Violence

Like Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. That’s how he had described them; how they appeared in his view of things. She disputed that. It was too romantic, too theatrical. She understood why he wanted to think of them like that. He loved them both, and wanted them to be a great passion; a self-perpetuating desire.

Alice played with the cat, tormenting her, tickling her in places she knew would be rewarded with a clawed swipe. Her skin was scuffed in places by short ragged tears in its surface. Nothing deep enough to draw blood. Only play. It made her laugh to tease the cat like this.

The stereo was buzzing in the background; a low level hum that sat just on the edges of hearing. Alice lay on her side on the sofa, the cat gone now; tired of her tormenting ways. She listened to the stereo hum and thought of him.

The world was more interesting with him in it. Even though he drove her to distraction. Tormenting her, tickling her in places he knew would be rewarded with a clawed swipe. His skin was too thick to ever be scuffed, though, and she had finally given up trying.

Her world was still more interesting, knowing he was there.

Try as she might, Alice couldn’t shake him off. Maybe Milo was right. Maybe they were Miller and Nin. “Meelo. Meeller. Neen.” She said the names out loud, drawing the vowels in an exaggeration of Hungarian, the way Milo said them. She couldn’t draw the vowels of her own name, or of his. They were too English. Flat, dull vowels. Alice. David. Wardrobe. Kettle.

Alice sat up. Thinking the word kettle to herself made her want a cup of tea.

In the kitchen, the buzz of the stereo was replicated by the hum of the fridge freezer. She filled the kettle and looked out of the window at the rain. It was almost wintry, the way the rain was falling. The flowers and plants in her neglected garden had yet to realise that summer was over at last.

As the kettle boiled, Alice made toast and sliced Jarlsberg to put on it. The cat sat in front of the cat flap, looking out on the garden and meowing creakily every so often at some imagined invader.

Toast and tea and the sweet sour taste of the Jarlsberg. Alice turned on the tv, flicking idly through the channels, thinking about the last thing he said to her.

“What else did you expect?”

Laughing at her, as always.

He hadn’t expected what she had done. Cat’s claws made contact for once, drawing blood. The paring knife had been sitting on the table, abandoned after she had peeled the apple and sliced it. She had eaten the apple while they talked. It was part of the choreography of the conversation. Call, response, consume. Gradually, the little pile of yellow-green slices had gone down. The conversation had gone its usual route of question and answer session, pricked with criticisms, until she had questioned why they were doing this again.

Bringing the question. Her anger, piqued, grabbed the knife and thrust it at him before her mind had a chance to control her hand.

It drew blood and an expletive. A flash of anger on both sides of the table, then equilibrium restored.

“I’m sorry. Are you alright?”

“Yes. It’s fine. Just a scratch. Don’t worry about it.”

The air in the room heavy like a blanket over them. Some close relation of shock. A kissing cousin. Maybe astonishment. Something that halted the conversation with its newness. Shock, astonishment, surprise, none of these things had ever been felt between them. They both sat there for a while, tasting it, savouring, getting the sense of what it might be.

“I’d better go,” she said.

“I’ll call you a cab.”

“No, no. It’s okay. I’ll walk.”

“It’s a long way. Are you sure?”

“Yes. Sure. It’s fine. I need to.”

Alice hadn’t been able to look at him; had made a pretence of looking for her bag, putting her coat on, getting up from the table; anything so she would not have to look at him.

If she had looked at him, she would never have left. And she needed to.

He didn’t even go to the door with her. She left the room with him still sitting at the table. The knife was crooked in the no man’s land of wood that had lain between them. She left without a backward glance.

They had both elected not to contact the other, without any agreement. She had shocked herself and didn’t trust what it meant. Her willingness to harm him. The passion she had felt in that instant.

It was that, more than anything, that made her wonder if Milo was right.

When she had met him for coffee in town and told him about what had happened, he had grinned his crooked grin and reiterated his belief.

“You are Miller and Nin. I’ve told you this before, and now you see the proof.” He looked at her slyly. “Love that is hate that feeds passion.” Then he laughed, showing rows of perfect white teeth. “Darling, you cannot live without each other.”

For weeks, though, it seemed that they could. She wrote lividly, consumed by the need to pour out the stories in her head.

Milo loved them.

“You need him, you see,” he said.

Alice didn’t want to need him. This burst of passion that had finally erupted and sent her spinning, reeling, crashing away from him was something she feared. She was in its grip. She would wake, burning, in the middle of the night, and instinctively reach for pen and paper. She kept a notebook by her bed, pens on the bedside table.

She would sit up late into the night, not even going to bed, and type out the words that jumbled inside her and pleaded to be set down on a page.

The absence of him was profound. He was never closer to her than when he was no longer physically present. She felt him watching her, somehow, from a distance.

She asked Milo, as they sat in the Cornerhouse on the tall brown leather bar stools, drinking espressos, as though they were some crude mock-up of artistic cliché, “Do you send my stories on to him?”

Milo had looked at her. He frowned. “Of course I do, sweetie. He needs to know the results of his inspiration.”

“But you never tell me anything of what he might be creating.”

“That isn’t my place.”

Alice stopped flicking and watched an overdubbed history programme on cable. It was now three months since their last conversation. Since she had attempted to wound him. Her writing continued, but the angles were different. She was beginning to write him out of her system.

She had reached a hiatus. That was why Alice could sit on the sofa eating toast with Jarlsberg, watching strange history programmes about holocaust and heresy and the underbelly of humanity. She seemed to have written the shock away. The summer was over, and with autumn came a new voice.

Alice hadn’t told Milo this. She had been ignoring his calls. She had sent him nothing for a couple of weeks. She had no intention of showing him anything of her current work.

She didn’t understand it herself. Pages of description, of landscapes, room settings, emotions, vast internal monologues. And at the centre of it all – nothing. No meaning. No denouement. All middle. Like a never ending plain of words that tumbled one into the other with no sense of direction.

How could she show that to anyone?

He was the only one who would understand, and she had already decided that he would never read it.

What had she expected? That he would one day turn out less cruel? She wouldn’t have wanted him, if he had. She would have bored of him long ago, if he had continued on the tack he started with.

But she knew now that he only had those two strings to his bow. The appearance of being genuinely interested, and the desire to destroy. He had hooked her in with the one, and changed her with the other.

As she sat there watching re-enactments of medieval burnings, Alice knew that Milo was wrong. They didn’t need each other. They both just chose to act as though they did. Reluctant to test what was outside the stimulus, they had both prolonged events to see what else could be wrung from it.

The answer to that had been violence.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006