Exposure (6 page)

'Like your pearl earrings,' said Suzannah. 'It's sort of monastic, I suppose—shaving your head like that. Paring yourself down. You refine yourself, show you mean business. Then off out to stab a couple of asylum-seekers and down to the pub for a few gallons of beer to celebrate.'

'No, Suzannah. It's exaggerated. It's all exaggerated in the press,' Alistair said.

'You can't argue with photographs.'

'Suzannah, that's ridiculous. Photographs tell incredible lies.'

'Like propaganda,' Luke said. 'The Nazis.'

'Not in England, for God's sake.'

'Why not?' said Rosalind. 'Probably they con us all the time and we just think it's the truth.' She pulled out her chair and sat down. They all watched her unfold her napkin and lay it on her lap.

'No, I see,' said Suzannah.

'Can we start, Mum?'

'Of course. I'm not stopping anyone.'

'It looks delicious, darling. Such a—'

Rosalind scraped her chair out suddenly and said, 'Salt and pepper.'

As a gesture towards acknowledging the incredible tactlessness of starting a conversation about newspapers, Suzannah lowered her voice to a stage whisper and carried on: 'You can't argue with the fact of a death, though, Alistair. The man got stabbed.'

'You can argue with why it happened. The press interprets things.'

'You're telling me there's no racial tension in places like Dover and Folkestone?'

'I'm saying it's hard to know how much of it is exaggerated—or caused—by the press.'

'Dad, I saw a woman spit out of a car at this Albanian guy. It was pretty bad.'

'I'm not saying there's nothing. I'm saying—'

'And the b & b on the corner of your road had a sign saying, "Asylum scum not welcome". That was pretty bad, too.'

'They're threatened, Alistair. It's not surprising. We all are. We have no sense of national identity any more. You try living on the edge of a country—a weird outpost—with people passing through all the time, never staying. Ferries coming and going. Europe coming to get you. That'll only make it harder to know who you are. Like a constant tide wearing you down—in both directions.'

'I grew up there, actually.'

'Oh, yes. I keep forgetting,' Suzannah said.

After supper they went into the drawing room while Rosalind and Luke made coffee. The Chopin CD was still playing quietly, on repeat. Alistair turned it off. There was something exhausting about it, the piano going on and on.

'Why have you been so secretive about your past? It wouldn't have mattered, you know,' Suzannah said.

He laughed. 'Wouldn't it?'

'I certainly wouldn't have cared.'

You would have been disgusted, he thought. You're the worst snob of them all. He smiled at her. 'You would have found it funny because it would have upset your father,' he said. So, he still had the capacity to humour them, to prettify their disgusting prejudices, making them sound playful—exuberant. 'Them', he thought. Still 'me' and 'them' after thirty years.

'Would I? Oh, God. You might be right. Maybe I am as terrible as you think.' She took off her shoes and lay back on the sofa. 'Am I allowed a whisky anyway?'

'You are.'

It was strange. They had never got on so well. Not that he trusted her for a second. She still smiled at nothing in particular, in her secretive way, as if she knew all about him.

But you can forget all that, he told himself—she does know now. You can stop being afraid. He gave her the whisky and noticed how the wilted leaves hung off the tree outside the window onto the garden. It tapped a spiny branch on the glass as if it was asking to be let in. He went over and drew the curtains.

'What are you going to do?' she said.

'I don't know.'

'You can't work any more, I suppose.'

'No. Not after this—no.'

'Perhaps you should move to France or something. Spain.'

'Perhaps. Perhaps I should just move away.'

As he said this, he felt a deep cleft of regret and confusion open inside him. He was falling into it, falling into himself.

Had he done this deliberately? After a life of exercising such intense control, it was as if he had suddenly indulged the part of himself that told him, 'Stand up! Shout! Spit!' in the middle of the stalls at the latest play. He might still have been a respectable member of the audience.

 

Late that night, as he shut the door of the spare bedroom and switched on the bedside lamp, he remembered saying his prayers once with his mother. It was the first occasion on which he had realized that she did not know all the answers.
'Why
do you, though?' he had asked her.

'Because that's what you do at night.'

'But
why?'

'What do you mean "why"?
Because everyone does.
Do you want to be the only litde boy who doesn't say his prayers before bed?' She looked at him with pantomime horror on her face.

He had thought about it for a moment, kneeling by the bed in his pyjamas, holding his favourite toy soldier. He opened his mouth to argue.

'Oh, just say them, Al, there's a good boy. I'm tired out.'

What a lot of trouble he had been to her. He could not bear to think how tired out she must really have been.

The first time Luke saw Arianne she was standing on a table at a bar called Noise. She was holding up one of her stiletto-heeled boots and laughing at the man on the floor beneath her. He seemed to be talking to her through gritted teeth, his hunched shoulders jerking with each word, and he pushed his hands into his pockets with a violent kind of casualness. Just then, a glass by the girl's foot tipped over, rolled off the edge of the table and smashed. She noticed this and kicked another one after it.

When the second glass smashed, the scene responded—as if that was the signal it had been waiting for. It was as if the car-chase music had begun. There was a flurry of movement; a man jumped up unexpectedly from the shadows of the leather banquette behind the table. Now that he looked Luke could see that, incredibly, three people were just sitting there, still drinking, while all this was going on. The new man shouted above the music, 'OK, why don't you leave her alone now, Dan? I really think that's enough, don't you?' He took off his jacket with enough difficulty to suggest that he was very drunk. The sleeves got pulled inside-out and he had to tug his hands free; one of his arms flicked back with a jerk and put him off balance. In his T-shirt, he provided a reference by which you could judge the incredible height and width of the other man. One of the girls from their banquette stood up now. No one paid any attention to her. She eased her way round the two men as apathetically as if they had been large rocks and made her way over to the bar for another drink.

'Leave her
alone?'
the larger man shouted back incredulously. 'She's gone completely fucking
mental.
Look at her. She's standing on a fucking
table,
Andy. What do you mean, leave her alone? To what? Smash the fucking place up?'

'Um—hello?' the girl shouted. Her voice was piercing, furious.

'You're just upsetting her more. That's all I'm saying, man.'

'So what? She's been a litde
bitch
this evening. Do we care if she's getting upset? She's having a tantrum. Oh, poor baby.'

'Hello? I am actually
here,
you know?'

'Are
you, Arianne? Are you here—on the same
planet
as the rest of us?'

'Oh, fuck you.'

'Fuck
you.
What makes you think it's OK for you to stand on a table and kick glasses on the floor? When did you get a letter from fucking
God
saying it was OK for you to do that? No one else did. I never got that letter.'

He sounded Dutch. It was an Americanized Euro voice. His sense of the dramatic had obviously been acquired from action films: it was lead-weighted with portentousness that no real-life circumstances could have fulfilled. His posture was studied, dumbbell refined. But you could have had nothing but respect for the breadth of his shoulders.

Luke turned abruptly to the friend he was standing with at the bar. 'Is that Andy Jones?' he said.

The DJ let one tune recede and another take over, and the dancing became faster in the background.

'Who? Where?'

'That guy. By the table behind us—with the girl on it. Andy Jones.'

'Andy Jones...'

'That
guy. The one on the right, in front of the door. You must be able to see him.'

'I can
see
him, Luke, I just can't remember who the fuck Andy Jones is. Do I know him? Is he famous?'

'We were at fucking school with him. Didn't he, like, act or something? Something artistic and vaguely poncy. Was it the choir? You did all that stuff. I
know
you remember Andy Jones.'

What was Andy Jones doing with that incredible girl? It was against nature somehow. Not that he was with her—just near her, really. She was an independent figure in the scene.

Arianne would always give him that impression—even much later, when she angled the mirror so they could see themselves making love on the bedroom floor. He watched her watching herself, analysing her own performance. He felt fascinated and lonely. Was Narcissus drawn to his own reflection as much out of fear of others as love of himself?

In spite of her beauty there was little genuine conceit in Arianne. Her self-obsession was born of alienation, of the early disappointment of realizing her parents had an 'open marriage' and that the word 'love' was liable to interpretation by sophisticated minds. Her consultations of all reflective surfaces were made with the intention of reinforcing self-sufficiency. Arianne feared that she could not surrender herself to dependence on another person, no matter what superficial trappings of it she allowed to exist. In fact, she was increasingly aware that the superficial trappings—financial, practical—were merely conjuror's diversions she had developed over the years. These were ultimately destined to fail in convincing both her and the men she chose.

'So, I think I'll go over,' Luke said.

'You think you'll go over. Right. What for, exactly?'

'To say hi to Andy Jones.'

'Oh, I
see!

'So, back in a minute, OK?'

'Luke?'

'Yes?'

'I'll bet you a million quid that big one's her boyfriend.'

Luke grinned and finished his drink. 'Look, this is Andy Jones we're talking about. I can't miss an opportunity like this.'

'Yes. What you can't do is chat up girls who are plainly insane and who are obviously
with other men!

'I know that. I do know that,' he said.

He put down his glass and turned to move off towards the table, but before he could, something else was said—something quiet between the two men—and the big man knocked Andy Jones off his feet.

It was a perfectly timed right hook to the jaw; a punch Dan had always affectionately termed his 'classic'. The atmosphere in the bar changed immediately. It liquefied. A wave of bar staff crashed at the edge of the bar and the distinction between dancers and drinkers dissolved as people stopped moving. 'Where? Where?' they said to one another as they strained to see what had happened. They wanted a bit of blood, a bit of human drama to mark out this evening among all the others. The strobe light was more apparent, slower and more sinister without the dancing. For a moment it was like cold, flashing moonlight, bouncing off all the hard surfaces—the glasses and table edges, the geometric aluminium chairs. The small act of violence had changed the room into a store of weapons.

To Luke, it seemed that the whole scene had spun out from the girl on the table, that she had effortlessly choreographed everyone around her. An entire bar full of people. He would have liked to make this observation to his friend James, but James laughed at him for the grandiose things he said about girls. James thought girls were for sex and men were for friendship, and it amazed Luke how many women his friend had to brush off.

Arianne got off the table. Now that he no longer had an opportunity to introduce himself to her, Luke felt invisible and drifted over towards her with the litde crowd of people who had been near the bar. They stood less than a metre away. People were using the word 'ambulance'. He heard the girl say, 'Oh, for fuck's sake, why do you
do
this shit, Dan?'

She was tall, about five eleven, so the large man—Dan—did not tower over her in her high heels. Somehow she managed to look impressed while she put her boot back on; she kept her eyes fixed on Dan's while she pulled it into place. She had an accent, too—it might have been French.

'Really, why are you such a total wanker?'

'Why? Because that's what you fucking
turn people into
,' Dan said.

Luke remembered that exchange—often. He remembered the unexpected pulse of anxiety across the girl's face and the instant softening of her manner. 'Hey, come on,' she said. 'I'm wasted. Let's stop fighting, baby. I want to go home. Let's go to your place, shall we?'

Luke was astonished by her voice. In a matter of seconds it had gone from searing anger to honeyed fragility. He couldn't help imagining that such range might have other applications.

All of the others in the little crowd were trying to catch sight of Andy, but Luke just watched the girl. They were separated by less than a metre—but there was no reason in the world for her to notice him. She put her hand on Dan's face. 'Oh, Daniel, you
hurt
him. What have you gone and done now?' she said. The big man slumped for her like a circus elephant. Then she turned to Andy, who was being comforted by the other girls from the banquette. His nose was bleeding and he was sitting on the floor. She leant down to him: 'Andy, honey, are you badly hurt?'

Following her, Dan shook Andy's knee back and forth in a vigorous, playful way. 'Hey, look, I'm sorry, man,' he said. 'I totally lost it there.' Then he raised his arm to give Andy a genial slap on the shoulder.

Arianne caught his wrist. 'Dan's
sorry
,' she said. 'He's very sorry and he's a
total wanker.
I will call you tomorrow, Andy. We
will
speak about this, sweetie. Don't worry.'