182
I am being irrational; I know this. Jaime and I arrived at Daniel’s party twenty minutes ago. We crunched over gravel towards the house, the sort of grand, ivied mansion that you see in BBC Sunday night dramas – Jaime in a pinstriped suit, me in a red silk dress, both of us wearing eyeliner and feather boas. The scents of summer flowers in the air; the moonlight splashing over us like a warm sea. There was a moment, at the start of the party, when we were united in our shyness. We took little sips from fluted glasses, whispering together, giggling at Daniel’s guests. I eyed up the tattoo on the inside of Jaime’s wrist: the small R an echo of the J on mine; a private joke, done while we were drunk. (It seemed hilarious at the time.) Then Daniel invaded our bubble and asked me how my new paintings were coming on, while a woman pounced on Jaime.
Now I am having a conversation with Daniel where I am only half present, watching Jaime chat to the woman who is watching his lips as he speaks. I overhear her name – Eleanor – and my heart skips a beat. She is nothing like the girl of Fate’s tale, nor Jaime’s ex, from his descriptions of her. This Eleanor is very slender, with pale blonde hair, and a sharp mouth.
183The last few weeks have formed a concentrate inside me. Since making up after our row, we have barely spent a day apart. During the day-time, when Jaime is managing his shop and I am painting, we text every few hours. Silly pictures, quotes, politics, jokes, or sometimes just trivial details: a weird customer, a brushstroke gone awry. One day, after Jamie left me to dream in his bed, I drifted through the flat and became a composer. I told him that it was a love song about him that I would never sing in his presence, but he would always be able to hear its echo in the walls. He hugged me very tightly when I told him this. After lovemaking we lie in the dark and words smoke between us, surreal and childlike. I ask him what colour his soul is and he says dark red. I tell him mine is the blue of the sea. Before sleep our noses bump as we say goodnight. I always borrow a T-shirt from his chest of drawers, normally one decorated with an obscure band’s offensive logo – and his tracksuit bottoms, which are too large and bag around my ankles. They are infused with his scent, which is catnip to me. I take him to galleries and he takes me to concerts. We find dark corners in bookshops and we share secret kisses with our spines pressed up against those of Achebe and Alighieri, Self and Smith. I learn that he hates garlic, but loves basil; that he can’t bear the mornings; that he had a tattoo of a dolphin removed from his arm; that the scar on his forehead was the result of his father thwacking him with a golf ball by accident when he was a kid; that he longed to have a pet wolf when he was a boy. One night, I have a dream that he is alone in a valley, with wolf howls echoing through the hills, and he is laughing with joy at the sound.
Our search for the Storyteller dwindles by the day, and Jaime has been mentioning them less and less over the last 184week. He still suffers occasional fits of panic, and still asserts that we cannot sacrifice our ‘proper’ lives for this place, but I can sense that this world is slowly seducing him: he is surrendering to it. The other day he told me that no relationship in the real world had ever made him as happy as ours.
I need to lure Jaime away from Eleanor. I’m keen to force an early departure, but Daniel is keeping the pressure on.
‘Can I see one or two pieces of your new work, then? How about next week?’ he asks.
I blink. I’m performing a balancing act between integrity and money. In the past, I’ve been too attached to the former, too dismissive of the latter. Jaime says it doesn’t matter if we fail here, because success only counts in the world we’re returning to, but I don’t feel that I can make mistakes; I have to get it right this time.
Eleanor shrieks loudly at a joke Jaime makes, spills a droplet of her cocktail on his thigh and then becomes very preoccupied with rubbing it off. Daniel gently presses his palm against the small of my back. I wait for Jaime to notice.
When he doesn’t, I excuse myself and tunnel my way through the crowds, ducking into the toilet. It’s fancy and ornate, closer to Fate’s period than this one: lavish tiles the colour of a peacock’s tail. When I wipe myself, I start. Red streaks. A period. I’m not pregnant then, thank God.
I find Jaime waiting for me as I re-enter the party.
‘Oh God, you have to save me,’ he says, kissing me. ‘That Eleanor woman kept pretending to pick fluff off the front of my trousers. In the end, I told her I need to find my girlfriend. 185I know I sound kind of boring – but could we just go home and get pizza? I mean, the waiter just told me the canapés here cost £30 per canapé. It’s kind of disgusting.’
The relief of departure makes us giddy and silly. In the back of the taxi home, I get out my compact and Jaime draws a moustache on my lip, before applying some more kohl to his lower lids. I tell him that it makes him look beautiful and dangerous, like a spy. He starts to roll a cigarette but I steal the paper balanced on his knee and declare I will roll it for him. He doesn’t complain too much even when he has to stand outside my flat smoking a tampon.
Jaime kisses me the moment we’re inside the hallway, pushing me up against the wall. He bites my ear and whispers, ‘Daniel fancies you.’
I pull back, his jealousy a delicious shock.
‘He’s an ugly old chauvinistic bastard.’
Jaime laughs, then curls an arm around my waist and squeezes me tight. There’s a mirror at the end of the hallway and I watch us, wondering: how can we ever go back to ordinary life? We’re used to these bodies now. Our scents have crept under our skins; our bonding is primal.
In the bedroom, I pull his boa from his neck as he is kicking off his shoes, and he chases me around the room. We collapse on to the bed together, laughing. We lie side by side, me facing away from him, and Jaime slowly uncurls my feather boa and 186his lips touch the back of my neck, his hand sliding up my thigh. I close my eyes, but as he draws me towards a climax, my hand clenches over his, my breathing harsh. I cannot let him continue. I feel as though he has taken a very delicate instrument and gently inserted it into my heart. He pulls his hand away, smoothing down my dress, his breath against my ear.
We lie together for a while. Then, out of nowhere, he says:
‘Tell me about your mum and dad.’
‘She was the best mother in the world,’ I say. These are words that I have not been able to say without tears before, but tonight I feel calm.
‘And your dad?’
I hesitate, stumbling, trying to think up a story that will suit this version of Rachel Levy.
‘It’s all right if your childhood wasn’t perfect,’ he says. ‘Mine was fucked.’ A pause, and then a swerve, a surprise question: ‘Is it because of your parents that you’re into Eastern philosophy?’
I turn and prop myself up on one elbow, the cool air filling the space between us.
‘It is because of yours that you’re an atheist?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you’re an atheist, I suppose you’re not afraid of death,’ I say. ‘Or perhaps you’re more afraid …’ Memories of the funeral drift across my mind; a life condensed into a eulogy, the rough parts edited out.
‘If you have one life, you treasure it, make the most of it, take responsibility for it. You enjoy it.’ Jaime reaches for his wine glass, and I smile, endeared by the hedonistic streak I have only recently discovered in him, just as he has been surprised by the ascetic in me. ‘If you really fuck things up, I suppose you might be reincarnated as a grape?’ 187
‘Waiting to be crushed into wine …’
‘I’d drink you,’ he says, and we giggle. I picture myself floating in his stomach, being processed by his blood. Jaime’s tone becomes solemn: ‘My dad always drank too much.’ He frowns. ‘Fate’s book gave me the chance to know what it’s like to have a good dad – one who loves you. Of course, I swear the bastard only did it so that he could destroy me by killing him off …’
‘Tell me more about your dad, your real dad, I mean,’ I coax him.
‘It’s funny. When I was a teenager, he’d come and go – that was always the way with him …’ Jaime hesitates, and I will him to carry on. ‘He’d play at being part of the family for six months, then disappear for six. He was my hero. He’d turn up with so much energy – making jokes, making us laugh, giving us presents, taking me to the movies and to church. He’d been brought up Catholic and got me into it. He’d confide in me that my mother was depressed, genetically doomed, sick in the head, and I bought it. Once, when I was seventeen, he turned up in a real state. He pissed himself and had to go to A & E to have his stomach pumped. And this woman turned up. I said, “Who are you?”, and she said, “I’m the other woman.”’
‘Fuck.’
‘The thing is, there had always been other women, but I told myself his story was true: that they were just friends, hangers-on. Anyway, the bubble burst that night. I realised my mum wasn’t the one with the problem; my dad was a fucking womanising drunk getting by on a mad ego and a lot of charisma. And like all addicts, he was imprisoned in denial. He thought he was in control, but really it was dictating his life. The guilt I felt then: for having thought that my mum was ill, 188when her depression was a perfectly sane reaction to her circumstances; for colluding with my dad in patronising her, for my role in the abuse … Fuck, I’ve never told this to anyone. Do you think I’m a monster?’
‘You were a teenager. You didn’t know what was going on.’
‘I didn’t. But I think it delayed her throwing him out. Once I woke up to what was going on, it was goodbye church and God and hello practical morality – like, what can I actually do to help my Mum and make the world better? I rang up an abuse helpline for advice, found her some counselling, and helped her take the first steps towards escape.’
I touch his cheek softly.
‘Mum and I are really close now. What with my dad being gone, and her being a bit lonely, she does smother me a bit. I’m her “golden boy”.’ He rolls his eyes but his pupils glow. ‘She rings every few days; she bakes for me. But I’m scared she might get back together with my dad, even after all that.’
I think of Jaime saying early on that he didn’t like flings, only committed, faithful relationships. I am piecing parts of his puzzle together, even if the centre remains an empty zigzag.
‘Would she take him back, after all that?’ I ask.
‘The trouble with being a high-functioning alcoholic is that eventually you lose the functioning part. He’s in danger of losing his house and the other women have deserted him, so he’s started calling Mum again. And he really can turn on the charm …’
‘You can be very charming,’ I muse. ‘I saw you at the party.’
Jaime looks pained. ‘But I’m nothing like my dad—’
‘Oh God, no, sorry. I just meant that people like you …’
‘People like you too.’ 189
‘People say I’m … aloof,’ I sigh. ‘I don’t know, I must give off bad vibes, because they never like me at first. People grow to like me.’
I turn to face him and he brushes his nose against mine in an Eskimo kiss. He whispers that when we go back to the world, we can look after each other. And his smile is so tender that I am very nearly convinced.
We’re still awake at 3 a.m., sitting up in bed, eating Pringles, watching TV. Jaime finds a channel with a cartoon in Russian. He tells me about the main difference between Russian and American cartoons. The latter, he says, are built around a three-act structure, where the protagonist suffers a challenge, finds themselves in crisis and crashes to their lowest point, before turning it all around in a triumphant resolution. But in a Russian cartoon the story starts off badly, things then improve a little in the middle, before the final act involves a return to loss and melancholy.
‘I wish the media wouldn’t only present success stories that match up with the American narrative,’ I say. ‘They make it sound like that’s the norm. And if you’re not a massive success having overcome your act two adversity, you’re the exception, the weirdo.’
‘Well, yeah … but you are a success story,’ Jaime says. ‘If I had your success I’d be so happy. In fact, I’d be intolerable, I’d be showing off to everyone, autographing everything, snorting coke.’
I laugh. ‘Well, I’m the mature one. Six years older than you.’ 190
‘Practically a boomer,’ he smirks, yelping as I pinch him.
The female protagonist in the cartoon has red hair and her name is Raisa.
‘That’s what my name for you is going to be!’ Jaime exclaims. We’ve tried testing a few pet names on each other but none of them have stuck.
‘I like Raisa,’ I say. ‘What would you be? Jaimus?’
I wake early and sit on the side of the bed, Jaime’s sleeping face taking shape in my sketchbook. I’m still out of practice, but the picture captures the colour of my mood. An art critic once said to me, ‘A thousand people can paint a tree beautifully, so what makes one particular painting seem that little bit special compared to the masses? It is the consciousness of the artist that makes a painting, the way it hovers in the work like a watermark.’ I think of my mother, staring at Pygmalion’s Girl in my Metamorphoses exhibition, her face lively with pride. I look at Jaime again, his mouth now slack with snores, and I resist kissing him awake. Instead, I decide to head out and get croissants for him: his favourite breakfast.
Outside, the world seems prelapsarian, washed clean by the dawn and the dew. When I was a child, I drew with a pantheist’s love for the world. I failed to notice that the garden was tiny, or smudged with London smog. It all seemed beautiful to me. When I stopped drawing in recent years, the apathy I felt 191was never a rejection of life, more a disappointment. That kind of melancholy can only really afflict those who have loved life too deeply and expected too much from it.
Maybe Jaime and I should be fighting harder to find our way back. I test the idea uneasily, picturing us both in my flat, with the dripping ceiling and mould on the walls. Then I imagine the two of us in a new place, a flat where I have my own studio … No: we could never afford such a luxury; the places we inhabit here will be beyond our reach in the real world. But we can find a way, I tell myself; we’ll look after each other. There are tears in my eyes as I bend down to pat a dog tied up outside the supermarket. The shop is closed. The dog keeps barking and I pet him, promising to be back soon.
There are numerous express supermarkets on Oxford Road. Jaime joked that the entire street will soon be nothing but a long, shiny row of them, like some kind of Ballardian nightmare. The Sainsbury’s Local has a grille yanked down halfway. The next one I pass is a Morrisons. I walk into its chaos. There’s a display of cornflakes in the entrance that people are fighting over. A man grabs a box of Kellogg’s, stuffing his hand inside so that the chicken logo swells up in fecund grotesque. He removes the plastic bag of flakes and throws the box away. The long queue by the till scatters in horror as he lunges at them. Two security men try to drag him out.
I back out and hurry on, digesting my shock by turning it into a story that I tell Jaime in my mind, ready for my return home. The next shop is a Tesco Express. The queue by the till is so long that I have to keep cutting through it – each member 192clutching their purchases with defensive eyes. When I find the bakery section, there are no croissants left, no fresh loaves, just one last sliced white Warburtons. I reach for it at the same time as another woman, and with an animal surge that shocks me, I yank it away from her. She turns and glares. I meet her gaze, challenging her, trembling, before she storms off. On my way out of the shop, I scan the headlines: gloomy forecast, housing market, recession.
Home. I lean against the wall in our hallway. I’m still shaking. I go into the bedroom to find that Jaime has just woken up. The look of fear on his face is akin to that of the desperate shopper I just fought with, and I hear myself gasp. He frowns at me as though we’re in different books, looking across oceans of prose from distant white margins.
‘I had a bad dream.’
I sit down on the bed and give him a hug, but he doesn’t want to be consoled, he wants to confess. He was eleven years old and taking an exam he hadn’t done any revision for. Sitting behind the rickety desk, he saw the whole class around him writing fluid answers while his words were ants on the page, and when he handed it in, the teacher who took it was Mr Turridge. He wielded a cane and ordered Jaime to hold out his hand so that he could punish him. The second part of his nightmare then evolved into a darkness of eternal return: he knew everything that would happen in his life, as if it had already happened to him, and he could only repeat it all and endure it again. When he finishes, I feel lost for a moment, 193wondering if Fate is seeping into this world, if he has found out where we are hiding.
Then I explain to Jaime, as calmly as I can, that Gwent has decided to change the direction of our narrative. The terrible thing is this: although he expresses shock and panic, there is a sparkle in his eyes, a fleeting exhilaration. Now we will have to move on, it seems to say. In a melodramatic tone, he announces that we must find the Storyteller or die.
As he sits down before his computer, I go to the window. I gaze down at the chaos on the streets, my heart breaking. Closing my eyes, I find myself praying silently to Gwent: If you gave us free will, then this must be our fault. Jaime organised a march; I fled back to Fate. We failed to appreciate what you gave us. Please give us one last chance. Over and over, I beg him to undo this plot twist, even while I know it is too late, that our Eden is over.