The Pickup

Chapter 14

Dumb.

Might as well be. When they are talking about matters you know better than they do or ever will. You are dumb if you can’t speak — speak their language as they do. You have to use your lips and tongue for the other purpose, your penis and even the soles of your feet, caressing hers in the bed, in place of your opinions, convictions.

What use is that, now?

He can’t make love. She has never experienced this with any other of her lovers. Without saying anything to her he takes the car — where has he gone? He comes back with the belongings he had left in his grease-monkey outhouse at the garage. The canvas bag with frayed labels addressed in that unfamiliar script sags on the floor of the room where they have eaten and slept, together.

He asks her if she knows where he can get a cheap air ticket. Of course she knows; her work with those pop groups and conference personnel means she has contacts with travel agencies and airlines. And then she’s looking at him, into him, in disbelief, as he speaks.

You’ll do it for me? Or find where I must do it.

Her breasts are rising and falling under the sweater and the nostrils of her fine nose (he has never thought her beautiful but has always, since the first day when he came out from under a car, thought it so) are stiffened and flared. Something will happen, tears, an outburst — he must come quickly over to avert whatever it may be, he has his arms around her as you might resort to putting a hand over someone’s mouth.

What she is struggling with, not only in this moment of practical confrontation but all the time, the days that are crossed off with every coming of the light through the gap in the curtains above the bed where they lie, cannot be discussed with him. Not yet.

Disappear. Like I say.

Either way. He disappears into another city, another identity, keeps clear; or he disappears into deportation.

They go back again at night to the EL-AY Café, away from the silence in the cottage and the slumped canvas bag, because there’s usually likely to be there someone to whom she has always felt closest, among the friends.

The struggle stays clenched tightly inside her. It possesses her, alien to them, even to those she thought close; and makes them alien to her. She feels she never knew them, any of them, in the real sense of knowing that she has now with him, the man foreign to her who came to her one day from under the belly of a car, frugal with his beautiful smile granted, dignified in a way learnt in a life hidden from her, like his name. Her crowd, Mates, Brothers and Sisters. They are the strangers and he is the known.

So what’s happening?

— A bloody shame. They glide in and out of immigration at the airports with cocaine stuck up their arse, ecstasy in their vagina — and I don’t mean the kind that makes them come — but he gets turned down and kicked out.—

Neither the indignation nor the sympathy count; these are simply tonight’s subjects for the usual animation and display. Let’s get some more wine, you need a drink, Julie, come on Abdu, you too. Someone passes a joint, that’s probably more like what an oriental prince needs. The poet is not there. There is no-one. There will be no-one, for her, in this city, this country.

The two don’t drink or smoke and they leave early. The empty space they occupied at The Table is a silence; broken: —It’s not the end of the world. Our girl’s been in love a few times, as we’re well aware.—

— This pickup of hers’s been a disaster from the beginning.—

— Come on, he’s not a bad guy, he just needed a meal ticket. A bed. And he obviously knew how to occupy it.—

— I’ve never seen her like this. Bad, man.—

A recent addition to The Table passes a hand over his shaven head, staring as if to follow the path The Table’s intimate and the foreigner are making through Saturday night partying that buffets them.

— Julie should chill out.—

As there is no longer any sense in playing the grease-monkey he spends these, his last few days, in the cottage. He has no appetite but is constantly thirsty; lies on that bed that has also outlived its usefulness, with a big plastic container full of cold water on the floor beside him.

So he was there when she came home from her work with the envelope from the travel agency. She handed it to him where he lay. He delayed a moment, reading the name of the agency, with its logo of some great bird in flight, as if to convince himself of its portent. He made a slit in the top of the envelope with his nail and slid a forefinger along to open it. Inside, there were two airline tickets.

She stood before him with her hands linked behind her back, like a schoolgirl.

And now’s the time: there has been no description of this Julie, little indication of what she looks like, unless an individual’s actions and words conjure a face and body. There is, anyway, no description that is the description. Everyone who sees a face sees a different face — her father, Nigel Ackroyd Summers, his wife Danielle, her mother in California, remembering her, her contemporaries of The Table, the old unpublished poet; her lover. The face he sees is the definitive face for the present situation. The two air tickets he holds in his hands, turns over, unfolds, verifies, materialize a face, her face for him, that didn’t exist before, the face of what is impossible, can’t be. So what she was, and now is — what the woman Julie looks like comes through his eyes.

They always want to be told what is beautiful about them — women, anywhere — but I suppose I never did this because I couldn’t consider how I should phrase it as I can think of it in my own language now. We also have our poets she wouldn’t have heard of, Imru’ al-Qays, Antara. Have to understand now what I’m seeing, when I look at this girl, this woman — how old, twenty-nine, one year older than I am. But it’s not the days and years, it’s the living that calculates the age! She’s a child, they’re all children, and what she wants to do now is not something for her, the living she’s totally innocent of, hasn’t any real idea of, innocence is ignorance, with them.

She came into the garage like any of their women who have a car husband or father has given them, and the freedom they’re not even aware of to go about wherever they please and talk to a strange man, giving orders while I get myself out from under a car and stand up, a dirty fool in those overalls, to follow her through the streets. Does she realize that a girl like her couldn’t go out alone, where I’m being sent back to. I don’t think I really looked at her. That day. Well: European — but they don’t call themselves that, they are not in Europe — they belong here. So — white, young, not smart but dressed in the style they think disguises the difference between rich and poor, the way my overalls outfit was supposed to disguise that I’m an illegal on the run. But she looked at me. I don’t know what it was she thought she saw, there was that invitation to take coffee. And there she was in that rowdy café, with a strange man, a nobody she found if not in the street then in a place not much better. I suppose I saw her as a woman, then. She was not a blonde — I was told by my uncle and cousins about how attractive blondes were, for them — hair a no-colour brown, and smooth and straight falling behind the ears. Later, sometimes in bed with her I noticed that the ear close to me on the pillow was small and set flat to the head. Pretty. Eyes water-grey and not large, always looking at me directly. What else; eyebrows much darker than her hair, not plucked to the thin line, like the girls who flirt them at you, lifting, lowering frowning, at my home. Dark paint on the mouth whose muscles always move slightly, unconsciously, while she follows what someone is saying to her. As if she’s learning a language. Trying to. As if she knows, all right, she knows nothing. Nothing!

It’s impossible, this idea of hers. What could she do there. What’m I expected to do with her. There. Responsible to her father, she thinks he doesn’t matter but he’s somebody in this city and I’ll be the filthy wicked foreigner who’s taken her to a run-down depraved strip of a country Europeans didn’t even want to hold on to any longer, were glad to get rid of, even the oil is over the border. Abducted her; that is what it would be called in my country. What use will she be. To herself, to me. She’s not for me, can’t she realize that? Too indulged and pampered to understand that’s what she is, she thinks she can have everything, she doesn’t know that the one thing she can’t have is to survive what she’s decided she wants to do now. Madness. Madness. I thought she was intelligent. Stupidity. That’s it. That’s final.

For the first time since the first cup of coffee together they quarrelled. He who was soft-voiced shouted at her. He who was beautiful became ugly with anger and scorn.

Who asked you to buy two tickets. You said nothing to me. Don’t you think you must discuss? No, you are used to making all decisions, you do what you like, no father, no mother, nobody must ever tell you. And me — what am I, don’t speak to me, don’t ask me — you cannot live in my country, it’s not for you, you can’t understand what it is to live there, you can wish you were dead, if you have to live there. Can’t you understand? I can’t be for you — responsible—

She became stiff and clipped with anger.

Nobody has to be responsible for me. I am responsible for myself.

For yourself. Always yourself. You think that is very brave. I must tell you something. You only know how to be responsible for yourself here — this place, your café friends, your country where you have everything. I can’t be responsible. I don’t want it.

He saw, could not stop himself seeing — everything change in her. All that she had been to him, the physical oneness, the tenderness, the expression of her whole being that had concentrated in the hours with lawyers, the humiliations suffered before the indifference of official communications, the recognition of him as the man he knew himself to be beneath the nobody with a false name — this possessed her face and body in revelation. And his words I don’t want it struck the staggering blow.

You don’t want me.

Not for her to speak those words; he heard them as she had heard them. Nothing for her to say; she knows nothing. That is true but he sees, feels, has revealed to him something he does not know: this foreign girl has for him — there are beautiful words for it coming to him in his mother tongue— devotion. How could anyone, man or woman, not want that? Devotion. Is it not natural to be loved? To accept a blessing. She knows something. Even if it comes out of ignorance, innocence of reality.

The capacity returned to him, for this foreigner makes him whole. That night he made love to her with the reciprocal tenderness — call it whatever old name you like — that he had guarded against — with a few lapses — couldn’t afford its commitment, in his situation, must be able to take whatever the next foothold might offer. That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.