It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2017-01-24 21:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, jack penhaligon |
Narrative: Jack P
Who: Jack Penhaligon.
What: Song for sobriety: in seven vignettes
Warnings: Long. Very long.
The saturation of high-end, duty-free perfume over yellowed lights and the squeak of wheeled luggage on sticky linoleum floor. Thick clumps of people at the barrier, signs written in marker pen in markedly poor script for different languages spelled phonetically over the phone. There would be cars that smelled strongly of artificial pine poorly disguising cigarette smoke, the plush of leather and the smatter of Somali or Punjabi over the radio, sitting in cold smoggy air that sat low, the gasp of over-processed warm air into the chill. He knew it all with the familiarity of habit, of childhood homes gone through room by room in the depths of insomnia. He remembered it having the dream-like consistency of the deeply jet-lagged or tired or still several thousand miles away under open sky and sand and with another language still coating his tongue like a piece of candy sucked to sliver. Removed. Home was anathema, riddled with media witch-hunts and the aftertaste of soured whiskey, left in outline like still-warm clothes on a bathroom floor. Customs was not the same without the sand stickily adhered to the line of skin between hair and collar, without a bag sagged over one arm and jet-lag blurring the flotsam of accents into a tide. He ducked through throngs and crowds, exclamations and warmth breaking around him like rock mid-water and in the cab, the address was on the tip of tongue and teeth before he remembered, fished out a phone and recited a hotel, unfamiliar, coolly distant and equipped with a bar. He slept the first night with the expectation of ghosts limning dreams. At once present but removed, smears seen on glass. I. It is a spire of glass and steel embedded in regeneration, the city consumed and consuming, the old patient as it is taken apart and restored. The view is spears beneath smog, a pugnacious ripple against skyline. The room is divided from the restlessness of the newsroom by glass, artfully obscured by newsprint but still the heartbeat of it resonates through lines of text arranged for artistic sake rather than literary value. He has been left, either as a reluctant act of trust (if trust is to be left in a stark boardroom and thus divided from his own former kind with coffee) or as an act of bloody-minded demonstration. The author - the Author - is ushered forward in a harem of fluster that burgeons through the nexus of desks and ringing phones until the door swings wide and people ranging, presumably, from the legal department (old friends, if ‘friend’ is synonym for exasperated collaborator in the efficient dance between the lawful and the legally sound) to the publicity engine to the editor whose face Jack has not forgotten in the passing of a decade. Truth of it is, he remembers the slice of her pen through particularly favored sentences, the scoring out of superfluous words. Once, he went where she sent him. Once, it would have been her office, jammed thickly with paper and with the nascence of careers crystalized through word limits. She had a couch, he remembers, he sat on it the day he told her he was leaving. She had worn disappointment like resignation, expectation of eventual fruition. “So this is Jack,” the flutter of the publishing assistant, aware only of the undercurrent, the thin ripple of mistrust that pools around him, as the Author sits at the other end of the table, unfazed by lukewarm coffee and blandishments of praise as his career is reeled off. His nose is sunburned, the skin flaking. He is young, christ, he is young. Has he seen Libya yet? Has he stood in the desiccation of a metropolis to scythe through the human condition, does he write with sympathy or scathing derision for migration patterns that writhe across Europe? Has he seen South Africa, corruption and back-rooms in Jo’burg or has he seen only Afghanistan yet, the poppy economy run by men who smile as if they believe in immortality? He looks for the ring, a ring on the writer’s hand and sees nothing. Buoyant with his own expertise, his star ascendant, the writer smiles, leans forward, extends a hand. Jack hears damning faint praise, the rustle of papers from the lawyer benched into the corner - do they keep him at every meeting, suited and with a faint air of censure, or only for those who had torn a newsroom apart in the last decade? “Let’s get started.” There is a spread of newsprint across the table, half of it not as terrible as he remembers, filed from the satellite laptop with the dust caked into the hair on his wrists, sweat dribbling down the crevasse between shoulder-blades and copy filed in a rush toward the finish-line, a camera near-enough to hand to pick up and go as the vehicle for the day’s run turns over in a choked cough from beyond. “What we’re really after,” the editor, the publishing house rather than the newspaper, with the breeze of certainty, “Is complementary. This,” she scores yellow over lines that Jack pores to read: they’re good, he’s surprised, fresh. In need of maturity but sharp, occasionally even pithy. “And this,” but he is, Jack realizes at the second cup of tepid coffee, foil. A mirror held up to refract rather than look into. He watches line after line disappear under the nib of the pen the publishing house woman holds. He doesn’t look at his old editor: he does not want to see the pity on her face. He can taste the sharp juniper of gin suddenly, a ghost blooming across his tongue. On the way out, he can hear the Author ahead, the woman from the publishing house in step. He has lingered, the outlook onto a city that is so changeable as to be forgotten year on year, he hears. “Regrettable, isn’t it? The old hacks, AA I think.” The sharp salivation he swallows on, the churn of resentful anger sharp between his ribs. ii. She takes him to lunch. She is wearing an angled copper bracelet, hammered to flat veined metal, it clatters against the water-glass as she lifts it. He knows as she does that this is not a meeting for commissions, for a signature put against a budget line for a ticket somewhere remote where stories can be carved out of the rock. This is for old-times-sake, the wake. He does not remember if she came to the funeral: he had parted with her like a divorce. A break as clean as contractual law could make it, legacy rights held until long past they are use to him. He counts the minutes until she asks. She has the decency to wait until the starter has been cleared, the bland conversation about turn-over, the rise of digital media, the bottom line. He remembers that pronouncement over the heads of so many hacks who sharpened teeth on thin budgets, the bottom line almighty in a temple erected to a different god. She is delicate when she does it but with the strength that is surgical in nature, refined in the probe. He’s almost grateful for it, for the honed insight of a mind used to scything through the static in search of detail, the clean story extracted from the ore. She has taught him everything he knows in that dusty, airless office that smells of whiskey worked into carpet fiber and she knows more. He is restless. The waiter approaches as she asks, “So - what publication did you say you edit?” His elbow jerks, even as he saw it coming he did not see her lift the scalpel. The nose of the wine is redolent as it splashes into his glass: he sees her glance over to the bulb of it and the flare of anger is match-light rather than candle or torch. He draws a smile up from the history-books. It is worn-out from leaning against her bookshelf, a determined attempt at winning praise rather than red underlines, it is old and it feels thin. “It can’t compete, it’s barely worth bothering with.” They are playing behind masks, and he has the sharp discomfort fanning out like blades that he needs it, that she indulges him as once she would have punctured the surface-tension of pretense. He breathes in as she talks of the way the newsroom has gathered and divided, the way it has evolved and shifted and - implicit - has left him flotsam on shoreline should he have wished to return. “You were very good,” she says toward the end, when his glass has stood at his elbow for the duration. When the blade of the compliment is dulled by a meal paid for by the newspaper, when the clarity of what will not come after the conversation is apparent and stark. The Editor leaves this as though it were a present beside his plate, damning him. And behind her, in this restaurant where people come to make deals, where conversation is conducted over linen napkins, he sees a man in a red tie and an old if immaculate suit, his beard clipped close and his eyes are sea-green and thickly lashed. He sees sea-green in sleep sometimes in a feline-sharp face. The man blanches: it is as if the bellows of his lungs ease air through the gaps in his rib-cage, as if his throat closes. The man glances at the glass, and then at Jack’s face and he passes as if they do not know each other. As if the shape of his chin is not as recognizable as a Cezanne hanging on the wall in the Portrait Gallery on Sundays. “Who is he?” she asks at the last. She saves curiosity for relish, like after-dinner mint. His elbow shifts as they stand, the glass catches and the bulb shatters against the side of his smeared plate, an ooze of blood-dark wine that soaks the air in oiled notes. He does not answer. Iii. The office is over a high street in the arse-end of London. Walthamstow, the prosaic of a pound shop that bristles mops and buckets and potting soil and plastic bins in which to store whatever it is that gives rise to such rude and pushing urgency cluttering the high-street, next to which the flight of stairs is tight and narrow. Why here, he doesn’t know. There had been a lawyer’s office once. Fourteen, in the too-tight collar of his school shirt, the knot immaculate and fat, the brush of fabric under his thumb satinny. A polished table, glossy enough to see his outline. He’d scuffed a thumb through it, a demarcation or a ruin, longevity of presence. The man beside him hadn’t noticed, the pen in his hands had been heavy, weighted with ink and money. “Here, and here.” The lawyer’s smile was unctuous, directed at the badge on his blazer rather than the constellation of painful pockets of spots on his cheek, the bridge of his nose. The air smelled like lilies; the receptionist had an arse like a peach and Jack - adolescent interest peaked by a skirt worn perhaps a little too tight, caught his father in profile with the same interest held in his face like a candle. Mulled resentment and categorical dislike comingled into bile. “Didn’t mother give you that pen?” Jack spoke with the insouciance of the boarding-school drawl, a bland blend of Home Counties vowels and clipped consonants, pitched to be heard by the receptionist pouring fresh-ground coffee in gold-rimmed cups. “One day you’ll inherit, my man.” There is no such silkily irritating presence here. Box-files litter the hallway: the lawyer is middle-aged with an air of dampened disappointment. He has a cough like dust, present but unobtrusive. The office he shows Jack into has damp mildewing the walls. “Sign here.” The paperwork is thin, probate an exercise in cutting Gordian knots of debt. He has a check, drawn on a bank that has ridden statements onto the doormat of an apartment he does not possess, merely owns. The lawyer, such a creature as he is, has dry hands, the skin is cracking around the nails. His pen is chewed, the cap cracked. “Did you belong to another firm?” Brand loyalty perhaps, the outline of hope that there is lingering remnant of the businessman rather than the imitation poker-player who rolled dice on the stability of the family and cleared off with the pot. The lawyer blinks a fraction. “We’re cheap.” This is clarification, delivered dryly. “For a man in your father’s position,” the sentence hovers on a precipice, knowing before the long-drop. There are signatories and statements in the bland manila folder. Somewhere within the myriad papers shuffled will be his mother’s signature, tremulous and shivering. His father’s was looping, careless. The bold black strokes are caught on paper leafed out of the manila; Jack blinks through miasma of recognition. His own is mirror-image, echo. Long strokes, leaned hard. “So that’s that.” The deposit for a bloody flat transferred, the lawyer shuffles away the papers. A pause, “You won’t want to keep any of it?” Detritus of wealth that had once had patina of age, familial silver, a portrait of a very ugly, very elderly patriarch. Jack thinks of the drawing room, his father’s plethora of glass bottles before the smeared window that turned the light to gold. “No.” He struggles for the artlessness of the question, flounders doggedly, “Ah. My mother’s ...estate, did you…?” It hangs in air that smells faintly of sweat and paper. “No,” the lawyer clarifies and something thin and barely substantial furls beneath his breastbone. The lawyer is squinted, “Another firm, ruinously expensive, I don’t know why, the fees practically consumed the inheritance, you know,” he is droning but Jack, he knows why. She never came here, the uxoriousness of thick carpets and lilies arranged at the front desk, oh you old bastard. He does not know whether it matters more or less if he loved her enough to save her that. Walthamstow has betting shop after betting shop and he finds sharp, ugly relief that he does not lean after the crumpled-brown paper bag and littered cans that preoccupy those that prop up the entryways. His tastes run more expensive than Walthamstow; a legacy, as it were. iv. He remembers the purchase in the long journey upward in the elevator. The vista of the city spread out before them in dizzying drop. Her arm wove around his, she leaned in to the cusp of his ear, “Think we could risk a fuck in here once we’ve bought it?” Her eyes glittered challenge in empty elevator, her laugh rang off glass. The renter has made small, finite changes to the substance of the apartment’s fabric. There is a new mark on the wall where a mirror has hung, the dusty air expectant of presence instead of long still. The bedroom door is long-locked. The kitchen first, sightless and fumbling blind, he can see the kicked off shoes, the flung down bag, the slide of her zip as the ice-cubes clink against the splash of gin. The symphony heralding her homeward return in the shuffle-step of jet-lagged celebration. There is a selection of tea-bags forlorn in the corner of the cupboard, the mug is brewed dark, thick with tannin until it blots out the remembered taste of homecoming, the bitter bite of tonic over disappointment. “Back then?” casually, an elbow against the counter, the blade hefted for dramatic emphasis. “I could have changed the locks.” The timbre creeps, the pitch sharpens. “Who was she this time?” But this is movie reel played onto blank screen. She isn’t here, she barely was to begin with. The keys shake against the lock: it is stiff with time, with bloody years. There are two sets and -- he enters a room washed white, with disapproval and the emphatic detail of covering over the ugly wine of arterial spray. It is antiseptic clean, this place where her perfume caught the air, darkly oriental. This is where he should find her, etched into the walls, the puncture wound of a stiletto heel flung still dips beneath his fingers under thick slather of white paint. The wardrobe has only the dim scent of stale air, the foxed note of a perfume that does not hold life long-trapped. His own things hang, next to empty space with the skeleton of hangers. The pile of empty cardboard boxes, neatly stacked against the wall are censure in the absence of in-laws. It is empty: he has expected a promenade of shades, of ghosts. He thought he had left her here, behind locked doors and in dead rooms but there is nothing. There has been nothing, he has taken her with him and if he is here and she is not, where is she? The keys in the lock and ego te absolvo in the boxed effects and the shipping labels firmly affixed. v. “I've been expecting you." The dry cough is encouraging, the pen that rolls to muffled stop on a pile of paperwork thickly bristled with tabs is expensive, the dull-gold glint of Mont Blanc. Here then, no expensive spared, the legal firm have been expansively cushioned in wealth. The culmination of quiet argument, conducted behind closed doors, in paperwork. He can remember the shining swing of her hair as she leant over the desk, her scrawl careless. She turned within his grasp, kissed him briefly on the mouth, rubbed the lipstick clear with the flat of her thumb. "There. Now everything I have belongs to you. And all I get in return is middle-class talent and a good fuck." She'd grinned, he'd laughed, the possessive rest of his hand on the violin-curl of her back. Signed, sealed, ordered. Jen, efficient. The office is thickly glassed, the smog of London a gray-blue carpet beyond the window. Challenges dragged into legal chambers and out again. "Sign here," he weights the pen in his hand, the thick of it beyond chewed biro, his signature scrawled hesitantly below the firm, even strokes of his father-in-law. Him then, Jack expected the battle conducted over the winter of his mother in law, the lawyer shows no scars. "You'll be selling it then, now it's clear." This expensive curiosity, the lawyer blinks over the glasses shuffled down the slope of his nose. The flat's title deeds across the polished oak. Probate signed, delivered, weighted with the albatross of familial disapproval. He signs for continuation of service: blood money exchanged to squeeze the stone dry, and the confessional of the lawyer drifts away with a folder as Jack stands stark, adrift on the carpet without the anchor of old money, new money but bastard hybrid in between. vi The summons comes as he half expects it to, in the never-twilight of a hotel room hung above Charing-Cross, the neon nightlife unroiling outside. It is earlier, the twitch of the phone in his pocket, the unfamiliar reel of a number he does not remember, he does not know if he has forgotten. The bar is warm, thick air undercut with cigarette smoke carried on on heavy coats, with the cataclysm of perfumes mingling and the Old Friend raises his arm above the throng and beckons. His jaw is thick with the fur Jack assumes is assignment shortly completed, his shirt is red-striped and the cuffs rolled back. How many bars have they met in? He does not know if it is sympathy or wry point rolled in like salt that the editor has joined them together. Careers run in harness, Jack cannot remember who was first, the jostling of colliding stars burnished for supernova. “What are you doing these days?” The slap on the back, the remembered order: how has he forgotten this man, the trivial nothing of assignments traded jealously over the foam-rimmed glasses collected like cards. A cleared throat, an abashed look. He has the same beer in his hand as Tom unfolds a wallet, leather-worn and cracked, the plastic sheaf pristine. The woman he remembers from a wedding, Jen’s shoes kicked off to dance, her arm curled round two kids, round-faced and grinning. “I teach now, you know,” this man who traded pussy on stories of Iraq, who showed off battle-scars and nearly-bullet wounds for girls with laughter like butter in this bar, “Take this lot on Fridays.” He is happy, the ashes of his own career are embers that still glow dully if looked at hard. He thinks of dinner, of rugby on Sundays, of a wife who waits at one remove. This then, he does not know is vituperative, the vindictiveness of abandoned editorial intent or simply shades of what could have been. Jack holds the beer until it warms to disgust in his hand and the night eclipses with the call, Tom with his back turned against the crowd to the bar, his finger in his ear, hushed nothings to sleep-thick voices down the phone and wishes he’d leave. The bar stretches beyond and he waits until long past-closing, until there is nothing to do but wander until the streets empty out and he can find fugged sleep in the hotel room. Vii. The tablecloth is snowy-white, the linen a heavy drift across his knees. He waits, belly stone-weighted with dread for the shape of the man's shoulders. He recalls the tailored jacket, the breakfast conducted over the edged presence of luminous laughter, the twist of Jen's hand under the table, on his knee as it jostled, slid over the flat of his thigh. It is the same and it is not, it is a club like so many around London. He comes with the newspaper folded into his hand, sign that he is accepted here, amidst the well-heeled, the established, the anonymous. Sea-green censure settle on bloodshot, scraped-raw and the waiter's officious hover near-by, Bloody Mary in hand. "Well," Jack can hear the dry voice over the clatter of cutlery, the throat cleared, the wry joke prepared until it has been squeezed dry. "Hungover, no doubt." The bile is hot in his belly, thick in his throat. "We knew you'd come back. For the money." This man shakes out his napkin, settles neatly into his seat. This will be gentlemanly, this is owed. Ego te absolvo. "And look at you now. Gave up before it could give you up. It would have, you know. You can only pretend skill so long by dodging the country. You didn't stick with it." He waits until the breakfast is served in silence, the neat fold of the newspaper headline is black print Jack can see in his sleep, the masthead. "He's still there," remarks the man who made the introduction, who engineered a career like a patisseur spinning molten sugar, with delicate precision. It is the last, after the polite decimation of effects, of money requested returned to cover costs, "The funeral, you know." He does not remember, whiskey and wine and gin until he remembers only the skirl of organ music and the wet paste of grass beneath him after the man has left him grave-side, still laughing at the sky. "She would have given you up," this small man whose eyes hold depths of furious grief. "Eventually, she would have. A drunk mistake, she could have done better. She would have done better." Jack does not mention the threat of divorce, the guillotine of disappointment. He does not agree, he does not disagree, the ash of the breakfast on his tongue and the familial inheritance signed over in triplicate in his pocket. He longs for the left glass until the taxi draws into the iced air of Heathrow and shades drawn down against the outline of London left behind. |