Читать книгу The Josephs and Other Stories - Polly Tuckett - Страница 6

You had to trust that your survival instinct would kick in, trust the will to control the body and determine a positive outcome. How could she know that whether on purpose or due to inexperience she wouldn’t veer off to the left into that stand of fir trees?

The white expanse was like death itself. Her weakness was a drug coursing through her body, taking hold. Her legs were trembling and her feet inside the unyielding boots felt as though they were swimming in blood. The only way was down, although she could take sidewise penguin steps up the mountain to the ski lift. But no, she couldn’t – look at those empty chairs sailing free on their way back. Paolo was dead. And she had to get down the mountain; she, an alien, placing her faith in the manmade prosthetics jutting from her feet. Sick of the drama, the tumultuous poeticisms and pseudo-philosophical pronouncements clamouring in her mind, she could not, though, distance herself from them.

The skis were pointed downwards, ready for the plunge. All around her people seemed glibly cheerful – determined, achieving, capable – people who knew not to question the sense of all things. A three year-old whooshed past, slaloming stylishly down the slope. The lift was passing overhead, the people sitting on the stupid little chairs seemingly unconcerned, legs dangling high above the abyss. And the sky so relentlessly blue. A set of feelings gripped her, nameless, overwhelming, and ice in her stomach.

Earlier that day she’d been taught snow plough on the nursery slopes, but now her knees wouldn’t bend right and the valley was rushing up towards her. She leaned back, lost a stick and swerved to avoid someone. Her skis crossed and ejected her. The jolt to her tailbone as she hit the ground brought tears to her eyes and once she started crying she couldn’t stop. Something more than physical incapacity, a deep humiliation in relying on the body to do what it should and finding that it would not. She couldn’t cry about Paolo, even though she spent her whole time thinking about him, yet here she was blubbing like a baby because she’d hurt herself.

There had been warning signs right from the start. But weren’t there always? He told her about a story he was writing in which a woman asked her lover to murder her. When they started sleeping together he put his hands around her throat and started choking her, reminding her of a group exercise in a Theatre Studies class where you had to fall backwards, trusting you’d be caught. She told him she wasn’t into it and he never did it again.

She spat out snow and brushed it off her face and the plastic bib of her neon salopettes, sitting up. A woman with white lipstick and reflective goggles swished to a neat stop beside her and asked in German if she was OK.

‘Yes,’ she answered in English.

‘Is this your stick?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

The woman helped her to her feet.

‘Will you be all right?’

‘Yes,’ she said. The woman skied off. Edith picked up her skis and trudged down the mountain to the next station. When she got there her mum, dad and brothers were waiting for her.

‘Have you been crying?’

‘No,’ she said.

After a while her dad and brothers took off and Edith sat with her mum on the veranda drinking Schnapps. She felt heat flood to her face. The snow was dazzling and the people were insects crawling about on it. Exposed rock on the mountains opposite appeared harsh, like wounds.

‘This is too much for you, isn’t it? We don’t have to do any more skiing if you don’t want to. You can get the lift down from here.’

The next day they went skating because she hated skiing so much. The lake was covered with a fine mantle of snow and scarred with the tracks of ice skates and paw prints. Shelf ice massed at the edges and the long spikes of candle ice pitted the surface nearer the middle, which was bluish white from impurities in the water. The ice was at least a foot thick but it creaked and groaned alarmingly as it split into rifts, great jagged continents forming beneath Edith’s feet.

A young girl whirled past, twizzling and flinging her arms about like a ballerina. The bloom on her cheeks and the soft hat, pinks and whites, her dewy youth and delicate eyelashes, the simple joy – Edith felt a stab of envy, wishing she could exchange her life. Her mum held her hand tightly as they skated tentatively out towards the far end of the lake. There was no need for words. Everything was dwarfed by the terrible mountains.

One night, unable sleep, she grabbed her diary. I would rather, she wrote, that he died than that he left me. When he’d been gone without news for so long, already dead, she had dreamed up fantasies of deception, him with another woman, laughing at her, or worse, oblivious to her. And then she found out that the night she wrote her diary was the night he died. Did this make her a witch?

The holiday was a mad idea and she’d been shoehorned into it. They were there with her brothers’ public school and she found the noise and the exaggerated Englishness of the party unbearable. So the ice skating was an escape. Her mum was wearing the black velvet coat with the real fur collar she’d had since the 70s. In the bright light its worn patches took on a gunmetal sheen. They lurched and stumbled as they went round the lake, keeping each other up.

Was she unlovable? Her mum loved her – well, she had to. He had claimed to love her too but it was a fad, his love for her, it hadn’t lasted. It was all poses, brilliant facets. She needed to be loved more than she could offer love. In feeling adored she was at her most loving, most expansive. When she tried to isolate characteristics that would make her lovable to someone else she was at a loss. But then she had always suspected that she didn’t really have a personality. She was just a being, filtering experience through a consciousness that had been shaped in this way or that to interpret the world. But this was avoidance. Thinking about his failed love for her in no way mitigated the impact of the loss of him. Remembering his bad temper in the mornings, his refusal to ever wash his work trousers, his love of avocados and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, his dry sense of humour, she was reminded that these were just examples of who she understood him to be, outer manifestations or accidents of fortune, preferences and modes of expression, not him in any essential way – their specificity seemingly revealing a uniqueness and irreplaceability which was really only ‘original’ in its one-off constellation of repeatable particularities – and so, like her, there was no essential him – he was a hollow soul, a flame of being, and they had been twin flames for a time.

As Edith and her mum walked back from the lake the evening sun stained the snows crimson. Deciduous trees with their dark bark were silhouetted like lungs against the sky, lacy forms, indecipherable as symbols in a dream. Beauty hurt her; perceiving it, she experienced vicious little stabs of sorrow and self-pitying bitterness.

Back at the hostel, the kids were making a racket and the adults were being grotesquely jovial around the trestle tables. She couldn’t manage a single mouthful and excused herself as soon as she could to wander the streets of the little town. A huge Christmas tree stood on an island in the middle of the street. Presents hung from the branches and Edith smiled, remembering her disappointment as a child on discovering these were fake when she stole one from the school tree and opened it in the toilets. Stuffing the empty cardboard box and wrapping paper into the bin, she had covered her crime with paper towels.

It was snowing, little polka dots on the night. Someone once told her there was no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing. She shivered pulling her collar up. The cobbled streets were narrow and the shop fronts mesmerising, their goods displayed with tantalizing negligence. A watch shop had a Christmassy diorama with a toy train driven by a waistcoated rabbit, the wagons filled with tiny clock parts and exorbitantly priced watches draped here and there over the glittering fibreglass snow banked high around the tracks, as if you could just reach in and pluck one out.

She looked up and noticed a man walking away from her down the street. From the back he looked just like Paolo. Yes, he was walking exactly like him, purposefully and with a slight stoop. The coat could be his, the hair, everything. It could be him! This whole nightmare might be some sick joke, God or Disney’s way of teaching her a lesson. Perhaps he was not really leaving her. Maybe his death was a malicious rumour. She followed him, her brisk walk breaking into a jog. Her ribcage constricted like a claw; she could hardly breathe. He turned down a side street. Now he was entering a café bar. She followed him in, wanting and not wanting to get a good look at him. He went to the toilets in the back. She ordered a liqueur coffee. But when he came out his face was all wrong. She took her coffee to a table in the corner and sat facing the window with her back to the clientele. She was so stupid. Furious, her shoulders shook and tears ran down her cheeks. The impostor left the café and passed in front of the window. Now, not even his gait seemed familiar as he ambled off down the street. She’d been tricked, life had played on her another vile trick.

She took out a compact mirror and dabbed at her eyes with a manky old tissue. She paid and walked, dazed, out into the street. All the shops were so expensive, so cruel and smug a contrast, all the wealth in such harsh conditions. What if you were homeless? – and what was the answer to that? – aren’t we the lucky ones? She looked at a pair of leather boots in one window, at a deep-pile rug in another and then stopped, spellbound, in front of a jeweller’s window. There was an exquisite ring, a diamond solitaire. It didn’t have a price tag.

A bell rang as Edith entered the shop. She asked to see the ring and as the shopkeeper went to fetch it from the window she felt slightly giddy and found herself clutching the glass counter. To go into debt would be a kind of relief, it would give her something else to worry about, something more tangible. She took off her glove and tried the ring on her wedding finger. It was a perfect fit. She asked the price. It was a staggering sum and would take her to the limit of her overdraft. She paid by cheque.

There was a woman who married herself, maybe a friend of a friend, or else an urban myth. It seemed stupid to her, exhibitionist, futile. Edith was alone too, but engaged to a ghost, the man who left her first then died, as if to make his point. No one else would bear witness. She could pretend though, a fake wedding with a real ring. The snow was falling fast. She held up her hand. The diamond winked, complicit with the snowflakes. She remembered him coming up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing her neck. ‘Cutchin my love, I’ll never leave you.’ ‘Cutchin’ was the name of his cat, he couldn’t even be bothered to invent a personal nickname for her.

The dizziness would pass. She hadn’t eaten all day. Her skin felt tight on her face. She was young, the cold reminded her of this fact, usually something to revel in but now she experienced a sense of bitter pointlessness. Life stretched ahead, a too-bright tunnel. She would never again find love like this, a forcefield around her chest. That she could carry on, put one foot in front of the other, seemed impossible, sickmaking.

She returned to the hostel. She borrowed a floaty white nightie from her mum, put it on and sat writing at the cramped little desk.