There’s more to this Inclusion brochure than first met your eye. You should stay interested in it and not allow your thoughts to stray to unanswered letters, unreturned phone calls, unpaid bills, unfulfilled ambitions, wasted opportunities and people unloved and unmissed.
* Selective Seratonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors, i.e. Prozac®, and other brand-name anti-depressants such as Sustral®, Faverin® and Sebcocat®. Author’s note.
The End of the Relationship
‘Why the hell don’t you leave him if he’s such a monster?’ said Grace. We were sitting in the Café Delancey in Camden Town, eating croques m’sieurs and slurping down cappuccino. I was dabbing the sore skin under my eyes with a scratchy piece of toilet paper — trying to stop the persistent leaking. When I’d finished dabbing I deposited the wad of salty stuff in my bag, took another slurp and looked across at Grace.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I don’t leave him.’
‘You can’t go back there — not after this morning. I don’t know why you didn’t leave him immediately after it happened. .’
That morning I’d woken to find him already up. He was standing at the window, naked. One hand held the struts of the venetian blind apart, while he squinted down on to the Pentonville Road. Lying in bed I could feel the judder and hear the squeal of the traffic as it built up to the rush hour.
In the half-light of dawn his body seemed monolithic: his limbs columnar and white, his head and shoulders solid capitals. I stirred in the bed and he sensed that I was awake. He came back to the side of the bed and stood looking down at me. ‘You’re like a little animal in there. A little rabbit, snuggled down in its burrow.’
I squirmed down further into the duvet and looked up at him, puckering my lip so that I had goofy, rabbity teeth. He got back into bed and curled himself around me. He tucked his legs under mine. He lay on his side — I on my back. The front of his thighs pressed against my haunch and buttock. I felt his penis stiffen against me as his fingers made slight, brushing passes over my breasts, up to my throat and face and then slowly down. His mouth nuzzled against my neck, his tongue licked my flesh, his fingers poised over my nipples, twirling them into erection. My body teetered, a heavy rock on the edge of a precipice.
The rasp of his cheek against mine; the too peremptory prodding of his cock against my mons; the sense of something casual and offhand about the way he was caressing me. Whatever — it was all wrong. There was no true feeling in the way he was touching me; he was manipulating me like some giant dolly. I tensed up — which he sensed; he persisted for a short while, for two more rotations of palm on breast, and then he rolled over on his back with a heavy sigh.
‘I’m sorry — ‘
‘It’s OK.’
‘It’s just that sometimes I feel that — ‘
It’s OK, really, please don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t talk about it.’
‘But if we don’t talk about it we’re never going to deal with it. We’re never going to sort it all out.’
‘Look, I’ve got feelings too. Right now I feel like shit. If you don’t want to, don’t start. That’s what I can’t stand, starting and then stopping — it makes me sick to the stomach.’
‘Well, if that’s what you want.’ I reached down to touch his penis; the chill from his voice hadn’t reached it yet. I gripped it as tightly as I could and began to pull up and down, feeling the skin un- and re-peel over the shaft. Suddenly he recoiled.
‘Not like that, ferchrissakes!’ He slapped my hand away. ‘Anyway I don’t want that. I don’t want. . I don’t want. . I don’t want some bloody hand relief!’
I could feel the tears pricking at my eyes. ‘I thought you said — ‘
‘What does it matter what I said? What does it matter what I do. . I can’t convince you, now can I?’
‘I want to, I really do. It’s just that I don’t feel I can trust you any more. . not at the moment. You have to give me more time.’
‘Trust! Trust! I’m not a fucking building society, you know. You’re not setting an account up with me. Oh fuck it! Fuck the whole fucking thing!’
He rolled away from me and pivoted himself upright. Pulling a pair of trousers from the chair where he’d chucked them the night before, he dragged his legs into them. I dug deeper into the bed and looked out at him through eyes fringed by hair and tears.
‘Coffee?’ His voice was icily polite.
‘Yes please.’ He left the room. I could hear him moving around downstairs. Pained love made me picture his actions: unscrewing the percolator, sluicing it out with cold water, tamping the coffee grains down in the metal basket, screwing it back together again and setting it on the lighted stove.
When he reappeared ten minutes later, with two cups of coffee, I was still dug into the bed. He sat down sideways and waited while I struggled upwards and crammed a pillow behind my head. I pulled a limp corner of the duvet cover over my breasts. I took the cup from him and sipped. He’d gone to the trouble of heating milk for my coffee. He always took his black.
‘I’m going out now. I’ve got to get down to Kensington and see Steve about those castings.’ He’d mooched a cigarette from somewhere and the smoking of it, and the cocking of his elbow, went with his tone: officer speaking to other ranks. I hated him for it.
But hated myself more for asking, ‘When will you be back?’
‘Later. . not for quite a while.’ The studied ambiguity was another put-down. ‘What’re you doing today?’
‘N-nothing. . meeting Grace, I s’pose.’
‘Well, that’s good, the two of you can have a really trusting talk — that’s obviously what you need.’ His chocolate drop of sarcasm was thinly candy-coated with sincerity.
‘Maybe it is. . look. . ‘
‘Don’t say anything, don’t get started again. We’ve talked and talked about this. There’s nothing I can do, is there? There’s no way I can convince you — and I think I’m about ready to give up trying.’
‘You shouldn’t have done it.’
‘Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I fucking know that?! Look, do you think I enjoyed it? Do you think that? ‘Cause if you do, you are fucking mad. More mad than I thought you were.’
‘You can’t love me. .’ A wail was starting up in me; the saucer chattered against the base of my cup. ‘You can’t, whatever you say.’
‘I don’t know about that. All I do know is that this is torturing me. I hate myself — that’s true enough. Look at this. Look at how much I hate myself!’
He set his coffee cup down on the varnished floorboards and began to give himself enormous open-handed clouts around the head. ‘You think I love myself? Look at this!’ (clout) ‘All you think about is your-own-fucking-self, your own fucking feelings.’ (clout) ‘Don’t come back here tonight!’ (clout) ‘Just don’t come back, because I don’t think I can take much more.’
As he was saying the last of this he was pirouetting around the room, scooping up small change and keys from the table, pulling on his shirt and shoes. It wasn’t until he got to the door that I became convinced that he actually was going to walk out on me. Sometimes these scenes could run to several entrances and exits. I leapt from the bed, snatched up a towel, and caught him at the head of the stairs.
‘Don’t walk out on me! Don’t walk out, don’t do that, not that. ‘ I was hiccupping, mucus and tears were mixing on my lips and chin. He twisted away from me and clattered down a few stairs, then he paused and turning said, ‘You talk to me about trust, but I think the reality of it is that you don’t really care about me at all, or else none of this would have happened in the first place.’ He was doing his best to sound furious, but I could tell that the real anger was dying down. I sniffed up my tears and snot and descended towards him.