A. Kennedy - All the Rage

‘People say things are complicated when they don’t want them to change. No one says heart surgery is complicated, so they won’t try it — people want to be alive, so they do it.’

‘I think they do say heart surgery’s complicated.’ Her expression hardened against him when he mentioned this — even though he was smiling. ‘Or maybe not now. Maybe it’s easy now. No, I know what you mean and that’s good. It’s a good metaphor. I’ll use it.’ He leaned himself towards the edge of offending her, bruising her principles, so that he could really feel how wonderful it was that she had them and how wonderful it was that she hadn’t completely thrown away her degree. She’d told him that much.

Five or six weeks after we’d started and she’d wanted to be more to me maybe, to have a little past.

‘In sociology?’

After a deep kind of night.

‘Yeah.’

Her eyes had been very open and very concerned with his own.

‘Wow! Darling.’

‘Like you’re surprised I got one.’

‘Like I’m — no — not surprised. .’ At which point he found himself losing any explanation that possibly her scuffle and drop between service jobs and periods of unemployment had struck him as unsatisfactory, in the sense of being not good enough for her. And it seemed even more a form of self-harm in the light of her having an, albeit laughable, degree. Her mum was a cleaner, her dad was shady and elsewhere, but she had a degree, the usual debt — more than the usual and something else to do with a grandparent’s savings — and a degree. . and a much older boyfriend who didn’t want to sound at all paternal. Mark didn’t want to suggest that her being with him was another indication of a reckless and damaging life.

‘You want me to be different.’

‘No, darling. No. My best girl’s my best girl. Truly. You have to do what you want.’ And he’d kissed her to break the conversation, kept on until they were silence and motion and nothing.

And I held her once we were done for so long that it appalled me.

Her later fixation about the demo had allowed Mark to hear himself repeat, ‘You have to do what you want.’ Which was true for everyone. ‘And I have to do what you want and that’s what I want. If you ask — and I like when you ask and you never have asked before, really — then I have to do what you want.’

She gave me a date and a time — an inconvenient date and time — when she would need me.

A breakthrough.

She was breaking through.

It was mainly gorgeous.

And she’d placed a minute kiss against his ear. ‘I would like it.’ Sober and giggly and energetic. ‘I would.’ This was Emily showing herself as a credible companion away from the bedrooms. She’d made a promise of ways they might be and he’d accepted it.

I think we both knew that.

‘But a demo, baby. . Not a concert, or an opera, or the movies, or the zoo.’ It occurred to him that he could only guess at the majority of her pastimes. She remained largely closed to him. ‘Or a club with naked ladies dancing that I would enjoy, but not as much as I enjoy you. .’ Kissing her in return across her stomach. ‘I haven’t been on a demo since I was a student and that, as we’re allowed to mention, is a long, long time ago.’

Emily had shaken her head like a woman who loved him and only couldn’t say so because it was too much. ‘Not that long. And if you’ve done it once, then you’ll know how.’

It made sense — drunks run their lives backwards: from unintimate intimacy to revealing commonplaces.

He’d had no intention of denying her, but he knew she would like if he teased her. ‘Say “Go with me, darling Mark, and make love to me first for at least an hour.” Go on.’

‘Then you’d have to stay the night.’ She offered this as if it were an ordinary sentence and didn’t scald his breath and then remove it. ‘Because we’d have to set out early. Please, darling Mark.’

Staying the Friday night with her and waking and getting the Saturday morning, too.

If I allowed it, then I’d want it again.

She would start to show on me and I’d like that and let it happen.

Sweet Emily.

I belong to sweet Emily. She’s the girl who has broken me. Wide open. You could park your car inside my chest.

Watching her light while she rolls out this story about being kettled and the cops pressing in and it’s turning a bit lairy before these kids — she called them kids — start up singing some daft protest song — I can’t recall any protest song that wasn’t a dirge — and the crowd laughs and the cordon pauses and it’s clearly this golden moment for her, proof of something. Hope.

And I wanted her to hope.

My generation is at fault — not active like the one before it, not active like the one behind — and she tasks me with this slightly.

I don’t believe that direct action makes any difference, but she did and it was lovely that she did.

Her expectations of happy change were as sexy as fuck.

Emily had kept on, more enthused than he’d known her, while he bled joy and horror invisibly into the sheets. ‘Please, darling Mark, and make love to me first. Yeah? Have I asked like you’d like?’ She was becoming a woman he’d want in her entirety.

He could have taken out a full-page ad. A Sunday feature. ‘Yes, well, okay. Okay.’ Her lips parted for him, still sticky with the darling that was him translated. His tongue tried to taste the word and failed, because it was given and gone. ‘You’re a funny girl, bad girl. I’ll have to plot like anything, so we can get away with that. Maybe Kempson will let me do colour on the anarchists, or the school kids, or something — the reality of modern unrest. He’ll tell me what reality he wants: brave and sexy sixth-formers with compassion for the urban poor, or home-grown barbarians who want to piss on war graves and buy anthrax. . Both. .’

And this rushing, magnificent lurch in his thinking when he saw her frown, fully display her disapproval. At last.

Because opposition is a proper part of love.

Or maybe I was a pervert: finding a new source of desire because there was finally something I’d done that offended her. And, in recompense, I could utterly apologise, abase myself.

He’d made a point of kneeling, pressing his mouth to her ankles, her feet. Kissing for forgiveness, all bared skin and making himself plain. ‘I don’t write what I believe, Emily. I should. Probably. But I’m not sure about that.’ His words and good intentions at the soles of her feet, plump, grubby. He was being devoted. ‘Newspapers aren’t something that people take seriously, not now. They’re dying.’ And hauling this, mining it from his bones, ‘I think you could teach me to branch out, though.’ Nothing but sincere. ‘Maybe I could write a book.’

Nothing, but sincere.

A tingle racing the length of me when she accepted this and grinned.

Funny girl, bad girl, best girl.

‘And I’ll have to be briefed by the Met — midnight updates, I’d imagine — midnight updates, I’ll tell Pauline — so I wouldn’t want to head home and trouble her when I’d only clatter off again at dawn. . That would do me in, so I’d want to avoid it. I would have to stay in town. On site. What if something happened in advance of the main event and I wasn’t there?’

‘You’re good at lying.’

‘Ssssh. Not with you. Not ever with you.’ This overtaking him for a while, driving him back into bed. Into Emily. Into his love.