Ten Stories About Smoking, page 9
‘Mal’s got the untidiest desk in the whole office,’ Teri said. ‘He must be a nightmare at home.’ Libby gazed at the floor and then started looking through her large, green handbag.
‘His mum still calls him Messy Mal,’ I said. ‘She says she’s never met anyone like him, and she’s got six kids, so she should know.’
Mal laughed and shook his head.
‘Don’t believe a word of it. I’ve been housetrained now,’ he said. ‘I even take my shoes off when I get in.’
Libby stood. ‘I’m going out for a smoke. Anyone care to join me?’ she said.
We shook our heads and she sighed.
‘Everyone’s a quitter these days, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘Lovely to meet you, Elaine, catch you all in a bit.’ She got up and brushed past me. I caught a brief note of her perfume; something plummy, cinnamon-like, probably expensive. When I imagine what he smells like now, that’s what comes to mind.
There is no evidence for the affair. I have yet to find lipstick traces, letters, emails or texts. The phone does not ring at odd times of night. There have been no suspicious wrong numbers. He acts in much the same way as usual; quiet, messy Mal with his books spread out over the kitchen table, catching up on paperwork, opening the wine. But I see it. I know it’s there.
Back when my stomach began to swell, my son growing inside, I wondered how Mal was coping. He had not really considered the fact that we would actually have a child, I’m sure of that. The months of trying had convinced him that there was fault with one or both of us. At night I would watch him sleep and hate him for seeming not to care. I’d hear him snore and snuffle and feel a sharp, splitting pain in my shoulder and in my breast. I would get up then and go down to the kitchen. As the sun came up, I would make tea and sip it sitting at the kitchen table, its top still covered with his books and papers.
I didn’t know how he could bear to spend his nights and days away from her. When I first met Mal, I’d not wanted to spend a single moment apart from him. I’d gone to football games and watched horror movies, I’d driven him to places he’d never been before, places he’d always wanted to visit. I did anything I could to be with him.
On a bright November afternoon, we walked around Chartwell House, Mal talking about Churchill’s depression while I nodded and told him that I was interested, honestly. He held my hand as we sat by the lake and then we kissed in a way that felt like reinvention. Even now I remember those kisses with clarity, and wonder if they felt the same in his mouth as they did in mine. Being in love can be a solitary business I’ve always thought: you can only get so close, and no further. Those barriers can’t be broken, no matter how much you love someone.
When I was heavily pregnant, I asked Mal about that afternoon at Chartwell and he said how much he would like to go back, that there was a new exhibition he’d be interested to see. He did not mention the lake, or the kisses, or that we’d stopped off on the way home to make love in a secluded field. Do those kisses only exist for me now? Do her kisses linger? Are they the ones that come back to surprise him?
Zachary looks up, milk escaping from his mouth. They are probably together now. He is supposed to be watching football at the pub, but he could easily be with her. He could be there crying, telling her that he wants to be with her, that his heart aches and his hands shake, but that he can’t just walk out: not now. I can see her big nose, her tear-struck face. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘Why is this so difficult? Why can’t life be simple?’ And then they collapse on the bed and make hurried, angry love. He puts his finger up her arse and moves it up and down. She tells him she loves him as he climaxes.
I burp Zach and move about the lounge, the radio playing in the background. When I was a teenager, before I cut my hair and started smoking and fooling around with boys, I used to listen to a radio show in which a DJ read out people’s true love stories. His voice was consistently sombre and listeners were unable to tell whether that day’s instalment would end happily or bring a tear to their eye. I’d always wanted to have my epic affair read out to the nation, the soundtrack to a million coffee breaks; but that was a long time ago now. Now it was a different story, and hardly the one I had imagined.
The love story still features me, but I am no longer the star. I am the woman unnamed; the one for whom you do not root. At the centre of the stage there is now my husband and his lover. They are soulmates, and they would be together were it not for the child – a child that he loves and understands is vastly more important than his own needs. The story goes on like this for years, the two of them breaking off the affair then finding each other later, desperate for each other’s embrace. In this telling of the story, he stays home to look after the baby, while I go out to work. He is a good father, but he cannot help but pine for his soulmate.
In the love story I am just a shadow, a blip on their perfect romance. After five years? Six? However long, eventually Mal confesses. He tells the story of the perfect romance and I, the blip and shadow, am quiet and thankful that he has been honest and a good father to Zachary. He leaves that day and goes to live with the woman he fell in love with on the 15th of September. At the end of the story the DJ sermonizes, adding a conclusion that reminds listeners that sometimes it’s better to have things out in the open, rather than living a lie. Stale homily wisdom served up as fresh advice, followed by the opening mournful bars of their song: ‘Dark End of the Street’.
The story the DJ does not tell is the story of a woman who loves her husband with the same passion with which he loves his mistress. It is the story of her love for her child, the only positive thing to come from this fractured relationship. And for as long as this child is young, his father will be around, attentive and dedicated. His lover may have his heart and his mind and his constant thoughts, but she will not have him. Not in the way that she wants and needs him. Not in the way that he wants and needs her. They can have their song, and their grand passion, but I will always be there, mother and wife both. Why should I not break his heart the way he has broken mine?
The radio goes to a news bulletin and a female voice reads the stories in this order: war, famine, freak weather, murder, political scandal and then the weather. The door opens and Mal is there, slightly red at the cheeks and wearing his old duffel coat.
‘Hey, love,’ he says. ‘Is he asleep?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
He puts his arm around me and kisses me on the cheek, then on the lips. He smiles, takes off his coat and goes to the kitchen. I follow him there.
‘What was the score?’ I ask.
‘Two all. It was a good game, too,’ he says. ‘Neil sends his love.’
He could have checked the scores on his phone on the way home, and Neil would do anything for Mal. He takes a beer from the fridge.
‘Has he been okay?’ he says. ‘Not too grizzly?’
‘He’s been fine,’ I say, ‘gorgeous.’ And I look at Mal for hints of make-up, glitter, evidence of her. I cuddle up to him.
‘I love you,’ I say.
‘I love you too,’ he says, but too quickly. I put my cheek next to his and breathe in through my nose as much as I can. There is nothing, not even a breath. And then, for a moment, I think I can smell cinnamon and plums, and her, and then cigarettes, and then beer, and then just the smell of the outside world.
Real Work
You had a theory that heaven is the constant repetition of the happiest moment of your life. For you, this was experienced on a bus heading to meet your first boyfriend; an older man with a wife and infant daughter. You said it was the first time you’d done something deliberately wrong, and your young heart beat like it never had before, and never has since.
For me, it was the morning after we first met. You were sleeping and I was watching the dawn spread a deep, burning orange over the East End. I was in your living room, on the fifteenth storey of a crumbling sixties council block, and on the turntable ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones was playing. The window was open, there was a warm breeze, and as I walked out onto the small balcony I smoked one of your imported American cigarettes. Below me the city was waking, but was still groggy. I could see the stained dome of St Paul’s, the suggestive lights of Canary Wharf and for the first time I saw a silent beauty in those buildings. Jagger sang to a quiet, cowed city, and if it hadn’t been for the scent of you on my skin, I’d have thought myself utterly alone in the world.
You said that you were sick of dating artists; their complex emotional needs, their conflicted egos. We were sitting at a booth in a mock-1950s diner in Soho, drinking milkshakes and sharing fries. You had put bourbon in the drinks and were toying with a paper napkin. It was our fifth date. Two bald men walked past us arm in arm, then stopped to kiss. You noticed the look on my face and for a moment I thought you were going to mock my prudishness. But you didn’t and instead balled up the napkin and told me to hurry because we were going to meet Mary.
It was summertime, early evening, and the sky was darkening. You were dressed in a black and white smock dress and had recently dyed your hair a shocking platinum blonde. We lit cigarettes and smoked them as we walked the litter-swept streets. By the Raymond Revue Bar we kissed and with a pinch of my behind, you pushed me through the multicoloured ribbons hanging from a sex shop doorway. I had never been inside a sex shop before and I didn’t know where to look. You picked up a vibrator and waved it at me. You laughed. Behind the counter, the attendant was asleep. You left a pile of coins on the counter and took a vial of poppers.
I asked you what they were for. You narrowed your eyes.
‘This isn’t a put-on, is it?’ you said. ‘I mean the way you are . . . sometimes it’s like you’re straight off the boat or something.’
‘I’m just a clean-living country boy with fine morals,’ I said.
‘We’ll soon see about that,’ you said and took me by the hand.
Mary ran a domination studio on the third floor ofa residential block just behind Beak Street. She had a heaving bosom and a tattooed tear just below her right eye. You knew her from art college. While you were in the bathroom, Mary showed me an adult diaper, a gimp mask and a variety of nipple clamps. She was trying to shock me, but I tried to remain impassive. I asked Mary how she conducted her taxes. I was serious, but you both found it most amusing. Mary said that the majority of the men who came to visit her were like me: timid, fragile and confused. I asked what the most popular request was for. She paused for a moment. ‘It used to be the lash,’ she said, ‘but now it’s crushing. They like me to lie on them until they can hardly breathe. Kinky buggers love it.’
She stood then and picked up a black patent clutch bag. ‘Would you like me to crush you?’ she said. ‘Would you like me to give you a good old crushing?’ I must have looked terrified because you both laughed again.
‘Oh no, Mary,’ you said. ‘This one’s crushed enough.’
‘So, what’s she like, then?’ Tom said. I hadn’t seen him in over three weeks and had been avoiding his calls. We were in the back room of the Faltering Fullback, the place we always met. I hadn’t wanted to come, but he had insisted and besides, you said you needed a night just for you. There were things you needed to do.
‘She’s different,’ I said. ‘She reminds me a bit of Helen Dyer from school. You remember her?’
‘The Goth?’
‘She wasn’t a Goth. She was an artist.’
‘So she’s an artist, this Cara?’
‘Trying to be.’
‘Tall? Short? Fat? Skinny?’
‘Hard to describe.’
‘Hard to describe, how?’ Tom said.
‘Tallish, sort of curvy,’ I said, trying to imagine how you would describe yourself. ‘She likes old clothes, fifties stuff mainly. She wears glasses. She’s into art and politics and culture. She’s passionate.’
Tom took a long pull on his beer and rested his head on his meaty hand. ‘So have you?’
‘Yes. But don’t ask me for details.’
Tom smiled and scratched his beard. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’
I nodded and lit a cigarette. The adverts finished and the second half of the football began. The number 14 challenged the number 6, his studs raised and his feet high. Number 6 collapsed and the pub was furious.
‘That’s a fucking yellow if ever I’ve seen it,’ Tom said. ‘That fucker’s an animal.’
Cities are as big or as small as you wish to make them. Before I met you, mine was approximately one and a half square miles. I had a house in South Tottenham and worked for Haringey Council in Wood Green. If I went out, say to meet Tom, it was within these parameters. You did not know either of these areas and were not much taken with them on the few occasions you visited.
Instead you showed me all the places you had lived, districts full of grotty bedsitters and shared houses, squats and tenements. In Brixton, in Harlow, in Peckham and New Cross; in Hackney, in Kensal Rise, in Kentish Town, in Finchley, in Gospel Oak and on the Edgware Road. You’d lived north, east, south, and west and all points in between. You moved on a whim, trying to find the perfect place to call your home.
‘I love this city,’ you said one evening as we took a taxi across town. ‘It’s a visceral feeling, you know? Like it’s tearing at my insides.’ The street lamps and neon bled through the taxi windows. ‘I love it like I love you.’
You took it upon yourself to expand my confined city. Early on Sunday mornings, you took me into the silent financial district. In the calm, as day broke, you’d point out architecture and talk of chaos theory, radical Marxism, fiscal inequalities. You introduced me to vegan cafes, Vietnamese canteens, Turkish grill houses and Albanian tea rooms. You took me shopping on Cheshire Street to buy clothes that didn’t embarrass you. I liked the way you looked at me wearing them, and the way you put your arm in mine as we walked.
We went out most nights. On the weekends we would sleep in late and only leave your place when it was dark. We’d meet your friends. So many friends. They were not the kind of people I would ordinarily talk to, and these were places of which I had no experience: industrial places, warehouses; wide open, draughty spaces where bottles of wine and beer were passed from bins filled with ice. There were smoky little bars, members’ rooms and pool halls. It was another city; a city that belonged to you.
These friends of yours talked like peacocks, their vocabulary and arguments showy and bright. If they discussed television it was in a way I did not recognize, and if they mentioned a book or a film or an art work, I had invariably never heard of it. As a group they were unsettling company. I never really knew what they thought of me, of my quiet presence on the edge of the group. I found that the best way to assimilate was to listen to the eddying conversation and give dry, ironic answers when asked direct questions. You were proud when I did that; I could see it behind your thick-rimmed spectacles.
You liked to test me. You were mischievous that way. One night we met up with Mary and the two of you took me to a fetish club. Your faces glowed as you explained what I would see. I said it sounded fun, and you looked at me oddly.
‘We don’t have to go, you know,’ you whispered as we walked. ‘I just thought it would be interesting.’
‘It certainly sounds that,’ I said.
The fact was that the rubber, the harnesses, the corsetry, the dead-eyed looks from the costumed patrons no longer seemed frightening. Besides, it was hot and underwhelming at the club. So very dark we could barely see the leather and chaps. Mary went off almost immediately, kissing us both on the cheek before disappearing. A woman walked past with a man on a leash. He drank from a bowl of water on the floor. We headed to the bar, not talking. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, or make the wrong impression.
‘Are you into this?’ you said. ‘Does it turn you on?’
‘It’s interesting,’ I said pointing to a man with something resembling a long, tasselled tail inserted into his rectum. ‘But I can’t say it does much for me.’
‘Spoilsport,’ you said. You smiled but I didn’t know whether you were joking We watched Mary beat the hell out of some guy, then went back to your flat.
You never liked staying at my house. It was my great aunt’s old place, a three-bedroomed semi with bay windows and a postage stamp garden. I had tried to spruce it up, but I understood your lack of enthusiasm.
‘This place has death in it,’ you said. ‘And not in a good way. I mean, it doesn’t give it character. This place has no character, this place has no soul. You could refit the whole place and you’d still feel an old woman’s last breaths on the back of your shoulders.’
In that first year you spent the night no more than five times. I preferred the brown walls of your high-rise flat anyway, the battered sofas and the old bed that creaked whenever we moved. The lift always smelled of piss and metal – nostalgic, like the stink of old telephone boxes – and I remained as in love with the view from the lounge as ever: it made me feel like I was part of a living, breathing organism. It made me feel alive.
After a year or so, I sold the house and together we bought an apartment on the top floor of a former mental institution in Dalston. The agent told us that John Merrick, the Elephant Man, had been an inmate for a time, and you loved that story almost as much as the exposed brickwork and pitch-pine floors. From the bedroom windows you could see Victoria Park in one direction and all the way down to Liverpool Street in the other. On the night we moved in, the two of us looked out of the second bedroom and toasted it with a bottle of Cava. You put your hand on the window and leaned your head against the pane.
