The Temporary

Sixteen

Ralph left the Tube station and turned up Camden High Street towards home. The days were getting longer now — he could suddenly feel it, the almost imperceptibly slow arm wrestle, the gradual gain of light over dark — and the sky was still bright with the memory of sun as he walked towards the Lock. He passed the launderette and then the funeral parlour, behind whose tinted windows pale ruched curtains were lavishly bunched above a thick pink lawn of carpet, suffocating as a girl’s bedroom. Inside, a middle-aged woman stood proprietorially at the glass, peering anxiously up and down the pavement like a waiter looking for customers at the door of an empty restaurant. He walked on, surprised to feel his lips stretching with a grin.

Tentatively, running nervous fingers over his feelings, prodding his situation again with a scientist’s circumspection, he could admit that things hadn’t been so bad today. Yesterday he had felt cast out, irretrievable, doomed to patrol the border of what he could endure, and it had come as a surprise to him to wake the next morning and realize that something, if only a day, now lay between him and his catastrophe. His sense of his own survival gave way as he walked to more expansive thoughts, a feeling of having been aroused from some long dormancy, the revivification which he recognized was the residue of pain. His life echoed now, empty, filled only with the potential for beginning it again. The idea lent some enchantment to the darkening street lit gold by a putative halo of street lamps, the friendly, sleeping faces of shops, the shy eyes of passers-by violet in the dusk, even the beating of his heels and the puff of his own breath! His body seemed suddenly rather miraculous to him, the ambulant parcel of himself: he was contained, all of him, in this machine bent only on doing his bidding, this vehicle in which he could travel wherever he chose. He wondered why he had never thought of his sufficiency before, for it liberated him to consider it, drew his muscles tight and ready beneath his skin. Remembering times when he had felt as if he were dragging his punctured form about after him, or were lying opened on a table with the world performing his dissection, he resolved to think of it more often.

He reached the Lock and walked briskly over, exchanging smiles with a man coming the other way. The man looked at his watch as he passed, and before Ralph could defend himself against it the thought had flown into his head that Francine must have left the office by now, and that from this moment he didn’t know where she was. He felt a pain in his chest, a bristling of nerves beneath his skin while she moved darkly across his thoughts, the light in her belly bobbing as she walked. All day he had been rehearsing arguments against such moments, but when it came to using them he suddenly found himself unable to remember how they worked: he groped for their analgesic while misery grated back and forth at his heart like a saw. He strained to be home, directing his legs to go faster, imagining the rooms of his flat, his possessions homesick for him, his fridge offering itself to his hungry fingers. He saw himself watching television later, warm and alone, laughing at something funny, the telephone ringing perhaps. What was she doing now? Where was she going, with his stolen property? There in the street he shrugged, irritated, and let a sigh escape his lips. He had to stop indulging himself like that. It would spoil him, like a child, inflame his emotions. The baby had seemed so separate that night — so distinct that he had thought he could just break it off and keep it! — but now that it had receded back into the tangled ropes of her body, an inextricable, futile thing, he knew that he must sever himself or be dragged stomach down after it. He remembered his flashes of hallucination, saw again the terrible images he had harboured of harming her, until his head ached with them. He reached his turning and heard his heels clop loudly like hoofs in the sudden quiet of the small street. What would it have been like? Who would it have become? He had thought that before, hundreds of times already in only a couple of days. Of course, it was always himself he saw, never her; himself going through life again, except knowing the road now, with all that had been wrong put right. It dogged him like a little ghost, and he wondered if it always would, would walk beside him through all its ethereal ages. He checked himself again, walking faster now with the naked trees flying by him in a rush. If such a thing could live, it would only be as the product of his own invention. It was nothing, less than nothing, a loveless clot of bad blood, just something he had done, like other things, not a miracle but a mistake. It had the consistency of an idea, and he could refute it. He could choose, really, not to care about it at all, switch off feelings like lights in a house. He would have a bath and then cook dinner. He saw himself reading the paper while he ate.

Approaching his flat in the failing light a sudden prophetic fear passed over him, as if something were about to happen, and in the next moment he saw a figure standing outside his front door. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew from the erectness of her head that she had seen him. He slowed his steps while his thoughts, busy with the provision of sedatives, instead struggled to manufacture panic. What was she doing here? He was close enough now to see her face, and felt himself so simultaneously drawn and repelled that he stopped altogether, wondering if he could find another avenue which might carry him through what at that moment seemed impossible to bear.

‘Don’t worry,’ she called out, seeing him halt. ‘I only want to get my things.’

Her words were lobbed awkwardly towards him, and hearing them he knew that she had selected them before he had even arrived. He wondered what else she planned to say to him, and the thought made him want to grip her shoulders and shake her until it all fell clattering out of her mouth to the pavement.

‘Oh.’ He walked carefully past her to the door and took out his keys. His hands were trembling. ‘Come in, then.’

In the stronger light of the hall he risked a glance at her as she came in behind him. Seeing her face he felt as if he had never been away from her, as if he had woken from a forgetful sleep and felt the memory of her drop like a weight through his empty spaces. It was a moment before he realized that she looked awful, quite unrecognizable, and it was in his mouth to ask her what was wrong before remembering that this was how things always began between them.

‘I’ll just let you get on with it, shall I?’ he said, opening the inner door to his flat.

She didn’t answer, but he saw with despair from the slight shrug of her shoulders that she still wanted to talk to him, to prise reactions from him like teeth. The gesture reminded him of his relation to her, her strange significance which was so surprisingly easy to forget when she was there before him. The pregnancy seemed not to be a part of her physical presence — if only he could see into her, look through her walls just once as if they were made of glass! — although now, noticing her curious deterioration, he wondered if this were its manifestation: something gnawing malignly at her insides, the proud extension of his own self, feeding, growing, planning its escape. Her face was deflated, the skin collapsed like a tent on the narrow ridges of her bones, and the hollows of her eyes were painted with shadows. He reminded himself that their poetry was a delusion, a limerick which he must not hear, and he turned away from her and walked into the sitting-room. Moments later he heard her in the bathroom, opening cabinets. He sat on the sofa, rigid with the tension of her presence. In a few minutes she would be gone. He desperately wanted a drink, but he knew he would not sustain his detachment if he made one. He would offer her one too, and she would jam her foot through the crack of his kindness and force herself in. He closed his eyes for a minute and when he opened them again she was there, standing in the doorway.

‘That was quick,’ he said stupidly, rubbing his eyes.

‘There wasn’t much.’

She watched him as a thick silence spread over the room. He looked down, unable to bear her gaze, while a polite impulse to make conversation fought in his chest.

‘So that’s it, then!’ he burst out finally, meeting her eyes.

‘Oh, I’ll be gone soon,’ she said acerbically, for once understanding him at the very moment in which he wished to be most opaque. ‘I just wanted to tell you something I think you should know.’

‘And what’s that?’

He caught the split second of her hesitation, and knew suddenly that he had been wrong, that she hadn’t even thought of what she was going to say until that moment.

‘I’m going to keep the baby,’ she said, throwing his gaze back at him defiantly. ‘I’ve decided.’

Ralph found that he could not take his eyes from her, although a fierce desire to pound his own head with his fists had gripped him. He felt the tide of confusion begin to rise again, the great gorge of their debris swilling on its surface, and he held his breath.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’

‘No,’ he said. His voice was a whimper and he put his head in his hands.

‘Why not? You have to say something. I’ve said I’m going to keep the baby, and you—’

‘What baby?’ He heard the shout come from him, and then the slam of his hand on the coffee table. The room capsized in an angry blur. ‘It’s not a bloody baby, for God’s sake! It’s not a baby!’ He wondered what sounds would fall from his lips if he ceased to restrain them with words, what grunts and howls and strange language. He felt an eruption at his eyes, his face growing messy. ‘I don’t love you, do you understand? I–I barely know you, I don’t actually know who you are!’ A drop of mirthless laughter spilled from his mouth. ‘Please leave me alone. Do you hear? Leave me alone.’

He hadn’t been looking at her but he sensed her suddenly come at him, and then felt the dark flaps of her coat baffling around his head. He realized to his astonishment that she was hitting him with her fists and he put out his arms to protect himself.

‘How dare you?’ she panted, drawing back. ‘How dare you speak to me like that? I know about you!’ Her voice hauled itself higher on a new rope of initiative. ‘I know all about you!’

‘What do you know?’ he spat back, laughing. ‘You don’t know anything about me at all!’

‘Yes I do!’ she said triumphantly, folding her arms. ‘I know what you are — you’re a fake!’ She waited, watching him, and when he didn’t do anything she said it again. ‘You’re a fake! You act all superior and high and mighty, but you’re not, are you? Oh, I’ve found out everything!’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ said Ralph.

He felt all at once calm again. He wondered if she had actually lost her mind, but then realized that he was merely seeing more clearly into it: its accumulation of junk, its piles of magazines from whose covers trapped, vacant beauties stared, its reels of bad films, its numbing hours of television; all these broken, abandoned versions of reality strangling her soil, clogging her consciousness. She lived beneath a dictatorship of nonsense; she imitated that which itself was only an imitation, and try as he might to search for her in this hall of mirrors, he would find time and again only comical, distorted reflections of himself. The worst of it was that, despite everything, he saw she had been capable of dragging him down with her; for every soft, silly thing she threw at him concealed a sharp rock of implication, the fact that he himself had chosen her.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Her voice sung with affected mimickry. ‘Oh, very realistic. Is that what they taught you at your posh school, then?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Ralph gaily, suddenly finding the whole exchange hilarious.

‘It’s not how your parents talked, though, is it?’

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ he replied, pausing with surprise. ‘I don’t really remember. Look, is that what this is all about? I hardly think it matters how my parents spoke.’

‘You lied to me!’ she shouted. Her fingers stiffened into fists and her face, hanging above him, was a lamp of anger. He saw that she was incensed, quite genuinely, and realized that she had expected him to be ashamed. ‘All this time you’ve been looking down your nose at me, acting like I’m not good enough, and it’s me who should feel sorry for you!’

‘Why’s that?’ said Ralph. He felt peculiarly unmoved, and it surprised him to notice that his heart was thudding.

‘Everyone feels sorry for you!’ She waited, watching him until he met her eye before she delivered her meaning. ‘Your father was a disgusting tramp and you came from a council house, and even your precious Stephen was only friends with you because he was forced to be!’

Something dropped through his centre like a pebble thrown down a well, a long, silent fall. He felt its faint impact down in the pit of himself.

‘That’s not true.’ He sat back firmly on the sofa and folded his hands.

‘Oh, yes it is! He told me so.’ Her face was excited now. ‘He told me it was his punishment, to be friends with you!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He got into trouble,’ said Francine victoriously. ‘And the master’ — she used the word carefully, and Ralph suddenly knew beyond doubt that she was telling the truth, that somehow Stephen had really told her these things — ‘the master said that instead of being expelled he had to be friends with you, because nobody else wanted to. He said he wished he’d been expelled,’ she finished matter-of-factly.

Ralph opened his mouth but found himself disarmed. The litany of Francine’s voice assaulted him, hammering against his thoughts and then slotting in amongst them, into spaces he had not really known were there but which now he saw fitted them perfectly. He saw the matrix of truth, touched its cold, steely walls, and knew himself captured.

‘He told me other things too, all sorts of interesting things about you. He took me out last night to a wine bar and we got drunk and talked about everything. I told him how bad you were to me and he said it wasn’t surprising, considering your background, and I should just feel sorry for you, like he does. He says you’re jealous of him because of Belinda, because she liked him more than she liked you. She was all over him, he said.’ He heard her laugh. ‘And you still go to the pub with him! It’s pathetic, it really is. Just pathe—’

Ralph saw himself spring to his feet and put his hands about her throat, but it was only the warm shock of his skin meeting hers that told him it was real, that he was now committing an impossibility, a physical rebellion which demanded to occupy seconds and space and would change everything. Her neck was surprisingly thick, resilient with cords. He squeezed with his hands, frightened by the sudden silence and then amazed by it, and as he looked into her startled eyes his heart flew to his fingertips and for the first time he felt locked with her in an unutterable intimacy. For a moment she was still, long, glorious seconds of quiet in which he looked at the petrified face in his hands and knew himself completely, but then she struggled, clawing at him with rigid fingers, and he let her go. To his surprise she didn’t recoil from him but stayed motionless where she was, the panting sound of her breath the only trace of what had happened. He waited for an aftermath, for something to flow into the vacuum of what he had done, but the room seemed just then to stand still with the evidence of his crime, and hers, the impossibility of retraction. He prayed for her to do something simple, cry perhaps, something which would retrieve them from this desolation where they were too far to be heard or rescued. Finally, she lifted a hand and touched her throat with her fingers, and he saw there the imprints of his own in a ghastly tattoo. His palms burned.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said, astonished at the familiar sound of his own voice, its politeness. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

To his surprise he saw her lips unfurl in a curious half-smile, and as her eyes grew excited again he realized that he hadn’t changed anything at all, merely delayed the progress of a strange campaign by which he had long been surrounded.

‘He did it to me too!’ she said, the wing of a shriek flitting across her voice. For a moment he didn’t understand her, but then his shame came back to him with redoubled force, dragging with it all the things she had said, the sound of her voice, the chasm into which he had for a moment frozen his fall. ‘He pushed me against a wall and did it to me right there in the street! I asked him to!’

A cry crowded fluttering in his mouth and he let it escape, hearing its soft progress through silence. With a painful grinding of joints he finally felt himself turn away from everything he knew, from the ugly, familiar place where he had always been, and it was as if something else, a clear and frightening range of vertiginous truths, had been there, just behind him, all along. He saw the sweep of it in seconds, exhilarated and despairing, and felt a rush of knowledge pass through him. He had done wrong, a terrible, intractable wrong reached by a steep stairway of mistakes and failures, from whose top he could view all the things he should have done and realize only how far he was from them. His helplessness could not absolve him: he had failed to defend what was his as it floated alone in its troubled sea, had abandoned where he should have protected, had cast away his fragile creation and left it to cower at the drip of wine-toxic blood, the rooting jabs of a stranger, the unfriendly air in which he himself was betrayed and reviled.

‘Poor thing,’ he muttered, hardly knowing what he said. ‘Poor little thing.’

‘Oh, don’t feel sorry for me!’

Their eyes met. Ralph endured the final, fatal collision of their differences and felt laughter jump in his throat. He saw Francine pick up her bag and he gasped, putting out a hand to stop her.

‘Don’t you touch me!’ she shrieked, skipping from the compass of his arm.

‘Please don’t go, not yet.’

He fixed her with his eyes, trying to fill them with some as yet unspoken promise, some prize which might lure her back to him. For a moment he held her, but then the knowledge of his own emptiness leaked from him and her eyes grew bored and looked away. She turned and left the room with his voice still ringing in her absence as if it had been the signal of her liberation, and seconds later he heard her shut the door.

*

‘Is that you?’

Ralph’s voice was barely more than a whisper. Stephen’s phone had rung for a long time, hundreds of rings, each one pounding like a hammer in his heart. Then finally there had been the click of someone picking it up, and now just the sound of breathing.

‘Is that you?’

‘Who’s this?’ barked Stephen suddenly. ‘Speak up whoever you are or bugger off.’

‘It’s me. Ralph.’

‘It’s Ralphie! It’s my old friend Ralph,’ said Stephen, shouting as if to a room full of people. Ralph could hear static in the background and beyond that, nothing. Stephen was drunk, or stoned, or both, he could tell from his voice. ‘This is a bit of a late night for you, old chap, isn’t it? Rebelling at last?’

Ralph felt himself break again, a strange sensation of inner collapse, something giving beneath him like a rotten bridge and then the blurred velocity of falling. He had felt it several times in the hours since Francine had left.

‘Still there?’ Stephen tapped comically at the receiver.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s up?’

Ralph waited, but nothing came. Now that he was here, claiming what was owed to him, his injury seemed fluid and ungraspable, impossible to lift from the mire which surrounded it and hold dripping above his head.

‘You’ve — wronged me,’ he said finally, and then instantly regretted it.

‘I what? Speak up. Can’t hear you.’

‘You’ve wronged me.’

Stephen was silent for so long that Ralph felt himself begin to disappear. He heard a dry cough in the receiver, a clearing of the throat.

‘Look, what’s this all about? Are you pissed or something?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve gone a bit nuts, then, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘You’ve wronged me.’

‘Yes, so you keep saying. Can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

Ralph tried to speak and felt a terrible constriction at his throat. He thought of Francine’s face above his hands, the face of a doll, her eyes empty as marbles.

‘She told me,’ he said, his voice strangled. ‘Everything you said to her, she told me. I know everything.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Stephen. His laugh rattled in Ralph’s ear. ‘Well, I wouldn’t take it to heart if I were you. We were both a bit pissed, that’s all.’ He laughed again. ‘My God, she was—’

‘You told her things about me,’ interrupted Ralph. The sound of his own voice excited him.

‘Did I? Can’t say I remember.’

‘Private things. You told her private things.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’

He muttered something else which Ralph couldn’t hear. He sounded distracted, as if he wanted to be off the telephone.

‘All my life,’ began Ralph; but then he stopped, unable to say something so portentous.

‘What was that?’

‘I said, all my life you’ve fucked me up.’ He strained over the words, finding them hard and unnatural. ‘All my life.’

‘Nothing to do with me. Fucked yourself up. Pathetic bastard, that’s your problem. Nobody forced you.’

Tears sprang to Ralph’s eyes and he put a hand to his forehead.

‘You’ve taken things from me!’ he said desperately.

‘Look, you only ever had one thing worth taking. She wasn’t yours anyway. As for the other one, she wasn’t worth the trouble it would have taken to shag her. Those are the facts. Now, why don’t you just toddle off to bed and get off my bloody case?’

‘She’s pregnant!’ burst out Ralph.

Stephen paused for a long time.

‘Not by me, she’s not,’ he said finally. ‘Anyway, you’re well shot of her.’

Ralph felt himself smelted down to his hot, thudding heart, saw the room around him and dissolved into its walls, evaporated in its corners.

‘And you,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’m well shot of you.’

Ralph could hear the measure of his breathing, up and down.

‘Oh. All right, then.’

‘I don’t want to see you again.’

‘Righty-ho.’

‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes, yes, I think you’ve made yourself quite clear. Goodbye.’

The line went abruptly dead and Ralph replaced the receiver. The silence around him was towering, enormous. He lay back on the sofa, stretching himself out so that he lay flat. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. He closed his eyes and waited.