Big Kiss, Bye-Bye E-Book

Claire-Louise Bennett

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 269

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she's left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept. An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she's loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage – a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss – make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.

Leseprobe

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‘Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent.’

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Morning Star

‘Bennett is a leading exponent of a new modernism, but her voice is all her own. Her prose is profoundly surprising; she gets to places you didn’t know were there.’

— Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren

‘Claire-Louise Bennett has again created another singular work, free of any conventional sentiment. Her writing has an addictive quality; I’d read her forever.’

— Nicole Flattery, author of Nothing Special

‘Brilliant, singular, feminist, ambitious – Claire-Louise Bennett is an extraordinary writer.’

— Sinéad Gleeson, author of Hagstone

‘Bennett’s language is an ornate and long-winded riposte to all those pared-back minimalists, and I love it.’

— Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13

‘Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze.’

— Jenny Offill, author of Weather

‘Bennett is a master at sweeping the caverns of life’s minutiae with her uncanny observations and stunning prose, arriving at the most pressing things that haunt the human condition.’

— Elaine Feeney, author of How to Build a Boat

‘A real writer with the real goods.’

— Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane

‘There’s no one in whose language and rhythms I’d rather immerse than Claire-Louise Bennett.’

— Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife2

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BIG KISS, BYE-BYE

CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT

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‘No, you cannot hear the thousand conversations with which my soul pesters yours.’

— Mme Chantelouve in The Damned,

Joris-Karl Huysmans, tr. Terry Hale

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Contents

Title PageEpigraphI.II.III.IV.V.VI.VII.VIII.IX.AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

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I.

Two weeks from now I won’t be living here anymore. I’ll be in the woodshed in L-. Xavier won’t know I don’t live here anymore. We are no longer in touch. It’s been three months since his last email, which I did not reply to. There really was no way of responding to it. I sort of feel like calling him now – I wonder what he would say? But it seems irreversible, that’s really how it feels. It’s better, I suppose, to have nothing more to do with him – and what choice has he given me anyway? I don’t remember what I was wearing the last time I saw him. It was the end of July, so I still had a nice bit of colour. I looked nice. I always wanted to look nice when I went to meet him. We hadn’t seen each other for almost a year because of the pandemic. When I got to the hotel restaurant he was already there, drinking a glass of prosecco. I always arrive a few minutes late so that Sean has gone and he’s already settled into a seat, nice and relaxed. He was sitting right beside an enormous TV screen. It was such a peculiar place to sit, I was demonstrably put out. ‘Come and sit next to me,’ he said, and I did. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we’re the only two people in the room who can’t see it.’ And he was right, we were, but I was conscious that when this or that person looked over at the TV they took a surreptitious look at us too. In fact it seemed to me that they weren’t looking at the TV at all. There was one man in particular who looked over quite a lot, and less discreetly each time. He was dining alone. Just come in from the racetrack, it was obvious. Had steak and chips and a big glass of red wine and after that a big glass of brandy. He drank and looked, eventually I stared back at him. Think what you like. It was race week, and I’d not been very optimistic that we’d get a table. He’d called them. I’d asked him to and he’d called them. Probably 10said to whoever picked up that Patrick knows us, and perhaps Patrick would remember us. Probably he would actually, because I’d complained about the afternoon tea we’d had. It was very poor. I wrote an email explaining how disappointingly lacklustre the cakes and sandwiches were, and Patrick, the recently appointed general manager, wrote back promptly and invited us to lunch by way of an apology. It was a good lunch. We’d enjoyed ourselves. It was probably one of the most successful lunches we’d ever had. We shared some prawns to start and they were very good. We ordered them again this time and they weren’t nearly as good and my glass of prosecco was flat. I asked him if his prosecco was flat and he said he didn’t think so, and it didn’t look flat – mine looked very flat, so I asked for another. I was surprised, relieved really, at how pleasant it was in the hotel restaurant – I’d anticipated it to be full of women dressed to the nines, because it was Thursday and Thursday is Ladies Day at the races. He’ll like that, I thought, while I was getting ready. He likes to see women dressed up, he’ll be in his element. Not that he’ll look at them very much. Just a glance probably, to register the effort that’s been put in and the overall effect. That will be quite sufficient. Too much scrutiny might spoil the illusion of sophistication and Xavier isn’t interested in having his illusions dispensed with – he rather likes them and is of the opinion that there isn’t much else: ‘Life is an illusion,’ he’ll say, ‘but then you already know that, don’t you.’ I wore a black dress, I can remember now, kind of silky. He liked it. Asked if I’d bought it with the money he’d given me and I said yes even though that wasn’t exactly true. I was wearing a pair of little gold hoops, one of which I lost the following week. They were practically brand new. He held my hand and there’s no harm in that. I ordered for him, as I usually do: ‘Pick 11something out for me,’ he says. ‘What are you in the mood for?’ I say. ‘I don’t mind, love,’ he says, ‘it’s not the food I’m interested in.’ I don’t remember at what point I took my book out of my bag and gave it to him. He opened it, said how smart it was, went to the back and looked at my photograph. ‘Cute little ears,’ he said. ‘Well done, darling,’ he said. I suggested putting it in the bag that hung from a handle on his wheelchair, but he said he wanted to keep it here beside him. I picked out a mild curry for him and a vegetarian moussaka for me. I was in a good mood – chatty, animated. Dinner was on me this evening. Usually he pays. There have been a number of occasions when I’d planned to pay but then the meal had ended so badly that I no longer felt like covering the bill. So many meals ended badly. Was it the drink? Certainly when we drank less we fared a little better. We didn’t order a bottle anymore. My moussaka was revolting, which was vexing because I was hungry. I didn’t say anything to him about it, we don’t talk about the food. He asked me if I’d like to kiss him, which surprised me. He hadn’t asked me that for a very long time, but it had been a year more or less since I’d last seen him, a strange year too – it would be forgivable, wouldn’t it, to forget, or overlook, how things stood. ‘Oh, not here,’ I said. He took hold of my hand, there on the banquette with my book beside it, squeezed it, and asked me again. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t you like to?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘no, love, I’m sorry.’ I put both my arms around him then and murmured something about being very fond of him and he was like a block, it was awful – he did not return or accommodate my embrace, he hardened against it. I withdrew, ashamed. ‘Don’t you find me attractive anymore?’ he said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’ ‘I seem old to you?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you are old, darling,’ and I started to cry. ‘Please, not again. It’s too painful,’ I said. 12‘It’s painful because you love me,’ he said. ‘Stop hurting yourself, angel.’ And then: ‘I shall have to find someone else, someone more suitable. It’s been quite obvious to me for some time, actually.’

He emailed later that evening, reiterating that intention. I replied that of course he must go ahead and do whatever will make him happy. The following Tuesday he emailed to tell me he’d read my book, which was, he said, ‘some sort of HELL.’ I was queuing in the supermarket when I read that. It winded me. I almost ditched my basket of groceries. I did not reply. What was there to say? That was three months ago and not a word since. I move out of here in two weeks. He came here a few times when I first moved in, almost seven years ago. It didn’t suit us, the apartment. Its windows are floor-to-ceiling, and the walls paper-thin. Too much of the outside world got in, putting us on edge. Plus, there’s no fireplace in here. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves, really. It didn’t suit us at all. I had the front bedroom then. Not for long though – I changed to the back room because it’s much quieter, or at least it used to be, and anyway I like a smaller bedroom. He never slept with me in this room. I’ve slept mostly on my own in this bed. One man went off in the morning to get coffee and croissants and he came back and spilt one of the coffees all over the bedcovers and onto my best Moroccan slippers. He got very flummoxed, I remember, poor thing: ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, getting up out of the spoilt bed. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. Another man came to stay for three nights, by the second night I couldn’t bear for him to touch me anymore. First of all I felt very bad about that because the last time I saw him we couldn’t keep our hands off one another so he must have been quite perplexed that I was giving him the cold shoulder all of a sudden after just one night, but then 13I felt irritated, because actually he seemed completely oblivious to my lack of impulse, and I just kept thinking, with increasing incredulity and antipathy as he kept on pawing at me, he cannot tell, he just cannot tell – it’s all the same to him, whether I am climbing the walls with escalating desire or I’m as insensible as a post box. But then again he probably could tell and was very confused and wanted, desperately, to make things nice again. The sun was shining, after all. We lay in the grass, I remember, it ought to have been lovely. Is there anything lovelier than lying in the long grass with another? But there was already another lying there with me in the grass – the man who had come to my flat a few months before, and who I hoped so much would one day return, despite that not being the deal. It was a Wednesday morning. He’d never been to my flat previously, and this was a one-off, it was agreed. He didn’t stay very long because he had to collect his youngest child from school at lunchtime. We lay in bed for about half an hour. He’d taken off all his clothes before getting into bed, including his glasses, and that was the item of his apparel I was most concerned about because in all these years I’d never seen him without his glasses, and people can look completely different without their glasses. He took off his glasses and there were his eyes. More startling to me than his naked body. ‘They’re so blue,’ I said. ‘They used to be bluer,’ he said. I kept my underwear on. I’m not going to take off my own underwear. We didn’t have sex. We’ve never had sex. We will never have sex. For ages I was convinced that one day we would. It seemed like just a matter of time, yet time just kept on passing by. I often find it hard to fall asleep next to a man after sex. I think really I would like them to get up and go into another bedroom, or go home. They fall asleep and all of a sudden I feel so alone and marooned. 14I feel completely stuck in fact, and that’s because my mind doesn’t feel free to wander. It’s as if the big heavy body slumbering beside me is an anchor, tethering my thoughts. It would be better if I really was alone because then I wouldn’t feel it. My thoughts would be free to drift, far, far away, taking me with them. It’s hardly an issue, I sleep alone night after night after night. Some nights and some mornings I think about men I’ve been with. Sometimes I think about Xavier. There was a time when I wanted him to kiss me, very much. There was a time when I got lost in kissing him for whole afternoons. But not any longer. And I suppose truth be told that is why he was so unkind about my book and why I haven’t heard from him since. He might be old, and he really is very old now, but that doesn’t stop him from hurting and wanting.

One evening about a year ago Xavier and I were talking on the phone and he told me he’d thought of a really good name for my book. I was surprised to hear this because he didn’t know anything about my new book, nobody did – I preferred not to say very much about it until it was time. I asked him to tell me the name he’d thought of. ‘It’s really good,’ he said, sounding very pleased. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘A Singular Woman,’ he said. ‘Well, darling,’ he said, ‘do you like it? It’s a very attractive title.’ ‘It makes me think of A Woman of Substance,’ I said. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘it’s a different thing altogether. Much more interesting. And it happens to be true.’ After a brief pause I said, ‘Well, even if it is true, I don’t think it’s really something one can say in relation to themselves – it’s something other people have to say, otherwise it’s a bit weird.’ ‘It’s a very good title,’ he said. ‘Yes it is,’ I said, ‘though perhaps not for my book.’ ‘And have you thought of a title for your book?’ he said. 15‘No,’ I said, which wasn’t true. I’d tell him another time. He’s never going to like the title I’ve chosen – I knew that more or less the moment I came up with it – and I certainly wasn’t going to proffer my idea while he was so proudly brandishing his own superlative suggestion. Many months later, when we sat in the hotel restaurant, and Xavier was holding the book with me there beside him, I said to him that it was interesting because some of the endorsements for it had included the word ‘singular’. ‘Look,’ I said, pointing at the jacket, ‘this one and this one – and one on the back too.’ ‘I don’t have my glasses, love,’ he said. ‘You see,’ I said, ‘it’s something other people have to say. It’s weird otherwise.’ ‘A Singular Woman,’ he said. ‘A wonderful name for a book.’

Until three months ago we spoke regularly on the phone. He had a knack for calling me at inopportune moments. It was uncanny. The phone would ring the very second I sat down to eat, or to watch a film, or the moment I left the flat, or when someone had just arrived at the flat, or when I suddenly found myself reading something freakishly pertinent, or when I was about to run down to the sea. Quite often when this occurred I wouldn’t answer, I’d let him leave a message. I found it discomposing, being on the phone with Xavier while something else was going on. It bugged him that he called me at an inconvenient time so often. He believed his life operated on a higher level to most and that level very much involved things like flow, synchronicity, a general sense of being in tune with things, especially people you love deeply. ‘Did you know that Yeats was able to communicate with the women in his life telepathically?’ he asked me one day. I said I did not know that. The perpetual discordance between us aggrieved him, and his efforts to make light of it from time to time were oddly touching. ‘No, no, of course not,’ 16I’d say whenever he said, ‘My goodness, I always get it wrong, don’t I?!’ ‘No, no – it’s strange, but I never hear this phone!’ But I did hear it ring, and then it would stop, and a few minutes later it would make that sound which I knew meant he’d left a voice message for me. I made sure that I always had at least one of his voice messages saved. He could die just like that at any moment. Then, I don’t know when exactly, my voicemail set-up changed. I only noticed this a few weeks ago. It had been a couple of months since that final dinner in the hotel restaurant and I wanted to hear his voice and I knew that I had at least one message stored on my phone. When I called through to my voicemail I noticed right away the menu options had altered and the voice directing me through them had altered also. It took me a while to find and select ‘saved messages’ and then when I did I was promptly told there were no saved messages. ‘You have no saved messages,’ the new voice said. I went through the whole routine again because I did have saved messages, I always had saved messages, I made sure I always had at least one saved message. I went through it a third time before conceding that despite having made sure for several years now that I always had a message from him saved, I did not have any saved messages.

‘How is you?’ That is a greeting he often used. The words sliding into one another. Howizyew. Employing the singular verb. He was curious about my friends, but had no interest in spending time with me in the company of other people, in case those interactions interfered with how he saw me – ‘I’m the only one who sees you correctly,’ he’d say, which I didn’t quite accept though I didn’t say so. It sounds alarming, narcissistic, controlling, but at the same time isn’t that what anyone wants their beloved to believe? That they see into them deeply, right to the core, 17and know them better than anyone else? He said many things that sounded intolerable, but when I thought about them sometime later it seemed to me he just said what most people think but wouldn’t dream of expressing. ‘I don’t understand why you need to see your friends so often when you love me.’ I used to laugh at that. He was wrong, and he was right. To him it seemed natural that we would spend every weekend together and he was openly bewildered when I had other plans. I got the impression he was of the opinion that friends are what you have when you are a child. When one has reached maturity and found love, one no longer has any need of them. ‘Do you find them interesting?’ he’d ask. Whenever I pointed out to him that he and his ex-wife had been part of a constant social whirl he told me that was different: ‘That was about business, and having a little fun.’ Sometimes the way he described his life back then, so many years ago, when he was married and very wealthy, repulsed me, and, naturally enough, turned me on. I don’t feel like relaying many details, as glamorous and as fascinating as it all was. On and off over the ten years I’ve known him he’s spoken about having a book written about his life, and it’s certainly an eventful tale, encompassing, amongst other things, British high society so-called in the 1960s and ’70s, but I’m not the one to tell it. When he was in Mallorca a few years ago he made a stab at it himself, in a large exercise book he’d bought in the small fishing town where he lived for several months. He referred to the resulting manuscript as his ‘bio’. What he dreamed of, ultimately, was having it made into a film. I said I could see Jude Law playing him. He didn’t react to that in any way whatsoever. He was thinking about something else. He was thinking about who would play me. ‘But I wouldn’t be in it, would I, love?’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t?’ he 18said. ‘No, of course I wouldn’t – I didn’t know you then, did I – I wasn’t even alive then!’ ‘Weren’t you?’ he’d said. ‘Hard to believe. I feel like I’ve known you all along.’

An option that the new voicemail service offered me that I’d never noticed before, so I’m assuming is a new feature, was to ‘leave a message for someone else’. I surely would have noticed this option if it had always been available. The possibility of leaving a message for someone without having to make a call and running the risk of them answering would be a service, if I’ve understood it correctly, that I’d be only too glad to make use of. Since discovering it yesterday evening I’ve been thoroughly preoccupied with thinking about leaving Xavier a recorded message. Various things occurred to me to say, the gist of the message being that I am moving out of here in less than a fortnight. I thought about telling him where I was going – Nowhere permanent, I’ll have a temporary base in L- – I’ll probably go to Paris, perhaps Madrid – Morocco in the new year – I’ll have to see how things go, it looks like the virus is on the rise again – I hope you’ve had your booster shot by now – Take care. This morning I thought better of it. Just because I can doesn’t mean I should, etc. Plus, how would I know for sure that he’d listened to it? I don’t know how it works his end. Does he get a text notification to say he’s received a voice message? He might assume it’s just another crank caller and dismiss it and that would be that. He gets a lot of nuisance calls, largely due to all the cryptocurrency platforms he investigates. He might assume it’s nothing and ignore it, but I don’t think so. He’s still banking on a big break, so as far as I know he monitors incoming correspondence with optimistic diligence. He might listen to it and then ignore me. I don’t know. I don’t know – I wasn’t really expecting this. To not be in touch like this after ten years. I’ve 19always imagined I’d be in his life right up until the end of it, regardless of whether we were in a relationship or not. A peculiar intimation came to me in the early days and I understood and accepted that I will be beside him when he dies. It seems that a witness is needed for the event and that witness is me. That is something, a sacrosanct role, which has been assigned to me, whether I like it or not. Indeed, a tremendous preordained loyalty towards Xavier took root right in the centre of my heart from day one more or less and grew thenceforth steadily and tenaciously. Whether relations between us are felicitous or dire makes no difference, the intimation is still present and persuasive, but it is not limiting and it isn’t a burden. I will be beside him when he dies, that is the decree precisely – not that I will be beside him until he dies. I haven’t been beside him in that way for several years now. But being out of touch with him altogether does not sit well with me. It makes me feel terribly ill at ease in fact. Not because I think he is going to drop dead at any moment, though he could, he could, that’s always been a possibility, but because I begin to feel in my bones that I am reneging upon a divine appointment. It is very important to me that I see this through. That I see Xavier through. Which is all quite peculiar really, since I don’t believe in God, I’ve never believed in God – though actually it occurred to me very recently that perhaps I do believe in God, I just don’t realise it. That would be just like me. Assuming the swagger of an atheist when all along, all along, my very soul is devoted to a higher and indifferent authority. Is there anything in the world more gloriously obliviating than devotion for its own sake? But perhaps I am getting a little carried away. I am generally a loyal person, after all. It is something I value. More than faithfulness, in fact. It is perfectly possible to be unfaithful yet loyal. And one 20can be faithful yet disloyal. Which to my mind is worse. Is sickening. Is the coward’s way. Take the man who came by in the morning, for example. We didn’t have sex. We’d never had sex. But while we lay beside each other resolutely not having sex he told me his wife wrote a bit and he didn’t think it was much good. ‘Certainly not up to publishing standard, I’m afraid,’ he said. He said many other things during our apparently chaste rendezvous, impassioned admissions that I assumed I’d cherish forever, but in fact their poignancy soon faded. No, it is not those words that have stayed with me, but the way he spoke so disparagingly about his wife’s poems. It was quite loathsome. The casual ease with which he said it, coupled with the absence of any reason to say it in the first place, was really quite loathsome. The bond between Xavier and me, very much predicated upon the aforementioned intimation of staying close during his final days and hours, was undoubtedly reinforced when I came to understand that in all likelihood I will be his last love. From time to time I must admit I have felt that role to be, if not a burden exactly, a profound responsibility. Last love. What I realised, ultimately, about this more involving devoir is that it didn’t matter a great deal if my love for Xavier was no longer as incalescent as it had been – what he treasured now, and so very ardently, was not my feelings for him so much, but his feelings for me – he treasured the opportunity to give love, to be a loving man, to be able to think of himself in that way, right up until the end. A loving man, yes, right up until the end. How could I deprive him of that? What else is there?

Yesterday, while I was going through old letters, I came across Xavier’s bio. I didn’t realise what it was immediately 21because I thought his bio was downstairs in a suitcase. I have never read it all the way through. I find it hard to read, and in fact I’ve decided to return it to him. I’m surprised he hasn’t asked for it back. He has done in the past and we rowed about it: ‘It’s not a bio,’ I’d say, ‘this idea you have of it is completely wrong. No way am I letting you show it to Max.’ I remember being on a coach from the airport when an email came through from him looking for it back. I replied right away and said I’d got rid of it. He wrote back, ‘I don’t believe you.’ I didn’t protest. I was somewhat peeved that he thought me capable of lying but not capable of getting rid of his manuscript. ‘It’s not what you think it is,’ I eventually said, for the umpteenth time. He wrote it when he was in Mallorca and when he was in Mallorca he was smoking a lot of weed, which evidently makes him think about sex a lot because there are a lot of anecdotes in it about racy parties and detailed passages of an intimate nature about me. That’s why I’ve been so keen to keep hold of it. I certainly don’t want his son getting his hands on it. So why have I changed my mind all of a sudden? Why do I want to give it back now? Is it just that I want to throw something back at him because I’m upset and angry? Am I upset and angry? I am intensely indignant. HELL. Look at your own life! Yes, look at your own life. Seven years have passed since he wrote that in Mallorca and most of it was penned when he was as high as a kite – what would he make of it now? I really don’t believe it is anything like what he thinks it to be. But really, most of all, I don’t want it anymore. It doesn’t belong among my things. I hate it. And I hate the way his writing looks, with hardly any space between the words. Like the writing of a madman, or an evil one. Looking at it for any length of time makes me feel deranged. He also wrote me a little story at around the same time about 22the birds in cages on his neighbour’s terrace, and how at dusk the wild birds come and visit them. I’ll keep that. It’s a beautiful story and his handwriting looks normal and elegant. I imagine he wrote it early one morning out on the roof terrace after sleeping really soundly. I remember the roof terrace very well. I remember the two washing lines that crisscrossed in the centre of it. I remember him lying back with a joint and a coffee in the shade after lunch, watching me hanging out my underwear. I went to see him in Mallorca just once, for his birthday. I didn’t stay long. I didn’t have a very good time. He didn’t think much of the present I’d bought him and I didn’t think much of the restaurant he brought me to. That was the first evening, so things didn’t get off to a good start. I met Cecil the following morning, and that wasn’t especially edifying either. He was preoccupied with his mobile phone, which wasn’t working. Xavier told him to bring it back to the store and Cecil muttered that he’d bought it off of a street seller. I was astonished at how naive he was, buying a phone from a street seller like that and expecting it to work just fine. He sat down with us at a table along the seafront and had coffee. The table wasn’t very clean. A man came along selling sunglasses. Cecil wasn’t pleased. He spoke to the man in Spanish. The man was perhaps a friend of the man who had sold him the phone. He offered Cecil sunglasses but Cecil didn’t want them. Xavier bought a pair. They suited him. Any pair of sunglasses suited him. I didn’t say anything to Xavier about them suiting him. I was mildly put out that he’d gone ahead and bought the sunglasses. The only explanation I can come up with to account for feeling that way is that it must have seemed to me that buying sunglasses from that particular seller at that particular moment showed a lack of solidarity with Cecil’s predicament. I don’t know what they were 23