After Purple (3 page)

I longed to grab it all again — the sugar on the Weetabix, the honey on the toast. Oh, I know I'd only ruin it — I always mess things up again as soon as I've put them straight. But just to escape the music, just to have a breakfast without the silences, the strain. Leo was playing slower now, but the notes were still cruel and spiky, cutting into me with their sharp, jagged edges, reminding me of disasters and divorce courts, of last rites and lost fathers. I had to get away. I never felt safe with Leo. There were too many gaps in his life I couldn't fill. He was like one of those intricate, five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles with the picture on its box missing, so that you had no idea what it was meant to look like if you ever succeeded in sorting out the bits. Adrian was simpler. He'd be at home alone now, on the last lap of his Christmas holidays. Term didn't start till the second week of January. He'd be deep in some book or other, wrapped in two sweaters to save on the heating costs, and with a bag of Creamline toffees hidden in his box-file so that Janet wouldn't find them.

She wouldn't find me, either. She worked in the City, half-past eight till five.

I didn't wash, just pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans, without any bra or pants. My jeans smelt sort of raunchy in the crotch. Leo liked that. He used to sleep with them sometimes, when I wasn't there. My mother had always nagged about clean underwear. It wasn't so much the hygiene as the fear of my being mopped up after a car crash and discovered in dirty pants or greyish vest. I was going by train, in any case. I've never learnt to drive.

I dragged on Leo's sheepskin, the second, shorter one, which was yellowish like he was. I was still shivering underneath it. I went downstairs and made a wide detour round the broken vase. I slammed the door on Leo's playing, which had swollen up again like a huge black shadow stalking after me. I could almost see the shrill, black squiggly notes crushed and writhing in the door like mangled flies. I left them there to die, whistling my own defiant tuneless tune.

It was cold and grey outside. The mulberry tree was pressing its bare arms against the bright, lighted window, to keep them warm. The sky looked stained and creased as if someone had picked it up cheap at a jumble sale and tacked it up skewwhiff. It was still early. People were hurrying to work with their stiff grey morning faces on. Nice to have a job. I'd had nine in twelve weeks, and blued them all.

The underground was crowded. I stood wedged among a party of German tourists whose coarse pink faces looked as if they'd been moulded out of
Leberwurst
. (That's not original. I pinched it from a girl at a dinner party who had just come back from Munich.) At Waterloo, the crowds thinned. The morning crush was over, but had left the station seedy and bad-tempered, pockmarked with dirty footprints and with little pustules of litter erupting all over it. A businessman with a briefcase and a bowler was queuing at the Baskin-Robbins icecream stand. I went and stood behind him.

“A marshmallow sundae, please,” he said. “To take away.”

I was almost disappointed. I'd hoped he'd order a double-scoop strawberry cornet, and suck it all the way to the Bank.

“Same again,” I said. That's typical of me. No originality. I don't even
like
marshmallow. But the thought of all those thirty-one flavours was almost paralysing. I could stand for ever, agonising, dithering, trying to weigh Orange Sherbet against Chocolate Chip. Decisions like that are more or less impossible. There are no absolutes. It's like trying to decide between the big-bang theory or the steady-state, or limbo or nirvana, or Marx or Mrs Thatcher. Left to myself, I wouldn't have bothered much with things like that. There are enough imponderables in deciding when to wash your jeans, without taking on the universe as well. But people around me were always fretting on a cosmic scale. At Adrian's school, we used to be invited for sherry and sandwiches, and some master or other would rabbit on about whether Sartre's Marxism contradicted his Existentialism (all those ‘-isms' again), and at Leo's gatherings, everyone agonised about Buddhism or Bio-Energetics or how Christianity could be compatible with capitalism. There were always so many arguments on all ten thousand sides. It astonished me how normal people could settle for one opinion or another. How could they be that
sure
? I tended to follow whoever I was with. If he was an ecologist, I threw away my aerosols and wore a badge saying ‘Save the Condor'; if a vegetarian, I shovelled in the nut cutlets. That's the only reason people like me, I suspect. I give them instant backing and support. I could have made a fortune working for Rent-a-Fan.

The icecream lady dolloped sauce on my sundae and sprinkled it with nuts. Actually, I'd rather have had a cornet. I like the way they melt on your hand through the aperture in the bottom. (Aperture is one of Adrian's words.) I once masturbated on a beach for twenty-two minutes, with a giant-sized Mr Whippy cornet dripping down my thighs like a sort of egg-timer. 95p the Baskin-Robbins cost. I could have bought a
meal
for that. The tube fare had been bad enough, and the day return to Twickenham almost cleaned me out. I should have bought a single. ‘I'm sorry, Adrian, but I'll have to stay the night. I couldn't afford the fare both ways.' I grinned to myself. Adrian would take it seriously. That was his life's work, really — Taking Things Seriously. He'd spread out those gloomy beige pamphlets from the Social Security office, and ask to see my cheque stubs, and start explaining all over again how I could claim something-or-other benefit if I filled in a form which was so long and complicated, it would have been easier to take a high-powered job than try and wrestle with it. You needed at least two A-levels to cope with forms like that. I didn't care, really. If I had cash, I spent it, and if I didn't, I went through somebody else's. I never knew whether Leo had money. He did buy Chinese pots, but they were often chipped, from low-grade dealers or even junky stalls. He also owned two floors of a house, but it was only on a lease, and his Bechstein had been left to him by a Russian relative. We never talked about money.

My train was in, already. I found an empty carriage and started on my sundae. Any icecream called Baskin-Robbins must taste better than one with a boring name like Walls or Lyons. Take my own name. I've always felt special being called Thea. I mean, it gives me an immediate advantage over the Susans and the Janes. It's much the same with Leo. Any Leo is bound to be fascinating, where a Ted is merely common and a John plain dull. If we'd been a conventional couple, people would have talked about ‘Leo and Thea', and we'd have sounded daring and decadent like Colour Supplement People. Names earmark you immediately. Vic-and-Brendas run ballroom-dancing schools in Penge, and Oliver-and-Emilys make their own duvet covers and send their sons to Bedales.

The icecream lasted only as far as Vauxhall. I licked out the carton with my finger and threw it under the seat. Someone had scribbled ‘R.B. for me' just above my head. I wondered who R.B. was. Robert Bruce, Roger Bacon — Adrian sort of people. I could see R.B. slumped on the carriage seat, a tall, bony man with black hair. I unzipped my jeans. My pubic hair is a sort of reddish-brown and very coarse like wire. Sometimes I use conditioner on it, the stuff they sell for scalp hair, but it doesn't make much difference.

I licked my finger, ran it down my stomach and left it sort of poised above the hair. Leo hates it if I masturbate. I think he believes woman's only source of pleasure can be Man, so touching myself is an insult to his sex. He holds my wrists if I ever try to do it, twists them tight behind my back, and then carries on with his tongue where I left off. (That's what makes me do it in the first place.)

Though now, I suspect it was simply a defiance. I never dared oppose him openly, so all I could do was break his rules (or fill his silences). Anyway, it's the only skill I have. Other girls can type sixty words a minute. I can come ten times in an hour. It frightens me, my own sexuality. That's not my word either, but Adrian always frowned if I said ‘randy'. Those ‘-ity' words are rather like the ‘-isms'. They're so bursting with prickly vowels and consonants, you can't tell one from the other, so that spirituality and bestiality land up sounding more or less identical.

It's the same with masturbation — God and slut combined. You soar beyond your own confining body and hit the electric fence which runs round heaven. It's all shock and heat and sparks — an angel or a rocket-launch zooming out of space and time and boundaries, towards the blaze and roar of the eternal. But afterwards, you find you're only Lucifer, belly-flopping back to earth, sore and stained and sweaty, with your wings and halo torn. And that rocket's just the damp, spent debris of a firework fizzling in the rain.

I don't know really why I go on doing it, except every time I think it will be different. Right, I vow, this one will be the clincher. I'll bump into God and
stay
there, spinning forever like a Catherine-wheel nailed on His front door, and that singing, panting, pleading, final climax will turn slattern into Soul.

I wriggled on the seat a fraction so that my jeans weren't cutting into me, and braced my feet against the floor. (There was no one in the carriage.) I wetted my finger again and pushed it up, probing very slowly and solemnly at first, and closing my eyes, to cut out all distractions like graffiti or no-smoking signs or five-pound fines for spitting. All my godlike feelings come to a sort of point an inch or so inside me. I touched that sanctum now, feeling it burn and quiver through my fingers, turning me from flesh to sacred fire. It was my own private morning service — lauds, or matins, or Mass in the vernacular — some new-style sacrament in which God's hands were on my thighs and His holy water welling up between them. My toes were clawing the floor, my face screwing up in total concentration, my whole body pierced and swooning like St Sebastian's. I used two fingers now, and then a fist, ramming more roughly as we rattled into Clapham Junction. I could feel whole chalices shoved high up inside me, bishops' croziers splitting me in two. The entire Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church had left the Vatican and set up court in Thea Morton's cunt. Wandsworth, Putney, Barnes — each station was a sacred shrine, a whistle-stop pilgrimage, thundering through my legs and out again. R.B. had slipped down from the wall and was pressed against my belly, in Communion with me, making me thump and judder on the seat. He was dark and wild like Leo, but had turned from mortal man to red-cocked cardinal, roaring into tunnels, leaping off the rails. I was so in awe of him, I thought I'd never come, but suddenly everything fizzed and purred and gloated and I heard doors slamming and feet trampling and we drew away from North Sheen at the very moment the cardinal shot his bolt.

Slowly, unwillingly, I opened my eyes and wiped my fingers on the rough accusing velour of the seat. I'd come so hard, I'd scratched myself, and my breath had gone all gaspy like a goldfish. I should at least have felt sated or relieved or even quits with Leo, but all I felt was squalid and depressed. The slut had won once more, the angel fallen. All I'd done was delude myself (again) that frigging was the fastest route to God.

Stupid tears were pricking behind my eyelids, trying to shame me further. I was wet both ends and I didn't have a Kleenex. I wiped my crotch with my shirt-tail and my eyes on my sleeve and sat there, hating myself, for the remainder of the journey. It was raining when I arrived at Twickenham, a stinging, ill-tempered rain which was almost sleet. It seemed strange that I had lived there five whole years, worked in the travel agency, belonged to the public library, swum in the municipal baths, shopped at Tesco's. I was divorced from the town as well as from Adrian. The Decree applies to streets, shops, cinemas, not just to the man.

I walked down from the station through the dingy main street and turned off by the river. Adrian had kept the marital home, as the judge kept calling it. It was a damp, cramped semi, with a small garden overlooking a dye-works. I'd been a couple there — Adrian and Thea. (His name always came first, like Leo's would if we ever became a couple, which we won't.) I stood in front of the prim French Blue door. Janet and Adrian had repainted it. (Her name came first, now.) It's a strange sensation, knocking at your own front door. Janet had planted snowdrops by the dustbins.

Adrian came to the door with a pencil in his mouth. I knew his pencils — 4Bs — very soft. He sharpened them with an old scout knife and left little coils and whorls of pencil sharpenings on his desk. They were soft, too. You could have made a pillow of them. He looked thinner. Janet rationed him. All his meals were gaunt and insubstantial now, but disguised with fancy French names and what Janet called ‘garnishes', which meant half a slice of gherkin or a sprig of watercress.

“
Bonjour
,” I said. It was the only French I knew.

“Thea!” Adrian sort of shrank back into himself as if I were a traffic warden come to book his car. “Look, I
told
you not to …”

“I know, but it's important. How's your cold?”

“Better, but …”

“Can I come in? It's freezing on the step.”

“Well, I suppose so, but you really …”

I had already stepped into the hall. The house smelt different now. When I'd lived there, I don't remember it smelling at all, but perhaps you're unaware of your own smell. Now it reeked of television commercials — Daz, Harpic, Clean-O-Pine — a self-righteous, Janet sort of odour.

Adrian was looking like a dog who had messed the carpet, guilty and abject both at once. He still had the door held open. “Look, Thea, I don't want to be unfriendly, but …”

He paused. Even now, he hated to hurt me. I finished the sentence for him. “Janet doesn't like it.”

“Well, of
course
she doesn't, Thea. I mean, it's only understandable. I tried to explain to you
last
time.”