Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(80)

But soon she asked me, “Will you live here again, China?”

“You know it’s all I want,” I said.

She warned: “I’m not promising anything.”

“I don’t want you to,” I said. I said: “I just want you to need me for something.”

That whole September we were as awkward as children. We didn’t quite know what to say. We didn’t quite know what to do with one another. We could see it would take time and patience. We shared the bed rather shyly and showed one another quite ordinary things as gifts.

“Look!”

Sunshine fell across the breakfast table, onto lilies and pink napery. (I am not making this up.) “Look!” A grey cat nosed out of a doorway in London E3.

“Did you have a nice weekend?”

“It was a lovely weekend. Lovely.”

“Look.” Canary Wharf, shining in the oblique evening light!

In our earliest days together, while she was still working at the aerodrome, I had watched with almost uncontainable delight as she moved about a room. I had stayed awake while she slept, so that I could prop myself up on one elbow and look at her and shiver with happiness. Now when I watched, it was with fear. For her. For both of us. She had come down off the tightrope for awhile. But things were still so precariously balanced. Her new body was all soft new colours in the bedside lamplight. She was thin now, and shaped quite differently: but as hot as ever, hot as a child with fever. When I fucked her she was like a bundle of hot wires. I was like a boy. I trembled and caught my breath when I felt with my fingertips the damp feathery lips of her cunt, but I was too aware of the dangers to be carried away. I didn’t dare let her see how much this meant to me. Neither of us knew what to want of the other anymore. We had forgotten one another’s rhythms. In addition she was remembering someone else’s: it was Alexander who had constructed for me this bundle of hot, thin, hollow bones, wrapped round me in the night by desires and demands I didn’t yet know how to fulfill. Before the Miami treatments she had loved me to watch her as she became aroused. Now she needed to hide, at least for a time. She would pull at my arms and shoulders, shy and desperate at the same time; then, as soon as I understood that she wanted to be fucked, push her face into the side of mine so I couldn’t look at her. After awhile she would turn onto her side; encourage me to enter from behind; stare away into some distance implied by us, our failures, the dark room. I told myself I didn’t care if she was thinking of him. Just so long as she had got this far, which was far enough to begin to be cured in her sex where he had wounded her as badly as anywhere else. I told myself I couldn’t heal her there, only allow her to use me to heal herself.

At the start of something so fragile, the worst mistake you can make is to say what you hope. But inside your heart you can’t help speaking, and by that speech you have already blown it.

After Isobel and I moved down to London from Stratford, business began to take up most of my time. Out of an instinctive caution, I dropped the word “medical” from the company description and called myself simply Rose Services. Rose Services soon became twenty quick vans, some low-cost storage space, and a licence to carry the products of new genetic research to and from Eastern Europe. If I was to take advantage of the expanding markets there, I decided, I would need an office.

“Let’s go to Budapest,” I said to Isobel.

She hugged my arm. “Will there be ice on the Danube?” she said.

“There will.”

There was. “China, we came all the way to Hungary!” She had never been out of Britain. She had never flown in an aeroplane. She was delighted even by the hotel. I had booked us into a place called the Palace, on Rakoczi Street. Like the city itself, the Palace had once been something: now it was a dump. Bare flex hung out of the light switches on the fourth-floor corridors. The wallpaper had charred in elegant spirals above the corners of the radiators. Every morning in the famous Jugendstil restaurant, they served us watery orange squash. The rooms were too hot. Everything else—coffee, food, water from the cold tap—was lukewarm. It was never quiet, even very late at night. Ambulances and police cars warbled past. Drunks screamed suddenly or made noises like animals. But our room had French windows opening onto a balcony with wrought-iron railings. From there in the freezing air, we could look across a sort of high courtyard with one or two flakes of snow falling into it, at the other balconies and their lighted windows. That first evening, Isobel loved it.

“China, isn’t it fantastic? Isn’t it?”

Then something happened to her in her sleep. I wouldn’t have known, but I woke up unbearably hot at three A.M., sweating and dry-mounthed beneath the peculiar fawn-fur blanket they give you to sleep under at the Palace. The bathroom was even hotter than the bedroom and smelled faintly of very old piss. When I turned the tap on to splash my face, nothing came out of it. I stood there in the dark for a moment, swaying, while I waited for it to run. I heard Isobel say reasonably: “It’s a system fault.”

After a moment she said, “Oh no. Oh no,” in such a quiet, sad voice that I went back to the bed and touched her gently.

“Isobel. Wake up.”

She began to whimper and throw herself about.

“The system’s down,” she tried to explain to someone.

“Isobel. Isobel.”

“The system!”