* * *
Saturday’s triumph in the quarter-finals, seeing off the Royal Standard Poolstars four games to three, inevitably leads to calls for a Sunday morning liquid debrief. Daniel’s playing has been solid, if unspectacular, Threadbare’s a little hit and miss but occasionally devastating, while that of team captain Bladder has been consistently fast, aggressive and deadly accurate, most crucially during the cliff-hanger of the final black. By Sunday, Bladder has been elevated from man of the match to hero of the day, affording him ample opportunity to live up to his moniker – not one visit to the gents during the entire morning’s revelry. It all places considerable strain on Daniel’s resolve to greet Gulnaz both sober and on time. Eyebrows rise as he begins passing up the offers of drink. By twelve thirty a consensus has been reached that Daniel is either sick or in love. Probably both. When at twelve forty-five he climbs from the table, a table still creaking under the weight of at least sixteen cued-up pints and twice that number of empties, only team mascot Jerry can muster a civilised goodbye. The rest of the mob simply shower him with tawdry abuse.
The uphill climb to the church does the power of good. The morning is clear and crisp, dry underfoot, with a breeze keen enough to freshen his clothes and breath. According to his watch he’s early, though the church entrance can’t be seen from the north gate, nor the hymns be heard through its heavy walls. But he can see the end of the path to the lichgate, as well as the track that winds his way. As yet, there is no-one in sight. Another five minutes passes before the first of the congregation emerges, and with them a faint crescendo of organ music. As more and more figures spill out into the churchyard Daniel finds himself growing more excited and more anxious, increasingly the latter as the crowd begins to thin again. Eventually though, Gulnaz appears. She’s entirely dressed in black, hair buried beneath a headscarf, never before looking so Middle-Eastern. For a while she vanishes behind the hawthorn trees and is suddenly close enough to spot him, her large white teeth lighting up her whole face. It seems the most natural thing, when he opens the gate to let her through, that they should kiss – just a friendly peck, a pair of them to be precise, one on each cheek.
For a second time in under a week they set off down Cooper’s Hill, over the crossing and into Sedgefield Court. This time there’s no hurry, and conversation can be a good deal more reciprocal. Gulnaz describes the service as having been simple but uplifting, the sermon promoting humility and grace for the year ahead. Daniel counters with the previous night’s pool victory, no place for grace or humility in the fierce battle that now finds Millwrights’ Mastercues poised to clinch the regional trophy. This morning’s drink fest is hinted at, but not dwelt upon.
Anxious this time to make an impression, Daniel finds the welcome offered at his doorstep more than a trifle infuriating. With its general stink and clutter, the lobby is always the low point in bringing home a new pickup. Today it surpasses itself; swarming with human traffic, a blockage on the stairs, another at the pigeonholes as discarded junk mail is trampled underfoot, and a third along the corridor, one girl fumbling to release her bicycle from the two others chained to the stair rails. Unable to move, Daniel and Gulnaz can do nothing but wait; plenty of time for her to absorb the vulgar graffiti, the stained paintwork, the piles of empty boxes and bottles, the heady aromas of stale cooking and toilets.
She observes all this without comment. Only when they finally round the corner to his flat does she snatch a sharp breath and laugh out loud. “Oh my god!” She mimics the expression on the face of his neighbour’s fearsome Santa Claus, “Now there’s something to give me nightmares.”
“Mrs Cropley’s idea of seasonal cheer,” Daniel snorts.
“And what’s the story here?” Her attention has now fixed on the door to Mrs Cropley’s right. Its window also contains a striking decoration: that of a spider’s web of cracked glass centred around a bullet-sized hole. A wooden board behind holds the fragile mosaic in place. Across the lower half of the door the words ‘Polack Shit’ are sprayed in blue aerosol.
“That’s been empty for a while now. Hasty evacuation.”
“Oh dear. But now this is funny.” She’s scrutinising his doorbell. “I didn’t spot it before.”
He peers over her shoulder. “Uh? Oh that. Yeah, very witty.” For the most part, Daniel’s flat has escaped the vandals, gunslingers and aerosol wielders. The glass to his door is reinforced, frosted and curtained, triple protection against snoopers or intruders. The wood is painted battleship grey, a near perfect match to the walls of the lobby, as if hoping it might disappear altogether. Only the doorbell has been targeted. His own personalised graffiti. Above the name George, some smartarse has written a column of other names:
John
Paul
and below his name, with an arrow curling up to the push button, the words: ‘And Ringo!’ Very droll.
Daniel sighs. “Better, I suppose, than ‘Polack Shit’ and an air rifle bullet.”
Gulnaz wipes her feet and follows him through.
Kitchen aside, by the standards of her first visit the flat is quite presentable. And, though Gulnaz would never have guessed, it’s really all down to her. Daniel’s Boxing Day clean-up, embraced with such gusto in anticipation of their cosy night in, has generally survived the subsequent neglect. Daniel might have cause to feel good about this, but for the foul stench that now hits them both like a truck – of something having crept in and died. As it happens, this is also largely down to Gulnaz. The double bank holiday having postponed bin collection for a week, and with everyone’s black bags piling up outside his windows, many already ravaged by vermin for their turkey carcasses, Daniel has been holding off putting out his own rubbish for as long as possible. For five days now, his gourmet meal of chicken portions with tinned carrots in mushroom soup has been mercilessly composting away in the kitchen bin. Somehow he’s been oblivious to the stink until now. But that’s the joy of bringing a woman into the home – suddenly becoming aware of all the little things.
He quickly ushers her into the sitting room in order to deal with the problem, quietly hoping to find her stretched out seductively on the sofa when he gets back. But he returns instead to discover her standing stiffly at the window.
“You have a cat,” she pronounces. Scoff purrs at her from Daniel’s favourite chair.
“Oh yeah, I do. He’s called Scoff. You didn’t meet him before?”
She shakes her head tersely. “I’m afraid I’m not so good with cats. It’s their fur, it affects my breathing.”
Not the greatest start then if she doesn’t even like cats. He shoos Scoff away and closes the door to the kitchen. The most natural thing in the world now would be to fix her a drink, but with alcohol currently something of a dirty word, he can think of nothing to offer her beyond his vilified coffee.
“Do you have any tea?” she asks.
“Tea. Yeah, I think so. Tea bags.”
“That would be fine. Black, no sugar.”
Almost certainly not the way she normally takes it. No warmed pot or fresh leaves. No tea cosy or silver strainer. No fine bone china. Just black, no sugar. Simple enough even for him not to ruin. He sets off for the kitchen, catches Scoff just in time from slinking back to his chair, and pulls the door to. Gulnaz may read this as him wanting privacy. Not a whisper emerges from the next room the whole time he is away. Itchy to finish and check on what she’s up to, he chucks the tea bag in the bin, sloshes milk and sugar into his own coffee, grabs a pack of digestives and backs his way through the door.
“I was having another look at the photo,” she says, as he hands her the mug. “I was looking at your father.”
The Devonport photograph he’d gone to such pains to dig out on Christmas Day now perches on the shelf over the radiator. Daniel can’t remember having put it there.
“He was handsome. He looked like you.”
With the picture in one hand, her tea in the other, Gulnaz proceeds to circle the room. Pausing at his
bookcase, she crouches down and runs an eye along the titles with an expression of growing surprise. Books on seafaring, military history, astronomy, science-fiction, illusions and magic, travel, mathematics, marine life, conchology.
“Goodness.”
He grunts. “So what were you expecting?”
“I don’t know really. But not this. These are fascinating.”
Maybe they do have something in common after all, even if it’s not cats.
Standing again, she scrutinises a picture above the bookcase, a brightly coloured abstract of repeating geometric shapes that has been Blu-tacked to the wall. “Computer graphics?” she asks, puzzled.
“A stereogram,” he explains.
“I thought that was something for playing records.”
“You got to stare right through it. Then you’ll see a 3-D image.”
After a few seconds of staring, she shrugs and moves on. “Can’t see anything. What should I have seen?”
“A sailing boat. It works best when you’re knackered.” Or better still, pissed, he muses.
Gulnaz laughs. “Then it should work for me every time.” She’s stopped now before a framed drawing in the corner near the window. “And what’s this?”
“That one? It’s called ‘Ants on a Mobius Strip’. One of those impossible drawings by Escher – you know, like the people going up and down an endless staircase, the fishes becoming birds. I’ve got a whole book of them, but this was always my favourite.” He steps over to join her. “Partly because, unlike most of Escher’s stuff, or the stereogram, a Mobius strip isn’t actually an optical illusion at all. They’re real. Easy to make, actually.”
“What’s so special about them?”
“Well, follow the ants – there are ants on the front of the strip and ants on the back, but really it’s all just one pathway. Twists back on itself, round the reverse side and round again back to the front.”
“Surely then that’s impossible.”
“Not at all. Hang on, I’ll show you.”
It must all seem a bit mad to her, this enthusiasm. Is this going to be his post-alcohol strategy with women? Hey, we can’t get wasted together but I can sure entertain you with magic tricks. Wait till you see what I’m going to pull out of the hat later! Dubious. Very dubious.
He grabs a sheet of A4, some scissors, Sellotape and a pencil from the drawer. Before turning around, he trims a length off the side of the paper and pre-cuts a small square of sticky tape.
“Okay. First thing. Take a strip of paper.” He holds it up to the light. No hidden trapdoors, no mirrors.
“Put a mark on one side to make it easier to follow.” After a moment’s thought he draws an ant half way along the strip.
“Now, twist the two ends…” He ensures the paper is kept taut to emphasise this all important step.
“…And join them together to form a loop.” Pinching the tips together between his left thumb and forefinger, he takes up the tape with his right hand and makes a secure join.
“There you go. One Mobius strip.”
He offers her the ring. She lets it nestle on the palm of her hand, compares it with Escher’s picture, traces its single surface with a finger, from his drawing of the ant, once around to the reverse side and round again to where she began.
“Amazing!”
“Ah, but that’s not the trick. Watch this.”
He is nine again. He sits cross-legged on a loud, flower-patterned carpet. He wears a formidable top hat. A thin black wand is propped against the box of delights, Christmas wrappers everywhere, his mother in the kitchen. Delicious smells of turkey and roast potatoes. Darker evocations too, but now is not the time for those.
“If I take these scissors and cut along its length, all the way around the loop, what will happen?”
“You’ll end up with two loops.”
“Okay, try it.”
She does. When the loop remains a whole, twice as long, her cry of joy echoes his own from all those years ago. Daniel feigns surprise.
“Oh! That can’t be right. Perhaps you’d better try again.”
Not such a bad strategy after all. She’s become girly and bendy, tactile and giggly like girls do when they’re drunk. Gulnaz finds, just as Daniel had done that infamous Christmas Day, that having cut around the loop again, she’s created two interconnected Mobius rings. She laughs with delight.
“How clever. Are you Scientist or Magician?”
Daniel scoffs. The darkness breaks surface again. How often he’s asked himself that one. Who knows, maybe given a second chance he could have been both scientist and magician, not ended up as some poxy labourer. If someone would care to turn back the clock to 1982, give him the schooling he was owed – allow him the study that was denied him…
“If it hadn’t been for looking after my disaster of a mother, I reckon I’d have made a brilliant mathematician. I could have been a scholar. Cambridge or Oxford. The next Stephen Hawking. I’ve read it, you know – ‘A Brief History’ – when I was just fifteen. You’ll find it there in the bookcase. I know loads of people have it, just to show how sophisticated they are, but I bet very few have ever read a single page. But I have – well, as far as chapter ten; string theory didn’t work for me. I had my own ideas on that one.”
Gulnaz runs a hand along his arm. “You’re very clever. You must have cared an awful lot for your mother to have sacrificed all that for her.”
“Like I had a choice? She buggered up my education, that’s all I know.”
He bites his lip. Gulnaz is trying to be nice. Must he always keep kicking it back in her face? By way of amends, he brings their attention back to the magic trick, carefully placing his left hand beneath hers and lifting the rings from her palm with the other.
“After Alex had gone missing, I used to imagine me and him being something like this in our mum’s tummy. Our DNA was a Mobius loop that got cut in half, which is how we ended up as twins.”
“Profound!”
“Ah yes. A true visionary, that was me: like Buddha or Newton under their trees – only I studied the world from the branches of mine; up in my ‘Green House’ for hours on end, just working it all out.”
“You had a greenhouse up in a tree!?”
“Not a greenhouse; The Green House. Well, originally the ‘Greengage House’. Alex named it that. It sort of stuck. It was our little wooden platform that Dad built for us up in the greengage tree. It wasn’t anything much, but to me it was a hundred magical places,” – the deck of a frigate, the command module of a spaceship, a makeshift raft, the battlements of a castle. “I remember, some months after Alex’s fall, I was up in the crow’s nest of a galleon, on watch. I heard a noise below and looked down through the wooden planks. And I swear I saw Alex sitting right beneath me with his back against the base of the mast. Only for a second. But I’d been practising the loop trick, and had all these Mobius loops scattered about. I think that’s when I decided that the two of us – like these rings wrapped around each other – could never truly be separated, because really we were only one.” That little fissure in his voice has returned. “Funny. There were moments in the past few days when it seemed I might have been right all along.”
And somehow they are kissing. Maybe she makes the first move, maybe he does. The Mobius rings get crushed somewhere along the way. It all begins in some innocence, lips brushing lips, restraint slowly yielding in waves. She doesn’t kiss like other girls. Not all coy one minute and eating him up the next. Her lips push and give, somehow communicating her whole character. And the taste of her mouth – freshened by the tea; he suddenly wants more than anything to take her to bed. Does his body give him away? Did the nature of his touch alter for a moment? Nothing overt, not a presumptuous hand or a pelvic movement, maybe just a change of motivation. Her body stiffens and the magic in her kiss begins to die.
As she draws back, a slight resistance briefly keeps their lips from parting. Just centimetres away, her eyes scan his as though
probing for an answer. Or seeking reassurance. He stares back with equal uncertainty. Is this regret he’s seeing? Or censure? Does she hold him responsible for having gone this far? Has he destroyed everything?
“I’m going to knock it on the head, you know – the drinking. Drinking to excess. I’ve decided.”
Though he’s convinced it’s the very promise she’s been longing to hear, the words hang unclaimed in the air for several seconds.
“I’m glad,” is all she says.
“I mean, I don’t really have a problem,” he hurries on. “You know, normally it’s just social drinking. But Christmas night, and in the café, coming straight after the hospital, and everything before that, my head was just a bit messed up. I think the drink was just a way of coping.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry; I’ve seen what it can do to people. I don’t want to go there.”
“That’s good.” Still she won’t be drawn, but her face radiates a certain calmness as she tidies her jumper and neatens her hair. It’s time, she announces, for her to be off. There’s a lot to get done at the home before the party. She’s been here less than twenty minutes, never even sat down. But she’s already swallowing the last of her tea and moving towards the door. Knowing it’s useless to argue, Daniel overtakes her and fetches her coat.
This woman. She’ll either be the death of him, or be the one to save his life.