Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

I wonder at times about the previous tenant. What traces are left of him that I don’t know about? Holding his stubby cock to piss, I feel strangely intrusive. I know I ought to feel sorrier for him. I’m sure he was younger than I was. Sturdier. Circumcised. I’ve studied the tattoos for hints. They’re crude and rather blurry. There’s an acronym under one that looks like it might be in Cyrillic, but the ink has bled too much to say for sure. The oddest of them is on the top of my right thigh. It’s a big roundel with intersecting rings and a cross through it: just like Jack’s. It looks like a target seen through rifle sights, and it’s relatively fresh: as though it was applied shortly before the poor fellow got — how can I put it? — borrowed.

He has an odd smell, this stranger. It was Assia Wevill, wasn’t it, who said Ted Hughes’s hands smelled like a butcher’s? There is something of the abattoir on me, something ferrous and musky.

I’ve grown fond of him. But there’s no getting away from the fact that I miss the old one, the body I grew up in, with its chicken-pox scars and marks that were mnemonics for bits of my past. I liked my narrow feet. The ones I’ve got now are huge with big splayed toes. They’re the feet of a peasant. If I had to guess, I’d say I was some farmer’s son. There’s a useful heft in my upper arms and it feels like he could handle himself. He has a prodigious appetite too.

Some of these tattoos are from military or naval service; others, I think, from doing time. The likeliest occupation? Kontraktnik , probably; one of those professional soldiers who bulked out the cannon fodder in the Chechen wars with a bit of military know-how. Too old to be a conscript. I imagine him back in the Caucasus for another tour of duty and drinking with the wrong people, or following the wrong woman back to an apartment. Bosh. Out go the lights. The next thing he knows he’s being held in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. They keep him dangling. Days of fear and boredom. At least they’ve got an incentive to treat him well. Constant misinformation about the state of the ransom demands or the prisoner exchange, or whatever they tell him. Things are finally looking promising. Only a few days now, druzhok. Skoro domoi . Bosh. Out he goes again. They unscrew his consciousness like a bulb from a standard lamp and put Nicky Slopen inside.

Lucius stacking toy cars in the front room; Leonora pulling sheets out of the tumble dryer; Sarah making faces at herself in the bathroom mirror, thinking that she’s unobserved: these are my memories. But when I dream as I did last night and see a courtyard splashed with the bloody stains of fallen mulberries, a dusty mountain road, a barking dog — is that mine, or his ? Who is this stranger inside me?

*

In the first week of July, I went to the twenty-four-hour chemist’s in Balham to pick up some antidepressants. My GP had written me the prescription at least a week earlier. I had hoped to manage without them. Someone once told me that you’re most at risk in those seven days when you first start taking them, but I’d had a terrible night and finally caved in to the desire to blot out the pain. I’d had a dream in which Lucius was a baby again. Pink-cheeked, a big grub wiggling in his sleeping bag, he was saying ‘Watch Thomas!’ through a mouthful of pacifier like a Punch and Judy Professor talking through his swozzle. I felt desolate on awakening and took the prescription from where I’d attached it to the fridge with a magnet.

The pharmacist, a grey-haired man with blue eyes and steel-rimmed spectacles, handed over the pills with an easy cordiality, as though I were a customer in a fashionable restaurant of which he was the maître d’, and not just one more inadequate who wasn’t up to facing the rigours of the twenty-first century without chemical assistance.

I washed the first one down with a caffe latte in the Starbucks opposite the supermarket and leafed through the Sunday paper. The colour supplement was full of recipes for swiss chard. I envied the exasperated young families juggling their coffees and tiny children. From my seat at the window, I could see the Pizza Express where Lucius had got his finger trapped in the door to the men’s loos as a toddler. The Dutch component of my psyche — my mother’s side — was slightly ashamed at my weakness. I knew at some level that I had to hold myself together for Lucius and Sarah; that I couldn’t be destroyed by this; and that people had got over much worse. But on the way home, the thought I have lost everything was like a heavy object that I knew I’d be carrying forever.

It must have been something about the symmetry of our bereavements that made me think at that moment of Vera. It came to me with a pang that in the midst of everything I’d failed to send her a letter of condolence. Even in my downcast state, I was capable of grasping that her loss exceeded mine by some order of magnitude. I sat down at my desk and began to write: Dear Vera …

Perhaps I was being hypersensitive, but I found the letter impossible to write. If I didn’t mention Leonora’s departure the dilatoriness of my condolences seemed unforgivable. Dear Vera, I was so sorry to hear the news about Jack two weeks ago. And if I did mention it, I seemed clumsily to usurp her right to grief. Dear Vera, I would have written sooner but I’ve had some bad news of my own.

I decided to call her instead, but her phone was off, so soon after lunch I travelled into town with some flowers, planning to leave them at the house with a brief note.

The mansion was shuttered and dark, but on the second or third ring, I heard steps in the hall and a bolt slide open across the door. It was Vera. She asked me in.

Preoccupied as I was with my own burden of grief and loneliness, I still couldn’t fail to notice that Vera was unusually pale and that she had the tense visage of someone under great mental strain.

I told her how sorry I was about Jack. For a while, we sat together in the half-dark of the drawing room, saying nothing. Much of the furniture was under dust covers and the place had taken on an oppressive, morgue-like atmosphere. It was more than I could stand being there. I told her I was going to an exhibition at the Royal Academy and, almost as an afterthought, I invited her to come. To my surprise, she immediately assented and rose to fetch her coat.

Of course, I’d actually intended to do no such thing, but now I was trapped by my lie and the two of us traipsed round room after room of insipid eighteenth-century watercolours by the painter and engraver Thomas Sandby. In my frame of mind, it was actually worse than being in Malevin’s gloomy mansion. There was something utterly devastating about being confronted by the flatness and gentility of Sandby’s landscapes. I looked in vain for something that would speak to my inner turmoil: something wounded, gothic and monstrous. But all there was were neat Augustan houses, tidy buildings and watery English sunshine. By the third room, I’d had enough. It wasn’t that I needed someone to confide in, but that I needed to say the facts out loud, to do something to break through a terrible sense of depersonalisation. ‘My wife left me,’ I said.

Vera took my hand and, turning slowly towards me, looked me straight in the eye. It is the first time that I can recall being exposed to the full force of her extraordinary charisma. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. Something so tender, so understanding in her voice drew out a wave of desire in me that was as abrupt as it was bewildering.

For a while, we stood in the courtyard while Vera smoked and the crowds queued for the Anish Kapoor sculptures. Then, when it became clear that neither of us was in any hurry to go anywhere, we walked to an odd restaurant bar behind Jermyn Street that was painted in bright harlequin colours. Over the genial hum of the afternoon drinkers, Vera listened to me and I drank most of a bottle of red wine.