Read by Paul Clarke
There are cobbled corridors in the city you don’t know about. A race of people avoiding people. Discarded, pre-modern arteries of London. Men in ragged herringbone, demi-lune specs; with fobs and brollies. Queer phillumenists and amateur classicist slipping unseen through public spaces like tatty particles in other, older dimensions. But if you put your ears to the city walls, if you hold your breath, you can hear their nervous coughing and tramping leather soles through the knapped flint. One of these men, for they are always men, is Tuff.
The room is brick and damp. Mould sidles up the walls, whistling and popping as it makes its slow respiratory headway. Around the crusty Persian rug are props. Maracas. A fencing foil. An hourglass filled with cement. A cat has lost its paw, head bent up, hissing at itself, black, stuffed, and female.
Snow had come under the jamb, creating a soft powder python to exclude the draft. He set the lights. Two huge chrome halogens smeared in grease, the fraying fabric on the flexes ever a danger. He timidly switches them on. The contacts buzz. Then to the sink in the corner, turning on a tap to let the ginger water run to light blonde before washing a glass. He checks it for sediment. Then places it on a coffee table.
Affixed to a tripod made from three broomstick handles, he points the camera at a gut-busted armchair smelling of white spirit and dead Egyptians.
At length he sat on an upturned tea chest. He took the photograph from his pocket and once again perused its edges. Then the background. Then the figure. Then the face. Then the eyes of the woman printed there. He could while hours with that photograph. Its grain had appropriated the pattern of his fingerprints. He ran his thumbs down its dogeared border.
Snow compacting. The propeller thrum of a taxi. Tuff to his feet, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. The smaller digits of his hands started their twitching.
A flat shoe came round the door and trod on the snake. Followed then by big dark eyes and a sad crimson smile. She came in, hips in figure-tight silk arriving just behind. The elements lined up. She stood there to let the pieces of herself collect their configuration. Revolving, shifting; gleaming. Model.
‘Mrs. Tuff.’
He had never got used to calling her by her name.
‘Tuff.’
Her voice was a divan of those melancholy bedfellows: sweetness and intelligence; measured, and with a lunar heart. In silence they looked at each other, waiting for their history to catch up. Tuff raggedly beyond his age, she could see chocolate buds on his bristling mouth. She raised her smile. All in black. Her hair an unstudied Amazonian bob, wild in it’s short cascade, no doubt highly styled. It appeared so healthy. It framed her face and matched her blue-black serious eyebrows. And even there, standing next to several tins of hardened emulsion, her poise, her neck’s aspect, raised the possibility of beauty’s superiority to truth.
‘There’s a glass of fresh water.’
‘Thanks.'
By a chest of drawers, all dislocated panels, Hélène laid down her jacket. Behind a Chinese screen punched full of holes she removed the rest of her clothes, hanging her gloves on a dented gas lamp. She stood naked, raising resilience to the cold, her arms resting simply by her side.
Tuff loaded the camera.
‘Remove the lipstick if you could.’
‘Of course.’
They spoke so softly to one another. Hélène stepped up to a cracked mirror and wiped her twenty reflected mouths with a scrap of gauze. Tuff held up the little photograph.
‘I’d like to try this one.’
She looked.
‘Again? You know I don’t mind, but perhaps you should try something different.’ Tuff held the picture higher.
‘I look like a nude fusilier. Too aggressive. My nipples are unfocused.’
She picked her way across the mess in bare feet, sipping some water, then stood before the spotlights in a pose.
‘Like this?’
Tuff stood behind the camera. He closed an eye. Her perfume was bonding with the meths vapour, making ethylated hollyhocks. He readjusted one of the lights, removing a shadow from her left side. He made some exposures. Of all the shutter and winding noises Hélène liked Tuff’s the best. It was the slowest. She could feel herself moving though it. He contorted his mouth, clicking his teeth as he worked. He looked at his wife. Her skin was shining with expensive creams.
‘I saw your wife with no clothes on at the docks,’ said Patter. ‘I say “nothing”…she was wearing transparent panties. Funny thing was I’d gone down there to load some fabric down the yard. The big ships are coming in tomorrow. There were rolls of fustian about the place she could’ve used to hide her shame. Then everyone wouldn’t be looking at your wife’s tits. Not that I mind old Tuff, old pal…no I enjoy your wife’s posters very much. I like a look!’
Tuff fixed his gaze on his pint glass. Darkie sniggered next to him, scratching the table with his nails.
‘She’s a lovely woman to look at your wife, Tuff.’
Patter the stevedore. One of the four crumpled maniacs he drank with. Darkie and Nines, who made sandwiches together in some abstruse café. And Repton, the toyshop owner, who was the maddest of all. The pub, down an alleyway off the beaten track. Low lintelled, serving one ale from a huge copper tap. Sawdust and fag ends on the floor. Not a nice place at all.
‘What’s the matter Tuff? Life steal your socks in the night? Glum like my spayed bitch you are.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Tuff.
‘Was it the one…she wears the lace?’ asked Nines.
Patter slapped his own breast: ‘I don’t know! I have work to do. Man’s work doesn’t do itself. The big ships are coming in tomorrow! I haven’t time to stare at his missus all day.’
‘I’ll wager it’s for lace knickers,’ said Darkie.
Tuff stared at the rheumy substance floating in his beer head. Repton continued his airfix gluing.
‘You’d be sad if I crushed your fire engine, wouldn’t you Repton?’
‘It’s not a collector’s item. It’s missing a wheel,’ said Repton.
‘You’d still be sad though, eh?’
‘Wouldjer like a bap anyone?’ asked Nines.
The table group shook their heads.
‘Darkie’ll eat it then. But you’ll all be sorry when you know it’s cheese.’
‘I don’t wanna eat that muck,’ said Darkie, pushing the sandwich away.
‘Stop nudging me.’
‘Shouldn’t you be doing that with a toothbrush?’ asked Tuff.
‘The bristles are finer on wig hair,’ said Repton. ‘The glue doesn’t stick so…’
‘Now Tuff,’ Patter interrupted, ‘it’s as easy as being friends: Couldjer get me another drink?’ He winked at Darkie. ‘Mine’s as empty as your wife’s womb and twice as needy.’
Nines chuckled, spitting bread and cheese over Repton’s model.
Tuff rose from his chair, and as he went to the bar he counted out the change for his friend’s beer.
Her breaths are manifest in the cold. Her navel rising and falling. Tuff moves towards her. Her metatarsals are pretty – used to selling jewellery. She looks down the lens with continental eyes, her gaze in unwavering devotion to the camera.
He reaches out to her. She does not move. He tilts back her head a touch. He extends her arm a little. His hand touches her stomach. He combs her hair with his fingers. He rearranges her. She stares only at the camera. She does not move. He depresses the shutter.
‘Is it love? Is it true love for you Repton?’ asked Patter, gesticulating at the fire engine.
‘If it were a collector’s item I would keep it for myself.’ Repton seemed both distant and emboldened when he spoke of toys. ‘This I will sell.’
‘I bet any child sooner play with his daddy’s back than pull that thing half a yard on a carpet!’
‘I heard Freece was going to start selling wine here. In a glass,’ mused Nines.
‘It’ll never happen. What Freece knows about wine I could paint on a duck’s forehead!’
Darkie rolled a cigarette, licking the paper and sticking the end in his tar-lined mouth. Behind the bar Freece was feeding his dog. Tuff waited his turn, watched mistrustfully by Patter in case he only bought a half. A tramp appeared at the toffee windows and hesitated to enter. His beard was white with snow.
Hélène perched on the tea chest smoking a cigarette, her elbow on one knee. It made him nervous. All the wood, paint thinner, varnish…a single ash could set the place. She remained naked, as on professional sets. Naked people sipping gin. Naked people mainlining substances. She bobbed her calf up and down, took up a magazine from the coffee table. Tuff was cutting the end of some film with his flick-knife, the easier to load it. She looked at the back cover – a glossy advertisement for lingerie. Hélène in suspenders, posing as a scientist. Her legs wide apart, a basque beneath her open lab coat. They’d given her a clipboard.
‘Tarcisio took this,’ she said. ‘Would you like to do this one next time?’
‘No,’ he continued slicing. ‘It’s kitsch.’
She flicked through the magazine. She found herself five times without trying. Two brunette, two blonde, and a redhead. She had forgotten her true colour. How could she recollect? She hadn’t had pubes for years. It was an industry thing. And her hair was dyed more times in a week than could be remembered.
‘What colour hair do I have Tuff?’
‘You have brown hair,’ he said without looking up. ‘Like the back of a Dakota Owl.’
Tuff adjusted the clockwork machinery of his camera.
‘Shall we carry on?’
Hélène stood. She shook her hands out to get the blood flowing
‘Likes his photographs does Tuff! More than beer I’d say! That’s the thing about Tuff,’ said Patter, ‘he likes to watch!’
Tuff watched her. He never rushed, though nothing changed. Neither equipment, wife, or light. Sometimes there were long minutes between his exposures. Hélène wondered what this betokened. She never asked, but in distant latitudes she was often taken with a thought: He espies in me something that no-one else does. And would I notice it myself?
As she gets dressed Hélène talks. Tuff packs up the film, marking numbers on the boxes with a pencil stub.
‘I go to Milan tonight. Two days. Then Saudia Arabia.’
‘The London Underground shuts this weekend.’
‘So I won’t be coming for a bit.’
He stops writing. He pauses. He says ok. Very softly. He watches her readjusts her garters. He knows that leg up and down, heel to hip. Still it has the capacity to surprise. Later he would fill a cat toilet try with chemicals. Jerk his rostrum camera. Make the room turn red.
‘I look forward to viewing this session.’
Her words like some childlike innuendo. It embarrassed Tuff. She stepped forward and kissed him generously. She opened the metal door, letting in a gust of cold, then shut it behind her. She had gone.
Tuff held the camera, looking at her footprints in the melting snow snake.
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Hélène and Desire by Joshan Esfandiari-Martin was read by Paul Clarke at the Liars’ League Brains & Beauty event on Tuesday 14 September 2010 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London
Joshan Esfandiari Martin lives in London. He hates going out and meeting people but sometimes hates to stay in and enjoy watching a film with a bottle of wine. He hates all kinds of food, and is not keen on conversation. He hates humour and current affairs. He is a mammal.
Paul Clarke trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, aftersacrificing his degree on the altar of Theatre. He has a fondness for grotesques,villains and all-round bad guys – theatre credits include Berkoff’s Decadence (withSally Phillips), Moon in The Real Inspector Hound, and title roles in Vlad the Impaler, Macbeth, and Pericles – a rare outing as a good guy.
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