Sex and Stravinsky
Read Sex and Stravinsky Online
Authors: Barbara Trapido
Sex and Stravinsky
BARBARA TRAPIDO
For Megan Vaughan
Contents
Josh Meets Caroline
Josh meets Caroline in a shared student house in London. The time is late 1970s so everyone in the house looks hideous. That’s everyone except for Caroline, but she doesn’t live there. Not yet. All the men have got too much hair, which tends to come lank, matt and flecked with dandruff. The women wear floaty purple cheesecloth things – either cropped floaty purple things, worn over flared jeans, or full-length floaty purple things that go from shoulder to ankle. Josh remembers this as the Purple Time.
The women also have lots of hair, long, lank and drooping from centre partings, but theirs has less dandruff since it’s better cared for. Josh, like all the others, has too much hair, but because his is so curly it looks shorter. He wishes it would grow in a Jimi Hendrix fuzz but because his curls are looser the effect is more Harpo Marx, except that it’s red. Josh’s hair, in his youth – in the Purple Time – is a dark, chestnut red. And, since facial hair for men is more or less obligatory, he discovers that his beard and moustache grow in an interesting speckle of red, black and white, like the chalks in a Watteau drawing. His work on the evolution of the clown has caused him to look at Watteau drawings. Whenever he sees photographs of himself these days, twenty years on, in the ‘now’ time – that is to say, 1995 – he thinks it is he who looks like a clown, but then everyone looks pretty weird. Except for Caroline.
Josh is quite short because his legs are short. He’s been told several times, by Greek persons, that this has to do with the Greek in him. That’s if ever he lets drop that the man who fathered him – a small-time crook, an unscrupulous, loutish ne’er-do-well, a man he never met beyond babyhood – was Greek. And his name isn’t really Josh, come to that. It’s George. Caroline always looks fabulous in old photographs, except that sometimes her head has been cut off. This is because she’s taller than everyone else in the picture. Caroline is blonde and six foot tall.
Josh meets her one Sunday morning when he trundles woozily downstairs wearing a long cotton tunic that comes from Tanzania, courtesy of his parents. Adoptive parents. He’s feeling the need for instant coffee and hasn’t yet surfaced properly, so his focus, behind his lenses, is fairly restricted. First, he takes in that the area of kitchen worktop around the kettle is devoid of its usual clutter and that his housemate Keiran’s saucer of squeezed-out reusable tea bags is no longer in evidence. There’s a nice corner-bakery smell that has taken over from the odour of dustbin and then when he looks up, widening his range, he sees that there’s a blonde Amazon standing at the sink with her back to him and that she’s wearing big yellow washing-up gloves.
The blonde, from behind, has what looks like regulation long straight hair, only nicer, because hers has thickness and lift like curly hair that happens to be straight and for the moment she has gathered up half of it to the crown of her head, with a large tortoiseshell clip. The Amazon is wearing loose black drawstring trousers that hang on gaunt, jutting hip bones and on her torso she has the top half of a black bikini. The faint outline of her ribs is visible under the flesh and Josh can see that her spinal cord is indented slightly, like rope under the skin. Her shoulder blades are two beautiful, almost-rectangles, one just slightly higher than the other, that hold him in thrall. Her neck is elegantly long. Everything about her is long. Then she’s finished rinsing the crockery and she pulls off the washing-up gloves. Sensing Josh’s stare, she turns round. Grace Kelly sort of face, Josh notes. Broad cheek-bones. Squarish jaw. Widely spaced blue eyes.
He takes a step backwards, thinking, Oh my God, just look at yourself, would you? Morning dog-breath. A bloke in a dress. Where is your nightcap, Mr Scrooge? Where is your candlestick, Mr Wee Willie Winkie?
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Excuse me. I’ll just get the kettle on. If that’s OK.’
It’s a whistling kettle that sits permanently on the gas hob, so it’s always encrusted with the grease that splatters from student fry-ups. Except that now it isn’t. The kettle is revealing itself as a thing made of gleaming dark-green enamel. Racing green, as it’s called these days in ad-man speak.
‘Something’s happened to this kettle,’ he says, staring at it hard, his lazy right eye drifting slightly outwards behind his glasses as he holds it under the tap, so that, for a moment, he sees two slightly overlapping green kettles, before the edges once again cohere.
‘I cleaned it,’ the Amazon says. ‘With washing soda. I’m Caroline, by the way. I’m visiting Tamsin.’
Ozzie, Josh notes. The girl’s from Oz. Love the vowels. A bit like home, only different. Diphthongs as monophthongs. It’s Josh’s drama school training that accounts for this tendency to see phonetic symbols dancing in the air when people speak. Josh is from Durban, but he’s been in London for a year. Everyone else in the house is English except for Tamsin, who’s Australian. Marty’s parents are from Jamaica but he’s been raised in Lewisham.
‘Hi,’ Josh says, ‘I’m Josh.’ Then he says, ‘It smells kind of different in here. It smells nice.’
‘Could be that I’ve emptied the bin,’ she says. ‘Plus I’ve got muffins in the oven. Fancy a muffin with that coffee? They’re just about ready.’
The muffins are made with bananas and a sprinkle of wheat bran, so they’re moist along with having texture. It’s quite a while since he’s eaten a muffin. The only approximation he’s managed to find in London is what he thinks of as a cup cake. Then there are those crumpet-type things called ‘English muffins’ that taste like ceiling tiles. Well, that’s until your housemates tell you they need toasting.
‘They’re called Seven-day Muffins,’ Caroline says, ‘because you make up the dough and keep it in the fridge for seven days, you see. Then every morning all you need do is take out enough dough for that day’s breakfast and pop it into a muffin tray. Bingo.’
‘Bingo’. Who the hell says ‘Bingo’? He wonders, Is the woman speaking tongue-in-cheek? Josh, whose mother – adoptive mother, that is – combined her professional life not only with political activism, but with large dollops of Yiddishe Mama, is familiar with basic cooking procedures, only he’s wondering, now, how on earth the Amazon has come by the muffin trays, not to mention the washing soda. Does she cart baking tins and household cleaners around in her luggage?
‘I reckon these should be called One-day Muffins,’ Josh says. ‘They’d never last seven days.’
‘You can make up the dough in larger batches and freeze it in seven-day portions,’ Caroline offers helpfully. ‘I could show you guys how to make up a batch for the freezer, only you’d need to get hold of some decent plastic storage boxes.’ Then she says, ‘Have another. Feel free.’
‘Tell me,’ Josh says. ‘Are you a being from earth? Or what manner of being are you?’
‘Come again?’ Caroline says. ‘I’m from Melbourne.’
‘I really like your clothes,’ he says.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Actually, I quite like yours.’
Caroline is wearing the bikini, she explains, because she’s been sunbathing in the yard.
‘Before breakfast is the best time for sunshine in England,’ she says. ‘Only time, I should say. Most students miss it. They’re always asleep.’ Then, unexpectedly, the Amazon smiles. ‘Still,’ she says. ‘You’re awake, aren’t you? Well, sort of.’
Josh doesn’t yet know that Caroline has made the bikini from a paper pattern, along with the drawstring trousers, but being patronised by a beautiful, judgemental creature strikes him as quite entertaining. And being smiled on by her is an altogether pleasing sensation. It’s a bit like being smiled on by the Blessed Damozel.
Caroline is a graduate student at Oxford, she tells him. History. She’s been in the country for eight months on a three-year scholarship. That night she, Josh and Tamsin go to the cinema in Tottenham Court Road. They see Polanski’s
Chinatown
, with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Then, within the month, Caroline has invited him to be her partner at her college ball. And Josh, who knows that he will never completely get over his passion for Hattie Marais, née Thomas – Hattie, his first love, his dainty five-foot ballet girl back home; Hattie, who turned him down in favour of Herman Marais, that loudmouth architectural student, that brawny rugger-bugger – is nonetheless both beguiled and entertained by Caroline. Beguiled by her grace and beauty; entertained by her remarkable spread of ability, which she combines so relentlessly with motivation. Caroline is quite simply Wonder Woman, and that’s in itself diverting, even though she herself is not a person with whom one can giggle and conspire. Caroline is not a ‘fun’ person and Josh is almost never really funny with her; not in the way he always was with Hattie. Caroline is not comfortable with what she calls his ‘clowning’. ‘You do it because you’re short,’ she says.
But then Caroline is such an awesome creature, so gaspingly prodigious, that Josh doesn’t really notice at first how much she is given to wrong-footing him. Or, combined as it is with that eager, early-on sexual attraction, it acts as a sort of come-on. Mistress Caroline Killjoy, with her repertoire of fabulous clothes. In her interactions with him, there’s almost always an element of put-down.
Caroline, even in her student days, is no mean cook. She knows the uses of coconut milk and cardamom pods. While her contemporaries are stuck with pulses, and tinned pilchards, and mounds of oily grated cheddar, she’s already making her own pesto with fresh basil that she grows from seed in flowerpots and her careful student budgeting allows for tiny bags of pine nuts and pecorino cheese. She has bought herself a stone mortar and pestle from a homeopathic pharmacy in Regent’s Street and she keeps it sitting next to her copy of
The Crusades through Arab Eyes
. She makes glazed fruit tarts. She makes a fruit mousse, mixing dried apricots, stewed and puréed, with gelatine, whipped cream and frothed egg whites. For Josh, she makes an airy angel whip, contrived from what she’s recycled from the college fellows’ discarded champagne flutes. Gleanings from the Warden’s garden party, for which she’d offered services as waitress.
Though Josh is shorter than Caroline by more than half a ruler, this doesn’t stop her from wearing four-inch heels to the ball. Caroline not only dresses beautifully, but she makes all her clothes herself, like a girl from the 1950s.
‘You’re kidding,’ Josh says, when she reveals that she has run up her own ball gown. Furthermore, as is the case with almost all her outfits, she has made it out of something else. Caroline, that night, is a vision of beanpole loveliness in a toffee-coloured Thai-silk dress with a wide V-shaped neckline that falls in papery folds from her naked shoulders, revealing small white breasts that have the gradients of shallow meringues. The dress is close-fitting and ruched like a festoon blind. This is because Caroline has made it out of a festoon blind that she found in the Broad Street Oxfam shop, just a stone’s throw from her college. And she’s honoured her undertaking to clothe her partner as well. She’s assembled the complete black-tie get-up from a retro-heap near the bus station and has, for a mere two pounds fifty, bought Josh a pair of Savile Row black shoes.