Their lips talk of misch.., p.29
Their Lips Talk of Mischief,
p.29
I walked back to Conrad Flats, hung up his suit and changed into my jeans, lumberjack shirt and the antelope-skin jacket, which was my father’s.
I left Lou’s old hip flask on the dining table. I didn’t take a single book. I posted my set of house keys through the letter box.
I walked all the way down through Shepherd’s Bush as Lou and I once had to the Fulham Road. At Victoria coach station it was so warm I felt poached. On the paved colonnade I heard the rifle-bolt snaps of young skateboarders practising their artful techniques.
Just down and across the road was the Victoria Station Hotel, where Lou and Aoife had spent their wedding night. I now was certain Abby and Lou had been up to no good that night, before Aoife and I had arrived. Confused and grasped embraces in the wedding chamber between the bridesmaid and the groom as the deluded bride arrived. A groom who himself would soon be deluded. For God Almighty’s sake.
The cheapest bus from London to Glasgow was the overnight. I sat down on a seat with people ranged around me. The odd Euro backpacker, a lost-looking Indian gentleman with a leather suitcase tied with string, a circling alcoholic counting change in his palm. The ranked seats resembled those of the Accident and Emergency waiting rooms. People with suitcases moved through the transitory space. If I bought a ticket, this huge city would thin out peacefully at its boundaries in the dark. Around me, I would see few glimpses of old England as I headed back to my encoldened north. I would sense more than see the hedgerows and the sunken lanes lashed with briars, or some ancient tree in the corner of a meadow. I thought of those weeks Aoife and I had in the curtained bedroom – more like a laboratory – where I had seen her hand clench and re-clench in the gloom as we both reached for some other world.
I tapped my shoe and looked at it. I was going to go over to the ticket booth, which resembled the booth at the hospital that night, or I was going to take a bus back up to Acton and claim I had needed some time alone. They would all be in poor Myrtle’s house at that moment, Lou drinking, Abby asking where I was, Aoife sometimes smiling but not too much, nodding politely to relatives and holding Lily up so they could pet her. Aoife would be surprised to see me changed out of the suit. I would tell her, oh, accidentally pulled the Yale behind me, could I borrow her keys? Yes, of course. Aoife smiling, the mole just there, maybe I would reach for her arm in that black death dress – Eeef, Eeef; Douglas, Douglas – desperate touches of fingertips outside the bathroom, relatives awkwardly interrupting; Abby snooping.
Under a new roof, it would be Lou who would undress Aoife from her mourning dress that night. Perhaps a single petal of blossom from the graveside had been carried all day, somewhere within the dress, and Lou’s fingers would release it? The bus – or them, and thence destruction? From where I sat, I could still hear the hard cracks of the skateboards. I had to make my choice and my right hand trembled. My lips moved silently with the answer.
Acknowledgements
Almost all the locations and of course all the characters in Their Lips Talk of Mischief are completely fictional.
The circumstance of a man alarming an entire hospital waiting room with his badly torn but painless sutures is a biographical detail related to me by Robin Robertson many years ago. Robin has used this experience in several of his own exquisite poems.
The image of the Luftwaffe crewmember stuck in the escape hatch of his doomed aircraft is related by Crelin Bodie in Ten Fighter Boys (Collins, 1942), edited by A. Forbes and H. Allen.
About the Author
Alan Warner is the author of seven previous novels: Morvern Callar, which was made into a film starring Samantha Morton, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven, The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and The Deadman’s Pedal, which won the 2013 James Tait Black Prize.
By the Same Author
Morvern Callar
These Demented Lands
The Sopranos
The Man Who Walks
The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven
The Stars in the Bright Sky
The Deadman’s Pedal
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2014 by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2014
All rights reserved
© Alan Warner, 2014
The right of Alan Warner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–31129–3
Alan Warner, Their Lips Talk of Mischief
