Deborah Levy - Black Vodka

We are standing in the garden and it’s autumn and there’s a bird in the tree that imitates a telephone when it sings. Your hair is silver but you are not old. Under your soft silver hair is your skull with your central nervous system inside it. It is dusk and it has started to rain. The roots of the eucalyptus tree that grows in the garden are spreading under the house. Our daughter is sleeping inside the house under a photograph of the sea. She is covered in a thick blanket. Her bed stands on a green carpet. There are two stains on the carpet.

You are wearing a white shirt and a suit and under your soft silver hair is your skull. While you speak the honest truth I am thinking about the time we ate horse steaks in Paris. The waiter served the dish of the day and the dish of the day was horse. It was like eating a unicorn in the twenty-first century. My iPod was playing a song we’d never heard before. You untangled the headphones and pressed them into your ears and you lifted my fingers and pressed them into your mouth.

But now we are standing in the garden and the telephone bird has stopped making calls no one answers. The car alarms and police sirens have stopped too. Silence is cruel in cities where missing people need to hide in noise. But we are standing in the garden in the rain and you have not stopped telling me the honest truth and I wonder if the telephone bird will one day learn to sing computer start-up sounds.

Your silver hair is wet. Our daughter is pretending to sleep inside the house under a photograph of the sea and she’s listening to the rain which always makes sorrow bigger and hard things softer. I walk towards you, bumping into things on the way. Kissing you is like new paint and old pain. It is like coffee and car alarms and a dim stairway and a stain and it’s like smoke. I am looking into your eyes and I can’t get in. You have changed the locks and I have an old key that doesn’t fit and our daughter is making her way across the garden towards us, holding her thick blanket. You are telling me you are dead, and I say yes, I know you are. We miss you and since you’ve gone I’ve forgotten all my pin numbers, I can’t remember the code to my gym locker or where the honey is or where I put the blue pillowcase — and could you tell me, again, where exactly the sea is, in that photograph?

1

Simon Tegala leaned his back against the wall of the American Embassy and held her against him. It was an electrical event. Small voltages spread through their limbs. She said, Honey, that was a test burn. She heard his heart sounds: lub dup lub dup lub dup. She noted they were fifth in the queue for visas. Naomi was the Newton of atomic kissing; erotic radioactivity buzzed through her blackberry lips. They had been told to produce proof of identity in triplicate. Driving license, passport and a household bill. Naomi would not let Simon Tegala see the photograph in her passport. She said, Stop looking for me. I am here standing next to you listening to your heart sounds. He knew that her lips were the only country he wanted to be in.

2

Simon Tegala decided to throw the I Ching to discover if Naomi loved him. At that moment the phone rang. While his father’s voice disappeared into his answering machine Naomi walked into his apartment carrying something for supper wrapped in wax paper. When she asked him why he was so quiet and what he was thinking about, he said SHAKING. My father has Parkinson’s disease. They salted the chicken and cooked it in its own sweet juices while the phone rang again. His father’s voice said AMERICA and then it said DID YOU GET YOUR VISA and then he said other words which upset Simon Tegala. DON’T LIVE FAR AWAY. Naomi pointed to a red felt hat that hung on the coat hook in Simon Tegala’s kitchen. He told her it was a fez and she told him it was a chechia. What is a chechia, her boyfriend wanted to know. It’s a fez, she replied. And then she said, shall we go and visit your father and take him a cake?

3

Later, Naomi said to Simon Tegala, I want you to touch my body in the following order:

3. My ear

5. My belly

Simon Tegala’s heart is a biomachine beating hard and fast as he searches for the missing numbers.

4

Mr Tegala is sitting in a cafe drinking a mug of tea thinking about how his father shakes and jerks his head and arms. Images of projected futures whir like a science fiction behind his eyes. He decides he wants to spend Christmas Day with her but fears she might think he’s getting ahead of himself because it’s only July. And anyway, he hardly knows her.

5

Naomi said, What do you mean you hardly know me? Simon Tegala stretched out his arm and tickled the nape of her neck where a curl had escaped from her hair clip. Tell me about your mother your father your brothers and sisters, Naomi. Look, Simon Tegala, his girlfriend replied, the past is a place I have left behind. I want to arrive somewhere else. How am I going to get there if I hang out with a cyclist who has no car to run his girlfriend or his ageing father around town?

6

While he negotiated with the car salesman, it occurred to Simon that this man had a substantial volume of blood pumping through a purple vein on his forehead. The salesman (who wore a thick gold wedding ring on his finger) was pointing at the vintage Cadillac of Simon Tegala’s dreams. Mr Tegala the customer had suddenly become butcher. He saw the salesman merely as a sum of parts with blood flowing between, through and around them. A biological highway of organs, venules and veins. The salesman, unaware that he was perceived merely in terms of circulation of the blood and lymph, smiled and said he’d make a friendly price for Mr Tegala. As they walked over to his office to complete the deal, the salesman twisted the band of gold round and round his knuckle.

7

When Simon Tegala said to Naomi, Perhaps we can talk about Christmas Day, she gazed out of the window of his new old Cadillac and pointed to a white cat sitting on a wall.

8

Mr Tegala plays back three messages from his father on his answering machine and decides to drive to a late-night movie on his own.

9

The usherette shone her torch on a red velvet seat and sat Simon Tegala next to a woman eating an ice cream in a cone. Halfway through the movie, the woman told Simon Tegala that her name was Caroline Joseph. At that same moment the plot took a twist. Simon Tegala had missed a crucial clue and the film made no sense from then on. On the screen a man swam in a pool of salt water. A woman in a bikini waved to him from a rock. Simon Tegala sneaked a look at Caroline Joseph. Her eyes were like spark plugs shining in the dark. She was all sharp edges, lathed and polished. So very different from Naomi. The film had a happy ending. When Caroline Joseph put on a jacket with a fake ermine-trimmed hood, Simon Tegala found himself saying, ‘I’ve just bought a new Cadillac. Do you want a ride home?’ Caroline Joseph was so perfect she looked like she’d just stepped off the production line of a factory in Germany. He unlocked the door of his new old Cadillac and she eased herself in, admiring the white leather seats and the way he gripped the steering wheel. She told him she lived in Hammersmith with her dog, a terrier called Bobby. Would he like to meet Bobby? Simon Tegala nodded enthusiastically. When he woke up next to Caroline Joseph the following morning she told him all about her family and he told her he was in love with Naomi.

10

Naomi said to Simon Tegala: It’s over between us. I can’t believe you wanted more sex magic because you think your father is dying. Simon Tegala’s heart has two chambers: the upper chamber and the lower chamber. Blood flows between these chambers. Simon Tegala’s heart is the size of his fist. What were you thinking, his ex-girlfriend shouts as she slams the door. Simon Tegala says, SHAKING. I was thinking about SHAKING.