Fascination: Stories Read online

  Dale sets the bar of the high jump at what seems to be my height and Juliana paces out her run. Dale, rather like a drill instructor, yaps out instructions (‘Lateral lean!’ ‘Leg loading!’ ‘Mass transfer!’) as Juliana tightens her pony tail and then begins to rock to and fro as she contemplates her first jump of the day. Then, in a flattening arc, she runs, she lopes, she bounds up to the jump and throws herself up, twisting on to her back, arms and head first, over the bar, straightening her legs as she sails over to land on the inflated mattress – which gives a wheeze and a gasp (of astonishment?) as this flying girl falls backwards on to it.

  Juliana climbs off, wincing with displeasure at her successful jump, one finger freeing the seam of her tiny shorts from the cleft of her buttocks.

  ‘Crap,’ Dale shouts at her. ‘Absolute crap.’

  You sat in the Fiesta with Yvonne, parked in a picnic area off a country road. All around you in the darkness lay the county of Kent. Yvonne continued to smoke and fiddled with the radio, searching the airwaves for a station that pleased her. Little contemporary rock music seemed to her taste. She winced with displeasure and switched the radio off.

  ‘What are we actually doing here?’ you asked.

  ‘Waiting for someone.’

  ‘Oh. Can’t you drive?’

  ‘I’ve been banned. Breathalysed – over the limit.’

  ‘Right.’

  She looked at you. ‘What’re you doing at that college?’

  ‘The crammer? History. I failed my A-level, you see. Retaking the exam.’

  ‘Do you want to be a historian?’

  You thought about this. ‘No.’

  ‘Why are you doing history, then?’

  ‘It’s my best subject.’

  ‘But you failed it.’

  It was a fair point – then somebody opened the rear door of the car and jumped in.

  Dale Auden will not leave me alone with Juliana.

  ‘She’s two centimetres under the UK national record. Going to go next season, isn’t it, Juliana?’

  ‘I’ll give it my best shot, Dale.’

  ‘That’s my girl. Oslo here we come.’

  Juliana is sitting on the running track knotting the laces in her trainers. She stands up, unfolding herself, undoes her pony tail and shakes her dark glossy hair free. The gestures have a naturalness, an innocence, that unmans me. Dale finally goes away to talk to some hurdlers.

  ‘Would you like to have dinner tonight?’ I ask. ‘I feel I haven’t really had a chance to have a proper conversation.’

  She glances over at Dale – why?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  I tell her I’m staying at the Tudor Lodge, tell her that Elite likes its profiles to concentrate on the personal as well as the professional, offer to pick her up from home, have a taxi drive her back. I am very persuasive.

  ‘See you tonight then, Mr Scully.’

  ‘Call me Edward, please.’

  You turned round in your seat to gain a better view of the small man who had entered the car.

  ‘Who the hell’s he?’ the small man said, staring at you angrily.

  ‘He’s called Edward. Bastard Tony never showed.’

  ‘Oh…’ He seemed to relax and smiled. ‘Very grateful, Edward. I’m Tommy.’

  ‘He’s my big brother,’ Yvonne said and she laughed, with a sudden naturalness, an innocence, as if everything was now explained entirely to your satisfaction.

  ‘We’d better get a move on,’ Tommy said. ‘That plane leaves in a couple of hours.’

  Somehow – oddly – Juliana looks younger in her makeup. She is wearing a dress and shoes with low heels that give her a four-inch height advantage over me. Walking into the Escutcheon with this extremely tall, slim girl seems as bizarre and surreal an event as I’ve ever experienced. And, feeling this strange and dissociated, I manage only to eat half my sirloin steak – I have no appetite, I only want to drink. Juliana doesn’t drink and so I have the bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape all to myself, which is just as well, as I was quite shaken by Felicia’s cold anger when I told her that circumstances beyond my control were going to prevent me making the Moreton dinner.

  Juliana, in the absence of any questions from me about her highjumping, asks me many questions about my writing. I tell her about my first published novel, Morbid Anatomy, and my second, Aztecs, still uncompleted after all these years. I tell her that what I really like to write about is poetry and for the first time the glaze of polite interest disappears from her expression and she looks at me with genuine curiosity. She says she loves poetry. I look into her eyes and say I do too. And then one of those adult silences falls between us, as if a policeman has stepped up behind her and laid his heavy hand on her shoulder: she now knows I want to make love to her, a prospect she had never considered until this moment. She colours and bends her head to cut a piece off her lasagne. Something about the pressure and angularities of her long fingers on the knife and fork, the conspicuous bump of the bones on her wrists make me suddenly want to weep.

  ‘For Juliana comes,’ I whisper, ‘and she what I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The Mower’ s Song by Andrew Marvell. How old are you?’

  ‘Ah… Nineteen.’

  I’m nearly twice her age. I could be her father.

  You stood with Yvonne in a cafeteria in Terminal One at Gatwick and watched Tommy argue with his wife. It was a quarter to midnight. There had been an announcement: the plane to Palma, Majorca had been delayed three hours.

  ‘That’s Irene’s plane,’ Yvonne said. ‘It’ll buy us some time.’

  ‘I should really be thinking about going,’ you said, remembering your essay on villeinage that had to be completed by nine o’clock the next morning.

  ‘We have to take Tommy back,’ Yvonne said.

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘To the prison. It’s an open prison, don’t worry. As long as he’s back before seven they’ll never know he’s been gone.’

  ‘Right.’

  Yvonne could tell from your expression that aiding and abetting even the temporary escape of a prisoner was not something you’d planned on doing in your life. So she explained that Tommy was in for embezzlement, a victimless crime.

  You asked about the purpose of this visit to Gatwick and Yvonne said that Irene, Tommy’s wife, was going to Spain to be with Tommy’s ex-partner. Tommy had to persuade her to stay, for the sake of the kids, hence the midnight rush to Gatwick.

  ‘The kids?’

  ‘They have two kids.’

  Irene and Tommy came over to the coffee bar and Irene was introduced. She was a small, buxom woman with a knowing look to her eye, dressed scantily and brightly for the Spanish sun. Tommy asked Yvonne if he could have a word and left you and Irene alone. You bought her a coffee and she accepted one of your cigarettes.

  ‘I hear the plane’s delayed,’ you said.

  ‘Charters.’

  ‘Nightmare.’

  ‘So,’ she said, looking at you shrewdly, ‘are you and Yvonne…?’

  ‘No. No, I live in the bedsit under hers.’

  When she drew on her cigarette small deep furrows appeared in her upper lip. She smoothed the lapels of her short-sleeved jacket, adjusted the lie of her cleavage, unclipped and reclipped an earring.

  ‘Ever been to Majorca, Stephen?’

  ‘Edward.’

  ‘Edward.’

  ‘No, but I’ve been to Barcelona.’

  ‘Never been to Barcelona. Las Palmas?’

  ‘Ah, the Canaries.’

  ‘Las Islas Canarias.’

  ‘Never been there.’

  Tommy and Yvonne returned, Tommy unable to keep the smile off his face with news that the charter flight to Majorca had now been cancelled. Irene didn’t believe him and even when an announcement followed quickly she still insisted you accompanied her to the desk to confirm that this was so. It was as if your presence would
thwart any dark plot by Tommy. The plane was indeed cancelled: there was an air traffic controllers’ strike in France affecting most European flights. To your consternation tears began to brim in Irene’s eyes.

  ‘This is what happens to me, Edward. I can never be happy. Just when I think my life’s going OK, and finally I’m going to be happy, this sort of thing always happens to me.’

  ‘Maybe it’s fate,’ you said. ‘You never know. Think of the kids. Maybe you’re not meant to go.’

  She ran a knuckle under each eye as she considered this, then she reached for your hand and squeezed it. You felt her long nails bite into your palm.

  ‘Thanks, Ed. Truly. Thanks.’

  In the foyer of the Tudor Lodge hotel I stand with Juliana waiting for her taxi. I feel a form of panic stirring in me, like a skittish animal. I can’t let this girl go.

  ‘Juliana,’ I say, ‘If you come up to my room I can show you that poem.’

  ‘What poem?’

  ‘The Juliana poem.’

  ‘I’d better get back.’

  ‘I’d like to write a book about you. A book of your life.’

  ‘There’s my taxi.’

  I want to kiss her but I realize I will have to stretch my neck and stand slightly on my toes to do so. I step towards her and she freezes. The Impossibility of Desire in the Poetry of… Juliana’s height suddenly makes me ridiculous. She stands there looking at me, wary, unsure – unhappy maybe: maybe I’ve spoiled something. She thanks me for the supper and I watch her leave through the thick plate glass of the Tudor Lodge hotel’s front door. As she bends into the taxi she turns and gives me a brisk, brief, final wave.

  It was dawn by the time you parked the cerise Fiesta outside the bakery. ‘What a night,’ Yvonne said. ‘I can’t believe Irene’s staying. What did you say to her?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ you said. Irene and Tommy had had a few words and then Irene had taken a taxi back to her mother’s, where she’d left her children. On the return journey to the open prison Tommy had been reflective, asking you several times to repeat the exchange you’d had with Irene. Tommy patted you gratefully on the shoulder, kissed Yvonne and slipped out of the car and into the night.

  ‘It’s just across the fields,’ Yvonne said. ‘They come and go all the time, Tommy says.’

  ‘Don’t they have guards at this prison?’ you asked.

  ‘Of course. But they trust the prisoners. That’s why it’s called an open prison.’

  You followed Yvonne up the stairs, your eyes on the pale blue veins showing on the backs of her knees, at that moment you wanted to do nothing more than reach out and run your hand over her flexing calf muscle. You felt desire stir in you like a skittish animal.

  You paused on the landing, fished in your pocket for the key.

  ‘Do you want a cup of coffee, or anything?’ you asked. You could see yourself in your narrow bed with Yvonne, belly to belly; you could smell her, feel her thick hair drag across your chest.

  ‘Better get some sleep. Got work in three hours.’

  She backed away, slumped like a marionette for a moment to feign extreme exhaustion, straightened with a smile and blew you a kiss. As evanescent as a blown kiss, you thought. What could be more insubstantial?

  ‘Thanks a million, Ed. See you later, maybe.’

  I tell Dale Auden I don’t like his tone. Don’t like his implications.

  ‘And I don’t like you, full stop,’ he says.

  We are in the carpark. I throw my grip into the back of the Volvo and turn to face him. He jabs his finger at me.

  ‘You asked her up to your room.’

  ‘To continue the interview.’

  ‘Bloody pervert.’

  I try to punch him in the face but he raises his arm and I strike his shoulder instead, hard. With astonishing speed he immobilizes me with some kind of double arm lock and hisses threats and obscenities into my ear. Then he pushes me brusquely away and I career into a shrub – twigs snap…

  ‘I’m going to call your editor,’ he says. ‘Pervert.’

  ‘Get a life,’ I shout at him. He laughs at that and wanders off. I flex my fingers: my hand hurts. Get a life.

  You found the continued clattering and tramping up and down the stairs an irritation and eventually looked out of your room. Yvonne and a guy in a leather coat were coming down from her bedsit, Yvonne carrying a suitcase, the guy lugging a cardboard box.

  ‘Hi,’ you said, surprised. ‘Want a hand?’

  ‘No thanks, we’re fine, thanks. This is Tony.’

  Tony nodded and grinned hello at you above his cardboard box.

  ‘Moving out?’ you said, suddenly realizing.

  ‘Yeah. Going to Penzance.’

  ‘Cornwall? My God. Never been to Cornwall.’

  ‘Come and see us,’ Yvonne said.

  Five minutes later, she came back up the stairs and knocked on your door.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ she said, ‘Irene went to Majorca. Yesterday. Took the kids with her this time.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Just goes to show.’

  You tried to understand this news, wondering if in some way you were responsible.

  ‘How’s Tommy?’

  ‘He’s a bit cut up. Not surprising, really.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  You stood there in your room with Yvonne and you both thought about that night you had shared, silent for a few seconds. Then you looked at each other. You flexed your fingers.

  ‘I’ll send you a change of address card,’ she said, softly.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ you said, but you knew she would.

  Then she stepped forward, took your head in her hands and kissed you hard, with a small clash of teeth, and her tongue was in your mouth, squirming, flickering. But before you could grab her she was gone, backing out of the room, with a wicked, half-suppressed smile on her face, and Tony was honking the horn of the cerise Fiesta in the street below. You heard her heels rapping the stairs.

  You went and sat at your desk, trying to stay calm, thinking about Yvonne and the way she had kissed you. You knew it would be something you would never forget, that it would become one of those events that shaped and defined you as a person, a key link in the chain mail of memories woven through your life. As you looked out of the window you noticed that a slanting ray of the morning sun had squeezed between two houses and touched the higher branches of the lime tree at the bottom of the garden, turning its dusty, tired summer leaves into shimmering coins of lemon-green, making the tree seem young again, and making you think of spring.

  When I arrive at the house I find it empty. Felicia will have taken Gareth out in his stroller. The day is mild and breezy, the clouds swift in the blue sky. It’s only three o’clock in the afternoon but I pour myself two inches of vodka and fill the glass with ice cubes and brace myself for the row that will surely come.

  I sip my drink, feeling my lips numb slowly, and look out of the window. The clouds move and a sudden angle of afternoon sun slanting over the top of the next-door house touches the uppermost branches of the old lime tree at the end of the garden. For a moment a thick wand of sun turns its tired summer leaves into refulgent coins of lemony green, making the tree seem young again and making me think of spring.

  Beulah Berlin, an A–Z

  Angst, ennui, weltschmerz, cafard, taedium vitae, anomie… Curious how oddly beguiling these words are. I almost don’t mind suffering from the conditions they describe. Some of the so-called ‘beautiful diseases’, perhaps. But I exaggerate: for most of my life everything was normal – I only realized I was in trouble when I went to Berlin.

  Berlin gave me my name and was the making of me. Before Berlin everything was conventionally straightforward: I was born, I became a child, I went to school then college (media studies), then film school – nothing about my life was particularly interesting. In film school I wanted to be an editor (I yearned for control), but then changed my mind after a year and decided to
become an art director (I was good at drawing). How do you know when your life is intrinsically uninteresting? You just do. Some people live quietly, unhappily, with this knowledge, others do something about it.

  At a film festival in Hamburg, where a short film I had art-directed was being screened, I met my first husband, Georg. He was an artist and, after the festival, I suddenly, spontaneously, went with him to Berlin. I was twenty-two years old and I think I knew that this would be the beginning of everything. A month later we were married.

  A man has just walked by leading a Great Dane and a Dachshund. How peculiar. (I am writing this in Amsterdam.)

  Georg and some of his friends staged an exhibition called ‘Stunk’ (it should be pronounced with a German accent). They rented a floor of an office building for a month on the something-strasse and it became their art gallery. (Stunk-Kunst.) Georg asked me to contribute and that was how ‘The Transparent Wardrobe’ happened, how Beulah Berlin came into being. After being Beulah McTurk for twenty-two years I knew that Beulah Berlin was bound to be more intriguing, altogether cooler.

  Colour dominated my wardrobe in those days. I wore the brightest clothes – as camouflage. Now I wear only black, white and grey. At the ‘Stunk’ show I hung my garish clothes on chrome rails and wore nothing but a black brassière and panties. People then selected a combination of items from my wardrobe, wrote the request on a piece of paper and I wore whatever they had suggested for an hour. Black stiletto and a brown hiking boot; a leather jacket and a bikini bottom; a straw sombrero and pyjama trousers. I took a polaroid photograph of the combination and pinned it on a giant pinboard. I have to say that without Beulah Berlin and her transparent wardrobe the ‘Stunk’ show would be completely forgotten. Ninety-nine per cent of the press coverage was about me and my tireless transformations. By the time the lease ran out I had over a thousand photographs: the pinboard was a multi-coloured collage of various Beulah Berlins. Georg never really forgave me, I now see in retrospect, and from then on our relationship went steadily to the dogs.