The Nothing Read online

  Eddie gets me into my room and helps to lift me onto the mattress.

  The pillows hurt. He arranges them as I like them. His fingers are swift and soft as I mumble. ‘Why is it when you see a cripple in a movie, you know he’s going to be killed? Is it because he’s already detritus?’

  ‘I’ll think about that,’ he says, and turns off the light. ‘It’ll give me something to do later.’

  Unusually, she doesn’t come in and kiss me.

  I lie there ready to listen. Tonight should be lethally entertaining. My brain might be consumed by agonising flames, but I assume the loving couple have forgotten about me. I am becoming less important. They are under the lights, while I am fading. I’m a walk-on in my own movie.

  Zee has always been devoted. She is the woman I always wanted. She gave up her country, her relatives, her husband for me. Once she said she’d love me even if I didn’t have a penis. Did I believe that for a moment? Who doesn’t love cock?

  There’s no life in her life, and she hasn’t had sex for at least seven years. I cannot satisfy her in any way. She masturbated, I suspect, to romantic scenes in front of the TV. I hope it was Jane Austen. Perhaps Zee would love my tongue inside her. I can still waggle it a little. On a bad day just lifting my arm resembles Zeno’s paradox. Motion impossible: an infinite number of movements which can never be completed. I can hold a drink, use my phone and turn my wheels, but I can barely do up the buttons on my pyjamas. What right do I have to be greedy or prohibitive?

  I can’t be a churl; I was young in the sixties. The seventies were even wilder and, probably, more corrupt. In those silly days when we were forbidden to forbid, when everything went and we believed orgasms were a cure-all, I had more than a good enough time, living in a commune in California with the motorbike and live-in lesbians, sharing the love. Those magical fucks, when everything else falls away.

  I had fuckability: a gorgeous man in flares and love beads, with wide shoulders, shoulder-length black hair and an ass you’d pay to bite. If you’ve once been attractive, desirable and charismatic, with a good body, you never forget it. Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness. Beauty is the only thing, it can’t be bought, and the beautiful are the truly entitled. However you end up, you live your whole life as a member of an exclusive club. You never stop pitying the less blessed. Filth like Eddie.

  I’ve learned that it is wise to beware of normality, and that virtue is a chimera. I’ve striven never to recognise common customs of fidelity or prisons of the conventional. Ethics are a pathological violence and the good an obstacle. I was, and hope to remain, a sensualist with a penchant for the Marquis de Sade as a moral guide. I will stick to this creed, despite the temptations of prohibition.

  But I have also grasped that transgression affirms the very rules it intends to flout. Nothing supports the norm like deviation.

  I want to say: it’s only sex. And: never take it personally. Be tolerant; let others enjoy. Progress is the overcoming of taboos. Yet however you work at it, you can’t take the meaning out of sex. Women still love more than men do. And it is not sex but love which bothers me. I am, I’ve realised at last, the sort of fool who wants to be loved exclusively.

  It wasn’t always that way. I misled myself: phoney ideals of masculinity – got from where, watching too many Westerns? – that made me think I had to screw all the women, even those I didn’t want, reproaching myself when I failed. The contempt for women who didn’t want me. And the thought that all women were replaceable, that you could easily pick up another. And when I was unhappy, the idea that sex would save me.

  I still have a 1960s sensibility. We took it for granted that the good things – equality, feminism, anti-racism, freedom for sexual minorities – would be extended. We believed we were enlightened. The good things would be good for everyone. But people didn’t want them. We were elitists, that’s all.

  Now, ready to spring into inaction, with a little dribble on my beard, I lie down and pretend to be tired and even snore for their benefit. It’s a good show. I worked as an actor for wild Dutch and German alternative theatre troupes – often naked, sometimes on acid, peering through the celestial curtain – at the beginning of what others call my ‘career’.

  I hear something. Have they started? I settle down. I am receptive; all ears, as they say.

  I think of my travels with her, the living creature I loved most. The food, wine, walks on Capri, in Paris and the Villa Borghese, Murree in Pakistan, afternoon sleeps beside her as she read. I contemplate her kindness, her caresses. I think of her fetching me a sweater when I am cold, and wiping my ass.

  I am soon asleep.

  Dead? No, worse: alive.

  When I wake up it is to birdsong and blackness.

  I stare into the darkness. There is silence; and silence is a strong sound. I groan and sigh. Even the lovers have given up. A night of non-knowledge and lumpish sleep. I sigh, and make the effort to turn over.

  *

  In the morning the birds trill, the lift rattles and Eddie has sloped off with my kippers, toast and coffee warming him. The world is back to normal. I closed my eyes and missed everything. It has gone. That night will never happen again.

  ‘You seem annoyed and bad-tempered, Waldo. Is everything okay?’

  ‘I had a bad night.’

  ‘Let’s hope tonight is better.’

  It will be.

  THREE

  I connect my hearing aid. This is how seriously I am taking the matter. I am, as they say, going for it.

  I inform Zee I want to listen to the wireless in bed. I often keep the radio on all night, the voices reassuring me I’m not the only person in the world.

  Eddie swings by in the early evening, like a husband coming home from work. He is careful to offer me a little gift and show respect when he arrives. We watch the news together and he listens to my opinions and has the temerity to parrot them, particularly when they are peculiar. I wonder if he can feel my irritation and suspicion. If he does, he ignores it. The power is shifting here.

  There is a flurry of activity as Zee gets changed. After drying her hair, a considerable and noisy procedure like a helicopter landing in your garden, she emerges from the bedroom wearing her pink – almost electric – dress, with pale tights and high shoes. She has a gay friend with a shop from whom she gets most of her clothes. She always dresses well and likes to be appreciated – the satisfaction of a woman who knows she’s being looked at.

  I set up the movie we have discussed. But she says, ‘See you later, Waldo.’

  ‘Yes, see you,’ echoes Eddie. He fetches his coat. He wraps his scarf. ‘We’re going to have a bite. Won’t be long.’

  There you are. They are gone.

  I scoot to the window, watching them walk up the street through my binoculars. Does she take his arm as they turn the corner?

  If I were a dog, I’d bark and bark. I am left with the psychotic head of the television.

  Making sense is always delusional, and I enjoy my magician’s imagination, thinking through the scenario as I sit here shovelling mango kulfi into my cakehole. I play the parts and do the accents. I know the local restaurant they are eating at. Carlo, the Roman owner, is a friend. There is a photograph of me with Carlo in the entrance, between photos of him with Michael Winner and with Sean Connery.

  ‘Where is the Maestro this evening, madame?’

  ‘Waldo is poorly, I’m afraid, Carlo. He’s declining. His thoughts are becoming increasingly unrealistic. He believes he’s in Venice.’

  ‘In the Danieli?’

  I hear her bangles jangle as she touches her hair.

  ‘Where else but having breakfast on the terrace? His favourite place in the world. I can’t bear to think of losing him. Please don’t make me talk about it or I will weep. Let me introduce Eddie, our dear friend. He is very close to Waldo.’

  ‘I am a documentary film-maker, curator, journalist and collector,’ says Eddie.

  ‘Al
so a lecturer,’ adds Zee.

  ‘Good evening, sir. Welcome. A glass of prosecco? Champagne? I’ll send Pietro to let you know what our specials are. I think you’ll be surprised with the lasagne, madame. I know you love almonds.’

  ‘You always surprise me, Carlo.’

  There it is, life is at a dinner table with a woman you desire: blinding napkins, butter in ice, cutlery, melon, sea bass and mashed potato, strawberry sorbet or summer pudding, double espresso – love.

  If Pietro or Carlo sees them touching hands across the table, I’d feel ashamed and murderous.

  Too anxious to watch a movie or a match, I wheel myself to the other end of the living room. At the window I drag the curtain aside and take up a position in the eyrie of my caliphate. Pressing my bloodshot eyes into the binoculars, I can see across the street. I sit here like a fat fly at the windowpane, investigating fantastic lands across the way. Despite the vastness of my solitude, it’s distracting up here watching people watch television and children looking at screens. As always, sipping my yogurt lassi with vodka on the side, I record my mumbled and blurted thoughts into my phone. I enlarge my reality by speaking it.

  From this palace of wisdom, I take photographs and I video strangers. I shoot sighs of bliss and featherbed clouds. Anything that looks unpromising.

  I can’t say life is any less interesting now I am almost paralysed and dead. The neighbours in the lighted cages of their apartments are compelling. Dinner parties are more riveting than wars, and are always an occasion for a close-up. But there’s no sex. The sex is here, behind me, in every sense.

  It is amazing how much people will let you see, and how little they appreciate the fact that they can come and go as they wish.

  The couple eating supper in the apartment opposite appear frozen, their forks suspended in mid-air. I tap my watch; it must have exploded as my blood pressure increased. How much can Eddie and Zee eat? My wife and my friend are away a long time. Oral foreplay. They will be getting to know one another. Soon it will be happy hour. Preparing for a night of love, with the infinity of desire ahead of him, Eddie’s penis will be twitching in anticipation.

  I hope the food and wine are expensive. What do I need money for now? It is irrelevant to me, and I want them to spend and enjoy it freely. Let everything go as you fall.

  Hours later and the key in the door. They have returned.

  Eddie watches the news while she is in her bedroom. I like a woman to take pleasure in herself. Zee is a Taurus and I believe that for Taureans the body is a church. She reveres – but also hates – her own body, as women tend to. Once she loved mine.

  As she checks me I pretend to be half-asleep. She is in her dressing gown. I gasp: fresh perfume on her wrists and throat. I cannot resist: I raise my neck as she moves and catch a whisper of lingerie. Rapture: there are straps and rings.

  I hold her red-feathered mules in the highest regard. I like a woman to look as though she just stepped on a budgie. I am that sort of man. But those shoes are not intended for me.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she calls to Eddie.

  She won’t be long.

  Everyone is unknowable. I have to ask myself if I still love her. Of course I do. Love doesn’t turn off like a tap when you want it to. The more difficult love is, the more it is love. Isn’t that right? It is hard to acknowledge how much you need someone else. As soon as you do, you’re in trouble. This suspicion is making me feel a fool. The struggle for every man is not to look like an idiot.

  With her it was the first time I wanted to be married to the person I was married to. We learned about one another. She liked me to sit on her face, even until she couldn’t breathe; she loved to suck my cock for a long time. She shyly adored, for the first time, to have her rim and arse fingered as I enumerated her beauties in a low voice. To love sex, you have to embrace repulsion.

  How banal, shocking and reassuring it is, then – when it comes to the oddness of existence – to wake up and find your lover has become a stranger who loves a stranger.

  I need to get her back. I like her, and need a woman other men will envy. Even these days, a woman is the ultimate luxury item; a diamond, a Rolls-Royce, a Leonardo in your living room.

  If my suspicions are correct, I will move like a serpent between the rocks. Watch me take that thief down. First I will smite him with madness, blindness and impotence, among other things.

  Then I will urinate in his mouth and wipe my ass with his head.

  FOUR

  Eddie is one of those Soho characters you see at screenings, festival openings, parties and dinners. It flatters him to be included in all the hoopla, and he is first at the booze and hors d’oeuvres. Posh, well-mannered and attentive, he will try to charm you through the back of his head and flirt with his eyes shut. He was, I’ve been told, not bad-looking in his teens. A vulnerable boy in thick glasses with a rosy mouth and the arse of a cherub, eager to please. A magnet for paedophiles, it is rumoured.

  He is usually sweaty with anxiety and smelling of drink, if not pubs, this overgrown schoolboy with his thinning hair, luminous scalp and cheap watch. Some disaster, involving his wallet, a train, a change of trousers and perhaps a woman – or two – has inevitably befallen him on his way to you. I dislike unsightly people when I don’t pity them. They’re always at a disadvantage when it comes to entitlement. If Eddie were good-looking, we wouldn’t be having this trouble.

  He has, however, made three documentaries, edited a couple of books, written for film magazines, taken part in conferences and taught somewhere or other. These I consider more serious offences. I think he may have sung in bars in a white jacket, also unforgivable. His French, they say, is immaculate, his voice smoky with public-school corruption and changing-room decadence.

  Zee is happily drunk, with clouded eyes. But she brings my coffee, washes and changes me, and chats about Carlo, what was on the menu, who was there and how overdressed they were.

  She is elsewhere. I can see it. Dadda, as she calls me, doesn’t mind, I imagine her saying. She is preoccupied. She is beginning to fall in love. Everything seems new to her and the world is charged with meaning.

  I lie down. I am still: going but not yet gone. I listen. I switch off the radio and tune in to another play. My hearing aid is an illumination. The world sounds unusually loud. I can hear people dining in Paris, turning pages in Stockholm, making love in Rome and singing in Madrid.

  Tonight, as I wait, I am a radio, with my receiver open.

  I recall how Zee enjoyed discussing stories in the newspapers about older women who had taken younger lovers or ‘toy boys’ in Third World countries; desperate, poor men who’d deceive the women after marrying them. ‘How could they be taken in?’ she’d wonder. This will be something to bring up in good time.

  The lights are dimmed. They play sweet music; I suspect they are dancing. Are they close together, pushing their fingers into one another’s clothes? They cannot wait. Only temptation is divine.

  It has started. Yes, I believe I can hear it all. I visualise the shape, colour and consistency of her body. I pretend his mouth is mine.

  They move to the bedroom. I strain. But I can hear less. The scene goes on a long time, increasing in volume. I learn he is a horny little beast, fucking my wife. He might be cash-poor, but he’s rich in jouissance, enviable at his age. Must be why women are suckers for him despite his looks and character. He’s perfect: every woman wants a man to save.

  You will be aware in my case of a man striving to be generous and understanding. I know that love is good for anyone. Eros the engine makes and remakes, reviving one’s passion for living. I made her a widow the moment I married her.

  I did say, ‘When I am dead I hope you find a wealthy man with an attractive penis to look after you’, while taking it for granted that when I died she would slash her wrists with a broken bottle, having first gone mad and ripped out her hair.

  I know she will have a life after me and how could I be so cruel as to wish h
er more mourning than necessary? Not that she didn’t once moan, in the throes of love, ‘You are the only man I ever wanted, the man who makes me feel complete.’

  And didn’t I know, when I met Zee and her husband while filming in Mumbai, that, after numerous wives, lovers, matches and mismatches, she was the end of all that searching. She was my destination: where I was always going. In my version of things, I had never been happy with any woman until I met her. She fulfilled me, becoming my mother, lover, sister and friend.

  She worked on the film, cutting and sewing costumes. No one thought it a good idea for her to dump her decent spouse for a wild man who was beginning to bear an unfortunate resemblance to the older Elvis.

  After the first month she cut my stringy hair herself and got me to wash every day. At night she monitored my money and turned out my pockets, throwing away my cocaine – which she’d never seen before – even as I swore I’d given it up. Whoever thought that pleasure makes you happy? Drugs had given me a faux bravery but they stopped me taking risks. Every outrage has to be earned; you cannot cheat reality.

  I was either Stakhanov or Oblomov. I had become reclusive and ashamed, convinced others could see how I’d failed to make myself happy, despite everything I’d achieved. Hard-working and decadent, I’d been smashed, trashed, slashed, trolleyed and wasted. Like a lot of people, I needed to have sex every day – with whomever. I was too alive; I couldn’t cope with my own energy.

  Zee knew my truth and loved the smell and taste of me, the shape and curve of my body, my masculinity. She chased away dealers, women, whores, liggers and holders, the bums and strangers who stayed for weeks. She weathered my cold turkey and held my hand. She forbade me ice cream; I gave up Guinness for wine. Enjoyment is difficult. She made me less stupid: I learned to have pleasure without making myself crazy. She helped me recognise and protect my talent. An intelligent hedonist at last.

  Work is always a diversion from the real thing, and I was in love. In the country we kept animals. We walked, lay in bed and had musical evenings, taking it in turns to play records. She likes show tunes and bossa nova, but came to appreciate Curtis Mayfield. We danced together.