A Traitor to Memory

She is the liaison between East London Conservatory and the schools from which the conservatory draws its students. A former music instructor, she is also a cellist. She is perfect for the conservatory in that she speaks the language of the instruments, the language of the music, and, most importantly, the language of the children themselves.

I am not aware of her at first. Not until we must deal with a parent whose child has run away from home, seeking a shelter that the conservatory cannot provide. The child, we learn, has been prevented from practising by the mother's boyfriend, who, we also learn, has other activities in mind for her. The girl has become little more than a servant in their squalid home. But that little more is defined by sexual favours she has been told to perform on both of them.

Beth is Nemesis to this pathetic excuse of a human couple. She is pure Fury. She waits for neither police nor Social Services to deal with the situation because she trusts neither police nor Social Services. She deals with it herself: with a private detective and with a meeting between herself and the couple during which she makes it clear what will happen to them both should this child come to any harm. And to make sure that they understand, she defines harm for them in the explicit street terms that they are accustomed to.

I am not there for any of this, but I hear of it from more than one of the other instructors. And the ferocity of her devotion to this student touches something within me. A longing, perhaps. Or perhaps a chord of recognition.

At any rate, I seek her out. We fall into together in the most natural fashion I can imagine. For a year all is well.

But then as it happens, she talks of having more. It's logical, I know. Pondering the next step is rational for a man and a woman, although perhaps more for a woman who has her basic biology to consider.

When the subject of next comes up between us, I know I should want what follows those professions of love we've made for each other. I realise that nothing stays the same forever and to expect that she and I will be forever content to be fellow musicians and ardent lovers is a form of delusion. But, still, when she broaches the idea of marriage and children, I feel myself grow cool. I avoid the topic at first and when it can no longer be shunted to one side with the excuse of rehearsals, practises, recording sessions, and personal appearances, I find that the coolness within me has increased in proportion and now has iced over the idea not only of a future with Beth but also a present with Beth as well. I can't be with her as I was before. I feel no passion, and I have no desire. I attempt to go through the motions at first but it's just not there for me any longer. Whatever it was: desire, fervour, attachment, devotion.

We grind against each other, then, which is probably the way it happens when a man and a woman are trying to preserve a connection that's already been severed. And in that grinding, we wear each other away until what we had is so distant a memory that we can no longer sift through the discord of our present to locate the harmony that defined our past. And it ends. We end. She goes on to find another man whom she marries twenty-seven months and one week later. I remain as I am.

So when Libby spoke of next levels, I felt my spirit shudder. And yet I knew it would always come down to this same conversation between me and a woman, as long as I allowed any woman into my life.

The shouldn'ts began their bows in my mind. I shouldn't have shown her the lower ground floor flat. I shouldn't have agreed to let it to her. I shouldn't have taken her out for coffee. I shouldn't have bought her a meal, played that first concerto on her stereo, flown kites from Primrose Hill with her, taken her soaring in the glider, eaten at her table, fallen asleep with her spooned into my body and her nightshirt accidentally hiked up so that I could feel her naked arse warm and soft resting against my flaccid penis.

That should have told her the tale: that flaccidity. That unchanging, indifferent, Laodicean flaccidity. But it did not. Or if it did, she did not wish to draw the conclusion implied by that lifeless piece of flesh.

I said, “It feels good, having you here like this.”





She said, “It could feel better. We could have more.” And she moved her hips three times in that way women have that unconsciously mimes the rotation against which a normal man wants to thrust.

But I, as we know, am not a normal man.

I knew that I was supposed to desire at least the act if not the woman herself. But I did not. Nothing stirred in me except, perhaps, the ice. And what came over me was stillness and shadow and that disembodied feeling of being outside myself, above myself, looking down on this pitiful excuse for a man and wondering what the hell it was going to take, for God's sake, to move the bastard.

Libby said, her cool hand on my hot cheek again, “What's wrong, Gideon?” And she became quite still on the bed next to me. She didn't move away, however, and the fear that a precipitate movement on my part might give her an idea I did not wish her to have prompted me to remain immobile as well.

I said, “I've been to the doctor. I've had all the tests. There's nothing to account for them, Libby. It happens.”