Mountains of the Moon (7 page)

Eight hours? Ten hours and forty-six minutes. I walk outside into the blinding headlights half alive. Men come, husbands, to collect the women. They’ve sat and waited. I get a lungful of exhaust fumes and fall into the flow of let’s-get-home. I’ve got a violent shiver trapped inside me. My every fibre is cross-wired. I’d like to faint. But I can’t. Someone mistakes my anguish for a smile.

“All right.” They cut across me.

I need something to eat, that’s all it is. I need to sleep. That’s all it is. I’ll get something to eat on Thursday; it’s only two more days. I’m shattered, that’s what it is, can’t sleep in the apartment, keep thinking I’ve got something on me. I work hard at walking, these shoes are crippling; that’s why I’m so skint: I bought the shoes from a charity shop; toilet rolls and bleach; a light bulb for the landing; I paid my water rates. I bash into a chain-link fence and bounce back on track. Someone in a car has stopped. Maureen’s face unrolls in the window, I think it’s Maureen. She gestures me a lift. Fueled with gratefulness I run around to open the door and get in the passenger seat. She drives like someone who has never done it before.

“Where are you going to?” she says.

“Montpelier.”

“Oh dear! What a shame!” She stops the car, seems really disappointed. “We’d be all right going but I’d have to drive back through St. Paul’s on my own, my husband wouldn’t be happy about it. I’m sorry, Ashley, I really am.”

Not as sorry as I am, Maureen.

“That’s OK,” I say, “I understand—thanks for stopping all the same.”

I try to be kind; it’s my only chance at beauty.

Curb crawlers light up the backstreet route. When I don’t look up they drive off, replaced immediately by another. Go home, man with baby seats. It’s too late and cold for the really bad bastards, there’s insufficient prey on the streets. I step out of the shoes, leave them striding out on the pavement. At the hill before the vicarage I wake up and wise up passing the park.

The pub landlord has long since finished chucking the empty bottles in the tall metal bins but the last smasher is still ringing out. Taxi work below the window has dried up; the driver is sleeping on the backseat like a child. Techno underneath is still going strong with his pair of sub-bass woofers. No, it’s the idea of a van door slamming in the car park that wakes me up. The intercom blasts a tune, I know it’s him. I know. I feel my way to the door like a diver with the bends. I live and die and hear him coming up the stairs.

“There you are,” I say casually.

He doesn’t duck under the door frame and stride in to inspect the place; he takes my hand and pulls me out on to the landing. I’m not dressed, my door is wide open.

“Door, Pete,” I say. “Keys. Trousers.”

He has my hand; I trip along behind him down the stairs. Techno’s door is wedged open; his music is so loud and thick on the stairs; it’s painful to breathe, to swallow.

Outside is warmer than in, balmy and perfectly still. The mammoth van is abandoned on the diagonal, blue-white in the security lighting. Pete has no inclination for parking. We stop; he lets go of my hand. I look to him for instructions. He points to the van with his eyes. I look; it’s still dirty and falling to bits. The engine gives the tick of cooling metal and drip-drip-drips oil on to the gravel. I look to Pete for another clue. I follow his gaze to the metalwork of the door wing mirror. Something is on the wing mirror. A bat, hung like a parachutist up in a tree. It’s dead, I’m sure, with its head at an obscene angle.

“Listen.” Pete cocks his ear close to it.

I don’t know what he takes, to make his eyes this wide, to fix this open-mouthed wonderment. I bend with my hands on my knees and strain my ear at the bat. I hear my pulse; synapses snapping, nerve fibres crackling with static; a bird in the park is singing its heart out, pausing now and then, ever-hopeful of an answer. I squint at the moss-green pixels in Pete’s eyes, search for some kind of picture. His hair is dripping wet and his face is dribbled with sweat, he would have me believe that the bat is singing, conducting it with his little finger. From the bat I hear nothing but out on the street the payphone is ringing; the taxi man—I hear him yawning, “
Half an hour.
” Up the hill Panda starts yapping at some four-o’clock-in-the-morning person, passing Gwen’s car.

Pete sketches a spooky laugh in the air. I think it’s a laugh reserved for me.

“Come on, Amazonia,” he says. He turns, goes back in the main entrance and takes the stairs ahead of me, four at a time, disappears around the turnings. On the wrong landing he ducks under Techno’s door frame, strides into Techno’s lounge.

“All right, mate?” I hear Pete say. “I’ve just popped in to turn this down—don’t get up.”

In my apartment, the quiet is breathtaking. I make coffee, without milk and sugar, handy because I don’t have either, while he checks out the airing cupboard and the bathroom cabinet. His shoe leather explores the painted landscape in each of the rooms.

“I didn’t know you were an artist,” he says.

I pretend I can’t hear him; my voice would give me away. I make him coffee in the bone-china cup and saucer that we stole, years ago, from the Swallow Hotel. I thought coffee was doubtful. It was half past four in the morning, Pete was in his market clothes, looked like he’d slept in his van for days. I was tragic, barefoot and fresh from treachery. The van was still shuddering long after he turned it off. Sure enough, the ferocious little doorman strode out from under the awning and opened Pete’s door for him.

“Hello, Mr. Eden, sir,” he said.

We had coffee in the drawing room, sat on identical sofas at opposite ends of the room. Then we went to Ashton Court woods. I remember the scene with the blue flowers, birch-leaf shadows draped like lace on Pete’s bare shoulder. Even now, waiting for the kettle to boil, it tips my head back against the wall. Villeroy and Bosch. He found the china cup and saucer a few months ago; they’d been under the passenger seat of the van, rattling for twelve years.

Now for the first time he’s in my place, arranged on the cushions like Valentino dragged through a wet hedge. The cup rattles on the saucer, amplified by silence. The lounge goes on forever. He chews on a matchstick and stares at the rattle; it rattles all the way to the floor beside him. I strike a match to light the candles; my hand rattles left and right of the wick, needs my other hand to steady it. I sit in the shade of a painted thorn tree and try to roll a cigarette, it’s tobacco butt end and tea-leaf mix, a trick I learned in prison. His voice is pitter-patter.

“I like the apartment; I like how you’ve done it.”

“What—like an empty stage with a few symbolic props?”

He sketches that laugh again and skids his packet of Silk Cut over. I take out one cigarette and crumble it into the mix. His eyes flit between the illusions of the room. He gazes into the candle flames licking the wet shine on the painted floor; I hadn’t wanted the high-gloss finish but beggars can’t be choosers, as it is six candles become twelve and then twenty-four in the mirror, multiplied again in the open polished window glass. Lamplight puddles, here and there and there. His eyes cast off across a painted promising sky. Double windows, double trees, double me.

“Was the mirror already here?” he says.

Can’t raise the spit for licking the cigarette paper.

“No,” I say.

I think about Pete’s van and the struggle I had with the huge mirror. It took me six hours to move it half a mile, from the skip where I found
it leaning. The trees are breathing in and out. He lets out smoke on a sigh.

“Sanctuary.” He lies back like a great tree brought down in a storm.

I blow across the floor to the record player. The needle rips across the grooves; eventually I get it on the start of the title song. Edith Piaf stirs “Exodus” up, thick in the vast empty room. I don’t know where Pete goes. I see a woman in the mirror watching him, watching me.

Mirror, mirror against the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

Pete is aptly named, dark and earthy, unnervingly handsome, as winter woodland is, as an oak tree in a plowed field is. I still try to kiss him. I like to see him turn his face away.

“Exodus” plays. I don’t know where Pete goes. When the song ends he looks for me in the illusions of the room, finds me distant in the mirror glass. Waves me over. I crawl all the way to him. He has no interest in my breasts or body, has never undone my shirt. Ours is a skinless thing about joints and limbs, my long light bones. My legs: he goes about them like something treasured, a pair of heirloom rifles, puts my feet against his shoulders, checks the pair are straight, blows dust from off my shin bones, polishes my calves, smooths and views them from different angles and cocks them at the knee. He ponders the scar on my right calf like a shame, a careless dent reducing my value. I’d be touched—if he wasn’t stroking the hypersensitive fray of severed nerves. He smooths a little air where a toe once was.

“Stand up and walk toward the mirror and back,” he says.

His arm has me do it half a dozen times; I feel silly. His eyes bid me continue; I do my best one foot in front of the other. He lies on his stomach to see my legs coming and going.

“Put the kettle on,” he says.

In the kitchen I lean on the cold wall, turn around to face it, close my eyes and rub my temple against it. He plays my nerves like harp strings, the tension fit to sing or snap. We know how easily and how happily we
could kill each other. Air just isn’t working. I put my head down between my knees; feel like a plane coming in to crash. In the kitchen he stops me falling, pins me up like a wall hanging. My legs keep dipping like I’ve got a hoop. I’m spinning. I’m spinning out.

“I don’t know whether to fuck you or call you an ambulance,” he says.

“Call me an ambulance,” I gasp.

“You’re an ambulance,” he says. Takes me down, drapes me over the work surface. Pete had a vasectomy. For all his presence I can’t feel him, I can’t feel his hands. Listen, the kettle clicks off. Listen, Pete’s trouser zip. Listen, in the cupboard under me. Pellet poison, rattling, in little silver-foil dishes.

On the cushions in the lounge, Pete drinks his coffee. I put my foot across, try to snuggle it on his ankle. He moves his foot away, chews lazily on a matchstick.

“You ruin it when you do that,” he says lightly.

Dawn light starts to show the apartment for what it really is. Brushstrokes. The sparrow lands on the branch closest to the window. Does its morning stretches, one leg then the other, seems to roll its shoulders back, opens one wing then the other. It chirrups and lets out a plaintive song. Waits for a reply.

“Are you happier here? Better than with those nutcase women?”

No reply comes. It chirrups. I wonder what the sparrow is saying to itself.

“I went around there to see you,” Pete says. “A few weeks ago; Tin-tin forgot to give me your note.”

“Was it four in the morning?” says the woman in the mirror.

“A mad old woman spun me around on the doorstep. ‘Well, fancy that,’ she said, ‘we all thought she made you up, but she’s gone now, gone.’”

“Gone,” I say.

Pete’s car keys jingle-jangle and he stands up.

“Put that song back on,” he says, “so I can hear it as I’m driving down the road.”

Pete goes.

I stay where I am. I sit and sit. There’s five coats of paint on the dominant wall but the word
Cunt
still shows through. Panda starts yapping up the hill, at school children passing the car.
Enough now.
I sit and sit. I’m back at Park Lane. The lounge is upstairs at the front of the house. I go up and open the door. Gwen is on her hands and knees, the two kneeling either side of her head have divided her hair between them and flick her back and shoulders with it, like horses’ tails. Her tongue is frantic, licking the air between them; in turn she swallows their cocks whole, spewing them back up again. Someone is suckling underneath. Heath behind her bangs away, looking up at the light fitting, at the jagged edge of a broken bulb, hanging there. Her face is twisted and ugly; she laughs and throws back her head. “We’re teaching Quentin how to do it, adequately,” she says. I see him then, fully dressed, curled up in the wing chair. Tears are streaming down his face. I step back and close the door.

Cars keep honking cos Mum’s got shorts on and all her hair pours down like custard. I bashes my head on the sump.

“Bastard.” Mum bashes her head on the bonnet.

“Stuck,” I says. “I needs the hammer.”

Mum passes it down through the engine. My fingers is good at fiddly. Water pumps is easier on a Hillman Imp, this Sunbeam Rapier int no good, Bryce got it especial for Mum so we run out of gas and can’t get no where. I hold the spanner on the stuck bolt and bash it. Slips. Ouch. Terrible. Lucky cos knuckles does grow back. I get the water pump off, crawl out to fit the new gaskit. Baby Grady’s eating daisies on the grass edge, we don’t mow it; council does.

Good thing is Auntie Fi turns up. I see her feets; even though she’s giant size her shoes is tall and pink. Mum hugs around Auntie Fi’s legs. Uncle Ike is on his crutches, got his trouser leg tucked up in his belt. I crawl out from under the car. Auntie Fi’s glasses is like a joke, but they int. Mum
says Auntie Fi is always happy cos she don’t know the seriousness of the situation. Long as she’s married to someone. She gets Uncle Ike’s leg from off the backseat and throws it over her shoulder. It’s got a different shoe on from what Uncle Ike is wearing. She always brings Mum flowers cos Auntie Fi does flower ranging. They loves each other, it works good cos Mum talks and Auntie Fi cooks us dinner. Afterward they does the Beverley Sisters and see how long it is fore Mr. Baldwin bashes on the wall. Good job Bryce has gone back to Holland. Auntie Fi don’t come when Bryce is home, cos Mum gets mouthy with Auntie Fi behind her and we has to go to the hospital.