You look across to the man on the sunlounger now reading his Tribune and tilt back your head and close your eyes. You’re living your days at the moment how a sheep grazes, meandering, not engaged with anything much. And yet, and yet, you’d never wish for Theo’s kind of existence. She’s so free, so answerable to no one that she’s lost.
The sky deepens, bathers pack up their suntan lotion and one by one leave, the baked breeze stiffens and umbrellas are snapped down for fear they’ll cartwheel away. You slip into the pool. The water’s ruffled like corrugated iron. You’re the only one in it and you slide through the coolness and strike out for the first time in years, feel unused muscles creaking into working order and think of your mother and her strong, confident hands and the ribbons of water when you were seven. You’ve no family consistently around you now, your friends have become your closest relations: Cole, of course, and Theo, your sister of sorts, although at times there’s the intensity of lovers between you.
It’s her birthday today, you must call.
You smile as you pull your body through the water and at the end of the pool look up to great plumes of ochre dust blown in from the desert; it’s as if the dusk is being hurried centre stage. The attendants move with crisp deliberation now, clearing towels and cushions from chairs. Most people have gone. Palm trees toss their branches like the manes of recalcitrant ponies, twigs and leaves blow into the pool and you climb out of the water at the first fat splats. You smell the earth opening up as if it’s breathing, feel the thundery day sparking you alive and you lift your chin to it and inhale deep and gather up, reluctantly, your sun gear. You pass the man from the lobby, still reading valiantly. He looks up at you.
You don’t look at him. You walk inside, to your husband, a fluttery anticipation within you.
lending is, as a rule, the greatest unkindness we can be guilty of, unless we can give
The elderly man who looks after the roses lets you into the room, bowing and smiling his gentle smile. He’s presented you, gallantly, with a single stem and you’ve accepted it graciously; it’s a game played with some seriousness. The petals are deep red, almost black, and you plunge your nose into their oddness: it’s a wild plump garden scent from your childhood, not the tight manufactured whiff from the buds you buy at the supermarket. You enter the room soundlessly, you’ll surprise Cole, he’ll throw you on the bed and make you laugh and kiss you in his special way and you’ll melt, succumb, even though you’re still menstruating. Sexy sex, hmm, grubby, spontaneous, impolite kind of sex, you haven’t done that for years and all of a sudden it seems necessary. The room’s dim from the darkening sky and you can taste the thunder outside and lift your chin to it. Cole’s on the phone. You’re cross, he shouldn’t be doing any work during this trip, he promised.
I can’t wait to get out of here, it’s driving me crazy, the heat, and he says this in his special voice, your voice, but there’s a playfulness, a lightness, it’s a tone you haven’t heard for so long. All she wants to do is run off to the markets and have rides in those fucking carts, I can’t stand it, I get so bored, I just want to relax. He pauses. Diz, Diz, no, you can’t. He chuckles. Yeah, me too. I’ll see you soon, thank God.
air ventilation oxygen
You’re very still. You walk past Cole without looking at him. You walk through the french doors, to the veranda, and sit, very carefully, on the wicker chair.
Your thudding heart, your thudding heart.
You sit for a very long time, soundlessly, into the rich silence after the storm. At the end of it the sun feebles out and nothing has cooled down, nothing, it is as hot as it ever was.
My soul waiteth on thou more than they that watch for the morning,
I say more than they that watch for the morning.
Psalm 130
there ought to be no cesspool attached to the dwelling
The Monday after the return from Marrakech. A cafe in Soho, alone. An old London chophouse selling beans on toast and Tetley’s tea in stainless-steel pots, the menu padded and plastic covered. Reading the paper but not.
Like you are skinned.
I can’t explain it, he has said, reddening, every time. When you’ve asked him again and again. You’re overreacting, he has said. She’s a friend, our friend, we’d just have a drink now and then. And then he stops.
As if what he wants to say can never be said, as if it will never be prised out. But you will not let up.
Just a friend. Uh huh.
You sit back at his words, you fold your arms. At his explanations that are scattered bits of bone, that are never enough.
You haunt the cafe in Soho. Want to crawl away from the world, curl up; want to shrink from the summery lightness in the air, the flirty pink on the girls in the streets.
Within this God-tossed time he’s never stopped telling you he loves you but you’ve no desire to listen any more. For the relationship has been doused in a cold shower and you are chilled to the bone with the shock.
Just a friend. Uh huh.
You will not let up.
Now it’s a week since you’ve known; now two. Everything is changed and nothing is changed, you’re reading the paper but not. You prefer this cafe in Soho over the American coffee chains that seem of late to be everywhere, despite Cole’s certain horror at the choice. Before, you’d let his likes and dislikes shape the movement of your day, even when he wasn’t with you. But you’re disobedient often now, in little ways. For realisation of the affair has snapped upon you as fast as a rabbit trap, and you are exiled from your marriage and home and life.
The elderly man behind the till senses something of all this; he smiles warmly in greeting, now, and hands you your cup of tea without waiting to be asked.
We’d. just. have, a drink, now. and. then. All right?
I don’t believe you. I’m sorry, I can’t.
It’s the truth, I am so sick of telling you that.
I don’t believe you. I can’t.
Your hands hover, frozen, by your head. Your fingers are clawed, your knuckles are bone-white. You have turned into someone else. You do not recognise the voice.
Day after day you shelter in this cafe in London’s red light district. It’s a small indication of something that’s burst within you. You’re not sure why you’ve picked this place, you never go to cafes or restaurants by yourself, it’s too exposing. All you know is that the two people closest to you have gone from your heart, it’s flinched shut.