Chapter 33 2012 #3
Her roommate (pixie cut, purple lips) doesn’t introduce herself but hugs him as well.
He has seen enough photos of her to know who she is, but avoids saying or even thinking her name because of all the consonants.
Neem? Nyam? “I knew you guys looked alike,” she says, “but it’s kind of amazing, you have the same… hand gestures.”
“What do you need?” Lola asks.
“A shower,” he says. A drink, he thinks.
Easily, she slips back into the role of anticipating his needs.
A towel, a coffee. Turn the left handle, not the right handle; the hot and cold are backward.
She has made up a bed for herself on the couch, insists that he take hers.
When she closes the door behind her, it is an odd feeling to be alone (naked) in her room, and he feels somehow unsteady to be here on her good graces.
He assesses the space. There are no clothes that are not cut to her shape, no boxers or beard oils. It’s a relief.
When he is changed, they step out together under the low London sky, walk down a street lined with open-faced brick buildings, women with shopping bags, old men stepping slowly onto lofty red buses, languages he has never heard before being shouted by young boys on the streets, everyone slouching under the release of a Saturday night.
He wonders, with her new, anemic hair, if people can still tell that the two of them are the same.
“Are you jet-lagged?” she asks.
“Not really.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I mean, sure,” he says, though he feels an odd detachment from all of his senses.
The outside air or perhaps their presence on the street (in public) has snapped him into the reality of the situation; he is here, he is walking next to her, they are walking together with all of the life shared and unshared between them.
She strides up the street with the slight mania of a tour guide, pointing out obvious things to him.
The architecture around here is very mixed, and This park is really nice.
He’s not sure what he expected from London, but it wasn’t this.
The houses have a plain unpretentiousness about them.
The streets are no more remarkable than streets anywhere, punctuated by occasional plastic bags and dog shit.
The people look like people anywhere, except maybe better dressed.
In short, he likes it more than he expected to; instinctively, he feels deeply at ease.
Perhaps more so even than Lola, who won’t stop apologizing for things that have nothing to do with her.
Sorry, they’ve been doing this construction for months now, and The sirens are really loud here.
“It’s cool,” he says. The place she takes him is light-filled and sanitized and full of white people. It serves sandwiches with vegan mozzarella and a sauce that he has never heard of. “Go-chu-jang,” he reads.
“It’s spicy,” Lola says proudly. “It’s Korean.” But she orders a smoothie. Green Machine. Machine. How can a smoothie be a machine? Who comes up with this stuff? When she speaks to the waiter, her vowels move forward in her mouth. It is strange to hear her voice, how different it sounds here.
“So!” she says, as though they are just beginning. She smiles at him.
“I still can’t get over your hair,” he says.
“Do you like it?” she asks. She bites her lip and wrinkles her nose, bug-eyed, an old familiar face.
“Dad texted. Asked me to check up on you.”
She smiles, then frowns. “What does that mean?”
“Check your vital signs, make sure you’re eating your vegetables.” He gestures to the Green Machine. “Looks like that isn’t a problem.”
It strikes him deeply how unknown her life is to him. How old they both are in person. Soon she’ll be Mom’s age, he thinks, when the cancer must have started. The worry hardens.
“Sorry I’ll have to work a bit this week. My course doesn’t really understand the concept of time off.”
“It’s cool,” he says. “We can still do stuff.”
“Definitely,” she says, lighting up. “My evenings are totally free.”
“Not shagging anyone then?” He says it in a Dick Van Dyke voice to make it clear it is a joke, but Viola doesn’t laugh.
For a moment, she looks quite serious, as though she might say something important, but then a cloud crosses her face and she fixates intently on the empty bottom of her Green Machine.
The café moves around them. How have they forgotten how to speak to each other?
He should have remembered her sensitivity around these things.
For a minute they search quietly for anything else to talk about until his food arrives sizzling and succulent and they can comment safely, idly, on the freshness, on the quality of the space.
Niamh’s room is dimly lit, and Sebastian can tell by the way that the mirrors are placed that she likes to watch herself during sex.
He is running his fingers over the plastic keys of the portable keyboard that is certainly the most expensive item in the room.
Unless she has some jewelry or something.
She doesn’t seem like the type to own expensive jewelry.
“So what, are you the cool twin?”
He attempts but fails to pull off a grin, takes another hit of the joint he packed. “It’s legal in Colorado now,” he says, as though that is a sufficient answer. He has never enjoyed that type of comparative question.
They had been quiet on the walk home, and he had the sense that he had disappointed her somehow.
Lola had gone straight to bed, and Sebastian and Niamh tiptoed around her huddled form on the living room couch.
Strange question, he had asked. But can I smoke in your room? Lola has never liked the smell.
“Still, it’s a bold move, drug smuggler. What if I was, like, a cop or something?”
“You don’t look like a cop.”
“Well, that’s just prejudice, isn’t it?” Niamh reaches for the joint and takes a slow, meditative slurp. “I think I would make a fantastic cop.”
“Really?”
“Well, I rate my own judgment about people.”
“Okay,” he asks Niamh. “What do you think about me?”
“I think you care very much.”
“I do care.” The thoughts in his mind are beginning to separate, like Christmas lights strung together with long bits of wire. Like the Christmas lights hanging from Niamh’s ceiling. “Caring is my downfall.”
“Most artists are very caring,” she says. “That’s been my experience, anyway.”
“That’s good. I was under the impression that most artists were narcissists.”
“Sorry, I should say most good artists.”
“Thanks.”
Niamh adjusts her feet, and he notices for the first time that her toenails are painted blue. He plays another few notes on the keyboard.
Sebastian feels full of a story about a late summer’s day when, driving around looking for something to do, he and Lola had stumbled upon a nature reserve, spent the afternoon following a trail to an ostensible summit, scrambling over fallen oak branches and white birches.
They had tired before they reached any sort of vista and, resting on a large, rotting pine log, decided to build a fortress.
With great gusto they assembled a sort of wigwam, dragging broken branches across the leafy forest floor.
Lola did the structural work while Sebastian focused on artisanal touches: a pine-cone chandelier, an arrangement of needles that read “No Bears,” which for some reason had been hysterical.
We’ll come back, Lola had said with every intention, but they didn’t.
Or perhaps more accurately, they couldn’t.
No matter how many times they tried to find the forest again, they could not remember what turn they had taken to get there.
“Brains are funny.”
“Well, that hit quick,” she laughs. “What do you mean?”
Sebastian strikes the bottom key, holds the note. “Humans are bad,” he says. “At giving other people space to be complicated.”
When Sebastian wakes up late the next morning, Lola is already gone. She has written a list of places he might want to visit: splendid green parks and botanical gardens, meandering canals and homes of literary notables.
But Niamh says: “You strike me as more of a Camden guy,” and so he takes his loaded Pentax uptown to capture Life.
It is almost overwhelming, the deluge of punk, the sheer number of faces, piercings, cleavages, and navels.
Small-town faces can be studied, known, captured in contours and wrinkles.
These faces blur, transient, gone before they arrive.
The city teems with unknowable lives, graffiti doodling under ancient bridges like ivy.
He buys hot dumplings at a market. He sets up his tripod outside a hotel, shoots the people coming in and out as though they are all celebrities, as though they are all being caught in an act.
In the evening, he returns flushed and fulsome with market treats. A cut of soft, aged cheese, bottles of ale labeled with vivid samurai cartoons. It gives him great joy, and it’s the least he could offer. Niamh and Lola bustle back and forth over dinner.
“How was your day?” Niamh asks.
“Good,” he says. “I saw Trafalgar Square.”
“That big phallic column?”
“I saw it.”
“Every city has one,” says Lola.
“Damn patriarchy,” says Niamh.
Lola fills the pot with water, Niamh turns on the electric hob. Niamh is peeling carrots and Lola is chopping them. “Can I do anything?” he asks.
“You could put on some music,” Lola says.
“You could open a bottle of wine.”