The Twisted Heart (11 page)

This time, Joe let Kit chop up the vegetables.

‘His flat's unbelievably worn. He hasn't done a thing to it in years. The pictures are slipped in their frames, you know?—which is symptomatic of what the whole place is like. Everything's threadbare and chipped. Humpty and I have offered to help him often enough, but he always refuses. He has a niece in New Zealand. He does have friends. He's a hotshot at the bowls club on the Marston Ferry Road.'

‘Where does the name “Buddy” come from?' Kit asked.

‘Brian, but I've never heard anyone call him that.'

‘Brian. Right. So how come this flat's so slick then?' she said. ‘I mean, I guess I hear dons grumbling about—they get paid so little, and how it's such a doss in the States, compared.'

‘The answer is that it isn't my flat. It's an investment property of my father's.'

‘Oh, God, I see.' While Kit mulled over his reply, Joe melted butter in a pan, which caused her stomach to turn hungrily. So far that day she'd had breakfast, a pint of custard and a few mouthfuls of shandy. At the prospect of a square meal, a meal made by somebody else, she felt almost ill.

‘You're right. I would never live like this on my own account, even if I could afford to.' Joe glanced round at Kit, then said, ‘Michaela's a bit of a one, yes?'

‘She has this boyfriend,' Kit replied. ‘Everyone in our house pretends he's imaginary. He's not, but everyone pretends he is because basically for the past year and a half he's been in the Amazon rainforest doing analysis of soil samples, and when she shows you a photo you pretend it looks nothing like the last photo of him and so on. It's just a joke, but the truth is she's lonely without him. She's a bit of a good-time girl, and I think she finds it hard that he's away. She's very sociable, but she pines, and—'

‘And you're good friends?' said Joe.

Kit tried to think. ‘Yes, maybe. Not exactly. When I first met her, before we started sharing, I quite disliked her. But I came to see that this was very much a snap judgement on my part. I mean, I saw that there was more to her, naturally enough. But it turns out—' she stared at the vivid colours of
the vegetables, a red pepper bleeding under her knife, ‘—it turns out that, you know, like constellations of stars holding steady, my snap judgements have definitely lingered. They may only come out when it's dark, but they're always there. I mean, I do realise there's still a lot about her that I don't—' Kit broke off to wonder why she was being needlessly ungenerous in this way, and finished her line of thought inside her head: there was still a lot about Michaela she didn't know. Of course, Kit reflected, there were only so many people you could take on properly in a life, whatever that meant. And as she starkly thought this through, she found she suspected—more than suspected, really—that so far as people she cared about went, she was some way from having reached a human limit.

She was so hungry that the meal seemed to come and go without her sensibly appreciating it, until they arrived at a point where Joe, pushing a coffee in front of her, said, ‘Shall we shift through?'

The enormity of saying, ‘Oh the kitchen's all right, let's stay here'—she couldn't make herself do it.

Drink this in sips, Kit thought. She stood up, picked up the coffee and followed him, glancing, as she had done on her previous visit, into his impressive, antique mirror.
Drink
it in sips
, she told her reflection,
string it out
. In the speckled, silvery glass, she looked distinctly flushed.

‘Oh—this picture,' she said, and stopped to take in properly a large pencil study that hung to the side of the mirror, next to the archway through which they were about to pass.

‘Ah, you've noticed,' said Joe. ‘What do you think?'

‘Well, I mean, at the risk of sounding completely silly, am I—doesn't she look like me?'

‘I know.'

‘You think so?'

‘Very much I do. I was startled when I first saw you for that exact reason.'

‘Yes?'

‘Yes. I thought, here's my picture, she's jumped off the wall and gone out for a dance.'

‘Was that why you followed me to the bus stop?'

‘No,' he said. A look flitted across his face. ‘No, I followed you because—you know it was such a crush and everyone had to divide into boys and girls? The way you managed the steps on your own; it was unlike anyone else there. For an hour I watched you, and wanted to be the person you were imagining dancing with.'

This answer made Kit feel so shy that she simply blanked it out. ‘Who is she?' she said, pointing at the girl.

‘Just a model, I think. It was done by a friend of Rodin's. My father picked it up for a song in a junk shop, and he can't sing.'

‘You mean, extremely cheap?'

‘Yes, considering. The artist's called Rothenstein. I think he was an early director of the Tate. I should find out. I'm not quite sure.'

‘You know there's this whole schtick about the image of the female reader in Victorian art?'

‘No, I don't know.'

‘I mean, boring, boring,' Kit paused, ‘—well, actually, it isn't
completely
boring—in art and in literature, I mean. I
wonder if he drew her because she was reading, or, because he was drawing her, he let her read to get through the time.' She leant in closer. ‘She's very peaceful, isn't she, despite looking like she's effectively unwrapped for display. It really is disconcerting how much she looks like me. I just have to say that. It makes me feel odd.'

‘It's even odder for me, now I'm seeing you both at once.'

‘Your father gave her to you?'

‘No.' Joe laughed a little, and not happily. ‘No, this whole place is his and most of what's in it. She isn't mine. I shouldn't have said that. That's mine.' He gestured through the archway to the sitting room, and an impressive black piece of furniture with shell inlay on the doors. ‘It's a replica of a desk by Charles Rennie Mackintosh; original was one of the most—I think—one of the most expensive pieces of twentieth-century furniture ever at sale.'

‘Blimey. I quite like it.'

‘Yes. This is supposed to be the ideal double bachelor pad. Chrome and antiques; probably passé, who knows.'

‘With mildly suggestive sketches of late nineteenth-century women readers?'

‘One.'

‘One.'

He took her out onto his balcony. Kit, on her previous visit, hadn't noticed the picture, had barely considered the sitting room and hadn't realised the balcony even existed. Here it was, though. Joe shifted a Japanese screen to one side. To get out, you had to climb through a window.

‘It's Buddy's bathroom underneath,' he explained, ‘and
the ground-floor kitchen under that. The extension isn't original to the house. They put this balcony on top without ever making proper access, hence the need to clamber.'

‘Buddy's flat has to be enormous,' said Kit, climbing out after him. Inside the flat it had grown quite dark, but outside, the sky to the west was holding its light—an empty, fading brilliance.

‘It is. Must be worth a lot these days, but he lives like a mouse.'

‘With his wodges of Stilton.'

Kit peered briefly down into the garden below, which was dotted with plastic toys, a lidded ladybird sandpit, a trike on its side.

‘Ground floor is married graduates with two little kids,' said Joe, ‘French. They've only been here a couple of months. It's a rent—change and change about.'

But Kit wasn't looking down any more, or even really listening. The balcony formed a striking contrast with the flat. On either side it was walled, and these walls were covered with wooden lattice, while at the front there was an iron parapet. In and out, in a jumble, wove a passion vine and a clematis, a jasmine, a rose; a white rambler rose in bloom. The brickwork, too, was strewn with plants that had been slipped into holes in the mortar.

Kit put down her half-empty coffee cup on a flaking and rusty, painted metal table. ‘Amazing,' she said, as she peered at the blooms and the clinging clumps of foliage.

Joe waved from one to another, ‘Snapdragons, thrift, valerian, daisies, pimpernel, wall lettuce, moss.'

‘Amazing,' said Kit again. There were baby snails on the
walls, no more than a couple of millimetres across, perfectly formed miniature knock-offs.

‘You see this red honeysuckle tucked away here?' he said.

‘It's pretty.'

‘I don't know, I've been thinking about whether to keep it. I keep thinking it looks like the trailing parts on some pimped-up tropical fish. Early October, most of these plants shouldn't still be in flower, but they are.'

‘I like the way it's almost entirely on the vertical plane, this garden, apart from these three pots,' said Kit.

‘Yes. They're actually a bigger challenge than the walls,' he replied. ‘I wouldn't mind having bare terracotta; but there are tricks to container planting, if you want them to look good all year round, that is, without endlessly adding new plants. This is a Japanese maple,' he added. ‘It should turn soon and go practically magenta. Exotics tend to turn before the native trees, although, these days—'

‘Isn't there something about prime numbers and fir cones?' said Kit, dredging up the question without thinking about it very hard.

‘You're perhaps looking for the word “fractals” as it relates to ferns?' he said. His lesser eyebrow twitched. ‘Or was it the connection between Fibonacci numbers and, for example, the ordering of seeds in the head of a sunflower?'

Kit grinned. ‘Just so you know, it was a miracle I scraped a “B” for maths in my GCSEs.' She nodded at one of the containers. ‘I guess people must occasionally
give
you new plants, though?'

‘It's not my custom to let anyone see this,' he replied.

Not for the first time that evening, Kit felt outmanoeuvred.
What a funny situation, she thought, when escaping it required you to climb through a window.

She reached for her coffee cup, searching, once again, for something inconsequential to say, and settled on, ‘I don't usually like wallpaper, but this is a bit like wallpaper that's alive.' She glanced at him hopefully. ‘I like
this
, I mean; and it must change all the time.'

‘I know. I think of this, the balcony, as being my real room,' he said. ‘Even though it's open, I don't feel overlooked. I could be, if one of the neighbours bent right out of their skylights, or if a person in one of that block of flats beyond the trees had a pair of binoculars on me; but why? And when I lie down on my back and stare upwards, I really am invisible. I can get to feeling sometimes as though I own the bit of sky above me here—not own it—as if, as if that's the right bit of the sky for me to be staring at. I like it. Humpty says he'll put it on my gravestone: “He liked looking up at the sky.”'

‘When you said “invisible”, I thought for a second you meant “see-through”, “transparent”; that when you lay down and couldn't be seen, it was because you became transparent.' Kit put a hand to the window frame. She wanted to go back inside—to leave, in fact. Life was confusing. She'd had enough of it for one day.

‘About Humpty,' said Joe, ‘you know you asked if he was all right? I just want to mention; you know how if you're crammed into a seat at the cinema and your legs don't fit, you feel too big, but if you are on the side of an enormous mountain you feel quite small, right?'

Kit let her hand drop again. ‘Believe me, I know all about
my legs not fitting into seats at the cinema, or on buses, or aeroplanes, sleeves not reaching my wrists, trousers floating above my ankles. I could go on,' she said.

‘Yes. The thing about Humpty is that I think he feels exactly the same size whatever he's doing, wherever he is. He always feels as though he's exactly the same size,' said Joe, ‘except at the weekends.'

‘You mean he's a bit mad?' she said.

Joe replied to this question merely by dipping his head. ‘What's your full name?' he asked.

‘My full name? Farr, Christine Iris.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes.'

‘Christine Iris Farr?'

‘Yes. Christine was my mother's choice, and my father's mother was called Iris. I chose to be Kit when I was about nine, because I didn't like being called “Chris”, or “Chrissy”. And by the way, I also have a brother—a half-brother—called,' she sighed, then said quickly, ‘Graham. He's miles older than me. We have the same father. My father's seventy-four. Graham's mother ran away with a man from Dundee, but left him behind, Graham, I mean. So we grew up in the same house and everything, but not at the same time, essentially. I mean I'm fond of him, but he's more like he's my uncle, kind of thing. There's twenty years between my mother and father, working out that Graham is considerably closer in age to my mother than my father is.'

‘Right,' said Joe, not apparently that interested.

Kit downed the remains of her coffee, realised what she had done and felt a pang of concern. ‘So?' she said.

‘So?'

‘What's your name?'

‘Leppard, Joseph.'

‘Leopard?'

‘Leppard.'

‘Leppard, sorry. Beg your pardon.'

‘That's all right.'

‘No middle name?'

‘No.'

Her coffee was all gone. Kit decided to announce that she was leaving. She began to gear herself up for it. ‘You know what I think's strange?' she said.

‘What?'

‘There's the sky up above, and we're down here surrounded by plants, but this is not the earth. It seems funny, you know? Do you know that Paul Muldoon poem about, one blue eye and one brown?'