A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

The daughter on high is wriggling with happiness and twisting round to see where her grandmother — the woman is surely her grandmother — is following along behind: another lanky, graceful, contented shape, corn-and-grey hair swept up in a stylishly untidy bun. The grandmother is talking into a banana, holding it like a telephone receiver of an old-fashioned kind the girl has probably never seen. The woman is nodding and chatting with complete conviction into this piece of fruit and the granddaughter is finding this hilarious, but also not right. It is not accurate in a way which seems to worry her profoundly. There is something impermissible about such a thing taking place. If this can happen, what else could suddenly be real, although this is not real, although it appears to be, although this is not?

The girl giggles and frowns and shakes her head and points waggingly at the phone which is not a phone and her mother reaches up to stroke her, soothe her daughter, who keeps on laughing, frowning, laughing. The daughter also shouts, over and over, ‘Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop.’

JON DIDN’T REFLECT upon this — genuinely did not — but he’d obviously made a gross error. Under pressure from several quarters he had acted in a manner that invited unintended consequences — not all of them good — and this was unpardonable, but any regrets at this juncture would simply compound the error with a waste of effort.

He’d screwed up.

He’d done so in an attempt, he supposed, to avoid screwing up.

Bespoke service: letters handwritten.

He’d still been with Valerie when he drafted the first advertisement.

Heartfelt.

That was cut immediately. He’d never wanted to feel a thing, especially not there. He needed to be businesslike and light.

Letters handwritten to female requirements.

Sounded sexist. And overly sexual. He wasn’t volunteering himself to write porn. Erotica. That was the term now, wasn’t it? For non-pictorial thrills. Ones that don’t insist anybody should be employed in a horrible job.

How men can watch that stuff … to look … to forget the performers …

And I wouldn’t be a literary performer.

And not erotica, either. I can’t write that. That’s another horrible job and I do not wish to do it. I couldn’t. I can’t.

And erotica, they could get that anywhere. Christ knew, Valerie had a whole shelf of the nonsense: her not-quite-joke at his expense. He had read it. Slightly. Strange that she might be stimulated by considering so many things that she would loathe to do in life. Pain and unfairness as agents of arousal.

If that were true, naturally, I’d have been priapic for decades and I haven’t and I’m not, I’m not, not this monster of the kind we’re meant to be — rape threats as idle chatter and demanding every woman should be nude and pretending we have to be scoundrels as a matter of course. That isn’t what a man should be.

I check online, Out There, because it’s wise to keep informed and why not take an interest in the generations who may be paying for my palliative care — should the need arise. I listen. I am rendered unhappy by what I see and hear.

Letters handwritten to your requirements.

Which couldn’t work, either — he’d known the ad would have to be gender specific. Jon had no interest in writing for men. He’d been selfish in that regard. In all of it, really. His pleasing others was not altruistic, it was a means to an end.

Wanted: Woman to whom a man can be anonymously nice. Opportunity for same unavailable to him in current circumstances.

It was worse than adultery, admitting that you couldn’t like or be pleasant to your partner and had forgotten if the problem started with your own distrust or theirs. A betrayer can distrust — a betrayer, of all people, would know they should.

Letters handwritten to the discerning lady’s requirements.

That had seemed potentially patronising and archaic — plus, it was likely to attract the type of women he wouldn’t warm to and he’d hoped there could be a degree of warmth.

Letters handwritten to the discerning woman’s requirements.

Which might seem ridiculous, or amusing, and those who found it amusing and even replied in kind might be the ones he wanted.

If he wasn’t, instead, simply swamped by the pompously lovelorn.

So he’d qualified the thing with more information. Factual.

Expressions of affection and respect delivered weekly.

He thought he could manage weekly and it would be good to establish that as a ground rule — no escalation and yet also no dwindling away.

No replies necessary.

This was intended to imply an interaction which was at arm’s length.

Although it would also suggest that I’m satisfied with nothing, with throwing myself down a well over and over and hearing my echoes, inside and out.

Terms on application to Corwynn August.

That bit was easy — he was born in August and his middle name was Corwynn. He’d never been that fond of Jonathan, it took too long. And Jon, rather than John, was unavoidably pretentious.

And Jon Sigurdsson … Well, Jesus Christ.

J.C. Sigurdsson having ridiculous echoes in that direction also. Valerie always enjoyed them — even threw a couple of nails at me once, as close as she ever came to DIY: ‘Get back up on your cross then, you bastard.’

He’d picked them both up and held them and not said, ‘I’d need three.’ Another moment to recall that not everyone loves accuracy.

Not everyone loves. Not everyone wants to.

But this would be possible, it could be, this writing thing.

So.

Bespoke service: letters handwritten to the discerning woman’s requirements. Expressions of affection and respect delivered weekly. No replies necessary. Terms on application to Corwynn August.

And he’d added the address of a Mayfair PO box he’d rented, the box number given as that of an apartment to add obfuscation. The whole effort had amounted to thirty-three words in the end, which one wouldn’t have thought would be the equivalent of high explosive.

Not that it detonated right away. He had been careful. His first trial ran out across Ohio through classified ads in a number of affiliated papers.

I believed that I was picking Ohio at random: far enough away, English-speaking and yet offering variations … On reflection, I was remembering a bungled Ohio execution — lethal injection. For some reason it stayed in my mind: a Department of Rehabilitation and Correction taking almost half an hour to chemically asphyxiate a man. Thirty minutes of smothering to death.

The name of one’s department either outlines your agenda and ethos, or acts as a permanent reproach. My department has changed its name three times since I joined it. This bespeaks unease, if not confusion, if not a prolonged divergence of intentions from reality. This bespeaks an oncoming tumble.

Despite its associations with Distasteful Death, Ohio had still been a reasonable choice for his pilot study. And there was no cause for alarm if — or rather when — correspondents seemed unsuitable. He had replied to them politely, pleading lack of capacity, the emotional requirements of the task, fatigue, and had then ignored any subsequent communications. That worked. That worked 100 per cent of the time.

It all worked.

Because Jon did get replies. There were people — women, he believed they were women — who still wanted delay to be part of a conversation, who wanted to hold paper held by other fingers first, who wanted more than packets of data firing intangibly about in a blizzard of sales pitches and perversions and gossip and cruelty and largely imbecilic surveillance and planned indiscretions.