Yes Yes More More Page 10

  “Are you hungry?” I say, and she turns round slowly, her face tilted down. She shuts the fridge door and leans back against the counter.

  “Do you want him, Annie?” she says. “He sleeps pretty well. He doesn’t cry much.” She smiles at me again and does a strange blinking and staring thing, sucks in her lips. Then she walks past me into the hall and through to the spare room, which is where we’ve put all her stuff, anything she didn’t take with her to her mum’s. It’s just a few boxes and some bin bags.

  “I’ll give you a hand.”

  “You keep an eye on Little Frank,” she tells me. She’s taller than me and staggers past with a box that would knock straight into my face if she just staggered a bit to the left. She stops at the door and looks at me, waits, and I lean over to let her out. I leave the door on the latch and watch her go slowly down the stairs, leaning backwards like she’s heavily pregnant but at chest height. When she gets back upstairs I’m on the living room floor again, leaning against the sofa, looking at Little Frank. He isn’t doing much.

  Kelly’s tied her hair back. She takes the second box, and the third, then the last one, then the big John Lewis bag with some material she’d bought to have curtains made.

  “I don’t want to go just yet,” she says. She’s in the kitchen now, Little Frank is still in the front room.

  “Frank won’t be home for a while,” I say. Does she want to see him?

  “Good.”

  “Have another drink.”

  She’s looking at her hands.

  “Is it too early to have wine?” I say, walking over to the bottle standing on the side. Red. “Are you still breastfeeding?”

  “Just one,” she says, and smiles. “I’m driving, and breastfeeding, so I shouldn’t really.”

  I pour two, put them on the table. She’s looking at the draining board, at Frank’s mug that he got on holiday in Crete once, upside down where I left it to dry. My phone gives a buzz – text message – which I ignore and she doesn’t.

  “Is he waiting for the all-clear?” she asks, looking at the phone on the kitchen counter instead of looking at me.

  “He’ll still be playing,” I say. “Or in the pub, maybe.”

  She goes to get Little Frank from the front room and I think, How can I stop this happening? And then she walks back in, sits back down, sits Little Frank up on her lap, takes her glass of wine with her spare hand. I sit down and look at her across the table, and at Little Frank who has brown eyes and a dimpled chin.

  “We need a thingy to sit him in,” I say. Turns out we have one – Kelly directs me out to the hall and after a bit of faffing I take the top part off the pram and it’s a little seat that holds up soft-spined babies while the grown-ups drink merlot. Little Frank sits like a half-deflated balloon, sometimes he’s watching us and his arms will both float up into the air and he’ll smile. Or his mouth will fall open a bit and he’ll put something in it – Kelly has given him a little plastic truck to chomp on, but other times it’s just his hand.

  “So work’s the same as ever, is it?” she asks.

  “Yeah. You thinking of going back to your place anytime soon?” Kelly used to work at a recruitment company.

  “I’m still doing some bits and pieces for them, from home. I’m not sure it’s worth it though.”

  Frank is giving her money, for the baby.

  “I’m on a retainer but it’s only tiny,” she goes on. “If it was any more it would start fucking up my maternity pay.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “But it’s nice to keep your hand in. Nice to be getting the emails.”

  “You want to play with the grown-ups as well as the baby.”

  “Yeah. He’s lovely though. He’s really lovely.”

  “He does seem pretty brilliant.” I look at Little Frank, who is looking at Kelly. “You’re pretty brilliant, aren’t you?” I say, in a high, exhaling voice.

  He ignores me. Kelly gets up and goes into the bathroom, closes the door behind her. I look around the kitchen and then I look at the patch of carpet outside the bathroom. There’s no sound from in there. I realise how quiet Little Frank is. He hasn’t gurgled for a while. I can’t even hear his breathing. I give him a little prod, and he giggles.

  “You are a very happy young man.” And I kiss the top of his soft hairy head, put my little finger inside his little fist to get that nice baby grip that they do. I shake his hand about a bit and touch my nose to his, which makes him giggle again.

  No sound from the bathroom, unless that’s the cabinet door closing. I sit back down and have just a little sip of wine. I text Frank back, tell him not to come home. Not yet, I mean. Little Frank is quiet again. He is the quietest baby I’ve ever met. There’s not a sound in the flat, I try to hear the boiler even, nothing. A bit of traffic outside.

  Then the toilet flushes and I feel ashamed that I’ve been listening so carefully. She comes back out and sits down.

  “Do you want some more wine?” I say. I get up to fetch the bottle from the counter so I can pour her another inch or two.

  And now the baby’s crying, a soft and empty cry. We both look at him, tired, and his cry gets louder and more purple-faced. Kelly reaches over to rub the top of his back, between his small shoulders. “It’s okay, darling,” she says. “It’s okay.” I pause, at the counter, and I think Kelly’s about to cry too but she doesn’t. She looks at me and starts to laugh, her head tilts back but she’s looking at me, her chest and belly shaking. Who won, is what I’m thinking. Who won here, and when is it time to leave? Then I sit back down and laugh right along with her.

  ‌Sex in New Orleans

  Annie Marshall set out alone from her north London flat on a sunshiney summer afternoon for a good long walk. She’d been bored and irritated all day, working at home, so she headed out into the pink light with the hope that fresh air and a stroll might calm her muddled brain.

  It was July, and after a few half-hearted weeks something like summer had set in. Edward Square was muggy and full of people and prams and dogs. Towards King’s Cross, where she headed down Copenhagen Street and past the car wash, Annie looked around and saw almost no one down the hill and across the canal and by the wide open steps along its edge, just a woman walking a small terrier and a car or two droning by. The sun began to sink as she walked across and towards Camden, alongside the water, running through her day’s work, trying to knock it into shape. An hour passed and, realising that the walk wasn’t doing much for her sleepy anxiety, Annie headed up the next main road and sat at the bus stop by the small cemetery there. The 274 bus would drop her back at home.

  It felt odd; there was no one else at the bus stop or anywhere in sight. A few cars went along the tree-lined road by the cemetery but that was all. There was no one in the flower shop, not even a florist, and no one in the stonemason’s yard, where crosses and headstones leaned up against the wall. It was cloudy now. Annie looked at the honeysuckle covering the pretty blue-tiled crematorium, let her mind follow the petals’ curves and the twisting stalks, thought about work, thought about her meeting tomorrow, even came up with some half-formed feature ideas.

  A few minutes later she was still sitting there, with buses quite likely gone past, when she noticed a figure in the porch of the brick office a few feet beyond the crematorium. He was standing and peering out as if he was hiding from the rain, even though there wasn’t any.

  She wasn’t sure whether he’d come out of the office or the crematorium, or from the street or the cemetery. Not too tall, thin, clean-shaven, with a stubby fat nose, he had copper hair and a milky, freckled face. He looked alien, otherworldly. He did, though, have a grey canvas bag hanging from one shoulder, wore a pair of jeans and muddy trainers. Though he wasn’t old, he had a walking stick which he held with both hands on top, the cane leaning diagonally from the ground, with one of his ankles crossed over the other. He looked like he might topple over as he looked up.

  Annie had been watching the man sleepil
y and perhaps not discreetly, and she was knocked awake when she realised he was staring right back at her. She shifted on the bench and turned away, as if to check up the road for that bus, and decided she wouldn’t take any more notice of this strange character.

  A moment later she’d forgotten him, distracted by something else: there was a sudden expansion in her chest, a dizzy lurch and soar, and a panicky urge for lost adventure. Annie was scared to move, and her hands held tight to the front edge of the bench. Then her brain filled with pictures of warm pavements and sticky cocktails, strange smiles and new hands to hold. She saw a sultry city, a glooping and glittering world of blossoming trees and pearls. She saw long fingers tapping songs on a tabletop, one leg crossed louche across the other, a fresh drink coming over. She saw water flowing slowly, green and topped with wet dust, cawing birds ignoring her, beautiful and jerky, clumsily flying. Then the dream left her, and with a sniff Annie leaned back on the bench, one ankle pulled up now onto the other knee, and breathed in slow and deep.

  She took two weeks’ holiday every year, plus that week between Christmas and new year, and she had a few weekends away. She was an editor, for magazines and occasionally working on books too. She’d got quite serious about herself really, as a fixture in a far-reaching and fairly well-to-do professional network. She’d been in love, though not for some time. She even lived with a man for a while, but that turned out to be no good at all. Still, she thought she’d probably stay in London forever, in her nice little flat, and keep on skipping to Spain or Italy every summer.

  The idea of disappearing to a place of sunshine and sticky drinks and glinting eyes was vague and silly. Then Annie thought about work, and those hours of staring blankly at a screen that stares blankly back. She was good at her job, but she had started to feel disdainful of those who praised her work and asked for more. She thought about the next few months, in her flat working or sometimes at the office, or out late in bars with friends and colleagues. A few years ago she used to walk home at two in the morning, barefoot and drunk, contentedly half-lost along orangey streets, but these days she muttered and wished grumpily for a taxi.

  She wanted an adventure – how cheesy – and she had the money to do it. Savings, a few, and she could rent out the flat. So she would go away, maybe a long way away, to the tigers. A night on a plane under a thin blanket. A month or two, or three, somewhere friendly and warm.

  And like that it was decided, as the bus approached between parked cars and slowed up for her. She was already impatient to look at airfares and hotels and weather forecasts. She thought, too, to glance back at the man with the stubby nose, her companion during that invisibly dramatic wait at the bus stop, but she couldn’t see him. He wasn’t under the porch anymore, or in the cemetery, or on the street, and he didn’t follow her onto the bus.

  *

  A fortnight later Annie had organised for her friend Joe to stay in her flat and cover some of the mortgage. She’d done it before, when she moved in with her ex. Joe would rent out the spare room and that money would go straight into Annie’s current account. It would be tight but doable. She told friends and colleagues that she was taking a sabbatical for a couple of months, maybe more. Then she set off for Perpignan, on the Eurostar from St Pancras and then from Paris straight down the middle of France.

  She wanted somewhere warm and abroad, but somewhere easy, so she was heading to the holiday house of her aunt Pauline, which she could borrow anytime it was empty. The house was five minutes’ walk from the seafront, a little way outside Perpignan on a small square surrounded by tall faded houses. She would sit there and drink Ricard and smile at the locals, wink at the old men.

  She got there, though, and the locals didn’t smile, the sun was hidden behind damp clouds, and she realised she had not found her final spot. On that first evening, sitting alone in the house, Annie’s brain skipped around the world trying to imagine where she might feel right. A place where it wouldn’t matter that she only spoke English. A place that was warm. A place with music and dancing. And not some place full of travellers finding themselves.

  She realised – it was clear and fantastic – the perfect, dreamy spot. She packed up again and booked her flights, reserved a room in a sweet little guesthouse she found online. It took less than two hours. She would go straight there, not go back home. The next day she was on a train to Paris, and that evening she’d be on a flight across the Atlantic to Detroit, where she would take a connecting flight to her proper destination: New Orleans.

  At Charles De Gaulle, dragging her bags, she saw a vast glass cave above her, enjoyed the noisy tiles under her feet. At check-in – passport in hand, passport on counter, hand luggage on shoulder, big bag on the conveyor belt – the groomed young man checked her photo and her visa, checked her face, and gazed softly at the screen while he typed. His hair was trimmed into straight lines behind his ears and across the back of his neck. His posture was straight like an obedient child’s and his voice was even and smiling.

  “Your bags will go straight through to New Orleans,” he said, closing the passport and sliding it back over, rather slowly and wistfully, not looking up. “What a place! What a place. Amazing.” He was almost mumbling. “Such a wonderful warm city! With the music, of course, and the food!” There was something strange happening, as if Annie wasn’t going to New Orleans at all, as if it was this check-in man who was going and she had disappeared from the whole scenario. She took her passport, nodded and said, “Thank you. I’m very excited,” but in a voice that was flat, and walked away, towards security and the departure lounge.

  With one hand on the railing, leaning a little, she watched the people in front of her in the queue, waiting for the scanners and conveyor belts. A woman kept an eye on three small girls, one of whom was beaming and giggling at a security guard. A couple of teenagers leaned on the railing too, tapping their passports together and humming a song between them. And right in front of Annie a group of women in their thirties were chatting and laughing, all nudges and shrieks, prods and hilarity as they compared passport photos and pulled silly faces. One of them, wearing a yellow dress with a silky crimson scarf and big sparkly earrings, was somehow the centre of the action – taller, maybe, or louder. When Annie took a good look at her, though, she realised with a cringing delight that the woman was not like the others. She was old, simple as that; she had wrinkles down her cleavage and liver spots on her arms; her hair was dyed, badly; the skin on her neck was loose; her hands were claws, and her mouth was a bit too thin, her teeth a bit too yellow. What did her companions think, what did they say, about this old woman wearing their outfits, as if she was in her smooth, firm prime of life? They seemed to treat her like one of the gang, as an equal, laughing, touching her bare arms, with no quick glances to each other behind her old back. Annie put both hands on the railing, felt hot. Something was not quite right, it occurred to her, and she closed her eyes tight-tighter, hoping to reset her brain. She tried it again two minutes later and half-believed that the scanner, as she passed through it, might show something strange living inside her.

  In seat 24H, with her bag in the locker above, Annie folded up her coat against the window so she could snuggle there. She watched the other passengers file in, shoving bags into gaps while air stewards went to and fro. The seat next to her was empty and she was pleased when it stayed that way. The dreaminess was starting to feel normal now. She didn’t close her eyes tight to try to shake it away this time, she just took a slow breath and watched the people around her settle into their seats. She watched the safety video, and glimpsed the air steward who was strapped into her own little seat a few rows ahead. Annie felt her fingers tingle as the plane rolled along the runway and finally let her eyes fall closed. Just then, the plane revved and sped, she felt a floating sensation and, looking out the window almost in panic, saw the concrete below tilt and recede. After some wobbling and lurching they were up in the sky, heading higher and away. She must have been doing something o
dd because the steward, before the seatbelt sign was turned off, came over to see if she needed anything. Annie smiled, said no, I’m fine, thank you.

  The air was clouds with stripes of light. There was no hint anymore of the land below. The wings shook and shuddered. With a blanket on her knees and another tucked around her shoulders, Annie watched through the small window and the hours passed. Dinner came and she left it in front of the seat beside her. They were in the pale blue, above the clouds. Below was land, or sea. In empty spaces and irrelevant scale, she thought, we float into the immeasurable. Smiling, chattering faces – the man with the copper hair, the woman with the wrinkled cleavage – seemed close by and familiar, and she fell asleep in their company.

  Hours later she was given orange juice, a small soggy cake and slices of apple for breakfast. There was a low sun outside. Other passengers were stirring too, sleepy and compliant, their shoes lost under seats, children lying sideways with heads and feet on laps. The breakfast was foul but Annie finished it, thought it best to eat something, and then got back to the window, watching the sky. Detroit was beneath them, and her connection was smooth. It seemed inevitable, it felt reassuring, when the chatting, laughing women took the same onward flight as her. On the next plane they were just a few rows ahead, tired but still piled up with colour and accessories.

  Sitting there, Annie imagined how it would be to arrive in New Orleans by ship instead, on a cruising steamboat, grand and stately. The air would be as wet as the river, her skin damp and warm too. The air in the plane was dry, and it was a little cold. She looked out over the wing and thought of the city waiting for her, the skinny balconies and the front steps, the shop windows to look in, the bars to drink in, the musicians playing old songs. Her chest felt light and tight, and her cheeks had lifted because her smile was so big.