Written on the Body (11 page)

Frank had the body of a bull, an image he intensified by wearing great gold hoops through his nipples. Unfortunately he had joined the hoops with a chain of heavy gold links. The effect should have been deeply butch but in fact it looked rather like the handle of a Chanel shopping bag.

He didn’t want to settle down. His ambition was to find a hole in every port. He wasn’t fussy about the precise location. Frank believed that love had been invented to fool people. His theory was sex and friendship. ‘Don’t people always behave better towards their friends than their lovers?’ He warned me never to fall in love, although his words came too late because I had already fallen for him. He was the perfect vagabond, swag bag in one hand, waving with the other. He never stayed anywhere long, he was only in Paris for two months. I begged him to come back to England with me but he laughed and said England was for married couples. ‘I have to be free,’ he said.

‘But you take your parents wherever you go.’

Frank left for Italy and I came home to England. I was torn with grief for two whole days and then
I thought, A man and his midgets. Was that what I wanted? A man whose chest jewellery rattled when he walked?

It was years ago but I still blush. Sex can feel like love or maybe it’s guilt that makes me call sex love. I’ve been through so much I should know just what it is I’m doing with Louise. I should be a grown-up by now. Why do I feel like a convent virgin?

The second day of my ordeal I took a pair of handcuffs to the library with me and locked myself to my seat. I gave the key to the gentleman in the knitted waistcoat and asked him to let me free at five o’clock. I told him I had a deadline, that if I didn’t finish my translation a Soviet writer might fail to find asylum in Great Britain. He took the key and said nothing but I noticed he’d disappeared from his place after about an hour.

I worked on, the concentrated silence of the library giving me some release from thoughts of Louise. Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing do we invariably think of another? The overriding arch of Louise had distracted me from all other constructs. I like mental games, I find it easy to work and I work quickly. In the past whatever my situation I have been able to find peace in work. Now that facility had deserted me. I was a street yob who had to be kept locked up.

Whenever the word Louise came into my mind I replaced it with a brick wall. After a few hours of this my mind was nothing but brick walls. Worse, my left hand was swelling up, I don’t think it was getting enough blood being strapped to the chair leg. There was no sign of the gentleman. I signalled to a guard and whispered my
problem. He returned with a fellow guard and together they picked up my chair and carried me sedan style down the British Library Reading Room. It is a tribute to the scholarly temperament that nobody looked up.

In the supervisor’s office I tried to explain.

‘You a Communist?’ he said.

‘No I’m a floating voter.’

He had me cut loose and charged me for Wilful Damage To Reading Room Chair. I tried to make him amend that to ‘accidental damage’ but he wouldn’t. Then he filed his report very solemnly and told me I’d have to hand over my ticket.

‘I can’t hand over my ticket. It’s my livelihood.’

‘Should a thought a that before you handcuffed yourself to Library Property.’

I gave him my ticket and got an appeal form. Could I fall any lower?

The answer was yes. I spent the whole night prowling outside Louise’s house like a private dick. I watched the lights going off at some windows, on at others. Was she in his bed? What did that have to do with me? I ran a schizophrenic dialogue with myself through the hours of darkness and into the small hours, so called because the heart shrivels up to the size of a pea and there is no hope left in it.

By morning I was home shivering and wretched. I welcomed the shivering since I hoped it might portend a fever. If I were delirious for a few days her leaving me might hurt less. With luck I might even die. ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ Shakespeare was wrong, I was living proof of that.

‘You ought to be dead proof,’ I said to myself. ‘If you’re living proof he was right.’

I sat down to make a will leaving everything to Louise. Was I in sound mind and body? I took my temperature. No. I peered at my head in the mirror. No. Better go to bed close the curtains and get out the gin bottle.

That was how Louise found me at 6 o’clock on the evening of the third day. She’d been telephoning since noon but I had been too sodden to notice.

‘They’ve taken my ticket away,’ I said when I saw her.

I burst into tears and lay blubbering in her arms. There was nothing she could do except give me a bath and a sleeping draught. In my sinking haze I heard her say, ‘I will never let you go.’

No-one knows what forces draw two people together. There are plenty of theories; astrology, chemistry, mutual need, biological drive. Magazines and manuals worldwide will tell you how to pick the perfect partner. Dating agencies stress the science of their approach although having a computer does not make one a scientist. The old music of romance is played out in modern digital ways. Why leave yourself to chance when you could leave yourself to science? Shortly the pseudo-lab coat approach of dating by details will make way for a genuine experiment whose results, however unusual, will remain controllable. Or so they say. (See splitting the atom, gene therapy, in vitro fertilisation, cross hormone cultures, even the humble cathode ray for similar statements.) Never mind. Virtual Reality is on its way.

At present to enter a virtual world you would have to put on a crude-looking diving helmet of the kind people used to wear in the 1940s and a special glove rather like a
heavy gardening gauntlet. Thus equipped you would be inside a 360° television set with a three-dimensional programme, three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you could pick up and move around. No longer would you be watching a film from a fixed perspective, this is a film-set you can explore, even alter if you don’t like it. As far as your senses can tell you are in a real world. The fact that you are in a diving helmet wearing a gardening glove won’t matter.

In a little while, the equipment will be replaced by a room that you can walk into like any other. Except that it will be an intelligent space. The room will be a wall-to-wall virtual world of your choosing. If you like, you may live in a computer-created world all day and all night. You will be able to try out a Virtual life with a Virtual lover. You can go into your Virtual house and do Virtual housework, add a baby or two, even find out if you’d rather be gay. Or single. Or straight. Why hesitate when you could simulate?

And sex? Certainly. Teledildonics is the word. You will be able to plug in your telepresence to the billion-bundle network of fibre optics criss-crossing the world and join your partner in Virtuality. Your real selves will be wearing body suits made up of thousands of tiny tactile detectors per square inch. Courtesy of the fibreoptic network these will receive and transmit touch. The Virtual epidermis will be as sensitive as your own outer layer of skin.

For myself, unreconstructed as I am, I’d rather hold you in my arms and walk through the damp of a real English meadow in real English rain. I’d rather travel across the world to have you with me than lie at home dialling your telepresence. The scientists say I can choose
but how much choice have I over their other inventions? My life is not my own, shortly I shall have to haggle over my reality. Luddite? No, I don’t want to smash the machines but neither do I want the machines to smash me.

August. The street like a hotplate cooking us. Louise had brought me to Oxford to get away from Elgin. She didn’t tell me what had happened in the previous three days, she kept her secret like a war-time agent. She was smiling, calm, the perfect undercover girl. I didn’t trust her. I believed she was about to break it off with me, that she had made it up with Elgin and begged this Roman holiday as a way out with a frisson of regret. My chest was full of stones.

We walked, swam in the river, read back to back as lovers do. Talked all the time about everything except ourselves. We were in a Virtual world where the only taboo was real life. But in a true Virtual world I could have gently picked up Elgin and dropped him for ever from the frame. I saw him from the corner of my eye waiting waiting. Elgin squatted over life until it moved.

We were in our rented room, the windows wide open against the heat. Outside, the dense noises of summer; shouts from the street, a click of a croquet ball, laughter, sudden and incomplete and above us Mozart on a tinkly piano. A dog, woof woof woof, chasing the lawn mower. I had my head on your belly and I could hear your lunch on its way to your bowels.

You said, ‘I’m going to leave.’

I thought, Yes, of course you are, you’re going back to the shell.

You said, ‘I’m going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.’

I’ve hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one’s watching. They haven’t faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

We went home to my flat and you brought nothing from your other life but the clothes you stood up in. Elgin had insisted that you take nothing until the divorce settlement had been agreed. You had asked him to divorce you for Adultery and he had insisted it was to be Unreasonable Behaviour.

‘It will help him to save face,’ you said. ‘Adultery is for cuckolds. Unreasonable Behaviour is for martyrs. A mad wife is better than a bad wife. What will he tell his friends?’

I don’t know what he told his friends but I know what he told me. Louise and I had been living together in great happiness for nearly five months. It was Christmas time and we had decorated the flat with garlands of holly and ivy woven from the woods. We had very little money; I had not been translating as much as I should have been and Louise could not resume work until the new year. She’d found a job teaching Art History. Nothing mattered to us. We were insultingly happy. We sang and played and walked for miles looking at buildings and watching people. A treasure had fallen into our hands and the treasure was each other.

Those days have a crystalline clearness to me now. Whichever way I hold them up to the light they refract a different colour. Louise in her blue dress gathering fir cones in the skirt. Louise against the purple sky looking like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine. The young green of our life
and the last yellow roses in November. The colours blur and I can only see her face. Then I hear her voice crisp and white. ‘I will never let you go.’

It was Christmas Eve and Louise went to visit her mother who had always hated Elgin until Louise told her she was divorcing him. Louise hoped that the season of goodwill might work in her favour and so when the stars were hard and bright she wrapped her mane around her and set off. I waved, smiling, how fine she would look on the Steppes of Russia.

As I was about to close the door, a shadow came towards me. It was Elgin. I didn’t want to invite him in but he was menacing in an unlikely jovial way. My neck prickled like an animal’s. I thought for Louise’s sake I must get it over with.

I gave him a drink and he talked aimlessly until I could bear it no longer. I asked him what he wanted. Was it about the divorce? ‘In a way,’ he said smiling. ‘I think there’s something you should know. Something Louise won’t have told you.’

‘Louise tells me everything,’ I said coldly. ‘As I do her.’

‘Very touching,’ he said watching the ice in his Scotch. ‘Then you won’t be surprised to hear she’s got cancer?’

Two hundred miles from the surface of the earth there is no gravity. The laws of motion are suspended. You could turn somersaults slowly slowly, weight into weightlessness, nowhere to fall. As you lay on your back paddling in space you might notice your feet had fled your head. You are stretching slowly slowly, getting longer, your joints are slipping away from their usual places. There is no connection between your shoulder and your arm. You will break up bone by bone, fractured from who you
are, you are drifting away now, the centre cannot hold.

Where am I? There is nothing here I recognise. This isn’t the world I know, the little ship I’ve trimmed and rigged. What is this slow-motion space, my arm moving up and down up and down like a parody of Mussolini? Who is this man with the revolving eyes, his mouth opening like a gas chamber, his words acrid, vile, in my throat and nostrils? The room stinks. The air is bad. He’s poisoning me and I can’t get away. My feet don’t obey me. Where is the familiar ballast of my life? I am fighting helplessly without hope. I grapple but my body slithers away. I want to brace myself against something solid but there’s nothing solid here.

The facts Elgin. The facts.

Leukaemia.

Since when?

About two years.

She’s not ill.

Not yet.

What kind of leukaemia?

Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

She looks well.

The patient may have no symptoms for some time.

She’s well.

I took a blood count after her first miscarriage.

Her first?

She was badly anaemic.

I don’t understand.

It’s rare.

She’s not ill.

Her lymph nodes are now enlarged.

Will she die?

They’re rubbery but painless.

Will she die?

Her spleen isn’t enlarged at all. That’s good.

Will she die?

She has too many white T-cells.

Will she die?

That depends.

On what?

On you.

You mean I can look after her?

I mean I can.

Elgin left and I sat under the Christmas tree watching the swinging angels and the barleysugar candles. His plan was simple: if Louise came back to him he would give her the care money can’t buy. She would go with him to Switzerland and have access to the very latest medico-technology. As a patient, no matter how rich, she would not be able to do that. As Elgin’s wife she would.