What Are You Like Page 17

  That night she sat in and drank a bottle of white wine because there was no point in corking it, and woke up at four in the morning livid with hate. Welcome to the job.

  Five weeks ago, her senior had rung in sick with flu. What he’d really meant to say was that he was having a nervous breakdown. Of course. Everything makes sense, but only if you translate it in time.

  So now, she was making his home calls, looking at the stories people had, the photos tacked to the wall, the flamenco doll on the mantelpiece or the doll with helpless scribbles on the plastic crotch. She looked for things that could not lie: a scar, a tremor, dilated pupils or pupils like pins. She looked for bum marks on furniture or flesh, and always tried to listen to a room, convinced somehow that the angle of things, the way they faced each other or turned away, would tell her what she needed to know.

  So the carpet was sticky underfoot, and there were no toys on the floor. The sofa was pushed against the wall and the two chairs were jammed up under the windowsill. But in the kitchen, on the draining board, in front of the window, there was a snowdrop in a little glass that said everything here is just fine.

  When what it really meant to say, of course, was Help!

  The woman who throws a chair across the room, the boy who spits on the floor, the man who looks at you and talks about your cunt.

  Help!

  And Rose did want to help people. She lay on her back in Regent’s Park one spring day and realised she was a blank sheet. She had to be careful what she wrote on it. She would do good things.

  But what if she didn’t like people, after all? Maybe this was why she had ended up here, in the probation service, and not in Cerebral Palsy or Guide Dogs for the Blind – because she wanted to punish people, but slowly.

  ‘No, not broken. Dislocated.’

  She picked up a file and walked down to the interview room.

  Attempted arson. Nineteen years old. Peroxide hair; his eyes very cool. He had strong white fingers, translucent to the bone. Rose looked at them and wondered where they had been.

  ‘So you’re clean?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t bother with shit.’

  ‘So, Simon,’ she leaned forward. He was laughing at her, the little shit. ‘Tell me about where we left off.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  Rose was still looking for the key. The tumblers would roll into place, and the damaged child spill out into the room.

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  She was hungry, still, for the stories people had. Rose wanted to bump into someone from college and tell them the remarkable place her own life had ended up. She had tried with William, rung him up to say ‘Who are you, these days?’ and when they met, he had pushed his hand down her knickers as she sat on the arm of a chair. Rose was astonished at his anger. She wondered, as she felt his blunt nail shove into her, how he could feel so connected as to want to hurt her in this way.

  The little shit looked at the ceiling and Rose imagined the Styrofoam dripping on to them, in gouts of flame. This was a boy who liked to burn things down.

  ‘Tell me about the fire.’

  Rose sat and counted in her head from one to five hundred. She lost her place at two hundred and thirty with the sudden thought that if she loved him, then everything would be all right. She imagined kissing him and telling him it would be all right. She imagined pulling his hips towards her, with their large and beautiful bones.

  ‘Just.’

  She waited.

  ‘I was fucked off.’

  ‘Why?’

  Veins

  Autumn, 1986

  A GIRL MARIA knew from college walked into her changing room – didn’t even see her, as she took the tag.

  Tall, with long calves, very self-possessed. She wriggled into a cream skirt and went out in her broken-looking bare feet to show a friend outside.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said his voice and Maria tried not to smile. Tom. She wanted to put her head around the curtain and say, ‘So what are you up to, these days?’ She wanted to surprise him with where she had ended up – working for crap money and living in a Hatch Street bedsit.

  Just for the laugh. You understand.

  When they met, he was in first med, and she was in second engineering. It was the year before she went to New York. He hung around the student bar, chain-smoking and talking about dissections, about stealing some dead guy’s dick and letting it hang down from the bottom of his trousers. Maria didn’t believe a word of it, but she fell for him anyway. Mostly because of the way he never looked at her, but also because of the way he smoked, the hunger of it.

  She got her friend Joanna to bring him on a double date to the Halloween Ball. He arrived pissed and sat at the table all night, picking the petals off the centrepiece. There was a bit of a lunge in the taxi home, a lot of tongue. Maria found it all a bit anatomical, but she spent the next three months chasing him. She went puce just thinking about it. About bumping into him ‘casually’ in Keoghs and letting him know, by the by, that she was on the pill.

  Now she looked at his girlfriend – his real girlfriend. Valerie. In a short cream skirt with a gold chain belt. She had studied Pharmacy, which must be handy. A good body, apart from the feet. They probably had sex like normal people. They probably lay around afterwards talking about how they felt about things.

  ‘I don’t know, Tom.’

  ‘Come on, Val, it’s fine.’

  She had slept with him, finally, in his family’s summer house in Brittas Bay. The lino slithered with holiday sand. The bed was heavy and cold with damp, and you could smell the sea. He looked at her arm and told her she had an extra vein running down the inside of her left elbow. He traced it for her. We all have our mistakes, he said. Every corpse they cut into had something missing, or something added on.

  Maria didn’t tell him she was a virgin. She hoped he didn’t go in for Gynaecology, and wasn’t too surprised when he did not call.

  The girlfriend dumped the white skirt on the floor, then picked it up like a rebellious child and hung it by the gold chain belt on a hook on the wall.

  When she was gone, Maria checked the inside of her arm, quietly in the mirror. A flat hinge of bone. A faint map of veins. Flesh. Blood.

  It was no use.

  She had lost a secret. This, she decided, was her definition of a nervous breakdown: after a nervous breakdown, you were never sexy again. There was no mystery that could be broken with the grief of your name, whispered in the dark.

  Maria.

  She walked home to Hatch Street, the fresh air crackling against her like cellophane. The streets were full of people like herself. She could see it in the way they crossed the road into the light or shade, shied away from shop windows. She could see it in the changing room, as they shifted their shoulders under new clothes. The way they said, ‘I can’t take black.’ The way they said, ‘It’s too busy,’ or, ‘I need something more at the neck.’

  Everyone had their rules. Maria just knew what hers were for. That was all.

  She was going to keep herself alive. It was too simple. What man could understand it? That when she said no she meant no. That the morning was always like this, that some days were just no good. Some films were no good. Some food was altogether wrong. That Maria had her likes and dislikes like everyone else, but every choice she made led in a straight line to life or death.

  ‘Suits you,’ she said. ‘No, really.’ And hung up clothes and sprayed air freshener, and waited for the key to turn in the lock, whatever the lock might be.

  Works on the Line

  Spring, 1987

  ROSE RANG HER mother and said she would come out for the long weekend. There was a funeral she had to go to first, way out on the Thames Link. Afterwards, she would make her way back to Victoria and take the train back home.

  Her mother just had to warn Rose about works on the line – always scrupulous about details and diversions: Rose, j
ust as scrupulous, wrote it all down. Sometimes she had to shake herself to get her mother’s habits out of her system. They were like a virus: the way she pulled her lips back when she put her lipstick on, the way she had to use three different chopping boards, and take her sunglasses off before she spoke. And now, a fading little series of farewells, like the phone was for whispering, and everyone you talked to on it was especially dear.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye, then.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Rose pressed the receiver back into its cradle. Her mother loved funerals. People died, and suddenly it was all worthwhile – all the stolen television sets and the syringes in the flowerbeds. If you had been kind to them, then their dying was a kind of success.

  For Rose it was still a failure of the worst kind. She stacked her folders and clipped the tops back on to her biros and pens. She looked out over the sky of south London, and checked for planes.

  A young man she barely knew was flying in from Amsterdam. He was flying in freight – in with the suitcases and boxes of tulips, his dead ears blocking and unblocking as they started to descend.

  Rose had lost a client. She had temporarily mislaid a client and when she found him again, he was dead. She looked at his file. Attempted arson. Nineteen years old. On the bottom of the page she wrote ‘Deceased’.

  She should have known he was dealing.

  For the funeral, she took out her interview suit, which was dove grey. She liked doing up the pearl buttons in the morning light. Here she was in her own flat – all her things: the CDs in a row, the colours tending to blue. The effect somewhat spoiled, of course, by William’s last little visit. When they met, he kept telling her about his new BMW. She had smiled at the time, but perhaps growing up was all about rage.

  Rose sat on the tube, and watched her shattered reflection in the opposite window, the two faces juddering apart. Poor William. Why didn’t he die? She would have gone to that funeral in a minute. She would have gone wearing lipstick and her yellow chase-me-fuck-me shoes.

  It was a fitful spring day, ragged with cloud. Rose found the church, a neo-gothic shed, and, feeling slightly ashamed, walked towards the door. In the porch, a young man in a good suit came over and shook her hand. She did not know if he was an undertaker or a priest. He gave her a long, loving look and she wanted to giggle. It was like taking a fancy to your dentist, licking his finger by accident as it entered your mouth.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘I’m Simon’s brother Matt,’ he said. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘A friend,’ she said, and ducked past him into the church.

  How peculiar. She should not be here at all.

  A cluster of people scattered slowly into their seats as Rose walked up the aisle. She wondered what was wrong, then step by step she began to miss the coffin. The body was not here. The boy had missed his own funeral. He was lost in transit – sitting on the tarmac in Caracas, or dumped in a hangar in Charles de Gaulle.

  It was a memorial service, not a funeral, after all. Still Rose felt she had failed in some way, that she had forgotten the paperwork or mislaid the file. She was at some baggage carousel, the other passengers picking up their bags and leaving one by one, while the missing coffin circled, unnoticed and alone, at the other end of the hall.

  The congregation stood and knelt and Rose stumbled after them as best she could. She felt she should go up to some counter, and point to the coffin shape on the plastic card, beside the picture of the backpack and the blue holdall. These days, they probably just cremate you, bung you off DHL.

  Matt turned to the woman beside him, lowering her gently on to the kneeler. His mother. She wore a black chiffon scarf over the bouffant of her hair, but Rose was ready to forgive her that, the Monaco feel she tried to bring to the death of her youngest boy. Everything matched, her ash-blond hair, the oatmeal-coloured trouser suit, the dull lustre of her cream slingback shoes. Her nose, as if to defy the soufflé she had made of herself, was hooked and strong. She hitched it up in front of her and followed it down the aisle, glancing at Rose as she passed. A flare of blood around her left iris made it leap into sudden violet, and Rose turned to follow her, as though she had planned it all along.

  ‘You’ll go with this lot,’ said Matt, and she climbed into a car, where three strangers squashed over in the back seat to give her room. They were about to break the silence any moment when the boy on her right started to cry.

  ‘A friend,’ said Rose, when she got into the house, and they looked at her like she was the girlfriend they had never met. Such a lovely girl. Rose found herself beside a table of food and heaped a paper plate. She forked the stuff in: coronation chicken and chicken tikka, slices of roast beef and scrolls of cooked ham. It was a huge Irish funeral. Cousins and sisters, in-laws, uncles, drink. Rose filled and refilled her glass with red wine and no one seemed to notice. She felt sober, but she wasn’t in control. This was important. It was important to drink. To say the thing that was waiting to come out of her mouth – whatever it might be.

  She heard the first laugh, cut short by the occasion, and after a moment, the room started to give. Rose picked up a plate of sandwiches and passed them around. She took up a tea-towel in the kitchen and started to dry the dishes, smiling at the people who passed. She was what they wanted her to be, the girlfriend that never was, the nearly sister-in-law, the woman who had no place, sad and important now that Simon had died. She started to cry.

  The tears came from nowhere, blurring the sink and smearing his mother’s face, which was smeared already with grief. She went into the living room and looked around, wanting obscenities to belly out of her, about these strangers who all knew each other, and bred with each other, and wore such terrible shoes.

  ‘Your bladder’s very near your eyes,’ said a voice beside her. She had noticed him earlier, a middle-aged man watching her with the nearly sexual intent of new uncles, of borrowed family.

  When she realised what he meant, all she could do was look at him. He started to laugh and she stared at the extraordinary droop of his jowls and chin, flying about.

  Rose wondered how anyone’s face could end up that shape. A sudden weight loss, perhaps – it had to be more than gravity. As if he knew what she was thinking, he pulled his hand in a broad stroke across his middle and said,

  ‘I haven’t been well,’ the fingers digging a stave into the fat under his blue shirt. Rose realised that he was steaming drunk. She tried to move away, but there was something that she had to figure out about him first, a problem that held her. It was the kind of thing she would realise later, like a missing eyebrow, or two different-coloured eyes.

  ‘Seriously.’ His face fell – quite literally. The fat slumped down to his collar. The whole thing hung in front of her, a drop about to fall.

  ‘That’s my wife over there,’ he said in a voice that did not mean anything. He gave a nod towards the other side of the room that forced him to take a drunken step backwards. Rose glanced around, despite herself.

  It was a perfectly normal-looking woman. There was nothing to say.

  ‘So what are you to the groom?’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Simon.’

  ‘I’m a friend.’

  ‘I see. Sad business.’

  ‘Actually, I was his probation officer.’

  ‘A trying task,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Probation.’

  ‘Yes. Well, we do try our best.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Very good. Very sharp.’

  Rose looked at the carpet, a swirl of green on brown. She felt that if she took one step away from him she would fall into its gaps and holes.

  He took her by the arm to steer her around. There was a photograph of Simon on the sideboard and they looked at it together. The boy in the picture was dead. Rose felt the man’s breath on her face and realised that he liked all t
his. He liked the realness of it, the access it gave him to people like her.

  ‘Too young,’ he said.

  She felt the sexual cup of his hand under her elbow, the direct blue of his insincere eyes. And Rose was shocked by his air of complicity. He was waiting for her to betray something. And she did not know what it was.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘pleased to meet you.’ His wife had come up behind them. She gave Rose a difficult smile and turned him back to face the room.

  Rose blundered around the house. Everywhere she turned there were people in groups, talking, touching, drinking. In a bedroom there was a young woman looking in a mirror and slowly brushing her hair. Rose sat on the edge of the bath, leaking tears. She stood by the wall of the living room, drinking red wine, her bones drying to splinters, her blood thickening to a viscous, wicked soup. She drank until she was the smallest thing in the room, every organ in her body small and hard and old. She drank until she was nothing. Sober and empty, no matter how much she tried to fill herself up with wine or gin. Old age was a bag with a hole in it, she decided, you can never get drunk again.

  Rose smelt the cool sheets. Her bedroom was just the same, the same wallpaper, the same stones in a pattern along the windowsill. Her mother must have dusted over the years; even painted under them, and put them back, just so. The tree outside the window was pressed up against the glass now: Rose fell asleep afraid that it would crack through the pane and invade the room.

  At six in the morning she woke, exactly conscious of where she was, her eyes seeking and finding the faces in the wallpaper – over by the mantelpiece, by the wardrobe, to the left of the light switch. She had been dreaming about a lost letter. She spotted it in a costume drama and rang the props department of the BBC to tell them it was addressed to her, but when it arrived, all scrawled and rubber-stamped, she saw that it was years old. It was from one of the boys, the one she had kissed, but he had nothing new to say to her. He had looked for her, and missed her, years before.