The Blue Book (29 page)

Don't remember what else he said, but
can't have him in the house
.

Mum had made the special fish pie with extra veg, and a cherry flan and optional cream and nobody ate it.

She was crying, but I was busy and Arthur was sitting in his car, not gone, but not in the house.

Can't have him in the house.

Dad holding on to my arm and we can't believe ourselves – we've been changed didn't mean to and I have to go and be with Arthur.

Can't have him in the house.

If they could have liked each other, borne each other.

The audience are clapping again. Derek huffs and shifts his legs. Matt Mitchell and his personality have skewered the balloon and yet it remains healthy.

Not even a drop of blood.

Perhaps maddened by his impossible success, Mitchell walks down amongst his spectators, pressing out minor waves of unease – they would prefer him to be neatly far away. He reaches out unsuavely and plucks a young lady out of her seat. She is manifestly fitter and thirty years younger than almost anyone in the house and walks like the kind of dancer who might take part, for example, in a New York Arrival Cavalcade of scenes from popular musicals in just such a venue as this, perhaps tomorrow night.

Matt leads his in-no-way-suspicious companion up on to the unruly stage, mugging and flapping mock applause until he is rewarded with a burst of relieved appreciation: he is back where he should be and the show is no longer a threat. A stagehand trundles out an improbable trunk that's draped with a yellow cloth.

Metamorphosis – that's going to be his finale: an effect which was already boring when his grandfather walked out of the music hall showing it because it was
FUCKING BORING
.

That's if his grandad took an interest in magic – someone in his family should have . . .

Or not – it doesn't exactly seem to foster functional relationships.

Matt whisks the cloth lumpily away – it is stiffened by a rod that runs along one of its shorter sides – and shows the trunk to his assistant who is amazed by it in the way that women in bad porn movies are amazed by their own and others' nudity: on a kind of big-eyed time delay. He then takes a velvet sack out of the trunk and waves it at her. He tells her loudly and clearly – the way he might speak to a senile relative or a puppy – that she must hold this sack open while he steps inside it and then fasten it round his neck before she shuts the trunk's lid over him and fastens that
very securely
.

Arthur gave me a vibrator once that was sold with a black velvet pouch to keep it in – just like Matt's sack – excuse the doubled meaning – drawstrings you could tie. It was smaller – but still a container for a dick – a fake dick.

That was in one of the London hotels – on the Strand. Our room had a window that looked on to white – a type of light well tiled in white – and he'd been to a sex shop before he arrived, bought stupid things, was in a funny mood: ‘You could take this with you and think of me. I know that you won't take me.'

He's never fair.

And nor am I.

The assistant, as instructed, stands on the locked trunk. She holds the yellow cloth in front of her as if the
audience have interrupted her while bathing. She attempts
to look confused, nervous and sexy – each of these emotions proving too stern a test for her acting abilities. She raises the cloth. The rod inside its top edge allows it to serve as a curtain that hangs sufficiently wide to obscure the trunk, her legs, body, head. Her arms are lifting high and she's swaying on tiptoe along with the general swagger of the ship, of everything. For a moment only the cloth is visible.

A synthetic melody is playing. It grows louder and therefore more sickening.

And everyone wants to see behind the cloth. We can't help it – we're all sure, will always be sure, that what's behind it will be wonderful. It's never quite as
good when it's revealed, but next time – then it'll be amazing. Next time the secret will be beautiful.

Bodies under sheets – is that why we do it, put our dead under cover? So then maybe magic will happen and we'll pull back the cloth and look at them and they'll be looking back – restored.

The curtain is let fall and – alacazam – Matt is standing thrillingly on the trunk. More exciting still, when he unlocks that very trunk, his assistant is inside and tied up in the sack. There are whistles and cheers mingled in the applause which Matt dips forward into, bowing open- mouthed, the way that he might dunk for apples. His assistant bows, too – professional about it, forgetting who she's meant to be.

It's the speed that impresses – how quickly they change places and the man can become the woman and the woman becomes the man – Houdini performed it with his sweetheart –
if you was me
.

Funny couple, the Houdinis – the Weisses, to be more accurate. No kids, so they just invented one, made him a story between them.

The house lights nag in and obediently the rows of seats begin to empty.

Beth nudges Derek, who has been dozing, when she'd rather he saved unconsciousness for later.

But I don't think he will sleep later.

And I won't be there to know.

Because it stops now.

We stop.

He sniffs, wriggles his shoulders and seems as tender and clean as anyone just woken.

I think what he liked was how unavailable I am. He read it as a complex interior passion, something to be cunningly unveiled.

But pull back the cloth and he'd see – I'm all in pieces, no use.

‘Let's get out of here.' He does sound a touch groggy.

And he's the real audience volunteer – a genuine innocent – so no matter what he does, the trick's against him.

They slip themselves in with the last of the crowd, the murmurs and perfumes.

In most paintings of the crucifixion they get it wrong – they show the nails fixed through his palms, when that would never work: you had to be pinned through your wrists or you wouldn't be adequately supported. But the artists understood: blood and metal at the sweet spot, that's what to show – everyone's had a taste of that.

Which isn't going to make what I do to him all right. I am aware of that.

Beth lets them be drifted and bumped towards an exit.

Francis and Bunny will be in their cabin, each one of them with their love, in their love.

‘Derek?'

‘Yeah.' Short, flat syllable.

‘Do you like Jimi Hendrix?'

‘What?'

‘It's
OK
. Forget it.'

They are outside the theatre by this time, paused on the insistently high-quality carpet and Beth is simul­taneously tired, tired, tired and beyond herself, starting to live in another place, somewhere thoughtless and taut, and this makes her unwary.

‘You fucking cunt.'

She doesn't expect that Derek will grab her elbow and, loud in her face – not fully shouting, but drawing in wider attention – he will announce, ‘You fucking,
fucking
cunt.'

‘What?'

‘I was
ill
!'

‘You were . . . Of course you were ill, I was . . . I was feeding you pills for days.'

The badness of saying this thrumming in her fingers.

‘Cunt.'

The foyer unhappy. A boxy-headed man in a dinner jacket jerking his head as if he's been slapped by the first use of
cunt
and – after the second and third – clearly torn between physical intervention and removing his wife from further exposure.

Further exposure to words for a place that she has and an activity to which it has quite possibly been subjected.

‘Derek, what are you . . . ?'
But Mr Box would not have called it fucking. He peaked early and now he's lost.
‘
There's . . . why are you doing this now?'
He'd never have said cunt.

Lovely, round, firm name for it – cunt.

Mrs Box might have said it – she has hidden depths – hidden from him – bet she dances alone at parties and scares the shit out of him when he sees her, bet she flirts with waiters.

And why am I reading them when I ought to be reading Derek?

Derek whose colour has risen and thickened, who has lost his dignity, thrown it away – upset much more than angry, eyes wet and large and steady on her, as if he can force her to reveal some strange capacity to strike him, or be poisonous, or a physical abnormality which will prove her wickedness. ‘I was ill and you were . . . All today.
All
today. And where have you been all this week?' He wants to point at her and shriek.

He basically is pointing and shrieking. And all the discontented couples loitering to stare because we're obviously much more discontented than any of them.

‘I'd wake and you wouldn't be there and you wouldn't be there and I wouldn't know why and then you'd come back and be . . . today, you were—'

‘Derek, like you say' –
I am a coward, Jesus I'm a coward –
‘You haven't been well. I've been around.'

‘
A-round
?'

We're an extra show for everyone.
‘I've been . . . you slept a lot. You don't know—'
They should thank us. We're pretty much as mediocre and predictable a gig as they would like.

‘I
kno
w
!' This a full yell and the crowd fluttering back in case things get genuinely untidy. ‘Were you with him?'

They'll send a steward, security – we're letting the side down, being inelegant and not dashingly dressed.

Soft sweater.

‘Him? Derek, what does that mean –
him
?'

Soft sweater.

‘That old bastard – he was all over you. Is it him? Were you with him?'

‘With
Francis
?'

‘I don't give a fuck what he's called – is it him? He has a wife. You're screwing a pensioner with a wife.'

I need to be quiet and elsewhere. I need to walk away and leave him and he is giving me every reason to.
‘You were rude to his wife.'

‘And you're
screwing him
!'

It's not you, it's me
. Does anyone actually say that? Goodbye, it's not you. When of course it is you; if I'm leaving it would obviously be you.

And me.

Why don't I feel anything?

‘Francis has been very kind to me—'

‘Yeah, I bet he has.'

This shouldn't be fun – to pace him, and pace him and here's his shoulders in the angle of mine and our feet – not agreeing – but now they do – and feeding him calmness and see if I win. Make him a game and he can't scare me, although he doesn't scare me – I'm not scared, shamed, not anything.

I'm not anything.

‘Derek, this is absurd.'

Derek glares at her, but he would rather be pacified and convinced.

‘You're being absurd. Francis is married, he loves his wife, he's . . . a nice guy. I don't know what you're talking about.'

And she leads and he follows and slowly, clumsily, they straggle into a lobby, past a winking clutch of lifts. She is taking him away from the scene of his crime and nearer to the scene of hers, while both of them are more or less forcefully ignored – some observers missed out on the previous scene and others are of the opinion it shouldn't have happened and therefore did not.

Can feel a tickle and giggle in some of the bystanders, though. The woman in the tan trouser suit especially – she's hot and wet with speculation and she'll talk. They'll all talk. By tomorrow morning this will be exciting the whole ship: perfectly sordid gossip.

Derek is also aware of the hungry and disapproving pressure set against what he would like to do – he wants the full-tilt drama and then probably a reconciliation. ‘You cunt.'

I don't want Francis to know, though – not Bunny and not Francis.

‘Derek, do you know what I did today? While you were asleep? Asleep again' –
always classy: blaming the victim –
‘
I went to the duty free perfume sale on Deck Three – a thrilling experience: village tombola meets
The
Poseidon Adventure
' –
lying this much, it gets you light-headed
–
‘And I had lunch and I read the ship's newspaper for the day and tried learning how to recognise ship's officers according to their epaulettes' –
the story to replace reality, that I will believe so that it will be believable –
‘And I had a massage and that meant I could use the pool and the sauna and sit in peace and read a magazine and – yes – they only had magazines for the elderly, talking about how sixty is the new forty and eighty is the new seventeen' –
and he is wishing every word into truth
– ‘And how to deal tactfully with double incontinence and how to bring cleaning materials with you when you go into hospital so the general lack of hygiene won't kill you' –
I'm being kind, something close to kind –
‘
This did not make me want to screw a pensioner. And I care about Bunny and I care about Francis.'