Untouchable Things Read online

  “Dutch courage?”

  He laughed without humour. “I can’t believe you persuaded me to come. How are you?” She was pale under her smile.

  “Oh, you know, terrified. Handing out drinks gives me something to do.”

  “You’ll be fantastic, you always are. Do you know anyone else here?”

  She made a face. “I’ve met some of them.”

  “Anna – over here.” A short Mediterranean-looking man was approaching, with a tall blonde woman behind him. He grinned at them. “So this is where the champagne is hiding.”

  Michael noticed the flush seeping over Catherine’s cheeks as she greeted him.

  “Hi, José.”

  “How are you, Catherine? I see Seth’s got you working again.” Both he and the blonde woman gave her broad smiles. Catherine wouldn’t meet their eyes.

  “I’m Michael.” He stepped forward to take the attention away from Catherine. The blonde woman gave him a handshake that wouldn’t have been out of place in a boardroom. They all talked for a few minutes while Catherine moved away with the drinks tray. They seemed okay, not stuffy and not in black tie. Very loud, especially in the woman’s case. Another man joined them, Charles, had been at Cambridge with Seth, but after a few minutes Michael didn’t hold it against him. He spoke thoughtfully, although Michael couldn’t catch everything he said; some of his words seemed to get lost in his beard. Not the type of friends he’d expected Seth to attract.

  Some of the others were, though. By now Michael had nearly finished his glass of champagne and didn’t care so much. A vile cellist, Camilla, who called everyone ‘darling’, kept throwing her head back and whinnying like a horse. He could see Anna and José sniggering at her in the corner. There was a Chinese-looking girl, surely no older than seventeen, and a whole clique of the usual concert-going crowd that Michael avoided. Also a petite, incredibly pretty brunette called Penny who said she was just there because Seth had invited her and didn’t know anything about music. Michael tried to get her into proper conversation but whenever he was talking her eyes would drift over towards Seth, like their old family Renault that always pulled to the left.

  Seth’s introductory address anticipated an evening of shared music-making rather than a recital or competition. Michael felt himself relax a bit. Whatever you thought of Seth he was seductively articulate. And the musical part did turn out to be very enjoyable. The bearded man, Charles, opened with a gorgeous Brahms lied – song – that was new to Michael, accompanied by Catherine – so those two must have met before. The Chinese girl got up next, amid whispers that she was some sort of prodigy. She performed an incredibly difficult Rachmaninov Étude, fingers moving almost comically fast while her upper body remained ramrod straight. She bowed to acknowledge the extravagant applause, but didn’t smile.

  Just his luck to follow that. He had lost concentration on the last part of the Étude and now regretted the champagne as he walked to the piano. He’d chosen Schubert’s An Die Musik – ‘To Music’ – because it was short and had a gorgeous piano line. And there was Catherine smiling at him and actually it was fine, all over in a couple of minutes. He even remembered to reach down to the top note in the way his college singing tutor had shown him to avoid the classic tenor yelp. It was slightly uncomfortable performing to such a small audience, though. He knew the received wisdom: look round the room and make as much eye contact as possible to draw people in. The trouble was that Seth was looking at him with an intensity that made it hard to look away. He was also mouthing the words – probably unconsciously, though God knows how, unless he was a German-speaker – but the effect was unsettling, as if they were having a private conversation over other people’s heads.

  Camilla the cellist’s contribution turned out to be as vile as her laugh. Her tuning meandered and her timing departed altogether; Michael started to feel seasick. Some of his kids could have done better. But she still took her bows as if she were Slava Rostropovich himself, reluctant to relinquish the spotlight to Catherine, the last performer. Michael had a suspicion that the whole evening was really an opportunity to showcase Catherine – for motives he didn’t fully understand.

  She was amazing. It made you realise what you’d been missing with the Chinese girl, whose technique far out-classed Catherine’s. Soul. Her fingers gave this shy, self-deprecating woman an eloquence he had never encountered in poetry, an insight he had never found in philosophy. As his tear ducts started itching he caught Seth’s eye again. They both looked quickly back at Catherine.

  * * * * *

  The applause had been far more than she’d deserved, especially with that blunder in the middle section, but Catherine had to admit it felt good. She’d been terrified of showing herself up after the Chinese student’s incredible performance. Seth should have told her he was inviting a pianist of that calibre. Of course she’d never have agreed to play, and he knew that. And now she was so glad she had, and he probably knew that too.

  People were coming up and saying lovely things. Anna, who never bothered with her much, looked a bit stunned as she congratulated her. Good. She knew Anna and José thought she was Seth’s doormat and she was pleased to show there was more to her than handing round canapés or doing his ironing. Michael gave her a big hug and Seth got down on his knees and kissed her hand. That gave Anna something to look at.

  * * * * *

  Okay, the woman was good, but did he really need to make such a fuss of her? She’d played the piano, not had his baby. To be honest this whole music thing was a bit much. Anna looked at her watch. Would it be sacrilege to suggest going clubbing?

  * * * * *

  José couldn’t help watching Seth differently now he knew the truth. Watching him around women. He was suddenly jealous of their accentuated breasts and curvy backsides. Not that there were many curves going on with Catherine. He saw Anna watching too.

  “Bit over the top, don’t you think? I mean I know she was good…”

  “Come on, you’ve got to admit, she plays piano like an angel.”

  Anna shrugged. “You wouldn’t want to have a beer with an angel, though, would you? Let alone shag her.”

  “An-na. Do I detect a note of jealousy?” He asked lightly but there was a catch in his voice. God forbid they should end up chasing the same man.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s just something about her that I don’t trust, I suppose. All this butter wouldn’t melt stuff, but I’ve caught a look on her face.”

  “You women – it’s always so complicated between you.” They were interrupted by Seth, bringing Charles, Catherine and her friend Michael over.

  “Fantastic evening, Seth. Well done.”

  “Well, don’t thank me, thank our three artistes here. I had a good feeling about tonight.” He surveyed the small group of them. “You know, I think we might be ready for the next level up.”

  Charles chuckled. “The next level up? I’m afraid I’m as far up that ladder as I’m ever likely to get.”

  Seth looked thoughtful. “I don’t mean standard. Something else. A regular group, doing this sort of thing – but not just music. Poetry, art – you could bring your paintings, José.”

  José blinked.

  “We could meet here on Fridays. The Friday Group. The Friday… Folly. That’s it, the Friday Folly!”

  “Folly? You mean silliness? I’m all for that.” Anna was starting to slur her words.

  “In a way. I’m thinking architectural follies.” Seth pointed at Charles. “Ask the expert here.”

  Charles coughed. “Not exactly much call for follies these days. More offices and shopping malls. Dull though it may sound.” He looked at José’s blank face. “Sorry. A folly is a building that looks functional but is in fact purely decorative. You see them quite a lot in the gardens of stately homes. Bit of a nineteenth-century fixation.”

  Seth grinned. “There you go – perfect for our purposes. Give it some thought. I’ll be right back.” He ushered his protégés on to th
e next group, Charles calling back over his shoulder something about a giant pineapple in Scotland.

  José and Anna looked at each other and giggled. Anna shook her head. “Barking, the lot of them.” They watched Seth making more introductions. “What d’you think of Catherine’s friend? He looks like he’d rather be somewhere else.”

  Michael had excused himself and was standing near the French windows, rubbing his glasses on a handkerchief. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a second.

  “Yeah, talked to him a bit. Tall, dark, sexy little glasses too. Just up your street, I would have thought.”

  Anna narrowed her eyes. “Hmm, I’m not sure I’m up his, if you see what I mean. Hard to make him out. Does something terribly worthy for a living. Made me feel quite superficial.”

  “Surely not.” They shared a complicit laugh. José followed Michael’s gaze to a swirly grey-black sky. “Hey, you don’t fancy heading into town, do you?”

  * * * * *

  He leaves as the headache starts. Looking for his coat, he opens a door at the far end of the hall and walks in. A four-poster bed, beautifully made up, is lofting up from the middle of an immaculate room. A hotel room, you might say, but for the huge ceiling mirror glimmering above. Michael flinches like he’s been bitten, closes the door on his confusion and leaves less politely than he might.

  Outside it is little better. Long, leafy streets speckled with BMW soft-tops stretch in every direction. An unnatural silence hangs over them, not the restful quiet of the countryside but the suffocation of city life with the damper pedal on. The canopy of trees overhead absorbs the sound of his footsteps, making him invisible, a ghost, nothing. He inhales hard, searching for oxygen in the humid air. Why does he feel so much more threatened here than amongst the muggers and joyriders of Finsbury Park? What is he afraid of – someone stepping out of a doorway and offering him a sherry?

  He knows that what he is afraid of lies inside him, skulking like a nervous animal, and that something has made it skittish tonight.

  He doesn’t want to give it wriggle room. He doesn’t want to taste its fetid breath in his mouth. He doesn’t want to watch the show. But tonight he may have no choice.

  Scene 20

  Your friend Anna Carmel tells me you didn’t realise that Seth Gardner was bisexual at first. Did it come as a shock, Mr Sanchez?

  If the sudden rush of bile into his mouth means shock, then yes. If his legs no longer wanting to support him, the ground no longer wanting to support them, holds significance, then yes. If a casual wink from a face he thought he knew, a face tongue deep in a drunk woman, can bring tears to his eyes, then what do you think? It was a fucking gay bar and he still found a woman to snog.

  Later, a text. So now you know. Hope it doesn’t change anything.

  It changed everything and nothing. It changed his understanding of Seth but didn’t change his feelings for him.

  Next time they met he probed a bit; he’d known gay men who snogged women to throw a smokescreen over their sexuality. Seth evaded his questions for a while and then said quietly, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” José blushed. He knew Seth had never judged him for the way they met. Two piercing eyes were fixed on him.

  “I like to fuck who I like to fuck. I don’t set limits on it the way you and everyone else does. Cocks and cunts, it’s all the same to me, only it’s not, of course, it’s infinite variety and I never get bored. I love a man’s tight butt and a woman’s fleshy arse. Rippling pecs one night, quivering tits the next. Is that so hard to understand? Do I need people like you telling me what I really want, who I really am?”

  The laser beam of his gaze made José look down, ashamed. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business anyway.”

  Seth relaxed, reached for a cigarette. “Good. Glad we sorted that out. Bit of an old wound you scratched. Let’s go dancing.”

  Were you angry with him?

  Yes, at first. But how can you be angry with someone for what they are? What they are they can’t help. What they do, that’s another matter.

  Scene 21

  The boy with the bogbrush hair sits alone at the piano. Piles of sheet music, three stacked chairs, a metronome and a battered box of descant recorders supervise him. A clock he has never heard before ticks inside his head. The boy notices the cobwebs for the first time, adorning the eaves and crevices like insipid bunting. He inspects his shoes, their scuff marks, the place where the heel is starting to come away from the sole. He sees that the white keys are jaundiced, failing through age and lack of care. He can’t bring himself to play a note. He thinks of Mr Johnson and Mr Crane and their jokes, the tone of insinuation, the shame of hearing it all from behind stale, fraying curtains.

  He lifts his head at the creak of the door and there he is, Mr Fleming, the light in his eyes that has become a fixture of their lessons, the spring in his step that the whole school has noticed.

  “Michael! Not like you to be sitting here quietly. What about a run of E major to get us going? Definitely an E major day!” Mr Fleming chuckles and pulls up a chair to sit next to him.

  “Okay, sir.” The scale collapses into a fumble of fingers halfway down. “Sorry.” Michael bows his head.

  Mr Fleming laughs nervously. “Not such an E major day, eh? Never mind, let’s try it again more slowly.”

  After a third tangle with the scale, Mr Fleming leans over the keyboard to demonstrate. Michael sees chipped fingernails and long, black hairs on the back of pallid fingers. He twists slightly, away from the warm, sour breath brushing his face. The teacher speaks and Michael has to turn towards him, confronting constellations of scattered red pores joined by lined skin, inches from his face. Spectacle lenses flash and take the place of eyes. Michael is breathing through his mouth and hears nothing but he can feel. He feels the hand on his back, a gentle stroke. It’s the same hand that moves round to squeeze his thigh. His upper thigh.

  Michael starts and pushes back the stool, jumps to his feet. “I – I’m sorry, sir, I don’t feel very well.” He faces the wall with his hands in his pockets as if he’s being punished, trying not to cry. Stifling intimacy throbs in his ears. Then a voice, different from normal, more a husky whisper.

  “It’s all right, Michael, we’ll finish the lesson if you’re not feeling well. I’ll see you at choir practice on Thursday.”

  A flash of the teacher’s haggard face leaving the room.

  He has never known what to think, how to process what happened. Of all the badness surrounding it, the worst is that along with shock at the teacher’s touch, he had felt arousal. The part of him that had responded was the part of him he’d recently started touching, at night, when his brother was asleep. His dick, no longer just something to pee with, something that could shoot out another type of deposit, slimy and hot and shameful. Did Mr Fleming know? Was it some sort of test? A warning?

  Of course he knew now that it wasn’t, but he still couldn’t be sure if Mr Fleming had been comforting him… or something more. Now he’s a teacher himself he sees the pure vulnerability of the kids, even the mouthy ones. How easy it would be to take advantage of that.

  Things had changed between him and his teacher after that day. The teacher who had given him the gift of music, who had believed in him, nurtured him, helped him to rise like scum from the slurry of his youth to be skimmed off into university and a different life. It was not so much a bubble that burst as a balloon that started losing air, leaking trust and easiness until all that was left was a sad, shrivelled scrap. After O-Levels he defied the huffing and puffing of his parents and transferred to a nearby sixth-form college to do A-Levels. He came back in to collect his results, an A in music, of course. Mr Fleming came over to congratulate him. An awkward handshake, churn of feelings. He wanted to say sorry and he wanted to flee from the sadness he glimpsed behind the glasses. That was the last time he saw him.

  It was his mother who’d written to tell him, during his second year at Nottingham. He was
amazed to see her handwriting on a small brown envelope in his pigeon hole. The first time he’d ever had a letter from her. Inside was the Yorkshire Post cutting, Local teacher found dead in home. She’d written:

  I know you liked him Michael and I thought you’d want to know. Apparently, he was dead for three weeks before anyone found him poor man. People are saying he was lonely and there’s talk of some kids picking on him though it was in the holidays so I don’t know. Me and your father are well and Mrs Butler across the road, well her daughter Shirley has just had a baby girl. She was in your class I think. I hope you are well. Love Mum.

  At the time he’d ripped the letter into shreds and gone running, sopping with sweat and rain, until long after dark. In bed, next to the discarded fragments, the familiar mulch of anger, guilt and shame sucked him down, but this time he allowed himself to cry.

  Scene 22

  Were you worried about Seth Gardner after the dinner party, Miss Laurence?

  Worried, disturbed, a strange feeling of impending doom. Like her mind had been taken over by a pack of demons, chuckling and chanting from The Waste Land to keep her awake. Even when she touched the edge of sleep they stabbed at her with little pitchforks, invading her dreams so that she woke gasping, over and over again. She saw Seth, his hooded eyes, heard his voice with its empty resonance and the tremor of something that frightened her. She’d rebuffed Jason’s advances pretty savagely and in the morning they fought. About Seth. She used his jealousy to beat him, knowing he had every right to it. They made up in the end, but she was glad when he left her earlier than usual on Sunday. She had a phone call to make.

  “Hello?” The voice was abrupt, irritable even. She knew immediately she’d made a mistake.

  “Oh, hi Seth, it’s Rebecca.”

  “Rebecca, hi.” His voice stayed level, registering neither surprise nor pleasure.

  “I was just ringing to thank you for a great night on Friday.”

  “Not at all. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”