Imagined Slights Read online

  She tried, but Mrs Konwicki couldn't keep her nose out of my affairs. She noted the absence of Julia passing through her hallway, Julia always saying hello if the door to Mrs Konwicki's flat was open before trotting upstairs to see me. The lie about her being ill had allayed Mrs Konwicki's suspicions, but it was only a lie and lies have a very short shelf-life. A fortnight after Julia gave me the old heave-ho, she collared me as I was on my way out to the newspaper offices to file my three articles. I had them in a leather slipcase under my arm: one a story on the progress of the county hospital's scanner appeal, one a report on the state of sea pollution in the area, and one a film review. (At the Weekly Herald and Advertiser you couldn't afford to be too eclectic.) She all but dragged me into her flat. She was not a big person but her grip was extraordinarily powerful; so much strength compacted into such a slender arm.

  "Sit down, Feelhip."

  "Mrs K, I'm in a bit of a hurry," I protested, but had I really been in a hurry I would have said I was late for something. Deadline was this evening, half a day away. I sat down. Mrs Konwicki's chairs were much like the chairs in my flat - oversprung, understuffed, floral-patterned, dating from circa 1950 - but they were in better condition. Naturally everything in the room reeked of dog: dog fur, dog food, dog breath, dog. The source of the smell lay sprawled in his wicker basket, his muzzle resting on the rim, one eyebrow cocked - staring at me.

  "What's happened?" she said.

  "What's happened where?"

  "With Jewelear. What's happened with Jewelear? Where is she? Why hasn't she been over? What have you done to her? What have you said?"

  "Shouldn't you be shining a lamp in my face?"

  "No jokes, Feelhip. The truth."

  Not my forte, the truth, but I did my best. "OK. We came to a parting of the ways. One of those things. Happens to everyone. Very friendly. I'm sure we'll stay in touch. Sad."

  Mrs Konwicki mulled over this information, frowning, then said, "That's a shame."

  "Oh yes," I said, nodding avidly.

  "Nothing you did or said? You can be very abrasive at times, Feelhip, just as you can be very charming."

  "Why does everyone automatically assume something's my fault?"

  "Is it permanent, do you think?"

  I took a deep breath. "I think it is."

  "Do you have any intention of seeing her again?"

  "None at all."

  "Pity." She moved to the window, which was scrupulously net-curtained, and gazed out. I imagine she spent most of her time like this, looking out on the front porch, keeping a caring but careful eye on the comings and goings of her tenants, thinking it her right as well as her duty. Her spine was straight and her shoulders had no hunch to them and her dark hair showed only traces of white, like seams of silver in a mine. From behind, you could have lopped twenty years off her age and still felt you were doing her an injustice. But the skin beneath her eyes gave her away: it was napped and creased and a delicate shade of grey from decades of gazing. The eyes themselves had stayed bright and clear. Any fool could tell that she had been ravishingly beautiful in her youth. She still was - in a faded, wilted sort of way.

  Lech gave a whistling whine and sank his head down on to his paws.

  "Nothing is permanent," said Mrs Konwicki without turning round. "Do you love her?"

  Now why hadn't I asked myself that question? "I suppose it would be hard not to, under the circumstances."

  "None of that, Feelhip. A simple yes or no. It's very important."

  A long, long pause for thought. "Yes."

  "Good. And do you want her back?"

  "Why not?"

  "Then I think I can help you."

  "Oh please don't try and talk to her," I begged. "Think how it'll look. It'll look like I asked you to be an ambassador."

  "You'll do the talking, Feelhip. First, you're going to have to invite her over to dinner."

  "That won't work. She's tasted my cooking."

  "She'll come if you ask her properly."

  "Tell her I've brought in outside caterers?"

  "Be calm. Be friendly. Don't beg."

  "And she comes over and what happens?"

  Now Mrs Konwicki turned. Now she fixed me with her old bright eyes, and the daylight, softened by the net curtains, glowed in a golden nimbus around her head.

  "I will give you something," she said. "I will give you something which you will put in her food. Something that will help change her mind."

  "Like a love potion, right?"

  "Yes, a little like that."

  I couldn't help myself. I snorted explosively and cried, "Oh God!" and fired off a volley of raucous guffaws and slapped my thighs a couple of times and tried to squeeze out a few tears for good measure. "Oh, Mrs K, be serious!"

  She wasn't offended. She had been here before. "I am serious, Feelhip," she said, seriously. "My husband, as I believe I said the other day, was a very aware man. That's to say, open-minded. He knew things. He knew things before they happened and sometimes he could influence things to happen the way he wanted. I often wonder if he didn't do this to me at the village dance. Wore a special sort of fragrance, or put something on his hands."

  "Sort of like an aphrodisiac aftershave. Jesus, why didn't he market it? He'd have made a fortune."

  "There was a woman in our village who could charm warts away but she never took money for it. A loaf of bread, maybe, or an egg or two, but never money. It wouldn't work if she took money. That's the way of..." She hesitated.

  "What were you going to say?"

  "I was going to say magic, but it isn't magic. It used to be magic, perhaps, but now it's merely a set of rules to be followed. Like a recipe."

  "Well, frankly, Mrs K, in the opinion of this hard-nosed journalist it all sounds a bit far-fetched." And I should know. I had made up enough far-fetched stories in my time.

  "You want proof? Eh? You want proof? What about Mr Vowelbroke?"

  "He's going to be discharged next week, someone told me. Mr Fleming."

  "But I said I would see to him, didn't I? And I did."

  "His appendix burst."

  She put on the sort of expression people use when they hear the authorised version of events and know better. "I gave Mr Vowelbroke a bottle of milk. I told him the milkman had delivered one too many and I wouldn't be able to drink it before the sell-by date. He was very grateful. He didn't seem to mind that the cap had been punctured. I told him sparrows had done it."

  And all of a sudden I pictured, with awful clarity, Mr Walbrook accepting the bottle of milk, ever so humble, ever so grateful, come in handy, you're much too kind, Mrs Conwikky, and then pouring it over his corn flakes or in his tea, innocent white milk just like what the milkman delivers every day, and an hour later, hey presto, a bit of a gippy tum that develops into a nasty stomach cramp that becomes a sharp, creasing, debilitating agony, and next thing he knows he's being grappled downstairs like some awkward piece of furniture, his face slick with sweat and ghastly livid, groaning. And he didn't even know what he had done wrong. He hadn't done anything wrong. And there but for the grace of God...

  It could have been me. It could have been me.

  I hauled myself trembling out of the chair. "Look, I've really got to go. I'm going to be late."

  "Think about what I'm offering you, Feelhip. I'm offering you a second chance. Think about it. Think about what you have to lose and what you might gain."

  I was backing out of the door, nodding madly, saying yes, saying I would, saying anything.

  "Jewelear!" she said, stalking after me.

  "Jewelear!" as I staggered down the hallway.

  "Jewelear!" as I crashed through the front door and stumbled down the steps.

  "Jewel-"

  The thick door thumped shut on its spring and I was left with the cool sigh of wind and the rumble of traffic and Julia's name ringing in my ears.

  I wandered like a mad and lonely cloud through town, through the straggling crowds of late-season
holidaymakers grimly enjoying the last of the sunshine, through the streets of sale-shops and closing-downs, making my way down to the seafront, slithering down a set of briny concrete steps, crunching over pebbles down to the waterline, there hunkering down on my haunches and letting the waves throw themselves down at my toecaps and fall short and suck themselves back with a hiss and a seethe, regroup and hurl again. Then one particularly heavy bore came purling in and soaked my shoes even as I crabbed desperately backwards on all fours. No doubt somebody saw me and laughed.

  I got to my feet and walked along the beach towards the pier. The pier had given up a long time ago. First it had been shunned by tourists, then condemned by councillors, and then a section of it had collapsed, and now it was an eyesore ignored by everyone. What remained, what teetered on rusty struts, resembled the leavings of a wedding cake after the guests have had their fill.

  I stopped in its shadow and together, the pier and I, we gazed out to sea. The seagulls wailed around us in memory of summer: may, may, may.

  Every man is some woman's dog. I went home to Mrs Konwicki with my tail between my legs.

  "You left this," she said, handing me the leather slipcase containing my articles.

  "I just want to know one thing," I said, taking it. "Will it work, your love potion?"

  "It will work if you want it to work."

  "But will she notice? Won't it taste funny?"

  "Cook something spicy like chilli con carne or a curry and she won't notice a thing. Neither will you."

  More questions, other objections, were queuing up in my head, jockeying for position, but one strand of thought held them all back: the thought of Julia, who had made life as a stringer on a no-hope local rag in a fag-end town in the arsehole of nowhere just about bearable and had made the future as a feature writer for a glamorous daily in the teeming heart of **LONDON** just about believable.

  "Chilli," I said. "I think I can manage chilli."

  "Hello?"

  "It's me."

  "Me? Philip! How are you?"

  "I'm OK. Listen, I know this is short notice, but how about dinner tomorrow night?"

  "Erm... I don't know."

  "It'd be nice to see you."

  "I'm not sure. I think I might have something on."

  "I'm cooking, but don't let that put you off."

  "You're cooking?"

  "Yeah. Wonders will never cease."

  "Will it be just us?"

  "Er, yeah. I thought we could get a vid in. But no pressure. If you don't want to, don't."

  "...OK. Yes. Might be fun."

  "Tomorrow. Eight. Don't be late. Or I'll get irate."

  "And in a bate."

  "And break a plate."

  "And seal your fate."

  "And your hunger I will not sate."

  "And I think we'd better stop there before the rhymes get any more contrived. See you tomorrow, Philip."

  Mrs Konwicki took me through to her kitchen and showed me shelfloads of unlabelled glass storage jars filled with powdered and preserved unnameables. Their smell painted the air pungent-sweet. No dog-smell in Mrs Konwicki's kitchen.

  The dull brown powder she gave me wrapped up in a twist of paper didn't look especially potent, but according to her it could give a charging rhino a hard-on. (Actually, those are my words. Mrs Konwicki used an altogether more delicate turn of phrase.) It was made from herbs, she said, common-or-garden variety but mixed together in a certain manner which she didn't care to specify. I sniffed. The powder smelled dusty and sweet, a little like chocolate.

  On one point she was quite insistent: "You must want this, Feelhip. If there is any doubt in your heart, the smallest shred, it will not work."

  "Oh, I want it," I said. Pretty convincingly, I might add.

  "Good boy," she said.

  Thinking he was being addressed, Lech pricked up his ears.

  Julia was quarter of an hour late.

  I had made the chilli con carne the evening before, following the recipe in the book to the letter - with, of course, the one small addition - and had left it simmering on the Baby Belling overnight for that authentic lived-in flavour. I had tidied the flat, or at any rate broken a hole in the crust of untidiness that seemed to form over everything; I didn't want the place too clean or Julia's suspicions might be aroused. I had agonised over the choice of video. Nothing mindless, nothing violent, nothing starring an actor she fancied, nothing that we had enjoyed together before, least of all anything romantic. Which didn't leave a lot.

  Ah, the politics of Just Good Friends.

  Her lateness, too, was political. Too early and she might have looked keen. Too late and she might have looked wary. Regardless, she looked stunning. But I didn't tell her so. Politics, again.

  At first it was like boxing against an unknown opponent, a round of feinting, dancing, ducking, weaving, dodging while we sized one another up afresh. We told each other what we'd been up to this past couple of weeks, hummed a lot, agonised over awkward silences. Then WHAM! I went in with a guarded compliment about her new hairstyle. POW! She came back with how good the chilli smelled. THOK! THOK! I returned with a double jab: it was nice to see her, I was glad we were still on speaking terms. WHACK! Her remark about a good choice of video was so swift I didn't even see it coming. BIFF! I hoped she'd approve. And so on.

  I suggested we eat. I opened a bottle of wine (in case we weren't punch-drunk enough already). I served the steaming chilli on mounds of basmati rice, with a bowlful of salad and thick-sliced granary bread on the side. I put on a Prodigy CD, because there was no chance we would ever have danced cheek-to-cheek to the album in the past and the tunes were too tuneless to have ever been Our Tune. We ate. We drank. We talked. The conversation slowly gathered momentum until it was flowing just like the old days.

  And I watched every forkful that went into her mouth. I watched her scrape up the drips that slipped her lips. I watched her sop up the leftovers with a slice of bread. (She probably thought I had developed some weird food obsession since we split up.) And I waited. And I hoped. And I wanted. And I believed.

  "Verdict?"

  "Pretty good," she said. "You could be quite a chef if you put your mind to it."

  Well, what had I expected her to say? Take me now, hot stud?

  "There was something unusual in it," she went on. "I'm not quite sure what it was. It was unusual."

  "Magic ingredient," I said, tapping the side of my nose.

  We watched the film sitting in separate armchairs. I didn't take any of it in. I can't remember who was in it, what they did, why they did it, who survived and who died. I know that at one point Julia started crying, and I thought, This is it, here come the regrets and the apologies and then the reconciliation, this it it. But it wasn't. Something sad had happened in the film. Someone had had to leave someone else, I think. Big deal. Then it was finished. THE END. Credits rolled. Julia got up and I got up and she kissed me lightly on the cheek and I expected her to step back, take a look at me and kiss me again, full on the mouth, wetly on the mouth. But she didn't.

  "Thanks for a lovely evening," was all she said.

  "My pleasure," I replied meekly.

  "We'll do it again some time."

  "Yeah."

  "Fun."

  "Mm."

  She left.

  I wanted to scream down the stairs after her: I'VE CHANGED! I'M NOT HOLLOW ANY MORE! I'M FILLED WITH BELIEF! BELIEVE ME! BELIEVE ME! BELIEVE ME!

  But I didn't.

  Mrs Konwicki turned up at my door bright and early and eager the following morning, Lech at her heels.

  "So how did it go?"

  She came all the way up five flights of stairs just to ask me that, as if she didn't know already.

  "I think you could safely say that it was an utter waste of time and that your powder was about as much use as desiccated dog turd," I replied, more in sorrow than in anger. "Christ, Mrs K, I don't know why I believed you. No, I do. Mr Walbrook."

  "Yes,
that was fortunate. The word, I think, is serendipity."

  "Seren-? Jesus..."

  "Poor Feelhip. And you fell for it." She leaned her head to one side and shrugged down the corners of her mouth. The shrug spread to her shoulders. "Well, I am very plausible. But really, what were you hoping for? A miracle cure?"

  "Would have been nice."

  "I'm afraid only God can provide those. God, and the human heart."

  "So..."

  "Cocoa powder."

  "And..."

  "It might have happened, you never know. It was worth a try."

  "But..."

  "At least the two of you had an evening together. It's a start. Something to build on." Mrs Konwicki reached out and patted my cheek. Her hand was dry as papyrus, dusty as a palm leaf awaiting monsoon. "Mustn't hang around gossiping. Ring her, Feelhip. Keep trying. Never give up hope."

  She turned and started downstairs, but Lech stayed in the doorway for a moment longer and we stared at one another, man to man, dog to dog, and then he thumped his tail against the floor and I swear, I swear he was grinning.

  "Lech!"

  And then he leapt around and was gone, too.

  Wings

  The bell rang, and suddenly the corridors and shafts of the school were filled with moving bodies, and the classrooms, libraries, laboratories and gymnasia were left empty and echoing to the slamming of desk lids and doors. Dust and loose leaves of paper settled even as the teachers began to shape their lips around the words "Class dismissed".

  Through the building the children flew with a great racketing roar, celebrating with their screams and whoops and yells the death of another school day. A dozen disparate streams of them converged in the main hallway, and when the hallway could no longer contain all these young bodies, all this enthusiasm made flesh, the main doors swung wide and spilled them out into the yard.

  There the children blinked and stood dazed for a moment in the sunshine, like prisoners released from long sentences in lightless dungeons; but then, quickly adjusting to their newly regained freedom, they fell to clasping hands and exchanging grins and sharing jokes and promising to meet up later that day, or tomorrow, or whenever; and dividing into pairs and knots of three or four and the odd solemn single, up from the yard they rose on single down-thrusts of their wings and off they flew along the windy streets of Cloudcap City, satchels in hand, shirt-tails and skirt-hems fluttering, blowing like dandelion seeds to all six corners of the compass.