The Blue Book (15 page)

And then Elizabeth ran away.

Which is a thing she doesn't do.

Not often.

I didn't scare them – worried them, but didn't scare them
– crying too much. Francis, he expected it and that made Bunny
expect it, too and
No, no, not all – we quite understand.

Francis anxious to ease and excuse. ‘It's this weather. Quite atrocious, I'll speak to the captain and have it changed.' So that her sobs start to shudder her more effectively than the deck and she has to go, to bolt.

Couldn't make him watch me fragment. Couldn't do that to a decent man, a normal man.

‘We've done as much.' He's determined to understand.

Bunny also: ‘I've done more.'

‘Both of us have gone quite completely to pieces and in front of people we didn't know from Adam. Honestly.'

‘So do stay.'

‘Yes, please stay. It's all right.'

Not a chance of it, though. Battering out through the tables and down and down and down.

Fuckit.

Still going.

Fuckit.

I am not just getting clear of them and clear of the help they might want to suggest which can't actually be of any help and which I can't stand because I'm beyond helping, but would rather not remember that.

I am not just running, I'm looking.

I'm looking for him.

Idiot.

Idiot.

Idiot.

Always the same.

And every window that she blurs past is monochrome and raging and around her the lights are trying to be golden, but seeming sad and there is music from the floor below – ridiculously pretty music – and Elizabeth is too dishevelled, she is having too large an emotion not to be noticed, remarked upon, but this doesn't matter, because she is searching and not finding – this is her humiliation, that she is clearly scouring, chasing after something she can't get – this is her paying the proper penalty, her shame.

For sin, or for rejecting sin.

For him, or for rejecting him.

And there is no sign of him.

He hasn't left a trace.

Predictable.

He disappears.

Another game.

Or the end of the games.

I didn't go to his room with him and so he's staying there without me.

He is somewhere without me.

Predictable.

And he loves predicting.

He puts a piece of paper in his pocket every day. He writes the day's date on it and then –
On this date I predict that Arthur P. Lockwood will die. Yours sincerely, Arthur P. Lockwood.

He'll carry on until he's right.

Has a game for all occasions.

Even the one he'll never see.

He showed me the note once and explained it. But he didn't predict that I'd slap him as soon as I read it.

Only time I ever hit him – terrible to hit him – never should. It was the shock. Arthur there and promising to die.

She jars herself through the drop of another staircase, then paces beside the dance floor – a dozen or so couples are dipping and bending inside piano music, accommodating to the ship as it kicks and slides, gives them new steps, propels them. Their bodies remember the turns and reverses and beats they learned decades ago, they fill the ghosts of how they moved and smiled
at weddings, dinner dances, parties, birthdays, anniversaries.

Not at funerals – not the custom.

The women are dignified and competitive, dressed to make the most of what they no longer quite have, and they're tenacious, brisk – echoing who they were with stronger bones and different skins. They largely dance with each other, because there are not enough men.

The men die fast, die soonest, leave us. We are made to be durable and therefore abandoned.

Except Bunny. She'll die before Francis. It wasn't just the black of the pullover, she has something quietly hollowing her out and they are here for the last cruise, the grand gesture – they are making him something to hold, for afterwards.

The feel of her palm wrapped round his finger and tight and the pulse in it and the heat – like fitting himself inside her, but discreet – they'd enjoy that: could promenade anywhere and no one need understand it, or notice it but them.

It would be something to remember.

A thought to burn him later – to hurt in his own palm, crucify him with her being nowhere he can reach.

Poor Francis.

Poor all of them.

However much money, however much they own or want to own, outside the cold is beating a way in, has all of their names.

I really shouldn't hate them as much as I do.

And she fights to slow herself – breathe, walk – until she sees them properly: all the silly, distracted people who are like her: who will die. They will dress up for special occasions and be pompous, or lovely, inadequate, languid, dull and they will make mistakes and be afraid and enjoy jokes and treats and surprises and maybe their children and then they will stop.

Which makes them wonderful.

Think of how rare they are and tender, of how they are extraordinary – no chance of escaping and still they do all this.

Makes you love them.

Makes you unable not to offer them a broad, indiscriminate love.

That's Arthur's trick, though – so he can love his enquirers into openness, trust. When he actively considers their frailty, it becomes irrelevant if he dislikes them, loathes them – because love is his only appropriate response. He loves them and they know it and that means they will let him burrow in.

He'd be ready for Francis. He'd take the good husband's hand and fold his own around it, press his thumb into its heart, touch where it's bleeding.

That's how he'd start.

Some people can sit in a café and drink coffee by themselves, be nakedly alone, eat teacakes, or something quite fiddly like pasta and they'll be fine.

But you might not be – not every day, not no matter what.

Sometimes you'll look at the café people, their bodies assured and all being well with them, as far as you can judge, and you'll think –
Who are you? How do you manage?
Because it appears they do manage very nicely, while it can seem, now and then, that you do not.

Walking across foyers, into unfamiliar rooms, half-empty restaurants, waiting for the first steps of a first date, being in parties with too many faces you don't know – you can find it taxing. But social anxiety is commonplace, a kind of bond, because you've worked out, of course you've worked out, that your discomfort is often caused by the equal, if not more profound, unease of others. And you've wished you could just announce –
we are scared here in this situation – whatever it is – all of us nervy and being tender-skinned precisely when we should not and although we are adults we feel we would like to run now or burst into tears – big children in stupid clothes who ought to be well-presented but aren't and can't think how they could be and this is, quite literally, painful and we should stop
– but you never have mentioned a word of this: you have only talked nonsense while voices pitched oddly and objects were dropped and the room became irritable or desperate for a drink, for several drinks, for anybody it could really talk to.

Because it can be complicated, having fun.

Not that you can't go out alone: to browse in a furniture
store, for example, or anywhere else you might wish – take a stroll in the park, or see a movie without the bother of somebody else – it's possible to relish that kind of thing, as a change, as a rest.

The café situation, though – it can niggle. You have, if you're honest, sat there and wondered if maybe your hands weren't properly angled, if you didn't quite fit, if people who glanced at you wouldn't be horrified, wouldn't find you somehow appalling. You have felt that your aloneness might look entirely justified, deserved.

Which is why you need games – Games for Unpeculiar People in Public Places – and your book can provide them here, would like to help.

c) You can sip your coffee, tea, or beverage of choice – perhaps decaffeinated – and believe you are taking a short break from pressing busyness. This will always be, to some degree, the case and not a thoroughgoing lie – and, as your belief convinces you and others, check your watch with an air of gentle irritation, indulgence: you wish your life weren't so demanding, but what can you do . . . ?

This will seem much less unfortunate than sipping something on your own and, in an unforgiving world, what can be wrong with reassuring falsehoods?

But try not to give the impression that you're actually waiting for someone. They will – naturally, because you
aren't
waiting for them – be unable to arrive and this may seem sad to your observers.

Another option, then.

d) Should you have such a thing about you, there's always your phone to bring relief. It can provide the necessary chore of weeding out your messages, or just reviewing them, reflecting on the fact that several people, people who know you, have formerly made efforts to get in touch – some of them wholly unsolicited. Thinking this, projecting this satisfaction, can be warming and easily done. Or you can text a random friend to say you're bored – you need not mention being solitary – and then you can smile quietly, as if you are in love, as if you have just done something new about your love. This will be additionally warming and will make you appear more attractive. Not that you aren't attractive and may not genuinely be in love and entirely appreciated: it's simply that your love is not here and not now. So you need a touch of proof, witnesses, reassurance. A gently enhanced presentation will mean you seem accurately yourself.

Although there is always the danger that, if your love is an absence or else a repeated mistake, the darkness of this may creep in and cloud you. Or it may happen that nobody calls you or texts you back. Not that you needn't still pretend they have.

Being publicly ignored is, once again, sad.

And miming that you have a small phone palmed in your hand when actually you don't, going through the motions – that would be even sadder. Don't do that.

h) Make little notes on scraps of paper – frowning, serious lips – as if an especially vital point has sprung to mind and must be recorded. Or make the effort to carry a laptop and use it – behave as if you're doing business, an unassuming figure at the heart of invisible empires, or someone who's working on sonnets, a biography of Houdini, a
roman-à-clef
with more keys than a piano and no locks.

Which would be very, very, very sad.

So perhaps not writing.

Reading then: that's involving, that's company.

i) Study the menu, or flyers, advertisements, scan through orphaned newspapers and wonder who's held them before – let this consume your time with a merry glow.

And bringing your own paperwork need not appear defeatist: you can peruse your chosen material as if it is challenging, abstruse, work-related, essential to a course of study – or else something you can demonstrate, with plentiful nods and grins, as exceptional, a book that everyone sensible should be reading. It would be good if any covers or bindings involved could be stylish.

l
) Play yourself preoccupying music – pipe it in gently through whichever headphones you prefer. Make it clear that you are enjoying yourself, that you inwardly thrum.

Don't simply stare into space as you might quite reasonably do while listening to something not unpleasant
– this will make you look mentally stunted. But don't enjoy yourself too vehemently, either – not if you're over twenty-five. Avoid anything beyond mild finger-drumming
and possibly foot-tapping. Mouthing lyrics, graphic physical commitments, the playing of imagined instruments – these are all to be eschewed.

Don't begin to fret in case your isolation indicates that parts of your life have gone wrong or astray.

That would be intolerably sad.

m) So you should turn the ugly pressure of being observed into observation – watch the other customers and staff and stand aloof from your species.

This will allow you to see that – let's say – couple G are in the first six months of a warm, but rather juvenile pairing – that couple E have not had sex, but are going to soon, although she is less interested than he is – that child N is a sociopath and his mother O isn't helping. She is swayed by his blue, blue eyes and his fair, fair hair and he's already using his beauty thuggishly, enjoys worship, believes every other woman he meets should offer it and that he should be perpetually able to do what he'd like.

But conversely, a not dissimilar child shouldn't be neglected. No one, for instance, should hold back her motherlove from a clever blond boy, or never fully meet her son's extraordinary eyes full of sea and want. This would harm him. It might drive a probably unpeculiar soul to fold himself away and make a package, a distasteful secret, of whoever he turns out to be. A good mother would study statistics and then avoid likely causes of injury and death: traffic accidents, choking, drowning, poisons, electrocution, falls. She would be aware. And she would be kind – she would love and be amazed by him and kind; she wouldn't want him growing to believe he's been defective from the start. She wouldn't want to make him alternately abject and untrusting in affection, both angered and paralysed by inrushes of hope – in short, ruined for any other woman he might care about.

Although none of this should matter to you. It's as irrelevant as the man A who might sit there, reading a book in the coffee shop. He might be both unashamed and undemonstrative about it, just reading – could always carry a book or a paper for dining out, could usually expect to eat and drink alone, stay neither happy nor unhappy, but wholly suspended in a resignation he isn't stupid or numb enough to call content. And possibly he used to be loved and a sliver of him still expects it, is alert, betraying him to every disappointment. Touch him with sufficient gentleness and he might kindle, smile.

And that would be very intolerably sad and sad and sad.

And none of your business. You have no connection to any of the café-dwellers you'll ever watch. Because you don't watch friends. At least, you shouldn't.

But anonymous lives, their being close, can sometimes seem a kind of safety, a comfort. If you let your mind out to touch the idea of someone and hold that – who they might be – they can soothe you. They're people you can decipher, who can warm you, but you'll never have to meet.

This does no one any harm. It's not intrusive.

Strangely, if you recall when you've been most lonely, you won't think of being alone, of guessing at unknown occupations, interiors. You'll remember having made an effort, perhaps being well-dressed and yet entirely certain this does nothing but highlight your obvious lacks – and there will have been crowds and laughter not your own and the shock of your friends' and of your love's inaccessibility. Those who should have been closest have stepped away.

y) Consider your love, focus, perhaps briefly close your eyes and entertain its full effect, let it come awake, flare in you like music, so it touches your sides and tickles, turns and strains against you, like the finest music – no electronic assistance necessary – like the songs that change your heart, that walk you through public places as if you're dancing, that make you feel like dancing, as if you're running out beneath close thunder and letting it lift your hair and make you dance.

But not if your love is gone, or spoiled: you couldn't bear it near your thinking then. Don't try.

Because you can't.

Shouldn't.

Can't.

Shouldn't.

Can't.

A little bit of crucifixion in each palm.

Find yourself rubbing the skin.