Inglorious (16 page)

‘I was thinking about you the other day,’ said Andreas. He put his arms around her. It was a clumsy gesture, but they sustained it.

‘And what were you thinking?’

‘I was wondering if you would like this band I was listening to. They’re called The Kills.’

‘Love is a Deserter,’ said Rosa promptly, thinking of the signs she had read.

‘Very good. And there’s another song I’ve been listening to, I’ll play it,’ said Andreas. There was a static pause while he stood and switched the CDs over. Then she heard a guitar and a voice and the lyric was ‘Hey Lyla, a star’s about to fall.’

‘Very interesting,’ said Rosa.

When the cuckoo clock rapped out midnight, Andreas moved her on to the sofa, told her to lie back and relax. ‘Let’s stay up really late,’ said Andreas. ‘You only have to travel and travelling when you’re tired dulls the boredom and I have, as I said already, almost nothing to do.’ He always spoke in this precise way. He was careful with English, concerned to keep himself accurate. For him it was definitely a game. The idea made her more comfortable, and she tried to relax into it, watching his back while he went to find another CD. He flicked his hair from his face, showing a fine stretch of cheekbone. His shirt was still creaseless. At 1 a.m., with empty bottles lined up on the table, she said, ‘Andreas, do you believe in providence? Or in something else? Do you believe in God? Or in Osiris, Shiva, Buddha, Viracocha, Yabalon, Allah, any of the rest?’ He shook his head. She wasn’t sure if he meant he didn’t believe in any of them or he didn’t see the point of talking about it. Always he was more decisive. He stopped drinking. Batting away another enquiry, he undid his shirt. She was tired; her vision was no longer clear. She saw him as if from far away, bringing his mouth towards hers. Automatically, she received his kisses. He was moving her towards the bedroom and she allowed him to lead her. She watched him undressing, smoothing out his trousers and putting them on a chair. She allowed him to take off her clothes. She saw the smoothness of his skin, the strong contours of his thighs.

At 3 a.m. she was watching the time flashing on a radio alarm clock. Andreas was lying with his head in his arms. She turned towards him, thinking why not just say it all, when she heard the regular sound of his breathing and saw his eyes were shut. She stared at the gaps in the curtains, where the streetlights flickered across the darkness. She saw Andreas’s shirt, hung neatly on his cupboard door. She fell into a doze which continually threatened to become wakefulness, coasting uneasily through the dark hours, lying half-conscious with the day breaking around her.

She heard the storm rattling the window when she woke. She lay on her side and stared at the room. In the distance, she could hear the humming of the fridge. Every so often the pitch rose, the fridge shuddered and there was a pause. Then it started up again. It was constant in its inconstancy, like the interrupted trilling of the birds. She heard Andreas breathing beside her. The place smelt of him, a musty smell of aftershave and warm skin. There was a high whine in the walls, sharp and penetrating. She didn’t mind it. She liked the mingled sounds. Now she could hear a noise in the pipes, like the beating of a distant drum. There was a clock somewhere in the room, scraping out seconds. She heard the city opening itself up to the morning. Cars and a low murmur of lorries. An engine moving up the gears. A few drills hammering into concrete, industrial arpeggios. Now a bird sang a soprano solo. She heard a train honking through a tunnel, the noise muffled, and the grinding of wheels on tracks.

Things
to pack,
she thought. She went on weighing things up with her head in the consoling softness of the pillow.
A
warm pair of shoes. A jumper. Your jeans. Socks and other
small items. A shirt. Buy them some presents. Take a newspaper.
Ask Andreas.
But she thought she would phone him from the Lakes. She would try her father first, over lunch, and then she would go away and phone Andreas with the soothing distance of a few hundred miles between them. Through the window she saw it was a tempestuous day. The night had blasted at the clouds, tearing them into vapour rags. Everything was ragged, the trees were bowed. Rain was falling in thick lines and leaves were gusting along the pavement. She turned to Andreas and kissed his head. He moved slightly and said,
‘
Was?
What?’ She kissed him again, and he settled. She gathered herself in the half-light, reaching for her watch, twisting it onto her wrist. There was a plant on the table, something like an orchid, deep red. Behind it she saw faint rows of books. It was too dark to see the titles on the spines. She heard someone walking along the corridor outside; she listened to their footsteps on the stairs.

Slowly, she moved into the bathroom and shut the door softly behind her. She sat on the toilet, sluicing her mouth with toothpaste at the same time. Then she flushed the toilet and splashed her face with water. Still much the same, she thought, with a glance at the mirror. She heard the loud gurgle of the pipes and wondered if that would wake him. Then she took a raincoat from the cupboard in the hall, and left a note.
Andreas, thanks so much for dinner.
I’ve borrowed a raincoat.
The oldest one you had. She tore that up. Andreas, my dear
young man. I’ve gone away for a couple of days. Good luck
with learning your fucks. Love, Rosa
. That wasn’t quite right either.
Andreas, my dear young pup. Thanks for dinner. I’m
going away for a couple of days. Rosa. Rosa X. Rosa xxx.
Back soon,
Rosa x.
So she took that one and folded it into her pocket.
Andreas, thanks for dinner. Sorry to go without saying
goodbye – I had to catch a train. Will call you on return. Took
a raincoat – the oldest you have (I hope!), R x.

Outside she crossed the bridge and stepped under the Westway, alert to the morning clash of tyres and steel. She surrendered herself to the wind and the rain. Fumbling with the raincoat, she walked with her head bowed. HEY LYLA: A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL; she saw the words on a lashed and rain-licked wall. She turned at a shop selling kimonos and passed on to Golborne Road. Mod’s Hair Salon was already busy, and in the window a woman was going blonde. The shops had their fronts open, and their shelves were filled with ornamental tagines. The street smelt of fish and coffee. A
woman passed by wearing a sealskin coat. And there was a woman walking slowly in a green jellaba. A man sat on a bench in his shop. He was selling old ceramic baths and antiquarian mirrors. He had on a ski hat and shorts, and he was holding a cigarette and a mobile phone. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said, ‘right, yeah’, as she passed him. From the upper windows of a building a round of applause broke out. Thank you, thank you all very much, thought Rosa. HEY LYLA: A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL. With the stone turrets of the Trellick Tower above her, she went to Café O’Porto and ordered coffee and custard tarts. It lifted her mood. She found a discarded paper and rustled through it. She ate a couple of tarts and sipped her coffee. She whistled a tune and wrote:
I’d not mention a man, I’d take
no account of him, if he were the richest of men, no matter if
he had a huge number of good things, unless his prowess in
war were beyond compare.
She paused, and then she gripped her pen again.
To the Guardians of the Laws, with my apologies
for behaving so badly.
She stared around at the others: a woman feeding a custard tart to her child; a man with a hacking bronchial cough, drinking greedy gulps of coffee in between his fits. To her left was another man, this one with a tie and an edgy stare. She recognised that look, the look of a man who had worked hard already, and would keep going all day. He was the last man to leave every evening, devoted to his four feet of office space. It had made him toad-like, flabby and flattened. There was a crowd who knew the café owner, speaking Portuguese into a cloud of smoke. The toad-faced man was assessing her with a beady glare. He had pushed his chair against the window and was leaning back, surveying the room. The room, or her? She was sure he had been staring. She was so certain that she was on the verge of turning round and asking him what he wanted.
YOU! What do you want? How
can I help you? Is there anything I can do?
She knew she was being absurd, at one level she was quite lucid and aware that this was mental rambling, superfluous, even preposterous. She understood that a man is allowed to stare.
Why look at me?
she was thinking nonetheless.
I can assure you I’m as befogged
as you are! From my vantage point, even with the width of idle
months between my former self and this person you see before
you, I still have nothing to say on the compelling subject of
TEMP
. She was trying to clear her thoughts. Staring is quite common, she thought. There’s nothing to stop him, no law set against those who stare. He stared at you, then he stared at the man with the distressing cough. He stared at the counter where the cakes are, at the women talking, at his newspaper. He’s been staring all over the place. No doubt you are staring too, she said to herself. If she was honest she had given a good eyeing to the woman with a child. So she bowed her head and looked at her custard tart. She thought of the things she had to do. She gripped her pen and began a list.

Go to your father and beg!
she wrote.
Then get out of here for
a night.
Even a night, that would kick-start her conscience. She really might come back galvanised and determined to stop wasting her time. She only needed a change of scene, a simple remedy, age-old, well-practised, generally advocated. A nice dose of difference. Dr Kamen had been ragging on about holidays, taking it easy, others had said the same, Grace and Whitchurch and even the other day Jess had said it, though that had been a feint to get her out of the flat. Now, Rosa was quietly optimistic. A few gaudy fells, a few evenings spent listening to the soft sounds of the English countryside, a pub lunch, a change of mode, and she would send off applications while she was there. She would write to people who might want an amanuensis, someone roughly literate to proofread their work. She would try to find that sort of job while she was away. If not, she would seek out a good office and die quietly into it. She would learn to love the paper shredder, the coffee break, the woman with the squeaky voice who delivered sandwiches, the whirr of the lift running people up and down the building, the tea-stained kitchen, the photocopier, the round robins and office games, the squabbles over territories no one really wanted anyway, the conspicuous waste of time, the death in life! She would learn to love it all.
You! You the toad-
face, over there! I’ll come back with you, whenever you like.
Just name the day and we’ll walk hand in hand, back to the
open-plan office, and I’ll never ask WHAT THE TEMP
again.
Just tell me when.
Now she told herself to stop. There was still Madame la Braze, who hadn’t called her yet. She would sort a few things out. Andreas, for one. She would certainly write to Andreas from the Lakes. Safely ensconced, far away, she
would come clean. She would explain everything and ask him for a place to stay.
Oh God,
she thought, shaking her head.
Tell him you’re a despairing toad. That you have dyspepsia.
As long as she kept limping round to Andreas, she would never really resolve anything. But it was absurd to call him a distraction. He was so tranquil. Whenever she thought of him she felt a stabbing sense of guilt. Guilt or lust, she couldn’t quite tell. She desired him even as she sat there, and that confused her. She thought of his body – perfectly rounded buttocks, hair-downed legs, straight back, smooth skin, long nose, brown eyes – it amused her that she saw him buttocks up, first the moon-like rounds of his arse and then the rest.
Cerebral
, she thought. Now she wanted to call him. With Liam they suffered from platonic drift. By the end they were lying side by side in a sexless bed. Still, with Andreas she felt the sort of basic passion she had entirely forgotten. It recalled her youth when she was, she now saw, green in judgement but perfectly handsome in an unformed way. She wanted to go back to his flat and lie in bed with him. She wanted to touch his skin. Would that be so bad, she thought? Still she couldn’t decide, so she stayed there writing in her notebook.

She turned again and caught the ragged toad-face looking towards her. Now the tables between them were starting to clear. Any moment he would say something to her; she could see him leaning forward, licking his lips. He would be stern and decisive:
Come back now! What do you think you’re
doing? You’ve been out of work for months, and what have
you got to show for yourself? NOTHING! A few books read,
but that will hardly help! A few walks through the city! Who
do you think you are, Henry James? Samuel Johnson? Get
back where you belong!
She could imagine him phrasing the order. Her last line of defence, the mother, put the child in her buggy and walked away. This made Rosa anxious, so she retreated. Banished by her inner fool, she took her tart and walked. As she left she looked over at the man and saw he was staring straight ahead. She went slowly along Golborne Road.
The wind was still up, and the street was awash with coasting litter, leaves and cardboard and plastic bags. Everyone was a swirling mass of clothes and coats, smothered in ravaged cloth, holding their umbrellas to the wind. Rosa walked with an eye on her reflection in the windows. She was another tousled ruin as she walked, hair unkempt, coat flapping. Another burst of rain and she started to walk faster. The damp stalls were selling wine and cheese. A wooden table blocked the path so she edged round it. She heard a car behind her and stepped out of the gutter. Outside the shops were boxes of brightly coloured Turkish delight, scattered with sugar. Rows of dates and figs. And in another shop they were selling halal meat,
Cash and Carry
said the sign. Now the shop owners were pulling plastic sheets over the boxes, holding up their hands against the rain. She had once bought a table in a shop round here, she thought, just one of the bits of furniture Liam was refusing to pay her for. Her reflection was bouncing alongside her, this flapping form. Everyone was sublimely indifferent to her; the man selling copies of the Koran, collar up, the woman selling baguettes and tomatoes, hood over her eyes, the man going slowly past on a bicycle, nearly beaten by the wind.

At Jess’s flat, she put the key in the door and stepped into the hall. Concerned about the carpet, she scraped her feet on the mat. Once inside, she cast the raincoat onto a hook in the hall, wrung out her jumper and put it on a radiator. She undressed as she walked to the bathroom and then stepped into the shower. She poured shampoo on her hair. Things were quite simple, she thought, if you just kept yourself clean and warm. She closed her eyes and lifted her face. She flexed her thigh muscles, drawing her legs tightly together. Her skin was red now from the warmth of the water. As she watched water coursing down her body, she stood her ground. Here she was, a tall woman with wide shoulders. Her arms had always been lean. Her stomach was taut. Her legs were thin; her shins were covered in fine brown hairs. She agreed, she needed to bulk up a bit. Apart from that, she was attractive enough. She
would attract men for a while, then they would deem her too old – most of them – and she would attract fewer of them. But she didn’t need a horde. She didn’t want an adoring mob behind her!