Lurid & Cute (2 page)

— I do not think this is what this is, I said.

— Of course, she said. — Keep arguing.

I think mothers are the atmosphere in which you have to live and I guess I do like that but it's also a miniature form of persecution, in the most lovable way possible. But still, I tried very hard to do as my parents would have wanted, which at this point meant considering the less fortunate lives of other people. The man who was at reception this early in the morning seemed a little sad so I thought about him with affection. He had a difficult job, I was thinking, an arduous job, which presumably necessitated answering phones to the people supplying the kitchens, as well as kids calling for a practical joke, and a woman arriving at four in the afternoon needing a room right now, and so on, as well as the preparation of check-in and check-out forms, and the monitoring of the pool maintenance team, and also the use of the credit-card machine. It was not easy at all. His name was Osman, and Osman, I was definitely thinking, seemed to shroud a deeper pain. He turned round to find a stapler or other office accessory and there was a dark scar behind his ear, as if from some bayonet or sabre or machete. Maybe in the heyday of Osman he had once been a fearsome Caucasian warlord, but events had so conspired that Osman was now here: in a chain hotel, taking calls. While at home he kept his videos, perhaps videos where he surveyed his troops, and I hoped that he did, because it's important to keep some kind of link to your past.

— Have a nice day and come back soon! said Osman.

— You too, man, I said.

I did mean it. A woman wearing headphones was swabbing down the wooden decking outside the rooms. I wanted to give her a gentle smile but she didn't see me. Then I thought I saw my dead grandmother walking towards me, at least it looked like she looked in photographs. She seemed relaxed. It was very troubling. But when I was closer she was no longer my grandmother. She was nobody at all. So I tried to forget it. I could see the exit route back to something that I could call my ordinary life. It was very close. Inside the room the light was now brightly bleaching the curtains. I tried to turn off the ceiling fan because it was making this blurry kind of noise but instead I only turned on the bedside light. Romy didn't notice. I walked across to the desk, where my bag was propped. And although I was anxious to make what the pulp fictions must once have called
the perfect getaway
, I also wanted to kiss her goodbye. I don't know if that's pulp, or if it is then it's a different variant of pulp, the romance pulp, but still isn't that right – to kiss a girl goodbye while she's sleeping? Isn't that what the passionate do? So I walked to the bed, and bent over her. Romy was sleeping on her front, and beside her nose on the pillow there was a thin dark slick of blood.

whose reality he tries to doubt

Everyone thinks they will not be there when someone dies, I mean when someone dies who is not their endless and married love. Everyone thinks that things happen in regular sequences but of course they don't or not always. Time, as the fakir once put it, has this malicious ingenuity in the invention of affliction. In the end everything happens. Savage combinations are always possible and in fact I'm not sure they're combinations, so much as aspects of the same thing. This was the knowledge that was being forced on me while I stood there. I was fading in and out. I was like a hologram or optical illusion. Or like a neon sign. I was switching on and off and I was sinister. I looked down.
What kind of big shot are you?
I was saying to myself.
A fucking small one.
I looked up. The ceiling fan was still going round and round. That was basically a version of me too. I looked back down at Romy. Yes, everyone thinks they know the order in which things will happen but in fact this is not true at all. And also whether something has happened or not is rarely obvious. I think we tend to overexaggerate the idea that things are real. Or at least I was trying to think how real something was when it was so far entirely private. I mean, do your own mini quiz. When a gorgeous girl tries to kiss you in the back of a taxi when you're both high on ketamine, do you go home and tell your wife? I do not think so. You keep the gorgeous blonde to yourself as a stereoscope slide for winter evenings and therefore she does not exist at all. Or when your husband knows you do not smoke but you do in fact enjoy a secret cigarette, why do you upset his peace of mind? You find some chewing gum to sweeten your breath and go home as if nothing has happened. And if you act as if nothing has happened, if nothing in your behaviour ever hints that something has happened, then has it really happened? That's my question. That's what I mean by nothing happening, or one of the things I mean. At this precise moment this situation was only known to me and so it was maybe not known at all. Although it's not so easy to really think this when you are inside the situation itself.

with blood all over the picture

The blood looked red to me but in close-up the blood seemed black. It was a red liquid that was turning black or a black liquid turning red. It seemed to be flowing more and more – how to say this? –
freely
. I think
freely
is the usual word for
flowing
. Then I tried to say Romy's name, but it wouldn't – my voice. It did nothing at all. I tried to breathe and that was difficult too. It was like my heart was somewhere on the surface of my body. I could still taste the stale egg taste from breakfast in my gullet. In other words I felt very much underprepared, like the nightmare where you are giving a PowerPoint presentation but leave behind your laptop in some stranger's Chevrolet. I felt definitely ill at ease. Because if you imagine me at a speed-date session being asked to define myself then I'd easily say I was a model citizen. I don't think that's exaggerated. My grades in literature were good, my grades in mathematics were spectacular. I read the classical texts. I had a talent for exams. I am aware that not everyone has the opportunity for such talent and I am very grateful for that privilege. Do good, said my mother and father, and you will prosper. Take exams, be diligent. You are a prodigy, they told me! I used to think they had things right but now I really wasn't sure if this was, after all, enough. It turns out that you can have all the ancestors you want, they can hover in the air around you like candyfloss, but still, they cannot help you in your mania and distress. Inside the room, my thinking was as slow as the way dub music's slow. I was remembering an article about a boy who went to sleep and woke up to find a girl jumping out the window. I didn't really want to think that, with variations, that boy was me, but then the only other possibility that was not suicide was that somehow Romy had been afflicted by a seizure or attack. And naturally the whole narcotics business was the main culprit or cause for this in my head, and since I was the person who had supplied these narcotics, this was not something that pleased me very much. But also I wasn't now so interested in causes, I was more interested in
what happens next
. I'd never thought of a life like a structure but now it was exactly like that, my thinking, because I was picturing those videos where buildings get blown up, where they just curtsy or dissolve from within. And I didn't think I could be expected in this situation to know what to do. It seemed beyond the usual life skills an average citizen should possess. I looked out the window. The view outside the window was very still. The bathroom contained two hand towels, two bath towels, a bathrobe and a bath mat. In the toilet bowl some paper from the night before had inflated like a parachute or squid. On the wall there was another velvet painting: the naked torso of a black woman, with shiny breasts and sunglasses, against a turquoise background. While outside, my car was parked, oh outside where there was also sunlight and the sky and everything was ordinary. Clouds gathered. Clouds melted. If I'd turned on the radio I would have heard a voice explaining the effects of the weather system in our city, but I didn't, because I was running the hot tap, washing my hands. And I was thinking about Romy. For to think comprehensively has always been my genius. I had checked out without mentioning that there was a woman in my bed; I had sat in the restaurant unnoticed for over ten minutes. The neutral observer might therefore, I was thinking, draw the wrong conclusions. And although of course it was possible to do the ordinary thing, the legal thing, to go back to a man called Osman for help and explain, in abject supplication, that I'd found the body of my friend comatose in my bed, but that I was nothing to do with this situation, or only in the most minor way: yes I suppose I could have returned to Osman to discuss the problem of hospitals and police, but the voices in my head were not so normal. The voices in my head, they did their own thing. They tended to prefer I should keep this to myself.

which creates small traps and impasses

Her left arm was behind her back and her left cheek was squashed softly against the pillow. It was like a Kodachrome of a kid sleeping or a cherub but it also wasn't. First, I needed to mop up the blood on the pillow beside her, because it seemed the tender thing to do, and I always try to do the tender things. I don't think at this point I had finally decided on my total project. I took a bath towel and laid it on the blood. The white terry cloth became maroon. And I was thinking that maybe this was the first time I had ever seen another person's blood, I mean blood that wasn't a minor wound or a girl's period but proper flowing gore. I didn't want to touch it but I knew I had to. I had this fear of someone else's blood, like I had the vaporous fear of coming inside a girl without a condom. I don't think that's unusual. I took the towel up and tried to rinse it in the bathtub – which meant that I was leaving a tiny trail of blood on the bathroom floor which was tiny, sure, but also gruesome and repulsive. Then, kneeling on the side of the bed, I gathered Romy in my arms, from behind, and gently lifted her chest and it felt wrong, touching her breasts like this, and the paradox was momentarily intriguing but then a cry of horror overtook me. I couldn't help it. It came out of my mouth much quicker than I knew. I was trembling. I held her there, as if I were performing some slow-motion Heimlich manoeuvre: first gazing at the pillow, which was a mess of polyester and vomit and possibly more blood, a total horror show, then gazing sideways at what once was Romy's entire expression, but all the expression was gone. I held her there. I bent to her face and her mouth smelled like vomit but also it was warm and that, I had to admit, was a very good sign. If I concentrated very hard I thought that also she was still breathing and I wanted to concentrate on this more, but I couldn't. Because, to return to you, Mr Chat Show Host, if you want to know what Fate feels like, it feels like this. You are holding a body in your arms, and then you hear a brisk knock, followed by a key card being slotted into place. That's how it feels. I would possibly argue that maybe it would be nice if just one time Fate used a more original ringtone. So I dropped Romy, gently, to the pillow again, and ran to the door. The maid was facing me, with her headphones in, and carrying a mop and brushes. I didn't have time to check if I was bloodstained. I probably was. Maybe people don't care any more. Maybe in the modern world blood is no surprise. But me I was always old-fashioned.

— Housekeeping, she said.

— But I'm still here, I said.

— This room is not occupied.

— But I'm here, I said.

I was trying to sound very hopeful, like I always do. She looked in and I suppose she maybe saw a pair of naked feminine legs. She looked at me. It was just about plausible that I was a mini donjuanish type, or at least I'd like to think so.

— They said you gone, she said.

— We're leaving, I said.

— Ten minutes. Ten minutes, mister.

It was probably then that my plan became obvious to me, which I still believe was a plan of carefulness. I was thinking that there were maybe two or three things that were true. That I needed to get Romy some medical help, that I needed to do this unbeknown to the hotel authorities, so that possibly it would also remain unbeknown to Candy and my parents, and that speed was very necessary. It was a difficult trio but maybe not impossible. I wanted Romy to be OK and I wanted to return to my ordinary life, or at least the possibility that such an ordinary life existed.

in the manner of many catastrophic myths

I suppose other people have their ways of thinking this through. I know that in such a situation my father would calmly acknowledge the presence of the Devil, for although he is not so devout he has his symbolic moments. For him there is a prosecuting spirit everywhere. I think this is in fact one of my earliest memories, standing in my water wings, waiting for my father to return from shul so that he could take me to the swimming pool. My father very softly and very secretly believes in devils, and while I have never managed to be quite persuaded, as I say this it does occur to me that I often fear many monsters. I call my devils
monsters
and in the end perhaps there's no big difference. I remember the ancient mutant monsters in the national museum and they make me very fearful still, those pictures of the green god and his dog-god of judgement, the devouring god with his crocodile head and the single feather of truth. Although at least the dog-god stays down below, in his alabaster hall. Whereas this scene in a hotel room felt more like what happens when the gods decide to lope up their ladder to earth, and when they do, they kill you. Have you ever met a god? It's like this. They just can't help themselves. They're very sorry, the gods, but they are going to fuck you up. Like the child-eating goddess who would very much like to but just cannot, really cannot stop herself from guzzling your little daughter. Or like the gods who once demanded that three temples should be built for them in one night. But dawn, so goes the record, came too soon – and therefore these aforementioned deities appeared and smashed the scaffolding up, like gang-rape footballers.