Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Read online

  By the same author

  The Changeling

  The Wave Theory of Angels

  Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction

  ALISON MACLEOD

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2007

  1

  Copyright © Alison MacLeod, 2007

  The publishers would like to thank Macmillan, London, UK, for permission to

  reproduce ‘The Creel’ from The Tree House by Kathleen Jamie

  The Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-91860-0

  For Hugh Dunkerley and Hugo Donnelly

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my talented editors at Hamish Hamilton, Juliette Mitchell, Simon Prosser and Francesca Main, who, year on year, bring exciting new literature into the world against the odds. I am grateful, too, to my agent, David Godwin, for his high energy and know-how. I’d also like to thank my reader-friends Hugh Dunkerley, Karen Stevens and Jane Rusbridge.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to include previously published stories: Prospect for ‘Sacred Heart’ and ‘Radiant Heat’ (in which the character of Kurt Zucker is very loosely based on the quantum physicist Klaus Kinder-Geiger, who was killed in the Swissair crash that took place just beyond Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1998; Zucker’s personal life, however, is entirely fictional); Pulp.Net for ‘Life and Soul’ and ‘Discharge’; London Magazine for ‘Live Wire’; Virago for ‘Rosie’s Tongue’, from their collection Short Circuits; and Littlewood Press for ‘Where there is milk, where there is honey’, originally entitled ‘Simon S-S-Says’, from their collection Northern Stones; also to Picador Books for allowing me to use Kathleen Jamie’s poem, ‘The Creel’, and to General Motors for my use of some of their advertising detail in ‘The Will Writer’.

  Contents

  so that the land was darkened

  Sacred Heart

  Live Wire

  E-Love: Heloise & Abelard

  Dirty Weekend

  The Knowledge of Penises

  Pilot

  Discharge

  Coupling

  Notes for a Chaotic Century

  Where there is milk, where there is honey

  The Will Writer

  Rosie’s Tongue

  Life and Soul

  Radiant Heat

  so that the land was darkened

  I. August 1999

  ‘Race me,’ you said that day at the bottom of Bow Hill.

  We collapsed on the grassy height, our chests heaving, while, over the Atlantic, the shadow of the moon sped towards us at 1,500 miles per hour. Like all the others that day, we’d climbed through the yew wood to the top of the hill, and then higher still, to the top of one of the ancient barrows, where we’d staked our claim, spreading a blanket and cracking open bottles of cool spring water. In the ground beneath us, the Bronze Age dead slept on. Poor buggers, I thought. Poor buggers – what they wouldn’t give.

  I walked to the edge of the barrow. Far below, wheat fields stretched away in tawny flanks of stubble, while, in the distance, the coastal plain of West Sussex shimmered, illusory in the light of mid-August.

  ‘Nathan!’ you called. ‘Almost time.’

  I lowered the binoculars, returned to our patch, and looped my yellow eclipse-glasses over my ears.

  ‘Sex-y,’ you pronounced.

  ‘I rather thought that might be the case,’ I replied, my eyebrow cocked. Then I pushed you on to the mildewed blanket and kissed you, our noses and glasses bumping. Even as we kissed, they were ringing temple bells in India and beating steel plates with sticks. They were going cold at the sight of black chicks hatched that morning. They were ushering children and pregnant women indoors. Within the hour, they’d be washing down their walls, cleaning them of the breath of darkness.

  You and I, we hardly saw it coming.

  ‘Quick!’ you cried, peering out from under me. ‘We’re missing it.’ High above Bow Hill, the sky had dimmed and the moon had started to eat the sun. We sat up and turned our faces skywards. The scattered schoolchildren started to clap – too early in their eagerness.

  ‘Over here,’ called their teacher, and he gathered them all just behind us. around a simple pinhole projector. Soon they were sitting quietly, mesmerized by the progress of the shadow they’d trapped in the cardboard box.

  ‘Better, sir,’ piped up one, ‘than watching the old cricket my sister has at home in a jam jar.’

  It could have been me fifteen years before. ‘Swot,’ I mumbled – under my breath, I could have sworn.

  ‘Plonker,’ came the swot’s reply.

  ‘Geek,’ I insisted, not taking my eyes off the sun.

  ‘Alpha geek,’ he countered, hardly turning.

  ‘Nerd,’ I whispered hotly.

  ‘Nutter,’ he retorted coolly.

  ‘Propellerhead,’ I tried.

  ‘Four eyes,’ he fired.

  I pushed my flimsy glasses up the bridge of my nose. What could I do but concede the point?

  You tapped the victor’s scrawny back. He turned, uncertain. Smiling, you passed him a melting HobNob from the stash in your rucksack. And it was obvious – from the way his fingers hovered in mid-air, from the sudden glassy look in his beady eyes, from the bubble of saliva on his lower lip – that he’d fallen helplessly in love with you.

  I knew the feeling. Hadn’t I tripped up the steps of the British Museum the first time I saw you?

  You were sitting on the fourth step from the top, your skirt spread wide, your legs bare and your head thrown back to the sun, like an acolyte on a fag break outside the temple. It was June 21st. The first day of summer. In less than two months, we’d be together on top of Bow Hill.

  I steadied myself, walked up the remaining steps, and hovered painfully at the museum’s main doors. I looked at my watch. Six minutes late for work already. Any longer would require fast talking – never my forte.<
br />
  Yet I drew breath and walked back down. ‘Hello,’ I said. A clear opening line. A perfectly adequate opening line.

  You turned slowly towards me, your eyes squinting against the midday light – blue eyes, lit from behind in that strange Celtic way – and my heart wrecked as I heard myself. ‘I want you to know that I haven’t been watching you, which isn’t to say I don’t regret the lack of opportunity, though I’m not a perve – you have my word on that – and, it’s true, you could be awful and I could be badly mistaken, but I think the opposite might be the case, which is to say, I think you’re probably lovely – I mean I can see you’re lovely, no probably about it – which is, in any case, why I’m standing here embarrassing myself when really I should be back at work by now, blowing the dust off some clay beaker – I work here’ – I waved a hand at the main doors – ‘but I find myself standing – no, loitering – beside you with something tantamount to verbal constipation, trying to ask you if you would agree to have coffee with me while also hoping you’re not about to call Security, and that, if nothing else, you have at least, please God, a working knowledge of English.’

  Eyes the colour of lapis lazuli.

  ‘I’d need a lot more than a working knowledge,’ you said, and you looked away again. American. Or Canadian. A tourist. A short-term visitor. Gone in two weeks. Or two days. I could hardly bear it.

  ‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘Of course. Absolutely. And apologies. I am a prat, though I have it on reliable authority that, when all’s said and done, I really am quite okay.’

  ‘Really quite okay,’ you repeated, inscrutable.

  ‘Yes.’ Oh God. ‘Really.’

  You shielded your eyes with your hand. ‘So is it coffee in clay beakers then?’

  Was that a yes? ‘Um, no. But I know a place that does a good line in polystyrene.’

  You weren’t sure.

  Keep talking, I told myself. ‘Cups which, no doubt, will be part of the archaeological horde the next millennials are doomed to unearth,’

  You looked up. ‘They don’t biodegrade?’

  ‘Not in a time known to man.’

  ‘Oh…’

  I was losing you. ‘Then again, there’s a tearoom not far from here. Sweaty scones, grumpy service, good bone china.’

  You smiled at the step below you. You didn’t make sense. You were North American but you were noticeably shy. There was a travel journal – pages of tight, cramped writing – flapping in the breeze beside you, yet you idled on the steps of the BM as if you’d never been anywhere else; as if you’d just walked free of some classical frieze. You were long-limbed –statuesque rather than slender – and your feet (bare, sandal-free), I suddenly noticed, were surprisingly large. Incongruously large. In fact, I’d never seen such big feet on a woman. Lord. How odd. But didn’t BotticellI’s Venus also have unusually sturdy feet?

  You must have noticed me noticing because, suddenly, you pulled them protectively close. Yet, the truth was, I wanted nothing more than to cup the travelling sole of one of those feet in my hand.

  The urge made me reckless. ‘Meet me at the Elgin Marbles at five.’

  You drilled the step with your big toe. ‘Five it is,’ you said at last.

  ‘I’m Nathan,’ I said.

  You nodded to the main doors. ‘You’re late.’

  At the top of Bow Hill, perched high on our burial mound, I hauled you between my legs and gathered you to my chest. The light turned briefly golden, the honeyed light of a late-summer’s afternoon. You leaned your head in the cradle of my neck, and we watched the vast V-shaped shadow of the moon cross the fields below. It was a panorama I had known as long as I could remember. ‘My family had a summer cottage not far from here,’ I said. ‘Mouldering, year in, year out.’

  You crunched on an apple. ‘Your family or the cottage?’

  ‘Both, as it happens.’

  You turned round, your eyes bright, searching.

  I shrugged. ‘I used to escape to up here.’

  Below us, on the hill’s plateau, a special-needs carer was running after her charge – a laughing girl with a collapsed face, a jutting nose and a crone’s chin. Or was she a laughing crone with the slim build and friskiness of a girl? As I watched she metamorphosed back and forth, back and forth, like a Victorian reversible illustration. The wind came up. The sky deepened to purple. I rubbed the goose-pimples on your bare arms. Overhead, swallows darted and dived in the mistaken twilight, raking the air for insects that weren’t there.

  My mouth was next to your ear. ‘Will we do this again in eighty-two years?’

  ‘See you here,’ you whispered back.

  Far beneath us, the tribal chieftains were dreaming of Bronze Age bling: copper daggers, votive shields, capes of gold. Behind us, a few of the schoolchildren giggled with sudden nerves. You squeezed my knee. I kissed your neck. The rare wew-wew-wew chur-chur of a nightingale rippled on the air. Then, high above us, someone blew out the candle of the day.

  II. August 2003

  Toronto brought out the worst in me.

  It was hot. Thirty-two degrees. I wanted only the deep, wood-wormy gloom of a pub somewhere on the Downs.

  It didn’t help that every Canadian man was three times broader than I was. Or that their teeth were disconcertingly white. Or that in every bar, every café, they stared openly at you, smiling, as if to say, ‘You? With him?’ And contrary to what I’d been guaranteed by many a London friend, everyone didn’t love my accent. Moreover, in exile from WC1, I could suddenly hear why. I sounded stiff. Lofty. I sounded like I was up to something.

  ‘I’m just making a suggestion, Nathan. It’s three-thirty and we haven’t been anywhere yet. Why don’t you want to go to the CN Tower? The views up there are really something.’

  ‘Vertigo,’ I said. I looked about in my desultory way. ‘Why is there no litter in Toronto?’

  ‘Because there isn’t.’

  ‘It’s almost eerie.’

  ‘You’re almost eerie. What about Casa Loma? The gardens…?’

  ‘Crowds.’

  ‘A boat tour of the slands?’

  ‘Seasickness.’

  You toed the sewer grate with your tremendous foot. Next to you, suddenly, I felt small and mean, and meaner still as you smiled and slapped your thigh in that Doris Day way of yours. Out with it,’ you said. ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘You won’t mind?’ The devil on my shoulder was taking hold.

  ‘I won’t mind.’

  My finger stabbed the map. ‘I rather fancy the Shoe Museum.’

  You blinked. ‘The Shoe Museum?’

  ‘Yup. That’s the ticket.’

  Because shoes made you self-conscious.

  I picked up the sheet of trivia on our way in. ‘What was the most ever paid for a pair of used shoes?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Eight pairs of ruby slippers were made for Judy Garland for The Wizard of Oz. The last pair were auctioned for $665,000.’

  ‘Who would have guessed?’

  ‘ “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” ’

  ‘Neil Armstrong.’

  ‘Of course it’s Neil Armstrong. Nineteen sixty-nine. Everyone knows that. But where are his boots from that very first moonwalk?’

  ‘Here at the Shoe Museum!’

  ‘Wrong. They were jettisoned from Apollo before returning to earth in case of contamination.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Approximately what percentage of all the bones in the human body are found in the foot?’

  ‘Nathan, can we look at something now?’

  ‘One quarter – or, a little more in your case.’

  You looked up, your eyes narrowing.

  We stared at ancient funerary sandals. We pondered a range of silk ‘pedestal’ shoes. You liked the nineteenth-century Peruvian woman’s silver stirrups. You tried to imagine me in the Argentinian rawhide gaucho boots.
We both fell quiet before a pair of beaded shoes from Persia, dating from 1830. Inside, on the insole, a blessing had been inscribed for the wearer. ‘In the name of Allah, the all merciful, the all compassionate. May all your needs be near. May your love of this little life carry you far.’

  ‘Every shoe should say that,’ you said quietly.

  ‘Every shoe should,’ I agreed.

  We arrived at the exhibition of shoes for bound feet. Shoes, some no longer than three inches, seemed as if they’d been made for a toddler’s foot. Yet they were exquisite: silk-covered, finely embroidered, fantastical in shape. Green for celebration. ‘Red, apparently, for the bedroom.’

  You looked up. ‘They’re awful… They shouldn’t be –’

  I read aloud from my fact sheet: ‘ “The practice of foot-binding originated in the eleventh century with the Chinese upper classes. It is estimated that, by the end of the nineteenth century, some 100 million women had had their feet broken and bound, often by their own mothers so they might attract a good class of suitor. Moreover, it was generally believed that the binding of the foot produced a tighter genital region.” ’ I looked at you over the sheet and choked back a witticism. ‘ “The four little toes were bent under the foot and bound, leaving the big toe pointing forward. Toes and heel were forced together. Toenails sometimes grew into the soles of the feet. The arch would grow so high, the toes often broke as a result. The process could take up to three years and began when girls were as young as two.” ’ I drew breath and looked up again. ‘Gosh. Your mum would have had her work cut out –’

  My smile died. Your eyes were glacial.

  Then gone.

  The lights were out. All of them. The overhead lighting. The display case lighting. The exit signs.

  ‘Laura?’ I called into the low-ceilinged dark. I edged my way along the wall and around a corner. ‘Laura!’

  An attendant appeared with a torch. ‘Sir, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to exit the building now. We’re experiencing a power failure.’