‘Declan,’ she says. ‘Don’t think – please don’t think the scale of it’s diminished. Please don’t think I’ve just comfortably assimilated it, what I’ve done. What I did. I know you think that.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘And don’t think that I expect you to have stopped hating me, because I haven’t. I know what a fucking vile and ugly thing it was. I know. I know. You wrong someone . . . When you wrong someone, in the old-fashioned way . . .’
Astonishing. Tears. Jumping Jimmeny Christmas. She moves fast, this girl. It’s been two-and-a-half years, going on. Gunn turns up, they open a bottle of wine, he tells her he wants to talk to her and zappo – the heart opens its wound and starts to bleed all over the place. (It is, you must concede, unpleasantly messy, this business of having feelings, this mattering to each other. I’ve always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually occurring road accident – everyone going too fast, too close, without due care and attention, or with too much . . .)
This is sweet, I’m thinking. Gunn, who despises her for having made him love her then betraying him, would want my guts for garters if he were here – which wouldn’t be a good idea, since they’re his guts, too – if he had the faintest inkling of what I’m about to do.
‘It was a fucking hideous thing,’ Penelope says. ‘It was. I know it was.’
‘Would you mind if I had one of those?’ I say, indicating the open-flapped pack of Marlboro next to her hand. She’s blank in response, a ravaged tissue held to her suddenly reddened nose. I see I’ve switched to the wrong level. (Damned impulsive desires, you see? How do you cope? I mean it just came over me, right then, that I really wanted a cigarette. I’d left my Silk Cut on the blasted train.) She’s so deep in her own feeling awful that it barely even grazes her, that I’m bothering about things like cigarettes. I take one anyway and light up.
‘What I mean is . . . Declan please don’t tell me you hate me. I know you do. And you’ve the right. Just please, please don’t say it here, now. I promise you I hate myself enough for both of us.’
I’m tempted to let her run on. I mean come on, it is rather charming, her misery, her guilt, finally, especially since her entire identity’s been built on knowing the right thing to do – then doing it. Not that she’s been perfect, of course. There have been slips, stumbles, days of laziness or existential ennui – but there hasn’t been a fall, not like the one precipitated by Declan’s unfortunately swollen head. She’s hard on herself. She remembers the past. Susan tells her, invariably, on their splurges: Your fucking trouble is you can’t let go of the past. Her cider-and-black flavoured breath beats against Penelope’s face. How can you expect to live if you’ve still got your head buried in the past? It’s not my head, Penelope’s wanted to groan. It’s my heart.
Now, here, I’m afraid, is where the atrocities begin. (My fingers hesitate at Gunn’s greasy keys. I’ve already stalled myself with three cups of Earl Grey and six cigarettes. If it weren’t for your language being so blatantly designed for deception, all this telling the truth would have me worried. Professional reputation and all that. However . . .) The most extraordinary thing. How to say this? I . . . I find myself . . .
Look I’m no fool. I’ve got used to bits and bobs of Gunn cropping up in my behaviour, the odd fingerprint here and there. I knew it was never going to be a clean distinction (the body has its limits on how many things you can let pass through – don’t I know from previous possessions? All that rot and stench? Involuntary snatches of nursery rhymes or surprise waves of tenderness at the appearance of a favourite teddy? Goes with the territory); but this. . . this is something entirely different. What we’re talking about here is the . . . the wholesale import of a particular feeling that I didn’t have to start with, suddenly, directly from Gunn’s past into my present. I open my mouth to begin what I’ve come here to begin – and find myself in an agony of hatred and pain. (Don’t get me wrong. If I’m familiar with anything I’m familiar with hatred and pain. Hatred and pain are my blood and bones, so to speak, my spirit’s dress, my odours, my shape, my – well, we’ve covered this. The point is that’s fine with me because it’s my hatred, my pain. I mean they affirm the continuity of my identity if nothing else. This, on the other hand, pitches up in me like an obstreperous and lightning-quick gatecrasher. One minute it isn’t there, the next it is – and I find myself – get this – hating Penelope. (There’s an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It’s insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.) I sit there with my mouth open filled with human pain and human anger. She was there, a voice is saying (Gunn’s presumably), all naked and warm with her hair spread around her in the bed that we’d . . . In the bed . . . How could she and think of it think of it go on her sucking his cock and swallowing his come and go on THINK OF IT HER FUCKING TONGUE IN HIS MOUTH AND HIS FACE HIS FACE AND HER FACE AND SHE WAS SHE WAS YOU KNEW WHAT SHE LOOKED LIKE AND NOW HE DOES TOO YOU THINK OF IT YOU MISERABLE FUCKING SHIT WRETCH AND YOU’VE DONE NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING EXCEPT WANT TO FUCKING DIE.
In hindsight, gentle reader, I think even then I felt a bit sorry for Gunn, having so much rage and pain and so paltry a medium for its expression. I mean compared to me he’s in fetters. I’ve got the whole earth and everyone in it to give tongue to my grievances. What’s he got? English. I don’t know what I must look like, sitting there, fuming. A children’s cartoon steam train, perhaps, red-faced, pulling and puffing in a foul temper up a punishing hill. Whatever I look like, the important thing is what I feel like. And I feel – I can only assume – like Gunn. Drenched afresh in all that vivid moment’s rich treachery. The slowly opened door introducing the scene like an amoral master of ceremonies. Penelope on the bed. That . . . that (what? Bastard? Fucker? Cunt? Cocksucker? Nothing adequately labels the object of Gunn’s rage . . .), that man up on his elbows above her; his look of mild surprise; hers, turning to the yawning door, of death.
The need to hurt her, now, sitting in distress across the table from me, is overwhelming. Not physically – Gunn hasn’t got it in him, whatever his fantasy life might think – but with the mouth’s unstinted repertoire, the complete arsenal, the maximum yield.
Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt. The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jewelled with tears. She holds her own mouth on a tight rein. Remembering – it makes a frightful mess of the human face. I’ve seen it a billion times.
Now Penelope.
And the overwhelming desire and need is to hurt her. The words – Gunn’s words – swarm on my tongue as if some inner smoke is driving them from the head’s hive. But – (oh yes, but) – when I’ve got a plan I stick to it. Unlike some. If this is Limbo’d Gunn’s distant broadcast (note to self: summon bloody Nelchael for a long overdue progress report), he’s reckoned on too passive an audience. This isn’t about what cuckolded Declan wants – no matter how loud and clear his carcass shouts its absent soul’s mass of demands. It’s about what I want. Thus, stepping around it, so to speak, as one might a sensitively alarmed sculpture in a narrow gallery space, I reach out and take Penelope’s hot, tissue-clutching hand by its knuckles. She’s a good, strong, guilty girl, so she looks me in the eye.
‘That’s not what I came here for,’ I say, imagining Gunn tearing his incorporeal hair out, wherever he is. Penelope looks tired and all but irresistibly human – but I’m determined, now. (Besides, if I decide to stay – ha-ha – I might want her to be the mother of my children . . .) ‘I came here,’ I continue, dropping my glance to the mug- ringed table top in the manner of a person who, through a great and near-fatal struggle, has learned the virtue of kindness and humility, ‘to tell you . . . to tell you . . .’
‘Yes?’ The air-speech of the grief-ravaged larynx.
‘To tell you that . . . I . . . forgive you,’ (the words come with a strange ease once I’ve got that ‘forgive’ out), ‘without expectation of any kind. It was a betrayal, yes, but I’d betrayed you first. My fucking vanity. My idiotic, deluded vanity. If you wronged me, my love, it was because you were provoked by my wrong. I’m sorry for what I did, for what I became, for how ugly and false.’
I look back up at her. Her eyebrows have gone up in the middle and her lips are pursed. She doesn’t know what to do, what’s going on, whether she loves Gunn all over again, whether, even, this might not be a ruse, the opening device in an emotional booby trap. She’s (I like this word) flabbergasted.
‘I’m asking for nothing,’ I say, getting slowly to my feet and unwrapping my jacket (it’s been a wrench, I don’t mind telling you, slipping out of the Armani, the Gucci, the Versace, the Rolex, back into Gunn’s excruciatingly dull threads – but there was no point in complicating things) from the back of the chair. ‘This isn’t a request, or a
