Genie and Paul (10 page)

Ten days after Cyclone Kalunde had reached a peak over the Indian Ocean, Paul, in a plane to Mauritius, was retracing its path. Up here, with only an indifferent sea below him, Paul felt free of everything he had left behind in London. He wondered if it would be possible to live on a plane, forever in international airspace. He thought of Grandmère, cut loose from the present tense. ‘International airspace’ was a less painful way to think about dementia.

Paul was drunk. But it was a reserved, self-contained kind of drunkenness – the only kind you could smuggle past the cabin crew. Paul had got drunk because of his fear of flying. That, and shame at his fear of flying, which to him signified a failure of imagination. Not fear of flying, Paul corrected himself. Fear of
crashing
. Then he thought ‘
smuggle
’ and bit his lip to stop himself from laughing, thinking of the pills in his suitcase. It was strange to think of them all the way down there in the hold, but still with a hold on him. He had meant to flush them before boarding but had been too paranoid. After Genie’s collapse Paul had determined to hang onto them. While he still had the pills, they could not harm anyone else. So he’d not wanted to let them out of his sight, out of his control. And then, after a while, he had begun to feel as though
they
wouldn’t let
him
go.

After Genie’s collapse Paul had run home to Mam’s. Then he had run around his room, yanking at drawers, grabbing armfuls of clothes, groping for the tub of pills he kept behind
the wardrobe, stuffing everything blindly into the small suitcase he’d taken from Mam’s room, Mam’s suitcase, the small cardboard one she’d carried through Heathrow in 1981 when they first came to London, the one he’d used now and again these past thirteen years, shuttling from squat to squat. The broken suitcase he’d had to tie a belt around to stop everything from falling out.

Hotel Europe, he’d thought, running to the bus stop. He could hide there.

As kids he and Genie had walked past it every Sunday on their way to Grandmère’s. He had wondered even then about the kind of tourists who found themselves there, in run-down Hackney, on a major road where lorries thundered past heading for the docks and warehouses of Essex. The guests at Hotel Europe were Bangladeshis and Somalis and pinch-faced white people. They always seemed bewildered. They had never looked much like tourists to him. Then, when Paul was older, he would catch his breath as he walked past the place, thinking of the blonde girls in suspenders who wandered the rooms inside: it was a whorehouse, he told himself. It was the gauzy curtains drawn across open windows; something teasing about the lazy way they stirred in the breeze, at once inviting and secretive.

For a cheap hotel it wasn’t so cheap, Paul discovered, though he suspected there were special rates for long-term guests. He thought he could guess who these were – they seemed defeated, no longer surprised to find themselves there. Paul unlocked the door to his room and, trembling, got into bed. It was already dawn. He pulled the covers up to his chin and lay there waiting for sleep. He lay there for several hours. He needed dark – unplugged dark – for sleep. Even when night eventually fell, it was hard to drift off with the fizzy street-light spilling through the curtains, soaking into the carpet; car beams tracked like searchlights across
the ceiling, narrowly missing him in their sweep. Paul tried hard to think about Genie, about what might have become of her after she’d been stretchered away – but his thoughts evaporated almost as soon as he’d struggled to formulate them. Like blowing soap bubbles. But the memories – these came without effort. Was this how Grandmère felt? Today was his birthday, he remembered. His birthday, and the anniversary of Jean-Marie’s death.

As he got older, Paul thought, sipping at another whisky, he felt he was hauling himself up through life in much the same way as this plane was climbing through the clouds. He would reach successive peaks of self-awareness from which he would look back down on his recent past and think, I didn’t have a fucking clue then. And every so often he’d look back on the last time he’d thought that and think, God, I didn’t have a fucking clue then… And so on, each step in this process of realisation corresponding to the increase in altitude, in age, in distance between himself and London, as confirmed by the blip-blip-blipping of the image on the little screen in the back of the seat in front of him. Paul wondered where all this enlightenment would end: possibly with his death, at the point of which he’d think, Fuck, I never had a fucking clue… He would reach death and the scales would fall away from his eyes as he crouched (his arms across his face in surrender) cowering and naked in the hot white light of absolute truth. He would feel like a baby. That’s what we all are, Paul thought, looking at the sleeping bodies curled up in rows around him like the occupants of a neonatal ward: old babies.

But two women sitting near Paul were still awake. He heard snatches of their conversation: two Mauritian matrons who did not know one another, trying to work out how they were – knowing that they would be – connected. Perhaps
they were somehow connected to
him
. Paul had heard many similar conversations throughout the flight. Creole, he thought, a Masonic handshake. That bastard language, formed from the cacophony of a hundred enslaved languages to confuse the oppressors, to hide things from them. Ironic, Paul used to think whenever Mam shouted at him in it, that it was the language of
his
oppressor. And it was still a secret language when it was spoken in London where few people knew it, as well as being a language for taking the piss out of people in, for swearing in, for being mad in, for cutting someone down in, for joking in, for being affectionate and playful in, for expressing love in. For Paul it was the language of love. It hurt to admit as much, because he spoke it, as Mam said,
kom si to ena patat so dan labus
(as though he had hot potatoes in his mouth); it hurt because Paul knew he would never speak it fluently, although in his dreams Creole came to him as naturally as dream-flight did. And when he dreamt of the two of them, him and Genie, as he had done constantly since leaving her that night – that same dream, the sad dream on the rocks that looked like chewing gum (she said) – the dream that he could never quite remember on waking – oddly and naturally enough, in the dream, when they spoke to one another, it was in Creole.

It was hearing Creole from two strangers that had made Paul realise he should abandon London for Mauritius. In the three days that followed Genie’s collapse and his escape to Hotel Europe, Paul had not left his room once. Three days had slid away like sweat off Paul’s back, leaving nothing but a salt stain on his sheets: three days and three nights he had spent there, lying drenched in his bed, alone. The morning his fever broke, he had woken with the certainty that if he didn’t get out of London he would die. This in between dreams of him and Genie, each one ending with him
saying something terribly sad that was not
Sorry
but seemed somehow to mean it.

During his fever, Paul had barely eaten. He still felt no urge to eat but he spent a long time looking at vegetables. Looking at vegetables made him calm. The vegetables outside the Turkish shop: onions, nestling in their grubby cardboard box; the ripe tomatoes hung tightly together, still clinging to their vines. If you touched the vines then held your fingers to your nose you went dizzy with the smell. What was it? Earth?

He pinched off a bunch and took them into the shop. Two dark-skinned middle-aged men – not quite Indian, not quite black – stood by the counter, chatting in another language, which Paul, registering the mild shock he always felt in these situations, recognised as Creole. Then, having run out of conversation, the two men stood nodding together. They both noticed Paul standing there with his tomatoes, staring at them. Paul knew what he must do. Where he must go.

Leaving the shop, he felt calmer. He looked wild, though, he realised, as his reflection swam up at him from the window of a parked car: his shirt hung off him and his eyes had hollowed out. He had not shaved in days. And he noticed the sky’s dull glint, like the sheen on old meat: it was going to rain. London rain wasn’t cleansing, it just shifted the dirt around. But Paul didn’t move any faster as the first few drops started to fall – though everyone around him was rushing for cover: the dusty old black guys who sat outside the minicab offices, the hard white kids who pulled up hoods to hide skin like pitted cement. Paul didn’t care about the rain. He didn’t care if it turned him to mud. He didn’t even care that, though it was still only March, there was already something warm and greasy, something second-hand about this rain which reminded him of the water that dripped out of air-conditioning vents onto the streets in summer – not
water but the sweat of overheated office workers. Paul didn’t care about anything except getting to Mauritius.

Which would mean seeing Eloise again.

It wasn’t the gunshot that woke him so much as the noises which followed: a car speeding away, a woman screaming, pausing for breath, then more screaming which seemed to segue into the astonished yelps of police sirens. He slept badly after that, his head full of terrible dreams about Genie. The next morning, looking out of his window, Paul saw ribbons of blue and white police tape stretched across sections of the road. Squad cars with flashing lights stood patient as horses while policemen nearby squinted into the middle distance, muttering self-consciously into their walkie-talkies. Bystanders watched and waited while kids ran around randomly like looters, working off their excitement. It felt as if a royal visit were expected.

Eloise was coming to see him. Perhaps she would think all this fuss was for her.

Paul lay back on his bed. He and Eloise had never stayed in a hotel together. In fact, he had stayed in a hotel only once before. A girl at his school used to sleep with boys for money. She liked him. She would do it for free, she said, but she wanted to stay in a hotel. She had picked one all the way across town, in Kensington. He’d had to hock his bike to pay for it. He’d ended up in Knightsbridge by mistake. Wandering around that area, trying to find the hotel, he’d felt as though he were in a foreign country. If you wanted to feel like a stranger in your own city, you just had to get lost in a part you’d never been to before, where you didn’t belong. That was how he’d felt, looking for that hotel. He remembered
the flashy car dealerships, the displays of oriental carpets for rich people to wipe their mud on. The Arab men in their shades and flowing robes, the Arab women in their shades and flowing robes, the liveried men loitering at the doors of hotels, all as transitory and featureless as the whorls of dust which blew disconsolately down the long blank streets. All the boutique windows slippery with a numb blank richness that looked right through you, and him, gawping, poor as a cockroach.

He had remembered that girl and the hotel again years later, the first time he’d gone to Eloise’s house: her mother lived in that same part of town. He had gone there to rescue a drunken Genie. He had not let Genie down that time, at least.

He’d found the hotel in the end. He remembered the room as dim, the walls a dull shade of red, the colour of dried blood. The air was thick with stale cigarette smoke and dust. This and the slow pounding in his chest had made it hard to breathe. He had lain on the bed and waited for the girl. A few hours later he was still lying there alone, smoking the packet of cigarettes he had bought her for afterwards, watching MTV. He hadn’t even felt like wanking.

And now he was back in that same hotel room, the red one, the air again heavy, and again he was alone. But this time, instead of lying on the bed and waiting for the girl to show up, he pushed aside one of the thick velvet curtains at the window and stepped behind it. He could see, in the large mirror opposite, just above the bed, that he was completely hidden in its folds. Again, he waited for the girl. But when the door opened it was Eloise who came in, followed by Sol, both of them panting as though they’d been chased there, the door slamming shut as Sol pushed El up against it. Then everything slowed down as Sol leaned in to kiss her. Paul realised then that he’d known all along they would appear
there together. And, as he watched, Paul felt so jealous and so turned on that he had to bite his lip hard to stop himself from pushing back the curtain and joining them where they now lay on the bed, El on her back, long hair fanned out behind her as though floating in water. Floating in water: yes, he thought dreamily, sex in dreams was always slow, like floating, and as he thought this he realised that he was dreaming and, realising this, realised he was not fully asleep after all and that the thwump thwump thwump of them on the bed together was coming in fact from outside the room, someone was banging on the door of his room, the other hotel room outside his dream where he now lay, alone, awake and with a hard-on. Securing it with the waistband of his shorts, he slipped on his jeans and opened the door.

He didn’t recognise her immediately. It was the hair. It was no longer the shade of dyed red that had made her skin look creamier than French butter. She’d gone natural, an indeterminate brown colour with an almost greenish sheen – the colour of sticks that crack underfoot in an English wood, he thought. It was bobbed, accentuating the little pointed chin that used to dig into his shoulder so viciously when he held her, as he did now, before she pulled away smartly.

Have I seen you in a suit before? he asked.

Not unless you count school uniform.

She came into the room. Sat down on the edge of the bed. Can I smoke?

Paul shrugged.

Put some clothes on, she said, not looking at him as she took out a packet of cigarettes, the menthol kind that teenage girls favoured, a taste she had never outgrown. She offered Paul the packet. Smoking them had always reminded him of Eloise: the actual taste of them – fresh and cold and hot and stale all at the same time. She looked around her.

Nice room, she said.

It is by my standards. I’ve only stayed in a hotel once before.

I know. You’ve told me the story.

You remind me of her, you know. The girl who never came to meet me.

His immediate thought when he’d first met Eloise had been that she looked as though she should have a tail. She looked as though she licked herself clean.

She was kind of feral like you.

Eloise fished into her handbag and brought out a brown envelope. This is what you wanted, right? I don’t want it back. And I don’t want to see you again, Paul.

I’m not planning on coming back any time soon. Thank you for this.

I have to get back to work now.

Where’s your work?

Canary Wharf.

Ah. Daddy.

His company, yes.

I’ve only been there once. To Canary Wharf, I mean.

What business would you have round there?

He raised an eyebrow. There’s a lot of business round there. But Paul had been too intimidated by the place to return. Some of the buildings he’d seen there were of a cobalt-blue glass, like the kind you looked through to view an eclipse. Perhaps you needed to look through coloured glass – emerald glass, grey-green glass the colour of the river – to see this place, Paul had thought, craning his neck to take in the Olympian heights of the buildings around him as he waited for the dealer who was coming to buy drugs from him.

I work in one of the tallest buildings there, Eloise said. Every time I go into it I remember a story you told me. The one about an ancient Greek philosopher who committed suicide by jumping into a volcano and how this other
philosopher a few centuries later, some French guy, admired the Greek for choosing Earth over Heaven:
What an affirmation of love for the Earth!
Then the French guy was diagnosed with a terminal illness and also killed himself – by jumping from a building.

I don’t remember that story, said Paul. Look at you. Job in the city. All smart. New boyfriend too, hey?

She nodded.

Paul got a soapy corrosive feeling then, as though his skin were covered in battery acid: a mixture of jealousy, sadness, lust. He had not had sex in such a long while that the thought of it scared him. In between break-ups with Eloise he would have casual sex with people he met in bars. But increasingly he’d found that the experience diminished him somehow. The effort of having to make himself anew for each encounter, after each encounter, made him feel as though he were losing pliability, as though he were – he’d heard this somewhere, about something else altogether, but he’d forgotten what – losing a little of the gold leaf from his photograph.

Paul leaned over and kissed Eloise. Hot ashes and mint. She pulled away.

Come on, Paul, she said gently. You know it’s not going to happen. She reached out a hand, but her touch was cautious, as though she were touching something which might be very hot.

You’ve changed, Eloise.

Good, she said. When I was with you, I felt as though I was on the edge of the world; I felt like I was outside looking in. You made me feel like that. I loved that about you, I sought it out when I was young, but it scares me to be like that now. How can you live like you do? Why do you always want to make things difficult for yourself?

I just need to know that I’m alive.

Why do you have to be dead or alive? she said. Can’t you find a happy medium like the rest of us? You wanting to run away from your mum and Genie, for example. What’s that about?

Paul told her everything.

He told her about the night he’d broken his rule and given Genie a pill when she’d asked him to sort her out: how he’d refused and she’d pouted, said she’d take her business elsewhere, nodded at a bloke Paul didn’t like the look of. How he’d said, Don’t be stupid, he could give you anything; how Genie had smiled in a way that said, Exactly!

And so he’d slipped a pill from his cigarette packet and passed it to her. As she’d squeezed his hand in return he’d thought in a flash that it was all fucked up, him giving Genie this fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil when Genie – her smirk lit up by the strobe – was surely the snake here… Paul told Eloise about losing Genie, about finding girls in a back corridor, the girls with long lashes, high heels who looked like an avenue of spiky winter trees, leaning against the walls of the narrow corridor that led to the back room, at the back of which was a trestle table heaped high with coke. He told Eloise tales that made her nose water, of how he’d troughed at that trestle table, taking turns with the spiky girls, then jumped the queue until he’d felt sick with himself and everyone around him; how he’d left the place, left Genie there. It was while he was outside, striding up and down in the watery first light of morning, his body thrumming with power chords played on cathedral organs, that an ambulance had pulled up. He told Eloise that it was while he was wondering, Why not a back entrance for such eventualities, for the casualties, as they would for the VIPs? that he’d caught sight of the girl on the stretcher and seen, through the plastic mask clamped to her face, that it was Genie. And, before she could ask him, he told Eloise, Yes. I left her there.