A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

You don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to hide.

In faith.

Out fear.

So-hum.

So-hum.

Breathing is supposed to keep you calm, but also it keeps you alive and so you are not calm, because you are alive and being alive is never calm.

And you are going back in your mind, going somewhere too close and too certain and too clear, somewhere in a time which should have vanished but hasn’t.

Something catches — something the man is doing to you — and it makes you flinch.

‘Sorry.’ You are aware that he probably doesn’t enjoy causing you pain and are ready to believe this is why his voice sounds irritated when he tells you, ‘Nearly done.’

‘Mm hm,’ you tell him back. ‘Mm hm.’

Mm hm is the opposite of so-hum.

And it betrays you, your letting go into grief. Even though nobody asks, not one person asks the most important question, or writes anything down, you know that your crying means they can see how you are, who you are. No one says anything and you don’t say anything and still it’s plain that you have been damaged and are still damaged and cannot be fixed.

The gynaecologist tells you, ‘There is thinning and there are changes: menopausal changes rather than your previous kind. We’ll send off the tests, but it looks clear.’

And you hear this as an announcement that your last chance to be a woman has already gone.

But the laser has got rid of the bad change in you, the precancerous change. The tick, tick in your head from the presence of that can now fade … If you really are clear … And you’re nearly done and this is a simple procedure and you’ll walk back out beyond the door and there’ll be a little queue of other women waiting their turn — women for whom this will be nothing and shrugged off and only a mildly inconvenient section of an ordinary day. Or a wonderful day. The rest of this twenty-four hours might be amazing for them. They are outside and sitting and waiting with the loudness of the clock and its tick, tick and it might be tapping away the time between them and forthcoming miracles.

And there could be miracles for you also. Up ahead and beyond this now which is now. You try to think this.

But you are fully weeping when he finishes, when it is over.

There is that last shock of withdrawal and then you’re done.

You cannot sit up and be reasonable as fast as you would like.

Kate the nurse tells you to take your time. No one else tells you anything.

The gynaecologist has nodded and drifted away, perhaps left, you can’t see.

You lean back against the angle of this final chair and you are aware that you are sobbing, that something is still happening to you, even though they have stopped being in at you, being there and fiddling, being all over you and not stopping.

There is an amount of sympathy from Kate and murmurs from the student doctor and you can hear them both and you would rather not.

You do not want to.

This is, this is the stopit, I love you, stopit, I can’t, I love you, stop it, you don’t love me, you don’t love me, you don’t, you shouldn’t and stopitstopitstopitstopitstopit under my breath where he couldn’t find it, in under my breath.

In faith.

Out fear.

He found everything else.

You do not enjoy being hurt.

But you have been hurt.

I can’t help it if I don’t like this.

It keeps you naked, even after you are fully dressed.

I don’t like this.

In some stupid and nasty way, you have stayed naked for a long time.

Stopit.

He isn’t here but he might as well be.

You would rather not be reminded. That would be your preference.

Stopit.

There’s the shape of him in me.

You would rather not be reminded that you have gone on and lived — not lived wonderfully, but still lived. You’ve kept on for all of this time, been naked but keeping on, and you must therefore be remarkable.

Stopit.

You are remarkable and therefore you walk — gently walk — back to sit on the chair in the corner — where bad girls sit at school — and you draw round the curtain and you wipe your face using the tissue which the nurse pressed into your hand and you are therefore reminded, therefore remarkable, therefore reminded.

Stopit.

I know that the shape of me is bigger than the shape of him.

I do know that.

You are remarkable and reminded and gentle and pressed and a bad girl in a corner and not living wonderfully, but still living, has made you tired.

And you are trying to press your heart into your hand, so as not to be naked — and if you could do that you would be remarkable, but you can’t — and the nurse talks to you through the still-drawn curtain, ‘All right, Meg?’ and she reminds you that you’re not.

But you open your eyes and have to answer her, ‘Mm hm.’

And you do what you have to, you keep on.

And this feeling — it doesn’t go away.

BY THE RIVER, on the South Bank, a bleak day is punching between angles of concrete, sheering along walls to gather up pressure and speed. Heavy cloud is grinding overhead, fat with blue-black threat, although it may not rain. The February sky and the water are sorely depressing each other. The Thames is high and has turned the colour of wet iron, it is making a muddy and rusty heave up from its estuary, from perhaps a troubled sea.

Pedestrians are sparse and hurried. Some carry umbrellas they’ll find impossible to use in the bankside winds. They carry them anyway. There is still ice in the chinks and seams of the pavement. The heat of the year hasn’t woken yet.

Running along the line of the kerb, dodging, comes a youngish man, his arms outstretched, long hair flaming upwards darkly. His anorak is loose, broad-sleeved, and catches each gust of wind.

For long moments he is his own sail.

From time to time he leaps.

The air snags away his voice, shreds it, but sometimes it is still possible to hear that he is whooping, laughing.

But something in his tone suggests fury.

What few people there are avoid him.

Jon had masters. This was an unfashionable way to term his position, but he was a servant and that did imply masters, which had further implications. Although, strictly speaking, he served the Queen. He worked, after all, within Her Majesty’s Government. So he had a mistress, then.

Always the women.

But he was hired out, made available for the sake of practicality and the functioning of a stable and democratic state. He served his queen by serving the ministers who served her. He was the servant of servants.

A passed-around servant of servants, hand to hand.

His phone twitched. Another text, one of a series. But not Sansom-related.

He replied. Or rather, composed one compact and effective message, thought about it, erased it, paused to make another, adjusted it and then sent his final draft. He had to tuck his briefcase away safely between his feet and stand in a doorway to accomplish this. He sent another text. He frowned.

Jonathan Sigurdsson, the king of felicitous rephrasing.

Well, it is a skill.

He texted again. One letter.

He ignored the shake in both his hands, retrieved his briefcase and then strode out briskly again. It wouldn’t do, somehow, to rush, pound along the street, release that flavour of desperation. So he never did, never had in the recent past, except for that one time … Still, being brisk was permissible. It projected a firmness of purpose. Which he did have, both as an individual and as one of his kind — the men who make ideas into realities, who translate words into provisions, schemes, systems, ongoing experiences, lives.