Fifty-Minute Hour (2 page)

I trudge along the grey and dingy street. Albert Henry Basing would not have liked the litter, nor the vulgar Dixon's with its rash of shouting signs, nor the launderette which smells of Madras curry, nor the stale and fetid air. Inner City air is always breathed-out air, expelled from sickly lungs. No young and frisky oxygen. And you can hardly tell one season from another. There's very little sky left, and trees are luxuries. The only green is mulched and rotting cabbages chucked into the gutter from the market stalls. Keats would never have written
Autumn
had he lived here, only
Melancholy
.

There's a queue at Bullock's, but Wilhelm lets me jump it. I wouldn't say we're friends, more business partners. We trade in dreams, not meat. I don't like meat, especially not in Bullock's, where decapitated rabbits swing from hooks, pathetic scraps of fur still patch worked to their twisted bleeding carcasses. A few last desperate feathers cling round naked turkey necks; livers and intestines coil black in neat white trays. I prefer to eat things which have neither lived nor died. Even lettuces can scream when they are shredded. Cheese and milk are safer: strawberry-flavoured milk in plastic cartons, or very mild white babies' cheese mushed up in silver foil. No mould or rind or oozings, no strong sour smells reminding me of cows.

‘Hallo, pet,' says Wilhelm. His accent is quite thick still, though he's lived in England since 1956. He must be seventy-five now, and rumour says he was an SS guard at Auschwitz, who escaped reprisals and set up home in Twyford with Welsh collies and an English wife, then moved to London after his divorce. His dreams are like the rumours – shocking, very violent, and drenched in blood and guilt. My own dreams are far too timid: drab and grey and often just fragmented shreds and wisps. Not gas chambers, but 1930s wardrobes; dead mice instead of decimated Jews. I've been making much more progress since I borrowed Wilhelm's dreams. Not borrowed – bought. I pay Wilhelm in sex. He rattles off a dream or two while he's still slicing tongues or gouging eyes from calves' heads, then he takes me out the back, where the sawdust's damp with gore and later sperm. I'm meant to swallow it, but it's not that hard to cheat. We're restricted to fellatio, since both time and space are short. The room is very cold and full of corpses. You can hear noises from the shop: meat-saws hacking thigh bones, choppers cleaving breasts. Afterwards, he adds a few more details, or even a new dream, and also gives me luxuries like veal or T-bone steaks, which my landlord's wife accepts in lieu of rent. It's a complicated system, but it works.

Wilhelm's very tall (which makes me less conspicuous), and also very bald. As if in compensation, other hairs luxuriate – fierce dark hairs in nostrils, long grey hairs in ears, jutting shelves of eyebrows meeting in the middle, hairs sprouting from his shirt neck and tangling with the medal, coarse hairs on wrists and thumbs. He wears white, like a doctor, but blood-stained white to match his blood-stained hands.

I unzip his blood-stiff trousers, kneel down in the sawdust, coax his foreskin back. He hates it if I bite, so I draw my lips right down until they're covering my teeth, keep them firm and taut, like a schoolgirl's small tight cunt. I try to build a rhythm, as much for my sake as for his. Once my mouth and hand are moving up and down, up and down, more or less together, more or less in time, I can slip away to Shropshire. I was born in Ludlow, where autumn was dramatic, even as it died, and winter had a grandeur in its cold and splintered cruelty.

I flick my tongue up and down his frenulum, climb the hill beyond my childhood home. The bank of oaks and beeches is so bright it seems on fire, blue smoke choking from the pyre of golden leaves, the sky bleeding in reflection. I can't smell fire, but chestnuts; leaves rotting underfoot; the sweet pink smell of dolly-mixtures clutched in my hot hand. I can hear a nut-hatch chiselling at beech mast, splintering the shells, snatching the soft kernels as they spray into the air. Other sounds intrude: Wilhelm's German gaspings (he always comes in German); a woman talking sausages, whose shrill and discontented voice soars out from the shop. ‘The beef are far too salty, and those pork are solid fat. Heart-attacks with mash.'

I close my eyes, concentrate on Wilhelm. He's taking far too long, yet the one mingy dream he gave me was brief and even boring. He's less generous than he used to be, or maybe just too old, so his memories are dulling, the nightmares tailing off. I increase the pressure slightly, use my other hand to graze his testicles, nails scratching, almost clawing. He likes me to be rough, so long as it's not teeth. He comes, at last, with a great guttural German cry. His sperm tastes bloody, and is tepid on my tongue. I hold it in my mouth while he straightens up his clothes and fusses with the sawdust, which we've scuffed and disarranged. Then I spit it out, guiltily and furtively, pretending just to cough. Impossible to swallow it, to have Wilhelm's guilt inside me, churning through my bloodstream. Already I feel tainted – a quisling, a collaborator; Wilhelm's hands my own now, as I whip the naked prisoners to their camps. How could I have done this for a dream? Would I
murder
for John-Paul, exterminate six million?

Yes, I think I would. I suspect he found me boring before I had good dreams, and it's essential that he likes me, doesn't cast me out. I'd shave my head if he said it made me pretty, lop it off completely if he preferred to see me with just a gaping neck. He seems excited by the dreams, says I've stopped repressing all my violence. I remember as a five-year-old crying one whole Sunday because I'd found a wounded bird. I'm not well-trained in violence, but I have to make an effort, fight to be more interesting than all those bashful Marys, who probably dream of bloodbaths every night.

I shudder as Wilhelm passes me the limp and soggy package. Sweetbreads? Maybe brains? I never check until I get back home. That would make me seem a prostitute, counting out my coins.

‘Same time next week,
mein Schatzlein
.' I try to nod and smile. My mouth tastes bloody still. I can hear the cries of butchered Jewish children. ‘And I hate those herbs you put in them,' the sausage woman nags. ‘They look like specks of dirt.' Why is she still there? Years have passed, whole decades. She should be old by now, or dead. Shrivelled like a sausage skin.

People shift and mutter as I pass them in the queue; see I haven't paid. I long to shout, ‘I
have
paid.' Far too highly. I sneak out with my head down, limp along to Waitrose. It's a very large exotic branch which sells Israeli pomegranates and ewes' milk with no additives. I buy two pots of instant noodles and a yogurt labelled ‘passion fruit', and John-Paul's Garibaldis. I sent him two huge crates once. He never thanked me, though he crunched them every session, which I suppose was thanks enough. He has a problem with orality and eats or smokes continuously.

I use Waitrose for my exercise. It's cheaper than a gym and less solitary than jogging. I trot up and down each aisle a dozen times each weekday, and twenty on a Saturday; sometimes with my trolley, sometimes not. Young men often follow. I never feel attractive, but people say I am. I think it's just my hair, which is very thick and heavy and reaches well below my waist. I've never cut it in my life. John-Paul says I keep it long to establish my identity as female. I began life as a male. For my whole nine months in the womb, both my parents assumed I was a boy. And even after the birth my father was still boasting about his ‘son'. He stopped boasting when he saw me. I was large and bald and ugly and quite obviously castrated. I try to quash the memory, which is upsetting in a supermarket, especially on a Saturday when everyone's in families – fathers pushing trolleys, fathers holding daughters whom they might even have wanted, young couples arm in arm. I gave up all my boyfriends when I started with John-Paul. It seemed unfaithful, somehow, and they didn't like it, anyway, when I called them by his name. My brain just plays the record, needle in the groove: John-Paul, John-Paul, John-Paul, John-Paul, John-Paul.

I dial his number as soon as I get back, leave another message from another (meeker) Mary, ape her simpering voice. I check the clock, a tiny ugly plastic one which came free with a computer and was a present from a client. I've done quite well: Monday's session's nearer by one hundred and seven minutes. I suppose I ought to eat, though it's not easy on my own. I drag upstairs to Sasha, hand her over the package (brains
and
sweetbreads), ask her very casually if she'd like to come to lunch. I know the answer before she spits it out. Sometimes I ask strangers, odd people in the street. ‘Come and share my lunch' – or tea or dinner. The answer's always no. It reminds me of that story in the Gospels, when the guests declined the wedding feast. My parents weren't religious. I had to read the Bible like other adolescents read porn, or violent comics – under covers in the dark. I still remember that chilling phrase in Matthew: ‘Many are called, but few are chosen'; imagine John-Paul saying it in his jam-and-granite voice.

I climb another storey to invite the man in number three. We all have numbers on our doors, which gives us more identity, except mine is zero and therefore blanks me out. No reply from Three. Four is fasting, Five works nights, sleeps days. I trail all the way downstairs again and pour boiling water on to basil-flavoured noodles. I had a friend called basil once – yes, lower case. He always signed his name without the capital. I could phone him, I suppose, ferret out his number from my five-years-old address book, ask him if he's free, but he'd probably only refuse, like all the rest.

The noodles mulch and soften, slip down very easily. I can't taste basil, can't taste anything. I drink water from a cup, which is a completely different sensation from water in a glass, and makes it more like milk. I've bought a piece of cheesecake for dessert. I like the name – my two favourite foods combined, yet tasting unlike either. I sometimes dream of cheesecakes – those heavy soggy foreign ones with moisture-logged sultanas which sink down near the crust. I never tell John-Paul. He prefers Wilhelm's dreams to food ones, and, anyway, I've given most foods up. Eating's so one-sided.

The food never loves you back. It's like John-Paul again – passion unreciprocated. Even now, I'm sinking teeth in curd, tonguing up cream and cherry topping, and the cake itself just sits there getting smaller. No emotion, no response, basil was like that in bed – passive, uninvolved, and always dwindling.

There's no washing-up, except two teaspoons and the cup. I ate the noodles from their pot, the cheesecake from its carton. All the same, I run a bowl of water, froth up Fairy Liquid. Rituals are important, help to pass the time. Three thousand and seven minutes now. I wish it were two thousand. The three thousands are quite frightening, especially on my own.

I pass the afternoon rearranging my collections. I collect anything that's small and doesn't die. I like to keep the different piles neat and clearly labelled. At five-thirty Howard rings and we do it with the light on. My bedsit's always gloomy, even in high summer. Howard's not a boyfriend. He helps me pay the bills. Which means mainly John-Paul's bills. John-Paul writes them out himself on stiff white damask paper (old-fashioned, like his shirts), and times them to arrive on the first of every month. I don't know how he does it. I find the post erratic and have sometimes missed a birthday by as much as half a week, but maybe John-Paul has a patient who's Someone in the Post Office.

I decide on early bed. If I swallow enough pills, I can sleep for thirteen hours, which is nearly eight hundred minutes off my load. I hate sleeping on my own, though my divan bed is so narrow, there's not much room for partners. My clients are all small. I never take John-Paul to bed – not now. The once I did, I woke with bleeding hands. He was made of glass underneath his clothes and when I tried to fondle him he shattered into pieces, and I scarred my fingers badly.
On
my bed is safer than inside it. Sometimes he's my father, watching by the womb, praying for a girl. Sometimes he's the chaplain in a hospice, helping me to die. Chaplains can hold hands. Their rules are very different. I checked it with St Christopher's, where people die quite regularly anchored to a chaplain.

I die at least five times, lingeringly but bravely. No morphine, no self-pity. The final time is real, if sleep is death.

Adieu
.

‘Make sure you take your raincoat, Bryan.'

I've got it.'

‘And those shoes won't like the rain.'

‘I'll change them.'

‘Do you have to leave so early?'

‘Yes, Mother.'

‘You never used to, did you, dear? Other firms don't start at seven o' clock.'

‘It's the management consultants. They want more productivity.'

‘Don't the other staff object?'

‘Not really. Just the older ones. Must dash. I'll miss the train.'

‘Don't I get my kiss?'

He moved a step towards her, let his lips graze empty air. He didn't like her smell: powder over sweat, hot flesh in cold silk knickers. Peck and gone. He heard her calling after him until he turned the corner – alarm clock for the neighbours. ‘I put fish paste in your sandwiches. I need the cheese for supper. Don't be late. Macaroni spoils.'

At least the train was empty. He'd caught the eight-thirteen for seven years; other people's newspapers thrust across his own, other people's briefcases slammed down on his feet. The six-ten was his exclusively. If he'd had the voice, he could have sung. No one to report him, and he was feeling almost well. Monday was a good day – well, better than the rest, since there were still another four to go before he spent another weekend with his Mother. Weekends took their toll.

He opened his blue notebook, still hadn't dared the red one. He'd touched it in the shop, returned a dozen times, nervous fingers stroking down its shiny crimson cover. No lines inside at all, just blank and dangerous paper, with no limits, no restraints. His blue book had ruled margins as well as neat ruled lines, and was labelled ‘narrow feint', which sounded like a description of himself. He was narrow top and bottom, longed to have broad shoulders, be less what he called an ‘-ish' man: smallish, fairish, slimmish, youngish, with mousish hair and lightish hazel eyes.