The Northern Clemency (95 page)

“You’re out of your fucking head,” Sandra said. “This is some kind of joke, yeah? I never knew you, Timothy. I spoke to you about two
times in my life. There’s no way you could have been wanting to fuck me for the last fifteen years.” She fingered, once more, the blouse torn at her shoulder, showing her bra strap and four square inches of shoulder flesh; she thought about going into the bedroom and changing into something, anything—a cape, a poncho, if she had one, a nun’s wimple. But she wouldn’t take off any of her clothes now with Timothy in the flat.

“It’s all about fucking,” Timothy said. “My brother fucking anyone he wants because he can, and Stig, the same, and my sister having a baby with her husband, they’re at it all the time, and my mum, even, she fucked that man she worked in a flower shop with, I know she did. And me, what about me? I’ve only ever had sex with Trudy, the whole of my life. It’s you I’ve been thinking about the whole time and now you say you don’t even remember me, you think you only ever spoke to me twice, it’s not true, it’s not true.”

“Who the hell’s Stig?” Sandra said.

Timothy looked at her, startled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said in the end. There was a long silence between them, broken by a burst of raucous girls’ laughter from the street. It came as a shock to her, the Australian sound of it. She might have been in Sheffield again for a moment, and the conditioned air a clean breeze off the moors. “Can I sit down?”

“No,” she said. “You’re going.”

“You really don’t remember,” he said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“And now you say you can’t remember me, that you only ever talked to me twice,” Timothy said. “You really don’t remember.”

“No, I don’t remember anything in particular,” Sandra said, although this was growing less and less true by the moment. “You were just at the end of the table when I came round for dinner—I only came round about twice—and that was it. You just sat and talked about what you’d been doing at school.”

“You
can
remember,” Timothy said. “You can remember one day—I don’t know why you were there, but you were upstairs in the spare bedroom on your own. You don’t remember? And you were lying on the bed and asked me in. You must have been fifteen, I’d be—what—ten? And your blouse was undone, and you lay back and undid it some more. Do you remember now? Do you?”

“You’re making it up,” Sandra said, but she felt less sure now. “This
is just your sick fantasy. No one would be like that with a ten-year-old.”

“Oh, but you were,” Timothy said. “You undid your top and you let me undo your bra. Do you want corroborative evidence? I remember your bra, it undid at the front, I’d never heard of such a thing, I’d only ever seen my mum’s bras in the washing basket, and they fastened at the back. I thought all bras did. I reckon it was a new thing, around then. If you don’t remember me, do you remember buying a front-fastening bra? I bet you do. Do you want more corroboration? Your back was really spotty. I hadn’t expected that, either.”

“You should just go now, fuck off, go,” Sandra said, with a sense of her own bravery. If she herself didn’t say it, didn’t remember it, none of it was true. Just now the spare bedroom upstairs in the Rayfield Avenue house, Sheffield, England, seemed not just remote and long ago, but nothing more than a fantasy of Timothy Glover’s. He had dreamt the whole vanished country up, had invented her motivations and reasons from twenty years ago, had derived from his fantasies further fantasies, believed it had all happened. None of it ever had. He had dreamt up reasons why she had done it, and made it all real in his own head. All the same, she remembered the front-fastening bra: she’d bought it in Chelsea Girl.

“I’ll fuck off when I’m finished,” Timothy said. “I’ve waited long enough for this. You don’t even know what I’ve been through. You haven’t given a moment’s thought to what you did. Don’t you remember? You let me take off your bra, and you took off your shirt, and you pushed my face down between your tits.”

“Listen to yourself,” Sandra said. “You’d never have thought people might actually enjoy doing it.”

“You’d have let me fuck you,” Timothy said insistently.

“You were ten years old,” Sandra shouted. “You weren’t physically capable of it.”

“Yes,” Timothy shouted. “I was ten years old. Do you honestly think it’s right to behave like that to a ten-year-old boy?”

“Ah, fuck off,” Sandra said. “Like you give a shit. Like you regret that happened to you. Like you wouldn’t have got round to hating women anyway, you little shit. Like I wasn’t a child myself. You really are a stupid fucking twat. What harm did it do you that you wouldn’t have done yourself?”

“You want to know what harm it did me? Let me tell you—”

“No, fuck off, shut the fuck up, I know exactly. Or I know in what ways you’re fucked up that you’re going to blame on me. You never got to fuck me because you were ten when the opportunity arose and the opportunity never arose again. And you’ve thought about it quite a lot. Don’t tell me that all this—the plane ticket, the denunciation about not dashing back to be with my dear old mum in her hour of need, the miners’ strike crap—don’t tell me it’s all because you never got a chance to fuck me? You’re off your fucking head.”

“It’s more than that—”

“No, it’s not,” Sandra said. “OK, then. Let’s put it right. You can fuck me now. I don’t give a shit. I’m a grown-up, even if you’re not. I’ve fucked a few men, one more won’t make any difference. And then you get on the plane back to England and both of us get on with our lives. I promise you, you’re not going to go on like this, once you’ve actually had sex with me. Whatever’s in your head, I can’t possibly live up to it. So, what about it, then? Hey? Hey?”

She went over to him, prodding him even as she unbuttoned her shirt.

“No,” he said, backing away. “I don’t think that’s what I want.”

“And ain’t that a surprise?” Sandra said. With a grotesque wink, she hoicked one breast out of the tear in her blouse like an old stripper. “You’re just like every other Communist in the world.”

“I’m not a Communist,” Timothy said. “I’m a Marxist. There’s a difference.”

“Forgive me for not giving a shit,” Sandra said. “So you sit around going, oh, yeah, I really want to fuck Sandra, or I really want to live in a place run by the workers for the workers, but you only say that, you know it ain’t gonna happen. That’s a kind of luxury, don’tcha think, big boy? And let’s say one day Sandra, she says to you, ‘Go on, let’s fuck, then,’ because that’s what you really want, or say one day, the workers’ paradise suddenly turns up, it’s really gonna happen. You know what a little shit like you’s gonna say? You’d go, ‘No thanks, love, you’re all right.’ You don’t want that crap. You just say you do, like you tell yourself it’s me who’s ruined your life. It’s just a bit easier to live your life like that.”

“You don’t know I don’t want it all, not really,” Timothy said bravely.

“Oh yes I do,” Sandra said, “because nobody could. Now fuck off out of it, and think yourself fucking lucky you’re not leaving here attached to a big black Sydney police officer.”

She had manoeuvred both him and herself about the room, inching about and letting him give way to her. And there she was, by the breakfast bar, there he was at the door to the flat. She gracefully bobbed a curtsy and came back smiling with the business end of a kitchen knife pointing at his stomach.

“And one more thing before you go,” Sandra said. “When you get back to England, tell your brother Daniel I want to come and eat in his restaurant some time. I hear it’s a top night out.”

Somehow, she had reached behind him as she spoke, and unhitched the front door, passing the carving knife from one hand to another. It was almost an embrace, this complicated move, juggling knife, door handle and Timothy. He found himself walking backwards through an open door, his face sore and his throat rawly snatching at itself in the aftermath of weeping convulsions. There was something in his way; his elbow caught something rough and sinewy and boned, which proved to be the mahogany-hued big-nosed face of an elderly Australian in singlet and skirt-wide shiny blue shorts, with an outraged expression and, behind him, a wife (unmistakably) peering out from the door opposite. He had been about to ring the doorbell of Sandra’s flat.

Timothy extracted himself sideways, and Sandra readjusted her stance, evidently seeing that she was pointing a carving knife at her next-door-neighbour’s chest. “You all right, Terry?” she said.

“What the hell is going on?” Terry said. “All this racket, Alex, it’s not like you, and—”

That was what he had prepared, and he had brought it out regardless. He hadn’t expected to be greeted by a bellicose Sandra with a carving knife in her hand, and his comments died away as an—

“And I’m not sure we appreciate overhearing all this effing and blinding and—”

“That’s right,” the wife put in from behind, her arms folded. It seemed to Timothy that the situation of ultimatum, horrified prissiness and being-proved-right-all-along, in terms of the three different people about him, had frozen permanently, and, for themselves, they could remain in those postures, however extreme, indefinitely. It was up to him to bring the situation to an end, and it was only he who could do it.

“I’ll be off,” he said bathetically, not knowing how else to put it, and slid, head down, between Sandra and her neighbour, not looking at the neighbour’s wife, and down the communal marble stairs, the segs on
his shoes clattering on the marble as he went. He had brought no bag, and he went lightly. The door to the apartment complex was shut. He tugged at it uselessly, startling and then amusing a couple on the street side walking past, who stared at him on the other side of the glass door. He tugged again, before seeing to one side the green rubber plunger that unlocked it.

Outside, the warm floating air was a shock after the Northern briskness of the building’s air-conditioning—he could not say how long he had been inside. He looked about in astonishment. It seemed like the world was coming to an end. It looked to Timothy like the world as it was before Christ came to it, or Marx. Above him only the blazing angry sky of stars, the jumble of familiar and unfamiliar and shaken-up and distorted and the completely new, all in a blaze of stage-effect. And then around him, a crowd of pleasure, going about their unblamable business, festive, clean, laughing—they looked, all of them, so stupid. They were so stupid. A crowd out for fun, and none of them, not one, was drunk. Timothy, though, he felt drunk, and soiled, and stared-at, as a filthy tramp might be in an ordinary Sheffield street. He looked down at his hand; it was red with gripping. Across the road, there was a restaurant, and a terrace, and a thought, a sensible thought occurred to him. He could get something to eat. He stumbled over and stood for a moment between two miniature trimmed bay-tree bushes. He could see the waiters inspecting him, talking to each other, and finally one came over—obviously delegated. He approached so upright, in his blinding white shirt and ballgown-like apron, right down to his ankles over his black trousers, that Timothy almost cringed.

“Can I help you?” the waiter said; he was dark and good-looking, and his accent, now, was not Australian but French.

Timothy uttered his request.

“I’m afraid not,” the waiter said. “Tonight—” He gestured at the full restaurant, the full terrace, the people enjoying themselves, all with their friends, their lovers, their lives on show.

Timothy turned away. It was a stupid idea, anyway. He could go back to the hotel and order something from the café in the foyer. Anyway, he wasn’t hungry. But at the end of the road, he turned, not right back towards the ferry stop, but left towards the beachfront, where he had sat and waited for hours that afternoon, gazing out to sea, waiting for Sandra to come back. He felt so alone now that the thought of Trudy came like an irrelevance. If he were ever to be admitted to that
enclave behind the bay trees, if he were ever to be less than alone, who would mitigate that loneliness? The thought of Trudy, standing with him just then, at the bay tree, both of them smiling and well-dressed and ungrievanced, struck him as an incredible fable. That would never happen. He went on walking. He seemed to see himself from outside, as these stupid, stupid handsome people saw him. He walked out into the road, between moving cars; but here on the seafront they were moving so slowly, cruising almost to the point of stasis, that they just slowed a little bit more, not hooting, just letting him pass as they were letting other people pass between them. He reached the other side, still seeing himself, grubby, shabby, hunched, through the eyes of the fit and stupid and rich and share-owning young of this seaside Arcadia, and there was an opening in the barrier.

He dropped through it, and on to the beach; the soft sand made an unexpected hard thud against the soles of his shoes. For a moment he thought of taking his shoes off, but realized he would need them on. That would help. The light cast by the seafront buildings, the flats, the shops, the offices, fell on to the near half of the beach. There was a group of surfers to one side, in the form of some mystic circle, a round of cross-legged devotees now the sea had subsided into dark, summoning up all the demons of the South with a glowing brand, passed from cupped hand to cupped hand. He would not go to them. He swerved away to the left, and as he walked further towards the sea, he walked, as it were, into darkness. “Hey, look at that guy,” he heard one of the surfers say, unconcerned, but then someone else seemed to say something at the same time, either over there or nearer, perhaps within his own head. And then the texture underfoot changed, became softer and harder, more packed and more yielding simultaneously, then changed again as a shock of water washed over his shoes, ran inside, soaking his feet. It was only with that sensation that every other sensation clarified: the noise, which had been of traffic, clarified itself as the noise of the surf, and the smell, which had been the salt of barbecue and the smell of fish laid out in restaurant windows, gave way to the great wash of the sea. He did not know which was the sea here, the Pacific or what. The great Southern sea. It was nauseatingly warm. He went on walking, and he might have heard a voice behind him, calling from the surfers’ group, but it sounded uninvolved, if it had spoken at all, and soon it stopped calling altogether. The sea was about his knees, his thighs, as he waded onwards into the dark. It pulled at his clothes with a dense suction. For a second he thought of his wallet, thick with
advanced Australian dollars. He had had a use for them, and now they were in his pocket, being soaked by sea water. He made sense of his thoughts, and strode onwards, dragging the sea behind him like a cloak. The weight of sea water against his chest; he felt overpowered, and this was no longer a wade into the fringes of the ocean he had waited for, but a medium in which who knew what might live, things bigger and hungrier and more widely jawing than even an inland Taipan. And then the first wave—it must have been a wave that in daylight surfers would watch and wait for—struck him direct in the face. At the same time, something seized his ankles, pulling them out from under him, and he fell, his arms struggling against the sheer weight all around him, the roar like an audience’s laughter in his ears. He began to change his mind; he thrashed out, but there was nothing to thrash against; and something now seized his legs like a rope, and it pulled him, down, into those whole unpurchased burdens of warm salt water. Hatloads of it, he said to himself, his mouth and his eyes open and filling. Buckets.