W2F-006 Smith-0.txt
My name is Smith.

That much I do know.

I know also, from our last walk together, in the forest, that sloe berries turn from green to powdery blue, like bruises which refuse to heal.

Perhaps that only happens in this land, where nothing heals, where the faintest brush of yellow on skin soon becomes an open, running wound.

But I do not know perhaps.

I know that the dry husk of a pine cone chewed by rabbits is the colour of death in countries such as this.

And that the silvery flesh of dead wood in the summer is the colour of life in northern lands, where we should have gone.

There are many colours, that I know.

Because I believe that in colours you shall know the secrets of people, which they will not tell by themselves.

Whether they believe that they are the stillborn daughters of angels, or the stronger second sons of devils, on nights like this.

And I know that you can tell by their colours that people are dead, and objects are alive.

I can tell you that my stove is alive, with its six rings, its ghost feather of a pilot flame, its black and aluminium.

My stove was made by Garland of Canada. I bought it in the countryside, from a writers'retreat which was closing. In a place dedicated to creativity, the stove was the only thing that lived, squatting black and superior in the empty kitchen.

I am alive, says the stove. When no one is looking, I confess, I have hugged my stove.

But that is only because you have gone, Jude, leaving me with stoves and visions.

I had a vision of the future last night, a future in which we could become a hologram of ourselves making love.

There could be three of me, plunging into every place, or five.

Or two of you.

It is my fear, Jude, to see a women being made love to by many men.

It is my fear, that it is always you I imagine.

You, who almost drove me mad with your sweet aversion to fucking.

What is the colour of fucking?

A dark and bitter red.

What is the colour of Jude?

The colour of innocence, covered with new dust.

What is the colour of these eggs I am boiling on my black stove?

The colour of swollen bellies, waiting.

What is the colour of the bottle of thawing champagne sitting on the old table?

The colour of Jack Nicholson's smile, all sweet evil and glee.

What is the colour of the table?

The colour of uncertain good. Everything is uncertain tonight, and perhaps I do know perhaps after all.

But all these colours add up to hope, Jude.

Hope that I will hear your voice tonight, as if down the telephone from a distant land, telling me that my ticket is on its way. My ticket out of this fiefdom of tasteless dwarves to the land of tall and nobler people for which I have long awaited my visa.

In this land of one-eyed kings, only the blind are free.

So let us be blind to the past tonight, so that instead of our conversation tilting away into the doomed monologues that conversations became in the last days of our marriage, it will free me from the agony of hope that eats at me now.

Hope that you will hitch your shoulders and stretch, and I will ask you if your back is troubling you again.

That you will finish your glass and set it down, and in the breathing silence I will look out of the window to where the garden meets the trees, and ask you if you would like me to rub a little oil into your back.

That you will give me one of your knowing, sardonic expressions. The slightly amused version.

'No, I don't think so,' you will say.

'Just a shoulder?'

That you will shake your head, tapping your cigarette into the ashtray we brought back from Amsterdam, as I refill your glass.

'Neck? An ear lobe?'

That you will feign resignation. 'Would you like to see my new Panama?'
That you will mime a tipsy despair. 'All right. But it's very dangerous.'
That I will lead you up to our old bedroom, my heart shaking the stairs.

Where are you, Jude?

It is the evening, and still you are not here.

I hope you are not late because you are angry. The thought of an evening again sitting across the loaded table is more than I can bear.

I have put some butter in with the eggs, to keep them moist through the shells, easing it off the knife and down into the winded water, melting there like the age-yellow shroud of a madonna, haloed by silvery bubbles of fat.

Now the eggs are steaming, fogging the window the way memory draws a veil across the past, and on the chopping board a mushroom lies beside the knife.

It is the evening, Jude, and the light is growing dim upon this table. It is the wise time of the day, and the fire in the other room is not quite lit, so that it seems there is no connection between the black surface of the coal and the flames that dance across it.

I worry, Jude, that you were the flames and I was always the coal.

I worry, too, that in the year since you left me, I have grown old.

That although my body is young, an oldness is creeping into it.

At the back of my left calf a clump of veins bubbles under the white skin, and my hands, blue turning blotched purple in cold weather, are the hands of my father.

An oldness creeps into my clothes, into the brogues which I spent the afternoon saddlesoaping. I allowed them to dry, then buffed the uppers into an amateur paradeground gleam.

Now they are beneath the table, their softened gleam shining nuttily up.

I confess, Jude, that when no one is looking I love my brogues.

Where are you, Jude?

It is the night, and it is raining.

There was a November once, when we were not long married, when I stood by the coalshed thinking of the music the rain made, because I knew that when I went back you would be in front of the fire in the other room.

I thought often in those days of us being in some foreign land of our own invention, some unnamed northern country where no one could touch us.

And that night, as I stood there in the dark with the rain on the coalshed roof, with the sound of coffee slowly getting ready, with the rain dripping cold on the crown of my head, it could have been the thaw in a land like that, with spring almost over us and summer like a field stretching to autumn's far hedge.

I do not want to cross that hedge into another winter alone, looking at other men's wives and burning for your beauty.

Because I know now that there are women whom everyone thinks are beautiful, and whom you can see are beautiful, but who do not make you burn.

After a time you cannot love women like that.

There are women whom you think are beautiful, but whose beauty no one else sees.

After a time you cannot love women like that.

There are women you think are beautiful from the moment you meet them, and who the world thinks beautiful too.

They are the ones who seek out madness, in themselves and others.

What I wanted from you, Jude, was a little sanity, a little binding of wounds, a little salvation.

What I wanted from you, Jude, was for you to be the fourth woman.

What is the colour of the fourth woman?

A dark and bitter innocence, covered with new dust.

The colour of your shoes, which you promised that you would wear today.

But where are you, Jude.

Tap.

I am drunk, Jude.

I have opened the champagne, and the rain has stopped falling from the frozen, methylated sky.

Drunk, I have put on my old black suit and shoes, a white shirt and a black bow tie, and I am sitting here at the table, drinking champagne and reading Antoine de Saint-Exup&/ery.

I am drunk, Jude. I think I am Antoine's co-pilot, descending into the jasmine and cicada whirr of small desert towns, our breath frosting against the studded aqua sky and our sheepskin flying jackets bulky about us.

And among those thoughts, tiny misplaced thoughts keep spinning up like rocks thrown by our wheels: of my mother wiping a smear of oil from my cheek with her handkerchief, of the false, indoor smells of lipstick and cigarette smoke of it.

In this little dream within a dream, the smell of oil becomes the laborious, working smell of men, and the smell of the handkerchief becomes the smell of woman, of the glittering, faraway surface of all things.

When Antoine and I land we taxi jauntily up to the hangar and there is Biggles standing, half in the light.

'Hello,' he says as we climb down. 'Still got all my first editions?' 'Of course,' I laugh.

He offers a cigarette, but I will not take it. His hands are fine-boned and effeminate, and I wonder then where I read that first.

Why are you not here, Jude? And what is that tapping from the door, when I cut the tree back last winter? Or was it the winter before?

You will be here, Jude, before the morning comes. I do not care how long you take, because there is no anger in me any more.

There is only the hope that you will arrive this night, wearing your bitter red shoes, so that we can stand in the clearing haze of morning, our feet firm beneath us.

That you will make heaven of this night, Jude, and bring the beauty of this earth into the day.

But I am drunk, Jude. I even wish you would come back and help me choose different curtains for the other room.

Tap; tap.

What is that noise?

It is the morning, Jude, and you have not come.

I have just awakened this minute, slumped over the table in the ether dawn. What is the colour of the dawn?

I do not know.

What is the colour of that sound, from beyond the door?

Black my clothes, and black my feet.

What is the colour of the door?

I cannot remember.

What is the colour of the shoes, which swing before me as I open the door?

A dark and bitter red.

Tap; tap.

What is the colour of that sound?

The colour of your death.

'There is a process,' said Smith, 'using a rich green with tiny flecks of gold. It's very expensive, but very sumptuous in... discreet, expansive way.'

'Mmm,' said the lawyer, who was trying to work out how something could be expansive and discreet at the same time.

'Like your suit,' said Smith. The lawyer was wearing a pure wool Prince of Wales check chosen for him by his wife.

'Mmm,' said the lawyer, who considered his suit expansive, but not quite discreet.

'We want every part of the house different,' said the lawyer's wife.

'There's a beautiful northern light on that staircase which I think demands it,' said Smith.

'Mmm,' said the lawyer.

'Of course we can afford it, dear,' said the lawyer's wife.

I love screwing the lawyer even more than I love screwing the lawyer's wife, thought Smith.

'Mmm,' said the lawyer.

Smith jumped, sure that the lawyer had heard what he thought.

The lawyer's wife gave him a strange look. 'What about the carpet?' she said.

'Marrakech blue,' said Smith, who was thinking of a famous house he had seen in the desert, in one of his Biggles dreams.

'Really?' said the lawyer, surprising the three of them.

'I know just the thing,' said Smith. 'It will be perfect.'

'I suppose it will,' said the lawyer's wife. 'It always is.'

Smith looked at the lawyer. Unless you looked at the lawyer regularly, it was easy to forget what he looked like. In fact, even now that Smith was looking at him, he would have been hard pressed to describe him.

What colour was the lawyer's face?

The colour of all lawyers'faces which manage to be both unhealthily flushed and unhealthily pale at the same time. The colour of most faces, in the land of the tasteless dwarves.

What colour was the lawyer himself?

No colour at all.

'Of course, we can afford it, dear,' said the lawyer's wife, laying stresses down gently in all the right parts of her sentence.

'Mmm,' said the lawyer.

Of course they could Smith always recommended the most expensive materials, which made him very popular with the sort of people who pay to have their houses designed.

But Smith had done very little work since the day he found Jude. Just enough to live on, and barely that.

His dreams of anarchy had almost gone, leaving him a spear-carrier in the cruel empire of other people's homes.
