In the City of Love's Sleep Read online

  She unlocks a cabinet, takes down a tray and explains that this particular lump of clay is a copy of a model of an animal’s liver. The original, which is in another museum, is four thousand years old.

  This is four thousand years old? asks Kate.

  No, says Iris. This is a copy. But it is about a hundred.

  What are all those marks? Kate is trying to be interested. Lou won’t look.

  Babylonian script, says Iris.

  What’s it say?

  I don’t know.

  Then what’s the point? says Lou.

  They’re a set of predictions. A priest would sacrifice an animal, cut out its liver and look for marks. And then he or she would look at the same place on the model and that would be the prediction. Like an oracle or a horoscope.

  Did they kill the animal first or just cut out their liver? asks Kate.

  Kate is trying hard to feel that this is something special but Lou is starting to need to say things more than she needs to protect her mother.

  Why would a museum want a copy? she says.

  To fill the gaps in a collection.

  Even if it’s not the real thing?

  Iris hesitates and then tries to explain.

  It’s very hard to say that anything is the real thing. Everything turns out to be a version of something else or a version of an idea.

  Am I a version? asks Kate.

  I suppose so, says Iris. You’re a version of me and Dad but you’re also an original, yourself, the real and only thing.

  Kate laughs with delight at this but Lou is rigid in her boredom.

  Why are there so many of the same thing? she asks. Don’t you need just one?

  The man who collected all this didn’t think so.

  Her daughters aren’t interested in what the collector might have thought. Iris wonders what else she can offer.

  We have fifty dentist’s chairs.

  Lou shakes her head.

  They’re only dentist’s chairs.

  Yes, but there are fifty.

  Kate puts herself between them and as if she were five rather than ten, she shouts: I want to see!

  The museum has put two dentist’s chairs on display in expensive mock-ups of surgeries of the relevant era. The chairs blend into their proper settings. Here, in the basement of the stores, huddled together alongside the iron lungs and radiography machines, they are perturbing.

  The girls are impressed.

  So much strange furniture, whispers Kate.

  The basement is full of versions of beds, tables, cupboards and chairs. From plain wooden slats to a red velvet throne, leather, chrome, plastic and paintwork of a pale clinical green, they all have the same ambivalence. Rest, they say, but also endure.

  For hundreds of years we have been finding new ways to enter and interfere with the body. Now, when we cut open a body or study its internal markings, all we can predict is why it isn’t working, whether it will work again, and perhaps for how long.

  *

  That evening Iris’s phone keeps ringing while she’s watching television with the girls. It buzzes away on the table in front of them and all three can see David’s name. Iris doesn’t move. The fourth time he rings, Kate reaches out but Lou stops her. They copy their mother and concentrate on the programme. Iris pretends not to notice but she’s horrified. When did the girls become these pale little diplomats? They’re too young to have to be so careful.

  Once they’re in bed, she rings David.

  They’re are under such strain, she says. We should both try harder not to impose on them.

  You want me to pretend not to be ill?

  But you aren’t ill, she wants to say, not most of the time. She says nothing.

  You always said we should give them the facts, he says.

  Shall we give them the facts about why you had to leave?

  Because you were so angry all the time? I think they know that.

  I never let them see my anger. Never.

  As she says this, Iris feels something twist inside. David’s voice thins as he reaches for what might hurt her most.

  You think you’re so in control. I had to rescue you before we’d even said hello, remember?

  That’s not fair.

  It’s true, though, isn’t it?

  She notices that he’s breathing strangely.

  Are you drunk, David? You’re drunk.

  She’s right. David lay down at lunchtime with a bottle of whisky. He wants to know who Iris is fucking and hates the fact that whatever is going on makes him want to fuck her too. But she doesn’t want him or his body. Most of the time now he can’t get it up and then there’s the problem of continence. He can’t get it up and he can’t hold it in, while Iris is being transformed back into her old fuckable self. And someone else, not him, is making that happen.

  He slams into her and she slams back, forgetting that his condition sometimes makes him slur his words just as it makes him shake and stumble and need to lie down. Iris despises herself as much as she despises David. They’re two blunted and acid individuals who’ve discovered that it’s easy to say the worst thing. They aren’t adults in pain, they’re monsters.

  *

  Iris and Max are wearing thick jackets as they stand in a chilly hallway in the stores making tea from a kettle on a shelf. The kitchen has been requisitioned. There are always more objects. Iris has been working with Max since before David’s diagnosis. When they met she was the mother of two tiny girls, still blurred, with an erratic but charming husband. She and David struggled but they had the resilience that comes from believing that the struggle will end.

  Iris’s job this morning is to retrieve and prepare sections of nineteenth-century marine telegraph cable for a researcher visiting this afternoon. The cable is so frayed and corroded that she’s anxious about moving it. She puts on gloves, lifts each tray from the shelf and places it on a trolley, which she wheels down the corridor to the lift. The lift is broken and the research room is two floors below. When she rings Max to ask for help, she sees that there’s a message from David. She leaves it unread.

  If an object has to be carried, an act that is fraught with risk, then it must be for as short a distance as possible. Only when Max is in position with another trolley one floor below does Iris pick up the first tray and walk down the stairs. Once every section has been safely transferred to the second trolley, they repeat the exercise and move down another floor. The lift won’t be repaired for weeks.

  When they reach the study room Iris reads the message from David: Your anger sucked the joy out of their childhood. They learnt to creep round you. We all did. You’re terrifying. Iris is shaking because she believes that this might be true.

  Is it from David? asks Max. Has he said no?

  No to what?

  Coming back. I thought—

  I didn’t ask him.

  But you said you’d decided.

  I hadn’t.

  You had.

  I know. I mean I don’t know. Anyway. No.

  Iris does not like to be seen. She turns away from the gaze of her husband and her friends. She turned away from Raif as soon as he started to meet her eyes. This is her most characteristic gesture and it draws people towards her because they feel they can’t quite see her. She has also for many years been turning away from herself.

  Max suggests they go up onto the roof for a cigarette. There’s a fire exit out through a window onto a series of spacious terraces punctuated by chimney pots, lightning conductors, aerials and ventilation units. Their view is into the sunset and the low line of the edge of the city. There are towers here too but they are neither valued nor protected. Their walls are cheap and their windows small.

  Max, without looking at Iris, confronts her.

  Do you think you can go on deciding?

  I’m not aware of a deadline.

  Nothing’s going to happen to make things any clearer.

  (Raif comes electrically to mind.)

  Someth
ing can happen that has nothing to do with anything, Iris says, but it helps you see.

  Max knows that she finds this kind of conversation difficult.

  You mean like an augury? Did you see a miraculous image in the broken cable we’ve been hauling about all morning?

  Iris doesn’t laugh, which makes Max curious.

  So what made you change your mind?

  I don’t know what it is or what it means but something’s different. I suppose I’ve been waiting for a sign and it’s as if there’s been one and I’ve missed it.

  *

  The cable that Iris and Max carried so gently down the stairs had once been laid across the bed of the Atlantic. After a thousand miles of it was in place, it broke and had to be abandoned. Now that a hundred and fifty years have passed, these salvaged sections are no longer just part of a failed instrument but historical artefact. Over time, things pass from being common to obsolete to rare.

  So much of what’s displayed in the museum reflects discovery and progress but there have been many more inventions that didn’t work or weren’t adopted. Even so, these failures were a vital step. Eventually cables were laid that did not snap, telegraphs were sent, telephone wires followed, and the four thousand people who sat in this building processing letters were out of a job.

  We make a mistake or take a wrong turn and if we’re wise we build on it and so a path grows. It’s like drawing a map out of precipices and dead ends.

  who are you?

  As you gather information about someone, you think you see them ever more clearly. Perhaps you’ll never see them as clearly as at first meeting when the yes was said.

  Iris types Raif’s name into the search engine and then deletes it. She’s like a girl who will only dare write the name of her crush in the sand when the tide is coming in. A girl who picks up a net and throws it towards the sea and as the net unfurls it keeps growing and instead of the three silver fish she wished for, she hauls in every sea creature that ever was: cloud after cloud of small matter, entire landscapes, things that thrash and things that glide, dazzle and stink. The more the girl pulls at the net the more gets cast up until she’s surrounded by tall shadows and tiny details, thrash and glide, dazzle and stink, and she can only let go.

  The three silver fish Iris wants to hold in her hands are enough information to give this man substance and presence. No more. She would say she’s curious and that he’s a potentially useful professional contact, more or less a colleague. Will she discover that he looks nothing like she remembers? (What does she remember?) She doesn’t want to find herself poking around inside his life. (Is he married?)

  Iris types his name again and deletes it but she needs to make a connection to compensate for the one that she has just denied herself. She needs to feel a thread being drawn. She types a different name.

  *

  She was eighteen, still new to the city and halfway through her first term at university. Though shy and uncertain in company, Iris was then sure of her heart. It said yes or no and she listened. She hadn’t yet found those who would become lasting friends, and had gone alone to a number of events where she stood in a corner and smoked. At one of these she met a boy who looked like a boy from home in that he too buttoned his collar and flopped his hair over one eye. But this boy wore bad jeans and carried a rucksack which was not the same thing as the backpacks the art students affected. Iris was concerned with this kind of detail but she was also flattered by his blunt attention and was about to discover a capacity in herself to set detail aside.

  This boy was refreshing. He wasn’t studying art history, as she’d assumed, but engineering at a neighbouring college. She liked his smooth build, his sweet features. They danced without acknowledging that they were dancing together and he was good at that too. She’d gone back to his room, where they had straightforward sex during which he was efficient and polite. It was clear that it wouldn’t be easy for them both to sleep in his single bed so she made her way back to her own.

  He didn’t get in touch but Iris was not the type to dwell on that. The next Saturday night she set out for the same club and saw him in the street just ahead of her with a group of friends. She was about to catch them up and say hello when they stopped to cross a busy junction and one of his friends, a tiny girl in black with backcombed blonde hair, stepped into the road just as a car swerved round the corner and he yelled Jen! The blonde stepped back and they all laughed and walked on.

  Iris knew from the panic in his voice that Jen wasn’t just a friend. She marched back to her room thinking that everyone she passed had seen this humiliation: her face light up when she saw him, her awkward acceleration and then his shout. Jen.

  She went over and over this, not realising that she had little interest in either the engineer or the blonde. She was fascinated by her own acuity – that a girl had stepped out in front of a car and a boy had yelled a warning and from the tone of that single syllable, their relationship had been revealed to her. It was a good story, though she never told it. It didn’t occur to her that she might have been wrong.

  Some months later, after she’d kissed two more people and been to bed with one of them, she was happily alone listening to records and selecting postcards for the board above her desk when the engineer knocked at her door. He asked, quite formally, if she’d like to go for a drink and walked her some way to a backstreet pub. She remembers a brown, muted room.

  Would you like a glass of brandy?

  Yes, she said, not knowing whether she wanted one or not.

  I wonder if they’ve got any lovage, he said. Have you ever drunk brandy and lovage? You haven’t? It’s a herb cordial. It’s traditional.

  He returned with two glasses of brandy. The pub didn’t have lovage and this seemed to change his mood. They left as soon as they’d finished their drinks and he walked back slightly ahead of her.

  Iris still can’t imagine having such an effect on someone that they would knock on her door and then be unable to say why. Nor can she see this from the boy’s perspective. He’d taken the risk of turning up. He failed to find a nice place to go. He tried to make it special by conjuring a drink she hadn’t heard of. He needed her to help him find the words for what this was all about. Why did she say so little? Was she bored? He’d decided to cut things short and let her go home. Though they bumped into each other now and then, nothing more passed between them.

  She hasn’t thought of him for years but when she is about to search for Raif, it is the engineer who rises up to divert her. He was someone who once came to seek her out and now she wants to know what’s happened to him. Is he happy, successful, married, alive, straight or gay, handsome or gone to seed? She could probably find clues to any of this but not to the question of why he came to her room that night and why the lovage mattered.

  His name is not unusual and there are dozens of him. One picture shocks her with its familiarity but it’s of a boy who is eighteen now and who lives on the other side of the world. The engineer might be this software designer or that butcher, the lawyer, the rugby player or the illustrator. Some have a trace of his sweet features. They smile at her from corporate websites, obituaries, class photos and snaps from a night out. They gather on her screen, variations on someone she barely knew but who once took it upon himself to turn up at her door.

  All she is to Raif is whatever she reminds him of. She tells herself this and it makes her feel wise. But if Iris were to reach out to him, as if opening a door, the atmosphere would grow dense with past detail. There’d be a drag on her action as if the air had become too thick to move through. Such a gesture would look effortful, too deliberate and invested – which is exactly what it would be.

  anywhere

  When you start to move through the world beside someone, you might say that you think about them all the time. Mostly you’re thinking about how you feel and their idea of you and the possibilities this brings.

  When Raif met Liis she’d been sent to London from Milwaukee to te
ach office managers about the computer systems her company sold. She would be there for three months and then they’d move her on. To Germany, she thought, or perhaps Australia, she wasn’t sure.

  She lived in a company flat in a mansion block close to the centre of the city. It had neither character nor detail but a solidity that Raif, who grew up in a house that was still being built, found amazing. He relished the heft of the glossy dark doors, how the carpet in the foyer pushed back against his shoes, and the lift in which they had to stand so thrillingly close that he made a game of it, refusing to touch her. The lift climbed so gradually that it seemed to collude in this tension and the corridor leading to her flat was narrow enough to sustain it. They still did not touch. But as soon as the front door was closed, Liis pulled him towards her and he found his way inside her as quickly as he could. They fucked on every one of that flat’s neutral surfaces: on the putty-coloured carpet, the cardboard-brown leatherette sofa, on the fake-marble kitchen counter, up against the pale-mushroom walls. They rarely fucked in the bed.

  The flat had no pictures or ornaments. Everything in it worked perfectly, every drawer closed silently and the doors shut completely. Raif saw the entire block as a smooth machine full of smooth machines like Liis. He was incomplete and inept. He hesitated and wondered. He did not belong in such a world and so he craved it.

  They often woke in the small hours at the same moment and talked in the dark. These were their deepest conversations and were neither continued nor referred to again.

  You’re not really English, are you? she asked without embarrassment.

  People usually found a more oblique way to approach the subject, asking too soon where he grew up.

  My father was from Mauritius. His mother was Japanese.

  But your name is Arabic?

  It was my grandfather’s name. He was from another island.

  Show me.

  She produced an atlas and showed him a page that was mostly sea. She waited for him to point at where he came from but he wasn’t quite sure. To him these were stories, not places. Liis traced a line from west to east, from one tiny island to another.