I took a mouthful of the golden drink to stop me saying anything rash. He put his hand on my knee and left it there. Desire turned up in me with a kick, a skipped heartbeat. All of my colleagues had gone and I hadn’t even noticed. Outside the bar he gathered me into a lightless corner and on to him. He kissed me hard on the mouth and I put my fingers through his belt loops and pulled him against me for a second, several seconds, before pushing him away, both my palms against his chest, then running to the train station over the street covered with rain, exultant, my body full of the dark feeling, not turning back, though I knew he would be looking.
The dark feeling by then was a shimmering, liquid thing, like a pool of blood or a black opal. It was a kind of raging joy, is how I can best explain it. I sobbed while I waited for my train, but I wasn’t sad.
On the way home the train was too bright and there was one other person on it, a woman with red hair and a long skirt, two spots of colour high up on the bones of her face, who met my eyes dead on and then stood up and walked down the train carriage to sit elsewhere, and I thought perhaps it was my weakness that had repelled her, that she had sensed it inside me and she wanted no part of it. Or maybe we were just two drunk women on a train and she wanted to be left alone.
So I met my own eyes in the window instead, the sheer dark as we passed through a tunnel, and my face was pale and drawn, my hair was a mess, and when I got in I walked straight into my bedroom and lay down fully clothed, a thick taste in my mouth. And I knew very well what sort of woman I was, and I did not want to be that woman any more—not the sort you would move away from on the train, not the sort that would allow herself to be kissed by strangers, crudely, where the empty bottles from the night were set out in boxes—and I thought Please, I thought Please, please, please, like a charm, until sleep took me over.
4
Memories from the earlier parts of my life didn’t come to me during sessions with Doctor A, even when he dimmed the room and put his hands on my head like a charlatan. All I did was sweat until my eyes stung and my skin was clammy.
Tell me about your journey to the city, Doctor A asked me, leafing through his notes. The journey where your life began.
Nice try, it was my turn to say.
I never spoke about that to him. Not even about the swooping of bats, their fingernail-scrape sound still just audible to me back then. Not about watching a group of tiny frogs running across the road one early morning for a full ten minutes, my own survival suddenly thrown into perspective. I had to hold on to some things. They weren’t important to anyone but me. They contained no mystery to unlock, they were not clinically significant. They were just there.
Do you ever think you might be too manipulative to treat? Doctor A asked, pleasantly, like I had a choice about seeing him. He met my eyes.
I mean, who isn’t, I replied, equally pleasantly. This was the sort of rapport we had established. He took his glasses off.
You seem unstable, he said. You are drinking too much because you are very unhappy. You know that the body possesses its own feedback loops. And you know that you’re driving them through your own negative actions. You make things worse and worse. And then what happens?
You tell me, I said.
Doctor A was in one of his stern moods. I wished he would be smiling and indulgent instead. I wished he would offer me one of the red-striped peppermints in the glass dish on the coffee table between us. The window was open a crack and I could hear traffic outside in the distance, a humming beyond preternatural stillness. He wrote down something on his pad. I watched the dictaphone as it spun, taking down every word I said, every word I had ever said to him in this light green room, and felt faint, suspended.
My unhappiness is a long time behind me, I said. My unhappiness is a skin that I have shucked off.
Unhappiness is cyclical, he said. Do not let your heart grow complacent. You won’t ever be immune to it. Nobody is.
Sometimes our practice was like a sport. I enjoyed trying to beat him, though I knew I never could. And sometimes I sagged in the middle like an old mattress, and just could not take any more.
He looked up at me. You’re very pale, he said. I can read your mood in your skin. Think about what your body is telling you.
He passed me a tissue and I held it in my fist, let my eyes water a little.
That’s good, he said. Get it out of you. He handed me the piece of paper. See you on Thursday, he said, and then the session was over and I almost ran out to the car, pressed my head against the steering wheel once I was safely inside.
5
The first time I brought R back to the low white house in the suburbs, I knew that all my neighbours would be at their windows, watching, ready to nudge me in the side when they saw me outside the house or on the green in the coming days.
Nice tall man, they were going to say. What happened to the last one?
In the kitchen I poured equal parts vodka and juice, to accelerate things. Umbrellas on the side of the highball glasses for romance. I put the small bunch of freesias that he brought me in the now-empty vodka bottle, rinsed. In the living room he had taken off his tie and his jacket and laid them neatly over the back of a wooden chair. I liked his manners, the nice swell of his arms, and when he took the drink I liked his smile too. I hoped he would pass them all on to our child. The thought made my heart freeze with alarm.
We talked for a while about work. He asked about the experiments I was working on and I said that they were confidential, which was basically a lie, but I didn’t feel like talking about myself. He worked in one of the high glass buildings on the other side of the city and lived near his office in another, similar building. While he explained what he did he was animated and beautiful, but I couldn’t listen properly, I couldn’t let another second pass. I went over to him and sat on his lap and kissed him. Oh, he said, putting his arms around me.
We took our second drinks to the bedroom. He became simultaneously businesslike and seductive as he unbuttoned then scooped the dress from my body, cursory admiration, pulling out a prophylactic in its little foil wrapper from his wallet before things went too far. He put it on the table next to the bed.
You don’t have to, I said.
I will, I will, he said, magnanimously, taking off his shirt.
Part of me was afraid he would somehow sense the dark feeling where it moved under my skin. Sometimes before I slept I put my hands on my stomach and felt a deep pulse that I was sure must be its visible manifestation, but when I read up on this, surreptitiously, it turned out it was just an artery that kept me alive.
I tried to be demure but it wasn’t really possible. I couldn’t help that I was a person with an appetite. Once or twice there was the threat of warmth, of connection, when he kissed the side of my head, and I didn’t want to like it, I knew liking it would bring its own problems. He stayed the night and didn’t bother with a prophylactic the second time, or the third time when we woke up. The act itself was vigorous, like doing aerobics. Afterwards I felt healthy as opposed to abject, my body humming softly. In the morning he left early and I didn’t mind at all, I preferred it that way.