Debatable Space Page 12

  On the basis of this triumph, though now in his mid-fifties, Andrei won a chance to compete in the Olympics again, despite attempts to have him banned on the grounds that his spontaneous rejuvenation contravened the rules about drug-taking for athletes. At the 2064 Olympics he set a new world record for the 400 metre sprint. He outclassed runners who were decades younger than him.

  And in so doing, he challenged once and for all the dominant Western myth: the myth of decline. In Eastern culture, the prevailing myth was the opposite; it was of the aged sensei who was faster, stronger and more skilful than his younger acolytes. But we in the West have always swallowed the dream of gilded youth; and consequently, we made a world fit for the young to squander.

  Andrei’s triumph broke all those rules, and shattered for ever the old paradigms. Suddenly, age became a state to which people should aspire, rather than a fate to be dreaded. Andrei was a hero who changed the world.

  And then one night he went to see a pianist play at Carnegie Hall…

  … and here I am again, on stage, playing the piano in front of my adoring public.

  My next piece was a zest-filled Brahms waltz, which went well. Then I segued into a delightful jazz improvisation based on a Dizzy Gillespie riff. My heart sang with joy; I felt superhuman.

  But slowly, my ease and fluency deserted me. I froze with fear at the beginning of the first movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto. At one point, I stopped entirely. The audience was hushed. Sweat beaded my brow and a tiny drop fell and splashed a piano key.

  Then I continued, and the audience sighed, and were with me. If I’d planned it, I couldn’t have managed more adroitly. I’d won their hearts! I’d played the underdog card!

  But my exultation slowly faded. As the evening continued, I felt the shuffle of feet, the exaggerated coughs, as sympathy ebbed away at the sheer… awful… fucking… mediocrity of my piano playing. I’d got away with so much with my flashy, entertaining introductory pieces. But now that I was playing the Beethoven, it became evident that my legato was stiff, my articulation uneven, and my crescendi and diminuendi too consciously “worked at”. I had flash, and flair, but I was slowly and cruelly revealed as a pub pianist with aspirations.

  Naturally, after the event, I blamed the orchestra. The piano. My nerves. But in my heart of hearts, I knew that for all my ability and mastered technique, I didn’t care enough – about the music, about the audience, about what my fingers were doing. So there is, after all, a mystery X element – commitment, soul, passion – call it what you will. After decades of practice, I could play the piano; the piano would never play me.

  But enough self-laceration. The point is: it doesn’t matter that I gave a mediocre piano recital at the Carnegie Hall. It matters that I did it at all. I had mocked the capricious God who endows some with great talents for music or sport, and endows others like me with fuck-all. So I laughed off the bad reviews, the book sales went through the roof, and I was the success of the season.

  And so after the first flush of embarrassment, I felt triumphant, and vindicated.

  And of course, I also that night met Andrei, who I had idolised from afar for many years. There was nearly a ten-year age gap between us – I was eighty-one, he was seventy-three. But he looked, frankly, older than me. He had a blaze of silver hair which he proudly refused to darken. There were deep laughter lines around his eyes, and his skin was thick and weathered. But these outward signs of ageing merely enhanced his extraordinary air of energy and fitness. He walked like proud air, his movements were effortless. And he saw everything. Without visibly flicking his eyes, he could see every person in a crowded room and remember their appearance and the colours they were wearing and have some notion of what relationship there was between people standing near each other – friend, lover, relative, business acquaintance, whatever it might be.

  I, by contrast, was still pretty clumsy. I used to break things a lot. And I was amazingly unobservant. I could be standing next to someone at a party for ten minutes or more and not be aware they were there.

  And even now, though my memory for detail is astonishingly acute, I am still capable of forgetting fundamental facts. For instance, I had a sister who died in her mid-forties. Recently I found a photograph of her and couldn’t remember who it was. (Luckily, I’d written her name and family relationship on the back.) It’s not bad memory per se; it’s just, well, to be honest, I never really liked her much. And I rarely noticed what she was doing, or saying. So my memory bank deprioritised her into oblivion.

  But I do vividly remember that first time I met Andrei. I staggered off the stage, went to my dressing room. Sank three glasses of vintage champagne, surrounded by my team, fighting off nausea at the memory of my many mistakes of mood and tone. Then my assistant told me there was a man waiting to see me – and it was Andrei Makov. My heart took a little leap. I agreed to see him. A few minutes there was a tap on the door and he entered.

  And I remember that when Andrei entered, everyone else seemed to be slouching or deformed. He wore a black dress suit. And I wore blue. Definitely. Blue. And he walked his way slowly towards me, shaking hands with my friends, my business manager, my musical assistant. It was like a sea parting, as this charismatic presence moved closer and closer. Then he took me by the hand, kissed it, and murmured, “So what else can you do?”

  At that moment, my purpose, my reason for living, sprang back into vivid relief. I smiled, like a tiger awoken by the rustle of a deer grazing.

  “We shall see,” I told him. Then he walked around until he was standing behind me, wrapped his arms under my breasts and lifted me in the air.

  I flopped. I let my body weight ebb away into his arms. My legs dangled, my head was loose. All the tension oozed out of me. Then he put me back on my feet. I felt ten times better.

  “That was good.”

  “I’m sorry… that was, impertinent. You looked tense.”

  “I was tense.”

  “I have no manners. When I met the Pope, I told him he had bad posture.”

  “He has severe arthritis, in fact.”

  “So I was later told. Imagine my chagrin.”

  “I’m imagining.”

  “Forgive me, good to meet you all.”

  With a sense of shock, I realised he was addressing his comment at everyone else in the room. This was his graceful apology for hogging me. But in truth, I had “lost” everyone else present. For about three or four seconds, Andrei was the only person there for me.

  “We were planning to go for a meal…” I said tentatively.

  “Ah.” He looked slightly shy.

  “You could join us?”

  “I’d like that. Where are you going?”

  “Where are we going?” I addressed my question to Philip, my business manager.

  “We’ve booked a table at Smollensky’s.”

  “Somewhere that’s not Smollensky’s, then,” I said to Andrei. He got it, though not everyone else did. He smiled.

  “The Caterpillar Club,” he said to me, very quietly. And left.

  Yeah, but what time? And do I change? I was wearing my best piano concert gown. But was that de trop for an “in” place like the Caterpillar Club? Or was it just trop enough?

  I left the dress on. I was there at 9 o’clock, at the Caterpillar Club. It was crowded, noisy, everyone was so young. They were all annoying me. Andrei was waiting. He had ordered champagne.

  “ Salut,”

  “ Salut.”

  We drank.

  “I read your book,” he told me. But I was very distracted. I could feel my heart beating. This ought to have been an erotic thing, but instead it was annoying. I heard… boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. It meant I couldn’t hear him, and I couldn’t take in a word he was saying.

  Then my enhanced peripheral hearing kicked in. I could hear a couple at the back of the restaurant:

  “It’s good to talk about these things.”

  “It’s stifling. I feel stifled.”r />
  “You need to know what makes me happy!”

  “I know too much about what makes you happy. I need to be, you know, spontaneous.”

  “It’s not like I’m giving you a schedule. There’s space for you to be spontaneous.”

  “How spontaneous? Five minutes of…”

  I finally managed to tune it out. Andrei was talking to me. I sifted through my short-term memory banks and picked out a few phrases: “… feel completely ignorant. I didn’t listen to any classical music until I was in my sixties. Does that make me a philistine?”

  “No that doesn’t make you a philistine,” I said and he nodded, reassured. And I felt a surge of pleasure; I guessed right about what he’d been saying.

  Then I got bolder. “Shall we order?” I said.

  “We already have,” he told me. There was a wary tone in his voice.

  “Yeah, yeah, of course.” I smiled crazily, sifted my memory banks. I remembered a blonde girl, with a sulky face, I was asking her for lamb cutlets. Was that here, or somewhere else? I glanced around, saw a blonde waitress, sulky face. I felt triumphant. I was on top of this. (This kind of muddlement happens a lot to me. Is it some weird mental glitch? Or am I just too good for this world?)

  “I’m a bit tense,” I told him. “Tension does things to me. It makes me tune out.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Forget it.”

  I looked at him. There was such a patient air to him. He seemed to really want to hear what I had to say.

  “Do you want to know what was the worst thing I ever did?” I asked him.

  “Go ahead, tell me.” And so I told him the story of the gang boss and how we “virtually” raped his daughter.

  I explained: “The Georgian mob finally killed Valentin in a restaurant in St Petersburg. They pumped a hundred explosive air pellets into his body and walked away. He was still alive. He thought he’d miraculously survived, he picked himself up and walked out. Witnesses say he actually thought he was Rasputin reincarnated. Then he got in his car and the bullets all exploded. All over the upholstery. Like a whale swallowing a depth charge, then burping. No one else was hurt, but there was body fat and hair and blood sprayed everywhere. Fat schmuck. But after what he did to his daughter, it was just deserts. We never proved it, but we think he used to sodomise her with a fire iron. You know, one of those things you used to prod coals on a coal fire? Not a hot one, nothing as truly vicious as that. It was just something that he had to hand, maybe a family heirloom. But we found traces of Victorian cast metal in her anus when we did our medical. That was the clue. Boy, that was a motivator! So anyway, that was how we killed Fat Grigori. Am I talking too much?”

  Belatedly, it dawned on me that Andrei was staring at me like a goldfish whose fishtank has just vanished. I mentally rehearsed everything I had just said, and wondered if it showed me in a bad light.

  “You, um. Aarrgh,” he said.

  “I’ve just appalled you, haven’t I? You are literally, physically disgusted at me.” A familiar sense of defeat washed over me; nice one, Lena.

  “No, no, no, not at all. I’m just… taken aback. I’m trying to recall similar anecdotes I can tell you. Like the time in Rome, when I broke my training schedule, snuck out of the hotel in the middle of the night, and ate a burger. A McDonald’s burger no less!”

  He’s being self-deprecating, I realised. A good response would be a gentle, but approving laugh. I laughed, gently and approvingly.

  “I’m such a nobody,” Andrei told me now. “I’ve done nothing.”

  “You’ve done great things!” I protested. “You’ve won medals, broken records, founded schools, worked for charity. You’re an icon.”

  “Yeah but I’ve never, you know. Bust balls. Or killed people.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone,” I laughed at him.

  “Yes, but you’ve manipulated circumstances so that they were killed.”

  “Oh yeah, I’ve done that. Like the Turkish drug dealer who we poisoned with impotence-inducing drugs. He blew his brains out in his garage. That was a particularly effective gambit.”

  “You are so fucking…” He searched for the world.

  “Evil?”

  “Steeped in life. Dangerous.” His eyes twinkled. “Sexy.”

  It’s a fantasy moment. Because for me, none of these things are true. In my heart of hearts, I am still a mousy academic who becomes paralysed with shyness at parties and is terrified that life is passing her by. But, objectively speaking, I can see he has a point. I have, in my time, kicked some serious ass.

  “Let’s eat.” The meal had arrived. Damn, it wasn’t lamb, I’d ordered fish. But I’d been looking forward to lamb for the last twenty minutes.

  Andrei’s meal arrived. It was lamb.

  “I don’t want fish any more, I want your lamb,” I told him, with unpardonable rudeness. But he swapped plates without a second thought, as if we were long-established lovers. A few seconds later, I asked, “How’s the fish?”

  “Dry. Musty. Inedible,” he told me. “How’s the lamb?”

  “It’s, ah. Sublime.”

  I grinned sheepishly, feeling myself go red and hot with embarrassment. But he found it funny. Then he laughed, and admitted, “Actually the fish is very nice.”

  “Let’s order some more wine,” I said.

  “I get hangovers.”

  “Take these.” I gave him some pills. I swallowed one myself. “It’s okay, they’re enhancing catalytic compounds, they’re not drugs. Your body will eat its own hangover.”

  Andrei clicked a finger. The waiter turned and looked. Andrei pointed at the bottle. The waiter hurried off. Andrei took a sip of wine.

  “I shouldn’t drink too much though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well.” And now he’s blushing.

  “Ah. You’re counting your chickens aren’t you?”

  “Chickens?” His English idiom didn’t stretch to this one. I tried it in Russian: Are you hoping to fuck me?

  Of course.

  Good. Don’t worry, I have ways of dealing with flaccidity.

  “Your Russian is very good,” he told me, approvingly.

  “I’m told it’s a little archaic. Too much Dostoevsky.”

  “He’s a writer, isn’t he?”

  “I can see there’s a lot I have to teach you.”

  That night we made love for the first time.

  In fact he had drunk rather too much, so it was a slow start. And there were problems later on too. But that made it more fun for me.

  His body was like granite, I savoured every muscle, the tautness, the power. I knew that his hands were impossibly strong. And, eventually, he rose to the occasion. I achieved six orgasms before he lost his focus and went limp again.

  And I couldn’t believe my luck. I was dating the sexiest boy in the class.

  But what could he possibly see in me?

  I called it Sex and Death.

  I learned the technique from a karate sensei in Camberwell, London. In his legendary dojo in a former marble factory off the Walworth Road, Sensei Eddy taught generations of South London kids his own brand of Eastern mysticism blended with East End savvy. Sensei Eddy came from a family of notorious armed robbers and spent five years in prison for a botched blagging that he committed as a very young man. But since going straight, Eddy had become a committed karateka, a vegetarian, an ascetic, and one of the greatest students in the West of mind/body control.

  I’ve seen Eddy break a breezeblock with his head. I’ve seen him pluck a fly out of the air and release it from his other hand. He was nearly sixty when he became my karate master, and even without the benefit of age therapy he had the physique of a twenty-year-old. He was fast, he was strong, he was totally focused.

  And he taught me the way to stop a man’s heart. It’s done with a single palm strike to the sternum, delivered with speed and lightness. It’s not intended as a killing technique, it’s an aid to meditation. Eddy did
it to me – he struck me in my chest, my heart stopped and for ten exquisitely long seconds I felt myself die. My inner self seemed to be floating outside my fleshly body. The blood in my head roared like a waterfall. Then Eddy struck me again, and the heart restarted.

  It’s a dangerous stunt to try on a woman with a history of heart attacks. But Eddy had a touching faith in his own powers, and in my natural resilience. And in the course of our training sessions he had encountered in me a strange stubbornness, a resistance to the idea of liberating my chi and entering a meditative state. So Eddy used this way to teach me the true transient nature of existence.

  The second time I had sex with Andrei, despite my very best efforts, he proved to be totally impotent. I was astonished, and amused. But then I was horrified, as I saw a look of dismay and self-hate spread across his face. I realised then – this was a common occurrence for him.

  I said the usual things about it not mattering, though my loins were burning with desire. He pleasured me in other ways, sipping and sucking as though I were a precious brandy, then fingertipping me to orgasm. But after it was over I felt his body and soul slump beside me.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I said to him.

  “Yeah, that’ll really help.”

  “So, um. This isn’t the first time, is it?”

  “It’s a recurring issue.”

  “Let’s try again.”

  “I’m content. Honestly. I don’t need it.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Women don’t need to come every time. Why should men?”

  “Exactly my thought.”

  “It’s nice, just lying here.”

  I bit his nipple then I scratched his chest. A trail of blood lay pooled on his hairy skin.

  “That got your attention.”

  Andrei sat up, scowling. At heart he was an old-fashioned man. I saw a trace of almost-rage in his eyes, his shoulders stiffened, a gulf started to open up between us. I could tell he was preparing to storm off.