Black Chalk (21 page)

She was still holding the picture frame, rotating it between her hands. The morning light shone through the messy strands of her hair, framing the invitation in her eyes, in her mouth as it drifted open. And I told her more. At one point, out of habit, I hesitated. I looked into her face, our gazes crossed, and I realised how strong she seemed at that moment, half naked, her hair ruffled, her eyebrows raised in concern. As if she realised it too, she looked down at our hands and, squeezing mine, urged me on.

I told her the way he'd cut his potatoes, till they were nothing but mash, the way he'd slammed his bedroom door on my outstretched hand, the way he'd sneaked back to London. Saying it all, I realised that it'd been bothering me, and I started to feel lucky.

An hour after she'd left, I was still smiling. There was a girl who'd been born good and, for some strange reason, she liked spending time with me.

***

That afternoon, I rode my bike into town and went past a college sports ground full of men in white. I stopped by the midwicket boundary, just as a stocky man bowled a lob to a watchful Indian batsman.

I hadn't played cricket since I'd left England, except for a few street games in India, where it was impossible to avoid the game but where I never spent more than a few days at a time, and one pick-up game when I worked in the Alps. The expat community had huddled, and from one man's trunk, from another's garage, we'd managed to find two bats and a plastic ball. Then, amongst peaks and cliffs, in a park a few hundred metres below the snowline, we'd played the sixth test of that year's Ashes. It was a matter of making the most our limited resources: the wicket was a track, which was still hard enough for the ball to bounce. One of the set of stumps was made of three sticks hammered into the ground, while the other was made of a stack of beer boxes. And it wasn't about the cricket either: three of the Australians decided they were more interested in David Boon's record – fifty-two beer cans over a twenty-four-hour period – than in the cricket itself. They passed out a long way before their half-century.

Putting my bike on the ground, I stood on the boundary, reacquainting myself with the game as it was meant to be played. I watched the batsman bend a long way forward to each innocuous delivery, as if there were some hidden danger in them, while his partner urged him to give him the strike. Their banter carried clearly across the field, and the rest of the batting team, safely sitting on the pavilion steps, sniggered quietly. On the penultimate ball of the over, he stepped out of his crease, reached the ball on the full, and swatted it high and fast in my direction. There was a fielder at deep midwicket, but it eluded him and came right for me. Shuffling, I stretched out one hand and felt it slam into the heel of my thumb, and my fingers curl around it.

The batting team cheered. Some in the bowling did too, but theirs sounded more ironic. I returned the ball, while the umpire signalled a six by raising both his arms so far behind his head that he looked as though he might fall down. There was one more ball in the over: the batsman blocked it, just as he'd blocked the first four, but this time he called for a single. His partner already had his back turned, clearly waiting for his turn facing. ‘Yes, yes!' said the Indian, running towards his partner. By the time the non-striker realised what was happening, he was halfway down the pitch, and the keeper was breaking the stumps. Looking at the pavilion, I noticed that the batting team was no longer smiling mockingly, but seemed a little worried now. They all averted their eyes as the non-striker walked in.

‘He can't fucking call!' I heard, together with another string of ‘fucks' while his teammates stayed quiet. I didn't stay to see how the new batsman would do.

Taking a catch off a six, seeing a farcical run-out, these should have had me yearning to play again, but instead they just made me realise how much I'd changed over the years I'd spent away. As a seventeen-year-old, I would have stayed up all night to watch England take on Australia on Boxing Day, while now, I smiled at the contest but didn't feel the urge to go and join a team.

***

Leona was helping me sleep. A few hours with her, and I worried less. Her body next to mine, matching my breath to hers, I slept even better. There was something comforting in her steady presence, in her deep unbroken sleep. She had a way of moving when she slept, of touching me just when I needed it.

But alone and sexless, I could only manage three good hours before I started drifting. In and out of a sort of sleep, of a sort of dream. Lucid hallucinations, memories congealing, evolving into something between the real and the mad.

By the fifth hour, I was gun in hand, surveying the field. Eric was on the ground, dead, unconscious. And everyone else was fighting between red and black. Or red and white. I pointed the gun at my foot: I could see skin, muscles and bones through the leather of my shoe. And I aimed for the nail of my big toe.

Before I could pull the trigger and watch a hole form itself between concrete and leather, my heavy eyes flicked open, and there was no chance I could go back to sleep. And I waited in bed, or I rose and wrote.

One morning, my mother pointed at the pot of coffee I was brewing myself.

‘Is that just for you?' she asked.

I eyed the pot.

‘I drank a lot of coffee in France.'

She traced lines under her eyes:

‘You look a little tired.' She sat down at the kitchen table.

‘It's normal. I'm not a big sleeper. I've been this way for a long time,' I said, looking directly into her eyes. I saw real concern.

‘Have you been to a doctor?'

‘No, I don't want to. I don't like shrinks.'

‘Not a shrink, no one is speaking about shrinks,' she said. ‘Just a GP. There are things you can do, you know, and if they don't work, they'll prescribe you sleeping pills.'

I said I'd look into it, for I could see that my mother wouldn't let go until she felt I'd listened to her, but I'd already browsed the internet for advice, and I'd tried their relaxation techniques. My case was different. That memories were mingling with dreams was the cost of coming home. A few more weeks, I told myself, and I'd be fine.

***

I moved in to the Stockmore Street apartment the day after my first class. The car was full of everything I thought I needed, comfortably stored in the boot, together with everything my mother thought I needed, which extended all over the back seat.

‘You have to feel at home,' my mother said as she added lamps, sheets, duvets (‘Two, just in case, and you can always store the other one under the bed'), cutlery, plates, two pots and a Teflon pan (‘You'll be able to cook with less oil').

When we first reached the house, the third in a row of eight identical 1950s townhouses, and she pulled out its key, she told me there was a spare and I could leave it with her if I wanted. I gave a non-committal answer, imagining instead Leona's reaction as I handed her a key. Would she be delighted, or take it in her stride, I asked myself, and I imagined both scenarios. I liked not knowing: whatever she did – I pictured a plethora of smiles and weighed it against a thoughtful cock of her head – I'd discover more of her. But then, as we climbed to the upstairs floor, which the flat occupied, I told myself that I was being silly: it had only been a few days. Surely, I should hand the extra key to my mother.

I listened to what my mother was telling me. The house, divided into two flats, was empty for the summer. Both of their children had been offered jobs in London within a week of each other, and her colleague being away, hadn't had time to rent them out yet.

The upstairs apartment had a put-together feel, as if some architect had decided to add each room independently of the others, and the furniture had followed the same logic. The main bedroom stood four steps above the rest of the flat, as if it needed the extra height, while the other bedroom, empty but for a desk and a exercise ball, was almost too small to be lived in. The kitchen, with its purples and bright greens, looked as though the architect had decided to turn a corridor into a psychedelic statement. And the living area, with its flowery sofa and its transparent plastic table, had a window facing the garden so high up the wall that I had to stand on a chair to see the top of the garden's shrubbery.

‘We didn't bring anything to put on the walls,' my mother said, and before I had time to say that I'd only be living there for a few months, she told me that I must come and take some posters and paintings from the garage. ‘Do you remember the big one with the church your grandmother did? It would fit well on this wall. But of course, you can take whatever you want.'

After I agreed, she left me and I called Leona. While I waited, I noticed that my mother had left the spare set of keys on the kitchen counter. Don't rush into anything, I told myself. But the scene I'd already constructed came to my mind, and this time I pictured a gentle, naïve smile as I handed her the keys. This expression felt so right that I forgot all the other scenarios, and I winced. Such innocence, and me, dirt peeling from my arms!

Rather than keep on thinking, I made myself busy, unpacking a few boxes, making the bed. When Leona arrived, I walked down to open the door feeling only slightly uneasy. But even that vanished when I saw her, the strap of her light blue bra toying with the strap of her green summer dress, and my hands, my nose, my lips followed impulses of their own. Feeling giddy, I made a show of covering her eyes until she was inside the flat.

When I took my hands from her eyes in the living area, she swivelled even slower than I'd ever seen her do before, her gaze taking in everything from the floor to the ceiling: ‘Do you think that chimney works? It'd be nice in winter… I like the polka dots on those curtains… How would you close the ones on that high window? … Nathan, there's even a washing machine. Oh, look at this vase!'

I listened, sharing in her delight.

‘Nathan, this is perfect.' Running her fingers along the wall, she found a door I'd glanced over, and peeked in. ‘There's even a hoover.' Opening the bedroom, she told me how much she liked the bedding.

‘That's my mother's,' I said.

‘She has a lovely eye for detail. I'd really like to meet her. You must come and meet my parents too. We have a little vegetable garden. I can pick some tomatoes, and soon I'll be able to pick blackberries, and that'll make a great salad.'

Her voice, light and happy, suddenly became urgent: ‘There's a spider,' she said and before I had time to react, she added: ‘I'll get it.' Bemused, I watched her as she took off one shoe, held it by the toe, climbed on a chair, and swung her weapon into the web. ‘Missed it.' She coiled her arm back again, pointing at the spider with her other hand, one foot balancing on the chair, the other on the kitchen counter, and she swung.

‘Here we go. Dead.' She came down from her chair, beaming. She showed me the flattened spider glued to the sole of her shoe.

‘How about next week? Could you come then?' she asked.

As we haggled over a date, I thought back to the way she'd wedged the chair against the kitchen counter, to her glee at the small spider's crushed body, and I felt oddly comforted.

***

While tomato sauce simmered in one pot, and pasta boiled in another, Leona remembered that she'd brought me a book. She handed it to me with a worried fold between her eyebrows. ‘I hope you'll like it,' she said. It was a well-worn paperback with a black cover. In its centre was a white star that looked like a Star of David gone curvy.
Thoughts on Thought
, I read, and hid a wince. The author's name, Kuraetsokov, only made me more worried.

‘He led a very interesting life,' she said enthusiastically. ‘He was born a prince in nineteenth-century Russia, but when he was in his twenties, he had a revelation, and he gave all he had to an orphanage. He started teaching all over Europe, and then in America.'

Having spent the afternoon shifting boxes, I was far more interested in her inviting, exposed skin than in meta-thoughts. But I must have hidden my reticence well, for she spent half an hour telling me more about the Russian's brand of philosophy, while I stole glances at the curves her green dress hugged. I don't know what it is, they didn't use to bother me, but now these sorts of semi-occult, semi-existential dwellings on life and the universe always make me suspicious. Years ago, when I was at sea, I used to seek out the esoteric. Like when I was in Pondicherry at the same time as the hugging guru and her white-clad posse of white faces with disposable income, and I was ushered to the front of a fifteen-thousand-strong crowd, so that I could better witness a miracle in progress. I sat with my legs crossed humming along with her fan-base, grasping at a strand floating under the tent, until I became so tired and dehydrated that I was ready for my own hug. For months afterwards, I told strangers this story, and they asked me what the guru had whispered in my ear. At first, I played it up – I wanted them to believe she'd known me personally. Me amongst fifteen thousand. But as the months passed, I stopped pretending – I hadn't heard what she'd told me, and I didn't want to know either.

Yet, seeing how easily Leona pronounced his name, I curbed my impulses and looked at the book more closely.

At that time, she seemed to have his ideas divided into two. On the one side, Kuraetsokov preached forgiveness as a state of being. ‘Forgiveness is here,' Leona told me, and for a second I grew more attentive, for she was situating forgiveness around her heart, pressing down on her left breast so that her cleavage swelled. ‘When you embrace forgiveness, you start to love. It can't work otherwise, don't you see? And love hides the ego.'

And this is how she linked it to his second concept: ‘To do that, you must stop thinking.' When she mentioned thinking, she tapped her skull, which didn't have the same effect as forgiveness. ‘Because, if you think, it always comes back to you. Me, me, me! How can you forgive, how can you love that way? Can you imagine, he came up with all of that a hundred and fifty years ago!'