In order to consume their punishment with their pleasure, which some might call a convenience, they were stoned. Nick remembered a friend at school saying — and this was the best advertisement for drugs he’d heard — ‘If you are stoned you can do anything.’ Why was living the problem? If he looked around at his friends and acquaintances, how many of them were able to survive unaided? They sought absence until they had become like a generation lost to war. Those who survived were sitting in shell-shocked confessional circles in countryside clinics. He suspected they had left success to fools and mediocrities. By midnight he was rarely able to see in front of him; he and Natasha held one another up, like the vertical arms of a staggering triangle. Sobriety was a terror, though they couldn’t remember why, and their heroes, legends, myths, were hopeless incompetents, death-soaked tragic imaginations.
He saw people going to heroin like a fate; imagining you could shun it was arrogant or solemn. Nick had wanted to find like-minded people; he turned them into his jailers. He recalled people in rubber masks, coming at him like executioners. It was arduous work, converting people into objects, when he had not been brought up to it
Midday one morning he woke up at her place. He rose and lumbered about, reacquainting himself with an unfamiliar object, his body. He had been whipped, badly; his face and hands were grazed, too: he must have fallen somewhere and no one, not even him, had noticed.
Somehow she had gone to work, leaving him a note. ‘Remember, Remember!’ she had scrawled in lipstick.
Remember what? Then it returned. His task was to withdraw three thousand pounds from his bank account, which, apart from his flat, was all he had and buy drugs from a man who sold everything, but only in large amounts. It would save them the trouble of having to score continually. In two hours he would have the drugs; minutes later the cocaine would be working, stealing another day and night of his life. Natasha would return; there was a couple they were to meet later; there would be cages, whips, ice, fire.
There had been the death-laden ways of teachers and employers, and there had been rebellion, drugs, pleasure. No one had shown him what a significant life was and the voices that spoke in his head were not kind.
And yet something occurred to him. He walked out of the flat and kept walking through his pain until he reached the suburbs; at last he fell through fields and fields. He never returned to her place. The rest was a depressing cold abstinence and mourning, sitting at his desk half the day, every day, repeatedly summoning a half-remembered discipline, wishing someone would lash him to the chair. Those characters in Chekhov’s plays, forever intoning ‘work, work, work’. How stale a prayer, he thought, as though the world was better off for the slavery in it. But boredom was an antidote to unruly wishes, quelling his suspicion that disobedience was the only energy. He had to teach himself to sit still again.
After a freezing month he rediscovered capability and audacity. Even the idea of public recognition returned, along with competitiveness, envy, and a little pride. He made her leave him alone, and when they met again, tentatively, his fear of any addiction, which had saved him, but which was also the fear of relying on anyone — some addictions are called love — meant he could not like her any more. What could they do together? It wouldn’t have happened to the ideal, desirable Natasha.
*
She had pressed a small envelope into his palm.
‘There.’
He glanced down.
She said, ‘You’d be making a mistake to think it was the other things I liked, when it was our talks and your company. You’re sweet, Nick, and strangely polite at times. I can’t put that together with all you’ve done to me.’ She touched his hand. ‘Go on.’
‘Now?’
‘Then we’ll walk.’
In the park toilet a boy stood in a cubicle with his trousers down, bent over. His father wiped him, helping him with his belt, zip and buttons. Nick went into the next cubicle and closed the door. He would open the envelope, have a look for old times’ sake, and return it. She had had the day she had wanted.
His hands were shaking. He held it in his palm, before opening it. A gram of fine grains, untouched. Heavenly sand. His credit card was in his back pocket.
He returned to her.
He said, ‘I took the parts of you I needed to make my book. It wasn’t a fair or final judgement but a practical transformation, in order to say something. Someone in a piece of fiction is a dream figure … picked from one context and thrust into another, to serve some purpose. A tiny portion of them is used.’
She nodded but had lost interest.
They walked by the pond, the cascade and the cricket pitch. Children played on felled logs; people sketched and painted; on pedestals, the heads of Roman emperors looked on. Nick and Natasha stepped from patches of vivid sunlight into cooler tunnels. The warm currents had turned chilly. As the sky darkened, the clouds turned crimson. Parents called to their children.
She started to cry.
‘Nick, will you take me out of here?’
‘If you want.’
‘Please.’
She put her dark glasses on and he led her past dawdling families to the gate.
In his car she wiped her face.
‘All those respectable white voices behind high walls. The wealth, the cleanliness, the hope. I was getting agoraphobic. It all makes me sick with regret.’
She was trembling. He had forgotten how her turmoil disturbed him. He was becoming impatient. He wanted to be at home when Lolly got back. He had to prepare the food. Some friends were coming by, with their new baby.
She said, ‘Aren’t we going to have a drink? Is this the way? Where are we now?’
‘Look‚’ he said.
He was driving beside a row of tall, authoritative stucco houses with pillars and steps. Big family cars sat in the drives. Across the narrow road was a green; overlooked by big trees there were tennis courts and a children’s playground. During the week children in crisp uniforms were dropped off and picked up from school; in the afternoons Philippino and East European nannies would sit with their charges in the playground. This was where he lived now, though he couldn’t admit it.
‘We are thinking of moving here‚’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
‘There’s no point asking me‚’ she said. ‘Everything has become very conventional. You’re either in or you’re out. I’m with the out — with the weird, the impossible, the victimised and the broken. It’s the only place to be.’
‘Why turn habit into principle?’
‘I don’t know. Nick, take me to one of the old places. We’ve got time, haven’t we? Are you bored by me?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I’m so glad.’
He drove to one of their pubs, with several small rooms, blackened ceilings, benches and big round tables. He ordered oysters and Guinness.
As he sat down he said embarrassedly, ‘Have you got any more of that stuff?’
‘If you kiss me‚’ she said.
‘Come on‚’ he said.
‘No‚’ she said, putting her face close to his. ‘Pay for what you want!’
He pushed his face into her warm mouth.
She passed him the envelope. ‘If you don’t leave some I’ll kill you.’
‘Don’t worry‚’ he said.
‘I will‚’ she said. ‘Because I know what saved you — greed.’ She was looking at him. ‘My place? Don’t look at your watch. Just for a little bit, eh?’
*
He could tell from the flat that she hadn’t gone crazy. The furniture wasn’t frayed or stained; there were flowers, a big expensive sofa with books on nutrition balanced on the arm. The records were no longer on the floor. She had CDs now, in racks, alphabetical. As usual there were music papers and magazines on the table. She went to put on a CD. He hoped it wouldn’t be anything he knew.