The Art School Dance (47 page)

For Virginia,
though, nothing could be as chilly as a single bed. Apart from
‘that other one’, the one she had just wasted the past four months
with, it seemed like ages since she had last had sex with someone
excitingly unfamiliar. Last All Saints, she thought that had been,
in a strange house, at a party she had not been invited to, with a
young sociology student she never saw again.

'Since I last
had sex,' Goomer sneered. 'Don’t be so prim, Virginia, it really
doesn’t suit you. What you mean is a good fuck, a bloody good bang
that’ll break your partner’s balls. That’s what you’re actually
after, if you’re honest with yourself. And as for love, which I’ll
mention before you do, well, if it should happen to come your way
you’ll only dash off in the opposite direction.'

Virginia
shrugged off Goomer’s opinions, for her shoulders already had
enough to bear. With her lips to her glass and her eyes peering
over the rim she looked around at the faces in the bar, some pink
and some pallid, all unaware of her gaze. The strange faces
fascinated her, she wanted their secrets and their intimate
company.

'Fight it,
Virginia, fight it,' said Goomer, recognising the mood and guessing
what was running through her mind. 'Go play with yourself in the
toilets or something.'

'It’s not the
same, Goomer. I want to feel arms around me and a broad shoulder to
cushion my cheek. I want to feel a man getting excited because I’m
there.'

'Whether you
play with yourself or play with a man the end result is going to be
the same. The only reason your kind wants my kind is for that flash
which comes with orgasm, that sudden slap to the senses that seems
to give everything reason. It’s only a transitory thing, though. Be
a poet instead, Virginia, their insight lasts longer.'

Virginia
emptied her glass before conceding that there might be some truth
in what he said.

'You’re bloody
well right there is,' Goomer insisted.

'You see,' she
continued, 'I’ve often felt, after making love with a man, that I
just want to get away and do something more important.'

'That’s it
exactly. If you stay too long with a person you find the knot is
tied, around your neck most likely, and it’s so tight that it makes
your eyes pop. You walk along the street with a hand clasping yours
and a smile beaming at you, crisp and white, and it’s not to say ‘I
love you’ but just to make sure that you’re there, in your place,
where you belong. That’s the sort of bloke you always attract,
Virginia. You bed them and then you belong to them. Before you know
it that knot is the size of an engagement ring.'

The impression
gleaned from this sermon was that Virginia would have to tread a
celibate path for the foreseeable future.

Her shoulders
slumped. 'So now I’ve got to forget all about men? I’ve got to give
them up completely, is that it? Or just stick with women?'

'Women would
be safer,' Goomer agreed. 'But no, you don’t need to give up men
completely. Just screw the ugly ones, so you won’t be tempted to
linger too long.'

That ruled out
John Goomer, then.

Chapter Two

Goomer was five
years younger than Virginia, as thin as she was slim, and possessed
of a quirky heart; though in its right place, and functioning
perfectly in terms of beats per minute and other medical criteria,
it had always seemed to be held like a treasured possession behind
cupped hands, ever his and never shared, never admitting affairs or
involvements.

Not that
involvement had been in Virginia’s mind when she first saw him,
wearily climbing the steps to the cathedral; she had been too
fatigued herself, clutching another of those hastily snatched
carrier bags of belongings and worrying over where she would spend
the night. He was a shambles of a figure when seen from the rear,
weighed down by the bulging pockets of his threadbare dufflecoat,
and she was so intrigued by the sexless shape that she followed,
noting that his head was suitably bowed beneath the hood as he
plodded along with a steady monastic gait. Up the steps to the
cathedral entrance she quite expected him to stumble and was ready
to play Simon of Cyrene to his offbeat Christ. Her assistance was
not needed, though, and it occurred to her that perhaps his body
was actually bowed by piety and not by tiredness.

He circled the
sepulchre and she trailed behind, showered by the muted light of
the stained glass which slowly became more resplendent as they
reached the west side of the cathedral and he noticed her. He
accepted her presence without question, without suspicion, and
pointed to the colours which streaked the floor in reverent
array.

'Blue,' he
said, facing a glass panel while apparently speaking to her,
'brings back the times I’ve been sad, obviously, and Guernica and
the tired old guitar player.' He walked on slowly, assuming that
she would follow, as he introduced himself. 'My name is
Goomer.'

'Goomer,' she
repeated, seeing that beneath the hood of the coat there was long
blonde hair but still no certain clue as to the sex of the
person.

He came to a
sudden halt, said in surprise, 'Goomer? You, too?'

The voice was
soft, it could have been either male or female.

'Oh no, not
me,' said Virginia, understanding the misunderstanding. 'I was just
repeating your name because it has a nice ring to it, that’s all.
My name is Virginia.'

'Virginia,' he
said, trying her name as she had tried his, like garments they were
swapping, and they continued their circuit of the interior.

He stopped
before another window, now bathed in carmine and vermilion. 'Red,'
he said, 'reminds me of times in Italy, with the housebricks ablaze
and the earth scorched a similar colour. Have you ever been there,
Virginia?'

'Yes.
Parma.'

'It’s a rare
place.'

She stopped,
to remember how it had been.

'Green,' his
voice came again, from some yards ahead, and she hurried back to
his side. 'Green for the Warwickshire countryside that I remember
from my childhood.'

He almost sang
this last recollection, his voice crackling back to some uncertain
past, and Virginia, intrigued, wondered about religion, which she
felt ought to come into this spectrum somewhere, ought to play a
part in the colourful liturgy.

'Well, I must
be leaving,' said Goomer at length. 'Which way are you going?'

Virginia
shrugged. 'I’ve no idea. At the moment I’m without a flat.'

'Then come
with me,' he invited her. 'I know where there’s one to be had and
it just might suit you.'

*

And the flat
was still Virginia’s, still much the same, which was perhaps a
little too much the same, for what she did on her return was
commence to break holes in its fabric, claiming that privacy was
what was lacking.

The rooms, of
which there were two, were an uncomfortable arrangement, for though
they were adjacent they were unconnected; each had its own door
fronting onto a communal corridor, and to get from the bedroom to
the living room cum kitchen she had to pass along this thoroughfare
in varying moods and varying states of undress, perhaps meeting
someone and being forced to strike up an embarrassed conversation.
There being no privacy in this setup, the obvious solution was to
make her own door between the two rooms. A simple matter. Then she
could move freely between sleeping and eating, these just about the
limit of the functions which she exercised in the place she called
home. (The bathroom was on the floor below, so she rarely used it;
she peed in the sink when she had to, washed in there, and any more
exhaustive evacuation of her body would generally have to coincide
with the time she spent outdoors.)

Virginia’s
search for privacy proved to be a tiring business. After removing
half a dozen bricks in as many hours the hole was little more than
a foot high. She had to work quietly, that was the problem,
scraping away with a once stainless steel table knife and wondering
what it must be like to attempt to escape from a penitentiary; a
mammoth undertaking that must be, and she vowed always to stick to
the straight and narrow to avoid such places. This was the wise
thing to do, and wisdom was one of Virginia’s fortes.

She was not
terribly well up on the science of the building trade, however, and
she thought that there must be structural stresses and such things
to be considered. She sat back for a while, to dwell on these and
to rest.

Moments later
a tap-tap on the door interrupted her deliberations and she froze,
hoping that whoever it was might go away, but the dust from her
efforts seemed to fall noisily to the floor, a thundering cascade
betraying her presence.

The knock came
again.

'Virginia? Are
you in there?'

It was Goomer.
Or a good impersonation. But then he was one of a kind and could
not be copied.

She opened the
door and ushered him in. 'I thought you were the landlord for a
moment,' she said.

'It’s lucky
for you that I’m not.' Goomer looked at the room, at the worn
carpet and the debris which covered it, at the drawings of the jazz
greats and the dust which coated them, at the hole in the wall and
the bricks stacked beside it. 'What on earth are you doing?'

'Making a
door,' she replied, explaining her need for privacy.

Goomer, though
he would never go to quite the same extremes of introversion, was
sympathetic, appreciating the reason and the method. 'You still
have the hassle of getting in and out of the house, though,' he
pointed out. 'There’s not much privacy there, having to use the
common entrance.'

'True.' This
was a problem which had already occurred to her. 'But I’m on the
third floor. What can I do?'

Goomer strode
over to the window, opened it with difficulty and looked out at the
rear of the house, at the overgrown garden with the coach house at
the rear and the cathedral beyond. Then he turned, his arms spread
like a saint giving a benediction, and smiled in his most beatific
way.

'You’ve come
up with a solution?' Virginia guessed.

Goomer nodded,
still smiling. 'A rope ladder.'

'A rope
ladder?'

'A rope
ladder. You can slip in and out without anyone noticing, down the
back of the house, through the garden and into the alley.'

'Right, first
thing tomorrow I’ll nip into town and get one,' she said
sarcastically. 'Are they expensive? Do they sell them at
Argos?'

The sarcasm
noted, Goomer dismissed it with a shake of his head and knelt down
among the drawings she had done. He blew the dust off them,
portraits of Charlie Parker, Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie, Mezz
Mezzrow, Jack Teagarden.

'Well done,'
he congratulated her. 'I said you’d cope.' Then, getting to his
feet, he said, 'Come on.'

'Where?'
Virginia asked, but did not really mind where; the dust was
developing into a cough in her throat and she was happy to leave
the room.

As they walked
along the corridor and down the stairs she was sure that doors
opened and closed behind them, that people were watching. Yes,
Goomer was right, a rope ladder would be just what she needed; if
she could scuttle past the neighbours’ windows they would be too
startled to be inquisitive.

She gave the
front door a good hard slam as they left the house, to let everyone
know that she had gone, and went with Goomer, by the side of the
cathedral where the sunlight flickered through the agitated green
of the trees.

Goomer slipped
his arm through hers. 'Right, imagine New Brighton,' he told
her.

'Okay,' she
agreed, closing her eyes and relying on him to guide her.

'So what do
you see?'

'The Irish
Sea.'

'Closer.'

'The
beach.'

'Closer
still.'

'The sea
wall.''

'Good. Now
what do you see on that sea wall?'

She thought
for a moment. 'Seats?'

'And-?'

'Seagull
droppings'

'And-?'

'A
lifebelt.'

'Exactly. And
beneath that lifebelt are the first dozen rungs of your rope
ladder.'

Though Goomer
nudged her and brought her back from the sea to the city streets
she could still picture the scene; in a red frame, below a white
lifebelt, was a short rope ladder, its wooden rungs bleached by the
sun and the brine. At high tide, in times of distress, it could be
flung over the wall to help those in difficulty.

'I couldn’t
take that, Goomer. It might save a life if there’s a storm.'

'And if
there’s a fire in the flat it might save yours. Right?'

Goomer’s sense
of logic was so simple that it was convincing, Virginia’s sense of
right and wrong so fuzzy that she was persuaded.

'Right.'

In the late
afternoon they strolled the city, enjoying the clement weather, and
Virginia found herself sharing the contentment of the people she
saw, or faking a contentment for those who seemed less than happy,
craved after the bodies of the men -and women- who appealed to her
and looked forward to hotter summer days, to the warm nights which
would fire her fancy more than spring ever could, when the still
air would be a skin which touched hers and the earth would be a
creature to be loved, to bear her body as she lay down to dream.
Such pyrotechnic fantasies accompanied her as she went with Goomer
along narrow cobbled streets, warehouses climbing on either side of
them making the sky a narrow blue ribbon above.

*

The drawings
were finished and dusted and Virginia took them across the city.
They were probably quite passable things, acceptable to most
people, but she had her doubts about them; after all, she was no
artist, she did Day-Glo posters for chippies and Chinese takeaways.
To allay her fears over how well they might be received she stopped
for a drink on the way to the ‘Corkscrew’, hid herself in an alcove
at the rear of the ‘Why Not?’, surrounded by half-timbered walls
and nicotine-brown plasterwork.