The Temporary (20 page)

‘Oh.’

‘Except it all got a bit silly and the poor chap ended up strung up by his ankles with his face in the pan. No wonder he’s such a miserable bastard. Scarred him for life, probably.’

‘It was Ralph!’ said Francine triumphantly.

‘Clever girl.’ Stephen refilled their glasses. ‘So there you have it. That’s how we got lumbered with each other. Quite touching.’

‘Didn’t he have any other friends, then?’

‘Not really. Scholarship boy. His parents didn’t pay for him to go to the school,’ he explained when he saw that Francine didn’t understand. ‘And all of us nascent little snobs looked down our noses at him because he emanated from a council house. He was having rather a rough time of it. Shameful, really.’

As the words reached her ears with a muffled thud, Francine understood that she was witnessing the sudden, utter reversal of everything she had thought to be true. She sat in silence, her thoughts erased.

‘His father came to the school once to see him. Looked like a bloody tramp.’ He shook his head. ‘Then he died. They found him in some god-awful hotel room up in the north, rotting away. Horrible. I never met the mother, she was gone
a long time ago. Cancer, apparently.’ He drank swiftly from his glass. ‘Poor chap’s a bit of a sad case.’

As quickly as she could accommodate each blow, another rained down on her, and as the images grew in her head she felt their contamination. She imagined his house, drawing vaguely on the topography of her old town to depict a bleak box wreathed in grubby washing, and then thought of Ralph’s father, a filthy tramp, lying in a hotel room. She had been cheated! How could he have lied to her, with his books and his educated voice and his pathetic exhibitions! How dared he make
her
feel inferior, as if there were something wrong with
her,
when he was just a common kid from a council house, the sort of person she had been taught never even to associate with! ‘Might as well get another,’ said Stephen, cheerful again suddenly as he emptied the last of the bottle into her glass.

And she had actually thought that he was
posh,
like Stephen – Stephen’s father was a lord, Ralph had told her – but he was just a pathetic nobody, a – what had Stephen called him? – a ‘sad case’ for whom people like Stephen felt sorry.

‘Yes, let’s,’ she said. She waited while he went to the bar, her mind churning up new outrages with every passing second. ‘So how did he get into university, then?’ she asked when he got back.

‘Ralph? Because he’s clever, of course. You don’t get into university for being rich, you idiot.’

‘I was only asking,’ said Francine bitterly. An urge to keep his alliance sweetened her tone. ‘I was just interested, that’s all. He never told me any of the things you just told me.’

‘Oh, he didn’t, did he?’ Stephen’s smile broadened. ‘Well, perhaps he doesn’t like to talk about it. It’s not all that surprising, is it?’

‘No,’ said Francine. Seeing that Stephen was defending Ralph, she dropped her eyes, drawing his attention to her own victimized feelings. ‘It’s just that I feel as if he’s lied to me.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Well, he pretended that he was – you know—’ Francine writhed her hands in distress and saw a look of comprehension dawn across Stephen’s face.

‘Thought you’d landed something out of the top drawer, eh?’ He laughed loudly, throwing back his head. ‘You little bitch! If the old dingbat had known
that
would make you jump ship, he’d have told you himself!’ He laughed again, wiping hilarious tears from his eyes.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Francine furiously.

‘Oh, calm down, Francine,’ said Stephen. ‘You’re a nice girl. Just go easy on Ralph. He deserves better.’

‘What, like you?’ she spat.

‘Oh, I’m no bargain, I know. God knows why he puts up with me.’ He sat back in his chair, crossing his legs, and then all at once impaled her with hard, frightening eyes. ‘I should have had you myself, saved him the trouble.’

‘So why didn’t you?’ she threw back.

‘Couldn’t be bothered.’ He shrugged. ‘For Christ’s sake, what does it matter?’

‘It’s what I wanted anyway.’

‘Did you now?’ He laughed.

‘I still want it.’ Francine felt wild with drink and daring. She thought of Ralph, of the loathsome thing that was inside her. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you’re scared!’

‘There is the small matter of
Ralph.
’

‘I don’t care about Ralph,’ smiled Francine. Exhilaration sharpened her, and she felt keenly, deliciously herself. ‘Anyway, he doesn’t need to know.’

‘You’re not such a nice girl, are you?’ Stephen sat back in his seat, amused, and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Francine, can’t do it, not again. I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep. Although I have to say, we’re made for each other.’

‘Why not? Just tell me why not?’

‘Ralph would kill me.’

‘I told you, he won’t find out.’

‘Of course he will. You’ll tell him. You won’t be able to resist it. I’ve been here before, believe me.’ She looked at him, not understanding, and he laughed. ‘So he didn’t tell you that, either? My, he has been discreet.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Oh, just a little past naughtiness. It was a long time ago.’

He fiddled shamefacedly with a beer mat, and Francine suddenly saw it.

‘With his girlfriend?’ she said deliriously. ‘With – what was she called – with Belinda?’

‘Clever girl’ He smiled. ‘I fucked the love of Ralph’s life and he still goes to the pub with me. That’s friendship for you.’

‘Does he know?’ said Francine, victorious with information.

‘I told you, of course he does. First sign of a quarrel and out it came, whack over the head. And that was the end of that.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Ah, lovely,’ said Stephen wistfully. ‘But she was a bitch to Ralph. And so are you.’

‘Ralph and I are finished,’ said Francine. ‘I finished it last night.’

‘So you’ve finally freed the poor creature from your clutches?’ Stephen laughed. ‘About time too. Was he pleased?’

‘So there’s nothing to stop us.’

Through a fog of drunkenness she heard the shrill music of her voice. Stephen drew back slightly at the sound. She tried to soften herself, smiling and leaning towards him.

‘Look,’ he sighed, picking up his glass. ‘You’re a beautiful girl, Francine, but at the moment I need you like I need –
look, I don’t want to get involved, OK? It’s too late for all that. So just drop it.’ He looked at the wine bottle. ‘This is empty. We might as well go.’

He stood up and began putting on his jacket. When Francine got to her feet the room whirled, listing like a flailing ship. Her thoughts spun with it, indecipherable, but through them she felt something hard and compelling, a wire drawn tight along which she appeared to be strung. Stephen draped her coat around her shoulders and she gripped his hand as he led her through the crowded tables and up the stairs.

‘I’ll find you a cab,’ he said when they were outside. ‘Come on.’

The night had grown black and the air was piercing, agonizing. As they set off towards the busy street Francine felt the drag of failure, and the penetrating cold shrank in seconds the heady dilation of the recent hours. She felt packed again with all the lumpy, ugly furniture of anxiety which had come in the past few weeks to clutter spaces which had once been bright and empty, and trapped amongst it a searing, hopeless consciousness of the fact that things were going wrong visited her. In that moment, as Stephen walked ahead, a violent flame of resistance coursed through her and consumed it all. She would not let this happen to her! Why, when every glance in the mirror told her, when every look and gesture confirmed it, when she knew – had been told time and time again! – that she could have anything she wanted, why then was nothing as she wanted it to be? How had she come to these doomed and darkened passages, so far from the world she knew; what had happened to her magic, the arts she had practised for as long as she could remember, the spells which she had known would one day conjure success? A wave of drunkenness washed over her, and she stood still as the alley blurred in her eyes. Everything seemed all at once rather muddled. A jumble of images churned and then settled thickly on her surface. For
a moment all of her was gathered and a forgotten doubt began to revive and struggle in her, beating its wings. She was sick, sick of herself.

‘Come on, Francine,’ said Stephen, waiting for her up ahead. He turned and walked back towards her. ‘You’re a bit tanked up, did you know that? Decidedly squiffy, as my dear old mother would say.’

Francine watched his mouth moving. Who was he,
standing
there making fun of her, talking about his mother, when he should be begging to touch her? They all wanted her – they all said it, that she was the most beautiful, the most desirable, that they would do anything for her. She hated them all, all of them! And most of all she hated Ralph, who had ruined everything and made it disgusting! Stephen was close to her now. She felt a pressure across her shoulders and realized that his arm was around her.

‘Come on,’ she whispered, turning and pressing herself against him. She felt him recoil slightly and she pressed harder.

‘Jesus,’ he said, laughing and putting his arms around her. ‘What are you doing?’

Her face was almost level with his and she lunged forward, trying to insinuate her tongue into his mouth.

‘Christ, Francine!’

He twisted his head to avoid her as a group of people came loudly out of the bar and along the street. One or two of the women giggled as they passed and a man shouted something.

‘Who cares?’ said Francine. ‘Ignore them.’

‘You’re drunk,’ said Stephen. His tone was milder now, and he ran a hand up and down her back. ‘Come on, stop it.’

‘Take me!’ she shouted. Her voice echoed along the empty alley.

‘What?’

Stephen began to laugh, but she planted herself against his
open mouth and suddenly he started to kiss her violently, grabbing her hair with his fist and pulling back her head. He tugged her blouse free of her skirt with his other hand and she had a dull consciousness of pain as his teeth bit into her lips.

‘Is this what you want?’ he said viciously in her ear, turning her and forcing her against a wall. Her head banged on the cold brick. She struggled against him with surprise but his body was a cage, pinning her where she stood.

‘Stop it!’ she said, writhing against his grip as terror penetrated her drunkenness. His breath gusted warmly in her face. ‘Get off!’

As quickly as it had started the tumult stopped. The pressure of his weight fell from her, and seconds later, feeling the cold gather at her clothes, she realized he had gone. The sound of fading footsteps drifted to her ears and she turned her head to watch his dark back grow smaller as he
disappeared
. As if feeling her eyes, he raised his arm in a salute without turning around.

‘Bye, Francine!’ he called.

The sound of his laughter bounded back down the alley towards her and vanished. She heard the silence of the small street in the darkness, and beyond it the sound of cars passing, going somewhere far away. The wall at her back was cold and continuous. She tucked her blouse back into her skirt, drew her coat around her, and began to walk as elegantly as she was able towards the road.

Ralph left the Tube station and turned up Camden High Street towards home. The days were getting longer now – he could suddenly feel it, the almost imperceptibly slow arm wrestle, the gradual gain of light over dark – and the sky was still bright with the memory of sun as he walked towards the Lock. He passed the launderette and then the funeral parlour, behind whose tinted windows pale ruched curtains were lavishly bunched above a thick pink lawn of carpet,
suffocating
as a girl’s bedroom. Inside, a middle-aged woman stood proprietorially at the glass, peering anxiously up and down the pavement like a waiter looking for customers at the door of an empty restaurant. He walked on, surprised to feel his lips stretching with a grin.

Tentatively, running nervous fingers over his feelings, prodding his situation again with a scientist’s circumspection, he could admit that things hadn’t been so bad today.
Yesterday
he had felt cast out, irretrievable, doomed to patrol the border of what he could endure, and it had come as a surprise to him to wake the next morning and realize that something, if only a day, now lay between him and his catastrophe. His sense of his own survival gave way as he walked to more expansive thoughts, a feeling of having been aroused from some long dormancy, the revivification which he recognized
was the residue of pain. His life echoed now, empty, filled only with the potential for beginning it again. The idea lent some enchantment to the darkening street lit gold by a putative halo of street lamps, the friendly, sleeping faces of shops, the shy eyes of passers-by violet in the dusk, even the beating of his heels and the puff of his own breath! His body seemed suddenly rather miraculous to him, the ambulant parcel of himself: he was contained, all of him, in this machine bent only on doing his bidding, this vehicle in which he could travel wherever he chose. He wondered why he had never thought of his sufficiency before, for it liberated him to consider it, drew his muscles tight and ready beneath his skin. Remembering times when he had felt as if he were dragging his punctured form about after him, or were lying opened on a table with the world performing his dissection, he resolved to think of it more often.

He reached the Lock and walked briskly over, exchanging smiles with a man coming the other way. The man looked at his watch as he passed, and before Ralph could defend himself against it the thought had flown into his head that Francine must have left the office by now, and that from this moment he didn’t know where she was. He felt a pain in his chest, a bristling of nerves beneath his skin while she moved darkly across his thoughts, the light in her belly bobbing as she walked. All day he had been rehearsing arguments against such moments, but when it came to using them he suddenly found himself unable to remember how they worked: he groped for their analgesic while misery grated back and forth at his heart like a saw. He strained to be home, directing his legs to go faster, imagining the rooms of his flat, his
possessions
homesick for him, his fridge offering itself to his hungry fingers. He saw himself watching television later, warm and alone, laughing at something funny, the telephone ringing perhaps. What was she doing now? Where was she
going, with his stolen property? There in the street he shrugged, irritated, and let a sigh escape his lips. He had to stop indulging himself like that. It would spoil him, like a child, inflame his emotions. The baby had seemed so separate that night – so distinct that he had thought he could just break it off and keep it! – but now that it had receded back into the tangled ropes of her body, an inextricable, futile thing, he knew that he must sever himself or be dragged stomach down after it. He remembered his flashes of
hallucination
, saw again the terrible images he had harboured of harming her, until his head ached with them. He reached his turning and heard his heels clop loudly like hoofs in the sudden quiet of the small street. What would it have been like? Who would it have become? He had thought
that
before, hundreds of times already in only a couple of days. Of course, it was always himself he saw, never her; himself going through life again, except knowing the road now, with all that had been wrong put right. It dogged him like a little ghost, and he wondered if it always would, would walk beside him through all its ethereal ages. He checked himself again, walking faster now with the naked trees flying by him in a rush. If such a thing could live, it would only be as the product of his own invention. It was nothing, less than nothing, a loveless clot of bad blood, just something he had done, like other things, not a miracle but a mistake. It had the consistency of an idea, and he could refute it. He could choose, really, not to care about it at all, switch off feelings like lights in a house. He would have a bath and then cook dinner. He saw himself reading the paper while he ate.

Approaching his flat in the failing light a sudden prophetic fear passed over him, as if something were about to happen, and in the next moment he saw a figure standing outside his front door. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew from the erectness of her head that she had seen him. He slowed his
steps while his thoughts, busy with the provision of sedatives, instead struggled to manufacture panic. What was she doing here? He was close enough now to see her face, and felt himself so simultaneously drawn and repelled that he stopped altogether, wondering if he could find another avenue which might carry him through what at that moment seemed impossible to bear.

‘Don’t worry,’ she called out, seeing him halt. ‘I only want to get my things.’

Her words were lobbed awkwardly towards him, and hearing them he knew that she had selected them before he had even arrived. He wondered what else she planned to say to him, and the thought made him want to grip her shoulders and shake her until it all fell clattering out of her mouth to the pavement.

‘Oh.’ He walked carefully past her to the door and took out his keys. His hands were trembling. ‘Come in, then.’

In the stronger light of the hall he risked a glance at her as she came in behind him. Seeing her face he felt as if he had never been away from her, as if he had woken from a forgetful sleep and felt the memory of her drop like a weight through his empty spaces. It was a moment before he realized that she looked awful, quite unrecognizable, and it was in his mouth to ask her what was wrong before remembering that this was how things always began between them.

‘I’ll just let you get on with it, shall I?’ he said, opening the inner door to his flat.

She didn’t answer, but he saw with despair from the slight shrug of her shoulders that she still wanted to talk to him, to prise reactions from him like teeth. The gesture reminded him of his relation to her, her strange significance which was so surprisingly easy to forget when she was there before him. The pregnancy seemed not to be a part of her physical presence – if only he could see into her, look through her walls
just once as if they were made of glass! – although now, noticing her curious deterioration, he wondered if this were its manifestation: something gnawing malignly at her insides, the proud extension of his own self, feeding, growing, planning its escape. Her face was deflated, the skin collapsed like a tent on the narrow ridges of her bones, and the hollows of her eyes were painted with shadows. He reminded himself that their poetry was a delusion, a limerick which he must not hear, and he turned away from her and walked into the sitting-room. Moments later he heard her in the bathroom, opening
cabinets
. He sat on the sofa, rigid with the tension of her presence. In a few minutes she would be gone. He desperately wanted a drink, but he knew he would not sustain his detachment if he made one. He would offer her one too, and she would jam her foot through the crack of his kindness and force herself in. He closed his eyes for a minute and when he opened them again she was there, standing in the doorway.

‘That was quick,’ he said stupidly, rubbing his eyes.

‘There wasn’t much.’

She watched him as a thick silence spread over the room. He looked down, unable to bear her gaze, while a polite impulse to make conversation fought in his chest.

‘So that’s it, then!’ he burst out finally, meeting her eyes.

‘Oh, I’ll be gone soon,’ she said acerbically, for once understanding him at the very moment in which he wished to be most opaque. ‘I just wanted to tell you something I think you should know.’

‘And what’s that?’

He caught the split second of her hesitation, and knew suddenly that he had been wrong, that she hadn’t even thought of what she was going to say until that moment.

‘I’m going to keep the baby,’ she said, throwing his gaze back at him defiantly. ‘I’ve decided.’

Ralph found that he could not take his eyes from her,
although a fierce desire to pound his own head with his fists had gripped him. He felt the tide of confusion begin to rise again, the great gorge of their debris swilling on its surface, and he held his breath.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’

‘No,’ he said. His voice was a whimper and he put his head in his hands.

‘Why not? You have to say
something.
I’ve said I’m going to keep the baby, and you—’

‘What baby?’ He heard the shout come from him, and then the slam of his hand on the coffee table. The room capsized in an angry blur. ‘It’s not a bloody baby, for God’s sake! It’s not a baby!’ He wondered what sounds would fall from his lips if he ceased to restrain them with words, what grunts and howls and strange language. He felt an eruption at his eyes, his face growing messy. ‘I don’t
love
you, do you understand? I – I barely know you, I don’t actually know who you are!’ A drop of mirthless laughter spilled from his mouth. ‘Please leave me alone. Do you hear? Leave me
alone.
’

He hadn’t been looking at her but he sensed her suddenly come at him, and then felt the dark flaps of her coat baffling around his head. He realized to his astonishment that she was hitting him with her fists and he put out his arms to protect himself.

‘How dare you?’ she panted, drawing back. ‘How dare you speak to me like that? I know about you!’ Her voice hauled itself higher on a new rope of initiative. ‘I know all about you!’

‘What do you know?’ he spat back, laughing. ‘You don’t know anything about me at all!’

‘Yes I do!’ she said triumphantly, folding her arms. ‘I know what you are – you’re a fake!’ She waited, watching him, and when he didn’t do anything she said it again. ‘You’re a fake!
You act all superior and high and mighty, but you’re not, are you? Oh, I’ve found out everything!’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ said Ralph.

He felt all at once calm again. He wondered if she had actually lost her mind, but then realized that he was merely seeing more clearly into it: its accumulation of junk, its piles of magazines from whose covers trapped, vacant beauties stared, its reels of bad films, its numbing hours of television; all these broken, abandoned versions of reality strangling her soil, clogging her consciousness. She lived beneath a
dictatorship
of nonsense; she imitated that which itself was only an imitation, and try as he might to search for her in this hall of mirrors, he would find time and again only comical, distorted reflections of himself. The worst of it was that, despite everything, he saw she had been capable of dragging him down with her; for every soft, silly thing she threw at him concealed a sharp rock of implication, the fact that he himself had chosen her.

‘What
on
earth
are
you
talking
about?’
Her voice sung with affected mimickry. ‘Oh, very realistic. Is that what they taught you at your posh school, then?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Ralph gaily, suddenly finding the whole exchange hilarious.

‘It’s not how your parents talked, though, is it?’

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ he replied, pausing with surprise. ‘I don’t really remember. Look, is that what this is all about? I hardly think it matters how my parents spoke.’

‘You lied to me!’ she shouted. Her fingers stiffened into fists and her face, hanging above him, was a lamp of anger. He saw that she was incensed, quite genuinely, and realized that she had expected him to be ashamed. ‘All this time you’ve been looking down your nose at me, acting like I’m not good enough, and it’s
me
who should feel sorry for
you
!’

‘Why’s that?’ said Ralph. He felt peculiarly unmoved, and it surprised him to notice that his heart was thudding.

‘Everyone feels sorry for you!’ She waited, watching him until he met her eye before she delivered her meaning. ‘Your father was a disgusting tramp and you came from a council house, and even your precious Stephen was only friends with you because he was forced to be!’

Something dropped through his centre like a pebble thrown down a well, a long, silent fall. He felt its faint impact down in the pit of himself.

‘That’s not true.’ He sat back firmly on the sofa and folded his hands.

‘Oh, yes it is! He told me so.’ Her face was excited now. ‘He told me it was his punishment, to be friends with you!’

‘What
do
you mean?’

‘He got into trouble,’ said Francine victoriously. ‘And the
master
’
–
she used the word carefully, and Ralph suddenly knew beyond doubt that she was telling the truth, that somehow Stephen had really told her these things – ‘the master said that instead of being expelled he had to be friends with you, because nobody else wanted to. He said he wished he’d been expelled,’ she finished matter-of-factly.

Ralph opened his mouth but found himself disarmed. The litany of Francine’s voice assaulted him, hammering against his thoughts and then slotting in amongst them, into spaces he had not really known were there but which now he saw fitted them perfectly. He saw the matrix of truth, touched its cold, steely walls, and knew himself captured.

‘He told me other things too, all sorts of interesting things about you. He took me out last night to a wine bar and we got drunk and talked about everything. I told him how bad you were to me and he said it wasn’t surprising, considering your background, and I should just feel sorry for you, like he does. He says you’re jealous of him because of Belinda,
because she liked him more than she liked you. She was all over him, he said.’ He heard her laugh. ‘And you still go to the pub with him! It’s pathetic, it really is. Just pathe—’