A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

After a while the woman holds his hands to still them and, once she lets go, they also drift back down.

The pair are on the top deck of the bus, right at the front. This is where adults let children sit so they can see and see and see. The boy does indeed mainly wonder out at the spin, slip and glide of buildings. From his expression, both the commonplace and the remarkable are equally satisfactory. His day is pleasing him.

At his side the woman maintains an intensity of interest in the child, almost as if he had appeared only this morning and might be taken back at any time.

Then the woman turns and leans her chin on the top of the boy’s head, leans and rests and closes her eyes. There is a moment when her face seems to suggest something like an unbearable joy.

The boy looks at the city passing.

Jon had — Jon loved having — this memory of a slight woman darting — not quite pouncing, but it felt like that — darting forward as he’d left the parcels office where he rented his PO box.

He’d known who it was. He knew before she said. He pretended not to, played badly for time while feeling faint and feeling trapped and feeling …

I felt I’d have to leave myself — be elsewhere and my body caught stupidly standing in its socks and brogues and meanwhile I’d never come back.

I’d just leave it — every part of it.

I’m not built for women who dart.

I’m not built for women.

Not for my mother — there was nothing right about me, according to her — not for Valerie … Well, fine then — don’t have me. I’ll just be in writing. Let me do that, let me be that. Surely to fucking God I am permitted to be that …

She’d called him — ridiculous — Mr August. And he’d reacted. Because in my heart, it’s my name. And then she’d turned shy — as soon as she knew she was right, she’d dropped her gaze. Extraordinary way of looking at me, she had — she has — as if I’m a sunset, or a … the last of my kind … alone in the glass case already. I truly don’t merit that much attention.

She’d said, ‘Mr August?’This utterly frail smile that would swipe the feet from under you if you had a pulse, and he still did, or thereabouts. ‘I think you’re Mr August. I’m very sorry, but I had to meet you. After all the letters. I had to.’

And he could feel her examining his hands and the small bundle of — absolutely, there they were — incriminating letters he was clutching. The week’s harvest amounted to three. And each of his fingers turned sticky with guilt and he couldn’t explain.

I’m not built for this — not for you — not for this. I love your letters. I do, I …

I love your love and I …

I’m not built to trot back and forth and to gather up letters — letters from you — letters like napalm and velvet and like having to take off my shirt while you watch — they feel like having you watch — which I know I could never do, or anything else …

I’m not built for letters from the other women, which I didn’t mean to keep running — it’s only that, on occasion, there have been letters which are not from a woman, letters that are from a journalist and that tell me where and when to leave his next dose of information. He suggests tea at the Natural History Museum and signs himself Lucy. You don’t need to know this. I, myself, would rather not have to know this.

Jon had realised that he was nodding, quite hard, agreeing with her, using some part of himself which was more forthright than it should be.

I suggested the name. After Lucy our early ancestor — Australopithecus afarensis — mostly portrayed as rather fragile-looking and dismayed.

Courting.

The urge to cry had scrambled up his throat from somewhere low and hot and his voice had managed, ‘You’re … You …’ His heart bailing hopelessly at what was apparently now a fluid both coarser and more taxing than blood. ‘Sophia.’

You … She’s … She was … Nobody says I’m beautiful. And why would they? And she did that without seeing me — she does that — and I don’t know if this means that her opinion is therefore more real, or therefore an especially reckless lie.

It has to be a lie. I’m not beautiful. I’m not wonderful. I’m not sweet. Who would think so? I’m not sweet.

He’d told her she was beautiful and sweet and lovely, because … It seemed very much a kind of truth. It was inevitable, like the truth.

And it was quite horrible that these forms of address, these descriptions had stayed with him — in fact, all that they’d given and received was quite impossible to dis-remember. This truth, these facts — probably truths and facts — they couldn’t help but be confusing, or a conflict of interest, or a cause for concern whether he was giving them or receiving because he’d known from experience they were the things one might say if one intended to reach in all the way and influence somebody. They were a kind of promise that things could get better.

Things can only get better.

Who would buy that?

Something you sing when you think the worst is over and you don’t know how much you’ve still got that can be taken. It’s something you sing while you steal in and start to take.

Beautiful, wonderful, lovely, sweet …

And one can’t keep it clear in one’s head — can’t tell who is courting and who is being courted and if she gives me this strange new version of myself and I accept it as possible, then she has the power — quite naturally — to remove it.

She won me. But somebody winning means somebody else gets beaten. ‘Mr August?’ Her warm hand had darted in and touched his wrist while the whole of Shepherd Market blinked.

‘Ah, that’s not my name.’

And this desolation had passed over her face — this horror he’d kicked up in her without even trying.

You can’t have that power over anyone — it’s just wrong. One couldn’t conceivably want it.

Jon had swallowed down this wad of both hysteria and elation.

She came for me, she sought me out and I’ve met her so often on paper, I’ve met her where it counts, where we are kind, where we can be beautiful, wonderful, lovely, sweet … Human beings are not generally kind or any of the rest. That’s why I wouldn’t study anthropology — too sad.

He had stumbled through, ‘I … That is, it’s not my name, but — I mean, I am who you would suppose me to be.’ And that was his confession, admission and made him not safe … it let her know where to find him … here, in this skin. ‘I am who you think, it’s simply that I took another name in order to …’

‘Oh, oh, I did, too.’

She was rushing her sentences, keen in a way that seems young and — yes — lovely and so forth. But what she said was a small disappointment.

I’d wanted you to be Sophia — that name for you was in my head, was there when I spoke to you in my head. I thought that I might not be able to start again and redirect all of my daydreams, readdress them … not that we should consider my daydreams … I shouldn’t have them. I didn’t quite want you to be called Meg.

‘But I’m the man … I am who you intend, intended me to be …’ He was almost entirely sure this would condemn him to disappoint her, but still he went on with, ‘Yes.’

And her face had become happy and it had been clear this was something he wanted to see regularly, always, forever. In just a moment, after maybe a pause for reflection, she had been suddenly and unreservedly happy. It had shown him that her happiness or lack of it would now be his fault.