it’s Sunday, we got people coming to lunch.”

“Yeah. Us.”

“That was yesterday, Johnny.”

We laughed with effort. Steve stood aside so we could step into his stinking hall.

When the front door closed we were in virtual darkness. By way of explanation, Steve said, “We’re making toast and the dog’s crapped all over the kitchen floor.” We followed his outline deeper into the house. Somehow the news about the dog made the gun seem pricey at seven-fifty.

We emerged into a large kitchen. A blue stratum of bread smoke hung at shoulder height, illuminated by french windows at the far end. A man in dungarees and gumboots was mopping the floor with undiluted bleach from a zinc bucket. He called out Johnny’s name and nodded at me. There was no sign of a dog. At the stove was a woman
stirring a pot. Her hair was combed straight and grew to her waist. She came toward us with a slow, floating movement, and I thought I recognized her type. In England, hippiedom had been largely a boys’ affair. A certain kind of quiet girl sat cross-legged at the edges, got stoned, and brought the tea. And then, just as the Great War had emptied the stately homes of servants, so these girls disappeared overnight at the first trump from the women’s movement. Suddenly they were nowhere to be found. But Daisy had stayed on. She came over and told me her name. Of course she knew Johnny and said his name as she touched his arm.

I guessed her to be about fifty. The long straight hair was a last rope to the bollard of her youth. Failure had written in lines on Johnny’s face, but with Daisy it was all in the downward curve of her mouth. Lately I’ve noticed these mouths in some women of my age. A lifetime of putting out, as they saw it, and getting nothing back. The men were bastards, the social contract unjust, and biology itself an affliction. The weight of all disappointment bent and locked these mouths into their downturn, a Cupid’s bow of loss. At a glance it looked like disapproval, but the mouths told a deeper tale of regret, though their owners never guessed what was being said about them.

I told Daisy my name. She kept her hand on Johnny’s arm, but she spoke to me. “We’re having a late breakfast. We’ve had to start again.”

Minutes later we were sitting round the long kitchen table, each with a bowl of porridge and a slab of cold toast. Right across from me was the floor mopper, whose name was Xan. His huge forearms were hairless and meaty, and I felt he didn’t like the look of me.

When Steve sat down at the head of the table, he pressed his palms together, raised his head, and closed his eyes. At the same time he inhaled deeply through his nose. Far back in some nasal cave,
chance had fashioned out of mucus two-note panpipes, and we were forced to listen. He held his breath for many uncomfortable seconds, then released it at length. This was controlled breathing, or a meditation, or a prayer of thanksgiving.

It was impossible not to look at his mustache. It couldn’t have been less like Johnny’s. It was dyed a fierce burnt orange and was ramrod straight, waxed to prissy Prussian points. I brought a hand to my face to conceal a smile. I felt weightless and shivery. The shock of yesterday’s shooting, this plan of reckless acquisition, the background fear, all combined to make me feel that I wasn’t really here, and I worried that I might do or say something stupid. My stomach kept plunging, and I felt skittish and giggly, feelings intensified by my sense of being trapped at this table. It must have been the passive smoking I had done in the car. I could not stop the similes accumulating around Steve’s mustache. Two rusty nails hammered outward from his gums. The pointy masts of a schooner I built as a kid. Something to hang tea towels on.

Don’t make fun of these people … they’re not too stable. As soon as I remembered Johnny’s warnings, as soon as it occurred to me that I must not laugh, I knew I was lost. The first minor explosion of breath through my nose I disguised as a reverse sniff. For cover I lifted my porridge spoon. But no one was eating yet. No one was talking. We were waiting for Steve. When his lungs were about to burst, he lowered his shaved head and exhaled, and the mustache tips quivered with rodent eagerness. From where I sat, human meaning appeared to be deserting the sinking ship of his face. Dancing in and out of my spiral of anxiety and hilarity was a train of yet more unbidden images from childhood. I tried to turn them away, but the evocative power of the ludicrous mustache swept all before it: a Victorian weightlifter on a biscuit tin lid, the bolt in the neck of Frankenstein’s monster, a novelty alarm clock with a painted face telling a
quarter to three, the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, Ratty in a school production of
Toad of Toad Hall
.

This was the man who was selling me a gun.

There was nothing I could do. The spoon in my hand was shaking. I put it down carefully and clenched my jaw and felt the sweat pricking my upper lip. I was beginning to rock. I was right in the line of Xan’s suspicious scrutiny. The squeaking noise was my chair, the muffled clucking sound was me. So much air had vacated my lungs I knew the intake was going to be a noisy affair, but my choices had narrowed now to embarrassment or death. Time slowed as I yielded to the inevitable. I spun in my chair, sank my face in my hands, and made a screeching inhalation. As my lungs filled, I knew there was still more laughter to come. I hid it behind a yodeling, shouting sneeze. Now I was on my feet, and so was everyone else. Someone’s chair hit the floor with a snap.

“It’s the bleach,” I heard Johnny say.

He was a true friend. I had my story. But stumbling through the commotion, I had yet to defeat the image of Steve’s mustache. I snorted and coughed my way across the room, half blinded by tears, toward the french windows, which seemed to billow open at my approach, and stumbled down some wooden steps out onto a lawn of baked earth and dandelions.

Watched by them all, I turned my back to the house and spat and breathed deeply. When I was calm at last, I straightened and saw right in front of me, tied to a rusting bed frame by a length of electrical cord, a dog, presumably the one that had fouled the kitchen floor. It scrambled to its feet and cocked its head at me and gave a most tentative, apologetic half-swipe with its tail. What other animal, apart from ourselves and other primates, is capable of experiencing in duration the emotion of abject shame? The dog looked at me, and I looked at the dog, and it seemed to want to engage me in some form
of cross-species complicity. But I wasn’t going to be drawn. I turned and strode toward the house, calling out, “Sorry! Ammonia! Allergy!” And the dog, bereft of a generative grammar and the resources of deceit available to me, sank back onto its bare patch of earth to await forgiveness.

Soon we were back round the kitchen table, with windows and doors opened wide, and the subject was allergies. Xan gave his judgments the ring of fundamental truth by adorning them with
basically
.

“Basically,” he said, looking at me, “your allergy is a form of imbalance.”

When I said this was unfalsifiable, he looked pleased. I began to think he might not detest me after all. He had the same hostile regard for his porridge as he had for me. What I had thought was an expression was actually his face at rest. I had been misled by the curl of his upper lip, which some genetic hiatus had boiled into a snarl.

“Basically,” he went on, “there has to be a reason for an allergy, and research has shown that in over seventy percent of cases, the roots can be traced back basically to frustrated needs in early childhood.”

It was a while since I had heard this device, the percentages snatched from the air, the unprovenanced research, the measurements of the immeasurable. It had a peculiarly boyish ring.

I said, “I’m in the less than thirty percent.”

Daisy was on her feet, ladling out more porridge. She spoke in the quiet voice of one who knows the truth but can’t be fished to fight for it. “There’s an overriding planetary aspect, with particular reference to earth signs and the tenth house.”

At this point Johnny perked up. He had been tense since we had sat down again, probably worried that I was about to misbehave. “It was the Industrial Revolution. Like, before eighteen hundred no one had allergies, no one had
heard
of hay fever. Then when we started
throwing up all this chemical shit into the air, and then into the food and water, people’s immune systems started to jack it in. We weren’t built to take all this crap—”

Johnny was warming up when Steve spoke over him. “Excuse me, Johnny. But that’s really a tissue of horseshit. The Industrial Revolution gave us a whole state of
mind
, and that’s where we get our illnesses.” He turned to me abruptly. “What’s your opinion?”

My opinion was that someone should fetch the gun. I said, “My thing is definitely a state of mind. When I’m feeling good, ammonia doesn’t bother me at all.”

“You are unhappy,” Daisy said. She pursed her own unhappy, downturned mouth. “I can see a lot of dirty yellow in your aura.” If the table had been narrower, she might have reached for my hand.

“It’s true,” I said, and saw my opening. “That’s why I’m here.” I looked at Steve, and he looked away. There was a silence that tightened as I waited. Johnny was taking this in with that helpless air of his, and I wondered if he had made a mistake.

The silence was all about who was going to speak first. It was Xan. “We’re not basically the sort of people who would have a gun.”

He trailed away, and it was Daisy who helped him out. “In the twelve years we’ve had it, it’s never been fired.”

Steve spoke quickly, telling her what she must already know. “It’s been oiled and cleaned regularly, though.”

And she said to him, also for my benefit, “Yeah, but not because we expected to be firing it.”

There was a confused pause. No one knew where we were. Xan started again. “The thing is, we don’t approve of this gun …”

“Or any guns,” Daisy said.

Steve clarified. “It’s a Stoller thirty-two, made before the factory was sold by the Norwegians back to the Dutch and German conglomerate
that developed it originally. It’s got a carbide twin-action release that—”

“Steve,” Xan said patiently. “Basically, this thing, like, came into our possession in a whole other time, when everything was crazy and different and who knows we might have needed it.”

“Self-defense,” Steve said.

“We’ve been talking about this a lot before you came,” Daisy said. “We don’t really like the idea of it being just, like, taken away by someone and, you know …”

She couldn’t finish this, so I said, “Are you selling it or not?”

Xan folded his mighty forearms. “It’s not like that. And it’s not the money.”

“Well, wait a minute,” said Steve. “That’s not true either.”

“Jesus!” Xan was a touch irritable. He couldn’t hitch his words round his thoughts; it was difficult, and people kept interrupting. His attitude was lining up behind his snarl. “Look,” he said. “There was a time when it was all about money. Only the money. You could almost say it was simple. I’m not saying it was wrong, but look what happened. Nothing turned out the way people wanted. You can’t think about it on its own. You can’t think about anything on its own. Everything’s connected, we know that now, it’s been shown, it’s a society. It’s basically holistic.”

Steve leaned in toward Daisy and said theatrically behind his hand, “What’s he on about?”

Daisy spoke to me. Perhaps she was still thinking about my unhappiness. “It’s simple. We’re not against selling, but we’d like to know what you’d be wanting with a gun.”

I said, “You get the money, I take the gun.”

Johnny stirred again. The deal he had brokered might be slipping away. “Look, Joe has to be discreet. For our sake as well as his.”

I didn’t like the repetition of my name. It could hang in the air of this kitchen for weeks, along with everything else, and get used.

“But listen …” Johnny was touching my arm. “You could say something to put people’s minds at rest.”

They were all looking at me. Through the open french windows we heard the mongrel whine, a squeezed-out sound it seemed to be trying to suppress. All I could think about was leaving, gun or not. I made a show of looking at my watch and said, “I’ll tell you in four words and nothing more. Someone wants to kill me.”

In the silence everyone, including me, totted up the words.

“So it is self-defense,” Xan said, with hope in his voice.