The Next to Die, page 10
“Is what okay?” I fired back in my best superior voice.
“This,” he said as he reached up and pulled my underwear to one side. “I can stop if you don’t like it.” I’d worn my best lingerie, telling myself this was only because it was the closest to the top of the drawer.
“Let me see,” I said, running a quick check on my feelings to see if I hated him. The results were unclear. I suspected my reaction was a false negative, as I believe they say in scientific circles. “It’s better than your crap opinions about comedy,” I concluded aloud.
“I can stop talking altogether if you like,” he suggested as he pushed his fingers inside me.
“Yes. I . . .” I gasped. “I’d like it if you could stop talking shit, yes. And emailing me your ill-informed opinions.”
“You turned up tonight in spite of the shit I’ve been talking,” Liam pointed out.
“Yes, but not for any reason that reflects well on you.” I raised my left hand and waved my wedding ring in front of his face. “I’m finding my husband annoying at the moment. I’d probably have come out to meet a Morris dancer. Or one of those people whose hobby is researching their family history.”
“Why’s your husband annoying?” Liam asked, stroking away quite expertly.
I couldn’t really speak at that point. Silently, I opened my book of Disappointing Husband anecdotes. here: Gabe once emptied out my nutmeg jar, throwing its legitimate contents in the kitchen bin so that he could use it to store his skunkweed. He needed an airtight container so I wouldn’t smell it. Skunk has a horribly strong stench, and I’m unfashionably zero-tolerance about any kind of drugs.
The next day, when I needed the nutmeg to put in a sauce, I couldn’t find it. I asked Gabe to help me search the kitchen, swearing I’d bought a new jar only the other day. Gabe hunted with me quite happily, emptying out the pantry and the dresser drawers—all the time knowing the jar was in the glove compartment of his car, which I opened a week or so later when we were driving to his mother’s, to see if he had any extra-strong mints. The nutmeg jar full of weed fell into my hands.
Gabe was sorry, sorry, sorry—for doing drugs, for lying again. His sorry phase lasted for the first ten or so years of our marriage. It was followed by the rational-defiant era. Now that Gabe and I are no longer together, I sometimes ask myself which was better. Did I prefer constantly playing hide-and-seek with pieces of silver foil dotted with tiny burned holes, searching my home for proof of the weed habit he denied, or was it better, all things considered, to have to listen to rapturous descriptions of £320 vaporizers that were so much better for you than bongs and that would enable Gabe to get wasted while protecting his lungs?
“I’m not going to discuss my husband, tonight or ever,” I said as Liam’s fingers continued with their due diligence. “I’d . . . aah . . . feel too disloyal. My husband is fine.”
I loved Gabe. I probably still do. He’s the funniest, cleverest, most interesting man I’ve ever known. He always had some new fad on the go that he raved about until I was so sick of it, I could scream—yo-yos, fencing, a particular brand of Greek olive oil, old issues of Punch magazine . . .
I wanted to be as loyal to him as I could, which meant not discussing him with Liam. I’d had a little bit of a vent, and I wanted to leave it there. And for all of you who are thinking there’s no point fretting about loyalty to your husband while a stranger’s got his fingers inside you, I would respectfully say this: what crap.
Have you ever been on a diet, one of those calorie-counting ones? First week or two, you’re as strict as anything. Half a potato: thirty-seven calories. One hundred grams of etiolated Quorn: minus seven calories. You lose half a stone, then a whole one. But then disaster strikes! You’ve already used up your thirty-nine-calorie-a-day allowance, and someone offers you a four-cheese pizza with extra Gorgonzola, and you can’t resist! You guzzle it down and exceed your calorie quota to the tune of seventeen thousand.
We’ve all been there. Question is, what do you do then? Most of us give up. We’ve failed. No more diet for us, only failure and shame and Gorgonzola pizzas every night from now on. Whereas if we could think to ourselves instead, “Oh well, it’s only one slipup—back on the thin broth tomorrow,” we could continue to starve ourselves quite successfully, until we’re no more than bags of bones covered in fine downy hair.
I digress. The point is: that’s how I feel about loyalty. So a stranger’s fingers are exploring my private parts—I’m the first to admit it—but does that mean I have to give up altogether on being loyal to my husband? I believe that if we all practiced as much loyalty as we could, the world would be a better place. To this day, I’m glad I never bitched to Liam about Gabe.
Liam didn’t care either way. He said so. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to. I was only asking to be polite. I don’t care.”
“I just need to get out of the house sometimes,” I explained. “Well, often. Actually . . . whenever I’m in the house.” It was true and it wasn’t. No one understands about the true-and-not-true thing that you have if you’re a real person with an onstage persona that’s a different version of you.
“Are you going to put that line in your next comedy show?” Liam asked.
“Maybe,” I said. (Update: Yes, Liam, I am. I’m going to put it in a book, too.)
“Are you married?” I asked him. “I’d need an X-ray to see if . . . ah . . . if you’re wearing a wedding ring.”
“No, I’m not married. And I don’t care that you are,” he said solemnly, as if nothing had ever mattered more to him than not caring.
I laughed and admitted to myself that I found him interesting. What kind of creature is this? I wondered. He was nothing like me—nothing at all, mentally or physically. I’m medium height with dark brown hair, brown eyes, olive skin, a longish face. Liam is a tall, well-built strawberry blond, with ivory skin and eyebrows that look, under the light, as if they’ve been added with gold highlighter pen.
He seemed not to care about my words, ideas or feelings. All he wanted—that evening and whenever we met subsequently—was to touch me. It was the one constant, from that first evening in the Hourglass to the last time I saw him, when I ended our affair: his physical urgency. He behaved like a starved animal that had found a raw steak and was determined to get the most out of it in case he never saw the likes of it again. After a session in bed with him, I’d feel raided and devoured. I loved this aspect of our relationship and told myself—because, like many women, I’m a dumb-arse who uses sex to try to get love—that Liam enacted his feelings instead of verbalizing them.
Meanwhile, his emails were a joke.
“It was good to see you yesterday. When next? L.”
“Can’t come tomorrow. Weds maybe. L.”
“Sorry, been busy all day. Yes, tonight okay. L.”
I felt lucky beyond belief if I ever got an email from him that was unrelated to the arrangement-making process. Once he sent me a message saying, “Have you read The Sportswriter by Richard Ford?” I hadn’t, but after hearing that Liam thought it was “good,” I bought and read it immediately.
He loved books; that was one thing I knew about him. He never used the word “love” about them, but he carried a printed list in his trouser pocket of the books he wanted to read, divided into categories, each with its own distinct box in a formal-looking table: History, Politics, Fiction, Sociology.
One night, after we’d been seeing each other for more than a year, he mentioned his office in Rawndesley. I reminded him that he worked in Spilling. “That was my old job,” he said. “My new one’s in Rawndesley.” He’d switched companies three months previously, it turned out. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I asked him. All I’d ever known about Liam’s work was that it was something to do with applying for patents for technical products.
He looked surprised. “I didn’t realize I was supposed to,” he said. There was no “supposed to” about it, I explained; it was simply that I’d have thought he might want to tell me, because it was news—good news. “I don’t regard myself as interesting, so I’m not interested in talking about myself,” Liam replied, before reaching inside my top to grab a breast.
Our sex sessions were long—longer than Gabe and I had ever managed, even in the early days. After a night with Liam, I was usually left stuck in a Y shape, wondering if anyone had invented a physiotherapy routine for coaxing legs back together again after they’d been wide apart for too long. I pictured a strict, shouty, secretly-devoted-to-me nurse in a white hat and tunic yelling, “Come on, Kim, don’t you dare give up, d’you hear me? When we started this morning, your legs were a full one hundred eighty degrees apart and look how far you’ve come—now they’re only at ninety degrees! Are you really going to quit now, like a loser, or are you going to keep working to get the gap down to forty-five?”
I had two birthdays during the time Liam and I were sleeping together. For the first, he didn’t buy me anything. I wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t the kind of person who bought presents, and I didn’t expect one. As far as I was aware, he didn’t know when my birthday was. I’d mentioned it once or twice in the weeks before, moaning about how difficult special occasions are to navigate when you don’t like any members of your family, but Liam hadn’t picked up on it.
On my second birthday that fell during the time we were together, Liam arrived at our basement rendezvous carrying a brown paper bag, which he thrust at me as I opened the door to let him in. “What’s this?” I asked.
“Have a look,” he said.
I opened the bag and pulled out a book that looked fifty years old: a small hardback with a maroon cover that had nothing on it apart from the title, Delirium of the Brave, and the author’s name, Terence Nithercott, in gold letters on the spine. There was no dust jacket, and nothing to indicate what sort of book it was. Two of the cover’s corners were sort of swollen: thick and bumpy, like calluses. This is beside the point but: How does the corner of a hardback book end up swelling into a massive bump? I mean, what is that? Joint inflammation?
Turning the stiff, yellowed pages, I smelled a dusty old house that belonged to a smoker. Rightly or wrongly, I pictured a quiet death in an armchair, a gray cardigan missing most of its buttons, a house clearance.
“It’s your birthday,” Liam told me.
“I know,” I said, distracted, obsessing about the tragically deceased former owner of Delirium of the Brave. Then, realizing what I’d just heard, I said, “Oh! Do you mean . . . is this a birthday present for me? From you?” It seemed so unlikely, I had to check.
“Yes,” said Liam.
“Ha!” I couldn’t help blurting out. “How . . . astonishing.”
I moved swiftly on to the next mystery: If Liam had wanted to buy me a gift, why this book? I glanced at the first page, which introduced an archaeologist from Dublin with an Irish mother and a Scottish father. His name was William Balbirnie, and his determination to begin his story at the moment of his birth led me to suspect that his narrating adult self wasn’t presently involved in any kind of urgent predicament.
Oh dear, I thought. There was no way on earth I would ever read this novel. I’d told Liam more than once that I loved science fiction, fantasy, horror. What was he thinking, for Christ’s sake? Delirium of the Brave by Terence Nithercott, published in 1952?
“You haven’t spotted it, have you?” he said. “Look at the printed dedication and then at the handwritten one.”
It sounded like a clue. I wondered if it would turn out that Liam had chosen this book for a good reason, rather than simply because he was crap.
I should say, I was already a cynic about presents by that point. I had no hope left. For my fortieth birthday, Gabe had bought me—as a little extra, to be fair, but still—a mug with a really bad drawing of Lionel Richie on it, and the words “Hello, is it tea you’re looking for?” Later that day, Marion had given me a Kobo e-reader, even though I must have said at least three times in her presence that I’d never want one. I knew she’d heard me say it, too; she’d replied, “You and me both. You can’t tell me those are real books they put in there!” Drew, meanwhile, bought me a bottle of aftershave he’d mistaken for perfume for my fortieth. I decided, after that poor performance, to cancel all future landmark birthdays.
Delirium of the Brave by Terence Nithercott was a real book. Just not an overwhelmingly appealing one. All the same, Liam’s clue intrigued me, so I went in search of dedications.
The printed one was fairly unremarkable. “For Penelope, in appreciation of many wonderful summers at Lillieoak. May there be many more.” I pictured a sandy-haired, bespectacled Nithercott trogging up the grand driveway of a country house, battered brown suitcase in hand, preparing to recount his entire life story, starting in the womb, to anyone brave enough to open the front door.
“This copy of the book’s unique,” said Liam.
I searched for handwriting and found some barely legible scrawl.
“‘Dearest . . . Pineapple’?”
“Penelope,” Liam corrected me.
“Oh, right. ‘Dearest Penelope, As I have always been, so too is this book, by printing press and now by hand—dedicated to you. Fondest regards, Terence.’ Hang on! This is the same Penelope, yes? It must be.”
“Yes.” Liam emphasized the word. This sudden foray into speech with expression startled me so much, I looked up at him. My sex robot was smiling. I’d never seen excitement from him outside of a sexual cause-and-effect situation. I’d never heard eagerness in his voice before. His enthusiasm was always exclusively physical. Until now.
“See? It’s unique,” he said, breathing fast beside my ear. “The only copy of the book that’s signed from the author to the dedicatee.”
“Unless Penelope lost this one and asked him for a replacement,” I said. “Maybe somewhere there’s another copy: ‘Dear Penelope—this is the last one you’re getting, you ungrateful cow.’”
Speaking of ungrateful cows, I hadn’t said thank you yet. Did I forget to mention that I’m disappointing, too? I’m pretty much incapable of taking anything nice at face value. Does this go some way to explaining my choice of husband and my choice of lover? When I speak scathingly of disappointing people, please don’t think I’m glowering down on Gabe and Liam from any great moral height. They are my tribe, my kith and kin. Disappointing people are my people.
“I doubt Penelope would have lost the book. No one would lose something like this.” Liam responded to my flippancy as if I’d been deadly serious.
I was almost ready to thank him effusively for the present. First, though, I had to make absolutely sure that it was as good as I thought it was. “Liam, did you buy this book for me for any other reason?” I asked.
“No. What other reason could there be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you thought I’d enjoy reading about an Irish archaeologist?”
“Who cares what the story’s about?” Liam shrugged. “I didn’t even look.”
“So you bought it for me, even though it might be the worst book in the world, because it’s dedicated and signed to the same person?”
“Yes. That makes it unique. I bet I’ll never see that in a book again. I never have before.”
“Well . . . thanks.” I wanted to say much more. I wanted to ask him if he understood that he’d done something almost magical, that he’d bought me the perfect present. If the book had looked gripping, or like a lost classic, that wouldn’t have been as good. A popular book would have ruined it altogether. It was better that it was Delirium of the Brave by Terence Nithercott, a novel the world had forgotten, one that looked impossible to enjoy. This way there was nothing to overshadow the two matching dedications, nothing to make us think there was anything about Terence Nithercott that mattered more than his relationship with Penelope.
“They must have been in love,” I said to Liam. Did he only see her in the summer? I wondered. It didn’t sound as if they lived together. Was one of them married?
“Who?” Liam asked.
I sighed. “Terence and Penelope.”
“There’s no reason to think that,” he said robotically. “Anyway, who cares?” Then he took the book from my hand and put it down on the desk by the bed so that he could get started on the main business of the night.
I felt as if he’d hit me with a brick.
He still bought me the book, he still did that, I recited silently to myself.
As he pulled off my clothes, I wondered what it was about the dedications that had so appealed to him if he didn’t care about the relationship between the writer and the recipient. Simply that the book was a rare object? If Terence and Penelope didn’t matter, and if you also didn’t care about the story in the novel Terence Nithercott had written, then what did it mean to call the book unique? Why even bother calling it a book? It’s only folded paper, right? If you’re someone like Liam, what’s the difference between that and literature?
Why not just call it origami?
* * *
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
“Come on,” I breathe. “Come on, for Christ’s sake.”
Finally the lift doors slide open. I burst out onto the fourth floor of the Rawndesley General Infirmary like someone who’s been trapped for hours and march along the corridor so fast it makes my calves ache. This is a new experience for me: hurrying to get to the cancer ward. I’m not here to visit a sick person, so there’s no need to stand still for ten seconds adjusting my scarf, no need to wonder if it might be sensible to nip to the loo or make a phone call first—anything to put off the awful moment of reaching those blue-gray doors.
Today, belatedly, I can do it the way we’re all supposed to: rush to get there, quick, quick, I have to get to the hospital, it’s urgent, look how dutiful I am.
I press the buzzer outside Ward 10, wondering how long I’ll have to wait. There’s an instant click followed by a different buzzing sound, a higher note. I push the door on the right, and it opens.
