Athena (19 page)

I wonder now if she devised all her scenarios beforehand or did she make them up as she went along? I was impressed always by how well she seemed to know what it was she wanted. Everything was at her direction, the words, the gestures, the positions, all the complex ceremonials of this liturgy of the flesh.
Tie my hands. Make me kneel. Blindfold me. Now walk me to the window
. How softly she stepped, like a sleepwalker, barefoot, with one of her own stockings bound tightly over her eyes, as I, half miserable and half excited, guided her across the room and stopped before the blank wall.

‘Is this the window?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are there people in the street?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are they looking at me?’

‘Not yet.’

The wall was pitted and scarred and there was the shadow of a dried-up water-stain shaped like a map of North America. Her hot little hand trembled in mine. Now, I told her, now they had seen her. And so powerful was the aura of her excitement that the scene began to materialise before me on the wall: the street and the stopped cars and the silent people staring up in the luminous grey light of the November day. She squeezed my hand; I knew what she wanted. Like a child being good she held up her arms and I bent and gathered her slip at the hem and lifted it slowly over her head, hearing the soft lisp of the silk as it grazed her skin. Now she was naked. The white wall reflected a faint effulgence on her breasts, her belly. She shivered.

‘Have they really seen me?’

‘Yes, they’ve seen you. They’re looking at you.’

A sigh.

‘What are they doing?’

‘They’re just pointing and looking. And some of them are laughing.’

A caught breath.

‘Who? Who’s laughing?’

‘Two men. Two workmen, in their workclothes. They’re pointing at you and laughing.’

She shivered again and gave a low gasp. I tried to take her in my arms but she stood rigid. Her greyed skin was cold.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ she said softly. ‘Why are you doing this?’ And she sighed. And afterwards, when we were lying together slimed and sweating on the couch, she undid the stocking from her eyes and ran it thoughtfully through her fingers and said in the most matter-of-fact way, ‘Next time, really take me to the window.’

She desired to be seen, she said, to be a spectacle, to have her most intimate secrets purloined and betrayed. Yet I ask myself now if they really were her secrets that she offered
up on the altar of our passion or just variations invented for this or that occasion. One morning when I arrived at the house she was in the bathroom. I tapped on the door but she did not hear me, or did not choose to hear me. When I opened the door and slipped inside she was sitting on the side of the bath with a cracked mirror propped before her on the handbasin, cleaning her face with a pad of cotton wool. She did not look at me, only went still for a moment and drew in her lips to cut off the beginnings of a smile. She was wearing a loose shirt and her hair was wrapped in a towel. Her face without make-up was blurred, a clay-white, hieratic mask. I said not a word but stood with my hands behind me pressed to the door and held my breath and watched her. Steam swayed in the whitish light from the frosted window and there was the sharp tang of some unguent that made me think of my mother. A. finished with her face and stood up and unwrapped the towel and began vigorously to dry her hair, pausing now and then and shaking her head sideways as if to clear something from her ear. Our eyes met by accident in the mirror and immediately her gaze went blank and slid away from mine. Then, running her fingers through her still-damp hair, she hitched up her shirt and sat down on the lavatory and perched there for a minute, intent and still, her grey eyes fixed on emptiness, like an animal pausing on a forest track to drop its mark. A spasm of effort crossed her face and she was done. She wiped herself twice, briskly, and stood up. The cistern wheezed and gave its cataclysmic gasp. Her smell came to me, acrid and spicy and warm, and my stomach heaved languidly. She turned on the geyser then and glanced at me over her shoulder and said, ‘Have you any matches?’ I wanted to ask her if she always wiped herself with her left hand or was even that faked, too, but I did not have the heart.

But no, fake is not the right word. Unformed: that’s it. She was not being but becoming. So I thought of her.
Everything she did seemed a seeking after definition. I have said she was the one who devised our games and enforced the rules, but really this seeming strength was no more than a child’s wilfulness. In the street she would dig her elbow into my ribs and stare slit-eyed at some woman passing by. ‘Hair,’ she would say out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Exact same shade as mine, did you not notice?’ Then she would shake my arm and scowl. ‘Oh, you’re hopeless!’ Poking among the drifts of immemorial rubbish in the corridors, one of our favourite pastimes, we came upon a mildewed volume of eighteenth-century erotic illustrations (suddenly it occurs to me: had she planted it there?) which she would pore over for hours. ‘Look,’ she would say, in a hushed, wondering tone, pointing to this or that indecorously sprawled figure, ‘doesn’t she look like me?’ And she would turn from the page and search my face with touching anxiousness, my poor Justine, yearning for some sort of final confirmation of … of what? Authenticity, perhaps. And yet it was precisely the inauthentic, the fragile theatre of illusions we had erected to house our increasingly exotic performances, that afforded us the fiercest and most precious transports of doomy pleasure. How keen the dark and tender thrill that shot through me when in the throes of passion she cried out my assumed – my false – name and for a second a phantom other, my jettisoned self, joined us and made a ghostly troilism of our panting labours.

Will you laugh if I say I still think of us as innocents? No matter how dirty and even dangerous the games we played, something childlike always survived in them. No, that’s wrong, for childhood is not innocent, only ignorant; we knew what we were doing. Paradoxical as it may sound, I think it was that knowledge itself that lent to our doings a lightsome, prelapsarian air. Like all lovers, we, I (for how do I know what
you
felt?) lived in the conviction that there were certain things that in us came into being for the first
time in the world. Not great things, of course – I was no Rilke, and you were no Gaspara Stampa – yet between us always there was that which seemed to overleap the selfish flesh, that seemed to overleap even each other and, quivering, endured, as the arrow endures the bowstring before being transformed into pure flight. And still endures.

She told me her dreams. She dreamed of adventures, impossible journeys. Of a great dane that turned into a unicorn and ran away. Of being someone else. How solemn she would be, lying on her front with her chin on her hands and the cigarette lolling at the corner of her mouth and the swift smoke running up in a shaky line like the rope in a rope trick. The lilac shadows under her eyes. Her bitten fingernails. That flossed dip at the base of her spine. In these sleepless nights I go over her inch by inch, mapping her contours, surveyor of all I no longer possess. I see her turning slowly in the depths of memory’s screen, fixed and staring, too real to be real, like one of those three-dimensional models that computers make. It is then, when she is at her vividest, that I know I have lost her forever.

I could feel it coming, that loss; from the start I could feel it coming. Intimations abounded: a word, a sly glance, a smile too quickly suppressed. In my arms one day she suddenly went still and put a hand to my mouth and said ‘Ssh!’ and I heard with a qualm of terror the faint, remorseless sound of a telephone ringing somewhere down in the depths of the house. A telephone! If a burst of gunfire had started up it would not have seemed more outlandish. Yet she was not surprised. Without a word she slipped from my arms and wrapped herself in my bathrobe and was gone. I followed after her, nimble with apprehension. The phone was in the basement, an ancient, bakelite model lost among jumbles of stuff on the workbench. I stopped in the doorway. She stood half turned away from me with one foot pressed on the instep of the other and the receiver cradled against
her shoulder. She spoke to it softly as if to a child. I could sense that she was smiling. After a moment she hung up and turned and walked towards me with her arms tightly folded and her head lowered. Suddenly, acutely, I became aware of my nakedness. She folded herself against me and laughed with a low, tigerish rattle at the back of her throat. ‘Oh,’ she said almost gaily, ‘how cold it is!’ I stood mute with unfathomable anguish, and for a second the mist lifted and I was afforded a heartstopping view of a far and altogether different country.

It was she who discovered No. 23. She had been watching the place for ages, she said. It was supposed to be a solicitor’s office (someone had a sense of humour) but the people she saw going in and out did not look as if they were on legal business. Then one day she arrived in the room and knelt excitedly on the couch without taking off her coat and tugged me by the hands and said I must come with her, that she had somewhere she wanted to take me. We hurried through the streets. It was mid-afternoon, there were few people about. Under an iron sky the pavements had a scrubbed, raw look and whoops of icy wind waited around corners. No. 23 presented a grimy, disused aspect. It had a big shop-window with a brown curtain pulled across it and a high, narrow front door. A. rang the bell and grinned and pressed herself against me with the crown of her head under my jaw; her hair was cold but her scalp burned. I heard dragging steps approaching inside and Ma Murphy in her cardigan and slippers opened the door and drew back her head and looked at us sceptically. ‘He’s not in,’ she said. She had a strong moustache and a bosom that reached to where her waist had once been. A. sweetly explained that it was not the solicitor we had come to see. Ma Murphy continued to regard us with suspicion. ‘Two of yiz,’ she said. If it was a question we had no answer. After another interval of dour consideration she stepped aside and motioned us in. I hesitated,
as if it were the portals to the Chapel Perilous that I was breaching, but A. excitedly tugged my arm and I followed her, my Morgana.

Ma Murphy’s broad backside swayed ahead of us up a narrow stairs. The place was dim and there was a smell of stew. A. squeezed my hand gleefully and mouthed something at me that I could not make out. On the first floor we were shown into a sort of parlour, low-ceilinged, ill-lit and chilly, with an overstuffed sofa and net curtains and a table covered with oilcloth. Brownish shadows hung down the walls like strips of old wallpaper. Ma Murphy folded her hands under her bosom and resumed her sceptical regard. A. linked her arm more tightly in mine. I began to fidget.

‘Yiz are not the Guards, are yiz?’ Ma Murphy said with truculence.

A. shook her head vehemently. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘no, we’re not the Guards.’ The woman fixed her eye on me. A. hurried on. ‘We want a girl, you see,’ she said.

I could feel myself blush. Ma Murphy remained impassive. Unable to sustain her colourless stare I turned with hands clasped behind me and paced to the low window and looked out; this was women’s work, after all. Oh, I am a hound, and spineless, too. What was I feeling? Excitement, of course, the hot, horrible thrill of transgression; I might have been a sweaty little boy about to spy on his sister undressing. (Why do such moments always make me think of childhood? I suppose I am being reminded of first sins, those first, tentative steps into real life.) Outside, the grey was thickening; twilight already. A waft of melancholy rose in me softly, like a sigh. Below the window there was a narrow lane with dustbins and a jumble of lock-up sheds. A cat picked its way daintily along the top of a wall studded with broken glass. Why is it the detritus of the world seems to me always to signify some ungraspable thing? How could this scene mean anything, since it was only a scene because I was there to
make it so? Behind me A. and the procuress were quietly discussing terms. I could have stayed there forever, glooming out of that mean little window as the winter day drew wearily to a close; not life, you see, but its frail semblance; that makes me happy.

Our girl’s name was Rosie. She was a hard-edged twenty-year-old, slight but compactly made, with dyed yellow bangs and bad skin. She might have been the ghost of my daughter, if I had ever had a daughter. I addressed a pleasantry to her and in return was stared at coldly. She gave A. a cordial grin, however, and they struck up an immediate amity, and sat down side by side on the bed to take off their stockings, fags clamped identically in scarlet mouths and eyes identically averted from the smoke. The room was low and bare of everything except the bed and an office chair with a plastic seat. The bed had a disturbingly clinical look to it. Uneasily I took off my clothes and loitered by the chair in my drawers, feeling the small hairs rise on my skin, more from apprehensiveness than the cold. A.’s directions were simple: she and I were to make love while Rosie watched. That, Rosie said with a shrug, was all right by her; naked, she sauntered to the chair and, giving me an ironic glance, sat down and folded her arms and crossed her legs. Her shoulders were shapely, and her left earlobe was pierced by a tiny safety pin. A. lolled on the bed in her Duchess of Alba pose. The two of them considered me, quizzical and calm. I felt … perused. The consequences were inevitable. I muttered an apology, sprawled helplessly with my mouth crushed against A.’s neck. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered breathily in my ear; ‘just pretend.’ She was pleased, I think. It was the way she would have wished it to be: not the act itself, but acting. And so for a quarter of an hour we toiled, miming passion, grinding and gasping and clawing the air. A. went at the task with especial energy, biting my shoulder and crying out foul words, things that she never did when
we were alone and not pretending, or not pretending as much as we were now; I could hardly recognise her, and despite myself felt sad and faintly repelled. I avoided looking at Rosie – I could not have borne her disenchanted eye – but I was acutely conscious of her presence, and could hear the sound of her breathing and the tiny squeaks when she shifted her bare bum on the plastic seat. Halfway through our act she quietly lit up another cigarette. Afterwards, when she was putting on her clothes, I got up from the bed and tried to embrace her, in acknowledgement of something, I’m not sure what, and also, I suppose, as a rebuke to A. The girl went still and stood with her pants in her hands and one leg lifted, and sadly I released her. A. watched from the bed, and when Rosie was gone she stood up and laid her hand on my shoulder with a tenderness I had not known in her before that moment. ‘We’re just the same, aren’t we, the two of us,’ she said. ‘Hardly here at all.’ Or at least, might have said.