The Kiss Of Life

THE KISS OF LIFE

LEE WILSON

The kiss of life

“What’s up with that bloke?” Linda says. She and Alan sit, fingers interlaced, by the glass pane. The swimming baths are busy with life, but just at the deepest pool’s edge a man who must be in his late thirties sits perched, one palm held above the abundantly agitated water. “He’s shaking like a leaf, look,” Alan says. He notes also that where his own hand is cold, Linda’s is warm. You two young lovebirds, his hopeful mother is known to coo, appearing at inopportune moments with trifle or cola. Of late, this has come to bother Alan less lightly: his teeth are troubling him, and the cherished six-pack is losing definition. Alan and Linda are both 17, they wear tracksuits. There is nothing to say about the unmanipulated dough of their faces, the carelessly set raisins of their eyes. A group of five children, two using floats and armbands, pass the man. The three swimming unaided begin snickering. And then the snickering becomes full-throated laughter. The younger two children look innocently at one another, eyes wide, and continue paddling. Part of Michael wants to yell at them, at the very least. Prickly heat visits his head, his cheeks, his chin. He could almost drown them at that moment. But he’d known there’d be a belittling of his fear, he’d known in the shower earlier, he’d known while shoplifting the new trunks he has on. Blessed by a silent youth, he’d known when he was barely

older than they are. And that’s why he’s too ready, just too poised for what today is about to ruin things. He takes a few deep breaths. He looks at his suspended arm, which has become wetter by the minute. The goose-pimples make him smile, quelling the nascent rage. Michael’s mother used to work at the pool twenty years ago, as an instructor. She used to and she doesn’t now. The woman doing her job today has been staring over; Michael has doggedly avoided catching her eye. “Do you reckon he’s a spacko?” Linda asks. Her breath on the pane obscures Michael at that point. She writes AV 4 LS in the condensed breath with her free hand. Alan lets go the other hand and wipes the window clean. Linda’s eyes leave the window abruptly, lock onto Alan’s retracting hand. “What’s up with you?” she says, her voice tense and thin. Her heart is jumping. When he was 23 Michael resolved to ‘go missing’; that was the phrase that had passed through his head, as if a reaction to his absence was more desired than the getting away. Without work, with only the weakest ties, Michael had, on the decisive morning, patiently waited in bed until his family had dragged themselves away to their respective cars. He had taken the most thorough shower of his life, scraped away at his most

thorough shave, and finally clipped his hair. He had walked into the living room, finally dressed for his disappearance, and begun rifling through the box of miscellaneous forms, photos and other papers in his father’s cupboard. He had yet, at twenty-three, to acquire a passport; he’d need a birth certificate first. The box was two inches high and its lid had had to be taped down; upon Michael’s slicing of the tape with a thumbnail, several sheets of paper had slid out, as if for want of air. Or light. As he unfolded each sheet, opened each envelope, his attention wandered back and forth between those swimming certificates, his father’s old Merchant Navy papers, and the Paris that was his destination. The City of Love. And then there it was before him. A few words were picked out almost at random, before his eyes came not quite to rest on the heading. CERTIFIED COPY OF AN ENTRY IN THE ADOPTED CHILDREN REGISTER The sound that came from Michael’s throat, though its journey had been the longer one from the pit of his stomach, people would term laughter. Michael then retrieved a leaflet from his travel bag. Would an adoption form suffice in lieu of a birth certificate? he wondered, as if considering a change of shirt. It would. But, as he stood up, everything around him was

turned strange. The immediate things: a chair, a television, a fireplace. And distant things: the road outside, the sky, air itself. The Channel suddenly seemed an untransversable expanse.

“Well spit it out then,” Linda laughs, warily. She goes to take Alan’s hands placed now again in her sight, on the table. He has begun to blush a little, looks uneasy, and he brings his hands up close to his chest, so that Linda’s fingers instead connect only with a Mars wrapper. She can still feel the sweetness on her tongue. It will be a few minutes before her attention can possibly be caught by the woman kneeling down to re-stock the refreshments machine. Alan prods and dissolves some caramel clinging to a molar. “I think I don’t want to do this anymore,” he says. It has become so that he is more comfortable to look out at the pool than at Linda. The man they had been watching has appeared close by, now, on the diving board. He’s picked the highest of the three, and Alan sees that his face is stretched into an insane-looking smile. He’s still shaking, though. Down below, the swimming instructor has left her junior class, it looks like she’s calling out to him. She’s tapping at her neck as she calls. Linda says, “Look at me.” She tries to flick the Mars wrapper at Alan, but it merely skitters sideways an inch. No one will hear it, but Michael’s lips mouth the words Goodbye, Emma. Michael stands, and stretches out his arms. He’s deaf to

those teenagers shouting at him in the queue for the board, who in turn are deaf to the swimming instructor trying to silence them. Emma. Strip from the name the flesh, drain from the name the blood; trample to dust the bones of the name. Let Emma be again merely a name. The dive is truly pathetic. No sooner has he left the board than Michael’s arms lose their straightness, and then are flailing. His legs part, his knees bend. His body is the letter N. A woman swimming alone, stiff with diffidence, though capable, sees Michael disappear into the water. She stops, and bobs. She recognises him, as he would her. One has often passed the other on buses to and from the town centre. There is usually blushing and an abrupt jerking away of heads. On their beds at home, once each of those days has slipped away, both put the uncaught gaze down to disgust. This will occasionally make them weep. Michael thinks he overheard a bus driver call the woman Jill. Jill. Linda sits alone at the table. She has just lifted her head up from its resting-place in pale, doughy hands. She fingers some change in her pocket. Her eyes are red and wet. Michael has not surfaced. The timid woman and the instructor come to notice, once the water has settled a little, that his body is still. The timid woman looks around for an instant, in habitual deference, and then pushes away from the edge of the pool. Her head disappears, a second later briefly replaced by her feet. Michael is caught in a grill vent by a chain around his

neck. Bubbles leave his open mouth. Jill tugs at the chain, and its links separate. On a locket Emma’s face disappears into the vent. Alan has appeared by the side of the pool next to the swimming instructor, in heart-red trunks. He extends his arm to bar the instructor’s way: she had been about to dive into the water. “Leave it alone. Let her,” Alan says. The instructor’s shoulders loosen and drop. No one but Alan, the swimming instructor and Jill have seen what’s happening. Children and adults alike carry on swimming and diving. Linda’s leaden body has just collapsed into her taxi. The pool manager, whose office overlooks the pool, continues having anonymous premium rate phone sex. Jill awkwardly pushes Michael’s thankfully slight frame onto some steps. She is not so mindful as to refrain from straddling him. She feels his heart. He’s pale, but there is no trace of blue. She looks at his face. He’s not what people call handsome, but Jill has long forgotten what these things mean. She does, though, understand the scars that are premature crows’ feet. She notes the fit of where their bodies have met. His scent cuts through the chlorine. She gives him the kiss of life.

Wine and cheese

Scott threw the book, a tourist guide of Paris, against the wall. Its pages fluttered like the wings of an already graceless bird, shot. Jean looked up from the hat she was making with a start. “It says in there,” laughed Scott flushing, caustic, “that the French will often treat a cup of coffee as a meal.” Jean pulled a face, lips turned down and taut for an instant. It was the face she pulled to show empathy for her boyfriend’s distastes though often she would follow it up by disagreeing, or showing she’d misinterpreted. “What, d’you think the book’s a dud? Throwing up stereotypes?” “No! No,” laughed Scott again. “I can believe it. But, a meal.” He was an anonymous-looking man who, when he could find them, wore clothes that followed the lines of his body: utilitarian, like his clipped hair. Look a bit closer and you’d see an arresting pair of eyes; but that, as he’d say when they were complimented, was an accident of nature and not worth breaking in a new quill for. Jean tried on the hat-to-be, holding the unsewn portion of the rim and adjusting it for size before a mirror. She made as if to curse, then stopped herself. Instead she muttered, “If I sew this any tighter it’ll be creased and deformed.” Scott was struggling with the stubborn cap of an Evian bottle. “What’s that?” he asked. “Have you made it too big?” He got up and walked towards the table. Jean sighed.

Scott leaned towards her ear. We could just go to Skegness again,” he said. They laughed together meekly, for different reasons, through their noses. Skegness, earlier in the year. It was an exercise in kitsch for her. They even played bingo. But Scott had been there six years running as a child. At thirty-one he trembled walking it’s streets. The scent of that burger stand by the fairground’s entrance triggered off a kaleidoscope of flashbacks. And the vendor: he was about 55. Could have been the same man. Scott cupped his hands around Jean’s chin, kissed her on the forehead. Standing behind her, the thin membrane of his blinking eyelids was all that lay between him and her upside down face. He took the hat from her hand, and the band from her hair. It seemed criminal to cover up that hair. There were masses of the stuff. Naturally it would have been brown, but Jean chose to dye it a heavy colour that didn’t seem to know whether it was trying to be auburn or black. He didn’t approve, of the dye: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but hair was never just hair, was it. He hadn’t seen its natural colour since a morning some ten days after they’d met, that point when those questions each had for the other had been answered. He patted her shoulders and stood back, said, “I think that quiche is probably warmed through.” Then he was gone from the mirror.

They were up early the next morning. The taxi was picking them up at nine and some of Scott’s packing wasn’t done. Jean had watched him at it, periodically interrupting himself to go and doodle at the piano; at one point she’d found him masturbating in the bathroom. Scott had been alone much of his youth before finding Jean at 28, when they’d

simultaneously picked up the same copy of an obscure LP. It troubled her that he’d gone on satisfying himself, it was a couple of notches away from infidelity, to her. Where to him those were his moments of fidelity. He would tell himself: I didn’t do too bad, twenty-eight years before copping out. Ten more than most. They did get on pretty well: they could talk, and made each other laugh, and neither was fussed about the cinema or clubs. But it wasn’t what he’d been hoping for all those years he’d steadfastly played dumb to others’ advances, in pubs and classrooms. Jean would often say facile things, and he’d laugh in a way that sounded as if he were laughing with her. He was laughing at his predicament. No doubt his ideal was out there somewhere - but Jean’s presence had stopped him wondering. He knew that would happen. What kept them together? What Scott told himself when he wondered why she didn’t leave was that maybe Jean was already just too strong and self-sufficient for it to matter who she was with. ‘Strong’, though. He didn’t trust that word. ‘Confident’: that was another one. There was something he said to the others, something he’d been about to say to Jean that day she suggested he move in. Nobody believes anything, went the spiel. Culture is clothing we pick with respect to where we’re going. And where did one go? Where the best cocoon could be had. Well. A cocoon was not what he wanted. These were cocoons you entered with wings and left crawling, an ugly grey nothing. Scott watched thin traces of blood disappear into the basin. He felt steeled. This weekend away was going to be a make or break affair. Did he dwarf her, or was she a fair consolation prize? If an experience could

bring out any sign, this one would. Either that or he’d see their life as the farce it otherwise was. “That quiche has played you up again,” said Jean. Her urine trickled as Scott leant over the basin, his mouth foaming. His upper cheek area was reddened. He spat out the toothpaste, didn’t say anything. Jean continued looking his way for a moment, wiped herself and left the bathroom. Scott glowered at the mirror. He read his lips miming: Fucking cheese.

“It’s a bit small,” said Jean, putting her suitcase on the bed. Scott had advance-booked them into a single room. It was the same room in the same hotel where he’d stayed at 22. He’d made out to Jean that the hotel had been fairly randomly picked; but the return seemed of some moment to him. With only a smattering of the language and a diffidence that city didn’t allow, the earlier visit was a disaster. He had wandered about, shoe leather thinning, just watching people. He had read minds, and the minds all told of the same thing. Sitting in fountains and doorways, cafés and restaurants, all bemoaned the sandstone cul de sac of their ostensible refinement. And now Scott felt an almost violent need to prove he’d been right. And not just to himself; maybe on the ferry home he’d watch Jean’s sloughing, watch the woman he’d waited for emerging from beneath. “Well,” he said, “there’s room enough to swing un chat if you’ve got one to hand.” He knelt by a leg of the bed and raised the duvet. He laughed through his nose. He’d intended, a decade previous, to carve a mark for each woman he’d bring back to that room. The leg was still

bare. While Jean inspected the shower, he scraped in his score with a key. “I’m a bit tired. Are you?” asked Jean, going to sit on the bed. “Well have a kip, then,” was Scott’s gentle entreaty. “I’m going to have a bit of a mooch about, though.” “Whereabouts will you go?” “Well there’s that forum I mentioned - in the taxi?” He looked at his watch. “I should still catch most of it, my French permitting.”

He was inside her. Not really erect. Propped on unsteady arms. “Why are you shaking?” the woman asked him, with a turn of the lip meant to convey both admonishment and endearment. She put her hands on his shoulder-blades as if to still him. “Your face is... your…” mumbled Scott. “I love your face.” The woman delivered her smile. Scott lost himself in first her lips, then her nose, then her lips again, her lips, her nose, the shape of her chin her lips the eyes lips he loved her lips her face. He lifted her head and put his arms behind to cup it, then lowered himself onto her, leaning his head into her neck, kissing. Was it better than with Jean? Yes, it was. But not much - only by default. It was not enough, it was never enough. What on earth did he want to wring from this stranger or Jean or anyone? As he pulled on his socks he looked up at the woman, sat on the bidet. He was sorry, sorry for his desire and sorry he’d not gone to sleep, sleep, next to Jean. The woman looked up as she dragged the cloth up to her belly. “You’re so quiet.” They smiled together. All he could see was a woman, a girl, robbed.

She called to the minder and followed Scott down the stairs, they passed her replacement. Outside, Scott inspected his wallet, watching the woman, from the corner of his eye, stop across the road at the window of a bookshop. She raised her hand to the glass and pressed her head up to the pane for a moment. Then she went in. Scott crossed to the bookshop and looked in at the same display: a new biography of Sartre. He grimaced.

“Hark at them,” whispered Jean, tapping on Scott’s chest. He awoke bleary eyed. A woman was nearing orgasm, calling at the top of her voice: a non-word, all consonants. A man was grunting, slightly out of time. Scott smiled. He could have been reliving his earlier visit; he sat up, as he had then. The rooms of the hotel formed a square; it worked marvels on the sound. There was a small explosion of heat under the duvet. “Jesus. What’s he using - a rolling pin? Why don’t you make that much noise, Jean?” And there it was on the windowsill, he saw: that hat. Some people didn’t know what they wanted. Silence, now. Jean went to speak, but Scott hushed her. A door closed outside. A tripping sound, more footsteps. “She nearly fell, then?” “Well she’s probably bandy. Shall I catch up with her? She didn’t sound like she could ever have enough. We could have a threesome.…” Scott jolted as if to avoid a blow. But it didn’t come. “Would you do that?” she asked, and she was grinning.

Scott straightened his back. He put on his best ironical voice and announced, “You’re enough for me, my love. Two’s company, three’s…” “Three’s a threesome,” she interrupted, tapping his ribs. And she was still grinning. Still looking at him, quizzing him. She ran her fingers along his ribs, and made a sound as if playing glissando on a xylophone. “Drdrdrooooop.” Scott was a bit skinny. She chased that thought away. Scott peeled back Jean’s side of the duvet and her firm, dizzyingly abundant breast stared up at him with its wise enough eye. The moonlight played on her sweaty tit, it was perfect. It was awful. He wanted to sleep, his penis was dulled, aching. He winced as she took it. But blood edged it’s way into his penis. Wine on her breath. Scott froze. “No, I really do need to have some kip,” he said. And he fell onto his side, his freed penis describing an arc, it could have been somersaulting with joy. Facing away from his girlfriend he raised his eyebrows, in lieu of a grumble: She could have at least objected a bit, he thought. And he thought about that sound again. Kuk. Kuk. Uk. Kkk.

The waiter placed their meals down with an adept and unnecessary flourish. Which Jean loved. “What I don’t get,” said Scott as soon as the waiter was out of earshot, “is why the stuff on your side of the table, there, is elevated to being swanky nosh.” He gestured with his fork. A strand of lettuce fell off and landed in the olive oil dish. He looked in the dish. “There’s another thing. Olive oil. It’s still oil, isn’t it. When a

beach gets clogged up with the stuff after a spillage, the Times Restaurant Critic doesn’t suddenly descend on the place and gorge himself.” “Olive oil is good for you.” “So is salad!” He ghettoised his egg with a nudge of his fork. He didn’t mind an egg, but it was compromising him. “It’s just that if we went home and had your teacher friends around and I said I’d had the salad they’d laugh.” “Well,” said Jean, “if you at least have one glass of this lovely wine they won’t crack any ribs.” “I’ll be sticking with my water,” Scott cut in. He looked at Jean, and then at the glass: there the ally. “Anyway,” he continued, “That stuff is a case in point. It’s just rancid grape juice.” “Refined grape juice. It’s refined. And it’s very good for you.” “Well why aren’t I drinking it, then?” “Because you’re allergic to it.” “And why am I allergic to it?” “I don’t know. You were unlucky, that’s all.” “Luck. You think it’s luck, do you….” He drank his water, it was as if he were alone with it. It’s purity absorbed him, shut Jean out entirely. Some deserts are themselves oases. “It’s the same with cheese. We’re not supposed to eat mould. Decay.” “Cheese is delicious, Scott.” “That’s just your tongue talking.” “Sour grapes.” Scott grinned, as if to disguise any aggression Jean might perceive. “That’s my point, isn’t it?” Jean rolled her eyes.

Perhaps a whole minute of silence followed before Jean asked, “Now: have you finished talking bollocks?” She was still smiling. She never got annoyed; it was as if there was always a trump card in the offing and she was just biding her time. Maybe it was that letter at home, to be dealt with on their return: a secretarial position in The Guardian’s offices. She’d have cleaned the toilets there for the kudos. He bit his lip in mock-penitence. “Allow me a bit of passion.” “Passion. You sound more drunk than me.” Scott’s face took on an expression of perfect solemnity and, perhaps, hurt. “There’s nothing drunken about what I’m saying,” he said. They were about equal in the eyes of the world; but she had none of his anxiety. “Do you believe what you’re saying, Jean? Do you believe in where you’re going?” Jean said nothing, she just looked at her boyfriend delivering more of his slavishness masquerading as integrity. What was that other bullshit she’d found of Scott’s, lying at the bottom of the linen bin? No one believes anything. Culture is clothing we pick with respect to where we’re going. It sounded good, sounded pretty grand; but the words didn’t connect with her at all. They were knives and she was a ghost. He was funny. He knew how to hold her and how to stroke her, even if it did seem kind of detached, as if he were a professional. And most of all he was self-absorbed enough not to intrude on her pastimes. It was as near to perfect as she needed - for now. They passed through Montparnasse on the way back. Scott’s head lowered, and his words became few. Jean asked him if he was tired. “Bit,” he said, stealing a glance up at an open window where a silhouette moved forward until it was not a silhouette. The woman looked at them both. Scott didn’t recognise her.

Jean was quite drunk. Her head rested on Scott’s arm as they walked; she seemed to be attempting a mobile kind of nestling. And then she grabbed his arm and stopped him. “We could have that threesome. Why don’t we?” If not for Scott’s salad habit there would have been some colour to leave his face. “Go on,” Jean continued, “take advantage of me when I’m pissed for once. You never do.” “It must be the setting,” Scott said, aloud but to himself. He looked in her eyes. “You’re in your element, here, I see.” “What would they charge?” She put her hand in his shirt pocket where there was a roll of notes. “How would I know?” he scoffed. He motioned as if to set them both off walking again. She clasped her hands around his waist and steered him towards the open door. A car braked a foot from Scott. Jean whooped and thumped the bonnet. Her jaw hung; a breath of laughter leapt from it. Upstairs, money changed hands. Scott glanced over at the anteroom: no minder present. The three began to undress. Jean looked around the room. The prostitute caught Scott’s eyes; she lifted her wig a little and winked. The Sartre biography lay open on a bedside cupboard. Scott flushed. “So, what do you want?” asked the third party. Jean lifted one of two pairs of handcuffs off a nail behind the headboard and took hold of the other woman’s wrists. The latter lay down and held her hands together around a bar of the headboard. The cuffs clicked shut. Then Jean walked over to Scott and whispered. “You really are drunk,” said Scott, his voice not quite a whisper, his eyebrows jumping. Jean walked back to the prostitute, and then looked solemnly at Scott, who lunged clumsily towards her, his trousers still around his ankles.

Jean’s fist connected with the woman’s belly. There was no sound. The woman had no breath. Jean shook Scott off and punched again. There was the slightest grunt. A third punch, to the teeth. There was blood. Scott pushed his girlfriend onto the bed. Her face flopped into the other woman’s belly, which she then bit. Jean tried to get up again, but there was a click and then her ankles were fastened to the headboard. Scott fell back against the wall and put his hand to his head. He was shaking. He could hardly see, his eyes were brimming. Jean began yelling. That was when he remembered a nurse he’d met when he was 18, at an evening class. Lisa came into his head then just like that. If he’d just kept his head down, and wooed her. At that point his integrity had only just begun to rear its head; Lisa could have seen it off, and everything would have been fine. She’d been eager enough, that Lisa had. There were several pairs of feet moving quickly on the stairs, voices. The two women raised their heads. Scott looked down at his trousers.

Bad shoes, worse feet

They want me out of the B&B by 10. I dream. This one, like so many since the Prozac, is an embroidered patch on the childhood knee. Twenty-five years ago now I played a tree in a production of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. A tree. Looking back, I have to admire Miss Foot’s eye for detail. There we were, twenty of us, arranged equidistantly as if points on one of the plastic bricks I’d spent the rest of the day playing with. What would have been wrong with modelled trees? Drifting in and out of sleep now, I consider how papier maché has no need of the lesson learnt. Laughter escapes the dining room, the laughter of the abundantly fed. Though in fact she was yet to be born, in the dream Jemima plays the part of Goldilocks. Crouched in brown and green I watch her as the audience coo and sigh. I awake to a heavy tapping - a broom? - on the ceiling below. I decide to make use of the shower. “Jemima will have more than porridge,” I mutter, dragging my legs across the bed. When the trickle turns to a lukewarm jet, I know the other guests have been up a while. I step out of the shower and begin to rub myself dry. My attention is caught by those patches of red appearing and dispersing with each rub: that blood coursing no matter the mood of the moment. Those mornings I just cannot get up, the oblivious heart does its job. The

veins, meanwhile, begin to carry more and more of the fear and pain that will eventually find its way to and still the heart. I can name and talk or write of that fear and pain, I can hold the dowsing rod of a book before my eyes; but when - if - the realisations come, blood does not speak English. And so I translate. Word by tortuous word. By the time I was 18 I weighed 5 stones. I would walk the length of a shopping centre accumulating bread, fruit, something bottled, and take the straining bag down to a park or to the river. On a good day I’d sit on a bench, open the bag and take the food in by then shaking hands. An edge of a loaf would disappear into my cavernous stomach, I’d swig at the cranberry juice. Then, without turning to see the million disgusted eyes, the abundant remainder would be binned. It ended the body’s demands for a time - without a full belly’s bringing on of that somnambulism that may as well be sleep or death. Though, looking around, that was just what one left a bed to attain. Crabbiness? I sit down at the table, alone. It’s rocking a little; I look under it. The book the landlord has been using to raise the uneven leg has come adrift, so I duck under the table to fetch it. Without a cover, and scrawled on in crayon: an extracted Book of Job. Through the serving hatch somebody says, “We have to clean up,” their impatience barely obscured. The clock reads 10.30, the food is no longer steaming. I take a slice of bread and get up, leave the table. I cross the street to the beach. There is no traffic to be seen, but I hear it in the distance. The only sign of life is an old man, trunk bowed,

carrying shopping. He stops for a moment and looks straight at me, his face a picture of untold bitterness and hate. I’d come to Hastings to flee those stuttered exchanges with Jemima, unreachable since the implants, unintelligible since their leak. Still we passed each other outside Victoria, she bound for the airport. (Heading for Mozambique - or Ibiza? Love won’t let the hammer fall.) I wondered if the plane that passed overhead later, faintly humming, held her. A child yelps. “Keep calm and it won’t sting you!” directs a still disembodied adult. I am drawn to the voices that are all that break this most silent Sunday. As I near their source I feel the tiniest instant’s flushing, as if home to an unpleasant remembrance. It had seemed apparent while they were still distant that the family were arguing; and the four knee deep in the water are at least now shouting at the youngest, a boy. The wasp gone, he kneels in front of an elaborate sandcastle created from piling bucket upon bucket, with artful additions by hand. Descending the steps, whose incipient cracks were being as artfully cemented as I passed, I had already seen the father drag his son from the beach once, only for the latter to run back to his project upon escaping an unfatherly grip. The father speaks of the importance of learning to swim as if all lives depend on it. His son the water otter. As his words squeeze through thin lips he scratches at an obvious patch of sunburn, unwittingly aggravating it with grains of sand. Only a metre away, I can see the boy’s now shaking hands beginning to spoil the sandcastle. He knows it: he begins to stall and slow, eyeing his work with mounting disappointment.

I continue walking along just to the dry side of the shoreline, trying not to note the events as they crescendo behind me. But it’s clear enough from the father’s sullen bellowing that their day out, at 11 o’clock, is over. I stop, with my back to the family, and let my gaze trail along the length of the pier before me. A wave breaking to my left brings back my earliest memory of a place like this, of being led by my own father into the water. The wave that broke then, knocking me over, terrified, seems to have taken these twenty-eight years to recede. The assault is done; but the wave’s brethren remain, enclosing this island. Reaching the top of the steps, I look back at the now empty beach. A car pulls away from the railing, muffled shouting and crying heard from within. The sandcastle has clearly been kicked at. I’d like to know if the angry foot was the father’s or the son’s. Will that boy build up around him and his creeping failure a palliative belief? Will the refrain of the song of his life, that he’ll come to sing (just beyond his own detection) on railway platforms, in queues, while the microwave table turns, be: I didn’t want it anyway, I didn’t want it anyway? Will he sing it until he believes it, till the hopes he had make him blush? Till he no longer knows the reason for his unhappiness? I look out to sea, into water grey beneath a similarly grey sky. Those few creatures that might for an instant startle and hold a wanting eye are English enough to know their place, far from the somersaulting dolphins and regal whales. Some are only there having seen and recoiled from, in disgust, the sharks. In ‘79 I played one of the rats in a school production of The Pied Piper Of Hamlyn. I missed the first of the two nights it ran, through fear and so lost my original role as one of the abducted children. By the second night I’d spent a day in shadow, and for want of that portion of

the spotlight befitting any rat, turned up at the school. The supervising teacher rustled up half my costume barely an hour before the musical began. As the tape measure darted and encircled, Mrs Prior let her annoyance seep out, carefully mingled with a teacher’s dutiful encouragement. Butterflies in your stomach? she asked, in a voice fit for delivering a curse. What do you do when you’re under-rehearsed? As a rat, I’d been spared a song. My scurrying, too, was merely a following of the other rats. In the city, head to toe in grey polyester we’re always underrehearsed. But in the city. Away from it, there are no lines to learn. And spared the smoke, the dirt, you find you are at worst a mouse. I begin to walk along the pier. I take one deep breath and my chest, momentarily held high, communicates a snub to a chocolate machine and a hamburger stand. The sound of my footsteps stir a man, roughly my age, sat on a bench. He begins to fumble in his pockets, and snaps out of a slouch. “Sorted, mate,” he says, flashing a strip of paper. “Eh?” I squint at the thing in his hand. “Sorted. Two fifty, mate.” The strawberry design is clear enough before his hand drops. I had slowed down for the puppet-motioned man, but not stopped. I hear him curse me as I regain my momentum. I come to a payphone. Someone has stuck above the receiver an advertisement: DO YOU HAVE IT IN YOU TO WORK IN SALES? Call 360419 NOW!

A decade before his first buzz-cut, my younger brother Richard played the Tin Man in a production of The Wizard Of Oz. But for the economic dysfunctionality of encouraging drag in a state primary school, he would have been Dorothy. Though not even Mrs Fowler foresaw, script in hand and smiling in the wings, how Dorothy’s drops of oil would free Richard to pursue successful careers in burglary, sexual assault and life insurance. Suddenly needing the toilet, the Tin Man had run from the stage, short of receiving that heart. One Christmas get-together I’d used the bed of my brother’s adulthood. Your body sunk snugly into its soft hand: you soon forgot the food and semen stains, the blood on the pillow. My fingertips brush the scant change in my pocket. A pair of seagulls swoop close by my head. One is white, the other grey. The grey seagull comes to land in the water and squawks: disapproval of its gracelessness, to human ears. I daresay the gull couldn’t care less where it lands or how it eats or mates or how many of its eggs make it to their hatching. But I watch the white bird, a leaner creature, soar, as if toward the sun before it. I take my hands from the paltry comfort offered by my pockets and spit. My flag. Dead on the bolt of one sodden plank between me and the end of pier bingo hall. The instant of unrestraint is my miracle, amidst the emotional din, of inside and out, that could so easily have claimed it. I turn and walk back along the pier. I catch some spray as the water crashes below: a last, negligible threat. I’d describe a striding between parted waves - but for bad shoes, and worse feet.

Back on the beach the sandcastle, close up, doesn’t look so damaged. I kneel before it and pat a fallen wall into shape, mimicking the piety of the men cementing the steps. The tide will claim it. Of what consequence is that, at mid-day? When the beaches are full, the children build their sandcastles; the adults lay waiting for the terrible moment. Some will choose to steel their children, using a foot to beat the tide at its own game. Some don’t know that game. And, driven inland by evening: some pass their time. Some, dripping salt-water, fill it. Some accrue debts. Some collect them. Some pick up the fallen. Some pile them up to reach the moon. Some love the ones that break them. Some break the ones that love them. Some scream; some put in earplugs. Some leave behind a legacy; some, their nail-clippings. Some go green - some get pierced. Some love to read; some read to love. Some give, some give up. Some hang from a cross. Some send home the nails. Some win with glee. Some lose with grace. With grace. Grace. Leaning on the railings is a policeman. I hear his radio crackle; I watch him look at the photo in his hand, and then again at me. I hear him speak into the radio as I turn back to the job in hand. By the time he has back-up I’ll have crawled, sideways, inside.

Tillage

If it had been that the bed was intended for her alone and for sleep alone she might have borne the apparent infestation, its presence for all she knew being her fault, and her being at fault for all she knew a condition of her being. In the circumstances, Karen held the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner as if more than mechanics were implied by the name. The machine, wielded right, might remove all trace of vacuum, and a man bloom there in the weeded bed. She felt it in her skin as she worked. Now below the left eye, now on the back of a knee, now a shoulder: instant after instant of what discretely were almost negligible pricks of discomfort, accumulated into what could have been termed distraction, if that wouldn’t suggest there being room for retaining a sense of what you were intended on. Without, as was usually the case, a sign of intention in the hand, there was none. There was no one you could trust to tell you for sure whether all this came from without; or whether this was after all some psychogenic complaint. Once, she’d held a microscope above her just bitten belly; but there was no culprit in evidence. That didn’t mean anything, it would have moved on. All the same, the current show of determination might be excessive. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and the machine was ancient, old as the need, and noisy with it; enough to drown out fists on walls and sticks on ceilings.

There just was the itch. Karen switched off the machine and kicked it back under the bed. There they were lain, the ogre and the bridge. She went and stood on her balcony. Prickly heat was the third possibility − although wasn’t it all the same? Prickly heat. You could get medication for that. Karen had; the feeling remained. Perhaps the pills had merely not worked. Perhaps something else was implied, the obvious or the as-yet obscured. You weren’t quite at square one while those perhapses were burning a hole in something. There was never any chance of being so advanced unless they made cinders of each other. In the breeze things did abate. Immaterial. A group of men and women in their early twenties passed by. They made their noise. They, though, solicited no fists or sticks; not that the discrepancy, insofar as it was one, could make itself known to Karen. A couple among the group broke off from the rest and began kissing. Karen gazed on, at first absently, and then not so, until she had seen enough to send her in, back to the bed, into sobs, which despite their feebleness nevertheless exhausted her into sleep. In the dream the psychoanalyst was saying to her: Sometimes a Hoover is just a Hoover. He was lifting a lighter up to his mouth, from which protruded a penis.

Everyone fumbled to grip something as the van began shakily to mount the hill. There was some laughter as limb nudged

limb, the six of them exchanging their diffident glances. After a few minutes there was cause for one of them to say: “There it is.” The others turned to see. The monk driving turned to quickly look back with a smile. Karen looked back the way they’d come. It really was some hill. Hundreds of feet of earth it took to raise the monastery a portion of the way to heaven. Soon, the visitors were shown to their allotted dormitories. In the corridors a passing monk would nod or smile. The party remained instinctively quiet or at least hushed. They were led then through what looked, though bigger, quite like the average living room with its imitation log fire, sofa and armchairs, into a hall where a group of monks were making a circle of chairs. Everyone sat. After a pause a monk began to explain what comprised this Weekend Retreat. Karen eyed the monk to his right, the driver from before. His gaze alternated between his knees and, more briefly, smiling then, a random visitor. A nervous one, him, which despite her own disposition made Karen feel, perhaps not so oddly, superior. She beat down the urge to wonder, to presume, about this man’s past; it wouldn’t do to resume so early in this visit her prejudice. All the same, unshaped by language, and if prejudice was what it was, she felt in seed its peripheral presence. That night most of the visitors, having travelled a good stretch of the country, headed for the dormitories early. Karen remained a while in the lounge, looking through the assorted literature spread about the room. The Three Characteristics and

the Uncreate… The Ties of Life… The Dhammapada.… Each of the pamphlets she took she would stop at most three pages in, with a feeling not unlike bloatedness, that sat uneasily with the somatic opposite brought about by the evening meal. True, the laymen had been warmly invited to take second helpings; but, from what was on offer, there was no danger of leaving the table feeling full. A monk entered and, as they all did, turned and bowed, to the room itself. He passed through, and at the other door turned and bowed to the room again. Karen put down a final booklet and sat back, looking about the room. She had come here to see the reality of this creed that had nagged at her for five years; perhaps she’d best keep away from the black and white relation of what was going on around her. On the second day, her attempts at meditation postures seeming to have begun re-articulating her bones, Karen was relieved to learn that next there would be private question and answer sessions, with each of the visitors assigned a monk. She entered the room, clocked who she’d been paired with. She began to flush. Looking intently at a corner of the window frame, holding a smile, she sat. He wasn’t looking any more serene. She barely heard his greeting, which the monk realised, approximating then a clearing of the throat and beginning again a little louder. Their discussion began with the obvious enquiries as to how she’d been faring the past day. The monk said then, “So you’ve got − you’ve got some questions for me?” Karen felt herself blushing. “Yeah,” she answered, looking into the carpet. “I would have written them down,”

she pinched her nose, “but I’ve been getting agitated lately with… writing.” She looked at the monk, who gave an understanding nod. She went to pinch her nose again, acknowledged it would look false, and put her hands in her lap. “I have trouble with the meditating,” she said. “I’m uncomfortable, really, with letting my thoughts pass.” The monk said, “That’s how it is at first.” “I mean,” she came straight back, “part of me… well not just part… doesn’t… want to let my perceptions slip away.” The monk nodded again. It was all very simple. “And yet you see the good of doing so.…” “Well…” Karen said, and pulled a face, awkward. “You seem quite a nervous person. Do you not think there’s a correlation between this and your difficulty in relinquishing your perceptions?” Karen, managing a fractionally better attempt at eyecontact, thought the obvious thought. The monk said, “You were reading The Female Eunuch in the van.” He pointed at her lapel. “And you wear the hammer and sickle.…” The monk seemed to think he need not elaborate on these things, and Karen could see where he was coming from, though his implications were hardly grounds for the epiphanic. Early on the third and final day Karen found herself again with this monk, this time partaking in the monastic community’s labours. They were gathering fallen branches in the grounds outside, the two of them with one of the other visitors. A smile crept across Karen’s face as she carried out

her part in this task. Push and pull as she would, here she seemed free to become absorbed in the purely practical and necessary, an instance of the real impenetrable to the self. Tired of its symbolic plateau-making, against this kink her mind fell. When the other visitor excused himself, leaving the trees to go and use the toilet, Karen noticed that the monk’s pace dropped, that once or twice he had just been standing there looking back at the monastery. Her back was turned to him for one second when she felt a weight against and then upon her as she collapsed to the ground. The monk’s right hand was around her mouth, the other on her belt. Close to her ear he said: “You cunt.” An uncoloured murmur. He grabbed her shoulder to turn her over and only saw a flash of her hatefilled face, bared teeth, before Karen had pushed something sharp at him, in his eye. There was a reflexive cry. She was on her feet, on the path away from the cover of the trees, the monk facing her and trembling, one hand to his eye. Karen tried to close the pin on her badge, but it wouldn’t, it had snapped. She looked at the design. She put the badge in her pocket. Running down the hill she listened to her footfall losing its mutedness as the soil fell away.

“Someone’s having a party,” the checkout girl said, scanning one of several bottles. She turned the label toward her. “Five per cent.…”

Karen began counting her change again. “All them pies,” the checkout girl said. “How do you stay so skinny eating like that?” She flicked at Karen’s arm with a smile. Faintly Karen laughed. She left the VeeGee, at once resuming her scowl for the sun. It was 1 in the afternoon and her dead hair felt like a fungus about her head. She would shave it off, the lot, but for the port stain. She looked at her bags, one in each hand. Sixteen pound. Her heart gave a little jump as she caught sight of a tin of soup, a bar of chocolate. Two kids on a bench, they’d be playing truant, called her Frizzy Lizzie; Frizzy Lizzie. She imagined stamping on their heads, slashing open their bastard throats, what with the sun. Home. She placed both bags on the bed. A few items fell out. There was a packet of crisps among these; she picked it up and opened it. She pushed quite a handful into her mouth, her breathing becoming constricted now. Some of the crisps rolled down her blouse, some onto the carpet. She sat on the bed and tipped everything out. She looked across the room at her table and saw the pliers, which she then retrieved. She opened and started on a bottle. She took great swigs. Three quarters of the way into the bottle she began to cry. She put the bottle between her knees and took a Cornish pasty from the pile, tore into the packet. Too much pepper. She put it down among the three others. She took a box of fries and a hot dog from the pile and walked to the kitchen, slid them onto the griddle, twisted the

dial. Flicked the switch. She took her pills from the cupboard and began putting them in her mouth, three or four at a time, swallowing. A few tearful sniffs came. Back on the bed she opened the chocolate bar. She broke it up into its squares. She would have liked to bite into the bar whole but her teeth were not up to that anymore. A year ago she’d felt a tiny piece of tooth come away; she’d looked into the mirror to see the backs of her lower set practically black. It had been a shock. Right away she’d begun to surmise along the lines of stomach acids produced by stress. Was that the science? Everything she read or heard got tangled. You could taste the milk in this brand, this brand alone. But there was no getting away from it: why swallow what only the tongue wanted? Even if she could have afforded to do all this every day, how would that make her happy? Well never mind, that was all academic now. And whether it always had been academic, that was all academic too. She began to play that thought back over in her mind, her forehead creasing. Never mind. She opened the second bottle. The cuts became scarcely deeper with each pass of the blade. Blood stood in thin lines both across the wrists and along the lower arms. She felt very groggy. This past half hour she had become so concentrated into the hopeful last act that any details of the life that inspired it had become eclipsed; it was as if this were now all she was compelled to do. She had become quite entranced. At one point making the longer cuts across her arms she might have been painting. But now, dropping the blade, there came

another wave of awareness of her surroundings. She began again, quite profusely this time, to cry. Karen looked about the room: at the shelves, at the table, the armchair. Her gaze fell to the floor, staying there for a few minutes. Then she sprang to her feet. She swayed, repositioned her feet. A dressing gown hung on the living room door. She pulled at its belt. On the balcony with one end around her neck she tied and retied the other end to the railing. She climbed over the railing and leaned out, backwards. She fell; the belt at once snapped. She was three storeys down, sat in a bush. She had a strange sensation of having been caught, in this green hand. The ground might have sped to her rather than she to it.

“Why don’t you stay in bed?” “It’s all right.” “Come on − after what’s happened. Let’s have the shovel.” Karen took a breath she hoped would keep her calm. “I’m too tired to argue but will you please go back in and just let me do the til… do the… this.” “Let’s have the shovel, Karen,” said her sister. She looked back to the patio door where her boyfriend stood, and scowled. The couple had taken her in after the call from the hospital. It was the first time Karen had seen the place; Samantha had given her the tour, gushing about the whole,

disparaging its parts. Karen had to get out of that prescription of a house, even if she was too weak to go home. She lifted another shovelful of earth and scattered it. Samantha put out her hand to take the shovel; Karen turned her back to her sister. With the shovel in the earth and her hands firmly around the shovel there was a feeling, a good feeling Karen was trying hard not to name. To name it would be to call the act into question, and fucking there was no more time for that. For her, for her. The shovel was a good weight: heavy enough to make her feel alive, not so heavy as to pull her any nearer that place she’d be soon enough. And this thing in her hand. Let’s, she thought, call a shovel a shovel. It was agent of nothing but what was there to see, the lifting of earth and the letting it fall and.… And nothing. And – “Hey now, Karen,” Samantha said. “Don’t be stubborn now, eh?” She closed one hand about her sister’s flesh, a few fingers of the other around the shovel handle. There was struggle.

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