The Human Pool by Chris Petit Read Free Book Online Page B

sister. We went back to her flat and got drunk. I thought we were flirting until we started kissing. An electric jolt of pleasure. Funerals and the shock of discovery. We carried on until we were breathless and told ourselves afterwards that we had just been fooling around. Desire and taboo, a piquant mix. Dora said, ‘It would, I suppose, technically be incest.’
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    In the paper yard I hadn’t been able to get Dora out of my head. It had nothing to do with jealousy. The correlation was an emotional smuggling in terms of what my father had done to her. I wondered if we weren’t both inheritors by default of the deep assignments, and detachments, that had secretly conditioned his life. Undercover is a form of detachment, too, of noninvolvement, while also being narcotic and addictive.
    Thanks to a combination of mortgage laziness and general domophobia, my flat was in a deteriorating block, a dumping ground for London’s problem families and illegal immigrants. (Hello, Siegfried!) On warm days when windows were open, the smell of frying and spices hung in the air. Most families cooked campfire-style on primus stoves.
    The building was terrorised by feral children, particularly two preternaturally pale, shaven-headed brothers. They were dumb in a damaged kind of way and barely articulate, apart from basic swearing. Their wildness was evidence of a withering parental neglect and boredom, but they made life unpleasant in so many little ways that it was impossible not to hate them.
    I gave Dora until ten then phoned her mobile. She did her hello all surprised and glad, but there was a new coolness. It sounded like she was with Carswell, who was the silent partner in a three-way conversation. ‘You’re in London,’ she repeated. Only for the day, I said. She seemed surprised. She hadn’t got my message, and had just swapped to the day shift so she could only see me before noon. ‘Dominic wants a word,’ she added, and put him on the line. Carswell suggested meeting at his club for lunch.
    Grays was a newish private members’ club in Mayfair, run by well-bred young men, with attractive staff. Grays was exclusive to the point of being secret, and secret to the point of variable spelling: no card, no notepaper, no telephone listing.
    Dora was waiting in the mews behind the club, smoking a cigarette. She looked different dressed for work. It reinforced how much we were becoming strangers. I wanted to be intimate but not personal. My vocabulary had been corroded by the Neos. Word blips ran interference through my head—Jew-wank, cunt-rag. ‘You’re looking great,’ I said, and censored out that fucking Carswell agreed with her.
    There was no point in discussing our semi-incestuous relationship. The ground had been gone over endlessly, the dangerous novelty and the intense curiosity. It had stopped short of full knowledge, not out of deference to taboo but because we sensed that extricating ourselves would be even more painful. Fucking would have driven us even further into our father’s world of secrecy and denial. It would have, in the end, only been a way of fucking Daddy, we had decided, tipsy at the time.
    She had moved on quickly to Carswell. I had guessed before she told me.
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    Dora worked at the club to subsidise her art course. It was how they had met. Carswell apologised for the tactlessness of his choice and fixed it so Dora didn’t wait on our table. I wondered what she had told him about us. He wore glasses to read the menu, the smart equivalent to school dinners. This was harder than Frankfurt. Dora and Carswell required a better level of acting. Dialogue with Carswell was notable for what was left unsaid; Dora the unspoken subject.
    Carswell the fencing master drew me out and opened me up. I told him everything about Germany. He offered good audience in return, his attention holding, knife and fork poised, his food forgotten. Why, I wondered,