Love (11 page)

‘Maybe,’ he replied, with a sense of foreboding.

‘I’d rather spend the money on something else,’ she said with the air of a child with a secret plan.

‘On what?’

‘First of all, on a taxi.’

He did not hear her instructions to the driver and found himself unexpectedly in the dockland among mean, steep, cramped streets and low, dark shops. Annabel’s features grew unusually animated; she glanced at him from time to time with a repressed, anticipatory glee. From the window, Lee saw a gaunt figure emerge from a doorway folded in the wings of a black cape like Poe’s raven named Nevermore but the taxi turned a corner and Buzz, if Buzz it were, was gone. The taxi deposited them on a main thoroughfare by a shop window above which a sign read: ARTIST IN FLESH.

The window was full of coloured photographs demonstrating the full range of the art of the tattooist. Men turned into artificial peacocks displayed chests where ramped ferocious lions, tigers or voluptuous houris in all the coloured
inks which issued from the needle. One man had the head of Christ crowned with thorns in the centre of his bosom and another was striped all over like a zebra. Some had flowers, memorial crosses and the words: MOTHER R.I.P. A young girl coyly raised her skirt to show a flock of butterflies tattooed along her thigh. In the centre of the window hung a very large photograph of a man upon whose entire back was described a writhing dragon in reds and blues; and every scale and fang of the beast, each flame it blew from its nostrils, was punctured into the skin for good and all unless he were unpeeled like an orange or pared like an apple. Lee experienced a sympathetic crawling of the flesh; sure, now, of her purpose, he glanced in astonishment at Annabel, who smiled seraphically and pushed at the shop door.

Lee did not know whether this ordeal was a piece of retribution or a rite of passage; nevertheless, he underwent it. The tattooist wore a prim, white, surgical coat and cleansed the ritual of a little barbarism by his care for hygiene, although the clinical asepsis of his shop and the gross attention he paid to the points and sterility of his needles affronted Lee, who could have wished for more atrocious pain, torrents of blood and an ultimate, festering wound to compensate Annabel in full for the skill with which she had devised this baroque humiliation, if she had intended to humiliate him; and, try as he might, he could think of no other reason for the exercise.

Shirtless in an enamel cubicle, he let them write her name indelibly in Gothic script and circle it with a heart so now he wore his heart on the outside, laid bare for all to see. A man in the window had a sacred heart on his left breast and Lee was now equipped with a new heart, also, as if the old one had been cut out, hand-coloured, pressed flat and reconsecrated entirely to Annabel, no longer his own to do with as he pleased. His new, visible heart was drawn in rosy red but, for her name, she chose the colour green. The needle attacked him like an electric bee and he stung and sweated beneath it, biting his lower lip, while she watched the artist plying his tool with intense concentration, her colourless
mouth ajar and the tip of her tongue protruding between her teeth. When Lee put his shirt back on, she made him pay and smiled once again, far more radiant than she had been as a bride. Weak and sick, Lee went out with her into the morning and she took his hand in hers, her long, narrow hand which was always nervously moist and unnaturally warm.

‘You’ll never deceive me again,’ she said with pale conviction. ‘What other girl would make love to you now?’

Lee realized he had credited her with more emotional sophistication than she possessed. She believed only that she had signed him; the mark was no more than a certificate of possession which gave him the status of any other object in her collection. She had not intended to humiliate him and was hardly capable of devising a revenge which required a knowledge of human feeling to perfect it. Nevertheless, he had been humiliated, even if it were no concern of hers. In wet weather, the tattoo seemed to throb and burn him; in dry weather, it itched intolerably and he was always nervously conscious of her name under his left nipple, shuddering as it did at every beat of his heart. Annabel was very pleased with the effect. Perhaps, he thought, it was a bad-conduct medal.

So they began their life alone together in the knowledge she had won a major victory over him and Lee could no longer pretend that he had rescued her. She sustained her conviction of supremacy so strongly, if in perfect silence, that soon he began to act as if he had indeed been utterly vanquished and let go all the acquaintances he had managed to keep. He ceased to visit anywhere outside the flat and spent all his free time with her. He became as silent and decorative as the statue with which she had always compared him while their home rotted around them, suffused with purgatorial gloom.

She never mentioned Buzz’s name and he never came to see them. Lee sometimes thought he would never see his brother again for as long as he lived. He had no desire to see his brother but a visit from him would have proved that the past had existed. And now he had no other evidence
that his life could once have been other than the way he lived now. His family photographs were not objective evidence that the beings in them had ever moved in a real, accessible dimension. His guilt had devised its own punishment. He acknowledged that she was far cleverer than he and began to fear her a little for he could not alter her at all, although she could change him in any way she pleased.

And now Annabel had docketed him securely amongst her things, she began subtly to evacuate herself from the room which had been her whole world, leaving Lee marooned there in miserable isolation.

Now she had two rooms, her unseen world extended its physical boundaries, though it seemed she no longer needed to populate it with as many real objects as before, perhaps because she had impressed her sorrow so deeply on the essential wood and brick of the place she knew for certain nobody could ever be happy there again. She no longer exchanged confidences with the figures on the walls. She did not bother to buy any more furniture or even to fill up the mantelpiece with bunches of leaves and berries from the park stuck into the necks of milk bottles. She lay in bed for hours while Lee was at work, sometimes drawing her pet apocalyptic beasts in her sketchbook but, more and more, merely gazing into space, absorbed in thought. The window remained boarded up and the room was always dark and shady.

Some days she did not get up at all and, if she did, she did not bother to dress or wash but lounged around all day in her nightdress, the very image of mad Ophelia, her disordered hair often caked with watercolour or gobbed with breakfast egg. But now she knew who mad people were and how they behaved, she became a little self-conscious and sometimes she looked like a blurred imitation of her former self. She did not take the drugs which had been prescribed for her and flushed them down the lavatory to conceal this omission from Lee. She kept none of her after-care appointments with the psychiatrist, but took good care to dress herself neatly on certain days of the week, as if she were going to the hospital, and Lee believed her.

Accustomed as he was to dealing with the sick, Lee fed her and cared for her, although, in herself, she seemed much the same as she had always been. Besides, he had few patterns of normal behaviour with which to compare and contrast her ways.

One day, she roused herself sufficiently to go downstairs and put his alarm clock in the dustbin. She said that the tick irritated her. After that, there was no more means of telling the time except for Lee’s wristwatch, so he was often late for work, although the days he passed at the school were scarcely different from the nights he passed at home. Both were barren. He felt as though all his vitality had drained out through the perforations of the needle. Each morning on the stairs, he passed the blonde girl, Joanne, and the swift, fascinated distaste in her glance instantly defined him as a debauched, shameless and abandoned person. Her look made Lee nervous and a little wistful. But she never missed crossing his path on the staircase and he was always aware of her precociously slumberous gaze fixed on his face when he gave her form their weekly lessons on current affairs and political institutions.

Seated at the round table in the bleak middle of a Sunday afternoon, he marked a pile of fifth-form essays on the British Constitution and found, written in a round, childish hand, only the following words on one sheet of paper: ‘They say this is a free country but I am not free in any way so stuff your free country.’ It was difficult to mark Joanne’s essay or to guess at the impulse which prompted it, though he thought she would not have submitted it to any other member of the staff. He scrawled ‘amplify’ at the bottom in red but she did not do so; it seemed the written word was not Joanne’s medium. She had a name for waywardness but Lee paid no attention to staffroom gossip though he noticed in class she was always biting her nails and her nails were brown with nicotine.

An unhappy adolescent will clutch at any straw. Joanne, who was dissatisfied, incorporated her schoolteacher in her own illusory web where, quite unknown to himself and entirely without his consent, he led a busy, active life of high
adventure and almost continuous sexual intercourse. She had never received much real affection. Her mother was dead and her father an alcoholic. When she was a small child, she found a wounded pigeon beside the railway line. Its breast and leg were hurt. She nursed it until it grew better and exercised it by allowing it to fly round and round her room. At first, as it learned once more how to fly, it blundered about from mantelpiece to chest of drawers like a raw beginner, bungling every movement, but soon it gained confidence and swooped around beneath the ceiling with the heavy grace of pigeons. It slept in the bottom of her wardrobe. One night it escaped from her room and fluttered downstairs into the kitchen where it sat on the plate rack of the gas stove, cooing, until the sound irritated her father, who kicked it to death.

She was an enthusiastic competitor in minor beauty contests out of a poignant, though unconscious, desire to be publicly acknowledged a pretty girl, yet she had a certain optimism and thought she might easily satisfy her desires as soon as she was sure what they were.

Lee sank more deeply into a melancholy so alien to his nature it never occurred to him he might be unhappy for he associated unhappiness with a positive state, with scarcely tolerable grief or furious sorrow authenticated by a death or a disaster, not with this unmotivated absence of pleasure that dulled the colours of the approaching spring and took the dimensions from the things around him so everything was reduced to flat, ineffectual shapes. He raised his arm and no shadow fell for Annabel had taken out his heart, his household god, squashed it thin as paper and pinned it back on the exterior, bright, pretty but inanimate.

Yet, always on the point of disintegrating, he contrived somehow always to hold himself together for he sincerely believed that, since the world was so full of a number of things, it was a moral imperative to be happy as a king. This was the final modification of his puritanism; that if he had enough to eat and a roof over his head, he knew he ought to be content even if the king he always thought of in connection with the smiling couplet he repeated to himself every
morning was Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. He lost his self-consciousness for it no longer served him any function and he revealed the aggressive reserve which had always lain beneath his acquired ease of manner. He ceased, almost immediately, to be charming but his beautiful, collected walk changed, or, rather, intensified in character. He strode along with more determination and far greater arrogance now he knew there was nowhere to go.

If his fatal sentimentality demanded that the promises he had made her and the anguish they had shared should, in some way, unite them, he could see with his own eyes that no union had been achieved. Because they spent so much time in silence, it was always possible for Lee to deceive himself they shared an unspoken and profound closeness; only when he occasionally spoke to her did the space between them become apparent and sour. By Easter, he had almost given up talking altogether and smiled only in fits of extreme absence of mind.

Their life passed in a diffused dreariness and Lee could not guess the subject of Annabel’s reveries for she took good care not to speak of the absent brother. Besides, she did not suffer from the loss of her playfellow for, since she no longer saw him every day, every day he became more real to her and, though she did not long for him, she waited for his physical return with a certain irritation that it was delayed so long. On the other hand, he might return to her in some other shape. Sometimes she thought of him as a mean, black fox and sometimes as a metamorphic thing that could slip in and out of any form he chose, so surely he could briefly inhabit a bird perching outside on the balcony, for he had no fear of heights. Then, again, he was equally at home in subterranean regions and could have become a mouse she sometimes heard, gnawing the interior of the wall. She remembered the game they had played with his father’s ring and thought it very likely he could shift his shape and come to visit her, if only with the other shadows, at night. She grew more friendly with the night-time shapes of things, for now they might possess identities.

Although she hardly budged from her bed, she often, in
her turn, visited him in his new room. He had found himself a dark and brooding habitation where light filtered thickly, if at all, through blackened windows on to his piled relics and everywhere among the knives and jars of acid hung photographs of herself. She spent far more time in this imaginary room than she did in her own home, which seemed to her now not a home but a transitory lodging. She threw away Buzz’s ring only in order to deceive her husband for she had decided to embark upon a new career of deceit and she knew, if she were clever, she could behave exactly as she wished without censure or reprimand, almost as if she were invisible whether she wore the ring or not. Lee no longer dared be angry with her no matter if she stole, forbore to wash, or pushed him away in bed because he was so frightened of the possible consequences.