The Only Story(39)

You quell the prompting inner voice which says: No, not a drop or two, a whole bottle or two more than is good for you.

She goes on, ‘I’m talking about something much bigger than that. I think there’s something seriously wrong.’

‘You mean, something that causes your drinking? Something I don’t know about?’ Your mind heads towards some terrible, defining event in her childhood, much worse than a ‘party kiss’ from Uncle Humph.

‘Oh, you really can be a Great Bore at times,’ she says mockingly. ‘No, much more important than that. What’s behind it all.’

You are already losing a little patience. ‘And what do you think might be behind it all?’

‘Maybe it’s the Russkis.’

‘The Russkis?’ You – well, yes – you yelp.

‘Oh Paul, do try and keep up. I don’t mean the actual Russkis. They’re just a figure of speech.’

Like, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the KGB or the CIA or Che Guevara. You suspect that this one brief chance is slipping away, and you don’t know if it is your fault, her fault, or nobody’s fault.

‘OK,’ you say. ‘The Russians are a figure of speech.’

But she takes this only as sly impertinence.

‘It’s no good if you can’t follow. There’s something behind it all, just out of sight. Something which holds it all together. Something that, if we put it back together, would mend it all, would mend us all, don’t you see?’

You give it your best shot. ‘You mean, like Buddhism?’

‘Oh don’t be absurd. You know what I think about religion.’

‘Well, it was just an idea,’ you say jokingly.

‘And not a very good one.’

How quickly it has gone from something tentative and gentle and hopeful to something irascible and mocking. And how far away from what you consider to be the problem, not just behind it all but on the surface and at all points in between: the bottles under the sink, under the bed, behind the bookshelves, in her stomach, in her head, in her heart. It may be true that you don’t know the cause, if indeed there is a single, identifiable cause, but it seems to you that you can only work with – against – the manifestations that erupt every day.

You know what she means about religion, of course. There is her adamantine disapproval of missionaries, whether they seek to convert in distant lands or on suburban doorsteps. And there is also the Malta story, which she has told you more than once. When the girls were small, Gordon Macleod was posted to Malta for a couple of years. She went out and lived there for some of the time. And her abiding memory was of the priest’s bicycle. Yes, she would explain, it’s terribly Catholic out there. The church is all-powerful, and everyone’s very obedient. And the church keeps them down by making the women have as many children as possible: it’s absolutely impossible to obtain birth control on the island. They’re very backward in that regard – John Bell & Croyden would be run out of town – so you have to take the equipment out with you.

Anyway, she goes on, it sometimes happens that a young bride doesn’t get pregnant immediately after marriage, say for a year or two, despite all her prayers. Or maybe there’s a woman who has two children and desperately wants a third but it isn’t happening. And in such cases, the priest will come round and prop his bicycle outside the front door, so everyone – especially the husband – knows not to interfere until the bicycle has gone. And when, nine months later – though of course it may take several goes – the family is blessed, that blessing is known as ‘the priest’s child’, and thought of as a gift from God. And sometimes there is more than one priest’s child in the family. Can you imagine that, Paul? Don’t you think it’s barbaric?

You do think it’s barbaric – you say so every time. And now part of you – the doomful, despairing, sarcastic part of you – wonders whether, if it isn’t the Russkis who are behind it all, then it might be the Vatican.

You still share a bed, but haven’t made love for a long time now. You don’t ask yourself how long in calendar terms, because what counts is how it feels in terms of the heart. You discover more about sex than you want to – or more than you should be allowed to discover while still young. Certain discoveries should be kept for later in life, when they might hurt less.

You know already that there is good sex and bad sex. Naturally, you prefer good sex to bad sex. But also, being young, you think that even so, all things considered, taking the rough with the smooth, bad sex is better than no sex at all. And sometimes better than masturbation; though sometimes not.

But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn’t, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

Sad sex is when, the toothpaste in her mouth not fully disguising the smell of sweet sherry, she whispers, ‘Cheer me up, Casey Paul.’ And you oblige. Though cheering her up also involves cheering yourself down.

Sad sex is when she is already doped by a cheering-up pill, but you think that if you fuck her, it might cheer her up a bit more.

Sad sex is when you are yourself in such despair, the situation so insoluble, the pre-history so oppressive, the very balance of your soul in doubt from day to day, moment to moment, that you think you may as well forget yourself for a few minutes, for half an hour, in sex. But you don’t forget yourself, or your state of soul, not for even a nanosecond.