All the Rage (18 page)

Morning would be best: it's the least emotionally charged time of day and will be brighter and have a sense of moving on, of futures and being uplifted.

Although it can also produce an atmosphere of having just left one's bed. That scent. The good one.

But afternoons could get cantankerous and evenings are too mellow and unfurling and nights are clearly a threat.

The coffee here's good.

The coffee here's good this morning.

But why would you decide to say that? Why on earth? Who would that mean you'd become? It would turn you into somebody misleading, casual, and a person who'll seem cruel in retrospect. You don't want that. You're not cruel.

They're not cruel, either.

You have faith they wouldn't choose to be.

But they might, nonetheless, have found it necessary.

Anyway, you're fussy about coffee and haven't been somewhere with a really good brew available in years, not with coffee worth a positive mention, so remarking upon it randomly in some mediocre venue would be weird, if not laughable, and this won't be an issue even, because, as you consider it thoroughly, a meeting at a café would be inappropriate. You've enjoyed that sort of niceness before, but you shouldn't again. It could lead you astray. Once you'd arrived, you might start relaxing, even though you'd be feeling lousy, and then you'd brush fingers while you chat with them and share opinions and none of it would end at the intended end. So you won't go to a café in the first place.

And visiting each other's homes would be an act of violence.

You can't.

You won't.

You couldn't.

You won't go anywhere.

You won't meet.

You are unable.

You shouldn't trap yourself in a position where you see their mouth, study their mouth and the movement of their lips and the terrible softandgentleness of everything: the dark and lovely, clever softening.

It would be a disaster.

Hi.

Likewise, every possible form of address – any speaking when you're together – would be wrong.

How are you?

What does that mean?

What are the implications?

You're a person who weighs implications and so are they, and that's a factor to consider while you plan. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, you want to be kind and do this right. They will do too. And there's the question of respecting the other party who's also involved and who has no way to alter this and neither can you.

I just can't.

I'm not sure any more.

I was never sure.

But I'm sure I can't.

And meanwhile you, there's you and you were, you really, you absolutely – I absolutely – in all of the ways I would like to – in all of the ways I would like

But I

But I

But I

But I

Phone would be better.

Getting clear of the same room, or building, or street would seem better, easier.

Much.

Much worse, if you're being frank. Only a moral bankrupt would attempt to make this tidy over the phone.

Only a moral bankrupt would view this in terms of being
tidy
, and you're not that. Your terminology was a mistake. The permanent grief that you have in the muscles along your forearms since you can't remember when is destroying your vocabulary and you scramble for phrases as if you're abroad somewhere inexplicable and scary. Sometimes your head is stuffed with no more than noises and you're afraid that, if you tried to speak, an animal mess would be the best you'd manage. You'd squeal and be undignified. There's also a long, anxious tendon, or connective something, a strained nerve, that stings when you reach to the left, or roll over at night – your sleep is, naturally, ruined – and there's a sense that when you swallow you come inappropriately close to drowning.

I'm not drowning.

I don't want to.

Your mind is unworkable and over-f.

Perhaps theirs is equally busy with aches and scrambles.

I could make a call, though. I could write down the points I should cover and be reassured and then deliver them presentably.

But if you phone, you'll hear them breathing, precisely as they might when they're skin-tight to your cheek and they find out the secrets along your neck and are warm and dense and interesting – they fit so much motion against you, demonstrate such a burden of potential, even when they're at rest. There are other people who are communicative as fence posts when you hold them: truly numbing, somehow. As if they had gone and left something dead, propped up in the space behind them. Or there are those who are peculiarly, or almost unnervingly, a horrible shape when touched. They're like badly packed duffel bags with absurdist contents. You don't like them. They are acquaintances. Or less.

Your life has uncomfortable requirements, one of them apparently that you should hold the unholdable as part of many low-grade social interactions. Comprehensive contact is the fashion currently. How this has come about is beyond you. You didn't ask for it.

You ask for very little.

Historically, this is true.

Hi, I was calling to

Hi is better than hello. It's smaller.

Hi.

Or hey. Hey delivered as a smoother version of hi. A dab of sound.

They will recognise your voice.

Even from that dab.

They'll know it's you.

They will know you are you, but quite possibly misunderstand what that implies.

Hey.

I was not calling to say that you are endless information. My palms against your back have touched unmistakably the way that you're built out of shouts and whispers, croons – you have these areas that croon.

You have sweet shapes.

You have places about you that shift my senses and make me have to understand your heats as flavours. You lead to kissing. Always.

You lead to blatant inadequacy and the fear of death, and the kissing blesses all of that away. You unharm me.

And I will never get used to the times when your breath splinters, or to the necessity of cradling. It is correct to cradle you.

There have been times when I have heard you and wanted only to run and cure whatever was wrong, whatever could be wrong, whatever might be wrong.

I am not calling to say that.

So I won't say that.

It would be, to a degree – not that you're ungrateful – an inventory of things you've never asked for.

Hey.

I couldn't predict what you would give me.

And you'd have to agree, I didn't ask for it.

You'll only tell them the one thing, small sound.

Hey.

After which they will have recognised your voice and then they'll want to chat and you'll need to be savage and get in there first like a cold-calling salesman.

Doing this will be vile. Completely. How completely vile of you.

And thereafter they'll have their own points they need to make and comments, of course. You will end up having a discussion, conversing.

You're already upset, as it is.

So when they start talking you'll really be in trouble.

Hey, I

You won't make a call, then. Not any kind of call – not ringing to leave them a message and ducking the issues arising, which would be cowardly to a degree that you might not survive. You might remain despicable to yourself for the duration after that.

You've established – because you intend to live decently, always have – this habit of testing your actions in advance. You ask –
will doing this leave me with permanent regrets?

It's a not unreasonable question.

In this case, simply dumping your decision as a fuzzily recorded message, talking when you're sure that they can't answer back, would be impossible. It would be too wrong.

Dear.

A letter defeats itself from the very start.

Dear.

It would be like confessing what you no longer should.

To Whom It May Concern:

Which would mean pretending you can't name them and do not hold them dear.

You do hold them.

Dear God.

To whom we will offer no prayers, because we neither deserve them, nor understand how they would work.

No letter.

No.

No here are your fingers where mine have rested and not been at rest, where they've howled, to be more accurate, in the usual manner for you for you for dear you, tendrils of darkness and liquid wishes rippling along the little bones, slowing minorly at each joint and at each thrum where you have previously kissed and the paper was warm when I left it, warm where I paused, where my skin was waiting, and tends to wait and has learned to wait and croons – I like to think it croons and you have found this in me, touched and heard this in my skin – and if you read what I put for you in ink, old-fashioned ink, it will show you the blurs and hesitations in my hope and the shrinking when I get uneasy and my horrible desire to push through and reach you where you will be, where you will be holding my mind in this, my most soft things in this, and you'll be fragile there and breathing delicate and not enough loved because I have not enough love because there is not enough love because you make sure that my self and my love are both not enough. I mean to be more, but I am not.

Believe me, I didn't ask for that.

And no one meant to give it.

You do realise.

And a letter would be inappropriate, because you shouldn't continue to be opened and unfolded in that manner, it would give the wrong impression.

Dear.

Very dear.

You could instead consider the many electronic options which will keep you eternally untouched. Clean.

But you can't type some absence or presence of light across a screen and hope to send it without your self-esteem intervening.

It would be like wrapping your note round a stone and then throwing it in through their window.

I just wanted to say.

There is no easy way to say.

I have to say.

You might hit them, hurt them.

But you're not a vandal.

I'm contacting you in this way to tell you I'll never contact you again.

You're not the person this would seem to make you.

I would love to. I did love to.

You're not the person you seem to be when you're with them.

You're not that frail little list of attempts to do better than you have and be better and act better when eventually, you realise, you won't. You'll be disappointing. You'll do worse.

I think it would be better if you could go.

I think I would be better if you could go.

I think I could revert to being worse in a way that would be better if you could go.

Please go.

It will make no sense to tell them how much this appals you.

Unless they are also appalled, which you suspect, and which means that soon they will appal you, which will be completely unbearable and when you ask for their support you won't, and shouldn't, get it.

You can't let that happen. You can't wait for that to happen. Not any longer.

You're worn out.

You're worn out and away.

Very dear.

Your only realistic option is to do nothing and to say nothing, to answer nothing and eventually they'll work out what's going on and, by then, they will hate you enough for matters to be simpler.

You don't want them to have any difficulty. You really, really don't.

So very dear.

Not at any time.

THERE'S THIS MAN
and he's telling you a story. Only he's not.

You're sitting together on uneasy, weatherproof chairs. He's dragged both of them out here to benefit from the sun, hauled out the table too and nobody from the café made any objections. He seemed authoritative when he said, ‘First good day of the year. How lovely.' And he left a pause beyond
lovely
during which he did not look at you.

Although you were also not looking – not looking at him – you had a clear sense of
his
not looking. You could feel it. If he'd asked what it was like, you could have told him –
it's like a tender hollowness, or some odd colour in the fall of light
.

He didn't, of course, ask.

You didn't, of course, tell him.

But you were paying attention.

You still are.

He'd then added, ‘Good' rather quietly and with a kind of helplessness, after which he'd rallied and re-repositioned the seats. Something about his movements during these proceedings had suggested a happy assurance – there might be many areas of doubt, but here he was certain: sitting face-to-face wasn't going to work. And anyone would have advised that side-by-side was a touch eccentric, if not reminiscent of pensioners waiting to die on a seaside bench – the type local councils fix near pleasant views to memorialise other pensioners who once also liked to sit near pleasant views.

You can imagine – are unable not to – a future within which you might lean against him as you consider your arthritis, or his replacement hip, and how the wind would ruffle what's left of anything and make you love him all the more, while he loves you back to a comparable degree. Or maybe you'd just eat sandwiches in a bitter and familiar pause and then go home to hate each other for another decade. It's not uncommon.

Which is inappropriate. You're on a first date. Why picture the brownish parka in which you apparently think he'll take decrepit holidays? Why conjure up domestic horrors and spats over too much pickle that will have dampened the nasty bread? Why assume you'll have nasty bread?