But now he wants something else. The logical next step. An overwhelming desire to share his triumph with a select few, to trumpet it. He’s that secure with the velvety ropes now binding this relationship tight.
13
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour – landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair!
He puts her to bed like a child. They do not sleep together. They never sleep together. Connie is up high, in the vast attic room, her choice. Her wonder room. Full of twigs and shells and sticks and cones, fossils, bones, sketches, books. Hand-stitched quilts from Victorian Ireland, battered fishing tins of wondrously mottled green, Edwardian rods from the Cornish coast. The windows are never shut so every night Connie can drink the night, the moon, the sky; and by day the melancholy cries of gulls that speak of London’s great maritime past and sing her home. The room has a lift, at Cliff’s insistence, but he never lingers, for this space represents a wild side of his wife he never quite trusts. Because it can’t be bought. She is a woman raw in this eyrie and he doesn’t want this aspect of her anywhere else. No leakage of any of this world – raw, battered, found grubbily off the street – is allowed into the rest of the house.
The rest: a bone house, no warmth. Interior-designed within an inch of its life. Audacious chairs, thick art books (never opened), oatmeal throws and broad, boastful art. This, of course, is what’s photographed.
Cliff kisses Connie on the cheek, kisses his thanks for the magnificence of the night. She turns from him, sleepily; feels the virgin weight raw between her legs. Does not know how many hands inspected as she lay there unconscious, in that theatre; she can feel an ache, a fulsome sullying. Was Clifford watching from the wings? Who, eventually, inserted the padlock? Who snapped it shut? With what sense of ceremony? She does not know. Any of it.
But it is there now, securely locked and suddenly, in the quiet, Connie is unstoppably up on all fours, a pillow under her, grinding the fresh, cold heaviness into her. The drug of it, the drug; never mind the bleeding, the six weeks of getting used to fresh piercings, the endless twisting of the hoops, the careful tending of it. She is back. It is worth it. Further and further along the path. She will do it all, all, for moments of exquisiteness like this when her body succumbs so beautifully and magnificently and powerfully and she is in awe of it, all of it; how she becomes, so completely, someone else entirely; forgetting the pain and the terror and the discomfort in the blind, addictive want. Thinking now of a myriad of hands, and cocks and cunts; cool Nika, the coy driver; it is not connected with Clifford in any way; never is, never was. She comes swiftly and collapses on the bed.
Has never felt more primed in her life.
14
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself
Connie collects Tracey Emin, the brazen knot of her. Cliff lets her because she’s ‘kinky’.
‘She’s not kinky, she’s honest,’ is the retort.
The soft glare of the neon in startling corners of the house.
‘I said Don’t Practise ON ME.’
‘I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW.’
‘MY CUNT IS WET WITH FEAR.’
The latter in the shared bathroom off the main bedroom that Connie hasn’t used since Cliff’s accident.
On the stairs leading to her eyrie is the wiry delicacy of legs splayed, a plunged hand, a labia scurried. Reddened, raw. The titles: Self Growth, Thinking About It, and Those Who Suffer Love, a series of heels and ankles wide, as wide as they can be, in homage to Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde.
Connie is drawn to Emin as she is drawn to Dickinson, Réage, Duras, Plath, for their vulnerability, authenticity, anarchy, courage, truth. Cliff just thinks she needs a fuck, quick smart. ‘That’ll fix her up.’
15
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface
Connie wakes late into a hard light. Pain, down below. Itch. Practically, how can this work? What is happening to us all? she wonders. All this brazen new openness and honesty, all this craven, spectator want? Public figures, A-list celebs, young royals: they’re all ending up at the Box at some point. Where does it go from here? The experimentation increasingly permeating the public sphere, the new nakedness, raw talk. The Brazilianed and Botoxed ladies of her book club have all read Fifty Shades and now discuss bondage and belts when once it was Proust and now this, her fresh little branding, yet it doesn’t feel so odd. The voracious devouring of these illicit texts feels revolutionary in terms of women’s reading; the dawn of a new age of … what? This new decadence, effulgence, feels like the tipping point of some sort, an inexorable slide into a waning like the Roman Empire’s demise and Connie wonders what on earth could follow it. A flinch into extreme conservatism, perhaps, a vast reining back?
All she knows is that there is a body, a being, a confidence that dies as soon as light hits her high room and the real world intrudes. But those secret nights … oh, those nights.
16
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in
Eleven a.m. Saturday. Breakfast together, the yellow and black room at the back of the house. Cliff chewing loudly as he reads the FT, masticating his egg and toast, slurping down his coffee in a loud gulp. Connie cannot bear the sounds, he is oblivious. No one has ever pointed them out to him, she is sure. It is one of those moments of utter stasis between them when her future life comes hurtling towards her suddenly, a wall of acquiescence, stillness, rot.
Cliff looks up as if he’s only just realized she’s there. Inclines his head. Engages. Reverses his wheelchair, a touch. Asks her to throw her silken kimono from Myla off one shoulder and come closer, right by him, to sit in the chair next to him, upright, one leg cocked: ‘Let’s see what that small fortune spent on yoga poses actually does for you, hmm?’
Connie complies, winces, it hurts.
He inspects, smiles a murmur, ‘Good good,’ snaps his paper for better viewing and returns to his reading. Connie relaxes her leg. ‘Play.’ Brusque, from behind the newsprint. ‘Cherish the family crest. Show me. I want to see. Hear.’
Connie feels too stiff, raw. It hurts. She stops.
Silence. Stillness. Her cage and she has constructed it, of course. With her obedience, her compliance, her truth. Cliff continues reading the paper, lost in his mergers. Connie now gazing out the window, thinking of Picasso, how he said that all women were goddesses or doormats and if they weren’t doormats at the start of the relationship then he’d do his level best to crack them into it. Herself? She’s never been any threat. It’s why his tight, moneyed family likes her, she knows that. One of those sweet ones who will not rock the boat; a pleaser, primed for a rubbing out; instinctively his family of strong women recognized it despite the slight niggle of a gold-digger,