Was this getting older? Kathy was worried about ageing, she hadn’t realised youth wasn’t a permanent state, that she wouldn’t always be cute and hopeless and forgivable. She wasn’t stupid, she was just greedy: she wanted it always to be the first time. When she thought about the people she’d populated her youth with she cringed. She could have made it so much more glamorous, so much more debonair, she needn’t have had a bowl cut, she needn’t have worn dungarees, the minutes were passing, she’d failed to get a death-grip on time. Now she was cool, but old; now she was hot, but wrinkled. My life is delicate (more delicate than my cunt), she’d written to a boyfriend not that long ago. I’ve had eleven abortions, she told someone else, which wasn’t even true. Kathy was always lying, she’d lied since she was a small child with unattractive red hair. When her hair began to fall out because of the stress of living with her mother she told the girls at school that it had been eaten by her rabbit. At that school they had a playground game where everyone tried to hypnotise themselves and then lift someone’s body with just their little fingers. The girl about to be lifted had to lie flat and everyone had to press on her as hard as they could. After that the lifting was easy. Weightlessness was another exclusive possession of the very young. Later on you started clanking around like tins tied to a car.
What Kathy was supposed to be doing was planning her wedding. She did this by looking through pictures on Instagram and making unkind comments. That’s very vulgar, she or her husband would say. Chairs and tables, napkins, that’s very vulgar. At this rate they’d end up getting married in a car park.
Kathy loved her husband. Last night they’d been forced to give a reading together, which wasn’t exactly her bag, and yet she’d found herself pleased to hear his poems, like someone wiggling a key in the lock of language, it’s jammed, it’s jammed, and then abruptly stepping through. For some reason there were three psychiatrists at the reading, one apparently very eminent and two from Sheffield, still in their swimsuits. A patrician man sat at the back and called out questions. There’s hope for us all, he said, inexplicably. At dinner that night Kathy found herself sitting next to him. Felicia, Felicia, he said, this is the writer. Felicia had the lock-jaw of the seriously posh. Kathy recoiled into her amuse-bouche, a fishy white sliver, and waited for the moment to pass.
Tomorrow it’s going to be 41 degrees, her husband said. That’s 106 in Fahrenheit. So when people in India and the Gulf States have temperatures of 50 that’s very hot. No wonder they’re dying. Pretty much 30 degrees above normal blood temperature. He was wearing a pink T-shirt and his left leg, which he’d burned earlier in the week, had begun to peel. A drill had started up somewhere. Kathy was writing everything down in her notebook, and had become abruptly anxious that she might exhaust the present and find herself out at the front, alone on the crest of time – absurd, but some- times don’t you think we can’t all be moving through it together, the whole green simultaneity of life, like sharks abruptly revealed in a breaking wave? Possibly her speeding thoughts presaged a migraine, possibly. On Twitter a Chinese photographer had gone missing. She’d last been seen at the funeral of her husband, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize and then spent the rest of his life in prison. Kathy had seen a photo of her, tightly wound in sunglasses. Anyway, she’d gone. And there’d been a statement from the government that had stuck in her mind, something about discarding the ashes in the sea, was that right. When the accusations about Jimmy Savile reached a pitch of plausibility his gravestone had been taken up in the night and ground into gravel and used to resurface roads. This too didn’t sound quite right but that’s how Kathy remembered it. The Jimmy Savile dust could be anywhere by now, sticking to car tyres and inching relentlessly off the island, no doubt especially on ferries. Evil was a subject of interest for Kathy, she wasn’t squeamish, she’d worked years in a strip joint in Times Square, she knew about appetite and dead eyes. She used to do a Santa Claus routine, anything not to be bored, releasing her flat little fried-egg tits into the eyes of the world. Nobody knew anything about life who hadn’t breathed a good lug of that pissy, spunky air, oh Kathy’d really seen it all. I want to know why a president is always a john and never a hooker, Zoe Leonard once wrote in a famous much-reproduced poem and Kathy felt like it was still a good question now, why some people always bought and never sold.