'Wow': An exclusive short story by AL Kennedy

Illustrations by Robin Heighway-Bury for The Independent on Sunday (Robin Heighway-Bury)

He keeps saying it. Every time the guy touches a new place on her skin, he allows himself this awed little murmur, “Wow ...” As if he were setting some compact object of great worth into the air above her spine, just grazing the rise of her back as it tightens against her breathing and then relents.

“Wow.” The word seems warm, his fingers less so.

The guy is called Philippe. Or maybe not. Quite possibly not. His entire name dodged by her in the blur of arriving and being late and slightly flustered.

This is the time of year when being late and slightly flustered were two of your better options. December and January – they aren’t reasonable any more. Two whole months out of the 12 are always going to be screwed up, clotted with nonsense, you’re braced for that before you’ve even started out with a fresh year. It isn’t, in fact, going to be fresh: it’s simply going to be another year. This is one of the few safe assumptions you can make. January will be tricky and the following months may crumple, or not crumple, as you try to move along before you crash back into next December, which will involve a Christmas and will therefore effectively start in June.

Comfort and joy – it’s a lyric, not a shopping list.

Her hands had been clumsy while she undressed, rendered stupid by her tiredness and the afternoon’s chill.

You’re not going to get comfort, not joy, no one’s going to get them. And tidings – what are tidings? They’re news about a thing that isn’t here. They are a statement, not a statement of intent.

His palms enquire along the curving slope that narrows and makes her waist. The curve will open again, of course, and turn into her hips, into the start of the rest of her, the beginning of ...

She turns her head a little, shuts her eyes and aims to pretend she is dreaming and isn’t with the man and his fingers and that she will wake in a while and be somehow refreshed.

Comfort and sleep. Comfort in sleep.

But that’s not a promise, that’s hypothetical.

I should settle for late and slightly flustered: that would be a kind of paradise in certain circumstances, certain lives. Believing that I will arrive at all, that anybody can – there are days when that could indicate more recklessness than your hoping should involve.

Which I won’t think about.

And I am no longer late for this: I have arrived. I am safe and well, or thereabouts, and only inwardly preparing to be late for what comes after. I may even want to be late for that.

Which I won’t think about.

And I am not flustered, not even slightly. Or I’m at least not as flustered as usual. That makes me, in so many ways, very horribly lucky.

Which I can’t think about now, either.

Chris, or Mateus – or is he maybe Mattheus? – intensifies his attentions. He can doubtless tell that she isn’t exactly relaxed. She meanwhile continues to have the strong impression that whatever this nameless person does, absolutely no matter what, he will seem to be making his efforts from behind a cheap and nasty wall, something made of plasterboard and wishful thinking. He isn’t with her.

Comfort and walls.

Outside in the street below them both, she is aware there are fully-clothed people passing, bundled-up figures letting themselves be caught by the sweeps and presses of a communal motion, a vast and purposeful desire to purchase.

Today she has purchased this.

One becomes resigned to it.

Comfort and wow.

I have a desire for the perfect desire equivalent. It’s the easier option but hard to source.

She walked here from the Tube, passing in amongst the bodies and the buses and the shopfronts, shop aisles, shopping, shoppers. She’d wanted to feel what they’d been feeling. She believed it was likely she’d wanted that.

It made me light-headed. My wants, their wants, everyone’s wants – they soak in and you end up feeling complicated, if not unclean.

Dirty, complicated, light-headed and so forth – I have no objections to that. It’s a sort of holiday from having to be myself. It might be a sort of jolly risk. It tingles.

His touching searches up one thigh and gives her the impression that his hand has a fixed agenda, “Wow.”

Maybe he’d let me stay here.

Whoever he is.

I could do with a break once we’ve finished, the chance to lie in a bit of peace and be on a private holiday, dream satisfactorily.

Comfort and wishful thinking.

Patrice, is he Patrice? Yosi? There definitely was an Oz once – a name even she couldn’t forget.

I’m off to see Oz, the mighty Oz, and that’ll mean I get a brain, or courage, or so forth – whatever’s left in the gift selection at the end of the yellow brick road. Yellowness and bricks not included.

The man who isn’t Oz shifts onwards to discover her left thigh – leading edge, following edge, outside, inside – you can’t say he isn’t thorough.

This area is apparently, once again, surprising, “Wow.” She tries to imagine a woman who might enjoy being a surprise.

My body is shocking a total stranger – repeatedly. I am providing a series of mild traumas to a man who keeps on bloody saying his important bloody word as if he is important and the more he tries to matter, the more he makes me bloody well exhausted.

I do sleep, though. I sleep a great deal but remain exhausted.

I have funny peculiar dreams which leave me wearier by the night. I also clench my jaw. I’ve been told that. As soon as I fall unconscious I start to bite down on the dark, fill my mouth with it and keep it like a terrier with a rat.

I have no idea why.

Not really.

She notices herself giving a sigh: this sound that implies intimacy, or comfort, or joy, or so forth.

At funny peculiar times, though, I do have energy.

This afternoon a woman stood slap in my way as I tried to get off the underground, leave the car. She was hampered with luxury parcels and a fancy coat, had this odd face that somebody else must have painted on her, airbrushed. No one actually looks like that without assistance. Everything about her was the product of some employee or other, I assumed, and she had this air about her as if she was making a first experiment with public transport and hadn’t understood that it wouldn’t be all about her …

It was all about me and me and me and so forth.

Delusional, the pair of us.

I told her, practically yelled at her, “Wait.”

She flinched. I don’t suppose she gets that tone of voice as an incoming, rather than outgoing, fact of life. Another assumption – she looked as if she had a husband. Another assumption again.

My vehemence wasn’t completely unjustified, I had myself and the people behind me to consider and also the laws of physics. She did have to let us past her impatience and her pretty packages and ribbon-tied bags of the type that I always resent. You’ve paid too much if you get a bag that’s tied with ribbon. You’ve been swindled, but your swindler has been kind enough to offer you a strip of cloth and tie it in a bow around the knowledge that fresh air will mingle only gently with your purchases.

“Wow.” The man who isn’t Oz is now exploring with his own vehemence.

Occasionally, the whole process, the contact involved – what she pays for – will make her cry. She wonders if Not Oz will manage that today.

I almost shoved her. I almost wanted to see if I could. Or I would have settled for barging the man who was standing beside her and who chimed in with, “Yes, you have to let other passengers off first.”

She recalls being certain, as she’d pushed her way out of the Tube train, absolutely certain, that Mr. Passengers-off-first had spent much of his recent past in a neat little blazer and tie, informing on his fellow-pupils and greasing up and down the corridors of some picturesque establishment, being self-righteous.

I was, myself, being self-righteous. I admit that.

She backed away from me as if I was unpleasant, potentially violent – like something you wouldn’t wish to touch, or would find nastily surprising if you did.

She wasn’t far wrong. I was in the mood to hate anything I stared at long enough.

Wow.

I’m out of order, out of joint – that’s why I’ve come here.

I hurt.

She’s never met this guy before and doesn’t know his personal style. Each of the guys does have recognisable character traits. The man who is Not Oz might be a talker – a few of them are – and it’s probably quite normal to think that if you’re touching someone and they are letting you, it might mean that conversation is required. It could be he is offering the small cues that are meant to begin a chat.

Wow, we could talk about the world and current affairs, financial affairs, family affairs … Wow, we could talk about why my mouth tastes of the dark and so forth ...

Wow, we could shut up and get this done and over with. Nobody wants to talk about the world. It is unmentionable.

Wow, I could tell you that you would not enjoy my saying anything in your direction. Not today. Not most days.

Ask my husband. He’ll say that in your direction.

Simon’s image leans into her head – her lawfully wedded Simon in his pyjamas which he’d begun to wear quite suddenly, but logically, one winter. But they never went away again and no need to bother enquiring about their multiple justifications. And he doesn’t pop them in the washing basket as soon as they’re staleish-smelling. He keeps on wearing the same pair. He climbs into them and then he boards the marital mattress and is creased and mildly rank and like a softly-spoken insult. She is disturbed by the loss of dignity involved.

On both sides.

The matter puzzles her. His sweat used to be a sweet thing, sweet salt. It was an expression of him and her freedom to share him and vice versa.

I do remember comfort and the first of his taste, the fresh heat, shining on his skin, innocent as water. Messing with each other. Comfort and so forth, the temperature of so forth.

In the morning, if we were wakeful early and with each other and the so forth started up and rolled on and let us really be there, afterwards I’d keep the scent of us, the two of us, with me. I wouldn’t wash and it would stay under my blouse, my clothes, when I went to work.

I’m not sure whose dignity that removed.

Now we’re fresh as a new year together, which is to say not fresh.

Illustrations by Robin Heighway-Bury for The Independent on Sunday (Robin Heighway-Bury)

It would be accurate to mention that she no longer lifts up his pillow – like raising a stone – and takes his pyjamas from underneath it and washes them, not even when they’re due. She has never established a pattern for pyjamas, a laundry-related response, and apparently refuses to try and he has never established one, either – quite the reverse. It’s as if they’re conducting a silent fight, using the medium of nightwear. Or else they are both testing ways in which they can make him unlovable.

I don’t have to make me unlovable. Mission accomplished. Long ago.

And today is supposed to be helpful and therapeutic, precisely because Not Oz has nothing to do with loving or being unloved. He is simply forensic, reading his way across the surface of her stresses and taking an interest, pondering sensible routes and destinations.

I am not a relief map. I am a map of my relief requirements.

The aim was to isolate one of love’s symptoms and force it to be useful – the way you might rip out a sinew and then string your bow with it, sew a canoe.

Like saving up skills and materials for wilderness survival.

I am a landscape involving rocks and hard places and animals people don’t take to.

Under my skin there’ll be the place where I’m still angry with that woman and the grown-up school boy to her left and everyone else on the platform and everyone else down below and everyone up on the surface and I am nothing but grateful that Not Oz is a man of few words – a man of one word – because I could not stand it if he produced the usual enquiries about headaches, or if there’s anything worrying me and what did I do at Christmas, what will I do next Christmas, am I buying anything in the sales?

There are always sales. There is always some kind of closing down.

“Wow.”

Yes – wow – I know. The more I think of what I don’t want to think of, the more it racks up the muscle tension and the more I feel like a poorly-executed carving and not a person.

That’s why you go to a masseur – they deal with you because you can’t deal with yourself and no one else will even try.

I shop around, pick different places, because I couldn’t really tolerate having someone regular. If you make repeat visits, eventually there are more questions and although it’s not intentional – I do see that – they’re always asking about need, want.

Loved ones.

Activities with loved ones.

And so forth.

Normality.

Christmas is the time for children, isn’t it? That’s what one is supposed to say. Each and every sentence has a bit missed out, space left for children. Kiddies on the telly unwrapping things and being delighted in the adverts, healthy and warm. We get a month and more of being shown domestic interiors and reunions. Or cooking shows. Or appeals for the money to buy domestic interiors – no reunions. Kiddies in plastic tents with no food to cook. Kiddies being lifted out of rubble.

I can’t comment, obviously.

But I do think I would be unhappy if that was happening to my own – if my own theoretical child couldn’t eat and drink. I could believe that help should be automatic – the way that you’ll reach out your hand to somebody if they trip, if you see them start to fall.

I can’t comment, obviously.

And I try to stay that way – being unaware is key if what you want is to survive. Radio’s either songs that scoop your heart out, or strangers shouting so I avoid it. I don’t do radio. I don’t like headlines. I don’t enjoy having to cope with strident views or information that suggests I’m powerless. I attempt to be comfortable and I hope that’s not a failing.

I can’t comment, obviously.

And in the current age of fears and high explosives, the sad necessity of layoffs in the spring and petty departmental cuts in my place of employment, the place that I can go to when I leave my house – those things can’t be permitted to matter. It’s bad of me to think they do.

I can’t worry about the mortgage and the health insurance and the silence that gathers on the landing and under the stairs and be sure that I want and that I need. I can’t stand in my kitchen and wonder how I could explain who I am at the moment.

I want to hold somebody. I need to hold somebody.

But I can’t comment – not qualified.

I read the papers – it’s supposed to be a good thing if you’re left untouched.

Thinking this unhooks her and lets her cry.

It is wrong and inappropriate that she should do so, if not obscene, but she does it nonetheless – she’s not a nice person.

Her standard tears during a massage are a slow drift of self-indulgence that seeps into the paper cover that’s always protecting the table and then stops. This afternoon the man who is Not Oz has to leave off his labours early because of her weeping and she has to apologise and they have to speak to each other at unnecessary length about the emotional release involved in deep tissue work and the fact that it’s nothing to worry about. The possibility of her coming back soon for more treatment is raised and she nods a good deal, while not making another appointment.

She dresses and apparently her clothes have altered and no longer fit as they should, or else she is more aware they seem dissatisfied with her limbs and disagree with her posture.

She pays Not Oz and in return he does not give her a brain, or courage, or so forth.

Down in the street, she starts shivering and feels unmistakably second-hand and harmful.

I upset him, poor Not Oz. I didn’t mean to.

For a moment or two she closes her eyes until she is buffeted by the tide of purchasers, so she has to rouse herself and move on.

Can’t sleep in the street.

Although, obviously, you can – you just wouldn’t want to. It one of those things which you do, even though you can’t do it.

Near to a brace of cash machines, she notices there is the usual sort of man who sits on a folded piece of cardboard with a paper cup set on the pavement in front of him. He and his cup are waiting for cash withdrawals to make people with bank accounts feel guilty. She continues to walk.

It troubles her that the man’s cup has a torn rim, as if he were trying to emphasise his poverty by not having a new cup.

Is it that hard to access a clean, empty cup?

There is a main road up ahead and it’s busy and the pavement at the crossing is busy, the whole area is busy and will be difficult to navigate without losing her temper. And the man sitting behind her has the wrong sort of cup. And doing what you can’t do is a form of dying – she knows that.

She is aware. People put up with it, anyway.

Perhaps he tears the edge of his cups as a comfort. Perhaps it is a joy. That’s horrible enough to be true – every one of us collects these pathetic, tiny pleasures.

I walk past people all the time who are experiencing forms of dying. That’s because I’m a human being, which is an animal no one can take to.

There’s no reason to turn around and wade back towards the man who is, as it happens, staring at his mutilated cup. He doesn’t raise his head, even when she pauses in front of him and waits. He ignores her from the soles of her shoes upwards, as far as her shins. She is nothing special to him, which is a relief. It makes being somewhere she doesn’t want to be rather easier.

It wouldn’t be polite to ask about the cup. He has this and the cardboard and two bags. You can’t insist that somebody describes a whole a third of their life to you.

It would be bizarre, as she’s here, to not give him money.

Illustrations by Robin Heighway-Bury for The Independent on Sunday (Robin Heighway-Bury)

I can pay him for his time, my time watching him, I don’t know …

So she roots about in her coat pocket and finds coins and puts them into the irritating cup.

The cup is a third of his belongings, not a third of his life.

No one can explain any fraction of their life, not without lying, so they might as well never try. They’d still want to keep it, though - their inexplicable existence – hold on to it with their teeth in the dark if necessary.

Her fingers dig again, scavenge in her pocket’s corners properly, and she puts all the rest of her change in his cup. The man nods gently, twice.

He finally looks up when she still doesn’t leave and – as one does with people who have no current address – she judges him and finds him not drunk and not druggish, not chemically altered as far as she can tell and not particularly old. She might say that he does appear to be pathologically cautious. An amount of visible thought precedes each small action, as if he anticipates errors and accidents.

He has started frowning slightly.

She waits to discover something she can say at him, but there’s nothing suitable.

The man has a deceiving face in the sense that he might be in his late forties, but could be 20, and he is staring at her as if she is in his living room and refusing to go away, as if she is trying to prove that he can’t stop her.

So I should pay him for his inconvenience.

She either doesn’t want to stop meeting his eye or is unable to and this means that when she reaches her purse, out of her bag – just as she did with Oz – she has to open it and search it by touch alone. She retrieves a single note – she has no idea of its denomination – and she puts it in the cup. As it drops, she realises she has given him £10.

Too much.

If it’s too much then I have to rifle a begging man’s cup? Take out money? Do a thing I can’t do?

And too much is what, in this city? Two meals? Three? One? It would be one for me. Does he know where to go to get cheap food, free food? How often is allowed to get free food? Don’t you need vouchers for that?

How many meals in a day? Do I want him to eat today but not tomorrow?

Should he not eat if he’s an addict? Should he not eat if he is an addict, but not currently high? Does he smoke? Smoking would keep him less hungry, but make him more ill.

The cup man doesn’t seem especially ill, more as if he has to focus on survival. And he has an expression she’s not seen before now, as if he is probably grateful but watching her from his wilderness and tired.

It’s his £10 now. I can’t comment, obviously.

The cup man is wearing a fairly new pullover which doesn’t match his other clothes and this makes her think that he’s been to some Christmas place to get donated clothing and maybe his turkey dinner for this year and that the pullover will deteriorate from hereon in. His face gives her the impression they’re going to make each other cry.

She feels for another note and gives him that. Rent for being in his living room.

Only £5. Anti-climax. Disappointment. Not enough.

Because I’m doing this to impress him? Because I’m doing this to bully him? Because it matters why I’m doing it?

What can somebody do with £15 and change? How much is a night in a hostel or a shelter? What use is one night of anything?

I’m light-headed again.

Because the man is trying to smile and this makes her hate herself, she nods – what the hell would that mean? – and starts walking away from the main road, and doesn’t speak in case that proves alarming.

How soon before …? There. It never takes long. Misery at regular intervals – same as bus stops.

Close beside the entrance to a chemist’s shop there’s a man in a wheelchair who is selling that homeless magazine.

He is wearing a new pullover, too, and a new hat – it’s unnecessarily festive, perhaps ironic, especially now it’s almost January.

As she approaches, she takes out whatever else is in her purse – a compacted fold of some other notes.

Am I being impolite? This is someone not begging. No cup.

This man checks her with a glance and begins to leaf one magazine away from its thin plastic envelope. He tells her hello as if he is expected to be a cheery tradesman and is equal to the part. She believes that he’s ex-military, not so much because he’s lost a leg, but because of this atmosphere he has of being ready for some absent routine, a specific suffering he’d like again.

The toecap of his solitary shoe glisters cleverly.

My grandad put a polish on his brogues like that, though – he wasn’t military. It’s an old guy thing to do. It’s a dignity. You’re working class and you’re bloody proud of it because that way it won’t fall and crush you. You shine your shoes.

Army, not army – war, war not war – working, not working – begging, not begging – you’ll always lose bits of yourself.

She accepts the magazine and gives him the wadded notes.

Less than what I paid for a massage that didn’t work.

The waste of me.

Whatever I give will always be less than something that’s important.

The man looks confused and then happy, but he can’t accept this because it’s a lot, but he looks so happy and it’s there in his hand already and she can’t take it back, she’s absolutely sure that she can’t take it back, that it might damage her to try. It tricky explaining this without sounding funny peculiar, but she mumbles an attempt.

In response, the man shifts his arms out from his body undecidedly, testing. He has the air of a dutiful relative, perhaps – an indulgent parent, or a birthday son – or else still the cheery tradesman. Then, having demonstrated his intentions, he beckons her down to the height of his chair and hugs her. Hard. She is held.

His coat has the scent of distant cigarettes and army surplus stores. His sideburns are yellowish white and long, slightly 1970’s and this gives her the idea that he might be a father for some reason. The way his hair is cut suggests children and colour photos with that old fashioned indoor tinge of orange and other pullovers for Christmas and some series of cataclysms between that decade and this.

He holds on and she holds back – they might be two people who’ve suddenly noticed that they’re drowning.

And this is not comfort and this is not joy and this is not being fitted with a heart, fitted to your heart, thinking of your heart – this is a means to an end and I would rather, I would rather, I would rather do this today than anything, because there are apparently no other options left and every month and every week and every day of this year has hurt someone, has hurt people, has let something terrible happen, has made people do what they cannot do, has forgotten what makes a human being die, but this today, doing this, is not terrible.

This is necessary.

It just isn’t enough.

A L Kennedy’s most recent short story collection ‘All the Rage’ is published by Vintage