What Becomes (10 page)

‘What?' Elaine has spent the last six months signing cheques with an unverifiable version of her signature, so that enquiries will be made and toing and froing will ensue, this causing delays in the removal of money from their account – money which is not their money, but an idea of money, an idea they pay for, more and more. Tom is staring at her. His expression has a sort of yowl in it, something intent. She prepares to say, ‘What are you talking about – you're not worth anything.' And realises how that will sound, even if she adds, ‘I'm not worth anything, either.' By then it would be too late, damage done.

‘I'm worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.'

Something in the light around her sparks for a moment and then contracts, because whatever he means won't be real, can't be real. ‘Tom, please. Don't.'

‘I read an article. It's if you sold me. Corneas, bone grafts, tendons – that way, I'm worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Skin – they even sell your skin. To people who need skin. Burned people. You have a legacy. You make the blind see.' This, he completely should not have said – it leaves him swallowing, clamping his jaw and the tears seeping out, becoming obvious, and his nose is running and he realises he is worried that the waitress will find him pathetic, not empathetic. He can't predict what Elaine will find him.

‘I'm eating. You're talking about somebody selling your skin while I'm eating.'

Elaine knows she ought to be angry – that would be completely justified – him dropping over into self-pity the way that he does and trying to haul her down, too – but it's such a strong, unnerving thought – her husband dead and therefore blameless – which she hadn't expected, but that's how he seems, this imagined corpse – and no one to defend him: not her, not anyone – so he is not only dead and blameless, but lonely and unloved and open to let someone creep in and steal what he was. ‘Tom.' If she moves, lets her fingers settle on his free hand, or holds his arm – if she feels him shivering – and it is clear that he is shivering and all the cold of the world is in him and the cold of how they are and have to be – if she does that, touches him, there is no telling what will happen. Her husband scares her.

Tom is aware that he is both weeping and shaking and that he's doing so mostly because of the meal. The other sadnesses are too enormous and he can't currently consider them, but he has to admit he is spoiling this marvellous food by loving it to the point where it wracks his heart and this is insane and also means that he's a whole new kind of wasteful bastard.

‘Come on, love. Tom.'

Her voice is kind. It'll be that way out of habit, he supposes.

‘Tom.' Elaine supposes he enjoys being ill. ‘You'll make yourself poorly.' She's noticed before that he can sicken, get real symptoms, vomiting, aches, when he doesn't want to do something, meet someone.

It may not be deliberate. He could be improperly balanced, prone to psychosomatic trauma. Unsuitable for sale, in fact. ‘Tom. Please get a grip.' He could be unfairly in need of protection. ‘Look, the waitress is coming. Please. For me. Please, sweetheart.'

And the waitress does come and pauses by their table while Tom looks up at her, blurry, and Elaine presents what she knows will be nothing like a smile.

‘Is everything . . .'

Elaine watches as the woman falters. It's plain to all three of them that any enquiry about their meal is going to prove indelicate.

Is everything all right? – No, it's not.

Can I get you anything? – What do you suggest? Do you have a gun, or a pair of matching nooses, or two hundred and fifty thousand dollars – so that my husband won't have to sell himself as meat – just two hundred and forget the fifty, what's fifty thousand dollars between friends?

‘Are you . . .' The waitress steadies and adjusts, ‘Happy with your meal?'

‘Yes.' Elaine nods to underline this. The laugh has spun in at her, is winding, drilling, it is making her spine seem fibrous, tinder dry. ‘Yes. And some more, some more tea and we'll have a dessert.' Why not? This was costing them fifty dollars each already – fifty, fifty thousand, what's fifty? – they might as well get a dessert.

Tom feels he should be explanatory and adds, ‘We lost . . .' and then can't begin to say what. Not that
We lost
doesn't pretty much cover it. The waitress nods softly and he believes that he likes her and she likes him and that he needs to grasp these moments, collect them.

Empathy.

Elaine dabs at the back of his hand for a moment and news of this travels slowly up his arm.

‘Do you think you'll want a pudding?' She pats his knuckles. ‘Tom? Might as well. I will if you will.' There's a flare of motion she doesn't expect and then her hand is caught between both of his, held in a hot, damp pressure. She faces him, blinks, ‘Have to build you up – then you'll be worth more.'

And this sounds too likely and too close, so they keep their hands stacked on the table, a confinement they find reassuring.

Elaine even wonders about adding to it, completing the set:
hands, two pairs, any reasonable offer will be considered.

Tom feels very slightly as if he has sprung across at her fleeing some unspecified peril and is now clinging.

For dear life.

He could let go. At any point. Just not this one.

We'll need to stay with her parents – bloody Edgbaston – it was bad enough living there by ourselves – arsehole bloody schoolkids hanging around – little pothead wankers and skinny, horsey tarts who throw up all the time. And their arsehole bloody parents.

And
her
arsehole bloody parents.
You're from Cumbernauld? Oh, well
.

Can't go and stay with the Ma, though. All settled in Brodick – sea views and Dad scattered on the beach. Worked himself hollow to buy me an education, the start of a life where this shite wouldn't happen. Oh, well. Can't even tell the Ma how things turned out. America? It all went tits up. Oh, well. Government bailed the banks out, but not us. Oh, well. First hired, first fired, crucifying fucking mortgage and not citizens. Oh fucking, fucking, well.

No swearing, though. And positive. We won't be homeless.

We'll be in Edgbaston.

They let each other go when the waitress clears their table and returns with plates of minute rectangular desserts – two pink, two cream, two chocolate brown with a brush of gold leaf on the top.

‘We should scrape it off and save it.' Although saying so makes Tom feel hemmed in rather than jovial. ‘Gold – the only stuff that's worth anything. Should have bought shares.'

Elaine slowly puts her fork into the pink, lifts up a beautiful fragment and eats. ‘God, it's wonderful. Sort of a mousse, or something. Very strawberry.'

They both manage the pink and the cream and softly agree they were ridiculously, unnecessarily fine and then they stare at the chocolate and the flakes of gold.

‘Confectioner's gold. Is there such a thing?' Elaine remembers she read somewhere that the secret way to win your man is by asking him questions and not knowing answers, deferring to the wisdom he wants you to prove he has. But Tom isn't like that.

‘Well, if there is, we've got some.'

Elaine hears his voice getting thinner, stressed. Tom her man, Tom who's snuffling and wiping his face with the heel of his hand, who's too much a boy. She tells him, as if this might cheer him up, ‘I bet people come in here all the time and just order it. Plate of gold, please.' Tom the boy who is a lecturer, letters after the name and a Dr in front – Tom who is still always waiting to be found out – she never has made him any more secure than that. ‘Plate of gold. Like eating money.'

‘Like eating something better than money.'

Tom clears his throat, readies his forefinger and thumb, flexes, picks up the soft chocolate between them and puts it all into his mouth, lets it warm, melt, cloy. He doesn't chew, only swallows and so tomorrow he'll be partly gold. He'll incorporate it, never let it go.

Or else this is just a waste. An intolerable waste.

There's something like fright in him, vertigo. He watches Elaine's face, something about her expression which is brave: small and courageous and enough to make him bleed, shout, touch her, although he does none of those things, only watches as she picks up the last of their meal, repeats his gestures, studies the shape and then eats it, swallows gold.

Afterwards, they head for the park, the sun dropping fast through the afternoon, already striking fire in the highest windows of the mountainous apartment blocks. Elaine sees her husband tread across a tangle of long shadows, then lean against the tree that cast them. He appears to be almost relaxed. The size of him – almost clumsy, but he never is – and the line of his back: when it softens he can seem like he used to be, the last three years driven off, cured. Maybe this is the secret way to keep her man – never look at his face.

Almost clumsy.

Sometimes completely clumsy. I used to think I'd say something – that there are nights when he'd want to please me, but he already had. Anxious fingers. Insisting. Too much.

Big hands.

He has stupid, magnificent, big hands.

And he isn't clumsy any more. Isn't anything.

Maybe this is the secret way to keep each other – never look and never touch. Never meet.

They wander in among the leaves and American robins, the flicker of sparrows, and then they deliver themselves to increasingly wider paths until they are easing along beside the road, heading out to the dimming streets. The light is bitter and behind them a bright haze of red is rising to finish the day.

By the time they get back to their borrowed apartment they are both a dead cold, slurred with exhaustion. Tom considers running a bath and then decides against it. Elaine makes them someone else's excellent coffee in someone else's excellent mugs and they sit on someone else's excellent sofa and stare out at someone else's excellent rooftop view, the wild shapes the city hides up against the sky: bell towers, temples, pinnacles, farmhouse verandas, nunnery gardens, buttresses and battlements: the fantasies that money conjures and maintains. The sunset leaps and gilds a tower block downtown and off to their west, makes it burn so sharply that it leaves a numbness when they turn away and marks wherever they look.

In the morning, they have to leave here. They don't want to go.

WHOLE FAMILY WITH YOUNG CHILDREN DEVASTATED

This was yesterday.

No, this was earlier today. This was 2.56 in the morning and I was brutally awake and very much unable to remember asking anyone to phone up and make me listen to their house.

That's all I could hear, just their house – the sound of their furniture, perhaps, a room with ornaments and carpet, the kind of space that wouldn't raise a din: muffled, cosy, none of that messy background you'd get from a mobile, or a late-night place of work, this was the noise of a person waiting in their home, not moving and not speaking, not a word.

And I imagined this person standing, sneaking their breath out and maybe their free hand weighted at their side, hanging – or maybe both hands dropped and the receiver pointless, as if they can no longer think what they should do. They were already making me feel compassionate.

An aeroplane worried distantly off to the east. Far and high.

I had no memory of reaching for the phone, which meant that had happened while I was unconscious. I was already aware that, like many people, I can perform complex series of actions without myself. This is handy.

I believed that I hadn't spoken and positive that he hadn't, either – or she hadn't – the person. There was only this concentrating silence that tunnelled in along the line, dragging a sense of my possible counterpart and their receiver, the curl of their fingers, a suggestion of their sweat. Late-night calling always does suggest some kind of sweat, the symptoms of personal emergency, unpredictable elements: pain, fear, failure to halt appropriately, removal of comforts and dignity, sex.

Something in those areas.

That was my guess.

And by this time I should have hung up, or shouted
hello
with increasing alarm, the way people do in horror movies when the killer has cut their connection, when there will soon be a murderer in their house. Instead I smiled.

I don't believe that smiles are audible.

But as soon as I happened to make one, the line snapped shut.

I rolled over and dipped back into sleep, stretched out my arm to catch at it, grab the doze, the ringing doze.

Which wasn't sensible, wasn't possible – a ringing doze, that was a source of confusion.

The telephone ringing again.

And I needn't have answered.

But I had this idea now of the person standing, someone who might need something, might need me – and that sound in itself, the ring, is intentionally demanding and who was I to think I should resist? Plus there was a more than average chance the call might even be for me, the start of a proper conversation.

So.

‘Hello.' I made a point of speaking loudly. I was abrupt in my manner.

‘Ah . . . I'm sorry.' A man's voice, muffled with a kind of indecision, but no more dramatic emotions than that.

There's this other voice, too, shrill and hacking up behind his words. ‘
Go on. Tell her. Her.
' A woman is shouting, ‘
Go on! Try it – as if . . .
' She's at a slight distance, ‘
as if!
' although not so far away that she
has
to shout. ‘
Go on! You called her, you tell her, you just fucking tell her.
' She is plainly screaming because she wants to, because her emotions
are
dramatic and are leading her that way.