Dispossession (20 page)

Which was another marker to help me plot how deeply I’d
entangled her in whatever mesh I’d been making, those few short missing weeks.
My heart ached for her, vulnerable and helpless as she seemed, beneath the
bluster. Caught like some innocent, blundering fly, I thought she was, in a web
of confusions and deceit. I wanted to help her, I wanted to peel sticky threads
from her wings and set her free; but I didn’t even know what the deceits were,
let alone who had set them or what they were for. All I was contributing here
was more confusion.

Could’ve been me, I thought, deceiving her for some cruel
cause of my own; or vice versa, perhaps she was the deceiver and doing it
still, doing it even now to keep me muddled...

“Okay,” I said, taking tea when she passed it to me but
reaching for the whisky also, pouring a slug into one glass and then into the
other when I glanced the question and had her nod in response. “Answer some
questions for me?”

“Yes,” she said. No hesitation, no equivocation in her:
total exposure offered if I wanted it, if I could think of the right questions
to ask, and no, surely this girl was not deceiving me.

“That first night,” I said slowly, watching her face,
looking for signals. “I hung around the takeaway, asked you to go for a drink;
you brought me here. Yes?”

“To the club, yes.”

“You wanted to get into my shorts, you said. Did you manage
it?”

A hint of a smile, and, “Not that first night, but I could’ve
done. You were up for it, I reckoned. Easier then than it is now,” glaring at
me over her cup, putting it down to light a cigarette, blowing an aggressive
cloud of smoke at me. If we’d been on the beach, she’d have kicked sand in my
face.

I just shrugged. “So what did we talk about? What did I
say?”

“Not much, in the end. All tongue-tied you were, like you
were suddenly ten years younger and this was your first date ever. It was
sweet, really. Weird too, mind, being with a stranger who wouldn’t talk to me.
But Lee was there to keep an eye out, and there were friends of mine on the
tables too, so I wasn’t worried.”

“What did we do, then? If I wouldn’t talk?”

“Well, I talked. For a bit. But I still wasn’t getting much
out of you, so we ended up playing snooker. What else would we do?”

“I don’t play snooker,” I said.

“You didn’t use to. You do now, a bit. When I can get you in
there.” She grinned then, and said, “You’re not exactly a natural talent, but
you say you enjoy it.” And then she stopped, seemed to listen to herself, shook
her head bemusedly. “This is so strange. Telling you what you like to do...”

“Stranger hearing it,” I said. “But all right, we played
snooker. Anything else?”

“Not much. You went off about two o’clock, I think, said you
really had to get back. At the time I thought you just needed sleep, you looked
terrible: pale and jittery, like you’d been overdosing on work and caffeine for
weeks. But I guess there was some guilt in there too, because of Carol.”

“I hadn’t told you about Carol?”

She shook her head. “Not that night. No. And I didn’t ask.
Didn’t want to know. Why spoil something that might be nice, before it even
happened? I’m a terrible slut, me. Used to be. That’s why you wanted to marry
me, you said, to stop me sleeping around.”

Did it work?
I wanted to
ask, meanly; but I thought that might get me slapped again, so I sipped
Macallan, savoured its rich sherry flavour and then the bite that comes after,
and asked a different question.

“What next, then? Did you chase me?”

“No, you looked like you could live without the pressure, so
I let you go. Didn’t ask for a number or anything. Your choice, if you came
back. Actually, I thought probably you wouldn’t: just one more bizarre night, I
thought it was, and I’ve had a few of those,” she said, with all the wise
experience of twenty-four. “But you turned up again. At the club, the next
night. You still looked haunted; but you’d shaved, and you smelled nice, and I
don’t think you’d eaten all day, so I took you down to Uncle Tang’s and fed
you. We had lobster, because you said you didn’t mind getting messy but you
couldn’t use chopsticks. That’s when you told me about Carol.”

And that memory required a meditative pause, a sip of
whisky, a sip of tea, a drag or two on the cigarette; and then, “So I said what
are you panting after me for, then? And you said you hated yourself but you
couldn’t help it. If I’d been a nice girl, I suppose I would’ve sent you home
right then. But I’m not, so I didn’t,” added unnecessarily.

“After that it became a sort of regular thing, you’d come to
the club for an hour or two every night. To wind down, you said, but it never
looked like that, you went off as fretted as you’d come. So one night I brought
you up here instead of letting you go. Carol would be asleep, you said, but you
phoned anyway, and left a message on your answering machine so she wouldn’t be
too panicked in the morning; and then I took you to bed.”

A reminiscent smile from her, that I only wished I could
match. It wasn’t only motives and understanding that I’d lost here, there was
simple experience too; and yes, I hated myself for it, but yes, I pined for the
loss of that one. Didn’t ask for a description, though. Instead, I put a new
spin on an old classic. “So how was it for you? How were you feeling about it,
I mean? I guess I was fixated, but were you just thinking of it as a one-night
stand, or were we starting an affair, or what?”

“You weren’t fixated,” she told me sternly. “You were in
love. You said that. And me—I don’t know. Not then. I liked you, I fancied you,
you interested me. That was about it, at the start. I didn’t fall in love with
you until I met your mother.”

“Oh, Christ.” I should have known, I should have guessed she’d
have been in there somewhere, stirring away with her fiddling-stick. She’d have
to be.

That did me in, for asking questions. I wasn’t interrogating
anyone about my mother, for fear of what answers might come back at me. I drank
tea and whisky and watched Suzie smoke, and she seemed content to smoke and
drink and watch me in return.

Slowly my body remembered how late it was, how weary
tomorrow would be; and when I’d yawned for the third time in five minutes, and
was shifting awkwardly in search of a more comfortable way for my bones to sit
within my flesh, Suzie said, “Go to bed, then, why don’t you? If you’re that
knackered?”

I ran a hand down over my face, felt just sheepish enough to
tell her. “I guess I was waiting for permission.”

“Not from me. This is your home, you live here. Do what you
like. I’m going to have a bath.”

o0o

I cleaned my teeth and went to bed, wishing her no more than
a brief, awkward goodnight and closing as many doors as there were between us.

No pyjamas, only cool cotton and silk against my skin, the
lightness of a feather duvet over my back and the unfamiliar firmness of a
futon beneath me. I stretched across its width, and lay on my belly thinking
that even with Dolphus on guard beside me—brought home again from the hospital
and back in what was clearly his regular place, and
thank you, Suzie
—I’d still never sleep.

And did sleep, swiftly and easily; and then was startled
awake again sometime in the dark, by the sharp sound of a door clicking open.

Took me a second to get a grip, to remember where and
therefore who I was. That done, though, it wasn’t hard to identify bare feet
padding on bare boards.

More sounds, silk on skin: or silk off skin, rather, another
kimono falling to the floor. And then a hint of a shift in the futon’s frame,
as another lighter weight came onto it. Ever the gentleman, I stopped
pretending to sleep and slithered a little way across, to make room.

Didn’t roll over, though. Lay with my back to her, not so
much of a gentleman after all. I was still getting more messages than I wanted,
learning more than I needed to know. Every fractional hesitation in her body as
she slipped under the duvet, every tight little breath told me stuff I didn’t
want to hear.

And then—
two fingers to hesitancy
,
and much more what I would have expected from her—she wrapped her arms tight
around me and was saying it all aloud, mumbling into my shoulder blade so that
I picked it up by bone induction mostly, as her lips traced the shapes of the
words against my skin.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I can’t sleep through there with
you in here. I can’t bear it. I’ve missed you so much, I’ve been so scared; and
I don’t care if you’re not who I think you are. You look like him and you smell
like him and you feel like him, your voice sounds right, everything’s right for
me except what you say, so don’t say anything, right?” A hand came up to touch
my lips to silence; the fingers lingered like a kiss. “You don’t have to talk,
I’ll do all the talking. Just don’t, don’t throw me out of bed...”

Well, I’d never done that to a girl yet; and I’d slept with
some I didn’t pretend to love, though not for a long time now. The problem I
had was with the agenda that got into bed alongside Suzie. She had too much
invested here, and I nowhere near enough. That imbalance was perilous to both
of us, I thought.

So no, I didn’t throw her out of bed and no, obedient to
instructions I didn’t speak; but no, neither did I turn within the circle of
her arms to make a gift to her, my body as playground, reassurance, another
definition of home.

Nearly she took it anyway, her hands sliding down now, over
chest and stomach and further down; but they found the waistband of those boxer
shorts that I was wearing still and stopped at the elastic, sensitive to
messages.

“Oh, you bastard,” breathed into my ear on half a chuckle,
half a sob. “What is this, a last line of defence?”

I just grunted, trying to make it non-committal though I
guess she took it for a “yes”. At any rate, the fingers of both her hands slid
in under the waistband but paused politely at their first touch of pubic hair,
making a V together like an arrow-head directed at my groin, dangerous,
threatening, too damn close. And when I made no move, either to encourage or
repel, she sighed against my spine and left them there, nestling a little
closer so that her neat naked body touched me at all the points it could.

Now truly sleep was impossible. For her also, I thought: she
wasn’t talking any more and only her skin moved in little involuntary twitches
against mine, but I didn’t believe she was sleeping. We lay there with nothing
to share beyond the moment and its pain, and even our pain was individual, each
of us suffered alone and she far more than I. At the last, when I guess she
couldn’t bear it any longer, she inched cautiously away from me and turned her
back, coiled up on the far side of the futon and tried not to touch me at all.

After a couple of minutes I thought I heard her crying, as
quietly as she could manage; but I was trapped by my own pretence, and could
offer her nothing of comfort. I lay still, and waited till that wanton sleep
came back.

Suzie was gone when I woke again, some time gone. Strong
sunlight lay like a bar across her pillow, squeezing its way in between the
curtains, but the sheet that side was cool.

Not I was cool: hot and sticky under the duvet,
bladder-full, I unpeeled myself from the futon’s unexpected comfort and
blundered in my boxer shorts all through the flat towards the bathroom.

Suzie watched me from the kitchen door, chewing on an apple.
Grinning behind it, I thought, at my ungainly, uncool hurry; but only her hand
offered me a greeting, and that was subdued. A half-wave with no flourishes,
uncertainty to match my own.

Knowing she was out there, sure she’d be waiting with some
ambush I couldn’t predict or prepare against, I took longer than I might have
done. After a piss I tested out her power shower with the jet as hard and hot
as I could stand it, pounding against the back of my neck to blast my bones
awake. I cleaned my teeth and then I shaved with care, not to give any bloody
hostages to unkind fortune, or to Suzie Chu Marks; and in her bathroom cabinet
I found my own brand of aftershave, in among other male toiletries I neither
knew nor used. Not her brother’s, surely; I was getting on top of this game
now. I guessed they’d turn out to be mine: gifts from her or else the choices
of that unknown, that stranger, the Jonty Marks she’d married and I’d mislaid.

Clean and dried and sharply scented, my mind no longer
sodden stupid after a hard sleep, I finally felt ready to face her. So I
unbolted the bathroom door and walked out to find a steaming cafetière on the
table with a mug beside it and a saucer full of pills and capsules.

She was back in the kitchen doorway again, dressed in loose
silk shirt and leggings, cradling a cup in her hands and leaning oh-so-casually
against the jamb, knowing precisely the picture that she made. She offered me a
small smile and said, “Drink. Eat.”

“Not my idea of breakfast,” I said, prodding a finger at the
pills, sliding them around in their saucer. “What are they?”

“Multivitamins, ginseng, guarana. Good for you. And lots of
vitamin C. We’ll go down to Uncle Han’s later, see what he says, but these’ll
do for now.”

I said, “Linus Pauling died, you know. Death on the high C’s,”
trying to turn that smile of hers more real; but then I swallowed every one of
those damn pills, washing each one down with a gulp of coffee. Continental
high-roast, blisteringly hot and mind-blisteringly strong: my bean and just the
way I like it. Nothing changed there, at least. This was a different message,
I know you inside out.

I sat down for a second mug, and after a bit let my head
topple back, my eyes close. Foolish man, dangerous action: she read ‘vulnerable’
and zoomed straight in there. Her fingers closed on my shoulders and worked
them a little, somewhere indecisively between massage and caress. Then they did
a little shiatsu on my neck and skull, and she said, “I knew I should’ve
chucked that aftershave. Now I’m going to have to convert you all over again.
Nice smell, nasty smell—it’s like training a dog. I’m patient, though. I’m the
soul of patience. You can keep it on for today, if it makes you feel at home.
Go get dressed, and I’ll fix you breakfast. What do you want?”