The Blue Book (22 page)

I risk the possibility of mentioning a graveyard – she went without her husband, of course, because he's a bastard, as previously established – she's somehow in a graveyard – she didn't quite mean it but there she is – not at her daughter's grave, she has no idea where her daughter is buried – may simply have been dumped in a communal pit, but that's what we'll never mention, I'll only imply that Sally's looked and couldn't find – and in the graveyard she's at one of its edges, an untidy place where they've grouped the untimely dead – a line of memorials, fading toys and playroom colours, cheap and obvious and sentimental and clawing you down by the legs, by the hollow in you where she grew, until you're in the turf and sinking and gone to that place – she's felt it, has often thought of the permanent numbness, the blank she doesn't want to think is all there'll be when she runs out over the edge of her life – she has wanted to leave and go to her nearly kid – she has wanted to leave and be nothing.

And when she swallows I do too and I am in her, I am her.

I am out of myself and in the miracle.

And if she believes that her child still sees her – knows, accepts, forgives and loves and loves and loves – then she'll be altered.

Better.

Maybe.

The deck here is painted ready for sunshine and games,
shuffleboard, quoits.

But that isn't why I did it.

I did it because it was wonderful. I enjoyed it.

Cupboards rattle against securing ropes, filled up with summer chairs, cushions, toys to keep little ones occupied when they're not in the paddling pool.

Love to paddle, kids.

Love all sorts of things – love their mothers – and they are loved.

She tries to focus on the sky, the way the clouds seem so languid, while everything here screams.

It was a thing we were good at – that I was good at – not as good as he turned out to be, but nevertheless we were something. And we felt like nothing ever has or will.

She angles her face to the cold sun.

Arthur and me, we could get tight up inside somebody's story – we could make them invite us in.

I'd start with a name, any name – doesn't matter – certain ones imply ages, nationalities, religions, others are more neutral – play it safe, or take a risk, I could pick – the enquirers are the ones who do the work. If the name gets a hit from the hall, if people claim it, then I keep with it, move on with it – switch in through descriptions – one detail, two, three – until I've knocked down all the possibles amongst my audience to a handful of enquirers, a couple – my woman, my man, all mine – I narrow and narrow what I give them until only their love fits. They think that I've found them, become more and more precise, when all that I've done is allow them to identify themselves.

And Christ, they do want to identify themselves.

The process is sly and irresistible and cheap and it will always impress, because enquirers have no understanding of probability: they don't know how very likely it is that somebody else in a relatively modest gathering will share your birth sign, or will believe in birth signs, or won't like opera, or will have a scar on their right knee, a bad back – get enough people together and someone is bound to qualify for any competent opening description – and then they'll get to be the heroine, the hero of a story, not just an also-ran. And they want as much for their departed – who maybe had a chest condition, bad legs – or someone they knew had bad legs – or forget it and slide on, keep talking – they had blond hair, wanted blond hair, had a friend with blond hair, had hair – they worked indoors, in an office, in a serious office, like a legal office, they were important, good at their job, they made a difference, didn't go on about it, not really, they worked there many years, had a send-off to mark their retirement and a gift, at a bit of a loose end after that, although
still with interests, sometimes they'd say that they couldn't imagine how they'd found time to have a job.

The more is known, the more it's possible to guess, the more it's possible to know, because close in the places where we think we'll be unique, we are anything but – we have first jobs we got through a bit of a fluke, an element of luck, and something happened when we were children that was nearly fatal, that gave us a scare – gave other people, the ones who cared for us, a scare – involving water – and when we are with our loves, we can be clumsy and worried and happy and scared and sometimes racy – we can surprise ourselves – and we can get so happy and so complicated and also simplified in our pleasures that we sometimes wonder how the fuck we could ever be this lucky and we also don't know why the fuck we have ever been this hurt, this marked, this damaged, so that anyone who knew about it would wonder how we move, how we can stand – only nobody does entirely know, they would have to be psychic to know, they would have to be in possession of strange gifts and able to see us in our deep, sweet, bleeding places – to go further than love.

Except no gifts are necessary: in the deep and sweet and bleeding, that's where we are the same. In the heart of us, we are together – joy, hurt, fear – if we paid attention, just held on, we would feel it beat.

Beth stays on deck until her head aches, her cheeks, until she is mortified, shivering helplessly.

And when the gig was done, I'd go back home and be without him, but next to the Arthur I'd built from his absence, I'd lie beneath the weight of that. I made him irremovable with too much thinking – didn't mean to – I was just scared – and
rehearsing – and scared – and I thought the story of him would be more controllable than his skin, his mouth, his fingers – I didn't want to spoil what we seemed to be.

Thinking their name when you come – you shouldn't. You'll always want to make it true, summon your love so they can hear it – your spell.

Working towards the nearest doorway seems an absurdly elongated process and very distant. She observes herself fighting her way back inside, yanking, jolting the door until she is finally accepted, lost in a deafened, broiling stillness.

Francis sees her in the café before she can avoid him, before her hands are ready to gather a bland warm drink from the many bland-warm-drink-dispensing machines.

‘Now.' He rises and marches at her briskly, Bunny waving, staying where she is. ‘For goodness' sake – you haven't been outside?'

‘Yes.' Beth's mouth almost incapable with cold.

‘Mad woman.' But he grins. ‘Was it very exciting?'

She nods, because he wants her to nod and because it is true.

He takes her arm and wheels her round, ‘You will sit with Bunny and tell her all about it – exaggerate as much as you like – and I will get you a hot chocolate, because that is the only thing that will do. It will be extremely sweet already, but would you like more sugar in it?'

She shakes her head and lets him father her, mother her – there's no harm in it, the ways we can adopt each other and this time he won't make her cry, she is too cold to cry and too suddenly settled in her mind.

‘Bunny, here's Beth again – obviously. You'd have to have had a funny turn not to remember.'

Bunny, tired perhaps, but shaking her head in a manner which is pointedly contented, ‘Just ignore him. I always do.'

‘I'm going to get her hot chocolate and also cake. She isn't eating enough. Look at her.' And he hands Beth into her seat, is briefly and tenderly grave when he looks at her. ‘Is there any type of cake that you don't like?'

‘Um . . . No. I . . .'

‘I think she has hypothermia, should we tell someone?' Stroking his fingers against his wife's neck, intent on her, hungrytender.

Bunny inclining to the touch, ‘Go away.'

Which Francis does with a kind of bow.

‘He's an idiot.' As Bunny examines her husband's back, its retreating, mildly self-conscious line, its resilience. ‘Now tell me about the waves and tempests – I can't get out in them myself, he won't let me. And we'll have a nice afternoon tea together, if you'd like – it is the afternoon, isn't it? Every day I change my alarm clock and my watch – except for today when I shouldn't have . . . I think. The ship's magazine said I should, but it was mistaken, apparently. Or else I am. And we do nothing but eat and sit and wander about and eat and then dress up and eat . . . most disorientating. I have a suspicion it may be Wednesday, is that right?'

‘Yes. It's Wednesday.'

‘Well, that is a relief.' Bunny pauses, checks on the patisserie area and then on Beth. ‘I was in a slough of despond because I missed the Napkin Folding Tutorial this morning – honestly, does anyone attend half the things they suggest we might like?' She pauses again. ‘Sloughs of despond are unpleasant, but we overcome them, don't we?'

‘Yes, we do.'

‘Strange situation – the ship, the crowds, the bobbing about, the dreadful couple from Windsor with whom we've been forced to eat dinner every night – they've only been married for fifteen years and clearly want to kill each other – amateurs . . .'

‘You don't want to kill Francis.'

‘Not often. Not lately. We've had our times.' Patting Beth's arm for a second as she raises her hand to beckon him in.

‘Stop flapping at me, woman.' Francis, arriving perilously with a laden tray – three mugs of chocolate and a variety of cakes, tiny cake forks, plates, napkins, the whole weight and balance of it slithering and clinking until it's set down at rest – or as much at rest as anything aboard seems likely to get. ‘I can see you perfectly well.'

‘No you can't, I've got your glasses in my bag.'

‘I can see you perfectly well enough.' Smiling at Beth so she's in on the joke. ‘I'd know you anywhere.'

And they sit and they have what Francis declares
an illegally early tea
and they talk about the storms – the good and bad weathers they have seen. They spend an intentionally pointless hour.

And Francis and Bunny tell Beth a story, give her an image of Bunny running in a downpour, chasing across a field and Francis there and also running, holding a newspaper over Bunny's head until it's no longer a protection, only this heavy, tearing thing, and so he throws it away and they stop hurrying, are dignified and – by the time they reach a little village – they are stately and do not mind that people laugh at them, because the rain is warm rain and they are together. Together and soaked.

And it is difficult to leave them.

Once she has, Beth doesn't return to her cabin, doesn't discover if Derek feels better, or worse, or the same. She goes to the Purser's Office and makes an enquiry – slightly bored manner, no commitment, even faint irritation – delivers it well: ‘Excuse me. Mr Arthur Lockwood . . . He's in one of the Grand Suites . . . I think that's what you call them. Could you help me with that?'

She no longer knows what else to do.

‘I am expected.'

And this is when your book can tell you about the man and about the woman and how they're both young and in a cold town, rainy, scent of dead industry thick in the breeze as they walked from the railway station this afternoon.

It's dark now and they're tired because all evening they've been concentrating and remembering and talking to strangers about other strangers and watching them cry. It is beautiful, but also tiring to watch strangers cry.

They lean in to each other while the rain flusters and link arms, working their way back to the hotel – station hotel, Victorian monster of a thing: big rooms and draughty and patches on the curtains that the sun has faded, patches where rain has caught the cloth and stained it, weary carpets, chipped tiles and thin towels in the bathroom, potentially fatal electric fires. The man and the woman don't mind the mixture of grandeur and shabbiness, it amuses them, is part of a world filled with pretending.

Although they don't have an umbrella, they almost amble, not speaking, past the ugly town hall and the emptied municipal flower beds, the brightness of shops. It takes them a long time to make a little journey and they even pause before they mount the hotel steps, as if they might wander further on.

But they do come inside, grin at each other as they stroll across the foyer, their clothes clinging. The man's thumb leaves a damp mark when he presses the button to call down the lift and when it arrives and the doors open, they already know that his room is on the third floor and hers is on the sixth, because they are good at keeping hold of numbers. And a stranger who's wearing a grey mackintosh trots up – he has this jerky, trotting step they will both recall very clearly – gets in with them, smells of cigarettes and Brut and some kind of dark stout. They grin at him, too. They love that the
stranger is here and let him stand between them, flurry and heat the absolute truth between them which is that they will both go to the woman's room and they will undress in the quiet and chilly dark and then they will climb into her bed and find themselves there and waiting with the story of who they are and want to be and could be and never will and have to try.

There are so many things you ought to know – for your safety, for your happiness – and your book would like to tell them all to you. It sees that you do love your friends, but you don't trust too easily, your intimacy needs to be won and sometimes you can seem inaccessible and this is unsurprising because you've trusted and been hurt before. Although keeping yourself too solitary can become abrasive, there have also been individuals, personalities that you've sidestepped and you had every right to, because they meant you harm. Others have simply been easy to forget. It's slightly embarrassing to acknowledge that there are people you went to school with, worked beside every day, and now you don't have their numbers or a current address. And there have been occasions when you've told your problems, even the large secrets of your self to total strangers – you've let them look clear into you, and this has been surprising, but also liberating. And after they'd heard all you could say they were nothing but compassionate, affectionate, humane. They owed you no courtesy, yet you inspired it. This is because you have a good heart, a quite excellent heart. And you're interesting; sometimes you doubt it, but you are. You know how to tell a story and when you do people listen. You can make them laugh, which is relaxing and a tonic – they appreciate it.

And you're beautiful.

Again you're by no means sure of this, but you do possess beauty and it can be something you ought to protect, if not celebrate. When you were younger you occasionally felt slightly muffled, you looked for ways to be expressed and – although you might not say this yourself – you wanted to let your beauty be expressed. You've allowed some of your plans for this to slip, though. They were over-optimistic. To be truthful, the creative side of your life has worked out unexpectedly – is still working out. You are not a disappointment to yourself, but equally you aren't quite who you intended you'd be.

And your excellent heart has been broken and since then you haven't been the same. You came back from your troubles in some ways stronger and you don't go on about it – you've had courage that no one can fully appreciate – but you were injured deeply. You can't say you weren't. You hope this has made you more patient, generous, but you're aware that you can also be bitter and self-punishing.

And these days you don't walk into situations with your eyes shut, not if you can help it – you like to be forewarned and forearmed. It can amuse you to be cynical, before you catch yourself sounding ugly or someone corrects you, or questions what you've said. Then you can stop, take stock of what you do have, what is here for you. You undoubtedly have reasons to be grateful and when you are, you feel more comfortable – not in a pious way, you'd hope – only with this slight peacefulness about you, a content.

There was a period when you might have attributed the good things in your life to higher powers: luck, God, willpower, effort, the stars, fate, the benefits of this or that philosophy, or system, your mental fibre or moral discipline. Now these kinds of simple assumptions seem rather naïve and you are less sure of your place in the fabric of reality – or if reality has a fabric, a pattern.

When you were a child you found it easy to believe – were apparently primed to have faith in almost anything and anyone. This has changed, partly because by now you've been fooled too often, scammed and disappointed. You also believe less firmly because you keep learning: you're open to new information and this can adjust your points of view. Your opinions aren't set in stone. Nor are you changeable for the sake of it, or shallow – although everyone can enjoy being shallow now and then and it need do no harm. You are perhaps more flexible and, indeed, thoughtful than average.

There have been television programmes and movies that you've watched ironically, or not at all, but you're aware that others took them at face value and accepted what you couldn't. You often read the papers and then hear their headlines repeated later, undiluted by an intervening thought, stale ideas in strangers' mouths, and this can disturb you. You worry true believers are out there, like fierce toddlers needing to have their own way, hoping to turn their whole species their own way: to unleash the unbridled market, unbridled government, unbridled precepts from unforgiving gods. You suspect they want to mark you with mythical whips, prepare you in their stories, dreams, laws, so that you will bleed in this world and the next. Their posturing can seem ridiculous, but also a genuine risk.

What you might call your current beliefs are complex, mature. God and death are changeable ideas for you: threatening, mysterious, blank, laughable, beyond reach: both of them can be odd comforts and bad jokes. You would like to inhabit a universe that's intelligent and loving, but it has shown itself unwilling to be either. Still, you have consolations: animals, landscapes, natural phenomena, the song of birds, the continuity of genes and minerals – blue eyes begetting blue eyes, carbon in stars and bones – and so much, so much, so much music. These can be joys, whereas many of the rituals from your childhood no longer impress and there are days when you may feel disturbed if you consider them in any depth.

And you aren't superstitious.

Habits and talismans of this or that kind can aid your confidence, that's accepted, but you wouldn't want to rely on them instead of proper preparation, instead of relying on your personal qualities. You'll admit they can give you a boost during tense situations. You may read your horoscope in the papers, but that's only a bit of fun – journalists make them up, they're patently generic guesses, veiled compliments and less-veiled threats. Surely, if astrologers were genuinely insightful, they could have told everybody about those extra planets out there, circling the sun: Sedna, Eris, Vesta and the rest – surely they'd have mapped them long ago. Whole planets – they're not like your spare keys, or your glasses – you can't just mislay them. You don't think that's an unfair point to make.

Under pressure, you may be a touch irrational and this can mean co-workers or family members may appear to be obstructive, or else your surroundings may seem malign for a while: the streets and traffic clotting, geography squirming away from available maps. Some days apparently have a grain and you can feel yourself going against it, but your anxieties do pass and they're rarely so great that you can't control them. Perhaps you do knock on wood, throw salt over your shoulder when you spill it – that's more about keeping a culture in place, about practising something your grandparents or parents might have done. None of this means you'd be taken in by any kind of mumbo-jumbo.

Although not everything has a rational explanation – you know that. You've talked about this over the years and found most people have one story, one place in their lives where the ground gave way and let them fall to somewhere else. They have been amazed. And the stories they've told you weren't the usual, fragile rubbish: that someone came to mind and then that very person called them. (No one remembers the endless thoughts that are followed by no call.) Or else some scenario, object, animal, human being was very clear to them while asleep and was then reproduced, or near enough, when they awoke. (No one remarks on the visions, intuitions, portents that don't come to anything.)

That kind of nonsense is easily explained. What shakes a human being is strong magic, the apparently real thing: someone is stopped by a flower seller in a foreign street, or an old man in a bar, an old woman, an uncanny child – whoever and wherever they happen to be, they make some announcement, statement, which proves miraculously accurate or useful at a later date. Or objects, circumstances, actions collide with an insistent significance which turns out to be of material assistance in vital decisions, or trying times. Or someone goes to see a card-reader, palm-reader, aura reader, colour reader, I Ching reader, psychic, obeah man, medium, santeria wise woman, healer, crystal gazer, cyber-witch, someone who claims to be a gipsy on a seaside pier – however it happens, an enquirer
is told something important
.

A magnificent force has touched them, sought them out, and a deep and golden fact is shown to them and it could never have been known in any ordinary way and it comes true – it is true, could never be anything but true – and it proves the pattern in reality, it unveils the threads and shows how they shine.

For anyone this would be special and would make them special and you realise they wouldn't like you to take it away.

Because it's happened to you, too – you've had your turn at being special. And you believed in it. It was made to be believed.

A man standing in a doorway.

It might have been something like that – an almost infinitely adjustable and eloquent bundle of words. It might have been something you'd heard before, or words not even meant for you, but still they hooked in and stayed with your thinking and spoke to you until you sought them out, began to search for their vindication.

And when you look, you find.

Beth looked.

A man standing in a doorway.

She's good at looking, is doing it now, walking her way towards whatever a
Grand Suite
will turn out to be, to whatever the rest of her trip will turn out to be, to however, for fucksake, she may spend the rest of her life.

No pressure.

Only walking to Arthur's suite. I have walked before and have walked to hotel rooms and suites before and he has been inside them before. This doesn't have to be a challenge if I think of it like that – bite it into little pieces and then I can swallow it.

And focus on the irrelevant and harmless – everything he's not.

So.

It has its own name, like a pet: the Astoria Suite. Art's staying in rooms with a name. Because things for important people can't have numbers, they need to be personalised – the rest of us get the numbers.

She winds herself up the stairs.

‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.' When he still did the platform work, he'd chuck in bits of Bible – enough to add ballast, but not provoke.

Eventually, I learned them, too. I can quote fucking scripture like a fucking nun if I fucking have to.

For a while it had been his favourite –
seek and ye shall find
– he'd used it too much, in fact, almost as much as
a man standing in a doorway
– and when she left him, the image of that left with her, lodged and watched until September
1999
– when she'd passed almost five years without him – and then it lit her, made her see.

She had taken her mother for a break – Bank Holiday weekend.

Can't resist a Bank Holiday weekend.

They'd got rooms in a spa hotel with nice toiletries and complimentary bathrobes and a selection of treatments and procedures guaranteed to be cleansing, or detoxifying, or relaxing, or just nice and hot tubs and a fucking swimming pool – as if this would be a sensible idea and as if they ought to be alone somewhere like that with too much time to think – alone because her father wasn't with them.

It was in Beverley – no reason to pick Beverley, but I did.

Beth's mother had walked the grounds when it wasn't raining and read when it was and, although the rest of the spa's suggestions didn't suit, she got a haircut and a new perm and had her nails done – nothing garish, just a nice manicure and a little bit of shine. She'd explained to Beth how the ladies who did it all – who encouraged her into it – had been very outgoing and pleasant, they had made her laugh and first called her Mrs Barber, but then later they called her Cath, because she asked them to, because Cath is unchangeably her name and isn't reliant on anyone else.

Cath had come down to dinner looking pretty for nobody, hands holding each other, unwillingly self- contained. She wore her first new dress since her husband's funeral as if it were a sin.

Beth had paid what she couldn't afford to for massages – face down and tensing more when they touched her, when they tried to let out what her muscles were barricading in: the thoughts and thoughts and thoughts. She'd guessed this would happen and wasn't alarmed – she was only embarrassed when she got her money back for one session because she had started sobbing – full, jerky sobs – and that meant the masseur had noticed and stopped.

It wasn't unreasonable – guy by himself with an upset naked woman under a sheet – could be awkward.

Everything stops for tears.

As a general principle that would never work. Put the whole bloody world into gridlock, that would. It would send everyone chasing round boats to no purpose, set them adrift.

No. I do have a purpose. It is a bad purpose, I think. I'm not sure. It may be the wrong way to do right.

Beth has reached Arthur's deck, which is Deck Seven – of course, it would be seven – and the light fitments are more aspirational here than elsewhere and the air tastes cleaner, subtly conditioned to please those who've paid for it.

The scent of people faking it – Kings of Glasgow with looted pensions, Duchesses from Solihull who are blowing their redundancy money, couples who want to be twenty years ago and newly-weds – and they want to have white glove service and little sandwiches cut into shapes and their picture taken with the captain and dancing the night away and pretending that being British should mean you are running a loving empire, keeping the less-blessed and foreign in line and teaching them how to boil vegetables into submission and forget themselves and salute the Butcher's Apron when it creeps up the bloody flagpole every morning.

They don't want to be ashamed.