Joy Read online

  ‘I’m sorry about the heat, boiler still on the blink, had the front door open to cool the place down and then forgot about it, the door, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ she says, head tipping towards his chest.

  ‘You work too hard,’ he says, spreading his arms.

  ‘Other women in the office have children to look after. They’re lawyers and mothers.’

  ‘Yes, well, granted, but I bet, if I was a betting man I’d bet, that they are either bad lawyers or bad mothers.’

  ‘And what would that involve?’ she asks, withdrawing from his sweater and the nest he’s built around it. ‘To be a bad mother?’

  ‘Joy-Joy, come on, you work too hard.’

  She works too hard. She has exhausted herself. She never questions Dennis’s reluctance, of late, to have one-on-one sex with her. She never questions her own willingness to let his fantasies, kick-started at some seedy party they attended years ago, intrude on her sense of self-esteem. Before his sabbatical, he sometimes complained that the university campus carried a palpable smell of death, the scent of literary theorists deconstructing his favourite books, and it must be the same with her. She is thirty-three but scarcely there; he can smell the death in her hair; he needs someone who can bring life to their bedroom. She used to think traumas killed you off with the rudeness of pure force, a nail to the brain, but now she views her remembered failures as a degenerative disease, a slow tilting into shadow and cold. The dusky scent of death must account for the way Dennis rolls over instantly, feigns uninterrupted sleep, ‘feigns’ because she wakes each morning to find a clotted Kleenex on his side of the bed, and it is no big deal, she says to herself, both of the morning tissues and the Thursday girls, no big deal. Yet she has become sensitive to the tremors in the mattress. They feel, more and more, like the ground itself is shaking.

  ‘Did you close the door on your way in, Joy-Joy? I’d better go and – why don’t I? – I think I’d better go and close the door.’

  She listens to his footsteps, and the hinge-creak, and wonders how young that girl was, and looks at her watch, and is reminded that Friday has already engulfed her, and when the latch goes and the first gulp of Merlot leaves her lips dry she turns to the sink and vomits.

  Being sick on red wine: there are few things worse in the world. It makes you convulse, afterwards, with self-disgust.

  Dennis

  NOW, DOCTOR, it all depends on whether you have the time, but the point at which I’d like to begin is the day before my wife’s accident, and it involves some seeming irrelevancies, and to be honest I do sometimes mix the salient with the irrelevant (I often say to my students that they should interpret my speech as if it incorporates the footnotes and parentheses of which I’m so textually fond), but should you have the time it (what I propose to say about the Thursday) might be useful background to what happened to Joy-Joy on the Friday and, indeed, what is happening to me, to my own mind, on an ongoing basis, don’t you agree?

  Too kind, and I thank you, because yes, I think I will, I think I will have one. They may work their lawyers hard, but the facilities and refreshments are quite something, no?

  So. Three times I’ve travelled in a first-class carriage. The first time, nothing happened,1 whereas on the second occasion I found myself sitting next to (provided you erase the centre aisle from your mental floorplan) ex-Conservative Party leader William Hague. He’d recently returned to the backbenches,2 and after silently weighing up possible conversational openers and intellectual entry points for two-thirds of the London to York journey, I finally spoke up.

  Nice cap, I said. Baseball, is it?

  Thanks, he said, peering over his newspaper. It is.

  Now I can see what you’re thinking, Doctor, and you’re right, quite right, I did indeed want to ask him (William Hague) how it could be that only months after resigning as Conservative Party leader he was entirely alone on a train to York, no security guards or trusted circle of advisers, a briefcase on his knees that was not red and barely looked lockable, but – here is the issue – it was obvious from his taciturn response to my comment on the hat (the baseball cap) that he was still sore about the Labour landslide (2001), and for that reason, and moreover the scowl on his little bald face, I held back and, for the remaining portion of the voyage, pretended to sleep.

  The third time I sat in first class, I was directly opposite a very famous female author. This was last Thursday, the day before my wife had her fall, hours before she came back from work and found the front door open and me inside with…well, hold your horses Dennis, first things – usually – first.

  Now I trust you completely, it goes without saying that I do, and I see no conflict of interest, as my wife would say, none at all, in you having a fiduciary medic–patient type relationship with me on the one hand and on the other proverbial hand having a pay-my-bills type relationship with the esteemed legal eagles in whose branches we are currently nested, but, at the same time, I have always been careful not to betray any confidences, it has been a rule of my adult life to avoid betrayal, so I am going to call the famous literary author Beverley Badger. That is not a real name.3 But despite it not being her real name you may find, if you are very clever, that the nom de plume I have created for said author gives, via an approximate anagram, a clue as to her most famous female character, and thereby – in a roundabout fashion – to her (i.e. the famous literary author’s) true identity. That, I’m afraid, is the only clue you’re getting.

  Jolly good, very sensible, write that down in the old doctorly handwriting!

  Not a…?

  But perhaps a PhD sort of thing?

  Right, I see, I see, so your proper title would be, even though it makes you sound a little like a moustachioed member of local government…?

  Understood, Counsellor. Now my two previous first-class adventures were funded by the university, but not on this occasion. Even if a 240-mile round trip to watch a friend-slash-rival delivering a lecture to his postgrads were an expensible item under the university’s English Literature Department Expenses Policy 2011 (sub-section: Travel; sub-sub-section: Rail; para 2(b)), which strictly it is probably not,4 I have by virtue of my long-term sabbatical from the position of Senior Lecturer forsaken all remunerative privileges enshrined in that document. On the day I met Beverley Badger (not her real name, remember) I therefore had in my possession an Advance Purchase Off-Peak Super Saver Return ticket with reserved standard-class seating. Had I not boarded the train at Bristol Temple Meads and found my reserved seat occupied, and had it not been occupied by a woman with a friendly open face holding a small screaming baby to her vaguely veiled breast, and had it not been a surprisingly packed train for that time of the day, and had the conductor not subsequently checked my ticket as I stood attempting to read my book squashed between the constantly swinging toilet door and the incrementally slideable window, and had he not felt sorry for me given I had paid for a reserved seat and was nonetheless standing, well then I may not have ended up in first opposite Ms Badger.

  I suppose I may partly have picked the seat opposite her because, in addition to it (the seat) being vacant, she (Ms Badger) was attractive in that refined unthreatening way unique to ample women. Given the choice, everyone will sit among the best gene pool they possibly can, don’t you think? My wife’s mother is a New Yorker and, on the one occasion Joy-Joy and I went over there together, ostensibly so Joy-Joy could try and make contact after years of estrangement, but in the final analysis simply to drink alcohol and eat cupcakes, the gene pool on the Continental Airlines Boeing 767 was positively disheartening, Counsellor, really it was. But anyhow it was only when I saw that this ample woman in the first-class carriage was using a pencil to scribble in her book, and that the front cover of the book bore the words Uncorrected Proof Copy, that I realised quite who she was, quite how well my powers of seat selection had served me, and, learning from my Willia
m Hague experience, engaged her in a discussion of her own work (not, e.g. – though she did not wear one – her hat).

  After a nervous start we talked excitedly, practically uninterruptedly, for the next hour and forty-five minutes.5 The discussion was marvellous. She told me many fascinating things about the publishing industry, all of which I data-inputted into my excellent memory in case I should be able later to recycle them and thereby impress-slash-engage-slash-attract a literary agent to represent my own in-progress work of prose.

  I beg your pardon, Counsellor?

  Ah, quite! Yes. Yes that’s exactly what I was suggesting. Nail on the proverbial head. On this sabbatical of mine I’ve been working on a non-fiction book about Shakespeare, but not as academic a work as my previous efforts, published as they were by the university’s own press. No, this book is going to bring Shakespeare to the people. It will be a completely unpretentious, thoroughly engaging, heavily commercial homage to the Bard.

  It does sound interesting, doesn’t it? I thank you kindly for your feedback. And whilst I wouldn’t presume to guess at your own views on such matters, my personal feeling (and my wife would disagree, and I make a qualified exception for Ms Badger’s opus) is that fiction these days always, sometimes, occasionally lacks a certain truth, no? Can fail to represent faithfully the way that, in real life, the absurd jostles with the serious, the dirty with the clean, the excessive with the spare, to create a disconcerting but amusing overtangled mess? Now of course with some kinds of fiction – novels told in the first person, say – everyone suspects they are reading disguised memoir. And with memoir, of course, everyone automatically suspects it’s pure fiction. But when I suggest I have a preference for non-fiction, for the messy truth, it’s not really memoir I’m talking about, indeed I’ve always found the very notion of memoir a touch egotistical – must be an arrogant literary form, don’t you think, to have both the words me and moi in it? – no, when I talk about the delights of non-fiction I’m ruminating on biography, historical account, literary criticism. A work on Shakespeare which is meandering, populist and true: this is the thing to which I devote my days.

  Is it difficult? To…concentrate, you mean?

  Of course…I…just a little. The book has been rather on the backburner, in the last few days.

  Nonsense! No, I’m fine, absolutely fine, thank you for your concern.

  Well it is simply difficult, that’s all, to get going with the book, when previously, as I tried to finish a sentence or a paragraph, there would be my wife calling on the phone, or having a box of kitchenware delivered to the door, or – late at night – rattling her keys in the lock. There were these external forces nagging at the walls of my concentration, generating a certain creative pressure within, a protective power to keep the world away, and now there is none of that, none at all, and I have all the time I could want to think about my book (or to consider the sell-by dates of particular products) and yet I find my sentences lying so flat on the page, crushed by the very qualities Lawrence saw as murderous to good free verse, showing too much finish, too much polish – no impulsive edginess, no insurgent naked throb, no lived experience poking through – and the half-heard rumours and refrigerated items that make up my days, these too seem to hold a certain settled loneliness I cannot explain.

  For instance the rumour that my wife tried to commit suicide, Counsellor. I know my wife, I have been married to her for almost five years, and she may have had low points during her troublesome twenties, there was the business with her nephew as perhaps you’ve heard, but those (those difficulties) are all in the past now, and I believe she (my wife) had come to terms with prior mistakes and misfortunes, and quite frankly the suggestion, the suggestion that she wouldn’t have left a note, that someone as meticulous and imaginative as her would not have left her husband a note, or that she would try and do it (the suicide) in such a public forum – in front of me and, what, two hundred colleagues? – quite ridiculous. Indeed I find the notion of suicide essentially ridiculous, frightening in its retrospective glitz, its sidestepping of death, its avoidance of the natural albeit chilling erosions of old age, its greedy grasping for the philosophical advantage, and what if you regretted it, what if Celan, Plath, Woolf, Hemingway, Gertler, Berryman, Pavese, Van Gogh, Rothko, Pollock regretted it all when the trigger clicked or the pills kicked in, as any sensible person surely would? No, not Joy-Joy; the suicide theory is ridiculous. But then, of course, it is only as ridiculous as some of the conspiracy theories.

  Why would I mind expanding? It’s not as if you are one of the lie-spreaders, Counsellor.

  I’m thinking, for example, of the one (the conspiracy theory) involving her friend Christine. The suggestion that Christine, simply because she hasn’t yet visited Joy in hospital, may have been involved with Friday’s events, the events following my first-class journey with B. Badger. I find that to be tremendously unlikely. Whereas Christine’s husband Peter, another Hanger employee, a bitter West Country bully who’s tinkered hard with his accent and clothes while remaining ultimately uncouth, I will certainly be keeping a close eye on him, and if I get so much as a hint that he somehow…well, yes, I rule nothing out.

  Skip Notes

  1 Not literally, of course – there’s always something happening – but I mean to say nothing of particular significance occurred such as to warrant the time of a busy young expert in matters of the mind.

  2 This was before his Foreign Secretary days in the well-spoken Clegg–Cameron government.

  3 By which I mean it is not her (the famous literary author’s) real name. Clearly it could be someone’s real name, that someone being unrelated to the anecdote now in progress and having parents who must have had – yes – a couple of drinks on the night they named her.

  4 Though it depends, frankly, on your interpretation of the phrase exclusively for the purposes of departmental business.

  5 I say practically because, thirty to thirty-five minutes into the journey, there was a pause as we considered the offerings of the refreshments trolley which a toadish teenager wheeled down the aisle (not the aisle you erased from your mental floorplan for the William Hague story – that was a different train on a different route on a different date – but similar in width and most other significant aisle-like qualities) and Beverley ended up going for a bottle of still water which, despite its brand name, is not manufactured in the Scottish Highlands, whilst I opted for a black coffee, which following a period of reflection I did not drink, as it looked thick with cancer-causing compounds.

  9.15 a.m.

  THE OFFICES of Hanger, Slyde & Stein stand between two thinner glass towers: the Icarus Hotel on the left, and on the right a financial institution said to outsource its recruitment function to a Shoreditch model agency. The twenty-somethings from the financial institution, all skinny ties and left-swerving hair, like to lunch at the pan-Asian restaurant in the Icarus. The restaurant is called Pacific Lust. It is full of tight-skirted staff and fortune cookies that contain advice like The secret to getting ahead is getting started.

  Joy is tired. As she walks through the courtyard she takes a glance around her. It will be a relief to see it no more, this place so lavishly landscaped that it appears as a pixelated version of itself. A strange, simple relief. Like unleashing a yawn. She yawns. She decides that Dennis should ditch Shakespeare and write about the underrated art of yawning – the elastic release, the wash of air. That bespectacled American whose novel six people gave her for Christmas (six times 500-odd pages made him the most prolific author on her shelves, she calculated), he’d managed to capture the varied banality of everyday life, the different shades of boredom at home and at work, the freedom which comes from the yawn itself. Why can’t Dennis turn his hand to a project like that? Yawn: a Great American Novel. She’d buy it in a flash, but Dennis won’t write it; he’s rarely great, never American, and too often on the wrong
side of yawns to feel comfortable trumpeting their virtues. There is also his distrust of modern fiction, a strangely tireless scepticism she considers while circling the firm’s award-winning Japanese water garden, its six bamboo fountains and staggered granite stepping stones. She worries about him. An unpaid sabbatical seems so out of character. People like Peter love taking chances – risk is their religion – but not Dennis, never Dennis, his fear of failure is total, like baldness, or a purge. He must be unhappy. Her unhappiness must be making him unhappy. It’s what every book and song and film is about: happiness and unhappiness. He could write about that, she supposes, though there’s probably not much more to say on the subject.

  When she first walked through this courtyard ten years ago (a decade! how has it happened?) she decided, actually decided, that she would either love the job or loathe it. She has always avoided at all costs the grey decisionless centre ground on which so many build their lives, the sorts of people who waste your time with I don’t knows and Up to yous. There are only so many Up to yous a life, let alone a conversation, can survive. Vehemence of feeling, colour, precarious energy – however flawed a person is she’ll forgive them all sins if these traits show through. In the ’87 election, she amused her parents by urging them to ‘vote Thatcher – more lively than Kinnock’. And when old enough to cast her own vote, she opted for Blair because he seemed more memorable than Major. The thing she cannot stand is lack of vitality and when, as a graduate of Oxford PPE and a now defunct London law school, she arrived for the first day of her training contract, she renewed her Life Promise not to be passive, not to be dull. If Joy did fortune cookies, they’d say Make it a miracle, make it a disaster, but for fuck’s sake don’t get stuck in the middle. She realises this needs some work.

  Her mother was very into sayings, Life Promises and joss sticks, but never prepared Joy for the complexity of everyday adulthood. No one did, actually. Was it unreasonable to expect a heads-up on issues such as the fact she might start work and find she loved it and loathed it, the precise state of fence-sitting flux she’d always wanted to avoid? It seemed obvious that workers would sometimes be riven by these contraries, but not that they could – as she now does – find them enshrined in every dotted i, every filed email, every late-night machine-made mocha. The biggest surprise of her career has been that no one else finds her ambivalent attitude to office life disturbing. Many, in fact, appear positively impressed by it. Joy cares and doesn’t care, has – as her ten-year appraisal put it – the fierce, relaxed intelligence that engenders confidence and calm. She started in 2001 with forty-eight other trainees; she is one of only four in her intake still here. Joy, Clare, Christine, Peter. Clare Harris-Bowler’s partnership potential evaporated when the firm’s Head of Public Relations & Brand Strategy found her enjoying class-A sex in the fourth-floor ladies’ loos (why didn’t they lock the door? Why not the spacious privacy of the disabled toilet? Nobody knows). The woman now cruelly known as Coke-Cunt Clare, or Triple C in polite company, is unlikely to stick around after her bonus this June. Christine’s primary goal is pregnancy, not partnership, and her husband Peter – well, he’s as complicated as Joy. There is a loose electricity in his eyes, some wiring gone wrong, and she doesn’t know which way he will go.