After Kate had gone he found he couldn't sleep. He'd just lie awake trying not to think, while thinking and thinking. So he took to driving at night. For the first week he confined himself to a four or five mile radius of the flat, then later cruising the Audi for longer periods, anything up to three hours into unknown territory: two lane, three lane dreamways of green cat's eyes, red cat's eyes, headlights crossing invisible bridges like aircraft coming in to land above him, the distant glow of the solitary car ahead drawing him further and further into dark and dangerous space. He drove until the red tail-lights blurred and merged and his hands grew numb in a sleepless dream, then he drove home again. This had to stop, he told himself; for one thing, he couldn't afford the petrol.
Night after night, however, he went on wandering the streets he barely saw in an attempt to evade the words, the images running through his head and the nausea gripping him whenever he stopped. Sometimes he thought he'd never felt so alive. It was not a comfortable feeling.
He couldn't quite believe she was gone. Without her there was just too much time to think, too much time spent waiting Too much time. He could do nothing but wait. He was waiting for the phone to ring. He knew it would ring. He could see it happening, the phone ringing, him picking it up, her voice breathless, slightly stilted with that over-rehearsed little speech. He’d let her run on, savouring the moment when he would interrupt. How he did this, however, changed as the days went by. At first he’d heard himself deliver verbal backhands of amazing fluency; then on bad days 'So what?' and 'Do I care?' was the only response that sounded authentic; driftwood in the flood of her accusation.
She didn't call. It got so he began to dread the ringing of the phone; it was never her. Did he want her back? For what? He wanted her, maybe, but mostly he wanted her to stop thinking of him in the way she thought of him, the way he didn't want to think of himself.
Mostly, he was waiting for her to take away her shoes. She'd been gone two weeks but her shoes were still there. The black suede four inch heels standing in the hall waiting to be picked up. He was ‘fucked’ if he was going to pick them up and so he let them stand there at that sluttish angle. They were all she'd left behind, the shoes, a week old copy of Time Out and the Kute Kitten calendar still hanging on the back of the kitchen door (dates marked in red well into next month). She'd cleared out on a Friday while he was at school, taken everything that was hers, at once, as if trying to erase herself from his memory or the flat from hers. A brief but neatly written note told him she was not going to tell him where she was or what she was doing (or who she was doing it with). They needed a clean break. It was the only way.
A mixture of amusement and irritation greeted his frantic call to the shop in South Molten Street where, apparently, she hadn't worked for the past month. No, they had no idea where she was now: LA perhaps, maybe New York. The female voice was distant and mocking. Who was this calling? Did he want to speak to someone else?
After the third day he'd placed the shoes carefully in a storage cupboard, but an hour later replaced them in the hall, just as they were. Going in and out of the flat he tried not to look at them, but he did not pick them up again.
She'd gone. She was not coming back, but nothing had changed, it all seemed so temporary and he drove with the thought he barely admitted to himself: somewhere in some lonely street she would turn, surprised, into his headlights. What he would do then, face to face, he had never considered.
The car had been a panic buy, a rash extravagance he'd forced upon himself the week after she'd left. Even as he signed his name to the papers he thought he must be going out of his mind; on his salary he could barely afford the insurance. It was the source of this panic he didn't want to think about. He just knew he wanted to see the look on her face when she saw him behind the wheel. Yet every time he changed gear he was shockingly aware of the power in his hands. This was a world away from the hobbling Honda they'd made the best of for seven years (which he thought he'd exchanged far too cheaply) and he was never certain he was fully in control.
He shifted up a gear, shifted lanes, sped through a changing light. He was not going to think of her. But it was always when he tried hardest not to think of her that he saw her most clearly: in the same silent soft-porn video, a violent crushing and slapping so real it could have been a memory, just not his memory. The camera caressed and fondled her, swooping in on her open face, her head tipped back, the muscles straining in her neck. It wouldn't let go. Who was directing this movie? Where were these images coming from?
He shook his head to flick them away, his hands tightening on the wheel, the dark road rushing beneath his headlights. She had the height, the hair, the high forehead of ‘a rebooted Jerry Hall’ and knew she was cut out for 'Something more than this'. She'd been ‘bright’ at school, ‘brilliant’ at work, was ‘vital’ and ‘positive’ and had 'personality.' She was born to have some kind of life and this was not it. At least, this is what she'd told him, again and again; and the fact that nothing was happening. None of the things they'd talked about when they first met. The past seven years now seemed like some featureless landscape through which they'd just gone on and on and which led nowhere. ‘You're just going nowhere. No, that's unfair. It's not you, it's your job, it’s your friends, it’s your family... No, it's you.’
‘Who does she think I am?’ he muttered. He'd recently found himself repeating the same question several times a day, like a mantra. It was a question without an answer. He opened out along a duel-carriageway. The speed, the moments of neon splashed across still, deserted streets, the radio tuned to talk, soothing, low-key conversation filtering through as dull, white noise, all calmed him and made him feel he was on his way somewhere. When rain pitted the windscreen and the wipers settled into the comforting heartbeat of iambic pentameter, he felt cocooned, suspended for a time outside thought. He longed for some extended moment of peace, some time when all his dreams would be good dreams.
It used to be the classes which filled the busy hours of his unconscious life. He'd teach them all day, then teach them all over again in his sleep. He felt he wasn't doing it right. The students were a continual threat. He had them under control, it wasn't like teaching practice, but he could never give them a chance. He knew the relentless insecurity of Macbeth, whose lines he could repeat now ‘by heart’, having spent four successive years listening to the familiar phrases mangled in a range of south London mouths from self conscious to arrogant; he was, however, a benign tyrant, but one who had to keep working to maintain power, he could never relax. He could also never stop to think of how he was doing no more than that; he was standing still. It took Kate to remind him of that.
Now drained by sleepless nights, aimless, pointless, he was no longer teaching and the classes had lost their hold, even as a distraction. He carried out his duties within the framework of a certain alienation, as though by marking papers he was merely marking time before something happened to him. When the holidays arrived, he was almost overwhelmed with relief; class after class had become oppressive, and, going through the motions, he kept seeing an image of himself standing at the board like some Bash Street teacher, repeating the same cartoon lessons, the same bubble captions to different sets of indifferent children. He could not imagine going through all this ever again, much less in a week's time when the new term began.
‘The loss of someone at the end of a relationship is like a death. You need a period of grieving and you must not deny this to yourself....’ The radio was always tuned to talk. Whenever music intruded he ran the dial through the waves until he found more talk (all the songs on all the stations were about his own life). He'd started out listening to shows featuring relationships, in which callers were encouraged rather than confronted, in the hope of hearing Kate coaxed into sobbing out a secret confession (already knowing she’d have to be another woman for this to happen) and he now remained tuned in out of mere habit.
The plain, very reasonable voice of a counsellor explained the connection between stress and premature ejaculation: ‘Just leave your name and address with our switchboard and we'll pop a leaflet in the post....’ ‘John’ was next, wanting to know how and where he could meet someone, anyone who would be kind to men under five foot; then Jackie, a girl with a very young voice, very concerned about her friend who had developed an obsession with a teacher in her school. The teacher looked like Gianni Di Napoli, the movie actor, sort of, though not, you know, loud sort of thing, and his clothes were a bit boring really, but he talked to you, he wasn't like a teacher at all really, none of the other teachers talked to you like that, and most of the girls thought he was a real hunk, but this friend was completely obsessed.’ ‘Infatuated...?’ encouraged the mature interviewer. No, obsessed, she couldn't sleep, couldn't concentrate, couldn't think of anything else and her exams were coming up and she was going to fail and she needed the grades badly so she could get into college to study as a beautician and she couldn't even tell anyone about it because she knew they'd only laugh.
‘Well she must have told you.’ the serene voice encouraged, then went on repeating her name into the darkness of space.
The counsellor provided advice anyway, explaining how 'her friend' might manage the stress of exam pressure (acquire an interest outside school, go out more, meet new people, people her own age) while Jim drifted through a red light leaving someone's blaring horn behind.
Where he drove after that he could only imagine. He came to on a motorway sucking in cat's eyes like tracer fire, still waiting for the girl to summon the courage to call back. Despite her nerves, the distortion of the airwaves, and the fact that he'd never heard the voice of anyone he knew in real life on a phone-in, he knew this girl was Amanda, a tall, slim, slightly shy girl in his Year 11 class. He'd been able to picture her sitting on the edge of a bed, head bowed, phone pressed hard to her tilted ear, her free hand covering her mouth, her eyes shutting tight with a determination to break the long pauses of her initial fear until the sudden release of repressed emotion. He went on gazing at the image in his head, fascinated in seeing her anew. Yet the blurring features made him feel he hadn't really looked at her before, certainly not in the way she seemed to have observed him. What had she been doing during his lessons? What had he been doing there?
He knew little about the girl outside his class. She was quiet and worked hard. What else did he need to know? She was in fact one of a dwindling population of white girls in the school (just above white working class boys, according to a recent report, in the race for underachievement). She wore her light blonde hair in a high, tight pony which stretched her face to produce a faintly Oriental look. She wore it like this not through any misguided empathy with the smallest ethnic group in her area or any slavish attempt to copy some popular Reality role model but because she'd heard it was how fashion models kept their skin clear (a subject she'd discussed in a brief, self-conscious 'D' grade talk to the class). Listening to her on the radio he'd recognised not so much the tone of her voice as the fitful speed with which she tried to express herself. Yet apart from the hair, and a square, regular face, her features remained a liquid blur, as were those of most of his students (hers only taking on structure in contrast to the brash, hard-faced ‘homegirl’ who usually sat beside her in class). He tried to remember some look, some suggestion of her feelings, which might confirm his suspicion, recalling nothing more than a surly attitude as he'd leaned over her table to identify the errors of spelling and punctuation in her last assignment, before admiring the one line of imagination in the four neatly handwritten A4 pages. She tried hard, but....what could he say? 'A very conscientious year' he'd written beside the generous D/C on her most recent report, struggling to find something more encouraging. And her 'friend'? No, she was not calling about that ‘tart’, he thought, and with a sudden remembrance he saw the tart, Julie, deliberately pulling open Amanda's rough work ring-binder to reveal a collage of Di Napolis pasted to the inside cover. Furtively, he glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror and realised he had his foot down too firmly on the gas.
Di Napoli? Di Napoli's star had peaked several years back. Several? Before Jim had even met Kate, when Amanda was still mastering joined-up handwriting, and, despite the hype over his latest film, it was a surprise to think he could generate any interest in someone her age. His image of the actor was always the same. It played like an intense trailer of highlights from one of his earliest films, in which a raw, energetic Di Napoli assumed the role of a semi-articulate, semi-psychopath locked into an obsession with a young girl. Critics praised his mastery of screen presence, how completely he embodied the obsession driving the character. Even alone on the screen he had a way of making everything he did seem significant. His life was so much more: passionate, violent, on the surface; the way Jim had felt for the first half-hour after leaving the cinema, his feet bouncing over the pavement, which now had the spring of Tartan track, as though he'd been thrown toward something and was still propelled by the momentum, though the thing at which he was aimed was no longer there. He hadn't felt that way for some time.
Amanda did not call back, the problems turned into the ravings of earnest insomniacs, and then, for Jim, into a background of familiar white noise. It was after 2.00am and raining hard when he jogged back to the flat from the nearest parking space, a street away, his shirt plastered to his chest. He dried himself, slicked back his hair then studied his image in the bathroom mirror.
At first he just saw himself. It was a strange feeling. He looked in mirrors no less often than anyone else, he guessed, shaving, combing his hair, checking his tie, but he could not remember lingering long enough to make any study of what he saw; maybe not since the first year with Kate, before they had moved in together. The sagging skin under his eyes reminded him of why that was. His hair, however, showed no sign of receding and the damp now concealed the grey beginning to work its way in on either side. He put the comb through it again, turned his chin to the left and, yes, he thought, maybe he could see something. What was it, the narrowed eyes? The prominent cheekbones? He saw it in the chin, maybe; maybe not. He had once thought of himself in a different way; the Drama club had taken up a good part of his second year at university, although he'd joined mainly for the women and graduated to only minor, almost mute roles in Orton and Pinter and one simulated ‘humorous’ sexual grappling (briefly, on stage, underrehearsed, with clothes and a troubling erection) with the one woman he wanted to be near, before his studies took over again.
He turned away and then back again, gave the mirror a Di Napoli 'look', that nonchalant jerk of Italian-American arrogance, repeated it, then again, building the movement from the shoulders and adding some work to the eyebrows as he found himself mumbling a typical Di Napoli line: ‘Fuck you, you fuck’. The words shocked him and he glanced toward the door, surprised at himself, as though someone was watching. After a moment he tried it again, this time with some accent and projection. ‘Hey, I’m a shmuck? I’m a what? You fuck. Lookame an lookatchoo, Lookachoo anlookame. Who’s the shmuck.’ It began with surprising conviction but ended a little choked, just above a whisper, smiling foolishly, embarrassed by himself. This was what she saw in class? Sure.
Back in the dark of the living room, however, he realised his mood had lifted for the first time since Kate had left. It took him a while to notice he hadn’t once looked at the still silent phone.
Then a strange thing happened; he slept. He knew he'd been asleep when he woke sweating from a bad dream, searching the blistered wallpaper for the noise of a woman in distress, or ecstasy. The silence was palpable and nauseous. He couldn't remember what had happened in the dream but at some point he'd been falling through space. It was the sudden spasm in his leg stepping off a ledge into a chasm which had woken him. He got up, took a bottle of water from the fridge and sipped at it, letting the ice cold turn luke warm as he watched the light grow slowly on the curtains.
He slept again and this time dreamed he was a lifeguard in the Baywatch series. He was wearing that bracelet with the bright red plastic torpedo attachment, though he still had no idea what to do with it. Somehow he'd also acquired great muscle definition which was useful because there were sharks in the water and every so often he'd have to swim out to a blonde struggling in distress, carry her back to shore, limp and heavy in his arms, before breathing life back into her on the sand. Reviving these girls was exhausting and no sooner had he finished peeling off the grateful, clinging limbs of one than he'd hear another scream in the distance and found himself running down to the shoreline again.
When he awoke again the warm red glow at the heart of the bedside clock came into focus to reveal a number he hadn’t seen for some time; he'd been asleep for several hours. He didn't exactly feel refreshed but there was a certain charge of energy which surprised him. The distant numbness of depression remained but the listlessness had lifted and there was this feeling of ‘resurrection’ (the word itself appeared in his head, complete with holy picture imagery). He knew he could do something if only he knew what it was. Alone, outside the strict routine of a school week, his days had become empty and endless, he didn't know what to do with himself.
He spent an hour in the bathroom, washing the sleep from his eyes and watching himself carefully while he shaved, as though making sure he was doing it right. Stripped to the waist his body was showing his age; or someone else's, someone about a decade older than himself. Di Napoli, for instance. But Di Napoli kept himself in shape, three hours a day, a disciplined regime he'd told Kate’s discarded copy of Time Out. He enjoyed working out, it was something he'd picked up preparing for a film in which he played a psychopathic boxer, and had returned to the gym for the new film, in which he got to reprise his earlier semi-psycho role (graduating to full-blooded psycho, in order to terrorise an entire family) and which put his aging muscles under even closer scrutiny. He had the time, he’d told the fawning reporter, he got paid to keep in shape. Jim thought he'd use the day to begin his own programme of self-maintenance (he kept a set of weights under the bed, permanently dismantled) but he had much the same thought within the scope of just about every school holiday.
An hour later he was still drinking coffee and gazing at the pictures breaking up the pages of the interview: a collage of Di Napoli's career like the inside of Amanda's folder: holiday snaps of the crazy gang. Di Napoli's thing, his gimmick, was Method, was building characters over months of ‘study’ and immersion in their ‘life’: lean, fat, muscular; long, lank, counter-culture hair, short military cuts, slicked back, shaved, mohican; everything seemed to be here. All of them, however, lived off the same aggressive gene, something pumped up on steroids, hard and unhinged. All of them (hoods, street-punks, prize-fighters, even priests) ready to deliver a familiar line in threat and damage. There was a warning in the puzzled bird-like movement of the chin, the sudden loss of hearing, the startled clown's grimace, the rising string-puppet arms: 'Hey? Sammada-chew? Sammada-chew, you fuck.' The unbelieving, alienated shake of the head told you something sudden and violent was going to happen as soon as you blinked.
Flicking back through the pages he read of a New York impressionist developing an impersonation of 60s comic Lenny Bruce for an Off broadway one-man show. 'The most powerful and engrossing study of a comedian I have seen.' said Time Out. ‘All my adult life’ said the impressionist, ‘I've been told that I should play Lennie Bruce. Because of the physical resemblance.’ (Jim mentally corrected the punctuation). ‘It's weird in a way because Lenny was Jewish and I'm Arab. But I guess we're basically all Semites - part of the same tribe.’ He was astute enough to know, however, physical similarity wouldn't take him very far. He'd done his research. He didn't want to be seen as just an impersonator. ‘As you watch him pace the stage’, said TO 'like a coiled spring, Hanna makes you believe he is Lenny Bruce.’
Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, nothing much had changed, but the energy he'd felt an hour before now seemed clotted and had begun turning to irritation. He was unhappy with himself, his clothes for instance, or the way he just stood there.
He returned to the front room for no reason he could remember and sat down in front of the blank TV screen feeling himself drifting into a somnambulant state; still seeking out the dreams from which he'd recently emerged. These previously fresh images had now, however, dissolved into a warm passive mood into which he could feel himself descend. He had been doing things in these dreams, however, taking action. He shook himself. Now was the moment to sort everything out, restart his life. Clearing the room would somehow clear his mind, he was sure.
There was much to clear; once he’d noticed it, it seemed to surround him, dominating the space like claustrophobia: bottles, glasses, half-filled coffee mugs, plates upon which food had dried to ground-in stains; the debris of an ‘independent’ life littered what Kate had always called the ‘living’ room (and the living she’d conducted there was high maintenance). He piled plates, cups and glasses on a tray like a novice waiter, balancing them precariously to the kitchen; however, the sink was already overflowing with unwashed dishes and there were very few places to rest the new batch before they began to slide and fall.
Cleaning what was already there would be a good start, he thought, but washing up liquid proved elusive and after opening and slamming cupboard after cupboard, he abandoned the task and found himself back in the living room trying to tidy the books and papers scattered over the sofa and floor. Two sets of assignments still waiting to be marked were in no order and he was idly shuffling them into their respective classes when he discovered a few drafts of Year 11 coursework, missing from folders already collated and passed on to his head of department in time to meet the course deadline. These were all from the same unit of descriptive writing, ironically entitled ‘Memories’ and placing them to one side he suddenly recalled Amanda’s. What was it about? A character study of sorts, an older man, he’d assumed to be her father or ‘boyfriend’ or something? What had she called it? A something something memory? My Dad? There was no reason for it to be here but the more he went on searching the more he was convinced he’d seen it lying on the floor only days before. He sifted back and forth certain he must have missed that tight, ordered handwriting, carefully pinching each sheet in turn as though hers might be stuck to the back of someone else's while knowing full well she would have written four sides, she always wrote four sides: two sheets fixed with a neat diagonal staple (big margin, spaced words); as though neatness itself could compensate for lack of ability; sometimes she even added little cartoon drawings.
He couldn't find it. For a while he was just staring at the blank TV screen again, listening to his own strained breathing. The assignments were nothing, a distraction, there was so much else awaiting his attention, urgent attention. Too many things. Blue bills and red bills: electricity and gas, the phone, the rent (already a month overdue) and now the payments on the car. His credit was close to its limit and his salary, when it was paid in, was not going to leave him much margin for error over the following weeks. He could not think of the time and effort waiting to be expended in finding alternative accommodation (to say nothing of the consequent reevaluation of his life) but without Kate's income he could not afford to go on living in the two bedroom flat; not in this area. The demoralising necessity to downgrade had been on the edge of every conscious thought since she'd left, although he found brushing it aside as easy as telling people she was still at home, inventing evenings out, evenings in, minor illnesses that kept her in the background.
What he needed was to clear his head and plan the day, filling it with an ordered series of events: this first, then this, then this; but it was already afternoon, the day was nearly over. He cleaned a cup, filled the kettle and waiting for it to boil, killed a few ants climbing the side of the bread bin before finding their source in the corner of the worktop just inside the door. What might have been, at first glance, another streak of dust caking the inside lat of the door became a trail of ants lifting the carcass of a dead wasp up the length of the lat. The wasp was moving up swiftly and smoothly as though on some invisible elevator, but while many ants scurried to and fro, up and down the designated route, only a few seemed to be responsible for the heavy duty work, some pulling on a parched, transparent wing while a select work crew were shouldering the black, rotting bulk of the thorax. Once they had manoeuvred it to the end of their trail, a narrow crevice between plaster and wood half way up the wall, it was clear the stiff wingspan would not allow the insertion of the body. The ants couldn't work out a way to overcome this, so began moving the wasp back down the wall, then back up again as though this alone would change its shape.
A voice from the living room made him freeze. The kettle had long since boiled and in the silence he listened to the low, almost wordless murmur of a woman. The freezing hadn’t been immediate; at first the sound had seemed so natural (measured, confident, articulate) he had caught himself almost responding. Hesitantly, he stepped into the room and saw the familiar face of a female newsreader, the volume of the TV turned as low as it had been the night before. He had no memory of switching it on and looked around vainly for the control, then back at the steady schoolteacher's gaze, her clipped tone (of accusation, he felt, firm but fair) informing him of a recent rise in house prices. ‘Do I care?’ someone asked her, ‘Do I fucking care?’ realising, with only a minor shock, this was his own voice. There was another, deeper meaning here (like the obvious theme of a poem eluding the grasp of his more ‘challenged ‘students struggling with their ‘learning difficulties’) and he wanted to hold on to this feeling and explain it to himself but there were no other words inside him.
In the silence he recalled an argument they'd had returning from a party in the West London townhouse of one of her friends from work. It had begun in the car and continued unsteadily, drunkenly into this room. What had she said? Under the pressure of relentless interrogation, she had first tried to laugh the accusation into diplomatic oblivion and, finding simulated laughter too tedious to maintain, had begun an offensive assault (which, to him, only confirmed her guilt). OK, so what if she'd ‘looked at someone’. So what? She was a natural flirt. So were lots of women. How bad was that? That wasn't so bad after six, seven years, was it? It wasn't as if she'd done anything about it. Unlike, etc, etc. And, yes there were times when she could have done something about it. And yes, she had, if he must know, wanted to be with someone else. It wasn't unnatural. Sometimes it seemed very natural. ‘Look at you’ she'd told him, looking at him in a way he didn’t like, and then repeated the words as if he hadn’t heard, as if she’d suddenly arrived at last at the essence of her grievance. ‘Look at you’, she pinched the fabric of his sweater (stinging his nipple beneath) and released her grip dismissively. ‘Look at those shoes. You're so...’ He never discovered what exactly he was because her rhetorical flow was cut short by the hard smack bouncing her head off the wall. He saw her face turned up to his, her lips quivering around some uncontrollable emotion she couldn’t voice and he was no longer sure he was living through a genuine memory or another illusion his mind had simply made up.
He shook himself to dismiss the image, genuinely disturbed, and saw himself gazing at his own distorted figure in the black gloss reflection of the TV screen. A diagonal shaft of sunlight exposed a film of static dust giving the surface a furry texture. He put the bills in a clear plastic wallet and the wallet, together with his marking, in the new leather briefcase (described by Amazon as a ‘timeless classic’) resting almost forgotten by the side of the sofa.
A short while later, ‘getting everything in order’, or creating a preface to a prelude to founding that order (‘clearing his head’), he found himself browsing through a clothes store he'd never before entered without Kate, intimidated, not so much by the cost as the ambience: mirrored walls, discreet lighting, spaced shelves, clothes whose labels he'd only seen in magazines, clothes other people wore, people in magazines with different, impossible lives. He stood looking at the neatly folded shirt in his hands, wondering what it was he thought he was going to buy here. The shirt was a short-sleeved casual, made of some silky material spilling over the edges of his hands, which to Jim felt as feminine as lingerie. Di Napoli had been wearing something similar on the cover of Time Out. The place had a dead-party atmosphere, he wished it could have been more crowded. Painfully aware of the unwashed T shirt he was wearing, Jim ran his fingers over the smooth collar searching blindly for the price tag, merely to stall whatever he was going to do next, too aware of the neatly suited assistant rocking on the balls of his feet in casual anticipation to a tranquillising soundtrack, something he didn't recognise: Jazz.
He replaced the shirt which lounged dishevelled across its neatly piled cousins on the shelf, then on an impulse snatched it up again. The changing-room was smart and spacious, a relaxed space in which he could not relax. He fastened a couple of buttons and turned sideways, then back. It was a good fit over the shoulders but the image before him looked stiff and awkward. Tucking the shirt into his jeans then out again did little to make it feel more his own (his jeans now looked more ragged and winded than he’d remembered); even in here he had the impression of someone breathing down his neck and merely stared at the self-conscious reflection to avoid meeting anyone's eyes. He tapped irritably on the back of the chair beside him, taking on the slow burn of the infectious bassline which drifted on in endlessly sinuous waves. He knew he had to take the shirt off or do something, but for a moment he couldn't move and merely felt his hand slapping harder on the back of the chair.
As if in a dream he watched himself accepting the smile of the tall, elegant girl at the sales desk returning his card and slipping the receipt discreetly into the elegant black bag; then he was moving toward the exit with a kind of rolling swagger, his step springing with the beat. ‘What the fuck’ he thought, nobody knew him here.
On the journey home (during which he thought he’d glimpsed her in Bond Street) to the hour spent placing some order in the kitchen, to the marking of at least two papers in a ‘productive’ day, somehow, as a consequence of all this purposeful activity, he’d convinced himself (like a character in a story he was teaching in class) he’d arrived at the moment Kate would ring. The phone, however, remained stubbornly silent through two game shows and an investigation into illegal migrant workers. Unable to relinquish the idea, he remained restlessly in front of the TV punching through the channels with growing impatience, lingering now only seconds on each, making insane sentences out of the snatched words of dramatic soap characters and bubbling (‘probably homosexual’) game show hosts. So what? ‘So fucking what?’ he challenged the earnest reporter reporting in the field from Mali or Somalia or some ‘fucking’ ruined shithole, the ‘fucking control’ slapping against the heel of his shoe, already twitching with excess energy (‘Jesus, just nuke the fucks’), his finger on the button ready to extinguish the voice at a whim. She would call when he was out. No, she knew him too well, she knew when he'd be in. This thought made him slap harder and the volume suddenly disappeared.
Another reporter, wisps of flying hair tenuously glued to a round, serious head, was mutely addressing the camera from Kensington high street. In a surreal moment, he saw Kate emerge from a navy Alfa Romeo Spider on the near side of the busy road. Her hair had been cut in a shorter style and expensively highlighted which seemed to take several years off her face. A man matching her new age: floppy hair, tan, collar raised on a tight fitting jacket (seen in the store earlier at a wincing price) had opened the door for her and now had his arms casually around her waist. She was returning the embrace with smiling enthusiasm as he led her off screen and he thought he'd never seen her looking so happy.
When the phone rang it took him by such outrageous surprise he picked it up without thinking.
‘You got a car for sale’ a man told him in a flat, factual voice.
‘I've got a what?’ The words came out involuntarily while he was still absorbing the absence of Kate’s sulky resentment.
As though on a game show the man named his make of car, the registration and a price. The price seemed undervalued as though for a quick sale. He thought he could do with the money. The man explained how close he lived and how he could call round in an hour, if that was OK.
No it was not O fucking K. ‘Who is this?’
‘Is this 570 5058?’ he asked.
‘Where did you get this number?’
‘Look,’ said the caller, now with a touch of indignation in his voice, ‘I have Auto Trader in front of me now. It says...’
‘Listen you fuck, I got a fucking car to sell? Where’ve you been? I got no fucking car to sell. Don't tell me I got cars to sell. What am I, some cut price garage? You don't call up and tell me I got some fucking car to sell. You hear me? You fucking hear me? Sammada-chew, you fuck?’
‘Who the fuck are you talking to?’ he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Who the fuck do you think I am?’ But there was nothing now, just an extended drone. He replaced the receiver and went on gazing numbly at the rest of the silent news.
Outside it was darker than ever and he drove with a kind of missionary zeal and a boiling, barely contained energy, like a vigilante or an actor improvising a part with no script, no set scenes, just waiting with a sense of vague menace for the action which would eventually emerge from the shadows. He felt at home now in the car, one hand on the wheel, an arm on the open window, an iron bar from one of the detachable dumbbells tucked beneath his seat.
Only once did he see the Spider; the sleek navy 2-seater accelerating away from him in the outside lane. To be honest, lacquered under the orange streetlights it might have been any shade of a spectrum of showroom blues, even black, but the sight caught him in the solar plexus like the vision of an old flame, a woman you’d always known instinctively would be ‘the one’, and as his foot clamped down on the accelerator his hands grew incredibly light on the wheel. In a desperate pursuit, cutting, dodging, lane changing, he found himself right behind, towing distance, close enough to see the two figures shoulder to shoulder, merged into a single silhouette with the intimacy of an all too familiar body language, imagining as he was the movement of the hands he couldn’t see. He trailed at 60 mph along a bright dual carriageway then 30 through a suburban maze then out into the orange glow of another carriageway, his heart rate and breathing synchronised. He was bumper close when their brake lights beamed so conclusively he had to jam on his own; simultaneously they shot ahead at a crossroads, another car and then a red light came out of nowhere to separate them, and he could do nothing but watch the inky shape shrink like an hallucination into the dark distance.
Something loud, ‘pimped’ and overloaded with adolescents pulled up beside him. The driver gunned his engine several times; instinctively, Jim revved his and the boys started yelling things at him. When the lights changed they sped ahead, the faces in the back grinning back insanely. ‘Wipe that scum off the streets’ he heard and with an impetuous acceleration, a residue of frustration, he caught them then let them go when they took a left. 'Kids' he thought (‘Ritalin-free soda junkies, packed with angst, empty rebellion and sugar highs’) but there had been something unsettling, mocking, in the grins.
The frustration was still working him when, cruising a now familiar carriageway, the Spider or its identical twin swaggered past in the opposite direction, pulling him into a U-turn so rashly timed he nearly collided with the wailing traffic sprung from an unseen junction. Forced to swerve and brake, he heard the tyres skid and his head glance the windscreen before the belt ripped him back into his seat. He sat still, breathing hard and holding what seemed to be a vibrating steering wheel in both hands. No damage. He drove on for a couple of slow, Spiderless streets then pulled over.
The world began to settle itself around him again. The radio became audible, a woman on a drama or phone-in was describing some terrible personal trauma, there were deep, empty spaces between her words but no one interrupted. On the edge of his gaze the front window of a nearby terraced house was throbbing with the industrial grind of a Dance beat, glowing green then red then green like traffic lights out of control. Two girls in short skirts hurried from the ragged crowd at the open doorway, throwing abuse over their shoulder as they jogged awkwardly in wobbling heels down the path before slowing to a walk and stopping only a few paces away. The heavier girl lecturing her friend who looked down sulkily at her shoes then up, seemingly at him with an expression of recognition. She nodded toward the car and the lecturer turned impatiently. ‘Oh Sir, it's you. Mand look, it's Sir.’
The girls walk-skipped toward him, Amanda hugging herself strait jacket tight, a pace behind. He was feeling for the key in the ignition but Julie (or ‘Jools’, as he remembered) was already tapping on the passenger window, which, reluctantly, he lowered. "We thought you was a mini cab, didn't we Mand. Where you off to Sir? I like your shirt"
Still trying to absorb the shock, he wondered if he was expected to answer. He was still holding the wheel to give his hands something to do.
‘No, we got a serious problem, Sir. Mandy needs to go somewhere really bad and there ain’t no sign of a cab.’
Amanda stared at her.
‘I don't know’ He stalled, his mind a slow shifting of gears, still focused on the Alfa and unable to formulate any justifiable reason to refuse.
‘No really, Sir. It's important. Tell him Mand.’
Amanda looked away down the street.
‘Where do you want to go?’ he sighed.
Julie accepted the question as an answer, opened the door and drew her friend toward it. Still without a word, Amanda settled herself reluctantly into the passenger seat. Her perfume and presence made the car seem very small. Was this really Amanda? Surely it was her older sister? She was made up for a photo-shoot: the hair artfully dishevelled, the face worked over with some expertise; that Spartan beauty regime obviously did not stretch to Saturday nights. Was it Saturday? What day was it? He could barely remember; it was hard enough tying to avoid looking down at her legs. The leather seat had hiked up her black spiderweb dress to her waist and her nervous tugging at the hem only drew attention to the exposed thighs.
He was waiting for Julie to insert herself into the back seat but with a wave and a backward skip, almost colliding with a passing pedestrian, a woman who glared into the car, she turned towards the house and Jim turned the keys in the ignition with a violent twist. As the engine throbbed, Amanda told him the destination in a sullen monotone then kept her eyes on the road as though he was a necessary but suspicious cab driver (or potential rapist).
In the silence immediately expanding between them, he became aware of the radio: a counsellor was rounding off a solution to the problems of impotence which involved lengthy bouts between partners caressing the non-sexual parts of their bodies. He didn't want to turn it off and draw attention to it, neither did he want to suffer the silence that would follow. ‘Why don’t you find some music?’ he suggested, recognising a slightly softer distortion of his classroom voice while feigning a preoccupation with the road ahead. Obediently, she turned the dial, cutting off the new caller (a young girl with a low voice in a controlled panic sounding strangely familiar) until she found the station she wanted. She now fixed her eyes on the darkness passing the passenger window, nodding her head then moving her shoulders self-consciously to the relentless flow of what sounded like a photocopier on an extensive print job (perhaps the latest police report on roadside rapists).
‘What is that?’ he ventured, attempting to close the distance between them and aiming for a neutral, paternal tone; nothing like a potential rapist,
She sucked in her breath then began to explain something in a soft, breathy voice. He heard the words "hardcore" and "kiss" and had a nervous struggle piecing them together.‘What?’
‘Kiss FM’ She told him, unwittingly bringing the stilted conversation to a close. She seemed to take some care not to call him 'Sir' but refused to meet his eyes and the silence went on long enough to become a mood. He wanted to turn back to that voice on the phone-in.
"So where have you been? he asked at last, barely recognising his own voice now.
‘Nowhere. Just out’ she told him, instinctively, as though addressing her parents. She frowned, perhaps wanting to add something more (some elaborate lie to explain to her teacher why she wasn’t at home locked into a systematic revision regime?) then just went on frowning out at the road (still frustratingly free of Spiders).
‘With your boyfriend?’ She glanced at him with a look that might have been fear or anger, maybe both. He tried to smile and felt the muscles in his face tighten, the words themselves had taken him by surprise.
‘He makes me sick. He's so stupid. He's nothing. He just thinks he's it.’ Her face remained set in the same sulky pose, staring straight ahead, but a suppressed animation kept moving her hands over her bare knees, the tips of her fingers trembling slightly at the touch. He hadn't looked at those legs in class, or maybe he had, but not in this way. She ran cross-country for the borough, he remembered.
Her boyfriend didn't understand her. He didn't know, wasn't interested in knowing how important her exams were to her, he thought women with careers were just a joke. Women were just a joke. The words came more easily now, but still in that clipped, resentful manner, as though this boyfriend was sitting behind them in the car and she was talking to him by proxy, explaining, as she was now, why she had to ‘get her grades’, ‘get into college’. There was a tightness in her voice as though they were taking part in some interview. ‘Could I get a C in English, I mean do you think so?’
‘I think,’ he said, lying surprisingly easily, ‘anything’s possible.’
‘That's not what you said on my report. You know what you always say about finding your own identity in your writing and writing about your own experience. What you really know...?’ He'd said that? Really? ‘Well I didn’t used to understand exactly what you meant but when I wrote...’ She was now talking about something in the assignment he'd lost but he was no longer listening, his eyes caught by the headlamp dazzle in the rear-view mirror, lights on full beam, off then on again. ‘...my sister's done really well for herself. Runs her own salon. She’s her own boss. That's all I've ever really wanted to do ever since I can remember. I don't know why, it's just what I want to do. This isn't the way.’
‘Huh?’ he said, still watching the headlights which now seemed to have been there for some time.
‘We should have turned left two streets back. Keep going, I’ll show you.’
He drove with concentration, without changing speed too suddenly, with an almost too obvious discretion (like a drunk trailed by a patrol car), but the lights remained, holding on through some fatal attraction. Nothing slipped in between himself and the tantalising blue-black shadow of his patient stalker, two car lengths behind, windsreen mirroring the alternating streetlights, as he waited for it to dissolve with his imagination. The skin felt damp beneath his collar and he flinched when, changing gears, his knuckles grazed her thigh.
There was a catch in her breath; she could see the car now in her wing mirror. She looked away, swallowed and straightened up. ‘Left up here’ she said, but without much conviction.
The headlights were suddenly flashing. The car had edged closer, was now right on his tail, shifting from side to side as though impatient to overtake but making no effort to pass. The restrained, calculating detective he had feared was now a swaggering joyrider. He slowed to let it overtake, yet the car made no attempt to change position. When they drew alongside on a clear stretch of road, he saw four boys three grinning passengers and a driver with a still, hard face set on the road. Jungle whooping lost beneath the panel beating rhythm of their stereo, they might have been the same crowd he'd seen earlier, they might have been anyone; 'scum': bully boys, sour and boozed up with infantile brutality, their yapping laughter flapping in the breeze. One of them was shouting something at him, something he couldn't quite make out. "Mandeee" he then heard. Something was going on here he didn't understand. ‘What's going on? Do they know you?’ She didn't answer but her eyes told him they were not mistaken. Headlights grew in the opposite lane and the ‘scum’ moved in behind him, then suddenly they were out in the lane again, so close he could see feral eyes and bared teeth, then pulling in and ahead only to fall back, scraping his wing mirror, shouldering him aside. ‘Fuck’ he thought, fighting with the wheel as they brushed him again. ‘That's it, that's it. Now you're going to die, you fuck.’ From what depths came this melodramatic fuck-nonsense? ‘Mandeee’ screamed the ‘fucks’ with an ecstatic mocking. Dead fucks now. They were directly ahead, slowing him to a crawl, bumper to bumper. He wanted to drive straight through them. ‘Who is that fuck?’
She shook her head looking at him strangely ‘Why are you talking like that?’
‘Like what?’ He pulled up behind the car, now a barrier at such an angle he would have to back up before rounding them. The faces gooned at him through the back window. He threw the gears into reverse but before he'd travelled a yard, Amanda was already, surprisingly athletically out, shouting at someone she obviously knew. They shouted back, joyfully drawing her into an hysterical exchange of taunts and abuse. When the passenger door swung open she lurched forward, hitting out at an arm which snatched, missed, snatched again and caught her wrist.
Seeing the girl’s suddenly dynamic features in the neon, he felt something tighten within him. It was a moment of distance, of hesitation, less than a skipping heartbeat.
Before the next pulse, however, he was already out the door, iron bar in hand, dodging a car breezing down the middle of the road, pumped up on a sudden insane rage he knew had little to do with Amanda or the fuck who’d taken out his wing mirror or anything he could articulate; just totally alive. With one hand around Amanda’s surprisingly whippet thin waist he hacked at the overstretched forearm clinging on to her wild struggle. The bar came down twice on the same spot, more or less, with the violent rhythm of the car stereo then vibrated loose from his grip; but in a jump-cut, with the instantaneousness of a dream, he had Amanda free and the boy's head now under his arm. His grip tightened and he squeezed with the power of lunacy; until, just as suddenly confronted by a shockingly rabid resistance, he was hanging on with the adrenaline of desperation. Too slowly it seemed, the figure, already unbalanced, began tipping and then falling from the seat and he used the momentum to haul the ‘fuck’ out and himself into a pumping squat, working the head with a quickening rhythm to bounce its face off the pavement once, twice, three times. There was no resistance now, it was limply bobbing like an animated cartoon. Amanda’s scream released his hold and springing up, breathless, lightheaded, he kicked out at some figure at his back but blindly, off balance, without a clean connection; just enough to give him some space.
Steadying himself, he’d now lost all sense of direction, he could feel the car floating around somewhere at his back and Amanda oscillating in front of him, still shouting, incongruously, his absurd title, ‘Sir!’; her voice both shocked and questioning, as if she didn’t know his name or who he was. For a brief moment everything was suddenly luminous, controlled and in front of him. He was amazed at the energy flooding through his limbs and the movie scene he seemed to own. Nothing was going to happen until he made it happen: the limp body face down on the tarmac, the figure in the front seat stalled in its rise from the open door, the shaved, angry head on the far side pressed to the roof by a passing car, Amanda's dress ripped from one shoulder. Her hand caught in his, lost, caught again. Snatches of a wild jungle loop thumping now from the car stereo or some tape in his head. He could feel each hair, each pore of himself alive with the animal energy Amanda would later compare to ‘a panther’ or some other discordant cliche in some future descriptive assignment.
DG 2015
Night after night, however, he went on wandering the streets he barely saw in an attempt to evade the words, the images running through his head and the nausea gripping him whenever he stopped. Sometimes he thought he'd never felt so alive. It was not a comfortable feeling.
He couldn't quite believe she was gone. Without her there was just too much time to think, too much time spent waiting Too much time. He could do nothing but wait. He was waiting for the phone to ring. He knew it would ring. He could see it happening, the phone ringing, him picking it up, her voice breathless, slightly stilted with that over-rehearsed little speech. He’d let her run on, savouring the moment when he would interrupt. How he did this, however, changed as the days went by. At first he’d heard himself deliver verbal backhands of amazing fluency; then on bad days 'So what?' and 'Do I care?' was the only response that sounded authentic; driftwood in the flood of her accusation.
She didn't call. It got so he began to dread the ringing of the phone; it was never her. Did he want her back? For what? He wanted her, maybe, but mostly he wanted her to stop thinking of him in the way she thought of him, the way he didn't want to think of himself.
Mostly, he was waiting for her to take away her shoes. She'd been gone two weeks but her shoes were still there. The black suede four inch heels standing in the hall waiting to be picked up. He was ‘fucked’ if he was going to pick them up and so he let them stand there at that sluttish angle. They were all she'd left behind, the shoes, a week old copy of Time Out and the Kute Kitten calendar still hanging on the back of the kitchen door (dates marked in red well into next month). She'd cleared out on a Friday while he was at school, taken everything that was hers, at once, as if trying to erase herself from his memory or the flat from hers. A brief but neatly written note told him she was not going to tell him where she was or what she was doing (or who she was doing it with). They needed a clean break. It was the only way.
A mixture of amusement and irritation greeted his frantic call to the shop in South Molten Street where, apparently, she hadn't worked for the past month. No, they had no idea where she was now: LA perhaps, maybe New York. The female voice was distant and mocking. Who was this calling? Did he want to speak to someone else?
After the third day he'd placed the shoes carefully in a storage cupboard, but an hour later replaced them in the hall, just as they were. Going in and out of the flat he tried not to look at them, but he did not pick them up again.
She'd gone. She was not coming back, but nothing had changed, it all seemed so temporary and he drove with the thought he barely admitted to himself: somewhere in some lonely street she would turn, surprised, into his headlights. What he would do then, face to face, he had never considered.
The car had been a panic buy, a rash extravagance he'd forced upon himself the week after she'd left. Even as he signed his name to the papers he thought he must be going out of his mind; on his salary he could barely afford the insurance. It was the source of this panic he didn't want to think about. He just knew he wanted to see the look on her face when she saw him behind the wheel. Yet every time he changed gear he was shockingly aware of the power in his hands. This was a world away from the hobbling Honda they'd made the best of for seven years (which he thought he'd exchanged far too cheaply) and he was never certain he was fully in control.
He shifted up a gear, shifted lanes, sped through a changing light. He was not going to think of her. But it was always when he tried hardest not to think of her that he saw her most clearly: in the same silent soft-porn video, a violent crushing and slapping so real it could have been a memory, just not his memory. The camera caressed and fondled her, swooping in on her open face, her head tipped back, the muscles straining in her neck. It wouldn't let go. Who was directing this movie? Where were these images coming from?
He shook his head to flick them away, his hands tightening on the wheel, the dark road rushing beneath his headlights. She had the height, the hair, the high forehead of ‘a rebooted Jerry Hall’ and knew she was cut out for 'Something more than this'. She'd been ‘bright’ at school, ‘brilliant’ at work, was ‘vital’ and ‘positive’ and had 'personality.' She was born to have some kind of life and this was not it. At least, this is what she'd told him, again and again; and the fact that nothing was happening. None of the things they'd talked about when they first met. The past seven years now seemed like some featureless landscape through which they'd just gone on and on and which led nowhere. ‘You're just going nowhere. No, that's unfair. It's not you, it's your job, it’s your friends, it’s your family... No, it's you.’
‘Who does she think I am?’ he muttered. He'd recently found himself repeating the same question several times a day, like a mantra. It was a question without an answer. He opened out along a duel-carriageway. The speed, the moments of neon splashed across still, deserted streets, the radio tuned to talk, soothing, low-key conversation filtering through as dull, white noise, all calmed him and made him feel he was on his way somewhere. When rain pitted the windscreen and the wipers settled into the comforting heartbeat of iambic pentameter, he felt cocooned, suspended for a time outside thought. He longed for some extended moment of peace, some time when all his dreams would be good dreams.
It used to be the classes which filled the busy hours of his unconscious life. He'd teach them all day, then teach them all over again in his sleep. He felt he wasn't doing it right. The students were a continual threat. He had them under control, it wasn't like teaching practice, but he could never give them a chance. He knew the relentless insecurity of Macbeth, whose lines he could repeat now ‘by heart’, having spent four successive years listening to the familiar phrases mangled in a range of south London mouths from self conscious to arrogant; he was, however, a benign tyrant, but one who had to keep working to maintain power, he could never relax. He could also never stop to think of how he was doing no more than that; he was standing still. It took Kate to remind him of that.
Now drained by sleepless nights, aimless, pointless, he was no longer teaching and the classes had lost their hold, even as a distraction. He carried out his duties within the framework of a certain alienation, as though by marking papers he was merely marking time before something happened to him. When the holidays arrived, he was almost overwhelmed with relief; class after class had become oppressive, and, going through the motions, he kept seeing an image of himself standing at the board like some Bash Street teacher, repeating the same cartoon lessons, the same bubble captions to different sets of indifferent children. He could not imagine going through all this ever again, much less in a week's time when the new term began.
‘The loss of someone at the end of a relationship is like a death. You need a period of grieving and you must not deny this to yourself....’ The radio was always tuned to talk. Whenever music intruded he ran the dial through the waves until he found more talk (all the songs on all the stations were about his own life). He'd started out listening to shows featuring relationships, in which callers were encouraged rather than confronted, in the hope of hearing Kate coaxed into sobbing out a secret confession (already knowing she’d have to be another woman for this to happen) and he now remained tuned in out of mere habit.
The plain, very reasonable voice of a counsellor explained the connection between stress and premature ejaculation: ‘Just leave your name and address with our switchboard and we'll pop a leaflet in the post....’ ‘John’ was next, wanting to know how and where he could meet someone, anyone who would be kind to men under five foot; then Jackie, a girl with a very young voice, very concerned about her friend who had developed an obsession with a teacher in her school. The teacher looked like Gianni Di Napoli, the movie actor, sort of, though not, you know, loud sort of thing, and his clothes were a bit boring really, but he talked to you, he wasn't like a teacher at all really, none of the other teachers talked to you like that, and most of the girls thought he was a real hunk, but this friend was completely obsessed.’ ‘Infatuated...?’ encouraged the mature interviewer. No, obsessed, she couldn't sleep, couldn't concentrate, couldn't think of anything else and her exams were coming up and she was going to fail and she needed the grades badly so she could get into college to study as a beautician and she couldn't even tell anyone about it because she knew they'd only laugh.
‘Well she must have told you.’ the serene voice encouraged, then went on repeating her name into the darkness of space.
The counsellor provided advice anyway, explaining how 'her friend' might manage the stress of exam pressure (acquire an interest outside school, go out more, meet new people, people her own age) while Jim drifted through a red light leaving someone's blaring horn behind.
Where he drove after that he could only imagine. He came to on a motorway sucking in cat's eyes like tracer fire, still waiting for the girl to summon the courage to call back. Despite her nerves, the distortion of the airwaves, and the fact that he'd never heard the voice of anyone he knew in real life on a phone-in, he knew this girl was Amanda, a tall, slim, slightly shy girl in his Year 11 class. He'd been able to picture her sitting on the edge of a bed, head bowed, phone pressed hard to her tilted ear, her free hand covering her mouth, her eyes shutting tight with a determination to break the long pauses of her initial fear until the sudden release of repressed emotion. He went on gazing at the image in his head, fascinated in seeing her anew. Yet the blurring features made him feel he hadn't really looked at her before, certainly not in the way she seemed to have observed him. What had she been doing during his lessons? What had he been doing there?
He knew little about the girl outside his class. She was quiet and worked hard. What else did he need to know? She was in fact one of a dwindling population of white girls in the school (just above white working class boys, according to a recent report, in the race for underachievement). She wore her light blonde hair in a high, tight pony which stretched her face to produce a faintly Oriental look. She wore it like this not through any misguided empathy with the smallest ethnic group in her area or any slavish attempt to copy some popular Reality role model but because she'd heard it was how fashion models kept their skin clear (a subject she'd discussed in a brief, self-conscious 'D' grade talk to the class). Listening to her on the radio he'd recognised not so much the tone of her voice as the fitful speed with which she tried to express herself. Yet apart from the hair, and a square, regular face, her features remained a liquid blur, as were those of most of his students (hers only taking on structure in contrast to the brash, hard-faced ‘homegirl’ who usually sat beside her in class). He tried to remember some look, some suggestion of her feelings, which might confirm his suspicion, recalling nothing more than a surly attitude as he'd leaned over her table to identify the errors of spelling and punctuation in her last assignment, before admiring the one line of imagination in the four neatly handwritten A4 pages. She tried hard, but....what could he say? 'A very conscientious year' he'd written beside the generous D/C on her most recent report, struggling to find something more encouraging. And her 'friend'? No, she was not calling about that ‘tart’, he thought, and with a sudden remembrance he saw the tart, Julie, deliberately pulling open Amanda's rough work ring-binder to reveal a collage of Di Napolis pasted to the inside cover. Furtively, he glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror and realised he had his foot down too firmly on the gas.
Di Napoli? Di Napoli's star had peaked several years back. Several? Before Jim had even met Kate, when Amanda was still mastering joined-up handwriting, and, despite the hype over his latest film, it was a surprise to think he could generate any interest in someone her age. His image of the actor was always the same. It played like an intense trailer of highlights from one of his earliest films, in which a raw, energetic Di Napoli assumed the role of a semi-articulate, semi-psychopath locked into an obsession with a young girl. Critics praised his mastery of screen presence, how completely he embodied the obsession driving the character. Even alone on the screen he had a way of making everything he did seem significant. His life was so much more: passionate, violent, on the surface; the way Jim had felt for the first half-hour after leaving the cinema, his feet bouncing over the pavement, which now had the spring of Tartan track, as though he'd been thrown toward something and was still propelled by the momentum, though the thing at which he was aimed was no longer there. He hadn't felt that way for some time.
Amanda did not call back, the problems turned into the ravings of earnest insomniacs, and then, for Jim, into a background of familiar white noise. It was after 2.00am and raining hard when he jogged back to the flat from the nearest parking space, a street away, his shirt plastered to his chest. He dried himself, slicked back his hair then studied his image in the bathroom mirror.
At first he just saw himself. It was a strange feeling. He looked in mirrors no less often than anyone else, he guessed, shaving, combing his hair, checking his tie, but he could not remember lingering long enough to make any study of what he saw; maybe not since the first year with Kate, before they had moved in together. The sagging skin under his eyes reminded him of why that was. His hair, however, showed no sign of receding and the damp now concealed the grey beginning to work its way in on either side. He put the comb through it again, turned his chin to the left and, yes, he thought, maybe he could see something. What was it, the narrowed eyes? The prominent cheekbones? He saw it in the chin, maybe; maybe not. He had once thought of himself in a different way; the Drama club had taken up a good part of his second year at university, although he'd joined mainly for the women and graduated to only minor, almost mute roles in Orton and Pinter and one simulated ‘humorous’ sexual grappling (briefly, on stage, underrehearsed, with clothes and a troubling erection) with the one woman he wanted to be near, before his studies took over again.
He turned away and then back again, gave the mirror a Di Napoli 'look', that nonchalant jerk of Italian-American arrogance, repeated it, then again, building the movement from the shoulders and adding some work to the eyebrows as he found himself mumbling a typical Di Napoli line: ‘Fuck you, you fuck’. The words shocked him and he glanced toward the door, surprised at himself, as though someone was watching. After a moment he tried it again, this time with some accent and projection. ‘Hey, I’m a shmuck? I’m a what? You fuck. Lookame an lookatchoo, Lookachoo anlookame. Who’s the shmuck.’ It began with surprising conviction but ended a little choked, just above a whisper, smiling foolishly, embarrassed by himself. This was what she saw in class? Sure.
Back in the dark of the living room, however, he realised his mood had lifted for the first time since Kate had left. It took him a while to notice he hadn’t once looked at the still silent phone.
Then a strange thing happened; he slept. He knew he'd been asleep when he woke sweating from a bad dream, searching the blistered wallpaper for the noise of a woman in distress, or ecstasy. The silence was palpable and nauseous. He couldn't remember what had happened in the dream but at some point he'd been falling through space. It was the sudden spasm in his leg stepping off a ledge into a chasm which had woken him. He got up, took a bottle of water from the fridge and sipped at it, letting the ice cold turn luke warm as he watched the light grow slowly on the curtains.
He slept again and this time dreamed he was a lifeguard in the Baywatch series. He was wearing that bracelet with the bright red plastic torpedo attachment, though he still had no idea what to do with it. Somehow he'd also acquired great muscle definition which was useful because there were sharks in the water and every so often he'd have to swim out to a blonde struggling in distress, carry her back to shore, limp and heavy in his arms, before breathing life back into her on the sand. Reviving these girls was exhausting and no sooner had he finished peeling off the grateful, clinging limbs of one than he'd hear another scream in the distance and found himself running down to the shoreline again.
When he awoke again the warm red glow at the heart of the bedside clock came into focus to reveal a number he hadn’t seen for some time; he'd been asleep for several hours. He didn't exactly feel refreshed but there was a certain charge of energy which surprised him. The distant numbness of depression remained but the listlessness had lifted and there was this feeling of ‘resurrection’ (the word itself appeared in his head, complete with holy picture imagery). He knew he could do something if only he knew what it was. Alone, outside the strict routine of a school week, his days had become empty and endless, he didn't know what to do with himself.
He spent an hour in the bathroom, washing the sleep from his eyes and watching himself carefully while he shaved, as though making sure he was doing it right. Stripped to the waist his body was showing his age; or someone else's, someone about a decade older than himself. Di Napoli, for instance. But Di Napoli kept himself in shape, three hours a day, a disciplined regime he'd told Kate’s discarded copy of Time Out. He enjoyed working out, it was something he'd picked up preparing for a film in which he played a psychopathic boxer, and had returned to the gym for the new film, in which he got to reprise his earlier semi-psycho role (graduating to full-blooded psycho, in order to terrorise an entire family) and which put his aging muscles under even closer scrutiny. He had the time, he’d told the fawning reporter, he got paid to keep in shape. Jim thought he'd use the day to begin his own programme of self-maintenance (he kept a set of weights under the bed, permanently dismantled) but he had much the same thought within the scope of just about every school holiday.
An hour later he was still drinking coffee and gazing at the pictures breaking up the pages of the interview: a collage of Di Napoli's career like the inside of Amanda's folder: holiday snaps of the crazy gang. Di Napoli's thing, his gimmick, was Method, was building characters over months of ‘study’ and immersion in their ‘life’: lean, fat, muscular; long, lank, counter-culture hair, short military cuts, slicked back, shaved, mohican; everything seemed to be here. All of them, however, lived off the same aggressive gene, something pumped up on steroids, hard and unhinged. All of them (hoods, street-punks, prize-fighters, even priests) ready to deliver a familiar line in threat and damage. There was a warning in the puzzled bird-like movement of the chin, the sudden loss of hearing, the startled clown's grimace, the rising string-puppet arms: 'Hey? Sammada-chew? Sammada-chew, you fuck.' The unbelieving, alienated shake of the head told you something sudden and violent was going to happen as soon as you blinked.
Flicking back through the pages he read of a New York impressionist developing an impersonation of 60s comic Lenny Bruce for an Off broadway one-man show. 'The most powerful and engrossing study of a comedian I have seen.' said Time Out. ‘All my adult life’ said the impressionist, ‘I've been told that I should play Lennie Bruce. Because of the physical resemblance.’ (Jim mentally corrected the punctuation). ‘It's weird in a way because Lenny was Jewish and I'm Arab. But I guess we're basically all Semites - part of the same tribe.’ He was astute enough to know, however, physical similarity wouldn't take him very far. He'd done his research. He didn't want to be seen as just an impersonator. ‘As you watch him pace the stage’, said TO 'like a coiled spring, Hanna makes you believe he is Lenny Bruce.’
Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, nothing much had changed, but the energy he'd felt an hour before now seemed clotted and had begun turning to irritation. He was unhappy with himself, his clothes for instance, or the way he just stood there.
He returned to the front room for no reason he could remember and sat down in front of the blank TV screen feeling himself drifting into a somnambulant state; still seeking out the dreams from which he'd recently emerged. These previously fresh images had now, however, dissolved into a warm passive mood into which he could feel himself descend. He had been doing things in these dreams, however, taking action. He shook himself. Now was the moment to sort everything out, restart his life. Clearing the room would somehow clear his mind, he was sure.
There was much to clear; once he’d noticed it, it seemed to surround him, dominating the space like claustrophobia: bottles, glasses, half-filled coffee mugs, plates upon which food had dried to ground-in stains; the debris of an ‘independent’ life littered what Kate had always called the ‘living’ room (and the living she’d conducted there was high maintenance). He piled plates, cups and glasses on a tray like a novice waiter, balancing them precariously to the kitchen; however, the sink was already overflowing with unwashed dishes and there were very few places to rest the new batch before they began to slide and fall.
Cleaning what was already there would be a good start, he thought, but washing up liquid proved elusive and after opening and slamming cupboard after cupboard, he abandoned the task and found himself back in the living room trying to tidy the books and papers scattered over the sofa and floor. Two sets of assignments still waiting to be marked were in no order and he was idly shuffling them into their respective classes when he discovered a few drafts of Year 11 coursework, missing from folders already collated and passed on to his head of department in time to meet the course deadline. These were all from the same unit of descriptive writing, ironically entitled ‘Memories’ and placing them to one side he suddenly recalled Amanda’s. What was it about? A character study of sorts, an older man, he’d assumed to be her father or ‘boyfriend’ or something? What had she called it? A something something memory? My Dad? There was no reason for it to be here but the more he went on searching the more he was convinced he’d seen it lying on the floor only days before. He sifted back and forth certain he must have missed that tight, ordered handwriting, carefully pinching each sheet in turn as though hers might be stuck to the back of someone else's while knowing full well she would have written four sides, she always wrote four sides: two sheets fixed with a neat diagonal staple (big margin, spaced words); as though neatness itself could compensate for lack of ability; sometimes she even added little cartoon drawings.
He couldn't find it. For a while he was just staring at the blank TV screen again, listening to his own strained breathing. The assignments were nothing, a distraction, there was so much else awaiting his attention, urgent attention. Too many things. Blue bills and red bills: electricity and gas, the phone, the rent (already a month overdue) and now the payments on the car. His credit was close to its limit and his salary, when it was paid in, was not going to leave him much margin for error over the following weeks. He could not think of the time and effort waiting to be expended in finding alternative accommodation (to say nothing of the consequent reevaluation of his life) but without Kate's income he could not afford to go on living in the two bedroom flat; not in this area. The demoralising necessity to downgrade had been on the edge of every conscious thought since she'd left, although he found brushing it aside as easy as telling people she was still at home, inventing evenings out, evenings in, minor illnesses that kept her in the background.
What he needed was to clear his head and plan the day, filling it with an ordered series of events: this first, then this, then this; but it was already afternoon, the day was nearly over. He cleaned a cup, filled the kettle and waiting for it to boil, killed a few ants climbing the side of the bread bin before finding their source in the corner of the worktop just inside the door. What might have been, at first glance, another streak of dust caking the inside lat of the door became a trail of ants lifting the carcass of a dead wasp up the length of the lat. The wasp was moving up swiftly and smoothly as though on some invisible elevator, but while many ants scurried to and fro, up and down the designated route, only a few seemed to be responsible for the heavy duty work, some pulling on a parched, transparent wing while a select work crew were shouldering the black, rotting bulk of the thorax. Once they had manoeuvred it to the end of their trail, a narrow crevice between plaster and wood half way up the wall, it was clear the stiff wingspan would not allow the insertion of the body. The ants couldn't work out a way to overcome this, so began moving the wasp back down the wall, then back up again as though this alone would change its shape.
A voice from the living room made him freeze. The kettle had long since boiled and in the silence he listened to the low, almost wordless murmur of a woman. The freezing hadn’t been immediate; at first the sound had seemed so natural (measured, confident, articulate) he had caught himself almost responding. Hesitantly, he stepped into the room and saw the familiar face of a female newsreader, the volume of the TV turned as low as it had been the night before. He had no memory of switching it on and looked around vainly for the control, then back at the steady schoolteacher's gaze, her clipped tone (of accusation, he felt, firm but fair) informing him of a recent rise in house prices. ‘Do I care?’ someone asked her, ‘Do I fucking care?’ realising, with only a minor shock, this was his own voice. There was another, deeper meaning here (like the obvious theme of a poem eluding the grasp of his more ‘challenged ‘students struggling with their ‘learning difficulties’) and he wanted to hold on to this feeling and explain it to himself but there were no other words inside him.
In the silence he recalled an argument they'd had returning from a party in the West London townhouse of one of her friends from work. It had begun in the car and continued unsteadily, drunkenly into this room. What had she said? Under the pressure of relentless interrogation, she had first tried to laugh the accusation into diplomatic oblivion and, finding simulated laughter too tedious to maintain, had begun an offensive assault (which, to him, only confirmed her guilt). OK, so what if she'd ‘looked at someone’. So what? She was a natural flirt. So were lots of women. How bad was that? That wasn't so bad after six, seven years, was it? It wasn't as if she'd done anything about it. Unlike, etc, etc. And, yes there were times when she could have done something about it. And yes, she had, if he must know, wanted to be with someone else. It wasn't unnatural. Sometimes it seemed very natural. ‘Look at you’ she'd told him, looking at him in a way he didn’t like, and then repeated the words as if he hadn’t heard, as if she’d suddenly arrived at last at the essence of her grievance. ‘Look at you’, she pinched the fabric of his sweater (stinging his nipple beneath) and released her grip dismissively. ‘Look at those shoes. You're so...’ He never discovered what exactly he was because her rhetorical flow was cut short by the hard smack bouncing her head off the wall. He saw her face turned up to his, her lips quivering around some uncontrollable emotion she couldn’t voice and he was no longer sure he was living through a genuine memory or another illusion his mind had simply made up.
He shook himself to dismiss the image, genuinely disturbed, and saw himself gazing at his own distorted figure in the black gloss reflection of the TV screen. A diagonal shaft of sunlight exposed a film of static dust giving the surface a furry texture. He put the bills in a clear plastic wallet and the wallet, together with his marking, in the new leather briefcase (described by Amazon as a ‘timeless classic’) resting almost forgotten by the side of the sofa.
A short while later, ‘getting everything in order’, or creating a preface to a prelude to founding that order (‘clearing his head’), he found himself browsing through a clothes store he'd never before entered without Kate, intimidated, not so much by the cost as the ambience: mirrored walls, discreet lighting, spaced shelves, clothes whose labels he'd only seen in magazines, clothes other people wore, people in magazines with different, impossible lives. He stood looking at the neatly folded shirt in his hands, wondering what it was he thought he was going to buy here. The shirt was a short-sleeved casual, made of some silky material spilling over the edges of his hands, which to Jim felt as feminine as lingerie. Di Napoli had been wearing something similar on the cover of Time Out. The place had a dead-party atmosphere, he wished it could have been more crowded. Painfully aware of the unwashed T shirt he was wearing, Jim ran his fingers over the smooth collar searching blindly for the price tag, merely to stall whatever he was going to do next, too aware of the neatly suited assistant rocking on the balls of his feet in casual anticipation to a tranquillising soundtrack, something he didn't recognise: Jazz.
He replaced the shirt which lounged dishevelled across its neatly piled cousins on the shelf, then on an impulse snatched it up again. The changing-room was smart and spacious, a relaxed space in which he could not relax. He fastened a couple of buttons and turned sideways, then back. It was a good fit over the shoulders but the image before him looked stiff and awkward. Tucking the shirt into his jeans then out again did little to make it feel more his own (his jeans now looked more ragged and winded than he’d remembered); even in here he had the impression of someone breathing down his neck and merely stared at the self-conscious reflection to avoid meeting anyone's eyes. He tapped irritably on the back of the chair beside him, taking on the slow burn of the infectious bassline which drifted on in endlessly sinuous waves. He knew he had to take the shirt off or do something, but for a moment he couldn't move and merely felt his hand slapping harder on the back of the chair.
As if in a dream he watched himself accepting the smile of the tall, elegant girl at the sales desk returning his card and slipping the receipt discreetly into the elegant black bag; then he was moving toward the exit with a kind of rolling swagger, his step springing with the beat. ‘What the fuck’ he thought, nobody knew him here.
On the journey home (during which he thought he’d glimpsed her in Bond Street) to the hour spent placing some order in the kitchen, to the marking of at least two papers in a ‘productive’ day, somehow, as a consequence of all this purposeful activity, he’d convinced himself (like a character in a story he was teaching in class) he’d arrived at the moment Kate would ring. The phone, however, remained stubbornly silent through two game shows and an investigation into illegal migrant workers. Unable to relinquish the idea, he remained restlessly in front of the TV punching through the channels with growing impatience, lingering now only seconds on each, making insane sentences out of the snatched words of dramatic soap characters and bubbling (‘probably homosexual’) game show hosts. So what? ‘So fucking what?’ he challenged the earnest reporter reporting in the field from Mali or Somalia or some ‘fucking’ ruined shithole, the ‘fucking control’ slapping against the heel of his shoe, already twitching with excess energy (‘Jesus, just nuke the fucks’), his finger on the button ready to extinguish the voice at a whim. She would call when he was out. No, she knew him too well, she knew when he'd be in. This thought made him slap harder and the volume suddenly disappeared.
Another reporter, wisps of flying hair tenuously glued to a round, serious head, was mutely addressing the camera from Kensington high street. In a surreal moment, he saw Kate emerge from a navy Alfa Romeo Spider on the near side of the busy road. Her hair had been cut in a shorter style and expensively highlighted which seemed to take several years off her face. A man matching her new age: floppy hair, tan, collar raised on a tight fitting jacket (seen in the store earlier at a wincing price) had opened the door for her and now had his arms casually around her waist. She was returning the embrace with smiling enthusiasm as he led her off screen and he thought he'd never seen her looking so happy.
When the phone rang it took him by such outrageous surprise he picked it up without thinking.
‘You got a car for sale’ a man told him in a flat, factual voice.
‘I've got a what?’ The words came out involuntarily while he was still absorbing the absence of Kate’s sulky resentment.
As though on a game show the man named his make of car, the registration and a price. The price seemed undervalued as though for a quick sale. He thought he could do with the money. The man explained how close he lived and how he could call round in an hour, if that was OK.
No it was not O fucking K. ‘Who is this?’
‘Is this 570 5058?’ he asked.
‘Where did you get this number?’
‘Look,’ said the caller, now with a touch of indignation in his voice, ‘I have Auto Trader in front of me now. It says...’
‘Listen you fuck, I got a fucking car to sell? Where’ve you been? I got no fucking car to sell. Don't tell me I got cars to sell. What am I, some cut price garage? You don't call up and tell me I got some fucking car to sell. You hear me? You fucking hear me? Sammada-chew, you fuck?’
‘Who the fuck are you talking to?’ he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Who the fuck do you think I am?’ But there was nothing now, just an extended drone. He replaced the receiver and went on gazing numbly at the rest of the silent news.
Outside it was darker than ever and he drove with a kind of missionary zeal and a boiling, barely contained energy, like a vigilante or an actor improvising a part with no script, no set scenes, just waiting with a sense of vague menace for the action which would eventually emerge from the shadows. He felt at home now in the car, one hand on the wheel, an arm on the open window, an iron bar from one of the detachable dumbbells tucked beneath his seat.
Only once did he see the Spider; the sleek navy 2-seater accelerating away from him in the outside lane. To be honest, lacquered under the orange streetlights it might have been any shade of a spectrum of showroom blues, even black, but the sight caught him in the solar plexus like the vision of an old flame, a woman you’d always known instinctively would be ‘the one’, and as his foot clamped down on the accelerator his hands grew incredibly light on the wheel. In a desperate pursuit, cutting, dodging, lane changing, he found himself right behind, towing distance, close enough to see the two figures shoulder to shoulder, merged into a single silhouette with the intimacy of an all too familiar body language, imagining as he was the movement of the hands he couldn’t see. He trailed at 60 mph along a bright dual carriageway then 30 through a suburban maze then out into the orange glow of another carriageway, his heart rate and breathing synchronised. He was bumper close when their brake lights beamed so conclusively he had to jam on his own; simultaneously they shot ahead at a crossroads, another car and then a red light came out of nowhere to separate them, and he could do nothing but watch the inky shape shrink like an hallucination into the dark distance.
Something loud, ‘pimped’ and overloaded with adolescents pulled up beside him. The driver gunned his engine several times; instinctively, Jim revved his and the boys started yelling things at him. When the lights changed they sped ahead, the faces in the back grinning back insanely. ‘Wipe that scum off the streets’ he heard and with an impetuous acceleration, a residue of frustration, he caught them then let them go when they took a left. 'Kids' he thought (‘Ritalin-free soda junkies, packed with angst, empty rebellion and sugar highs’) but there had been something unsettling, mocking, in the grins.
The frustration was still working him when, cruising a now familiar carriageway, the Spider or its identical twin swaggered past in the opposite direction, pulling him into a U-turn so rashly timed he nearly collided with the wailing traffic sprung from an unseen junction. Forced to swerve and brake, he heard the tyres skid and his head glance the windscreen before the belt ripped him back into his seat. He sat still, breathing hard and holding what seemed to be a vibrating steering wheel in both hands. No damage. He drove on for a couple of slow, Spiderless streets then pulled over.
The world began to settle itself around him again. The radio became audible, a woman on a drama or phone-in was describing some terrible personal trauma, there were deep, empty spaces between her words but no one interrupted. On the edge of his gaze the front window of a nearby terraced house was throbbing with the industrial grind of a Dance beat, glowing green then red then green like traffic lights out of control. Two girls in short skirts hurried from the ragged crowd at the open doorway, throwing abuse over their shoulder as they jogged awkwardly in wobbling heels down the path before slowing to a walk and stopping only a few paces away. The heavier girl lecturing her friend who looked down sulkily at her shoes then up, seemingly at him with an expression of recognition. She nodded toward the car and the lecturer turned impatiently. ‘Oh Sir, it's you. Mand look, it's Sir.’
The girls walk-skipped toward him, Amanda hugging herself strait jacket tight, a pace behind. He was feeling for the key in the ignition but Julie (or ‘Jools’, as he remembered) was already tapping on the passenger window, which, reluctantly, he lowered. "We thought you was a mini cab, didn't we Mand. Where you off to Sir? I like your shirt"
Still trying to absorb the shock, he wondered if he was expected to answer. He was still holding the wheel to give his hands something to do.
‘No, we got a serious problem, Sir. Mandy needs to go somewhere really bad and there ain’t no sign of a cab.’
Amanda stared at her.
‘I don't know’ He stalled, his mind a slow shifting of gears, still focused on the Alfa and unable to formulate any justifiable reason to refuse.
‘No really, Sir. It's important. Tell him Mand.’
Amanda looked away down the street.
‘Where do you want to go?’ he sighed.
Julie accepted the question as an answer, opened the door and drew her friend toward it. Still without a word, Amanda settled herself reluctantly into the passenger seat. Her perfume and presence made the car seem very small. Was this really Amanda? Surely it was her older sister? She was made up for a photo-shoot: the hair artfully dishevelled, the face worked over with some expertise; that Spartan beauty regime obviously did not stretch to Saturday nights. Was it Saturday? What day was it? He could barely remember; it was hard enough tying to avoid looking down at her legs. The leather seat had hiked up her black spiderweb dress to her waist and her nervous tugging at the hem only drew attention to the exposed thighs.
He was waiting for Julie to insert herself into the back seat but with a wave and a backward skip, almost colliding with a passing pedestrian, a woman who glared into the car, she turned towards the house and Jim turned the keys in the ignition with a violent twist. As the engine throbbed, Amanda told him the destination in a sullen monotone then kept her eyes on the road as though he was a necessary but suspicious cab driver (or potential rapist).
In the silence immediately expanding between them, he became aware of the radio: a counsellor was rounding off a solution to the problems of impotence which involved lengthy bouts between partners caressing the non-sexual parts of their bodies. He didn't want to turn it off and draw attention to it, neither did he want to suffer the silence that would follow. ‘Why don’t you find some music?’ he suggested, recognising a slightly softer distortion of his classroom voice while feigning a preoccupation with the road ahead. Obediently, she turned the dial, cutting off the new caller (a young girl with a low voice in a controlled panic sounding strangely familiar) until she found the station she wanted. She now fixed her eyes on the darkness passing the passenger window, nodding her head then moving her shoulders self-consciously to the relentless flow of what sounded like a photocopier on an extensive print job (perhaps the latest police report on roadside rapists).
‘What is that?’ he ventured, attempting to close the distance between them and aiming for a neutral, paternal tone; nothing like a potential rapist,
She sucked in her breath then began to explain something in a soft, breathy voice. He heard the words "hardcore" and "kiss" and had a nervous struggle piecing them together.‘What?’
‘Kiss FM’ She told him, unwittingly bringing the stilted conversation to a close. She seemed to take some care not to call him 'Sir' but refused to meet his eyes and the silence went on long enough to become a mood. He wanted to turn back to that voice on the phone-in.
"So where have you been? he asked at last, barely recognising his own voice now.
‘Nowhere. Just out’ she told him, instinctively, as though addressing her parents. She frowned, perhaps wanting to add something more (some elaborate lie to explain to her teacher why she wasn’t at home locked into a systematic revision regime?) then just went on frowning out at the road (still frustratingly free of Spiders).
‘With your boyfriend?’ She glanced at him with a look that might have been fear or anger, maybe both. He tried to smile and felt the muscles in his face tighten, the words themselves had taken him by surprise.
‘He makes me sick. He's so stupid. He's nothing. He just thinks he's it.’ Her face remained set in the same sulky pose, staring straight ahead, but a suppressed animation kept moving her hands over her bare knees, the tips of her fingers trembling slightly at the touch. He hadn't looked at those legs in class, or maybe he had, but not in this way. She ran cross-country for the borough, he remembered.
Her boyfriend didn't understand her. He didn't know, wasn't interested in knowing how important her exams were to her, he thought women with careers were just a joke. Women were just a joke. The words came more easily now, but still in that clipped, resentful manner, as though this boyfriend was sitting behind them in the car and she was talking to him by proxy, explaining, as she was now, why she had to ‘get her grades’, ‘get into college’. There was a tightness in her voice as though they were taking part in some interview. ‘Could I get a C in English, I mean do you think so?’
‘I think,’ he said, lying surprisingly easily, ‘anything’s possible.’
‘That's not what you said on my report. You know what you always say about finding your own identity in your writing and writing about your own experience. What you really know...?’ He'd said that? Really? ‘Well I didn’t used to understand exactly what you meant but when I wrote...’ She was now talking about something in the assignment he'd lost but he was no longer listening, his eyes caught by the headlamp dazzle in the rear-view mirror, lights on full beam, off then on again. ‘...my sister's done really well for herself. Runs her own salon. She’s her own boss. That's all I've ever really wanted to do ever since I can remember. I don't know why, it's just what I want to do. This isn't the way.’
‘Huh?’ he said, still watching the headlights which now seemed to have been there for some time.
‘We should have turned left two streets back. Keep going, I’ll show you.’
He drove with concentration, without changing speed too suddenly, with an almost too obvious discretion (like a drunk trailed by a patrol car), but the lights remained, holding on through some fatal attraction. Nothing slipped in between himself and the tantalising blue-black shadow of his patient stalker, two car lengths behind, windsreen mirroring the alternating streetlights, as he waited for it to dissolve with his imagination. The skin felt damp beneath his collar and he flinched when, changing gears, his knuckles grazed her thigh.
There was a catch in her breath; she could see the car now in her wing mirror. She looked away, swallowed and straightened up. ‘Left up here’ she said, but without much conviction.
The headlights were suddenly flashing. The car had edged closer, was now right on his tail, shifting from side to side as though impatient to overtake but making no effort to pass. The restrained, calculating detective he had feared was now a swaggering joyrider. He slowed to let it overtake, yet the car made no attempt to change position. When they drew alongside on a clear stretch of road, he saw four boys three grinning passengers and a driver with a still, hard face set on the road. Jungle whooping lost beneath the panel beating rhythm of their stereo, they might have been the same crowd he'd seen earlier, they might have been anyone; 'scum': bully boys, sour and boozed up with infantile brutality, their yapping laughter flapping in the breeze. One of them was shouting something at him, something he couldn't quite make out. "Mandeee" he then heard. Something was going on here he didn't understand. ‘What's going on? Do they know you?’ She didn't answer but her eyes told him they were not mistaken. Headlights grew in the opposite lane and the ‘scum’ moved in behind him, then suddenly they were out in the lane again, so close he could see feral eyes and bared teeth, then pulling in and ahead only to fall back, scraping his wing mirror, shouldering him aside. ‘Fuck’ he thought, fighting with the wheel as they brushed him again. ‘That's it, that's it. Now you're going to die, you fuck.’ From what depths came this melodramatic fuck-nonsense? ‘Mandeee’ screamed the ‘fucks’ with an ecstatic mocking. Dead fucks now. They were directly ahead, slowing him to a crawl, bumper to bumper. He wanted to drive straight through them. ‘Who is that fuck?’
She shook her head looking at him strangely ‘Why are you talking like that?’
‘Like what?’ He pulled up behind the car, now a barrier at such an angle he would have to back up before rounding them. The faces gooned at him through the back window. He threw the gears into reverse but before he'd travelled a yard, Amanda was already, surprisingly athletically out, shouting at someone she obviously knew. They shouted back, joyfully drawing her into an hysterical exchange of taunts and abuse. When the passenger door swung open she lurched forward, hitting out at an arm which snatched, missed, snatched again and caught her wrist.
Seeing the girl’s suddenly dynamic features in the neon, he felt something tighten within him. It was a moment of distance, of hesitation, less than a skipping heartbeat.
Before the next pulse, however, he was already out the door, iron bar in hand, dodging a car breezing down the middle of the road, pumped up on a sudden insane rage he knew had little to do with Amanda or the fuck who’d taken out his wing mirror or anything he could articulate; just totally alive. With one hand around Amanda’s surprisingly whippet thin waist he hacked at the overstretched forearm clinging on to her wild struggle. The bar came down twice on the same spot, more or less, with the violent rhythm of the car stereo then vibrated loose from his grip; but in a jump-cut, with the instantaneousness of a dream, he had Amanda free and the boy's head now under his arm. His grip tightened and he squeezed with the power of lunacy; until, just as suddenly confronted by a shockingly rabid resistance, he was hanging on with the adrenaline of desperation. Too slowly it seemed, the figure, already unbalanced, began tipping and then falling from the seat and he used the momentum to haul the ‘fuck’ out and himself into a pumping squat, working the head with a quickening rhythm to bounce its face off the pavement once, twice, three times. There was no resistance now, it was limply bobbing like an animated cartoon. Amanda’s scream released his hold and springing up, breathless, lightheaded, he kicked out at some figure at his back but blindly, off balance, without a clean connection; just enough to give him some space.
Steadying himself, he’d now lost all sense of direction, he could feel the car floating around somewhere at his back and Amanda oscillating in front of him, still shouting, incongruously, his absurd title, ‘Sir!’; her voice both shocked and questioning, as if she didn’t know his name or who he was. For a brief moment everything was suddenly luminous, controlled and in front of him. He was amazed at the energy flooding through his limbs and the movie scene he seemed to own. Nothing was going to happen until he made it happen: the limp body face down on the tarmac, the figure in the front seat stalled in its rise from the open door, the shaved, angry head on the far side pressed to the roof by a passing car, Amanda's dress ripped from one shoulder. Her hand caught in his, lost, caught again. Snatches of a wild jungle loop thumping now from the car stereo or some tape in his head. He could feel each hair, each pore of himself alive with the animal energy Amanda would later compare to ‘a panther’ or some other discordant cliche in some future descriptive assignment.
DG 2015
