Separate tracks, p.14
Separate Tracks, page 14
Orph watched and listened with no sign of reaction, except that now and then he would rise, switch it off, and stand listening.
Over the days the house changed. Whenever he moved or used anything in the kitchen or sitting room, he left it where he’d used it. From the original bean can and half-loaf, the following collection built up on the kitchen table: a butter wrapper, a half packet of biscuits, an open jar of Nescafé, an open 2lb sugar bag, the silver wrappings of four Kraft cheese-spread triangles, two more bean cans, two tomato soup cans, an empty milk bottle, a Spam tin, a half-eaten tin of creamed rice pudding, six cups containing various dregs, and numerous plates and items of cutlery. On the floor in front of the TV were two more biscuit packets, the cellophane wrapper of a pound of mild English cheddar, a half pint of milk, a blanket from Orph’s bed. He didn’t go into the others’ rooms now. He stuck to an area comprising the kitchen and half the sitting room, occasionally venturing up to the toilet. He slept in front of the TV, wrapped in his blanket. He stared at the items on the kitchen table and refrained from touching them once they had been used. He kept the kitchen gas fire on all the time. There was a pool of water on the floor around the fridge. The kitchen began to smell. Christmas passed.
Emma was the first back. She looked at the living room and kitchen. It was revolting. She didn’t say anything, but made them both a cup of tea. The doorbell—Phil.
He stamped straight in. “What a bloody awful mess. What’s going on? It stinks.”
There was a slight silence, then Emma laughed. “Orph’s been experimenting in housekeeping, haven’t you?” Orph looked around the room blankly.
Phil smiled at Orph. “Want some experimental help in clearing up? Come on, I’ll give you a hand.” He propelled Orph to the sink. “You wash.”
Emma went up to her room. She sat on the bed and looked round. It smelt faintly musty, but also of her perfume. Her hyacinths on the windowsill were poking healthily through the soil. She had put up deep red velvet curtains before Christmas, and the green leaves looked well against them. She liked her room. She chose a record and put it on her stereo.
Chapter 32
But something had a grip on her now. A premonition, clinching in with the steely cold, of something dying. She was a puppet, someone was going to pull the wrong string. Perhaps it was David. From time to time she considered ending the relationship. Although she did not ask him, she felt fairly certain that he was seeing someone else. Why don’t I ask him? It was simple: because she didn’t want to know. She was drawing in and into herself, he barely touched her now. At times a convulsive sentimental regret swept over her and she clung to him weeping, but she could not convince herself that it was real. He jarred on her.
They stayed at his place one Saturday night after a party. In the morning they made love then he bounced up, had a shower, bought Sunday papers and made breakfast, while she still hugged the draining warmth from the bed. When she finally went into the sitting room there was orange juice and real coffee and croissants and honey, and the Sunday Times and Observer spread across the sofa.
He handed her some coffee and waved at the papers by his side. “News or chat?”
“Um—chat, please.”
He laughed. “I knew you’d say that. Women always do!” Emma bit her lip.
They ate breakfast slowly, amidst the rustling of pages. Emma was uncomfortable. It was an easy luxury which, for some reason, she was outside.
He looked up and smiled. “OK?”
“Mmmnn.” When she had finished her croissant she brushed the crumbs off her jeans. Looking for cigarettes, she went back to the bedroom, but stopped in the doorway. The curtains were still drawn. The wide bed was rumpled. The duvet had partly slipped off and the pillows had been squashed up against the wall at the bed head. Between pillows and duvet was the expanse of wrinkled blue sheet, with two little patches of white staining it. On the floor to the left lay a jumbled heap of both their clothes, removed in a hurry. Her handbag was thrown carelessly on a chair, the contents spilling out. It was like a scene from somebody’s life. A picture in a gallery that you stare at with a voyeur’s envy. Here they were, this is what happened, spell out the story from the evidence.
She sat carefully on the edge of the bed, so as not to disturb any of those real wrinkles left by the real actions of two real people. She took cigarettes and lighter from her bag. I envy you, she told herself. Your life in this room. It was as pointless as envying somebody else. The bedside lamp was still on, as if the room waited for its inhabitants to return and resume their lives. He expected her to open the curtains to the grey daylight, switch off the glowing lamp, shake the pillows and tuck in the sheet. Pick up their clothes, turn them right side out and put hers in her bag. Cleanse the room of her presence, make it blank again. She didn’t want to. She wanted it to stay. Like the calm glowing order of Dutch interiors; like Vuillard’s crooked farmhouse kitchen—she longed to inhabit and be possessed by such a room. Rooms where lives were lived, objects known, their edges softened by intimate contact over time. Rooms which vibrated with their own identities. Seen by eyes that knew them, belonged to them.
Did the artists know that one day the courtyards would be empty of ladies in hoop skirts and little dogs, that the drawing rooms would lack musical instruments and players of them? That the checked tablecloth would be torn for dusters and the solid table find its way to the fire? Did they admit that from second to second the calm lives of those peaceful inhabitants could be shattered by death, disease, illicit passions?
She rose carefully and laid her cigarette packet down on the chair so that it again looked as if it had just fallen from her handbag. Walking carefully, as if the very air might be disturbed by her movements, she went back into the sitting room. He was on the floor, leaning on one elbow, head bowed over the newspaper. Another picture.
She tapped on the glass. “David?” Silence. “David?”
He looked up. “What’s the matter?”
She hesitated. “Can I stay here today?”
He frowned. “What for?”
“I don’t know—I just want to. It seems so odd.” There was a silence. “We’re so disconnected.” Pause. “A night here. A drink there. I’m—I don’t feel real. I’d like to stay.”
He closed the paper as if it were a box that he was putting the lid back on. “What d’you mean? We see a lot of each other.”
“Yes—”
“Emma, we’re not going to see any more of each other. You might as well be quite clear about that. We’re busy people, we’ve both got our own lives to lead—we’ve both got separate lives.”
“I haven’t.”
He stood up. “You’re talking nonsense. Utter nonsense.”
She could see he was getting angry. It’s going to end today, she thought. Now.
“We don’t own each other, Emma. You don’t own me. Don’t rely on me. We see each other when it’s good, OK? That’s enough. And don’t cry. I can’t stand it.”
She wasn’t going to. She was quite calm now, as if she had achieved her ghostly desire. He was angry, backing away. She had known it anyway. “All right,” almost to soothe him, calm his ruffled feathers, “all right, I’m going.”
He watched her get her things in silence. Don’t say anything now though, don’t say anything else. He followed her to the front door and held it open for her.
“O K, Emma?”
“Yes. Goodbye.”
He hesitated, then he too said, “Goodbye then.” She heard the door close softly behind her. She was relieved.
Chapter 33
David spent the day reading. At six o’clock he went into the kitchen and began to prepare a meal. Annabel was coming to dinner. He took the meat from the fridge and unwrapped it on to a plate. Two bright red slabs of steak stared up at him. From various parts of the kitchen he assembled garlic, fresh runner beans, aubergines, seasonings, saucepans. His face was set in a smile. Taking a clove of garlic he stripped it carefully with a sharp knife. He cut the naked white kernel in half, and grasped half between the ends of his stubby thumb and forefinger. Taking one thick drooping steak in his left hand he rubbed it slowly with the garlic, feeling the strong stretchy grain of the meat moving under the pressure he created. His nostrils widened to take in the mingled blood and garlic. He enjoyed cooking. He sliced the beans rapidly and accurately, allowing them to fly off the knife end into the saucepan. One or two fat pink inner beans he removed pickily from the pan. In their swelling pinkness they looked pregnant, ready to burst. He sliced the purple-black aubergines as precisely as a surgeon. Their resistant oily dark skins divided at the blade touch, revealing the pale yellow flesh within, the seeds and softness. He put them on a plate ready for frying. When it was all ready to cook he ran himself a bath and put new sheets on his bed.
He bathed slowly, looking down the length of his body as it hung, half-floating, in the water. Four long straight limbs lying relaxed in the water, supple with muscles and the knowledge of movement. A thickly built torso with working belly and lungs and heart, machine parts, running smoothly. A small delicate penis floating under the water like a drowned thing, feigning innocence. A head that could look down and say, I am self-contained. He dried his body lovingly, as if it were a new gift.
While the food was cooking he poured himself a half tumbler of whisky. He drew the curtains and switched on the lamp. It is surprising, but I am upset, he thought. His pain could find no expression. The lit room stood factually around him. His brain ran through the twists of the problem and found no answer. Dead ends. These women. At a point where they began to believe something like real affection existed between him and themselves, their own identities began to disintegrate like rotting fruit and they dropped, helpless and disgusting, into his lap. How could it be his fault? He was seized by the claustrophobia of being alive. Alive, in a cage of flesh and bones, trapped within the dreadful confines of his own knowledge and experience. Never able to leap beyond.
He reached for the whisky bottle set by the stereo and topped up his drink.
Chapter 34
“I’ll come.”
Phil turned to Emma. “You? Why?”
“Why not? The more the better, isn’t it?”
“Sure, yeah, OK. Can you pay me now?” Emma went to find her purse and Phil added her name to the list of people who’d paid the coach fare to London. There was a demonstration on Saturday.
“Does Orph want to go?”
Phil nodded.
“Here, take for him out of this too.” She gave Phil £10.
“Anyone else?” Phil sniggered. “Not really dear David’s scene, is it?”
“Phil shut up.” Alison’s face was white with a red thumbprint on each cheekbone.
Phil wrote something on his paper then looked up, his face contorted with irritation. “Shut up yourself for Christ’s sake.”
Two coaches went. Phil rushed up and down organizing people and fitting in banners and collecting more money, and finally got into the second coach. Alison and Emma sat together in the first, with Orph behind them. People started to chant, and bottles and cans of beer were passed from seat to seat.
Alison shook her head. “I feel too old. It’s like going on a school outing.”
Emma nodded, staring out of the window. The land was flat and wintry grey, grey roads grey sky grey iron trees, grey river meandering through. The coach was a silly bubble of noise. People were shouting and laughing about how to protect themselves, showing off layers of clothes with newspaper stuffed between. “Do they think they’re going for a fight?” Emma was contemptuous.
The coach took them to Edgware Road. In all directions Oxford Street, Edgware Road, Marble Arch, Park Lane and the park itself were dense with bodies, but the effect was strikingly different from an ordinary crowd. It shocked Emma to see so many so oddly similar, and to think that she might be as easily classified as they. Most were older than Emma and Alison, and many had young multicoloured children with wellies and hand-knitted mittens. Babies hung in pouches on people’s backs or stomachs, like marsupials.
Alison laughed as Phil pushed into view. “Great, isn’t it?” he said, and put his arm round her shoulder.
Like a gardener who’s proud all his cabbages have come up, thought Emma. “You can see why the British textile industry is in decline,” she said. They looked at her. She waved her arm towards the crowds. “Just look around you—it’s all second-hand or third-world. Oppressed peasants who make Peruvian jumpers must be doing a bomb!” Phil laughed generously and Emma was pleased, though she had intended it as a taunt against him. Orph stared in silence. He was wearing an old jumper of Phil’s, hand-knitted and baggy with a mock-Fair Isle pattern on the front. Emma decided she would give him some money for a jumper.
Fighting up the underground steps more heads, bodies, legs came into view. The pavement was crammed. Traffic on Park Lane was crawling while streams of people flowed between the cars, joining the great sea of bodies that filled the park, stretching as far as the eye could see.
“It’s amazing!” said Alison. She was intoxicated by the numbers, and some of her excitement even penetrated Emma’s gloom. The power of so many people—the power! They crossed Park Lane. People were singing, shouting and milling about, laughing and smiling at total strangers. Phil led the way through the crowds. Emma could hear a tannoy, the voice patiently repeating itself. They heard the same sounds over and over, though they could not distinguish the words. The crowd seemed to be centred well away from the road, towards the middle of the park.
The view from the police helicopters chop-chop-chopping above was peaceful enough. The masses of people in the park were moving only slightly. Gradually from the myriad dots the march took shape, its body punctuated by stripes of banners. It was created simply by the density of the dots. The tired winter-green grass was a background to them. Bright sunlight lit the city. Windows of offices and hotels and cars glittered silver. Cars crawled infinitely slowly down Park Lane. From the little flying capsule of metal and plastic, encased in its own noise, the park and streets were as pretty and peaceful and silently slow-moving as a child’s kaleidoscope, where the coloured crystals fall slowly into each new pattern. London. The crowds and sun gave it an air of holiday. And like kaleidoscope repeating patterns, dark lines of navy blue encircled groups of other colours, lined Park Lane, and demarcated the sides of the march monster. A line of motionless black vehicles stretched up one of the little streets to the left of Park Lane.
Phil flung himself into rapturous greetings with long-lost friends who were clustered under the NUS banner, while Alison and Emma smiled dazedly at everyone. Orph, unnoticed, detached himself from the group and wandered on down the side of the march. Groups were still slotting themselves in and waiting for friends to join them. The loudspeaker repeated tirelessly the order they should be in, and people who were cold and bored with greeting forgotten friends looked nervously backwards and forwards, checking their positions. There was a policeman standing every ten yards, facing inwards on the marchers. Orph passed one who was in laughing conversation with two girls. Others stood stoically, arms folded, staring in front of them or wandered from their positions to chat with their neighbours. The loudspeaker voice was becoming hoarse, and more insistent. The front of the march was beginning to move. Orph left the crowds and cut across the park which was littered with papers, cartons, tin cans. Isolated groups of people, twos and threes, stood now amongst the rubbish, but nearly everyone had joined the march. Bright yellow leaflets blew across the grass in handfuls. He went back under the iron trees to Speakers Corner. An old man in a fawn mackintosh was talking about God but no one was listening. A crowd of stragglers clustered round the ice-cream van near him, buying canned drinks. Orph moved down under the trees and positioned himself by the railings bordering Park Lane. Two policemen were holding back the traffic, and coming out of the log-jam of Marble Arch corner the trickle of marchers began to move more swiftly, like the front end of a worm surging forward from stationary fatness. The atmosphere was carnival. Laughingly, people adjusted to carrying the banners high, moving further apart and getting into step. Two women banged tambourines and started to chant. A group of punks came tumbling past, two boys young and very self-conscious in black leather trousers, festooned with chains looping round their waists and down their legs. A girl with them had a shaggy halo of electric pink hair and black-rimmed glazed eyes. A contingent of uniformed nurses followed them, dumpy-looking in their short skirts and flat shoes. They were unsmiling, purposeful, as if tackling an unpleasant part of their duties. The sound of raised voices came from the corner, and the flow of marchers ceased. The line of police shifted and cars slowly began to move down the outside lane.
Other people gathered by the railings near Orph began to mutter. “Bastards! They’re breaking it up. Look—letting the fucking traffic through. They’re breaking it up. It’ll take hours, at that speed—people will drift away.” Way back round the park those at the tail end of the march had not even begun to move. They stamped their feet in the cold and breathed out steam. At last the cars stopped and a new group of marchers burst forward. The police moved in like pincers on either side to prevent the march from becoming too wide. “Fucking pigs. We should have three lanes. Look what they’re doing.” The chop-chop-chop of the helicopter broke in on the other noises, as it moved slowly above Park Lane. Several marchers paused to raise and shake their fists at it. A hawker with a wide tray of badges moved up the march against the stream, and people clustered after him, eager to buy labels.
