Life (27 page)

There was that face again. A man and a woman strolling, oblivious of the rain, coming away from something at the South Bank: arm in arm, dressed in evening clothes. The man’s sumptuous overcoat, dark ample umbrella cartwheel behind the two heads, the woman’s face lit by a glitter of jewels: fine-boned and delicately aged, the clear light blue eyes that looked straight into Ramone. The woman said to the man. “Excuse me
—
”

It was Lavinia, her grey hair cut and coifed, dressed in pomegranate satin under her open cloak, with a diamond necklace and diamond earrings.

“Just a moment.”

She went back to the man, who was standing a few steps away, said something to him, and he walked off. Ramone was too fascinated to stir. She got herself into a heels-on-the-ground crouch. There was a bench beside her. Lavinia came and sat on it. She took out some cigarettes from a black satin evening bag and offered them at arm’s length.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Well, I do.” She lit up. “I wondered what had become of you.”

“You see, I was a heroin addict. I had my first book out, I was doing really well: but it was all a facade. The drug pulled me down. I had this violent boyfriend, an artist but completely nuts, and it was through trying to get away from him and the drug that I ended up on the street. I couldn’t help myself.”

“Hmm. Why did you have to stop using? All you need to thrive with a heroin habit is enough money. How did you get into this state, honestly?”

Ramone knew that Lavinia had been the woman at the end of the alley, though not wearing a camel dressing gown, that had been Ramone’s own little
aide-mémoire.
Lavinia had maybe seen Ramone around here lots, without making contact. She didn’t really want to hear Ramone’s sad story. The carefully poised way she was sitting, the cool way she stared ahead of her, not at Ramone: that said it all. Lavvy’s brother had been right, schizophrenics don’t look back. She wondered what to say. She still sometimes woke from smothering dreams in which she’d found the door of the Pinebourne flat open, walked in, and there was Lavinia, arms ending in bloody stumps, blood gouting from her mouth. The woman mutilated to stop her from revealing what was done to her, irony comes not much more savage. That’s what Lavinia means, the silenced daughter and wife in
Titus Andronicus.
Lavinia had never produced any other derivation from her store.

“I’m on a research project. I’m investigating the wilder shores of Girl Power.”

The beautiful, rich elderly lady who was the new Lavvy turned her head: examining Ramone with a steady curiosity, not exactly sympathy.

“That I can believe. And what have you discovered?”

“It’s all bullshit. May I go now?”

“No one’s stopping you.”

Ramone stayed. She’d been too fucking right to be spooked. With one
look,
Lavvy had transformed Ramone’s snug home to a dank squalid den full of slugs. She was shivering, her clothes were worn and filthy, and she had lost her baby hedgehog, probably never going to find her now.

Lavinia went on smoking. Finally she asked, “Is there anything I can do?”

“I’m a beggar,” said Ramone, thinking that Lavvy hadn’t changed. “Give me money.”

At which Lavinia actually began to look in that little bag. Ramone held out her hand, thinking how weird this was, but then instead of a coin or a note, Lavvy’s fingers touched her cheek, and then her forehead.

“Oh no. This won’t do. You’re burning up. I’m going to call a taxi.”

“I’m just drunk. I can’t come with you. I’ve lost my pet, I have to…” She was unsure. Maybe she had dreamed finding Heggy. Maybe she’d dreamed that someone had blown her box up. She tried to struggle, feeling an awful pang of double loss. But here was the taxi, and she was getting inside.

Roads and the Meaning of Roads, II

You’ve heard of Jewish Princesses? thought Anna, as she slowed for the Services. I was a Catholic Princess. Like Cinderella in the fairy tale,
elle s’estoit bien.
I was brought up by my Spanish-nostalgic grandma and French-Enlightenment-nostalgic nuns and my Socialism-nostalgic mother to believe that I had the power and the duty to make everybody around me both happy and good. They’d given me the technology. I could do it; so I must. I wanted to be like that. It was an ideal I embraced, though it didn’t come naturally to me. Was I helplessly driven by my innately caring, non-competitive female genes when I gave up my doctorate? I don’t think so. Would Albert Einstein have made that decision? Of course not: ask Mrs Einstein. But there are men, first-class men in science, who have failed to be ruthless. Where does that leave us? Dominant people behave dominantly. Talent without dominance is a fish on a bicycle.

Ah, the memory of that summer morning. I was too stiff to do good yoga first thing, but it was the only slot in my packed schedule: paschimottanasana, the western stretch (the back is the western part of your body) leaning forward gently over my outstretched legs, face lowered toward my knees,
hey, where are you little fish, where are you hiding?
But she was gone. I knew she was gone. The brutal things people say, that you remember forever. When Spence phoned his Mom, she said maybe it’s for the best: which poor Spence repeated to me, not knowing any better. The priest in hospital: You’re a healthy young thing. A year from now you’ll be back in here and holding a bouncing new baby. Forgive them for they know not what they do.

Spence’s Mom had been aghast because there’d been no barrage of tests for Anna and the stillborn, to establish what had gone wrong. Why bother? It wasn’t as if she was going to try and get pregnant again. Anyway, first miscarriage, even a late miscarriage, is happenstance: most likely you wouldn’t find out anything useful. Parentis clients had often been told by their GPs not to worry, though they’d clocked up three or four failed pregnancies. No one would ever know if Lily Rose had died by chance or because her mother was working too hard; or if she had been an early statistic in a global tragedy that had not yet become news.

She moved the car smoothly from the flickering racetrack into calmer regions but killed her speed too late, so that the automatic brakes kicked in and Jake hooted at the jolt. Spence said nothing. Anna gritted her teeth: woman driver, bad driver. Since she had lost her job the world was full of these abrasive reminders, you are second-rate. How naive I was! If I’d been more experienced I’d have known the moment I saw her that
Sonia
was my enemy, not Nirmal—a disappointed woman, older woman, jealous of her role as the boss’s emotional vizier. Along came Anna, bright-eyed young genius. Naturally she fucked me up… I should never have let her get between me and Nirmal. Above all I should have told him myself about the pregnancy, at once. It might have made all the difference. Instead of which he threw me out, Lily Rose died, and he let the crucial SGF papers appear without my name on them, which was criminal, as he knew fine well. People ought to take fairy tales more seriously. Anyone who has lived, out in the wild world, knows that’s how things happen. Fate. An unwise glance, a word said or left unspoken, and your whole life is changed or set in stone.

Their faces rose, out of the mists of time: Marnie Choy, gone forever. Ramone on that Beevey Island weekend, scruffy and low-spirited in spite of the fancy car. She was embarrassed at how little of the world around the faces had survived. Who was Prime Minister when Anna was an undergraduate? She had no idea. News headlines, wars, famines, terrorist massacres, political upheavals, new technology, natural disasters, none of it. She might as well have been living in a hole in the ground.

Into the car park. Cruising, looking for a space.

They got out of the car. Jake had put on his mother’s black and white ikat jacket. He wore it with a swagger, hands in his jeans pockets, dark glasses, and his coolest smile; it trailed past his knees. My son has started stealing my clothes, already. Spence took the glasses from Jake’s nose and tucked them into the jacket pocket; “Vampire chic is for dorks, kid.” They checked the place as they approached, making sure there were enough white faces visible through the battered frontage for them to be comfortable, and not too many. It felt okay.

Around them, hidden by a node of shrubs and trees that bellied out from the motorway verges, there was conurbation. They had to run the gauntlet of local teenagers who came here as to the hub, to hang out. Anna noticed how tall and strong the girls looked, and how differently they filled their physical space these days. How easily they came into their inheritance as swaggering adolescent humans, as if it had always been theirs. How easily the boys seemed to accept this, as if it had never been in doubt. The group looked dangerous but offered only a sultry glance or two and those bursts of laughter as soon as your back is turned, that you hope have nothing to do with your passing.

They went into the restaurant, Jake between his parents, looking from one to the other, wanting them to be happy. “Everything okay between you two?” he asked, chummily, like a marriage guidance counselor. He was old enough to know when there was trouble in the air, young enough to believe that if only people would smile everything must be all right. Anna smiled, and Spence smiled. To please the child they shared a plate of chips and a large cola, signifiers of license and good cheer. Jake ate vegetable soup and a roll: he liked to see the forms of self-indulgence observed, but his own tastes were sober.

“What are you thinking?”

“Strangely enough, I was thinking of Lily Rose.”

“Ah.”

Spence reached out and took her hand. A lost baby becomes a talisman. She adds intensity to every moment, whether you think of her or not. When he’d agreed to try for another pregnancy Spence had said, you realize that this will bring it all back. It was true. Wherever Jake was, there was Lily Rose. Wherever any loss, it was her death. Their linked hands lay together on the tabletop. What are you thinking of, she wondered but didn’t ask. What do people think about on long drives? Their sexual fantasies?

Jake played with condiment sachets—squeezing an oozy slug of ketchup up and down inside its flexible shell—the dark car park through the glass behind him, half one huge pane covered by hardboard. It must have taken some violence to kick out a window that size. When he was a baby, he used to be the lid baron. You could keep him happy for hours in the back of the car, gloating in his baby seat over his treasures, a hot drink beaker lid in each hand. He watched his parents’ silence.

In the toilet on the way out, Anna looked at herself in the mirror and hardly recognized this tired, lined, grown-up woman (only this morning outrageously youthful for her age). She had been time traveling… She washed her hands with absentminded thoroughness, thinking of Nirmal whose standards had been legend. Back off, sunshine. I don’t contaminate anything, I never make mistakes. I trained with KM Nirmal.

Back to the road…

World Music

i

Spence carried his washing basket over the grass, bare soles punished by the rough red earth and the edged blades that would never be as docile as temperate zone turf. He should get most stuff dry before the rains kicked in at noon. There was nobody about. The surface of the pool lay limpid, Hockney-ripples glittering under the watery sky of the southwest monsoon. Career housewives, children, and Filipina maids were lurking out of sight in the darkly glazed depths of the ground floor apartments. The foreign worker breadwinners had long departed, getting an early start to beat the insane congestion in downtown Sungai.

Now that the monsoon had arrived, people said the city smog would clear. It would not. No way. It would clear in February, for about half an hour. As in the famous Lat cartoon of acres upon acres of empty desks and abandoned screens in KL. Have the aliens landed? No, it’s the air report: reads good, everybody rushes out into the street to breathe, QUICKLY! But here in the condo belt, you might be in rural Africa. The sky was rain-cloud and blue, the light clear, and there was that smell, composed of more elements than he could begin to identify (spice trees, mangrove mud, corn cobs grilling on charcoal, sago palm, market refuse), which meant the tropics. He put the basket on the ground by the drying racks and began to peg out clothes. The expat wives rarely came near this plot, and as long as he was out early enough he avoided the maids too. Spence was happy to be hanging out the washing, but he was happier without an audience. The condo maids thought it was hilarious to watch a foreigner, a man, doing domestic work. You’d think they’d have more sympathy, since they were all foreigners themselves. He suspected they were hoping to see his sarong fall off, a mishap not unknown to the whitey males of Nasser apartments when they tried to go native, which always caused great joy among the female servants. Not a chance. Spence was no amateur at this wrap-around skirt business. He had the thing secure as a ready-made bowtie.

Spence and Anna had been wanderers on the face of the earth for nearly six years. The little house in Leeds still belonged to them; they rented it out through an agency: but they had never been back. They had spent a year and a half in Ibadan, in a wired security compound, while Anna worked on a big Nigerian reproductive-health project; two years in Northern China, on a rural population improvement program; a stint in Lithuania; and six well-paid months setting up a flashy new HAR clinic in Tamil Nadu. In the gaps they’d been traveling, seeing the sights. They’d decided, while taking a short break with Spence’s Mom after India, that they still didn’t want to settle down in the US or the UK, but that they’d like to try somewhere that was futuristic as well as exotic. So here they were on the Pacific Rim, in Sungai state, Borneo, a few kilometers outside the unimaginatively named capital.

They’d known they wouldn’t be adding to their foreign legion-generated nest-egg this trip. Anna’s contract fee, paid in local currency, put them in the local struggling middle-class band, which was one good reason for not employing a maid. Neither of them had realized that Spence would be so isolated. Everywhere else there’d been some kind of congenial company centered around Anna’s job. Even in China, where the foreigners on the population project were kept locked up in a prefab dome, in the middle of a dustbowl plain the size of the Atlantic ocean, there’d been a deranged, alcohol-fueled camaraderie. Also, he’d always had some kind of employment. In Sungai he couldn’t work online, there didn’t seem much demand for English conversation lessons, and Nasser apartments was a bastion of aging expat conservatism. To do them justice, the women who holed up here while their beefy engineer husbands were engaged in Sumatra or over in Kalimantan had been eager to welcome a new, male expat-wife into their lives. But he had quickly tired of those poolside encounters, when Floral Bikini One reports that Floral Bikini Two’s daughter just had a secret abortion, or Floral Bikini Three wants to dish the dirt on some other Floral B’s drinking problem. You could call it female bonding. Spence called it plain distasteful.

So here he was under the morning sky, alone like a sparrow on the housetops. No money to spend and nothing to do but the domestic chores: in flagrant transgression of his neighbors’ fossilized sex roles. It was strange to be made to feel like that, after the way his mother had raised him and the unisex lifestyle he’d followed since. Strange, but not unpleasant. Nobody here knows who I am, he thought, wringing showers of spray from the cool hanks of wet fabric and tossing them to shake out the creases. Nobody can put a label on me. And he was relaxed, like a spinning top run down to rest, like an atom filled in every electron shell, safe in his stable state.

The air was so full of moisture it seemed ready to burst like a bruised grape, but the rain held off. At noon he went down to swim. The walks and lawns and tiled poolsides were still deserted, except for Floral Bikini Three from the pool terrace row, who was improving her tan under a darkened sky, tennis-knotted calves and stringy concave belly laid out on a lounger. He sneaked by without incident. But before he’d ploughed through more than half his daily laps, fat cold drops were thundering on the tepid water, lacerating his warm skin whenever he broke the surface. It was a glorious feeling until he remembered the washing; then he had to scoot.

Everything was damp. He strung it up in the unused second bedroom in their first floor apartment and left it shut in there with the aircon unit turned on high. Aircon was for special needs, usually they were happy enough with the ceiling fans. Spence had known summers in Illinois that would have shattered the morale of Sungai’s equatorial populace, where there was practically civic uproar if the thermometer went above 40, even in the so-called hot season.

He couldn’t decide what to do next. He had to mop the utility room floor, where their defective secondhand washing machine had produced its usual flood, but he didn’t feel like doing that. He might check his email. Foreigners were permitted to have email, but not to surf the wicked web, get paid for anything they did there, or share access with a local. He might tidy the living room. But their place was so minimally furnished it couldn’t get messy. The daytime tv was crap. Finally he went to look in Anna’s closet. If she didn’t have enough clean underwear he ought to microwave a few of the damp pairs.

The devil finds work for idle hands. Among Anna’s things he came across the lacey, satiny bra and knickers set he had bought for her last Christmas. She’d worn them a couple of times, to be polite, but his wife had no taste for frills. Her idea of sexy underwear was that it should be easy to remove or otherwise displace. Underwiring, tangas, thongs, G-strings: forget it. It was a crying shame. Any women’s clothing store, and especially the lingerie department, was such an Aladdin’s cave of jewel colors, glimmering promise, exquisite texture, all wasted on lovely Anna. He appreciated her determination not to take unfair advantage of male desire. But undercover, and for Spence alone, couldn’t it be different?

He took the fancy items over to the bed and sat holding the bra against his bare chest, admiring the effect in the mirror on the closet door. Looking good. He decided the straps would stretch, he wasn’t going to do any embarrassing damage, so he put it on, enjoying a distinctly autoerotic struggle with the hooks and eyes. And why not the knickers too? Dressed in his wife’s underwear he walked around the room, running his hands over the deliciously slippery fabric. If only she had some really high-heeled shoes. He felt like a child dressing up as Mom, innocently enjoying the accoutrements of power. Of course he also had a fine erection. He lay on their bed, balls tightening in the soft constraint, one hand inside a satin cup, teasing a nipple. What if Anna should come home unexpectedly and walk in here now…?

Eyes half closed, he reached for his trusty kleenex from the bedside cabinet.

And thought better of it.

It would be a superb wank. However, he did not plan to get hooked on fantasies of a kind in which Anna, in life, would not willingly play her part. That way lies the abyss.

If Spence was doomed to be an idle expat househusband he’d like to
explore
the role. He mused on spending the day naked, except for a slender golden cord around his waist and looped around his balls (to this cord she could attach his leash), oiling and preening himself, Anna phoning up from time to time to remind him he was her slave. That would be cool. No use, she would not go for it, anymore than she’d go for Spence dressing up as a girl. She spent her days poring over weird sex in nature—the double X men and the XXY women and every kink between. She’d couple with you in a doorway, at a bus stop, on a dance floor: she didn’t give a fuck as long as it was good plain fucking. But paradoxically, strangely, there was something in his wife that recoiled from sexual ambiguity.

Steel true and blade straight. Yeah. So live with it. She’s not going to change.

He lay back, hands linked behind his head. He had cropped his hair to stubble before they set out on their travels: a symbolic gesture he’d regretted afterwards. Now it was grown again, and he kept it long enough to startle a bunch of vintage bikinied harpies. Next summer it would be eight years since Lily Rose died. Often he didn’t think of the baby for weeks at a time. Often, remembering his purgatory in that little house—cooking lentils, quipping merrily with the milkman, oh God—he found it hard to believe he had suffered so much or for so long over the death of a stillborn child. Sometimes, even now, the grief returned intact, like a promise that he would never completely lose his little girl.

He didn’t know when he’d passed into this last, lifelong stage of mourning. Interior states had been a low priority in the hurly burly of the foreign legion; that was the point. But after years of short-term group bonding, drunken pranks, roachy hotels, epic discomfort, extremist sightseeing, it was strange to be cast up here alone with Anna. It reminded him of his Exchange year, when he’d been afraid he wasn’t going to make it as a male, until she saved him. Why had he fallen in love? Because she was sexy and gentle and full of womanly power. Because she walked around clothed in modest nobility like the coolest of the seven samurai, with those I-could-blast-you-where-you-stand-but-I’m-not-going-to-do-it eyes. Because she was shy and vulnerable, and stubbornly determined to do the right thing. It was all still there. For better or for worse, nothing had changed since the day she made her extraordinary offer. He was still poised on the brink, living in that moment: the moment when he had accepted sex without daring to confess that he was in love. She has never loved me, he thought, pleased by the doleful exaggeration. Not the way I love her. He lay pondering life in Sungai, the absence of distractions, the dangers, and the possibilities, while the afternoon drifted by.

When Anna came home he was mopping the flood. “Ah,” she said, “I see you’re having your floors cleaned.” This was a reference to an unexpected visit they’d had from Anna’s line manager at Parentis, a solemn Christian Fundamentalist called Aslan Gaegler, who had made the same observation when Spence had opened the door to him, mop in hand, in the middle of washing down the terrazzo. Luckily Gaegler, whose pay was on a way different scale, didn’t socialize with them; so he didn’t often get his brain stalled by the sight of a college-educated Midwestern boy doing domestic chores in gookland.

“Yes ma’am.”

“I think we should buy a new washing machine.”

“We can’t afford it babe. The situation is under control. I can fix the brute again.”

“I think we can afford it.”

“Yeah? Well, I know we can’t. I don’t want to sit on my butt for six months and then not be able to do any travel around here when you get your leave because we spent our money on labor-saving devices. That does not compute.”

“Sorry.”

Sungai was a bust. They had discussed moving to another address, but it wasn’t worth the effort. Everywhere else they might live was the same as Nasser apartments.

“It’s okay,” said Spence. “Didn’t mean to snip.”

“They probably won’t let us do any travel anyway. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

They’d done the parodic
Hi Honey I’m home!
thing to death in the first few weeks. She slipped off her shoes and padded over to him for a brief embrace. “I’m going to have a shower. You hungry? I have to do some reading, but I’ll cook first, if you like. It’s my turn.”

“No thanks. I was about to take a nap.”

Anna showered, Spence put away his mop and bucket. He lay on their bed pretending to doze, actually watching his wife as she moved around the room, with such graceful economy you’d think she was a blind woman doing it by echolocation. Not an extra step, not an unnecessary gesture. It was like watching a wild animal: the same seductive sense of privileged access, the same sleek and darting beauty. The creature hath a purpose, and her eyes are bright with it.