The Blue Book (20 page)

‘How are you this morning? Good morning?' Mila is the stewardess for Beth and Derek's cabin. Mila is weatherproof and cheery, her conversations melodiously penetrating. ‘Your husband? Three days ill, four nights ill, that's no good. He is a little better?' Mila's interest in her charges is both heartfelt and exhausting.

Beth no longer tries to explain that Derek is not her husband, that he did, until quite recently, want to
become
her husband, but this is almost undoubtedly no longer the case, that he is currently barricaded somewhere surly and disappointed inside his head. Their room feels like his skull, somehow, like being locked in an uneasy skull, wearing itself smooth from the inside out – rabbity and stale. ‘No. He isn't better. Not really.'

He isn't the better man – only looks like him. Bloody depressing to think of how often I've gone for the tall and the blond and then been sorry, spent all manner of awkward coffees, dinners, clammy nights, with the sense that I've misplaced something, that I'd glance away, turn back and see what I want.

Who I want.

And is that because of Arthur, or is that because of me: am I someone inclined towards wanting things like Arthur? Men like Arthur. Is he a genetic weakness, like diabetes? Or does some part of me harbour Nazi cravings for blue eyes and blond hair? And something broken.

Does he mean I'm a racist?

He does mean I can't think of him for long without distracting – he's too much, otherwise.

It's not that I wouldn't love to concentrate – Jesus, please – to be clear and single-minded, but not about him, it can't be about him – because then it turns out that I'm not a bigot, I'm alone. And I don't crave a type.

It's just that I know how to learn things and I learned a man, but I can't have him, because in person he's a toxin. I keep him in my skin and I don't forget, but I can't be with him. Even when we're together, we're not real: I'm not me, he isn't him.

And this is my finest time – what he doesn't get. Back when I had the skin, the bloom, the sort of ease, I wasn't ready: it's now we should be together, when I think I might have found the start of what we need to do, how we could be.

It's different with men and women, I realise – I did read the manuals:
Female 45–55, Male 50s Professional, Immigrant Female 30s
:
I memorised the classifications, the life paths, studied what to tell enquirers.

Gentlemen peak early and ladies are late.

But that's a very incomplete story.

Gentlemen peak early, but then they can find out who they are, how to apply themselves.

Ladies peak early and then can keep peaking. This can be a conflagration or a tragedy, a wound.

When I came in my twenties it seemed significant: today I could bang my elbow and find myself more deeply moved. I have capacities I barely understand.

And sometimes we almost really touch, but never quite.

We get theatrical instead. We waste ourselves. We don't hold each other and catch light. We never rest, enjoy the peace of ourselves. We are never properly naked. We do not ever truly fucking meet.

I miss him. And he misses me.

We are stupid enough to wreck ourselves at heart.

From which I should digress.

And there are very many varieties of digression.

In word, in thought, in deed.

My digressions involving the wrongly fair-haired and imperfectly tall – the spidery, washed-out imitation Arthurs and my being unable to like them. Clambering into stupid situations in case they might be feasible – trying to be under someone and to touch them but not that much – proving I'm alive and capable without Arthur and being with whoever else, but not that much. They don't quite exist – are just someone who isn't Arthur.

Like Derek.

Don't know what was I thinking. Then again, that's what I aim for – to not know what I'm thinking.

And so it's closing the eyes and lying – in every fucking sense lying – and holding whoever's shoulder as loosely as I can – imagining there's a lace doily, or a napkin laid between us, something insulating and polite – and closing my eyes and needing to feel the better man, but he isn't there because I settled for safer and stupider and less. Again.

It passes the time.

Christ.

Beth puts the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, because Derek has promised that if Mila comes into their cabin again while he's trying to sleep he will
glass her in the face
. He's in no condition to harm anyone and isn't a violent person, but he may make a scene, insist on indulging in complaints.

Mila leans on her trolley – her
luxury Porsche trolley
– which rattles with each surge and is laden with nice clean facecloths that no one will get and pillow mints that no one will eat and shampoo that no one will have the strength to use. ‘He needs dry food. Like toast. Like biscuits – the way you have biscuits in the lifeboats. When we have lifeboat drill there is biscuits in the boat and water only and they say someone will give you two pills when you come in – I don't get sick, but I would get two pills, because in those little boats you will be sick and then everyone else will see you be sick and will be also sick – more than thirty people in a little boat, being sick, that would be such a terrible thing.' Mila is, no doubt, audible to Derek, and Beth is not remotely attempting to move her away along the corridor. ‘I can fetch dry biscuits and give them to him, but not now – if the
DND
sign is on the door then we cannot knock even, we can do nothing.'

‘I think nothing is what to do.'

‘You are sure?'

‘This evening, we can give him water and dry biscuits. He's had the injection and I think he's sleeping.'

He isn't sleeping – he's flat on his back and venomous and staring, he's turning himself into something I can't love, can't like.

I used to be able to like him. Liking is
OK
.

Settling for less. Settling for decent and reliable and normal.

Which is less.

‘We drill all the time, have exercise for when the ship sinks.' Mila says this happily, confidently, and it is plain that she would be equally sanguine in a lifeboat – her liner going down by the stern, its harpist perhaps still playing on the ever-more-slanting deck, and Mila quite content, asking after everybody's health, handing out biscuits and perhaps one or two of those mints. ‘Look at this today, this morning – the whole way is
DND
and
DND
and
DND
. . . I will have to make report, say why I don't go in and clean . . .'

It's true: the passageway is thick with plaintive Do Not Disturb signs that swing from the handle of each door and indicate distress within. Elizabeth walks past them along the press and give of carpet, the perspective dipping, twisting ahead. She moves through the section that rattles like walnuts in a tin, the section that whines like a metal-on-metal puppy, the section that constantly bathes in a mild howling, and then she ascends, staggers round and round the stairwells. She wants to be outside: not on the circumnavigating deck, still haunted by a few mad walkers, brisk and smug in their waterproofs, clocking up miles – not where Arthur leaned at the stern, where the stain of him leaning will be by the handrail, a salt and judgemental shape – she's heading higher, high as she can, up until she runs out of ship.

Fucking Arthur – who is more, rather than less – too much and indecent and unreliable and abnormal and I didn't love him at the start. He did that to me – I think – he made it happen – I think – or I did – or we both did. We saw something in each other, something bad, and then chased it and it didn't run away.

Lying – again in every sense – by myself in bed after the party – after that first night. And I'd broken that sodding glass abomination and I wanted to anyway, but I know that I did it so I could tell him later – which will have to mean seeing him again. I already want to see him again, but I don't fancy him – it's definitely
noticing
, not fancying.

Only I want to be near him again and that leaning against each other thing was nice and hand-in-hand was nice and maybe this makes me nice – my sudden fondness for small and friendly gestures.

I could be nice about him.

It's not as if I really want a wank.

A wank would be rude. And the fact that it's rude and to do with him is not in any way another layer of attraction.

Dear God, the utter rubbish you tell yourself.

When really you just want a wank.

When your mind's already out and predicting, sketching how he'll be, playing the cheap psychic, the way we do with everyone we love – building how they are when they're without us, how they'll be when they come back.

Habit of a lifetime.

And he made it worse.

Arthur there at arbitrary parties, at some and not others – nobody seemed to invite him, but he'd get in all the same – and seeming to know which pubs I went to and being about the place, then elsewhere, more tangible when disappeared.

Be available, then not: make your appearances random, a long tease – it never fails.

He would have realised that, but I never did feel he was playing me. He felt reassuring, let both of us be unwary in this gently hungry place. It was almost like friendship, as comfortable as that.

While – absolutely and of course, this would have to be the case – I'm studying
MAD
– Mutually Assured Destruction.

You couldn't make it up.

That was the subject for my thesis – great conversation-stopper, not bad at emptying rooms: simply tell them you're learning how to get a population of sane and ordinary people to be happy with
MAD
and convinced they could survive any conflagration – convinced they'd want to survive – how to make them optimistic enough to believe we can change, or survive anything.

Survive anyfuckingthing. Protect and Survive: take your doors off their frames and hide in underneath them, shove your head in a brown paper bag – as if you're a pound of apples. I spent months with all of those lies: the Public Information films, the plans that were no kind of plan. The bad spells, shoddy enchantments.

And then I'd come home and maybe Arthur would be there, or I'd go out and maybe Arthur would be there – and maybe he happened to be in my living room while a bunch of us watched the Berlin wall come down and were happy for other people and for a good change, an achieved change – and this was history and when I remembered it, I was going to remember him also
–
it'll make a nice story for the kids, the kid, the puppy, the cat: that while we weren't exactly dating, the world turned wakeful, tender, changed its dreams.

We kept ourselves unerotic for so long – which is almost more erotic than anything else – and maybe that's what he intended for those nights when I'd go to my bed alone, the nights after we'd chatted, leaned a bit – maybe he knew the condition that I would be in and was lying in his own bed and hypothesising, breaking a sweat. I was certainly thinking about him and I was a grown-up and at liberty and it's not unusual or peculiar to touch yourself on somebody's behalf – you know them a bit, but not like that, but not exactly
not
like that – actually, you know them just enough to make this awkward and yet lovely – if you imagine them being aware of what you're going to do – may do – could do – will do – why fool yourself: the pausing is preamble to a definite end – it's what you will do – you're going to fancy yourself enough as their replacement to make yourself come – but you feel naked, shamed, extraordinary, if you think of them knowing, of informing them:
yesterday, I wished my hands into your hands and improvised from there
– then it's almost too uncomfortable to continue.

Almost.

But when we were together we digressed, we made distractions. He took an interest in my work: found me descriptions of mass shelters, their lists of
provisions, amounts of fuel stored for running generators, the rules for admission and denial – survival not always the kinder option – some things intended to be unfuckingsurvivable – your wife dead outside, your kids dead outside – kid, puppy, cat – your life dead outside. No doors on the toilets in case you hid in them and tried to top yourself.

We listened to Patrick Allen being the last voice we'd ever hear: all his announcements – sensible and inevitable wartime advice with this stink of a hell underneath it. That shouldn't be sexy. But it was.

Me full of mass casualties and damage and him full of I had no idea what – man in gloves, magic man, quiet man, man who works in a florist's sometimes, who can build things for you: cabinets, bookshelves, makes little boxes with sliding panels, private places – handy – secret – whose aim seems to be elsewhere and as yet unrevealed.

He didn't tell me what he really did for months. Took off his gloves and held my face and told me, kissed. And why not try it together – give the wounded their dead together – Mutually Assured Eternity – bombproofed.