Story for performance #399
webcast from London at 09:01PM, 24 Jul 06

I had already seen to it that the makeshift bed had been aired and restored to the vaguely ordered state of last night. I knew this would be a waste of time, since the bed would again become a couch when I left, but I did it nonetheless. The sheets were thick and stiff, and quite difficult to fold in that way that I preferred, with hospital corners at ninety degrees and the fold at the top of the bed, near the pillow, smooth and firm.

I was surprised by this, and didn’t really understand how the thick, stiff sheets squared with the rest of the flat, and indeed of what I knew of Susan more generally. Her sweaters, for example, were always made of finely-woven wool and were compellingly soft to touch; I often manufactured excuses to touch them. I had never felt fibres so soft. Looking around her flat, I could see that the sweaters prescribed to a general predilection for thin lines and sensitive surfaces. The flat was itself, in a way, quite erotic.

When she came back, the room still carried embarrassing traces of my sleep. I wanted to leave the place, since its social space was now cloudy with my own sleep smell. But she wanted tea, so I sat down on the makeshift bed and became even more self-conscious while she went into the next room and made tea in a small pot. I was thankful for the tea when it came. It was aromatic. The cup was also very beautiful. My fingers slipped around its handle as if it had been cast from them. It was quite uncanny.

I sat on the bed, awkwardly since I didn’t want to unsettle the sheets that I had already carefully put in place. So I more-or-less squatted, with my weight pressing down on my right leg. We didn’t really talk, and I was surprised to notice that there was no music on. It was a weird moment, insofar as there had been nothing like it in our short relationship. Our familiarity rested on almost continuous dialogue. But there was none of that this morning. I wondered whether the smell of my body from the night before was somehow responsible, in that it disrupted the generally rhetorical nature of that familiarity.

Susan asked how I was going to get home. I hadn’t thought about it at all, so I sort of mumbled ‘dunno’ without looking anywhere in particular. I’m sure she would have offered to drive, but the apparent indifference of my response probably surprised her, or else left her with the impression that I wanted to ‘keep my options open’, as she often put it. It wasn’t really that, although there was something of that in it. It was more that I was trying to work out what the question really meant. Just as our relationship had been intensely rhetorical, it was also built on both of us making and taking up opportunities to prolong our encounters. Now she seemed to be second-guessing the moment when I leave.

I wondered at this point whether the tea had been a bad idea. I felt grubby, and the tea wasn’t enough to rinse away the sticky taste of poor wine. We should have instead left the place and started walking somewhere. That’s always been the trigger for that great space we always manage to find. When I first met her, and when she proceeded to ‘court me’ as she put it, the places had always been kind of ‘uninvested’: the street, bars, second-hand furniture stores. But being in her place complicated all of that, at least for me. It reminded me of how little I actually knew of her.

The sleep smell, drifting in among all these fine things, became a kind of emblem for this. I had no way of telling what she thought of it—whether it was a sign of our intimacy, or if its eroticism was somehow a transgression.

I got up and put my cup on the shelf above the heater. The effect of the porcelain and white shelf was too much white, and I felt slightly nauseous. I wasn’t going to be able to deal with public transport now, and realised that this meant a long walk through the city and Carlton. I also knew that I’d become lost in the walk. Susan offered to drive me home, but I was now kind of titillated by the idea of disappearing again.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Shaune Lakin.