After alyson, p.7
After Alyson, page 7
“Your wife is very beautiful,” he said to me.
“Ah, she’s not my wife,” I began to explain when Al interrupted,
“Nah, I’m just his floozy,” she said.
The barman looked a bit shocked – I could sense that he thought it might well be possible that Al wasn’t lying.
“Will you stop it?” I said over-protesting so that the barman could see I was joking. “This is what happens,” I said, “when you go for something other than a mail order bride.”
The barman smiled understanding now that this was that famous, ironic English humour.
“Oh, mail order brides are from Thailand – not Malaysia,” he said, smiling.
Yet later as we wandered through the night market in China town, crammed with fake watches and pirated DVDs, Al and I had our first serious row.
Al had been uncharacteristically quiet to the point of being cold for about 40 minutes or so. I could feel the storm clouds gathering.
“Come on Al,” I asked eventually, “what’s up?”
“I don’t like being called a mail-order bride,” she said. “It cheapens me.”
I was astonished.
“So what about suggesting you were a floozy? Doesn’t that kind of devalue your currency?!”
“Yeah but – ah look, it doesn’t matter, you know I’m just tired from the flight.”
“No, no this matters,” I said. “Look, the barman was really confused and I sensed his embarrassment. I was simply trying to put him at his ease. Anyway, I don’t like you pretending we’re anything other than lovers.”
“Lovers?” she said “Isn’t that a strange term? It suggests impermanence and like we’re just passing through. I mean you’re more than my lover.”
“OK, OK.” I was getting irritated, “How would you like me to describe you as? My girlfriend? Bit possessive if you ask me. My partner? Makes us sound like a pair of accountants, or how about her indoors? Again, too parochial for my liking but, you know, you’re the boss.”
“Well how about just saying ‘this is Al,’ let them work it out.”
We continued in this vain for some time. It was a game of verbal tennis where we seemed to be more content with smashing the volley than the affects this game was having on each other.
By the time we’d eaten, I’d grown fed up with the row. I wanted to turn the clock back to the scene before we were sat in the bar a few hours earlier. Yet no matter what I tried, Al seemed happy to pursue the argument until she was vindicated.
The evening wore on, we continued to argue as we wandered through the streets back to the Colonial, ignoring the charms (actually lack of if the truth be told) of KL and instead just continuing to wind each other up. Later in bed, I tried to make amends. I held Al in my arms but she pushed me away. I tried again, but again she moved my arms off her.
“Look,” she eventually said, “I’m too hot and too tired – OK?” and then she turned her back to me.
It was the first time we had slept together and never made love. I lay there awake starring at the ceiling and the ineffective fan that was whirring away above me. This stank. Here we were at the start of our whole future together and we were fighting. What happened to the girl on Shell Beach?
I got up and I went to the bathroom for want of anywhere else to go. I sat on the loo, looking at the patterns the white tiles didn’t make on the floor. Eventually I grew bored, finished my toilet business and made my way back to bed.
Al seemed deep asleep, which irritated me even more. She could just ignore this and go off to dreamland? I contemplated going to the bathroom again and bringing myself off, but to be honest I just felt totally depressed. What on earth was I doing here? How stupid could I be to think that me and this strange, ultra pretty, Australian kid had a future together?
As I churned all these negative thoughts around in my head, Al moved from off her side and rolled across the bed towards me.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but she said it below the threshold of my hearing.
“Sorry?” I said, which she took to be me asking for an affirmation that what she was saying was sorry.
“Yeah,” she said.
I then had to explain that I didn’t hear the first thing she said, which made her physically tense for a moment. Then she sighed deeply and turned on the lamp at the side of the bed. She was naked under the thin sheet and I found myself getting excited, stiffening as I saw the contours of her perfect breasts moving against the harshness of the white sheets. She placed herself so that her elbows were resting on my chest and then gently pressed the end of my nose like it was an on-off button. She was speaking a bit more clearly now but had a lovely gentle sexy, sleepyness to her.
“I said I’m sorry. I’m tired, it’s been a long day. I’m sad about leaving Perth and I was a bitch earlier on. It’s me not you,” she raised an eyebrow “OK?”
“OK,” I said. I think I must’ve looked a bit down because she smiled and said “I love you the most when you’re looking like this.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Ah, you have this little boy lost look, like somebody took all the toy soldiers, all the cricket bats and all the footballs home so you can’t play.”
I laughed gently
“Well my favourite toy wouldn’t come out of the box,” I said, trying harder to look sad, deliberately playing with the edge of the sheet in order to add to the impersonation of the little boy lost.
She paused. “I want to make love in the morning – not now – I’m too hot and too tired. OK?”
I sighed “Promise?” I said.
“Promise” she smiled.
“OK then,” she kissed me, not passionately but sweetly on my mouth, rolled back to her side of the bed, turned off the light and we both drifted off to sleep.
With Al, she could be a devil and a saint in the space of a few hours. She wobbled between the two. I didn’t dislike her devilment, I just missed her saintly side when it wasn’t there. Yet loving her was loving her as the whole person, not just the loving, gorgeous, caring angel but as the fire-breathing, halitosis-ridden dragon that she could also be. When I was a kid, I was told that dragons came from the West, from Wales. Now I know they come from western Australia too.
* * *
I’m sat in Kalpna’s dining room. It is plain white with a beautiful bay- fronted window, dressed in cream muslin curtains, draped rather than hung to dress the window.
Number 8 is the last in a row of Victorian villas, all four storeys high. There is no road outside, instead, a path runs along the front of the house and means that you feel like you won everything you can see. The view is phenomenal. We can only be 100 foot above Hope Cove, but it looks picture perfect from here. The main road winds down into the town square, where the Spar supermarket and the bus stop are easily visible, then it drops away again down to the harbour. I can see The Ship quite clearly and Drake House, sat on a hill above the quay.
The table is littered with the remnants of our meal. Kalpna seems to have culinary skills that match her looks, and although I didn’t know, she is also veggie. I spent the whole day worrying about this, so when she said I was unbelievably relieved. Earlier in the evening when she told me, matter of factly, that she was veggie and hoped I wasn’t a meat and two veg man. I think the look on my face must have given the game away.
“If I’d have served meat, would you have eaten it?” she asks, looking attentively at me.
“Well,” I begin to explain, “there is a Buddhist view that you should eat whatever is placed in front of you and not to do so is disrespectful. But no, I wouldn’t have eaten it.”
I wonder if this is the right answer, but also wonder why I’m so bothered about giving the right answer.
“Good,” she says, “I like people who hold to their principles.”
For a moment, I am irritated. Why can’t I ever meet unprincipled women? Why do I always have to fall for the bloody stroppy ones with opinions and ideas? I sometimes wonder about relationships with traditional women – Tories perhaps – who have failed to open hostilities in the gender wars. I’d even settle for a Switzerland type, who hasn’t joined the battle. Perhaps men who only drive Ferraris feel much the same way about Morris Minors? Who knows?
So the food, all Italian dishes, all perfect, has gone down like manna from heaven. We’ve also, over the course of two or three hours, consumed a couple of bottles of Barolo. So we are both on the ‘hic’ side of mellow.
My musing is interrupted by Kalpna’s footsteps coming down the hall. She is looking stunning in a little black number, her hair clipped back, her skin perfect, all so understated, given her obvious sensuality.
“Shall we have our cheese and coffee through in the lounge?” she suggests. This sounds like a good idea and I nod my approval.
Kalpna has disappeared to finish making coffee, so I decide I’ll go down into the kitchen to see if I can help.
The hall walls have black and white photos of Alpha at different stages of her childhood. One of her in a paddling pool naked, she must have been about 2 I guess and then a quite breathtaking one of her and Kalpna in the bath together. In both they’re naked. I have to quickly glance away, feeling voyeuristic at having seen Kalpna’s naked body. I feel like I’ve seen the pudding before I’ve even looked at the starters. As I get to the kitchen doorway, Kalpna turns from a vast Aga and sees me.
“Oh no! Out! Out – go on!”
She is shooing me away as if I am a stray cat that has come in from the garden.
“I just wondered if there was anything I could do to help?” I say in defence.
“Yep. Be patient. Coffee won’t be long.”
“I’m not very good at being patient,” I offer.
“Well go and practice. Practice makes perfect, you know.”
‘I like this. This feels good,’ I think.
“OK, I’ll go back and study the view and the rogues gallery on the walls.”
I want her to know. I want her to know I’ve seen her naked photos. I wanted to see her reaction.
“Oh, those,” she says “Yes, you can tease Alpha that you’ve seen her bum. She’ll be mortified.” She’s smiling. “Now leave me to it, OK?”
So I wander back along the hallway to the dining room and wait, taking in a few more photos as I do so. These are all of Kalpna and Alpha together, or of Alpha on her own. They are innocent photos of a little girl playing on a beach, of a six year old on a pony and her mum on a horse (this looks like it was taken abroad), of a 10 year old girl at a birthday party with a big cake that says ‘Happy 10th Birthday Alpha’ and lots of very well-behaved looking kids smiling to the camera with Kalpna in the middle of the scene holding a knife and smiling at the camera. I wonder what happens in the scenes that follow, the slicing of the cake? The unwrapping of presents? The inevitable fight between badly behaved little boys?
Before I can answer my own questions, Kalpna calls again.
“Do you want to come across into the lounge now?”
I wander in to the Hallway and she is stood with a cafeteria of coffee and a round marble cheeseboard that seems to have a ton of all sorts of cheeses on it.
She kicks the stripped pine doors, that have a distressed look to them, and I follow her into a room that is the mirror image in shape to the dining room, but which has a totally different feel.
The windows have wooden shutters across them and the walls are a dark burgundy colour. There is a real fire with a modern wood burner and the far wall is dominated by a huge oil painting that depicts Kalpna with her back to you sat naked with a towel around her midrift. It has the feel of a Degas, but again exudes an undercurrent of suggestive eroticism.
“What a fantastic painting,” I say, “I love the size of it.”
Kalpna smiles. “Daniel, my ex-husband, did it – I like it because it captures a time in the past when he and I were happy.”
“So it is you?” I ask, knowing the answer.
“Yes,” she says gently, “a version of me that was then.”
By now, the cheeseboard and coffee have been placed on a big round oriental looking, low table. I decide I want to move the conversation away from her nakedness, and what could become a discussion about failed love – never a good thing. So instead we chat more about Hope Cove, life in Devon and joys and disappointments of the place.
“Do you think you’ll stay here?” she asks.
I smile. I wish I could tell her the truth and tell her that I could stay in this room, right here, right now, until the moment I die, such is the sense of calm and space that has been created. Instead, I give a factual answer.
“Well, I’m not sure. It’s totally impractical living here from a work perspective. Takes me longer to get to work now then when I lived in Birmingham and I’ve got to be out of Drake by Easter so…Well, we’ll see.”
“Oh,” she says “I really hope you decide to stay.”
Something about the way she says this implies more than a discussion about estate agency.
We are not sat close – in fact, we are sat in two armchairs opposite each other near the window. This adds to my sense of longing and brings an additional charge of repressed lust to the way things are going.
And then there comes a point where I know that we’ve exhausted the possibilities of the evening. A time when less will indeed be more.
“Look,” I say, “this has been great. I have really, really enjoyed being here. The cooking, the food, our conversation. I’ll have to hire in a catering company, or brush up on my beans on toast, but I’ll return the compliment before I move out of Drake House. OK?”
It’s credit to her ice-cool stylishness that she doesn’t come out with a ‘Oh going so soon’ or ‘Stay for another coffee,’ but instead merely responds with;
“Yes. I’d like that,” she smiles “and the beans on toast might make a pleasant change.”
We wander into the hall. She goes and collects my coat from a hat stand in the hallway.
We are stood on the doorstep by now. I turn to her, she smiles and then I think ‘bollocks – if this fails it will be beans on toast’ and kiss her, on the mouth.
She accepts this and returns the kiss. And then she smiles.
“So,” she says, still very cool, “there is some passion in there after all?”
“Some?” I laugh. “Let’s leave that for another time, shall we?”
She nods. I wander down the path to where it meets the road. I turn to look and she is still stood in the doorway and waves. I return the wave, mouth ‘thank you’ and then turn towards Drake. As I do so, I noticed I am being watched. Stood in the shadows, with her less than savoury-looking terrier, is Wilma Mapp. She has a look of horror on her face- perhaps she isn’t keen on inter-racial relationships?
“Evening, Mrs Mapp!” I say.
She ignores me, turns and walks off in the opposite directions, doubtless marshalling her resources for the battles that lie ahead.
* * *
It is strange how a familiar place begins to change and everything in it. Before Alyson came back from Australia, my flat in Edgbaston was as familiar to me as my belly button, possibly more so, as I rarely paid much attention to my navel, whereas I would spend hours in the living room at the flat, or lazing in the bath, listening to football commentary or just generally letting the time wash over me. Anita and I were perfectly happy doing our own thing, although I never did quite master her ability to perch on a window ledge for hours on end, preening the top of my head.
Alyson’s arrival changed this. For instance, Anita and I had to get used to a new concept that neither she nor I had ever had any need for. Houseplants. It seems strange now, but I had actually managed to survive for over 30 years without knowing the difference between a spider plant and an umbrella plant or without the chore of having to water them. Within 6 weeks, though, the flat had taken on a greener look. Anita didn’t seem to mind, particularly as the large Swiss cheese plant that arrived one weekend gave her a nice new place to crap in wet weather. I admit to being a bit jealous of Anita. I gained no such advantage. Nor did we ever seem to yield a crop of umbrellas or Swiss cheeses. However there was a marked increase in the numbers of spiders around the place, as I seemed to spend a good deal of my evening removing them from baths and other places where they liked to chill. Until this point, I had never realised that spiders were so loud, they seemed to scream, and I often confused this with Al, but what was there to scream at?
After KL, I also had my worries that the bright, warm sunny Al that I had first met was being replaced by the storm cloud version her Dad had referred to back in Oz. In reality, the current weather system that was present in Edgbaston was prone to hazy sunshine at times and the occasional squally shower, but as time went on she gradually became the person she was before she went to Australia. I put the spat in Malaysia down to a short, brief monsoon.
As August became September, and Al’s birthday approached, I was at a loss as to what to get her. One Friday lunchtime, I was sat talking to colleagues at work and one had mentioned that they had just got back from Hydra, 60 miles south of Athens and unspoilt. It sounded perfect; no traffic, the remnants of an artistic community and good food. A call to my travel agents, who by now were getting used to me sticking hotel rooms in Malaysia and flights back and forth to Perth on my increasingly over-burdened Access card, suggested that we could both go for a mere snip of £200 each. I knew it was mad, but also wanted to give Al a birthday surprise.
Another thing I loved about Al was that she was never a ‘girly’. I would buy her things and would never get a ‘No you shouldn’t have’ – a very English response, anyway – but instead I would get a ‘That’s really cool’ or ‘yeah, fab!” to most positive things. So despite the fact that we had no money, and she was only doing locum work, we ended up on the morning of her birthday at Pireaus, taking a Flying Dolphin through the waves to Hydra. Al just seemed to love it; the fact she was in a new country, the fact that Greece was still relatively unspoilt, the donkeys in the harbour instead of cars to carry our bags to the hotel, with shuttered rooms that had no air conditioning. The whole thing just melted her, turned her into a puppy in the sunshine where she was coy, playful and occasionally sexily naughty. In fact, frequently sexually naughty. Actually, continuously, to the point of not leaving me a-bloody-lone naughty. I didn’t complain.
