Wicker and Stone and Coral (Part 1)

Lester Holcombe hated his bicycle. He loved it and admired it and felt terribly attached to it, but he hated it. Didn’t he hate it? No, he wished he could eat metal. He wanted to put it out of its misery in the way it deserved, tearing his insides apart like he had torn it apart. He was immensely proud to be its owner, a fine vintage that had belonged to a French porter in the 1960s, but he was always conscious of the flaking paint of its frame, the noisy housing around its roller chain, and its worn and uncomfortable brown leather seat. Lester knew well that he could fix these issues - or at the least behave like he might one day attempt to - so he acknowledged quietly to himself each time he reached his leg across the saddle that he didn’t hate the bike, just that such a beautiful thing had fallen into such inept hands.

Lester’s face was Buster Keaton and his hair Thin White Duke. Tall and haggard, strangers often thought he was unhappy, but he was content and unconcerned and arguably, because of this, happier than most others. As he cycled he seemed to hit each and every pothole and hump in the road that he hit every day and warned himself not to hit the next and thought to himself the tyres might just as well be wood. To take his mind off the crumbling bike and the crumbling road Lester took to bums-up riding, not that he had more than one but thinking in the plural reminded him of the old gang riding and no responsibilities and summer heat that was bearable not oppressive. He enjoyed the wind in his hair and on his face until his hamstrings tightened and his forearms ached from holding the handlebars rough. In passing he saw one of those who seemed to make a habit of judging Lester by his cover. This colleague was, Lester noticed, experiencing the tough end of a Bronx cheer from a roaring partner. In asking sullenly why he was being scorned so, the partner replied, “For being so terribly unhappy of course!” Lester didn’t smirk or smug at this sad yet pretty irony, but pedalled on with the words of the father of all our minds in his – do not answer others’ resentment with your own. He resumed his ride, not wanting to stay out of rhythm for longer than he must.

Approaching their house Lester half dismounted and rode like on a stunt scooter to the gate. He called it their house but it was hers proper and had been for a little over three years. Lester had lived in set accommodation at the start, but soon after they had tumbled into each other’s lives and he had moved in, never considering how it was paid for or even if it was paid for. She never asked for any sort of contribution that they couldn’t eat or drink or groove to. It was a house equal parts beautiful and garish. It was tall and narrow but went back a long way, had high ceilings, and was east-west facing so fell under whatever sunshine there was as much as it could throughout the day; a blessing that had become a curse in the harsh wave of heat that bowled over and bleached the ivy scaling the house, turning the building cracked and flaky-looking. Its front door was a gaudy marvel of glass and wood feeding into a large circular stained-glass window whose depiction of a night sky, according to her, was Van Gogh’s inspiration for his, coming together to form an entrance in the shape of the letter P.

Lester hoisted his bicycle onto one shoulder and entered, dumping his things in the hallway one was immediately confronted with. The interior was as the exterior, so beautiful as to make you queasy with it and crafted as though the resident was entirely given over to a concern to not drown in the mainstream, but rather than buying wetsuit and snorkel they had gone out and bought themselves an Astute class submarine. There was no carpeting, but everywhere patterned rugs of all styles and fashions covering wooden floorboards; walls were covered with mirrors and clocks and ornamental hooks and light fittings; and no two items were even remotely similar, thrown together with childlike haste, so much so that one might think a mess as this could not have been anything but deliberately selected to appear so. Lester knew the design of the building’s insides reflected proper her feelings and wants from moment to moment. It was their Shangri-La, to her main and good but now to him some and alright.

He picked his way through it all and up to their bedroom and there she was, asleep all heroin chic. The large shutters to the shallow balcony were open, calling in the warm late afternoon sun and the cool late afternoon breeze; their private cordon sanitaire breached some. She was there on the bed curled under a sheet with an arm behind her head and a foot poking out. The foot with the hard-forged heel from wearing those cracked but still sturdy shoes every day for all time. He wanted to kiss her and as he walked to do so his finger ran over the bare foot, then as he did so he did so on her forehead and then said, “Brett White, sweet.” If he called her he called her in full and she had never asked him why because each knew as well as the other that names go to the bone. Besides, Lester liked to prove wrong the people who think a full name can only be used in anger or by authority because he was never angry with her nor had any authority over her.

He was gentle in kissing her but she stirred as he stood up from it. “ElAitch,” she said, rising to him. “What was work?”

“Usual and uphill but forgotten on the downhill coming home as always.”

“You’re getting terribly good at being two people to the world, you know”

“Don’t worry you does it?”

“Not full, but it can’t be good halving yourself like that.”

“It’s not even close to half, most all of me is consumed by most all of you. Your Lester is the only that matters.”

She stood in the balcony-way stretching and basking in the sunlight looking out down the street. “Stay as you are, Brett White. Just as you are,” Lester had her stand there as she was because he needed to look at her as she was, wearing a much too big blue shirt which had been bleached pale at the bottom and no longer had sleeves. She had told him in the past that she had often been compared to Wednesday Addams if Wednesday Addams had the suspicious glow around her eyes that her mother did, yet Lester looked at her now and thought of nothing else because he had no power to. She had and would always look to him as all men believe their girls look in the early days. And then she turned and he came to.

“Have you packed and all?”

“I’ve packed all and everything and more, ElAitch. Couldn’t you tell by the way I slept?”

“I don’t discriminate that way, plus you know you don’t change when you sleep. I’ll shower and change and we’ll eat before going.”

She wandered off out the room, moving like Maya the Cat Girl if Maya the Cat Girl had actually been Maya the Cat-Swan Girl, effortlessly yet unintentionally fiercely elegant, as though her body was aware of onlookers and was always ready to perform but her mind was not. As Lester stripped and washed and dressed again he thought of how strange a sight it would be for anyone but him, Brett White packing up a car. Somewhere she got herself a certain quality, one that is all too rare and precious as such. Things always seemed to Lester to be happening around her and to her, as though animal and vegetable and mineral were all drawn to her or were intent on having her succeed. A stranger would have seen her moving slowly, carrying little and accomplishing less, yet the car would undoubtedly be as packed as it could be, complete with whatever she had decided might be necessary or useful or fun.

He found her out back of the house, centre of the long garden, sat in amongst the untended knee-high grass drink in hand. If it isn’t water it’s a martini, Lester thought. She took them Vesper. That is: three measures of gin, one measure of vodka, a half measure of Lillet aperitif, shaken to be cold serious and wrapped with lemon peel. Although Brett White would quite often thrown an Orange Blossom in with it to mellow the thing and liven her some. Lester noted a larger than normal heap of peel decorating the glass and knew she had done it to make the drink look less menacing, “I’ll make up some batches, sweet. You won’t be much good driving after that see through and no food.”

Her deep, worldly eyes could, whenever Lester was concerned, be seen to almost palpably blur out her surroundings so that he was all that was in focus. “Bless you ElAitch, there’s a terrible tune going around at the moment that I caught today but you’ve gone and knocked it out my head and bless you again for the consideration – but I had food with you.”  

“Just the one tune? And not since this morning you haven’t, you’re coming up on empty I reckon.”

“Aye just the one, I wouldn’t know how to hold too many at a time, I bet you could catch tunes in stereo and hold on to them as such.” She sighed, warmly with no frustration, “you’re right I suppose…my stomach was rumbling something like thunder whilst you were pampering yourself.” Lester had noticed long ago how her talk sometimes seemed to fall in-step with the loudness of her walk, bringing about turns of phrase long out of fashion or a pronunciation of words like ‘americano’ with the type of ‘-cano’ you find in ‘volcano’, especially when she was getting into thoughts good and proper. Grandiloquence and anything highfalutin couldn’t touch her.

When Lester returned to her she had seen off the drink and was glowing for it. “One is for health the other for burden,” he explained as he set himself down beside her. He had invested far too much time and energy into the food, but that was his way with everything for her; a salad made of chopped celery, hot mango chutney, mayonnaise, toasted sesame seeds and turkey, spread across toasted focaccia topped with zucchini, red bell peppers, spinach and mustard. For his burden piece Lester had simply thrown slices of thin ham onto white bread spread across with mayonnaise, accompanied by whichever crisps he could find.

“For health will restore me fine,” she said, knowing that he had worked proper on that and would want her to have it.

They sat quietly. They never spoke much when together but there was no awkwardness, only contentedness. Each knew more or less what the other was thinking or might say and what they themselves would reply, since the two had unknowingly attained something that all couples subconsciously strive for, the sharing of a single soul between two bodies; and, anyhow, neither could ever translate the brave and happy tempo of their thoughts about and in the presence of the other into any sort of coherent speech. The comfortable quiet, however, always broke eventually when either Lester or Brett White had gone too long without hearing the other’s voice. “Why we going, ElAitch?”

“Because soon it’ll be hard for us to,” Lester told her for the howevermany’th time as they both threw back the last of their food. He was right in his assertion, and she knew this. He had fallen from his bachelor’s into a zero-hour contract at some small-timey law firm working for a big-timey construction firm, a contract that was soon to be over but that would, Lester was sure, morph into a full-time job offer. He had worked hard because he had always thought leisure is found in exchange for a broken back, but his work was not his be all and end all. It was something to support and fill the spaces between travelling and trespassing with her.

More serious for sure was the cash, good and stable money that could keep her content in the unstable lifestyle of an artist she so adored and fuel her aspirations of being a socialite or social light of whichever community she decided she was a part of. In this regard the old ‘opposites attract’ adage was apt. She hoped to be adored while Lester was content with what he deemed his lot in life and had little ambition beyond her, a mindset that rendered ‘superiors’ powerless over him when coupled with his willingness to accept a bit of humiliation here and there. Her work, which others labelled as providing commentary on current events and societal issues, was niche and impassioned, selling few but selling big, each solid with some risk on top. Her masterpiece up to now had grown out of a supposed resonance that a story of political sexual indecency and rape allegations had had with her, culminating in the hacking away at a decades-old fallen tree trunk in a very public local park until it resembled a phallic caricature of the politician in question heading towards a strategically placed woodchipper, which she had ‘signed’ “Old wood chips hardest”. So accurate was the likeness of both the villain and the organ that the local council had it removed at their own expense for the obscure Danish collector who took a fancy to it. Lester knew that while the social relevance of her work might be adopted as the story behind its origins, Brett White just found fun in carving wooden penises or throwing paint covered horse hair at canvases.

“True double, but why there?”

“Because who goes to Cornwall?”

“It’s not unpopular,” she said, sensing condescension or something like it but ignoring whatever it was as always. “Besides you always hard talk passionate about never going back ‘cause you’ve got all you can out of the place and how important it is to drop things once they’re bored-bound or start dragging you down…”

“For sure it’s popular but remember Capri,” Lester instructed, sensing a crowbar headed for his emotional strongbox.

“What about it?”

“We didn’t go up top in the funicular because it was close and airless and over too soon. We walked so we’d smell the island and feel the sun and hear the locals and be hassled by the waiters trying to drum up business. When we’d made it all we could see was bloodshot but the wine and ice cream and smells and tastes were richer for it,” he was in his element now, airing his thoughts big to her. “There are fewer tourists in Cornwall or least ways fewer ways to be like one. It’ll be like Capri without the English tourists and we can be as we are and as we want. You see, don’t you sweet?”

She didn’t know how much of what Lester had said was true but she knew she trusted him and that he loved her as she loved him, stripped bare of husks and gloss, without nuance and to their depths; and they sat there, giving off more heat between them than they felt from the sun itself.