Life (39 page)

The living room in the flat was full of boxes; they were getting ready to leave. Anna came home from another day of picking-up-the-pieces admin and showered, luxuriating in the hot needle power, the glistening tiles, the shining taps and pipes. After China and Africa, it was eerie to have come so close to disaster while living in a place like this. It was as if they were on a space station and had been reminded by some minor emergency of how insanely fragile it all was…
all this.
On the wall beside her wardrobe mirror a transparent lizard skated on clinging toes. She twisted a gauzy purple and green sarong around her waist, fastened the scalloped margins of her white kebaya jacket with a silver pin, and cupped, for a moment, the warm weight of her own breasts in her hands. The infertility expert who is childless, the money-motivated foot-slogger who longs to be a reputable scientist, the straight-as-a-die monogamist who is drawn to her best, female friend. Was it time to look these contradictions in the face?

We won’t do this again. Goodbye to the foreign legion. And what comes next?

In the living room Spence lay on the couch trying to watch abysmal terrestrial channel tv. The ceiling fan hummed; rain fell in sheets across the swimming pool, the squash courts, the container port, the wide darkness of the South China Sea. Anna picked up the postcard that had arrived that morning, announcing that Ramone was safely back in England.
Suffer, Birdone…
The picture on the front was Bournemouth seafront.

“Spence, how would you feel if I were to…well, fuck with Ramone, sometime?”

“I would be rightly pissed off,” he answered, sitting up sharply. “I don’t know how you can consider the idea. After the trouble she caused…! I’m not saying you have to be exclusive, doing it with someone else is okay. But please, NOT Ramone!”

Ramone as a sexual partner would be the same as Ramone for a friend: capricious, aggressive, hating you for having witnessed her moments of weakness, the very weaknesses that made you love her in spite of everything. Certain things about the sex itself would make a lovely change, but it wasn’t worth the price. She was amused to note, from the vehemence of his response, that Spence had been more attentive than she’d thought to aspects of Ramone’s visit. She’d have teased him, but the look on his face warned her otherwise—

“Calm down. It was a weird, passing idea.”

vi

While Ramone was in Sungai, Lavinia’s brother Roland had come up to London to check on her and carried her off home with him. He claimed she wasn’t looking after herself. Six months later, while Ramone was away for a few days promoting the
Parable
paperback, he did it again. Ramone rushed down to Dorset, to that smug middle-class house in the country, to reclaim her. But this time Lavvy didn’t want to come home.

Ramone stuck it out for two days. Roland’s wife (Ramone had expunged the woman’s name from her mind) managed total denial of the fact that Ramone was a best-selling author and treated her like dirt. Like, can lower-class persons of your type actually read? Do you know how to eat with a knife and fork? Roland said that Lavinia was staying there: Ramone was selfish and irresponsible and unfit to look after anyone. The grown-up children (who still lived at home, the slobs) were on Ramone’s side, but no one was asking them. She gave up the fight on the third day, sickened and disgusted: couldn’t make it past breakfast. She drove to Bournemouth, and there she had to stop. Had to get out of the car and walk around, beating her pointless grief into submission.

Those few days in Kota Baru jail had done wonders for the sales of
Parable
and for Ramone’s engagement diary. She was supposed to be starting a job in a few months’ time, something flashy at one of the old universities: she didn’t know if she even needed it. But could she stand this? Could Ramone hack fame and fortune, without Lavvy?

Nobody understood
Parable.
Not her dear friends and others who’d trashed it unread, or the critics who groveled before it now.
A profoundly divided woman,
someone had said,
descends into the world of myth, in the hope of finding a meaning for her life.
Fucking cheek. It’s the world that’s divided, not my heroine… Ramone had written a fairy tale. A young woman, named only
L’Inconnue
(when she’s fallen from grace, it becomes a name, “Nou-nou”) learns that she can secure a large inheritance from her father’s estate if she can discover the laws that govern worldly fame. She sets out on this quest, interrogating celebrity figures from the past, the present, and the future—some of them human; some of them technologies, texts, discoveries; all of them
persons
(of course, autotheology). Reproached by nameless, superior beings who prove to her that public success is destructive of all virtue and value, L’Inconnue protests that she has never doubted this. As soon as she has won her rightful inheritance she plans to return to the ranks of the unsung, the truly good and truly beautiful whose names are effaced from history… (Women are always there. Look in the contemporary records of any movement, any crisis, any endeavor: and you find them. Their names just magically never make it into long term memory.) What Nou-nou wants isn’t possible. She cannot have justice, unless she gives up her innocence.

Of course it was about Anna Senoz.

The publishers wanted her to write something quick and dirty on women’s rights terrorism in the Developing World, on the tail of the Kota Baru thing. She hated the idea. Maybe she’d better do it, because if you don’t capitalize on something that’s made you saleable, the chance will not come back. This is what it must feel like to be a man, she thought, wandering through the streets. Yes, I’ve become a man. You obey orders, you count your hierarchy points. My editor is a bigger cheese than your editor! My penis—oh, sorry, did I say penis? I meant my advance—is bigger than your advance.

She went to visit Mary Shelley’s grave, but hadn’t the heart to stay there long. The graceful, solid Victorian facades mocked her. By the time the moment for hyenas in petticoats came round again, Ramone wouldn’t be here to enjoy it. She stared through the window of a tasteful little clothes shop. A woman on the other side, browsing a rack of skirts, started back in alarm… Ramone grinned like a gargoyle, rolled her eyes, and passed on. Better to be funny-looking than look like nothing at all. And the more successful you are, the more beautiful you get. The latest pub-shot almost made her look
strange,
rather than comical. By the time she was world famous, she’d be irresistibly attractive.

That was something to look forward to.

Finally, she took refuge in the Russell Cotes Gallery and bought some coffee and sticky cake in the cafe, the first food that hadn’t choked her in several days. She began to write a letter. In fountain pen, on lined paper, on the same kind of blue covered A4 pads she’d used since her first year at university. Feint and margin,
Suffer, Birdone.

Behold me eating cake in Bournemouth, in the museum. (I visited Mary S. on your behalf, do you remember?) As you know, I am fond of museums. I can’t understand why I should reverence all those stupid cases full of china or pebbles; or the headless, armless, handless, marble things with the daft descriptions like “headless young boy.” They’d look better left to rot gently in situ, in which case they’d never bother me, because I don’t like abroad, except for Paris and New York. What I like is the waste of space, the only true conspicuous consumption. It was in the British Museum basement that I found the portrait of Nou-nou which adorns the cover of the new Parable paperback, which I’m sending to you with this. She’s called Figurine of an Effeminate Eros, in an attitude of flight, from Boeotia. She has black patches because she was in a funeral pyre. She looks a lot like you, with your hair pulled up on top of your head; a form-fitting feathered kilt around her long thighs; and lovely pointed feet, like a ballet dancer’s. In the same case there is another Eros, not so effeminate, nonchalantly burning a butterfly, signifying the human soul, which he’s dangling by the legs over the flame of a lamp. It’s a splendidly cruel, off-hand, sophisticated piece. Probably turned out by thousands. The first century Rome-world terracotta workers really did do butterfly wings on their Psyches: which looks weirdly modern and tasteless…

Anna and Spence were coming back to England, Ramone planned not to meet them. She had decided to abandon the fight that she could not win. Anna had made her choice. She preferred sex with a man, a creature fundamentally different, someone who could never, no matter what he did with his baby-maker, invade those final privacies. So be it. Ramone felt the same way, that was why she avoided lesbian relationships herself: too much like surrender. But she enjoyed writing these letters—not least because she knew Spence was bound to read them, and feel suspicious, and hopefully
suffer
a little, hahaha. Anna always answered. In her latest nice polite little letter she had revealed that Spence was now going to be a writer, news that made Ramone’s blood boil. Fucking typical New Man: first he wants me to call him a radical feminist because he sponges off my friend; now he wants to be a lady novelist; I expect he’ll make his fortune, rot him.

I sure hope Apuleius had a good agent for all this merchandising. Or did he get ripped to shit, like the best of us always do? I have no idea. Anyway, I wanted to ask you if you know anything about the life cycle of the sea-urchin…

She didn’t know if she should talk to Anna about biology. She might lose face by misusing some crap piece of jargon, perhaps a risk only to be taken when you were drunk and drugged. But she had recently discovered, in the course of her reading—which roamed as always to and fro across the Great Divide— that sea urchin larvae, instead of growing older, give birth to successive, radically different versions of themselves. Had she misunderstood? Well, that was what it looked like in the pictures. Which were very fruitful and suggestive… She started drawing spiny urchins in her margin, thinking of
The Water Babies.

A woman, instead of growing up, gives birth.

In
Parable
there was a woman who thought her works of art were children, that she had literally given birth to them. She told Nou-nou a god came along and shot them, that’s why they were now dead, turned into lifeless objects… A woman who aspires to fulfill her traditional role and at the same time live a life of ideas and achievement is suffering from catastrophic
hubris.
She wants to be passive and active, private and public, the sculptor and the clay. This is not allowed, this is not possible. But what if she finds the trick not only possible but natural? A thinking woman must be both the consciousness that draws the world into existence by defining it and the world in which that consciousness is immanent… Are we not approaching, through the humble image of the working woman, the busy mother who thoroughly enjoys her part-time job, a new vision—or better, a return with new understanding, to the essential experience of being a conscious animal?

The thought of Lavvy a cold stone in her stomach.

…neatly brushed old lady with the bright eyes, says warily
I seem to know you?

Next time you met her she was all right. But she knew what was happening. She knew that she was going down again, this time forever. So young, not even sixty. Ramone had been shocked to discover how young. And in perfect health, physically. Oh god…

Another time. Think about it another time.

In some profound way, Ramone knew the game was up. She had peaked too soon; her genius had deserted her; she had missed the crest of the wave She would never invent a new concept of humanity. From now on she was falling, not flying, no matter how long it took to hit the ground. But still, she had an idea for a book. Not the Kota Baru Women’s Prison Spoof the publishers wanted. Something like
Parable
only different, a work of science and scholarship, dream and autobiography. She felt radiant with promise. Oh, the reading she would have to do! The nights she would spend, the hollow hours she loved, sating her titanic appetite on heaps of text, hearing again the beech tree fingers tapping at her dark window, long ago. She would call it
The Earth and the Plough,
and dedicate it, as always, to Anna Senoz. If not on the title page, then in her heart.

Roads and the Meaning of Roads, III

All this.…

Coming awake at the wheel of a car: you are hurtling along in a box of plastic and metal; you are nominally in charge of this machine, but the engine pumps, functions engage without your understanding. Is this how it feels to wake into consciousness? To see the strange movement that seems so far away, because distance itself is a new sensation. That thing, that big blurred thing,
it is my hand, it is moving.
I am moving it! I am here, I am me.

All that, rest of stuff, is not me.

Mont Ventoux, that high, inimical scoured limestone landscape, where Anna and Jake admired the spoor of the Tour de France and shivered in the cold, while Spence reverenced the site where Petrarch had the experience claimed as the birth of the modern European mind. Our alienation and amaze at the world that is not us. Then the cloud lifted: and it was as the poet said, an extraordinary lightness,
légèreté,
because of all the white bare stone—air full of light. But this place that he found so strange was his own mountain. Every day of his childhood he had seen it—as you do, from the plain of Carpentras—or from the ridges above Vaucluse—
whenever I lifted my eyes
… That was what Spence and the medieval poet liked, and Anna too: to make a pilgrimage to the already known. Seeing something twice, knowing it again, the experience of the experience—

The secret history of Spence as a New Man. In Nigeria, when there was no mainline electricity for months, they kept the lab going on a generator, but domestic chores reverted to primitive drudgery. Anna desperately didn’t want to have servants: no human sacrifices! Spence agreed in principle. But it was Anna who did the drudging, on top of her lab work, because it was her idea, after all. She remembered kneeling beside a tin bath, in a small room with a wet concrete floor and a kerosene lamp, tired to death, tears falling hot onto her hands as she scrubbed pants and socks in the cold soapy water. Spence passing by: looking in at the open door in dumb puzzlement, like a dog who doesn’t understand why mistress is upset. They had sorted it out. She’d had to let him hire a servant: a half-share, actually, of a lunatic called Walter who ruined everything he touched; and thereafter, when they refused to use servants it was out of self-interest, not idealism.

Spence was righteous. He was more rigid than Anna over some things: wouldn’t have a dishwasher, or a second car, or mass-market connectivity; had never set foot in a McDonald’s except to use the toilet. But Spence will not drudge.

The secret history of the sophisticated travelers. When they arrived in Sungai there’d been a mightily disappointing orientation trip. She and Spence had stayed for an extra weekend at an old river trading post. The inn, a fine wooden building standing out over the slurry-colored water, was probably the most picturesque “sight” in the whole country. They were sitting in the common room when a man, short and neat in shirt sleeves and suit trousers, started talking to them. At first it was very interesting and a cool achievement. Then he started telling them about his brother. He’d been to Jakarta looking for his brother: and something about…terrible, those bastards…a normal life impossible… He was crying, in an adult way, pinching the tears away with two fingers on the bridge of his nose and still talking. The young foreigners sat smiling nervously, trying to look intelligent. Suddenly he realized how little they could understand. He got up, abruptly said good night, and hurried out of the room.

We thought we were so well informed: we knew nothing. She remembered Aslan Gaegler’s burly figure, used to look as if he had an invisible football under each arm, his golden beard, (yes indeedy) short and glittering around his firm jowl—standing there with the white chrysanthemums. That dress with the little Audrey Hepburn belt, it was never the same… A white light splashed across her eyes, making her wince. She was in the middle lane, doing what ought to be enough speed for anyone in this heavy traffic, but the flasher was not satisfied. She tried to get away from him, the headlights only came closer. She dropped into the inside lane the first chance she got, but oh shit, he followed her.

“Oh shit.”

Spence roused a little. “What’s the matter?”

“I’ve got a flasher.”

She overtook the next car, dropped back again. No use, horns blared indignantly, and he was there, right up her arse and flashing. If it was plain irrational rage, nothing to be done. If it was one of those psychos who objected to a woman driver, then it was too late for them to swap

“Cut across to the fast lane,” suggested Spence.

“No thanks. Car won’t take it, and if I have to get rammed, I’d rather be doing sixty.”

She set her teeth, prepared for long nagging from those lights. But it was worse than that. The little car jolted around her. They’d been shoved. Jake sat up in the back and squeaked with excitement. “Mummy, he’s after you. Will we get killed? What are we going to do?”

“Deploy the torpedoes. Okay team, hang on, I’m going to lose him.”

They were coming up to an exit, get-in-lane boards snapping by overhead. She glanced in her mirror and at the last moment dived into the twinkling slip road, heading for some different part of the country. “What are you
doing?”
yelled Spence. The flasher gave chase. He’d been taken by surprise, he came snarling round the high speed curve with his foot on the floor. Anna was running out of road. She hauled on the wheel, the car jolted across lane-end chevrons, the flasher went sailing on by. She completed a jumpy handbrake turn and drove swiftly the wrong way up the hard shoulder, back onto their homeward trail.

“What the fuck! What are you doing, this isn’t a video game—”

“Sorry,” she said. She waited for a gap in the traffic. Fortunately, there were no police about. She was shaking, but grimly elated. Beaten the bastard.

“He’s coming back!” shouted Jake.

The flasher must have done a U turn on the other road: he must be really angry to be so persistent. The car, which she saw clearly for the first time, was a red saloon, nothing special. It stopped on the shoulder, about twenty meters behind them. The driver’s door opened. “Turn the tv on,” said Anna. “Find loud music. Don’t open the window. Don’t get out of the car. Don’t look at him. Jake, lie down and hide your face.”

The man came up. Anna and Spence sat with their eyes at an angle of sixty or so, not submissively lowered (which might invite attack) but unavailable to a challenging glare. Spence had hit a classical station, some woman in purple on the postcard screen singing Mozart lieder of all things. The man kicked at their doors, banged on the windows, shook the roof, pushed his face up to the windscreen. But he was alone, didn’t have a weapon, and thank God he didn’t think of going back to his car to fetch a wheel jack or something. He battered himself against the stonewall of loud Mozart for a few terrifying moments, and then he gave up. Horns blared as the red car made a forced entry into the traffic stream. It drove away.

“I’m sorry,” said Anna, realizing how horribly her plan could have misfired.

“You should give way to them, straight off. You should never provoke them.”

“I tried!”

“Is it all right again?” asked Jake.

“Yes, baby.”

“You’re a good boy, you were very good,” said Spence, leaning over the seat to hug him.

Anna reached across and switched off the tv, an unusual move. In-car entertainment was Spence’s territory. She sat with her hands at ten and two, and the traffic roared by, towards what blank wall, invisible in the darkness.

“D’you want me to drive? I think you should let me drive.”

“I’m fine.”