The Twisted Heart (12 page)

‘Why do I get the feeling it would be better to admit to syphilis or something, than to not having read Paul Muldoon?'

‘No, no.'

‘What about it?'

‘The poem?' she said fretfully.

‘Look,' said Joe, ‘you might want to factor it in that the answer to any question you ask me that begins, “You know that poem where”—the answer will almost certainly be,
no
.'

‘That's okay. I apologise. I mean, I'd quote it to you,' said Kit, ‘but I can't remember it. And it only has four lines. To me, that's me having—that's, I've got syphilis as well, that I can't even quote it, four lines. I often find myself wishing I'd
been brought up to memorise, as a matter of course, the things that I really like; not that I—' What was she on about? Never mind. I'm leaving now, she thought: the window. ‘But in the poem, you know,' she said, trying to wrap up her remarks, ‘it's that, there's this girl with eyes different colours, and it's the brown eye for the earth, and the blue eye—' she threw a hand skywards.

About as lightly as it's possible to ask such a thing, Joe said, ‘Would you like to sleep with me again?'

‘Oh I just
couldn't
,' she exclaimed.

A woman's voice burst out from a window down below. ‘
J'en
peux
plus de ce bordel!
'

Joe looked away, over across the gardens, taking in Kit's reply. With a touch of amusement, he said, ‘I didn't mean out here.'

After this, they stood, for what felt like a long time, just as they were, mute and still, in the city-whacked dusk, undecided.

Kit lay in bed looking at her clock radio, 8:37—8:38—8:39—8:40—whereupon she put out a hand to turn it off; except, as she confusedly then understood, she hadn't been listening to the radio, she'd been watching the time. And the time you don't turn off.

Another Friday, not enough sleep.

Michaela came thumping into the kitchen with the post. ‘Yours,' she mumbled, and tossed Kit an envelope.

‘Thanks.'

‘For nowt.'

Spoon, bowl and cup, knife, a box of parched health stuffs, fruit, soya milk: noisily, Michaela made herself a collection on the table.

The envelope was stamped with the information that it came from Shropshire, was an appeal for funds for the rehabilitation of careworn donkeys, and was ‘important'. Kit slung it unopened into the paper recycling box under the counter by the oven.

‘For fuck's sake,' said Michaela, leaning back out of her chair, ‘office paper here,
window
envelopes and cardboard in with cans and plastic bottles.' She retrieved the letter and threw it into the correct crate. Out flew a wasp.

‘Sorry,' said Kit, who found herself wondering whether it was because Michaela's father owned a bottle factory that she was so militant about recycling.

‘I've labelled the bloody crates. I've done all the work.'

‘Believe me.'

‘You haven't put vanilla in your coffee? Why do you do that? Vile. You're so free and easy.' Michaela fished around in her bowl, trying to get just the pineapple bits on her spoon. ‘Well, in some ways,' she added, ‘nudge, nudge.'

‘Betsy Trotwood, yes,' Kit wasn't paying attention, ‘yes, Betsy Trotwood,
David
Copperfield
, hates donkeys. I suppose they still have them, do they, on beaches? They haven't been banned yet?'

Michaela looked up. ‘Planning another little adventure this evening?' she asked. ‘And don't say, “With who?”'

‘With whom?'

‘Piss off, okay? What's he called? Jack, Bob? It's a Friday night thing, right? Friday nights? Right? What does he do other nights?' Michaela sat back and pushed her bowl away from her. ‘More's to the point, did you sleep with him again last week? I've been very good. I haven't asked.'

Kit endeavoured, as a performance, to look wry—although, how was she supposed to tell what face she was pulling? No one practised, did they? Or was a wry face the exception? She felt she had seen it in the movies, young men, timid, faintly smiling at themselves in the mirror. She
had
seen it, more than once; though was this in English-language movies only? She took in her fair share of Korean, French, Japanese films, naturally, the odd Iranian one,
German ones, heaven knows; but she couldn't instantly place the scene she had in mind in a setting with subtitles, which perhaps meant—

‘Not very talkative, are we?' said Michaela. ‘Too early for you, ten past nine in the morning?'

—which perhaps meant that the business of using a mirror to be certain you were pulling off
wry
was a defining experience common only to the writers of English-language film scripts.

This was the sort of line Kit could imagine being delivered by someone funny, who would say it funnily, so it sounded funny. But was it true? Did—‘What?' she said. Oh. Yes. Yes, she was meeting him again, Bob?—
Joe
, up the hill, dancing, yes. He owed her, apparently, wished to discharge his debt. The rest of the week, goodness knows what he did. Yes, she thought, it's a Friday night thing, and today is Friday and—why was it that she and Michaela always seemed to want breakfast at the same time?

‘Kit,' boomed Michaela unpleasantly, ‘you're off in la-la land, you twit. You slept with him again, I'm asking? I take it you did, right? Was it better than before?' She stared narrowly across the table. ‘I see. Yes. Good. Sweet. I knew it. I
knew
it. Maths lecturer sounds a bit crap, frankly, but, I don't know, he's got presence, hasn't he? Don't look at me like that, the wind might change. I mean, seriously, for you, Kit, twice is practically married.'

Kit flicked a scattering of toast crumbs onto the floor. She doubted it was humanly possible for a person to feel less married than she did.

She knocked off a reading list for Orson—she was getting increasingly efficient about them, and he was as ready as he was ever going to be to tackle
Bleak House
—then spent most of the day between two libraries, with a break in the middle to watch
Get Carter
, a film that buoyed her with the illusion that she was more alive coming out of the cinema than she had been going in.

She had started out that morning trying to make progress with her regular work, but had swiftly abandoned it. Friday had become the day she allowed herself to pursue other courses, and besides, while hunting for traces of Eliza in the catalogue of all Oxford's libraries, she had come upon an irresistible title, the very thing she had been hoping might exist.
Eliza
Grimwood, a Domestic Legend of the Waterloo Road
was a supposedly true, contemporary account of the murder, initially printed in instalments, and designed to capitalise on the public's fascination with the crime. The author had been catalogued as, ‘Grimwood, Eliza, fict.'—wrong all ways round. Eliza was by no means a fiction, but at the same time, could hardly have written up her own death. Kit had ordered the book in a whir of excitement. The film had then put her in the perfect mood, so that she felt a terrible, happy jump within herself as she danced back up the Bodleian staircase. She was even happier as she collected the book from the issue desk. It smelled great. Her hands felt suddenly heavy as she tucked herself in at a table, seat 109, and began to read.

At first she scrabbled to try to understand the material. Then she slowed down. The narrative was formulaically circuitous, to pad it out, and formulaically titillating. It was, after all, about a prostitute. What was unusual, though, as Kit soon
began to understand, what was bizarre, was the book's explanation—Kit pulled out her notebook—of Eliza's murder.

From the start of the 1830s, the author wrote, the big newspapers had all had their ‘tame incendiaries', and ‘special and general criminals', subdivisions of their more aboveboard labour force. If there was no news, news would be created. These illicit employees were ‘consummate concocters of London crimes'. Thus the destruction by fire of the Houses of Parliament in 1834, so the author asserted; and thus also, during an ‘insipid' down patch in 1838, when the public was stuck waiting for all the excitements of Queen Victoria's coronation, the merciless killing of a prostitute in Waterloo. The city's heaving populace—the newspaper readership—had been notably restless, and so, ‘the initiated gentlemen of the press', drawled the narrative, had ‘expected that something would happen to horror-strike the nation'.

Eliza had been executed to boost the sale of newspapers? Kit patted her cheek compulsively. But then, as she tried to think this nonsense through from various angles, she was led to a question she couldn't confidently answer. Might Dickens have been accused, with much more justice, of something not dissimilar, when earlier killing off
his
prostitute, Nancy?—of having tried to boost his entertainment value by crassly horror-striking the nation?

When Kit had put
Oliver Twist
on Orson's reading list a few weeks before, she had done nothing more than skim it herself, to remember its general feel; so she pulled a copy off the shelves now and dipped into a few of the appendices, trying to gain purchase on how it had been received when it first
came out. She hadn't much time left, though, and only just scraped getting to the dance session as it began. This wasn't polite of her, but she naturally wished to arrive after Joe, not before him, if one of them was going to have to wait around. Let him wait, she thought.

It was a pleasantly blowy evening, an evening to be on the streets. She looked along the pavement to see if he was folded into the railings, but he wasn't.

He was, however, inside. Kit picked him out, through a shifting crowd of bodies, leaning against the battle-worn plaster at the back of the hall, self-contained, but also perceptibly tensed; at which, entirely out of concert with her spirits, she was afflicted by a thrill of desire—at which she
then
thought to herself, oh shit.

All she wanted to do was to dance.

She made her way over to him. ‘So it's definitely on,' nervous, ‘the right way round kind of thing? I'm the girl this time?'—dropping her bag down, stripping off her jacket.

‘Hi, hello,' said Joe. ‘You're here, good. Yes, sure. As agreed.'

‘Thank you, thanks,' she replied, speaking much more sincerely than she would have known to had she never attempted what she was now expecting of him.

Joe straightened up. Kit was wearing her flattest shoes. There wasn't much between them like this. I didn't need to ask, she thought, I made myself look—‘
Okay
, people,' the instructor yelled, ‘over here. Come on. That's right. Great. So, yes, this week I'm going to really make you suffer, okay?' She switched on the elderly music system. ‘Let's step it up now,'
Lucille
. ‘Eyes this way. You, yes, excuse me,
yes, can I borrow you, love? Yes, yes, you.' A young man with scabbed elbows came forward reluctantly to partner the instructor. ‘Right, listen to the music,' she yelled—they were all embroiled now—‘counting in slowly here and—
Quick-quick
one; and
quick-quick
two; and
quick-quick
three; and
quick-quick
four—again? Quick-quick one; and
quick-quick
two; and
quick-quick
three; and
quick-quick
four—Let's—spread yourselves out, okay? Cooee? Let's all have a pop at this. Find yourselves a partner. Boys and girls, in a minute you're going to take it in turns dancing with your eyes closed, so please pay attention. Okay, ready, here's the music—whap, three,
four:
QUICK
-quick
one; and
QUICK
-quick
two; and
QUICK-QUICK
THREE
; help!,
QUICK
-quick
four; good—
quick-quick
one; and
quick-quick
two; and
quick-quick
three; and
quick-quick
four; and—' Kit? And Kit was lost already, whirling amongst the phantom bullets, gone.

‘Bloody fucking hell, you really did it,' she said, jumping off the hall steps onto the street, other people flooding out around her.

Joe, though thin, was so much the stronger of the two of them that even when she'd made errors, he had guided her through them by force. He was a beautiful dancer. Only a very few times in all two hours had either of them distinctly stumbled.

He had tried to help Kit back on with her jacket, but it was cut tight, and she was so unused to this gesture that it had made things more difficult for her, not less. She had flailed with her free arm trying to find the sleeve, pleased, nevertheless—on a bit of a high.

‘Did
it?
' Joe repeated, catching up with her, entertained.

‘I didn't have to think at all. It was so lovely, and—' Kit shrugged her jacket up, ‘I just really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you.
That
was what I—'

‘I know,' he said.

On the bus heading back into town, warmly squashed together, he asked how she was, ‘And how's the work going?'

‘You know, Dickens is fucking interesting,' she replied. She was in an exceptionally good mood.

‘I don't think he'd approve of that as a compliment,' said Joe.

Kit looked round at him. ‘Dickens? How do—? Oh no,' she said, mortified by the expression on his face, unable to keep the pleasure out of her voice, ‘you went and read a Dickens?'

‘I've started one,' he said.

‘
Bleak House
?'

‘No,
Oliver Twist
.'

‘Good God. Because of me?'

‘Of course because of you. You said it was interesting, and violent, if I recall correctly. I saw the movie as a kid, the musical, didn't particularly remember it as violent—psychologically perhaps. I thought I might as well read it, start at the beginning.'

‘I don't think any screen adaptations have come that close to the real thing,' said Kit, ‘as far as I'm aware, although there have been a lot of them, I mean in the order of forty, I think; because, they make them for kids to be able to see, whereas if they were accurate to the
book, you'd be talking X-rated, certificate 18. It's a funny point, but if Oliver Twist could read the book he appears in, he'd faint away in horror.'

‘He's a fainter too, isn't he? You're right. You must mean the ending, though. I haven't got there yet.'

Kit hardly noticed the scene outside the bus as they made their stop-start way in heavy traffic. ‘I can't believe it,' she repeated delightedly. ‘I made you read a book.'

‘True,' said Joe. ‘And how's your maths coming along?'

She covered her eyes with her hands and made a small, agonised peeping noise.

‘Forget I mentioned it,' he said. ‘It's all right, I was joking. Tell me again what it is about
Oliver Twist
that interests you so much?'

Kit took a deep breath, held it tight, smiled at him, and then spoke in a whoosh: ‘For example, the death of Nancy, which you haven't read yet but Bill Sikes bashes her to death, is objected to by modern critics as being absurdly melodramatic. But at the time Dickens wrote it—well, a few years later, 1840—Thackeray offended him deeply by describing Nancy as, “the most unreal fantastical personage possible”. Thackeray thought that if you took account of the actual prostitution element, which Dickens was forced to gloss over, then any goodness Nancy manifested would be rendered void by her immorality. And anyway, Thackeray didn't believe in her good side. He thought it was sentimental rubbish.'