With Your Crooked Heart Read online

  ‘A nightcap,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘Are we going back? I’m not tired.’ You don’t want the flat yet. You don’t want Johnnie asleep and all the hours open in front of you, and the little girl on her roller-blades skating away, not fast, but faster than you can walk.

  ‘Did you know Paul was on speed when he did the Almeida flats?’ you ask Johnnie, not caring if he follows the train of thought.

  ‘Course I knew. I was living with you, wasn’t I?’

  ‘It was having two jobs on at the same time. He said it was the only way he could keep up.’

  ‘Well, maybe he was right.’

  ‘I don’t know. I should have thought about it more. A man shouldn’t come in at three o’clock in the morning and get up to do a day’s work at seven.’

  ‘But he did, didn’t he?’

  ‘I know.’

  And you think of Paul, on the sites and on the phone, on the motorway at three or four in the morning, when he said he liked it because there was space to move. Sometimes he drove east and saw the sun rise, and knew he was chasing it back to where it came from, gaining a minute or more. You called it working all the hours God sent, and you accepted it. You behaved as if he could keep on doing it because he said he could keep on doing it. And you never had the guts to contradict him, even when a part of you must have known it wasn’t human. There’s a word you’re looking for, and it’s not one you’d use in ordinary speech. It stays at the edge of your mind, but you know it’ll come back when you least expect it.

  The water’s wide beneath you. You know it. You taste maple syrup in the crevices of your teeth, and the taste of Johnnie too, as if it were yesterday and everything still to play for.

  ‘Lou.’ You hear his voice, thin at your side.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t look now. Wait. When I say, look by the hot-dog stall.’

  You count your dropped coins into your purse, smile up at Johnnie, then glance round. What’ll we do next? Ice-cream, roller-coaster, drink in the bar? You make your eyes as vague as clouds, travelling over the two men by the hot-dog stall. They’re looking at nothing in a way that makes you know there’s a something. You wait, yawn, let your gaze travel again. And there it is, like a small, definite contraction: their look on Johnnie, and on no one else. They burn into him.

  ‘I’m a bit tired, now I come to think of it,’ you say. ‘I wouldn’t mind an early night.’ The word that’s been whirring uselessly on the edge of your mind suddenly clicks to rest like a row of three oranges. Mercy.

  Twenty-five

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘Nobody. Just a couple of guys.’

  ‘Not the ones —’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then, it’s all right.’

  But you say it knowing it’s not, almost asking for the angry spurt of breath as he says, ‘It’s not fucking all right. I don’t want anyone knowing I’m down here.’

  ‘They saw you, that’s all that happened. They don’t know where you are. They don’t even know you’re staying. You could have been down for the day. Loads of people go down to Brighton for the day.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  You stand side by side on the balcony, in the dark. The night is still. It’s like Italy, you think, the warm sudden dusk. You loved it there, though Paul didn’t. Maybe it was the Romanian in you. Your mother used to talk about the heat in Bucharest in August, and how she would long to go away to the mountains with her friends. It was hot there too, but different heat. A dry, clear heat. It swelled of pine, and as soon as you got out of the train, with your eyes closed, you knew where you were. She spoke of those things sometimes, though rarely when you asked questions. Now it seems that her memories are yours. You too stand on the low platform beside the train that belches brown coal smoke. The steps are drawn up, the train leaves, you stand in the yellow heat with your suitcase in your hand, and the smell of pine steals over the empty station. You stand side by side on the balcony, with Johnnie. You’re right on the edge of the land. London’s behind you, and the fields and woods you slept through on the way down. The country always sends you to sleep. This is where they rule off England with a firm line, and everything stops. One minute there are cars and shops and Pelican crossings and off-licences and public libraries. The next, nothing. Stones and water. And when you look into the water there are things to make you wish you hadn’t. You remember an angler fish you saw in a museum once, with a label on its glass case. No one could have invented a creature that ugly: it had to be God.

  You watch the cars sweep by. You don’t need a jersey. It’s fine to stand with your arms bare, folded, feeling the warm solidity of your own arms, your own flesh. Johnnie picks up the bottle of whiskey from the wrought-iron table and pours some into his glass, some into yours.

  ‘We made a mistake,’ he says. ‘We shouldn’t have come here. I should have taken that boat from Harwich.’

  ‘What’s so great about Denmark?’

  ‘There’s a man in Copenhagen, he owes me fifty grand.’

  But you know Johnnie. There’s always someone he knows who can take you there quicker, get stuff cheaper, cut the prices, get the tickets. All he’s got to do is give them a bell.

  ‘And he’s waiting there, is he, for you to turn up and ask him for it? Got it all ready in a box under the bed?’

  Johnnie’s face shutters. You’ve broken the rules. You don’t hold Johnnie’s promises up to the light. You let them lie on the table or you change them for real money. ‘It’s sorted,’ he says, and you know that it is. It’s all there in his mind, clearer than the balcony or the black, whispering sea, or you with the glass in your hand from which you’ve hardly drunk, because you know you need to keep your mind clear.

  ‘What’s his name?’ you ask.

  ‘Hans,’ says Johnnie, straight away, without needing to think about it.

  ‘That’s a German name.’

  ‘Maybe he had a German mother, I don’t know.’

  ‘So Hans owes you fifty thousand.’

  ‘He was in on the deal with me. We were going to come out with fifty thousand each.’

  ‘But it didn’t work out.’

  ‘It would’ve, if Hans hadn’t screwed it.’

  ‘So he owes you what didn’t happen.’

  You turn away, walk to the edge of the balcony, look down. Once the daylight’s taken away, there’s nothing friendly about the big blocks of buildings, the wide lawns, the sharp silhouettes of beach huts and the sea beyond. You are glad you’re up here on the second floor, not down there where there could be anything. You think of what Paul said about Johnnie, when his boatload of dreams evaporated somewhere between Zennor and Land’s End.

  ‘I don’t understand how he can be so fucking careless. If you’re going to go into that kind of business, setting everything else aside, there’s money in it. There’s got to be. But he still screws it up. All he’s getting is the risk without the outcome.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what he wants,’ you said, and Paul looked at you as if you were mad. But you knew you were right. And you know it now. No one could be as careless as Johnnie, all the time, without putting some thought into it. He’s got a system. With one hand he takes it, with the other he throws it away. There’s no man in Copenhagen, though that isn’t to say Johnnie’s lying. There’ll be a Hans of some sort. He’s probably got a flat and benefit and a job sometimes, and a dream which took on flesh when he met Johnnie. Johnnie can always be the flesh of other people’s dreams. He shines back at them, a bright reflection of what they most want. That’s his talent. But Paul doesn’t recognize it, even when the talent is working on Paul just like it works on everyone else. The trouble is, it works on Johnnie too. The dreams flash off him, and he believes them.

  ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ suggests Johnnie. ‘Have a bit of a holiday. We’ve got the flat for the month. I’ll get the train up to London tomorrow. There’s a boat from Harwich in the evening.’

  ‘You shouldn
’t go to London. You should stay here.’

  You say it dryly, not as you want to. That’s the best way with Johnnie. If you can sound professional, like a doctor, as if there’s nothing personal to you in what he does or doesn’t do, then he sometimes listens. He’s terrified of illness.

  ‘You tell me why.’ He sounds as if he really wants to know, so you get started.

  ‘Because all that’ll happen if you stay here is that you’ll get bored.’

  ‘I can’t stay here for ever. I’ve got a life, haven’t I?’

  ‘We’re not talking about for ever. We’re only talking about now. You stay here for a few weeks and everything’ll blow over.’

  ‘Blow over,’ he jeers, but longingly too, as if there’s just a thread of a chance that you might know the symptoms of his disease better than he does himself. That’s when you know he really is in trouble.

  ‘I can get money,’ you say. ‘I can go up to London. I can even go and see Paul.’

  ‘They want to mark me,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know.’

  And you believe it. They want to put a stop to the dazzle of Johnnie. Almost nobody has what he has. Mark him, spoil his looks, make him something you feel pity for, not desire.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ says Johnnie. You nod. It’s true, you don’t know what it’s like. You can only guess and go slowly and hope the ground holds. Beauty’s even stranger in a man. It’s something apart, like the shape of a baby’s head, designed to move you. You know it and you try to resist it, but it moves you all the same, each time, helplessly, somewhere so deep it’s as if it was born in you. You can’t wipe it away, any more than you can destroy your own fingerprints.

  Twenty-six

  You lie down, side by side, and the breeze from the window ripples over your skin. You can’t sleep in a shut room, whatever Johnnie says. He’s made you lock the French windows at the front, and draw the bathroom blinds even though the bathroom window faces a blank brick wall. When the phone rang he wouldn’t let you answer it.

  ‘It can’t be for us,’ you said. ‘No one knows we’re here.’

  The phone takes incoming calls only. You let it ring, ten, fifteen, seventeen times. It seemed against nature not to answer it. On eighteen, it stopped. You were just thinking of taking it off the hook when it started to ring again, with anonymous, piercing urgency.

  ‘Can’t you pull the plug on that fucking thing?’ said Johnnie.

  ‘It’ll only be someone selling double-glazing. Let it ring. It’s not doing us any harm.’

  ‘It’s doing my head in,’ grumbled Johnnie, but then he wandered off to the bathroom, and a little later you heard the shower on ‘boost’ and knew that he couldn’t have heard the third set of rings, or the fourth. And then the phone gave up.

  Johnnie lies on his back, naked in the staring eye of the central light. He wouldn’t turn it off. You wear your cream satin nightdress, very plain apart from a bit of distraction at the neckline, and wish to God he didn’t have to have the light on. It’s not like when you’re twenty and you can’t wait to get your clothes off and show what you’ve got. Now it’s a question of which way to lie to make it look as if you’ve got two stomachs, not three. And here you are, stranded in the wreck of yourself just when you most need the looks you wasted for years. Not that you were ever one of those women who always look good. Sonia, for example. See Sonia once and you’ve seen her, you don’t need to look again. You were beautiful sometimes. You would feel the power switching itself on and off in you, like that light. Off for good now, you tell yourself grimly, so don’t start getting your hopes up. You doubt if anything else will be getting up tonight, either.

  You lie back, propped on your own pillows, and Johnnie’s. He prefers to lie flat, and he does so now, looking up at the ceiling. You watch him as if you have never seen him before. You take him in: the black hair you ran your hand over when he was a kid, the hair running in a dark line between his nipples, down to the base of his stomach, his penis lying curled sideways, as if you weren’t there.

  You half-smile. You think how strange it is to find yourselves here, and how strange that your tenderness for Johnnie rolls up in you like waves, rising, breaking, sinking back, rising again as if it will never end. It makes no difference to him at all. He’s so used to people looking at him like this that he doesn’t even notice it. He’s had it from Paul all his life, and where Paul left off there were plenty of others ready to begin.

  You watch him grope for the whiskey bottle at the side of the bed. He’s trying to pour it without looking, the silly bugger, and it doesn’t work. Whiskey slops on the floor. The carpet will stink of it. You’ll have to remember to buy one of those carpet-cleaning aerosols that smell like the air-freshener in department-store toilets. You can’t bear them. And what’s worse are those poor sods they keep in there all day, dashing into the cubicles to wipe the seat every time a bum comes off it.

  Johnnie fumbles with bottle and glass. ‘You want a drink, Lou?’

  ‘No, I’m all right.’

  ‘Are you feeling OK?’ he asks, propping himself up on one elbow, mocking you. ‘You don’t seem like yourself tonight.’

  ‘I told you. You drink it if you want it, I’ve had enough.’

  You can’t believe it’s you saying those words: I’ve had enough. And meaning them too. Feeling nothing for the whiskey except a sort of surprise that there isn’t more of it. He’s going to feel rough in the morning. That’s three-quarters of the bottle gone. You’ve never seen him let it get to him like this before. His eyes are thick with whiskey, and his face looks knocked out of shape. Yours must look like that, most of the time, but it’s not something you can notice about yourself, even in a good mirror.

  Johnnie flops back on the bed, making both of you bounce up and down. It’s a very good bed. You looked under the mattress protector, just to be sure. He’s closed his eyes now. Anybody who didn’t know him might think he was starting to relax. The white light overhead picks out every detail, but you couldn’t say it was harsh. Just clear.

  He turns into your arms. They’re already open, like they were always open for Anna when she’d fallen, even before she opened her mouth to yell. It’s all here in the room with you: the pier with its lights and black water underneath, the horses trying to gallop but fixed to fail, the smell of candy-floss, scorched rubber, chips. You see the faces turned on Johnnie, casual. You see them sharpen. You remember that cat, in the garden. She shot her steel claw through the water and got one of the fish. She couldn’t get the big carp with their thick white flesh, but she pulled out the little orange one. It looked as if it was burning as she snatched it out of the water, and bit its head off. But you can’t let yourself think about how it feels to be a fish. Instead you think: pond, fish, cat, and that blunts it. It turns into a story which has already been told a hundred times. The fish swims, the cat waits, the pond is deep, or else not deep enough. Her head closed round the orange carp and stripped off its flesh. She let you see her eat it, and when she’d finished she licked off her paws, dipped her head and rasped the velvet pads until she was perfect outside as well as in.

  Like a cat going to communion.

  The sun was blinding. That was when Johnnie came through the door and you saw the darkness of shadow at his feet like a pool of ink or blood. He said, ‘How’s it going?’

  There was something between you then. The tight ball of flesh that was Anna, stretching your flesh to bursting-point. You on one side and Johnnie on the other. You didn’t touch. You lied and kept on lying, and you made Anna no one’s, and pretended not to understand what you were doing. But now you know it was a sin.

  Here he is now, on the other side of your flesh, held back from you by the bulk of your breasts and stomach and thighs. Nothing’s going to happen. He’s had too much whiskey, and besides…

  You stroke his hair. His eyes are closed now. You feel the length of him, his heat, hi
s whiskey sourness. He’ll be asleep soon, and then you’ll slide him off you if you can, and turn the light off.

  He’ll go to Harwich, and you won’t be able to stop him. But you’ll go with him.

  Twenty-seven

  Anna’s warming milk for the kitten. No one else is up yet, because it’s not even six o’clock. She’s used the last of the milk, but she’s going to walk up to the village and buy some before they notice.

  A car’s coming down the track. It stops, there’s a long silence, then the clunk of a car door. A minute later tyres slew on gravel in the turning circle, and the car’s away off up the track again. It must have been someone who was lost and came down here by mistake. Anna turns back to the stove and lifts the pan off the burner. The milk’s too hot now, she’ll have to cool it. She turns with the pan in her hands, heading for the sink under the window, and freezes. There’s Sonia, hurrying past the window towards the front door. Anna ducks, but it’s OK, Sonia hasn’t seen her. She ducks and the milk rises to the edge of the pan in a wave and slops out over the tiles.

  She’s down on the floor, swabbing it with the wrong cloth, as Sonia opens the kitchen door. There Sonia stands, not quite indoors yet, still shining with the beautiful earliness of the day, body tingling, mind blank with bliss. Anna sees none of it. She smears milk on to the tiles and doesn’t dare look up. Slowly Sonia rouses herself, takes in the child, the mess.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I was making some warm milk.’

  ‘Give that to me.’

  Sonia seizes the cloth, rinses and wrings it in the sink, squirts bleach into the water and dunks the cloth vigorously up and down, as if she would like to drown it.

  ‘Can’t you tell the difference between a floor cloth and a dishcloth? she demands. But Anna is making herself small, rubbing a bare milk-slimed foot against her calf. She doesn’t answer. Sonia’s already into the sink cupboard, fetching out a floor cloth, brandishing it at Anna.