Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Read online

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you want to too much.’

  Naomi claps her hand over her mouth, but it’s too late. The torrent of fizzy drink, egg-and-cress sandwich and low-fat crisps spills into a display vase of imitation lilies. Her eyes stream. The muscles in her calves tremble as if an electric current, and not blood, runs in her veins. Her stomach lurches again. She throws everything up, hollowing herself out.

  When she raises her head at last, a child in blue dungarees is staring at her, and the lilies are sprayed with orange. In the near distance, she can hear the quick, castanet click of heels coming close, and she hates him, she hates him, that dead man who would not die, that dead man who would neither let her be nor give her a second thought.

  At the salon, she scoops a handful of mints from the bowl by the till and walks, head down, into the tiny staff loo, bolting the door behind her. She shoves all the mints into her mouth at once, chewing them fast, burning her windpipe with their cold fire. She slips off her skirt and runs the stained corner under the hot-water tap, heedless of the dry-cleaning tag. She squeezes it out, then bangs the hand-drier on the wall into motion.

  ‘Naomi, you back? Mrs Deleuze is ready for you at sink 3.’

  She drapes the wet skirt over the drier, washes her hands under a scalding tap, digs in her small handbag past the rolled-up magazine, and quickly applies wide strokes of blusher to her bleached cheeks.

  ‘Naomi? You in there?’

  She slips into the still damp skirt, unbolts the door, and smiles apologetically at Davina, one of the senior stylists.

  Naomi is a hair technician. She will ask Mrs Deleuze if the water temperature is all right. She will remind her to avoid conditioning her crown, as she is prone to an oily build-up at the roots. She will not mention dandruff. Instead, she will recommend tea-tree oil shampoo, essential fatty acids and biotin-rich foods. She will manipulate Mrs Deleuze’s scalp as she learned to do on her Indian head-massage training day. She will make pleasant conversation, though she has not had time today to consult Mrs Deleuze’s index card. Was her new terrier puppy called Fido or Dido? Would Mrs Deleuze name her dog after a pop singer? Naomi thinks not. She will ask after Mrs Deleuze’s last holiday, remembering not to mention Mr Deleuze until Mrs Deleuze does so herself. She will not say she found a man, stiff and blue, on the bench beside her at lunch. She will not say, ‘Poor man. What a shock for his family. I wonder who he was.’ She knows all she needs to know. She knows he was looking at her legs. She knows he was looking at her slim feet in her gold strappy shoes. She knows he sat uncomfortably close. It was awful because Naomi was in the middle of ‘Seventeen Ways to Have an Orgasm’.

  She’s been sleeping with Jason for three months now and is not sure that she’s had a proper orgasm yet. That’s what she told Carrie one night as they scoured the sinks before closing.

  ‘What do you mean – fuckin’ hell, there goes another nail! The glue they give you with these things is cheaper than spit.’

  ‘Like, you know, a proper one.’

  ‘Proper? Me, I’m happy with the plain old improper kind any day.’ She winked at Naomi, and Naomi laughed, as if she really had got the joke, but the truth was she hadn’t, not really, and that was the whole point.

  As a child, she had played on the old oak banister that rises from the cellar to the hatch in the floor of her mother’s small kitchen. She had tested her own strength, hauling herself up its creaking length by her arms, clutching it with her thighs, as if she was a lone survivor escaping a rising flood. The first time, her legs had fluttered like they’d belonged to someone else, like she was someone else, and she lay still and breathless, under the sound of her mother’s light footsteps, her hot cheek pressed to the secret of the banister. But it was different with Jason. Of course it was. Jason was warm and alive. Jason was no piece of dead wood. Jason was everything she wanted. He was handsome. He was strong. How could she become her cellar self in front of Jason? How could she let that happen to her face?

  Number 1 – Girl Power. Number 2 – Handiwork. Number 3 – Good Vibrations. Number 4 – Mouth Organ. Number 5 – A Bird in the Hand. Number 6 – G-Spot Magic. Number 7 – Bottoms up! Number 8 – Twist and Shout. Number 9 – Wet Wet Wet. Number 10 – Please Come Again. Today, at lunch, Naomi had only got as far as Number 10 when she noticed the corner of her skirt was damp. Had it rained that morning? Should she have wiped the bench before sitting down?

  ‘Naomi? Naomi, Mrs Deleuze would like a jasmine tea.’

  Naomi waits for the kettle to boil. The client in chair 6 is a tall redhead, early thirties. She wants layers after all, and she’s telling Zoe, a junior stylist, about the aunt she’s just visited in Nice. Naomi has never been to France, not even to the diesel cloud of a French ferry port for a duty-free shopping day.

  The redhead is called Claudine. Her family on her mother’s side, she explains to Zoe, has had a commercial ice company in Nice since the turn of the century, and the aunt, whom she apparently takes after, was delivering ice one day, back in the fifties, to a famous hotel. ‘Picture this,’ says Claudine, through a curtain of hair. ‘It’s a sweltering summer day, in the hundreds, yeah? And my aunt, who’s not even eighteen, is waiting in the hotel kitchen for an invoice or something when the phone rings. Someone wants enough crushed ice to fill – wait for it – a double bath, and they want it delivered to their room straightaway. The kitchen manager rolls his eyes and says pah! pah! several times. He’s understaffed that day as it is, and with the heat and the humidity, the kitchen’s an inferno. The last thing anyone wants to do is help some rich bastard to more ice than anyone has a right to. But my aunt, never one to miss an opportunity, gets her pretty backside into gear and delivers not one, not two, but twelve tureens of crushed ice to the room all by herself. She knocks once, announces the arrival of the ice through the door, and leaves the trolleys just outside. She’s just turning on her heels when…’

  ‘When?’ Zoe changes her scissors.

  Claudine’s face peeks through the curtain of red. ‘When the door opens and a little dog comes running after her, licking her toes through her sandals and jumping up to say hello. Ten minutes later and guess what?’

  ‘What?’ Zoe’s cutting hand goes limp.

  ‘My aunt is in that double bath with one, a French cabinet minister, two, a toy poodle, and three – no word of a lie – Brigitte Bardot.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Swear.’

  ‘But I thought she was an animal activist.’

  ‘How much activity do you want? The worst of it is, when I asked my aunt what happened next, all she would say was, “Zee ice melted, pet.” ’

  Zoe laughs. Davina and Mrs Deleuze, at chair 4, laugh. Naomi does not. She squeezes the jasmine-infusion bag hard. She is glad her aunties do not visit upon her stories of bisexual romps in the bath with house pets. She is glad her aunties live in Streatham.

  Tonight, even though it’s Friday, and balmy too, she and Jason will not have sex in his little brother’s pop-up garden tent because his coach says he’s got to save it for the away game tomorrow. But he will kiss her a long goodnight among the KitKat and Galaxy bar boxes in the alleyway between the One-Stop and her mother’s house. He will press himself, hard against her. He will show her again, on his special sports performance watch, how she makes his digital heart rate race. And she will leave him, unsure why she didn’t mention, even once, the man on the bench.

  All night she is restless. She tells herself it’s the mobile phone under her pillow. Jason is going to ring her first thing from the team mini-bus and she cannot miss his call. He needs her to say, in a voice just for him, ‘Go get ‘em, Lightning Man,’ the way Posh might say it to Becks. It’s his lucky saying, and his private name for his thingy, the one she sometimes whispers in his ear when she nuzzles him. She can’t remember how it started or where it came from but now, come what may, she has to whisper it to him before each game, even though she is in fact too embarrassed to ever say it
with the throaty desire he would, on these occasions, like. It’s the only thing Jason is irrational about so she tries to oblige as best she can, like when he wants her to go down on him and the force of him at the back of her throat almost makes her dinner come up, but she keeps at it anyway, and swallows too, even though the thick salty slick of it makes her stomach judder, even though Carrie’s told her there are over a thousand calories in every ejaculation, and Naomi wonders if that’s why she’s putting on weight, like the prostitute Carrie read about – the one who ate nothing, smoked fags instead, but swallowed several times a day and put on three stone. Naomi does it anyway since what kind of girl would tell her boyfriend she can’t because she might throw up all over his thingy. His bit of lightning in this world.

  Still, when the call comes, she jumps from sleep, her heart banging like an old tin can tied to a bumper.

  Incoming call. Not Jason. Not Carrie either. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Miss Naomi Phillips?’ A woman’s voice.

  ‘Yes.’ Naomi crosses her legs and pulls her duvet around her.

  ‘This is the Patient Care Office at St Richard’s. I believe you passed your details to one of our paramedic teams yesterday.’

  Naomi almost hits the call-ended button. She wants to say, this is a mistake. If she’d known he was going to die, she wouldn’t have sat down in the first place.

  ‘Yes. They asked me to fill out a form.’

  Already, in her mind, she is rehearsing the words: she will not be able to attend the funeral, she is glad she was able to do what little she could.

  ‘We thought we’d update you on Mr Peter Bartholomew.’

  It is a long moment before Naomi realizes that the woman on the phone is talking about the man on the bench. She doesn’t like him having a name. She can’t quite believe he has – had – a name.

  ‘I’m pleased to tell you he survived surgery.’

  What surgery? Naomi’s chest goes hollow, as if something has punctured her lungs. ‘But the man I saw was –’

  ‘It’s only natural you feared the worst.’

  ‘He wasn’t –’

  ‘An understandable mistake. That’s why I wanted to –’

  ‘– breathing.’

  ‘Yesterday must have been very upsetting for you, Miss Phillips. That’s why I’m glad to be able to give you some good news. Mr Bartholomew’s condition is clearly critical, and I cannot over-emphasize the seriousness of the situation, but –’

  ‘There’s still hope.’ Naomi’s legs go numb below her. Suddenly she feels half dead herself.

  ‘Since the operation, Mr Bartholomew has been in and out of consciousness. All we can say at this point is, that’s encouraging.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He has said very little. However, one of our staff nurses told him he was a lucky man, that a young woman phoned 999 on her mobile phone. He seemed to become a little more coherent. The nurse had the impression he’d like to thank you. That’s nice, isn’t it? Nice to know you made a difference.’

  ‘There’s no need. I only –’

  ‘Visiting time is strictly limited in the cardio unit, and usually only family, but under the circumstances, and given that there seems to be no one else, we felt it right to let you know.’

  ‘Of course I’d like to come, but I’m on lates this week. I’m a hair technician. My shifts don’t start till three-thirty so that means I’m on late every night this week.’

  ‘We generally discourage evening visits in the cardio unit. Come any time between twelve and four. I’ll register your name at the reception desk. You can tell them you spoke to Mrs Booth.’

  Naomi gets up and locks her bedroom door. She doesn’t want her mother to come in. She has to think. How is he doing this to her? How is he stitching her life to his even still? How has he twisted everything around? Blue but still breathing. Helpless but demanding. Passive but rigid as a corpse.

  When Jason rings, Naomi panics. He tells her they’re almost at Grantham, that the pitch is supposed to be rubbish, it’s raining there, and if she’s wondering what the stink is, it’s Jimmy’s kit, and she should close her bedroom window. There’s a battery of laughter, and he says low, just for her, that he thought he’d give her a quick call. He wanted to hear her voice.

  Her cue.

  ‘Naomi, you there?’

  ‘Yes. And – I wanted to tell you something.’

  ‘What’s that then?’ His voice is warm as beer. He tells her to wait. He moves to an empty seat at the back of the bus. They go through a tunnel and lose each other.

  ‘Naomi?’

  ‘Still here.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘There’s someone else, Jason.’ She doesn’t know what she means. But she says it again. ‘I’m really sorry, Jason. There’s someone else.’

  Down corridor after corridor, through Witterings Ward, Middle-ton, and back again. She can’t concentrate. Many-eyed machines on wheels, on two legs, on leads, litter her route like a strange, watchful menagerie. She doesn’t belong here. She is a fraud. The seedless grapes in her hand are from her mother’s fridge. She cannot even remember what the man on the bench looks like. Outside a patients’ toilet, a nurse is laughing with a one-legged man. ‘See, Harold? What did I tell you? Your sins will find you out.’

  On her left, she passes a door marked DIRTY UTILITY ROOM. ‘Please keep this door shut.’ But it’s not. Naomi sees a wide sink, a black bin for waste labelled INCINERATE ONLY, and a stack of commodes under another sign: IF YOU RETURN IT, YOU WASH IT.

  Down the corridor, two giggling cleaning girls in fitted green smocks, sunbed tans and platform shoes wrap themselves in cellophane aprons and gloves they pull from a dispenser on the wall. She wonders what might splash on them; where they will have to put their hands. She wonders if they have read the notice on the wall about the proper way for staff to wash their hands. ‘Do not forget your thumb,’ the final line warns, and Naomi suddenly feels she is wandering alone in a world where danger is at your fingertips.

  At the cardio reception desk, the nurse ticks her name off a list, confiscates the grapes like she would a petty weapon, ushers her into a ward and pulls back a plastic curtain to reveal what Naomi assumes must be the man from the bench. She does as the nurse says and pulls a chair up to the foot of the bed. His eyes are closed. She does not know if he is asleep or unconscious. She does not ask. She tries to summon the face under the bubble of the mask, but it’s lost in the mist of his ventilated breath.

  She looks around, nervously. Eight beds. Six men. Windows too high and narrow to see through if you’re confined to a bed. Two other visitors, both women. At the end of the ward, one, middle-aged, with a face like porridge that has set in the pan. Across from Naomi, another, old but dignified. A Chichester lady. A major’s wife, Naomi decides. Her lipstick is well applied. She has a clear widow’s peak, which must have been striking when she was younger – Naomi would tell her as much if the major’s wife were a client at the salon. She would not say that, the truth is, she can never really imagine old people any younger than they are.

  Technology pulses and sighs. Here, in the dim hush of this place, drips, defibrillators, ventilators, pacemakers, balloon pumps and Hewlett-Packard monitors are more alive than the anonymous hearts and lungs over which they watch. It scares her. She wonders how long she has to stay. She doesn’t feel right sitting beside the still body of a strange man, possibly naked except for the cheap, hospital-issue blanket over him. What does the major’s wife imagine? she wonders.

  She crosses her legs and her left foot accidentally kicks the end of the bed. Its metal frame shudders. ‘Sorry,’ she whispers. To bed or man, she is not sure. She stands, walks to the window behind his bed, and pretends to take in the view. The back wall of the hospital laundry. Mounds of linen in rolling skips glide in and out of double doors. She almost took a job as a chambermaid once, the summer before her GCSEs, but the thought of the sheets of strangers made her turn to Shippams and fish paste
instead.

  Rain spits at the window. She turns. Finds herself suddenly near him – over him. They’ve shaved his chest. The light is poor but if she squints she can see the new growth of dark stubble rising below the pale, flaccid skin. He is pierced all over like that saint in the picture she saw on a school trip to the National Gallery, the one with the long hairless body and all those arrows sticking out of his white, white flesh. There’s a needle in his chest, his arm, his wrist, his hand. Twisty tubing springs from each, like the plastic crazy straws her mother used to buy to get Naomi to drink her milk. For a time, she cannot stop herself watching the slow drip of his wound into the drain-bag at the side of the bed. She does not know a word for the colour.

  Beyond the wound, through the tubing and wires, there are red electrodes taped like too many nipples to his sunken chest. He doesn’t look real somehow. She stares at his chest, and for a moment it seems as if she need only take the blue biro out of her bag and connect the dots to bring him back into being.

  She takes her seat once more and resumes her role as a visitor. ‘Hello,’ she tries in a low voice. ‘Hello?’ Miracles are possible. This is the Church of the Heart. ‘I’m Naomi. I’m the girl who phoned for an ambulance. I think you wanted to see me?’

  The IV monitor starts to bleep angrily. Naomi sits back, embarrassed. The nurse who seized her grapes arrives, pushes past her chair, adjusts a dial, and fingers the drip-feed suspiciously. ‘You haven’t touched this?’ Across the room, the major’s wife looks up.

  Naomi shakes her head, eyes wide. Do they think she wants him in pain? Do they think she wants to kill him? Will this nurse demand to know her exact relationship to the man from the bench?

  ‘Been playing up all week,’ she sighs. ‘Must be faulty. I’ll order a replacement, okay?’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Naomi, relieved, relieved not to stand accused, relieved that the nurse feels instead she must be accountable to her. Naomi is important. Suddenly she is the loved one of the mortally wounded. The nurse smiles at her briefly and leaves.