It struck Kathy that she was not unevasive herself. Take her novels. She liked to steal other people’s stories, just lift them wholesale. I am Toulouse Lautrec, I’m a totally hideous monster. I’m too ugly to go out into the world. I am Laure the schoolgirl, I thought you didn’t notice me because I’m so invisible. I’m born poor St Helen’s Isle of Wight. 1790. As a child I have hardly any food to eat. Behind her an Australian girl was on the phone to her mother. It’s an eleventh-century village, it’s not very baby-friendly, it’s beautiful, no it’s beautiful here. She had silver flatforms and Kathy hated her because the previous day she’d stolen her sunlounger, literally just lifted her towel and books off it and dumped them on the ground. I read an article about how self-soothing is good for babies, I’m a bit worried Laura’s going to believe in that shit. Yep she said eleven times. Exactly. Oh fuck, now she was talking about her breast enlargements. It should take four months for the swelling to go down, if in four months they’re still too big for my liking I can have a one-night operation a very non-invasive procedure. We think we want to build a house rather than buy a house. What was she, twenty-four. We might fly to Mexico on 21 September. Well, nothing’s set in stone. Jamaica, would you be okay with Jamaica? It was all the same thing, it was the world talking. You couldn’t hate it, or you did but that was just more of the same, another opinionated little voice in an indecently augmented chorus.
KNOTS
Kathy did not have a happy time in Rome. It was too hot, the taxi driver’s air conditioning had broken on Friday, it was now Sunday 6 August 2017, the taxi was its own ecosystem of damp woolly air. She and her husband lay naked on their hotel bed and panted. Then they went for a walk which accidentally transitioned into going to mass. Kathy hadn’t been to mass since some time in the 1980s, she forgot to genuflect and then crossed herself with the wrong hand. There were two nuns in the front with lovely gauzy veils. The priest gave a sermon in Italian in which the word WhatsApp was frequently discernible. Kathy felt moved and then hot and then irritable and then absolutely claustrophobic. They had a dinner reservation, she didn’t have time for this. She got up and edged her way to the door. Children were gallivanting in the aisle, it wasn’t like St Joseph’s circa 1983.
In the restaurant Kathy and her husband had an enormous fight. It started because she put two of his prosciutto and fig ciabattas on her plate. He had four, they were enormous doughy pillows, the same unpleasant temperature as the room. Her husband was furious but Kathy’s fury as ever was larger and less ambiguous. She maintained it at the same pitch for several hours, hissing and eye-rolling, the whole works. She had a vicious stomach ache, she might plausibly faint, there was a full moon but her husband couldn’t even follow the bouncing blue dot on Google Maps, craning over his phone with his mouth hanging open. She hated him, she hated any kind of warmth or dependency, she wanted to take up residence as an ice cube in a long glass of aqua frizzante. Anyway they sorted it out, after she’d banished him to the lobby and sweated alone for 45 minutes, examining the world by way of her scrying glass, Twitter.
Now they were in the air, Italy like a cauliflower protruding beneath them, extending into a really blue luminous expanse of sea, a green hem by the beaches like boiled glass. A small white plane moved rapidly through a different shelf of air. At the airport Kathy had become a connoisseur of T-shirts. I Only like Positive People. Hello darling Happy Spring. The best T-shirt she’d ever seen was in the ready-meal aisle in Brighton Waitrose, well it ain’t going to suck itself. A Brazilian boy had once come up to Kathy in there, hands shaking, whole body trembling, and asked if she’d sleep with him. She’d just swum round the ruins of the West Pier, she was giving off some kind of wild energy, a person who didn’t give a fuck about personal safety or concealed dangers. She still remembered how it felt to reach open water, the way her body was tugged and slammed, the sense she’d had of a vast metal skeleton just below the surface, girders poking up like fork prongs. Beneath her the sea, beneath her a mountain range with its own armada of creamy cloud.
Sometimes I drag my lover into the shade of soto-portego, inside a dark corte, I steal a voluptuous embrace. Back home, back in England, Kathy was reading about Venice. She also read a humorous article about make up for vaginas and the beginning and end of an essay in the London Review of Books about young men escaping Mosul. I never saw such terrified people in my life as a group of young men who had run away from Mosul waiting to be vetted by Iraqi security to see if they were former IS fighters. Two men of military age went into a tent for questioning. They were carried to the camp hospital on stretchers two hours later covered in blood. There was currently, Kathy thought, a problem with putting things together. It had always been a problem but the blind spot had been bigger. Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own. Now, perhaps because of the internet, it was like the blind spot had got very small, and motionful like a marble. You couldn’t rely on it. You could go on holiday but you knew corpses washed up there, if not now then then, or later.
There is no away to throw things to, that was an environmental slogan Kathy had internalised several decades ago, which was why she was having to find homes for the several dozen almost empty bottles, tins and spray-cans of cleaning products she’d hoarded in her various cupboards, believing it was better if she did her share of custodianship rather than dumping everything in the landfill in which they’d all soon be living.
She was moving house, she was finally and unequivocally moving in with her husband. She’d been living for nearly a year now in his much larger substantially more desirable house, but she’d kept on her own, first because of her abnormal need for solitude/escape hatches, then because she had to have somewhere to fuck Sébastien. That’s an expensive trick pad, Joseph had told her when she unpacked the whole thing for him on Avenue A. They were in a diner they liked called Yucca. Every time she returned to New York she walked down A in terror lest Yucca be shuttered. It was holding out for now, unlike Gracefully or French Roast or the willow outside the Avenue C version of 9th St Espresso. They sat outside always, once they’d been verbally attacked there by a Ukrainian witch, an event Joseph perpetually tried to spin into a blessing. Anyway it was a nice place, the huevos rancheros were notably yolky. And Joseph was right, it was an expensive trick pad and since the trick had flown it was time to do without it.
Kathy had removed all the things she actually liked and was surprised at how little attachment she now felt to what had been her cherished and longish-term home. She put things in a bag, she put the bag in the bin, she wheeled the bin outside the house. They weren’t curable, she didn’t need them, they were broken and hopeless. 6% of her possessions had already gone to one of three charity shops, she was purging and experiencing a little of the pure light-headed ecstasy she habitually felt after being violently sick. Saintly, even. Divested of mismatched socks, old bottles of nail varnish remover, bags of soda crystals someone else had abandoned. The soda crystals were unopened. She snatched them back and put them in the car.
A funny thing: she’d begun hearing voices. It had happened now three times in maybe six days, that she’d find she’d tuned into a frequency in which a human voice was whispering, just below the threshold of actual words, a sort of impassioned mumble, a communicative withholding tone. Eventually the line would sever. It had happened once when she was lying on her lounger with the breast augmentation woman behind her. That time the voice was incantatory and not a little malevolent; for a minute she genuinely thought the woman was cursing her, before she realised she was wearing earbuds that might plausibly be leaking. The next time, also in Italy, she’d distinctly heard her husband muttering something, which woke her abruptly up, only he wasn’t in the room and indeed when questioned had been in the pool. Sometimes Kathy’s mind ran too fast, it was very pleasurable and almost invariably was the prelude to a migraine. She wasn’t worried about the voices. They were just the uninvited accompaniment to a change in her way of life, an auditory elevator between floors.