Fallout (15 page)

And then she did it again to him, the third breath, and this time he was dizzy just from that.

Afterwards Leigh moved away abruptly and didn’t look at him. She handed the joint back to Paul and got up to turn the record over. She kept the needle hovering for a long time to find the place because her hand was shaking. It would be all right if they never touched, if he never got so close to her. She settled the fragile needle onto the spinning record.

When she moved away from him Luke had the impression of desertion. Her closeness had been dangerous intimacy. Now he was alone. Leigh lay down with her head on Paul’s lap. They began to talk. Luke’s heart was pounding hugely, as if it had doubled in size and his head felt light.
Headrush
, he thought, waiting for the slowing-down he had seen in other people, and to be able to laugh. It didn’t hit him like that. The sudden unravelling of the many threads of his thoughts wasn’t good. They were talking about the performances that night, Jack, and
The Penal Colony
– he couldn’t follow it all but knew it was ludicrous, there was nothing to say. It was all over and the mess of it was abhorrent; the wreck of a future that was now the fallen past. He wanted to be able to join in but he couldn’t find a place to say anything. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been sitting there. He began to sweat.

Paul looked at him and said, ‘You all right?’

Luke nodded, then he got up and left them.

As if he were stepping through a mirror he saw himself from a distance, going down the hallway and into his room.

He could feel the sweat on his neck and on his face and the cold air making him shiver but his room was quiet and at least he was on his own.

He went straight to the desk where a half-finished page stuck out of the typewriter, abandoned for rehearsals at Graft. He looked at it. It was a scene he’d been rewriting that he didn’t think was working. He pulled it out and added it to the heaped manuscript on the desk.

Then he remembered the drafts that had come before on the floor behind.

He knelt down and pulled them out, laying them out around him on the carpet. His heart was still pounding but his type-written words drew him in. He began to look through the drafts; sorting the scenes, the pages, handwritten, typewritten, and the many scrawled messages to himself. There were box files under the bed, papers under the bedside table and in the cupboards; the notebooks he had brought with him to London years before.

He got them all out and spread them chronologically round him in a spiral. His mind was playing lines from
The Penal Colony
,
Macbeth
,
Cartwright
– and things Jack had said in insistent, repetitive sentences.

They had done mediocre work and he had let them do it.

Intently, he tore blank paper into strips to join the notebooks and manuscripts into a pattern. Then he started on sub-divisions, splitting the chronological into the thematic. He made new piles of what failed and what succeeded; the things he had hopes for and others he needed to abandon. Paul came to the door, on his way to the bathroom and said, ‘Fuck. What are you doing?’

‘Sorting some things out,’ said Luke, not looking up. Paul stood over him, watching. It was irritating. ‘Can you not stand there?’

‘This is nuts,’ said Paul. ‘It’s after two.’ And he left.

Luke could hear whispering somewhere in the room. It wasn’t Paul or Leigh, it was someone else, someone with him in the room. He stopped, suddenly, and thought it was strange that there was someone whispering in the room with him, and wanting them to stop. He sat back to listen, holding a sheaf of papers in his hand and trying to hear the separate words. And then he remembered his mother. He remembered very clearly how as a child, a teenager, he had observed her searching compulsively through the pages of a book, or rifling through her sewing basket, or the drawers of her room and whispering her plan to unseen companions. He remembered her arguments and counter-arguments with people only she could hear. And recalled his discomfort and pity, not knowing whether to play along or try to stop her. He remembered and he thought that he had seen enough madness in his life to know what it looked like.

He looked down at the pages he was holding. His hands were like another person’s hands. He realised that he couldn’t remember exactly what was written on them. The whispering grew louder and then louder again, as if a volume knob were being turned, and now the words were clear.

You have greatly sinned
, said the voice.
In your thoughts and in your words, in what you have done and in what you have failed to do, through your fault, through your fault, through your most grievous fault
.

Shit
, thought Luke,
that’s
funny,
but the voice continued
.
He wondered if so many mad people heard God communicating with them because religion was Man’s essential delusion.
I’ll look into that tomorrow
, he thought. Then he got to his feet.

In the sitting room, music was playing and Paul and Leigh were reading at either ends of the sofa. They looked up when Luke came and stood in the doorway.

‘Can you help me?’ he said. ‘Please. I really need to go to sleep and I can’t. It’s important.’

Paul was sitting on the floor in Luke’s room near the door and Luke – eyes open, fifteen milligrams of Valium and two shots of Bell’s down – was in bed in his clothes. Leigh, also dressed, was on the bed too, with her body around him and her chin resting on the top of his head. It was half past four. Paul was rolling cigarettes in the dim light, drinking tea and trying to stay awake.

‘You said it every night before sleeping?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Luke. ‘Hypnotic.’

‘Tell me it again,’ said Leigh. ‘The words are nice.’

‘
Zdrowaś
Maryjo, laski pełna
. . .’ said Luke.

‘English this time,’ said Leigh.

Luke moved his head back an inch, into the space under her chin, and his shoulders pressed against her chest. He closed his eyes.

‘
Hail Mary, full of grace
,’ he said. ‘
Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death
.’

‘I’m Jewish,’ said Leigh.

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Luke. ‘And it’s all just made-up spells to comfort idiots.’

‘Yes,’ said Leigh.

‘The whole concept of a messiah is infantile and flawed.’

‘I know,’ said Leigh. ‘That’s not the point. Tell me it again.’

‘Although, as it happens, I was thinking; the
Word
.
In the beginning was the word
. That’s good, isn’t it? What else could there be but the word? In the beginning, I mean.’

‘
Shh
– yes.’

‘The very first thing, the
word
—’

‘
Shh
.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Go on.’

‘. . .
Hail Mary, full of grace
,’ Luke murmured, and Leigh closed her eyes and took deep slow breaths along with him. Luke closed his eyes, too. ‘. . .
Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women
. . .’

When he woke the next day his bed felt half the size it normally did. Leigh and Paul were both sleeping on it with him; Paul lying across the bottom like a giant hound and Leigh, who had moved away from Luke in the night, alongside him. Luke sat up, examining his mind as if he were feeling out a bad tooth, but there was no danger. He just felt cloudy from the Valium. Daylight. All the usual components of reality and nothing added. The day before returned to him and that Graft was over.

Neither Leigh nor Paul stirred. Paul’s arm was over his face, Leigh’s head half-covered by a pillow. They must have fallen asleep holding onto one another because their two left hands lay open side by side like an interlocking symbol. He was a trespasser on their gentleness. His only experience of such joining was the quick fusion of sex. Maybe it was the same thing, he thought, just different ways of escaping lifelong mortal loneliness. He remembered Nina Jacobs looking at him over her shoulder as she walked away. The image of her had not faded, and it surprised him. He often saw her in his mind. He knew his feeling for her was not reality, just a phantom he had conjured to fill the cutout gaps within himself – but still, the certain instinct of his heart had not surrendered her. The way she looked at him as she walked away. It was no good thinking about Nina Jacobs. He’d been doing that all week.

He got up – carefully – so as not to wake the others and was confronted by what had not been visible from the bed; the floor was entirely carpeted with paper. Years of work spilled out like guts. Remembering the state of himself the night before he seriously doubted there was any magical order to it.

And yet. He stood there gazing down on the floor made of paper. He surveyed the sea of black on white, and like the clearest church bell ringing out the hour he knew the time had come. He could no longer keep himself from judgement. The safe experiment of other people’s work was gone; there was only his own.

Later that day, when Leigh had gone out, Paul was shaving – to the Stones, very loud, singing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. With the music deafening him, Luke cleared the floor and found the latest draft of his play from the mess of the night.

. . . You can’t always get
. . .

He picked it up, and some other shorter ones – the better ones – and took them into the sitting room.

. . . You get what you need . . .

He put the manuscripts on the table, biting his lip and the side of his nail as he stood over them. Paul came into the doorway, drying his face with the threadbare towel. He turned the music down.

‘What’s all this?’ he said.

‘I want you to read something,’ Luke said, bright with fear and conviction. ‘If that’s okay. I want you to tell me how shitty it is or isn’t.’

‘Well . . . Finally.’

Paul went over to the table in his jeans and bare feet, drying off his neck and chest, behind his ears, scanning the piles of work.

‘That one,’ said Luke.

‘This one?’ Paul picked up the manuscript. Luke clasped his hands behind his head and rocked to stop himself snatching it from him. Paul looked down at the others.

‘Cor, there’s enough of them.’

‘Yeah,’ said Luke.

‘What are they mainly?’

Luke laughed. ‘Plays, Paul. It’s plays, mainly.’ He walked up and down. ‘There aren’t as many as it looks.’

‘Why not stories? Or a novel?’

‘Or a handsaw.’

‘Yes, hilarious.’

Paul flicked through the pages of the play; close, handwritten lines, held together with elastic bands. Luke stared around the room, rubbed his hair, scratched his calf with his foot, squinted at the ceiling, shook off an imaginary shiver – and looked back at Paul.

‘It’s not typed,’ said Paul. ‘You type a lot.’

‘The last draft was at night. I didn’t want to keep you and Leigh awake.’

Paul was unexpectedly touched by this. He eased the elastic band off the manuscript, looking down at the top page.

‘
Paper Pieces
by Luke Last. Who’s Luke Last?’

Luke did not answer.

Paul adopted high camp. ‘Sorry, love, but
Luke Last
? Sounds like a pop singer.
Coming in at number 15, “Ooh Yeah”, by Luke Last.
’

‘Yes. Fuck off. Thanks. It’s just better,’ said Luke.

‘Better than what?’

‘For a name.
Lucasz Kanowski
.’ He said it very Polish, swallowing the sounds.

‘Yeah,’ said Paul, ‘Kanowski. And?’ Paul waited, counting his friend’s cost.

‘I’m not ashamed.’

‘Why would you be?’

‘It’s my father’s name,’ Luke said. ‘It’s bad enough that . . .’ He ran out of words. ‘I don’t want my father’s name.’

Paul watched him and saw that it was as much as he could do to stay in the room. He was a high-wire act with vertigo, he thought. He wasn’t going to be the one to make him look down. He left it alone.

‘
Paper Pieces
?’ he asked.

Luke cheered up, instantly. ‘Yeah. Well. It was called
A Piece of Paper
. Then I wrote some more. For a long time it was
Seven Pieces of Paper
, then it was
Twenty-two
. . .’

‘Yeah, okay, I get the idea. You might want to reconsider that.’

‘
Three Acts and Some Words
?’

‘Now we’re cooking,’ said Paul, enjoying himself. ‘What’s it about?’

‘Some people. They talk, and walk about.’

‘Super.’

Paul put the notebooks on the sofa next to him and rooted in his pockets for roll-ups, matches . . .

‘So are you going to piss off so I can read it?’ he said.

Luke could not stay inside. He walked. He felt as though he were being skinned, slowly, and in public, and could not take himself seriously enough even to calm down. He stopped by the Brompton Cemetery and went inside, walking the paths among the graves.

Winter wind shifted the trees. Clouds rolled helplessly above the tombs. There was nothing he could do. It didn’t matter if his play was bad. It probably was. He had others. He could rewrite. He walked for an hour and a half and then, unable to stay away, started back.

Paul had come out to find him and they met with the timing of trapeze artists in the street near the flat. It was a moment they both would always remember, knowing even as it happened that it was a rare collision.

‘It’s good!’ called Paul, catching sight of him. He was smiling solidity and belief itself. ‘It’s
very
funny, Luke!’

‘Yes. It’s a comedy.’

‘But it’s
properly
funny. And strange. Did you hear me laughing?’

‘No, I was,’ Luke gestured, blank with nerves, ‘in the graveyard.’

‘Of course you were.’