The Crossing Read online

Page 4


  ‘Una bruja? Que va! Es como una chica que trabaja en una pastelería.’

  Professor Kimber is at the party, dress split to her thigh, a silk camellia in her hair. She has brought two bottles of prosecco and a bunch of small yellow hothouse roses. She has also brought three or four of the moths, who look innocent, sane and gentle, entirely unpredatory. At some point during the evening, the party in its last fling, the moths flown home, Tim finds himself alone with the professor. ‘Congratulations,’ she says, touching her glass to his, and when he thanks her she says, ‘Now which do you think she is, Tom—very fragile or very strong?’

  ‘Tim,’ he says, ‘rather than Tom.’

  She smiles. ‘I suppose you’ll find out in the end,’ she says. ‘I suppose we all will.’

  At Christmas they are invited to his parents’ house. He puts them off with the promise of being there the following year, and he and Maud spend Christmas Day alone eating tinned sardines, peaches in brandy, chocolate money. He has bought for her several small lovely things. A little brooch of antique jade in the form of a salamander. A dozen bangles of thin, beaten silver. A trinket box of polished rosewood (though she possesses no trinkets). A book of Chinese poems full of lovesick minor officials setting off for remote provinces. Also, a pot of winter jasmine, flowering.

  To Tim, Maud gives a sailor’s knife with a cork handle and a marlinspike. ‘This is perfect,’ he says, not mentioning the two he already has in a drawer somewhere. ‘A perfect present.’

  On New Year’s Eve, frigid air tangled in the branches of the plane trees, Tim prepares them a private feast. First, a dozen oysters that have been sitting in their woven basket on the narrow balcony; then steak tartare made by hand-mincing best fillet, a raw egg stirred in, a chopped shallot. She has never eaten steak tartare but is happy to try it. He cannot imagine what he might suggest that she would baulk at. Sago pudding? Calf’s brain? In restaurants, when she chooses from the menu, he does not get the impression she particularly favours one dish over another. And he loves the way she steadily clears her plate, the way at the end she puts her knife and fork together, tightly, a dead knight and his lady.

  With the meal over they sit on the sofa and drink gin. Glass after glass of it. The room is snug, a faint odour of seafood, the sea.

  ‘Have you ever done anything you’re ashamed of?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever done something, you know, deliberately to hurt someone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever stolen anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever lie to your parents?’

  She shrugs. ‘I didn’t tell them everything.’

  ‘Aha! What didn’t you tell them?’

  ‘Just not everything.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Where I’d been. Who I went with.’

  ‘Who did you go with?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. When you went.’

  ‘We’re drunk,’ she says.

  ‘Of course we’re drunk,’ he says. ‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I bet you kissed Professor Kimber. I know she wants to.’

  She laughs at this, that short laugh of hers that always seems to catch her unawares. ‘Why don’t you play the guitar?’ she says.

  ‘I want to know everything,’ he says. ‘Swindon 1975. Daylight. Your first breath.’

  ‘That tune you played when I came out of hospital.’

  ‘When did you start being you?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘Try.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You never ask about my girlfriends,’ he says.

  ‘Why would I ask about them?’

  ‘Curiosity?’

  ‘I’ll ask if you want.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No. The past is the past. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘It’s just us now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tim and Maud.’

  He tops up their glasses. They’ve been drinking it neat. Their colour is high, their mouths burned with gin. They decide to go for a walk but get no further than the bedroom. They kiss, they topple on to the bed. The curtains are open but the room is unlit.

  They seem to have been sewn into their clothes. Buttons do not operate in the usual way. He licks her wrists, she strokes his ears. Half an hour later he floats into the bathroom, kneels in front of the toilet and throws up. Oysters, raw meat, acid, gin. He’s there a long time. When he comes back to the bedroom, cold, shaky, he stands in the doorway looking at her as she sleeps in a pool of thin light that falls past the netting over the window. His heart fails him for a moment, for there is nothing there, nothing in her shape on the bed, compact as a seed, to suggest she has any need of him, that she is not already complete. He has been fooling himself! He has not reached her, has not understood her at all. He should get out before it’s too late. He should pack a bag and get out. He will change his name. He will work on a trawler. Maud, in time, will marry a passing god, a moth god. Or become a temple prostitute or an assassin or the first woman on Mars. She will think of him sometimes. She will look at the bangles, the jade salamander. She will not cry.

  He whispers her name. She is snoring lightly; a girl, a woman, dreaming of snakes. Or whatever. You don’t know. He unhooks his big towelling bathrobe from the back of the bedroom door, lays it over her with elaborate care, then settles himself on the bed beside her, shudders, shuts his eyes, plays music in his head, thinks, wow, 2001. Wow.

  In the morning, he remembers neither insight nor fantasy. He feels ill and cleans the kitchen. He decides—kneeling in the middle of the brightening floor—that the only thing that matters is being brave and he shouts this news to Maud in the bathroom and after a second or two thinks he hears her call back her yes.

  She starts work at Fenniman’s. She has bought two new outfits from the department store near the bus station. One is dark blue, one is black. Dresses with jackets that make Tim think of the sort of outfits a woman detective might wear to give evidence in court.

  She gets up early, perhaps two hours before it is light. By lamplight he watches her dress. If she notices him she doesn’t object. The clever way women put their bras on. Deodorant, camisole. He likes to watch her pull her tights on, how the act of pulling up the tights to her waist is somehow childlike, so that it’s easy to imagine her at eight or twelve, dressing for school on a winter’s morning. Depending on the outfit, she sits on the edge of the bed for him to zip up her dress. Each morning for the first two weeks he offers to make her breakfast but she doesn’t want it. She cleans her teeth then leans in to say goodbye, her coat in her arms.

  The first month is induction. She goes up on the train, eats a sandwich, drinks tea, looks out at the grey fields, houses in their morning privacy, the light coming up over England. Certain faces become familiar—the man who never takes off his cycling helmet, the man who appears to be meditating, the woman with eczema. When the carriage is very warm she sometimes falls asleep and twice in one week she dreams of the desert—or some place, scuffed, waterless, inchoate, that she thinks of as desert for lack of any term more exact.

  At the laboratory they introduce her to everyone, including the cleaners. Fenniman’s has bright, egalitarian policies. First names, no titles. The atmosphere is relaxed but focused. The walls are painted a fine silvery grey. The furniture is moulded plastic in primary colours. Here and there, on walls and doors, there are squares of board printed with inspirational quotes—Martin Luther King, Einstein, Gandhi. On the door of Meeting Room 2 there’s a poem by Marianne Moore:

  If you will tell me why the fen

  appears impassable, I then

  will tell you why I think that I

  can get across it if I try.

  The air of the place is odour neutral. The staff wear no perfumes or colognes, no one smokes. Even in the animal room, where three hundred rats live in carefully indexed cages, there is no strong smell. Heat in the room is strictly maintained at between twenty-two and twenty-five degrees. The lights come on and off at twelve-hour intervals. The animals themselves, or those not subject to experimentation, are sleek with health, gentled from regular, careful handling. At break-times, rather than sit up in the staff room, Maud sometimes goes down to help the technician, a man called Keith who plays at the weekends in a bluegrass band and who sometimes winks at her as if he and she alone can see through it all, the Fenniman vision, the Fenniman mission.

  At the end of induction she is given two hundred business cards and two lab coats (Fenniman Laboratories embroidered over the breast pocket). She is given a phone, the Nokia 8260. She is given a computer—one of the iBook ‘clamshells’ that come in a variety of colours (Maud’s is blueberry). There is also a company car, a Vauxhall Corsa (purple), 78,000 miles on the clock, the driver’s seat moulded to the shape of someone larger than Maud, someone who has left the company.

  She will monitor three projects in three different cities. A study of nociceptors and allodynia at the Radcliffe in Oxford, liver enzymes at the Royal Infirmary in Bristol, and the epibatidine trial in Croydon. Each project has its allotted day. One day a week will be spent at the headquarters in Reading; the remaining day she will be at the flat, working on the clamshell. She is not highly paid but paid well enough and she will have more if she successfully completes her probation. Promotion to Clinical Research Associate could happen as soon as eighteen months. On the last day of induction, Henderson, despite the cold, the blustering wind, walks her the length of the car park to where the Corsa is waiting. ‘For luck,’ he says, and gives her a small origami crane he has made from red paper. It almost blows away as he passes it to her.

  8

  Spring comes, and with it the sly greening of the city. Doing yoga in the living room while Maud is at work, Tim is struck by a beam of sunlight and imagines himself a saint in a painting.

  He decides to write a concerto, quite a short one perhaps, which he will call CYP2D6 after the liver enzyme that converts codeine into morphine and which, for the pleasures of her teacherly gaze, her fluency, he has made Maud explain to him at length and in detail. He will, of course, dedicate the concerto to her. For Maud, for M. For M with love. He will give it to her on her birthday or some other auspicious day. The little concerto. It will be proof of many things.

  Elated by this—the prospect of the work, the already perfectly imagined moment of the presentation—he cycles to a music store at the bottom of Park Street and buys workbooks bound in blue card. Urtext. Merkheft fur Noren und Notizen. He buys a dozen (they are so beautiful) then cycles to the delicatessen on Christmas Steps and has the plump girl lift ribbons of pasta from the wide floury drawer under the counter. He buys fennel sausages (that he will split from their skins), dried porcini, single cream, imported yellow courgettes. Also a bottle of red wine with a painterly label that seems to show Eve companionable with the serpent, the pair of them under an umbrella pine in some dangerous southern garden.

  When she comes home—it’s been a Croydon day, a three-hour meeting about the biosynthesis of alkaloids, then a talk, endless, entitled ‘What can we learn from ABT 894?’—the wine is open, the mushrooms soaking in warm water, a large pan on the gas coming slowly to the boil. She takes a shower. When she comes back to the kitchen towelling her damp hair he says, ‘Today was a true spring day, wasn’t it?’

  He watches her sit, watches her set up the little blueberry computer. He pours her a glass of wine. ‘Check out the label,’ he says. ‘It may not be theologically sound.’

  The sideboard by the cooker is spread with good things. His technique with garlic—crushing the clove with the flat of his knife, slipping it from its skin, dicing it—has an almost professional flair. He chatters to her over his shoulder. He hears the computer keys, now slow, now as though she is dropping fistfuls of dried peas. He has finished his first glass and pours himself a second. The wine, which had been interesting at first, with notes of rosemary and black tobacco, now seems bizarrely heavy, syrupy and heavy, with notes of tar, dead flowers, bath oil. How stupid it is to buy wine for the label! How stupid to go shopping because you have been touched by a beam of sunlight while practising yoga!

  On the wall above her head the plaque of evening light is crisscrossed with the shadows of the plane trees. He takes a plate from the rack beside the sink, holds it at arm’s length over the floor, waits some eight or ten seconds, then drops it. She looks at the shattered plate, glances up at him, turns back to the columns on the screen. ‘Sorry,’ he says, and fetches the dustpan and brush from the narrow cupboard at the far end of the kitchen where all the cleaning things are kept.

  9

  Something he would like to tell somebody. That when she sucks him it is no more lewd than if he were being sucked by, I don’t know, a heifer, something of that kind. It is thorough and patient. And when he comes she drinks every last drop of him so that he wavers over the abyss and for several minutes afterwards is unable to meet her gaze or even say her name. In fact, there is no one he could possibly tell this to, not even his brother.

  10

  Though neither of them is now officially connected to the university, they are allowed to stay in the sailing club. They are the type of members the club cannot easily do without. They work on the boat, they pay their subscriptions, they know how to sail.

  The boat is out of the water again but there is no caulking to be done, no bolts to replace. Some scrubbing of the hull and keel, on deck some sanding and varnishing. The most pressing job is replacing the stern gland around the propeller shaft. By the end of last season a steady drip had become a thin persistent trickle. It is not a job to attempt in the water, seawater flooding the engine compartment while someone flails with a spanner.

  On the Saturday before Easter, they drive down to the coast in the Lancia. At the boatyard they meet two other members of the club, Angus and Camille. They pull on overalls. Camille, a fourth-year medical student, has brought two thermoses of coffee and a tupperware box of madeleines she has baked herself. Angus tucks copper dreadlocks under a woollen cap. Tim fetches the ladder and lashes the top rung to a cleat on the deck. He does not want Maud going up, feels his stomach turn at the sight of it, her blithe stepping from ladder to deck. He suggests she wear a safety line though he does not expect her to agree to it. She does not agree to it.

  They work until two; coffee and madeleines sustain them. The men scrub the hull—neither is remotely mechanical—while Maud and Camille kneel either side of the access hatch on the cockpit sole, skinning their knuckles undoing clips and loosening bolts. To shift the locking nut they have to wrap four hands around the handle of the wrench. The capping nut is no easier. Camille hisses, ‘Merde, merde,’ and when she catches her wrist, hard, on the edge of the hatch, is briefly tearful, then, laughing to find herself so ignored, comes back to the work. To free the old packing they need a tool they do not have—that may not, in fact, exist. Maud goes down the ladder and crosses to the boat shed. The shed is a hundred years old, an expanse of roofed air like a provincial railway station from the heroic days of steam, one of those places always grander than the town it served. There is no one in view—the yardsmen are still at lunch perhaps—and she is about to leave when a man leans from a shadowed tangle of ribs and struts, the beginnings or end of a boat, leans out and looks at her a moment and says, ‘You’re the girl whose flying lesson went wrong. I was here when that happened.’

  His name is Robert Currey. He is forty, perhaps a little more, short and broad, his hair in dark curls. She tells him what she is trying to do, what she needs. He nods and crosses to a canvas tool bag, roots around (the bag is like an old canvas fish, a pantomime fish) and comes out with a tool, steel handle at one end, then a length of hawser, then, at the tip, something like a corkscrew. He smiles at her. ‘Good luck,’ he says.

  The old packing is dragged out. Tim and Angus drive into town to buy crab sandwiches and a box of new packing. Maud and Camille wash in the marina toilet block. Camille brushes her fingers over the ink on Maud’s arm. ‘I love this,’ she says. ‘You want to see one of mine?’

  She unbuttons the overall, peels herself, undoes her jeans and hooks down the waistband to show, just above the black cotton of her pants, a pair of elegantly drawn ideographs, Chinese Japanese.

  ‘What does it mean?’ asks Maud.

  ‘Fuck me until I cry,’ says Camille. She rolls her eyes. ‘Actually, it means harmony.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ says Maud.

  ‘Yes,’ says Camille. ‘It’s nice but I like yours better. Yours is speaking.’

  In watery sunlight they saunter in the yard. There are yachts on stilts, a few power boats, some upturned wooden boats like wherries or ships’ pinnaces; a fishing boat hauled up on the slip, halfway through a fresh coat of blue paint. At the far end of the yard, the point where they will have to begin their loop back towards the water, Maud stops beside one of the chocked boats, looks up, walks slowly around it, first one way then the other. Everything suggests it has been there a long time. Even the wooden props are darker than those of the other boats, have more weather in them. The hull—fibreglass—is spotted with old red paint. The keel is long, deep, substantial. When she steps back she can see the end of the unstepped mast poking out like a bowsprit. All the rest is under a green tarpaulin streaked with bird shit and lashed so low over the transom they cannot see a name, a home port. From the mast tip, hanging like something someone has slung there and forgotten, is a small wooden board, the words ‘For Sale’ painted on it, and a telephone number, of which only the first few digits are legible.