Innocents (19 page)

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I knew to expect these calls. They unfailingly came ten or fifteen minutes after I walked in the door, suggesting that you watched the clock over your desk, waiting for me to finish school. That was a good sign. I approved of that.

I used the fact, once or twice, for emotional mileage.

We sat coiled on the couch, watching the evening news.

‘You always call me when I come home,’ I commented.

‘I get worried.’

‘I'm not gonna die.’ I shifted position—oh, how subtle I was!—so that you were forced to re-locate your hand further down my leg.

‘You didn't answer once,’ you said.

‘I was having coffee!’

I'd been invited along after school with some acquaintances. It was one of those awkward, ‘everyone standing here is going so we can't not invite you’ things. I sat and sipped politely in a cafe for an hour. I spent the whole time wondering what you'd think when I didn't pick up the phone.

You hand tightened on my ankle. You said, ‘I thought, That's it. She's gone.’

I waited tensely for those calls. Often, I sat right next to the telephone, just watching it. I always let you ring half a dozen times before I picked up the receiver. Then I tried to sound busy with something else while I spoke to you.

Usually, of course, I
was
busy. After school was snooping time.

I was a careful, thorough sleuth. I knew the importance of small clues—what you were reading; little things you mentioned; tiny, unconscious gestures.

I scoured your possessions with a secret agent's calm meticulousness, every afternoon before you got home from work. Your clockwork, nine-to-six routine was very useful. It's good when your quarry has habits you can rely on.

I went through your filing cabinet gradually and systematically. Each day I read your letters, both private and official. I knew the dates and details of your divorce, as well as the anguish it had caused you.

The filing cabinet in the study was like an extension of your brain that I could open and rifle through at any time. You filed the acrid letters from your ex-wife under
Miscellaneous
.

There were only a limited number of letters, of course. But finding them was just the start. I read them over and over again. I touched them like talismans, for luck, whenever I was alone in the house. My eyes searched automatically through the columns of words, seeking anything useful, any new idea that they inspired.

I continued to read the occasional journal you kept in the school exercise book that lay in the top drawer of your desk, beneath a pile of ancient accounts. I used it to invent myself in the image you had of me. If you wrote that I was charmingly impulsive, I exaggerated my impulsiveness threefold, waving my hands in the air and talking too fast, as I demanded presents and explained crazy new ideas. If you said you were worried that I barely ate, I was careful not to let you see me snacking.

It was like researching an enemy country so as to build the most effective weapon for the terrain.

It was this thoroughness that led me to look for clues everywhere. Even under the mattress.

I'd never thought of looking there before, but one afternoon after I'd checked all your drawers mechanically, already knowing what I'd find, I ran my hand swiftly along between the mattress and the bed. I don't know why.

And there they were, in a crumpled manila envelope.

The telephone by the bed made me jump when it rang. I froze, as though I'd been caught stealing. I counted to ten under my breath, then answered it with the envelope in hand.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey, darling.’

‘Hello!’ Expertly, I caught the receiver under my chin, leaving my hands free to probe the envelope.

‘You got home all right, then?’

The word
cunt
caught my eye. I nearly fainted with surprise, but I kept my part up perfectly.

‘No. I got chased up a lamp post by a pack of rabid giraffes. It was terrible.’

‘Don't be silly.’

‘Mmmm.’ I was astounded at what I'd found. I whinged, ‘When'll you be home? I'm hungry.’

You chuckled indulgently. ‘Are you? There's biscuits in the cupboard.’

‘I'm hungry for stir-fry.’

‘I'll be there soon. About an hour. Go and watch “Heartbreak High”.’

‘Okay.’

‘I love you,’ you told me, and hung up.

I stared at the papers in my hand.

These were like gold. What a find!

I read them speedily, scientifically, but my fingers shook.

I've still got them. I read them, occasionally. They make me guilty, but at least they remind me of you.

They're pornography, really.

That didn't shock me.

I'd read pornography—real, official pornography—before. It seemed stupid.

It was in a magazine that you had below your socks in a drawer. An ancient
Hustler
. You must have jerked off to it before you met me. I found it when we were still living in your old house. (Yes, darling, I was snooping even then.)

My first instinct had been to take offence, next time an opportunity presented itself. An unworldly girl could easily get away with being disgusted at what I'd found. It was ideal guilt-inducing material.

In an instant, I had formulated a plan: I would become silent and withdrawn. I'd fiddle with things, abstracted, anxious. You'd worry:

‘Baby? Baby?’

‘
Hmmmm? Sorry—I
…’ A shake of the head.

Then, when you, in desperation, sought for the problem, I would snivel a little, I thought, and confess what I'd found, turning big troubled eyes on you, inviting reassurance. That should be good for nights of anxious, careful lovemaking on your part.

But after a moment or two of flicking through this magazine, I abandoned this idea. I thought instead how sad it was that a man of such intense, desperate passions should find himself masturbating in front of cheap glossy paper. I experienced a surge of sympathy for you, darling, for the ordinariness of those old arousals, the loneliness of them.

This fallibility, this little patheticness, I surmounted in an instant. If you were a slightly different shape to the one I'd been led to expect, that was okay. I'd just tailor myself around you.

It was two years out of date when I found it. I suppose this only demonstrates the sameness of those magazines.

The stories were all simple; too simple. There are only six or seven adjectives you can use when writing smutty porn. The same words crop up again and again:
hot, wet, thrust
. The women all seemed to have silly, dated sex-kitten names like Kimberly and Taylor.

They were powerful images, of course. Especially for one with my past.

I'll admit that my heart beat a little faster and my hands shook imperceptibly when I saw the pictures. But it was more the
idea
that such pictures existed, than the images themselves. All those splayed airbrushed thighs, those pink plastic fingernails, those shameless
cunts
shaved in funny bikini patterns, grated on me. I soon grew bored. Besides, the models seemed to have such terrible taste in shoes. It was all gold sandals, pink slippers, thigh-high leather fuck-me boots. How can you have elaborate, operatic fantasies about a woman wearing gold sandals? I wondered.

There were a few erect penises, but again, the men to whom they were attached left me cold.

I had hoped vaguely, after the initial shock passed, that the magazine would give me some ideas. Clues. I turned the pages with my usual professional detachment.

But I soon realised that these trite fantasies wouldn't do at all. They were nothing like as vivid, as charged, as the scenarios I created every moment and lived out with you.

I smoothed it shut, and tucked it back underneath the socks, where it belonged.

But your own writings were different. They were personal. They were like private poetry; too exquisitely ridiculous to be read aloud.

I perused my treasure silently, speedily, braiding it in with my picture of you as I went.

You had never used words like
cunt
and
cock
and
cum
to my face. Whenever I swore—‘Fuck!’—you shook your head, more lover-injured than parent-angry. And yet here those harsh guttural words jumped out like splashes of red across the white page, impossible to ignore or excuse.

They aren't calm and sensible and well ordered like all your other correspondence. The writing is messier, too. They're fragmented—a paragraph on a scrap of tracing paper, a page torn from a notebook covered front and back—all savagely wrinkled with the force of your furtiveness as you shoved them into the envelope.

They're like a kind of shorthand. They're something you knew already, but took a deep pleasure in articulating.

The scenarios were already there in your mind, before you ever took up a pen. They've burned holes, they've been sitting there for so long.

They're like my pictures.

You were never as thoroughly bad as me, of course. Your fantasies, compared to my discarded ones, were almost tame. They bordered on the normal, though they had more bite than the everyday, the long-married. I couldn't imagine my uncle whispering such things—

—to my fat indifferent aunt.

Seeing these deeper desires—scrawled as intensely as I had once scribbled the outlines of my victims on expensive sketch paper—parading across the pages, made my mouth dry with a powerful, psychological lust.

I wanted to hear you confess your desires. I wanted to see you shiver and almost break before the weight of acknowledgement.

It wasn't your fault, what happened.

I provoked you, knowing what provocation would reveal. You were a scorpion I poked and prodded into stinging me.

It's funny how lusts don't seem to exist for you in your other secret world, in your journal. Nothing else is taboo in there. You confess to worrying you'll go bald; to fearing impotence; to hating yourself; but
never
to these desires. They're segregated from the rest of your secrets, in their manila envelope. They're like a limb you've tried to amputate.

And that's so terribly good of you that it brings tears to my eyes.

You were prepared to be a gentle man. Civilised, you had succeeded in subordinating your sadistic desires. They didn't fit in with your picture of humanity, and so you fought them down, lulled them into an uneasy slumber at the bottom of your consciousness.

I woke them. I did it deliberately.

Once, I read a magazine article about sadomasochism.

You can't guess, it said, under which neat lawn in this city lies the dungeon.

And I wondered about the anonymous man they'd interviewed, living above the dungeon. Were there times when, changing his socks or buttering toast, he forgot about the chamber under his feet and the racks and the whips and the manacles and the Internet site and the coded advertisements in obscure magazines? Or were his very footsteps charged with sexual significance, as he strolled about over the realisation of a fantasy?

Did he ever long to move house, to go somewhere innocuous, some house where there were no concrete neuroses buried beneath the kitchen tiles?

I did more than build a simple house around my fantasies. I built a whole artificial self.

I've realised now, too late, that sexual fantasies are fictions. Trying to make them real is like trying to converse according to an opera score.

I can't stand violence.

I close my eyes in graphic movie scenes.

I can't bear to see sadism made flesh. I hate booted feet belting into stomachs, blood dripping down foreheads, gunshots, stabbings, punches, slaps.

It's the
risk
that bothers me, I think. The risk of pain, to the hitter, the kicker, the shooter of guns. I can't bear the thought of risking myself, of leaving myself open to reciprocal attacks. I hate the way victims can so easily get up and retaliate, in the movies. So, for some funny twisted reason, my sympathy latches irrevocably onto anyone who's being hurt. I feel every blow. I wince and wince. My friends used to piss themselves laughing at the way I closed my eyes in horror movies, protecting my neck from the vampire with one hand.

In all my imagined violences, I existed only as a thin thread of control. I was all mind, in those fantasies, barely present save to shape and direct the responses of my victims.