An Irresponsible Age. Lavinia Greenlaw
subsided back under the quilt. He was working as a despatch rider and had to set off at seven-thirty. Mary settled herself back against the pillows, feeling the child’s fist knock against her ribs as she sang to her:
Somewhere over dawn’s early light,
it begins, the holding hands,
haunting me to tell,
a long long while outside.
Soon Bella was sleeping again and Mary continued to sit, one hand caught in Tobias’s sleeve and the other pressed against the solid back of her daughter. She started to drift off but even this sketchy darkness brought the rushing feeling back, and as her eyes closed her hand shot up and she shouted ‘Stop!’
Tobias turned towards her.
‘Sorry, did I wake you?’ Mary asked, putting her hand on his shoulder. Stop.
He opened his eyes. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I don’t know why I said it, I’m sorry.’
‘Said what?’
‘Stop. I shouted “Stop”.’
‘It was just a dream. You didn’t shout anything. I would’ve heard you.’
Even if the post had not been lying on his camp bed, Jacob would have known that it was Barbara who had broken in. He would say nothing to her. The spilled papers and books were worthless to him now. He would leave them where she had dropped them until the day he gave up the room, and began now by walking over them to collect a notepad, a bottle of whiskey and a packet of Egyptian cigarettes. He wrapped the Mexican blanket from his bed around his shoulders and sat on the step where he smoked and drank, the calm this brought balanced by the stimulus of the cold air. He made notes in writing he would not be able to read, looking up now and then to watch the light enlarging above the river.
Jacob had the air of someone halfway through a door. People thought of him as averted and non-committal and, being Jacob, he enjoyed such misunderstandings. He wondered at the evening, and admired his own insistence. This girl who looked like a boy was still young enough for her gaucheness to be endearing. She had begun to know things about which he knew more. She was more susceptible than she realised and she was in pain, he could see that. She was going away. Jacob knew exactly why Juliet interested him and this did nothing to alter his belief that he was in love.
Juliet sat up in bed. ‘Endearingly emphatic! Endearing! Christ. And emphatic. Emphatic! Fuck, fuck. Endearingly emphatic! Fuck …’
Once Juliet decided that she ought to see a doctor, she began to organise her illness. She made a list. How long had she been having pain? She could not remember when it began, nor could she imagine being free of it, and because it had once been tolerable, she had assumed it still was. It had not occurred to her to worry about the fact that she had to sit down and lift her feet into the air to put on her shoes, or that sometimes she could not breathe well or find words. These things were simply there to be negotiated.
The doctor was a shockingly handsome man of about her age and she was so determined not to be embarrassed, she was a doctor’s daughter after all, that when he asked her to undress, she stood up immediately and pulled off her skirt. ‘No!’ cried the doctor. ‘I’ll just fetch a … someone … Please! Go behind the screen and remove your clothes, just your lower half, and lie down. And cover yourself, please, with the blanket.’
He returned with a nurse, who stood by Juliet’s head while the handsome young man asked her to raise her knees and then touched her thigh, meaning to move her leg to one side, only he did so too slowly, too gently, and Juliet blushed and turned her face towards the wall. She felt a chill blob of lubricating jelly and then the doctor started to issue warnings – that this might feel cold or sharp or uncomfortable – and Juliet felt pressure as the speculum was inserted and then opened with that scraping noise that was only the turn of a screw, but which nonetheless frightened her more than the pain caused by his fingers probing parts of her that felt too deep to belong. She had tears running down her face but the only sounds she made were when the doctor asked if this hurt, or this, or this. He was picking over the pieces of glass and stone she had come to imagine were inside her, and he knew exactly where to find them.
Eventually, the doctor peeled off his gloves, washed his hands, went back to his desk and began to type with unexpected efficiency as the nurse handed Juliet some tissue, with which she wiped her eyes. The nurse handed her some more. The doctor typed for a long time.
He asked more questions and Juliet told him in explicit detail about the colour and texture and quantity of the blood, and also about the pain: ‘Sometimes it makes me throw up; other times I shit brown water.’
He rubbed his hands together, realised what he was doing and stopped. ‘I’m going to refer you.’
‘What will they do?’
‘Probably a scan and then, if need be, they’ll take you in and have a look round.’
‘Look round for what?’
‘Anything a scan might not pick up. They’ll probably go in through the belly button so you won’t have to worry about a scar.’
‘When will this be done?’
‘The current waiting time is five to six months.’
‘But I’m going away.’
‘You’re, what, twenty-eight? You’ve got plenty of time. Reschedule if you have to. Meanwhile, I’ll give you something for the pain.’ He had stroked this woman’s thigh. He wanted her out of his surgery as quickly as possible.
When Juliet arrived at the gallery that afternoon, there was a note from Tania asking her to pick up some contracts from an insurance company whose offices were near Chancery Lane, in that uncertain area where banks and newspapers hovered close to what had for centuries been their home. There were many parts of London that Juliet did not know and this was one of them. She had found her routes, her places and her perspectives, and it was not in her nature to wander. She hated getting lost and was cross to find that she had, emerging from the Tube station confused by a choice of exits. Still phased by the handsome doctor’s touch and the residual pain from his examination, she followed other pedestrians as they made their way between traffic cones and scaffolding, realised she was heading in the wrong direction, turned a corner and found herself at the back of Smithfields meat market, which had already closed for the day. The tall doors looked as if they hadn’t been opened for years but splashes and clots, theatrically scarlet, persisted in the sluiced gutters and among the cobbles. She could not see a way past the market, nor was it going to let her in, so she turned back to the station.
As Juliet approached the company’s offices at last, she was thrown to the ground. She had heard a profound boom and a large hand, an enormous hand, had pushed her. She lifted her head and looked back. There was no one, nothing behind her, but she had felt the force of something heavy and close, as if a building had collapsed at her shoulder or a skip full of earth had been dropped at her heels. She pulled herself up onto her feet with the sensation of having to peel an electrified swarm of something off the ground and pull it into shape. It was as if this sound, which travelled so unnaturally through her body, had separated every cell.
Around her, the noise of the city was changing. The dragging tension of grid-locked traffic broke up as drivers pounded their horns, wrenched steering wheels and scraped their tyres in a bid to inch their way out. There were footsteps, someone running, cries and shouts, sirens, odd silences. A man she couldn’t see almost singing it: ‘A bomb! A bomb!’
In ten years, Juliet had absorbed the insecurity of the city. She did not avoid declared targets or the scenes of past explosions but was after all not much interested in