‘I wanted to go back. This time, I wanted it. There was so much I had not seen. Instead we came to world. Do you like it?’
‘Like what?’
She gestured vaguely to the room – the sofa, the armchairs, the curtains, the unused gas fire.
‘It’s all right, I suppose.’
‘I told them I did not wish to visit world,’ she said. ‘My parent-teacher was unimpressed. “You will have much to learn,” it told me. I said, “I could learn more in sun, again. Or in the deeps. Jessa spun webs between galaxies. I want to do that.”
‘But there was no reasoning with it, and I came to world. Parent-teacher engulfed me, and I was here, embodied in a decaying lump of meat hanging on a frame of calcium. As I incarnated I felt things deep inside me, fluttering and pumping and squishing. It was my first experience with pushing air through the mouth, vibrating the vocal cords on the way, and I used it to tell parent-teacher that I wished that I would die, which it acknowledged was the inevitable exit strategy from world.’
There were black worry beads wrapped around her wrist, and she fiddled with them as she spoke. ‘But knowledge is there, in the meat,’ she said, ‘and I am resolved to learn from it.’
We were sitting close at the centre of the sofa now. I decided I should put an arm around her, but casually. I would extend my arm along the back of the sofa and eventually sort of creep it down, almost imperceptibly, until it was touching her. She said, ‘The thing with the liquid in the eyes, when the world blurs. Nobody told me, and I still do not understand. I have touched the folds of the Whisper and pulsed and flown with the tachyon swans, and I still do not understand.’
She wasn’t the prettiest girl there, but she seemed nice enough, and she was a girl, anyway. I let my arm slide down a little, tentatively, so that it made contact with her back, and she did not tell me to take it away.
Vic called to me then, from the doorway. He was standing with his arm around Stella, protectively, waving at me. I tried to let him know , by shaking my head, that I was on to something, but he called my name and, reluctantly, I got up from the sofa and walked over to the door. ‘What?’
‘Er. Look. The party,’ said Vic, apologetically. ‘It’s not the one I thought it was. I’ve been talking to Stella and I figured it out. Well, she sort of explained it to me. We’re at a different party.’
‘Christ. Are we in trouble? Do we have to go?’
Stella shook her head. He leaned down and kissed her, gently, on the lips. ‘You’re just happy to have me here, aren’t you, darlin’?’
‘You know I am,’ she told him.
He looked from her back to me, and he smiled his white smile: roguish, lovable, a little bit Artful Dodger, a little bit wide-boy Prince Charming. ‘Don’t worry. They’re all tourists here anyway. It’s a foreign-exchange thing, innit? Like when we all went to Germany.’
‘It is?’
‘Enn. You got to talk to them. And that means you got to listen to them too. You understand?’
‘I did. I already talked to a couple of them.’
‘You getting anywhere?’
‘I was till you called me over.’
‘Sorry about that. Look, I just wanted to fill you in. Right?’
And he patted my arm and he walked away with Stella. Then, together, the two of them went up the stairs.
Understand me, all the girls at that party, in the twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces but, more important than that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it is that makes a beauty something more than a shop-window dummy. Stella was the most lovely of any of them, but she, of course, was Vic’s, and they were going upstairs together, and that was just how things would always be.
There were several people now sitting on the sofa, talking to the gap-toothed girl. Someone told a joke, and they all laughed. I would have had to push my way in there to sit next to her again, and it didn’t look like she was expecting me back, or cared that I had gone, so I wandered out into the hall. I glanced in at the dancers, and found myself wondering where the music was coming from. I couldn’t see a record-player or speakers.
From the hall I walked back to the kitchen.
Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an excuse to be there and, on the good side, at this party I couldn’t see any signs of someone’s mum. I inspected the various bottles and cans on the kitchen table, then I poured half an inch of Pernod into the bottom of my plastic cup, which I filled to the top with Coke. I dropped in a couple of ice-cubes, and took a sip, relishing the sweet-shop tang of the drink.
‘What’s that you’re drinking?’ A girl’s voice.
‘It’s Pernod,’ I told her. ‘It tastes like aniseed balls, only it’s alcoholic.’ I didn’t say that I’d only tried it because I’d heard someone in the crowd ask for a Pernod on a live Velvet Underground LP.
‘Can I have one?’ I poured another Pernod, topped it off with Coke, passed it to her. Her hair was a coppery auburn, and it tumbled around her head in ringlets. It’s not a hairstyle you see much now, but you saw it a lot back then.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Triolet,’ she said.
‘Pretty name,’ I told her, although I wasn’t sure that it was. She was pretty, though.
‘It’s a verse form,’ she said, proudly. ‘Like me.’
‘You’re a poem?’
She smiled, and looked down and away, perhaps bashfully. Her profile was almost flat – a perfect Grecian nose that came down from her forehead in a straight line. We did Antigone in the school theatre the previous year. I was the messenger who brings Creon the news of Antigone’s death. We wore half-masks that made us look like that. I thought of that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and I thought of Barry Smith’s drawings of women in the Conan comics: five years later I would have thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddall. But I was only fifteen, then.
‘You’re a poem?’ I repeated.
She chewed her lower lip. ‘If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea.’
‘Isn’t it hard to be three things at the same time?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Enn.’
‘So you are Enn,’ she said. ‘And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?’