Love Your Enemies (18 page)

At work on Monday Steve questioned Melissa closely about her weekend. She seemed deflated, depleted. First thing in the
morning he made her tea and said, ‘You seem depressed again. Any particular reason?’

Melissa thanked him as she took the proffered mug. ‘Yes … No. I saw John, you know, on Saturday. We had a bit of a row. I think I offended him, but in a way I think he was being a bit pig-headed and stupid.’

Steve frowned. ‘How did it happen?’

She paused and looked down for a moment, unsure whether she wanted to discuss it with him. She felt very protective of John, possessive. Eventually she said, ‘If you laugh I’ll be furious. What he’s doing isn’t funny, it’s just that I’m not sure if I think it’s a good idea.’

Steve interrupted. ‘Don’t analyse in advance before you’ve even told me what this is all about. It doesn’t mean anything to the uninitiated. Tell me.’

She sighed. ‘Well, he’s making this stupid coffin which is based on some stupid Warhol painting, the Campbell’s soup can thing, you know.’

‘Vaguely. You mean he’s making a coffin which looks like one of the old Campbell’s soup cans?’

He tried not to smile, but she saw his expression and said angrily, ‘I knew I couldn’t trust you. I knew you’d just try and trivialize this.’

Steve looked indignant. ‘I’m not trivializing anything. I happen to think that it’s an excellent idea, and funny – not funny-stupid – I mean a good idea.’

Melissa looked away sulkily. He sighed. ‘For God’s sake, Melissa, what’s the big deal? Since when does it matter a jot what you think about his work? Your ideas are your business.’

She turned back to face him but couldn’t think of how to reply. Eventually she said, ‘I don’t even know. Maybe I’m just jealous or something.’

Steve smiled incredulously, ‘Of what, for fuck’s sake?’

She shrugged, ‘Of anything, everything. What do I know?’

He shook his head, amazed. ‘Not of anything, Melissa, of nothing. You’re not jealous of anything, it’s just a stupid impulse that you’ve had, a pointless display that means nothing. Maybe you do have a reason, but I can’t think what it is. Maybe you’re just contrary by nature.’

Someone came into the shop and Steve walked over to help them. Melissa regretted having talked to him at all. She felt stupid.

John awoke early on Sunday morning. It was still dark outside. When he tried to move his body it felt weak and stiff. His mouth was dry and he felt as though his throat was sealed and his lungs were somehow deflated. He struggled to breathe. The atmosphere in the room was very dusty. After a great deal of concentration and self-persuasion he managed to drag himself from the sofa and on to the floor. His body felt as fluid as water, as devoid of energy. He thought, ‘But water is very powerful and I am just one person, a single person whose body is no longer working.’ He didn’t even really understand what was wrong with it.

He dragged himself along the floor, into the hallway and slowly, inch by inch, upstairs. He crawled into his bedroom and on to the bed. By the time he was on the bed the sun had begun to rise. He felt too tired and lethargic to close his curtains, so closed his eyes instead and drew a sheet over his body and face. The colour inside his head was a red-orange; the colour of the light shining in through the skin, blood and veins of his eyelids.

He felt sad and resentful, languid. He tried not to think of Melissa but she was all he could think of. It was as though she had violated his great plan, his scheme, his purpose. She had made it into something without meaning, or rather, something too full of the wrong sort of meaning. At the back of his mind he knew that Melissa had merely been facetious and that what she’d said should hardly make any difference. He
knew that a small display of conventional disapproval shouldn’t be capable of affecting his purpose and his belief in what he was doing, that in many ways it should rather have reaffirmed the purity of his ambitions, the greatness and originality of his work.

At the back of his head was a sneaking awareness that his sudden depression and disillusionment were nothing to do with his work, his ambition, his aims. In actuality it was to do with the fact that he was dying, and his body was slowing down, perceptibly slowing down. He didn’t want to think about it so he tried to think about other things as he lay on his bed almost too weak for comprehensive thought, but not quite.

He lay in bed for a full twenty-four hours and then got up, stumbled downstairs and had three glasses of water before recommencing work.

Melissa spent the following ten days debating whether to send John a card or a postcard saying sorry. In some ways though she thought it was best just to ignore what had happened on her previous visit and simply to visit again and pretend nothing had gone wrong, or maybe to start off by saying sorry. She decided that it was best to just let things cool off. She was relatively nonchalant and saw the scale of their relationship in terms of the infinite. She saw no reason why they shouldn’t be good friends in the future if she gave things time.

Steve said nothing to her, but he was convinced that she was in love. In fact she was not in love at all, she was just bored and had nothing else to think about. A general sense of apathy gave specific things in her life more emphasis. Even so, she thought a lot, and often her thoughts were on John.

John carried on working. It was difficult because his body was no longer dutiful. Often it moved in ways which were of no use to his work at all. It had become a hindrance. But he made
progress. After ten days he had completed his coffin’s lid. The shape was perfect and he filed it so that it was as smooth as the flesh on his belly.

The following few days he spent in a state of half-wakefulness; sleeping on the sofa and only rising to open some tins of beans or spaghetti or soup which he ate cold, or to drink glasses of water. He listened to the radio for company.

Among the letters on his doormat was one from his mother, who was concerned because she had not heard from him and his telephone number was unobtainable. There was also a letter from his old girlfriend which said that she was thinking of coming home to England for good. Things hadn’t worked out and she needed his advice. John read neither letter. Instead he dreamed of his silver spray can and his pot of varnish. He was nervous about doing the lettering because his hands were now so weak.

Eventually he felt strong enough to work again. He had a wash and opened a window for ventilation as it advised on the spray cans he was using. He worked slowly but with infinite care. When he looked at the coffin he felt so proud that a lump came into his throat. It was shaped perfectly in every detail. At either end the edges of the coffin jutted out slightly as they do in that place on tin cans where you fix the tin opener and squeeze. He had sanded a series of rings on the top and bottom of the coffin that radiated into a central circle like those on a real tin. He had even created a seam down the edges, a little exaggeration on one side, where his actual seam was. On the other side the join was virtually invisible. The tin was entirely coherent and faultless. To stop his coffin rolling about like a normal tin does when it is on its side, he had filed a very small part of the base of the coffin flat, but this was hardly visible and didn’t really affect the tin’s radius. He had also made four neat wooden triangles which acted on the same principle as door-stops. If he pressed two in firmly on each side of the coffin they supported it and
curtailed any possibility of it rolling. (These he didn’t spray silver.)

He coated the coffin a few times, and after a couple of layers of paint the essential woody feeling, a sensation of something porous and natural, disappeared completely. He wanted a very smooth finish so that the paint was reflective and glossy and shiny. After spraying the outside of the coffin he opened it up and sprayed the inside edges and parts of the inside so that the movement between the paint and the material would be as gradual and gentle as possible.

It felt as if he was building a house, and the temptation was great to try and put the material into the coffin before the painting was completed so that it would feel finished and snug straight away. But he resisted temptation and waited for the paint to dry thoroughly while planning and trying out a few letters and colours for the label in rough.

This was the hardest part. Things were made more difficult because he felt so ill all the time now, not just ill but inexpressibly uncomfortable and tired. He had begun to find it hard to take solid food and was also too exhausted to negotiate a trip to the shops.

Melissa’s next visit was timely. By the time she arrived again he thought he was probably about to starve to death.

When he answered the door to her ring, after a perfunctory greeting he asked quickly, ‘Would you mind doing me an enormous favour?’ He told her the location of the nearest chemist (for painkillers) and the nearest shop (for soup), and handed her all the cash he could find, which he hoped would be sufficient.

Her arrival seemed like part of a continuous dream in his mind. She didn’t seem real, she didn’t correspond with his present reality. He had entirely forgotten about any disagreement that he may have had with her. He was more concerned about getting the job done.

Steve hadn’t discussed John with Melissa again since their initial conversation. She had tried to cheer herself up and had acted as though nothing could be further from her thoughts. But she continued to think about him and worried about what it would be best to do. Eventually she decided that it would be appropriate to visit him. Two weeks had passed and she wanted to make amends.

She’d tried to phone him in advance on the off-chance that he had connected his telephone again, but he hadn’t, so she’d decided to arrive on Sunday after lunch and had taken along a small fresh cream cake as a peace offering.

After she’d rung his bell she waited for several minutes before he answered. She didn’t ring again or hesitate and turn away because she was sure he was in. The house seemed to fester, possessed and vitalized by the spirit within.

When John answered the door she tried to swallow back an impulse of sheer disgust. He looked like someone she had never met before; a stranger with a strange disease, a beggar on the streets of an alien city. His body looked broken and pathetic. As he greeted her he supported himself against the wall.

Before she could articulate her surprise he had asked her to go on a trip to the shops for him and to the chemist. He dug around in his pockets and handed her a small amount of money. She nodded, took the money and handed him the cake, for which he thanked her. As she walked away she thought, ‘Presumably he hasn’t remembered that this is Sunday and most shops won’t be open.’

She headed back towards the Mile End Road where she’d noticed that a small newsagent’s on the way to his house was open ten minutes or so before. The newsagent’s had soup and painkillers in good supply. She bought six tins of soup and a couple of packets of painkillers, hoping this would be enough.

On returning to the house she knocked on the door instead of ringing the bell again and it pushed inwards under the
pressure of her hand. He had left it on the latch. She paused for a moment then entered.

Initially she headed for the kitchen because the living-room door was pulled to and she knew that this room, his work-room, had a certain sacred quality to John. The kitchen was still dirty and chaotic, and John wasn’t there. She called his name quietly but the house was silent and he didn’t respond.

She put down her bag of shopping and walked back towards the living room. Knocking quietly on the door and pushing it open, she called his name again. No response. She looked around the room and saw him lying on the sofa, curled up like a cat or a child. The room was – if it was possible – even thicker with dust and wood chips than on her last visit. It reminded her of how the moon looked on TV, everything dead and silent, the air so thick as to make any movement possible only in slow motion.

She called John’s name again but he was fast asleep. As she drew closer to him she saw that his hair and his heard were dotted with multi-coloured flashes of paint. His hands were mostly silver and white. His entire body seemed to have shrivelled but his hands now seemed incredibly disproportionate to his body. They were large and strong and rough like the hands of an old man.

After she had stared at John for several minutes Melissa turned away from him and towards the other main occupant of the room; the coffin.

It was in two pieces on the woodwork table. It was a gorgeous, glossy silver and had a white label with the beginnings of some lettering. It was perfect and intricate, very beautiful. It was impressive but also intimidating. She knew what power it had as an object, what (so far as she could see) it had done to John. It had worn him out and smothered him. She turned away from it with a superstitious shudder and headed towards the kitchen again.

Given that John was asleep, she decided that it would be
a kind gesture to tidy up the kitchen, in order to make it a bit more habitable. She rolled up the sleeves of her yellow shirt, which was patched all over with bursting pink hearts, and turned on the taps in the sink.

As Melissa worked in the kitchen John slept on the couch and dreamed about his coffin, which was on a long conveyor belt heading towards an enormous oven filled with fire. Although he was a short distance away from the fire he felt it burn his face and blister the paintwork on his coffin. The coffin was initially moving fairly slowly on the conveyor belt but its speed increased with each second. He was trying to hold it back and away from the fire but it kept moving on and on, closer to the flames. As he clung on to its edges he shouted, ‘You can’t burn it yet, it’s not finished and I’m not in it. I’ve got to get in it first. I don’t want to go into the fire after it. I don’t want to go into the fire without it.’

But the coffin moved towards the fire at a relentless speed and he could not stop it or climb in. Pulling at the lid he tried to tip the coffin from the conveyor belt, but it was as if it was stuck to the base with glue; his nails snapped and still it would not open. He jumped away from the coffin as it entered the flames and it felt as though he was falling and that he would fall for ever, as though he had jumped from a cliff and was falling, falling.