Slack-Tide, page 14
As my breathing slowed, he told me we had just returned from a long sea journey. We had made land, and night had fallen.
‘You’re not a yacht,’ I breathed. ‘And I’m not your lighter. I’m a person, not a boat. You can be the captain. I’m your deckhand.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Cute deckhand. Wanna share my cabin?’
‘Sure. What happens next?’
We had cleaned our boat, he said, and re-provisioned her. The sail was furled and the deck swept. There was only the sound of a rope straining, or of other boats, rocking. We were sharing a tiny cabin, just the two of us, and in the morning, if we wanted, we would be gone early, before anyone else was even awake, so that it would be as though we’d never been there. Within a half-hour, he said, we could be on the high seas, but for now, we were sleeping, and dreaming of what we had seen on our voyage, out in the big blue nowhere.
May
How to make an SOS call from a plane
The question from air traffic is not ‘How many people are on board?’ but, rather, ‘How many souls?’ In answer to the former iteration, there would always be an ambiguity; should it be ‘Eight’ or ‘Me plus seven’? But to the question ‘How many souls?’ there is no doubt: the answer should be ‘Eight’.
Martha Parker, The Language of Flight
As a student Robert drew angels, which he fashioned into models with stiff card. He graduated to ply-board frames, and clad them with thin sheets of aluminium. Once, he constructed an angel from strips of wire, clad with nothing at all. Forming the fancy that it might take flight, he remade the hollow prototype several times and consulted aviation manuals. His last attempt was the biggest: at twenty foot tall it stood lightly, but he went no further with the idea.
When he completed the foundation course, his grandmother booked him a series of lessons at an airfield in New Jersey. He learned to fly, and the angels stopped. Finding himself unable to let go of that last vast figure, he stored it in a friend’s studio.
‘You’re like one of my angels,’ he said to me one Saturday in May. Smiling, he held the fabric of my top between his fingers. ‘I’m sorry, have you been here long? Were you bored out of your mind?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s been fine. I watched the water. I watched people.’
‘I’ve never seen this before,’ he said, holding the fabric again. ‘Is it new?’
We were at Victoria Park for a picnic. The polka-dot top he’d admired was made to a simple design: two large T-shaped cotton panels stitched together, with ribbons attached on either side at waist height. If the ribbons were left untied, the top hung slack. This morning I’d tied them, so the fabric was cinched at my waist and fell in folds.
Waiting for him to arrive, I’d taken off my backpack and stood facing the lake. The breeze was from both sides. Beneath the ribbon ties, the fabric of my top was lifted up and out. The sleeves had billowed like wings, and I could feel the air on my tummy.
‘You really like it?’ I said. ‘I was going to send it to the charity shop.’ I untied the ribbons and held the fabric out in front. ‘Then I thought it might come in handy.’ Puffing my cheeks, I thrust my belly forward until Robert laughed.
‘I’m not joking!’ I said, laughing as well. ‘I mean it. It’s basically a maternity top.’ I held the fabric out again. ‘Look!’
He picked up my backpack and moved off. ‘Come on, honey. I’m hungry. Let’s eat.’
Laying out the lunch, he said it was his first ever picnic.
‘It can’t be.’ I unpacked cutlery and plates, and small glass tumblers for the wine.
‘In London.’
‘In eight years?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You guys never –?’
‘Nope.’
‘But why?’
‘It’s not something we would have done.’ He took a baguette from his bag. ‘Lena would never have – I guess Philippe might’ve liked it.’
‘Of course he would! Look!’ There were families all around us. Holding up blankets and letting them settle, they opened bags of food. One or two groups had lit tiny barbecue trays and were sticking sausages onto skewers.
‘Well,’ he said, pulling out a half-bottle of red wine, ‘I have some catching up to do.’
He asked a passer-by to take our photograph. Kneeling up behind me, he clasped me in his arms and posed for the shot with his chin on the top of my head. Later, he went to the drinks kiosk. I’d brought the weekend papers, and when he reappeared with little cardboard cups of coffee, I was buried in an article.
‘You don’t want to talk?’ he frowned.
‘We talked a lot over lunch,’ I said. ‘Let’s read.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’
He knelt down, then he pointed at a couple to our left. They held novels, and sat back-to-back, with their torsos resting against each other. ‘They’ve obviously been together forever,’ he said.
‘Hmm?’
‘They must’ve been. It takes years for couples to be able to read together.’
‘Honey, come on.’ I passed him the news section. ‘It’s the weekend. It’s a nice thing to do.’
He objected a little more then he was quiet. Every now and again he told me about an article. I read out extracts of a profile of a writer I knew, or a review of a play I wanted us to see. Then he said, ‘I still can’t believe it just disappeared. It’s impossible.’
‘Hmmm?’
‘A whole goddam jet. Two hundred and thirty-nine people. Can you imagine their last moments? What they thought when they knew they were going down?’
‘If they went down.’
‘Oh, you think they’re still out there on a mystery flight path somewhere, a month later?’
‘Sorry. I was being flippant.’
‘It’s not something to joke about. It’s crazy. I mean, listen to this. “Goodnight Malaysian three seven zero.” That’s the last single thing they called in. After that, nothing.’
‘Is there some news?’
‘The report’s come out, that’s all. They left it three hours and fifty-two minutes to get the search and rescue going. Can you believe that? The Australian prime minister is “baffled and confused”. I’ll say.’
He held up a radar image. There was a dot and a line, then nothing.
I took off my sunglasses and looked at the dot, then I lay back on the grass and stared at the sky.
My first ultrasound scan showed a dot just like the one on Robert’s radar image. For the final scan, when my husband and I were told Phoebe had died, there was a consultant obstetrician, and with him, two registrars. Taking it in turns, they rolled a probe over my belly and discussed what they could see. Then the machine was switched off and the registrars walked out. The screen blinked twice, then was blank. ‘Viable’ was the word the consultant used, turning his face away. ‘Not viable.’
Because I was flat on my back in the park, my tears rolled into my ears. Robert was talking, but instead of listening, I noticed the way the hot salt water tickled the skin on the sides of my face. It pooled first in my outer ear then it ran right in, so his voice was distant.
I sat up and shook my head. Tuning in, I heard him repeat three words.
‘Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. You got that?’ He saw my blank face. ‘Have you been listening to anything I’m saying? One more time. Aviate: make sure you are alert and oriented. Navigate: always know your geographical location. Communicate: report in – that is, tell the control tower where you are. Those are your basics, right there.’
I nodded.
‘Well,’ Robert said, ‘I’m just trying to tell you the basics.’
I didn’t say anything. Robert pointed to our left. I looked at the reading couple again. Occasionally, one of them picked up a wine glass and took a sip, or turned another page, but otherwise they were still.
‘They’re like two adjoining walls in the corner of a room,’ Robert said. ‘Look. They’re actually holding each other up.’ I could see what he meant: if one of them was to shift their position, the other would fall. We watched them, then Robert said, ‘Children are the coving.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’ve worked something out.’ He’d slipped off his shoes and socks, and was sitting cross-legged. He shrugged his shoulders up, and down, then he sighed. ‘Here’s the thing. If a marriage is like a room in a house, then the child is like the coving. You sand the walls and paint the room. Maybe a new ceiling rose, around the light. Different drapes, to match the new colour. The very last thing you do is fix up the coving, right? Your room is perfect. Then a few years later, the kid goes to college, and you decide to redesign the interior. The coving comes down and you see the whole thing differently. The walls are uneven. They don’t join properly. They’re not aligned right. You couldn’t see it before, but now you do. There’s gaps in places there shouldn’t be, and everything is – it’s a mess. Listen to me, Elizabeth.’ He scratched the side of his face. ‘You’ve just turned forty, right? I remember my fortieth birthday like it was this morning. I’d worked on our house until there was nothing left to do. Philippe was happy, Lena was beautiful. I was doing well at the firm. My parents were healthy. Everyone was – We were all OK. I came downstairs that morning and I walked into the living room. Lena and Philippe were sitting there. Everything in the picture was perfect. But you know what? It was like it was someone else’s life. Now the whole goddam thing is broken up. The house is gone, the walls are gone, and the picture frame is on the floor, smashed into pieces.’
On the Sunday afternoon he went to Paris. As we said goodbye I asked him to bring me a present.
‘What kind of present?’
‘Oh, nothing fancy. A leaf. Bring me a leaf from the Tuileries Gardens.’
‘I can’t!’
‘Why not?’
‘Who does that?’
‘Don’t, then.’
‘A leaf? Who asks someone to bring them a leaf?’
After dinner with friends that evening, and meetings on the Monday, he would fly to Tokyo.
My flatmate was having a party I didn’t feel like being at, so I did something I’d never done, and accepted Robert’s offer of his place for the week he was away.
His postcard from Paris arrived Tuesday. On its face was a photograph of Giacometti’s L’objet invisible. A doleful figure was perched on an elongated chair. The chair was cast in the same dull bronze as the figure, whose hands were held aloft and slightly apart. The caption on the reverse was its fuller title, Mains tenant le vide. Other than my name and address, Robert’s only inscription was a square drawn in black felt tip.
That evening after the library, I spread my notes on the living-room floor. Kneeling there, I noticed the manila pages of his prenup poking from under the coffee table. The agreement, still bound with its pink ribbon, had been placed on top of a stack of hardback architecture books.
All the next day in the library, the little flash of pink was in and out of my mind. At the apartment again, I pushed the agreement further under the coffee table and looked on Robert’s shelves for something to read before dinner. In a book by Adam Phillips, Robert had underlined passages. ‘If you want to make someone fall for you,’ one of the passages read, ‘intrude, invade, insert yourself.’
I sat with the book in my hands for some time, thinking about the stream of empty hotel envelopes Robert had sent me from his trips. Once, he’d enclosed a room-service slip with a heart scrawled in the corner, our initials entwined inside it. Another time there was a subway ticket from New York, and a map of Manhattan on a plastic card. On a trip to Toronto he’d sent a chocolate-bar wrapper in a tissue-paper envelope. Turning it over, I had just been able to make out the letters ‘L-O-V-E’ stamped into the foil, intaglio-style.
I’d always imagined those things to be proxies for the letters he hadn’t had time to write. That evening in his apartment, though, I read further in the Adam Phillips. ‘Take every opportunity to put yourself in their field of vision,’ the underlined extract concluded. ‘Interfere with every aspect of their life.’
I put the book away and ate dinner at the breakfast bar. I thought of his conquest of Lena. ‘It didn’t matter what,’ he’d said, ‘as long as there was something on her doormat every day, with my name on the back.’
He’d printed the photos of our picnic. Flicking through them while I ate, my polka-dot top was all I saw.
I had a bath after dinner. Drying myself, I took the towel from between my legs and a string of mucus, like egg white, flicked onto my inner thigh. Realising what day of my cycle I was on, I stretched the mucus between my fingers to two, maybe two and a half inches. I pulled on a pair of Robert’s pyjamas. I wrapped myself in his kimono robe and put his orange-green fine wool scarf around my neck. Wearing his socks pulled up over my knees, I lay on the living-room sofa under Lena’s silk-fur throw, and I read the prenup through.
When he’d sent for his copy of the agreement in March, he’d offered to read it out to me but I’d said no. He’d given me a summary instead, but I hadn’t really listened. Now, I only half read it. Skipping whole paragraphs, I glimpsed a line that was familiar: regardless of the pair’s individual finances, and without recourse to them, the assets of the marriage would be split precisely in two.
I had discovered nothing new by looking at it, but it felt strange to have read it in his absence. I pulled Lena’s throw up and over my face. It was heavy, and as my temperature rose, I remembered Robert telling me how, on his wedding day, he’d brushed off his mother’s warning about the precariousness of his new-found wealth, and I thought of Robert signing it.
Lying there on his sofa, I remembered Robert coming back from Washington in February. He’d shown me photographs of Philippe, and I’d been struck by how proud he was of his son’s height. The subject had come up more than once. ‘It’s all because of Lena,’ Robert had said. ‘I mean, the guy’s three inches taller than me! It’s amazing.’
‘Boys always grow taller than their mothers,’ I’d said.
Robert had shown me those photographs a few times, always with the exact same commentary: Philippe had his mother to thank for his height, but it was Robert who had given him his thick, black hair and his dark brown eyes. ‘He must have girls going crazy for those eyes!’ he’d laughed. ‘I know I did when I was his age! I’m telling you, look at’em. But I never had quite his height. That would’ve been something.’
Now, with my own eyes shut tight and my temperature still rising, I pictured his beautiful, tall American boy, and I imagined his beginning, and the fusing of those genes that had made him what he was. I pictured the tiny new life, half-Lena, half-Robert, burrowing its way into the lining of her womb. I saw it take its first taste of her hot red blood, then I realised: whatever else Robert was entitled to under the prenup, he was quite within his rights to claim his half of Philippe.
My breathing grew shallow. I imagined myself as a surgeon holding a scalpel to Philippe’s face. Pressing hard at a point just beneath the young man’s hairline, until both layers of skin were pierced, I would dig and drag, tracking a line down the front of his body. Then I would work the scalpel in the other direction, digging a line up and over the top of his head and all the way down his back.
Returning to the site of my first incision, I would reach my fingers under the flaps of skin and peel away the whole of it, in much the same way as one might skin a mango: lifting and ripping, then reaching my fingers in further, and lifting and ripping again.
Next, I would raise a hatchet above the newly bare skull and bring it down sharply. Provided I was fast enough, and my aim sufficiently exact, Philippe’s skull would fall into equal parts, clean as a watermelon chopped in two.
The final severing (of the whole of the body from the neck down) would require a tool not unlike Robert’s angle grinder, and a stand of the sort found in a bicycle-repair workshop, so that Philippe might be held firmly in place.
Because there would be sparks from the grinder, I would be masked. As well as my surgical gloves, I would wear a rubber apron. The prenup required a precise separation, so I’d have to take my time: holding the grinder against myself, to better sense its weight and motion, I would saw from the top down steadily, ignoring the spray of flesh and bone.
When my ex-husband and I bought our flat, we were asked a question by our conveyancing solicitor that we later laughed about. Did we want to own our home jointly, so that we each had an equal right to the whole asset, or would we prefer to own it in different quantifiable portions, so that our shares might one day be divided?
Choosing the first option without thinking, we were as careless in our happiness as Robert had been, signing his prenup without so much as reading it.
In our final week together, my husband and I trailed around the flat, pointing.
‘You can have that, if I can have this.’
A pair of wedding-gift wine glasses, etched as finely as spiders’ webs, were touched together one last time to hear the particular ring they made, then just as easily wrapped separately. A couple of pottery teacups, one light blue one dark, took us two seconds to divide.
We used Post-it notes to record our decisions about furniture. The flat took on a festive appearance, as though we were putting up bunting for a party. When the notes dwindled, I found a bag of Christmas wrapping paper with balls of ribbon. He took the dark green spool, and I the red. Dusk fell outside as we worked, tying bows around what remained: the stem of a standard lamp; an armchair; a globe he had found in Stanford’s when we’d first moved to London a decade ago.
‘So we know where we are,’ he’d said when he’d brought it home. ‘It is absolutely essential that we know where we are at all times,’ then he’d laughed, and made me laugh.
The division of our books was more difficult. Contemplating the wall of volumes, laid down over the years like heavy layers of granite, we were made too unhappy by the idea of their division and decided to wait until the flat was sold.
