Fascination (11 page)

The sun hammers down and I sip my cold beer slowly, watching the green waves of the Atlantic roll endlessly in. The woman who runs this bar is playing Brazilian rock music. She has a slight and firmly muscled figure and is wearing a pale blue t-shirt, tight enough to reveal the precise shape of her small, unsupported breasts. Her hair is dyed blonde. She smiles over at me, holding up another beaded, chill bottle of beer. I shake my head. I note these details and feel nothing more. The beer I am drinking is ideally cold. A faint breeze comes off the ocean. And I wonder if I am finally free of Wallace Kilmaron at last.’

It is six in the morning and I sit in my kitchen looking out at the garden, watching the sun slant obliquely past the old lime tree and across my lawn to reveal the dense silver mesh of spiders’ webs linking the grass stems. For a few seconds, as the earth turns and the sun rises, my tufty rectangle of suburban lawn flashes in my fascinated eyes like a burnished shield – before becoming dull green grass again, my quotidian epiphany gone for ever. And I think: where and when had I seen that before? Which of the myriad interlocking memories woven through my life had fired there? Then my moment of transcendence becomes mundane: I say to myself, I really must have my mower repaired, soon – Felicia will want the lawn cut and it is my constant ambition to pre-empt her reproaches and complaints.

‘And there among the grass fell down / By his own scythe the Mower mown.’ ‘Damon the Mower’ by Andrew Marvell. I must stop thinking about poetry.

I’m the first of the household awake and dressed. Upstairs I can hear my wife, Felicia, moving about in the bathroom. My baby son, Gareth (I’ve never really liked that name – my father-in-law’s), sleeps on. Has there ever been a more narcoleptic infant, I wonder? We wake him, late, and he becomes immediately fractious and angry – isn’t it meant to be the other way round?

‘Edward,’ Felicia calls down, ‘Could you make me a cup of tea, darling?’

You never liked the town, right from the start. When Dad and Mum parked the car on the front and Dad stepped out and began to run on the spot, doing his deep breathing exercises, and you heard Mum make her inevitable remark about the extra oxygen
molecule in the ozone, you wandered off, embarrassed by Dad, and contemplated the shingle beach, the mouse-grey sea and the pier and the tawdry stucco of the hotels and the houses. You searched the idlers on the promenade, and the strollers by the surf’s edge looking for a sign, some signal that living in this town would be all right, would provide some consolation. A modest quotidian epiphany would have sufficed (you’d been reading Joyce) – but your eyes remained unenlightened and your soul sagged again.

Felicia kisses me and I climb into our (her) Volvo. She’s pleased that I’m writing these articles, back being a proper journalist again, albeit freelance, earning ‘real money’, as she calls it, secretly delighted that I have abandoned poetry. I spent three weeks on my piece for
revolver
and she couldn’t believe I was doing it unpaid (she did not regard six complimentary offprints of the article as proper recompense). Spending all this time writing ‘The Image of the Train in Contemporary British Poetry’ was not gainful employ, in her opinion. I wanted to say: but your bank pays you six – no eight – times as much as I earn in a good year, so why shouldn’t I do something I actually take pleasure in? But some residual shame at being a kept man made me ring Phil (at Felicia’s urging, her wheedling) and to my surprise he gave me this commission. And so I kiss my wife goodbye, start the engine and drive off to research this, my third article on the new generation of women athletes (sportsbabes) for
Elite
magazine: first the fencer, then the cyclist, now the high jumper.

You were glad you had resisted Mum’s urging – her wheedling – that you should find a hostel or a YMCA, and had insisted, instead, on a bedsit. It was above a bakery and the smell of warm bread coming through the floorboards seemed to reassure her as she poked around while you and Dad brought up the suitcases and the turntable, the amplifier and the speakers. The window looked out on the garden and Mum stood there identifying the shrubs and trees: forsythia, a laurel, sycamore and lime. Ash, Dad said. No,
lime, Mum insisted. They stood around for a while, reluctant to let you go, reluctant to leave you to your freedom, but your set face, your pointed refusal to suggest a cup of tea or a final stroll eventually drove them away. ‘Bye, Edward, darling,’ Mum said, kissing you farewell, ‘don’t work too hard.’ Dad remonstrated: ‘Do work too hard, that’s what he’s here for.’

When they left you put up your posters – I remember the dark girl wrapped in clingfilm, and Aristide Bruant with his red scarf – and then went to find a pub – the Cornwallis – where you drank a pint of beer and smoked three cigarettes and wondered again how someone as manifestly intelligent as you had managed to fail, splendidly and unequivocally, his best subject at school: history.

I don’t like the town at all, and not just because of the jets flying in low above it on their approach to Gatwick airport. Everything seems ‘newish’, which is worse than new, and everywhere (the tethered saplings, the themed roundabouts, the preponderance of road signs, the neatly planted verges) is evidence of the town planner’s homogeneous hand. There is a historic centre to the place but I never even reach it (and so have to imagine its church with the fourth-highest steeple in Sussex, the remains of the Norman castle and the Georgian brewery) as the ring road directs me inexorably towards the football ground and the sports complex where I am to meet Juliana Lewkowitz and watch her train.

At the crammer, your tutor for History was a hard-faced woman called Mrs Franzler. Mrs Franzler asked you what university you had applied for and you told her it was Oxford. What do you want to read? she asked. History, you said. When she asked you why you had failed your History A-level you said you’d had a mini nervous breakdown – had stared at the paper for three hours and not written a word. Not a single word? Not even a mark. Her eyes narrowed with suspicious disbelief and she set you an essay of astonishing complexity on the 1813 Corn Laws. So let’s see just how
clever you are, then, she said. Outside the building, you leant against a tethered sapling and smoked a consoling cigarette. Then you went home to your bedsit to work and you saw the girl.

I walk across the stadium towards a small group of athletes in track suits, sitting on the grass listening to a taut, over-muscled man in white shorts and a white t-shirt who is reading from a clipboard. I’m looking for Juliana Lewkowitz, I say. The man ignores me and carries on talking – he’s talking about food, about calories, proteins and carbohydrates. Excuse me, I say. Would you mind not interrupting? the man says coolly, finally looking at me. I’m from
Elite
magazine, I say, here to interview Juliana Lewkowitz. I suddenly obtain his full attention. We move away from the others and he introduces himself: Dale Auden he says, he’s the club coach – Juliana’s coach. Any relation to W.H., I ask? W.H. who? I must stop thinking about poetry. Juliana, it transpires, has a bit of a sniffle. He has sent her home.

You were unlocking your door when the girl came clumping carefully down the stairs from the bedsit above. Her eyes were on her very high heels as she descended sideways, stooped like an old person, fearful she’d fall. Her streaked blonde hair hung forward over her face and, as she reached your landing and safety, she straightened up and with both hands swept it back over her forehead. At that moment your heart felt taut, over-muscled, and you opened your mouth to gulp more oxygen. You smiled hello.

‘Just moved in?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Right. See you.’

You sat for an hour trying to write something about the Corn Laws and failed. She had a scab on her left knee.

I call Felicia from the Tudor Lodge hotel and explain the Juliana situation: there is no point in driving all the way back to Oxford simply to turn round and drive back here the next day. Don’t forget
we’ve got dinner at Tim and Rosie Moreton’s, tomorrow, Felicia reminds me. I have forgotten: I wanted to forget. Don’t be back too late, she warns, gently. After I hang up I realize I’ve neglected to ask how Gareth is.

The Tudor Lodge hotel is just off the ring road, a mile from the sports complex. It is modern, newish, like everything else in this town. It has a gym and a small swimming pool, a pitch-and-putt mini golf course, a bar called the Portcullis and a restaurant called the Escutcheon. Soft porn films are available on a pay-per-view channel in the privacy of your own room. There is no need for me to leave its precincts.

You were trying to write another of Mrs Franzen’s terrifying essays (on Palmerston’s second government, 1859–65) when the girl knocked on your door. Did you by any chance have a screwdriver? she wanted to know. She needed to change a plug. You didn’t have a screwdriver,
per se
, but you did have, to your vague embarrassment, a multi-function penknife that possessed a screwdriving component and which you were happy to lend to her. In the time it took her to change her plug you managed to tidy your room, boil a kettle and take down the poster of the dark girl in clingfilm.

‘Thanks very much,’ the girl said, handing back your penknife.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ you managed to say. And she thought about it for a second and said, yes, why not? Wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee.

Her name was Yvonne. She wanted to be a nurse. She was working as a cashier in a bookmaker’s, trying to save money. She took three sugars. She had a boyfriend called Tony. The scab on her knee (her personal escutcheon) had disappeared. She had been born in Bedford. She declined your offer of a cigarette (she only smoked menthol). She had a pretty, small-featured, pouty, aggressive face – as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether to sulk or be angry. She hated this town too but it was cheaper than London. Her blonde-streaked hair was thick and long. She asked you no
questions about yourself. You wondered how you could arrange to let her know your name.

Dale Auden has instructed me to be at the stadium early, at seven, and I arrive as requested, with a mild hangover (three post-prandial brandies in the Portcullis while I read Elizabeth Bishop for my next
revolver
article: ‘The Impossibility of Desire in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop’). To my vague irritation I am the first person and the stadium is locked. A bus pulls up at the nearby bus stop and a tall girl descends, carrying a navy blue grip, and she comes over towards me. She’s wearing jeans and a multi-pocketed cerise windcheater, her dark hair is pulled back from her strong Slavic face in a pony tail. She’s a good two inches taller than me and I am five foot eleven (all right, five foot ten).

She smiles, showing her white, uneven teeth.

‘Hi,’ she says, ‘Dale not here yet? Typical.’

I say, my breath suddenly short: ‘You must be Juliana.’

‘Edward,’ Yvonne said when you opened the door (who told her your name?). ‘Can you drive?’

‘Yes,’ you said. ‘Why?’

‘Couldn’t do me an enormous favour, could you?’

Yvonne handed you the keys of a cerise Ford Fiesta parked outside the baker’s.

‘This your car?’

‘Tony’s,’ she said with uncommon vehemence. You couldn’t help noticing she seemed agitated. ‘He was meant to be here an hour ago.’

‘Tony?’

‘Bastard.’

In the car, Yvonne offered you one of her menthol cigarettes. You declined.

‘I really appreciate this, Edward,’ she said, blowing smoke at the windscreen. ‘But it’s, you know, kind of like really important.’

You said you were glad to help. In fact you were excited to be
sitting with this girl in her boyfriend’s car, pleased to be leaving your half-finished essay behind (on the decline of villeinage in fourteenth-century England) and you couldn’t help noticing as you reached to switch on the headlamps how Yvonne’s denim skirt had ridden really quite far up her thin, pale thighs.

‘Where are we off to?’ you asked.

‘Kent,’ she said. ‘Then Gatwick airport.’

Dale Auden and I watch Juliana Lewkowitz warm up with a few fifty-metre sprints and continue watching as she strips off. I half listen to Dale drone on (about pylometric exercises, about arm drive and leg plants) as I take in the lanky, lethargic grace of this girl as she bends and stretches. Everything is in proportion but longer, somehow, like an El Greco or a Klimt. I like this notion and decide to open my article with the concept of a Klimt nude made modern athletic flesh. Or maybe Egon Schiele, I reconsider, as I look at Juliana’s thin, pale thighs, her arms, her wrists, her fingers. Her minute shorts and vest are made of a stretchy, clinging quasifabric that reveals the jut of her pelvic bones and flattens her small breasts on her ribcage.

Dale sets the bar of the high jump at what seems to be my height and Juliana paces out her run. Dale, rather like a drill instructor, yaps out instructions (‘Lateral lean!’ ‘Leg loading!’ ‘Mass transfer!’) as Juliana tightens her pony tail and then begins to rock to and fro as she contemplates her first jump of the day. Then, in a flattening arc, she runs, she lopes, she bounds up to the jump and throws herself up, twisting on to her back, arms and head first, over the bar, straightening her legs as she sails over to land on the inflated mattress – which gives a wheeze and a gasp (of astonishment?) as this flying girl falls backwards on to it.

Juliana climbs off, wincing with displeasure at her successful jump, one finger freeing the seam of her tiny shorts from the cleft of her buttocks.

‘Crap,’ Dale shouts at her. ‘Absolute crap.’