What Are You Like Page 12

  Over dinner, she realised what it was that made William old. She looked at the dreadful mess of his mother coming out through his face, listened to his father discuss the lawn – as though a good mower was early Baroque, and dandelions were those fools who wanted to play it on period instruments. William was lived in: by his father’s bluster, his mother’s sexual response; by these dreadful, banal, living ghosts.

  ‘William says that you are adopted,’ said his mother, and Rose felt all her features jumble and strain. Her face was full of people she did not know, and they were fighting their way out of her. Some woman’s mouth, some man’s nose. Even the way she chewed might come from someone else, the tiny muscle that gathered on her chin. She cut into the overdone roast beef and felt her body fall to bits.

  ‘Yes, apparently.’

  Her own mother would have said, ‘How very romantic,’ or ‘Do you mind?’ But William’s parents did not feel they should say anything at all.

  That night William came into her room and they made love, in silence. He was very keen, but she could not concentrate. She felt a baby catch in her stomach. She could feel its stare. She turned into it, and found herself falling into its plum-like, foetal eyes.

  She jolted away and William came out at a funny angle that nearly did for them both. He laughed, all angry and flustered like he had pulled his head out from under a waterfall.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m sure your parents heard.’

  ‘Don’t worry about them.’ He seemed almost proud. He rolled on his back and looked at himself with regret and said, ‘Is that it, then?’

  Rose decided to marry him then. She straddled him and kissed him for ages and made love to him again for real, her heart sinking.

  At the end of the year Rose went home and announced that she was giving up music. The family were having dinner. Her father was reading up on a new ulcer drug and squeezing the flesh under his ribs. Her mother was talking to Gareth, a foster boy with bin-liners on his hands who had lasted all of six years. He had a hygiene thing that kept him away from the cats.

  ‘I boiled your plate,’ her mother was saying. ‘For ten minutes. You timed it. You were there.’

  ‘Did anyone hear what I said?’

  ‘Sorry, dear?’

  ‘I have decided to give up the violin.’ Her father closed the medical journal and waited.

  ‘Because I’m not good enough,’ she said.

  ‘I see,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if you can’t be good, be useful,’ said her mother, then looked at Rose and regretted it.

  ‘You could always become a composer, dear,’ and Rose slammed her fork down and shouted that it wasn’t that bloody easy and there was nothing left to fucking compose, was there? while Gareth sat upright and started to sweat, filling the room with the smell of bleach.

  Her father went back to his reading.

  ‘So what’s this chap’s name?’ he said, turning a page.

  ‘What chap?’ she said, feeling betrayed.

  Rose sat at the piano, picking her way through a Chopin nocturne she found in the stool, pausing just before she got it wrong, starting again, pausing again, her hands completely still and gentle an inch away from the keys. In the pause was a pain so acute, so timid, that nothing would cure it except the next right note, the perfect one that she knew was there, and could barely find.

  She was four when she picked out her first tune on the piano, and ‘Oh, she’s musical,’ said her mother. ‘She’s musical!’ as though she was wonderfully unknown, full of surprises. All orphans are musical. So Rose was musical. That was what she was.

  She broke into a piece she used to know blind, the adagio from Mozart’s Sonata in F that she had once dreamed would grow into the Concerto in A with a full orchestra behind her, herself plunging and weaving over the keys in a perfect black dress.

  The music rolled and sadly lifted, just tipping the melody before slipping away. It barely reached, then lost itself again, over and over. And as it yearned and caught and let the melody go, Rose started to make mistakes, dreadfully, one after the other. One mistake after the other, until she felt like she was beating herself up.

  Just beyond all the wrongness was a place where she could actually play this thing. She pushed on, flinching and fighting through the slowness of it all until, for a few phrases, gone as soon as she had grasped it, she was there. Bliss.

  She finished the piece simply and rested her hands on the keys.

  This was why she played. Because she was musical. Because somewhere out there, her real, musical mother was listening. Somewhere out there, her real, musical mother was singing into the dishes, to the child she loved so very much but had to give away. This is why she paused and played, and paused and could not fall. She had switched to the violin because she thought it would make the falling easy – but there was nothing easy about it.

  Because her mother was not in the music. She was in a room somewhere, she was riding in a car. She was cutting her toe-nails in a bedsit, or stroking the head of another child. She was not in the music, and every time Rose found her there, she was already gone.

  That night, she thought it over as she fell asleep, listening to Gareth next door, soaking his room with fly spray.

  She had the wrong kind of mind. She did not know where it came from and there was no one she could blame. It wasn’t exactly a man’s mind; it was something different again. It was the kind of mind where nothing was ever enough.

  She would have to make do.

  ‘So what have you decided?’ said her father a few days later, when she met him in the hall, ushering a man with a spongy nose out of his consulting room.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Nothing yet.’

  Love

  New York, 1985

  MARIA LOOKED AT the menu. All she wanted was a sandwich.

  ‘Genoa salami, mortadella, Black Forest ham, provolone, balsamic vinegar and olive oil.’

  It looked like a dinner party slapped on a slice of bread. Maria tried to imagine what it might taste like, what kind of person went to parties like that.

  ‘Pâté Croissant’. That was more like it. It was not a sandwich you had to dress up for. She had just put in her order when a man passed her table, in a green shirt and a pair of black jeans that bagged at the base of his spine. He worked the lock on the big window, sliding it back on one side. And,

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Maria to herself, as he stepped out into New York.

  When he came back in again, she knew it would be easy to talk to him. He had been out in the wind and the weather. The café was like coming home.

  ‘Thought you were going to fly away,’ she said. And he laughed.

  I am twenty years old, she said. It is time I fell in love. For the next week Maria set her thoughts on him. She looked at the same sky as he did, rode the subway in his head, and when she went back to the café he was there, as she knew he would be, because now she owned the map.

  He sat down and smiled.

  ‘So what have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  They talked for a while, and Maria was amazed at how clear it was, this thing that was happening at their table, how anti-social. It had nothing to do with Manhattan at all.

  It was not the ordinary way of things that you saw in the street and in the bars, women flirting with their foreheads, the men leaning back. It was not the anxious door-opening, body-dodging, how can we get through this building, being differently constructed down there. The problem of getting anatomies through architecture, the problem of getting anatomies through the streets. How can we get through this conversation even? Laughs and coughs and sudden clearings of the throat because we can never be the same down there. It was desire itself, when the map is your blood, and the room becomes so big it disappears.

  ‘I was talking to an Irish girl, says she knows you.’

  It was easy, it was horrible to watch.

  ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.
’

  ‘Why not?’

  They would sleep with each other, tonight or the next night, sober or drunk or in the middle of the afternoon. All they could do was try to keep speaking until the time came. It was as simple as that. As simple as men walking on the moon.

  They went down to the skateboarders in Central Park, then over to a bar on St Mark’s and then back to a bar near her place to hear some Haitian Creole. It was a fake journey, a fake afternoon. In the cab home they were already disappointed. They looked out the windows or smiled deliberately when they caught each other’s eye.

  But inside the door of the apartment Maria said,

  ‘This is what the Polish girl left behind. Look.’ She pointed at a picture of a girl sitting in a field of daisies in a see-through shift. And he laughed.

  He stayed for a week.

  It was August. So hot. Maria set three fans around the bed. She went out to the shops now and then, came back with things like pumpkin pie ice cream. They laughed all the time.

  He liked to dress her before she went out, to undress her when she came home. He pulled a red dress and a pair of heels out of her wardrobe, and danced a close, chunky salsa with her, naked from the waist down. She looked over his shoulder as the room lapsed and lifted around them and the sweat on his chest stained her front.

  It was so hot. Her hands leaked on to the bag of groceries, turning the base into a brown pulp that gave way as she opened the door. They ran around picking up bagels and half-spilt cartons of salad. They laughed as they shouldered the door shut and spilled the food out over the counter, eating it in no order at all.

  She fell in love.

  His name was Anton. He couldn’t remember his mother. He remembered a woman sitting in a cupboard and crying. His grandfather played the piano along the edge of the kitchen table. His father tried to set himself alight.

  It amazed her how like grief it was – this desire for someone’s story, and the flesh it came wrapped in.

  Anton had a circular scar on his arm and two pearly patches on his shoulder blades. He had leant against the stove as a child. He had taken a tow from a friend’s bike, on his new skates, and the twine bit into his arm, when he tripped and fell.

  One night he started to cry. They were having sex enough to make you mad. He was coming softer and softer, until she thought her heart would break. Anton lay there looking at the ceiling and talked about his mother, sitting in a chair for hours and hours, and when she finally got up, there was blood on the back of her dress.

  ‘When was that?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean, “when”?’

  It was so hot, she did not know if they slept or not. They slid over each other in the bed, so she could not tell which bit of him was under her hand. When she finally fell asleep, she felt herself slipping between the mattress and the wall.

  What else did he say?

  He said he slept with a girl in Tucson, he slept with a woman who turned out to be a whore, he slept with a girl who had lost her foot as a baby, during a protest against the Vietnam war. He slept with a man once, just to try it. He saw a man in a urinal, who pulled his dick out on a ribbon and pissed holding it like a dog on a leash. He went into a urinal with his father once and could not believe the size of his thing, or the hair.

  So how much of that was a lie, and how much was true, in a way?

  It was always so hard to see him. Every bone in his body was twice the length it should be. They lapsed into a shape on the bed, stroking the length of each other, losing themselves in a dent or a curve, surfacing again to the bare cube of the room and their bodies in it, lying on the bed.

  Anton said he was in a motel once in the middle of nowhere, Arizona, listening to the sound of sex coming through the wall, shifting over in the bed, those thin sheets, getting a hard-on, the noise going on all night. Finally he walked out into the desert wrapped in a motel blanket, and sat there and smoked until even his lungs got cold.

  The next morning they were gone. No idea what they looked like: they sounded like a pom movie, but they might have been ugly, they might have been fifty years old. The door to their room was open, he could see the bed and a half-empty bottle of Tio Pepe on the locker. So he walked in, and lay on the used sheets, and drank it all.

  ‘Tio Pepe?’ she said.

  ‘You know what it tastes like?’ he said. ‘Metal.’

  Where was the lie in that? she thought. Which part of that is a lie?

  The light shifted on the walls, making them more solid. Then it loosened again and the room began to give way. The light read and re-read them and dusk fell because it suited his skin. His face shifted into night as she lay beside him, trying to match her heartbeat to his.

  He said he never knew his mother. His grandfather played the piano along the side of the kitchen table, he said. His father had laid his dick across his shoulder once, said, ‘Feel the weight of that.’

  He said she had a familiar face.

  The Abortionist’s Restaurant

  London, 1985

  WILLIAM WAS VERY excited by the fact that Rose was Irish. This she discovered when he took her out to dinner and said,

  ‘This place used to be an abortion clinic,’ for no reason at all. Rose looked around at the white-tiled room and back at William – who did not seem to realise. Bless him. William had a job now. He had taken her out to dinner just because he could.

  So I am Irish, said Rose to herself, sitting in the abortionist’s restaurant and eating Tagliatelle alle Vongole. So this is what it means. Perhaps he wants me to order potatoes, say, ‘Oh holy God, fuck me, fuck me,’ when we are having sex, which, from now on, will be in the dark.

  No. She should not have told William.

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Irish?’

  When she was thirteen, Rose read Anne Frank’s Diary and decided she would be a Jew. She would have fine eyes, a deliberate approach to things. She would be a small point in the present with history howling at her back.

  She still thought of herself as being conceived during a war, somehow. A father home on leave, a mother who rushes to the door while trying to undo her print apron, her hands wet from the stone sink.

  But the Irish didn’t have A War, they just had a mess. They bred like something in a petri dish, each generation scraped off the top. Rose had been dumped by a mother, not because she was interesting or tragic, but because she just couldn’t help it. Never mind the clouds, the cliffs, and the rain.

  She was conceived in a shed, born in a ditch. She was started in a priest’s fumbling, or an old uncle pulling down his fly. She was made with a difficult soft grunting: a young woman crying silently, as if she were somewhere else in the room.

  ‘What about James Joyce?’ said William. ‘I always thought you were good with words.’

  She looked at him across the table. Rose still slept with William, but she had not put her tongue into his mouth for a long time. And now, she knew, she never would again.

  She watched him work over his pasta, forking it up over and over until the sauce was mixed in. Why did men do that? They mashed potatoes into gravy, and mixed the rice into vindaloo, while woman just picked out one vegetable at a time.

  ‘Why do men do that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mix everything up like that. With their food.’

  ‘Do they?’

  Most of the time, Rose did not know who she was. She was a woman. But, until now, being an English woman had not come into it. Maybe it was time to bring in food.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are we talking about men again?’

  ‘I’m not saying “men”. I’m just saying it’s true, that’s all.’

  ‘Probably because we’re a bunch of shits.’

  She took a baby clam on the end of her fork and looked at it. So this was who she was. She was a person who picked at her food. She picked at her food because she was a woman. She picked at her food because she was English, because she was Irish. She picked at her food bec
ause she was a Capricorn, because when she was a baby she had choked on a spoonful of puréed parsnip, because she had a famine gene, or a food-picking gene, or because when she was young her mother told her to sit up straight and not wolf her food. She picked at her food because she was middle class.

  ‘So how’s college?’ said William, after a while.

  Rose did not say that she had started staying up all night. That her brain was racing all night. She did not say she was in love with the dark outside her window, or that she had become interested in silence, addicted to it, so that when she put on some music she felt as though something vital had been broken. She did not say,

  ‘I think I’m losing it.’ She said,

  ‘Oh, you know.’

  William took another forkful. He lifted his spaghetti high and dipped it into his mouth. She watched his jaw muscles as he chewed.

  It probably was a gender thing, actually. Less time at the breast if you’re a girl. The thorough, satisfied boy child. The fearful, precise girl child. The knife-and-fork man. The anorectic. Rose was very interested in psychology these days. On Thursdays she slept with a man who was married to a psychotherapist and said it was driving him mad. It was driving Rose mad too. She wanted to go into therapy for a start, if possible with his wife. Not that it would be much use, lying on a couch and talking her face off. Tearing her dreams apart. Recovering her childhood, those first months, that blank.

  But she had to do something. Her brain was whirring. There was too much inside her now. There were all the things she did not say to William for a start.

  Like, ‘Who am I, William? Who do you think I am?’

  ‘So how’s work?’ she said.

  William had taken to blue stripey shirts with plain white collars. He spent his days in a legal office listening to pop songs, slowing phrases down in his head and speeding them up again, trying to prove they had been stolen from someone else. He loved the job, convinced, as perhaps he always had been, that the whole music thing was a con. Perhaps because it had fooled him into feeling something, once.