Cathexis (8 page)

“Tell me what you're thinking” I said. She spun round, exasperated hands splayed before me.

“I'm thinking of getting a divorce” she said, rolling her eyes. “Durr” she added, using my own vernacular against me.

“What about the children?” I said, surprised this was my first thought.

“Jesus, Minette, I don't know” she said tetchily. “How about Todor gets
Sasha and we keep Nikolai? Fuck knows!”

I hoped she was illustrating her aggravation, rather than making 'a Sophie's choice'. In truth, I could have done without either of them; I just wanted her.

“We'll keep them both” I said.

“So you see” I said, picking at a callus. “I reckon with my savings I'll only need eight grand more to have enough for a deposit and I could probably get a loan for that. Plus there's the mortgage repayments. It's scary, but I think I can do it”.

Nancy scooped crumbs into her hand thoughtfully. “And then we'll have somewhere to go” I added.

She stood and sprinkled them in the bin.

“I can give you eight thousand” she said, kicking a plastic basket towards the washing machine.

“Oh, but I wasn't angling, I mean I didn't, I wasn't trying to...”. Silenced by her finger on my lips.

“Don't protest” she said. “When you find a place, I'll write you a cheque”.

“I'll pay you back of course”.

She tutted and ruffled my hair.

“No I will” I continued.

“Whatever you like”. She shrugged and kissed my forehead.

“Thank you”.

Hunched over my phone in a boho jazz cafe in the afternoon, reviewing my messages from Nancy. I'd kept them all, even the logistical ones. They charted the progress of our odyssey from lust to love via snatched moments at dawn and kid's tea times. The latest addition 'Meet me 4.30 Take 5'. She'd forgotten to put a kiss.

The stairs creaked and the breath taking woman with the biblical hair was here, wearing her glasses, which set off a curve ball of desire in that hollow. After peering around in the gloom, she located me (I was the only one there) and sat down, reviewing her hands in her lap.

“Why are you wearing your glasses?”

She looked up. Conversely, they made her look younger, a flash of her in her twenties, teens even.

“I haven't had time to buy any contacts”.

A weird shunt as if I was standing beside myself. My heart kicked up a thumping rabbit. Something wasn't right. The glasses served to frame the fact the light had gone from her eyes.

“What's wrong?” I stammered. “Tell me what's wrong”.

She put her hand to the back of her neck and rolled her head left and right.

“Can you show me where the toilet is please?” she said.

“But are you alright?” I steered her towards the stairs behind the bar. Half way down I halted, nostrils flaring, passing my nose over her hair. She stopped and looked up.

“What is it? Why are you sniffing me?”

“Nancy” I said aghast, “you smell different”.

“Different how?” she said.

I couldn't pinpoint it ...a foreign body.

“Are you pregnant?”

“Don't be ridiculous” she said and continued her descent.

Returning to my seat, I calmed myself by going into my mind gallery. I saw 'Christina's World' by Andrew Wyeth and the cover of 'What to look for in the Winter', a Ladybird book. But it didn't help. Not yet, please, not yet. Plates had shifted.

She slid a conciliatory plate of chocolate cake towards me.

“Here” she said. I balled my shaking hands into fists under the table.

“So what is it Nancy?”

She gave a deep sigh. “I just wanted to see you”. But she'd barely looked at me.

“When can I see you properly?” I said.

“I'll call you, don't worry”.

“Nancy, please, you're scaring me”.

She moved the cake to one side and found my trembling hands, covering them with hers.

“Minette”. She frowned. “I love you, but this is becoming quite a strain you know”.

“I'm seeing two properties tomorrow” I said. “It'll be alright”.

“Oh yes”, conjuring up a tiny puff of enthusiasm. “Good luck” she added.

That evening I texted 'Am I still your boy? x'. There was no reply.

Chapter 15

Mixed feelings about the gefilte fish pong that percolated through the alarmingly sloping floor in the flat in Belfry Road. It seemed everyone had lived or knew someone who had lived in Belfry Road. People tended to pass through, partly due to the prevalence of Hasidic Jews (The Charedi) who had no need for pubs and restaurants and so Stamford Hill remained ungentrified, blighted by desolate tower blocks, an inner city backwater. As a consequence, it was cheap by Zone 2 standards, despite being only a stone's throw from swinging Stoke Newington.

A washing machine stood self-consciously in the tiny living room – nowhere else for it to go. Nancy wouldn't like this. Wrinkling my nose at the estate agent and Clive, I shook my head.

The first thing that hit us as we entered Flat 6, The Limes, was the stench, an eye watering concoction of dog piss and something more elusive, like burnt rubber and cheese.

“Oh Christ”
.
Clive squinted, the estate agent looked to his shiny shoes.

It was, as they say, bijou, just a living room that doubled as a bedroom, a galley kitchen and a miniscule bathroom opposite the front door. The living room, almost entirely taken up by a double bed, which we had to sidle around like penguins. A fitted cupboard occupied the length of one wall and the other three protruded floor to ceiling metal brackets, for now absent shelves, giving the room an unnerving iron maiden feel. However, there was a high ceiling, tall skirting boards and half glazed Victorian doors, which opened onto a modest balcony overlooking what appeared to be an orchard.

“How do I put an offer in?”

Clive and the estate agent exchanged glances.

“Perhaps you’d better think about it?” Clive said. “Sleep on it”.

“No, I like it” I said.

On a train, returning from Crawley, where I'd had an appointment with Evelyn, a mortgage broker. Max, an ex-girlfriend, had put me in touch with her by way of restitution I guessed. Max had thrown me out after falling for her therapist (we'd been Minimax for a year). She'd long since put the therapist relationship down to experience and now, I heard, wanted me back. Having been crazy in love with her, I found it fascinating that now, on reflection, I felt nothing other than a sense that some celestial scales were rebalancing. She'd cast me out and was helping me find a home, the rooms within me where she'd once resided occupied by another.

Evelyn had fabricated more fitting earnings for someone of my age and as she fed the application into the fax machine fixed me over her half-moons. “Just promise me you can make the repayments”.

“That won't be a problem” I lied.

The cables strung between posts by the side of the track appeared to roll up and down in one continuous oscillation, correlating my heart. At the nadirs, Nancy inexorably retreating, at the zeniths, the posts stanchioned a gathering of hope. I made one of my deals; if I counted 21 posts before they were obscured by trees or a tunnel, I would get the mortgage, the flat and Nancy. I counted 18 before an oncoming train chopped my game into a flicker book.

Remy was embroiled in a furious row with the upstairs neighbour over her predilection for dropping nappies and food waste into our garden, rather than the bin. Placing a guilty kebab on the wooden industrial cable reel that served as a coffee table (Nica flared her nostrils, gathering food information), I left a note: 'I'll call you x' and slid past the gesticulating pair, swinging two black sacks that contained my belongings into Fritz's cab.

As I headed down Seven Sisters Road, the propelled kebab in my mind's eye, tumbling down the woodchip, leaving a gory shock of chilli sauce and heartbreak.

When I'd broached the subject of moving out, Remy had viewed it as a positive step, no doubt clutching at straws that I might miss her. My mewling conscience assuaged by viewing Remy in parallax, already a distant body rotating in the aubergine gloom, well out of my orbit. Nancy's magnetic pull was too strong to bother resisting; every atom in my being iron filings.

After I'd parked in the gravel driveway outside 'The Limes' I phoned Nancy's landline. If she answered, it meant that everything was going to be just fine, if she didn't, it meant that she was out; I always brokered favourable deals.

“Hi, this is Nancy and Todor, please leave a message”. That was my punishment for fixing the odds. A stark reminder her life was entwined with another.

The flat vacant, the estate agent had handed me the keys with a wink.

“So you can measure up for curtains” he said. How funny, me, curtains.

When I'd got the knack of the three locks and shouldered the door, the bed and kitchen appliances were gone except an archaic cooker called a 'Creda Cavalier'. My offer had been accepted and Evelyn inferred the mortgage was in the bag
, so I didn't feel it was tempting fate to start making the flat habitable. All that was lacking was Nancy's money.

Dragging acres, it seemed, of piss-drenched carpet, lino and disintegrating hardboard to Fritz's flat bed, I swabbed and scrubbed and dismantled the cupboard and iron maiden affair, working with zealous adrenalin. With every floorboard I scrubbed and each new task ticked off my list, I thought of Nancy and imagined my viability as an option increasing. If I managed to deep clean the bathroom by 10.30am, her bottom would be parked on the 'Dudley Diplomat' toilet at some point tomorrow evening. That afternoon, I went to Ikea and bought the last three quarter sized mattress in the world from bargain corner, along with a set of bedding and white linen, a starter cookery kit, plates, cutlery, mugs, glasses, towels, candles and some scatter cushions in lieu of furniture. I surveyed my world – clean, minimal and kind of sexy.

'Can you come this evening? x” I texted.

'No, Todor is out tonight'.

'When then? I miss you x”.

I sat on the 'Dudley Diplomat', expelling a great deal of converted red wine. M8 in the bed/living room, flicking buttons on the elderly ghetto blaster she had given me as a house warming present.

“You can rewind but you can't fast forward” she said as 'Homeloving Man' by Andy Williams tweeted from the integral plastic waffles. “Oh, while you were on the Dudley Diplomat, M8, your phone beeped”, handing it to me.

'Tomorrow 6.30'.

“She's coming, M8” I said through clenched teeth. M8's eyebrows arched in suggestion and intrigue.

I cried off work that afternoon to prepare. Nancy maintained that English people were dirty so I gave the space another going over, constructing elaborate winning deals as I went, involving breath holding and completing chores before the minute hand on the Ikea clock settled on nine, no ten, no eleven. I bought a large selection of alcohol I could ill afford. I discovered just one ring on the Creda Cavalier worked and there was no discernible increase in oven temperature after it had been on full blast for half an hour. Coq au vin in a pan then, tasty, easy and I could have the leftovers for my dinner tomorrow.