Swallowing the Sun Page 4

  ‘But is London not a more exciting place than here?’

  ‘There’s a real buzz over here now, everything’s changed while I was away. I really like it – there’s lots of things happening.’

  ‘It’s the peace dividend,’ he said in a monotone, not knowing why he said it but knowing it sounded stupid. So stupid they both laughed and it felt good to laugh with someone else. Someone who understood about art and ideas.

  ‘When I left, Belfast city centre was like a ghost town by seven o’clock. Do you remember that song by The Specials? Every time I heard it in London I used to think of Belfast.’

  ‘So what song makes you think of Belfast now?’

  ‘I don’t know. “Copacabana”, “I Will Survive”, “Boogie Nights”.’

  They talked about music – she loved Billie Holiday – had another drink and then he had lingered to the point where going forward felt as easy as going back. Her flat was in the streets behind the University and he helped her carry the boxes of leftover material up the stairs and when they got there everything she said and everything she did made him less scared of what they already knew. And when she looked at him, it was always as if she liked him and that made him feel good and he wondered if being washed in enough people’s like could be the thing that would make him clean. Like everyone else. The same as everyone else.

  The bed was narrow and draped in different coloured fabrics. Bright colours – orange, green and yellow. The headboard was slatted wood and linking some of the slats were the same necklaces of shells and feathers he had seen in the museum. Her hand in his was small but strong, and when she led him towards it he felt like a child but somehow everything she did made him trust her and he wanted to believe that she knew enough things to help him, that she had some secret knowledge. As they lay on top of it he cradled her head with both his hands as she kissed him and could feel its whole shape, the springy spikiness of her hair at the back and sides, the softness where it fell across her brow. At first the warm moistness of her mouth seemed doomed to break against the closed tightness of his, but it was insistent and uncompromising and he could not avoid it or resist, until everything in his head gave way and he kissed her in the same way. Then she was opening his clothes, with sure deft movements of her hands but making no effort to remove hers until the very last moment and then it was only the lower part.

  There was a large high window facing the bed, screened from the outside by a green voile curtain with scalloped leaves. The last strength of the evening sun streamed through it, casting trembling little shadows of leaves on the wall. A breeze disturbed it as he entered her, making him turn his head and for a second it felt like an eye watching him but as he hesitated she moved her hips and took him fully. And now he didn’t care if it was an eye because in that moment part of him wanted to tell the world that there was someone else who would give him and take from him all that people could. And that had to count for something. She gasped and under him he could feel her body squirm and try to settle into an accommodation but already now he knew that it was not his love that he had to give her but his unrelenting need and so he pummelled and bruised himself in her, firing himself on as she pressed her palm against his hip in an attempt to lever him off a little.

  ‘Easy boy,’ she whispered, her arm tightening round his neck. ‘Easy, easy.’ Her breath was in his ear, her fingers splayed against the warp and strain of his back but he heard only uglier words, wanted to fuck them silent so there was no respite until he shuddered into a sudden cry of defeat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, shocked into profuse gestures of gentleness, touching her face with his fingers, stroking her hair. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Where did that come from?’ she asked. ‘You felt like a man who’s just got out of prison after about ten years.’

  He rolled onto his back and put a hand across his face to hide his embarrassment, to shield his nakedness from her scrutiny. But she pulled it away and calmed his brow with her fingers, furrowing them across his skin and massaging his temples. His breath streamed from him in a loud rush.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. I can feel your heart still pounding.’ He started to look for his clothes but she stopped him. ‘Stay there, don’t move.’ He watched her move from the bed. The backs of her legs were lightly muscled and brown. They had a light stipple of freckles below her knees. She put music on her CD – it was an instrumental piece with guitar and flute, and then she returned with two small candles which she lit and placed at either side of the bed. In her hand was a small, red jar.

  ‘Turn over on your front.’ He mumbled something about having to go but she silenced him with a shush the way you would speak to a child and her hands started to work on his back, kneading and stretching, sometimes kneading inwards with the knuckles of her thumbs. ‘You don’t have a spine, you’ve an iron rod. There’s great knots of tension.’ He felt her hands smoothing and pressing, smelt the pungent tang of whatever she was working into his skin. Turning his head towards the window the light warmed the side of his cheek and in its cadences rippled the sense of light and space.

  ‘You do this for all your men?’ he asked.

  ‘Never met anyone who needed it as much as you. And there aren’t so many if you’re asking.’ Her thumbs dug deliberately deep, making him wince and squirm.

  ‘Don’t be such a baby. Lie still. And try to breathe slowly and regularly.’

  He pressed his face into the burn of colour on the bed and smelt her scent. Tried to breathe and not to think, to block out all the thoughts beginning to clatter noisily round his head. Her hands felt as if they were doing him good, draining away things that he needed to get rid of. Maybe she was helping him, helping to make him better and not just for himself but for the people he loved. Making him better for Alison. It was the first time – the only time, he told himself. It was just like a medicine – that’s how he told himself to think of it. And afterwards he would go back home and be better for her, better for all of them and he’d be cleaner and lighter with whatever lingered below his surface salved and mended. After a while she stopped moving her hands and rested her head on his back. His skin felt primed and alive, alert to the slightest sensation. For a long time she lay on his back like a coat, a protection from everything that might fall on him and her breath lisped against his shoulder. Her fingers traced the line of his hair on his neck then pushed lightly into his scalp, the tips of her nails gently scratching his skin. He felt sleepy, aware of the first waves softly breaking against him, urging him to give himself up to it and now only the music was inside his head and in the sleepy blink of his eyes he saw the wisp of smoke from the candles.

  But she didn’t let him sleep and as he started awake he felt her hand between his legs, stirring and easing him into life and then she turned him over and sat astride him.

  ‘I have tiny breasts,’ she said as she pulled her jumper over her head. ‘Like a girl’s. Sorry.’

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ he said before seeing them. ‘Just beautiful.’ When he did, he touched them lightly and kissed them and then in his excitement he started to push and lift into her but she stopped him by pressing both her palms against his chest. ‘My turn,’ she insisted. ‘Just relax,’ He tried to do as he was told and watched as she rose lightly and fell on him, and the scalloped leaves flitted across her body in a wavering frieze of light. ‘Isn’t that better?’ she asked. It felt as if they were back in the tent, sheltered and brushed by the travelling transfer of cloud and sky. He traced the wiry rhythm of her body, let his fingers linger on the ridge of her lower ribs as he let the ebb and fall of her breathing mingle in his senses with the music and the sweetness of the scents that seemed to suffuse the bed.

  She leaned back and rested her hands on his legs. In the movement the tiny tremble of leaves across her skin looked like little notes of music on the score of her body. Her voice broke into its own faltering sounds to accompany her movements, her breasts pulled flat and tight
to her chest so that they had almost disappeared but her rhythm had become quicker, more insistent and as she closed her eyes he told himself again that it was a medicine, something that might help to make him well. But as he did so, something broke inside his head and he’s in the tent again but this time flitting and running across the walls are a sudden constellation, cold and sharp in the darkness of the sky, and a group of children huddled round a glass case and as he eases them aside it is the black and wizened face of Takabuti he sees and even in the hollow sockets of her eyes, a gaze he knows he cannot escape.

  Afterwards as he drives home, everything, even the controls of the car, seems changed under his touch. He feels as if he’s falling away from himself, his hands too heavy and clumsy to hold fast to what might steady him. He’s in a kind of freefall and the churning in his stomach and the frenetic flurry of ideas running across his mind seem at odds with the slowing pace of the car. Before he gets home he has to sort it in his head or he knows he’ll stagger through the door and spew it at her feet, and every mile that brings him closer sees him slip from whatever dream he was momentarily lost in nearer to the rim of the realities that gird his life.

  He bursts into snatches of speech then back into broken breathing like a radio struggling to hold the signal, cursing himself, as if only he can inflict enough pain then it might start to pay the price because already he thinks there will be a price that has to be paid. He slows as he approaches a green light, hoping that it will turn to red and delay him a little longer but it only beckons him on, indifferent to whatever it is he wants. And what he wants now more than anything is to go back to where he was before he did this thing. It’s started to rain and as the road ahead sheens and darkens, he can’t escape the fall of his guilt, can’t wipe it from the tightening consciousness of shame.

  When he tries to piece the different parts together, he tells himself that he’s been deceived. The colours, the moving frieze of images, the scents, the music – all of it conspired to drug him and detach him from the world in which he lives. He tries to give the blame to her, to make himself the victim, but the solace is only momentary and then for the first time he stops thinking of himself and thinks of Alison, of what he’s done to her. Done to the only person who ever loved him. And the flail of swear words streams once more against the windscreen and splashes back against his face.

  All of their shared memory shoots through him like a burst of electricity – every second of their courtship, every changing stage of feeling – it fires itself complete and alive, terrible now in its luminosity as it lights up every shadowy crevice where he tries to hide. But every particle of the memory feels altered in some way by what he’s done, so as they reform and reshape themselves, he’s afraid to let the images take hold, in case they too have been damaged beyond repair. At first everything seems the same. So, as always, it is her hair he thinks of when he remembers. The black flow of it, his desire to touch it as strong as the impulse to let your hand slip below the surface of moving water. To feel the strands between his fingers. It moves as she walks and sometimes he watches her and envies the hand that pushes it back from her face.

  They work in a lemonade factory on the Castlereagh Road. He humps crates and loads delivery lorries, she works in the canteen. Sometimes if he manages the queue right he times it so that she serves him but he never speaks other than to give his order. All he looks at are her hands which wear no rings and if she ever smiles at him he never knows because this close he can’t look her in the face. He worries she might look at him and somehow know that he’s been watching her and be disgusted or frightened, so for six months the closest he comes is taking the plate or cup and saucer from her and looking at her hands. He could take an examination on them, knows every contour and colouring of the skin, the shade and shape of her nails.

  ‘There you go,’ is what she says to him as she serves him. It’s what she says to everyone. There you go. It takes him six months to speak to her. It’s when the first Workers’ Strike paralyses the city and the factory is told to close. As they leave there are already hijacked vans and cars blocking the road. He doesn’t notice her behind him at first but recognises her voice immediately.

  ‘Do you think there’ll still be buses running?’ she asks.

  ‘No, they’all be off,’ he answers. ‘Off or burning.’

  ‘Nothing for it but to walk,’ she says.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he asks, glancing at her and suddenly blushing as if he has asked too personal a question. When she tells him and he says it is not that far from him, she asks if they can go together. A week later they go to the cinema. Touches her hair for the first time, his hand trembling at the thought, and right from the start it feels right. Uncomplicated, right. Better than he could ever have hoped for. Until the moment she says, ‘So when are you taking me home to meet your family?’

  He’d already been to her house a score of times, met her parents. He knew it was coming but he’s no better prepared for it, despite all his planning, for all his practised responses and so he starts to lie to her, to make excuses that sound half-believable. But then he stops and for the first time in his life he thinks that the truth might be less shameful than the lies. So he tries to tell her, not everything, but just enough to make her understand and all the time he’s scared of losing her because of the shame he feels at being different, of being stained. But she doesn’t understand and for the first time he realises that it’s not possible to understand because the world she lives in is a different country and it’s nowhere near the borders of his. So she thinks his father has a bit of a temper, that sometimes things aren’t good between them and because she doesn’t understand she still wants to meet them. Keeps on until he has no other option but to say yes.

  He’s told Rob to clear off so at first it’s only the two of them and his mother. And maybe this will be enough for her. They drink tea out of the best cups and try to make conversation and all the time he’s waiting for his father and thinking that just maybe he won’t come. But before enough time has decently elapsed for him to suggest to Alison that they should move on, he hears the back door open and his father’s feet in the kitchen. He glances at his mother but she looks away and stares at the cup she’s holding in her hand as if she’s suddenly noticed something in the dregs of tea.

  He’s a little flushed but he’s not drunk and he apologises for being late as he drops into one of the chairs. He even shakes her hand and then he sits and looks at her, smiling all the time as he opens the laces of his shoes.

  ‘Any tea left in the pot?’ he asks.

  ‘I’ll make some fresh,’ his mother says, standing up, then pausing turns to Alison, ‘Come into the kitchen and give me a hand.’

  But as Alison rises, his father lifts his hand and says, ‘She’s a guest, we don’t ask guests to make tea.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Alison says.

  ‘Rest yourself, sure I’ve hardly got a look at you yet.’ He leans back in his chair and smiles at her. ‘Well, aren’t you a right bobby-dazzler! How our Martin managed to get a look in with a picture like you beats me.’

  ‘I’m only after all his money,’ she says.

  ‘And spirit too,’ he says, slipping his feet out of his shoes. ‘Beats me how you’ve managed it, but you’ve done well for yourself, Martin.’ Then he asks her some questions about where she lives and her family, even tells her a funny story and makes her take another cup of tea.

  Later when they’re walking back she tells him his father wasn’t so bad as he’d made out and in relief and gratitude he nods his head as if she’s right. When she pulls him into the doorway of a closed shop and holds him tight, he buries his face in the thick splay of her hair and even when she’s searching for his mouth he holds his head fixed and hidden.

  A year later they’re married. There’s no one from his family there. His father has fallen out with them over the arrangements for the wedding, feels his place isn’t being acknowledged properly in some way no one
understands. He doesn’t tell Rob where the wedding is in case his father takes it out on him. Afterwards the silent and then the abusive phone calls start, sometimes in the middle of the night. It’s beginning to frighten Alison – he doesn’t know what to do and then he goes and talks to someone and they tell him that they’ll look after it for him. So one night, just after he has come home from work, his father gets a knock on his door and when he answers it there is a man standing on his doorstep who asks him his name, then tells him that he is to stay clear of his son and his new wife. As he’s about to reply, to clench his fists, the stranger opens his coat just wide enough to reveal the revolver stuffed into the waistband of his trousers. Now there are no words, only the slow shutting of a front door and a stranger walking away and seeming to button his coat against the cold.

  *

  She’s in the kitchen making the next day’s packed lunches. Three lunch boxes sit in a row on the kitchen worktop. Each one will be a slight variation of the other according to taste, according to need – in Tom’s, raw carrot and grapes alongside the tiny triangular sandwiches with their crusts cut off, and a little chocolate bar that describes itself as ‘fun-sized’. Although he denies it, they think he supplements his lunch with purchases from the tuck shop.

  She doesn’t turn to look at him when he enters the kitchen and he’s glad because he thinks it must be written across his face, every blink of his eyes signalling the blatant truth like semaphore. He thinks the very smell of it must seep from his pores and so he doesn’t touch her or go closer but slumps at the kitchen table.

  ‘You’re late,’ she says, turning to glance briefly at him. Her voice has no condemnation, only concern.

  ‘They’re setting up a new exhibition. Ran over time.’

  ‘Cheese or ham tomorrow?’

  ‘Either,’ he says. ‘And thanks.’

  ‘What for?’ she asks.