Rachel had to lie on the bed comforting me for fifteen minutes before I would let her leave.
Absurd, really, because all week I had been looking forward to it. Read a book, have a wank, pick my nose, be smelly and alone. When I rang her later that night – Harry answered, his bad manners whetted by a fortnight in Paris – and Rachel did the crying: I felt, well, nothing much, nothing to write home about.
Furthermore, as Mr Bellamy said, I had the asthma to think of. This affliction seemed to collaborate with the other spanners in my respiratory works. It opened up new dimensions to my coughing fits. I would get a tug in the solar-plexus (quite pleasant, actually) and a kind of hollow pressure at the back of my throat (again, not unsexy) which nevertheless I had to lose, and the only way to lose it was to go on coughing: each rasp softened my diaphragm and chipped away at the emptiness in my lungs until I was left with a drunken, emotional, husky resonance deep in the chest and there appeared to be no need to cough any more. One particularly illustrious fit ended when a huge, wriggling blob of gilbert leapt from my mouth and smacked solidly against the bathroom wall – better than five feet away. I focused my eyes; it was enormous; it looked like – what are they called ? bolasses ? – the weighted lassoos employed by South American cowpokes. Soon, I thought, soon, just by coughing in the direction of their legs, I’d be able to trip up old ladies in the street.
It also enriched the texture of my phlegm: I whoofed up goo pretzels, fried slugs, pixie’s nylons. And it wouldn’t let me sleep and it made me feel old and it left me gasping on the stairs and it cemented my nostrils so that I had to breathe through my mouth, like a yob.
There were good things, too, of course. Some serious work remained to be done, mostly in the form of track-covering – I had referred (abusively) to countless writers I had barely even heard of, let alone read – and there was ample time to percolate anxiety about my interview. The addition of various rhetorical trills to the Letter to My Father gave occasional light relief.
Further, Rachel came to see me every day. She brought presents, a mag or some fruit (bananas and grapes only, after she noticed the apples browning in their dish). She brought me the library books I asked for. She looked marvellously independent and she didn’t stay too long. The poems almost wrote themselves.
We talked a lot about the times we’d have when I was well and my interview was out of the way. For I was entering a national under-21 short-story competition, sponsored by one of the colour magazines. With the prize-money we might just have a few days in Paris ourselves.
Twenty to: the dog days
There goes the last of the plonk – and a very nice drop of wine, too. But I’m afraid it hasn’t quite done the trick.
My father is alone in the sitting-room, a typescript and a glass of soda water before him.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Just thought I’d have … a small whisky.’
‘Hi.’ He looks up as if trying to catch my eye across a room full of people. ‘Why not have one with me?’
‘Oh. Well I’ve got one more thing to write, actually. But how long are you going to be up?’
‘Thirty, forty minutes.’
‘Then I might well come down later. Valentine’s away, isn’t he?’
My father cocks his head. ‘Yes.’
‘Only there’s something I want to dig out of his room.’
‘Ah. Well then. Hope to see you some time after twelve.’
Valentine’s room used to be my room. We switched when I was fifteen. You think I resisted the change ? Not at all. I welcomed it. Attics seemed more thoughtful and fair-minded places to be, then. I kneel on the window-seat in the dark and admit the thrillingly cold air. I think about my formative heterosexual experience. It won’t take a minute.