Grey Area (25 page)

I sucked on the fag and thought determinedly of other things: figure skating; Christmas sales; the way small children have their mittens threaded through the arms of their winter coats on lengths of elastic; Grace . . . which was a mistake, because this train of thought was bad magic. Grace’s relationship with John was clearly at an end. It was perverse to realise this, particularly after her display in the café, when she was so secure and self-possessed in the face of my tears and distress. But I could imagine the truth: that the huge crevices in their understanding of each other had been only temporarily papered over by the thrill of having someone in the flat who was in more emotional distress than they. No, there was no doubt about it now, Grace belonged to the league of the self-deceived.

George had put on a tape. The Crusaders – or at any rate some kind of jazz funk, music for glove compartments. I looked at the tightly bunched flesh at the back of his neck. It was malevolent flesh. I was alone in the world really. People tried to understand me, but they completely missed the mark. It was as if they were always looking at me from entirely the wrong angle and mistaking a knee for a bald pate, or an elbow for a breast.

And then I knew that I’d been a fool to get into the cab, the rapistmobile. I looked at George’s hands, where they had pounced on the steering wheel. They were flexing more than they should have been, flexing in anticipation. When he looked at me in the office he had taken me for jailbait, thought I was younger than I am. He just looked at my skirt – not at my sweater; and anyway, my sweater hides my breasts, which are small. He could do it, right enough, because he knew exactly where to go and the other man, the man in the office, would laughingly concoct an alibi for him. And who would believe me anyway? He’d be careful not to leave anything inside me . . . and no marks.

We were driving down a long street with warehouses on either side. I didn’t recognise it. The distances between the street lamps were increasing. The car thwacked over some shallow depressions in the road, depressions that offered no resistance. I felt everything sliding towards the inevitable. He used to cuddle me and call me ‘little animal’, ‘little rabbit’. It should happen again, not end like this, in terror, in violation.

Then the sequence of events went awry. I subsided sideways, sobbing, choking. The seat was wide enough for me to curl up on it, which is what I did. The car slid to a halt. ‘Whassermatter, love?’ Oh Jesus, I thought, don’t let him touch me, please don’t let him touch me, he can’t be human. But I knew that he was. ‘C’mon, love, whassermatter?’ My back in its suede jacket was like a carapace. When he penetrated me I’d rather he did it from behind, anything not to have him touch and pry at the soft parts of my front.

The car pulls away once more. Perhaps this place isn’t right for his purposes, he needs somewhere more remote. I’m already under the earth, under the soft earth . . . The wet earth will cling to my putrid face when the police find me . . . when they put up the loops of yellow tape around my uncovered grave . . . and the WPC used to play me when they reconstruct the crime will look nothing like me . . . She’ll have coarser features, but bigger breasts and hips . . . something not lost on the grieving boyfriend. . . Later he’ll take her back to the flat, and fuck her standing up, pushing her ample, smooth bum into the third shelf of books in his main room (some Penguin classics, a couple of old economics text books, my copy of
The House of Mirth
)
,
with each turgid stroke . . .

I hear the door catch through these layers of soft earth. I lunge up, painfully slow, he has me . . . and come face to face with a woman. A handsome woman, heavily built, in her late thirties. I relapse back into the car and regard her at crotch level. It’s clear immediately – from the creases in her jeans – that she’s George’s wife.

‘C’mon love, whassermatter?’ I crawl from the car and stagger against her, still choking. I can’t speak, but gesture vaguely towards George, who’s kicking the front wheel of the car, with a steady ‘chok-chok-chok’. ‘What’d ‘e do then? Eh? Did he frighten you or something ? You’re a bloody fool, George!’ She slaps him, a roundhouse slap – her arm, travelling ninety degrees level with her shoulder. George still stands, even glummer now, rubbing his cheek.

In terrorist-siege-survivor-mode (me clutching her round the waist with wasted arms) we turn and head across the parking area to the exterior staircase of a block of flats exactly the same as the one I recently left. Behind us comes a Dunhill International, and behind that comes George. On the third floor we pass a woman fumbling for her key in her handbag – she’s small enough to eyeball the lock. My saviour pushes open the door of the next flat along and pulls me in. Still holding me by the shoulder she escorts me along the corridor and into an overheated room.

‘Park yerself there, love.’ She turns, exposing the high, prominent hips of a steer and disappears into another room, from where I hear the clang of aluminium kettle on iron prong. I’m left behind on a great scoop of upholstery – an armchair wide enough for three of me – facing a similarly outsize television screen. The armchair still has on the thick plastic dress of its first commercial communion.

George comes in, dangling his keys, and without looking at me crosses the room purposively. He picks up a doll in Dutch national costume and begins to fiddle under its skirt. ‘Git out of there!’ This from the kitchen. He puts the doll down and exits without looking at me.

‘C’mon, love, stick that in your laugh hole.’ She sets the tea cup and saucer down on a side table. She sits alongside me in a similar elephantine armchair. We might be a couple testing out a new suite in some furniture warehouse. She settles herself, yanking hard at the exposed pink webbing of her bra, where it cuts into her. ‘It’s not the first time this has happened, you know,’ she slurps.’ Not that George would do anything, mind, leastways not in his cab. But he does have this way of . . . well, frightening people, I s’pose. He sits there twirling his bloody wheel, not saying anything and somehow girls like you get terrified. Are you feeling better now?’

‘Yes, thanks, really it wasn’t his fault. I’ve been rather upset all day. I had a row with my boyfriend this morning and I had been going to stay at a friend’s, but suddenly I wanted to get home. And I was in the car when it all sort of came down on top of me . . .’

‘Where do you live, love?’

‘I’ve got a room in a flat in Kensal Rise, but my boyfriend lives in Barnsbury.’

‘That’s just around the corner from here. When you’ve ‘ad your tea I’ll walk you back.’

‘But what about George – I haven’t even paid him.’

‘Don’t worry about that. He’s gone off now, anyway he could see that you aren’t exactly loaded . . . He thinks a lot about money, does George. Wants us to have our own place an’ that. It’s an obsession with him. And he has to get back on call as quickly as he can or he’ll miss a job, and if he misses a job he’s in for a bad night. And if he has a bad night, then it’s me that’s on the receiving end the next day. Not that I hardly ever see him, mind. He works two shifts at the moment. Gets in at three-thirty in the afternoon, has a kip, and goes back out again at eight. On his day off he sleeps. He never sees the kids, doesn’t seem to care about ‘em . . . ’

She trails off. In the next room I hear the high aspiration of a child turning in its sleep.

‘D’jew think ‘e’s got some bint somewhere? D’jew think that’s what these double shifts are really about?’

‘Really, I don’t know – ‘

“E’s a dark one. Now, I am a bit too fat to frolic, but I make sure he gets milked every so often. YerknowhatImean? Men are like bulls really, aren’t they? They need to have some of that spunk taken out of them. But I dunno . . . Perhaps it’s not enough. He’s out and about, seeing all these skinny little bints, picking them up . . . I dunno, what’s the use?’ She lights a cigarette and deposits the match in a free-standing ashtray. Then she starts yanking at the webbing again, where it encases her beneath her pullover. ‘I’d swear there are bloody fleas in this flat. I keep powdering the mutt, but it doesn’t make no difference, does it, yer great ball of dough.’

She pushes a slippered foot against the heaving stomach of a mouldering Alsatian. I haven’t even noticed the dog before now – its fur merges so seamlessly with the shaggy carpet. ‘They say dog fleas can’t live on a human, yer know, but these ones are making a real effort. P’raps they aren’t fleas at all . . . P’raps that bastard has given me a dose of the crabs. Got them off some fucking brass, I expect, whad’jew think?’

‘I’ve no idea really – ‘

‘I know it’s the crabs. I’ve even seen one of the fuckers crawling up me pubes. Oh gawd, dunnit make you sick. I’m going to leave the bastard – I am. I’ll go to Berkhamsted to my Mum’s. I’ll go tonight. I’ll wake the kids and go tonight . . . ‘

I need to reach out to her, I suppose, I need to make some sort of contact. After all she has helped me – so really I ought to reciprocate. But I’m all inhibited. There’s no point in offering help to anyone if you don’t follow through. There’s no point in implying to anyone the possibility of some fount of unconditional love if you aren’t prepared to follow through . . . To do so would be worse than to do nothing. And anyway . . . I’m on my way back to sort out
my
relationship. That has to take priority.

These justifications are running through my mind, each one accompanied by a counter argument, like a sub-title at the opera, or a stock market quotation running along the base of a television screen. Again there’s the soft aspiration from the next room, this time matched, shudderingly, by the vast shelf of tit alongside me. She subsides. Twisted face, foundation cracking, folded into cracking hands. For some reason I think of Atrixo.

She didn’t hear me set down my cup and saucer. She didn’t hear my footfalls. She didn’t hear the door. She just sobbed. And now I’m clear, I’m in the street and I’m walking with confident strides towards his flat. Nothing can touch me now. I’ve survived the cab ride with George – that’s good karma, good magic. It means that I’ll make it back to him and his heartfelt, contrite embrace.

Sometimes – I remember as a child remembers Christmas – we used to drink a bottle of champagne together. Drink half the bottle and then make love, then drink the other half and make love again. It was one of the rituals I remember from the beginning of our relationship, from the springtime of our love. And as I pace on up the hill, more recollections hustle alongside. Funny how when a relationship is starting up you always praise the qualities of your lover to any third party there is to hand, saying, ‘Oh yes, he’s absolutely brilliant at X, Y and Z . . . ‘ and sad how that tendency dies so quickly. Dies at about the same time that disrobing in front of one another ceases to be embarrassing . . . and perhaps for that reason ceases to be quite so sexy.

Surely it doesn’t have to be this way? Stretching up the hill ahead of me, I begin to see all of my future relationships, bearing me on and up like some escalator of the fleshly. Each step is a man, a man who will penetrate me with his penis and his language, a man who will make a little private place with me, secure from the world, for a month, or a week, or a couple of years.

How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer? I won’t be the same person when I come to lie with that man there, the one with the ginger fuzz on his white stomach; or that one further up there – almost level with the junction of Barnsbury Road – the one with the round head and skull cap of thick, black hair. I’ll be his ‘little rabbit’, or his ‘baby-doll’, or his ‘sex goddess’, but I won’t be me. I can only be me . . . with him.

Maybe it isn’t too late? Maybe we can recapture some of what we once had.

I’m passing an off-licence. It’s on the point of closing – I can see a man in a cardigan doing something with some crates towards the back of the shop. I’ll get some champagne. I’ll turn up at his flat with the bottle of champagne, and we’ll do it like we did it before.

I push open the door and venture inside. The atmosphere of the place is acridly reminiscent of George’s minicab office. I cast an eye along the shelves – they are pitifully stocked, just a few cans of lager and some bottles of cheap wine. There’s a cooler in the corner, but all I can see behind the misted glass are a couple of isolated bottles of Asti spumante. It doesn’t look like they’ll have any champagne in this place. It doesn’t look like my magic is going to hold up. I feel the tears welling up in me again, welling up as the offie proprietor treads wearily back along the lino.

‘Yes, can I help you?’

‘I . . . oh, well, I . . . oh, really . . . it doesn’t matter . . . ’

‘Ay-up, love, are you all right?’

‘Yes . . . I’m sorry . . . it's Just . . . ‘

He’s a kindly, round ball of a little man, with an implausibly straight toothbrush moustache. Impossible to imagine him as a threat. I’m crying as much with relief – that the offie proprietor is not some cro-magnon – as I am from knowing that I can’t get the champagne now, and that things will be over between me and him.

The offie proprietor has pulled a handkerchief out of his cardigan pocket, but it’s obviously not suitable, so he shoves it back in and picking up a handi-pack of tissues from the rack on the counter, he tears it open and hands one to me, saying, ‘Now there you go, love, give your nose a good blow like, and you’ll feel better.’

‘Thanks.’ I mop myself up for what seems like the nth time today. Who would have thought the old girl had so much salt in her?

‘Now, how can I help you?’

‘Oh, well . . . I don’t suppose you have a bottle of champagne?’ It sounds stupid, saying that rich word in this zone of poor business opportunity.

‘Champagne? I don’t get much of a call for that round here.’ His voice is still kindly, he isn’t offended. ‘My customers tend to prefer their wine fortified – if you know what I mean. Still, I remember I did have a bottle out in the store room a while back. I’ll go and see if it’s still there.’

He turns and heads off down the lino again. I stand and look out at the dark street and the swishing cars and the shuddering lorries. He’s gone for quite a while. He must trust me – I think to myself. He’s left me here in the shop with the till and all the booze on the shelves. How ironic that I should find trust here, in this slightest of contexts, and find so little of it in my intimate relationships.