Leaper

He phoned at completely the wrong time, my lover. “Write me a story. A man and a woman, fucking. Keep it short and dirty.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “If you want a story, speak to my agent. The going rate is £500 a thousand words. If you want a fuck, speak to me. The going rate is . . . what is the going rate?”

“Do as you’re told,” he said, just the tiniest bit menacing.

“Fuck you,” I said, and put the phone down.

I’d spent the morning struggling with a never-to-be-published story and was sunk in a kind of slime of incapacity. What I lack is confidence. Much good it does to know what’s lacking. I’ve written quite a lot: short stories and articles for magazines, most of them published. Looked at from the outside, the writing’s going quite well. I’ve made a small but significant reputation with a number of editors and it’s only a matter of time now, before I attempt The Novel that will, I hope, fulfil the promise I’ve shown.

If that sounds like an efficient piece of PR, it is, because I know, in that place where you really know things, that I can’t write at all. That fact, that I have produced decent stuff to murmurs of quiet appreciation, doesn’t affect this knowledge I have about myself. Something to do with my childhood, I suppose. Anyway, although things turn out more or less all right in the end, it doesn’t change anything, and I face every blank piece of paper in a state of panic. This time, I know for sure, they’ll find me out.

Things could be worse. That bone-deep knowledge of my own inability doesn’t, as it might, pervade my entire life. Not any more. At least it’s contained in the writing department, realising, I suppose, that there is where I’ve decided I can live. I see this now as part of my internal structure; just as there is a language centre in the brain, so I have a worry centre which fills with anxiety and has to find something to worry about. It used to attach itself to anything available: money, sex, shopping, the daily news, the condition of my flat. For no reason connected with anything that was happening, anxiety would erupt. Suddenly, it would occur to me that there was dry rot under the floorboards, or perhaps, since I didn’t know one from the other, it was damp rot; and the gnawing worry would infest the day. No matter what sensible things I told myself, that it probably wasn’t true, or, if it was, so what, or I could do something about it, the ache would thrum away, colouring the day with anxiety. The damp/dry rot was desperate all of a sudden, festering and rotting the fabric of my flat. I would go about my business efficiently enough, but accompanied always in some small space inside me by my fears. By the following morning, the certainty of rotting floorboards beneath my feet would have faded, but something else would take its place, filling up the worry gap before I had a chance to be relieved. A bank statement would arrive and now the money situation, unchanged from a day or a week before, would be terrifying, and I’d spend every free moment listing and relisting my income and outgoings, coming up each time with the same answer, forgetting almost what the problem was, but knowing there was some solution it was essential to arrive at. Sometimes, it made life very difficult to live.

All the time, even in the midst of the panics, I knew it to be free-floating anxiety, its source a well of terror in me that had nothing to do with my chosen concerns. But this information wasn’t much help. And sometimes, exhausted by it all, I wanted someone around who would tell me none of it was real, and take away from me the problems that seemed, now and then, to threaten my sanity. But, in fact, I managed, and things have improved. The anxiety is contained.

Now, as I say, since I decided that writing is the only route I’ve got through life, the worry has latched on to that, like a cattle tick, and gains sustenance from my fears.

What I’ve learned about this is to ignore it. Most of the time, I write through a miasma of terror, and something decent comes out the other end. I don’t know how. I think of it as The Process and leave it at that. It’s like swimming in mud; not pleasant, but you get to the other side if you just keep going.

Usually, I can live with the discomfort. Why should things be easy? But occasionally I get exhausted by it, with having to contain my insecurity and generate enough energy to just bloody well get on with it. And still, sometimes, I wish someone else were here to do it for me.

I imagine the conversation with this paragon who will devote his energy to keeping me at it.

“I can’t do this. I can’t write,” I wail, a formless heap.

“Of course you can.” The voice is practical, not comforting, even a bit impatient. “What about all the things you’ve written? You did them, and they were all right. Now, do it again.”

“I can’t,” I howl angrily. “I don’t know how those other things happened. They weren’t anything to do with me. This is the real thing, and I can’t do it.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to try harder, aren’t you?”

That’s what I’m after. Not soggy comfort, but a hard line. A brusque assumption that I can and will do it, that I don’t have any choice. And that, I suppose, is what I do for myself most of the time. But, as I say, sometimes it’s hard to conjure up that other voice, and I wish someone else were here to help. Which is foolish, I know, and I get over and on with it. But it doesn’t help one bit when Dan calls to play games in the mud I feel I’m drowning in. It doesn’t make me feel—I don’t know—valued.

I decided it was a good moment to take some exercise. Sometimes I can disperse the panic by working up a physical sweat. I go to a gym just past the local underground station.

As I approached the station, trying to contain my annoyance at Dan by promising it a monumental expenditure of energy on the work-out bench, I noticed that something was going on. Too many people on the street for a weekday afternoon; the bus queue a long, rush-hour line; and small, static groups outside the station itself, standing around in that way, signalling an event. An ambulance waited throbbing in the road, traffic building up as cars skirted carefully and curiously around it, its back doors open, red blankets folded neatly on the beds. The entrance to the station, normally a corridor of warm air, a dark gloomy cave into which travellers disappeared, was closed, heavy iron gates pulled across, and behind them, a handful of uniformed figures milled about. Two middle-aged men sat in pale silence on the stone step in front of the gates, neither of them looking as if this was their normal way of being on the street.

I allowed myself the luxury of imagining an electrical fault, an unattended carrier bag, a heart-attack, even, while I walked through the small crowd and beyond the locked gates toward the gym. Where, no longer needing willed ignorance to get past the spot uninvolved, I gave my brain permission to interpret the signs.

There had been a leaper. Some poor but efficient sod had jumped under a passing train.

It’s the drivers who call them “leapers.” My ex, who likes to know this kind of technical, inside information, met an underground driver in a pub, who told him. Also, that leapers are a bit of a blessing among the lads, since any driver it happens to is given two days compassionate leave, with pay. It always sounded to me like front-line bravado, the brutality of the stomach-sick medical student, the ho-ho-ho of the intolerable. Anyway, “leaper” had stuck with us as a generic term for this particular kind of no-kidding suicide, and that was the word I thought.

I exercised viciously on the sloping bench, jerking the pulleys with muscles that surprised me, so that the weights clanked noisily when they came to rest, and the sliding bench screeched as it rolled up and down the gradient. But no matter how hard I pushed and pumped at the weights, I couldn’t drown out the conversation. Two other women had stopped exercising and were standing at the window that looked out over the station.

“What a terrible thing to do.”

Right, that’s the word, “terrible,” I thought.

“Why do you think it’s taking them so long to bring the body out?”

Jesus Christ, think about it. Think hard.

“You know, my sister was on a train when someone jumped in front of it. They don’t let you out. And he wasn’t killed, the bloke. Not outright. She had to sit there and listen to these awful screams. He screamed and screamed, apparently. She says she won’t ever forget it. Can you imagine?”

Can’t blame him, can you? A voice was probably all the poor bastard had left.

“Terrible. Terrible. Such a terrible thing to do.”

I kept my end of the conversation silent and worked on grimly at the bench.

But the conversation continued.

“I suppose we shouldn’t be . . . But killing yourself like that, you’d have to really mean it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to feel so . . .”

“No. How could anyone imagine it? The poor driver . . .”

When I’d finished my routine I sat in the sauna for as long as I could stand, trying to sweat it all away. Which wasn’t long, saunas being unbearable. A Swedish Protestant plot, I think, a stab at hell-on-earth, a dire warning of the discomforts to come. Unsuccessful, actually, since it makes hell-fire attractive by comparison.

Out in the daylight, dehydrated and aching, I looked to my left, in the direction of my flat, on the far side of the underground. Small groups of people still stood outside the station, some in shock, others merely showing a passing interest, a few professionals looking as if this was all in a day’s work, some of them succeeding better than others. The ambulance still throbbed and waited. I turned right, and sat at one of the tables outside the café on the other side of the gym.

Recuperate a bit, I decided. You don’t have to walk back through and over that drama until you’ve had a cup of coffee. Sometimes, I’m good to myself.

The woman sat down at my table a few moments later.

It doesn’t seem to make much sense, but there’s a difference between tables inside a café, and those on the street. Inside, unless everywhere else is taken, it’s very unlikely that anyone will ask to share a table that is already occupied. It’s a virtual act of aggression, the mark of men on the make and the mildly mad. But it’s different in the open. Even if there are empty tables elsewhere, it’s an easy, insignificant act to sit with a complete stranger. It must be that people feel they can escape more easily where there are no walls to contain them. And the bright, daylight street seems to exclude the likelihood of whatever it is we fear. Streets are everybody’s. Indoors, in the darker interior of the café, the table becomes defensible space, and the approach of another a threat.

I mean to say that I wasn’t made uncomfortable by the woman’s approach, nor did her presence impinge until she spoke.

She was tall, well-built and sleek, in her elegant middle age, with a face that was all bone structure, and dark, spherical glasses. Smooth, dark hair, cut to a heavy, architectural bob, and the clothes tailored (and not in England) to match her perfectly manicured fingernails. Not English. Diane, I was to learn, but think it with a Mediterranean accent: Dee-ahn.

She sat at the table, facing the station in silence for a little while, and then lit a long, dark cigarette.

“Are you watching or avoiding walking over it?” she asked, releasing smoke as she spoke and moving her head slightly to indicate the underground.

“Both, I suppose.”

“It will ruin your day if you watch the stretcher come out.”

“It’s not much of a day, anyway. And a worse one for him or her down there. Or better.”

She shrugged lightly.

“Yes. Or no. Her. I understand it was a woman.”

There was a quality of utter detachment about her, as though she looked out on the world and saw, but was untouched by it. Everything—her clothes, make-up, the way she sat poised and posed in her chair—looked deliberate and yet it was all so well done that nothing seemed artificial. I hadn’t seen her eyes under the sunglasses, but I knew they would be steady whether they looked at me across the table or at the scene along the road. Now she lifted the glasses away from her face and looked me over, running her eyes up and down my body in a slow sweep. Her cool, emerald appraisal was electrifying; the air filled with the static of possibilities.

“Does it excite you, the death down there?”

I took one of her mysterious cigarettes and leaned forward to catch the light she offered. I’m a believer in balance, a serious work-out requires nicotine as ballast.

“I’m thrilled. It astonishes me. I’m bowled over with admiration.” Her brow creased in a question. “At the certainty that’s been acted on,” I explained. “I like a person who knows what they want and leaves no room for indecision or an accident of salvation.”

“But what if it were a whim?” she queried. Her deep eyes were amused beneath their steady gaze. “A momentary thing? Irretrievable once acted on?”

I shook my head briskly.

“That’s a thought the living use to comfort themselves. He didn’t really mean it. So that the next time we stand on a station platform we don’t have to choose between getting on the train or throwing ourselves under it. We wouldn’t mean it, we tell ourselves, we’d be sorry afterwards. What afterwards? The only thing to be sure of is that we wouldn’t be sorry afterwards. In any case, what makes a momentary whim less true than the thought we’ve continued to have for twenty years because we haven’t bothered to change it?”

She sat back in her chair, resting the coffee cup lightly on her silk shirt.

“The only thing that’s true now is the physical end of a life,” she said quietly.

I heard my voice, clipped, angry. “Is anything more important in a life?”

“No,” she agreed calmly. “But you are a romantic. You will be angry at being told so, but it’s true. The fact is that to kill yourself in such a way is childish and aggressive. And stupid, for the corpse down there cannot reap the benefits. Look at the disruption that has been caused. Trains are held up all along the line, people are made late for appointments. Perhaps some of them are important. The traffic is slowed down and passers-by going about their everyday business are drawn in, they cannot avoid being aware of what has happened beneath their feet. Now they feel foolish and petty to be buying a bunch of flowers and a quarter pound of cheese. So much power, so much effect.”

But there was no real anger in her voice. It remained distant and melodic. Even a little pedagogical. She continued.

“It makes people think thoughts they do not have to have. That person was living a few moments ago, they think, I might have passed her on my way to the grocer. Was alive, is dead. Only moments in between. As I am alive now, this moment. What is to become of me? What right has someone ending their own life to impose such thoughts on others who may not choose to have them?”

This conversation pleased me. I liked her matter-of-fact, practical assessment of the anonymous death. There was a hardness in her voice that made me listen. And it was a relief to hear those things said. She echoed the thoughts I hadn’t allowed myself to have, describing exactly my resistance to walking back over the scene.

I think about death a lot, in a general sort of way. I have a tendency to see it as heroic, a feat. I know we can’t help dying, but it’s such a serious and solitary thing. Death seems to me to ennoble the most frivolous and incompetent of lives. And voluntary death awes me with its absolute refusal to tolerate the intolerable. I admire the cold calculation, the rejection of a life of fear and panic in favour of decision.

But as I had walked past the underground station on my way to the gym, what I had actually thought was: “I can’t stand this.”

I couldn’t bear the idea of that person’s misery as she walked along the street, moments before me, and the terror she felt standing on the edge of the platform waiting for the incoming train. I hated her for making her pain and her death so evident and imposing it on me. It angered and frightened me that she had advertised her safely anonymous unhappiness, and required me to imagine that appalling death beneath my feet.

The truth was I’d had precisely the same thoughts that underlay the conversation I had contemptuously dismissed between the women standing by the gym window, but wouldn’t permit myself to say aloud. I couldn’t bring myself to admit the common thoughts, banal, true, automatic, human, inevitable, that were being spoken carefully so that the unease could be dispersed by the sound of the words. I prefer to let those thoughts, pointless as I know they are, roll around in the silence between world-weary shrugs. I want them to stay hanging in the air, recognised by their absence. I am, I must admit, ashamed to be on the side of the living.

The woman sitting opposite me, with her brisk tones and coolly interested eyes, voiced my real thoughts and made them seem acceptable. She spoke knowingly, in the manner of a distant observer, of the uncomfortable effects of death on our doorstep. And always her eyes held me in their gaze, faintly humorous, as if commenting, though not unkindly, on my self-deceit.

I heard myself say, “I’m trying to write something. But I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

And held my breath, horrified to hear the words out there in the world, but certain, now that they were said, that she could give me the right answer. I hadn’t thought of that harsh, reassuring voice of my imagination belonging to a woman; it hadn’t occurred to me, but it didn’t seem to make much difference now that I saw it was.

She stubbed out her cigarette with a sudden urgency, as if she had been waiting for a signal and now, having received it, could get on. Putting her glasses back, she smiled, but so slightly it was hardly there.

“Do you have to be somewhere?”

With you, I thought.

“No, not really.”

“Then why don’t we go back to my flat and have a drink? I live just around the corner. It’s too depressing sitting here. Why don’t we turn our back on this melodrama? Refuse to allow it any power.”

She gathered her black leather bag from the table and stood, inviting me to join her.

“My name is Diane.”

We crossed the road at the traffic lights in front of the café and she led me to a street directly opposite the station. If we had turned to look in the other direction we would still have been able to see the entrance to the underground. But neither of us did.

The flat was as well-manicured as her fingernails. She made me a drink.

“So you find death exciting?” she said, handing me a large scotch.

“I suppose so.”

“And does going home with a strange woman excite you, too?”

“Yes, that also excites me.”

She smiled.

“Death has a way of sharpening our desires. It makes us want to eat good food, or listen to a sublime piece of music. Or make love. To lie in someone’s arms and feel warm flesh respond to our touch. Death is very sensual, don’t you think? The dead have a secret we can’t grasp. The secrecy of sex is as near as the living can ever get to it.”

Did I say she was beautiful? Apart from all those other things, she was beautiful. Her face was a carved frame for the long, green eyes that looked and looked. Her body was beginning to show its age, loosened a little, but full, ripe and round. I haven’t ever rejected the idea of women as lovers, but the event had never occurred.

She undressed me slowly, looking carefully at my body and then checking back with my face. Whatever she saw in it seemed to give her permission not to hurry. When she had finished her slow examination she took off her own clothes, just as leisurely, giving me as much time for taking her in as she had given herself. Then she took me in her arms with as much passion as Dan would show, but it was different. Not his fast, harsh, funny fuck, but a long, slow pleasuring, a drawing out of desire. It was a lesson in timelessness. By the time she led me to the bed she had woven a veil around us with her intricate caresses that seemed to exclude the light. She made the world contract to a capsule containing only the two of us on the white expanse of her bed. And I knew that was what we were there for: to create that veil that confused time and light.

All the while, the green eyes watched with the same humour and detachment I’d seen at the café. But I didn’t mind. It exhilarated me that she was in control, building my excitement with careful touches and stroking, checking my response as she increased or decreased the pressure of her elegant fingers and beautiful mouth. Then she took my hand and guided me towards her pleasure. And all of it was more than sensual delight, it was also a promise that she could respond to my cri. That she could give me the energy and certainty I couldn’t find for myself. Everything she did corresponded to that person in my head who seemed too weary now to help.

I lay naked in her arms, waiting. There was no urgency. I drifted in and out of sleep, listening to the buzz of traffic in the distance, content with the memory of the tone of her voice and the touch of her hands. I knew nothing about her beyond her name and the style in which she lived. But that, along with her capacity to guide me through desire, was enough information, and I had no real curiosity then about her past. Now that I was sated, it was my solved future that interested me. She would, I knew, encourage me and insist I work, understand my necessity, wrap my insecurities in a blanket of her strength. At that moment I thought I had everything. Found, at last, the solution to the panic that threatened to swamp me. I remember the quality of that moment, even now. It was, I think, the first and only time I really felt that everything was going to be all right.

“So you write?”

Her voice was languid and deep, the scent of sex seeped into her low murmur.

“What do you write?”

I lay pillowed in the angle between her arm and breast, smelling the sharp mix of expensive perfume and satisfied desire.

“Stories, articles,” I told her, whispering. “I think soon a novel.”

I held my breath at the power of the moment, those seconds before one’s life comes right.

“You must show them to me,” she said, and stroked my hair gently. “I’m sure they must be very good.”

And the moment was gone.

I sat up and looked about the room. The afternoon sun poured in through the long windows, washing the beige tones of the furnishings with a warm pink. But I was cold. I wondered for a second if they had brought the stretcher up.

“You met me two hours ago, you can’t possibly know whether I can write or not.”

I was as confused by my chilly reply as I suppose she was. She sat up beside me and rubbed the side of her face against my hair.

“Well, then, you must show me, so I can judge. I’d like to see the story you’re working on at the moment. The one you’re having trouble with. We’ll have dinner tonight and you can bring it.”

I swung my legs out of the bed and stood up.

“I don’t show unfinished work. Unfinished work is nothing.”

“Then perhaps something you’ve completed. Bring that so I can see what you do.”

She lay back in bed and I began to dress. Everything, suddenly, had slipped from my grasp and I watched as reality wrenched at my fantasy of reassurance and tore it to shreds.

“I don’t want to talk about my work,” I heard myself say. “It’s not something anyone else can be involved in. You have to do it alone, or it’s not yours.”

And this, also, was something I knew bone-deep, but had forgotten in the surprise of death and sex and comfort. There is no alternative to the panic and the fear, because it is the panic and fear—and the isolation—that are the writing. The desperation created the necessity that made me write. I fed on it.

I was only ever half a romantic, the rest of me, the part that keeps on going, knows how things are and would not swap the final satisfaction of a finished piece for the easy comfort of that voice in my head. I had forgotten that voices in the real world have bodies and intentions of their own—they have flats and furnishings and they make dinner, and need.

I looked at her lying on the bed. She looked to me tired, terribly weary, worn, but her green eyes shone bright and hard still.

“All right.” She watched me tie the laces on my shoes. “Dinner without your work. We must get to know each other better. When you’re ready I may be able to help you. I have contacts. I can help in various ways. But tonight, just dinner.”

She didn’t want to be alone, I realised, although there was nothing of that in the tone of her voice which remained cool and steady. And not just tonight. I wondered, at last, about her life.

“Do you live here alone?”

“Yes. I do now. There was someone living here with me, but she’s gone.”

Her voice was so vague it was impossible to place this information in time. She could have been talking of decades or moments. I felt as if one of us was no longer in the room.

“I must go,” I said, turning to the door. “I’ve got to get back to work. I don’t know about tonight. It depends on how the work goes. Shall I ring you later on?”

She reached for a cigarette. The phone rang as she drew on the flame from her lighter, but she made no attempt to answer it.

“Yes, call me later,” she said airily, and lay back on the bed watching the smoke spiral through the light beams. The phone continued to make its mechanical bird call.

“Your phone . . .”

“I’m not going to answer it.”

“But it might be imp—”

“I know what it’s about.”

She got out of bed, slipped on a faded silk kimono and moved away from the phone to stand and look out of the window. There was nothing to see except the houses across the road. The phone went on ringing.

“It sounds important.”

She inhaled deeply on her cigarette and turned her head slightly in the direction we had walked. From this angle, the station was out of view.

“They will have found this address on Helen. She must have had a letter or something in her jacket, because she didn’t take her bag with her.”

She turned and glanced at the chair by the door where a tan shoulder bag lay open.

“I suppose they’re calling to find out if a relative lives here. They’ll be wanting to inform her next of kin.”

She spoke more to herself than me, her cool unchanging voice almost inaudible beneath the insistent squeal of the telephone.

“Are you sure you won’t come to dinner this evening?”

She looked at me questioningly, her face an impassive sculpture of angles and planes.

“You lived here with Helen?”

The room for all its elegance was a desert, suddenly, an empty cold place being worn away by time.

“Helen lived here for two years. She left this afternoon. She wasn’t a happy girl. I tried to look after her, she needed to be taken care of. But some people just won’t be helped.”

The telephone stopped ringing as she spoke. We both stared at it for a moment. The silence was shattering.

“I must go,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stay.”

She smiled.

“We must meet again soon. I would very much like to read your work.”

But I was already closing the door behind me.