Pussy Foot

Also by Peter Raposo

dUST

The Illusion Of Movement

Second Life

This Is Not The End

Pussy Foot

The Sinking City

Part 1

Ennui & angst

NUMBERS

The number scared her. It wasn’t even a big number -35- but it scared her. When she saw the number on the birthday cards, splattered everywhere, big numbers and smiley faces, big numbers and silly comments, she panicked and did some kind of weird dance; hands on her face, hands on her hips, and she turned around, her face away from mine and the cards and the presents and the number.

Thirty five.

Thirty-five years old, she said, her hands still on her hips, back hunched forward, and she looked as if she was about to be sick or about to be cry. Or both. She turned to face me and said, In five years’ time I’ll be forty.

The place was dead quiet.

We were staying at a hotel in York and it looked as if we had the whole place for ourselves, such was the silence around us, but that wasn’t the case. Instead of spending her birthday in London with our friends, Joanne had insisted that we came to York, just the two of us, to spend some quality time together away from everyone, especially her parents, and even her younger sister whom she loved so much but who was going through a divorce and taking a lot of Joanne’s time.

I tried to make a joke about the number and I said, Yeah, sure, and in fifteen years’ time you’ll be fifty, and in thirty years’ time you’ll be sixty-five.

As the words came out of my mouth, the words and the numbers, I realised that my joke had backfired because Joanne looked petrified.

I heard a door being shut, voices in the corridor, loud voices and loud laughter; proof that we weren’t alone at the hotel.

We had arrived on the previous day, had lunch at the Tiger 10 Cafe Bar (numbers everywhere, even at the restaurant, but at least the numbers on the bill were low), and then we went to Fairfax House; apparently the finest Georgian town house in England, a place Joanne had been dying to see, but if you ask me, it was dead boring. What do I care about classical furniture? Even classical literature – Stendhal, Tolstoy, Rousseau - bores me nowadays. (But that’s not the case with Proust or Dostoevsky).

So, back to Joanne and York and numbers; our time away had started well, and later at night we made love so loudly that I thought we would be having someone knocking on our door, but that didn’t happen. Then in the morning came the big day. I got up a couple of hours before her, took out the birthday cards that her family and friends had sent, a few presents too (but not all of them because there were others – presents - at home), and I left it all on display, on top of the small desk that we had in the hotel bedroom. Then while she slept I skipped thorough the pages of a new collection of poems by Sharon Olds, a book called Stag’s Leap, only reading the poems that I found interesting, ate a couple of bananas to keep the hunger at bay, stared absentmindedly out of the window and saw a couple of cyclists pedalling past the hotel.

When she woke up I already had been up a couple of hours, fidgeting about with things, regretting the fact I didn’t bring my laptop with me. All the notes for my new book The Memoirist were in the laptop. I usually write by hand, in a few notebooks, and afterwards I revise and type it all, but this time I decided to just do it on the laptop, and revise while I was typing – and then revise again - and just save time. But before we left London Joanne forbade me to do any writing while we were on holiday and that’s the reason I left the laptop behind.

At first, when she opened her eyes and saw the cards and the presents, everything looked normal, as it should be, and she was happy to be there, so happy that she got up and came running naked through the room and jumped in my arms, but once she got dressed and saw the number 35 in every card, a big 35 smiling at her, she panicked and turned her face away from me in fear, before turning around to look at me, her little blue eyes pleading for time to be kind to her, and that’s when she said, Thirty-five-years old. In five years’ time I’ll be forty.

Well, yeah. Duh. Good maths, baby. You don’t hear me complaining and I’m 42.

I tried to reassure her and told her everything would be okay, which was a lie because I can’t predict the future, but, come on, it was only a number and thirty-five is not even that old. I only got my first blowjob at that age.

We left the hotel and went out for a walk; my idea because I thought the fresh air would do her good, and we had something to eat at the Punchbowl in Blossom Street, and from there we went to an antique shop, also in Blossom Street, and to a bookshop called Ken Spelman Books where I bought a copy of Updike’s Bech is Back and Model Behaviour by Jay McInerney. But while we walked and shopped she didn’t say much, and I knew the number was still in her mind, pounding on her little brain, making fun of her. I saw the stress on her face, the stress and the anguish, and I wondered what she wanted.

Marriage?

Children?

Settle down?

That was fine by me as I was getting on with the years too and both my parents were wondering when I would settle down and give them grandchildren. All my other brothers and my sister had embraced marriage and parenthood while I was still enjoying my freedom. Joanne and I had been going out for close to three years but neither of us had talked about settling down. She had her career as a journalist, her place in Hackney, and I had my career as a writer and my own place in Finchley Road, a two-bedroom apartment that cost me a fortune years ago but which was worth a lot more now, and neither of us had felt the need to change their lifestyle to suit the other. True, she spent more time at my place than I did at hers, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise since my place was nicer – and bigger - than her little apartment. Anyway, going back to York and Joanne’s 35th birthday; the whole thing was a fiasco and the whole time we were there she wandered through the city and its sights looking like a zombie, and when we finally got back to London she told me she needed some time on her own. That was four days ago. Last night she called me late in the evening. I was at my desk, trying to do some work on my new book but spending – and wasting - time on Facebook as I checked on what my old friends were up to. I would check on an old friend, see what he or she was up to, and then I would see another familiar face on her/his circle of friends, and I would check on that face too, and I would follow another face afterwards, and another, and before I knew it an hour had been wasted online. Furious with myself for such behaviour I decided to close down my Facebook account for good. Once that was done, I resumed work on my new book, and that’s when Joanne called me.

She sounded tired, but when I asked her how she was she went all euphoric and told me she had started a new chapter in her life.

I had my tongue pierced and I’m getting a tattoo done tomorrow... she said and I interrupted her.

A tattoo? Isn’t that a bit too much? I said.

Oh please, Sam. Stop being so Jewish, she said, always bringing my faith into the conversation whenever I gave an opinion about something that I disliked. By the way... and afterwards she told me she was breaking up with me because I was a bore and she needed new experiences. I felt like Woody Allen on Play It Again, Sam, when Nancy leaves him and he wonders what to do with his life, and Sam is my first name.

I’m still young. I’m still pretty. I need to enjoy life, she said and that was that. The number had scared her and now she wanted to enjoy her life to the full before it was too late. But too late for what?

There’s a lovely café in Finchley Road called the Garden Café and Restaurant, not that far from where I live, and this morning I’m meeting my friend Paul in there for breakfast and a chat. When I arrive at the café, Paul’s already there, a cup of coffee by his side. I order coffee too, and afterwards he orders a full breakfast while I order Eggs Benedict, toast and a glass of orange juice. Paul orders another cup of coffee. He likes his caffeine.

Joanne has left me, I say as Paul wrestles with a vegetarian sausage.

Why? he asks.

I tell him about York, Joanne’s birthday, the number 35, the scary look in her eyes, and of how she asked to be left alone for a few days once we arrived back in London.

And then last night she called to tell you she was breaking up with you? Paul asks and I nod. He keeps on talking: And now she’s getting piercings and tattoos? Hmm...

He ponders about something for a few seconds, his eyes looking away, and then he stabs a mushroom with his fork and adds a piece of tomato to it. A woman sitting two tables away from us is reading Quiet by Susan Cain, and her man is reading The Guardian. There’s an article by me in it, an article about Goncharov and his masterpiece Oblomov, and how so many of this modern generation are becoming Oblomovians; a term probably invented by me, similar to Proustian, which wasn’t invented by me.

What do you think? I ask once I see that Paul has nothing else to say about the subject.

Our plates are cleared away and I order another cup of coffee.

About Joanne? I think she got scared.

Well, I already know that.

Basically, that’s it; she got scared and now she’s trying to delay the inevitable.

Which is?

Old age. Death.

And then there’s silence. Paul forces a smile while staring at me and I know what he’s thinking. Soon he’ll be 49, a big number, one away from 50, and from 50 onwards the numbers get bigger because each number after 50 is a step towards 100, towards old age, an age where our bones start to ache a bit more, when the hair on top of our heads becomes less and less, and our penises stop working properly.

Bloody numbers; they scare me.

AN ACTOR’S LIFE

Jeet, a friend of mine, asked me to be in a Marquis de Sade play that he was putting together with another bunch of friends; A de Sade play for the new century, he said, but I, having read Justine years ago, wasn’t a great fan of de Sade’s writing so I said no.

At the time I was doing voiceovers for commercials and nothing else apart from playing volleyball on the beach, a lifestyle that many people envied, and I was aching for some acting work. Nevertheless, no matter how desperate I was for some acting work, a play by Marquis de Sade wasn’t something that I really wanted to be a part of.

But it’s an acting job and you’re an actor, an unemployed actor, and unemployed actors can’t be picky, Jeet said.

This actor can, I said.

Who the hell do you think you are? Laurence fucking Olivier? he asked.

Hmm. More like Marlon not-fucking Brando, I said, mentioning Brando because he’s my favourite actor of all. Anyway, forgive my ignorance but I didn’t even know that de Sade wrote plays.

"Well he did and this sounds like a line from The Savage Detectives."

The Bolaño book?

Yes.

What does Roberto Bolaño have to do with Sade? I asked, and he shrugged his shoulders and said he didn’t remember. Sometimes actors and their friends have the strangest conversations. You should see me and my mates when we’re out on a Friday night. No one, including us, has a clue what we’re talking about. At times it looks