‘Why are you getting texts in the middle of the night?’ he wanted to know.
‘From Zoë,’ I lied.
‘But it’s three in the morning.’
‘She’s having some fantastic affair with a woman in Edinburgh,’ I lied.
I lied and lied and lied.
Carl slept with his face towards me in a mess of curls. He breathed easy as an angel in the dark of the tent.
‘I’m pregnant,’ I told him.
‘What?’
That woke him up.
‘But that’s fantastic!’ he said. ‘That’s absolutely fantastic!’
Then lying down again he said he couldn’t figure out how it had happened since he was always so careful.
‘What are you saying?’
‘Nothing. Hey, Beth, nothing.’
He talked for ten minutes and fell asleep again. Pretty well mid-sentence. He was chattering away and then he wasn’t, he was asleep, breathing lightly and easily again.
Mr GH Diarist hasn’t even stirred. He hasn’t registered my presence at all. I haven’t sneaked into his dreams or altered his breathing or anything. He’s just lying there, time flowing over him like water over rock. Actually, I quite like being awake while others sleep. I could kiss him, if I wanted, or kill him. Or I could just observe. ‘Just observe, my friends, just observe the sensations as they arise and pass away. Without a trace of craving, without a trace of aversion. Only in this way can you change the behaviour pattern at the deepest level of the mind. Only in this way can you come out of your misery.’
Except there’s not much to observe, really. I lean over. His hair is thinning. His face is quite lean, but wrinkled round the eyes. His mouth is full and quiet. He hasn’t shaved for a couple of days. Why bother at the Dasgupta? He’s stubbly. Not much else to say. A man. An ordinary man. I could go into every room along this corridor and watch them all sleeping, all the men. That’s a nice thought. To be there while they sleep. To watch over sleeping men. Their stale breath. Maybe run a fingertip over their stubbly cheeks. Or I could sit on the floor beside them and meditate. I could sit like a statue beside each sleeping man. Like an angel. My men.
Why do I want to do that, Mi Nu?
I would feel strong and calm and happy meditating beside the men as they sleep, if they would let me do that. Or I could be a little mouse in the men’s dormitory, gnawing away in the dark. That would be fun. It drove me wild that Jonathan slept so easily on our last night together. But what did I do about it? I sat and watched over him. I gnawed round him. I felt motherly is the truth. The stupid stupid truth. Jonathan was a baby. Anyone could see that. He left his wife and reverted to being her baby. He was the child they hadn’t had. She had the keys to his studio and brought him food when he wasn’t there, brought him clothes, even booze. I felt more motherly to Jonathan than to the baby in my belly. And to Carl too. I felt motherly towards Carl. Even when I ran off to go skinny-dipping with the French boys. Maybe especially when I ran off. I was staggering with drink and dope. This will save you, Carl, I thought. This is going to save you so much shit, so much shit. It will all be washed away on the tide. Beth’s shit. The French boys couldn’t believe it, that I was up for a swim in a sea like that. ‘C’est dangereux, bien sûr.’ They couldn’t believe how high those waves were. ‘Your cocks have shrunk to nothing,’ I yelled. ‘Shrunk to nothing, shrunk to nothing.’
Will I ever have a child, Mi Nu?
At least that might be a new kind of question for her.
There is nothing in this room but his clothes on the floor and the diary by the bed. Diaries. A pile of exercise books. It’s too dark to read in here. Jonathan’s room was stacked with paintings. I don’t know if he was a good painter. There was something childish about his pictures, a kind of stupid longing. You looked at them and felt filled by a sort of yearning. It didn’t mean anything. There was no connection with anything real, no chance of anything really happening. They were girls dissolving in abstract backgrounds, surreal collages. Clever, but stupid. Stupid because they were so clever maybe. There was something I didn’t understand. The cleverness was being used for the wrong thing, perhaps. Like when a musician wastes his cleverness on some tricky syncopation instead of concentrating on the song. The painting he did of me was different, though. It was more solid and fleshy than the others, more real, except for those silly birds flying up from my feet. They were tiny birds with really bright colours.
‘The birds are you too, Beth,’ he said. ‘The birds are my surprise that you exist.’
‘Give it to me,’ I said.
He thought a moment. ‘After I’ve shown it in New York. I’ll make a copy.’
‘No, now.’
‘It’s on the catalogue, Beth. I have to show it.’
‘By the time you get back from New York it’ll be over between us.’
‘Why, Beth?’
‘I’ve got other fish to fry. I’m not the kind of girl who waits around.’
He was quiet.
‘You too. You’ll shag anything that moves. I know you will.’
‘Come with me,’ he said then. ‘Come to the airport and get on the plane. Come to New York.’
‘You should have asked before. You can’t ask me the night before the flight.’
There was a pause. Our life was in that pause, in the carefully tidied space between his paintings and his bed. Jonathan was an amazingly tidy man. But he didn’t fight for things.
‘I guess I’ll go and fuck Carl,’ I said. ‘In his tent in France.’
He didn’t say anything. If he had grabbed me by the wrist, if he had said, Let’s go and get your passport, Beth …
If I went and got one of the kitchen knives, the one that whams the celeriac in half, I could kill this man sleeping here now. This unfaithful diarist. How many men could I kill along the corridor before they stopped me? Two? Three? Four? All unfaithful. Bank on it. All diarists. But the night is passing. I need to light this cigarette.
Grabbing the top exercise book, I sneaked out.
The Second Arrow
VIPASSANA SHIT HAS a special smell. Sort of sweeter, but staler. It lingers. At first I thought it was the diet, the oats, the veggies, no meat, no fish, no booze. Now I think it could be the thinking we do here. If mind and body are one why shouldn’t our shit smell of our thoughts? Anxious shit, laid-back shit. Anyhow, the female servers’ loo is the only place where I can smoke and read through the night. It stinks.
What a lot this guy’s been writing, though. I can’t find the line I scribbled. Something about pain. It must be way back. Or it was in another notebook. Flicking through the pages, it doesn’t seem to matter where you start. He hammers on like a drum solo at a druggy festival. Sometimes I find a few words I could have written myself. I mean, really could have written myself, as though we were the same person. I used to think that about Jonathan sometimes, that we were the same deep down. We had started to speak the same, think the same. Or I had started to speak like him. Now I wonder if we ever met.
Dawn session surreal. Since we started vipassana my body confused as my mind. Hands swapping over, left right, left right, mouth detaching from my skull, merging with my stomach, parts of my body disappearing for long periods, then resurfacing, like those exotic islands explorers kept losing and finding again. My knees behind me. My shoulders in my thighs. Cramps aches stabs burning pleasure pain happiness sadness hopelessness bliss all fading in and out of each other through calves ankles spine everywhere.
Just getting used to all this when L barges in. She looms up inside my skull like a shadow on the wall in a Hitchcock movie. I want a dog! she yells. She must have a dog. She needs to substitute me with a dog. Because a dog she can train. A dog she can trust. She can’t trust me. I betrayed her. She’s through with men. She wants a dog! Me shouting: But Linda, I am a dog! Can’t you see? I’ve always been your little doggie.