"Come on," said Vic.
"It'll be great."
"No, it won't," I said,
although I'd lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it.
"It'll be brilliant,"
said Vic, for the hundredth time. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" He grinned
with white teeth.
We both attended an all-boys'
school in south London. While it would be a lie to say that we had no
experience with girls -- Vic seemed to have had many girlfriends, while I had
kissed three of my sister's friends -- it would, I think, be perfectly true to
say that we both chiefly spoke to, interacted with, and only truly understood,
other boys. Well, I did, anyway. It's hard to speak for someone else, and I've
not seen Vic for thirty years. I'm not sure that I would know what to say to
him now if I did.
We were walking the backstreets
that used to twine in a grimy maze behind East Croydon station -- a friend had
told Vic about a party, and Vic was determined to go whether I liked it or not,
and I didn't. But my parents were away that week at a conference, and I was
Vic's guest at his house, so I was trailing along beside him.
"It'll be the same as it
always is," I said. "After an hour you'll be off somewhere snogging
the prettiest girl at the party, and I'll be in the kitchen listening to
somebody's mum going on about politics or poetry or something."
"You just have to talk to them," he said. "I think it's probably that road at the end here." He gestured cheerfully, swinging the bag with the bottle in it.
"Don't you know?"
"Alison gave me directions
and I wrote them on a bit of paper, but I left it on the hall table. S'okay. I
can find it."
"How?" Hope welled
slowly up inside me.
"We walk down the
road," he said, as if speaking to an idiot child. "And we look for
the party. Easy."
I looked, but saw no party: just
narrow houses with rusting cars or bikes in their concreted front gardens; and
the dusty glass fronts of newsagents, which smelled of alien spices and sold
everything from birthday cards and secondhand comics to the kind of magazines
that were so pornographic that they were sold already sealed in plastic bags. I
had been there when Vic had slipped one of those magazines beneath his sweater,
but the owner caught him on the pavement outside and made him give it back.
We reached the end of the road
and turned into a narrow street of terraced houses. Everything looked very
still and empty in the Summer's evening. "It's all right for you," I
said. "They fancy you. You don't actually have to talk to them." It
was true: one urchin grin from Vic and he could have his pick of the room.
"Nah. S'not like that.
You've just got to talk."
The times I had kissed my
sister's friends I had not spoken to them. They had been around while my sister
was off doing something elsewhere, and they had drifted into my orbit, and so I
had kissed them. I do not remember any talking. I did not know what to say to
girls, and I told him so.
They're just girls," said
Vic. "They don't come from another planet."
As we followed the curve of the road around, my hopes that the party would prove unfindable began to fade: a low pulsing noise, music muffled by walls and doors, could be heard from a house up ahead. It was eight in the evening, not that early if you aren't yet sixteen, and we weren't. Not quite.
I had parents who liked to know
where I was, but I don't think Vic's parents cared that much. He was the
youngest of five boys. That in itself seemed magical to me: I merely had two
sisters, both younger than I was, and I felt both unique and lonely. I had
wanted a brother as far back as I could remember. When I turned thirteen, I
stopped wishing on falling stars or first stars, but back when I did, a brother
was what I had wished for.
We went up the garden path, crazy
paving leading us past a hedge and a solitary rosebush to a pebble- dashed
facade. We rang the doorbell, and the door was opened by a girl. I could not
have told you how old she was, which was one of the things about girls I had
begun to hate: when you start out as kids you're just boys and girls, going
through time at the same speed, and you're all five, or seven, or eleven,
together. And then one day there's a lurch and the girls just sort of sprint
off into the future ahead of you, and they know all about everything, and they
have periods and breasts and makeup and God-only-knew-what-else -- for I
certainly didn't. The diagrams in biology textbooks were no substitute for
being, in a very real sense, young adults. And the girls of our age were.
Vic and I weren't young adults,
and I was beginning to suspect that even when I started needing to shave every
day, instead of once every couple of weeks, I would still be way behind.
The girl said, "Hello?"
Vic said, "We're friends of
Alison's." We had met Alison, all freckles and orange hair and a wicked
smile, in Hamburg, on a German exchange. The exchange organizers had sent some
girls with us, from a local girls' school, to balance the sexes. The girls, our
age, more or less, were raucous and funny, and had more or less adult
boyfriends with cars and jobs and motorbikes and -- in the case of one girl
with crooked teeth and a raccoon coat, who spoke to me about it sadly at the
end of a party in Hamburg, in, of course, the kitchen -- a wife and kids.
"She isn't here," said
the girl at the door. "No Alison."
"Not to worry," said
Vic, with an easy grin. "I'm Vic. This is Enn." A beat, and then the
girl smiled back at him. Vic had a bottle of white wine in a plastic bag,
removed from his parents' kitchen cabinet. "Where should I put this,
then?"
She stood out of the way, letting
us enter. "There's a kitchen in the back," she said. "Put it on
the table there, with the other bottles." She had golden, wavy hair, and
she was very beautiful. The hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that
she was beautiful.
"What's your name, then?" said Vic.
She told him it was Stella, and
he grinned his crooked white grin and told her that that had to be the
prettiest name he had ever heard. Smooth bastard. And what was worse was that
he said it like he meant it.
Vic headed back to drop off the
wine in the kitchen, and I looked into the front room, where the music was
coming from. There were people dancing in there. Stella walked in, and she
started to dance, swaying to the music all alone, and I watched her.
This was during the early days of
punk. On our own record players we would play the Adverts and the Jam, the
Stranglers and the Clash and the Sex Pistols. At other people's parties you'd
hear ELO or 10cc or even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you were lucky.
During the German exchange, the only LP that we had all been able to agree on
was Neil Young's Harvest, and his song "Heart of Gold" had threaded
through the trip like a refrain: I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. . . .
The music playing in that front
room wasn't anything I recognized.
It sounded a bit like a German
electronic pop group called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I'd been given for
my last birthday, of strange sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The
music had a beat, though, and the half- dozen girls in that room were moving
gently to it, although I only looked at Stella. She shone.
Vic pushed past me, into the
room. He was holding a can of lager. "There's booze back in the kitchen,"
he told me. He wandered over to Stella and he began to talk to her. I couldn't
hear what they were saying over the music, but I knew that there was no room
for me in that conversation.
I didn't like beer, not back
then. I went off to see if there was something I wanted to drink. On the
kitchen table stood a large bottle of Coca-Cola, and I poured myself a plastic
tumblerful, and I didn't dare say anything to the pair of girls who were
talking in the underlit kitchen. They were animated and utterly lovely. Each of
them had very black skin and glossy hair and movie star clothes, and their
accents were foreign, and each of them was out of my league.
I wandered, Coke in hand.
The house was deeper than it
looked, larger and more complex than the two- up two- down model I had
imagined. The rooms were underlit -- I doubt there was a bulb of more than 40
watts in the building -- and each room I went into was inhabited: in my memory,
inhabited only by girls. I did not go upstairs.
A girl was the only occupant of
the conservatory. Her hair was so fair it was white, and long, and straight,
and she sat at the glass-topped table, her hands clasped together, staring at
the garden outside, and the gathering dusk. She seemed wistful.
"Do you mind if I sit
here?" I asked, gesturing with my cup. She shook her head, and then
followed it up with a shrug, to indicate that it was all the same to her. I sat
down.
Vic walked past the conservatory
door. He was talking to Stella, but he looked in at me, sitting at the table,
wrapped in shyness and awkwardness, and he opened and closed his hand in a
parody of a speaking mouth. Talk. Right.
"Are you from around here?" I asked the girl.
She shook her head. She wore a
low-cut silvery top, and I tried not to stare at the swell of her breasts.
I said, "What's your name?
I'm Enn."
"Wain's Wain," she
said, or something that sounded like it. "I'm a second."
"That's uh. That's a
different name."
She fixed me with huge, liquid
eyes. "It indicates that my progenitor was also Wain, and that I am
obliged to report back to her. I may not breed."
"Ah. Well. Bit early for
that anyway, isn't it?"
She unclasped her hands, raised them
above the table, spread her fingers. "You see?" The little finger on
her left hand was crooked, and it bifurcated at the top, splitting into two
smaller fingertips. A minor deformity. "When I was finished a decision was
needed. Would I be retained, or eliminated? I was fortunate that the decision
was with me. Now, I travel, while my more perfect sisters remain at home in
stasis. They were firsts. I am a second.
Soon I must return to Wain, and
tell her all I have seen. All my impressions of this place of yours."
"I don't actually live in
Croydon," I said. "I don't come from here." I wondered if she
was American. I had no idea what she was talking about.
"As you say," she agreed, "neither of us comes from here." She folded her six- fingered left hand beneath her right, as if tucking it out of sight. "I had expected it to be bigger, and cleaner, and more colorful. But still, it is a jewel."
She yawned, covered her mouth
with her right hand, only for a moment, before it was back on the table again.
"I grow weary of the journeying, and I wish sometimes that it would end.
On a street in Rio at Carnival, I saw them on a bridge, golden and tall and
insect-eyed and winged, and elated I almost ran to greet them, before I saw
that they were only people in costumes. I said to Hola Colt, 'Why do they try
so hard to look like us?' and Hola Colt replied, 'Because they hate themselves,
all shades of pink and brown, and so small.' It is what I experience, even me,
and I am not grown. It is like a world of children, or of elves." Then she
smiled, and said, "It was a good thing they could not any of them see Hola
Colt."
"Um," I said, "do
you want to dance?"
She shook her head immediately.
"It is not permitted," she said. "I can do nothing that might
cause damage to property. I am Wain's."
"Would you like something to
drink, then?"
"Water," she said.
I went back to the kitchen and
poured myself another Coke, and filled a cup with water from the tap. From the
kitchen back to the hall, and from there into the conservatory, but now it was
quite empty.
I wondered if the girl had gone to the toilet, and if she might change her mind about dancing later. I walked back to the front room and stared in. The place was filling up. There were more girls dancing, and several lads I didn't know, who looked a few years older than me and Vic. The lads and the girls all kept their distance, but Vic was holding Stella's hand as they danced, and when the song ended he put an arm around her, casually, almost proprietorially, to make sure that nobody else cut in.
I wondered if the girl I had been
talking to in the conservatory was now upstairs, as she did not appear to be on
the ground floor.
I walked into the living room,
which was across the hall from the room where the people were dancing, and I
sat down on the sofa. There was a girl sitting there already. She had dark
hair, cut short and spiky, and a nervous manner.
Talk, I thought. "Um, this
mug of water's going spare," I told her, "if you want it?"
She nodded, and reached out her
hand and took the mug, extremely carefully, as if she were unused to taking
things, as if she could trust neither her vision nor her hands.
"I love being a
tourist," she said, and smiled hesitantly. She had a gap between her two
front teeth, and she sipped the tap water as if she were an adult sipping a
fine wine. "The last tour, we went to sun, and we swam in sunfire pools
with the whales. We heard their histories and we shivered in the chill of the
outer places, then we swam deepward where the heat churned and comforted us.
I wanted to go back. This time, I
wanted it. There was so much I had not seen. Instead we came to world. Do you
like it?"
"Like what?"
She gestured vaguely to the room
-- the sofa, the armchairs, the curtains, the unused gas fire.
"It's all right, I
suppose."
"I told them I did not wish
to visit world," she said. "My parent-teacher was unimpressed. 'You
will have much to learn,' it told me. I said, 'I could learn more in sun,
again. Or in the deeps. Jessa spun webs between galaxies. I want to do that.'
"But there was no reasoning
with it, and I came to world. Parent-teacher engulfed me, and I was here,
embodied in a decaying lump of meat hanging on a frame of calcium. As I
incarnated I felt things deep inside me, fluttering and pumping and squishing.
It was my first experience with pushing air through the mouth, vibrating the
vocal cords on the way, and I used it to tell parent-teacher that I wished that
I would die, which it acknowledged was the inevitable exit strategy from
world."
There were black worry beads
wrapped around her wrist, and she fiddled with them as she spoke. "But
knowledge is there, in the meat," she said, "and I am resolved to
learn from it."
We were sitting close at the
center of the sofa now. I decided I should put an arm around her, but casually.
I would extend my arm along the back of the sofa and eventually sort of creep
it down, almost imperceptibly, until it was touching her. She said, "The
thing with the liquid in the eyes, when the world blurs. Nobody told me, and I
still do not understand. I have touched the folds of the Whisper and pulsed and
flown with the tachyon swans, and I still do not understand."
She wasn't the prettiest girl there, but she seemed nice enough, and she was a girl, anyway. I let my arm slide down a little, tentatively, so that it made contact with her back, and she did not tell me to take it away.
Vic called to me then, from the
doorway. He was standing with his arm around Stella, protectively, waving at
me. I tried to let him know, by shaking my head, that I was onto something, but
he called my name and, reluctantly, I got up from the sofa and walked over to
the door. "What?"
"Er. Look. The party,"
said Vic, apologetically. "It's not the one I thought it was. I've been
talking to Stella and I figured it out. Well, she sort of explained it to me.
We're at a different party."
"Christ. Are we in trouble?
Do we have to go?"
Stella shook her head. He leaned
down and kissed her, gently, on the lips. "You're just happy to have me
here, aren't you darlin'?"
"You know I am," she
told him.
He looked from her back to me,
and he smiled his white smile: roguish, lovable, a little bit Artful Dodger, a
little bit wide- boy Prince Charming. "Don't worry. They're all tourists
here anyway. It's a foreign exchange thing, innit? Like when we all went to
Germany."
"It is?"
"Enn. You got to talk to them. And that means you got to listen to them, too. You understand?"
"I did. I already talked to
a couple of them."
"You getting anywhere?"
"I was till you called me
over."
"Sorry about that. Look, I
just wanted to fill you in. Right?"
And he patted my arm and he
walked away with Stella. Then, together, the two of them went up the stairs.
Understand me, all the girls at
that party, in the twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces but, more
important than that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or
humanity it is that makes a beauty something more than a shop window dummy.
Stella was the most lovely of any
of them, but she, of course, was Vic's, and they were going upstairs together,
and that was just how things would always be.
There were several people now
sitting on the sofa, talking to the gap- toothed girl. Someone told a joke, and
they all laughed. I would have had to push my way in there to sit next to her
again, and it didn't look like she was expecting me back, or cared that I had
gone, so I wandered out into the hall. I glanced in at the dancers, and found
myself wondering where the music was coming from. I couldn't see a record
player or speakers.
From the hall I walked back to
the kitchen.
Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an excuse to be there, and, on the good side, at this party I couldn't see any signs of someone's mum. I inspected the various bottles and cans on the kitchen table, then I poured a half an inch of Pernod into the bottom of my plastic cup, which I filled to the top with Coke. I dropped in a couple of ice cubes and took a sip, relishing the sweet-shop tang of the drink.
"What's that you're
drinking?" A girl's voice.
"It's Pernod," I told
her. "It tastes like aniseed balls, only it's alcoholic." I didn't
say that I only tried it because I'd heard someone in the crowd ask for a
Pernod on a live Velvet Underground LP.
"Can I have one?" I
poured another Pernod, topped it off with Coke, passed it to her. Her hair was
a coppery auburn, and it tumbled around her head in ringlets. It's not a hair
style you see much now, but you saw it a lot back then.
"What's your name?" I
asked.
"Triolet," she said.
"Pretty name," I told
her, although I wasn't sure that it was. She was pretty, though.
"It's a verse form,"
she said, proudly. "Like me."
"You're a poem?"
She smiled, and looked down and
away, perhaps bashfully. Her profile was almost flat -- a perfect Grecian nose
that came down from her forehead in a straight line. We did Antigone in the
school theater the previous year. I was the messenger who brings Creon the news
of Antigone's death. We wore half-masks that made us look like that. I thought
of that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and I thought of Barry
Smith's drawings of women in the Conan comics: five years later I would have
thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddall. But I was
only fifteen then.
"You're a poem?" I
repeated.
She chewed her lower lip.
"If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose
world was swallowed by the sea."
"Isn't it hard to be three
things at the same time?"
"What's your name?"
"Enn."
"So you are Enn," she
said. "And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three
things at the same time?"
"But they aren't different
things. I mean, they aren't contradictory." It was a word I had read many
times but never said aloud before that night, and I put the stresses in the
wrong places. Contradictory.
She wore a thin dress made of a
white, silky fabric. Her eyes were a pale green, a color that would now make me
think of tinted contact lenses; but this was thirty years ago; things were
different then. I remember wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I
was sure that they were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it
almost hurt.
Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were talking nonsense, even if her name wasn't really Triolet (my generation had not been given hippie names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the Moons, they were only six, seven, eight years old back then). She said, "We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again."
"And then what
happened?"
She looked at me with her green
eyes, and it was as if she stared out at me from her own Antigone half-mask;
but as if her pale green eyes were just a different, deeper, part of the mask.
"You cannot hear a poem without it changing you," she told me.
"They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited
them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images
permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its
aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be
born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things
go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any
longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself
across the vastness of the known."
I edged closer to her, so I could
feel my leg pressing against hers.
She seemed to welcome it: she put
her hand on my arm, affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading across my
face.
"There are places that we
are welcomed," said Triolet, "and places where we are regarded as a
noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and
eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?"
"I don't know," I said,
still smiling. I could hear the unfamiliar music as it pulsed and scattered and
boomed in the front room.
She leaned into me then and -- I
suppose it was a kiss. . . . I suppose. She pressed her lips to my lips,
anyway, and then, satisfied, she pulled back, as if she had now marked me as
her own.
"Would you like to hear
it?" she asked, and I nodded, unsure what she was offering me, but certain
that I needed anything she was willing to give me.
She began to whisper something in
my ear. It's the strangest thing about poetry -- you can tell it's poetry, even
if you don't speak the language. You can hear Homer's Greek without
understanding a word, and you still know it's poetry. I've heard Polish poetry,
and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like
that. I didn't know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and
in my mind's eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the
palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the
relentless advance of the ocean.
Perhaps I kissed her properly. I
don't remember. I know I wanted to.
And then Vic was shaking me
violently. "Come on!" he was shouting. "Quickly. Come on!"
In my head I began to come back
from a thousand miles away.
"Idiot. Come on. Just get a
move on," he said, and he swore at me. There was fury in his voice.
For the first time that evening I
recognized one of the songs being played in the front room. A sad saxophone
wail followed by a cascade of liquid chords, a man's voice singing cut-up
lyrics about the sons of the silent age. I wanted to stay and hear the song.
She said, "I am not
finished. There is yet more of me."
"Sorry love," said Vic,
but he wasn't smiling any longer. "There'll be another time," and he
grabbed me by the elbow and he twisted and pulled, forcing me from the room. I
did not resist. I knew from experience that Vic could beat the stuffing out me
if he got it into his head to do so. He wouldn't do it unless he was upset or
angry, but he was angry now.
Out into the front hall. As Vic
pulled open the door, I looked back one last time, over my shoulder, hoping to
see Triolet in the doorway to the kitchen, but she was not there. I saw Stella,
though, at the top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and I saw her
face.
This all happened thirty years
ago. I have forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will
forget everything; yet, if I have any certainty of life beyond death, it is all
wrapped up not in psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot
believe that I will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on
Stella's face as she watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death I shall
remember that.
Her clothes were in disarray, and
there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes --
You wouldn't want to make a
universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.
We ran then, me and Vic, away
from the party and the tourists and the twilight, ran as if a lightning storm
was on our heels, a mad helter-skelter dash down the confusion of streets,
threading through the maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop until
we could not breathe; and then we stopped and panted, unable to run any longer.
We were in pain. I held on to a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long, into the
gutter.
He wiped his mouth.
"She wasn't a--" He
stopped.
He shook his head.
Then he said, "You know . .
. I think there's a thing. When you've gone as far as you dare. And if you go
any further, you wouldn't be you anymore? You'd be the person who'd done that?
The places you just can't go. . . . I think that happened to me tonight."
I thought I knew what he was
saying. "Screw her, you mean?" I said.
He rammed a knuckle hard against my temple, and twisted it violently. I wondered if I was going to have to fight him -- and lose -- but after a moment he lowered his hand and moved away from me, making a low, gulping noise.
I looked at him curiously, and I
realized that he was crying: his face was scarlet; snot and tears ran down his
cheeks. Vic was sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly
as a little boy.
He walked away from me then,
shoulders heaving, and he hurried down the road so he was in front of me and I
could no longer see his face. I wondered what had occurred in that upstairs
room to make him behave like that, to scare him so, and I could not even begin
to guess.
The streetlights came on, one by
one; Vic stumbled on ahead, while I trudged down the street behind him in the
dusk, my feet treading out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could
not properly remember and would never be able to repeat.
