She went to the toilet, and when she came back, his friend was gone.
‘Why did you pick me, if it doesn’t mean anything? That’s what you are saying, isn’t it? You’re saying I shouldn’t have stayed.’
‘Don’t worry, you’re great. You’ll make some woman a great lover.’
‘You should have fucked Jim. He understands these things. You both understood each other like I was an eejit.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
He was no longer polite. He walked her back to the flat when he should have gone home.
‘So. Welcome to aggressive sex,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed that.’ He had broken her like a match.
‘You’re all talk.’
After a while he turned to her and felt her body from her shoulders to her hips, passing his hands slowly and with meaning over the skin. She felt herself drifting off the bed through the black space where the door should have been. It seemed to grow in the dark and swallow the room.
‘When I was a kid, there was a monumental sculptors in the local graveyard and the polishing shed was covered in marble dust. The table was white, the floor was white, the coke can in the corner was white. There was an old wardrobe up against the wall with the door hanging off, all still and silent like they were made out of stone. And outside was this rock with “Monumental Enquiries” carved into it like a joke. Which just goes to show.’
After he left, she saw the shadow of flour on the carpet, where his clothes had lain, like the outline of a corpse, when the clues are still fresh.
HISTORICAL LETTERS
1.
So. I wouldn’t wash the sheets after you left, like some tawdry El Paso love affair. No one is unhappy in El Paso. There is lithium in the water supply. So it all still smells of you and at four in the morning that’s a stink and at five it’s a desert hum, with cicadas blooming all over the ceiling. Because you are on the road.
I am not hysterical. We have mice — just to go with all this heat and poverty and lust business, two flatmates with grownup salaries and lives to run after. Actually, it is hot, which I hate. If I want weather I pay for it, besides, the sun only came out for you. Actually, also, there is something in the water supply.
I have prehensile toes because you made my feet grip like a baby’s fist. That’s not something you forget so easily.
You, on the other hand, do forget — easily and all the time. This is something I admire. You don’t make up little stories to remember by. Which means that I am burdened with all the years that you passed through and neglected. I can handle them, of course, with my excellent synapses that feel no pain.
There is something about you that reminds me of the century. You talk like it was Before as well as After and you travel just to help you think — as if we were all still living in nine-teen-hundred-and-sixty-five. There’s nothing special about you, Sunshine, except how gentle you are. And you talk like it was nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-four. ‘Live a quiet life, be true, try to be honest. Work, don’t hurt people.’ You said all this while putting on your socks, which were bottlegreen, very slowly.
Sleeping with you is like watching a man in a wet suit cleaning the aquarium glass, in with the otters on the other side.
All I want to say, before you disappear into that decade of yours, all I want to say is how things became relevant, how the sugar-bowl sits well on the table, how the wood seems to agree.
But it is a gift, like snow. It is a gift the way the bowl sits so well on the table, it is a gift how it all, including you, was pushed out through a cleft in time. Pop! I can move my hand from the bowl, over a fork, to my own blue cup, and the distance between them makes me content.
2.
You may say, in you turn, that I am an aquatic kind of girl, an underwater sort of thing. Since you left I spend most of my time on my back, as it were. I can see the street in a fan of light on the bedroom ceiling. When someone walks past, they move a line of shadow like the needle on a dial. Cars make everything shiver.
I remember most of what you said and I said. I don’t see the point of this landscape of yours, blank and full of frights with no clock in it. All your pain strikes me as very nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-seven. I come from the generation that never took drugs, the generation that grew up. I am a woman that was born in 1962.
And you know what that means.
Despite the fact that I was born in nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-two, I go around the house mouthing words like they were new, like the whole problem of words was as fresh as Paris. You have infected me with the fifties, une femme d’un certain âge who knows how to dress but not how to speak. Sweetheart.
Tell me. When was the Spanish Civil War? Is that where you are? Having a serious discussion about reification and blood, rubbing alcohol and the future. I bet the people you meet all have stories, perplexities, Slavic bones.
When I was ten a white horse ran into the side of the school bus and died. I saw the blood bubble out of his nose.
You should go to Berlin in nineteen-hundred-and-eighty-nine, with the wall coming down. You could put the Cabaret and the Jews back in perhaps. I am there, watching it all on TV, getting everything wrong. I am wrong about remote-control televisions, denim, history in general. I can’t tell where the party is. I do not have a democratic mind, but if I watch the right movie, the horse dies every time. (Why is it always white?)
So I am supposed to sit here with my finger in my gee until you come back — from Moscow in 1937 where you discover what music really is. From New Orleans in 1926 where you are eating the heart out of artichokes. From Dublin in 1914 where you are walking, pretentiously enough, on the beach. When I just got my credit cards, the sign of a woman who does not wait around.
History is just a scum on reality as far as I am concerned. You scrape it away.
Listen.
When de Valera died, I didn’t care either way, but a girl in my class was delighted, because her granny was buried half an hour before him, and all the soldiers along the road saluted as they went by.
I saw them landing on the moon, but my mother wasn’t bothered. She wanted to finish drying the dishes, so she said, ‘Sure I can see the moon, right here in the window.’
When I was ten a white horse ran into the side of the school bus and died. I saw the blood bubble out of his nose.
That is what I want to say. I was not washed up on the beach of your life like Venus on the tide. I know the distance between the cup and the bowl. I have seen Berlin. I have seen the moon. I will find out how to speak again and change the sheets, because it must change, I say, in order to give pleasure.
Never mind the horse.
LUCK BE A LADY
The bingo coach (VZE 26) stopped at the top of the road and Mrs Maguire (no. 18), Mrs Power (no. 9) and Mrs Hanratty (no. 27) climbed on board and took their places with the 33 other women and 0 men who made up the Tuesday run.