Touch (17 page)

But Leo wasn't ageless. He was mortal. He knew he was going to die and he couldn't cast the worm away where it turned in him. That night he went from pub to pub. The Endeavour, Duke of York, Black Horse, Jolly Sailors, The Board. Twice he was recognised and asked to arm wrestle; twice he refused with the charm of a professional actor. The imperturbable charm that nothing could shift and that he was famous for. Almost.

Walking home, he paused on the swing bridge to stare at the river that glittered under him. It stank of death. Everything did. He needed a woman, needed to fuck away all thoughts of decay from his mind. Helen had carried on making love to him despite everything. But he'd never touched her to the quick. Never after that first betrayal, never again. Every time she'd left him with a sense of failure, the sense that he had never and could never satisfy her. She'd sucked the spirit out of him. That had driven him back to the women who wanted him, who'd gasped for more as he pleasured them and clawed his back, but left him feeling just as empty and lost. So much of that was Helen's fault, the way she'd pushed him away.

Leo spat at the river and watched the globe of froth spin and pock the surface below with a small slap. No, he didn't need a woman after all. It was needing women that had made him like this.

 
Leo slept soundly, without dreams, and the next day felt better. He dined on fillet of rainbow trout fried in butter and black pepper, washed down with a bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc. No pasta, no rice or potatoes to pile on the weight. He was doing alright, feeling better each day. That night he read for an hour then climbed up to the churchyard below the abbey where Dracula had lured poor sleepwalking Lucy Westenra. Where he'd leaned over her as she swooned in a trance and pierced her throat with his eyeteeth and sucked her blood. Leo sat among the weathered headstones and stared out at the grey waves of sea and sky. He smoked idly, listening to the cries of invisible gulls.

The next day Leo sat for hours at the quayside, watching cormorants dry their wings in the sun and trying to remember his mother's face. His father had left home before he was born. Because of that he'd been an only child. Maybe that was why he'd needed women like he'd needed food or drink. He'd slaked himself with women and after the first flush of cock-sureness, they'd meant nothing. There'd been the odd one that he thought he might leave Helen for. Once he'd even packed his bags and threatened to walk out. He'd ordered a taxi and stood waiting in the hallway, but her mocking laughter had kept him there. Her contempt had trapped him somehow in its snare. He still couldn't understand that.

Leo remembered that he was hungry. He left the dockside and went to the shop under the cliff to buy kippers, staring for a long time into the smokehouse where the gutted herrings were strung in rows. He walked home slowly through the town with the fish wrapped in a newspaper bundle. He fried two kippers for lunch and settled them with two bottles of Guinness.

That evening he took a whisky bottle to the harbour and drank from it as he leaned against the iron railings, watching tones of grey overcome each other as night crept over the sea and lay there. He tasted salt spray mingling with the whisky, felt it stiffen his tangled hair. After a while he felt sick and threw the bottle towards the lights of a fishing boat. He took the steps up to the parish church, walking along by the abbey, its ruined stonework lit by spotlights. Then he went out along the cliff road with the wind on his face, until night came on deeper and he wandered back towards the town.

He'd keep away from pubs now. He'd been made wary and wanted no more challenges, no more celebrity. It hadn't even been that difficult. Not faced by such hollowness. The trick was done by going snake-eyed. He'd been shown it by an old stuntman years ago. Snake-eyed and ice-bellied he'd forced that big bastard's hand, licked him and swallowed him whole. Never underestimate an actor and a gentleman. Never.

Not knowing how he'd got there, Leo fell asleep on one of the benches in the churchyard. At two o'clock he woke and vomited into the grass. He was cold and drizzle had begun to blow across the town which wavered below him in a mass of blurred lights as he walked home, cursing and fumbling for his key.

 
The next day he rose feeling ravenous, breakfasting on kippers and toast. The postman came to the house and he found a card from Helen asking why he hadn't rung and was he alright? There was no phone in the cottage; that was the good thing about it. He read the card with a cynical, staged grin. Peter Helman, his agent, had been asking when he might be fit for work again. Sod Peter. He'd always rather despised him anyway. But maybe he was lucky, being queer. Maybe that was the best way – love and friendship between men and no other. Maybe. Leo tore the card up and scattered it on the floor. He wasn't interested in friends anymore and he wasn't interested in work. He felt oddly optimistic, as if he was close to the edge of something. As if something new and invigorating was about to happen. That was how he'd felt when he'd taken a new woman.

Leo lived almost entirely on kippers now, frying them up twice a day until the house stank and drinking whatever their friends had left in the cupboard – Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Grigio, Syrah, Sangiovese, Montepulciano, Balbera – somehow they all seemed to go with kippers. And he drank whisky, especially the peaty Islay malts – Lagavulin and Laphroaig – for which he had a particular longing. He drank as he picked at the delicate flesh of the fish, crunching their fine bones with a shudder of pleasure.

Leo stopped shaving, deciding to grow a beard. He stopped washing, enjoying the stink of sweat when he ducked his face under his tee shirt, revelling in the itch under his foreskin, the crusty feeling between his buttocks. All his life he'd been scrupulously clean but now he enjoyed the squalor of dirt. He piled up unwashed dishes until the house reeked of fish and the decaying contents of bin bags. Rancid water greased the sink, which hardly drained at all now. He stank and he enjoyed this unique sensation. He loved the revenge of it, tenting the bed sheets to smell his own acidifying body odour. Even the bathroom began to stink of piss where he'd swayed at the toilet after too much drink and missed the bowl.

 
The next day, another card from Helen asking him to call. He relished its hint of annoyance. She didn't really care. Didn't really give a bugger. For years she'd sucked the life out of him, for years she'd driven him away. Even when she'd wrapped her legs round him and made him come inside her she'd been distracted by other things in her life. Legal matters or something else more important than him. And his gasped,
Was it good, darling, was it good?
was merely irrelevant and sad, like her superior little smile of assent, as if she was humouring him. What did it matter how it was? Somehow she'd made him suffer and he didn't quite understand how. Though he knew why.

More and more he thought of the split herrings hanging in the smokehouse, dripping out their own grease and slowly purifying. Walking home from town he'd catch the scent of them blown against the cliff-face or up into the ruins of the abbey and he thought of the shaman pressing a hand against his chest. The shaman naked, just as he was, oily-skinned and elusive, pressing him backwards into the reek of oak shavings where they smouldered in darkness.

 
The day after, Leo stayed in bed and couldn't be bothered to eat. He took an Australian Shiraz and the faithful whisky bottle with him, smoking and drinking quietly all day. Listening to the clanging of the harbour, to passing traffic, to the cries of gulls outside the window. The day passed in drifts of cigarette smoke. Leo stubbed their wine-stained filters out onto the blue carpet, watching the play of sunlight across the patchwork quilt where his legs lay. He'd run out of kippers and he'd run out of clean socks and underwear days ago. He hadn't washed and he hadn't shaved. He stank. He who'd always been spotlessly clean. And it gave him a frisson of pleasure. It sustained him, this sense of dirt and unworthiness, the foetid stink of his body under the bedclothes.

That night the moon rose early. Not a full-blown moon, but a three-quarters moon, a gibbous yellow fruit that glowed in its incandescent rind beyond his window. Above the orange lights of the pedestrian crossing where they winked on the road below. Over the white jawbone of the whale across town. Leo bathed in the moonlight, quite drunk now and sleepy, but not quite asleep. He stretched in the bed, intoxicated by the light. With each hand felt the smooth skin of his arms, felt their beauty and kissed them as if they were the arms of a young girl. Gradually he fell asleep.

At one o'clock Leo woke up, noticing that the moon had moved out of his window. He reached under the bed for the whisky bottle and drained the last inch. Then he finished the dregs of wine, throwing the bottle against the wall and leaving a streak of purple down its yellow emulsion. The lights at the pedestrian crossing blinked on the road below. Leo got dressed, struggling into his underpants and trousers. He pulled a shirt over his head, enjoying its barbarous stink of sweat. Being close to himself was like being close to something feral. A fox or a badger. Or a bear that wakes from its winter sleep. He ran his tongue over his teeth, rough with neglect and the fur of days of drinking. He remembered the taste of a woman's nipple, the wet sensation of pushing his tongue into a woman's mouth. The way they'd put their tongues into his, whimpering with desire, pressing against him. It had all been an act. They'd fallen in love with his performance and he'd hardly even noticed theirs. It had meant no more than that. Like shooting a flare, an SOS which burned briefly and then fell into the sea below and was extinguished.

Dressed, Leo went downstairs and out of the house, leaving the front door wide open. He clambered down the steps that led to the main road, striding over the pedestrian crossing and the swing bridge towards the harbour entrance. The moon was there above the sea, misted now by faint strands of cloud. Here was the river, dark and oily, slapping up against moored boats and the stone of the quayside. There was hardly any traffic at this time of night, though seamen still moved about on their boats and there were lights far out at sea. Leo walked into the sea breeze, past the Magpie café and the Dracula Horror Show, past all the other cafés and chip shops and amusement arcades that littered the front. He walked down onto the beach and his feet sank into damp sand. The tide had abandoned pebbles which lay stranded in little dimples of water. Leo could smell the sea. He could hear it, could just make out its grey band where a trail of moonlight lay.

Leo took off his shoes and socks, loving the cold grit of sand between his toes. He heard an oyster catcher call out close by and loosened his shirt, tearing off buttons and dragging it over his head. It stank of him. Half naked, he broke into a run, trotting towards the sea, eager as a child. Feeling the breeze on his skin, he paused to take off his trousers and then went naked, the wind raising gooseflesh as he ran, his penis flapping against his thigh. He laughed at the thought of its helplessness. It had governed him all his life and now there it was, flopping about uselessly.

Leo ran until his feet hit the waves where they boiled at the shore. Until water was breaking against his buttocks and thighs, until his balls retracted at the shock of cold. He ran until water lifted him from his feet, until his ears were drowned in the sound of waves tearing themselves to pieces against the harbour walls. Leo ran until he could run no more and then he swam. He sculled out with slow, powerful strokes, his arms beautiful in the moonlight. For a moment he thought he could smell smoke skirling down over the water, thought he could hear faint music. But he swam on into the sting of the sea, ducking his head, spitting salt, following the faint silver pathway before him.

When Marie came up with Pendeen as a holiday venue I must have looked surprised. So that curious look came over her face. Well, I was surprised. I hadn't been there for over thirty years. Which made me feel old, to say the least.

‘Pendeen? How do you spell that?'

She looked surprised now, squinting at the map. We were having breakfast and the kitchen table was scattered with coffee cups and plates. The gas boiler was grumbling and there were a pair of greenfinches upside-down on the bag of nuts she'd hung from the washing line.

‘P-e-n-d-e-e-n. It's near St Just. Pretty close to Land's End. Heard of it?'

‘I was there in '74 with Yusef. '73 or '74, must've been…'

‘Yusef?'

‘A Persian –
Iranian
– guy I knew at university.'

Marie coiled her ponytail and pushed in a hairgrip. It was going from auburn to grey now.

‘You're a dark horse.'

I wasn't sure what she meant by that. She'd found a holiday cottage on a website and wanted to go ahead and book it for September when the kids had gone back to school and the beaches would be quiet. Not our kids. We'd got over that. But kids in general. Other peoples' kids. She raised an eyebrow.

‘Yusef?'

‘He was a mining engineer. He'd had a placement at the Geevor mine for a few weeks. Loved it so much he wanted to go back and dragged me with him.'

I was trying to remember a name.

‘We camped outside this pub… the Radgel.'

She looked bemused now.

‘It's Cornish for fox or fox's den or something.'

‘And…?'

‘Can't remember much about it. Great pub. Cornish pasties and beer for breakfast. Nice place. Lots of mining along the coast from what I remember, but that's probably all gone now.'

She was folding the map.

‘What kind of mining?'

‘Tin. Copper. Mainly tin. Geevor was the last mine to close. There was a big accident there in eighteen-something.'

‘Ok… right… and so?'

She looked at me and then back to the map of Cornwall, draining the last of her coffee. I wanted to get to work.

‘Come on,
vamoose
, or we'll be late.'

Marie rummaged in her bag for the car keys. I put the breakfast things away and stacked the plates in the dish-washer. It smelled of biriani from the night before. And something else. Something backing up in the drains. I dialled in a hot rinse, still musing about Yusef as I followed Marie out. But she was already at the door, pushing her arms into her jacket, lugging her overstuffed briefcase to the car.

* * *

Yusef standing by the roadside, legs apart. Tight Levi shrink-to-fits. Though mine never did. His cowboy boots are scuffed and he's facing the traffic. Bold as brass. His hair is straight and black, falling across his forehead above jay feather blue eyes. He cocks his thumb and grins at each driver as they pass. I stand beside him, half a foot shorter in hiking boots and ex-army pants. I've never hitched before. It's seven-thirty in the morning. Cars surf Manchester's rush hour and the early sun melts their windscreens as they move towards us. Yusef chants his mantra of the road: ‘Come on stop, you bastards, give us a break, eh? C'mon baby. C'mon baybee….'

Then dipping his thumb ironically as they pass.

‘Yeah fuck you, too. Fuck you madam.'

That was Yusef. Easy come, easy go. He didn't mind the endless hanging around trying to bum a ride. He didn't even mind the shite-awful food in truckers' cafes and motorway service stations. I was new to the game and felt vaguely embarrassed at asking something for nothing. Yusef didn't give a monkey's.

‘Man, we are
entitled
!'

His blues eyes crinkle like underwater lapis. Now he's racing down the slip road as the first car stops. Slim in his perfectly fitting jeans and Led Zeppelin tee shirt. He has a gold pendant around his neck in the shape of a half moon. He hasn't shaved and his teeth sparkle a grin at the driver from dark stubble. I mean it. They
sparkle
. I watch the smooth brown skin on the back of his neck as I sit cramped in the back of the car with the rucksacks and tent. Yusef chats to the driver. His father was so rich that they'd once owned a private plane. Then the Shah kicked them out and they'd fled to England. The driver is a pigeon fancier of all things and Yusef is talking to him about racing birds. How does he know this stuff?

The first lift gets us as far as Cannock and dumps us on the M6. Yusef is happy now. He takes a swig of water from the canteen and sprays an arc into the dust.

‘Perfect! We'll get down there in a day. Just takes
charisma
… and balls!'

He grins and hoists his crotch. Then he's slapping me on the shoulder, squaring up to the drivers who trundle out from the lorry park, the sun blinding them as they change gear and squint down at us. Miraculously, they stop to pick us up, dazzled by Yusef who pierces their loneliness. He interrupts their lives of endless driving: service stations, junk food, that solitary early-morning shit with strangers in the next cubicle, dirty roller towels, sleep-overs in the cab, the chance of a woman in a strange town, then sudden, cholesterol-induced death.

* * *

Marie booked the cottage and we drove down in mid-September, just as planned. Most of the traffic was streaming the other way and we couldn't help feeling smug. It took us three hours to reach Exeter where we did some shopping at the enormous service station and then hit the A30, which runs right down the centre of the peninsula to Land's End, close to where we needed to be. Way past the signs for Jamaica Inn – which rings a sunken bell of memory – we see a sign for Pendeen and I hang a right. The road winds through fields of heather bordered by walls built from huge granite boulders. Ragwort is flowering everywhere. Marie's been dozing but she rouses herself for the last leg.

‘It's poisonous.'

She's pointing at the hedgerows, splashed with yellow.

‘What? Ragwort?'

‘Yes. Gorgeous, though…'

There's fuchsia and montbretia and ox-eye daisies nodding in the slipstream of cars. A buzzard slips across the windscreen, wing tips curled upwards as it wheels then rears like a crucifixion. We enter the village almost without noticing we've arrived. I recognise nothing. I feel nothing. The Radgel is still there, at right angles to the road. There's a row of new houses opposite that couldn't have been there when I camped with Yusef. I park the car on the roadside and snap on the handbrake.

‘I'd like a pint.'

‘I'd like to get there.'

‘I know. It's not far.'

‘You don't know that.'

‘I do, it's close. I've driven all the way. A pint won't kill us will it? C'mon. It's a holiday, remember?'

‘Ok, ok.'

We climb out of the car, legs stiff from the drive. The sea smells sharp and clean. A line of washing blows about in the back yard of the pub.

The first thing I see in the bar is a black-and-white photograph of a stout unshaven man in his sixties.
Wally
. The name comes back effortlessly. Wally was the landlord who'd let us pitch our tent in his back field. Yusef had charmed him into it as soon as we arrived. I can't remember how we got there or that final lift, just the hours we spent at Bristol in a queue of other hopefuls. Here's another photograph: five lads in tweed jackets and long hair, two of them with shotguns broken over their arms. They look like they might have been around when we were. A couple of terriers are pulling at their leads and Wally's there again, younger, wearing a collapsed pork-pie hat and a grizzled smile. The same faces looking ten years older are there in the Pendeen cricket team.

Marie's in the loo as I take a quick look round. A thin guy with a ponytail is watching me from behind the bar, drawing on a roll-up. He's got dirt-blue fingernails and Celtic tattoos twining on both arms. The pub's familiar in a forgotten sort of way – a long bar with an open fireplace, a back room where we drank with Yusef's tin-mining mates. But that's all. Why can't I remember anything else? It's weird. There's no detail, just a sense of familiar space, vague faces crowding around us.

We take our pints of Tanners outside to where a couple of benches catch the sun. There's a car park beyond and beyond that a small field that looks familiar. Below that the cliffs and the sea. We sit down and Marie gets into conversation with a pleasant-looking guy with sandy hair and a generous beer gut. She's friendly like that.

I was a lifeboat man thirty years, I was. Then my back went. 
Now  I'm a lorry driver. Go all over the place, I do. I saw  Britain
from the outside from the boat, like, so I reckoned it was time to see
the inside. Everywhere from Leominster to Glasgow, Penzance to
Manchester. I reckon I must have travelled halfway round the
world by now, rightly speaking. But life on the boats was great. I
can't knock it. Not for a moment. Can't knock it.

A wasp hovers above his pint glass, a tiny hyperactive ingot of sun. He whisks it away. His speech sounds rehearsed, as if he's said it a thousand times. I imagine him picking up women as he travels the country, seducing them with his beery breath and easy body.

I leave them to it and walk into the little field. I have to duck under the line of knickers, striped pinnies and baby's nappies. I can just see the lighthouse down to the right on the cliff. It's disused now, but it used to blink in the middle of the night, its rhythmical light slicing the dark. That, at least, comes back to me. Groggy with sleep and groping outside the tent to piss. And in the morning, tankers clinging to the blue-grey heat of the horizon. We'd had perfect weather, ten days of sunshine. The only rain had been that night we got smashed on scrumpy.

* * *

Yusef tossing back his hair and laughing as I try to drive in the tent pegs. They hit stones buried under the soil and bend uselessly. The sun's burned the back of my neck and my tee shirt's chafing. He drags the little gas stove out of his rucksack humming ‘Stairway to Heaven'.

‘C'mon Yusef, give me a hand, you're supposed to be a fucking engineer.'

‘
Mining
engineer. That's civil engineering, man!'

And he's laughing again, his teeth shining, his eyes alert, singing…
and she's buying a stairway to heaven...
another moment of air guitar, then he's holding the ridgepole for me as I tighten a guy line. He smiles.

‘Gotta stay cool, Tim.'

‘It's too fucking hot to stay cool… it's alright for you…'

He doesn't like that. Frowns.

‘What, 'cos I'm Persian? You cunt! I was born in fucking Croydon, man!'

And he's laughing again, tossing peanuts into his mouth, necking the pint he's carried from the pub. He pushes back his wristwatch and I see a paler band of skin there under the fine black hairs.
Ginger minge
. That's me. The sun brings me out in freckles and sweat. My feet are sticky in my desert boots. Gritty. I need a wash. Yusef's cool. So fucking cool.

* * *

The cottage we've hired turns out to be at an awkward corner of the road. We have to park a hundred yards away on the village green and lug our bags. Marie scans the instructions she's printed from the website and finds the key. It's under a bay tree in an earthenware pot in the tiny front garden. The door opens directly into the kitchen. There's a table, a cream-coloured Aga that doesn't work any more, an electric cooker, some ramshackle handmade cupboards and a faint musty smell. The main bedroom and bathroom are downstairs. You can step through French doors from the bedroom to the garden and there's a wooden bench that faces the sea, just big enough for two people.

Upstairs is the lounge with a large screen TV, a dining table, shelves of romantic novels and some brochures for local restaurants. The owner has left the visitor's book out for us. Marie shrugs, wiping her finger along a shelf to check for dust.

‘It's ok, I suppose. I've seen better.'

‘It'll do. Bit smelly… gin?'

‘Gin.'

I find some old ice in the fridge – the kind that's blind with frost – and mix two large G & Ts. Marie puts a couple of Marks & Spencer's lasagnes in the oven and opens a bag of rocket.

‘These'll be about twenty minutes.'

I'm setting out two plates and she's smiling at me. Dark-green eyes, with pale creases at the corners where the sun's caught her face. She tosses back her plait, takes my arm.

‘Come on. Let's try the bed.'

We take our drinks into the bedroom, draw the curtains and undress. Her nipples taste faintly of lavender water. Her eyes close and then open, showing the whites, slightly startled. They close again and her hands touch against my chest before gripping the iron frame of the bed. She's silky against me as we make love. Afterwards we open curtains, clink the ice in our glasses; watch the sun sink over the sea. The buzzer goes on the cooker. Marie pushes me out of bed then follows. I turn to cradle her breasts from behind, warm as two birds in my palms.

* * *

Yusef twisting into a wave on the beach, his body lost in breaking foam. He's shouting for me to join him.

‘Come on you soft twat!'

A man walking two red setters jerks up his head disapprovingly.

‘Come on in!'

Yusef laughs, his white teeth perfect as a film star's. I still feel self-conscious about undressing in public. I'm cowering behind a rock, trying to get into my swimming shorts without filling them with sand. Yusef's hair is slicked to his head. He flicks water at me as I tiptoe in.

‘C'mon ginger bastard! It's cool.'

‘You mean it's fucking freezing!'

Then he's dragging me in. The shock of cold makes me gasp and grab his arm for balance. We stagger into the Atlantic, wave after wave swelling to the shore, sweeping the sand into underwater clouds, knocking the breath from our chests. Our bodies slip against each other. Our mouths are stung by salt. Yusef's skin feels smooth as oil. The gold pendant glitters and bounces on his chest where black hair curls against dark skin.