Things to do, Monday
Get a job.
Wash your clothes
Clean the kitchen.
Phone Liam. Furniture. Ask him.
Phone Kersti. Entreat.
Find a place to stay. WHO? Whitchurch? Impossible! Kersti?
Too flinty by half. Then WHO? Andreas? Could you?
Absurd!
Buy some tuna and spaghetti
Go to the bank and tell them you need more time — more time to pay back the rest of your debt.
Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.
Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao,the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge
Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest
Hoover the living room
Clean the toilet
Distinguish the various philosophies of the way — read History of Western Philosophy
Sort through your papers and see if there is anything you can send to anyone who might plausibly pay you some money for it
Clean the bath
Unearth the TEMP
Go to see Andreas and ask him for somewhere to stay for a few days until you find somewhere else.
The last she could do, or at least she could certainly go to see Andreas. It was a quick walk to the corner, and at the corner she saw pink and blue walls and signs on the guttering and she heard the planes whining their descent and the trilling choirs of birds. An immaculate day stretched out before her, around her, and Rosa was walking past the lines of cars and the ragged thin-stripped trees, laughing quietly to herself. ‘Ridiculous,’ she said. She was leaning back now, finding that her head was sore. She was aware of a vague smell of sweat and dust. Her mouth was dry and she wanted something to drink. She saw the roads winding along the canal, and the concrete skeleton of a new block of flats. There was a church and a matted line of old houses. She saw everything in monochrome, because she had screwed up her eyes. The light made her head pound, but really, the doctor had misdiagnosed her. It was perhaps not significant, but she had a prince. It was uncertain what they were to each other, but he was called Andreas and he was a fine man, presiding over a few feet of space by another stretch of railway tracks. Had she been less distracted she might have fallen in love with him. But love was quite impossible, given the conditions. With things as fleeting as they were you couldn’t risk it. Instead she turned up at his flat and they slithered in the darkness. He was young — perhaps too young, at twenty-five — but he was beautiful, with his brown hair, brown eyes, long limbs. He was German and he wanted to be an actor. Beauty hadn’t yet propelled him onwards, so he waited on tables and taught German. They had little in common, and they couldn’t express themselves together. Nonetheless she liked talking to him.
*
She could see a slanted forest of cranes in the distance. They were angled over a building site on the horizon, suspending cables. She turned left and saw a pub. Thin black doors, a big Victorian advertisement on the upper walclass="underline" The PARROT. A Fine Victorian Pub. Original features. Fine Ales. Good food. She had always liked the atmosphere of pubs. That was because her parents often ate in pubs: at the weekends, on holidays, they went for pub lunches, and so, perversely enough, she associated pubs with her childhood. She had played in the gardens of a hundred pubs, pawing the grass with other infants, as if the grass was a lost continent a thousand miles wide. She remembered the pub they went to on Sundays — a big Georgian hotel on a long winding street — had a donkey in the garden. It was roped to a fence, and it groaned and shrieked as she played. And there was another pub her father liked, with a view of the Avon Gorge. She remembered playing on the patio there, the paving stones stern in the dusk. At the edge was a deep drop to the muddy estuary beneath, and upstream was the inverted arch of the Suspension Bridge. In the summer months she liked to stand by the wall watching the light shining on the muddy water, though her mother always summoned her back from the edge. The gorge was vast and green, its slopes full of slanted trees.
*
As she walked, hands in her pockets, chin lifted, quite alert and aware of the seeping colours of the sky and the progress of the cars, she was thinking that Andreas had appeared to her one night in a bar. That was a few weeks ago, when she had been sitting on her own drinking wine. She had taken herself out because Jess had told her she was having a dinner party. ‘Friends for supper. Will you be here?’ which meant ‘Can you not be here?’ She had been in the bar for a while, picking at the complimentary nuts and writing in her notebook, when Andreas came over and asked if she was waiting for someone. She wasn’t sure what to say, and then she held up her hands and confessed, ‘No no, I’m not. No I always come here and drink alone. Pretty much every night.’ She thought she might have blushed.
‘That’s not true,’ he laughed. ‘I work here pretty much every night.’
She was apprehensive, monosyllabic at first, but they drank a glass of wine together. They could hardly hear each other, and he kept putting his lips close to her ear, and she discovered he told plausible jokes. At one point she laughed, genuinely and without strain. When they had shouted for a while, he said: ‘Shall we get out of here?’ and she said ‘Yes.’ Her friends would have told her not to bother, had they been there. But they weren’t. Rosa was really alone and the thought of walking back to Jess’s flat and twisting the key in the door, nodding her way through the living room and retreating to her bed, made her take his hand on the corner. This was how she got to know him, through lust and a fear of solitude. Still, they scuffed along the streets, suddenly self-conscious, and he said, ‘Do you like jazz?’ and Rosa said, ‘No, I detest jazz.’ And he laughed. ‘I was about to say,’ he said, ‘that there’s a fantastic jazz club which I go to. But I suppose that’s not of interest any more.’
‘Is there another sort of music you enjoy?’ asked Rosa.
‘No, only jazz,’ he said. They were standing outside a large church, a grey spire behind them. The sky was thick with clouds and she could hear the leaves swirling along the pavement. It was quite cold.
‘Well, that’s a shame,’ she said. ‘For you, anyway.’
‘I feel a great sense of sorrow,’ he said.
They stood stock still, and he seemed embarrassed. They were smiling at each other. He was tall, statuesque, and when he turned his head to look at the street she saw he had a stark profile, a long nose, an overhanging brow. His features were unsubtle in their handsomeness; it was hard to tell what age would do to them, whether it would refine them or blunt them altogether. She caught herself looking at his lips, which were bright red against a surrounding shadow of stubble.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here we are.’
‘Here we are,’ she said. Inevitably, they kissed. He smelt strongly of aftershave and more remotely of smoke. It was curious but far from seedy; she was surprised how glad she was to kiss him.