Mouthing the Words (13 page)

I shook my head in embarrassment.

“Well, of course you can have the room,” she said. “Look, take my key. I have to leave now, I’m sorry not to be able to show it to you myself, but I do prefer not to have to climb the stairs. Let yourself in and have a look around. I’ll let myself in later with the key in the flowerbed.”

I had a key. I looked up at this enormous, rambling house almost lost in the greenery that surrounded it. Wisteria wound its way to the upper stories and clematis clung to its brickwork. I opened the gates, shutting them gingerly behind me. It was Lucia who opened the door. Lucia who looked at her veiny, fleshy nakedness, grabbed my hand and pulled me into the foyer, some kind of dumping ground for comings and goings, littered with shoes, ratty jumpers, newspapers and plastic bags stuffed with unknown contents. To the right of the door was a vast post box which spanned the wall from floor to ceiling, pigeon holes for everyone who had ever lived in the house over the course of the last three hundred years. Some of the boxes contained envelopes, others held bicycle lights, slippers and tulip bulbs.

I followed Lucia through a dark narrow hallway, along a threadbare Persian runner covered in cat hair.
At
the end of the hallway, a spectacular stained glass window cast a scattering of blue and red triangles over dust-covered books piled high on the floor. Lucia pointed dismissively to her door on the right before we climbed the first staircase. The walls beside us were covered with sepia-stained posters of proverbs and psalms.

On the first floor, Mrs. Morin, Mona and Vera had their respective rooms. The loo, a tiny refurbished closet with a red linoleum floor and shelves labelled with women’s names, revealed much; intimacies of the women I had yet to meet. Clare’s shelf with its witch hazel, peroxide and shampoo to kill head lice, Vera’s with its rich creams, Mona’s shelf holding a pumice the size of a football. And Lucia’s, with its alarming display reminiscent of a medieval apothecary, its glass jars with rusty lids containing unknown contents. I took comfort in imagining my collection of old toothbrushes and an industrial-size box of Arm and Hammer baking soda on a red shelf, inviting me to scrub my mouth and spit blood into the heavy porcelain sink.

Up the next flight of stairs, the landing was crowded with a refrigerator and a bookshelf full of plates, cutlery, cups, saucers and rusty saucepans. There were two doors. One was mine, she told me, and the other, Clare’s. But Clare was “away.”

“She will be back,” Lucia told me. “She always comes back,” she said, smiling sweetly and leaving me to explore what lay behind my new door.

The room was tiny, filthy and dust-covered, but the dust sprang to life and danced in an abundance of sunlight as I entered. From the big bay window overlooking a small balcony I could see Jesus, looking as sad and as sorry as I felt. I collapsed in the brown lumpy bed, which smelled of damp linen, and slept. Slept away the drunken rowing crews, the mixers that turned into gang rapes, and the lecherous professors, sauced in sherry, pickled in posturing, fried like their ugly egg and toast breakfasts.

—

There is a novel by a woman whose name I forget, which Mrs. Morin lends to me. The author describes this place, this vicarage in the nineteen thirties and forties, as a refuge for women, battered women. I know this isn’t fiction. I wonder if it isn’t Mrs. Morin’s story. I wonder if she wrote it. I wonder if I am writing it.

We injure ourselves because of injury. The braces on Clare’s legs. I am cautious around her, pretend not to notice her torturous climb up the stairs, pretend not to hear her screaming, pleading to God. But Mrs. Morin wants us to know. She wants us to know that Clare threw herself off a bridge, a bridge not high enough. And she wants Clare to be reminded every day by the braces on her legs.

I am reminded. Clare is howling on the other side of the wall each night and I am dreaming wildly and whispering in the dark. I am whispering:

please don’t. please don’t pant. this is vomit. this is the
inside
of me thrown out. please don’t punish. i cannot keep my mouth closed and swallow. please don’t kiss me like you love me now. please don’t love me in the moment of killing. i am a hole into which evil comes. i can kill myself. just kiss me nicely on the forehead and i will spare you the trouble. just go away and i promise, i promise i will be good
.

But no, I am not sleeping, I am dreaming again of the wide, open mouth that sounds like thunder, trying to inhale the world. I am hovering here, the room long and narrow below me, my body shrunk to the size of a twig, a stiff insect clinging to the wall above my pillow.

Sometimes I wonder if I am only playing. Sometimes I think all roads led me to this place, this house, so I could play at myself. In the early evenings I crouch low on the balcony and smoke a cigarette and peek over the ledge at Jesus crucified. I imagine that he will look up suddenly and burst out laughing and say, “Hah, fooled you!” I am afraid to look away, just in case I miss him blink. When I am writing late at night, I look out to see him underlit by floodlights. In my life, in this house where we work so hard to keep ourselves invisible, I am so conscious that if he were to lift his head just a little he would see me here, night after night, typing and twitching, in a place without a forwarding address, in a world without men, in a world of women and ghosts. But what if he is the eyes of men? What if all men see through his eyes? What if my father sees me? The sight of Jesus scares me now and I pray that those
nails
are secure. I draw the blinds and the only reminder of the world is the lingering scent of the presence of other women. We are without words here but I know the others are around me and beneath me, engaged in the harsh battles of their own private wars.

I feel Heroin close in this country and I am speaking to her a lot these days—calling through the trees in the forest, listening to the determined gallop of those hooves, which carry her in circles around me. She is in orbit and she is angry, too angry to stop and speak. I am hurt, but I know somehow that she is on a very important mission and that she cannot slow down and be gentle and known. She is hooves pounding through graveyards, crushing evil bones, trampling human heads that poke like obstinate mushrooms up through her well-worn path. I try not to take it personally, not to feel rejected, but I am, nevertheless, calling out loud in the dust she kicks up in her passing.

Aubrietia

MISS N. A.
Shepherd says, “It’s a damn sight better than that stinking locker room.” She is my guest for tea on a cold and wet October Saturday afternoon. She has just broken up with Luke the Pluke from Cambridge, and she’s on a real downer.

“I hate that bloody drive,” Naomi says. “I’m glad I won’t have to do
that
anymore. I have to entertain myself when I’m driving by imagining extraordinary lives for the people in other cars. Pathetic! Most of the cars I pass are driven by really reptilian businessmen types, the sort who have forced my opinion of men to an all-time low. They all drive the same type of car and dominate the road as if that mostly shrivelled one inch of bodily fluid-evacuating flesh hanging between their thighs gives them the right to treat all other human life as an unnecessary inconvenience. I imagine their
sterile
spiritual lives and it keeps me amused for hours.” She pauses. “Do you know what I mean?”

We have had this discussion before. The one wherein I ask Naomi, “If you think they’re all such pigs, why do you sleep with them?”

She usually refers to some awesome power beyond her control. “Some primordial instinct. Some chemical thing,” explanations I can digest more easily than, “Because it can be so great,” or “Because I love him.”

She is determined to hand me the key to this awesome power. We have been once to the night club on the Oxpens Road where we drank our half pints of bitter and hugged a post and Naomi ogled a group of American marines. She has bought me a pair of black leggings from Marks and Spencer, tweezed my eyebrows mercilessly and showered me in White Musk from The Body Shop. We burn aromatic oils in my room, which is supposed to “put you in the mood.”

“What mood?” I keep asking her.

“You’ll know it when you feel it,” she says assuredly. “Starts in your fanny and works its way up.”

“Nom!” I object.

I have tried to resist this fashion/lifestyle make-over by saying, “But really, I think that’s tacky,” on more than one occasion, but then yield to her insistence that I have a hair rethink. I have had my legs ruthlessly waxed, yet this chemical thing shows no evidence of surfacing. I am a piece of wet driftwood refusing to light.

Then this happens. Naomi comes to pick me up at the Bodleian Library one evening and we go to Rajiv Ali’s on the Cowley Road for a curry. We sometimes do. I have a biryani and she has a vindaloo and we share some pappadums and pickle and an order of saag aloo and I say:

“Did I ever tell you about …”

And she interjects with “Suresh?” but indulges me and laughs and quickly adds, “No, who is he?”

At some later juncture she brings me back with, “Your point being, Suresh made a wicked curry.”

“My point being—ugh—Nom—can’t you see?”

“I know, Thelma, he shook your world.”

“Well, yeah. I mean it was as if he was sent there to teach us something.”

“Mmm, hmm,”

“No, I’m serious, Naomi.”

“I know,” she says reassuringly. “But check out this bloke,” she says, rolling her eyes in the direction of the man seated to her left at the adjacent table.

I take a peek and say, “Yeah, what about him?”

“I think he fancies you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I scoff. “Men don’t fancy me.”

“He’s given you the once-over at least ten times,” she nods.

“Naomi, men don’t check me out.”

“Sure they do. And this guy is, shamelessly.”

I am never sure what to do in these situations. If I
were
my mother I’d probably thrust out my new C cups. If I were Naomi I’d probably shout across the table at the end of the night, “Right, then. Are you coming home with me or not?” (Which she actually does, some months later, to a stranger in a crowded pub who eventually becomes her husband.) But apart from these two role models I have little to go on, so I steal a few surreptitious glances. He is pale and thin and deeply engaged in conversation with the man seated opposite him. He is leaning forward, arms crossed on the table, now reaching across to pull a Silk Cut from his dinner companion’s cigarette pack, nodding his head and periodically pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“This is what we do,” says Naomi, pulling a pen from her bag and turning over her napkin. “We write him a note.”

“We don’t,” I whisper in disbelief.

“Sure we do.”

“Have you ever done this?” I ask, uncertain.

“’Course,” she says. “Plenty of times.”

“And does it ever work?”

“Depends what you mean by work. So he may or may not respond—but the beauty of this is, he takes the note, he is invariably flattered and then he does with it what he will. You never even have to know if you’ve been rejected. You never have to see the bloke again, and if he doesn’t call, you just tell yourself that
his
gay lover burned the number when he found it in the pocket of his jeans while doing the laundry. Nothing ventured, Thelma.”

“No, this guy doesn’t have a lover,” I say.

“Intuition?” Naomi asks.

“He’s missing something,” I say.

“Well, then,” she glares at me, wide-eyed.

—

I am going on a date. Oh my God. Jesus God, why the hell am I doing this? I would rather be at home studying, I would rather be at the Bodleian, I would rather be anywhere but here on Little Clarendon Street in squeaky new black shoes walking toward Café Tryst. Naomi is watching me from the other end of the street calling, “Thelma, I’ll kill you if you don’t do this.” A brief moment passes where I do think, “That’s OK, I’d rather be dead.”

He is there, tapping his pack of Silk Cuts nervously on the mahogany bar. His legs are wrapped and wrapped again around the legs of a stool. His thumb is poised on his lower lip. I am Patrick, he is Thelma … I mean, he is Patrick, I am Thelma.

“I am Thelma. I am pleased to meet you. I’ll have orange juice. Thank you very much.”

“I don’t drink either,” he says. “At least I try not to. Alcohol’s a depressant. Silk Cut?” he offers. “I’m trying to quit myself,” he says, shaking his head.

“Thank you,” I say, a little alarmed by the look of my
nails
pulling at a cigarette, unfamiliar but not altogether displeasing after the manicure Naomi has insisted upon.

“I wasn’t going to phone,” he says. “But I was carrying your number around in my pocket and it started to feel heavy there. I was working in the rain, on the roof of my house, and I could feel this napkin in my pocket. I got soaked through and I pulled out the note but it was wet and the numbers were starting to blur.” Patrick pats his pocket like he’s feeling for a pet rock. “More rain and I would have lost the numbers altogether.”

I am imagining a blue river of numbers. I am imagining a sea of missed opportunities and faded promises. I am imagining Patrick building a roof in the rain.

“You’d be better off building an ark,” I say. We talk weather for slightly too long and retreat into silence.

“Are you sure you won’t join me in a glass of wine?” he asks.

I am thinking about this literally. Join you in there? Swim with you to the Antipodes? Float like flotsam on the Pacific? Drown like a slug in tequila, preserved, immortalized and potent?

“Thanks,” I say.

“I try not to. Like I said, it’s a depressant.”

“Do you get depressed then?” I inquire politely, as prompted.

“I’ve been depressed for the last seventeen years,” he
says
. “Chronic, low-level. Feeling like I walk in the margins of life. Everything just slightly off-colour.”

“That’s wonderful,” I exclaim enthusiastically.

“Wonderful?”