The Cheek Perforation Dance. Sean Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ met, she thinks, she’s done virtually nothing towards her PhD. And this does not make Rebecca feel empowered and royal: right now this makes her feel crap, teenage, girly and feeble. God it’s so crap, Rebecca decides, pulling down her dress to hide her legs: that a mere man can come along and upend her priorities, distort her intellectual life, make nonsense of her ambitions and life goals, by not having shaved for a day or two. How gay is that?

      So she must do some work, Rebecca decides, just to show she isn’t just a cheerleading troupe of hormones.

      Sighing in the sunshine, putting down her pint of lager, Rebecca takes a textbook out of her bag, the ever-present, hardly-touched Crusades history book, and starts to read up. Flicking pages she comes upon the section she was deconstructing up until … the bit she was studying up and unto the moment Patrick walked casually through the front door of her life, like he’d had a key all along …

      Patrick …? Patrick … PATRICK. Rebecca wonders why it should be Patrick that finally stirs her, rather than any other. He’s nice-looking, she thinks; not the most good-looking. So is it because he’s like her father? Rebecca cannot imagine anyone less like her passive, diffident, tentative, bridge-playing father. Is it then because he’s like her mother?

      Rebecca shudders.

      Then it must be because he’s like neither; the opposite of both. In which case, how will her parents react to him? And how will he react to them? Can they possibly get on? Will Patrick understand the set up? Will he despise Rebecca for living at home, with her parents, at her age, for having sloped back home so as to do her London Uni PhD? Will he understand that she only did this because home was luxurious, convenient, palatial, and cheap …

       Work!

      Page opened, page corner unfoxed, Rebecca reads. She has to work. Lips firmed, she begins:

      As the Crusaders trekked across Europe towards the Holy Land, they left a trail of dead. In Speyer, Worms and other German cities they butchered Jews in their thousands. Witnesses in Mainz, in particular, reported fearful scenes of panic, of terrified Jewish women barricading themselves in their houses, and throwing gold coins out of the windows, to try and distract the rampaging soldiery.

      To no avail. The pogrom was savage, and relentless, and shocking, even by the …

      — Hello?

      Eyes up, Rebecca sees that: yes! it’s Patrick. Half stooping Patrick kisses Rebecca on her grateful cheek, turning her face Rebecca turns this into a kiss on the lips. At this Patrick seems to start, then stop. For a second Patrick seems unsure again: he just stands there. Rebecca takes this chance to shut and bag her book, and also to appraise Patrick: to assess his hiply retro jeans, his cool white cotton shirt, his two days’ stubble. Sensing the appraisal, Patrick makes a wry face, and a buying-the-drinks gesture, and disappears inside the pub. Two minutes later he comes out with two pints of coldish lager which the two of them sit and drink quickly, and thirstily, while they talk. After these two pints Patrick goes into the pub and buys two more pints; they drink these two almost as quickly. They are getting drunk. As Rebecca gets drunk, Patrick gets drunk, and the two of them talk excitedly and happily as they get drunk. The fact that they are getting drunk means they keep breaking into laughter apropos of nothing. This in itself makes Rebecca feel quite strange inside: sipping her beer, calming herself, she tries to concentrate on what Patrick is saying. Patrick is explaining that the small record label which he is helping to run has just bought an even smaller label which means they now have a roster of Asian ambient techno bands to promote and, yes, Rebecca thinks, his tanned chest looks nice with that silver cross against it.

      Patrick has stopped talking. Rebecca makes a sorry-I-was-distracted-could-you-say-that-again face. Patrick shakes his head:

      — Like you’re interested

      — Oh I am

      Patrick laughs:

      — Lying tart

      — No no really tell me more about that Asian thrash metal scene

      — OK OK – He chuckles – Do you fancy coming back to my flat?

      Eyes on his laughing eyes, eyes on his thick, black, slightly violent hair, Rebecca wonders: about Patrick’s differentness, his maleness, his foreignness. As Patrick makes some more noises it comes to Rebecca that his Irish-English-Britishness is as foreign to her as, no doubt, as a Jewess, she is to him. She is his Outremer. He is her Frankish knight. And this is their First Crusade.

      And perhaps, Rebecca thinks, I overintellectualise

      — Got some Kiwi Riesling

      — Uhhh, sorry?

      Looking at Rebecca with a cool expression, of amused bemusement, Patrick says:

      — I was … suggesting – He slows, deliberately – That we eat at my place, I could do some food, open a bottle of white or something. You know?

      Nodding demurely, saying ‘sure’, Rebecca sips at her lager. Then she gives up on being demure and gulps the rest of her beer down. As she wipes her lips with the back of her hand, he laughs. Rebecca sarcastically apologises and says:

      — Did you not know I was a complete lush?

      Fitting his empty beer glass into the circle of dampness it has already made, Patrick says:

      — Come on – Holding out a hand he takes Rebecca’s hand, and thereby helps her up and away.

      Pleased to be holding hands with him, worried her hands are perspiring, noticing he is checking out her cleavage as they walk along, Rebecca says nothing. Together, hand in hand, they walk down Windmill Street, over Tottenham Court Road, along the side roads to Patrick’s flat. His flat. To the bare, unpainted stairs of his first-floor shared apartment.

      In the flat they stand, slightly awkward. Rebecca makes a comment about how nice and bright it is in the day, and of course how centrally located. Patrick makes a mumbling noise about how he grew up in a boring small town and therefore has a fear of living in small towns or suburbs; how living away from the centre of London makes him feel like he is dying. Dying in prison. Then he laughs and says:

      — I’ll get a drink

      Into the sitting room, flooded with square sunlight from the large first-floor windows, Rebecca kneels in her summer dress on the polished bare floorboards and starts checking out Patrick’s bookshelves. From the kitchen she can hear sounds of him, uncorking bottles, clattering plates and cutlery. The last time she was in this flat, she thinks, the only other time she was in this flat, she had been very very drunk and it was very very dark and she had not had the time to case the bookcase, to do the essential appraisal. So now is her chance.

      — White wine OK then?

      — Yes – Rebecca calls back, through the walls, into the kitchen – Yes please fine

      So: the bookcase. Running her eyes along the spines, feeling slightly guilty about her intellectual snobbishness, Rebecca does her assessment.

      De Bernières, of course; Bridget Jones, slightly surprising; Tolstoy, v.g.

      — Dressing on your salad?

      — Yes, please, whatever

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