All the Rage Read online

  And then in the hotel later that funny sleep caught me: the twitchy and messy unrest which comes after flight. A wrong sun was behind the curtains and my day had been knocked all westwards and stretched and my skin smelled frightened and of catering in confinement, bad catering, and also carried some harsh/sweet combination of scents that wasn’t like me and wasn’t something I could like. This despite having taken a bath as soon as I’d got to my room. No one can win with long journeys: in every case, they precipitate bad bodily changes.

  That’s what I’d say. If asked.

  That’s what I’m saying.

  I’d go on the record should I have to, although I won’t. Why would I? To whom would this be of interest?

  After the bath and the lying down and the discontent I woke up fifteen hours later raw-eyed. I’d got a headachy thirst as well – drank the whole big bottle of bedside mineral water, which I thought was free, but it turned out not.

  What had roused me was the so, so quiet quietness – everywhere the broad silence which is the same in no matter which country and indicates snow. Even before I’d gone and checked the windows and worried I wasn’t keeping up my pace, I already knew that, close around the outer walls, normality had been taken and this pale stasis was locked down in its place.

  Same every time. One understands the symptoms, causes, and maybe refers internally for a moment to girlhood information about each individual flake being not quite the same as any another and having continually found this a source of disappointment when so many seem entirely the bloody same, just bland clumps and gobbets of cold. Not the miracles promised.

  Because, of course, I continue to have an appetite for miracles promised, I stood and watched the whiteness dropping, fine and gentle, and wished them all well: not flakes, more a wavering dust, a disturbance barely visible in the blanked sky. This is the style of fall that doesn’t seem it’ll be a problem, but it’s deceptive. The stuff doesn’t stop and tenderly eats up your street, your views, and settles, and being out in it will make you end up cold – cold in the lungs – and still it keeps on and overwhelms and then the fun’s gone.

  There is usually fun at the start, I think. Snow makes the only wholesale change that human beings choose to tolerate. People embrace it.

  We’re an odd species, embracing ruined water, a gradually sifting possibility of disappearance. Some of us don’t, I realise: those trying for specific ends and getting trapped away from them – making hospital trips, for example, contending with rural environments – residents of places held habitually under various things like winter, the effect of winter.

  But city snowfalls conjure up simple delight. Often. More often than in the country. The older woman who comes and stays sometimes in the flat next door to mine, she adores it. Or, more properly, she demonstrates her adoration on behalf of someone else. That would be the best way to put it. Oooh, la neige. Voilà. On peut faire les boules de neige. One morning she was there on the front path with her bilingual grandkid looking up, or else with her she’s-sodding-well-going-to-be-bilingual grandkid looking up – I don’t know the woman, only to say bonjour to, and am unsure of her details – the grandkid looking and complete in wonder – beyond the grand-mère thing having been established, I can’t recall exactly how, she’s really a blank – this kid looking – pink outfit, so I presume a granddaughter, the nose visible and eyes, but not much else, which led to guessing – the bundled-cosy granddaughter looking up and widely about herself and breathless with the newly bright air and amazed by the strangeness lying and giving beneath her feet and the wonderful – attention aux pieds! – and the wonderful danger there, made fresh and lovely.

  It was a great morning. I wouldn’t swear to it having touched on fun, but it did feel clean. Or cleaned. Erased. Eradicated. I have an inordinate fondness for blank sheets.

  Bright white and unbothered, that’s what I like. A crisp domestic glare of cleanliness.

  Love it.

  Crave. I feel I can say I crave it.

  I crave the potentially fraudulent kiss of fresh hotel sheets along limbs, even though the mattress beneath may be a nightmare of mites and skin cells, sweated into by strangers for several nasty reasons. It’s a stupid thing to crave.

  But I long for and choose to believe in the sharp linen. I allow it to give me confidence.

  So here we have it.

  Me standing by a foreign window on a valeted carpet, underfloor heat that’s pleasing the bathmat, through in the bathroom where I’d have a shower soon – I had confidence.

  Wash me in the water where you washed your dirty daughter and I shall be whiter than the snow.

  I had a relative used to sing that.

  Granddad. My grandfather sang it.

  And, in addition, we have –

  Kid standing and about to pitch in for a go at a laundered world. With her relative. Who maybe sings, perhaps French standards, favourites, Belgian show tunes, I couldn’t say.

  There’s a type of confidence in both of them, too. There’s noticeable faith.

  Sod that, though.

  It’s all nonsense.

  We can forget about the plane and the hotel.

  They didn’t happen.

  Or they did, but they’re not relevant where we are.

  We could also get rid of the snow.

  It has no place in the current narrative.

  The winter-sports granny is true, absolutely, and numerous hotels and aeroplanes and weathers have been parts of my life, but they don’t belong in the story I’m telling you.

  This didn’t happen abroad – this thing that happened – this parcel of things that happened – and this also didn’t happen on the morning of the grandmother – Vous parlez Francais? Un peu? – and the obliterating sky. I shouldn’t begin with leaving her behind and a walk to the bus stop beside the park and seeing the narrow balances of bleachwork along tree limbs, frosted trunks, the fountain halted.

  There wasn’t a fountain.

  There never has been.

  I don’t know why I added it.

  I want to describe my genuine circumstances on the occasion in question, but I can’t.

  I don’t remember a bus stop, a bus, a journey of that kind. I usually drive. There would have been parking and, before that, the customary instances of discourtesy, bits of waiting – I’m sure there must have been – only I had no idea they might be of importance and paid them no heed.

  But I was neither in an alien country, nor suffering unusual conditions.

  That rubbish isn’t true.

  I did get lost. True.

  I was raw-eyed. True.

  I had passed a shallow night holding on against a memory of altitude and claustrophobia. Doesn’t everyone? True.

  I was tired. Contributing factor.

  I might have thought briefly about the bread rolls served on aeroplanes and how they’re incredibly cold, as if they’ve been delivered straight from the screaming sub-zero outside. Wherever they’ve been kept is somewhere unnatural, unbearable.

  I might have thought that.

  I do wander. In my thinking.

  I have the impression that – on the day I might prefer to recall more entirely – I’d loitered in several places once I’d reached the city centre. There was a café, a health-food store with bargains offered on useless supplements, as endorsed by celebrity photos, none of which were remotely trustworthy or familiar.

  That’s probably the case. I can rely on myself about these points.

  And then I went into somewhere that sold clothes that I would find despicable and therefore preoccupying as I pottered about, loathing bad seams and poor cuts and weird colours and cheering my mood with how horrible it might be if I were someone else with stridently different tastes, which would make anybody who saw me think I seemed dysfunctional and bizarre.

  This was just a way to waste my time, not serious.

  I was aware that, if I were someone else, I would have been pleased by the awful clothes and have
bought something I’d feel was charming, or else have put it in mind as a possibility for later, a treat, and – either way – I’d have gone home satisfied. I did realise that at the time.

  I don’t habitually hate or mock strangers and what they might like.

  Unless I’m depressed.

  Then I do it because it’s cheering, but not too much and I get it over quickly.

  So the proper preamble to my story is a blur of avoided purchasing and raised spirits.

  And after that I wound up in another shop and began to make a moderate mistake.

  I’m not ashamed.

  I’d say that now.

  It was something I walked into and couldn’t control. Like the weather. It was like an unexpected stroll in snow.

  If I’d been, I’ll suggest this again, some other person with other likes and dislikes and not myself, then what was, in this case, unique for me might have been an already long-established and fond habit and no sweat. In someone only a little removed from myself, that could have been the case.

  It must have been cold in the street. I believe that my hands were hurting in my pockets. They scolded. That memory’s inflexible. So I can assume that I dodged indoors quite blindly to borrow a touch of warmth. I’ve been known to do such things before, particularly lately. I no longer concentrate as I once did.

  The shop assistant was immediately – Can I help you? – right close at my elbow and her tone weird as she continued – You were looking for something particular? – which I wasn’t – and she was asking me as if she was somehow a caring professional: not a doctor, or a nurse exactly, but maybe a dental hygienist, or a top-price hairdresser. She was dragging along this atmosphere of support and expertise which she leaned against me like a rolled-up carpet – second-hand, dusty – and there was a top note she put across most of her words to imply she was a friend I should confide in, girls together and ice cream this evening with crying and new lip gloss.

  Lip gloss makes me feel constricted. As did she.

  And wearing mascara’s like peering through a fence. Make-up is what one does for others, isn’t it? One goes to trouble.

  One says things, if only to one’s self, like I have gone to trouble for you.

  As if it’s a trip to be made on somebody’s behalf.

  I have gone to trouble for you, so you don’t have to. I brought you back this souvenir, it’s a small box of difficulties. You needn’t unwrap them at once.

  The gist of this was there in my head at the time – ideas being held – and there were other matters present, too, forming contours underneath the thinking, like knees underneath a bedspread. The knees have implications, but you don’t have to deal with them, or not at once.

  The assistant continued – insistent assistant – For a special occasion? – and I was, it must have seemed, drifting in an exploratory way along racks and shelves and display stands packed with choice. The lighting was unsubtle, so I found my surroundings rich in detail.

  I was somewhere like a very big grocer’s – For yourself? – a supermarket – times change and why be furtive, I suppose – a supermarket full of sex. Not sex. Devices engineered – there was a lot of engineering – to mimic the effects of sex. Only devices – For yourself? – not costumes, or DVDs, or magazines, or books, or most of the things I’d expect to be in a sex shop, in as far as I’d never had expectations in that field and couldn’t be sure, but must have surmised at some point. I surmise a great deal and at random. I did not intend to be there and yet there I was, nonetheless – For yourself? – and I had no answer. I’d halted in front of a bank of what were probably – definitely, now that I looked – fake vaginas and I couldn’t answer – who would? – that, no, I intended to buy such a thing for someone else. Who? For whom? A female friend to whom I would suggest that their own was unhelpful? Or would I give one to a straight man as if he’d no chance of access to a real one? I’m sorry his girlfriend left him, never mind and here’s this, which boils her down to her essentials? I’d want to imply that he felt these were her essentials and no wonder she left? Or would I foist one on a gay man? As what, a novelty letter box? Or I should deliver one to a lesbian as a hint she was sexually hopeless and ought to make do. This is – For yourself? – an impossible enquiry. Yes, for myself and I will give it to my partner because I want a rest? Or am I lacking? Or am I supposed to be gay and irreversibly solitary? Or have I discovered that mine doesn’t work any more?

  I attempted a smile that intended to seem well informed and relaxed. The assistant wore a name badge which called her Mandy, although I couldn’t accept that as likely.

  I adjusted my smile, broadened its dimensions.

  I didn’t want Mandy, or whoever she was, to imagine that I had no sense of fun.

  Fun is important.

  I constructed a small and intentionally visible idea of myself as someone with numerous options and a wide-ranging social circle. I folded my arms and moved on with purpose and as if I had no need of guidance – Oh, then these – Mandy wouldn’t let me be – These are wonderful – I rounded the end of the aisle with her in tow and announcing – They really are – as she reached for a favoured item, being factual, not salacious – Things have moved on – and she offers me what things have moved on to from among the gathered ranks of more and less sci-fi imitation penises.

  It didn’t look – thank you – very much like a penis at all. Mandy had judged me – thanks – over to my left were obsessively anatomical offerings – thanks – Mandy had judged I would favour something impressionistic. Vague. Elegant lines. Inhuman.

  I had the air, then, of someone who might wish to redesign their partner.

  Thank you.

  To love and despise simultaneously – Mandy assumed I was capable of that.

  Thanks.

  Clever Mandy.

  Thank you – trying to – really, thanks – get rid of her with gratitude and taking the package – mainly a clear plastic bubble for ease of inspection – thanks now, yes – and my aim was to shift off to the back of the place, ditch the thing and leave.

  Actually, not-so-clever Mandy.

  I don’t love and despise. That wouldn’t be clear in my face, not to someone who knew me, because it isn’t factual.

  Mandy is a bad judge of character.

  I love and resent.

  Everyone does that, it’s impossible to avoid. The real experience of love is of having unreasonably lost all shelter. There are wonderful additional elements in love apart from that, factors and truths which demand more than affection, which require worship of sorts, but there is, there really is, that initial loss. Sudden. And you cling to whoever is with you for sheer safety, beyond anything else. You cling to whoever has robbed you and they cling back because they are equally naked – you have stripped them to their blood. They are your responsibility, frail and skinless. It can’t be helped.

  I hurried from Mandy.

  I rushed to the extent that I could rush without suggesting unseemly desire to acquire some further contraption with which to astonish my privacy.

  The far wall of the shop offered objects that weren’t coat hooks, that wouldn’t enable arthritic hands to open tricky jars, that couldn’t be used for games of hoopla, even though they were unwieldy, even though they were unlikely, even though the human pelvis could never accommodate them as an internal feature and they were therefore unfit for their stated purpose.

  All these wild attempts at satisfaction, these declarations of absurd need.

  Chocolate-flavoured condoms. They had chocolate-flavoured condoms.

  You like penises, you like chocolate, why not both?

  There were many whys for not both. For many reasons, my opinion was in favour of not both.

  If I like penises, might I not be assumed to hope the flavour of a penis will be penis, which is to say not too much of a flavour, ideally just this subtle, unflavoured pleasantness and that isn’t a problem, how could that be a problem? I don’t feel my experience of oral s
ex is intended to be primarily culinary.

  Unless is it? Have I got this wrong? Is it not about love, about knowing and being known? Is it – I can get confused – perfectly reasonable in that, or any other, context to insist, to appear to insist, to act in such a way that I’d be insisting your penis is inadequate and ought at least to taste of chocolate to compensate, so here you go and roll on one of these?

  Am I being over-sensitive? Am I mistaken in thinking that when I touch the man I love, no matter where I touch the man I love, in no matter what way I touch the man I love, then the point is that I’m touching him and it’s love and the whole of him is him and I am happy with the whole of him and my aim is to produce an increase of happiness in both parties and where he is tender I will be tender because that would be only right and the best and finest thing and sweet to my soul and lips in tender places can be tender. Even in the rush and stroke of the moment, it’s only simple, only tenderness.

  Nothing else would be required.

  Something else would be an insult.

  I wanted to explain this, because it was important, but nobody I’d want to hear me was there to listen.

  I peered from behind the hoopla section until Mandy had pounced on another woman and led her away. They were chatting back and forth as I supposed they were intended to, taking advantage of a female-friendly emporium and an informative and unembarrassed ethos and I didn’t care about my position per se, but it still made me angry, nevertheless.

  Although this was a setting unsuitable for rage.

  And anger is always the second emotion, something else having always been there first.

  I wish I’d never learned that.

  Fear and pain being the most usual precursors.

  I would rather not notice the signals that prove I’ve been hurt or frightened.

  Nothing else for you today? – I couldn’t quite understand how Mandy had ambushed me again. I’d been heading to the penis area to abandon mine – it was not mine, but was burdensome enough by then to be taken personally – and I’d hoped to be free soon, but there she was – Ready? – the pert and relentlessly outgoing and dreadfully helpful Mandy. I’ll take you across to the cash desk. As if I was an invalid, imbecile, had never visited a shop.