Emotionally Weird(36)

While the kettle was coming to the boil I went to the toilet—

~ In the same sentence? Nora objects, it’s been nothing but ringing phones and boiling kettles, doorbells and toilets, since you began.

Ignore her, she is in a bad mood today. She is avoiding telling her story.

—a journey that took me past the open door of the spare bedroom that Archie used as a study. A strange noise wafted out of the room, a faint little purp-purp noise like a kitten snoring, and I peered in the room, curious to find the source.

It turned out to be a boy – more a man really – who was lying on the bed, as still as a corpse. He was a very fine specimen of his sex – just the right shape and size, with no strange features or disturbing blemishes, only a rather fetching scar on his left cheekbone as if he had been raked delicately by a tiger’s talon. If it hadn’t been for the snoring you would have thought him dead.

I wondered who he was (how helpful it would be if people were labelled). His hair was dark, his skin pale, his lashes long, and you might have thought that his lips – carved into a curving pout by Cupid himself and slightly damp from sleep – were waiting to be kissed. But I didn’t do that, because that would have been like asking for trouble instead of simply waiting for it to arrive in its own good time.

He was lying on top of the covers and although his feet were naked, the rest of him was fully clothed in a pair of Levi’s, an old sweater and a battered leather biker’s jacket that indicated a darker and more interesting personality than Bob’s army greatcoat or Shug’s Afghan ever could. I sniffed the lanolin of his rough wool sweater and the slaughtered smell of his jacket. I inspected his ears (clean, shell-like), his fingernails (dirty, bitten), the faint tidemark of grime on his neck, the ingrained oil on his mechanic’s hands, inhaled the faint aroma of marijuana on his breath.

He smelt like a Platonic ideal of a man would smell. Compared to the slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails that composed Bob’s biodynamic, he seemed to be made up of entirely testosterone-based ingredients – leather car seats, cut-throat razors, ropes and knots and binding cords, salt, mud and blood. He was all . . . other.

I wondered what colour his eyes were beneath those gorgeous sleepy lids. Of course, for all I knew he was squint and cross-eyed, or worse – a blue-eyed man. I thought about prising open one of his semi-comatose eyelids but decided against it. Was it possible to tell his character from his appearance? He looked sublime but he might have been any one of a hundred undesirable things. A university lecturer, for example. Perhaps he was a thief who had come in through the window and had grown tired in the middle of his thieving and lain down for a rest. More unlikely things happen every day, after all.

The window was wide open and the temperature in the room must have been near freezing. The unknown man’s feet were turning blue and felt icy to the touch, more like cold corpse flesh than the appendages of a warm and breathing man. Hastily, I pulled a blanket over his motionless form. He was sleeping on his back with his arms and legs flung out like a dead starfish – although with fewer legs. (Or arms, or whatever it is that starfish have.) He didn’t look as if he was on a harmless date with the Sandman, but more as if he was stranded in the Land of Nod for ever with no map and compass of return and I wondered if I shouldn’t keep watch over him for a while, but, sadly, there is only so much pleasure to be got from observing a sleeping man – even a handsome one – and I was soon distracted by the sight of a very fat manuscript poking out from under the bed.

The edges of many of the pages appeared to have been nibbled by small animals – clan McFluffy, I presumed – and the title page announced it to be Archie’s great novel, The Expanding Prism of J .

‘Well,’ I said to the sleeping man, ‘I don’t see what harm there can be in just taking a look .’ Words which, as we know, everyone lives to regret (Pandora, curious cats, Lot’s wife, all of Bluebeard’s wives, and so many, many others).

The Expanding Prism of J appeared to be a novel with neither plot nor character (and certainly no pictures). Even the simplest details were cloaked in a claggy syntax, and reading Archie’s prose was like trying to make sense of glue. As far as I could gather, the eponymous J was a university lecturer employed in an institution more tortuous than a Borgesian labyrinth. J himself had no fixed or true character but was a man made up of layer upon layer of impenetrable metaphor and alienated asides. Struggling through the dense language of the first few pages, it took me some time to realize that J was not riding through a Mitteleuropean city on a tram but was indulging in something quite perverse with his mistress’s lapdog. I began to feel slightly nauseous and wondered if Archie’s words might be having a toxic effect. Perhaps if I looked further under the bed I would find small dead animals.