“There’ll be lots of other times,” Tony said softly as they lay, a little apart, breathing more regularly, letting surprise settle in and dry off. “So this is what we were up to all along. I had no idea. Fuck shoplifting. This is really living on the edge.”
Mark tugged his lifeless cock aside, felt the wet, like blood, smearing his thighs. It seemed like everything had been wrenched out of him. Disembowelled, he waited for morning.
SINCE LAST YEAR THEY HAD DONE THE BAR UP. IT WAS BIGGER, WIDER, ART Deco with arched windows that saw the town roofs. This as the height of the pantomime rush, the week before Christmas, the theatre’s grandest moment, with school parties filling the foyer, stairways and balconies. The kids were clustering about gold-framed photos of last year’s stars.
“Remember Beauty and the horrible Beast. Remember last year?”
The kids nodded solemnly, gazing at Conrad the Wolf.
Mark saw Iris and Peggy bringing Sally up the stairwell. They noticed him and forged their way through, complaining about toilet queues.
A rush of softness filled him at the sight of Sally’s school socks hanging down, the trepidation in her eyes as she eased past school friends who showed no sign of recognising her.
She was so quiet, so meek. She sat next to her father, waiting until he assured her that the lemonade really was for her, then sipping slowly at it. He was scared for her, learning to ride her life like a bike, up crowded theatre steps. She had grandmothers for stabilisers, but how long before they fell away? Mark wouldn’t care so much, but a crappy old bike, every scrap of it in some way second-hand, was all they could manage for her
He suddenly realised why, at base, he fought so stubbornly against Sam’s one-woman feud. It was because Sally needed Peggy and Iris so much. Sam didn’t love her daughter enough. Sally needed these surrogates, and she knew it herself.
“Thanks for taking her,” Mark said.
“Are you enjoying the show, Sally love?” Iris bellowed, patting her fuchsia coat as if looking for something.
Sally looked up as she carefully lowered her glass. She beamed brilliantly. “I just love it. It’s all so easy.”
Iris smiled kindly, as she often did to soften Peggy’s occasional bluntness.
“Life is so easy in there. It’s all love and magic.”
The two grandmothers cooed over this until the end-of-interval bell rang, starting a swift exodus to the stairs. Mark slipped an arm around his daughter and gave her a tight hug.
“I’m glad we thought of you, Sally Kelly. You were a good idea.”
She smiled.
During the second act of the show, Mark leaned to offer Sally a wine gum. Her hands were full. Cupped in her palms she held a tiny, sleeping terrapin, her own name etched on its shell in nail varnish.
Mark looked away and forgot all about it until they climbed aboard the school coach to go home.
“Sally,” he said as they say in place. “You haven’t got a terrapin with you, have you?”
“No, Dad.”
He nodded. The coach pulled away. She had left it in the theatre. Mark was obscurely pleased.
SIX
WE KNEW ALL ABOUT EACH OTHER’S INADEQUACIES. IT WAS PART OF THE bargain. We would compensate for each other, cover each other’s blind spots as we brazened life through, walking abreast. We were inseparable.
I wonder about Victor Frankenstein. My reading—for my course—has become a little sidetracked; I’ve read Frankenstein twice this week. It was because my library privileges have been temporarily withheld too, mind, and I can’t get anything new just yet. But luckily I still had this one. Have you read it, Mark? Have you ever wondered exactly what is going on in that book?
This is the sort of thing you get to thinking about on a course like mine. You start to take things apart, to wonder exactly what they’re really saying. Books aren’t just decoration, it turns out. They’re not just stories, icing on the cake of real life. It’s what they don’t say that’s important, apparently. And something is going on in my copy of Frankenstein. It is as if it is somehow infested; this book has bedbugs. When I read, something darts across the yellowed pages, just ahead of my eyes. I read and reread, hoping to track it down, yet fearing infection. Something nags at me.
In case you haven’t read it, it’s a book about betrayal.
In case you’ve only seen the film, it’s really a book about love. About loving someone so much and having it thrown back in your face, you turn entirely the other way; meticulously, systematically, you take to bits and pieces the circumstantial impedimenta that hedge in and create the beloved’s life. Hatred takes over; hatred is the dark, glossy, bloody obverse of a love that is fused by another obstinacy. Fused into molten rivulets, as in welding.
It’s a difficult book; I haven’t figured it out yet. Frankenstein makes the monster; he wants to take him apart. Yet it is the monster who also hates and wants to take his creator’s life apart, bit by murderous bit. I think, perhaps, they are in love.
Somehow they can’t cope with it. This is a long time ago, this book. Still, I am told by my study notes that it is widely regarded as the world’s first science-fiction novel. Surely in science fiction the wildly outlandish is permitted existence? Couldn’t they have come to some kind of settlement up on that mountain; faced the truth, in the teeth of the tempest, about their feelings for each other?
We did, didn’t we, Mark? In the early seventies. It was different from the nineteenth century. It was easier,
