She called on the eighth day.
‘Hello?’
‘Xan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well I’m here,’ said a comfortable voice — educated, accentless. ‘And I’ve kept my promise. I’m lying on the sofa in a rather grand and rather warm hotel room, and I’m all dressed up as a little girl. What that means is that everything I’m wearing is much too small. These panties, in particular, are ridiculous. So when would be good for you?’
‘And you are?’
‘And I am? I’m Karla. Idiot.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Cora Susan.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. We will go quietly
After a couple of days on his own, batching it in the basement down the road, Xan Meo slowly realised something. Before, he had lived in a house full of girls: two that were women, two that would be women thereafter. And now? Now he was living with a man — himself: he felt denuded, and hideously revealed. Xan didn’t know the lines (and, in his present disposition, would have rejected them as unmanly), but he was sharing Adam’s agony, after the Falclass="underline" ‘… cover me, ye pines, Ye cedars with innumerable boughs, Hide me …’ He had fallen. He was a Septembrist, not a Decembrist, but he found it very ageing, his exclusion from the house with its women a hundred yards away — a minute’s walk; yet Russia had sent him on a much longer journey through time.
Standing with one foot up on the toilet seat, Xan clipped his toenails — so kippered and curled. The nail of the big toe cleaved with a crackle; its immediate juniors each gave a defiant tick as he lopped them. But the nail of the little toe made no sound at all. How tactful, how very discreet. The nail of the little toe came quietly.
Reading the instructions on the packet of a store-bought meat pie, he noticed that an ampersand of eye-dreck jumped from word to word — like the bouncing ball above the nursery rhyme on the television, there to help the children sing along.
Passing the mirror, naked, he seemed to see a Rubens in the glass. That thickened, tightened feeling around the gut and saddle, making him feel that he was, to say the least of it, a couple of hundred bowel-movements behind the game. There was nothing wrong with Xan that a year in the lavatory wouldn’t cure. But where would he find that year? Did he have that year?
Waking, and rubbing his face, he felt a pillow-crease like a duelling-scar on his cheek. He had just shoved himself out of a dream of kitchen chaos — buckets and coffee-grounds and upended rubbish-bags. No need to tidy up, not after dreams, he thought; no need to leave dreams as you’d expect to find them. But this was a dream about a man alone. So don’t allow that room to let itself go: you’ll be back. The duelling-scar was still on his cheek as he stood by the fridge and ate lunch. He caught himself in the glass of the garden door. Like a Junker: brainwashed, paranoid, talentless.
Climbing from the straightbacked chair, he gave voice to a groan. Sitting back down again, he gave voice to another. Anything and everything made him groan: bending, turning, wiping his brow. And the very old—they didn’t groan all the time. They trained themselves not to; and so would he. We will come quietly, like the little toenail. We will go quietly. We won’t make a sound.
On the fourth day he was allowed home for a probationary half-hour with the girls. Russia greeted him with a cousinly hug and then withdrew, but only tactically: she would look in, pass by, she would clump about on the stairs and on the floor above. This was meant to fortify Imaculada, whose sickened glances suggested (to Xan at least) that domestic disharmony was quite unknown in the slums of São Paulo … Billie was the kindest to him, consenting, after a while, to be lifted on to his lap for a book; then Russia appeared and loudly and brightly suggested that they sit on the sofa (side by side). Although Sophie burst into tears the instant she saw him, she recovered surprisingly well. Thereafter she cried only when he coughed. And Xan’s cough had come on a bit in recent days. He coughed not in helpless reflex but with purpose and method, hacking the ragged edges off the soggy presence in his throat.
With Russia he tried to look the very picture of contrition, which was the best he could hope for, because contrition was not what he felt. He was perhaps open to intellectual persuasion about the solecism, the regrettable typo, of raping your wife. But a persuasion is not a conviction; and it would in the end be countered by the argument, or the unadorned encyclical, that your wife is your wife. Besides: everyone knew that a special indulgence should always be extended to men who, through no real fault of their own, happened to be unusually drunk. Yet Xan was making the effort. He was making the effort to be or at least seem reasonable, to bow to reason, as hereabouts interpreted. For instance, with Russia, he never succumbed to the ever-present temptation to ask (or order) her into the bedroom. The work of controlling or dissimulating these urges and grievances caused him to tremble, sometimes for a minute on end. During one of those minutes Russia looked at him and fleetingly imagined that he was trying not to laugh.
But nothing openly terrible happened, and his visits became longer, looser, laxer. Russia’s patrols further receded; Imaculada would sometimes leave him briefly alone with Billie; and he was soon permitted to look in on them as they bathed … Observing the girls was now part of Xan’s schedule, like his morning hour with Tilda Quant, and his first cautious sessions at Parkway Gym; but there was nothing routine about it — about observing the girls. Indeed, the experience was hallucinogenic, uncannily vivid and unstable: he never knew what it was going to do next. Why was it such a savage pleasure to watch them eat? Why was it of desperate importance to him — the volume of water they displaced in the bath? And why did they so often remind him of pornography: the lewd contortions, the self-fingerings, the slurping ingestions with chin and cheek dripping with milk or vanilla icecream? Why did he always expect them to die, every day, every night?
There was one time when Sophie fell apart early on, having been deprived of her afternoon nap, and was asleep in her room by a quarter to six. On his way out, Xan asked Russia if he might take a last look at her, and in he went. The blanketed figure seemed quite inert as he reached down and placed the flat of his hand on her spine. There elapsed an evanescent eternity before he felt the soft push of her breathing; and then he heard his own quiet retch of deliverance.
‘She’s down,’ he said. He stood in his overcoat at the door of the small half-landing sitting-room, where Russia was watching the news. ‘Dead to the world,’ he added.
‘Oh well. She’ll wake at five.’
Russia continued to look up at him from her chair. The aerodynamics of her face: its angled gauntness, in the present light, made him think of hunger, of famine.
‘Answer me something,’ she said. ‘Why do you think Billie has stopped “exercising” when you’re in the room? She masturbates in front of Imaculada and me — still. Why not you?’