Inglorious (15 page)

‘Who is the playwright?’ said Rosa, as she followed him admiring the contours of his legs and the strong line of his shoulders. She wanted to put her hands on him, but he was setting a place for her.

‘I don’t know, I’ve no idea. It doesn’t concern me. The play is so terrible that I really don’t want to know. Imagine if I met them, one day, I would have to fight them! “I’ll fuck you so
you cry and I’ll fuck you so you want to die you bitch you bitch get down there and I’ll fuck you” – there’s another bit I get to say. All these beautiful lines, and just for ME!’ And he slapped his chest, in mock pride. That made her laugh, quite genuinely.

‘Wow, it sounds like the play really taps into the zeitgeist,’ she said.

‘Ah, you know German,’ he said, putting a fork in her hand. ‘Anyway I get paid. Really, I actually draw a cheque each week, and it’s going to be running for several months. It’s on south of the river in an experimental theatre, of course. I’ve always hated experimental theatre, but now I find they pay you to do it, so who cares? I am a convert. You should come and see it, if you want to experience something truly horrible. I’ll get you some comps. Bring your friends. I am on for literally three minutes. The play goes on much longer, all will say too long. They are hoping it will run for months, though. But I can imagine we’ll be playing to a house of five each night. So the more the merrier. Anyway you can imagine how pleased my mother is. She’s even saying she will come over from Berlin to see it.’ He smiled slightly, cracked his knuckles, and looking more closely she thought he was tired. His face was more shadowed than usual.

‘Is she really pleased?’ asked Rosa.

‘Oh yes, she’s delighted. Do you want ketchup with your melted cheese?’ He had a bottle in his hand.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘I’d have it. Otherwise the cheese is quite monotonous.’

‘OK, thanks.’

‘Anyway, so you’ll come to my terrible play, yes?’ he said. ‘You can meet my mother.’

By now she was sitting at the table, while he stood at the cooker, stirring some food in a pan. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. There was a gentle pause, while he turned to the pan and pretended to sniff the air like a chef. She smiled at him. Then she said, ‘So, have you been burning the wick?’

‘Burning the wick?’

‘You know, staying up late?’

‘A little, at the bar,’ he said, putting down the book again. ‘I’ve been rehearsing all day and then working at the bar. In a few days I’ll have to quit the bar. They won’t keep my slot open while I do my Art.’ And he laughed again. Still, it was clear that he was becoming industrious. A glimmer of success, and he started trying. Perhaps he would never be more than a bit-parter. Perhaps he would go from one minor play to another, stating the lines of bad playwrights. But he would throw himself into it, all the same.

‘But you know, these bars, you can always find another terrible bar to work in. Although I am sentimental about this bar, because it’s where we met.’ And he patted her hand, laughing.

‘That’s true, how could you leave it?’ she said, awkwardly, and thought
Now what?
But now he was giving her a plate of something he had cooked, which tasted of cheese and spinach and grease. ‘You know, I should have cooked something better,’ he said, shrugging at the mass of cheese he had created.

‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘Delicious.’

‘You’re lying, and you can’t even do it well,’ he said. He smiled. ‘You are such an honest person, to see you struggling to praise my food is moving. Really, it’s moving.’

‘I’m not lying,’ she said. They smiled at each other. That was easy enough, and then there was a pause. They brushed each other’s hands, claimed it as an intimate moment. They paused again then Rosa told him she was going away. ‘Tomorrow, for a few days,’ she said. ‘But only for a few days.’
Then I will
need a place to stay. But how about it, Andreas? For a week, or
so?
The problem was she hardly knew him. This banter, and the way they stuck to facts, concrete statements about family history and observable qualities, meant they never really progressed. They talked like friendly strangers, for the most part. It unnerved her. It seemed to be what he wanted. And she, perhaps she had also insisted upon this careful talk, because it allowed her to conceal her thoughts. Much of what she
thought she couldn’t say to him, aware that he would believe her arrogant or a fool. And what would she say?
Andreas,
you’re a great guy, better than I deserve. It’s a failure of mine
that I can’t respond to your overtures of kindness. But thanks
for the melted cheese.
She would hardly be saying that to him. So she put her head down to the trough and ate.

‘Lucky you, to go away,’ said Andreas. He took her hand and brought the fork to her mouth. Then he smiled and made to wipe her lips. She shook him off, but gently.

‘Where are you going anyway?’ he said, leaning back in his chair again.

‘Oh, friends of mine. They have a house in the Lake District. It’s very beautiful.’

‘Why are you going away, when you could hang around with me and be fed with a fork?’

She laughed and said, ‘I know, it’s crazy.’ But he seemed serious. ‘Really, don’t go away,’ he said. ‘Or come away with me in a couple of weeks. When I get paid I’ll take you away.’ Now he took her hand. ‘You know you want to.’ He looked directly at her, and this made her embarrassed. She held his gaze for a brief moment, then dropped her eyes. She was trying to think of something light to say. ‘I’d love to,’ she said, looking down at her plate. ‘The thing is, I’ve been promising these friends of mine for months that I would go to see them.’

‘Aren’t you worried about how it looks?’ he said. She looked up at him, and saw he was quite relaxed, his legs slung over the arm of a chair, his hair falling onto his fine face. He lifted a hand and seized his glass. He drank, staring at her over the brim.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s looks as if you are running away because you can’t control yourself with me,’ he said.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. She always entered into his badinage, though she sometimes cringed a little as she did it. ‘I’m hot-footing away from my powerful feelings.’

But that was close to the bone, if not the bone of their relationship
– dalliance, friendship, however she was naming it – then certainly it was quite close to the raw and ragged existential bone, and Rosa stopped. She even blushed, which confused him, and he leant across the table and kissed her on the cheek. Really, Andreas was like a symbol of simplicity – dark eyes and hair, white shirt, crisp clothes. This is how it might be, he was saying, if you just relax. She dropped her fork on the plate and sat back. ‘Still, I tell you, you are a little too thin,’ said Andreas. ‘You need much more cheese in your food.’

‘It’s delicious, thanks.’

‘So how was your day?’ he asked.

‘Oh, busy,’ she said.

There was much Andreas didn’t know, and at present he thought she was between contracts, looking for something truly fine with a decent offer already in hand. He thought that because she had told him and he seemed to believe her. She wasn’t sure why. It only made things more complicated. Instead of telling him about Brazier and the agony of the shoes, she had to summon an altogether different day, invent and galvanise. ‘How’s your search for the perfect job going?’ he asked. He spooned her out some more food.

‘Nervous energy,’ she said. ‘That’s the thinness.’

‘Yes, but you could plump up and no one would mind,’ he said. ‘I’d enjoy it.’

‘The job hunt is fine,’ she said. ‘Just as usual.’

‘I’m glad you came,’ he said, kissing on the cheek again. ‘I was having a really boring evening.’

‘I wanted to see you,’ she said. ‘Of course, that’s why I came.’

In fact I wanted to ask you. Could I come and stay? Just for
a few days? The weekend and then a few days beyond. Just
while I look for somewhere else and find a job?
She was very hungry, so she thought she would eat a little more and then ask. When she had finished she ran her fingers across the plate and licked them. A neon light spluttered above their heads; behind the smell of soap was a background trace of detergent.
Andreas passed her a glass of wine and said, ‘Better?’

‘Much better,’ she said, cracking him a smile. He took her hand and kissed it.

Later they were sitting in his small living room, where the furniture was old and matted with dust. There was a jaundiced collection of newspapers on an oak table. ‘My cuttings,’ he had explained, when she asked. A spotlight was angled from the mantelpiece, beaming at the fireplace. He had stacked a series of plants by the window, set off against thick green curtains. The effect was determinedly theatrical. There was a piano, its keys chipped at the ends. On the piano was a portrait of Andreas, in theatrical mode, lit carefully, the shadows making him more chiselled than he was. But he looked more beautiful in the flesh, she thought, turning towards his wide, solid back and the slender lines of his hips. Their talk kept drying up, like a stream in a drought, but they battled on, determined to wring out every last word they could think of. That was part of the problem, these heavy pauses they sustained. She felt them like a kick to her stomach; they made her hunch up. He was more relaxed than she was, and didn’t seem to mind. He could sit cracking his knuckles, smiling at her. As if it didn’t matter at all! Several times, Rosa asked Andreas about the other actors in his play. Several times he replied. It was a conspiracy between them, to pretend each time was the first. And when he talked he moved his hands, and his hands were elegant, good to watch. He had a wide jaw like a dog. This suited him and made his hair curl up at the ends. It was all delightful, this vision of youth was quite the consolation she required, and for a few moments she thought that instead of going north she would settle herself in Andreas’s flat and stay there, until he noticed that she did nothing and asked her to leave.

‘Can I help you with your lines?’ she said.

‘Which lines? Oh those. Yes, well, I have managed to commit them all to memory. It’s been a long day. But you are a sort of highlight.’

‘Thank you.’

Then Andreas said, carelessly, ‘Are you going to stay up in the country and become a lass?’

‘A lass?’ she said.

‘You know, a wench. These are archaic words I was definitely taught when I studied Chaucer.’

‘You studied Chaucer?’

‘Yes, they let me do it, even a person as idiotic as me,’ said Andreas. He smiled, but she thought he was offended.

‘No, no, I meant, I’m surprised, in all your international schools and so on, that they bothered with medieval English.’

He thrust out his lower lip and looked more boyish than before. ‘Well, they had to teach us something. So are you?’

‘Staying in the countryside? Of course not,’ she said. ‘My invitation is for a few days only.’

‘Well, make sure you come back,’ he said. And there was a subtle shift to his expression; she noticed he looked briefly embarrassed.

‘So tell me something else about your play,’ she said, quickly.

‘Rosa, there’s nothing more to tell.’ He took her hand again.

‘Job interview,’ she said, to change the subject. He hardly knew the half of it. ‘I had an interview with a company in Hoxton,’ she said, dimly remembering a scenario from some weeks before. Then she really had an interview, had really worn a suit and tried to impress some kids of thirty who were wearing spotted ties and handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. They claimed to be a ‘media consortium’. She claimed to be a ‘top arts correspondent for a leading newspaper, enjoying a career break while I reprioritise’. They were all on the same page for a good twenty minutes and then Rosa was aware that she had fallen silent a while ago and so had they. Perhaps it was round about then that they looked her up and down and wondered why her suit was frayed and what she had done to her hand – earlier that day she had shut her hand in a door in a mistaken moment, and had really ripped it apart. Her hand
was black with bruises. She couldn’t do it, and after a decent interval they thanked her and said they would call her. That was a resounding lie, and she never heard from them again. The doors of their office were swing doors, like a cowboy saloon, and once she swung them open she trotted out of their particular town and never went back. She was telling this to Andreas, cutting out some of the details, and he was laughing at the image of the kids and the cowboy door. ‘Kids?’ he said. ‘How old?’ Five years older than you, she didn’t say, and laughed and said, ‘Kids in mind, of course.’

‘Rather than kids in station, like me,’ he said. That was another of their clunky bits of repartee, and she laughed and allowed him to stroke her hand. If there had been an audience she would have cared more. Still, she had to drink a jar just to get over the embarrassment of watching herself tapping her hand on her knee as he played her a song he liked. All this furniture, she thought, suggested permanence. It was clear that Andreas had affluent parents, because there was no way he could have bought all of this from his bar tips. It evoked a large parental house, rooms full of superfluous objects, shipped out to their son as he struggled in London. It was a touching idea, these comfortable generous parents. For a moment she admired the leather of the chairs and then she wondered what she was doing here, smiling and talking very loud, lying mostly. It was a good question, one she consistently failed to answer. It was solitude she craved and feared, attracted to its possibilities and then repulsed again when she glimpsed them. So she came round here and said her nothings to Andreas. She was a metic, she thought. But perhaps they were all metics, after all, waiting patiently for keys to the city.

Andreas leapt at the shelves with enthusiasm, and brought back a CD. It was traumatised guitar music, he said. ‘It has a veneer of angst. Musical
Weltschmerz
. I picked it out thinking of you.’ That was another joke and she laughed.
This mess
we’re in
, went the song.
The city sun sets over me. And I have
seen the sun rise over the river … This mess we’re in.
This sort
of music was familiar to her. As a teenager she had consoled herself to the sound of countless guitar bands. Like millions of others, she sat in her room with the curtains drawn, headphones on. It irritated her mother, who thought she was wasting her time. She was indiscriminate – miserablism to the sound of a guitar was fine enough. The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Field Mice, The Breeders, Babes in Toyland, The Sugarcubes, The Pixies.
A dreaded sunny day so let’s go
where we’re happy and I’ll meet you at the cemetery gates.
Keats and Yeats are on your side … they were born and then
they lived and then they died. Seems so unfair, I want to cry.
She had listened to The Pixies at the age of sixteen, touting around in second-hand shops for bargain bohemian cut-offs, wearing grandad coats and black plimsolls. Andreas had been six at the time, though perhaps that didn’t matter. She had always liked guitar music. But she was quite eclectic, even as a kid. Opera, classical orchestral, plainsong.
La Traviata
, Bruckner, Mozart,
Carmen,
Schoenberg, Tallis, Schubert, Cage, Glass, anything, almost anything, except jazz.
We sit in silence you look me in
the eye directly
sang Thom Yorke in a falsetto. Rosa tapped her foot. She had recently stopped listening to music, because she had sold her stereo and all her CDs. Of course, this is youth, she remembered. Not so much has changed.