Ideas Above Our Station Read online

  I dip the clutch and the gearshift, cured for a moment, locks into reverse like it was meant to be.

  The Dress

  Charlie Cottrell

  I am one of life’s hoarders. My too small Clapham flat is crowded from floor to ceiling with heteroclitaire cupboards, boxes and files containing every letter I have ever received, every cinema ticket, a breadcrumb trail of matchbooks and a thousand half-finished notepads.

  I like my clutter. Each drawer-full is a collection of memories; a bus ticket from a first date I didn’t want to end; the McDonalds spoon from a bitter location shoot in Scotland; shells from a world of beaches. They are the uncompiled scrapbook of my life, my wanderer’s life. And in the nomadic world of a photographer, jetting off at a moment’s notice and living out of suitcases and lobby bars, they are steady. Solid and familiar.

  Where I like my clutter, other people do not like it. My girlfriend does not. She despises the stacked up shoe boxes and dusty box files whose magnetic clasps have retired long ago and who expel their contents in hostile protest at the first sign of movement. Her flat, her old flat, looked as though it had been lifted, complete, from Heals’ window. It comprised uniform wooden cupboards with brushed aluminium handles and accessories aligned in neat trios in accordance with contemporary rules on interior design. Dust dared not settle in my girlfriend’s old flat. Instead it migrated to mine where it could rest undisturbed between back issues of Black and White and vintage copies of The Face.

  ‘What have you kept these for?’ she says holding a fistful of textless tickets before me in dismay. ‘They’re all faded.’ They are. To the untrained eye they are indistinguishable from all the other pieces of paper debris that have failed to escape the cull but I could look at every one and give you its history. I know that the shiny one with the creased down corner was REM in Paris (November 1994) and that the pink tinged one was a Patti Smith gig in North London when I was twenty-one and in love with a girl called Isobel. I let her banish these into the rubbish pile without argument because I love her and love is about compromise. Her compromise is to move from her Heals haven into my magpie’s nest. Mine is to sit in silence as all these familiar friends are raked through by hostile hands and presented to me coldly for validation: Yes that little wooden figure is creepy – no I don’t suppose I need it. The pace she can work at is alarming. I would rather do this alone and give myself time to revisit the memories of this lifetime of souvenirs but it is this sentimental nostalgia that got me here in the first place. It is good to move on. It is good to remember that we can discard an object and keep a memory.

  ‘What on earth is this?’ Ah. If someone had asked me what had happened to this I suppose I would have remembered I had it though I doubt that I had set eyes on it in twenty years. As we look at it my girlfriend thinks it is an old net curtain (which it is) and I think it is a dress (which it also is). I suppose it might be described, kindly, as a punked-up tutu. It has lost some of its edge. My girlfriend pulls it out of the musty hatbox to where I had banished it years before. As she does, a crumpled photograph falls from the folds. I reach to catch it but she has it first. Her face contorts into that look of distaste we reserve especially for the discovery of evidence of a loved one’s former loves. ‘What the hell is this? Some sort of shrine?’ She is spitting. She throws the picture to me and fingers the dress as she might a tramp’s nappy. I look at the picture. Tanis looks back at me. Her eyes bright and holding the memories of a thousand secrets. The offending dress clings to her slender body like an affectionate lover.

  Tanis was the first woman I had ever photographed. We were nineteen, consumed by lust and ambition and had stumbled into each other during the now foggy period of week-long parties and bedsit living of my fledgeling career. I had taken her home one night to my shabby room (the hallmarks of the hoarder were present even then) and she had stayed there for nearly eight months, pottering about the place between castings like an exquisite pet and posing for portfolio shots that I would continue to use long after she was gone. We might have been in love, it wasn’t really important. What mattered was that we were in belief. I believed that she would be swept away by a soulful artist as his muse, she believed that my prolific pictures had insight and depth. We would tell each other this over paupers’ meals of baked beans and mackerel, feeding each other from the same plate in our tiny attic room and keeping each other’s dreams a reality. In my hands, looking up from the crumpled yellow picture, her face brought me back to a time of nervous uncertainty and the terrifying freedom of beginning.

  The dress had been her idea. A new outfit for another faceless party. ‘That curtain would make a great dress,’ she had said. She was probably drunk, we usually were. Alcohol coursed through our veins continually since there was very little to absorb it.

  ‘It would make a great dress,’ and she had taken it down and bleached it in the bath, treading it like a viticulturist treads grapes. When it was dry she wrapped it, tight, around her little torso and had me pin up the excess as a skirt in big, irregular swathes. It looked like a Miss Haversham bridesmaid’s dress, filthed up by the honey limbs that extended from it and the just distinguishable pair of pink knickers that she wore underneath. She could do that. She could take something mundane and make it brilliant. That night, in my beaten net curtain she had owned the room. I had spent the entire evening waiting to get her home. I snapped her when we had staggered back, tired and wasted from another killer evening. She was flopped over the arm of my battered sofa-bed grinning at me with the happy exhaustion of a shared evening. Her baby-white hair had fallen out of its pigtails and her ribs showed through the big holes in the net. You can see this in the picture.

  I know why my girlfriend is jealous. Tanis was beautiful. A tousled angel who looks out from her portrait and knows me. To my girlfriend, to the world, she looks as perfect and as carefree as models always do in pictures. It is my job to make sure they do, no matter what is happening out of shot. Just to the left of Tanis was a skirting board that a large and fearless rat had chewed through. We could hear it gnawing away as we lay in bed. It terrified Tanis and made her cling to me in a way that satisfied my desire to appear manly. The rat hole is out of frame. My girlfriend does not see it, she sees a beautiful girl making a curtain look fabulous.

  A photographer likes to play God. Through my lens I preserve the world I want to see and discard anything which might taint it. I create small scenes of perfection. Stolen glimpses of exquisite creatures. Pretty girls in crazy dresses. It is my job to make women look at them as my girlfriend now looks at the picture of Tanis. Untouchable perfection. Two-dimensional images of one-dimensional lives. We do not present a narrative, we merely suggest a moment to our audience and let them create a history. Looking at Tanis’ picture and Tanis’ dress my girlfriend thinks she has uncovered a secret but she knows as little about the woman she sees as I did the day I looked down through the lens and captured her. She does not know, as I did not know, the wealth of sadness behind that pretty face. She would not expect to discover, as I did not expect to discover, that the lithe body she is envying would be found in a studio in Milan, as limp and useless as a broken umbrella. Nor would she wish to learn, as I did not wish to learn, that on the very day that this smiling, knowing picture was taken, the carefree, exquisite Tanis had been told that she had less than a year left to inspire jealousy and lust in those that beheld her. To my girlfriend she is a beautiful ghost in a shabby home-made dress.

  ‘So, do we need this?’ she asks me holding the old curtain on the extremes of her fingertips. And there it is, before me, as close as it was when I scooped it up, with Tanis inside it, and nuzzled my face into the warmth of her body. As close as it was when I tried to drink in the last of her scent through tears that would not dry on the flight home from Italy. Hanging from my girlfriend’s angry fingers as it had hung from my angry fingers, both of us hating it for the memory of the girl it had hugged. The object but not the memory.

  Do we need
it? No. We don’t.

  Middle Spirit

  Michael Nath

  We had one thing left to eat, a tortilla in a long bread roll, which I now produced from our food bag. In turns, we took bites, my wife with vivacious expression. Her face was freckled from the Easter sun. Over Surrey the clouds were high. Was I glad to be back under them.

  To the right, another train from the south stretched itself along beside us, obscuring the sky. Involuntarily, I felt the competition. It was the lengthening that did it. Only we could be going where we were going. We had our destination. How could anything else be converging on it? Louise passed the sandwich to me. The train from the south lengthened further, snouting ahead, carriages empty. I carefully bit off the penultimate eighth of the egg and potato omelette so as to leave my wife something interesting; another carriage passed. Its occupant had bright blond hair in a ponytail. Then his train contracted and fell behind us. When I looked back at Louise, she winked vivaciously. She’d enjoyed her holiday. Clouds refilled the horizon.

  At Victoria, we discussed taxis. ‘This time of evening,’ Louise said, ‘the tube’ll be just as quick.’ We took the District Line to Earl’s Court.

  The carriage was pretty empty. I stood by the door to keep an eye on the cases while Louise occupied herself with a book which she’d started too late. On the opposite side of the carriage, some feet away from her, sat our blond competitor. Was I surprised? I could have been. Rather massively fit, of quick heavy build, still he sat, eyes on nothing. I saw him as a housebreaker; Brighton was his base.

  No. He was too steady, martial – too big for windows. I saw him in a free-style martial arts bout, kicking and punching steadily from his quick mass. He was some kind of bum. He’d crossed the skies to get here. From one of the hot white places of the earth: Australia, South Africa – Zimbabwe maybe. His tan was resinous: hurt your finger to tap it. A surfer or a climber, that’s what he was: he moved consummately when he had to; otherwise, he would stay dead still. Now he raised his eyes to the long map of stations above the carriage window. His eyes were sky grey. It was nearly our own station. I began to arrange the luggage.

  At home we opened the mail, listened to the messages, did some unpacking. Louise filled the washing machine and it started to rumble. I wondered how the house had been in our absence. Still, silent, unoccupied – of course. But strange to think of. If only we could have caught it out in its emptiness, just before our own incoming, how would it seem?

  While we were abroad, what materialized? At first there and gone, a pale-fringed floater crossing the eyes. As time condensed in the empty house, manifesting itself like a jellyfish; slowly firming, more glassy now, like a bottle in a pond; and next behold it turning humanoid, bronze-tinted, gold, white, grey, veiny: sitting down with the TV controller, putting the kettle –

  ‘What are you laughing about?’ Louise was standing in the door-way of the living room, hands on hips. She believes I’m peculiar. I think she compliments herself on it. Her friends’ men are straightforward.

  ‘Ah – the house.’

  ‘What’s funny about it?’ she enquired gladly.

  ‘The quality of the air.’

  She retired humming to herself. After a while, she called from the other room. If I was ready, we could go round to Tesco Metro to buy things for the fridge and a bottle of bleach, which we needed.

  Our road is long, straight and wide. You could run a good race down it. One hundred and seventy yards or so it must be. Light fills it, bright yellow, or when the clouds heave in from the west, bright grey-white light such as falls on cliff-paths. Outside Hotel Arden, two world travellers were smoking on the step: a chubby guy with a white ‘Mission Impossible’ T-shirt and green shorts, a girl with small eyes. Up above on the balcony, two girls had come out of a bedroom, one of them to iron; there was a green can of Heineken Export on the parapet. They shouted down to the smokers, and the smokers stayed put; then stepped onto the street from under the balcony:

  ‘Lisa’s gonna come down on a bungee!’ yelled the ironer above.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lisa’s gonna come down on a bungee rope!’

  ‘Why’s she gonna come down on a bungee rope?’

  ‘Cos she’s sick of the goddam STAIRS that’s why!’

  There are four of these hotels in the eastern half of the road, the Arden, the Urquhart, the Kensington and Table Mountain. Most of the day the young travellers lounge around; early evening they start getting ready; they came around the world for nights in the city. We were turning into the main road when the blond traveller from the train passed us inside on the left, pausing to look through the kebab house window at the cone of meat. ‘Three times is enemy action, Mr Bond!’ The line came readily to mind.

  But it’s stranger than that. The coming from afar, the coming nearer; the being here. It is like –

  ‘What else do we need?’ Louise wondered. ‘Can you think?’ She was bending to get a tin of tuna. Her knickers were red. She could have had an eye tattooed at the base of her spine to catch anyone looking at them.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  It’s like seeing rain at a distance, over fields or sea. Those grey cones, over there, east side of the bay, see them swagging? That’s rain that is. And now, here – marvellous! – the same rain soaking us, darkening the sand. We actually saw it coming. – Is it like that?

  When we left the shop, he was walking away from us carrying his kebab in a parcel like a novice father, so carefully that we overtook him at the corner of our road. The smokers from the steps of the Arden were now up on the balcony whooping. As we passed, the tubby guy nodded.

  ***

  Late in May, Louise asked if we could put up her friend on Saturday night. It turned out the friend’s husband was less straightforward than it had been popular to suppose. I said of course, as Louise ennumerated the stages of sexual dissimulation on the fingers of her left hand with the index finger of her right, tup tup tup, looking in my face for indignation. Certainly, it was a tale of wickedness; certainly; a straightforward tale of wickedness, that’s what it was.

  Anyway, Louise said, now from another room, Georgie’d be here about six o’clock Saturday. First she was going to see a psychologist; then she would drive up. She could sleep in the other bedroom. That would be all right wouldn’t it? It would.

  She arrived just before seven o’clock, having enjoyed herself with the psychologist and then got caught up in the Whitsun traffic. She looked very bright for a woman in crisis, as if she’d been walking a dog on the beach and become excited by the game of stick-throwing. With my permission, she and Louise seceded to the other bedroom and shut the door. I stood at the window and watched the street. Their voices came through the wall as if I were a trapped miner and they were having a break from knocking their way through to me. Then they would murmur, and I was abandoned. I couldn’t move from where I was. They murmured on. After two days, I’d have to drink my own piss. In the twilight, the crossbeam of the kids’ swing above the privet hedge of the residents’ garden had the appearance of a gibbet. The red sign of Hotel Arden flicked on. The door behind me opened and Georgie and my wife were waiting.

  We went along to a new Indian restaurant on the main road. Figures were passing in and out of the balcony of the Arden, laughing and calling others to come out and join them; a couple of dark figures on the street below were called up too. Six or twelve thousand miles they’d come. I wondered how many could fit on it before it collapsed. If you were too old, the whole lot’d come down.

  Chettinad Junction was a large place; we were given a concealed table in its western transept. When we’d settled, Georgie told me her troubles, listening eagerly to my responses, while Louise nodded and translated some of my philosophical remarks. There was a lull. The main courses appeared. I didn’t want to say too much more: talking about things in particular gives me a parochial feeling, particularly interesting things. The noise of words drives them
away. Thinking’s better; thinking is quiet.

  ‘Bet you haven’t read Corinth, Mark!’ Georgie glimmered at me.

  ‘He won’t read books like that,’ Louise chaffed me loyally. She was feeding herself from a noodle bowl the size of a medium lampshade. The noodles steamed and glistened as she sorted them from their yellow broth.

  ‘I’ve seen it in the shops,’ I said. Stacked in pale woody-brown pilasters. The cover of the book, it’s the colour of millions of living rooms. Louise looked across, Georgie sideways, at me. They wanted my scornful opinion as sauce to their meal. I couldn’t give it. ‘You have read it, Georgie?’ She had golden powder on her face: Louise must have given it her to cheer her up. She’d left some of her meat.

  ‘I’ve read it twice.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m ashamed to tell you!’ She laughed. She wasn’t very ashamed. On the other hand, maybe she lived and read in shame, with her glimmering face. A smell of grapefruit cologne rose from her, more spirituous than the hosts of spices on the air. Single-handed it fought them and died.

  ‘But it’s got an interesting theory,’ Georgie said. Louise sat patiently, knowing how I liked to hear theories. No noodles were left in her lamspshade. ‘The main character’s a librarian.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Not an ordinary librarian.’ Georgie gave me a chastening look. ‘He’s won all these research prizes. Don’t make that face, Marcus, or I won’t tell you!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Anyway he goes to Corinth to do research.’

  ‘What into?’

  ‘The fall of the Greek Empire. Ssh a minute. Anyway, he’s in a bar one night sipping an ouzo –’

  ‘Are they all smashing plates in the backgound?’