Like the First Time, Every Time

ON THE NIGHT before the show Stephen is in the final, incandescent stages of paranoia. Everything circles around him before disappearing into his head. His eyes are unbearably bright. I am afraid they will implode.

‘All set?’ I say.

‘Set?’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I say. ‘What are you scared of?’

He shows me the list.

ballistophobia BULLETS

eisoptrophobia MIRRORS

chrometophobia MONEY

dermatosiophobia SKIN

pteronophobia FEATHERS

gephyrophobia BRIDGES

barophobia GRAVITY

onomatophobia NAMES

uranophobia HEAVEN

phagophobia SWALLOWING

hamartophobia SIN

sophobia YOU

I go around the house and in an old and final gesture take all the mirrors off the walls. There is however little I can do about gravity.

I can only get him to bed by bringing the television upstairs. He stops singing to watch but when I turn the sound off he starts to hum along with the pictures. He hums, not easily in the back of his throat where a hum usually sits, but at the front of his mouth, like a sound trying to climb out of his face.

‘So tell me something,’ I say, wishing instead to touch him as a friend might, a difficult thing to do in a bed.

‘Like what?’ he says.

‘Something you know.’

‘Tum Tum,’ he says, ‘is the talmudic word for an angel whose sex cannot be easily determined.’

‘That’s a good word.’ I thought he might be trying to tell me something. ‘Tum Tum.’

‘How can they tell?’ he says. ‘They only knew about two sexes. And women can’t be angels.’

‘So?’

‘So it doesn’t matter what you know.’

The news is finishing up on the television. I try to figure out the weather for tomorrow. I cannot go to sleep.

The copulating angels are back, all two hundred of them. The air is full, as they say, with the beating of wings. Mayflies are crawling out of a hole by the tap of the radiator, wet and mutilated. Their wings dry in the heat and make a fierce, inorganic clatter as they take off around the room. Horseflies with florescent eyes for heads extract themselves from the wet tea-leaves in the bottom of a cup. ‘Tinkerbell it ain’t,’ I say and know by my tone of voice that this is a dream, as the maggots do their thing.

Then the birds, all in a flap. Birds with human heads or birds with fat legs and coy little toes. Some of the thrushes have bollocks for their undercarriage and a finch is circling on the concrete, flapping two thin white arms.

A heron stands on the table, stretches like a dinosaur and weeps. On the naked underside of its wings the feathers have rooted up under the transparent skin, like a shoal of sharp-nosed fish, suiciding into a swimmer.

Then the roof clears to sky.

I am woken by his hand leaving my stomach. His hair and his breath are touching my shoulder. His instep pushes quietly up into the arch of my foot.

I feel like someone had told me a joke two months ago and only just remembered the punchline.

The light from the television is shifting and changing at the end of the bed. His body is curved, like the arc of a D against my quiet I. Other than that, the only thing I can think about is the gap between us and about the tip of his tongue, through his open teeth, touching the air of the room.

My body seems to have forgotten what to do with it all, has forgotten how to cross space, how to complete the surprise. My body is still all in bits, and all different ages, so his breath smells like the air outside a dance-hall when you are fourteen years of age, the sheet between us is aching like sixteen, the place where his fingers left my stomach feels hot and twenty-two, and his foot feels old.

He knows I am awake. The distance between us is so simple and white, that I can feel the slither of the sheets as his hand slips through them, stumbles at my hip bone, gathers blindly to find my belly again, where it rests, without moving. We lie there for a while, a difficult H. Waiting.

His tongue tasted so sweet I nearly did not know what it was. The alphabet abandons me as his hand reaches the top of my legs, which quite simply separate as I change from I to Y, though upside down. The words garble in my head, though what followed was not the liquid amnesia of the movies, but fierce and easy and tasting of several different types of skin. The cool baby skin that fitted at the back of his ear, the hot plump skin of his earlobe, the thick but hairless skin of his throat, then the startling velum of his glans, too fine to be called skin at all, the friendly hide of his belly and the complicated and salty crease of his eye, tasting of sleep.

So although I had no words for how new it was, I saw it all and remembered it all. At least I remember it in bits, how solid his chest was as it gave under the weight of my hand, the awful lightness of his fingers, the light of his eye, the surprising weight of his head, the weightlessness of his mouth, how substantial he was outside of me, though inside there was no end to him.

I came all over the place, as was only to be expected. So it was some time before I worried for him, for the sweat, for the gathering lightness and the fear on his face. I worried for him as he slipped into the helpless and surprising centre of himself, the air over his shoulders fluttering in agitation and his eyes on mine. I did not know what might happen. I thought he might die or weep or disappear. I did not stop it.

I felt it first, a tidal bore, running with unexpected slowness into the very heart of me. A kind of bark from Stephen. Then silence. For the first time since he touched me, I felt frightened. That last wave of his was still going through me. I don’t think it stopped. I think it is going through me now.

*

He is cheerful in the morning and sane. I can’t believe it was that simple. The sound of the bath water running, the smell of toast and Stephen talking to the toaster saying ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to give it up now. I’m afraid you’re going to have HUP! Sorry about that.’

I wonder if my body might be blank as a sheet, but in the bath I am all there, soft and tough, blood and bone, each breast jealous of the other and the kisses it remembers. There is a hopeful glow of pink fighting back through the white where Stephen left his mark.

We are shy in the kitchen. I wonder if I might be pregnant. He looks at me in the way you might look at a woman who is pregnant.

We drive into work, while my body secretly remembers all the lettermaking on the white sheets. M was one of them, a touching O, an informal kind of R, for Rumple or embRace, a hilarious K which was just too complicated.

Most of the words made no sense. KORMA for example. There was also DATA, a more reciprocal DATTA, and a very fine HAT of which the T was so distinctive I fell out of the bed. All this as we drive into work—that was another one, with a hip-popping W and an R where Stephen cried. Oh he cried.

He cried. So I made love to him carefully; using my hands carefully to remind him where his body was and where it stopped, to remind him where it stopped and where it turned into something else. Because he was so substantial outside of me but inside there was no end to him. There was no end to him and no telling so I just lost it instead and nearly crashed the car.

‘Watch it,’ says Stephen. He seems solid enough now. He seems fine. I would have said he was a new man, if I could be sure that man was the right word. He talks to me about buildings we pass, wonders what an office block would look like if the glass just melted, if the carpets started growing, if the phones started ringing like Angelus bells.

‘No tricks,’ I say.

‘Sorry?’

‘Just. When we get there. When we hit air. No tricks.’

‘Who me?’

‘Promise.’

He leans over and kisses me until the lights go green. The shock of his mouth is like everything we did last night all at once. If this is his promise I believe him, though in retrospect, and I have had quite a bit of retrospect, the lights stayed red for an unnaturally long time.