Serious Sweet (36 page)

Jon was making what his mother would have called a spectacle of himself –
and she should know –
and strangers were finding him more difficult to ignore than perhaps they'd have preferred.

So then, listen. Although I can't guarantee you'll understand.

‘And the woman … she does, absolutely, have one of those thin corner-shop carrier bags with her and in it there is a fairly new pair of shoes and some less new shoes and some kind of winter hat and I don't want shoes or a hat. I have nothing I can say to her. I have never knowingly met someone who cannot feed their own child.'

Milner let out a derisive little huff of breath which Jon answered, ‘Or else, she was – of course, because the poor are always wicked – conducting some fabulously profitable business which involved having to tell strangers humiliating lies.' Jon leaned in towards Britain's last remaining Real Journalist.

He calls John Pilger a dizzy blond who's up himself and says Greg Palast is a wanker in a hat …

‘I decide to give her some money. Less money than I could afford. Enough money for some milk, or some heroin, or some food … but not enough, because she'll need milk, or heroin, or food for a very long time. And I tell her that I'm fine for shoes and hats and then she reaches one hand into her top – this thin top she's wearing – and she brings out her breast – small breast … She's not drug-thin, but she is thin. This flawless skin … Wiry little woman on her own in the street, showing her breast to a stranger and she's telling me that I'm a good man and that she thanks me.'

Jon glowered across at one rugby man who is staring at him, or perhaps only pondering thin air.
It's not as if I have much substance.
And Jon didn't say aloud that the woman had much the same build as his mother – the figure of a slim fighter, of someone who is slim because she has to fight. But he does feel that he should continue – go right to the end – hit the buffers. ‘And she squeezed out milk from her breast. You understand me? There, in the street, she is explaining to me that she is expressing milk in the street to prove she has a kid. She wants me to know she's not lying. She has a kid and the kid needs milk when she can't give it, needs the follow-on stuff and also needs all of the other things kids need. Her flow of milk is proof she isn't lying. As if this is always demanded and indignity is necessary at all
times, in all places.' And Jon paused and then – being overly audible again – said, ‘Fuck.'

And Meg would have said that with me, before me – she would have held my hand through this, all of this, and it would have been not so bad, not quite so bad.

Jon coughs while the male escort of the cake celebrity glowers across at him for sullying the hearing of a woman whose fondant rose petals were pure as an anchorite's prayer.

He has an eloquent glower and it does seem to imply all that and slightly more.

Jon lowered his chin and prepared to continue softly, while being of the opinion that purity was something which no longer truly existed and perhaps never had.

No. Wrong. It exists. So many people wouldn't be so pleased they could destroy it, if it didn't initially exist.

Purity exists, the problem exists … People like me – any people, just people who are people – we all suppose that purity and the problem always stay apart.

‘And the woman's crying and I'm apparently a good man again – better than I was when she first said it – and she's lifting up her arms like a girl, wanting to be hugged and I can't hug her because she has her breast still there, still naked, and if I hug her like that … I can't, can I? If I held her, half-naked in the fucking street, as if that's OK and I have the right … That can't happen. And it looks as if maybe she'll cry because I won't touch her and it would only be the kind of hug I'd give my daughter … That's what she wants, that level of acceptance … But then she sort of works out what's wrong and straightens her top and covers herself … She looks like a kid remembering something obvious and being that bit clumsy about it and … then I do … I do hug her. Of course.'

If somebody will hug you, will hold you, then you're not as unclean as you think, or as you are being led to believe … You're not completely done for – you're a going concern.

Jon stood up suddenly, almost lurched up, while the floor objected, fluctuated – one, two, three – like an uneasy heart and then agreed
to be flat again, under his feet. ‘And I didn't want to know what actual trouble she was in – the detail – it was none of my business. She seemed to be a refugee from somewhere softer … from somewhere that hadn't required degradation … She seemed to be waiting to wake up still, and to find that she was OK and her kid was OK and food in the house and heat and … objects, toys … Comfort. I suppose. That could have been nonsense. I was only guessing. I often guess wrong, am wrong – I'm wrong. I've been wrong for years, I've been off course … ' He shook his head back and forth and was surprised he didn't hear a noise – something like wet matter, or maybe the silly rattle of a stick running down along a fence. ‘My point would be that there is no world within which you don't give money to that woman. No matter what. There are no other considerations that matter. You give her the money.'

Christ I'm tired.

And wrong and condemned and infectious.

Jon cleared his throat –
I sound raw
 – and pushed himself on, his tongue heavy under and over the words: ‘There is no world …' And then the air around him got simply too clotted, too unbearable. ‘Milner … I take no further interest. I'm done.' And he turned and began what was now a long and sagging and weirdly angled walk across the few yards between him and the door. At his back there was an outburst of half-serious cheering that blurred into laughter and a few bangs at a tabletop. It had nothing to do with him.

I take no further interest, because everything is over now.

It's all done.

He released himself into the little shock of darkness, night. There was a languid straggle of smokers loitering outside at the foot of the steps, murmuring in bands and clouds of conversation and carcinogenic breath.

When I walked away from the woman, there was this guy sitting on the wall beside the jerk chicken place. He was smoking. Off duty from the kitchen. I knew him – he's called Samson, he's a nice person. We chat. I've tried his chicken. But that evening he sucked his teeth at me and laid this long stare down against me and he said, ‘Ought to be ashamed.'

And I couldn't tell who he meant should be ashamed.

I didn't know who he meant.

I'm out there in my ex-council bedsit at the Junction, because that is where I chose to be, but I don't have to stay … I have access to other possibilities and could leave at any time. But living in the Junction – really living there – has to do with having no access to choice, about having only frailties in most directions; it's about mildew and noise and lousy window frames and botched repairs and no repairs and policemen giving out crime numbers, so that victims can keep an eye on their ongoing crimes, this daily cascade of smaller and larger risk. I am not unaware of this. And at any time I can step away and leave it. So I don't really live in the Junction. I'm playing a game, acting out some kind of purposeless mortification in a scruffy patch of SW9 – tough enough, but not so very tough, not too harsh an imposition …

And, conversely, I have submitted myself to the Junction as if it can only be a punishment – but it's a home to people and must be loved, at least liked and sometimes loved by its residents …

I am a patronising charlatan.

Oh, and Christ knows, if I hold on for a couple of years the whole bloody postcode will really commit to being upwardly mobile – the whole of London being upwardly mobile, the cost of each metropolitan square yard of earth becoming as miraculous as unicorns and mercy. And the Junction's residents are trying to improve it, so as soon as they succeed they will be cleared and then replaced with much more palatable people. Like me. People who do not quite have to live in places – who can always manage to investigate other options.

I'm permanently elsewhere. I'm an elsewhere man.

It doesn't make me a bad person.

It's all of the other failings – they do that.

Samson was right.

And I did know who he meant.

And I ought to be ashamed.

And I am.

Of everything, something, myself.

When Jon started walking, his feet didn't cope with the cobbles as well as they should. To anybody watching he'd look drunk – like a man who'd thrown it all away and then got wasted.

MEG, I CAN'T
talk and I don't think I wish to talk at this time and I can't meet you tonight. I am very sorry. I can't do this. I can't do any of this and should not have begun what I would be unable to pursue and please forgive me. It's for the best. I never intended to make you angry or sad and I know that I have and I regret it. You should never be hurt. Please don't pursue this. I am so sorry. X

IT WAS BEST
to expect your disaster – then you could be ready.

Meg was in Pont Street. She wasn't exactly lost, it was more that she knew exactly where she was and couldn't leave. She was walking and walking unstoppably, back and forth between the tall ranks of salmon-pink mansions, the too-much terracotta and red brick: apartments stacked up underneath their Dutch gables, Victorian window glass showing and showing and showing high rooms full of brightness and there's fresh pain on the railings … no, fresh paint on the railings … fresh everywhere … Everything here was expected to be like new – as good, or as bad as new.

I was sure that he'd end up doing this.

Brass nameplates at front doors had a rime of old polish around them after years of pressing care.

I was expecting it.

The rub of hard attention has left a stain along the brickwork – it's slightly like a greenish or greyish moss, or a smeared unease.

But I wanted to find out that I was wrong and stupid and worrying over nothing because that's what I always do. I wanted to be me and love a clean man.

He was supposed to be a man who didn't fucking …

Being sad about a man … I'm not going to again.

It ends badly.

I won't.

And fuck you and fuck you and fuck you, Jon Sigurdsson.

I bet you could afford to live here.

So go ahead and why don't you fucking live here.

You go and have everything you fucking want.

Jon Sigurdsson, you don't have me.

Jon Sigurdsson, you don't want me.

No one would want to live here, though – not if you were sensible, not even if you could – you'd have to suspend too much of your disbelief, ignore everything but the prettiness you came home to. Although Meg, of course, does not especially come home to prettiness – at least she does her best, she is a work in progress and so is her home – and so she can only make guesses about prettiness and how it would be, having no clear idea herself and –
fuckit fuckit fuckit
 – she had this … There was this …

Eventually she would have to go back to the Hill and her street and her front door and … It wasn't a good place to be. It would have …

His letters were inside it.

She was going to open the door and she would know they were there and she'd have to forget them or else she would be in this pain – this … It was like somebody reaching inside you and doing what you hadn't asked or wanted or needed and what you did not deserve. Even you did not deserve it.

I won't sleep. And If I don't sleep then I'll be … I'll need …

All around her there must be old money and new money, wrapped up snug indoors and being happy, or being – you never knew, but it generally happened one way or the other – being junked up, or drunk, or married, or living with someone, or being with someone in dangerous ways – all of the usual mess and disaster, like anywhere else, but with nicer carpet, nicer worries, much more expensive fixes for much more expensive mistakes.

He was too scared and once you're frightened then your plans all come apart. I fucking know that, I fucking know, but I get scared and I was trying to hold it together, I was holding it together, I was being better than I am, better than me.

I did that for him.

She'd been up and down these few Knightsbridge blocks, making a rat track, wearing this furrow between the point where Pont Street was forced to cross over Sloane Street and the junction where the pavement lost its name and had to be called Beauchamp Place.

And he fucking liked me. He said it. He said. He said love. There was … He said.

He didn't even phone me – he ran away by text.

Meg didn't seem able to go any further than Sloane Street.

I can't go back to not sleeping.

She was caught in these few blocks – back and forth – getting cold, or shivering, which wasn't exactly the same thing.

Not sleeping, you get the big bad dark and I don't know how to fill it except in the ways that I can't any more … so I won't sleep, then … But if I won't sleep.

And she was halted at the foot of this hard, high watchtower … it's a church spire, but when she looks up at it, the thing seems aggressive and more like a prison, but also … It has a simplicity … It puts up its calm and implacable weight on the corner of its street and it's making her gaze, strain, and it seems dizzying and judgemental and too big.

It's beautiful and when you don't feel the way you need to, you can't deal with beauty – it can sod off.

By text.

You don't say anything like that in a text. You don't do that.

It's acting as if I'm nothing and I don't think I'm nothing – I'm not much, but I'm not bloody nothing.

And Meg wanted somebody to take her inside the beautiful tower –
sanctuary, isn't it? A church is a sanctuary
 – she wanted them to pick her up and carry her and make her in some way absolved, the contents of heart and mind washed out until the muddy water runs quite clear and then she'd be all right and she'd find someone better and not be alone.

I can't – not awake and at night – I can't – the alone is what I can't …

But the building couldn't help her tonight, because it was empty and because buildings can't help and churches can't help and nothing can help.

I'm nothing.

I can't be alone.

I was supposed to be with him and I was doing it right, I was doing it all the right way and I was going to meetings and I was being grateful and I was doing my best and I was being my best, better, and I was telling him the truth and I was loving him because that was …

Meg walked on, this time beyond her boundary and up into Beauchamp Place.

This isn't supposed to be … There aren't enough people like me for me to be with, I won't find another, I'll be … I'll just sit in rooms and listen to strangers telling me all about the wonderful fucking stuff they do now they don't drink and I'll fucking be alone, I'll fucking be alone, I'll fucking be alone.

Shopfronts winked and glimmered, full of things women with men would wear to be with their men and to be successful with their men, full of things worth more than she ever could be.

I think he is sorry and this doesn't make sense if he's sorry … He said he was sorry and why bother to say that if you're telling somebody goodbye and you needn't be kind?

You're not being fucking kind, so why try to be kind?

If he's sorry, then he shouldn't have …

I think he is sorry.

Everything she could see was laughing at her.

Fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him.

And it wouldn't do to fold herself up here and sit on the kerb.

I can't feel like this. I need to stop feeling. I need to feel something that isn't this, or else I'll bloody die.

There is a certainty – calm and high – that she will be killed by her own emotions, that it could be possible this will happen.

And there is no room on the kerb because of the nice cars parked up nicely beside it and there is no corner to hide in because of the nice lights and the glitter from the nice windows and the shapes of the nice people outside the nice cafés with their shisha
water pipes and the nice smell of sweet tobacco, hot fruit, is swaying along the nice pavement, narrow pavement, and Meg is not a creature that belongs here. She isn't nice.

Fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him.

Meg is thirsty. She is so thirsty. This is in her like a law of physics – this rule that governs her actions and sometimes sleeps or fades but never leaves her.

Fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him.

Inside the café – this still-open café – they have things which are things to drink. When you are thirsty, you have to drink. This is simple, like the edge of a cliff, like the edge of a knife, like the edge of this happy pantomime you were acting out when really you didn't belong there – you belong with a drink.

Meg opens the door and goes in because this is better than going home.