Cathexis (6 page)

“Right you are”. His footfall retreated.

“Do you think he saw your boots?” she asked. Even if he had I said, he wouldn't have made the connection.

We lingered on the top landing, looking down on my team. Quincy, extracting a length of decking from the radial arm saw and about to offer it up to its resting place.

“That's a centimetre too long”
I said.

“You can't possibly tell that from up here”.

Quincy scratched his head as the board wedged against the brick wall, some two degrees from level, about to bring his foot down on it.

“No” I whispered.

Thinking better of it, he snatched it up.

“A tad too long” he shouted to Clive.

“…I can see everything now” I said.

Increasingly less time at Remy's, not returning until gone midnight only to leave at a quarter to six the next morning. Jasmine was in crisis and needed my support. Remy praised my self- sacrifice but was concerned I looked tired.

“Minsk, you're running yourself ragged”.

Chapter 10

It was evening, a new nip in the ai
r. We strode along Highbury Park to buy wine. Nancy had dressed me in a fluffy, bottle green jumper that smelt like her. She curled her warm hand around mine, a brazen thing to do given the proximity of neighbours and shopkeepers. Also foolhardy; she hadn't been a lesbian before and knew nothing of the dangers inherent in such public display.

As if on cue, a group of Turkish boys ambled towards us, casually scanning the street for something to prick their interest. Men often looked at Nancy, sometimes stopping in their tracks to see if the rear view was as good as the front, craning their necks as they drove past. Occasionally, a lewd compliment, or obscene suggestion raised my gorge, but Nancy, accustomed to it, would walk on focused on a distant thought.

“Look man, le le le lesbians” leered one. I looked up challengingly, unsure which had spoken, locking eyes with one.

“Yeah, but look man” he said. “They're beautiful”. He grinned at me without guile and they swung past. Nancy smiled at the ground, squeezing my hand.

Nancy bent over, her legs as far apart as they would go. A paintbrush swished across the deck between her spread feet. She reversed towards me in shuffling steps, her arse level with my face, helping me now. Clive and Quincy had moved on to the next job in De Beauvoir and so I'd enlisted my alibi, Jasmine, to assist in tying up the loose ends at Palladian Road.

Jasmine, a single parent with two boys: a three year old who her mother looked after if she had work, and one of six months, baby Harris, currently nestled safely in the armchair structure that I'd constructed from bags of peat while his mum dug planting holes.

Jasmine had shivered with vicarious excitement when I'd told her about Nancy and me: there was little in the way of light relief in her life. She was small but effective, her eyes, guarded brown codes, which she allowed a select few to decipher, me among them. Thick black hair, like summer sable already threaded with silver, simply existed on her head; she had no time or money for such treats as haircuts. Her approach to life was robust and pragmatic, but if you could peel back her wrapper and take a good bite, you'd see 'victim' in red letters through her core – no fault of her own.

Jasmine and Nancy chatting animatedly while I traipsed back and forth through the house, loading Fritz with detritus and tools,
a satisfying sense of sisterhood settled on me. I touched Fritz's chrome wing mirror in appreciation of my current lot, despite the dynamic of three. I didn't like three, commonly regarded as a harmonious number. I saw it as ominous.

Three cars passed in quick succession. My obsessive disorder created violent aversions and mercifully redeeming preferences, which allowed me to rectify any perceived imbalance. I mistrusted trinities, threesomes, trios – three blind mice, three little pigs, three bears, three wise men. A number weak and incomplete, trapped in triangular repetition needing a fourth to break the cycle. The farmer's wife, the wolf, Goldilocks and baby Jesus.

I lingered in the street unable to move until a fourth car went by. Four better
,
but not ideal. Already protected against the double disaster of 33 by adding the two digits together to make six. Six was good. Pleased with my fancy footwork, I consolidated the correction by counting two more cars before hurrying down the basement steps, through the house and back to the garden, where Nancy's broadly spread fingers rested on Jasmine's back. A green, toxic thistle flowered in my chest
.
Narrowing my eyes, gathering armfuls of offcuts, I marched back to the car and hurled the blocks into the flat bed with unnecessary force, more in fear than anger. On my return, Nancy was gone and Jasmine placidly patted soil around a lavender plant.

“Where's Nancy?”

“She's just gone to get some stuff from the attic” replied Jasmine, without looking up.

I turned on my heel.

“Minette?”

“Yeah?”

“She's really nice”.

“I can't do ladders”. Nancy was pensively eyeing the steps that had miraculously unfolded from the trap door in the ceiling. Her mission, to give all her old baby paraphernalia to Jasmine. I passed down carry cot, booster seat and sacks of clothes, but left the gruesome contraption that was the breast pump, unable to palate the thought of Jasmine's knockers squidging into the perspex pods where Nancy's had been - an intimacy too far.

She and I stood in the landing window watching Jasmine sitting in the peat armchair, staring into space, Harris's pink face pressed against her white breast.

“Go!” I said. Clive pacing around the kitchen in De Beauvoir, ru
nning his hands through his mousey hair. He reset his baseball cap. Becky was having contractions. “Go to her, you fucking idiot”.

He kissed me shakily, his face in rictus, a snowman with black coal eyes and a crazy, imprinted smile. He smelt of elation and terror. Shoving the company mobile in my hands. “Let me know what...” I shouted at the slammed door.

It was hard on your hands and shoulders. Jasmine and I, staggering through the house in De Beauvoir, laden with two buckets each, full to the brim with shingle. She also toted Harris on her back in a sling. Quincy was bashing about, erecting a fence at the back. At least it was shorter than Nancy's house and there were no steps. Great tides of fatigue swirled about my legs and I shifted into the zone, clenching my buttocks and marching, four wheel drive, one foot in front of the other, hands winches, shoulders a crane, spine a metal, flexible thing. Too exhausted for further motivating metaphors.

Out on the street, I climbed into the almost empty tonne bag on the kerb and visualised falling asleep as I scooped the flinty stones into the bucket wedged between my knees. Nancy! The word floated before me in the puffy, intestinal letters of a sky writer. The message urgent, but fleeting. I peered over the edge of the bag like a gopher. Across the road and some way down, the purple Saab. An apparition hanging behind the windscreen, its expression unreadable, startling me even though I knew it was a friendly ghost. Dropping the bucket, I broke into a jog. She refused to wind down the window for a few seconds and then depressed the button to explain she'd only wanted to see me and not to interrupt my work.

“Hey, Nancy” Jasmine beamed, not unduly surprised as I led her up the stairs to the client
’
s bathroom. She perched on the edge of the Victorian bath while I washed my hands.

“I'm sorry” she said. “I didn't mean to disturb you”.

Standing her up, I dispensed with her pants and pressed her down again, bunching her skirt up around her waist, my calluses catching on the black chiffon. I guided her knees apart and regarded her glistening, fluted furrow. She remained rigid, knuckles whitening as she gripped the roll top, impeccably upright as if her cello were missing. The mood music was the brassy scrape of Jasmine raking the shingle and the asthmatic wheeze of Quincy's hand saw. First I made her come with my tongue and then with an oral, digital combination which induced her to cry out my name and gush fluid over my hand.

Emerging into the sunlight holding hands.

“I was thinking of getting some lunch” Quincy said
.
“Does anyone want anything?”

“I think Minette's already eaten” Jasmine said.

Chapter 11

Alone in Nancy's living room, regarding the modest manilla envelope carefully propped on the mantelpiece. 'Minette' in tiny, curiously cautious script – an intimate whisper rather than a declaration. She was no longer here, not even on this island. She'd phone
d me from the airport on a mobile bought specifically.

“I'm longing for you”. I could almost feel her breath on my ear. She'd left something for me: two squares of duplicate passport photos. In the first set, she emoted a sultry gravity, a tacit resonance of desire and loyalty, her green eyes glowering with implication, lips a dark, delicious crimson. They spoke of a whorish disdain for anything other than myself, on whom they would feed.

The other shots, her smiling, laughing no less, playfully winding a dark lock around her finger, eyes crinkled into viridian benevolence, her broad smile revealing even, white teeth and prompting a series of well placed dimples, as if she was laughing in response to something I'd said. I loved to make her laugh. I fished further into the envelope. A substantial nugget sized item
,
but I left that for now and plucked out a piece of paper torn from a lined notebook.

‘Love spoke: Would you jump off that cliff for me,

And be dashed on the rocks below?

Yes I replied, for fleetingly I would have flown.’

Nancy

Several things here
.
I recognised the quote from the Astrid Apple song, ‘Love Spoke’. It amused me how Nancy had appropriated it. Now there was distance between us I had a disorientating feeling I didn't know what else might have been appropriated and what was authentic. I gazed around the unresolved room and suffered an uneasy precognition. 

The main thrust of all this of course was she was telling me she loved me. My heart morsed my ardour back at her.

I retrieved the tissue wadded walnut, a thin chain already escaping like sand onto my palm. A weighty gold heart-shaped locket, engraved with nouveau-style flourishes. I located the button on the upper left lobe and it sprang open, revealing a miniature version of her sultry pout opposite a photo of me laughing which she must have taken in the 'eyes and teeth' session. I wondered who had been summarily turfed out to accommodate our situation; perhaps grandparents, or even better, Todor.

A beautiful and valuable thing. A declaration which made my skin heat up with wonder. But as I looked at our little faces, they already seemed to be in the past; perhaps that's just the nature of lockets. One day though this will be in the past I thought ...but not yet, please, not yet.

I stared stupidly at the mobile which was emitting the 'Afro' ringtone I'd selected.

'Nancy calling' it said, while a tiny green handset rocked around the screen joyfully, much like my heart.

“Hey, Nancy”

“Hi, Minette, how are you?” Clearly a snatched moment.

“OK, you?”

“Listen, darling, I can't talk for long. I miss you so much, I think about you all the time”.

“Me too”.

“I wanted to tell you what happened this morning ...it was the strangest thing”.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, perfectly. I was lying in bed, Todor had just got up.”