drag myself down there on my hands and knees.
Give myself to the water and the dark.
And to the girl.
Let her suck the meat from off these tangled bones,
transmute me to something incorruptible and ivory:
to something rich and strange. But that would be foolish.
The voice of the storm is whispering to me.
The voice of the beach is whispering to me.
The voice of the waves is whispering to me.
CHAPTER 27: How Do You Think It Feels?
I am in bed, now. I can feel the linen sheets beneath me, warmed to body temperature, slightly rumpled. There is no-one in the bed with me.
My chest no longer hurts. I feel nothing at all. I feel just fine.
My dreams are vanishing as I wake, overexposed by the glare of the morning sun through my bedroom window, and are being replaced, slowly, by memories; and now, with only a purple flower and the scent of her still on the pillow, my memories are all of Becky, and fifteen years drifts away like confetti or falling blossom, through my hands.
She was just twenty. I was by far the older man, almost twenty-seven, with a wife, and a career, and twin little girls. And I was ready to give them all up for her.
We met at a conference, in Hamburg, in Germany. I had seen her performing in a presentation on "The Future of Interactive Entertainment", and had found her attractive and amusing. Her hair was long and dark, her eyes were a greenish blue. At first, I was certain that she reminded me of someone I knew, and then I reallsed that I had never actually met the person she reminded me of: it was Emma Peel, Diana Rigg's character in the Avengers television series. I had loved her and longed for her, in black and white, before I ever reached my tenth birthday.
That evening, passing her in a corridor on my way to some software vendor's party, I congratulated her upon her performance. She told me that she was a professional actress, hired for the presentation ("after all, we can't all be in the West End can we?") and that her name was Rebecca.
Later, I kissed her in a doorway, and she sighed as she pressed against me.
Becky slept in my hotel room for the rest of the conference. I was head-over-heels in love, and so, I liked to think, was she. Our affair continued when we returned to England: fizzy, funny, utterly delightful, a little dangerous. It was love, I knew, and it tasted like champagne in my mind.
I spent all my free time with her, told Caroline, my wife, I was working late, needed in London, busy. Instead I was in Becky's Battersea flat with Becky.
I took joy in her body, the golden litheness of her skin, her blue-green eyes. She found it hard to relax during sex-she seemed to like the idea of it, but to be less impressed by the physical practicalities. She found oral sex faintly disgusting, giving or receiving it, and liked the sexual act best when it was over fastest. I hardly cared: the way she looked was enough for me, and the speed of her wit. I liked the way she made little doll-faces out of modelling clay, and the way the plasticine crept in dark crescents under her fingernails. She had a beautiful voice, and sometimes, spontaneously, would begin to sing-popular songs, folk songs, snatches of opera, television jingles, whatever came into her mind. Caroline did not sing, not even nursery rhymes.
Colours seemed brighter because Becky was there. I began to notice parts of life I had never seen before: I saw the elegant intricacy of flowers, because Becky loved flowers, and knew all their names; I became a fan of silent movies, because Becky loved silent movies, and I watched The Thief of Baghdad and Sherlock Junior over and over on video; I began to accumulate CDs and tapes, because Becky loved music, and I loved her, and I loved whatever she loved. I had never heard music before; never understood the black and white grace of a silent clown before; never touched, or smelled, or properly looked at, a flower, before I met her.
She told me that she needed to stop acting and to do something that would make her more money, and would bring that money in regularly. I put her in touch with a friend in the music business, and she became his personal assistant. I wondered, sometimes, if they were sleeping together, but I said nothing about it-I did not dare, although I brooded on it. I did not want to endanger what we had together, and I knew that I had no grounds from which to reproach her.
"How do you think I feel?" she asked. We were walking back to her flat from the Thai restaurant around the corner. We ate there most of the time. "Knowing that you are going back to your wife, every night? How do you think it feels for me?"
I knew she was right. I did not want to hurt anyone yet I felt as if I were tearing myself apart. My work, at the small software company I owned, suffered. I began to nerve myself to tell Caroline that I was leaving her. I envisioned Becky's joy at learning that I was to be only hers. It would be hard and hurtful to Caroline, and harder on the twins, but it would have to be done.
Each time I played with the twins, my two almost-identical girls (clue: look for the tiny mole above Amanda's lip, the rounder line of Jessica's jaw), their hair a lighter shade of Caroline's dark honey colour, every time I took them to the park or bathed them or tucked them in at night, it hurt me inside. But I knew what I had to do; that the pain I was feeling would soon be replaced with the perfect joy that living with Becky, loving Becky, spending every waking moment with Becky, would bring me.
It was less than a week before Christmas, and the days were as short as they were ever going to get. I took Becky out to the Thai place for dinner, and, as she licked the peanut sauce from a stick of chicken satay, I told her that, immediately after Christmas, I would soon be leaving my wife and children for her. I expected to see a smile on her face, but she said nothing, and she did not smile.
In her flat, that night, she refused to sleep with me. Instead, she told me it was all over between us. I drank too much, cried for the last time as an adult, begged her and pleaded with her to reconsider.
"You aren't any fun any more," she said, simply and flatly, as I sat, sadly, on the floor of her living room, my back resting against the side of her battered sofa. "You used to be fun, and funny. Now you just mope around all the time."
"I'm sorry," I said, pathetically. "Really, I'm sorry. I can change."
"See?" she said. "No fun at all."
Then she opened the door to her bedroom, and went inside, closing it and locking it, finally behind her; and I sat on the floor, and finished a bottle of whisky, all on my own, and then, maudlin drunk, I wandered about her flat, touching her things and snivelling. I read her diary. I went into the bathroom, and pulled her soiled panties from the laundry basket, and buried my face in them, breathing her scents. At one point I banged on her bedroom door, calling her name, but she did not respond, and she would not open the door.
I made the gargoyle for myself in the small hours of the morning, out of grey modelling clay.
I remember doing it. I was naked. I had found a large lump of plasticine on the mantelpiece, and I thumbed and kneaded it until it was soft and pliable, then, lost in a place of drunken, horny, angry madness, I masturbated into it, and kneaded my milky seed into the grey shapeless mess.
I have never been a sculptor, but something took shape beneath my fingers that night: blocky hands and grinning head, stumpy wings and twisted legs: I made it of my lust and self-pity and hatred, then I baptised it with the last drops of Johnny Walker Black Label and placed it over my heart, my own little gargoyle, to protect me from beautiful women with blue-green eyes and from ever feeling anything again.
I lay on the floor, with the gargoyle upon my chest; and, in moments, I slept.
When I woke up, a few hours later, her door was still locked, and it was still dark. I crawled to the bathroom, and threw up all over the toilet bowl and the floor and the scattered mess I had left of her underwear. And then I put on my clothes and went home.