Between Each Breath Read online

  Then there was Kaja.

  The first kiss with Kaja was the closest I’d ever got to the kiss I’d imagined, reading that novel all those years back in my bedroom in Hayes with its bright Scalextric wallpaper (the nearest I ever got to having my own Scalextric, it has to be said).

  It happened about five hours after she had whacked me on the face, which is often the way. Having told her about the Millennium Dome commission, on the café terrace, I listened gravely and with a trampolining heart as she told me in turn about her plans to study English and Russian at Tartu University once she’d earned enough money as a waitress to rent a room. Then she’d gone back in for the two hours remaining of her shift.

  I had said, not unnervously, as she stood up to go, ‘Let’s talk some more. Um, look, I’d like to buy you dinner as an apology.’

  And she had nodded and said, ‘As an apology?’

  ‘For my mistake.’

  ‘And mine. Look at your eye. It’s going yellow and blue like a bird.’ She said something in Estonian, which turned out to be Russian – some lines from Anna Akhmatova which she rendered into English there and then: ‘The slabs are heavy that press on your sleepless eyes.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sleeping OK,’ I said, just for something to say. No girl had ever quoted poetry at me before, or not as if she was throwing a crystal ball to see if I would catch it.

  ‘Then it’s not sleep is the trouble.’

  ‘Probably not. Look, this dinner idea, I’m on for it. It’s a peace dinner. Old and New Europe.’

  ‘You’re not so old,’ she said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Thirties. Say no more. And you?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  My eyebrows shot up in surprise. She leaned against the wooden rail around the café terrace.

  ‘Yeah, I look eighteen. That’s the sports.’

  ‘The gymnastics?’

  ‘Yeah. They gave us pills to keep us from development. East German trainer. A lot of my friends are sick, now. Swimmers especially. They took pills to make their muscles huge. Cancer, they have. Children with handicaps. Or dead babies. Or no darn babies at all.’

  I nodded, trying not to think of Milly and our no darn babies. ‘Yup, I remember. Soviet weightlifters and swimmers. Women built like houses, mammoth biceps. Won all the medals. Did you win any?’

  She laughed.

  ‘I was never a champion,’ she said. ‘But I was second best at vaulting in all the Baltic republics, age twelve. You know? Vaulting over the horse with your legs out, right wide out like scissors?’

  ‘The Olga Korbut of Estonia,’ I said, admiringly, thinking how people opened up to weirdly wonderful depths once you probed.

  ‘No, never,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘How to be that? I was from Haaremaa.’

  I pictured her vaulting the horse in slow motion, with legs out, doing the splits. It explained the ease and grace of her movements, the litheness, the way she twisted her wrists like an Indian dancer. Though I’d have been just as happy if she’d said she was a clog-dance champion, to be honest.

  We met as planned in an African restaurant in the shadow of the old city wall. The place was brand new and very hip, with low tables and benches and good West African music. She knew one of the cooks, a large Nigerian who winked at me and made me feel good.

  I gazed at Kaja across a lit candle (she had changed into a long and appetising dress and smelt of ambergris), and reckoned this was paradise.

  We had not yet touched, apart from the café incident. My cheek was still slightly numb, as if I’d been to the dentist, but Kaja assured me it hardly showed. My black eye had settled for even more interesting colours, like a beautiful stormy sky. That was her simile. Then, while she was in the loo, my glance strayed over the restaurant and I saw a speckled cowrie shell on a carved cupboard nearby and knew immediately what her cheekbones reminded me of. The soft polish, the thick curve, the foreign wonder of it. I knew exactly how they would feel if I were to run my finger along them, lay my lips upon them. A couple of warmed-up cowrie shells.

  After the meal, during which our words seemed to have been designed by Swiss engineers to interlock perfectly, we walked out on to the grassy area below the wall. It was dark, finally, but not too cold. The lights of the suburbs below were cut by swathes of darkness, which were either water or forest. We stood side by side with a couple of inches of air between us. It wasn’t really air, though: it was a scrum of electrical colours, pheromones, tiny mischievous angels. I had to take the moment by the scruff.

  The final, most creative step is always a lunge, blind and momentous.

  My arm seemed to twitch up and its hand came to rest on her shoulder on the far side. One thing leads to another, there is no actual beginning. I am committing adultery, I thought. My arm started to ache. Without me doing anything with my arm, she settled her side against my side. Flank on flank. Her body seemed very warm and comfortable through her thin coat. Her head rested against my neck, gently.

  ‘I’m very happy,’ I admitted.

  ‘How is your eye?’

  ‘Also happy.’

  ‘My grandmother tried to kill me when I was seven,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘Really?’ This slotted into the whole: it was OK.

  ‘Yeah. She was drunk. Life was always being hard for her. She punched me on the eye then she picked this really heavy pan. My father stopped her breaking it on my little head. She died in the asylum. My eye was like yours.’

  I could feel the vibrations on my neck as she spoke.

  ‘That’s terrible. Why you?’

  ‘Maybe because I was reminding her of what she had lost.’

  She turned her head and I lowered my face and that was it: the kiss I’d imagined as a twelve-year-old. A rich, smooth, slightly sticky kiss (we had finished the meal with a complimentary honey biscuit in the shape of a finger), in which my thin lips complemented the voluptuous tubbiness of hers.

  We hung in there quite a long time. I felt the breath through her nose blowing hard on my sore cheek, making it tingle. I’m eleven years older than her, came the thought through the rich silken folds of my happiness. That’s not so bad. She couldn’t be my daughter, at least.

  Then I kissed her cheekbones, one after the other.

  ‘They’re like cowrie shells,’ I said, just as I’d rehearsed it.

  ‘Like what? Carrying shelves?’

  ‘Cowrie shells. A really beautiful shell. There was one in the restaurant.’

  She didn’t reply. I felt I’d better shut up.

  We kept to the quieter, darker streets, slowly because her head was on my shoulder. We reached the park under the castle. The ducks were swishing about on the black water, catching the night lights on their glossy backs.

  ‘I think this has never happened to me,’ she said, as we walked.

  ‘Your boyfriend?’

  ‘I left him now. Right now.’

  ‘OK.’

  I experienced, I have to say, a momentary panic. This was serious and some.

  ‘I think we knew each other in a past life,’ she said. ‘I would never hit a stranger, you know? Like that. Or feel what now I am feeling.’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe not.’

  ‘You believe of past lives?’

  ‘Not really,’ I fibbed (because part of me did and still does). ‘An awful weight to carry around with you, all that suffering. Over and over again. Birth, pain, death.’

  ‘Kisses. Falling in love. Chocolate.’

  I buried my nose in her hair, which smelt slightly of onions, coffee and cigarettes from her café shift and maybe from the restaurant. I was surprised she hadn’t washed it. It was silkily supple against the hard bone of her skull. We were somewhere underneath the castle, possibly near where I’d smoked my cigarillos in a former life. ‘Yeah, that would be nice, repeated endlessly.’

  A duller part of me was worrying slightly about the gang of goths, but they seemed to have vanished. The trees whispered in the darkness. The ston
e tower high above us was subtly floodlit. The bubble of my happiness was swelling my ribcage. This is all for the music, I said to myself. This is what’s supposed to happen. A lone, bearded drunk passed us, singing in what sounded like Russian but could have been, at one point, Geordie.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘we don’t even know each other’s name?’

  ‘Kaja. Jack.’

  ‘Surname, I mean. Family name.’

  ‘We’ll keep it like that,’ she said. ‘Family can be difficult.’

  We laughed. It was sexier, too, I realised, with some surprise.

  ‘OK, that’s cool. How about, um, a drink at my place, Kaja?’

  She didn’t reply, only snuggling closer as we walked on until I wanted to be teletransported instantly into the flat; the closeness of her and my simple, animal anticipation had made ordinary legwork awkward, to be honest.

  In fact, we didn’t go straight back to the flat, but sat in an underground bar for half an hour, listening to a withered guy with long bleached hair and a Scotch-taped Fender singing cover versions of Led Zeppelin, Procol Harum and Lynyrd Skynyrd over a drum machine. We were, incredibly, the only ones. We’d passed the place – called Rock Cavern – and Kaja had said, ‘Live music, here. Let’s go.’ I held her hand and descended the narrow flight of stairs papered in rock posters as if burrowing down into my own past.

  I didn’t mind; she was clearly nervous about going straight to my place. And so was I; I was still not quite convinced that the African peanut stew hadn’t been spiked with some seriously subtle hallucinogen.

  Thick pillars had hidden the bulk of the room and the concomitant fact that it was entirely empty, despite night lights burning on each table. The singer waved to us in the middle of the song and looked so relieved that we felt we had to stay. It was funny. It was fun. A thin, ill-looking waiter served us beers. I hummed the best-known tunes, but she could not – she had been on her Soviet island, doubly walled off.

  We snuggled up close on the bench and I thought: He’s singing for us. This is the life. Um, yup and some. This is it.

  I thought of Milly not liking this place, and then unthought her. It was very easy. It was like zipping up a body bag over a face.

  We’d known each other three days. We were lying in bed together by the second, snug as two bugs. I’d bought a packet of condoms called Sure.

  For the last year, Milly and I had been trying for a baby with all the spontaneous passion of animatronic puppets, though naturally I didn’t mention this to Kaja, who still thought I was a bachelor. Kaja told me that before Heino, her shark sculptor (who had apparently not yet noticed she hadn’t called), she had made love – she lifted her hands and spread her fingers – that many times with – showing one hand only – that many boys. I wasn’t sure whether she meant ten times or fifty times, and didn’t ask.

  On a Party camp run by a drunken Lithuanian in the last days of the Soviet Empire, a fellow fifteen-year-old, while they were fetching water, had requested her quietly and politely to give him a blow job by a chicken-wire fence. They were hidden by a stand of trees. He was the grandson of someone on the committee of the Estonian Supreme Soviet. She did not enjoy it. The other times were better, but only with Heino did she ever look forward to it. Then Heino got depressed and couldn’t be bothered to make any sort of love at all.

  ‘I thought it was the pills they gave me for gymnastics,’ she said. ‘Maybe I was backward. Not enough hormones. I dunno.’

  I shook my head in amazement. We were lying in bed, and I was on top of her. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. I was still inside her, albeit shrivelled to a soft walnut. Her chin rested on my hair. Her own hair came down to the small of her back and, in front, hid her breasts entirely if she wanted it to. Whenever she ran, her untied hair moved from side to side like a painter’s brush.

  She had run – from sheer joy – in the park the day after she had whacked me in the café. It was not a particularly sunny day – there were fitful attempts at rain, and only the odd dazzling October interlude – but watching her, I felt as if I had swallowed whatever sunlight was going and that it was shining in my heart. It was, quite possibly, shining out of my ears and my mouth too, like a depiction of Apollo I’d once seen in a museum in Greece. Not out of my arse, I hoped. Guilt saw to that, the old-fashioned word ‘adultery’ appearing in dayglo letters from time to time. Adultery was termed ‘gallantry’, I seemed to recall, a couple of hundred years ago.

  If Milly had suddenly appeared from behind a tree, ‘gallantry’ would not have worked for a single minute on her. Not for a second. I saw her emerging with a cricket bat, its willow studded with nails.

  Did you resolve your guilt?

  To a certain extent.

  How?

  By thinking of these three weeks as work, as work in progress, as a framed experience towards a work of art that would free it from whatever had been nailing it down to dullness, repetition, boredom.

  This was soon after the failure of ‘CO2 Emissions from the Family Car’, wasn’t it?

  Failure’s too strong a word for such a tentative work. It was designed as an activist piece for a two-hundred-strong choir of Danes, to be sung at this green conference on the island of Bornholm, and the idea completely hobbled me. The commission came through my wife. It bored the pants off everyone, and the words were dreadful. Thankfully they were inaudible. There was also a freak snowstorm.

  So, this framed experience …

  Yes. Into this frame had come Kaja, the Muse. It was inevitable, somehow. I thought I might be in love with her. She seemed to be in love with me. In the back of my mind, however, was the absolute certainty that Kaja was temporary. Here, in the front of my mind, I was living in the present. In that part of my mind, the word ‘temporary’ didn’t exist because it simply described time, which by its very nature is only real in the moment. It’s like describing Beethoven’s Fifth (just because it only has existence through the movement, the breath, of time) as ‘temporary’. ‘Temporary’ and ‘temporal’were the same thing, in other words.

  And this satisfied you?

  It did. And so I watched Kaja run in her athletic, ex-gymnast’s way and felt full of sunlight. It was as if I’d never really known what it was to live, until now.

  We went to Haaremaa at the end of that week. Although I wanted to see more of the countryside than the outskirts of Tallinn, I wasn’t too keen to go to the island. I felt it was going in too far.

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘I think it’s OK. I’m your official guide to Estonia, not your girl. They left the island once only. They’re open, but not very open. They’ve heard the stories. Nasty rich men looking for Estonian girls to enjoy. OK? This time, it’s the best way.’

  This time. Of course she’d expect there to be another. And another. Until the island wedding. I pictured everyone smiling and shaking my hand. Simple folk. No money. I even saw her mother in a peasant’s headscarf, like the women in places like Kosovo. I would be the answer, in the end, to their wildest dreams.

  For about ten minutes on the Friday, while Kaja was cleaning herself up in the flat’s bathroom, I did consider packing my bags and slipping away. My eyes clocked where everything was. I could do it in ten minutes, just stuff everything in and scarper, leaving my toothbrush and razor to Kaja. All so easy. Just off and away. I felt quite thrilled by the idea. But Koit the landlord had my English address. Kaja would plead with Koit to give her the English bastard’s address. He was a soft man in a crumpled sweater, and would give it to her. She would pursue me to London and ruin my life. She would definitely do that, not out of spite, but out of pain.

  Instead of running away, I went into the bathroom where she had decided to have a shower. The curved perspex door of the cubicle showed her as a pink blur, an impression, an ideal not yet come to focus in the real world. I tried to open the door but like shower doors the world over it would not slide easily and I had to jolt it and tug it until it juddered on its runners
. She protested jokily under the pelt of steamy water, lifting one leg up and soaping the arch of her foot without toppling. A gymnast’s equilibrium.

  The water was finding its natural course over her body, following the curves and the gulleys, polishing her up. Pearl necklaces formed between her breasts and then broke, descending over her belly, the sudded water frothing against the snag of her bush – a little waterspout from it – only to creep down each inner thigh to her hard shins and arched feet. The nicest fingers I had ever seen. I’d noticed this when Kaja was playing her violin: really slim, tapering fingers. I wanted to have her right now. She had amazingly beautiful knees, as well.

  ‘What exactly did you do to that nasty boy on camp?’ I asked, standing stark naked by the open shower door, watching her as she smiled at me and got on with tending to herself, the luxury of the shower that Milly would have condemned as wastefully long.

  ‘By the chicken wire?’

  ‘By the chicken wire.’

  She hesitated. ‘Anything goes, huh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You might say he took advantage for me.’ She turned the shower off and stepped out in a wreath of steam to take the towel I was offering, avoiding my other hand. The water pipes thumped and trembled. ‘Or rape. You don’t want to do that again to me, do you?’

  ‘I didn’t do it the first time. I just wanted us to be even closer. You do it to me, then I do it to you. But forget it, it doesn’t matter.’

  I was embarrassed by my stiffening, now. I saw the animal in it, the farmyard bull. Pigs and apes, all that. I crossed my hands to hide it, casually keeping it against my belly. My feet were cold on the tiles. The steam wrapped me in a damp warmth in which it was harder to breathe.