11. A trick of the light
This is part eleven. Odd place to start I agree: Part one is here.
Last time: Slipshod flats, sitcom dads, sagging stones and seaside koans.
11.
I have two lists. The first, the list of my missing body parts, is worn and torn and taped together and lousy with Dorito-stained fingerprints. The other is my list of home improvements. Lately I’m making better progress on the latter. Not counting my kidney, I only have one organ left to find. I don’t know where my stomach is, and I have no idea where to start. But I do know how to rewire and replace a plug socket, so I’m working on that. The trick is to turn the power off first. Behind me, a freshly painted stretch of wall in the living room invites the spring sun to recline across its pock-free visage. The trick there is a tub of skim filler and a few hours with a sanding sponge. Between sun and emulsion the place is brighter already. A lick of paint might not solve any underlying issues, but it can leave the impression, for a second, that everything is fixed. That it’s all shiny and new. A trick of the light, perhaps. But a neat trick all the same.
12.
The living room is piled eight-feet high with a mix of suitcases, boxes, totes, duffels, duvets, and loose pillows, along with dozens of Tesco bags each stuffed with a stack of books. Unpacking isn’t nearly as hard as it seems once I start, and I started because I got a text from Saffron telling me she is planning on visiting at the weekend. Since I haven’t yet built shelves, paperback books now line the mantel and windowsills and hardbacks sit in small piles either side of the bed in lieu of nightstands. There are books under the bed and books behind the sofa and books in kitchen cupboards. I also make time to hang clothes hang on a rail I rigged from scaffolding poles, and towels from a ladder leaned against the bathroom wall. For bedroom curtains I drape a blanket across a length of twine, affixed at either end with hooks reclaimed from the stair well, and call it bohemian. By mid-afternoon I’m back to my show. If you haven’t seen it, Mad Men is a show about sneaking a snooze or a shag into the middle of your workday. Cocktail encouraged. The main character, Don Draper, finds time to write very occasionally between affairs, benders, and naps, which sounds about right.
13.
There are things I know how to do: Plumb a sink. Patch some plasterboard. Hang a door. I can also build the fuck out of some IKEA. I find it therapeutic, a free afternoon, a pile of flatpack awaiting assembly; screws and spacers, wooden dowels and cam-lock connectors laid out neatly in a row. I can bang out a BILLY in fifteen minutes. A two-by-two KALLAX in ten. The trick to flatpack is almost always power tools. The free allen key is a practical joke played by the Swedes. Throw it away and use a drill driver with a decent clutch instead.1 Your marriage will thank you. I know how to do these things because I practised. But also because of Dad. I was helping out, handing him tools, standing on the end of something he was trying to saw, a boy-shaped counterweight in short pants. He gave me my first tools. A box to keep them in. On the weekend we did jobs together. There were always jobs. Part of our friction is he wonders why I’m not that little boy anymore, bright and curious. Raring to go. Ready to learn. A little boy that needs him. Part of our friction is I wonder where my dad went. The one that didn’t look at me like I was letting him down. Who didn’t invoke lost promise with every glance. There are things we both know how to do. Navigating time and memory and present reality aren’t among them.
14.
Part of the application process for the flat was I had to prove that I had access to funds to renovate the property. The surveyor estimated that the successful applicant would need to spend ten thousand pounds in materials and labour to make this place liveable. In the income box I wrote: I recently pawned a kidney. I also had to show I have published work, and to give an idea of what I’m working on next. Under current project I put: working on myself and under works of note I said: if I had any works of note I wouldn’t need to live in a shithole. They either found my candour charming or there wasn’t much competition because they approved my application the next day.
15.
Rain. The April kind. I’m trying to smoke a sodden cigarette outside the station. You look like a wet dog, Saffron says when she spots me. Being easy to spot in a crowd is among my best qualities. An improvement, I know, I say. Hen-dos and drunk teens spill onto the concourse around us. She leans up on my forearm and kisses my cheek. Who’s a good boy? she asks. She’s wrapped in wool and an easy charm. Her wit is sharp and her smile slow to fade. It’s good to see you, too, I say. We sit under a shelter outside the station and split a cigarette, waiting for the weather to calm. Saturday night in Seagate has two options, a selection of old man pubs, all of which are hosting karaoke, or an escape room. Being that every room is an escape room when you’re depressed, we find a pub, The Lack and Lustre, where the singing hasn’t started yet. It looks like a living room, log fire, old men and all. The only whisky they’ve got is whiskey, with an e. There’s a difference, but one should pick their battles. We sit and peel off a layer or two, remembering each other. I read your book, she says. It’s very sad. This is a common appraisal, but a fairly accurate one. But, it made me want to visit you, she says. A kiss is interrupted when the Karaoke DJ arrives to enthusiastic cheers from a sea of septuagenarian crooners, and we leave mid-round before someone can murder Robbie Williams.
16.
She tastes like smoke. Her tongue whisky, her breath cigarettes. Her body slight and unselfconscious. We fuck as slow as we dare, as slow as a short trip will allow, taking our time to undress and redress each other with kisses and limbs, torsos draped together, both softer than our clothes betrayed, edges melting under the weight of lips and fingertips. My hands wrap her almost entirely and I grip and grasp and learn which sighs and groans live where, her vocabulary reduced to the permissives: yesses, nos, and where words fail, nods. She traces my scars and kisses each one, never stopping to ask for stories. We fuck and talk and drink and smoke, and smoking leads to kissing and kissing to fucking and we flow into each other like pools, pausing for breath and blasphemy and to remember how to speak. She instructs me in English, swears in German, and comes in French. She straddles my lap, holding my shoulders and rocking her hips against me, whispering there, oui, oui as she comes. We swap tricks and don’t think to hold a few back for next time. The energy wanes eventually, along with the condoms and the cigarettes. Sweat-soaked and spent, high on oxytocin and each other, we head to the balcony for a final smoke. We sit huddled against the breeze, against the world, savouring the quiet of the small hours. Her kiss is delicate. Her tongue whisky, her breath cigarettes. She tastes like smoke.
17.
Saffron is in the kitchen on a toast and coffee run. She asks about the note on the fridge: Make yourself useful? I tell her my dad left it. My flannel shirt enters the room, a tiny Belgian hidden beneath its folds. She climbs back into bed and sits cross-legged eating toast, an act of violence against hearts and bedsheets both. She asks if we get along. I tell her how in every sitcom one of the sons is always a disappointment. In this sitcom I suppose that had to be me, I say. She looks at me the way you might at a dog chasing its own tail. Have you noticed you never give a honest answer to a serious question, she says. She leans over to kiss me and we collapse into each other, her hands relieving me of clothing and covers and any chance of leaving the bedroom today.
18.
In the hush of dawn I attempt an honest answer: The truth is we disappointed each other, dad and me. He wanted me to toughen up. I wanted him to soften the world.
19.
Saffron is not long for Seagate. An extra night extended her stay, but all good things, so they say, and the same is true for whatever this was. A folly. A fuck. Some fun. She waves goodbye to the sea and to the sun trying to park somewhere behind it. At the station we share a final cigarette, a casual intimacy keeping us close. Cambodia, she says, answering a question I haven’t asked. Agence-France Presse are sending me out. A year, initially. But who knows? It turns out what this was, was goodbye. That’s wonderful, I say. I mean it. She asked for what she wanted and got it. Funny how that works. Phnom Penh is a bit murder-y, she says. But very cool. She asks what I’m going to do now. Maybe I’ll start giving honest answers to serious questions, I say. Our last kiss is sweeter for its finality. It’s hard to know what I feel as I watch her board the train. It strikes me, as she waves from the window, that the thing I’ve felt most this whole time is present. Fully and entirely. What a gift that was.
20.
Nights are always hardest. The loneliness seeps in with the cold. The list in my pocket paints a picture of progress. I look whole. I seem whole. What it doesn’t show is the profound discomfort I feel in my own skin. As if I’m wearing a costume, a disguise. The body as pantomime. The self as side show. A performance I can hide behind. All that work, all those parts recovered, so I can wear the mask a little longer. Perhaps a day or two now before it slips. Before despair sets in and I find myself staring at the ceiling for three hours unable to move. When you’re sick for a long time you get really good at pretending. Really pretty great at it. Perhaps the parts I’ve retrieved are just props I added to my routine. A misdirection, a ruse, orchestrated to make it seem like I mean it when I say I’m okay, really. Every play needs an audience. Every grift a mark. Someone to convince that the skin I’m wearing fits me just fine. That I’m comfortable, at ease, complete. If I keep inviting people to visit maybe I can keep the loneliness at bay a little longer. Maybe I can keep up this charade long enough to fool myself.
If you hit like I’ll know it’s worth debasing myself this way.
Modern battery-powered combo drills have a screwdriver setting – the combo in the name – coupled with a clutch ring that surrounds the barrel of the drill. The clutch, generally numbered from 1-20+, is among the more misunderstood features of the combo drill. Rather than use a high-powered impact driver, which is a similar looking tool meant for driving difficult screws into hard materials, like decking, one should use a combo drill on its screwdriver setting when assembling IKEA. Adjust the clutch ring so that it allows you to drive the screw without stripping the head or ploughing it too far into the surface of the IKEA panel. The clutch will cut power to the drill once the screw is all the way in and starts providing resistance (this makes a clicking noise, and means it’s time to stop pulling the trigger), thus protecting the surface of the IKEA furniture board – often chipboard or cardboard filled fibreboard which is too delicate for the raw torque of an impact driver.