The Bradshaw Variations (19 page)

Most of the men he knows are at work at this time of day. Even Susie is at work, at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. It is only Leo who can feel cold at that hour and have the freedom to go and buy himself a coat. In Marks & Spencer he tries on three or four. He is shy, and slightly disgusted. It can feel like a kind of prostitution, the first cold forays into a shop. His needs are so private, so over-fashioned by his imagination, and the shops so concrete and matter-of-fact: it takes a while for him to warm up, and reshape his desires to match what is actually on offer. This is why people like Susie do their shopping in Temple Street. They don’t cast themselves out into the world when they need to buy a coat. They go to places that specialise in what they want.

There are two other people in the men’s department, a couple, shopping together. The woman goes into raptures about whatever unexceptional garment her eye happens to fall on.

‘Oh, isn’t
this
nice!’ she keeps saying to her husband.

In each coat he puts on Leo looks like a different person. He is surprised: he wouldn’t have thought it was possible. On the hangers these coats have a vague look of uselessness, but when he puts them on they are startlingly powerful and complete. There is a navy blue one with square shoulders and a tapered body that particularly disturbs him. It is the coat men of his age wear over their city suits, or have hanging from a peg in their company cars: men Leo knew at school, as boys, who still seem frozen in childhood in spite of their paunches and their balding heads. Wearing that coat, there seems to be no difference between himself and them. This is the son his parents wanted, this red-faced man in the mirror with a coat that suggests a job in banking: he knows it beyond any doubt. He takes it off and puts on a horrible black tailored cashmere that turns him into an undertaker.

‘Oh, that’s
lovely
. Isn’t that just
lovely
,’ the woman says.

She speaks so sombrely, so profoundly, that he has to turn his head. He sees her, a nondescript person with cropped, rigid hair, holding up a tan-coloured anorak. Her husband is a tall silent hunk of grey flesh who stands behind her with his giant hands hanging lifelessly at his sides.

‘I just think that’s really lovely,’ she repeats.

He takes off the black coat and drops it in a bundle over the rack. Momentarily he catches the woman’s eye. She is looking to see what he has discarded. Her face wears a gleam of predatory interest. He stares back at her reprovingly. Doesn’t she see how ugly she is, how repellent? She reaches past him and picks up the coat where he has let it fall. She seems to have no awareness of him at all. She looks at the label and runs her hand over the heavy black cloth. To Leo it is as if she is running her hand over death itself, blindly stroking its nullity, its soft evil.

‘That’s nice too,’ she says to her husband.

‘Excuse me,’ Leo says loudly.

They are standing so close to him that they are blocking his way out. He has to force himself sideways through the space between them, and even then he remains invisible. The woman’s padded jacket makes a rasping sound all down Leo’s back as he pushes past her and stalks away towards the escalators.

Susie would laugh at a woman like that. She would get her exactly, the way she touched everything, the way she said,
That’s nice too
. She would neutralise her: she could neutralise the devil himself. Susie could make even the most horrible things seem harmless simply by retaining her ability to comment on them. Leo sometimes wonders what becomes of the fact that some of these things are not harmless at all. The other day he read something out to her from the newspaper, about a man who had been attacked in the street – stabbed nine times in broad daylight by some mental case and left there to bleed to death. No one had stopped to help that man. No one had knelt down beside him and held his head, held his hand. He said – because he’d survived and re-covered to write the article that Leo was reading – he said that he remembered seeing people huddled at a distance calling an ambulance on a mobile phone, but that no one had spoken to him or come near him. Leo was very upset by that. He read the whole thing to Susie.

‘That’s horrible, isn’t it?’ she said, exactly as she would have said it about something they were eating that didn’t taste very nice.

‘No one even
spoke
to him!’ exclaimed Leo, stricken. ‘For all they knew he was about to die!’

This idea, that the world could triumph in its coldness, could triumph even over one man in its despicable bleakness, was abhorrent to him.

‘I expect they were frightened,’ Susie said; so that their being frightened became normal, became understandable even. There were people who were mad and there were people who were unlucky enough to be stabbed by them, and then there were people who were frightened. The only abnormal thing, in Susie’s view, seemed to be Leo himself. ‘Why does it get to you so much?’ she said. ‘At least they called the ambulance. You couldn’t expect them to do more than that.’

If he could only leave it all to her; if he could simply be incorporated into her beliefs, the way people are absorbed into religion: Susie never worries that she and Leo always seem to be reaching and reaching for something they can’t quite touch, striving for a satisfaction that eludes them. She doesn’t think about it like that. She lives in the moment as though moments are all there are. She swabs away the past and the future from the shining instant. She deals efficiently, hygienically, with its rich waste-product of guilt and shame and apprehension. She laughs at the children, and the way Madeleine says, ‘Not
again
,’ in the mornings, with a puckered little face like a raisin. She makes it seem as though all these things are one thing, one entity neither good nor bad.

Leo wonders if he has been too easily defeated in the men’s department. There was a coat he didn’t try on. He left it there, out of the rack, hanging over the others. He had it all arranged. That woman and her husband have driven him off before he was finished, like hyenas from the kill. The escalator carries him fatefully downwards. His eyes fill with electric light. Above his head are strange geometric distances and perspectives, a labyrinth of grilles and air vents and sections of false ceiling that seem to travel upwards and upwards towards some unseen core, strung with cables like giant nerves. A dazzling yellow haze stands just over him. It makes his eyes water: it is almost alive. It seems to have no source other than the building itself, as though a monstrous god or spirit has struggled into being somewhere up in that grey labyrinth. The escalator carries him past a blown-up photograph of a woman standing in a doorway in her underwear. Her hand rests on the doorknob and she looks at the camera with a beckoning expression. Her lips are parted to show a glimpse of her teeth and tongue. The underwear is intricate and white, but somehow little-girlish on that obstinately self-regarding body. What does she think she is doing, standing there? It is the door to a hotel room, he realises. A sign reading ‘Do Not Disturb’ hangs from the doorknob. Leo lets out a strange bark of laughter. At the bottom of the escalator he turns around and goes up again on the other side. She reminds him unexpectedly of his sister-in-law, Tonie. She has curly brown hair and a tight little midriff. She has a body so buffed and groomed that it vitiates her nakedness. It seems a form of clothing in itself. But it is her eyes that he can't stomach. That fake, play-acting expression, as she goes about her fake hotel tryst above the endlessly revolving escalator on West Hill Road – she makes it seem as if there is nothing lovely or true in the whole world.

Someone has returned the coat to its place on the rack. He takes it off the hanger again and puts it on. The woman and her silent husband have moved away to the shoe section. He can see them in the distance, together, like little figurines. In the mirror he strikes himself as extraordinarily flawed. His skin looks rough and red and his hair goes everywhere in painful-looking spikes, and he seems riven through with wearying variation and texture, with pores and veins and cracks, with moles and bumps and broken fingernails. By contrast the coat is amazingly bland and smooth. It is like something that has been cut out and pasted on to him, like a felt coat from Madeleine’s Fuzzy Felt kit. It is brown and big. It envelops his strange particular contours like a large brown generalisation. His soft belly, the little breast-like mounds of flesh on his chest, his white, womanly haunches: those are all now as private as thoughts, unseen behind the brown shield of the coat. It is not exactly the coat he has imagined – that coat actually transformed his defects rather than simply obliterated them – but all the same it has the feeling of a good idea. Already he is getting used to it. What a relief it is, what a blessing, to be completely covered up. It is the same sensation he sometimes feels getting into bed at night and drawing the covers over himself, a feeling of being returned to an original innocence; as though his years of life drift away once his body is hidden from view. When he and Susie have sex, it is spoilt for Leo by the sight of their abundant mottled bodies all grizzled with pubic hair. He never looks the way he feels, any more than Susie looks like that girl in the poster. But in the dark all of that moves away from him, that dirty, densely wrought revulsion.

At the till he has to take the coat off to pay for it, but as soon as the woman has his credit card he lifts it from the counter and tears the price tag off with his teeth.

‘Do you want a bag for it?’ she says.

‘No. I’m wearing it.’

‘Do you want a bag for what you were wearing before?’ she says, as though every second person who comes into her department does precisely what Leo has just done.

‘Oh. I suppose so.’

‘Hanger?’ She waves it in the air, a plastic shape.

‘No, thank you.’

Leo feels deflated. Somehow, in the course of that exchange with the woman at the till, the desirability of the brown coat has peaked, has reached the summit of what it is or ever could be. The woman hands him the plastic bag containing his rumpled grey jacket. She has folded it carefully: she has smoothed the exhausted fabric with her long, brilliantly varnished nails. She seems to take pity on it, this discarded piece of his life. She seems to feel for it, for all unwanted things, for everything that is old and abandoned: he feels that by her folding and smoothing she has criticised the world for its inhumanity.

‘Very nice,’ she says, when Leo puts the new coat on.

She gives him a little approving smile. He looks at his watch. It is a quarter past ten. He takes his card and his receipt and stuffs them in his coat pocket. The pocket’s silky lining, cold and unfamiliar, closes around his hand.

XXVI

Her mother has different faces. Sometimes she has a face like a witch. It is on the back of her head, not the front. Alexa sees it when she walks up the stairs behind her.

In the mornings, when Tonie comes into her bedroom, Alexa pretends to be asleep. Often she is asleep. It is the presence in the room that wakes her up: she feels it through her closed eyes, something warm and soft and attentive, though at first she doesn’t remember what it is. She keeps her eyes shut. She lies still. She thinks her mother will love her better that way. She feels beautiful, lying completely still in her nightdress. She is like a doll. She imagines her mother looking at her and loving her. But at the same time she knows she is pretending.

‘Are you awake?’ Tonie whispers.

There is the tiniest smile on Alexa’s lips. Her mouth wants to twitch at the corners, feeling it. But she stays totally still. She wants her mother to think that she is a girl who smiles in her sleep. The bedclothes rustle beside her. The mattress creaks. Her mother’s hair tickles her face. She kisses Alexa’s cheek. Sometimes Alexa will pretend to wake up then, like a princess waking from her enchantment. She will yawn and stretch her arms, and say, ‘You woke me up,’ in a pretend-sleepy voice.

But sometimes she remains still, smiling, with her eyes shut. She wants to bring her idea, her pretence, to perfection. She wants to fool her mother entirely. There is something she senses she will gain if she succeeds. She waits to receive the kiss. It comes out of the infinite blind distances beyond her eyelids. She never knows quite when it will come. Afterwards she hears her mother softly leave the room. She hears the door close.

When she opens the curtains the day is already in motion, alive, waiting for her to get up. She stands at the window in her nightdress. The sun bursts and bursts again against the glass. The wind is tickling the bare branches of the trees, jiggling them up and down, up and down. A dead leaf twirls past, spinning through space. Alexa watches a tiny airplane stitching a white line across the blue sky overhead. She watches a bird springing amidst the waving branches, alighting and then springing again.

Her father walks with her to school. His feet are next to hers, going along the pavement. His shoes have big frowning creases in them. They wink and frown at her as they walk. They are old and angry and brown, with drooping laces.

‘You need new shoes, Daddy,’ she says.

‘Do I?’ He stops and looks down at them. ‘These are all right, aren’t they?’

‘They’re old. And the laces are too long. They’re dirty.’

‘They can still take me where I need to go,’ he says.

She laughs. She imagines the shoes walking all by themselves, all around the world; something you could hitch a ride on, like a bus.

‘You could attach little rockets to them,’ she says. ‘And wheels.’

‘Rocket-powered shoes,’ he says, and she laughs again.

They reach the road, where the cars come like waves out of the horizon, building and rising and breaking, going over with a roar. They cross to the other side.

‘I can go on my own from here,’ she says.

‘Don’t you want me to come?’

She shakes her head. He bends down and there is his face, in front of hers, the lips puckered in a kiss-shape. Close up his face is complicated. His eyes have tiny paths in them, and there are little valleys all around his mouth and hairs like miniature trees, and the skin is bumpy, detailed, like the surface of the globe in Mrs Flack’s classroom. He kisses her. He lays his hand on the top of her head. She has to turn away from her knowledge of him. She takes a few steps and when she looks back he is smaller. She knows his shape but it is less complicated. He is standing on the pavement. He waves.