Joy Read online

  Jonathan Lee

  Joy

  Jonathan Lee is a British novelist living in New York. He is the author of the novels High Dive, Joy, and Who Is Mr Satoshi?.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN LEE

  High Dive

  Who Is Mr Satoshi?

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan Lee

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by William Heinemann, an imprint of The Random House Limited, London, in 2012.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Ebook ISBN 9780525658528

  Cover design by Madeline Partner

  Cover photographs: woman © ChristinLola/iStock/Getty Images marble © kundoy/Moment/Getty Images

  www.vintagebooks.com

  a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r1

  For Amy

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Jonathan Lee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Act One: Dream Logic

  1 a.m.

  Peter

  1.10 a.m.

  Dennis

  9.15 a.m.

  Samir

  9.20 a.m.

  Barbara

  10.35 a.m.

  Peter

  11 a.m.

  Dennis

  11.45 a.m.

  Samir

  Act Two: Colour Her Happy

  2.05 p.m.

  Barbara

  2.25 p.m.

  Peter

  3.05 p.m.

  Dennis

  3.32 p.m.

  Barbara

  4.02 p.m.

  Samir

  4.15 p.m.

  Act Three: Mispers

  Peter

  4.42 p.m.

  Dennis

  4.48 p.m.

  Samir

  4.58 p.m.

  Dennis

  5.09 p.m.

  Barbara

  5.12 p.m.

  Dennis

  Untimed Fragment

  Peter

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.’

  William Maxwell

  Act One

  DREAM LOGIC

  …Do bats eat cats?…

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  1 a.m.

  WHY IS the door ajar? The front door should not be ajar. 1 a.m. in Angel, fatigue buzzing in Joy’s brain like a trapped fly, and the door is ajar. At a certain stage in your life every single thing gets complex.

  She checks her BlackBerry. Nothing new. Not since she checked it in the taxi seconds ago. No email or voicemail or text message from Dennis to explain why the door isn’t closed. As the black cab that delivered her here purrs out of earshot she runs a fingertip along the teeth of her house key, the house key which is now surplus to requirements, and feels sharp little judgements scissor through her thoughts: irresponsible – unsafe – did this once before – left it open when he went to bed – went to bed with late-night toast – Egyptian cotton and he snacks on toast! A tingling, achey sense of irritation takes over, a state which is exacerbated by the very next thing she notices: a pavement-laid present from Zorro, her neighbours’ manifestly incontinent cocker spaniel, a halo of mocking moonlight round its rim.

  Lately Joy’s been making an effort to suppress expletives but she feels a few floating up her throat now, heat rising to her ears and eyes and lifting a hint of perfume from her skin. ‘You’re too hard on people,’ her father used to say, and she’s been working on that, being less hard on others and herself, has resolved to pass her last day alive in a wraithlike serene state wearing her most implausible heels and treating strangers to generous wide smiles, but now the door has been left ajar, one hour into this final Friday it is noticeably ajar (wide open, almost – yawning, gaping), and the Atkinsons are unacquainted with the term ‘pooper scooper’, and the air outside her home is a doggy fog of faecal stink, a stink made cheaply sweet by floral tones from her own perfume, and a deep frown is forming on her forehead which even the wispy silken fringe above and always-shining eyes below cannot make unserious.

  She swallows down a shit and a prick, settles for muttering tit under her breath. Calling your husband a tit, watching the word become a tiny vanishing cloud in the January air – it’s surprisingly soothing, actually. Already feeling a bit better, standing here. Less woozy. Less of the week’s frustrations, its toast crumbs, clinging to her skin. After a period in the office like the one just gone – an absurdly stretched series of meetings flecked with stress and caffeine; sixteen hours of painstaking discussions about food law and what you’re allowed to inject into chicken breasts; of not-so-furtive glances at her own breasts by men sporting splayed B cups under clammy jaundiced shirts – it feels like a fitting and blessedly succinct coda to her Thursday: Tit.

  An animal is passing between parked cars, reddish in the sombre glow of street lamps. Above these street lamps Victorian rooftops wear aerials and a hook of moon hangs in darkness. She keeps her head tilted upward, acknowledging the fact she’ll never see the moon again, determined to appreciate its abstract elegance, then hears the soft spinning of wheels – a bike light illuminating the fox’s face – and reaches out for the doorknob, tired of lingering in the street, the leather of her handbag flirting with her skirt as she enters the deeper gloom of her home. Her objective for the coming hours? To avoid over-thinking, to execute her plan with methodical calm, a quality her employer, naively deaf to the inevitable acronym, recognises as a Tier 2 Soft Skill called Conscientious Office Conduct (‘You need more COC,’ say Joy’s colleagues, ‘the partners love COC’), but somehow it is not –

  Cre-aack.

  The sound – what is it? – makes her pause.

  There is silence as the moment gathers itself in and then, again, cre-aack. Somewhere between a creak and a crack and it – wait – was that different?

  Yes.

  Different.

  Punctuating the cre-aacks she hears a noise that carries more air, a…woo-wooh? Almost like the backing vocals on that Stones track, the one Peter likes, ‘Sympathy for the Whatsit’ – woo-wooh – ‘Devil’. Odd. Frightening. Only she and Dennis use this front door; the bedsit above their split-level property has its own entrance. She hears nothing from up there, never does hear a thing. This weird mix of two sounds is coming from her kitchen, her lounge.

  Cre-aack.

  Woo-wooh.

  Probably nothing…unless…probably nothing…

  She slips off her shoes and begins to move, in slow motion, down the hall. The air, even with the front door open, is syrupy with central heating. Flushed, afraid, she acquires a highly inflamed sense of everything ahead of her: the dust-green rug, the shadowy walls, the balled fuzz under the radiator. It makes no sense to be scared. Cre-aack. So what if a psyc
hopathic burglar jumps out and takes her life? He’d be saving her the trouble of taking it herself. Woo-wooh. But if he hurt her, only hurt her…

  Hesitates. Thinks about turning back. Wake the Atkinsons up? Return with Zorro?

  Then, in the midst of this hesitation, a surge of self-hate: come on; the approaching hours are about courage; the Atkinsons are Latin teachers; Zorro’s only frightening feature is his bum.

  One step, two steps, three. Beyond the kitchen doorway now so the sounds are coming, must be coming, from the lounge. She pauses again. Focuses. Calls out Dennis’s name. It arrives as a thin rasp, a match flare in vast darkness. She considers unplugging the lamp. Make it a weapon. Where is her tennis racket? Her tennis racket is normally under the table which holds the lamp that in the absence of the tennis racket may be the best weapon she almost has to hand.

  Cre-aack.

  If she survives this encounter with the intruder, but nonetheless finds he has stolen her tennis racket, then she will miss her lunchtime tennis game.

  Woo-wooh.

  Which would be far from ideal, since it was due to be the final tennis game she would ever play, and with finality comes ceremony, and although Joy is on the whole an authentic and unpretentious person the trappings of tradition – the precedents, preambles, kind regards and chauffeured cars that constitute a career in law – have made ceremony a part of who she is. And she is Joy, still Joy, despite her doubts of late – the niggling sense that she’s in the wrong skin, that even her feelings are borrowed or false.

  With adrenalin blundering through her body she finds her attention snagging on the puzzlingly banal question of whether, if the burglar takes her racket (but not her life), she should cancel tennis with Christine, should instead do a final gym workout with her personal trainer at the office, but she had hoped to be in the company of a friend and she doesn’t want in any way to disappoint a friend who has been as good to her as Chri—

  —A-AACK.

  Louder now, and the volume brings unexpected clarity, the two sounds less tangled than before, and Joy thinks, Joy concentrates on the present problem, and finds it funny, really quite funny, that one sound should seem so breathily human and the other more like a piece of furniture sort of creaking and – could it be –

  She feels, somewhere in her fear-fogged brain, the silent glide of a fresh idea.

  WOO-WOOH.

  The noises. The noises are. The noises are surely something to do with Dennis’s new fitness thing.

  She exhales. Jesus. All well. Christ. Ever since he took his sabbatical from the university, Dennis – safe, dependable Dennis – has been spraining muscles in front of fitness DVDs, sipping drinks that have the consistency of wet cement. Older men. They should come with a health warning. He was young enough when she married him, but no one explained that the gap would seem somehow to grow, that for men past forty every year is a dog year bringing flatulence, paranoia, regular naps and vigorous barking up the wrong tree.

  CRE-AACK.

  Joy has formed the mental picture now: he will be doing some kind of ridiculous late-night breathy I-don’t-look-forty-five woo-wooh-ing midlife-crisis tricep dip with his heels digging into the costly carpet and his weight leaning back on the cre-acking Jacobsen sofa and she can live with this scenario, she can tolerate it, for it is a scenario that does not involve her going to the trouble of unplugging the lamp and murdering a burglar hours before Hanger’s attempt to present her with partnership, ask her to sign the papers, try to take from her a capital contribution, tie up her finances, make the business of dying as tricky as the business of living has, with relentless quiet persuasive force, proved itself to be. She wants to go as planned, in the afternoon, on the anniversary of the day her life most fully fell apart – with the least fuss possible, with hardly any fuss at all.

  In the tempered darkness of the hallway a memory starts to flicker. Sees herself, and her nephew, in a tent. A tent pitched in the middle of the dining room in her previous home, hastily assembled on the carpet in the hope it would make the child’s bottom lip wobble less. He was missing his parents, wasn’t he; camping with friends in the South of France. As both babysitter and tent-pitcher she found she had a lot to learn. Designed to be a free-standing structure, it nonetheless needed improvised guy lines to remain in place – lengths of string tied to bookcases and table legs which went periodically slack as, excited by the torch beam Joy rolled around the sloped walls, the child unsettled the fibreglass frame. ‘Auntie Joy can I perform the torch?’ he said…those words or words like them…a curious precision to his question. His role as a tiny god controlling light and dark made him giggle for a while but soon, growing bored, he asked for more cereal…

  Motionless amid the continuing cre-aacks and woo-woohs, exchanging stares with a pair of discarded glasses on a console table, her own fear has segued into boredom. Nothing more dreadful than discomfort awaits her, the aggravation of debating unlocked doors and early-hours exercise. The cycle of fault-finding and grumbling is loathsome yet habitual, somewhere safe she can snuggle into. It’s the same with Dennis’s exercises, she supposes. He is doing them before bed because they whittle the day down to a manageable scale and shape. And there are worse habits, if she’s honest. Take the guys at work, guys who’ll probably sneer when she’s gone (Couldn’t cope! Too much pressure!). Guys like Peter, who likes to end each day gazing in that mirror by the burly Coke machine, his self-regard so intense you can almost hear it sometimes, a waveband fizz, a twiddle of excited static. At least Dennis doesn’t do mirror-love, is merely trying – in a vaguely manly fashion – to keep fit.

  As verdicts go, ‘tit’ was perhaps a little harsh.

  Except that. This is strange. As she leans her head forward and relaxes her posture, to squint past the glasses and the table edge, into the submarine light of the lounge, something new comes into view. A scrap of material on the carpet, its colour muffled by shadow. And is it – are those – knickers?

  Peter

  IF YOU walk down the same corridor for a hundred months, hearing the sound of tapped keys and sipped tea, you know something about what it is to feel safe. Even a man of my vision and experience would be forgiven for seeing the office as a sanctuary, a place where the wider world was both abbreviated and improved. Beautiful women. Pleasant furnishings. A range of enjoyable biscuits. Yes: Hanger, Slyde & Stein was – until last Friday – a kind of paradise. And I’ll tell you the really troubling thing: when it all goes wrong, when colleagues start to do horrific things to each other and themselves, their appearance remains the same. As people become monsters, they grow no horns or extra eyes. No. They stay perfumed in pencil skirts.

  What’s that?

  Oh, I see. Skirts, suits, kilts – I was making no distinction. I met my wife here, and more to the point Joy, so it’s not as if I have anything against the firm’s female contingent. Have you heard anything about Joy, by the way? About her condition?

  Naturally. Say no more. I’m no stranger to confidentiality. Although, to let you in on a trade secret, at Hanger’s confidentiality is considered against the public interest. Law firms are networks of people who want to digest every tiny private detail. The appetite for humiliation, for the finer points of a disgrace or discomfort, is particularly great. In 2008 a camera-phone clip was circulated of Nigel Beast dozing off at the Annual Partners’ Dinner. His head bobbed over candlelit petits fours and in an instant his famously frenzied nasal hairs, full of the kinks and curls of gift ribbon, caught a naked flame. Like a firework, people said. Like a Catherine wheel. Your average bystander is pretty loose with their imagery, but you get the idea. Nigel Beast’s charred button nose was the talk of the office for nearly a year. Committing an embarrassing act at Hanger’s meant Doing A Beast right up until spring ’09, when a woman in Real Estate was discovered naked, in the ladies’ fourth-floor lavatories, allowing a gym-built reprographics assistant to snort coke o
ff her clitoris. Nobody is amused by what happened to Joy, of course. That’s not what I’m saying. But the incident is still public property. It is Beastgate, but with more blood; Clitgate, but with less blow. Good employees, like good citizens, are curious. They will talk it over. They will get their story straight.

  I must admit, I was a little intrigued to meet you. You see all these American programmes – do you have a chaise longue, at least, in your normal office? – but you don’t expect your firm to bolster its occupational health function like this. In the spirit of enquiry, I thought I’d be the first to come and say hello. Ease you in with someone senior and sane. I’m afraid Friday has left some employees, and of course Dennis, two snacks short of the full picnic.

  Dennis.

  No one’s told you about Dennis?

  They may have! They may have. You really are taking this privacy stuff seriously, aren’t you?

  For the avoidance of doubt, he’s Joy’s husband. The sort of boarding-school toff who belongs in Parliament, though in fact he’s housed in another fossilised institution: academia. He was here when the incident happened, and – wink twice if I’m right – the firm has made your services available to him as well as us? They called him in yesterday to impart that news, and afterwards, stirring coffee in the kitchen pod, he cornered me with one of his monologue moans about the CCTV footage doing the rounds. I tried to explain to him that it’s only natural people will be curious. Did she jump? Did she fall? Will she wake? I told him, these are all valid questions.

  You’re not sure they’re valid, or you’re not sure they should be asked?

  But of course. Everything in life depends on your perspective. Even the most niche activities – using vegetables to sodomise a loved one, for example – depend on your perspective. But does unremitting relativism advance the argument? Does it get us any closer to understanding why the curt courgette, the prim parsnip, might be considered arousing?