Ménage (15 page)

A SUDDEN MOVEMENT
woke him in fright. From the bottom of the bed frame two eyes stared at him, huge, the very image of Dot’s. As he tried to focus, the eyes joined a tiny body that ran laughing from the room. He nudged Dot.

‘Shit! I think . . . Molly just . . .’

She moaned and pulled the duvet around herself, exposing his every-morning erection. He fought the duvet back and tried to cover himself, searching for his pants and trousers on the floor only to find the used condoms. The voice of the South American nanny from down the hall. ‘
Bambino, silencio. Mama dormi
.’

This had been the third time he had slept over with her and although he had said he wanted to meet her child, he’d been postponing.

He pulled the duvet from Dot and she was flailing for it, grumpy, trying to hide the light from her face and cover her naked body all at once. He felt a fool, standing wrapped in her duvet, as he hopped about trying to pull his trousers on underneath the thing, then falling on his arse and cracking his head against the wardrobe. As if on cue, the child ran back in with arms full of paper and pens shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy, wake up!’

‘Molly,’ he should say. ‘Hello, Molly.’

He shot Dot a glance. She sleepily extended her arms to the child and brought her to her naked breast. This was wrong, all wrong.

‘Mummy, I wanna do a picture, wake up, wake up!’

Owen got his trousers on and turned his back as he pulled on his T-shirt. The child was giggling at him.

‘Mmmmm, baby,’ Dot muttered, ‘you OK . . .? This is Owen, he’s . . . say hello to Molly, Owen.’

Owen raised an embarrassed hand – ‘Hi, Molly’ – then reached and stuffed the condoms into his pocket. ‘Eh, look,’ he said to Dot. ‘I really should go.’

Dot protested, and even asked him to come onto the bed with her and do some art with Molly. Her nipples brushing the child’s cheek, Dot enfolding the child in her naked legs, and covering her four-year-old head in kisses. It was not right. Not right at all. He said they’d speak soon and left them in the midst of the child’s screaming for her mother’s attention over the sound of his many awkward goodbyes.

He was caught at the door by the nanny who shot him a recriminatory glance.

‘See you . . . soon,’ he called back through to Dot.

Outside he chastised himself for not having given her a day and time for their next meeting.

In the following week Dot was away in New York taking part in the anthology show on the history of video art. He’d got three emails from her. They all talked of art, of Nam June Paik and Douglas Gordon, and of the stress, and how she was sick of it, dragging Molly round the world and Molly couldn’t handle jet lag and it must be the reason why she was such a brat and was unable to focus on anything. And how she needed to change everything or give up art or get married or hire a slave or . . .

None of the messages mentioned their nights together.

So he had called some fuck-buddies.

But with Sue he’d been barely able to maintain the pretence of post-coital conversation. And with Sharon he’d fallen into a funk after the act and asked if it was OK if she left so he could sleep alone. On the second failed attempt with Toni she’d laughed and said: ‘So, what’s her name?’
Michele
had got up halfway through and shouted at him because she just knew he was thinking of someone else. So that was it. Funny as it seemed. What was most offensive to the world of infinite interchangeable bodies was the secret whisperings of love.

Over two weeks since she left and she must have been back in London, but she had not called and he was losing sleep and had to cancel a few pieces of journalism. To be lovesick this late in life.

Maybe this was her revenge. To appear enigmatically then leave again. Like that call from Saul in the night. To make him break the resolution he thought he’d reached, to make him spin out the anxieties for another fifteen years.

Four days of the sickness and then the phone rang. The number was withheld. He knew in his bones that it was Saul. If the number had been there he’d have had it barred. He picked up to tell the man to leave him alone, but it was Dot.

‘Owen, thank God, look, I just got in, I’m in a cab, Consuela didn’t meet us at the airport, it’s a real mess, look, sorry about this but, I’ve got to be up early tomorrow at the studio to take a call about Zurich, so it would be much easier to crash at yours, me and Moll, would that be too weird? I’m going to have to get another nanny. I’ve got some duty-frees, would that be OK?

So then Dot was on his doorstep with her grumpy bleary-eyed child in hand. He struggled with the springs and metal of the sofa bed in the living room. He suddenly felt he was being watched. The child was in the doorway in Hello Kitty pyjamas, holding an in-flight toothbrush bag.

‘Hello again, Molly,’ he said and gave her a little wave.

‘Mommy says Kurtie killed himself.’ She had an endearing mid-Atlantic posh accent. ‘But I think all the other singers murdered him cos they were jealous.’

‘Sorry?’ He really had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Nirvana!’ the kid said, stomping her foot.

‘Oh, OK. Really, so your mum lets you listen to grunge?’

She stared at him.

‘You’re weird,’ she said. ‘But that’s OK. I’m weird too,’ and pootled back down the hall to her mother.

He was bewildered.

Later, he waited alone in his study as Dot read her child a bedtime story.

‘“Lady Frogspawn was so tired of being a horse.”’

Every word random. Totally bewildered.

That night Dot fell asleep before any explanations were forthcoming. As he held her while she slept, he thought of how it had always been like this with her. Huge life-changing events happened with no discussion or plan. Sentences started up from nowhere and were left unended. Lady Frogspawn and Kurtie. Weird, yes, but I’m weird too, he thought.

It started with contact lens solution, then deodorant, then her toothbrush and woolly slipper-socks; her copy of Plath’s unabridged journals that she left by his bedside, that she never seemed to get more than a page or two into before reaching for a kiss or falling asleep, that he sometimes had to prise from her comatose fingers. And her toothbrush lying next to his, his examining of the bristles, the little traces of blood because she brushed too vigorously. That week she’d bought a second toothbrush for Molly and it was there in his sink cabinet. A small investment in their future. It made him laugh. Her hairs in the shower drain; her little Post-it notes to herself, stuck on whatever object was at hand, whenever a brilliant new idea came to her, that said cryptic things like: TRY VIDEO FEEDBACK and THREE PEOPLE IN A ROOM and MILK THISTLE DETOX.

As he went about his day, finding her hairs everywhere, on his keyboard, on the coffee cup that had been his favourite
before
she claimed it as her own; the lipstick kiss on the rim of her wine glass; the smell of her perfume in his bed; the subtle scent of her sex on their sheets, it became increasingly absurd to him, this pretence that they were ‘just seeing each other’.

There was much talk of the difficulty of selling her flat in the recession and maybe renting it or redecorating it first and of the search, always, for the new perfect place to live, and how sweet he was to be helping her out. And it was crazy that Molly was in nursery in Notting Hill and not somewhere nearer London Bridge because it meant Dot was leaving her home an hour earlier to commute then leaving her studio an hour earlier just to pick Molly up.

‘What am I fucking doing?’ she said on the phone just yesterday. ‘Putting in four hours’ work a day and spending the rest of my time running from –’

‘Tube to tube.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d . . .’

Yes, he understood, but did she, as to where this was headed? Her impromptu flustered calls brought a sense of expectation to his days. Would she call around four, or earlier? What would her excuse be this time?

‘God, I just can’t face cooking tonight!’

Or ‘Molly’s got toothache and we’re stuck here in the studio.’

Or ‘I’ve got to do a radio interview at 6.30 a.m. It’d be easier to crash at yours.’ Or any of the many excuses that always ended with the same line unspoken. So Owen would find himself saying it for her: ‘Fine, just pop over then.’

After their first month had passed, the time of day when she called got earlier and earlier and the pretence that she was just popping round on a whim became increasingly, endearingly, transparent.

He slept at Dot’s twice a week and she slept over three or four times at his. Leaving them just a day or two apart,
the
hours of which were usually spent on the phone to each other. And, absurd, on the days that he slept over at hers, that they’d both have to take the ten stops on the congested Central Line back to Bank, for her to change to go south to her studio which was only, actually, four stops from his flat.

Her aromatherapy night oils, three now, in their bottles by his beside: lavender, thyme and bergamot. And their little spills that had started seeping into the covers of his books. Yes, they were putting on a brave show. Both thriving on the thrilling denial of facing where this was ultimately heading.

And he had committed to writing the essays on the
Nine Works
. There were deadlines now, six weeks till Zurich, and much work to be done, writing about her art with the required objectivity, to be her critic, to make an historical appraisal. The DVDs stacked and ready to watch. A month, it would take.

On their late nights, after a typical dinner of pesto and pasta and Molly put to bed in the spare room, settling down on the sofa with a bottle of Rioja and a movie, he’d find himself stealing glances at her.

They were sitting watching TV in his lounge and her hands sat face down in her lap. Those wrists she always hid from him, the silver scars he knew were there and would have longed to have kissed.

The hands, impassive, looking as if she did not know how perfectly proportioned they were. Just tools for her, two objects she threw in the air when ranting. The way her thighs had filled out so slightly, womanly, that tiny bulge round the top of her jeans, her top, her breasts, braless, as always, beneath, the tiny points of her nipples that made him recall the sucking, the hardening between his fingers. Her long, long neck and the way she rubbed it sometimes as if trying to reconnect her head to her body. The taut tight skin of her cheekbones, ankles, neck, the tiny creases that spoke of
survival
. And how she tucked her feet under her thighs when on the sofa, the way those long slender feet would brush his leg and she would say ‘Sorry’, pulling herself into herself. The endearing clumsiness of her every move: she would have laughed at if he ever told her. The way her fingers played with her now long hair, as if remembering how close she’d once shaved it, almost to the skull. The way she would sometimes catch him staring and laugh to herself, and just as he was about to tell her how beautiful she was she would kick him gently with that slender foot and laugh.

‘Stop it!’

She had just caught him again. She did not kick, but spoke.

‘But you know . . . I don’t want to get into a . . .’

The game of second-guesses.

‘ . . . a long-term thing again?’

‘God, yeah, it’s so fucking . . .’

‘ . . . stifling?’

‘Yeah, yeah yeah . . . so glad you agree.’

These lines they swapped, taking each other’s. Dot sometimes finishing Owen’s for him. To remind and caution each other. The words that would stop abruptly as the eyes looked to lips and eyes closed and lips were found. This shared sense that they were doing something dangerous, forbidden. She would break away then and say: ‘I’ll never do the . . .’

‘God, me too. I mean, what does it mean, this . . .?’

‘ . . . falling in . . .?’

‘Exactly . . . sounds like . . .’

‘ . . . like someone’s bound to get hurt.’

And in bed she whispered that this was all wrong, that she was not going to be weak again, as she stroked his cock and made it ready, as she climbed onto him and moaned as he entered her, whispering sorry, sorry, yes, yes.

Then it was Molly’s Hello Kitty toys and her grizzly bear, and a few extra nightshirts and first one then two then
five
of Molly’s favourite bedtime books, and Owen had found himself online, shopping for Hello Kitty child-sized duvet covers. And all the time, neither of them said anything about the accumulating shared possessions, the little credit-card spendings that were starting to mount up to an investment.

Saul.

On the day that Dot had brought round Molly’s inflatable bouncy castle Owen found himself thinking of Saul. There had been maybe three late-night phone calls in that last month. He had turned the ringer off and stared at the flashing light, willing it away. BT informed him that they could only bar a known number, not a withheld one. He’d been developing this paranoia that somehow, impossibly, Saul knew everything and wanted to destroy it. A shadow had been following him on the street. Every time he turned to look there were only strangers with shopping bags. On the nights Dot slept over, he pulled the phone from the wall socket, discreetly.

‘Man is one and woman is his negative. History has made her so,’ Saul had once said. ‘One plus minus-one equals nothing.’

Midway through the ridiculous exertions of pumping up the castle, he found himself saying words to her he’d promised he would never say again.

‘Look, this is crazy, why don’t you just move in?’

‘I . . . I couldn’t . . .’

‘Seriously, what the fuck am I doing rattling around here by myself . . . C’mon. At least till you find your new place. It’d give you a chance to get Notting Hill cleared up for selling too. You bring enough stuff here for a month, pack the rest and . . . it’s not like I’m . . .’

‘I know, but it’d be . . .’

A line from Saul flashed through his mind.

‘ . . . impossible.’

The smile on her face seemed to acknowledge it. Owen finished the line off, to claim it as his own.