Weekend (24 page)

She was surprised at how easily the confession had come out, especially since none of it had happened. There had been a Davy at school but the most physical thing he had ever done to her was wave to her once in the street. She was glad they hadn’t asked for his second name. It was bad enough inventing a liaison with somebody without passing on his surname as well.

After that, she created a couple of other assignations with phantom lovers. Once in a dingy flat. Once in the bedroom of someone with wealthy parents. That was an exciting episode in her life. The furnishings had been amazingly plush. One wall of the room was lined with the mirrored doors of a fitted wardrobe, in which they could see themselves making love. It got her so interested she almost believed it.

Perhaps the exposure she was feeling now was just the result of being out of the swaddling clothes of make-believe.

A young man came through the door of the bar suddenly. He was gasping and red-faced. He seemed to come too quickly into the middle of the room. You could tell he had been running. His stride was slightly out of control, as if the message from his brain that he could stop running now hadn’t yet reached his legs. The blind look in his eyes was something Kate used to associate with the eyes of her friends coming out of a cinema matinée. It wasn’t only a matter of adjusting to the light. The recent past had seemed more present than where they were. They were having to wait until the vivid images of where they had been receded before they could see clearly.

The man focused. His awareness seemed to arrive to join his body. He crossed to the bar. The barman came along to stand in front of him.

‘Could you get me a half-pint of lager and a taxi?’ the man said.

‘A taxi?’ the barman said. ‘What kinda drink’s that?’

‘No, I mean a real taxi.’

‘One with a driver in it?’

‘That would help. I’ve had a bit of bother. I know it’s a liberty to come in and ask you like this. But I don’t fancy going back out on the street.’

‘That’s all right. I thought you meant something like a Sidecar or that. The names of these drinks is changing every week these days. I’ll get the drink first. You look as if you need it.’

When he had served the man, the barman phoned.

‘That’ll be about ten minutes,’ he said. ‘So what was the problem?’

News of the taxi was like an instant readjustment to the
man’s thermostat. He shook his head. He took a small sip of the lager and replaced the glass on the bar. When he started talking, everybody was listening except the small man, who seemed to be continuing the argument with the barman in his head.

He was going home alone when someone shouted at him from across the street. He was lost in his thoughts and it took him a moment to locate the sound. Opposite were several teenagers – he thought there were five of them – and they were moving their arms backwards and forwards in time with one another to point at him, like a football crowd, he said.

‘Five of them?’ one of the men at the bar said. ‘They must support ma team. That’s the kinda crowds we get.’

The teenagers were jeering and they started to chant. ‘Say goodnight, wanker. Say goodnight.’ They started to run towards him and he ran away. He was lucky some passing cars delayed them long enough to give him a good start. They chased him for a couple of streets until he heard one of them shout, ‘To hell with it. Let’s get that old bastard over there.’

She was starting to worry about Mickey when he came back in. She repeated the story to him as the taxi-driver arrived and the young man went out with him. As Mickey and she chatted she was aware of the men at the bar talking about how things had changed in their lifetime, like a descant to their own voices she couldn’t quite shut out.

‘It’s great we found each other.’

‘Think of thirty years ago.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve paid your dues. If you can’t see any difference between then and now, ask for your money back. You’ve missed the show.’

‘We’re going to be good together.’

‘No rules to violence now. About as macho as pulling the wings off a fly.’

‘As long as you learn to like Tolkien.’

‘Don’t know. Sometimes love can ask too much.’

‘Private terrorism. The weaker the victim the better they like it.’

‘I’ll listen to Coldplay.’

‘I think I’ll emigrate.’

‘Where to?’

‘Same everywhere. Nowhere to hide.’

Mickey took her hand and smiled. She was remembering that Mickey’s only reaction to the story of the incident in the street had been to raise his eyebrows. It was the first time she had felt it might be possible to be alone in his company.

She thought of Willowvale. She had supposed it had been what an idyll is. But perhaps idylls were only recognised in retrospect and you couldn’t travel deliberately towards them. Certainly, as Mickey released her hand, winked, stood and lifted their bags, she couldn’t imagine how to get to a place that wouldn’t have the kind of hurt in it that must have happened to the old man the teenagers had decided to settle for. She just wanted to try.

Mastectomy. Chemotherapy.

The words waited for her like instruments of torture under which she wasn’t sure she could hold her nerve. She had heard them often enough before, words that went in and out of conversations, evoking a sympathetic shiver, like news of a mugging that had happened to someone else. Now they had
come to live with her, frightening presences that stared at her when she woke up in the darkness, looked over her shoulder at every book she read, made an irony of Jason’s casual treatment of her, accompanied her to the supermarket, biding their time. Their time was now.

She had looked them up in the dictionary several times, as if to confirm that they really existed, as if to verify the address of a place she was moving to. The dictionary didn’t tell her much about what it would be like to be there: ‘the surgical removal of a breast’; ‘treatment of disease, esp. cancer, by means of chemical agents’. She liked the casualness of the
esp
. She had thought of trying to find out more but she had decided not to. She suspected that to know too much about a dread, to pace out its dimensions too precisely, made it overwhelm you more effectively. It was enough to know that the words had climbed out of the dictionary to find her. To meet them she needed the irrational defiance of a certain amount of ignorance.

She had managed to sustain that until now. She had wept a lot at first but the tears had begun to space themselves out, just punctuation for the resolution she was trying to make herself express. She would try not to let them happen tonight. She touched her left breast, as if reassuring herself that it was still hers.

Her breasts. She remembered a summer day before she and Alan were engaged. She would be twenty. She was to meet him at his office in Bath Street to go for lunch.

The day stood like a crossroads in her memory, a time when she took a turning from which she was still trying to find her way back. She sometimes felt it had led her insidiously, step by step, to where she was now.

It had been a day of fierce sunshine, or so it seemed to her now. It had certainly been bright and she remembered it as
very warm with the kind of heat that makes you aware of your skin, conscious of the fact that, no matter what you are wearing, you are really clothed in your own flesh. That day she didn’t simply know what nubile meant. She lived it. Her breasts were like antennae sussing out summer. She had by then come to accept the effect they had on men. She should do. She had had plenty of time.

They had arrived early when she was a girl, as if nature had mixed up the dates and had her down as sixteen in its records. She was twelve when her breasts became alarmingly obvious. She couldn’t have been more embarrassed if she had been a boy who had started to go bald at twelve. She was miserable.

She started to find excuses for not taking gym. She tried to learn to sleep lying on her chest. She pleaded with her mother to buy her blouses in a bigger size. She slouched around, furtively aware of being someone with a sad deformity, the Hunch Chest of Notre Dame. Some of the girls began to treat her as if her sudden development were the result of a personal choice, the flamboyance of a show-off. Their eyes followed her like gossip. She often worried about what the gossip was. Some of the boys took to sniggering as she passed. She didn’t want to know what they might be saying, although some of the remarks, fired at her from the safety of the group, gave her more idea than she wanted to have.

She knew now what that painful phase of her life had been about – three or four years in which a girl was obliged to walk around in the body of a young woman. Her body had been delivered to her like a DIY kit without instructions included. She had all the parts but she couldn’t put them together, so she was obliged for a long time to provoke reactions to which she could find no imaginable response.

But something happened. Slowly the feelings came to fit the
body she had been given and she began to feel good inside it. It was then that the misery she had experienced turned to something positive. The standoffishness of other girls revealed itself as jealousy. The threats of the boys became immaturity. She wasn’t an ugly duckling. She was a swan.

Having been a woman for years before she knew she was one, she seemed to have a kind of accrued, retrospective maturity to draw on. She started going out with older men. But she handled herself carefully and by the time she met Alan, who was five years older, she was still a virgin. Three weeks after she met him she wasn’t.

It had seemed so right at the time. She was glad she had waited. She was enjoying exploring sex. He made her laugh a lot. They knew they were going to get married. Any problems that arose were just part of making the necessary adjustments to becoming a couple, like that day in summer.

She had been very clothes-conscious then. She chose to wear a tight pair of black jeans. The memory made her conscious of what she was wearing now. She stood up and looked at herself again in the mirror. She turned and looked over her shoulder. She seemed as trim now as she had been then. But what surprised her was that they might have been the same jeans. She had bought them on impulse, unaware that she had been replicating a moment from eighteen years ago. Was she trying to erase the intervening time and begin again?

The thought depressed her, not just because she knew it wasn’t possible. You could move beyond the past but you couldn’t deny it. You could transform its meaning but you couldn’t wipe it out. What really depressed her was that perhaps the attempt to contradict Alan’s influence so determinedly, if that was what she had unconsciously been doing, might merely be a way of acknowledging it.

She looked at the Lycra top. At least that was different. But not very much different, she had to admit. For a start, it was white. That day she had worn a white cotton bustier. How different was that? Not exactly the transformation of Vikki Kane. She drained her glass and went through to the kitchen to get the wine-bottle from the fridge.

That summer day the bustier had accentuated her breasts nicely. She hadn’t minded that by then. She had grown used to the way men appeared to be fixated by them. She had suffered enough in coming to terms with them; she could enjoy them now. She had earned her tits, she had decided, the way they said knights used to earn their spurs.

So when she resolved to walk to the lawyers’ office where Alan had recently begun to work, carrying the woven black bag over her shoulder, she felt good in herself. The glances and the whistles didn’t bother her. She could afford innocently and accidentally to flirt with the world because there was only one man she was interested in and she was going to meet him. He was the armour that made any incidental advances harmless.

In Bath Street scaffolding had been erected in front of a building maybe fifty yards from Alan’s office. As she manoeuvred herself round it, she heard the chorus of workmen from above her. Hullo, hullo there. Does yer mother know ye’re out? Room for one more up here. Jesus Christ, look at those.

She thought they must have an interesting view from above and she would have become seriously flustered if she hadn’t seen Alan emerging on the steps outside his office. He was watching her as he came down on to the pavement. She kept her eyes fixed on him, smiling as she came. He was her protection against this and she came into the haven of his
presence gratefully. She didn’t realise the haven was an ambush.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said, as she leaned towards him.

What should have been a kiss felt like a slap. She stared at him. She thought she had been walking along the street. She felt immediately vulnerable and isolated, standing between the workmen and Alan, caught between two simultaneous expressions of the one aggression.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Look at you. You might as well be carrying your tits on a silver salver.’

He glanced up at his office window and started to walk quickly away in the opposite direction from the workmen, obliging her to teeter after him. She could barely keep up. She felt towed in the wake of an anger the force of which was wildly in excess of any reason she could give it. She was aware of how dusty the street was and she felt suddenly cold, as if the weather had changed.

‘It didn’t occur to you to put clothes on?’ he said.

‘I thought I had,’ she said.

‘Did you?’

‘I’m wearing jeans, for God’s sake.’

‘No, the jeans are wearing you.’

She had no idea what that was supposed to mean. She wasn’t sure Alan did either. His mouth seemed to be working of its own accord, making gasping noises and hisses and contorting itself strangely.

‘And that,’ he said. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘It’s called a bustier.’

‘No wonder it’s called that. That’s what it does, all right. They should call it a massive-tittier. You never heard of decency?’

‘Listen, in my book this is decent.’

‘What’s your book? The
Kama
fucking
Sutra
?’

It was a dire day. They raged at each other as they walked. There was no way he was going to lunch with someone dressed like that. There was no way she was going to lunch with someone whose mind was so narrow he could have worn a thimble for a hat. They parted simply by taking two different directions at a corner without saying goodbye.