Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

You thought your father, of all people, would disapprove. You thought he would issue you with one of his standard lectures about idiotic administration, money wasted, dimwits with purse strings. But he did not. Instead he seems peculiarly interested in the items of the collection. Last night you rang to see how your parents were, to check in, to tell them what you are doing and to reassure them, as you do most days now, that they still have one of their offspring. His spirits lifted a little when you talked about the exhibition. Hey, I bet there’s some bloody deviant stuff, eh Suze? I bet there’s vintage dildos and all sorts of jiggery-pokery. Those randy old sods! When’s the opening? You’ll get us on the bloody list, eh?

It was nice to hear his gigantic old voice back again, banging down the phone after weeks of quiet depression, good to imagine him sitting in his usual chair with his foot up, balancing the receiver between his ear and his shoulder, and rolling his tobacco into a black paper while he nattered on with you. His great rimy sole stretched out towards the hearth, toes furling and unfurling. You were midway through a sentence when he clattered the phone to the floor and you heard him yell out I’ll be back in a minute, Sue. Then squeaking stair boards, and silence except for a faint crackle down the line. After several minutes he picked the receiver up again. I just needed a pee. You talked a while longer, then said goodbye.

After you hung up, you thought about the place downstairs in Shoreditch. You’d walked along its corridor with Tom, not touching, but close together. There was the smell of something sweet in the air, like unpasteurised honey, speckled with pollen and lustrous. There were liquorice-black doors with small windows. You’d expected a worse environment, somewhere silty and culpable. You’d expected disturbing scenes inside. Multiples. People being stretched and held down perhaps. Everything done roughly and expressions of distress, breasts being flung and rocked beneath bodies. As you walked down the corridor you wished for a moment you hadn’t come here with him, and you weren’t sure how it had happened, how it had been agreed. It was only the second time you’d arranged to meet in the city. In the bar you’d had a drink, two drinks. You had both heard of the place, but you don’t know which of you suggested it. Because of what you’d begun doing you felt adventurous. You felt upended, sensed the lees of sex drifting in the air around you. The idea seemed un-boundaried and appropriate.

When you looked through the glass pane it was very delicate, exquisite even. A man kneeling in front of a woman, giving her oral sex. A second man came into the room. He entered her by fractions; pain and rapture registered on her face, though she must have been used to it. The glass panel was thin enough to hear their sounds. She was shaved. You couldn’t see it all. The act was carried out as if you were not there looking. Watching excited Tom and his reaction excited you. Afterwards, you wanted each other urgently. You tore your dress on the railing of the churchyard. He couldn’t stop himself coming inside you.

You could say you didn’t mean for it to happen. You could say that it is out of your hands, out of your control. You are simply searching for feeling, for meaning, and it was this that sent you to him the first time, and to the hotels, and to that accommodating place of voyeurs. It is this which made you show him the hidden clasp of your dress under your lifted arm, while your other hand held his wrist, letting go of it as he worked his fingers across your ribcage, to your softly polished nipple. It is a workable defence. These exchanges are simply a confirmation of life to your entropic atoms, an attempt to reverse the exodus of your psyche. You are simply grief fucking. But you are too good at it. This beautiful wet correction, this deep erotic. You are too generous and emotional at his mouth and his prick not to recognise the possibility of something else, something meaningful. You have both become reckless. Once Angela was still in the building, holding their baby on her lap, nursing it. You kissed, only two doors away from her, after he found you sitting in the cloakroom, your mobile pressed against your forehead, having scrolled no further in the index than Danny’s undeleted number.

Susan, he whispered. Conosco questa sensazione. Non ci sono bordi a cui aggrapparsi. È come essere pazzi. Aggrappati a me. You didn’t understand what he was saying, until he kissed you. It was a kiss of such complicity, of such uncomplicated sympathy, that you felt for the first time not alone in your suffering. His hands held the sides of your head while you continued to cry. She could have walked in at any moment. When he drew back and looked at you, you felt certain he had lost someone too. Later, in the emptiness of the galley after Angela had gone home, with the door locked and the sound of cars on the road outside beginning to thin, you lay back on the floor. You felt yourself tense as he worked himself in. The smell of the day was on your bodies, transferring between your hands and mouths. Both of you struggled to breathe. And it was as if he was staring into the void, making love to those rich and fallow griefs between. Then his eyes closed and he swore and gathered you to him.

Always there are apologies after finishing, as if you have offended each other with such efficient function, such discomposure. You both swear it will not happen gain, and you both know it will continue. It is a good fit, this indiscretion. It has the right scent. There is the match of something disturbed. It is a romance of ill-health. Like hyacinth, like sugar and must, his serum, and you taste him elsewhere. You carry away images of him to use later, his lightly muscled groin, his eyes put into climax as you are.

You know you must be wearing this illicit new history. Soon someone will see it. The smears on your breasts when you undress. His semen dry as lichen on your skin. In the shower, the soap pulps, your hands wearing it down like the two incessant tides of the sea. But you can still feel the sting and tear of that first time, the bruising at the neck of your womb. You can still smell him. You know that soon your raw interior will be revealed, its marks and bacteria, its record of infidelities. And so you flee. You pull on layers of clothing, phone National Rail Enquiries, and leave messages on phones where you know Nathan will not be. You go north, back to the fells, to the cottage with its stained gable and its crow-stepped chimneys. You go back to your beginning, the place where Danny first existed, where he was with you.

No one has questioned your movements. Angela trusts you; she trusts your symptoms. Nathan too knows you are deeply injured. The darkly obvious looms close by, encompassing everything. It is huge, your bereavement. It is consuming, protecting. Loss has cast you utterly into shadow. They all tiptoe around the tragedy. They tiptoe around you. After losing him, so violently and suddenly, your vagary, your absence, must be understandable. You are heart-broken. You are recovering. You are letting go.

On the days the envelopes arrive from England my spirits are lifted and I am more charmed by the things in my house. Antonio forwards all correspondence and I should like to be dutiful and reply, but still there is no return address. Peter is a transient agent! I am beginning to understand that these letters are simply gifts and I should accept them gratefully and enjoy them. Currently Peter is reading the Irish Ulysses. After many attempts he has not read past the first twenty pages. Something in the language has prevented him, he says. But on the last attempt a revelation! The text is a doorway, or a device for transporting the mind. In itself it resists interpretation, but instead affords the opportunity to think in tandem, like a man riding a bicycle while on board a ship. Peter thinks this is what Joyce intended. It will not make him unhappy to be oblivious to the narrative until the book’s very end, he writes, for he is sure to enlighten his mind in other ways.