Chapter 43

 

It was Saturday and I was teaching non-stop. My pupils had had their audition results and the lucky ones were keen to start polishing their solos. The others were consoling themselves with new material. With such relentless demand I was glad I’d stayed sober at the party.

Jean Dowman, the next-door neighbour and leading light of the horticulture society, was one of the audition failures. She was licking her wounds with a recitative about finding joy in Jesus. Recitatives aren’t easy; they’re like the spoken part of an opera and have very little tune. To perform them well, expression is all.

She bleated the song in a monotone, with less expression than the way she had asked to borrow a cup of sugar from me – or rather Jenny – that morning.

I stopped her and tried to explain what was wrong.

‘Look at the words. This is about joy. Do you have joy in Jesus?’

‘Yes I do.’ She blinked at me as if she felt it was none of my business.

‘Now show me in the way you perform this song.’

Her second attempt to share the joy was even more grudging than the first.

At least the work was easy. No need to warm up. No struggle with my slow body and criticising mind until I tumbled into the zone and started to truly make music. No need to be producing my best. I didn’t have to do anything. Just react.

 

 

Gene answers the door in shirt, jeans, wet hair and bare feet – and grey eyes heavy with exhaustion.

‘Is that a hangover,’ I say, ‘or have you had an even worse day than me?’

He turns and leaves me to close the door. I follow him up, catching the scent. Skin fresh from the shower. Damp hair with a faint fragrance of exotic wood.

The living room is still full of boxes. The shelves in the alcove are empty. I try to joke about my day of musical purgatory. He picks up a cigarette from an ashtray and sucks the last mouthful, then takes another from a packet and lights it off the dying one.

That is seriously intensive smoking.

He turns out the main light so that the only illumination is from the kitchen and the street lamp outside. I put my bag on the sofa. The Dictaphone is already on the cushions, red recording light primed.

Next to where he expects I’ll sit.

He walks behind the sofa, takes another drag from the cigarette then kneels down so that one hand and his chin are leaning on the back of the sofa. His face is close to me.

The semi light, as ever, makes his bone structure sculptural. He takes another drag on the cigarette and tilts his head away to blow the smoke, then turns to me.

Ready to start. And we’ve hardly said hello, talked about last night, or anything.

Something’s wrong. I’ve never seen him smoke like that, one after another. I don’t relax back on the cushions as he expects. I twist around and look at him.

‘We don’t have to do that.’

The grey eyes look at me. It’s such a cold, judging expression that it actually scares me. What am I starting by saying this?

Like in the car the previous night, as soon as I put him under pressure my body tries to tell me not to. My throat is dry and there’s a pulse trembling in my jugular. As if I’m going against some deep conditioning that says I must obey him.

For a moment he doesn’t say anything and I wonder what he’s going to do. Then he takes my left wrist. His cold fingers find my pulse. A few seconds of rapid beats and he takes his fingers away and starts to talk.

His voice is quiet, the whisper like Karli’s rich mezzo voce.

‘You’re falling, you’re falling very fast. The wind is scouring your face. There is nothing in your head, or in your body, but pure, blinding speed.’

I want to resist and tell him no I’m not, but the more I do the harder that pulse beats, like it’s being fed back to me through headphones.

He goes on. ‘This is what it feels like to fall out of the sky.’

And it does feel exactly like falling.

‘Down you go. Then the parachute opens and you've stopped.’

Yes I have. Thank God because I couldn’t take much more. He’s caught me, got me as surely as if I landed in his hand.

‘You’ve stopped in mid-air and are floating; in silence, clouds and brilliant sunshine.’

He gets up and pads to the kitchen door. ‘Now you’re starting to go down again. Not falling now. You’re drifting. All around you is bright sunlight. It is dazzling and warm, like being in a cloud. At last you can breathe.’

Yes, I can breathe. I feel my chest slowing. There is an electronic tick-tick as he adjusts the thermostat on the wall. The gas flares up in response. It makes a sound like wind snatching a flag.

He moves quietly onto the sofa beside me. A smell of cigarette smoke mingles with skin fresh from the shower and exotic wood.

That fragrance smacks me back to the reality of us in this room.

I hear locks turning and the heavy slam of the front door in the warehouse that adjoins the flat. I erupt to my feet and go to the window, legs moving before I’m even aware they are.

Below, on the path, a figure in a checked skirt and a parka walks away from the house to the gate, a big cardboard file in her hands. I see street lamps, parked cars, indicators and headlights twinkling through bushes as cars circle the roundabout by the hospital, everything in urban amber monochrome. A Saturday night in Vellonoweth, England. I’m still in the world.

My nails curl into my palm; in case I slip again. Slip where? To where he wants to put me. The tendons in my left arm obligingly keep me grounded with a lance of pain.

I don’t want to do that tonight. Gene, talk to me. Communicate with me. You’re alive and you’re warm; I can smell you. You’re flesh and you’re upset and if you were Jerry I’d put my arms around you.

I don’t know how to say any of this to him. I’m breathing fast again. All I’ve done is get up and go to the window but it feels like I lifted a two-tonne car.

I turn around. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’

He reaches down beside the sofa and tosses me the packet. I take one out, then have to go to him for a light. He ignites the end with polite care, narrowed eyes assessing what’s going on.

Is he angry? Or just calculating his next clever move?

I don’t want the cigarette, I just want something to be in control of. The nicotine gushes in, takes hold of my heartbeat. It’s not pleasant but at least it’s something I’m doing to myself. I’m in charge of me again.

‘You look as if you’ve had a hell of a day,’ I say, breathing out on smoke.

He drags his hand wearily through his hair. ‘Do you really want to know? I have spent the afternoon hypnotizing people with Alzheimer’s and senile dementia.’

I believe him totally. This is not calculated, he looks too tired.

The only thing I can think of to say is banal and obvious. ‘You were working on a Saturday?’

He drags his other hand over his head again. His damp hair flops between his fingers, dark as his eyebrows, making his skin pale and drained.

‘It’s a thing they asked me to do at the care home. I put the patient into a trance and ask them to talk about their memories. An artist listens to it later and paints a picture for their relatives.’

He takes a drag on the cigarette and blows the smoke up towards the ceiling. ‘After I’d done four of them the nurses told me no one else had ever managed to get through to them. They’ve got no attention span left. Poor old things.’

He takes a deep drag on the cigarette, and then one more, as though he’s in a hurry to finish it because what he really wants to do is start another. Now he’s not trying to hypnotise me he looks nervous. His bare foot across his knee is beating a fidgety rhythm.

I return to the sofa and sit next to him. If it was Jerry I would pull those slim shoulders towards me, stroke the fine hairs at the back of his neck. But it’s Gene and I don’t feel I can even touch his hand.

My gaze drifts to the packing crates. I am sure they are in exactly the same spot as the first time I came to the flat.

Perhaps if we do something practical that will take his mind off it. Break this stalemate.

I take another drag on my cigarette – unwanted now, it tastes disgusting – then stub it out in the glass ashtray beside the chrome leg of the sofa. I stand up.

‘Shall I give you a hand unpacking?’

‘No. I’ll get round to it sometime.’

I roll up my sleeves, go to one of the boxes, inspect the lid. It’s still taped, sealed. ‘How long are you going to leave it like this? Come on, just one box won’t hurt.’

‘No. Or I won’t know where anything is. Leave it.’

I give up on the box and wave my hand towards the Dictaphone with its waiting red light. ‘We shouldn’t be messing around with all this. We should be out in a bar getting smashed out of our skulls. Are you coming?’ I go back to the sofa and reach for my bag.

Even if he doesn’t come, I might as well go, he seems hardly aware I am here.

Before I can lift the bag he puts his hand on it. His eyes look at me, slashes of dark in his pale face. ‘Please. Let’s just go back to where we started.’

The appeal shocks me. He looks completely defenceless.

A cynical voice inside me observes that this is why he’s so effective as a hypnotist. He will not give up. Drug addicts in appalling pain haven’t been able to resist him when he gets going. Or people who can’t even think any more. What did he tell me? You find the way. He can appeal to me, be vulnerable, spin a plausible yarn (yes I’m doubting that business about the Alzheimer’s people). I believe he will do anything he thinks will get me to go with him.

His hand is on my bag. Pale skin, contours shadowed in the light from the kitchen, resting on white leather. Carefully manicured nails, fingers leanly shaped like the rest of him.

A devilish thought enters my head. How far could I push this? A frisky game of spin the bottle for two, perhaps? I think he probably would. He knows he’s sexy. He takes care with his appearance. Those jeans he’s wearing aren’t just any old jeans, they’re expensive and the shirt is Paul Smith. That haircut is West End too. You find the way, he said, and I bet there have been times when he’s used his charms as part of the game.

He may even be hoping that’s what I’d respond to.

But it would just be a game. Like the games he was playing all night at the party.

Which is why I wouldn’t.

This obviously matters to him. Why? The challenge? But he doesn’t look excited, he looks exhausted. Like someone who’s cold and can only think about being warm again. Like me when I’ve had a bad day and all I want is my hands on those black and white keys.

Besides, when I turned up at his door looking for an antidote to my day, what did I expect? When you go to the house of a duet partner, you expect to play.

I let him put the bag on the floor. Lie back on the sofa. And let him talk.

This – this thing with the listening Dictaphone and the half light – is what we do.