Stalling. Sorry. Pitiful.
I’ve seen photos, obviously. She hasn’t changed much. The hair’s still warm golden and prone to tangles, but shoulder-length now, not the spine-long treasure that drove Gunn potty. The green eyes still have it. Beauty, of course, but life, time, history, thinking, pain. Less curiosity than the Gunn Penelope. Less curiosity, more life.
She lectures. There’s a one-bedroomed garden flat. A cat called Norris and two unchristened goldfish. There are men, when she feels like it: illicitly indulged-in post-grads from time to time; these or wild cards picked up during assaults on the city’s nightlife (her and her debauched mate Susan); but since Gunn she’s treasured her own space, a burrow to which she can retreat and brood; a smouldering Marlboro, a bottle of plonk, the garden at evening, its anarchy of birdsong. There’s been a woman, too (footage Gunn would have paid cash money to see), a PhD third-year with feisty black eyes and wet-gelled hair who wore tan leather strides and what must have been cripplingly expensive silk shirts. Laura. Smelled of lemons and Impulse Musk. Deeply exciting for Penelope, initially, her adventure at the Looking Glass. Ultimately no more manageable than the half-dozen straight lovers since Gunn.
The green leather jacket hangs on the back of the kitchen door. She sits opposite me at the stripped oak dining table, in profile, her arms around her knees, her bare feet up on the chair next to her. The kitchen’s door opens directly onto the bright garden. I’m tempted to giggle, glimpsing it, remembering my unseemly moments back at St Anne’s. She’s opened the wine I brought – not plonk, but an extortionately expensive Rioja – but both of us take our first gulps without the bother of a (to what, exactly?) cheers.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I say.
She swallows, takes another quick sip. Swallows again. I know what she’s thinking. I’m about to tell her that: Penelope, my darling, I know what you’re thinking, I’m about to say, when she turns, suddenly, and faces me.
‘Declan,’ she says. ‘Don’t think – please don’t think the scale of it’s diminished. Please don’t think I’ve just comfortably assimilated it, what I’ve done. What I did. I know you think that.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘And don’t think that I expect you to have stopped hating me, because I haven’t. I know what a fucking vile and ugly thing it was. I know. I know. You wrong someone . . . When you wrong someone, in the old-fashioned way . . .’
Astonishing. Tears. Jumping Jimmeny Christmas. She moves fast, this girl. It’s been two-and-a-half years, going on. Gunn turns up, they open a bottle of wine, he tells her he wants to talk to her and zappo – the heart opens its wound and starts to bleed all over the place. (It is, you must concede, unpleasantly messy, this business of having feelings, this mattering to each other. I’ve always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually occurring road accident – everyone going too fast, too close, without due care and attention, or with too much . . .)
This is sweet, I’m thinking. Gunn, who despises her for having made him love her then betraying him, would want my guts for garters if he were here – which wouldn’t be a good idea, since they’re his guts, too – if he had the faintest inkling of what I’m about to do.
‘It was a fucking hideous thing,’ Penelope says. ‘It was. I know it was.’
‘Would you mind if I had one of those?’ I say, indicating the open-flapped pack of Marlboro next to her hand. She’s blank in response, a ravaged tissue held to her suddenly reddened nose. I see I’ve switched to the wrong level. (Damned impulsive desires, you see? How do you cope? I mean it just came over me, right then, that I really wanted a cigarette. I’d left my Silk Cut on the blasted train.) She’s so deep in her own feeling awful that it barely even grazes her, that I’m bothering about things like cigarettes. I take one anyway and light up.
‘What I mean is . . . Declan please don’t tell me you hate me. I know you do. And you’ve the right. Just please, please don’t say it here, now. I promise you I hate myself enough for both of us.’
I’m tempted to let her run on. I mean come on, it is rather charming, her misery, her guilt, finally, especially since her entire identity’s been built on knowing the right thing to do – then doing it. Not that she’s been perfect, of course. There have been slips, stumbles, days of laziness or existential ennui – but there hasn’t been a fall, not like the one precipitated by Declan’s unfortunately swollen head. She’s hard on herself. She remembers the past. Susan tells her, invariably, on their splurges: Your fucking trouble is you can’t let go of the past. Her cider-and-black flavoured breath beats against Penelope’s face. How can you expect to live if you’ve still got your head buried in the past? It’s not my head, Penelope’s wanted to groan. It’s my heart.
Now, here, I’m afraid, is where the atrocities begin. (My fingers hesitate at Gunn’s greasy keys. I’ve already stalled myself with three cups of Earl Grey and six cigarettes. If it weren’t for your language being so blatantly designed for deception, all this telling the truth would have me worried. Professional reputation and all that. However . . .) The most extraordinary thing. How to say this? I . . . I find myself . . .
Look I’m no fool. I’ve got used to bits and bobs of Gunn cropping up in my behaviour, the odd fingerprint here and there. I knew it was never going to be a clean distinction (the body has its limits on how many things you can let pass through – don’t I know from previous possessions? All that rot and stench? Involuntary snatches of nursery rhymes or surprise waves of tenderness at the appearance of a favourite teddy? Goes with the territory); but this. . . this is something entirely different. What we’re talking about here is the . . . the wholesale import of a particular feeling that I didn’t have to start with, suddenly, directly from Gunn’s past into my present. I open my mouth to begin what I’ve come here to begin – and find myself in an agony of hatred and pain. (Don’t get me wrong. If I’m familiar with anything I’m familiar with hatred and pain. Hatred and pain are my blood and bones, so to speak, my spirit’s dress, my odours, my shape, my – well, we’ve covered this. The point is that’s fine with me because it’s my hatred, my pain. I mean they affirm the continuity of my identity if nothing else. This, on the other hand, pitches up in me like an obstreperous and lightning-quick gatecrasher. One minute it isn’t there, the next it is – and I find myself – get this – hating Penelope. (There’s an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It’s insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.) I sit there with my mouth open filled with human pain and human anger. She was there, a voice is saying (Gunn’s presumably), all naked and warm with her hair spread around her in the bed that we’d . . . In the bed . . . How could she and think of it think of it go on her sucking his cock and swallowing his come and go on THINK OF IT HER FUCKING TONGUE IN HIS MOUTH AND HIS FACE HIS FACE AND HER FACE AND SHE WAS SHE WAS YOU KNEW WHAT SHE LOOKED LIKE AND NOW HE DOES TOO YOU THINK OF IT YOU MISERABLE FUCKING SHIT WRETCH AND YOU’VE DONE NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING EXCEPT WANT TO FUCKING DIE.