Starting Over, page 23
When it ended, Lara stood there with her hands on her aching hips, filling her lungs, holding the breath for a count of four, then letting it go as slowly as she could. She blinked, the salt of the sweat stinging her eyes, as the whippet-thin choreographer moved among them, her eyes on the director like an auctioneer whose gaze was fixed on the richest man in the room. Making the cut.
‘Okay, okay. The girl in red – Megan – the girl in white – pink shorts – Debbie – Coco…stage left. The rest of you – thank you very much.’
Lara was the girl in white. And the girl in white was still there.
I don’t think she could see me lurking at the back of the stalls, but as she left the stage she smiled and gave a quick thumbs up to all those empty seats, all that worn red velvet, and the darkness beyond.
‘Maybe it will be all right,’ Lara said, holding the wide brim of her wedding hat so that the autumn wind couldn’t take it. ‘Maybe it will.’
She was trying to cheer me up. We were on the steps of the registry office, and we were waiting for a wedding to exit before we could go inside. A laughing middle-aged man and woman were coming out, and their friends and relatives were pelting them with confetti. Lara and Ruby and Nan and I took a step back, but the wind blew stray confetti in our faces, and we entered the registry office covered in small scraps of pastel-coloured paper. Lara gave my arm an encouraging squeeze and I nodded, showing her I appreciated the effort. But how was I meant to feel? We were covered in confetti before our son’s wedding had even begun. That didn’t seem right. Nothing seemed right.
‘Registry of birth, marriage and death,’ Ruby said, reading the gilded sign above the door. ‘Which one do we want?’
All three, I thought.
‘Be nice,’ Lara said.
A few familiar faces were already inside. My parents – my dad in an old suit, my mum in a hat so new that it broke my heart. She had had her hair done – one of those frozen Margaret Thatcher hair-dos that resemble a medieval helmet.
Keith was there – Uncle Keith, Ruby still called him, but Rufus had dropped the uncle bit, which somehow made him seem even younger. Faces from Rufus’ work. The security guys. The little Muslim girl. But the friends from school had drifted away, and the friends from stand-up had not been made. Rufus had invested his life in this one unremarkable woman. And it was like watching someone you love flush their life down the toilet.
Nancy’s side was better represented. Lots of earrings. Especially on the men. They looked as though they were on their way to Ascot. For a bit of light mugging. Tough guys in tight suits with short hair or no hair. Tarty-looking women with boob jobs and gold ankle chains. And that was just her grandmothers.
Lara dragged me over into the heart of the mob and attempted to make some introductions. But Nancy’s mother – a fierce blonde of fifty with great legs and a West Ham United tattoo – and Nancy’s father – who you wouldn’t want to meet even up a very well-lit alley – were both with new partners now, so just meeting the parents was four people right there. I smiled weakly. But it was all too complicated for me. It was all too much.
And then they were there. The groom and the bride and the bride’s souvenir from a previous relationship, dressed in a suit and bow tie that somehow made him resemble a performing monkey. If his mother hadn’t been gripping him tightly by the wrist, I swear he might have done a bit of juggling. We filed into the office where the deed would be done.
‘Stop sighing,’ my wife hissed at me.
But we were gathered there beyond the sight of God. No bride in white, no biggest day of your life, no unsullied future. Just my son pledging his troth to an older woman with a bun in the oven and somebody else’s brat by her side, a child in a bow tie who mined his nose and then speculatively examined his findings. I wanted it to be over. I wanted to go home.
The registrar droned on. A smiley fat geezer, he was, and you could almost believe that we were not the tenth on his list today. The usual Hallmark card clichés, with all hope that heaven might be watching dropped from the programme. But then the bride spoke. A traditional Irish vow; the registrar beamed. I had not realised her family were Irish.
‘As light to the eye, as bread to the hungry, as joy to the heart, may thy presence be to me,’ she said. ‘Here is my hand to hold with you – to bind us for life and grow old with you.’
And I noticed for the first time that she was wearing a pale yellow dress that seemed appropriate for a second wedding.
She was clearly pregnant, but what I saw – now that I looked – was that her face seemed to have softened. It was as though the day had drained all the hardness and bitterness out of her.
And somehow it made the cynicism seep out of me, like a wound being cleaned of poison.
And when Rufus turned to look at her, nobody could doubt that he loved her, and that this was the happiest day of his life, and that whatever the coming years might bring, he was exactly where he was meant to be today.
And who was I to deny them? Who was I to claim that my son was throwing his life away? Perhaps my dark fears would all come to pass, but it was impossible not to give them the benefit of the doubt today, especially when I saw what the boy – Alfie, his name was Alfie – had in the hand that wasn’t spring-cleaning his nose. In that tiny fist he clutched the rings, and now he held them out to the registrar, as his mother and my son smiled down at his little shaven carrot-topped bonce.
Yes, I thought. Maybe it will be all right.
Lara knew she could do it now.
By the last day of auditions, the pain was excruciating. In her tendons and in her right side, where the hip met the lowest rib. But she knew she could do it, and when she talked about it, her eyes shone with that truth. Technically, she was a better dancer than all of them, the dance-school graduates and the drama-school alumni.
The music started. They danced. It was the one about the private dick with the gruff sidekick.
And when the music stopped, the whippet-like woman glanced at the old man in the stalls, and then after a moment she said, ‘The girl in white – thank you very much.’
Lara stood there, letting the failure grow and take shape, and the choreographer quickly crossed the stage and touched her arm. A rare act of compassion, or just getting it over with? Getting the girl in white to understand, and leave the stage.
I could not hear her – nobody could – but you could read her lips.
‘Sorry, darling,’ she said. ‘Too old.’
Lara sat on the edge of our bed, massaging her side, and I wanted to tell her that their rejection meant nothing, that she was the best of the bunch, that I was proud of her, and all the rest of it.
But I couldn’t tell her any of these things because by now the pain was too much to ignore. I could no longer put it down to the demands she had put on her body. I could no longer look past the pain. It coloured everything.
‘You really have to see someone,’ I said. ‘You know that, don’t you? This is not right.’
She sat up and looked at me. Everything ached. She did not have to tell me that. I could see it.
‘Yes,’ she said wearily. ‘I will.’
I waited. She took off her clothes for bed. Down to her pants and a T-shirt, and I was still waiting. She smiled at me. ‘I promise, okay?’
Still I just stood there. ‘When? When will you see someone? This can’t wait, Lara. You’ve got to go now.’
‘Can I do one thing before I go?’ she said, the smile growing. ‘Is that allowed?’
But I wasn’t smiling. I was angry and afraid. ‘Why can’t you go now?’ I said.
And she laughed at me. ‘Oh, George,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You’re such a bloody grown-up.’
She slept well that night.
I can’t explain it.
But there were none of the catches in her breath that signalled the pain and discomfort invading her dreams. None of that. It was a cold night – they were all cold nights now – but the touch of our bodies made the bed warm, and at some point, without waking, she abruptly threw back the sheet.
Lying on her belly, her bare back angled towards me, that skin I knew better than my own.
And I could not sleep. I slept badly that night, or perhaps not at all. I thought perhaps that if sleep did not come then I would at least manage to pray. But prayer was as distant as sleep.
So I stared at my wife’s back as she was sleeping, and among the familiar birthmarks and beauty spots and freckles, I traced a constellation of stars.
twenty-three
There were a couple of Red Bull cans floating in my parents’ pool, bobbing on the water like spent shells.
I reached for them with my leaf net as my dad came and stood by my side.
‘It’s the new thing, Dad,’ I said. ‘They call themselves the dipping crews.’
‘Dipping crews?’ said my father, and I saw a flicker of fear on his face. I knew that sometimes he wondered if he was being told something for the first time, or if he had heard it before and just forgotten.
‘You know,’ I said gently. ‘They look online for houses with swimming pools. On Google Earth. On the Internet, remember?’
‘The computer,’ my dad said.
‘That’s right. Then the little bastards go round when people are sleeping or away and they take a dip. They have a party in your pool.’
‘They have a good time,’ my dad said.
My mum came across the lawn and slipped her arm around my father’s waist. We all looked at the water. Not quite as lovely in the pale autumn sun.
‘We might have to get rid of this thing,’ my mum said, nodding at the pool. ‘Getting more trouble than it’s worth.’
I knew she thought it was getting dangerous now that my dad was not very well. She shook her head as she watched me dump the cans on the grass.
‘Bloody kids,’ she said.
‘The dipping crew,’ my dad said mildly, as though it were perfectly reasonable for strangers to invade his home while he was sleeping, and then get us to clear up their trash.
The dipping crew.
My dad wasn’t angry about them. But that was all right.
Because I was angry enough for both of us.
I had bought a .22 air rifle on the Internet and it stayed in the boot of Lara’s car until my parents had gone to bed.
Then I brought it into the house and I sat in the kitchen with the lights off, the gun resting between my legs, my chair pulled up against the sink, the window above it slightly ajar so that I could slip out the rifle when the time came. In the garden the swimming pool shone like black glass in the moonlight.
I knew that Keith would have laughed at my air rifle. But it could give someone a mark that they would carry with them to the grave. It could take someone’s eye out. Keith would have laughed, but I knew that it could make someone change their mind in an instant.
‘George,’ Lara said, and I felt her hand on my shoulder.
I didn’t look at her. ‘I’m just going to talk to them,’ I said.
She shook her head and sighed. Upstairs I could hear my mum helping my dad in the bathroom. The gentle encouragement on one side, the half-hearted resistance and complaints on the other. They did not sound like a married couple. They sounded exactly like a parent and a child, and it tore me up.
‘He had a good day,’ Lara said, very softly, but as if I had just alleged the very opposite.
‘But they get less,’ I said. ‘The good days get less.’
I squinted and leaned forward at some movement in the back garden. A young fox emerged from the rose bushes, sniffed at the ground and moved on.
‘It’s still him,’ Lara said. ‘It’s still your dad.’
‘Mostly it’s still him,’ I said, and I thought of that old Zen sword. If you change the blade, and then you change the handle – is it still the same sword? ‘But then one day there will be a point where it is not him any more. Not the boy she fell in love with, not the man she married. Not her husband. Not my dad. Somebody else.’
‘No,’ Lara said, her voice little more than a whisper in the darkness. ‘It will still be him.’
I hung my head, pressing the barrel of the .22 against my face. I looked up at her and smiled.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’
She put her arms around my shoulders. I could feel her breath on my face. Her voice in my ear.
‘Please don’t be so angry,’ she said. ‘Please don’t be so angry about everything.’
I turned my head and looked at her. ‘Are you going to go?’ I said. ‘Are you going to see that bloody doctor?’
She stared at me for a long moment and then she nodded. ‘I’m going tomorrow,’ she said.
Then we heard the voices. And I was on my feet, lifting the .22 to my shoulder. Lara put a hand on my arm, but I took a step away from her. I wanted to hurt someone. I wanted to hurt these people who came to this garden in the night.
They came out of the same spot as the fox. A dipping crew of two. They looked up at the house, and they must have seen only darkness. I took them for two girls at first, because of the length of their hair. But it was a man and a woman. I leaned across the sink, silently edging the barrel of the gun out of the open window.
I saw them shuck off their jeans and T-shirts and slip without sound into the swimming pool. I pressed the butt of the gun tight against my shoulder, felt my finger on the trigger, and held my breath. They disappeared under the water and seconds later silently broke the surface. My finger tightened on the trigger, squeezing it back. Then I saw their heads come together. I watched them kiss. And I felt my wife next to me. I knew she saw it too.
I pulled the gun from the window and held it by my side. And Lara took my hand and we watched them. Not that there was much to see. Their heads drifting without sound across the water. Coming together for a few moments and then coming apart. Black shadows against more blackness, the light of the night and the city seeping into the garden, catching the beads of water on their heads and making them shine like jewels.
Lara said at one point that this was how David Attenborough must feel out in the wild, and we both laughed, very quietly, and apart from that we said nothing. There was nothing to say. She knew that I could see it too.
They were beautiful.
And at some point I put down my gun and pulled Lara on to my lap and I held her as she held me and the boy and girl in the pool got lost in their night-swimming.
It was an hour before dawn when they finally emerged from the pool, shivering in the chill of the morning mist, sleek as a pair of seals, and burnished by what remained of the starlight.
twenty-four
You could tell by her shoes.
Everyone at the milonga could tell by her shoes. They were high-heeled and strappy, with thin leather soles. Jet black. Shiny as a mirror. Her shoes said that she was there to dance.
You heard it all the time in Buenos Aires. If you are not there to dance, then go in trainers or sandals. If you are not there to dance, then dress like a wallflower, dress like a tourist. Lara’s shoes marked her out as a dancer.
The milonga, which was a kind of shifting dance hall, was in a sports centre in a quiet barrio in Barracas, in the south of the city. The venue was a surprise. I knew by now that the tango had little to do with the elegant couples you saw at the tangueria dinner shows that brought the tourists in by the busload. I had been expecting a smoky bar, with perhaps a few ladies of the night and loitering sailors on shore leave, reflecting the working-class roots of the dance. But this milonga was in a sports hall with basketball hoops on the wall. And here was the real thing.
Lara and I stood on the edge of the dance floor and watched the dance flow before us. The couples all moved in an anticlockwise direction, as if trying to make time run backwards, and they were of every age imaginable. Boys just out of their teens danced with women old enough to be their mothers. Pensioners gripped each other like young lovers. A man in his sixties wearing a blue suit partnered a young woman whose cropped T-shirt revealed a stomach as flat and hard as a washboard. Age did not matter at the milonga. What counted was how you did the dance.
Lara smiled at me and took my hand and pulled me on to the dance floor. It was like joining a school of fish. There was no room and yet somehow we found room. I felt the pinch of my brand-new shoes, selected for the thinness of their leather soles, and I could feel the fear in the pit of my stomach. We assumed the position, smiling self-consciously, and then we counted. The lessons we had been taking in the salon at Confitería Ideal in Suipacha had taught us tango etiquette as well as steps, and after six days we knew enough to count eight compases, bars of music, before joining the dance.
And now, on the seventh day, we danced.
It was fine. I mean, I didn’t step on her toes and make a complete idiot of myself. I didn’t fall over. And she was beautiful, of course – just a joy to hold and behold and dance with as she followed my clumsy lead with almost imperceptible shifts of weight, her feet inside her high heels never seeming to leave the ground and yet never still, never resting, full of grace. Fluid and fast – that was what I noticed when I danced with Lara, and what I had always noticed when I danced with her. How she seemed to make ten movements for every one that I made. And so we danced, moving always and forever against the clock.
We danced until five melodies had come and gone – until the end of a set. And then she smiled at me and took my hand and led me from the dance floor. Then I saw the man watching us.
He was perhaps fifty, dark and lean, with a full head of hair that he was clearly proud of, the black streaked with silver. If anything made him look his age it was the combination of jacket and jeans. He came over to us. Or rather, he came over to Lara.
The man had eyes that were such a dark shade of brown they were almost black. His teeth were bone-white in his lined, handsome face. Up close he looked his age but was somehow more impressive. Some people say that the Porteños of Buenos Aires are the best-looking people in the world. This guy would definitely have agreed with them.
