What Kathy was supposed to be doing was planning her wedding. She did this by looking through pictures on Instagram and making unkind comments. That’s very vulgar, she or her husband would say. Chairs and tables, napkins, that’s very vulgar. At this rate they’d end up getting married in a car park.
Kathy loved her husband. Last night they’d been forced to give a reading together, which wasn’t exactly her bag, and yet she’d found herself pleased to hear his poems, like someone wiggling a key in the lock of language, it’s jammed, it’s jammed, and then abruptly stepping through. For some reason there were three psychiatrists at the reading, one apparently very eminent and two from Sheffield, still in their swimsuits. A patrician man sat at the back and called out questions. There’s hope for us all, he said, inexplicably. At dinner that night Kathy found herself sitting next to him. Felicia, Felicia, he said, this is the writer. Felicia had the lock-jaw of the seriously posh. Kathy recoiled into her amuse-bouche, a fishy white sliver, and waited for the moment to pass.
Tomorrow it’s going to be 41 degrees, her husband said. That’s 106 in Fahrenheit. So when people in India and the Gulf States have temperatures of 50 that’s very hot. No wonder they’re dying. Pretty much 30 degrees above normal blood temperature. He was wearing a pink T-shirt and his left leg, which he’d burned earlier in the week, had begun to peel. A drill had started up somewhere. Kathy was writing everything down in her notebook, and had become abruptly anxious that she might exhaust the present and find herself out at the front, alone on the crest of time – absurd, but sometimes don’t you think we can’t all be moving through it together, the whole green simultaneity of life, like sharks abruptly revealed in a breaking wave? Possibly her speeding thoughts presaged a migraine, possibly. On Twitter a Chinese photographer had gone missing. She’d last been seen at the funeral of her husband, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize and then spent the rest of his life in prison. Kathy had seen a photo of her, tightly wound in sunglasses. Anyway, she’d gone. And there’d been a statement from the government that had stuck in her mind, something about discarding the ashes in the sea, was that right. When the accusations about Jimmy Savile reached a pitch of plausibility his gravestone had been taken up in the night and ground into gravel and used to resurface roads. This too didn’t sound quite right but that’s how Kathy remembered it. The Jimmy Savile dust could be anywhere by now, sticking to car tyres and inching relentlessly off the island, no doubt especially on ferries. Evil was a subject of interest for Kathy, she wasn’t squeamish, she’d worked years in a strip joint in Times Square, she knew about appetite and dead eyes. She used to do a Santa Claus routine, anything not to be bored, releasing her flat little fried-egg tits into the eyes of the world. Nobody knew anything about life who hadn’t breathed a good lug of that pissy, spunky air, oh Kathy’d really seen it all. I want to know why a president is always a john and never a hooker, Zoe Leonard once wrote in a famous much-reproduced poem and Kathy felt like it was still a good question now, why some people always bought and never sold.
She was forty. She’d had breast cancer twice, she’d barely ever not had some kind of STD, she spent more time in the GUM clinic than her own front room. She’d owned several apartments in several countries, selling and buying, trying to take advantage of shifts in the market, mostly failing. People took her photograph often, she’d ditched the old look, her head wasn’t shaved now, she was a true bottle-blonde. She had a thrift-shop Chanel suit hanging in her room, far too hot for that here, dumb to put it in her case even, though she had hopes for Rome. Is it hot in Rome she asked her husband and he replied with a grunt. So maybe the suit was a waste of space, so what. Tomorrow they were supposed to be going to dinner with a famous opera singer, right here in the Tuscan hills. The patrician man came past, slapping in his sandals. Not a bad life, he said. Insparring. He was hosting a toga party that night and was concerned about noise. Kathy had recently complained to the owner of the hotel about a drone some guests had been flying above her sunlounger. She didn’t like being watched and she didn’t like the sound, which at first she’d mistaken for an especially agitated bee. The owner agreed with her, he had many famous guests, names you’d know immediately, and he didn’t think drones had a place here. It struck Kathy now that she too was a kind of drone and that perhaps what she was doing, writing everyone down in her little book, wasn’t exactly gracious. Then again she liked the idea of herself up in the air with her compound eyes, hovering, havering, gathering data. There used to be bombing raids right here, her husband had told her. He was an expert on bombing but he had not, he said, known that the Americans had bombed civilians in Italy. I was surprised that the Americans had been so assiduous about bombing and strafing civilians, he said. And children. It was a fact that a great deal of people had been killed right here, of many different nationalities and political allegiances, partisans soldiers prisoners of war farmers refugees the starving people who walked from Rome and Siena and sat at the gates, waiting for food. A few days back there had been a wedding at the hotel, and Kathy had sat with a lunchtime beer and watched some florists from Florence assembling a complicated half-arch out of pink roses. Also watching was an elderly man whose father had been shot dead right there in the square, in the last year of the war. There was a plaque about it, which later the bride stood under for her official photograph. That was history, that was how it went, now they were tearing out all the 1970s ceilings and making it look medieval again, only with rainfall showers. It was hopeless, it was crazy, just the mess that time made. A little white road through the valley, that was the ground, but you could draw pretty much anything on top, bodies or children with tubas or a Ferrari being towed by a pick-up.
At lunch, more pork, the patrician man and his wife were at the next table. Again, he leant over. Where are you getting married, he said. Kathy didn’t know how he knew she was getting married and frankly she wasn’t thrilled about it. Dick, she muttered under her breath. His name was Henry, she didn’t even need to ask, she could just tell. Henry chuntered for a while about shadow Labour ministers being thick as shit. She turned down the peerage Felicia said. I’m not surprised, she’d been passed over twice. Kathy liked proximity to people with information, she wouldn’t have been a good spy, it all went through her, like a sieve. She just wanted to nibble on it for a minute. Henry was handsome. He looked like an untrustworthy fox in a Disney film. A very short fat man came into the bar and greeted everyone by name.
While Kathy was watching the preparations for the wedding she’d absolutely and completely forgotten she was about to have one of her own. She’d actually already purchased the dress, Isabel Marant, too short, no surprises there. Some people she knew, friends really, had expressed surprise and doubt that Kathy would be willing to share the spotlight for long enough to actually make her vows. She’d once physically pushed another writer off the stage and she had a lot of subtler moves too.
Lots of things happened that night, 3 August 2017. For example Kathy met a major donor to the Democratic Party. As it happened this was the second major donor to the Democratic Party she’d met in two days. They know Hillary really well, someone told her. The donor had an extraordinary daughter called Dahlia, who was the most poised person Kathy had ever met. She was wearing a clinging dress that had been crocheted in several strong colours, blue and yellow and black, and she looked terrific, really lovely. She was nineteen, maybe twenty, and she ran the conversation like a world-class tennis player, serving generously, returning every ball. Nice she said fondly when an adult nervously volunteered information about their home life or occupation. Nice. Next! She told Kathy about what politics meant and also what engineering meant and the differing but similar ways in which they could change the world. Her mother leaned in to volunteer that she too was writing a book, though it was going quite slowly what with living between LA, Tuscany and Israel and having several houses and working in the film business and giving up a year to volunteer for Hillary. What Kathy really wanted was for them to Dish about the victory night non-party, but that wasn’t happening. The conversation moved on to kosher food. At my brother’s bar mitzvah, Dahlia told Kathy, the hotel wouldn’t serve cake after meat. And we were like it’s a party and they were like it’s a kosher hotel. We got round it though. We got them to serve it at midnight. Yeah, we had to have cake.