After Purple Read online

I opened the door a crack. The music punched me in the face again. It was pouring down the stairs like lava, coating and choking everything with noise and heat and fury. Leo had me trapped. I could only escape by bolting out of the back door in my nightdress. If I wanted my clothes, I’d have to walk right up the stairs past the source of the eruption, that black, smoking, evil-minded Bechstein.

  I didn’t want my clothes — I wanted Leo — so I braved the stairs and stood deafened at the door of the drawing-room, watching his body lurch and plunge along the keyboard. The room was shuddering with the impact, objects trembling on the table, walls and ceiling wincing. I was totally shut out. I think that’s why I resented Leo’s music — he gave it his full devotion and attention, when I could never win them for myself.

  I waited a while until he’d reached that section where the piano draws its breath and quietens down a bit, then I walked towards him and stood behind his shoulder. The music was merciful now, forgiving — armies kneeling in the snow and laying down their swords, brother embracing brother. I wanted to slip in underneath the notes and have Leo’s slow, dark, bony hands stroke and gentle me the way they did the keys.

  “Leo …”

  “What?” He leant away from me to rumble down the lowest end of the piano. “Well, what?”

  “Oh … nothing.” It was pointless, really. He was squeezing such feeling out of those notes, such anguish, my own petty little needs could hardly raise a murmur.

  He paused a moment, flexed his fingers, closed his eyes. “I’m meeting Otto for breakfast,” he said. He made the name sound grand and showy like the climax of the piece.

  “You’ve had breakfast.”

  “Lunch, then.” He was already playing again, Otto’s name now frilled and furbished with a flurry of arpeggios.

  “You said we’d have lunch together.”

  “We could have done. But you just turned breakfast into lunch.”

  “I didn’t.”

  He answered with a mocking little trill in the left hand.

  “Anyway, you told me Otto doesn’t eat breakfast.”

  “He doesn’t eat at all.”

  “So why are you having lunch with him?”

  “I’m not, I’m having breakfast.”

  “Oh, Leo …”

  Both hands were jeering at me now, turning their backs on me, jabbing the notes with a slow, lazy scorn.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Now.”

  “But you’re not dressed.”

  “No.”

  “So couldn’t we … ?”

  “No.”

  The music had turned loud and fierce again. He should have stopped by now. I think he’d tacked a new bit on, simply to shout me down. The right hand was darting like a lizard over the keys, while the left one kept on repeating the same phrase, the same phrase, the same …

  I suddenly wanted to chop it off — that hand — smash it into pulp. All the fury I had ever felt towards him, all the pain, resentment, pique, humiliation, was pouring into that left hand. On and on it went, the same dazzling, murderous phrase; spinning, sparkling, screwing the room tighter and tighter, while the right hand raced and tumbled over it. The piano was throbbing, the whole room roaring and trembling. Leo had his eyes closed. He was communing with the souls of dead composers, deafening and insulting me in a language I couldn’t understand. I hadn’t a clue what key he was in, I didn’t even know which century. It was like Adrian again. All those confusing battles in the Hundred Years War; strings of kings with the same name but different numbers, Henrys and Edwards whom I always muddled up. Feudalism, scholasticism, internationalism — all those impossible words with ‘-ism’ on the end of them. The only one I understood was sensualism. I wanted to lie down under the piano, on my back, and have Leo’s thundering hands play the same phrase over and over and over me, pounding me, dazzling me, in any key he chose. Eroticism. Barbarism. Steel rods rammed against my breasts, sheet metal gouging out my stamens. And there he was, vertical, not horizontal, making love to that dead, smug, preening slob of a Bechstein, pouring out lies about tenderness and emotion, (dolce and grazioso, con somma passione), when he was a pig, a brute, a thug, a …

  I didn’t slam out, just slipped into my bedroom, lay down on the mattress (which my mother called a divan), closed my eyes and snuggled up against my father. I hadn’t seen him since I was a tiny kid, but I still knew what he looked like. He was so tall, I only came up to his thighs and he could pick me up with just one hand and sling me over his shoulder. He bought me sweets on Saturday afternoons, and when he read Red Riding Hood, he made his voice all frightening for the wolf.

  I didn’t want to think of wolves, so I moved on to my second father who was actually a step-dad. His name was God and He lived in the convent boarding school where my mother sent me to give herself what she described as breathing space. You had to be a proper baptised Catholic to claim Him as your real father. The other three hundred blessed girls all were. They feasted on His flesh and blood and wore His naked body on a chain around their necks. I was the only step-child. The difference showed, of course. My mother got as irritable with God as she had done with my father, so she moved me to a godless college where I first discovered Life and Lib and cheese-and-hashish sandwiches and mortal men like Adrian.

  Adrian told me God was an irrelevance and replaced Him with Philosophy. On Saturday afternoons, he bought Spanish plonk and Durex Gossamer instead of jelly babies, and read me history books in place of fairy tales before we went to bed. There wasn’t that much difference, so I married him. Actually, I didn’t have much choice. God was still cold-shouldering me because I wasn’t a cradle Catholic and my father had long ago pissed off and married someone else.

  I shivered in my nightie. Leo and the Bechstein hadn’t relented yet. I tried to picture him and God and Adrian and my father, and even Bertrand Russell and Bernard Levin, all fighting over their claims to me, all begging me to give them one more chance. It didn’t really work. They were much more interested in demolishing each other’s theories than they were in wooing me. Instead of their impassioned pleadings, all I could hear was Leo’s jeering music shrilling and scoffing underneath the door. I longed for my father to wrap me in his great-coat and pretend I was Goldilocks sleeping off the porridge. Or God to sneak me into bed with Him and pull the blankets tight. Or even Leo to simply stop his playing and prove I still existed. There was only Adrian left. I was crazy to have left him. I only did it because we’d had a row and I wanted him to come panting after me and beg me not to go. Instead, he had gone grovelling round to Janet’s and asked her to marry him. (I didn’t even know he had a Janet.)

  I booted her out of my bed and set up house with Adrian again. Things had been safer then, predictable. He always came home (and left it) at the same time, and made careful, unobjectionable remarks in the right order. Simple things like breakfast cereals never became reasons for contempt. He’d shared a packet with me, most mornings, and even helped me enter the competitions on the back. (Complete the line: “We eat Kellogg’s Ricicles because …”) He took the competitions very seriously, juggled words, jotted headings. We might have won a trip to the Bahamas. Adrian would have taken the cash in lieu of, and then gone somewhere grey and cultured and boring, like Ephesus or Athens, which had history and temples instead of golden sands. We always had five or six different cereals, so we lived in constant expectation of new cars, world cruises, day trips to Disneyland. Most of the packets were too tall for our poky little larder, so we stood them in a row on top of the refrigerator. It was an old fridge with an intermittent judder, and every time it juddered, one or two of the packets fell on their backs. We never moved them to a safer place, just picked them up again. They were like our children, I suppose, bright and sweet and shared and always falling over. I suppose that’s why divorce hurts so much. Not the obvious things, the division of the property, the haggling in the courts, but the loss of a plastic Batman in the cornflakes packet, or the chance of a cabi
n cruiser with two coupons from Puffed Wheat.

  I longed to grab it all again — the sugar on the Weetabix, the honey on the toast. Oh, I know I’d only ruin it — I always mess things up again as soon as I’ve put them straight. But just to escape the music, just to have a breakfast without the silences, the strain. Leo was playing slower now, but the notes were still cruel and spiky, cutting into me with their sharp, jagged edges, reminding me of disasters and divorce courts, of last rites and lost fathers. I had to get away. I never felt safe with Leo. There were too many gaps in his life I couldn’t fill. He was like one of those intricate, five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles with the picture on its box missing, so that you had no idea what it was meant to look like if you ever succeeded in sorting out the bits. Adrian was simpler. He’d be at home alone now, on the last lap of his Christmas holidays. Term didn’t start till the second week of January. He’d be deep in some book or other, wrapped in two sweaters to save on the heating costs, and with a bag of Creamline toffees hidden in his box-file so that Janet wouldn’t find them.

  She wouldn’t find me, either. She worked in the City, half-past eight till five.

  I didn’t wash, just pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans, without any bra or pants. My jeans smelt sort of raunchy in the crotch. Leo liked that. He used to sleep with them sometimes, when I wasn’t there. My mother had always nagged about clean underwear. It wasn’t so much the hygiene as the fear of my being mopped up after a car crash and discovered in dirty pants or greyish vest. I was going by train, in any case. I’ve never learnt to drive.

  I dragged on Leo’s sheepskin, the second, shorter one, which was yellowish like he was. I was still shivering underneath it. I went downstairs and made a wide detour round the broken vase. I slammed the door on Leo’s playing, which had swollen up again like a huge black shadow stalking after me. I could almost see the shrill, black squiggly notes crushed and writhing in the door like mangled flies. I left them there to die, whistling my own defiant tuneless tune.

  Chapter Two

  It was cold and grey outside. The mulberry tree was pressing its bare arms against the bright, lighted window, to keep them warm. The sky looked stained and creased as if someone had picked it up cheap at a jumble sale and tacked it up skewwhiff. It was still early. People were hurrying to work with their stiff grey morning faces on. Nice to have a job. I’d had nine in twelve weeks, and blued them all.

  The underground was crowded. I stood wedged among a party of German tourists whose coarse pink faces looked as if they’d been moulded out of Leberwurst. (That’s not original. I pinched it from a girl at a dinner party who had just come back from Munich.) At Waterloo, the crowds thinned. The morning crush was over, but had left the station seedy and bad-tempered, pockmarked with dirty footprints and with little pustules of litter erupting all over it. A businessman with a briefcase and a bowler was queuing at the Baskin-Robbins icecream stand. I went and stood behind him.

  “A marshmallow sundae, please,” he said. “To take away.”

  I was almost disappointed. I’d hoped he’d order a double-scoop strawberry cornet, and suck it all the way to the Bank.

  “Same again,” I said. That’s typical of me. No originality. I don’t even like marshmallow. But the thought of all those thirty-one flavours was almost paralysing. I could stand for ever, agonising, dithering, trying to weigh Orange Sherbet against Chocolate Chip. Decisions like that are more or less impossible. There are no absolutes. It’s like trying to decide between the big-bang theory or the steady-state, or limbo or nirvana, or Marx or Mrs Thatcher. Left to myself, I wouldn’t have bothered much with things like that. There are enough imponderables in deciding when to wash your jeans, without taking on the universe as well. But people around me were always fretting on a cosmic scale. At Adrian’s school, we used to be invited for sherry and sandwiches, and some master or other would rabbit on about whether Sartre’s Marxism contradicted his Existentialism (all those ‘-isms’ again), and at Leo’s gatherings, everyone agonised about Buddhism or Bio-Energetics or how Christianity could be compatible with capitalism. There were always so many arguments on all ten thousand sides. It astonished me how normal people could settle for one opinion or another. How could they be that sure? I tended to follow whoever I was with. If he was an ecologist, I threw away my aerosols and wore a badge saying ‘Save the Condor’; if a vegetarian, I shovelled in the nut cutlets. That’s the only reason people like me, I suspect. I give them instant backing and support. I could have made a fortune working for Rent-a-Fan.

  The icecream lady dolloped sauce on my sundae and sprinkled it with nuts. Actually, I’d rather have had a cornet. I like the way they melt on your hand through the aperture in the bottom. (Aperture is one of Adrian’s words.) I once masturbated on a beach for twenty-two minutes, with a giant-sized Mr Whippy cornet dripping down my thighs like a sort of egg-timer. 95p the Baskin-Robbins cost. I could have bought a meal for that. The tube fare had been bad enough, and the day return to Twickenham almost cleaned me out. I should have bought a single. ‘I’m sorry, Adrian, but I’ll have to stay the night. I couldn’t afford the fare both ways.’ I grinned to myself. Adrian would take it seriously. That was his life’s work, really — Taking Things Seriously. He’d spread out those gloomy beige pamphlets from the Social Security office, and ask to see my cheque stubs, and start explaining all over again how I could claim something-or-other benefit if I filled in a form which was so long and complicated, it would have been easier to take a high-powered job than try and wrestle with it. You needed at least two A-levels to cope with forms like that. I didn’t care, really. If I had cash, I spent it, and if I didn’t, I went through somebody else’s. I never knew whether Leo had money. He did buy Chinese pots, but they were often chipped, from low-grade dealers or even junky stalls. He also owned two floors of a house, but it was only on a lease, and his Bechstein had been left to him by a Russian relative. We never talked about money.

  My train was in, already. I found an empty carriage and started on my sundae. Any icecream called Baskin-Robbins must taste better than one with a boring name like Walls or Lyons. Take my own name. I’ve always felt special being called Thea. I mean, it gives me an immediate advantage over the Susans and the Janes. It’s much the same with Leo. Any Leo is bound to be fascinating, where a Ted is merely common and a John plain dull. If we’d been a conventional couple, people would have talked about ‘Leo and Thea’, and we’d have sounded daring and decadent like Colour Supplement People. Names earmark you immediately. Vic-and-Brendas run ballroom-dancing schools in Penge, and Oliver-and-Emilys make their own duvet covers and send their sons to Bedales.

  The icecream lasted only as far as Vauxhall. I licked out the carton with my finger and threw it under the seat. Someone had scribbled ‘R.B. for me’ just above my head. I wondered who R.B. was. Robert Bruce, Roger Bacon — Adrian sort of people. I could see R.B. slumped on the carriage seat, a tall, bony man with black hair. I unzipped my jeans. My pubic hair is a sort of reddish-brown and very coarse like wire. Sometimes I use conditioner on it, the stuff they sell for scalp hair, but it doesn’t make much difference.

  I licked my finger, ran it down my stomach and left it sort of poised above the hair. Leo hates it if I masturbate. I think he believes woman’s only source of pleasure can be Man, so touching myself is an insult to his sex. He holds my wrists if I ever try to do it, twists them tight behind my back, and then carries on with his tongue where I left off. (That’s what makes me do it in the first place.)

  Though now, I suspect it was simply a defiance. I never dared oppose him openly, so all I could do was break his rules (or fill his silences). Anyway, it’s the only skill I have. Other girls can type sixty words a minute. I can come ten times in an hour. It frightens me, my own sexuality. That’s not my word either, but Adrian always frowned if I said ‘randy’. Those ‘-ity’ words are rather like the ‘-isms’. They’re so bursting with prickly vowels and consonants, you can’t tell one from the other, so
that spirituality and bestiality land up sounding more or less identical.

  It’s the same with masturbation — God and slut combined. You soar beyond your own confining body and hit the electric fence which runs round heaven. It’s all shock and heat and sparks — an angel or a rocket-launch zooming out of space and time and boundaries, towards the blaze and roar of the eternal. But afterwards, you find you’re only Lucifer, belly-flopping back to earth, sore and stained and sweaty, with your wings and halo torn. And that rocket’s just the damp, spent debris of a firework fizzling in the rain.

  I don’t know really why I go on doing it, except every time I think it will be different. Right, I vow, this one will be the clincher. I’ll bump into God and stay there, spinning forever like a Catherine-wheel nailed on His front door, and that singing, panting, pleading, final climax will turn slattern into Soul.

  I wriggled on the seat a fraction so that my jeans weren’t cutting into me, and braced my feet against the floor. (There was no one in the carriage.) I wetted my finger again and pushed it up, probing very slowly and solemnly at first, and closing my eyes, to cut out all distractions like graffiti or no-smoking signs or five-pound fines for spitting. All my godlike feelings come to a sort of point an inch or so inside me. I touched that sanctum now, feeling it burn and quiver through my fingers, turning me from flesh to sacred fire. It was my own private morning service — lauds, or matins, or Mass in the vernacular — some new-style sacrament in which God’s hands were on my thighs and His holy water welling up between them. My toes were clawing the floor, my face screwing up in total concentration, my whole body pierced and swooning like St Sebastian’s. I used two fingers now, and then a fist, ramming more roughly as we rattled into Clapham Junction. I could feel whole chalices shoved high up inside me, bishops’ croziers splitting me in two. The entire Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church had left the Vatican and set up court in Thea Morton’s cunt. Wandsworth, Putney, Barnes — each station was a sacred shrine, a whistle-stop pilgrimage, thundering through my legs and out again. R.B. had slipped down from the wall and was pressed against my belly, in Communion with me, making me thump and judder on the seat. He was dark and wild like Leo, but had turned from mortal man to red-cocked cardinal, roaring into tunnels, leaping off the rails. I was so in awe of him, I thought I’d never come, but suddenly everything fizzed and purred and gloated and I heard doors slamming and feet trampling and we drew away from North Sheen at the very moment the cardinal shot his bolt.