A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

I assured him there would be no multiplicity. It was clearly very easy for him to believe me.

There he was on the corner of my desk, swinging one leg, one Church’s loafer, cutting the air back and forth, as if this was fun, relaxing fun. There he was having both a word and fun. He wanted me to see how he was expertly grilling a professionally efficient and yet privately worthless man and enjoying the process immensely.

Or I may have been projecting my own low opinion of myself on to a superior. He did seem to share it, though. His mouth did seem both unavoidably amused and contemptuous. He was being deliberately, lightly, shaming.

Harry Chalice having a word.

Not having a word anywhere quite private enough to be respectful and you know the way with lack of privacy …

The word was good and the word was passed and the word was elaborated upon and the word then roamed about.

So I am known for women.

And I didn’t go on leave when it was offered.

What would I do without work?

And I did keep courting.

What would I do without doing what I do? What would I do?

This was allowed.

But, yes, since then I have been known for women.

Always the women.

But it’s not that.

A man runs out of White Horse Street and turns left into Piccadilly. The day is fine, although autumnal, and his overcoat is open, showing a suit with its jacket also unbuttoned and then a pale shirt, a disordered tie. His coat-tails lash about with his own motion, as does his scarf. He is in his late fifties, perhaps early sixties, and yet there is something much younger in the way he pelts, something of a boy he may never have been. He is dressed appropriately for Mayfair in tailored shades of quiet blue, but his recklessness attracts attention as he rushes and dodges in amongst pedestrians and then across the first two lanes of traffic between him and an entrance to Green Park. As he paces and frets on the central reservation, clearly anxious to proceed, it is possible to see how happy he is, visibly happy: the bunching of one hand in the other and the sweeps of fingers through his hair, the apparent welcoming of excess energy in his limbs. Something about him approaches dancing.

The man, then, wasn’t running because he was in flight. It seems more likely that he ran because he had become somehow uncontainable. He may no longer know where to put himself and so he is hurrying into the nowhere which is motion.

His scarf, in a dark, quiet pattern, perhaps silk, lifts with a breeze and he allows this, apparently enjoys this when it touches his face. A couple, perhaps tourists, join him in his uneasy waiting and he stoops to tell them something emphatic. Whatever he says is perhaps not unpleasant, but does elicit a type of shock. The pair flinch very slightly.

At his first opportunity, the man darts into the road, barely clearing a cab, and is over, out of danger, back on the pavement and then sprinting into the park, faster and faster.

The tourists watch him as he goes.

Behind him, the street has settled again and resumed its customary state — the Ritz is still the Ritz, the traffic is still the traffic, the gaudy arcades are still gaudy arcades.

By this time the man is deep in the park, a wild form dashing over the tired October grass. The shape of him seems largely joyful.

SPANIELS MADE NO sense. They were intended to withstand things: ponds and horrible weather and the noise of guns and battering out across moorland and into undergrowth; and they had to scare bodies into flight and then bring them back dead, gripped in their mouths, and you’d think this would make them insensitive and hardy. Not so. They were soppy. Generations of county types and aristocrats had bred legions of canine neurotics: slaves who were deliriously happy to be slaves, codependents who were delighted just to touch you, pieces of outdoor equipment that forgot every command in jovial frenzies of sensuality, who craved the scent of decomposition and also blankets and affection and — when it was arranged, or they could sneak it — sex and sex and sex.

Gun dogs told you a lot about the ruling classes.

As she walked, Meg was being followed — padpadpadpadpad — by Hector, an older springer spaniel to whom bad things had happened and who was therefore even more than naturally clingy with anyone who was halfway decent to him, averagely gentle. Meg was heading to the ladies’ bathroom at her place of work — Gartcosh Farm Home.

Gartcosh Farm Home was nowhere near Gartcosh and it was not in any real way a farm. It was a home to the animals it defended, but did not wish to be. Its aim was to send all its residents back out into safe keeping in the wider world.

Meg was, this morning, choosing to ignore the wider world. She was additionally trying to ignore her body while it resented its earlier loss of dignity.

And I feel his weight on me — that’s the thing. After all this time, I can still feel how it was when he was there and it was starting. He can still ruin my breath.

She was glad of Hector, although aware he was being especially attentive because she seemed, to him, injured. He kept reminding her of the chairs in the waiting room and the crying and all that.

I should look on the bright side — at least I wasn’t handcuffed to anyone while they rummaged about …

Telling me that I went to the left … Why say such a thing? And how far to the left can a person’s vagina go? I am not a mine working, I am not a mysterious warren of tunnels, I can’t be that fucking tricky to navigate.

There were two ways to cure oncoming depression: to be glad of something worse that wasn’t happening and to be amused.

Meg was trying both.

And there was also anger.

Bastard.

Although anger in the absence of its object was unwise, because it turned inward and led you straight back to despair.

Which I do not want. I want Hector. But not quite as constantly as he wants me.

Hector was not allowed into the ladies’, because he was a dog and a boy dog at that and therefore it would be weird to have him loitering.

Joke. Sort of. Being amused. Not angry.

More seriously, people sometimes took showers in here — the cyclists took showers, very serious showers — and the work here could be messy and mean all manner of stuff had to be washed off, and nudity could seem inappropriate in the presence of a dog.

I need a shower.

But I have no excuse for taking one — no excuse I’ll tell anyone.

I do need to, though, and so I will.

Basically, whatever anyone was doing in the bathroom, they’d want privacy, rather than a spaniel peering at them, or licking the soap off their knees, or being ridiculous in other canine ways which didn’t bear thinking about.

Nothing bears thinking about.

My running theme.

I should have it painted on the bathroom mirror, back at home.

I’ll open a wrist and do it this evening in fresh blood.

Joke.

Not a very good joke.

Meanwhile, I am actually thinking — because I have to think about something, I can’t just be empty-headed — I am considering how enchanted a spaniel’s attention can make you feel, especially when he’s been denied. Enchanted and guilty. They have the most beautiful-and-tragic-looking selfishness.

And he intended to keep her from harm, from further harm. He knew about harm, did Hector. And his eyes had never left her as she’d swung the door shut across his attention.