‘Rather than kids in station, like me,’ he said. That was another of their clunky bits of repartee, and she laughed and allowed him to stroke her hand. If there had been an audience she would have cared more. Still, she had to drink a jar just to get over the embarrassment of watching herself tapping her hand on her knee as he played her a song he liked. All this furniture, she thought, suggested permanence. It was clear that Andreas had affluent parents, because there was no way he could have bought all of this from his bar tips. It evoked a large parental house, rooms full of superfluous objects, shipped out to their son as he struggled in London. It was a touching idea, these comfortable generous parents. For a moment she admired the leather of the chairs and then she wondered what she was doing here, smiling and talking very loud, lying mostly. It was a good question, one she consistently failed to answer. It was solitude she craved and feared, attracted to its possibilities and then repulsed again when she glimpsed them. So she came round here and said her nothings to Andreas. She was a metic, she thought. But perhaps they were all metics, after all, waiting patiently for keys to the city.
Andreas leapt at the shelves with enthusiasm, and brought back a CD. It was traumatised guitar music, he said. ‘It has a veneer of angst. Musical Weltschmerz. I picked it out thinking of you.’ That was another joke and she laughed. This mess we’re in, went the song. The city sun sets over me. And I have seen the sun rise over the river … This mess we’re in. This sort of music was familiar to her. As a teenager she had consoled herself to the sound of countless guitar bands. Like millions of others, she sat in her room with the curtains drawn, headphones on. It irritated her mother, who thought she was wasting her time. She was indiscriminate — miserablism to the sound of a guitar was fine enough. The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Field Mice, The Breeders, Babes in Toyland, The Sugarcubes, The Pixies.A dreaded sunny day so let’s go where we’re happy and I’ll meet you at the cemetery gates. Keats and Yeats are on your side … they were born and then they lived and then they died. Seems so unfair, I want to cry. She had listened to The Pixies at the age of sixteen, touting around in second-hand shops for bargain bohemian cut-offs, wearing grandad coats and black plimsolls. Andreas had been six at the time, though perhaps that didn’t matter. She had always liked guitar music. But she was quite eclectic, even as a kid. Opera, classical orchestral, plainsong. La Traviata, Bruckner, Mozart, Carmen, Schoenberg, Tallis, Schubert, Cage, Glass, anything, almost anything, except jazz. We sit in silence you look me in the eye directly sang Thom Yorke in a falsetto. Rosa tapped her foot. She had recently stopped listening to music, because she had sold her stereo and all her CDs. Of course, this is youth, she remembered. Not so much has changed.
‘I was thinking about you the other day,’ said Andreas. He put his arms around her. It was a clumsy gesture, but they sustained it.
‘And what were you thinking?’
‘I was wondering if you would like this band I was listening to. They’re called The Kills.’
‘Love is a Deserter,’ said Rosa promptly, thinking of the signs she had read.
‘Very good. And there’s another song I’ve been listening to, I’ll play it,’ said Andreas. There was a static pause while he stood and switched the CDs over. Then she heard a guitar and a voice and the lyric was ‘Hey Lyla, a star’s about to fall.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Rosa.
When the cuckoo clock rapped out midnight, Andreas moved her on to the sofa, told her to lie back and relax. ‘Let’s stay up really late,’ said Andreas. ‘You only have to travel and travelling when you’re tired dulls the boredom and I have, as I said already, almost nothing to do.’ He always spoke in this precise way. He was careful with English, concerned to keep himself accurate. For him it was definitely a game. The idea made her more comfortable, and she tried to relax into it, watching his back while he went to find another CD. He flicked his hair from his face, showing a fine stretch of cheekbone. His shirt was still creaseless. At 1 a.m., with empty bottles lined up on the table, she said, ‘Andreas, do you believe in providence? Or in something else? Do you believe in God? Or in Osiris, Shiva, Buddha, Viracocha, Yabalon, Allah, any of the rest?’ He shook his head. She wasn’t sure if he meant he didn’t believe in any of them or he didn’t see the point of talking about it. Always he was more decisive. He stopped drinking. Batting away another enquiry, he undid his shirt. She was tired; her vision was no longer clear. She saw him as if from far away, bringing his mouth towards hers. Automatically, she received his kisses. He was moving her towards the bedroom and she allowed him to lead her. She watched him undressing, smoothing out his trousers and putting them on a chair. She allowed him to take off her clothes. She saw the smoothness of his skin, the strong contours of his thighs.
*
At 3 a.m. she was watching the time flashing on a radio alarm clock. Andreas was lying with his head in his arms. She turned towards him, thinking why not just say it all, when she heard the regular sound of his breathing and saw his eyes were shut. She stared at the gaps in the curtains, where the streetlights flickered across the darkness. She saw Andreas’s shirt, hung neatly on his cupboard door. She fell into a doze which continually threatened to become wakefulness, coasting uneasily through the dark hours, lying half-conscious with the day breaking around her.
Get a job.
Read the The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Read History of Western Philosophy
FIND A PLACE to live
ASK ANDREAS
Read Francis Yates on Giordano Bruno
Explain everything to Andreas
Wash your clothes
Clean the kitchen.
Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.
Go to the bank and beg them for an extension — more money, 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
Unearth the TEMP
Distinguish the various philosophies of the way
WALPURGIS NIGHT
She heard the storm rattling the window when she woke. She lay on her side and stared at the room. In the distance, she could hear the humming of the fridge. Every so often the pitch rose, the fridge shuddered and there was a pause. Then it started up again. It was constant in its inconstancy, like the interrupted trilling of the birds. She heard Andreas breathing beside her. The place smelt of him, a musty smell of aftershave and warm skin. There was a high whine in the walls, sharp and penetrating. She didn’t mind it. She liked the mingled sounds. Now she could hear a noise in the pipes, like the beating of a distant drum. There was a clock somewhere in the room, scraping out seconds. She heard the city opening itself up to the morning. Cars and a low murmur of lorries. An engine moving up the gears. A few drills hammering into concrete, industrial arpeggios. Now a bird sang a soprano solo. She heard a train honking through a tunnel, the noise muffled, and the grinding of wheels on tracks.