Читать книгу Twelve - Vanessa Jones - Страница 7

one

Every Friday night we rehearse the desertion of the city. Its pull becomes a push – a heartbeat pumping us out – to its limits and beyond. Trouble is we’ve got varicose veins. Or gout – look at this road. Stasis. We’re always stuck on this spooky bit of road, and it is always the same. Once it must have been a normal slice of quiet suburbia, but now most of the houses are boarded up: sold to the department of transport, bought by the department of road expansion, leased to the drivers of these cars.

One resident in every ten is hanging on. And they have painted their cause on the boards of their neighbours, their rantings against the drivers and their exhausts, dirt, noise. But I have only ever seen this in evidence and never the protesters themselves. ‘Time is suspended here,’ I say to Edward, who’s driving. ‘The anti-car campaigners always in precisely this state of invisible outrage, the cars in exactly this state of non-movement.’ Every moment is a freeze-frame in an action movie – it is a sculpture, a still life.

He doesn’t answer because he’s considering his next move in a word game we’re playing, a meaningless game, the way to win it is not to come to the end of it, its only point is to pass the time. ‘How apt,’ I think, and laugh. I say ‘Everything’s a metaphor,’ and then, ‘– I love statements like that which prove your point.’

Edward says, ‘You talk absolute shit, do you know that, Lily?’

‘The car is the city’s metaphor for freedom,’ I say, ‘its get-out clause’ – but once in, freedom is lost. We have no choice but to go with this not-so flow. Breathing in. People use this gas to kill themselves!

‘T-H-M,’ says Edward.

Country weekends. Weekends away. ‘I’m going away for the weekend.’ Maybe one day no one will live in the country. Perhaps one day it will be populated only from Friday evenings till Monday mornings and the city in hush.

‘Your go,’ says Edward. ‘God, this is boring.’

‘Well, we could have a conversation.’

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘You start.’

Edward and I are friends. We are better friends in theory than in practice. I love him, but what does that mean? We are going to his parents’ house, which is my favourite house – I love it and I like to think I have an understanding with it. It is elegant and grand, it is family and snug. How? Every room I want to breathe-in. I am always given the same bedroom, which I call Lily’s Room, but Edward’s family call it Bobbin’s room after some great aunt who lived there once. It feels like home to me but it is not my home, and I do not belong to it.

When we arrive, we’ll see through the window Edward’s parents sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen. If you go in through the back door (and I have never been in through the front), the first room you come to is the kitchen. It is dark, in the way that a wood is dark. We’ll leave our bags in the car. We’ll walk in looking exhausted and dirty in the way parents expect, and secretly like. Edward’s mum will make room for us at the table. She’ll jump up and try to fetch us things, and Edward and his dad will tell her to sit back down. Then the others will arrive and there’ll be a general commotion involving luggage and kisses and fragments of lives. There’ll be a massive lasagne for supper and a treacle tart and after Edward’s parents have gone to bed, we’ll go into the drawing room and drink coffee, and take drugs.

I often wonder how much our parents would like us if they knew the whole truth.

Edward has quite an odd collection of friends which he likes to mix and match on these weekends. And although some of them look like they’re mutual, really I only see them these days by proxy, when I’m with him. We look uncomfortable in the drawing room. We are neither old enough nor young enough to own it. We look like props on the over-stuffed sofas, smugly smoking our joints or, now that we all have a bit more money, snorting a surreptitious line of cocaine. We are an uneasy mix of tailored suits and denim jackets. We have almost completely let go our dreams into the i-wish abyss. But not quite. Another year perhaps, two? at most five.

We’re never at our best on Friday nights. Something it is about coming to the country. We all invest the ‘country’ with some sort of healing power, and I don’t know whether it actually possesses it, but I do think it’s odd that anyone should lead a life they need constant respite from. Tonight I’ll go to bed earlier than I have done all week. Tonight I’ll sleep in Lily’s bed, next to the window which looks out onto fields of sheep. I’ll read a few lines of the Agatha Christie novel that’s always on the bedside table and listen to the silence. It’ll be dark. Properly dark like it is in a memory. No dreams.

After breakfast, before lunch, we go for a walk. To nowhere in particular. Edward’s garden becomes fields becomes the whole wide world. It is summer and the trees look heavy. Flowers bud bloom and rot on their stalks – decadence. If Edward’s mum had come with us we should have heard the names of them all, but today she doesn’t come. Too busy in her usually mysterious way. I’ve never met a mother who isn’t. They make lists, which sometimes branch off into sublists: a, b, c, d. In her absence I ask Edward to name everything. It is another game we play. If he doesn’t know, he knows to make it up. I find this delightful, like being a gummy child. Or Eve.

He points out to the others the line of cedars visible from this hill. He has taught me to love cedars – the elegant stillness of their elongated limbs – but weeping beeches are my favourite trees. They look like the sea stopped. There is one in his garden, and sitting under it I get a panoramic view of everyone’s calves playing croquet. There are sounds but not the words they are making. I’m wondering what Edward talks about when I’m not there and whether he has the same conversations. The light under here is the same as the light of the kitchen. Hands on mallets on balls. Clock-clock.

He is a fanatic games player, Edward. Chinese checkers, bridge, chess and on rainy days, Risk. I have spent whole weekends watching him try for world domination. He tells me that tonight will be perfect for murder so we bring the dining room outside. Tablecloth, candles, the whole kit and boodle. It is an old crone of a moon. Ace of hearts kills; Jack detects.

Edward says ‘the secret of life is to enjoy the world without wanting to possess it’ – but not everyone can borrow such an eden. I feel like pointing this out to him as we drive past the high-rises on the way back to town. I don’t, because we’re having an argument. The same argument we always have on the way back home about me, and how I expect to be driven to my front door. I quite like it because by the time it’s over we have driven to my front door. Rewind. All return journeys are shorter, like the last half of the week once you’ve got past the hill of Thursday, 12 p.m.

Tonight Shirley is watering the hollyhock in her front garden. I say garden, but really it is just the space between the road stop and her house start. She planted it out last year and this summer her hollyhock has swollen to gigantic proportions. It really is an extraordinary sight, barely diminished by her presence next to it.

I have discovered that it is a mistake to make friends with your next door neighbours. I can’t slide into my house now without having some intercourse with her and tonight I’m just not in the mood. It’s the same as going back to school after the long summer holidays. You’ve got something precious from home in your bag, and suddenly you see your teacher or your best friend and it’s sullied. You’re back down to earth and it was only a dream – silly. When I get in I’ll put a bag of blueberries down, and Edward’s mum’s chocolate brownies, and they’ll seem completely out of place and stupid. I’ll go to my room, and it will look like time hasn’t passed, like nothing’s happened. I can’t bear it. I want to hold on for a bit longer before I believe it. ‘Put your sunglasses on,’ says Edward. I do, I get away with ‘Nice weekend?’ and ‘Yes, thank you.’

At the moment, everything reminds me of being at school. Our individual lives are minute replicas of our whole species’ evolution. When a baby gets up onto its two legs it becomes homo erectus, becomes homo sapiens. Thinking man. It occurred to me at the ends of term that the school was a magnet momentarily switched off scattering us, its iron filings, into the beyond. This is how I feel again on Friday nights when we abandon our city, one day never to return. But which day? We live in the meantime. At school there is that sense of another life that will be yours, and now I sense it too. Home – not far away, but too far to touch.

In the meantime, this is my home. Josh is in the kitchen smoking a cigarette. There are five clean shirts on the table beside him, sunday-evening-newly-ironed. The working week is a steep rock face, and tonight is for laying out our crampons. Tomorrow we’ll put on our garb and ointments and we’ll leave the tent for the week ahead. Monday morning a little slow, but we’re picking up momentum. We’re more in the flow by Tuesday; throw the rope, click the clip, up a bit. On Wednesday we can neither see the ground beneath nor the summit above us, we’re dangling on Wednesday. Then dragging ourselves up by our fingernails on Thursday and panting at 12 p.m. Thursday afternoon is – the edge of the abyss: the relief, the run towards it, the ground falling away, time accelerating, it’s a roller coaster we’re on, we’re all feeling a little hysterical, silly we somersault towards The Weekend.

Tonight is just the beginning. Tonight I’m not looking forwards, I’m remembering. I’m hanging onto time and willing it to slow down. I kiss Josh’s forehead. I take my mementos out of my bag and as I predicted they look vaguely flat and tired. Still. They’re still brownies, they’re still blueberries and cream, and one of life’s treats. Josh and I eat them in the garden with a cup of coffee. He swings his legs up onto the bench so his knees hold his elbows hold his hands hold his head. He says he thinks the most highly-evolved form of life is the jellyfish and wishes he could be one, floating. He is one big sigh Josh, and not always of relief.

In mawkish moments it has always been Josh and me. Before we met – I don’t like to think about it – I couldn’t survive it now that I know better. In that respect, perhaps, I’m with God and his adamance on the Tree of Knowledge – once you know things it is very hard to unknow them. It is Josh has created this garden, he insisted on it. He said, in the summer, it’s like having a spare room. It is too small for a lawnmower so he put down paving and a step. To cut us off from Shirley on one side and mr faceless on the other he erected a wooden fence that creaks like a ship in the wind. He doesn’t believe in buying plants, so from trips to the country, from front yards we passed on the street, from commemorative gardens in town he has ripped cuttings. Usually under cover of darkness, but never intended. His garden has grown exactly as he has grown, slowly and by series of chance. It is the same with all his possessions, furniture, clothes, books and friends. I try to be more like him but I am too much in a hurry. I have an idea and like to realise it all at once. He waits, and he finds the design by accident. He is far less often disappointed.

I don’t think I have ever seen the garden looking as real as it does this year. It has come into itself. The plants are growing so thickly that it looks like a secret, but still it manages to steal the sun. In it, on the paving, Josh has drawn a backgammon board in chalk. A game of skill and chance. He suggests one.

Could I ever not understand backgammon? could I survive without Josh? how did people get hold of me before my mobile phone? can we forget concepts once we have them? could we unlearn the word “car”? Luxury turns right turns given turns necessity. When I was younger I could almost have moved in with someone who lived in a barrel of water, but I have definite needs now, definite edges. I don’t understand how anyone manages to fall in love after the age of seventeen. I do understand claustrophobia.

Because every day I make the decision to see exclusively. I must not register certain realities – like: there is no silence, or: I am never further than ten feet away from another person above below left right – for I am going down a tunnel. And looking straight ahead it seems there is room to manoeuvre but noticing the backdrop is never starting again, and attempting to turn around is: panic.

Josh and I make packed lunches for each other. It started off as an economy drive but has become a game of surprise. It was his turn last week and on Wednesday he shocked me with a cockle sandwich. It was a coup, not least because he did it on the most uninspiring day of the week. This week it’s my go, and I’ve decided on a radically different approach, five days of egg mayonnaise. It’s a huge price for not-that-funny a joke I realise this morning as I’m slicing the bread. For a start, egg mayonnaise first thing. For another, I too have to eat it. For a third, if someone did it to me I’d think they were very sad. Will he? Well …? Here we go.

When we first started working, we used to smoke a joint before we left the house. I don’t know how we did it, it is entirely unthinkable now. At the least delay on the underground, we’d come home and phone in to say we were catching a bus. We did wonder if they could hear us filling the kettle on the end of the line, but we decided we didn’t care – they could sack us – then we’d roll another. Funny how you get over it without noticing. Funny how what the company does was once ‘what they do’ and is now ‘what we do’. Funny how it doesn’t hurt.

Still, Monday morning it is definitely them and us and ‘them’ is everyone apart from me and Josh. We stride to the station, we sandwich ourselves between varying amounts of aliens and we look straight ahead, soft focus.

So many people all rushing to do their jobs. I wish I knew whether they enjoyed them, or got from them some sense of satisfaction. To my mind, work is the most monumental waste of time. I know that I could be thinking a larger thought, or having a more interesting conversation elsewhere. But I suffer from a lack of imagination. I don’t know where elsewhere is, or how to make it pay my rent, I can’t picture anything that could keep me interested nine-to-five, monday-to-friday, forty-eight-weeks-of-the-year. And I’m inclined to believe that everyone agrees with me for if they didn’t, surely there’d be no such word as ‘holiday’. Watching them, joining them struggle for space in this survival-of-the-fittest test first thing in the morning, every morning, the city seems to me a complex organism with a terminal disease. The new age has notions which oppose its ethic – fitness, health food, relaxation – and the age of communication has negated its reason to be.

After twenty minutes, Josh goes east and I go west. When I was little, I used to steal application forms and leaflets from banks, and with some other small friend whose every detail is now lost to me, played ‘work’ which consisted of, fundamentally, filling in these forms and reorganising them in piles. This is pretty much what I find myself doing for real now and it’s somewhat lost its appeal. The origami heaps on my desk are exactly how I left them minus my friday-air of elation. As far as they’re concerned, the weekend was my illusion.

It is ironic that, as an atheist to the work ethic, I have incarnated as a recruitment consultant. It startles me sometimes that my journey to this point is entirely due to a secretarial course that I never wanted to take. If I could unlearn to type, how different my life might have been. I started here as a temporary secretary and I have never left. Well, you’ve got to do something and I’m no good at first days. On my first day at school I got sent to the corner for colouring the moon in yellow and not knowing why I’d used that colour; I hated being new and I was new often. Now, I’m an old hand and no longer a secretary, in fact I’ve got one of my own. He tells me this morning that I have wall-to-wall interviews till lunch time. Time will fly then. Then I’ll think of Josh, ignorantly tucking in.

Time is subjective. The interviewees sitting in reception find the ten minutes until I can see them an eternity of sweating palms. The fly on the wall beside them spies in an even slower motion which lets it dodge the swiftest of swatting hands. Someone has found life on Mars. Well. Even if it were more than a single-celled bacteria, it would be as distinct from a human as a fly, or a lion. It would have no knowledge of day or night, week weekend, month year century millennium. We have invented millennia. And although I know we’ve made them up, I can’t help but feel apocalyptic at this point in time, in the madness of weekday mornings, on the Friday nights when we abandon our metropolis, one day never to return.

The city is sick. At its centre is chaos because everyone within it is dispensable, yet the central icon of our times is: the individual. In a tunnel though, there is no direction but straight ahead. Evolution involves the collation of information, to no end but survival, but how will we survive? I may feel apocalyptic but I’ve no idea what should happen next, I suffer a lack of imagination. And so does everyone else, I imagine. We’re neither-nor. We laud people over machines, but we can’t help looking forward to the day when computers can make love to us. We’re unsure whether to live organically farming or safe within the helmet of a virtual world. It is the end of the decade, the century and the millennium. It is Thursday Afternoon all over the world and this is what I’m wondering: where are we going for the weekend?