Her Name was Lola
Part 7By Steve Finbow
Click here to read from Part 1
Two days later, they met at 6pm in The Spread and then took the tube to Charing Cross and the train to Rye. They had dinner in a small bistro and talked, he drank beer, and she drank wine. When they got back to the room, she undressed in the bathroom and he in the bedroom and she came out in a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms. He was already in bed, she got in. she smoked weed while he drank a bottle of beer. They watched the first forty minutes of Annie Hall, she fell asleep, he turned the lights out, and he too fell asleep. The next morning they had breakfast. She destroyed a croissant and ate blackcurrant and apricot jam and honey on toast and he had an English breakfast. While she went through her lines in the garden, he went for a walk around the town and out into the flats where he saw a great bustard (Otis tarda) displaying and sheep in a field. He looked at the blue plaques on the houses of Paul Nash and Conrad Aiken. He returned at noon and sat in the garden reading The Darling by Russell Banks and she paced back and forth, reciting her lines. He helped her with them, playing Peer Gynt – liar and reindeer rider. And he liked the line ‘Where’s the snow of yester-year?’ and the line ‘South of the border, west of the sun’.
There were frogs in the pond and a rabbit named Wilbur. Gulls on the chimneystacks sang their strained songs. Then they went down to the harbour and walked out to the sea and she told him how she used to hate the ocean. They went to The Anchor pub, he had a crab sandwich, and she had fish and chips. They sat at a table with a stuffed blowfish swinging above it, its beak-like mouth looked hard and mean. A fishing net held a lobster and a spider crab. He drank Bishop’s Finger and a scruffy Airedale terrier begged for chips. Later that afternoon, she wanted to take magic mushrooms, Tasamanians, the box said; so she went back to the room and he went to Lamb House. He sat in the garden, wrote pastiches of Henry James’s sentences in his notebook, and looked at the pet cemetery and the dogs buried there – Nick, Peter, Tosca, and Tim. There were two busts of James in the house – one black, one white – and he looked at the books owned by James: New Grub Street, Imaginary Portraits, New World for Old. He returned and they went to the Mermaid Tavern for a drink and she was tripping and her pupils were dilated and it made her even more beautiful but she felt nauseous and couldn’t eat and he drank too much and they returned and sat on the step outside and she smoked a joint and was stoned and they went up to bed and they undressed and got in and he said:
‘Are you OK?’
And she said she missed her boyfriend. And he said:
‘I didn’t need to hear that.’ And he lay on his front, depressed, and said things he shouldn’t have and fell asleep.
The next morning, they talked it over, and the time dragged and they got nowhere in spite of their wishing to do so. She was defensive and suspicious, she thought everything he said was said to make up for what had been said but it didn’t, it couldn’t. She said she wanted to leave after breakfast, the portents of which he did not want to understand. He was with her in a place he wanted to be where everything was possible but now impossible. He wanted peace. There was nothing in the world he could do about it. His instincts had been wrong. His heart quickened first with love and then quickened still with dread. It was simple and good. He had made it complex and bad. He had said what he promised would remain unspoken – unspeakable. He had sacrificed friendship for desire. Every minute – every stinking clashing clanging one of them – was remorse. He wanted her to stay. She would go. He wanted to use force. He used restraint. They ate breakfast in silence. He was hung over. She was angry. She needed space. He couldn’t provide it.
On the train back they went through her lines and he bought her chocolate-covered coffee beans at Waterloo station. It didn’t help. He walked her to her flat. They hugged and she said she would see him in the week, to stop thinking about it, it was OK. And he said sure, yeah, uh-huh. But he didn’t believe her. He walked away and decided not to contact her for a few days and halfway home took out his phone and watched the video he had made of her and deleted it and deleted the picture he had taken and deleted the text messages and deleted the calls he had made to her. Then he texted her – ‘I have a feeling I will never see you again. If so, I know you will be a success.’ And he was going to write ‘X’ but didn’t. A little later, his phone pinged and he opened the message and it read, ‘Stop thinking. Lay off the Stella and it’ll be OK. I’ll see you Wed, Thurs, and Sun.’ And he was happy and went to the pub to read his book.
Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.
© 2005 Me Three
