The Pickup

Chapter 3

You’re not there; I’m not there: to see. It’s not a traffic tangle in the streets, hands going up in culpability, surrender, owing this, open to the public.

It’s not the spectacle available late-night on adult TV.

She still joins the friends as usual at The Table to which she belongs — they are, after all, her elective siblings who have distanced themselves from the ways of the past, their families, whether these are black ones still living in the old ghettoes or white ones in The Suburbs. But her working hours are flexible and she’s there at times when he’s under one of the vehicles round the corner; he doesn’t always come along with her to sit over coffee or the plonk that the EL-AY has available. The friends are not the kind to ask what’s going on, that’s part of their creed: whatever you do, love, whatever happens, hits you, mate, Bra, that’s all right with me. People come and go among them; so long as they remain faithful among themselves: gathered at The Table.

There was that day when this was something surely he would realize for himself, the day he was with her when one of them told The Table he had just been diagnosed: AIDS. Ralph. Same wealthy suburban provenance as Julie herself, clear yellow-grey eyes, shiny cheek-bones, adolescent sporting feats that had given him shoulders so muscular his shirts seem padded: they gazed at him and it was as if the old poet saw something they did not, on the unmarked forehead. The old man spoke to The Table in the groans of an oracle. — It’s an ancestral curse.—

— For Chris’ sake! What is this now—

There’s a time and place for the old crazy’s pronouncements. Murmurs: shut him up, shut him up. But when The Table poet has something to say he doesn’t hear or heed anyone.

— We are descendants of the ape. The disease started with primates. Then hungry humans in the forests killed them and ate their flesh. So the curse comes down to us from the revenge of our primeval ancestors.—

The Buddhist convert stirs in agreement: meat-eaters, breakers of the code of respect for creature-life.

Ralph the victim suddenly bursts into laughter. No-one had dared even to smile encouragement at him; a mood of bravado takes The Table. What has befallen one of their own isn’t going to be something they can’t deal with alternatively to the revulsion and mawkish sympathy of the Establishment, after all. They will always have the solution — of the spirit, if not the cure.

He, Abdu, does not join them; perhaps he didn’t quite understand this is not just a matter of this model of athletic good health being HIV positive, a gamble with the future, but of the disease — that curse the poet’s babbling about — already in possession.

On the street, subdued, later she began to explain.

I know, I heard. Your friends — they laugh at everything.

Difficult to tell whether he was envying or accusing. She was silent.

That’s their way.

Yes, we don’t go in for lamentation.

And after she had said it she saw that might be taken as a dismissal of what she supposed would be the reaction in his hidden life.

She arrives at the garage about noon and he comes out to the waiting car he found for her. She drives to a park away from the quarter of the EL-AY Café and they walk round the lake and buy something from a mobile stall — hot dog for her and chips for him. She asks about his home, does he have photographs — when she makes assumptions, she doesn’t even have a photograph to go by, faces to learn from. His figure, a slim taut vertical as he comes out of the dank dimness of the place he works in, the lines of his back, in the sun, as he strolls to the water to give some left-overs to the ducks — he’s a cut-out from a background that she surely imagines only wrongly. Palm trees, camels, alleys hung with carpets and brass vessels. Dhows, those sea-bird ships manned by men to whom she can’t fit his face. No, he has no photographs.

Nothing much to see. It’s a village like hundreds of others there, small shops where people make things, cook food, police station, school. The houses; small. A mosque, small. It’s very dry — dust, dusty. Sand.

There are brothers and a brother-in-law, sisters older and younger than he — a big family, of course, he expects her to understand, in that part of the world. There’s one brother who’s away over the border at the oil fields. The sister-in-law and kids live with the family.

The one — the uncle — with the backyard where you learned about cars?

Oh it was in the village. Next to my father’s house.

You must miss them, all so close, and here— She becomes him, as she walks to his rhythm, she has forgotten how she has removed definitively, removed herself from the family, such as it is, in The Suburbs. But she has no idea (if there’s not even a photograph) of what the people he could be missing might be like.

I would bring my mother. Here. I wanted.

All that he said. And— of course, again — that was impossible, he himself was not here: had disappeared under the name in which he was born to them.

Perhaps of her I have a photo — my things, in the room.

She had never seen the room. For her he was detached from it, as he was from that other place she had never seen, the village in that other country.

When it rained one Saturday they did not go to the park but to her elected place — her cottage. She wore a raincoat; his shirt was soaked, clinging to his skin in the moments they ran from the car to the door. Running in the rain makes for laughter. Take it off, take it off, we’ll dry it in the kitchen. You can have one of mine, they’re unisex, you’ll see. His chest and back gleamed as if the rain had caressed him with oil, a chill shuddered under the muscles of his breast, and he found what it appeared was, for him, the presumption to ask something of her.

Can I have a hot bath?

His manner suddenly made her realize that she had never given a thought to how he managed in that room, that room behind the garage — there would be no bathroom?

Go ahead. I’ll get you towels. And the shower’s great, if you’d like that.

A shower’s what I get all the time — there’s an old thing in the garage and sometimes it works, sometimes no water comes. I’ll take the bath, if you don’t mind.

Fill her up to the hilt! You’ll find foam stuff and herbal soap and whatnot. I’ll make coffee meanwhile.

She heard him in there, the slap of water against the bath sides as his body displaced it, a little groan of pleasure as he wallowed, the gush of a tap turned on again, probably to top up with more hot water. His occasional presence in this dwelling-place moved further into the nature of its containment of herself. The pad became a home — at least for the Saturday afternoon.

He came out barefoot, in his jeans, smiling, the towel neatly folded in his hands.

Don’t bother about that.

She approached to take it from him. It dropped and the hands, his and hers, held one another, instead. She moved her palms up his arms in happy recognition of his well-being; so simple. They embraced. All was as it should be. The living-room was also a bedroom, so no awkwardness in finding a place to make love. If they really had desired one another so much it had not evidenced itself before — no hand-holding or kisses, or intimate touching over clothes in titillation; probably due to him, some tradition or inhibition in him, foreign to her — she had been accustomed to playing at love-making since she was twelve years old, had had the usual quota of lovers common to the friends around their table, and took her contraceptive pill daily with her vitamins. Yet he must be equally experienced; they made love beautifully; she so roused and fulfilled that tears came with all that flooded her and she hoped he did not see them magnifying her open eyes.

He did not spend the night, that weekend. When he had gone — took her car, she wanted that, he would bring it back in the morning — to fetch your shirt and give me mine, she said, head on one side — when he had gone she wandered about the room in the echoing of their presence together. She had made love so many times before. But she squatted at the bookshelves and found what she vaguely knew she was looking for. In an anthology of poetry were the lines that expressed what she was aware of in herself: Whoever embraces a woman is Adam. The woman is Eve. Everything happens for the first time…. Praise be the love wherein there is no possessor and no possessed, but both surrender…. Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal.

He drove back to the locked and deserted garage, the room redolent of fuel and grease, in the calm and passing content that follows love-making as it does not, he recognizes, what her friends round The Table call a fuck. That’s the word that comes to him although there’s its equivalent in his own language. He knows that at least he gave complete satisfaction. He resists residue feelings of tenderness towards this girl. That temptation.