THE LOVING ROOM
By
Martin Goodman
Martin Goodman
‘You'll burn for this,’ Mum said. ‘Just like I'm burning now.’ Her hair was ginger but didn't look to be on fire. It was permed to curl softly round her head even after sleep. She pawed her fingers through it to try and make it look distraught, and stretched her face wide while she furrowed her brow.
The morning light shone through the curtains. It tinted the walls and made the orange swirls in the carpet pattern lick into flame.
‘Good morning, ma'am,’ Ranjit said. He slips on good manners like he slips on condoms, not because they suit him but because they make life safer. It's attitude too. He likes to freeze that look of disdain on people's faces, likes to puzzle them with the composure in his voice.
Mum's face grew blank. She turned her head to shout out through the door and up the stairs. It was only when her voice came out that I knew she had stopped breathing for a while. I expected a bellow but it came out as a whimper, then blood threaded through the veins in her cheeks again as she gulped air back in.
‘Dad,’ was her call. They do that, call each other Mum and Dad. ‘Come down here.’
I guessed how it would be, Dad acting like Mum. Mum was naked beneath her towelling robe, so Dad was naked beneath his robe too. He came in through the door just like she did, eager to see who his son had brought home, the smile on his face waiting to break out as a grin. His hair was wet from the shower and shone black. It was slicked against his scalp to make his head more interesting. His head is sculpted in lines as long and noble as the outline of the head of a horse. Dad's long rather than tall. His head is high and the rest of him hangs down from it. His weight, his bulk, gathers in his stomach, like the water in a drying shirt that falls and collects at the edges. The stomach is round like Mum’s. His stomach is the resemblance between their two bodies.
He came in and looked at Mum, because she was the most dramatic thing in the room. The smile dropped from his face and into his stomach. His long hands knotted the robe's belt tighter as he stared at her.
‘Look what Cupe's brought in,’ she said. Cupe's short for Cupid. They called me that because they said I was all about love.
We were all four in the same room now. It's my favourite room, the room I love, but it had grown up overnight. We were all in the same room, but in different worlds.
‘Good morning, sir,’ Ranjit said.
I reached across and lay my hand in the shallow dip of his chest, flat against his skin. It is the best place to feel his voice, which is deep and gentle like bubbles in the sea. It makes his heart vibrate. Sometimes he murmurs into my ear, recites names of things we love or just talks dirty, and it's me who vibrates then. My whole body and everything else about me.
Dad stepped further into the room so he could look over the back of the sofa bed. Ranjit hoisted himself up and held out his hand.
‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ he said.
One of Dad's virtues is a long reach. He can dust cobwebs off the cornice with his fingertips without standing on a chair. He reached forward and took Ranjit's hand in his, and the two of them shook. Ranjit said later that he had to do all the pumping, that Dad's hand was limp, but that's just talk. Men do that. They try and prove themselves at the expense of others. Ranjit's no different. He's just the one I love.
‘It's sick,’ Mum said, and stared at the two hands. ‘Sick that you should touch him.’
Dad drew his hand back. My own had slipped down to Ranjit's stomach when he moved. I patted him twice and got up.
‘I'll make a pot of tea,’ I said.
*
Life was beautiful in the kitchen. Childhood was only hours ago, and I stretched into the firmness of my body. A brick wall faces the kitchen window for privacy, above it bloomed the light and dark greens of a broad treetop, and the sky was made bluer by the shadowed white of the clouds. Water ran from the tap and over my hand as I waited for it to turn cold. It thundered into the base of the kettle.
‘We heard a laugh,’ Dad said. ‘A girl's laugh.’
He was trying to explain.
‘It was me,’ I said. ‘My laugh.’
I'm not effeminate. Well not wildly so. Sometimes I sense grace in the way I'm moving and ride its flow, but I put that down to youth. I'm not girlish. My voice has settled mid-range, neither high nor low. But in the night a sudden move of Ranjit's seemed to snap the thread that held my voice to my being. Up it went, so high, laughing to be free.
I laughed again with the memory of it, but in my grown-up body's voice.
‘I was happy,’ I said. ‘The laugh just flew out of me. I didn't know it was so loud. Sorry.’
That was a lesson learned. I used to think we chose what sounds we made. I used to lie awake in my narrow bed and listen for the voices coming from the spread of the sofa down below. My brothers and sisters would roll into the comfort of their lovers' bodies and cry in contentment so I could hear and know that my world was relaxed and happy.
That's what I thought. The clamour of sex was my lullaby.
Now I knew different, with a lover of my own. I hadn't laughed to send my parents a message. I hadn't even laughed. A laugh had gone shooting out of me.
I think that's it with all our voices, all our speech. Strip away all we think it means, and that's what it comes down to. The squeal, the drone, the taking flight of some mood that was sulking deep inside ourselves, pining for lack of attention. We hear ourselves and think we're being sensible. We're daft.
I lay my hand on Ranjit and feel the vibrations on his body. That's my way of finding the truth in speech.
I put the kettle on the hob and lit the gas. This was great. It was my turn. I was making tea for my lover.
‘We thought it was Elaine,’ Dad said.
I looked back into the room to see both Dad and Mum staring at me. They were trying to recognize their baby. He was still there in the fairness of my skin. There was the ginger fuzz of my pubic hair, the tufts in my armpits, the down on my legs, but otherwise my body was hairless. I stood to face them like a child too, nudity just my freedom from clothes. We liked our bodies in our family. We knew they were nothing to hide.
Ranjit looked back at my eyes and smiled. Mum and Dad were looking lower down. I concentrated on them, and watched the fractional shifts of their eyes, the slow curling of Mum's left nostril. This was an examination. They were checking my body for signs of violation, bites or scratches or the dried white crust of semen.
‘It should have been Elaine,’ Mum said. ‘We spoke on the phone. She sounded ripe. Eager. A mother knows. She hears the fullness in a woman's voice. She was yours, Cupe. Why didn't you take her?’
‘She's too white,’ I said.
Mum snorted. Dad gaped.
‘Not just the skin. She's white all through. There's no shade to her.’
‘White hot, you mean,’ Dad said. ‘She was white hot and you couldn't handle her. There's nothing wrong with Elaine. Nothing a real man couldn't cure. Too white you say? You're just scared. Elaine's a fine young woman. A big young woman. Give her a try, Cupe. Give her a call.’
He stepped out to the hall to fetch the phone from its cradle and held it out to me.
‘I know what you feel, Cupe. Breasts can be awesome. But think of them as a pillow. A man can dream himself anew on breasts like Elaine's.’
A thin female voice sounded from the phone, a recording that kept insisting Dad should hang up and try again. He hung up.
‘There's no black and white with Elaine,’ I said, though keeping quiet would have been better. ‘It's all white. She wants a white wedding and a white Rolls Royce. A white refrigerator in her white kitchen. White children to soak whiter in a hot white bubble bath. She wants to suck my white body into the process. She longs for that.’
Our talk made Elaine swell up like a ghost in the room. There wasn't space for me while she was there. I backed into the kitchen. The kettle began the first low purr of a whistle and I prepared the pot.
‘I've shagged Elaine,’ Ranjit said. ‘For all the practice she's had she's no great shakes. Cupe would be wasted on her.’
I laughed. I knew he was lying. The words were just his mood coming out, a mood of having fun. And the lie was a truth in a way, because it sent the lie of Elaine's presence farting out of the room like a flyaway balloon.
‘You've got a great son in Cupe,’ Ranjit continued. ‘I can't love him like you do. You're parents. You love him like you love yourselves. I only love him for what he is. He's lovely.’
‘He's a child,’ Mum snapped back.
She meant loads by it. Mum is a woman of inference. It didn't matter anymore though. I was back together with myself. I took the tray back to the bed, poured the tea into four mugs, and stirred sugar into three of them. Ranjit, Mum and Dad took sugar, I didn't. It was good to join them all together like that and keep myself apart, to give them what they wanted and know I wanted something different. Sometimes it's hard to know the difference between what you want for yourself and what others want you to want.
Dad pulled two of the dining chairs from the table and he and Mum sat down. They sat at angles so as to stare above us into different corners of the room.
‘It's like old times,’ I said, though not because it was true. Sometimes talk is like singing. My words come dancing out to keep me company. It's like talking of summer in the middle of winter and feeling warm. Like the times when I was a kid and my brothers and sisters had brought their lovers home to this room. We all sat around in those mornings after, drinking tea, eating breakfast, not talking much but happy. We didn't talk because the washing machine made such a noise, churning away at the dirty sheets from the night before. We were happy because of all the love that was about, the lovers still pink and hot with it, the spores of sex floating in the air that we sniffed. We sucked at our tea and smiled a lot.
‘Do you know the other smell I love?’ I asked. ‘Second only to this room. It's the strawberry disinfectant in the toilet. When I'm in there I don't notice it. It's the whiff on the stairs or the landing that gets me, sick and sweet at the same time.’
Every room in this house has got a life of its own. The girls' room, empty now, pink curtains lank at the windows, talcum powder caking the carpet, a scented breath I still catch as I open its door, a room that sleeps and longs for other girlhoods to feed it. The boys' room, blue curtains fading to cloud white, the empty bunkbeds of my vanished brothers and me in the single, stale sweat and a busting for more energy than I can give it. Mum's and Dad's room, decorated primrose yellow when they were both fresh but now with the hue and taste of nicotine. The toilet with its strawberry fart at the heads of the stairs. The house knows this family's spent. It wants a new one.
Ranjit lay his hand on top of mine. He didn't know where my thoughts were taking me, but his touch called me back.
‘This bed used to be so big.’ I stretched out to reach from corner to corner. Stretching's some of the most fun I can have. It's great in a pool, back arched, toes and fingertips pointing, the water as support both above and below like I'm carried in a womb, stretching right out of my skin. Or diving, diving from high, the air shocked into wind to stretch me till I reach into the water.
I curled up, tucked in my knees and bowed my head to pillow it on the duvet above Ranjit's ankles. He'd picked up my tea to stop it spilling. With two mugs in his hands he could make no move. Mum and Dad hadn't drunk enough tea to melt them yet. We were all still.
My head on Ranjit's ankles kept me close enough to happiness not to cry. I looked at my thoughts instead, and saw why I had bundled myself up.
It made me smaller.
I'd stretched too far, got too big.
‘You can't carry me anymore,’ I said. The words came out wrapped in the sound of tears even though my eyes were dry. I sat up to face Mum and Dad, since I was talking to them, and tried again. ‘You can't carry me anymore. You can't cradle me in your arms and make everything alright. Look at yourselves. Look at me. It can't work.’
They did look at me. I took my mug back from Ranjit and held its warmth for comfort.
‘It's great what you've done. I'm doing all my growing up in just a few hours. I can feel it. My head's catching up with my body. I'm almost one piece again.
‘This bed was magic as a kid, the way it spread out to fill a whole room. I used to come down every morning when the lovers were dozy, climb on at the end here, and crawl up to settle between their bodies. They always let me stay.’
‘You never did,’ Mum said. Her voice was quiet, like a reminder to herself of what she believed in. ‘You were never a child for touching. We remarked on it. As a baby you took no comfort from being held. The others all climbed into our bed in the night, but never you. You were a distant child.’
‘It was our secret,’ I said, and was surprised. I thought I had no secrets. ‘I came down when it was still dark. The damp patch on the bed was cold and the bodies were warm. They held onto me till the light came in, and sometimes I held onto them. Dio's back is the first back I remember. My arm stretched wide to curl over his shoulder, and the light played shadows across his muscles as it shifted the dark aside. I loved those shadows. I loved Dio's back.’
Dio's my brother. It's short for Dionysus. We all have names to do with pleasure and love. There's Bacchus, who has a lovely back too, though more slender. Aphro, short for Aphrodite, whose back is more slender still. And Bea, short for Beatrice. We all like our names, apart from Bea. She was named after Dante's inspiration but it wasn't enough. She didn't want to be some poet's love object. She was more primal than that.
‘They'd wake for a while and we'd smile into each other's faces. Even the lovers. None were surprised, all of them were gentle. It's part of the magic of this room. The love, the acceptance, softened us all. They stroked my hair and sometimes I was kissed. I carried their warmth back up the stairs and into my dreams.
‘Ah Cupid,’ Bea said once. She grew and I grew. She got a lover to this bed years before me, but still I grew. She stroked her hand down my body and onto my penis. It was only tiny but her hand was sensitive. She sensed a pulse of blood, a stirring into life. 'You're big now, Cupid. There's no room in this bed for three now you're so big. We love you, Cupid. We love you so much. You've helped us all to love. Now you're big enough to wait for a lover of your own.' She hugged me then. It was a hug into softness. It dissolved all that was set in me and left me fluid, ready to flow into a grown-up form.
‘A hug for evermore’ she said, and released me.
I pointed to a picture on the wall, an enlarged seaside snap. ‘That's Bea,’ I told Ranjit. I could have pointed to a dozen more, then dozens more of each of us. Other families have photo albums. We have walls. Mum spends one day a month just dusting them, taking them down and putting them back, playing tapes she's made of favourite records from all of those family years.
‘This is Ranjit,’ I said, because he hadn't been introduced. ‘I love being with him.’
He makes me natural. I used to say something and he laughed, because I wasn't natural yet. 'I've already met your parents,' he said before I brought him home. 'You've repeated all the rubbish they've ever said.’ Then I learned how to speak for him and to laugh in a different way, a laughter that was conversation as we shared ourselves in words.
I looked at Mum, at the tears that filled her eyes.
‘Don't tell me you're happy,’ she said. ‘I can see into your eyes. I can see that you're not.’
‘I am happy,’ I told her. The tears in my eyes were reflections of her own.
‘Be happy then,’ she said. ‘Come on Dad. We'll go upstairs and leave him to his happiness.’
I watched them stand and go and close the door behind them. Their tread went up the stairs and reached their room, where all of Mum's silence broke out as a sob. Dad cooed his sympathy.
‘They'll get over it,’ Ranjit said.
Wounds heal but leave scars. Fractures heal but the bone remembers.
‘You're learning to be yourself. Learning to be happy. You can't give up your happiness to please others. It doesn't work.’
I stroked a hand across his chest.
‘We've all got to break out of our pasts,’ he said. ‘Even them.’
I loved the colour of our skins, the paleness of mine, the darkness of his. I loved putting them together. It made them complete.
I loved looking into his brown eyes out of my blue ones. Well they're blue sometimes, grey at others. It's him that tells me they're blue.
I put his mug beside mine on the floor, so our arms were free.
‘You can't just break from the past,’ I said. ‘You have to complete it.’
I eased him down the bed and onto his side so that his back faced the daylight.
‘It's beautiful,’ I said. ‘Your back's beautiful.’
It was dark and yet reflected the light. It was all the shade from all the backs I had known in this bed.
The sounds from upstairs were softer now. They had muted their sadness in each other's company.
I moved around to face Ranjit. The head of his penis is still a surprise to me. I expect something brown but it's pink, a dark pink touching on red. It's the colour to match the smell of Mum's strawberry disinfectant. The colour I found as a kid when I licked the coating off my favourite ice lolly to reach its frozen strawberry centre.
I crawled into this bed as an infant. Turned one way to find a man, turned the other to find a woman.
I shivered.
‘What's wrong?’ he asked.
‘You're my past,’ I said. ‘It's all in you.’
I lay my head on his chest and he cradled it in his arm. I looked across his skin and touched it with my fingertips. It's nothing to do with my past. It's alive.
‘Is that it?’ he asked, when I had lain a while. ‘Anything else to say?’
He turned me round so I was on my back.
‘Any more nonsense?’
He held his head above mine and arched an eyebrow.
I paused, and grinned with relief to find there was nothing else to say. I shook my head. He smiled down at me.
‘Then let's laugh,’ he said.
The morning light shone through the curtains. It tinted the walls and made the orange swirls in the carpet pattern lick into flame.
‘Good morning, ma'am,’ Ranjit said. He slips on good manners like he slips on condoms, not because they suit him but because they make life safer. It's attitude too. He likes to freeze that look of disdain on people's faces, likes to puzzle them with the composure in his voice.
Mum's face grew blank. She turned her head to shout out through the door and up the stairs. It was only when her voice came out that I knew she had stopped breathing for a while. I expected a bellow but it came out as a whimper, then blood threaded through the veins in her cheeks again as she gulped air back in.
‘Dad,’ was her call. They do that, call each other Mum and Dad. ‘Come down here.’
I guessed how it would be, Dad acting like Mum. Mum was naked beneath her towelling robe, so Dad was naked beneath his robe too. He came in through the door just like she did, eager to see who his son had brought home, the smile on his face waiting to break out as a grin. His hair was wet from the shower and shone black. It was slicked against his scalp to make his head more interesting. His head is sculpted in lines as long and noble as the outline of the head of a horse. Dad's long rather than tall. His head is high and the rest of him hangs down from it. His weight, his bulk, gathers in his stomach, like the water in a drying shirt that falls and collects at the edges. The stomach is round like Mum’s. His stomach is the resemblance between their two bodies.
He came in and looked at Mum, because she was the most dramatic thing in the room. The smile dropped from his face and into his stomach. His long hands knotted the robe's belt tighter as he stared at her.
‘Look what Cupe's brought in,’ she said. Cupe's short for Cupid. They called me that because they said I was all about love.
We were all four in the same room now. It's my favourite room, the room I love, but it had grown up overnight. We were all in the same room, but in different worlds.
‘Good morning, sir,’ Ranjit said.
I reached across and lay my hand in the shallow dip of his chest, flat against his skin. It is the best place to feel his voice, which is deep and gentle like bubbles in the sea. It makes his heart vibrate. Sometimes he murmurs into my ear, recites names of things we love or just talks dirty, and it's me who vibrates then. My whole body and everything else about me.
Dad stepped further into the room so he could look over the back of the sofa bed. Ranjit hoisted himself up and held out his hand.
‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ he said.
One of Dad's virtues is a long reach. He can dust cobwebs off the cornice with his fingertips without standing on a chair. He reached forward and took Ranjit's hand in his, and the two of them shook. Ranjit said later that he had to do all the pumping, that Dad's hand was limp, but that's just talk. Men do that. They try and prove themselves at the expense of others. Ranjit's no different. He's just the one I love.
‘It's sick,’ Mum said, and stared at the two hands. ‘Sick that you should touch him.’
Dad drew his hand back. My own had slipped down to Ranjit's stomach when he moved. I patted him twice and got up.
‘I'll make a pot of tea,’ I said.
*
Life was beautiful in the kitchen. Childhood was only hours ago, and I stretched into the firmness of my body. A brick wall faces the kitchen window for privacy, above it bloomed the light and dark greens of a broad treetop, and the sky was made bluer by the shadowed white of the clouds. Water ran from the tap and over my hand as I waited for it to turn cold. It thundered into the base of the kettle.
‘We heard a laugh,’ Dad said. ‘A girl's laugh.’
He was trying to explain.
‘It was me,’ I said. ‘My laugh.’
I'm not effeminate. Well not wildly so. Sometimes I sense grace in the way I'm moving and ride its flow, but I put that down to youth. I'm not girlish. My voice has settled mid-range, neither high nor low. But in the night a sudden move of Ranjit's seemed to snap the thread that held my voice to my being. Up it went, so high, laughing to be free.
I laughed again with the memory of it, but in my grown-up body's voice.
‘I was happy,’ I said. ‘The laugh just flew out of me. I didn't know it was so loud. Sorry.’
That was a lesson learned. I used to think we chose what sounds we made. I used to lie awake in my narrow bed and listen for the voices coming from the spread of the sofa down below. My brothers and sisters would roll into the comfort of their lovers' bodies and cry in contentment so I could hear and know that my world was relaxed and happy.
That's what I thought. The clamour of sex was my lullaby.
Now I knew different, with a lover of my own. I hadn't laughed to send my parents a message. I hadn't even laughed. A laugh had gone shooting out of me.
I think that's it with all our voices, all our speech. Strip away all we think it means, and that's what it comes down to. The squeal, the drone, the taking flight of some mood that was sulking deep inside ourselves, pining for lack of attention. We hear ourselves and think we're being sensible. We're daft.
I lay my hand on Ranjit and feel the vibrations on his body. That's my way of finding the truth in speech.
I put the kettle on the hob and lit the gas. This was great. It was my turn. I was making tea for my lover.
‘We thought it was Elaine,’ Dad said.
I looked back into the room to see both Dad and Mum staring at me. They were trying to recognize their baby. He was still there in the fairness of my skin. There was the ginger fuzz of my pubic hair, the tufts in my armpits, the down on my legs, but otherwise my body was hairless. I stood to face them like a child too, nudity just my freedom from clothes. We liked our bodies in our family. We knew they were nothing to hide.
Ranjit looked back at my eyes and smiled. Mum and Dad were looking lower down. I concentrated on them, and watched the fractional shifts of their eyes, the slow curling of Mum's left nostril. This was an examination. They were checking my body for signs of violation, bites or scratches or the dried white crust of semen.
‘It should have been Elaine,’ Mum said. ‘We spoke on the phone. She sounded ripe. Eager. A mother knows. She hears the fullness in a woman's voice. She was yours, Cupe. Why didn't you take her?’
‘She's too white,’ I said.
Mum snorted. Dad gaped.
‘Not just the skin. She's white all through. There's no shade to her.’
‘White hot, you mean,’ Dad said. ‘She was white hot and you couldn't handle her. There's nothing wrong with Elaine. Nothing a real man couldn't cure. Too white you say? You're just scared. Elaine's a fine young woman. A big young woman. Give her a try, Cupe. Give her a call.’
He stepped out to the hall to fetch the phone from its cradle and held it out to me.
‘I know what you feel, Cupe. Breasts can be awesome. But think of them as a pillow. A man can dream himself anew on breasts like Elaine's.’
A thin female voice sounded from the phone, a recording that kept insisting Dad should hang up and try again. He hung up.
‘There's no black and white with Elaine,’ I said, though keeping quiet would have been better. ‘It's all white. She wants a white wedding and a white Rolls Royce. A white refrigerator in her white kitchen. White children to soak whiter in a hot white bubble bath. She wants to suck my white body into the process. She longs for that.’
Our talk made Elaine swell up like a ghost in the room. There wasn't space for me while she was there. I backed into the kitchen. The kettle began the first low purr of a whistle and I prepared the pot.
‘I've shagged Elaine,’ Ranjit said. ‘For all the practice she's had she's no great shakes. Cupe would be wasted on her.’
I laughed. I knew he was lying. The words were just his mood coming out, a mood of having fun. And the lie was a truth in a way, because it sent the lie of Elaine's presence farting out of the room like a flyaway balloon.
‘You've got a great son in Cupe,’ Ranjit continued. ‘I can't love him like you do. You're parents. You love him like you love yourselves. I only love him for what he is. He's lovely.’
‘He's a child,’ Mum snapped back.
She meant loads by it. Mum is a woman of inference. It didn't matter anymore though. I was back together with myself. I took the tray back to the bed, poured the tea into four mugs, and stirred sugar into three of them. Ranjit, Mum and Dad took sugar, I didn't. It was good to join them all together like that and keep myself apart, to give them what they wanted and know I wanted something different. Sometimes it's hard to know the difference between what you want for yourself and what others want you to want.
Dad pulled two of the dining chairs from the table and he and Mum sat down. They sat at angles so as to stare above us into different corners of the room.
‘It's like old times,’ I said, though not because it was true. Sometimes talk is like singing. My words come dancing out to keep me company. It's like talking of summer in the middle of winter and feeling warm. Like the times when I was a kid and my brothers and sisters had brought their lovers home to this room. We all sat around in those mornings after, drinking tea, eating breakfast, not talking much but happy. We didn't talk because the washing machine made such a noise, churning away at the dirty sheets from the night before. We were happy because of all the love that was about, the lovers still pink and hot with it, the spores of sex floating in the air that we sniffed. We sucked at our tea and smiled a lot.
‘Do you know the other smell I love?’ I asked. ‘Second only to this room. It's the strawberry disinfectant in the toilet. When I'm in there I don't notice it. It's the whiff on the stairs or the landing that gets me, sick and sweet at the same time.’
Every room in this house has got a life of its own. The girls' room, empty now, pink curtains lank at the windows, talcum powder caking the carpet, a scented breath I still catch as I open its door, a room that sleeps and longs for other girlhoods to feed it. The boys' room, blue curtains fading to cloud white, the empty bunkbeds of my vanished brothers and me in the single, stale sweat and a busting for more energy than I can give it. Mum's and Dad's room, decorated primrose yellow when they were both fresh but now with the hue and taste of nicotine. The toilet with its strawberry fart at the heads of the stairs. The house knows this family's spent. It wants a new one.
Ranjit lay his hand on top of mine. He didn't know where my thoughts were taking me, but his touch called me back.
‘This bed used to be so big.’ I stretched out to reach from corner to corner. Stretching's some of the most fun I can have. It's great in a pool, back arched, toes and fingertips pointing, the water as support both above and below like I'm carried in a womb, stretching right out of my skin. Or diving, diving from high, the air shocked into wind to stretch me till I reach into the water.
I curled up, tucked in my knees and bowed my head to pillow it on the duvet above Ranjit's ankles. He'd picked up my tea to stop it spilling. With two mugs in his hands he could make no move. Mum and Dad hadn't drunk enough tea to melt them yet. We were all still.
My head on Ranjit's ankles kept me close enough to happiness not to cry. I looked at my thoughts instead, and saw why I had bundled myself up.
It made me smaller.
I'd stretched too far, got too big.
‘You can't carry me anymore,’ I said. The words came out wrapped in the sound of tears even though my eyes were dry. I sat up to face Mum and Dad, since I was talking to them, and tried again. ‘You can't carry me anymore. You can't cradle me in your arms and make everything alright. Look at yourselves. Look at me. It can't work.’
They did look at me. I took my mug back from Ranjit and held its warmth for comfort.
‘It's great what you've done. I'm doing all my growing up in just a few hours. I can feel it. My head's catching up with my body. I'm almost one piece again.
‘This bed was magic as a kid, the way it spread out to fill a whole room. I used to come down every morning when the lovers were dozy, climb on at the end here, and crawl up to settle between their bodies. They always let me stay.’
‘You never did,’ Mum said. Her voice was quiet, like a reminder to herself of what she believed in. ‘You were never a child for touching. We remarked on it. As a baby you took no comfort from being held. The others all climbed into our bed in the night, but never you. You were a distant child.’
‘It was our secret,’ I said, and was surprised. I thought I had no secrets. ‘I came down when it was still dark. The damp patch on the bed was cold and the bodies were warm. They held onto me till the light came in, and sometimes I held onto them. Dio's back is the first back I remember. My arm stretched wide to curl over his shoulder, and the light played shadows across his muscles as it shifted the dark aside. I loved those shadows. I loved Dio's back.’
Dio's my brother. It's short for Dionysus. We all have names to do with pleasure and love. There's Bacchus, who has a lovely back too, though more slender. Aphro, short for Aphrodite, whose back is more slender still. And Bea, short for Beatrice. We all like our names, apart from Bea. She was named after Dante's inspiration but it wasn't enough. She didn't want to be some poet's love object. She was more primal than that.
‘They'd wake for a while and we'd smile into each other's faces. Even the lovers. None were surprised, all of them were gentle. It's part of the magic of this room. The love, the acceptance, softened us all. They stroked my hair and sometimes I was kissed. I carried their warmth back up the stairs and into my dreams.
‘Ah Cupid,’ Bea said once. She grew and I grew. She got a lover to this bed years before me, but still I grew. She stroked her hand down my body and onto my penis. It was only tiny but her hand was sensitive. She sensed a pulse of blood, a stirring into life. 'You're big now, Cupid. There's no room in this bed for three now you're so big. We love you, Cupid. We love you so much. You've helped us all to love. Now you're big enough to wait for a lover of your own.' She hugged me then. It was a hug into softness. It dissolved all that was set in me and left me fluid, ready to flow into a grown-up form.
‘A hug for evermore’ she said, and released me.
I pointed to a picture on the wall, an enlarged seaside snap. ‘That's Bea,’ I told Ranjit. I could have pointed to a dozen more, then dozens more of each of us. Other families have photo albums. We have walls. Mum spends one day a month just dusting them, taking them down and putting them back, playing tapes she's made of favourite records from all of those family years.
‘This is Ranjit,’ I said, because he hadn't been introduced. ‘I love being with him.’
He makes me natural. I used to say something and he laughed, because I wasn't natural yet. 'I've already met your parents,' he said before I brought him home. 'You've repeated all the rubbish they've ever said.’ Then I learned how to speak for him and to laugh in a different way, a laughter that was conversation as we shared ourselves in words.
I looked at Mum, at the tears that filled her eyes.
‘Don't tell me you're happy,’ she said. ‘I can see into your eyes. I can see that you're not.’
‘I am happy,’ I told her. The tears in my eyes were reflections of her own.
‘Be happy then,’ she said. ‘Come on Dad. We'll go upstairs and leave him to his happiness.’
I watched them stand and go and close the door behind them. Their tread went up the stairs and reached their room, where all of Mum's silence broke out as a sob. Dad cooed his sympathy.
‘They'll get over it,’ Ranjit said.
Wounds heal but leave scars. Fractures heal but the bone remembers.
‘You're learning to be yourself. Learning to be happy. You can't give up your happiness to please others. It doesn't work.’
I stroked a hand across his chest.
‘We've all got to break out of our pasts,’ he said. ‘Even them.’
I loved the colour of our skins, the paleness of mine, the darkness of his. I loved putting them together. It made them complete.
I loved looking into his brown eyes out of my blue ones. Well they're blue sometimes, grey at others. It's him that tells me they're blue.
I put his mug beside mine on the floor, so our arms were free.
‘You can't just break from the past,’ I said. ‘You have to complete it.’
I eased him down the bed and onto his side so that his back faced the daylight.
‘It's beautiful,’ I said. ‘Your back's beautiful.’
It was dark and yet reflected the light. It was all the shade from all the backs I had known in this bed.
The sounds from upstairs were softer now. They had muted their sadness in each other's company.
I moved around to face Ranjit. The head of his penis is still a surprise to me. I expect something brown but it's pink, a dark pink touching on red. It's the colour to match the smell of Mum's strawberry disinfectant. The colour I found as a kid when I licked the coating off my favourite ice lolly to reach its frozen strawberry centre.
I crawled into this bed as an infant. Turned one way to find a man, turned the other to find a woman.
I shivered.
‘What's wrong?’ he asked.
‘You're my past,’ I said. ‘It's all in you.’
I lay my head on his chest and he cradled it in his arm. I looked across his skin and touched it with my fingertips. It's nothing to do with my past. It's alive.
‘Is that it?’ he asked, when I had lain a while. ‘Anything else to say?’
He turned me round so I was on my back.
‘Any more nonsense?’
He held his head above mine and arched an eyebrow.
I paused, and grinned with relief to find there was nothing else to say. I shook my head. He smiled down at me.
‘Then let's laugh,’ he said.