TWO
Youth, which is forgiven everything,
forgives itself nothing
—George Bernard Shaw
Brad Cousins was exercising his favourite habit of speaking to one person as if they were a gathering often. Lee was his audience. Against the backdrop of the student bar, pinball tables chattering, crack of pool balls striking and muted Stones' classics piped through a stuttering PA system, Lee was regaled with an accumulating list of Brad's personal antipathies. He was half-way down a pint of flat amber beer by the time he had been instructed on Brad's aversion to basketball, brazil nuts and beehive hairdos, his detestation of Liverpudlians, lavender perfume and loose-leaf ring-binders, his hatred of trade unions, tapioca and television journalists. Lee groaned inwardly at the thought of another dismal half-pint's worth of cataloguing before he could make his excuses and leave.
"She's dirty," cackled Brad, breaking off from his inventory of rancour, "I like her; dirty."
Lee followed Brad's gaze and locked on to a figure in black beret and black tights standing at the bar. Having shaken off her shadowy friend, Ella Innes had arrived and was ordering herself a drink. As she turned from the bar Lee semaphored wildly to attract her attention. But she looked through him without recognition, and settled at a nearby table where she expertly proceeded to roll a cigarette in brown liquorice paper.
"Frosty," Brad scoffed, swirling his beer to make it froth. "Anyway I can't stand women who drink out of pint glasses to try and prove something."
Lee ignored him. Ella's table was two strides away. "I waved at you to ask if you wanted to join us," he said, sitting down next to her.
Ella moved an eighth of an inch away from him. "Yes, I saw you." She concentrated on crafting the cigarette in her long white fingers, only looking up at him as she slid her tongue along the gummed edge of the paper.
"Oh?"
"Pardon?" She blinked at him.
Lee hovered, looking for a way out. She's pulling my strings, he thought. "Why don't you join us?"
Ella looked over her shoulder as if for signs of imminent rescue. She was an international celebrity being pestered for three minutes of her time by a provincial journalist. With a practised, long-suffering if there's to be no help shrug she gathered her papers, matches, tobacco and beer and relocated to their table.
"What did you make of that session?" Lee asked.
She shrugged and lit her cigarette. "What did you?"
"That beret is ridiculous," Brad said to ten people. "You look like a member of the Provisional IRA. In drag. After a bad night. In Belfast."
"The thing about going to these sessions," Ella said to Lee, "is that you never know who you're going to meet."
Brad pretended that the irony was lost on him. "All I'm saying is that the effect doesn't work. It doesn't come off."
"I was interested," Lee cut in quickly, "in some of the things you were saying. About controlling the direction of your dreams, I mean. I'm really going to get into it."
"Do it," she said, as if to say stop talking about it.
"You sounded quite advanced."
"Head of the coven," said Brad.
"But I don't have premonitions." She plucked a loose flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue.
"He only said that about premonitions," Brad put in, looking at Lee, "so he wouldn't sound as boring as the others. Isn't that right?
Lee only glared back at him.
"Ignore it," said Ella.
"And it worked," said Brad.
"What did you think of L. P.?" Lee asked her.
"I've come across him before; I think he's sweet."
"Why do women always say sweet when they mean clapped-out and half-way to senility?" Brad again. "What on earth is sweet about that dry old stick?”
"It's true;" she replied dryly, "that he doesn't suffer fools gladly."
Lee established that Ella was prepared to take the weekly sessions quite seriously. She told him that it hadn't occurred to her that most people were unable to direct their dreams. She was prepared, she said, to take things as far as she could to find out what they meant.
"I'm not," said Brad. "You sound like you're expecting too much from it. I can't see it going anywhere."
"Then why don't you drop out of it?"
"I probably will after a while."
"The group," said Ella to Lee, "would never recover."
She produced her purse to buy another drink. Lee offered twice, but she insisted that she buy her own. While she was away at the bar Brad said, "Listen mate; she's making you dance."
"What?"
"Dance! Dance! She's a vixen."
"A vixen? I don't know about that, but she's got you taped."
"Not a chance! Anyway it's not my tongue that's hanging out drooling: you're making an indecent public display of yourself."
"What?"
Brad got up to go. "I'll leave you to it." He patted Lee on the face. "Dirty."
Ella returned. "Your friend's gone, then?"
"I only met him tonight. He's not a friend."
"He's a reptile. He's got the eyes of a lizard and scales on the inside of his mouth." She crossed her legs.
"I see."
But Ella obviously didn't think of Lee as a reptile, otherwise she wouldn't have taken him back to the house she shared with two other girls about a mile from the university. Lee, for his part, overestimated Ella's style. Once they were behind closed doors he half-expected, wished, hoped that Ella would tear off her erotic black outfit and demand that they make urgent love (beret remaining in place). To say that Lee was more relieved than disappointed when she didn't would be a lie. He was a knot of tension and in Ella's presence his mouth ran dry. Although he was not a complete stranger to the private rooms of the women students, something about Ella's aura—a subtle scent and a kind of leading signal beyond the range and faculty of human definition—intimidated him while at the same time snaring him in a noose of sexual longing.
Ella at twenty was busy cultivating an air which, ten years later, she would be earnestly trying to throw off—that of the jaded adventuress, physically satiated, spiritually exhausted. This blasé image had, as was intended, a contradictory energizing effect on Lee. When he breathed in a single hot draft of this distillation of elements, it worked on him like a witch's potion. He perched nervously on the corner of her bed nursing a chipped mug of chicory-flavoured coffee as she relaxed back into a comfortable armchair, crossing and uncrossing her legs.
Ella's room was a revelation. Those of other female students had always been pale stereotypes of pastel shades, feminine pillowslips and obligatory postcard collections. Entering Ella's room was like walking into a subdued decorated cave or a Bedouin tent. The four walls were draped with hanging fabrics, Indian batiks, Serbian rugs, Greek blankets, Russian scarves, antique lace cloths—a hanging exhibition of textures, a treasury of intricate folds. Slow-burning incense breathed seductive fumes from elaborate brass cups. Ella relaxed in her armchair, rolling herself another liquorice-paper cigarette as she spoke. In Lee's mind she had already fused the mystical qualities of the Tarot Priestess, a 1970s Sibyl, and a contemporary Circe into one exotic being, and had focused them all into a soft dark triangle at the top of her legs.
"I don't do drugs any more; it's a waste of spiritual energy," she was saying. She seemed to be deliberately parodying herself.
"I've come to the same conclusion," said Lee, who had never so much as abused the instructions on an aspirin bottle.
"I'm in and out of TM at the moment.. ." she continued.
"TM?"
"Transcendental Meditation."
"Right."
"Only just recently I got my head into TA . . ."
"TA?"
"Transactional Analysis."
"Right."
"Where've you been living?" asked Ella.
"I've been into TP."
Ella looked foggy. "TP?"
"Teaching Practice.TP. It's a joke."
"A joke," said Ella. "Right." She looked at her watch and glanced at the door.
"You're quite a spiritual entity," Lee tried. It was obviously the right thing to say. Ella brightened, or perhaps her aura expanded, but anyway she proceeded to map out the dizzying geography of her psychic development over the past twelve months. In a matter of minutes she alluded to astrological configurations and Zen Buddhism; the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Hexagrams of the I Ching; Tantric Lore and Cabbalistic Law; primal screams and astral projection; rebirth experiences and regression into former lives.
Lee thought he might be talking to a Martian.
"In the end you're just chasing your tail," said Ella. Lee nodded in sage concurrence. "Which is why I'm interested in this dream thing. I want to leave all that clutter behind, trust in my own resources. I want to get inside my own head."
I just want to get inside your pants, Lee thought. "Exactly why I'm interested," he said.
Coffee had gone cold in the bottom of cups, incense had burned itself out. Ella was silent for the first time since they had walked through the door. Lee tried to keep the conversation on the boil by casually declaring that he was thinking of dropping out of university so that he could travel overland to Tibet.
"Do it," she said simply. It was the second time she had used the phrase that evening. There was something dismissive about the way she said it which twisted the knot in which she already had him tied.
Lee sat squirming on the corner of the bed, trying to think up a way of making the next move when she suddenly said, "Now I'd like to go to bed."
Lee stared at her, dumbfounded. Was that an invitation or what? He made an assessment of Ella's breezy self-confidence. "OK," he said, and started to untie his shoelaces.
Ella watched as he kicked off his shoes. Then she spoke.
"What the hell are you doing?" For a moment she looked flustered and a little wide-eyed: an apprentice Sibyl lost for words, a novice Circe frightened by a piglet.
"You don't want me to stay?" asked Lee.
"If ever I do," she said, recovering slightly, "you'll be the first to hear of it."
Lee pulled his shoes back on, trying to model a win-some-lose-some look as Ella opened the door. At the last minute she tore a book from the shelf and thrust it into his hands, simultaneously propelling him forward. "You really must read this and let me know what you think of it OK goodnight." She closed the door just a little too hurriedly behind him.
Lee took a short cut across the university lawns, philosophical. The book Ella had given him must have been a way of saying that the door would be open another time. He was half-way home before he looked at it. It was a battered paperback copy of Alice in Wonderland. The university clock-tower rang out the hour in the distance. It was 2 A.M.