In hindsight, gentle reader, I think even then I felt a bit sorry for Gunn, having so much rage and pain and so paltry a medium for its expression. I mean compared to me he’s in fetters. I’ve got the whole earth and everyone in it to give tongue to my grievances. What’s he got? English. I don’t know what I must look like, sitting there, fuming. A children’s cartoon steam train, perhaps, red-faced, pulling and puffing in a foul temper up a punishing hill. Whatever I look like, the important thing is what I feel like. And I feel – I can only assume – like Gunn. Drenched afresh in all that vivid moment’s rich treachery. The slowly opened door introducing the scene like an amoral master of ceremonies. Penelope on the bed. That . . . that (what? Bastard? Fucker? Cunt? Cocksucker? Nothing adequately labels the object of Gunn’s rage . . .), that man up on his elbows above her; his look of mild surprise; hers, turning to the yawning door, of death.
The need to hurt her, now, sitting in distress across the table from me, is overwhelming. Not physically – Gunn hasn’t got it in him, whatever his fantasy life might think – but with the mouth’s unstinted repertoire, the complete arsenal, the maximum yield.
Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt. The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jewelled with tears. She holds her own mouth on a tight rein. Remembering – it makes a frightful mess of the human face. I’ve seen it a billion times.
Now Penelope.
And the overwhelming desire and need is to hurt her. The words – Gunn’s words – swarm on my tongue as if some inner smoke is driving them from the head’s hive. But – (oh yes, but) – when I’ve got a plan I stick to it. Unlike some. If this is Limbo’d Gunn’s distant broadcast (note to self: summon bloody Nelchael for a long overdue progress report), he’s reckoned on too passive an audience. This isn’t about what cuckolded Declan wants – no matter how loud and clear his carcass shouts its absent soul’s mass of demands. It’s about what I want. Thus, stepping around it, so to speak, as one might a sensitively alarmed sculpture in a narrow gallery space, I reach out and take Penelope’s hot, tissue-clutching hand by its knuckles. She’s a good, strong, guilty girl, so she looks me in the eye.
‘That’s not what I came here for,’ I say, imagining Gunn tearing his incorporeal hair out, wherever he is. Penelope looks tired and all but irresistibly human – but I’m determined, now. (Besides, if I decide to stay – ha-ha – I might want her to be the mother of my children . . .) ‘I came here,’ I continue, dropping my glance to the mug-ringed table top in the manner of a person who, through a great and near-fatal struggle, has learned the virtue of kindness and humility, ‘to tell you . . . to tell you . . .’
‘Yes?’ The air-speech of the grief-ravaged larynx.
‘To tell you that . . . I . . . forgive you,’ (the words come with a strange ease once I’ve got that ‘forgive’ out), ‘without expectation of any kind. It was a betrayal, yes, but I’d betrayed you first. My fucking vanity. My idiotic, deluded vanity. If you wronged me, my love, it was because you were provoked by my wrong. I’m sorry for what I did, for what I became, for how ugly and false.’
I look back up at her. Her eyebrows have gone up in the middle and her lips are pursed. She doesn’t know what to do, what’s going on, whether she loves Gunn all over again, whether, even, this might not be a ruse, the opening device in an emotional booby trap. She’s (I like this word) flabbergasted.
‘I’m asking for nothing,’ I say, getting slowly to my feet and unwrapping my jacket (it’s been a wrench, I don’t mind telling you, slipping out of the Armani, the Gucci, the Versace, the Rolex, back into Gunn’s excruciatingly dull threads – but there was no point in complicating things) from the back of the chair. ‘This isn’t a request, or a plea, or a gesture that requires response. It’s just that I want you to live the rest of your life knowing that as far as I’m concerned you’re forgiven, and loved. The whole thing was my fucking fault.’
‘Declan . . . Oh, God, Declan I –’
‘Don’t say anything now. I just want to feel clean and right for once. We’re not stupid; there’s no point in talking about being friends or anything. I think we were too much to each other to be satisfied with that, now.’
I’m in two minds about the next bit – but it feels right, so I turn her hand over in mine and bend forward to leave a chaste kiss in its palm. She’s utterly astonished. (And would you believe it? A thought breaks through in her like a sunbeam: My God, I was right. My instincts were sound. He’s grown – but you have to have the potential for growth . . . Maybe . . . maybe . . .) But I’m gone. Out of the kitchen and down the hall while she’s still scraping her chair in getting up from the table. I deal with the front door myself (’Wait . . . Declan please wait . . .’) pull it shut behind me, then stride briskly away down the street. I feel her, of course. She comes to the door, opens it, looks out, sees the purposefulness and speed of my step, understands that now it must be left to germinate, that more words will ruin it. (Indeed they’ve ruined things enough for me, already, one way or another – but I’ll come to that in a moment.) Nothing has prepared me for how I feel. I flag a cab and fling myself into its gloom, barely capable of muttering a destination (’. . . station . . . Piccadilly . . .’) before feeling overwhelms me and I pass away into a terrible dream.
The first terrible part of this terrible dream was a merciless assault on my body. The train journey was bad enough (the train journey’s bad enough even if you’re tickety-boo in the health department, I’ll grant you): shivering, cold sweats, hot sweats, tommy-gun teeth, blood flecked with peppercorns and glass fragments, the fever taking and releasing me like an equivocating molester, every bone a bruise, flesh as if stripped of its dermis – you wouldn’t think, would you, that a mere seat cushion . . . A murmur in my ears like a Wimbledon crowd between games. Mere consciousness a terrible interrogation. By the time I staggered into my room at the Ritz it was all I could do to chug down a fifth of Jameson’s and collapse onto the imperial bed. I believe I tried to speak. Not English, you understand. No. My own language. A very bad idea. I was seized with convulsions. My tongue swelled and burned. I hurled myself from the mattress with the intention of crawling (slithering would have been more likely, ha very bloody ha) to the enormous bathroom with its cooling spirits of basin, bowl, bidet and bath. Another bad idea. I hit the deck to discover I was paralysed. My tongue detumesced and my guts fired out a spectacular arc of sulphurous vomit. Now I’m familiar with this sort of thing – you don’t get through the average possession without the odd gastric fiesta – but previous chunderings were picnics compared to the . . . the surrealist free-for-all to which I gave myself over that evening in my bathroom. I tried getting out of the body altogether: nothing doing. A wave of panic that sent through me, you can imagine. (S’all right. I’ve done it since. Must’ve been a temporary blockage on account of my . . . on account of what I was going through.) Things progressed. A chain-gang of fevers. Me babbling, incomprehensibly. I wouldn’t’ve believed myself capable of moving – let alone writing – but, since I have the sheet of Ritz stationery to prove it . . . Not that it makes any sense. Handwriting’s pretty atrocious, too. I can barely decipher it. 5%ityas 3insevvse££3 666666666theyiii ho yo hurthurtyoulove6$$$and evenb thetgloryisn’t you!!!!1youthought isn’tyouisn’you%$$was te of????y ou£££rexis 10sveig rof3”1””””!t ogoh$£$£ome