Mantrapped (13 page)

There is no need to describe Ruby. You will know her already. She is a middle-aged woman, a size 22, and the high street is full of them. She just moves faster than most, and speaks more loudly.

As for Peter, anyone who can trap and set up house with as superior a specimen of womanhood as Doralee is bound to look personable. He has to shave only once every two days. He worries about this sometimes in the night - is he sufficiently masculine? Can the oestrogen in take-away chicken be sapping his virility? He reads and checks the health reports, as well as keeping abreast of weapon development in many countries, and knows all too well how vulnerable the West is to terrorist attack and so on. His is not a reassuring job. He works in a tall office block and the sound of aircraft makes him jump. After the Twin Towers he found his offices moved upstairs to the twenty-sixth floor: others more senior than he were moved down. He worries in case Doralee leaves him, or that like his father he gets cancer. He checks himself for prostate symptoms, even though he is so young, and makes love to Doralee yet again to confirm that he can. Peter's family are in short supply, unlike Doralee's, who have siblings and to spare.

Peter collects his dry-cleaning

Mrs Kovac is left pale with rage and exhaustion after having had words with Doralee. It has been a hard day. But Mr Kovac, coming by to help his wife put up the new steel shutters, seems to have found his tongue. He speaks twelve words in English in a row. 'Perhaps I see to lady for you,' he suggests. 'She no good to world.' Until now, beyond the occasional 'dinner now,' 'fine day,' 'I go out now,' 'out of petrol,' or 'have no money,' the conversation between them has been minimal.

Mrs Kovac shakes her head, hoping her husband does not mean what she thinks he means, and also that the sudden improvement in his English is not due to too close an association with some young woman. Mr Kovac is a handsome man with merry, twinkling eyes. Mrs Kovac is older than he and doubts her own luck in tinding such an affectionate, silent and helpful man. Having resigned herself to the likelihood of his wandering off with some young woman from his own country, wherever that is, she is surprised that a year later he shows no signs of doing so. The idea that he actually wanted to marry her, and that it was not just a marriage of convenience to help with his visa and housing problems, is as much a source of pain as of pleasure. The problem with having something precious is that you can then lose it.

Her husband worries about nothing: she worries about everything. She worries about the business: after a year's trading she is barely in profit. She does not have the volume of trade she had hoped for. Everything looked good on paper; she had a diploma in business management, a bank loan to set up the domestic agency and a small business resource centre has helped with the dry-cleaning start-up, together with ten years of her savings as a call girl, but three recent muggings and two break-ins in the immediate neighbourhood suggest the authorities put more trust in the future of the neighbourhood than perhaps they should. Mrs Kovac is trying to go upmarket but downmarket keeps creeping back. The son of the previous owner got done for dealing drugs, but that has not discouraged his customers - they keep coming back, swirling round her doors like some oily, blackish tide to do their deals outside her door. She notices they melt away when Mr Kovac appears, but he is not always there. She would keep a couple of large dogs but the customers would not like it.

The bathroom accessory shop has closed in the last month, as has the Italian deli. These shops stand empty. Turn your back for a minute and new paint sprouts graffiti, and fancy glass ends up cracked. Vomit, she has discovered, eats away
at
floor tiles.

'A
learning curve
,' she tries to call it, wrestling what is bad into what is good, as her life-enhancement courses have taught her, but words do not create the world, however much society seems to insist they should. Nothing is what she expected. The up-market crowd, though free with their money, are unhelpful and ungrateful, always wanting more. Down-market types ask about prices and walk out. At least the few old ladies who still totter by have a good word and a thank you when they pick up their best blouse for a funeral, and count out the exact change into her palm. The new lot can't even be bothered to pick up their brown coins.

Mrs Kovac accepts that she is in no position to annoy middle-class customers, of the kind who have mattress-covers and use them, and need buttons replacing - buttons, zips; what's wrong with Velcro? But nor is it in her nature to tolerate rudeness. The most tiring thing about the work, she finds, is not being on her feet all day but the struggle between self-interest and impulse. Self-interest says
smile sweetly and mind your tongue;
nature says
fuck off and die
.

And quite what Mr Kovac did during the day, what it was he delivered from door to door as well as dry-cleaning, who was to say? Mrs Kovac tries to shut her eyes to it. His trouser pockets would be stuffed with bank notes, though she understood if only from his regretful look and gesture that the money was owed to someone other than his wife. Not his to keep, his to pass on, for fear of what might betide if he did not. That was a worry too.

Sometimes she was so busy and tired she would exceed the six weeks' limit she set for the hairdresser, and her dark roots would show through the blonde and she hated that. She was a business woman with a diploma, not a slag with business worries. But there were many compensations, she told herself. Her life was not turning out too badly. Mr Kovac was there every night after ten o'clock, eating his supper, silent and smiling, soft, strong, clean hands searching her body at night. He played the guitar to her, and that was worth a lot, though he slept with a gun beneath his pillow.

Now here was this idiot young man complaining. 'But we pay way over the odds for next-day delivery,' he was saying. His lot affected an accent she would be ashamed of, speaking through their noses and hardly opening their mouths. 'This is unbelievable. My partner's really upset.'

Partner? Couldn't he at least pretend the cow was his wife? But people today were at pains to let the world know they belonged to the new world order. Theirs was not an existence of marriage, domesticity and trouble. Theirs was one in which no one smoked, no one married, and others cleaned the clothes, the better to maximise their lifespan. Mrs Kovac gritted her teeth and repeated that the cover was at the menders, that she never sent out part orders, that the buttons had been of the cheapest sort, and so had melted and damaged her machine, and there had been no need for his wife to have taken the tone she did.

'I was doing your wife a favour,' said Mrs Kovac. 'I am surprised you don't realise that.'

Mr Kovac hovered in the background. All Mrs Kovac had to do was say, '
See to the bitch'
and she suspected he would. But you couldn't go down that path. This was the civilised world, not ancient Rome. You could get anyone bumped off for a tenner, or so they said, by asking around in any pub, and a fiver to crack knees. But there were as many undercover policemen around these days as there were criminals, taking sly pictures and recording conversations. The guy you hired would turn out to be the cop. Besides, first find your pub. They were closing like a field of sunflowers in the dusk, and wine bars taking their place.

'My partner, not my wife,' asserted Peter, and to show his further determination asked for the address of the menders, so he could collect the mattress-cover himself, buttons or no buttons. It was needed urgently at home. He hoped Doralee would take over the couscous. He was hungry and this might take longer than he thought.

Mrs Kovac looked at Peter and laughed. His shirt was a credit to Kleene Machine, but his suit was of the pale, crumpled linen kind, which was high maintenance, of some kind of organic fabric: if you so much as sat on a grassy slope it would pick up a green stain. He was a reed in the undergrowth, too thin for its own good, grown in bad soil, too prone to bending, yet not immune from breaking. Why did he assume he was better than she was? Because she saw to his dirty clothes? The wife, or partner, was having a hissy fit, and everyone was meant to take it seriously?

Mrs Kovac said she supposed she couldn't stop him, he could pick up the cover from the apartment above the shop if that was what he wanted, but she expected payment in full, on his way out, and for the seamstress's time and labour as well, and would his wife kindly put the collection slip in the post to her since she, Mrs Kovac, had to keep her records in order and did not want any further unpleasantness. She would be glad if he took his custom elsewhere.

This would not be the outcome Doralee had wanted, which was a contrite and humbled Mrs Kovac and better service from then on, but it was too late to worry about that. There was some kind of mountain tribesman hovering amongst the garments at the back of the shop, whom Peter would wager was an illegal immigrant, a sinister presence, and Peter was suddenly aware that Wilkins Parade was not necessarily coming up in the world, but could be going down, and that it might be a good idea to sell the High View apartment before other people realised this was the case.

He pushed open the door at the side of the shop while Mrs Kovac made out the bill, and went up the narrow stairs. They smelt of urine, which was hardly surprising, since the side door was not kept locked. He had assumed that the seamstress would be crone-like but the woman who startled him by appearing on the top landing, with his mattress-cover over her arm, was youngish and rather smart, with curly red hair and quite attractive, in a flashy kind of way. He stopped; she stopped. They caught each other's eye briefly - both were in a state of outrage and resentment - and then he went on up and she continued coming down. Neither was prepared to give way to the other. As each brushed past the other, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, their souls took the opportunity of jumping. Tradition has it that they can, and now it had happened.

By the top of the stairs, Peter was to be in Trisha's body: by the bottom of the stairs Trisha was to be in Peter's, and the mattress-cover in the Peter body's arms. Trisha would get the best of the deal: if only because her Peter body was younger, and she had access to money in the bank, and could sign the cheques.

On the question of souls

When I was a small child in New Zealand and going to a convent school, there was a lot of talk about souls. Souls had to be kept pure and untarnished, and were always in danger from the devil, who tried to steal them. But they could be sold to him, in an emergency. I had the idea that they hovered over our heads like the proud milky little cloud in Pooh Bear, tethered by a golden cord and rather talkative. I asked the nuns and they said no, souls were inside us, and silent, and I asked where, and they pointed variously to the heart or just above the bridge of the nose. They were real and solid enough. I thought then perhaps they were like the white inner-sole of a slipper - they would have to be thin and flexible. But I was told, no, every soul was different and none of this really mattered, the important thing was to treasure your soul and keep it from harm, or else you went to hell - or if you were me, and un-christened, to a place called Limbo. And if I didn't stop asking questions, such was the implication, I'd be there quicker than I imagined. So I contented myself with visualising the souls of the nuns. Mother Martha's - she was nice - was soft and round and squishy, Sister Alexis's was thin like a rake and dug into her ribs, and yapped for joy like a little dog while she rapped my knuckles.

Mrs Kovac's soul need not concern us too much now, but I think it is a bright pink triangle, waving yellow and black fronds as if it had been too long underwater and developed growths, but otherwise hard edged and crisply configured, like some kind of warning sign at a celestial driving school, fallen into the harbour but undaunted.

You will have noticed the future and predictive tenses which surface every now and then in the previous section. Peter
was to be
in Trisha's body, Doralee
is to fail
to find her little black dress with the shoulder straps, and
is to fly
into - Mrs Kovac is quite right -
a hissy-fit
. I move forward in time, I put the action into the future. I let you know not so much what is going to happen next but what I have decided is to happen next. At least, I am reassuring you, or possibly myself, I
know
.

There is still time to change things, of course: to put everything back into the past, taking out some present tenses, striking out an's', putting in a'd'. '
Is to be'
can go back to '
was'; 'fails'
becomes '
failed'
. It is exhilarating to be able to be so cavalier with time itself. Peter and Trisha can just pass on the stairs, rashly but not fatally, no souls need jump, they may not even need a mention. Life can proceed within its normal limits, without acknowledgement of the existence of the soul. Peter can simply collect the mattress-cover, pay off Trisha, and go home and finish making the couscous.

Or there could be a disturbance down below. Mrs Kovac, finally driven mad by the carbon tetrachloride fumes, could use Mr Kovac's gun upon him, finding him to be unfaithful. Trisha and Peter could get caught up in an ensuing siege. There could be a hostage situation. Peter's mother could have a lesbian relationship with Trisha. Anything. I could weave my own life even more into the text and not acknowledge it, thus saving inventive energy. The field is open just so long as I use the future tense, the '
is to be'
and not the '
was'
.

But I would be left with the feeling of guilt implanted all those years ago by Louis Simpson that there is a proper way of writing a novel, which is to do with recognising the inevitable as it forms in front of you, while not nailing it down too firmly in advance. You will get it wrong if you try. The narrative of the novel is destined, a remedy for the randomness of real life, but hidden - you are Moses on the mountain searching for instructions on tablets of stone, Mohammed in the desert listening out for revelation. To use the 'i
s to be'
future construction, or the 'is
to have beer
? future-perfect, is a kind of blasphemy against the gods of fiction. And dangerous. Adrienne to have a lesbian relationship with Trisha? Off the rails entirely.