A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

They don’t meet his eye. They dance as though they had always intended to, as though they always do, as though it is only coincidental that they’re keeping his second-hand beat. They shift and spin, change places, as if they have realised they are beautiful, are human beings in their twenties and therefore effortlessly lovely, unable to do anything other than shine like this and be in the world with a perfect bloom like this and show the tranquillity of easy muscle like this. They are languidly delighted, ignoring the man in a way that means he becomes so aware of himself that he blushes and a sudden jolt of the moving car makes his feet stumble, while his arm snaps up and clings to the overhead rail and saves him, lets him hang.

The young man, possibly a student, watches the girls as if they are a miracle, a wonderful humiliation that he can’t mind, that he loves. It seems they have suspended his breathing. It seems he doesn’t mind that, either.

JON HAD REACHED South Kensington Station. He rose up from the platform with the purposeful frown of a man in a hurry. That seemed a hopeful choice. He mounted the escalator with fierce and obvious strides as the grey-toothed metal steps lifted beneath him, reeled him forwards to the exit and ground level. He was his own ministry in motion.

I progress.

When the treads subsided, meshed and flattened at the end of his climb, they offered the usual illusion of mildly gliding dominance and things sinking before his will, going his way.

Even though quite a number of things were not.

I ought call her. Again. Explain myself, everything, something.

I need explaining. That second time, in the restaurant … I was a disaster. I was unmitigated in my total fucking failure. And I’m aware that’s a criticism framed in terms unsuited to a supportive and functional workplace.

But I am not a workplace. Or supportive. Or functional. I am only a person. I am a fucked-up person.

He coped with the station’s final steps while shaking his head like a swimmer, freshly emerged.

Or maybe I’m not quite totally screwed — I’m simply not perfect at once. Even the greats, they’d have a few takes at each song. The version you finally hear, it’s had work. And I need time to work. I don’t improvise. I can’t get away with rough and ready. I will not ever be a feasible live show. I’ll always be the hideous semi-pensioner, thrashing about with his fork like some care-home resident, suddenly baffled by pasta in an empty restaurant.

Not empty — full of her.

Talking to her about goats, about tongues … As if all I could think about was … As if I was constantly in a state of …

Lurking — I was lurking somehow — spattered with olive oil and tepid bits of parsley, opposite a not-so-much-younger woman, but for God’s sake there is a gap — mind the gap — a discernible gap and one feels that one has no right to expect …

I mean, the letters are one thing …

Dear Mr August

He kept at least one of them folded in his pocket when he went out and about. Always. For ever. Two folds of cream paper were in there today, snug by his heart and full of tiny, hot motion. Like a pacemaker he couldn’t quite keep up with.

Sweet Mr August

Inside his jacket, held safe, were whole remarkable sentences of kindness, meant for precisely him. Bespoke.

You get me through.

And she gets me through and once I’ve tried a few rehearsals, I can write that to her. I have told her that truth, but she simply gives it back again. The whole process is bloody well unending, apparently — and then you have to bloody meet her.

You get me through, Mr August. And you’ve changed things that happened a long time before I met you. Now everything can seem to be the route that led to you. So I make sense. I never expected to make sense.

I know her off by heart. Her music.

But I can’t play my own tune, not now, not under my fucking circumstances.

Heading away from the station, Jon understood he was fine on paper. A person of around sixty — genuinely, technically not quite sixty — could be, in their absolute absence, possibly impressive and — if not attractive — then agreeably lived-in.

If you’re bluesman cool, any kind of cool — then you can get away with being lived-in …

I’m not bloody lived-in. My face has squatters. My premises have been ruined by moral subsidence and stress — I’m all crumbled façade and squinting little windows.

Why does the skin around one’s eyes collapse with age? Exuberant eyebrows, endless sodding vigour in your ear hairs, nose hairs — but your eyelids turn entirely apathetic. Is this a type of natural mercy? Do the slumping lids join the fading eyesight and spare one the pin-sharp details of one’s personal decay?

Jon’s vision was, in fact, still quite serviceable. He only needed glasses for the work on paper.

Papers of colours appropriate to their function, memos, reports, emails — and letters.

I wear the glasses when I’m trying to write letters back, to match her, to correspond, to be …

Jon cradled the back of his neck with one cooling hand and stood beneath the sodium lights and tactful surveillance cameras of South Kensington. He had this sensation of weakness in his legs which made him believe that his brain was being damaged. If perhaps he could think less …

What the hell should I have said to her? What warning should I have posted in advance?

We do live in an age of prior warnings. We have less and less real safety, but there’s hardly a human experience now that isn’t introduced by catalogues of cautions: walking routes, furniture, sandwiches, films …

I may contain scenes of mental collapse and sexual …

This evening may end with … Myself, everything, something.

Jon spun slowly, sighting along the voluptuous, straight perspective of Exhibition Road and its central, prickling spine of futuristic street lamps. It seemed for an instant to lead his eye along towards a great emptiness, a devouring space.

I do want her to be happy.

A kind of hot cramp ran down from between his shoulders and crouched at the small of his back. Chalice’s voice was somehow still rooting about and doing harm within Jon’s inner ear.

Chalice, you are a thing with an inhuman scent.

Jon felt himself becoming shadowed, essentially naked and ready for display in a suitable case, exuding just the air of melancholy that would prefigure an extinction. His reflection in the window of a tiny Chinese restaurant apparently agreed. He was this stricken outline, tall but round-shouldered — this old-school monkey man lost inside a good coat.

You don’t know me, though, Harry fucking Chalice. You haven’t noticed we’re not the same species. I’m not a modern man who’s chosen to unevolve, slide back to the days of blood and territory. Your kind — you’re out for wild cries and hunts through darkling forests in like-minded troupes.

Not far away in the dark was the Natural History Museum, dozing inside its swarming terracotta ornaments and creatures.

One day last year Jon had made an entirely innocent visit — no notes to leave for anybody. He’d trotted upstairs to visit the hominid cases, wanting to contemplate the skulls and faded dioramas and to be with the vanished dreams inside his forebears’ skulls.

They might have imagined all kinds of humanities: strange musics, dancing and setting one’s palm tight to a wall and painting around it to show the cleverness of fingers, keep a record of the tenderness that might touch other skin, might care when someone reached for care, might be their warmth and their shape of safety.