The universal substitute

The door swung inward noiselessly, and I found myself being looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.

He rubbed his eye with a finger, as if he had just got up. He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and his ribs stuck out like that of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut.  The skin stretched over them was nearly colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were bare, he was only wearing a pair of old Khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were obstinately melancholy, as if he was assuming the expression on purpose.   

*** 

He must have been equipped with a kind of science fiction extra sense, a third eye or antenna. Although his face was turned away so that he couldn’t see mine, he said in a soft dry voice, ‘I can tell you’re admiring my febrility. I know it’s appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful.’ He was looking at me now, cunningly, sideways. ‘You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know.’ 

*** 

What is character? Maybe we know them only by the dent they make in our emotional landscape. Some are so odd in shape you are left wondering for years afterwards what difference did they make? What did they change? Like someone who came into your house when you weren’t around and rearranged, ever so subtly, the things on your shelves. You are compelled to go back and back over anything you can hold onto to find an answer, but like a seed that refuses to grow, the dent gives you no answers.

There is a character from a book I read years ago who won’t let me go. The character is an aimless graduate student called Duncan from The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. Aimless, thin, unattractive, sly, manipulative and selfish, he was completely, smugly and self-consciously comfortable with not conforming to expectations. He was calculatedly deceptive and so he often pierced through to the truth. It’s not clear if he brings redemption or destruction – or just nothingness - as he (metaphorically) devours the heroine at the end.

I feel like I’ve received the occasional long distance phone call from a ‘Duncan’ over the years. I hear the ringing mostly when I’m asleep and have slept so long I can hardly wake up. I feel like I’ve met many ‘Duncans’ over the years, he keeps reappearing in different guises. Sometimes he even feels like a permanent fixture, there at the back of my mind, being his sly mocking self, making things uncomfortable, offering no answers. 

***

The long time she had been moving through…had been merely a period of waiting, drifting with the current, an endurance of time marked by no real event; waiting for an event in the future that had been determined by an event in the past; whereas when she was with Duncan she was caught in an eddy of present time: they had virtually no past and certainly no future… Duncan was irritatingly unconcerned about her marriage. He didn’t seem to care about what would happen to her after she passed out of the range of his perpetual present. She found it comforting, and she didn’t want to know why.

*** 

‘I don’t want you to think all this means anything. It never sort of does, for me. It’s all happening really, to somebody else.’ He kissed the end of her nose. ‘You’re just another substitute for the laundromat.’

Marian wondered if her feelings ought to be hurt, but decided that they weren’t: instead she was faintly relieved. ‘I wonder what you’re a substitute for, then,’ she said.

‘That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the universal substitute.’

*** 

He was talking in a monotone, sitting hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his head drawn down into the neck of his dark sweater, like a turtle’s into its shell… He wasn’t even looking at me. He might have been talking to himself.  I leaned forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue-tinged fluorescent lighting of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his skin was even more unearthly. 

*** 

His mouth tasted like cigarettes. Apart from that taste, and an impression of thinness and dryness, as though the body I had my arms around and the face touching mine were really made of tissue paper or parchment stretched on a frame of wire coathangers, I can remember no sensation at all.

*** 

She wanted to stand for only one more minute with the snow sifting down here in this island, this calm open eye of silence…

‘Hello,’ a voice said.

Marian was hardly startled. She turned: there was a figure seated on the far end of a bench in the darker shadow of some evergreen trees. She walked towards it.

It was Duncan, sitting hunched over, a cigarette glowing between his fingers. He must have been there for some time. The snow had settled on his hair and the shoulders of his coat. His hand, when she removed her gloves to touch them, was cold and wet. 

*** 

His ringing jolts me from my sleep. But that's it. I wonder what he would say if I ever picked up the phone? I imagine it would be something like this: 'hello, sugar,' he'd say. 'It's me.'