Jonathan Lee - High Dive

At Columbia she’d watched the cheerleaders at the football games and thought how shiny they were, how gloriously unreal. Cheering and cheered. Leading and led. Sexy and giving off the air of having, all the time, sex. Throwing each other up into the air in huge flirtatious twirls and arcing back down with a reckless grace. The furrows of their skirts, the pleats and tucks. The silence between her father’s snores. The gap between the whistle-breaths and the great inward slurps. Was he, did he, if. A daughter never responding to these lonely little postcards.

‘You can reach me on this number if you want.’ A line sometimes included and always ignored. Because how could a conversation like that happen? Like you’d say Hello, what did you have for breakfast today, Mum? How’s the last half-decade been? The question on her mind more and more these last few weeks was how to know when she was choosing a thing as opposed to it being chosen for her.

The fire crackled and wheezed and her father’s head moved forward. He rubbed his face as he looked at his watch and with great feeling he said, ‘Fuck.’ She pretended to be asleep.

HE ASKED LENA what she thought the barman did in his spare time.

The reply came quickly: ‘Child killer, probably.’

He blinked.

‘Or,’ Lena added, ‘a collector of model aircraft. Tiny B-52s, let’s say. Or maybe, if you really want to know, a Harrier Jump Jet. All laid out on his dining table, next to his sticky stamp collection.’

‘All stamps are sticky, I’d chance.’

‘His in particular,’ she said.

‘Well. Jump Jets.’ He found he was looking at the blue frill of her bra strap. Felt his face gathering heat as he glanced away. After a pause she adjusted the shoulder of her dress and said her father had been with the armed forces. A vicar for a while in the British Army. The family had lived in north Devon.

‘Man of the Church,’ Dan said, though the word on his mind was Anglican.

‘I think he probably would have preferred the RAF. The passion was planes but his eyes weren’t good enough, see. He died last year. Don’t ask if we were close.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Everyone asks, that’s all. It’s the idea that it hurts more if you were close.’

‘Not true?’

She shrugged. ‘It hurts just the same either way. It hurts the same as it’s worth.’ She looked to the wall and drank a good amount of wine. ‘By the way, I’ve strong views on nothing.’

‘Is your ma alive?’

‘Oh,’ Lena said. ‘Always there with an answer. Though like a deaf woman it’s rarely an answer to what you’ve asked.’

He laughed. ‘I know the feeling.’

‘Originally from Poland. She was my father’s cleaner, the vicar’s cleaner.’

‘A scandal.’

‘Not a big one, though, by the standards of the Church.’

‘True,’ he said.

They drank and looked around.

‘You know,’ he said. ‘I had that Latin waiter down as a tango dancer rather than a child killer.’

‘Did you?’

‘I had him down as a tango dancer whose father had a stake in a — a hair gel factory. That’s how he got the ticket to Ireland. His father cashed in some of those …’

‘Dividends?’

‘Know your finances, do you?’

‘And you probably know your knitting,’ she said. ‘It’s almost like we live in the twentieth century.’

‘I didn’t mean —’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Fuck you too, Lena.’

She smiled and drank.

The conversations that went on around them were impossibly banal to his ears. A feature of most nice parts of town was that people spent a lot of time discussing the fact that the nice parts of town weren’t as nice as they once were. The other drinkers gave off an air of negativity, snobbery, paid-down mortgages and — while he couldn’t say any of them looked exactly unkind — Lena was the one that mattered.

Which aspect of her life to probe? They looked at each other. He imagined her past. It contained a year or two of trailing wildly through Europe, modelling for mail-order catalogues, being cornered by a prick in a well-lit Paris attic, sleeping on the streets of Rome and then building a new hard shell for herself here. It seemed a shame in a way to discover what was true.

‘A gypsy king gets to be king by calling himself one.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘Sorry. Random thought for the night. Passed some travellers earlier. The gypsy king in a given group, he gets to be king by announcing it, I read.’

‘And then proving himself?’

‘Maybe. But mainly it’s a matter of confidence, is the point.’ His dick was hard against his inner thigh. ‘I used to swim,’ he said. ‘Do you swim at all?’

She shook her head and he tried not to let his disappointment show.

‘You’re a thoughtful one, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘I can shut up any time you want. My friends are always telling me: Jack, why don’t you shut the fuck up?’

‘Are they?’

‘No. Not really. My friends never say that.’

‘Because you’re so fascinating?’

‘Because my name’s not Jack.’

She laughed and touched her hair, took a slow slip of wine. Be bold, he thought. Do what’s bold.

‘I’ve money for a room,’ he said. ‘I’m guessing you’ll not be staying here otherwise. Would you join me for a drink, in a good room? I doubt at these prices it’s full.’

A pause. ‘And why would I do that?’

‘For a nice drink.’

‘I have a drink here. It happens to be nice.’

‘How nice, though?’

‘Any other reasons?’

‘For what?’

‘Why you’d want me in a room?’

‘I’m outraged,’ he said. ‘I’m offended is what I am.’

‘I’m lacking a boatload of the pre-sex information, you know.’

‘There’s pre-sex information? That’s a thing?’

‘To be sure it is,’ she said. ‘Name, birthday, origin of that accent.’

‘My accent is pure Falls, as you’ll know. Once we’re upstairs we can do our bit to broker peace.’

‘Weakest line yet,’ she said. ‘I think I even heard some English.’

‘Bollocks you did. It’s you that has the English.’

‘Maybe you don’t notice it in yourself.’

‘Aye, bollocks.’

‘Saying “aye” now, are we? Certain way you say a thing. Your language lets you down.’

‘You should hand out a wee form when you first meet a guy,’ he said. ‘Client info.’

She narrowed her eyes. He wasn’t sure why he’d said it. A feeling he had in his gut.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I don’t go in for racists.’

‘Oh?’

‘Picking on my handsome Argentinian. The one who brought us our drinks. Nasty.’

‘I seem to recall you called him a child killer.’

‘Nothing nationality-specific in that, is there? Whereas all that stuff about greasy hair, stereotypes …’

They looked at each other for a long moment. She was quicker than he was. She was still smiling. He thought of it as a smile. At a neighbouring table a man was supporting his wife in conversation, murmuring affirmative words and corroborating facts. He wished he could swap his Tullamore for a vodka and water. He was sick of the bite the whiskey left in his nose. A platter of fruit travelled by and something about its molecular complexity, its sheer decorative excess, made his stomach do a flinch. He was drunk, for sure. Drunk.

‘If you think I’m racist you’ve got it totally wrong. You don’t know me from Adam.’

‘Who’s Adam?’

‘Adam and Eve. Any bells?’

‘Ding dong,’ she said.

‘It’s an expression, Lena.’

‘Oh —’ she bit her delicious bottom lip — ‘I thought he might be a friend of Jack.’