Will Self - Grey Area

‘Coffee?’ His voice was icily polite.

‘Yes please.’ He left the room. I could hear him moving around downstairs. Pained love made me picture his actions: unscrewing the percolator, sluicing it out with cold water, tamping the coffee grains down in the metal basket, screwing it back together again and setting it on the lighted stove.

When he reappeared ten minutes later, with two cups of coffee, I was still dug into the bed. He sat down sideways and waited while I struggled upwards and crammed a pillow behind my head. I pulled a limp corner of the duvet cover over my breasts. I took the cup from him and sipped. He’d gone to the trouble of heating milk for my coffee. He always took his black.

‘I’m going out now. I’ve got to get down to Kensington and see Steve about those castings.’ He’d mooched a cigarette from somewhere and the smoking of it, and the cocking of his elbow, went with his tone: officer speaking to other ranks. I hated him for it.

But hated myself more for asking, ‘When will you be back?’

‘Later. . not for quite a while.’ The studied ambiguity was another put-down. ‘What’re you doing today?’

‘N-nothing. . meeting Grace, I s’pose.’

‘Well, that’s good, the two of you can have a really trusting talk — that’s obviously what you need.’ His chocolate drop of sarcasm was thinly candy-coated with sincerity.

‘Maybe it is. . look. . ‘

‘Don’t say anything, don’t get started again. We’ve talked and talked about this. There’s nothing I can do, is there? There’s no way I can convince you — and I think I’m about ready to give up trying.’

‘You shouldn’t have done it.’

‘Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I fucking know that?! Look, do you think I enjoyed it? Do you think that? ‘Cause if you do, you are fucking mad. More mad than I thought you were.’

‘You can’t love me. .’ A wail was starting up in me; the saucer chattered against the base of my cup. ‘You can’t, whatever you say.’

‘I don’t know about that. All I do know is that this is torturing me. I hate myself — that’s true enough. Look at this. Look at how much I hate myself!’

He set his coffee cup down on the varnished floorboards and began to give himself enormous open-handed clouts around the head. ‘You think I love myself? Look at this!’ (clout) ‘All you think about is your-own-fucking-self, your own fucking feelings.’ (clout) ‘Don’t come back here tonight!’ (clout) ‘Just don’t come back, because I don’t think I can take much more.’

As he was saying the last of this he was pirouetting around the room, scooping up small change and keys from the table, pulling on his shirt and shoes. It wasn’t until he got to the door that I became convinced that he actually was going to walk out on me. Sometimes these scenes could run to several entrances and exits. I leapt from the bed, snatched up a towel, and caught him at the head of the stairs.

‘Don’t walk out on me! Don’t walk out, don’t do that, not that. ‘ I was hiccupping, mucus and tears were mixing on my lips and chin. He twisted away from me and clattered down a few stairs, then he paused and turning said, ‘You talk to me about trust, but I think the reality of it is that you don’t really care about me at all, or else none of this would have happened in the first place.’ He was doing his best to sound furious, but I could tell that the real anger was dying down. I sniffed up my tears and snot and descended towards him.

‘Don’t run off, I do care, come back to bed — it’s still early.’ I touched his forearm with my hand. He looked so anguished, his face all twisted and reddened with anger and pain.

‘Oh, fuck it. Fuck it. Just fuck it.’ He swore flatly. The flap of towel that I was holding against my breast fell away, and I pushed the nipple, which dumbly re-erected itself, against his hand. He didn’t seem to notice, and instead stared fixedly over my shoulder, up the stairs and into the bedroom. I pushed against him a little more firmly. Then he took my nipple between the knuckles of his index and forefinger and pinched it, quite hard, muttering, ‘Fuck it, just fucking fuck it.’

He turned on his heels and left. I doubled over on the stairs. The sobs that racked me had a sickening component. I staggered to the bathroom and as I clutched the toilet bowl the mixture of coffee and mucus streamed from my mouth and nose. Then I heard the front door slam.

‘I don’t know why.’

‘Then leave. You can stay at your own place — ‘

‘You know I hate it there. I can’t stand the people I have to share with — ‘

‘Be that as it may, the point is that you don’t need him, you just think you do. It’s like you’re caught in some trap. You think you love him, but it’s just your insecurity talking. Remember,’ and here Grace’s voice took on an extra depth, a special sonority of caring, ‘your insecurity is like a clever actor, it can mimic any emotion it chooses to and still be utterly convincing. But whether it pretends to be love or hate, the truth is that at bottom it’s just the fear of being alone.’

‘Well why should I be alone? You’re not alone, are you?’

‘No, that’s true, but it’s not easy for me either. Any relationship is an enormous sacrifice. . I don’t know. . Anyway, you know that I was alone for two years before I met John, perhaps you should give it a try?’

‘I spend most of my time alone anyway. I’m perfectly capable of being by myself. But I also need to see him. .’

As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn’t hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it all: his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the café at couple after couple, each confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.

Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn’t down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there. . It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony.

After he had left that morning I went back to his bed and lay there, gagged and bound by the smell of him in the duvet. I didn’t get up until eleven. I listened to Radio Four, imagining that the deep-timbred, wholesome voices of each successive presenter were those of ideal parents. There was a discussion programme, a gardening panel discussion, a discussion about books, a short story about an elderly woman and her relationship with her son, followed by a discussion about it. It all sounded so cultured, so eminently reasonable. I tried to construct a new view of myself on the basis of being the kind of young woman who would consume such hearty radiophonic fare, but it didn’t work. Instead I felt quite weightless and blown out, a husk of a person.

The light quality in the attic bedroom didn’t change all morning. The only way I could measure the passage of time was by the radio, and the position of the watery shadows that his metal sculptures made on the magnolia paint.

Eventually I managed to rouse myself. I dressed and washed my face. I pulled my hair back tightly and fixed it in place with a loop of elastic. I sat down at his work table. It was blanketed with loose sheets of paper, all of which were covered with the meticulous plans he did for his sculptures. Elevations and perspectives, all neatly shaded and the dimensions written in using the lightest of pencils. There was a mess of other stuff on the table as well: sticks of flux, a broken soldering iron, bits of acrylic and angled steel brackets. I cleared a space amidst the evidence of his industry and taking out my notebook and biro, added my own patch of emotion to the collage: I do understand how you feel. I know the pressure that you’re under at the moment, but you must realise that it’s pressure that you put on yourself. It’s not me that’s doing it to you. I do love you and I want to be with you, but it takes time to forgive. And what you did to me was almost unforgivable. I’ve been hurt before and I don’t want to be hurt again. If you can’t understand that, if you can’t understand how I feel about it, then it’s probably best if we don’t see one another again. I’ll be at the flat this evening, perhaps you’ll call?