Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Read online

  Naomi tries again, quietly, so the major’s wife can’t hear. ‘Perhaps you don’t remember me. I’m Naomi. I’m nineteen. I live here in Chichester. I’m a hair technician. I was having lunch on the same bench as you just yesterday. There were all those flies buzzing round, remember? Weren’t they a nuisance? And I was reading a magazine. Of course you might not have noticed me. I was wearing, um, gold sandals. Anyway, that was me. I mean, um, those were my feet.’

  ‘I SAY, IS THIS A CHINESE SEX OUTFIT?’

  Naomi swivels in her chair. The major has sat up and is shouting from his bed. ‘IS THIS A CHINESE SEX OUTFIT?’

  The major’s wife tries to shush him into submission. She pats his hand. She wipes his bald head with a damp cloth.

  ‘IS THIS OR IS THIS NOT A CHINESE SEX OUTFIT?’

  Her coiffed silver hair slips loose, falling over her face, into her mouth. ‘The morphine,’ she apologizes to Naomi from across the room. ‘And the cataracts don’t help, I’m afraid.’

  Naomi smiles kindly, one wife to another. It gives her courage. She stands, picks up her chair, and moves it from the foot of the bed to the side. She bends down and opens the small plyboard cupboard squeezed awkwardly between the bed and the IV monitor. His clothes. The ones he was admitted in. One by one, she refolds them: the brown tweed jacket; the pullover vest; the faded cotton shirt, its buttons ripped off in the scrabble for his heart; the trousers with the frayed hems; a pair of white briefs; brown socks; black shoes with worn laces. She returns each item to the cupboard with care. Then she takes the hand of the man from the bench in hers.

  She sits by his side for two and a half hours. She sits until ten past three when she has to leave at last for her shift at the salon. He does not open his eyes even once. He does not squeeze her hand.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ says the nurse. ‘Try again tomorrow. I had a few good minutes with him this morning, you know. It’s just going to take time.’ And she returns Naomi’s mother’s grapes to her.

  The following morning, she wakes to the sound of voices downstairs. Her mother and – she listens – Jason.

  She takes her time. She irons her hair so it falls sleekly past her shoulders. She slips into a clingy pink summer dress with spaghetti straps. Her nipples rise through the jersey. Which is fine. Nipples are in. Nipples are the new cleavage. She finds one gold sandal under the bed and the other in the wardrobe. She squirts her wrists and neck with Elizabeth Arden eau de toilette. She reaches for a delicate white cardigan that ties at the breast with a single silk ribbon.

  The clack of her sandals on the stairs is unabashed.

  ‘Naomi, I was just going to wake you. Jason’s here. To help us clean out the cellar, like he said last week. Isn’t that nice? He thinks he might even be able to replace that rickety old banister. I’m sure it’s got woodworm.’

  Jason smiles nervously. ‘You look lovely.’

  Her mother has made him a cup of tea. She will have remembered that he likes two sugars and lots of milk. Her mother likes Jason. Too much. ‘If I were twenty years younger,’ she had teased him once.

  Now she’s giving him a conspiratorial smile. ‘I’ll get back to “Woman’s Hour” then.’ He has told her. That Naomi has someone else. That her only daughter is leading a double life. She cannot believe it will last. She cannot believe a daughter of hers will pass up a boy like Jason.

  ‘I’m on my way out, Mum.’

  ‘But the cellar.’

  ‘Can’t today. Sorry.’

  ‘I thought you were on lates this week. That’s why I asked Jason round this morning.’

  ‘I’ll give you a ring later. Bye, Jason.’

  ‘I’ll walk you into town.’

  ‘No. Finish your tea. I’m fine.’

  Her mother’s house smells of pot pourri. Outside, the breezy sunshine is a relief. She fills her lungs. Her heart quickens. Women, Jason once said, have faster heart rates than men. Today, she feels this must be true. She has life enough to share.

  She hardly looks up as she walks. She wonders what colour his eyes will be when they open. She wonders that the most.

  When the double doors of the hospital slide back she realizes she is early. Visiting hours don’t start for another forty minutes. The hospital shop is open. She looks at the cards, but decides against one. Get Well Soon cards are from acquaintances. She chooses instead a sewing kit, a comb, a nail clipper, some lotion for extra-dry skin, a pack of disposable razors and a magazine for ramblers. ‘He loves walking in the Downs,’ she hears herself telling the major’s wife.

  When she arrives at the desk, the same nurse looks up. Naomi smiles, juggling her purchases.

  ‘I’m very sorry. You can’t go in.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m early, aren’t I? I thought maybe –’

  ‘Miss Phillips, is it?’

  ‘Yes, my name’s on your list? I was here yesterday?’ Her voice does this sometimes – turns statements into questions. Someone asked her once if she was Australian.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Miss Phillips. Mr Bartholomew passed away this morning.’

  ‘He passed a what?’

  ‘He passed away. I’m so sorry. Please, sit down. Let me take your things.’

  ‘But just yesterday, you said he –’

  ‘He was critical. Let me get you a glass of water. It’s a shock, I know it is.’

  She hates this nurse. She hated her yesterday by the IV drip. She hated her too for her ‘few good minutes’ with the man from the bench. ‘He can’t be. Perhaps you’ve got the wrong bed. He was in the one by the door –’

  ‘It was heart failure. I’m afraid our efforts at resuscitation failed. The doctors did everything they could. Would you like to speak to one of the team? Would you like a doctor to explain?’

  ‘No.’ She has read the poster. It hangs outside the door of the ward. She can see it now over the nurse’s blue shoulder. She doesn’t know why medical staff need a poster to tell them about cardiac life support, 1: Mouth-to-mouth ventilation. 2: Administer precordial thump. 3: Place paddles correctly. 4: Give oxygen. 5: Intubate. 6: Cannulate large vein.

  ‘Can I ring someone for you? A taxi perhaps? A friend? We have a chaplain on staff.’

  ‘Can I see him? Mr Bartholomew, I mean. Is he here still?’

  ‘Let’s give it some thought. Why don’t you sit down?’

  ‘I want to see him.’

  ‘The fact is, the porters will be here shortly.’ She pauses, studies the blank insistence of Naomi’s face. ‘Okay. Take a few minutes. Slip through the curtains.’

  The hospital-issue blanket is gone. He’s almost unchanged against the fresh white sheets. Paler. But better in some way. No mask, needles, tubes or wires. She can see the outline of his thighs through the single sheet that covers him. More muscular than she would have thought. ‘He loved walking in the Downs.’ Will she be able to tell the major’s wife?

  His hands are by his sides, bloodied slightly where the needles for the drips have been withdrawn. The wounds are small stigmata, like the ones she saw in that documentary the other night about the supernatural.

  He will not bleed for her.

  Someone has left a piece of transparent surgical tape on one wrist. There’s another strip on his chest. She moves to his side, hesitates, then peels each piece away. The skin hardly lifts with it. She raises his hand, his arm. He’s stiff. Cold.

  Again.

  Beneath her white cardigan, beneath her pink summer dress, Naomi’s heart clenches into a raw fist.

  Later, she will not remember slipping off her sandals. She will not remember climbing on to the bed. She’ll remember only the sharp stillness of the ward, the sweat at the back of her knees, and the explosion of words in her mouth as she rode the dead muscle of his thigh.

  Love me. Love me.

  Live Wire

  You used to say you knew I was in a room before you saw me; that the air smelled like it did after a rainfall. Ionized.

  Energy is eternal delight. I read that
once, but I knew it when I was a child, shuffling my way in sock-feet over the creamy shag carpet, charging myself. ‘Oh! You’ve given me a shock,’ my mother’s elbow would cry, wrinkled and vulnerable at the edge of the kitchen table. I can see the scene again. Behind my mother’s back, a smile gets the better of my babyface, and I shuffle my way back through the living room, where our ancient beagle lazes like a fitful lung under the big bay window. Outside, the black cables of power lines are swaying against a purple, rain-bloated sky. The soles of my feet are tingling with static, my toes are curling with it, and I’m stretching out my index finger. My mood-ring from the cereal box flashes blue when I make contact with the tip of Brutus’s sleeping tail. I see it twitch with the secret current of me.

  Remember the Powergen woman who came on before the late-night weather? ‘Powergen,’ she pronounced in her smoky voice. ‘Generating electricity whatever the weather.’ She arose in black latex from a storm cloud of open umbrellas. A plume of water rose impossibly from her head, teasing the eye. Her face was white, her pupils were huge, and she was unapologetically fatal.

  That first time, I called you Dr Numb. I wanted to shock you. As the nurse wheeled in the electroencephalograph, I asked if you had ever wanted to have your way with a woman once you’d put her under. My eyebrows flickered, but you remained composed. Don’t be shy, I said – ether you have or you haven’t – and your eyes smiled above your green mask.

  The gag tasted of peppermint. My earrings were removed, then my shoes. As I raised my head to check the state of my socks, a bright needle rose on the horizon. Muscle relaxant, the nurse smiled, so you don’t do yourself an injury. I’m relaxed, I mumbled through the gag. You won’t be with a bone fracture, she chuckled. Then the dials were spinning, the flowmeters were at high tide, and you were lowering the mask and hose on to my face, brushing a wisp of hair from my cheek. In no time I was inhaling the sweet smell of halothane and rising, over the song of the electrocardiogram, over you, over the balding head of Dr Burns, and slipping into the earth’s upper atmosphere as if I were moving through water. Far below me, electrical storms were raging in the darkness, and in that upside-down, head-over-heels world, I was the golden key on the kite. The fuse of bright hair in the candle flame. The live wire. The finger of Adam. The spark in the synapse. You stood and watched seventy volts of electricity enter me, and in that moment, you wanted to enter me too.

  I remember that, as I was coming to in the recovery room, you risked a breach of professional conduct. So how was that – for you – Gloria? you said, lurching into comedy, and as you did so, your throat blushed. You regretted the question the moment it escaped your mask. My mouth and jaw were slack with the anaesthetic. My head was humming like a plucked harp string. I felt nauseous. But you were grateful for my lopsided smile.

  On our first date, you were frightened someone would see you with me. We sat in a hospital bus shelter with two cups of takeaway coffee. From where we sat, we could see the smokestack of the hospital incinerator; what once had been blood and bone climbed high into the atmosphere. We talked mostly about the weather: recent droughts, hosepipe bans, the greenhouse effect, El Niño. I said, the snowdrops are already up, it gets earlier every year, and you nodded. I breathed in tendrils of steam. You said it looked like rain. I said, have you ever been in the hospital mortuary? and your coffee sloshed over the side of your cup, burning your hand. I smiled nervously, trying to say, can we pretend I didn’t say that? Why on earth did I say that? Then: yes, you said, as a student, years ago. And since then? I heard myself asking. Once, only the once. I nodded. You sipped the remains of your coffee. I played with a hangnail. Did you see anyone – any body, I mean? A middle-aged man, you said. And did you look at him? No, you hadn’t, there was no reason to, but the coroner had shown you the bruising from the blow he’d sustained to the back of his skull. He’d been hit? I said. Yes – and you turned to look at me – by a hailstone.

  Talk of the weather became our private language, a code for intimacy and evasion. On our second date, after a particularly rich meal in a tiny Italian restaurant, I inquired indelicately about winds from the torrid zone. You blushed brightly, answering with an embarrassed nod as the waiter poured the espresso, quickly. After an evening of malt whisky from the bottle behind the books in your office, I tapped your groin and asked for the forecast. A low-pressure system is sadly upon us, you reported, and I laughed. I sweet-talked you with murmurings of cold snaps and warm spells. I coaxed you with word of lunar eclipses and vernal equinoxes. We walked everywhere in all weather, dodging imaginary hailstones, goading death.

  I can’t remember when you started reading: weather reports, shipping forecasts, farmers’ almanacs, compendiums of freak-weather occurrences. But one day, you tried to describe for me the mystery at the eye of a tornado, and I remember your pupils, vast as you looked at me. I said I loved high winds, whirlwind courtships, and windy nights for lovemaking; I liked the rattling of the window-panes because the whole world seemed to be shaking with you. You said, did I know? women were more likely to conceive in July and December, when the magnetic fields associated with solar winds are low. I declared myself a slave to the elements, and especially to magnetic fields. An electromagnetic personality, that’s me, I sang, and your eyes narrowed. I couldn’t tell what you were thinking.

  Once, you showed me a picture in a library book of a woman disfigured by lightning. I traced the red scar tissue on her chest with my finger. It’s beautiful, I said; it’s like an oak tree springing from her breastbone, see? And suddenly you saw it too. I told you about the hot dry winds of the world: the Fohn off the Alps, the Mistral in southern France, the Chinook on the prairies of Canada, the Sirocco that blows out of North Africa. All famous for inducing madness. You said, thank goodness we can rely on the good old British damp. Can we? I said, and I blew in your ear. Warm dry winds, I whispered, blow down from the Cotswolds, disquieting the citizens of Cheltenham, and winds, hot as stale breath, creep down from the Pennines and rub the stubborn necks of Yorkshiremen, predisposing even them to dreams and whimsy. You’re joking, you said. Yes, I am, and I paused. It’s actually much worse than that, the madness. Be serious, you said. I am being serious. And you were quiet for the rest of the day.

  Sometimes, in your bed, we’d talk dreamily about buying a satellite dish so we could sleep to the blue flicker of the twenty-four-hour weather channel. We slept with the window open because I loved the smell of the night. Once, we heard a fox barking by the rubbish skip behind your building, and the smell of it – a whiff of damp fur and stale earth – climbed up through the window and between the cotton sheets. You said you couldn’t smell it for the smell of my skin and you inhaled me like an irresistible stimulant, pushing your nose between my breasts, down my belly and over the rounds of my thighs. Sometimes, as we made love and you yearned within me, I knew you’d bury yourself in me if you could, that you’d rest there like a baby, or a body, your ear tuned to the blood frequency of my heart.

  Then sleep: sometimes, your groin a pillow for my head, your cock soft by my cheek like a thumb that had slipped from my mouth, and your legs around my legs; two strong roots earthing me.

  You never asked what was wrong with me, though you were there, administering my halothane breeze at ninety, one hundred, and one hundred and ten volts. Two sessions per week. Four weeks of treatment. Perhaps you had seen the case notes. You would have assumed mania. I spoke too fast, thought too fast, slept too little, sensed too much and I craved a life for ever in the moment as much as you craved the ephemera of the past.

  You’re mad, I said, when I discovered your stash of weekly checklists in a desk drawer: yellowed scraps of paper with references to your ex-wife’s dental appointments; to a deposit for a Greek holiday taken last year; to a pair of shoes that had long since been repaired. It was your weakness, you confessed; a kind of superstition. Relics of the past – inconsequential things in themselves – reminded you you were alive.

  As a child, you h
ad chalked your name on city walls. You’d scratched I WAS HERE on wooden desks with the tip of your schoolboy compass. You had ticket stubs from 1972; a bracelet your first girlfriend had left behind in your mother’s house; a novel you reread once every year. You wanted a song we could call ours. ‘Crazy’, I suggested, but I could tell from the look on your face you weren’t confident the joke was on me. You wanted places to remember us by; favourite haunts; anniversaries; a string of photo-booth snaps to discover weeks later in your coat pocket. You wanted the ghost of my voice on your answeringmachine; strands of my hair on your sheets.

  I wanted the smell of you in my nostrils; your lips on mine in the ladies’ toilets; the ricochet of our words in an argument; the shy surprise of your laughter; the two of us counting backwards together before the big blue zing; the pulse in my clitoris at the thought of you. I wanted to bring you to life. Over and over.

  Insatiable, you called me by night.

  Oh, my dear one, I’d whisper back. Oh, my own sweet dead-beat. Rise again, rise again.

  There is a saying among maniacs: a hundred and thirty volts for quick canonization. I said, imagine my entry in Lives of the Saints. ‘Saint Gloria, Ecstatic (1969-99): martyred at the switch-happy hands of Dr Burns, consultant psychiatrist. In excelsis Glo-n-a.’ Think of the radiance, I said. Think of the glow.

  It was the eve of my final treatment. The voltage was to be increased again. Dr Burns had yet to find my seizure threshold.

  We’d had a late dinner. We were waiting for the late-night weather. You were washing up. I was leafing through one of your medical journals.

  What does ‘awareness’ mean?

  You looked up over the sink of dishes.

  I read aloud: ‘Experimentation must be cautious, at best, if complications such as awareness are to be avoided.’