Читать книгу Glover’s Mistake - Nick Laird - Страница 13

On a wet, dark, interminable Wednesday, one of those winter days that lacks an afternoon, Ruth emailed to invite David to dinner. He’d never been asked to her flat before, to the Barbican, and Glover’s email address didn’t feature in the recipients’ section. Her note was casual and he matched the tone, replying with one line: Sure, that’d be nice. Probably nothing would happen, but the night before he was due for dinner, he ironed his skyblue shirt. This action carried a certain evidential weight: he loathed ironing, its peculiar blend of fussiness and tedium, and got away with wearing round-neck jumpers at school. However, that particular shirt, according to his mother, brought out his eyes. He was childishly excited to see Ruth’s natural habitat. He’d never known her to cook before and was envisaging something plain, unfussy. Italian perhaps. Zucchini. Basil. Pecorino. Fruit to finish.

The day itself was a write-off. The only thing achieved was managed after hours when David, on the rota to supervise study group from 4 to 6 p.m., helped Susan Chang, who smelt of vanilla ice cream, remove a paper jam from the photocopier. He felt delighted by his small victory, and to celebrate, and in preparation for the evening, he decided to smoke some of the emergency weed he kept hidden in the locked drawer of his desk. He visited the staff toilet, perched on the edge on the flippeddown lid and skinned up. The joint was small, heavy on green, pointy as a golf tee, and would take the edge off the nervousness he was feeling. It was not beyond reason that it might be tonight. Ruth was unaccustomed to being alone.

He slipped the joint inside the pocket of his jacket and, at six o’clock exactly, headed up the ribbed linoleum stairs, wedging the fire-door ajar with an empty Coke can. Out on the roof of the school the evening sky was enormous. Tidal night was rolling in across the rooftops and the horizon was stacked with sinking bands of oranges and reds and pinks.

Sometimes David saw things and wanted to tell someone about them, face to face, eye to eye. He had had a girlfriend once, Sarah, years ago. They’d met in the students’ union in their last term at Goldsmiths: she’d spilt his beer and then insisted that he buy them both another. Over the next four months it happened that nothing became real to him until he’d told her about it. If they weren’t together, they rang each other in the afternoon to describe what they’d done in the morning, then spent the evening recounting their afternoons.

Back then David still had hair, and one stoned lunchtime Sarah had used her flatmate’s clippers to shave it off. David saw what he would look like bald: insane and shiny, a spoon with eyes. In her bedsit, above a fried-chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, they watched a lot of New German Cinema, lit joss sticks and had clumsy, vehement sex. In the moment he’d once accidentally caught her fish-shaped earring and her ear had bled on the sheet. She hadn’t cried but had squirmed below him faster, panting, and then slapped him on the shoulder hard, saying, ‘Now hold me down. Now put your hand across my mouth. Now hurt me, hurt me.’ When she went to India for six months, she wrote to tell him it was over. It did not escape his notice that the letter had been posted, presumably from Heathrow, on the same day that she left. He had only been in love once, and it wasn’t her.

Queuing in the student cafeteria, in his first week at Goldsmiths, he had reached the checkout before discovering, in a hot flush of shame, that he’d forgotten his wallet. The girl in the line behind him had tapped him on the back, and when he turned had pressed a five-pound note into his hand, saying, ‘Take it, really, it’s fine.’ He had never seen anyone be so kind. She didn’t know him at all. He ate his lunch directly behind her and couldn’t take his eyes off her hair. Thick and dark and shiny as an Eskimo’s. Natalie was a third-year, he found out, and when he met her the next day to pay her back, they’d ended up eating lunch together and he’d made her clear green eyes close repeatedly with laughter.

David leaned against the red-brick chimney stack and lit his spliff. He thought how he was growing old and odd, how he was falling prey to calcified and strange routines. The thick unfiltered smoke began to spread its anaesthetic chill throughout his head. Two pigeons sat on the bitumen lid of a water tank, cooing and soothing the traffic below. He moved towards them and they fluttered off, settling on a lower ledge. In the distance the British Telecom minaret rose above the hum, and the satellite dishes on the roofs stood out like white carnations fixed in buttonholes. He stubbed what was left on the lid of the tank and was halted for a second by the presence of the moon. It was cinematic, scaly and yellow, and had crept up silently behind him as if it meant to do him harm.

On the pavement, foggy but relaxed, he put on Elgar’s Sea Pictures and caught a 38 on Oxford Street up into the City. The Christmas lights had been erected, but were not yet switched on. He was going to be early, so he got off by Turnmill Street to walk. This was the hour before the evening started, the hour when anything might happen. It was the hour when the newspapers were skimmed and ineptly refolded like road maps, abandoned on the vacant seats of tubes and trains and buses. It was the hour when the smell of cumin and curry would waft across his parents’ garden in Hendon. It was heaven. It was the dog-walking hour. It was the hour of a million heating systems clicking on and thrumming into life, the hour of a blue plastic bag whipping above the building site on Clerkenwell Road in spasms of desire. Would Ruth be wondering, right now, about tonight? Would she be looking down at London in transition, and thinking anything could happen? This hour must once have been the kingdom of the lamplighters, and subject to their piecemeal, point-by-point illumination, but now the street lights all came on in a single instant pulse, a blink, as David stopped by Smithfield meat market to spark his Marlboro Light, where the floors had been hosed down and water ran in rivulets out into the street, creating tiny eddies round his sensible brown loafers.

Natalie had graduated a few weeks after the incident in the cafeteria. She’d found work in a graphic designers in Ascot, though she came back to London at weekends to stay with her boyfriend in Clapham. Every so often she spoke to David on the phone but was always too busy to meet. So on Friday evenings and Monday mornings David took to hanging around in Waterloo station—along the route where she’d have to walk from the overground train from Sunningdale down into the Underground to catch the Northern Line, and back. He did that for two months and never saw her, not once. He had wanted her so much he could barely think straight. He wrote her hundreds of poems and letters that he never sent, and a few that he did. He wanted her in his arms, in his eyes, in his kidney and spleen and heart. He wanted to unbutton her white shirt and slide the snakeskin belt out of the loops of her Levi 503s. Jittery with excitement in the station, he would take up his position by the ticket machines and scrutinize for an hour or so the unknown faces passing through the barriers until, eventually, he would give up, and move off with a grimace and a heavy gait, as if some part of him ached when he took a step.

As the lift ascended the twenty-three floors to Ruth’s flat David stared at himself in the mirror. Here was the elliptic face. The joint had left his eyes watery and the walk had taken it out of him. His sweaty head shone like a conker, and his cheeks were watermelon-pink. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and blotted himself. At the second knock, he heard Ruth shout from inside, ‘It’s open.’ He tried the door and here she was, walking towards him in dark skinny jeans and a black kimono jacket. Her hair was still damp, swept neatly into a side parting, and such unfussiness lent her face a new authority.

‘Hey hey hey,’ David said, for no good reason he could think of, lifting his arms like some favourite uncle.

‘Wonderful to see you.’ She offered her cheekbones to kiss in turn and then presented a cordless telephone, the mouthpiece covered by one of her palms. ‘I’m just in the middle of something.’ He mouthed Sure and she said, ‘The living room’s through there,’ nodding up the corridor, before pushing the door shut with a naked foot. David noticed that her toes were not beautiful—misshapen as pebbles—but the nails were painted electric blue.

He propped himself on the arm of a massive maroon sofa. It ran the entire length of one glass wall—the exterior walls of the living room were ceiling-to-floor windows, and an outside walkway ran along them, enclosed by a chest-high barrier of hammered concrete. In the corner of the living room there was a huge battered travelling trunk—the kind of thing a seven-yearold in a peaked cap and uniform, going back for Michaelmas term, might sit on in a railway station in the 1950s. There was an armchair that matched the sofa and was functioning as a filing cabinet of sorts—papers were divided by being stuck behind, or to one of the sides of, the seat cushion. Ruth was at the other end of the hallway—in the bedroom he assumed—talking loudly.

‘Look, all I’m saying is you can do all of that stuff after you’ve graduated…No, no, I think it’s incredibly important that you do it, you have to do it, but after you’ve graduated…Honey, I understand that completely. But you’ve spent three years working towards this thing…I don’t care what he says.’

David shrugged to let his satchel fall from his shoulder. It landed on the oatmeal carpet with a jangle of the keys inside.

‘He did not pay for your education. Did he say that? Who paid the fees at Wellsprings? Who pays for your apartment?…No, all I care about is you making a mistake now that in ten years or ten days, you might regret…’

David stepped into the galley kitchen. It was pristine and impersonal as a show house, except for invitations to art events that patched a cork noticeboard. How could she already have received so many? A door shut at the far end of the corridor but no footsteps approached. He slipped outside to the balcony; he could then at least pretend not to have been listening. London laid out like a postcard, like its own advertisement. The Millennium Wheel, Big Ben, Tower Bridge. A light blinked on the pyramid top of Canary Wharf to warn migrating birds and gazillionaires in helicopters not to come too close. He sat down on a plastic folding chair that dug into his back. From this level he could only see the sky, its baggy cloudlets and scatter of stars. He fastened his duffel coat and retrieved his satchel from the living room, skinned up again and smoked, and waited. He listened to a few Leonard Cohen tracks on the iPod, then some early Sinatra to lighten his mood. When he went back in again to get a glass of water, according to the wooden sun-clock hanging above the sideboard, twenty-two minutes had passed. The flat was silent. Down the hallway the bedroom door was open and inside the bed was huge and white, the tangled sheets and duvet ski runs, snowdrifts, ice crevasses. He faked a little cough to warn of his approach, but it dislodged something solid in his throat and by the time he reached the closed door of the bathroom he was hacking noisily. He knocked, needlessly gently now—a tap was running within.

‘Ruth, everything all right?’

‘Oh no, fine. Sorry. I’ll be out in two minutes. Sorry.’

He turned to pad up the corridor but the lock snapped back and she appeared. She’d taken her jacket off and was wearing a yellow vest that showed her shoulders, freckled and thin but tanned, un-English. Her eyes were just cuts now in marshmallow puffiness. She’d been crying and had washed her face; she still gripped a small black towel.

‘I’m so sorry, David. This is sort of embarrassing for me, and probably for you too. Bridget is being so difficult and her father…’

She began to cry again and then moved towards him. The actual contact came as a shock. He’d kissed her cheek many times, and even once lightly pressed his fingers on her shoulder as they parted. But now they embraced, and he arranged himself in it, and felt her shoulder blades sharp on his forearms. Things were changing. He knew he would never see her in quite the same way again. In an instant she had grown beyond the abstract; desire was no longer theoretical. Touch is much more dangerous than sight, or little smiles, or honest conversations, or whispers about pictures in a gallery. Touch is how the real thing starts. He felt an overwhelming urge to protect her, to gather her up and keep her safe. Her slender body shivered as she exhaled a long sigh, and he gripped her tighter. She was so light. He could lift her so easily. The smell of coconut soap came off her hair and he breathed it in deeply, willing it to fill every cell within him.

When she straightened up and stepped away he was almost surprised to find his body hadn’t retained the indentation of her form. Immediately she busied herself—arranging the towel on its rail, tugging off the bathroom light. She walked quickly and he followed. When she pulled a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the fridge he leant against the kitchen counter, watching. It seemed to him then that leaning against a kitchen counter was obviously the embodiment of style. He felt enormously powerful. If he so desired he could run a marathon or lift that fridge and throw it. Instead he handed her the corkscrew, the only visible utensil in the room, with a courtly flourish of his wrist. A hypnotic spell of domestic familiarity had been cast between them, then she broke it.

‘God, I’m sorry, David. I hope I didn’t make you feel…awkward.’

Did he look awkward? It wasn’t awkwardness he felt. She gave a sad laugh, took a sheet of kitchen paper from a roll hanging on the wall and blew her nose loudly. This depressed him. He disliked hearing a nose being blown; he always attended to his own in private. A little of her mystique disappeared into that piece of kitchen roll, and it annoyed him that she didn’t care. He tucked his blue shirt back into his waistband where her hug had pulled it out, realized he had pushed it inside his underpants and rearranged it.

‘Oh shit, I’ve got mascara on your shirt.’ She raised a hand to brush at it and he stepped back, aware suddenly of the softness of his chest.

‘No, no, it’s pen, I think, it’s fine.’

‘Let’s get some glasses, sit down. Do you have cigarettes? Oh poor Bridge…She’s such a wonderful girl. But sometimes…’ She sighed and clinked the bottle down onto the coffee table, then turned back to the kitchen.

‘Teenagers!’ David half-shouted after her, and then regretted his banality.

‘Christ—she’s twenty. I think this is the way she’s going to be. Headstrong. Like her mother.’ She allowed herself an indulgent half-smile as she reappeared in the room, holding filled glasses.

‘What’s the actual issue?’ David said professionally, taking one from her and settling back in the sofa.

‘She wants to drop out of her acting course. Well, change to a teaching programme. And I don’t think it’s the best idea she’s had.’

‘You know, I came to see you once when I wanted to change courses. I stayed behind after a lecture. I’m sure you don’t remember.’

David had always wondered if she recalled their conversation, and now he saw she didn’t, although she wasn’t going to admit it. She walked to the balcony door and looked out.

‘Of course I remember. You were going to switch courses…’

‘You were very supportive. You said I should do the thing I thought was right for—’

‘Oh, I know but, David, this is my daughter. You were some…’

She couldn’t choose a noun and her indecision seemed to spark something unpleasant in her: she cried, ‘Oh, be realistic!’ and waved a hand at the window, the walls, anything that might be secretly encroaching on her life. David, mortified, stared hard at the arm of the sofa. He had become Bridget’s surrogate in the argument. Ruth sighed, then added softly, as if it should be a comfort, ‘I wouldn’t have cared what you did. I didn’t even know you.’

She was upset. And even though he hadn’t for a moment thought her version of their chat would coincide with his, he felt her admission as humiliation. Here was his pedigree, here was his rating. He could go ahead and fuck his talent in the ear, he could give up art, teach English, but the meagre flame of Bridget’s gift should be somehow sheltered from the buffetings of salaries and standardizing test results, from buses and marking papers and the merciless alarm clock. A still, clear moment in his life. A kind of emotional vertigo—becoming suddenly aware of someone’s real opinion. Unsteadily, he set his glass on the carpet and stood up. Ruth was staring out of the window as he walked over to the shelving unit with its untidy stacks of books, piles of prints and photographs. As lightly as he could, he said, ‘I know that, of course. I just mean that maybe, you know, you should listen to her arguments and then—’

‘Her arguments consist of telling me I don’t know what the world is like. Look, David, I didn’t mean I didn’t care. I just meant—’

‘No, of course, I understand. It’s fine.’ He grinned enthusiastically, multiplying chins.

‘She has this thing,’ Ruth continued, swerving back to her own road, ‘that she wants to teach inner-city kids and change to an education major—she’s just spent the last three years in drama.’

‘Is this her?’ He’d lifted a small photograph off a pile of four or five of them on the top shelf. A stringy girl with long chestnutcoloured centre-parted hair. She had her hands in the praying position and was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table. Behind her, the columnar trunks of vast redwoods formed a solid backdrop.

‘God, no. That’s about twenty-five years old. Those are flares, David. That’s Jessica. You remember. She lives in New York. Her partner Ginny edits that journal—you should send some reviews there.’

‘She was very pretty.’

He set it back on the pile. She had told him once about sharing a flat in the Latin Quarter with a girl named Jess.

‘Oh, she still is. Bridge is too, but even darker, like her father. Dark and mean.’

She sat down neatly on the sofa and pulled her legs up, hugging her knees to her chest. David had just realized that there was no sign of food preparation, no preheating oven, nothing. He felt his stomach tense. It was listening very carefully as he asked, ‘What about dinner?’

‘Ah, that’s the other thing. Can we cut out and grab something?’