Dressing and undressing …
Such a tenderness for them overtaking … it being prudent that it should overtake … such a tenderness …
I didn’t look at her because I didn’t have to, because she was leaning against me and feeling like a song — lullaby, aria, anthem, this song that has never existed — and I tell her, because I can tell her things, because we can tell each other things, because fuck everybody but us: ‘They get taken — most of them — out of the wild when they’re babies and saleable and cute and the poachers kill their families because otherwise the families won’t let their children go — they won’t ever let their children go — and then the infants are caged up and alone and it must be inexplicable, unimaginably miserable, and there’s travelling, aircraft or ships, and if you survive the trip then you’re sold and you maybe have your teeth pulled out to stop you biting, or you’re taught to smoke, or given drugs to keep you placid, because that’s easier than beating you, or they teach you to drink and you do your tricks, do what you’re told, you meet strangers and wear your outfits, put a suit on so you look like a person — this joke person — but you’re scared and—’
She told me, ‘Shush.’ A child’s kind of way to put it. ‘Shush.’ Or a parent’s.
My fault for making her cry.
As if she was fighting, this soft fight, deep fight so that she could be …
She was here.
Arms inside my coat, this coat, arms all fierce and untranslatable and loving me because I am a fool and have hurt her.
I don’t want to hurt her.
Body that scalds.
Beautiful.
You know where you are.
Crying with her.
You get single-minded after having a time like that.
I don’t want to hurt her.
Jon tucked down his chin, absented himself from an expansive, well-manicured street and headed down the slope of a lane.
Her arms closed round the small of my back.
He turned left at a strange narrow house with ominous windows — I never believe in that house, it seems taken wholesale from Dickens — and entered a cobbled mews. Ahead was the mild noise of a little pub — the sort that guidebooks like to pick out and pet. He didn’t want to be with people yet.
I was in her arms and I could rest.
He wanted to sit, perhaps on the cobbles, and marshal his forces. He wanted to rap on the odd house’s door and ask to be taken in and welcomed at a fireplace and given charity and a pathway to his favourable conclusion.
I should call her. I should say that I am single-minded.
I should promise to keep her safe.
I should tell her how.
His hand lifted to reach inside his coat — his coat that knew her and that she liked — but before he could finish the movement somebody punched him.
21:45
MEG WAS AT South Kensington Station. For some reason, although she had left her train and climbed up a staircase or so from the platform level, she couldn’t quite continue her ascent. Other passengers brushed past her as she stood, her back to the passageway, facing a vast metal grille, peering into the workings of the station.
She’d been catching and changing and catching trains beneath the city for a while this evening — for a long while, it seemed, now that she checked her watch.
The system had taken her into itself at Leicester Square, pushed her north to King’s Cross and she’d let it. She had drifted up the Northern Line, then rolled back down, nudging all the while between the eddies and jolts of more purposeful commuters. Then she’d transferred to the Circle Line.
Gets you nowhere. Round and round.
It no longer was quite possible to ride the Circle Line and find yourself back where you started without ever leaving your seat. A break had been inserted annoyingly at Edgware Road and carriagefuls of humanity would wait about there to make connections which had once been unnecessary; the Edgware atmosphere was permanently thick with irritation and murdered plans.
The break prevents homeless people tucking themselves up in corners and falling asleep in their seats, simply circulating in the warm and dry for the price of a single fare. And I suppose it removes the possibility of depressives using the circuit to demonstrate their own uselessness — the way that they end at their beginning and do not progress. You can only do that now if you get on and off at Edgware Road. Which was gloomy enough as a station in any case.
Meg had only ridden along clockwise, dodged some more, caught the Piccadilly Line to here — South Kensington.
Jon may well have called. He said he would.
As soon as I come up for air I will know. I might have heard nothing because he is a man who tends to fade and he has faded. You can see it in him — the way he’ll be. Maybe he’s going to avoid me all day and by the time I go to sleep nothing good will have happened. Maybe I make him too scared. Broken animals scare people — although he liked the chimps … The one who rolls sticks in her fingers and acts as if she’s smoking them when she’s stressed. Messed-up monkeys. Apes. Fucked-up apes.
But maybe he only likes the way we are when we’re stuck behind glass and fences, when he can walk away.
Or maybe I’ve just heard nothing because I’ve been underground and I’ll hit the open air and it will be fine. You can see that he doesn’t want to fade and is trying not to — that’s there in him as well, the wanting to stay. I do know what wanting looks like and he does want.
And he’s nice.
She remembered the way Jon had held her in the rescue centre.
Sometimes you just need a hug — there’s no drama, or anything, not really, it’s probably nothing special to anyone — you just want that.
And Jon knows what wanting looks like.
And so I got my hug.
He’s a kind man — that’s always true.
And I could do with another hug now.
After this morning … If we only think of that — then I’m entitled.
I’d have smoked a make-believe cigarette in that hospital, if I’d had one. I’d have smoked a real one.
I’d have shat on their floor, if it wouldn’t have taken the last of my dignity.
They made me an exhibit, why not act as if I’m in a zoo?
Meg leaned against the grille and through it came the rush of cold tunnel air and undisturbed depths. It licked against her hugely. Beyond the mesh was this kind of broad, round shaft, lined with ocean-liner-looking iron plate — old and secretive.
It was put in for ventilation, I suppose, or to lower equipment.
The well had the authority of Victorian construction. It spoke of clambering labour, important and forgotten skills, fatalities.
Long way to fall.
The drum of space gaped above her head, clear up to street level, but showed no trace of sky. And it sank away beyond her feet — she supposed — to the depth of the lowest platform. It was usually out of sight, rendered unnoticeable by its darkness. But now there were raw white lights across the broad yawn of the drop and so she could see and see and see: the complications of metal and equipment, other grilles on the far side, structures of obscure purpose.