EXCERPTS
Saturday again. Framed by the bar’s dirty window, with its sunburnt, red frame, Adam gazed at his friend, thinking absentmindedly of his other friends, the few lovers he’d had, and his many acquaintances. What they said and did somehow spread out from them, somehow escaping their grasp. This effect, he thought, was almost like a row of dominoes falling, or the stone his stepson had thrown into the rich, still waters of the local lake the weekend before. Concentric ripples had radiated out from the stone’s point-of-impact to the far shore. So, it was with what people did and said, he supposed: our smallest expressions of kindness or malice spread out beyond us. And, in this way, we encounter –– at one or several removes –– dozens, hundreds, thousands of people we’ll never know we touched. Someday, he thought, someone should tell the story of a life from the outside, through the eyes of all those it moved, however directly and indirectly.
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But sex is not like in the movies. She of all people knew that. Still, the stranger filled her stomach with something of sepia’s sickly-sweet excitement. As the tarmac wore on, iridescent sunlight filled the cabin. She studied the lined face of her thin companion closely. His pale complexion had been away from the north for a long time. Several years of long heavy summers had turned his skin reddish in places, freckled in others, while pale blue veins stuck out in his wrists, hands and forehead. She imagined his hands on her hips. His thumbs pressing on her abdomen or the impress of his calloused hands in the soft flesh of her lower back. Sat inches away from him, unable or unwilling to speak, she instead fantasised: it would seem as if he had never done this before, although she knew he had, somewhere, in that inscrutable past, before her little apartment, and before the grainy Turkish coffee they were to drink. He was to say to her that ‘love is making the same thing new’. Waking daily together. Re-fashioning the universe, with all its spite and heaviness, into something they both shared.
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She thought she caught the eye of a tall, dark-eyed man, wearing tight black trousers and a red shirt, who was walking past the plate glass widow, glancing at the large grey tattoo at the centre of her cleavage: a pistol pointing downwards, a pistol from a time before chinos, offices and desultory restaurants. Catching his piercing eyes for a moment, she recalled her now almost unrecognizably strident student days: “Fuck your reservation! I want emancipation, not cunting restaurants,” she had once screamed, slamming the front door of her shared house in the face of a carefully combed boy – a “beau,” her moralizing, perennially permed mother would have called him. His round florid face, stooping shoulders and punctilious attention to detail, she thought in later years, must have flourished in the air-conditioned worlds she found herself inhabiting.
Perhaps the stranger was captivated by her ink. Perhaps by the incongruity. That’s it, most likely, she thought, although half-hoped it was her body that drew his gaze. Still, there’s no way of knowing for certain, she thought – his desires will remain forever tacit, a matter for interpretation. Checking her reflection in an under-filled, oversized wine glass, she drew her white dress – this lace-around-the-cleavage thing is like something out of Jane fucking Austen, she thought, but he likes it: his ultimate fantasy would be fucking a slice of cake, she thought, as she drew the lace across the offending Colt 45, which had been heavily dusted, but not wholly obscured by Chanel face powder.
How had she ended up here, she wondered? Like this. Certainly, a transformation or realization of the impossible smallness of life, both within and without, had something to do with it. Something about the passing stranger, whom she would never know, spurred some dormant sense of reflection and, she had to confess, bafflement. The girl with leather trousers and a Colt 45 now perched in semi-detached promise: cast adrift in early middle age, she had felt her current beau’s frog-eyes on her. A conference. Sales. That was three years ago. She gazed at his midriff disapprovingly, swaddled in an off-white half-cashmere mix V-neck, under his gym-wear. His wheezy breath filled the room, while she strained her neck for one last glance at the alluring, lonely-looking man, passing by the plate glass window, emblazoned with a ridiculous motto: “For those with a distinguished palate and small appetite”.
___________
From that day, almost every Thursday, the two men would sit in endless conversation; the older man’s labyrinthine narratives shifting to the mythical, before suddenly returning to their original, obscure topic. Virgil spoke simply – partly probably as a consequence of years of living abroad – almost gnomically, at times, or so his new friend thought; with Virgil, so much remained under the surface. Neither he, nor – as far as he could tell – Virgil ever seemed to feel the vaguest stirring to formalize their real topic, too immense, too close, and so strangely ineffable: a childish wonder at the other. Desiderius assumed that Virgil shared his intuition that their friendship had already happened. Desiderius had once started to write something about love’s asynchronicity. Those most important to us arrive in our lives a little too early or a little too late: “tragedy”, he would say to Virgil, “is just bad-timing”. Still, he must ask Virgil what his take on their unlikely friendship was –– he knew Virgil shared a begrudging penchant for the esoteric. Beyond or above the smoke and passions of tattooed and thinly T-shirted bodies in second-hand leather and denim, in those evenings, Desiderius felt, their friendship overflowed the Inferno Bar’s dank basement, and rose up into the incurious universe…
And Desiderius certainly felt as if Virgil – as a child from the countryside, like him – had also stared out at a lake one late autumn day at twilight. That was friendship for the old man, a carefully honed definition, and love too, perhaps… Suddenly, he recalled a warm palm pressed to his and the earthy smell of an abandoned reservoir. It was cold and the fallen leaves made the lake look as if it were paved with vivid red, burnt orange, and dark brown slabs, though all this was more than forty years ago, during the old regime. Still, he recalled those sycamore leaves in the lake; he recalled thinking that they must form some obscure and infinitely complex puzzle of dodecagons, fallen and flat, and half-submerged, agonised rhombi. But, minutes later, this island of floating leaves seemed to be a solid, sodden mass of orange and brown tones; it seemed to be the scales of some half-submerged monster in the middle of the wooded lake; a monster that once breathed and roared, but now was sinking slowly into this abandoned reservoir’s ruddy depths. Yes, he could see it all, as if it were yesterday. But something, he thought, something must have caused those leaves to fall… And there must have been some kind of obscure logic governing all of this. Something that dictates which leaves fall into the lake; which become ensnared by the debris at the side of the lake and lie rotting and stinking in the eerie autumn light; which leaves fall to the frigid ground, where they freeze and contract to look like carelessly dropped cigarillos… No, learning the rules of this infinite game of the sky, lakes and wistful soft-haired boys – as he imagined himself and Virgil to be – staring up to dark infinities and down to still darker lakes was not the purpose of this game… No, what mattered was the sudden tranquillity such moments bring, moments that we recall almost shyly, but which can no more be abandoned or forgotten than defined. So, the old man considered his long life… He thought of his strangely-faded parents; those slain school colleagues; the girl with the oval face and shining eyes, and the other, his wife; life was a multitude of broken images, arranged by chance, but with geometrical precision. Then, with a shudder, he pictured himself as one of those leaves, all those years ago, sinking into the lake’s still, reddish depths, but held for one last moment to the light.
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He sought permanence. Solidity. A poet, though he forgot who – probably someone Virgil spoke of – had written: ‘These are the fragments…’. He struggled for a moment and then recalled the full quotation: ‘These are the fragments shored against my ruins’. Sure, he thought, we are hanging on. But we could be more. Together, we could be completed by having a real home of our own. The pressure in his abdomen built. He turned his slightly toes inwards, pressing downwards into the comfort of the fluffy pink matt, as a faltering yellowish stream began to flow into the pinkish toilet bowl. Clara’s un-flushed sanitary towel eventually bowed to the pressure and gave way to his stream – a mysterious totem of her metamorphosis and to possibility. Leaving his soft hands – ‘sissy-fingered’ his father had called them – unwashed, he went and sat opposite Catherine at the dinner table. Tentatively, he outlined his plan. He thought of her pale tongue, threaded with purple-veins.
“You, a legacy?!” she cried, with the sort of joyous contempt only someone who is a professional failure could muster.
Perhaps all the most interesting things happen next door. Catherine certainly had. Some miles away from Naughton, in another dreary monstrosity of a town, but nestled in those same uncertain greenish hills. Two up. Two down. Or, together, four up, four down. Double. That was the initial attraction, perhaps. Arithmetic, again. They were both outsiders, neighbours, certainly, in a town renowned only for the level of mental illness of its inhabitants, who muttered and stumbled their way around a few streets of shops and an uninhabited precinct, and lived lives of astonishing intensity and heavy tedium in equal measure. And all this in a primal drizzle, with a sleeping damp that crawled up yellowing walls and into wheel arches. Gripping the PVC bag tightly, its rotting contents straining and stretching it, he walked down the uneven concrete path towards the bin at the end. In the corner of his eye, a shadow loomed. She, who was to become his wife, came into focus. Bobbed mousy hair, narrow hips in grey chinos, narrower lips and green eyes, a black roll-neck, her ribs and pelvis protruding sharply.
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Like many aspirational English women, Vera had noticed that her mother seemed to view death as something that mainly affected the finically irresponsible, or the unknown faces of places she’d never been. When the time came, her mother, she was sure, would die in an orderly manner. Like a policeman, or a child.
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Vera knew this was all her mother could offer. All any parent can ever offer is proximity, a warmish huddle against the vast expanse of terrifying solitude, into which Virgil, they both thought, had rather obstinately chosen to jump, unable or unwilling to continue the life with her. ‘One day, some time ago, it just broke,’ his parting words, after the drunken argument the evening before. He had simply uttered this, turned, slung his half-backed adidas sports bag over his shoulder, and walked towards the station, with nothing more to say.
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Perhaps these things didn’t torment Virgil, she thought, but they seemed to fill him with an implacable melancholy, something about their disingenuousness, something about the whole situation, he’d once explained, what he called “pointless civility” and “fake friendship”. ‘I know who my friends are, Vera’ he’d always say, with a seriousness that was comical coming from a skinny kid in his early-twenties – the type she would see from time to time when she ventured beyond Whitehall to Bloomsbury, towards the libraries, museums and – most of all – empty Georgian squares.
After such dinner parties, uncomprehending, she could see his entire body tense, bent, desperate to leave her, or rather the world she inhabited, a suffocating world of credit cards, cars and over-priced cafes, a life in which all the possibilities of a twenty-year-old fade to a staid middle-class, middle-age, half-life, in the blink of an eye.
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With time and wilderness, such lassitude had become more immediate than the stories he still occasionally heard from back home, Christof thought. What they don’t tell you, what no one will admit, is that you are only really present to those immediately there, otherwise you sink, forgotten with an easy combination of pity and envy, curiosity and resentment, which are all quite misplaced because nothing, of course, really changes. No, you still carry sadness on your back, and still sit in bars under neon lights, waiting, waiting for someone to become immediate and to talk, albeit, for the most part, about the far away and finished. So many, like him, he thought, like Virgil, so many sit under-lights and wait for someone, somewhere. They live out their moments bemused and bedazzled in the clangour of unfamiliar pop, gazing upon beach trees lacquered with rain, rigidly paraded on the darkening boulevard, palms or sand. He wondered how Virgil felt now, now that his school-mates sat in fine houses, attached to a universe of things, children, and problems, problems that no longer seemed real because they had become incomprehensible mush, like the drowning notices of lost dogs and rings, lovingly penned by shaking, desperate hands.
Was it such implacable moments, with all their spare lucidity that had separated him from a world half-known and half-remembered? Those memories were now like someone he had met years ago, somewhere under the sun, their outline still familiar, but their face faded from view, from the gap of time, and their familiar life unfamiliar. No, this, he thought, seemed unlikely in the extreme. No, it was something else entirely, probably: “You don’t come from here anymore”, someone once said to him on a rare trip back. The past is formed by a concrete presence, without which history itself is forgotten. That’s why we have statues. He must ask Virgil about statues sometime. All this life of people he once knew, whose contact he had sorely and ardently yearned for when he first left, they now took on the sadness of family photographs, images where the faces of the dead stare back at you with an infinite melancholy – the present, on that occasion, sucked away for the sake of record, for the sake of a half-remembered, half-improvised continuum. A saccharine compromise.
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“Look,” continued Virgil, “what I mean is that we only live a fraction of our lives… most of it is, well, somewhere else… somewhere in a web of fantasies. I wonder if we’re all the same like that… you know? All of us walking around thinking about somewhere else, somewhere that was only ever a possibility, once, perhaps”.
multiverse.