After Purple (11 page)

“Otto?”

“Yes, of course Otto.”

“Why ‘of course'?” It hurt to keep on talking. My body wanted simply to drift away.

“It was at his house, I told you.”

“Why didn't you
say
Otto, then?” The tension made me irritable, the tenderness. I wasn't used to tenderness.

“Oh, Thea, don't go
on
… Look, I shouldn't have left you. But I phoned at least a dozen times and when you didn't answer, I presumed you must have gone out. I'd have come straight back if I'd realised you were ill.”

“I'm
not
ill.” I had slumped back down again. The whole of my body between my headache and my feet was water-logged and churning. Leo hated illness. He was never ill himself. If I didn't sit up and talk to him, he might run back to Otto's. Libby, Sian, Rowena were always radiant.

“Leo …”

“What?”

“Do you
like
Otto? I mean really like him?”

“Yes.” There was a tiny pause, as if he were waiting for a star to pass, a tree to fall.

“I don't,” I said.

“I know you don't.”

“Does
he
know?”

“Yes.”

“Does he mind?”

“Yes.”

“Do
you
mind?”

“Yes, I do, Thea.”

I jabbed my foot against the coverlet. Four yes's in a row. Sometimes I didn't get a yes in seven days. But these were Otto's yes's. I wanted yes's for myself, strings of them,
years
of them. I always had to share him. Otto was like Karma, fawning on Leo, beloved of him, closer to him than I was.

“Thea …” He was stroking my hair again. It felt miraculous and terrifying. “I wish you'd
try
and like him.”

“Why should I?” It came out curt, though I didn't mean it to.

“Because it's … important to me.”

I hated that word “important”, a hard, bony word when I was only a limp, crumpled sick-bag. I shut my eyes and tried to picture Otto — pale, flabby hands, fringe of soft hair falling in his wounded-mackerel eyes. All I could see was a white fish on a grey beach, gills gasping in and out, pale eyes staring, and a brown sea creeping up, up, up, on it.

“I don't like his eyes,” I said.

The brown sea was swirling through my stomach, the grey fish flapping in my throat. I could feel the waves rolling over and over the bedspread.

Leo had a strand of my hair pressed against his lips. My whole scalp was singing with it. “D'you know what he said tonight?”

“Who?”

“Otto.”

Christ! Would we never be rid of Otto? Must he always be there between us, with those eyes?

“No,” I said. I didn't want to know. I wanted Leo wholly to myself, coffined in the bedspread of my hair, saying only yes yes yes.

“He told me he thought he was suffering for the persecution of the Huguenots. He's convinced that he was Louis de Gonzague in another life.”

“Who's Louis de Gonzague?” I asked. This was worse than Adrian. I wasn't well enough for history lessons. I was just an empty carton, kicked into a corner, leaking at both ends.

“Oh, a French nobleman who slaughtered thousands of the Protestants. His henchmen hacked them into pieces and flung the bodies in the Seine. He died in 1595, but Otto thinks he was Louis in a previous reincarnation.”

“I see,” I said. I felt like saying “fuck”. Only Otto would claim power on such a scale. Other people fretted about being insects in another life, or cats, or rats, or cockroaches. Only pale, scaly Otto spent his pasts as noblemen, masterminding massacres.

“I don't think I
want
another life,” I said. Not if it was a life like this one, with divorce courts, and foetuses in bottles, and vomiting in bathrooms, and bodies in the Seine and only halves of people. An after-life was safer, a Roman Catholic one, where the soul was purged and the body purified, and one soared up, up, to where everything was free and white and shining, and God was legally and infinitely Father.

“You may not have much choice.” Leo had stopped stroking.

He still had my hair twisted through his hands, but he wasn't concentrating. I could tell he was still haunted by the Huguenots. He and Otto had shut me out again, name-dropping in sixteenth-century France, believing in things I could neither prove nor leave alone. They'd been friends for years, long before I'd known them. Otto may have shared
all
his previous existences with Leo. Even as Louis de Gonzague, he'd probably sat with him over a pile of hacked and steaming corpses, arguing about the authority of the Bible versus the Pope.

“Why don't you come to bed?” I asked. It made me uneasy the way he sat there, fully dressed. I didn't feel like sex at all, but I wanted him to want me. I had never lain naked in his bed before without being straddled and deflowered. Usually, we never talked for long, before he rolled me over and rammed into me. But now it was the early hours and he was still just sitting there, holding my hand as if he were a nurse. The room was full of other people, other things — all the friends and fears and fancies he had churning in his head. I wanted to split it open and tip them out, until his head was clear and clean and empty, and I could burst inside it and reign there all alone.

“It's late,” I whispered. “Come to bed.”

He didn't answer. I felt tiny fingers of terror probe along my spine. He even had his boots on. It was as if it was all over and we had signed the divorce papers, divided the property, zipped up our jeans. Leo didn't desire me. I bored him, disgusted him. He could probably smell the vomit in my hair.

“I'm sorry,” I said, struggling out of bed. “I'll go and have a bath.”

“Hush, Thea, go to sleep.”

That was almost proof he didn't want me. As soon as I was sleeping, he'd creep away again, return to his dinner party, clean Gonzague's sword. I was sitting up now, my breasts only inches from his face, yet he hadn't even glanced at them.

“I'm not tired,” I insisted. I took his hand and laid it on my chest, almost forced it there.

“No, Thea, it's late. Too late. I want to go to sleep.”

Even Adrian didn't say “too late”, or pull his hand away like that, or keep his boots on. I'd almost forgotten Adrian. I dragged the covers right up to my neck and lay back on the pillows.

“I had some people round tonight,” I said.

Leo only grunted.

“For dinner.” I could see the aubergines curdled with the damsons. I never wanted to think of food again. If I came back in another life, I would return as something which didn't have a stomach — a cloud, a stone, a flower.

“I invited Adrian.”

No answer. Only the sound of Karma's heavy breathing. He was curled in a corner like a nerveless cat, paws across his nose, snuffling in his sleep.

“He said he couldn't manage it at first, but he turned up later, when everyone else had gone.”

Silence.

“You didn't know that, did you, Leo?”

“Go to sleep.”

At least I had made him nervous. He was flicking the fringe of the bed-cover through his fingers, one foot jab-jabbing the floor.

“His text book's been accepted. They gave him an advance just on the first five chapters. They're terribly impressed.”

“Look here, Thea, it's over with you and Adrian.” He was pacing up and down now. “Why can't you accept that? It's finished, dead. Why d'you have to go on resurrecting things, creeping in underneath them and trying to prise them open when they're all nailed up and rotting?”

I shifted the pillows a little, so that they were soft against my head. “He stayed for simply
hours
, Leo. Once he was here, I couldn't get him out.”

“I don't believe you. Adrian wouldn't come here.”

“Oh yes, he would. He did. He often does, in fact. He comes up when you're out.”

“You're lying, Thea.” The back of his neck looked very thin and spiky, as if I could cut my fingers on it. “Adrian doesn't want you. He's married to Janet now. Perhaps you'd forgotten that.”

“Maybe he is,” I shouted. “Maybe he is! But he doesn't fuck her any more. He can't. She's pregnant. Huge. Monstrous. He can't even get
near
her. She squashes him in bed.”

“Stop that!”

“That's why he came up here. He was
dying
for it. He'd hardly got in the door, when he …”

“Stop it, I said.” He was slumped against the desk now, elbows grovelling on the blotter, hands across his ears. “I don't want to hear. I don't even want you
in
here.”

“I did say ‘no' at first, but he went on and on insisting. Then he undid my dress. I tried to stop him, Leo, but …”

“Get out!” Fists clenched now, grinding them against the wood, nails digging into palms, head down. At least it was safer than the tenderness.

“Actually, I didn't
want
to stop him. Not by then. We both had all our clothes off and …”

“Get
out
, I said.” Leo had picked up an old Victorian paperweight made of heavy glass, one that Otto had given him a hundred years ago, with tiny scarlet peonies painted on it in dainty little clusters. He was rocking it backwards and forwards against the desk. The noise went through my head. Karma had woken now and slunk over to his feet.

“He kept whispering things, dirty things. He even brought
you
into it. He kept asking about — you know — what we did in bed and everything. He made me show him all your things. I knew you wouldn't mind. He used your razor and your toothbrush. He even wore your dressing-gown. He seemed to want to sort of take you over. We did it in your bed. He forced me to. I was lying just like this and …”

“Get
out
of that bed, get out of it, get out of it …”

“It's all right, Leo, there's no need to be angry — I cleaned it up afterwards. It was quite a mess. Adrian thrashes around a lot and …”

Leo had jumped to his feet and was striding towards me. I could see his shadow stalking him along the wall.

“Then we did it standing up,” I whispered. There was no more need to shout. Leo's shadow was almost breathing on me. It had lunged across my feet and was creeping up towards my breasts. The paperweight was still between its hands. “Adrian's very good at that. He …”

Karma was snapping and lurching at Leo's heels. His growl was like a low, crooning lullaby.

“He came three times,” I murmured. “He would have come again, but …”

I could see the paperweight plunging towards my face. I even had time to notice Leo's yellow fingers gleaming through the glass. I opened my lips to tell him that I loved him, I desired him, and took the full force of twenty scarlet peonies in my mouth.

There was a sharp, sick, cracking sound, which must have come from outside in the street. It was nothing to do with me. Red petals were falling on the bed, like bright, crushed, mangled peonies. The pain was so bright, the room was heaving with it. A dog was howling somewhere, howling. Somebody else was crying. A dry, jagged, horrifying sound. It must be Leo crying, crying for my mouth. I hadn't got a mouth. Only a smashed, pulped, purple flower. I groped out of bed and stumbled to the mirror, stared at the person in it, almost laughed. She had a dumb black hole where her two front teeth should have been. The others streamed with blood. Her fat stupid lips were split apart and swollen, purple around the edges, her nose was so wide, she must have had Negro blood.

Somebody else had once sat in that mirror — an elegant receptionist with cheekbones, an ambitious Mayfair girl with white well-mannered teeth, an Abbey National saver with her own eight-digit number and her little savings book. Leo had destroyed them, bashed them all to pieces, refused to let them share his room. And now he was standing powerless, almost paralysed, shoulders shaking like a ninny. Terrible things were happening to my face, swelling, scorching things, which only he could stop. But he had turned his back, shut his eyes. I needed mending, restoring, staking like a broken flower, and there he was, broken down himself. The room was tipping sideways, sliding on its back. Leo could have righted it with just one finger, but his hands were clinging on to each other for their own support. He was drowning, floundering, snivelling like a baby, cowering close to Karma, impotent, unmanned.

I lurched across the tipping floor to Karma and kicked him, first in the flank, and then again, across his dumb, gloating muzzle. Dark paws reared towards my face and I heard the growl trapped and rumbling in his throat. Leo had come between us. I hit out at Leo, punched him, kicked him, tore at him. It hurt my mouth so badly, I was almost sick again, but I wouldn't have him cry, couldn't bear him weak.

He was warding off my blows, trying not to hurt me. I hit out harder. Red petals were still streaming on the carpet. Karma was there behind me, double-barred steel jaw protecting his master. Leo hacked him off. There was a tangled mass of arms, paws, petals, fur. I dodged away. As I fell, I saw the jagged teeth of Leo's cruel brass fender leaping for my forehead.

When I came to, I was lying on a sort of high white table with a red stain on the pillow, and a white nun was standing over me, sponging the ruins of my face. I didn't have a body any more, only a deep purple pain somewhere where I should have had a mouth, and a huge throbbing lump on what had once been my forehead. I tried to feel my teeth. Most of the bottom ones were there. My tongue was thick and lumpy and seemed to be sticking to itself. I tried to pull it free.

“Leo …” I stuttered. It was difficult to speak. There was cotton wool stuffed above my gumline and something pulling on my lower lip. The nun smiled. Her own teeth were false, very white and thick like the stuff toilet-bowls are made of. I wondered if Mr Leatherstone could help me. I shut my eyes and tried to see his step-by-step instructions for repairing faces. All I could see was damsons. Something told me I'd been sick again.