What the Eye Doesn't See Page 21

  ‘Maggie, dear.’ That is all I can trust myself to say, in case she hears the pain, and I hold her arm for a moment, then she walks away, towards the gate, and she grows small, fading into the purple night and all I can see is her hand waving, as though blown by the wind – and the air closes around the place where she stood. Then I put my hand over my face, spreading my fingers out across my cheekbones, holding together the splintered fragments of my face.

  Maggie

  Every day I wake up and think – oh no, not this again, I’m finished with this. But then I lace myself up tight, go to work, and play the Normal Life Game. In my mind I can make a rational case about how this is just a bad period of my life. But the truth is that I’m stuck within the confines of today. And today is becoming unmanageable.

  It’s a terrible thing to be frightened of your own mind. Mine has become like an unwanted guest. I say to it – all right, that’s enough now, you’ve got to leave, but still there’s this person crashing around in my head, their voice ranting and arguing all day long. I don’t want to live in the same skin as myself any more. The days are taut and edgy. Everything is over-lit and green at the edges.

  In my flat a process of decay sets in. My cardboard life is folding up. There’s dust everywhere, and piles of dirty clothes, and dead flies, and cereal bowls from a week ago by the bed. I’m ill but it’s only a cold. I’d like to be properly ill – a Keatsian bout of tuberculosis, so I could turn into a pale shadow, and cough up blood. Inside I feel ill enough for that. But every day I look in the mirror and see the same disappointingly solid and healthy shape. Biology is meant to be biography – in which case you’d think I could at least be thin.

  Out there – in the world beyond the circumference of my head – Brussels has pulled down the blinds and left for the south. August heat burns in empty streets, life is on hold, shadows are short, lone cars rattle over the cobbles. Before my boss left for vacation, he called me into his office and told me what an asset I am to the department. He said that my contract will definitely be extended – and asked if I’ve thought about trying to get a permanent position. I’d be ideally suited, he said. Shiny fruit, rotten core.

  Now nearly everyone else in the office is away – except me, because I agreed to take my holiday later. The grey corridors are silent – a few survivors play cards, smoke, or listen to the radio. The phones ring unanswered. I read books or sit with my head on my desk. At four o’clock I walk home, then lie in bed in a whipped-cream mess of white duvet. Light filters in through my pale gauze curtains. My red suede shoes stand pigeon-toed next to a striped deck chair, scarves are looped on unoccupied picture hooks. Piles of half-read books lie on my packing crate bedside table. My blood runs sluggishly. Adam calls but it’s impossible for us to meet because he’s away in the States.

  One evening I cut my hand with a kitchen knife because my eyes are full of onion tears. I feel so faint I have to sit on the floor for a while. The cut runs across the pad of my index finger. If I squeeze it open there’s something white deep inside – the bone perhaps? I wonder if I ought to get it stitched, but the thought of going to a hospital and speaking French and dealing with the medical insurance is all too much. So I wrap my finger up in a handkerchief, go to an emergency pharmacy and buy bandages and lint.

  I worry that the cut will become infected, so I keep unwrapping it and bathing it in disinfectant. I do that every day when I get home from work, and this business of dressing the wound begins to fascinate me, and I fiddle with it far more than I should. I like taking off the lint, and laying my hand on the dirty kitchen tablecloth, and squeezing the sliced skin open until I can see the white bone.

  At the weekends I don’t get up. Javier has gone away and the air pulses with the sound of notes which aren’t there. I turn over in bed, and sneeze and wipe my eyes on the duvet, which is less white than it used to be. For hours I watch the window, patches of bright blue sky, a white cloud edged with grey. On the bedside table there’s the bracelet Adam bought me. When the phone rings I let the machine take a message because I don’t want to speak to Dad. I’ve decided I hate him, which is a good decision to make. With hate there are no halfway houses, no in-betweens.

  Finally I go to see a doctor, and tell him about not being able to sleep, and about the voices. He sends me to a second doctor who’s French and specialises in ‘maladies nerveuses’. I sit in an office in a modern block somewhere in the Brussels suburbs and watch the corner of a net curtain blowing in the breeze from where the window is open a crack. The doctor smokes, and there’s a roar of traffic from outside. We discuss ‘mes sentiments’ and I begin to understand the point of the French language. I see the value of the circuitous, and imprecise. I tell the doctor that I have no idea why I feel so bad. He prescribes drugs, and talks as though it’s flu, and I float back on my bicycle through the suburbs in a sudden, ecstatic good mood.

  But in the evening I feel angry because I realise that this doctor is trying to cure me of being myself. Down with shrinks, I think. I’ve got a perfect right to be fucked up. I take the bandage off my finger and open up the wound to look at the white bone inside. Then I throw the prescription in the bin, and don’t go to work the next day, and lie in bed. The hot-water heater breaks down again, just as it used to when I was first here. With no Javier to fix it, I have to stand at the sink with a sponge and wash myself in cold water.

  One evening I take Tiffany’s scarf out of the back of a drawer. Candyfloss and fuchsia – the scarf I didn’t want to keep and couldn’t throw away. The static hair of it sticks to my hands. I suppose the truth is that I was jealous of her. Tiffany, Rosa, Fiona – they all stand in my light. Look at me, Dad, look at me. Contempt has been a good substitute for grief. A line of photographs is propped on my desk – the sepia photographs I bought in the market. Lives are ending all the time, dropping like fallen leaves.

  Adam calls from the States. ‘You sound bad,’ he says.

  ‘No, not really. Just a cold.’

  We don’t have anything to talk about. That’s how it is now.

  ‘Maggie, listen. The longer you leave this situation the worse it will get …’

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to tell me what to do.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Listen, sorry, I have to go. My bath is running over.’

  I take a day off work and go to Amsterdam to get the pills for Nanda. I don’t see why she can’t order over the phone. Except probably she would need a credit card and, of course, she doesn’t have anything new-fangled like that.

  The house in Amsterdam is next to one of the central canals. It’s red-brick, tall and thin, with a gabled roof. No curtains or blinds cover vast sash windows that glint in the sharp sunlight. I stand on the doorstep, and wait, looking around me, smelling drains. In the distance a jazz band plays. A barge passes, ploughing a furrow in the black canal water. From the deck a dwarf-like man watches me. The light here is different – larger, paler. It holds objects still and makes them significant. I want to raise my hands above my head to stop the sky from pressing in on me.

  The door is opened by a woman who seems to be expecting me. Her sitting room is bright white with cushions made from kelims on a wooden floor. The sound of wind chimes glitters in the morning air. Burmese cats, like Maud and Agatha, sleep on a white sofa. The woman speaks to me in English and makes me a cup of China tea, amber in colour, tasting of ginger and cinnamon. She shows me the sunflowers on her terrace, over eight foot tall. I sit on the sofa next to the cats. The woman, who is dressed in a flowing orange robe, is silent. I want to stay in her house forever.

  As I leave I see Nanda. She’s in the distance, walking away, carrying a plastic bag in her hand, her lace-up shoes hurrying around a corner. Of course, when I get to the place she isn’t there. I go to a post office – a grey, sixties building in a side street. The sun is frying my skin so it’s a relief to step into an interior of shadows. Oddly the post office is empty except for a fraught mother, and a ch
ild wailing and screaming in a pushchair. I have to buy a cardboard box to put the bottle in and I wrap it up in a handkerchief from my bag. It’s difficult to wrap with my bandaged finger. The bottle of pills weighs nothing in my hand.

  The lady at the counter speaks to me in English before I’ve said a word to her. That’s a birthday present, is it? I tell her it is, because she’s an old lady with worn-out grey eyes, and I want to see her smile. Then I walk off through the sizzling afternoon, and hear the child wailing all down the street.

  A letter comes from Nanda. It’s full of descriptions of the shapes of clouds, and the cracks opening up in the fields because there’s no rain, and the ladybirds on the terrace. She says that the wind blowing through the cornfields makes waves which roll in towards her, just like the sea. She can hear the wings of birds as they hover above her, drifting through the air. Her words are full of wonder – as though what she sees has never been seen before. I feel jealous.

  I write back to her. I’ve got to do something, I say. I’ve got to decide something. She writes back – you don’t ever solve problems, you only ever move on to a place where they no longer look important.

  You could think of your life as a garden, she says. There are all sorts of seeds under the earth, the potential for all sorts of flowers. But you can’t tell when any of the seeds might decide to push up through the earth and bloom. Some could come suddenly but others might lie dormant for years. You just have to wait and see. There’s no point in shouting at flowers.

  I don’t find that advice helpful.

  Tyger rings up, with Sam and Dougie standing beside her.

  ‘You’re in a right black hole, aren’t you?’ she says.

  ‘No, not really. I’m OK …’

  ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what it sounds like …’

  There’s a pause while she shouts at Dougie for turning the music on loud.

  ‘So what about Adam?’ she says. ‘Are you going to marry him. Seriously?’

  ‘I don’t know. In Seville I thought I would.’

  ‘Oh, Seville,’ she says. ‘You should be careful. There are plenty of women who’ve finished up with total plonkers because the sunset was more than normally beautiful that night.’

  ‘I know, but he was so serious about it suddenly. Men are such funny things, you don’t think they have any emotions, then suddenly it’s like the cork going off a champagne bottle, and they’re spilling all over the place, and you’re scrabbling around for a glass to put it all in.’

  ‘Yes, but getting married. I mean, really …’

  ‘OK, OK …’

  ‘Sorry … Sorry. Listen, why don’t you come back to London for a while. We’d really like to see you. It’s not the same without you. Come and stay …’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  Tyger passes the phone to Sam.

  ‘It’s your dad that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ Sam says.

  I’m shocked that he should see so clearly, and be so direct.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it is, really …’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do, is there?’

  ‘No … No.’

  He cheers me up by telling me stupid stories about the horrors of auditing on the M25. Then he passes the phone over to Dougie, who sounds even less connected than usual. ‘Yeah, it is a bit complicated. What with losing the Operating Instructions, and all that.’

  He wanders on, full of random words of comfort.

  ‘Friends,’ he recommends finally. ‘And rabbits …’

  Javier arrives back from his holiday. He’s having a party and he invites me. I say yes, and thanks very much, although I’ve got no intention of going. On the night of the party I go out to the cinema on my own. When I come back I cook myself a late supper. The noise of Javier’s party is so loud that my floorboards seem to be vibrating. Salt and pepper pots jump up and down on my kitchen shelf. Voices babble and someone is thumping away on the piano – it can’t be Javier, he never plays like that. Through my open bedroom window a smell of cigarettes and red wine rises up from his balcony.

  Two o’clock and I’m lying in bed. The noise from Javier’s party is getting worse and worse. The neighbours will be around to complain shortly, I tell myself, and then remember I am the neighbours. I watch the face of the alarm clock. The piano music from downstairs is hectic, crashing through the darkness. I’m too hot, so I get out of bed, and go to the window.

  From below – a shriek of laughter, the sound of a glass smashing. Above the jumble of roofs the sky is dark blue, and there’s a potato-shaped moon, with a few half-lit stars. On Javier’s balcony a crush of people are sitting around a table, or propped against the balcony rail, drinking. A creeper grows along the rail of the balcony. Everybody seems to be twined together like one of those Bacchanalian scenes on Greek friezes. A haze of cigarette smoke surrounds them, and lights from inside the flat touch on one side of their faces.

  I can see Javier on the balcony, sitting with one foot propped on a chair. He’s dressed more smartly than usual, although his shirt hangs out from underneath a jacket that is too small, and he’s still wearing his slippers. He’s pouring drink from an earthenware jug and his other hand is on a disembodied leg. I remember what Adam said about Javier being gay. His hand on the leg is white, and the length of his fingers stretches far across the leg. Tiffany’s voice echoes from the past – you should wear things that emphasise your waist more, honey. Pink would be such a good colour on you.

  I go back to bed, and watch the alarm clock. The luminous blobs move slowly. I sleep for a while then wake at four. I get out of bed and go back to the window. The balcony is empty now, except for a single figure, with a shaggy head, standing on the table. In the blue light the figure is like a satyr or a cherub, with a slight body, and a rounded stomach. I realise that it’s Javier. He hasn’t got any clothes on.

  The piano music is still crashing out from inside the flat, and he’s dancing like someone possessed, jumping up and down on the table, twisting, his legs spinning and tapping. His hips are moving to the music and his shaggy hair waves as he jumps. For a brief moment the music stops and he stands quite still, one long-fingered hand stretched above him. He’s got something in his other hand, which he’s holding down low. It’s a bottle, perhaps, with the neck sticking upwards.

  As the music starts again, he dances, but more slowly now. Both of his hands are in the air. There isn’t a bottle. That’s not what it is. I feel as though all the blood inside me is trying to push its way out. Why isn’t he embarrassed? I am embarrassed for him. Is he too drunk to know? He doesn’t dance like someone who’s very drunk. I shouldn’t look at him, but I lean forward so that I can see better. I can’t stop watching him, as he twists and turns under the fading stars.

  The next day I don’t wake up until three. I decide I’ll go to Dad’s house – but it’s only a game, a dress rehearsal, because I know he won’t be there. The sky is grey and yellow like an old bruise, and the air is tightening. Storm weather. Everything is pale and shallow. The world has been wrung out. My head is swirling and my legs have turned to butter.

  It turns out that I’ve walked past the house where Dad lives several times before. How strange to walk past a house and not know your father lives there. I stand at the railing and look at the naked lady in her panel above the door, and the palm leaves that press against the curved glass of the bay window. The square is deserted, a dog lies on the pavement in a spiral of flies beside a bag of rubbish in the gutter.

  The front door opens and Rosa is there. She comes down the front steps. She has the same tortoiseshell octagonal glasses that I remember from years ago. Her hair is surprised, with a green scarf tied in it. A freckle below her eye is like the tear painted on a clown’s face. She wears a straight linen dress. I remember the half-open door, her naked back, shaped like a cello, Dad’s hand resting on the strings of her spine.

  Everything around me seems to be melting like wax. Rosa smiles and says hello, like we’re old friends –
which in some sense we are. She invites me in, and I slide into the hall, and put my hand on the curl at the bottom of the stair rail. Rosa explains that Dad is at Brickley Grange. She’s staring at the bandage on my finger. A necklace made out of a leather thong with a green stone rests against the brown skin above the neck of her dress. I remember that day – the twisted sheets, his white knee, enclosed in the light from the half-curtained window.

  At that age I wasn’t very keen on skin – it was something that was best kept under vests and woolly jumpers. I’d seen Dad’s hairy white legs underneath his shirt tails, and the wrinkled flesh between the stocking tops of old ladies, as they sat on Nanda’s sofa, but Rosa’s skin was different. It wrapped around her bones neatly, as though it was made to fit. It was as normal to look at as a face or a hand.

  She offers me tea, and I follow her into the front sitting room. ‘I’m glad you came,’ she says. This house is decorated like the French Revolution, as interpreted by a set designer with a limited budget. I hold onto the back of a green velvet chair. A china dog grins at me from the shadows. Everything in my body has settled down into my feet. I wipe a hand across my eyes and sneeze. I mustn’t chat with Rosa. I mustn’t let this become a pleasant meeting.

  ‘Rosa, I came around to see Dad … I came to say …’ I decide to sit down, because my feet have gone fuzzy, but then the room moves up in front of my face. I’ve gone over the top on the big dipper. The chair looms towards me – a thump, I find my face close to the parquet floor. I try to pull myself up onto the chair, but then sit propped against it.

  Rosa’s bony face is close to mine. Her eyes swim like green fish behind her octagonal glasses. She holds a glass of water out to me and asks me questions but the sounds don’t make words. I sit up and hold the glass of water.