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  Everyone is out on the streets. A man called Stan in a straw hat and filthy suit is ahead of her in the queue for the post office. Another man walks in. Hello Malcolm X top of the morning hello Malcolm X top of the morning hello Malcolm X Malcolm XXX. She sends a parcel to Italy, chooses the second cheapest option. At home, their possessions have been covered in white sheets. Everyone drinks coffee. The curtains are down. It’s August but it feels like autumn, slanting light, a smell of rot and ripeness. It’s pleasant but makes her feel bad, like a lot of old news is churning under the surface, returning unexpectedly. Memory showers desire, desire infects memory. Upstairs, she reads the flight log of Capt. William ‘Deak’ Parsons, who dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. 03:00 final loading of gun, 07:30 red plugs in, 08:38 leveled off at 32,700 feet, 09:15 ½ drop bomb. Then she reads about Oppenheimer, then she reads about Oppenheimer’s daughter Toni. After his death she wanted to become a translator for the UN but she wasn’t given security clearance on account of her father and so she killed herself at the age of 32.

  A story in that, Kathy thinks vaguely. But you could go in any direction, it wasn’t just war or women at the fringes or how consequences mount up with the minutes, invisible invisible and then overwhelming. It was permission: who gives it, who needs it. An example, should you censor pictures? What if they were bad pictures made by bad people who didn’t understand. Take away their brush, put them in prison, chastise anyone who wants to look at their art. Kathy had been to see the painting that everyone was upset about. Back in May she’d gone with PJ to the Whitney Biennial, which smelt by that time strongly of rotting bologna. She didn’t like or dislike the Emmett Till painting, she had strong feelings about what had been done to Emmett Till but as to what a person could or couldn’t paint, no. Her books had been banned in Germany and South Africa, she was no stranger to saying things so disgusting and repellent that everyone gagged, she was like a really bitter drag queen only – surprise!!! – she had a pussy under her dress.

  The markets were tanking. Everyone was jittery even especially financial traders. North Korea was threatening to bomb Guam. Kathy knew about Guam because her friend Gordon grew up there. Gordon the only man she knew to genuinely look good in a beret, hot, tight, like the kind of Beatnik revolutionary who wrote poems but could also fight. Trump’s face with its white sweating eye-holes. How had all this happened? Some sort of gross appetite for action, like the Red Wedding episode only actual and huge. It didn’t feel actual, that was the problem. It felt like it happened inside her computer. She didn’t watch the news or listen to the radio, in fact she’d imprisoned the TV inside a cupboard she’d had specially built. If she walked away from her laptop what was there: a garden, birches, that Malcolm XXX man chatting in the queue. Walk back, Armageddon. A bird had landed in the tallest birch. She couldn’t make it out with her glasses on, or with them off. 40, not a bad run in the history of human existence but she’d really rather it all kept going, water in the taps, whales in the oceans, fruit and duvets, the whole sumptuous parade, she was into it thanks, she’d like that show to run and run.

  Two days passed. Asleep, Kathy came hard and woke into a grey disappointing morning. She lived here now, in her husband’s house; this was her one extant bed, her own actual bed being packed in pieces in a storage unit somewhere in Cambridgeshire. Yesterday she had opened the door to three young Romanian men, boys really, who had cleaned her windows impeccably and made a mess of her worktops and kitchen floor. She slipped the oldest a five-pound note, one of the non-vegan slippery ones, because he seemed to be finding the responsibility of teaching the use of mop squeegee and cloth overwhelming. They kept ringing to say they were almost done and she’d come back to find them sitting in the garden washing pieces of the oven, 20 minutes, 20 minutes. In the end it took 4½ hours and she scrubbed the floor herself. Then she gave the keys back, then she went about bowed under recollections of the things that had happened in the house, sex mostly, some parties, a lot of miserable nights non-sleeping, a passionate interest in repainting radiators. Sébastien always came in the back gate, wheeling his bicycle, er hello, um shall we have coffee. I like you she’d once said after or maybe even during intercourse and he’d looked round the room wildly and cried I like your bed! I like your room! Matthew at New Year, shouting at Jonathan for months on end during his morning visits. For years she’d thought she was cursed with evasive non-committal distant men, my soi-disant boyfriend she’d called Stuart but now she saw she’d picked them all, that they were the bulwark between her and any actual emotional demands, at which she was not good, not skilled, she’d be one of those women who ignored their family and lavished all attention on the dog. She felt blank. She felt blank and mildly hysterical, she was itching to do something but it wasn’t clear what. She wanted to get in the car and drive to somewhere entertaining and ideally hot, she wasn’t prepared to bed down just yet. She wrote six emails, three dutiful, one ill-advised and then felt a little sick. Human relations, how. It was never easy to know how close to situate yourself, how open to be. The chestnut trees all had a fungus that was turning them brown. There was one directly in her eyeline, it made her feel like summer was already over, like the rot had set in. There were regions of cellulite on her upper thigh, she’d seen stretch marks on what had for 40 years been her unchangingly skinny arse, time was doing her over, she felt breathless with it. There was a literal train line at the bottom of the garden, how much more emphatic could it be? She was at the middle of her life, going south, going nowhere, stuck between stations like a broken-down engine.

  Kathy was actually happy. This was the best month of the best year of Kathy’s life, she was just unphlegmatic, a drama queen, sunk to the knees in her own moods. Go to Homebase, buy some paint. Paint your shed. This is home ownership, this is as permanent as it gets. The mistake she’d made as so often was to read the news immediately after waking. A Nazi march in Charlottesville complete with flaming torches and armed militias, an email from the Guardian headline UK family found guilty of enslaving homeless and disabled people subhead Lincolnshire gang forced at least 18 victims to work for little or no pay and live in squalor for up to 26 years. She felt sick. Stories like that displaced her, they displaced everything, how could you be happy when you knew the tendencies humans had, their aptitude for cruelty. Libyan coastguards firing on sinking refugee boats with machine guns, climbing aboard to pick the pockets of the drowning, Kathy was sick of it all, she sat down at her desk and typed Hiroshima, the flesh on the back of his hands was loose like pieces of wet newspaper she typed most of the dead bodies lay on their stomachs and were naked scorched black she typed round black balls lay in the sand she typed a child tried to get milk out of her dead mother’s breasts. Maybe this last one was Kathy, the eternal orphan, the needy little girl, but it was also the world, an unshruggable burden, nastiness in small private places and out in the open, flagrant and stately. Since there’d be no end to it she might as well consign it to paper, the only thing I want is all-out war she wrote with a flourish.

  *

  It was midday, Saturday 12 August 2017, she ran herself a bath and fumbled a book from the small tower she’d assembled last week. She chose an extended essay by a New England novelist, a pornographer with good syntax, a lusty grammarian. It was about another novelist she liked less, it was an ardent assessment of his sentences and soul. She breezed through words like tennis, suntan lotion and adultery. Nabokov and Henry James were called into service. Then the New England novelist made an astounding statement. He said that the only good novels were written by gay men and women, that they have the gig locked, that they’re streets – whole boulevards! – ahead. The gaiety was how he referred to the homosexual community, which suggested he didn’t know many of them. However, Kathy agreed. What’s the novel about if not getting fucked.

  That afternoon, she and her husband decided to go for a walk. They drove into the countryside, not a place where Kathy spent much time. They followed a path in silence, e
ating blackberries as they went. A moth, her husband said. Or perhaps a butterfly. They saw a car parked at the edge of a field. How did it get there? There was a striped sheet or towel blocking the windows. Kathy, who thought about suicide a lot, wondered whether someone had killed themselves, but the car was empty. They walked a little further. There was gunshot. Bird-scarers Kathy said confidently, and saw a small fluttering thing in the field spasm and fall still. There was a fort of hay bales and inside there was a man with a gun. This was why Kathy hated the countryside. Above clouds like helium balloons, like zeppelins. Further on another man bulky in black was leading a small child with long blonde hair across a cornfield. Everything looked not-innocent, she shouldn’t have come.

  It was no better at home, it was worse. She watched a stream of images coming out of Charlottesville, armed militias, crackers in camo armed with assault rifles. They were chanting Fuck You Faggots, they were waving Nazi flags, they were holding up Tiki torches they’d bought in Kmart to scare off mosquitoes, disgusting putrid horror-faces, Halloween mask America. Why do men always want to punch you in the face, what was that about? The women stood on the sidelines in tight red vests that said FREEDOM right across their boobs. Nazi flags but T-shirts, sloppy, Kathy thought. Aviators and button-downs, belted chinos, pimpled white chests. She’d been writing about Nazis since 1988, she knew what she was seeing. Let’s communicate w/out hate in our hearts, Melania or let’s face it her aide tweeted some hours in. The headline of the Daily Progress: Fire and Fury. A car drove into a crowd of counter-protestors, HORRIFYING FOOTAGE everyone retweeted, one woman dead, nineteen injured.

  Kathy was becoming obsessed with Holocaust-deniers, especially the young ones, the Nazis who’d rebranded themselves as the alt-right. She kept going on the Daily Stormer or following threads. The main argument seemed to be that there weren’t enough gas chambers, enough mass graves. They used words like cuck and octoroon, fag obviously, they liked testosterone and whiteness, they were anxious about having their car windows smashed. They made jokes about gassing Jews, they were like stupid boys at school except killing people and in the government, it wasn’t a great moment in history, she still couldn’t quite grasp how it had all come about. The Holocaust was said to have happened in the 40s, she read on a Nazi website, when information was exactly six million times harder to come by than today. Also, all of the ‘evidence’ was sealed behind the iron curtain, so no one could even investigate the sites where it was supposed to have happened until the 90s. On it went, talking about the absence of gas chambers, the reconstruction of gas chambers, how there were no mass graves or evidence – a sarcastic emphasis on evidence – that any more than a few people had died of starvation and disease in these work camps, how the whole thing was a narrative that got fixed. Sunday morning, 13 August 2017. There were people in the White House who believed this shit. Truly Kathy was living in interesting times.

  *

  Marriage in 5 days, marriage in 4 days. Kathy peeled herself from her husband and boarded a train to London. She was feeling panicky, she couldn’t quite remember how to be alone, ironic since she was the poster girl for female solitude, itself ironic since she barely regarded herself as female. A fag with tits, statistically improbable but not unheard of, especially in the conglomerate-building internet era of gender dismantlement. The best thing about breast cancer was the double mastectomy, lop them both off she’d said, I always hated them. Hair cropped, skinny, flat-chested, she was a lovely dickless boy, a wrinkling Dorian Gray, fondling her jewels. Who was the drag queen who’d kept a mummified corpse in her studio for years? Dorian Corey? No one Kathy actually liked had a stable gender identity, not really. Transitioning, she loved the word, with its sense of constant emergence and zero arrival. She was indeterminate and oversexed, a hot chrysalis, if she’d had a dick you better believe it would be perfect, at least as good as David Bowie’s.

  At King’s Cross she took the Piccadilly to Holloway Road and walked north. She stopped at the Costa to buy mineral water and proceeded to an alley off Seven Sisters Road. The artist occupied a windowless studio. Her work was very pure and strange, she’d invented a new technique that allowed her to incorporate motion, assembling her sculptures precariously so that they toppled or burst or otherwise deviated from authorial design inside the kiln. The new pieces were kinetic and disturbing, they contained dangling entrails and slabs of bacon, hide, balls, a donkey’s head, women’s dainty ankles and bare Barbie doll feet, petals, guts, cloaks and various internal organs. They weren’t representational, Kathy just kept being reminded of things she’d seen, rendered deliciously in the coolness of porcelain. There wasn’t any precedent, maybe a garden that was simultaneously a mass grave would give you the right feeling, or some sort of body soup, out of which a white world would shortly be created. They were that frightening, that generative and grossly pretty. The new ones had a component she hadn’t seen before, which looked like the spine of a dead dolphin. Kathy was not being whimsical, she’d seen the spine of a dead dolphin and this frighteningly ratcheted torted shape reminded her of it.

  Studio visit accomplished, PG Tips drunk, Kathy went back to King’s Cross and met Jenny in the pub. They talked about marriage, how to do it so it didn’t bury you beneath all its baggage. They thought they had a handle on it, they thought they could see a way to maintaining their dignity independence autonomy style, but it was touch and go they both admitted. Place cards, stag dos, the whole thing was fucking repulsive. Someone somewhere had told her that day about hearing women say they were voting for Trump because they didn’t want to work, I mean, Kathy said three beers in, could we just fucking abolish not even gender but people. I think I’m done.

  Home again, she went on Instagram, Rich naked and pallid in the ruined fallout shelters of Orford Ness, somebody’s courgettes arranged and lit like a Renaissance painting. Over the course of the morning she’d become an expert on neo-Nazis, she knew about the Oath Keepers and the 3%ers, she knew that cops were even crazier and more racist and evil than she’d thought, which speaking as a cop-watcher Rodney King and Michael Stewart through to Philandro Castile and Eric Garner was maximally racist and unjust. It was late, she was up in her study listening to trains and a neighbour or burglar hauling sacks of compost in their garden. Red lights, white lights, how close to the state do you want to get, do you care for the state, does the state mean anything to you at all? Kathy was a libtard, a regular schmuck, but she was also a biker bitch, a libertarian, live and let die, she didn’t give a fuck, people could rip each other’s faces off if that’s what they wanted, only she really hated a racist cop with a gun, strip ’em and drive ’em through the streets like wild pigs, wouldn’t that be the best thing to do? Outside, a man was shouting No Power No Power in a resigned voice. A new camaraderie, a green square like a meadow we can all be friends in. Kathy was tipsy and punchy, Kathy’s hope is the hardest thing to hide.

  *

  It is now 3 days till she gets married. Her husband emails her a list of his shopping and cooking intentions plus a Word doc of the household expenses, many of which she finds immediate fault with. £200 a month for electricity, insane. Virgin TV, she won’t pay that, she’s been a TV refusenik since she was seven, standards have to be maintained. Cleaners, fine okay she has entered a new era. The cooking and shopping list is more endearing, it is 100% her husband’s style. On the morning of their wedding, at 9:30 precisely he proposes to go to the market for salad materials, rosemary, potatoes, courgettes, and strawberries (the Oxford comma is his), and to check if the fish man is there on Saturday. Order sea bass if so, he writes (If not, buy now). At 11 he will make dressing for salad, at 11:10 he will ice their wedding cake. She has asked him repeatedly to buy a cake but he believes absolutely that this is a task only he can accomplish. They are getting married at 3pm, though this is not on his list. On Saturday, their first day of actual real married life, he will be collecting a leg of lamb and making tiramisu. Fine. Kathy will be ambling and complaining,
failing to put her bowl in the dishwasher, stalking the internet, rehanging pictures. Everyone needs a job, and she understands hers. 11:10 ice cake, what a very nice man. He’s taken to sunbathing naked in the garden, in a hidden zone she built for him by lugging various items of not-quite-rotten garden furniture behind the shed. He likes to lounge there with his tea and biscuits, lordly on a striped blue towel, preserving, he explains, his small speckled bottom from splinters and ants.

  That evening, 15 August 2017, Kathy and her husband went out to dinner in a very dirty convertible. The driver was an old friend of her husband’s, he kept asking where her pad was, he was a ’60s person, loping and long-eared, the light was hitting the filth on the windscreen and he could barely see, he said, explaining why he wasn’t laughing at Kathy’s jokes. The light was low like a wave, a breaking gold wave, and everywhere there were plumes of dust from the combines at work in the evening fields. The man was telling her about the purple bird shit he’d found on the car roof. Blackberries Kathy said, no he said, cherries. The dinner was in a house in a village she’d driven through several times with Sébastien, on the way to a pub he’d developed an obsession with. The man whose house it was was a highly regarded even quite famous home cook, he had a wood-oven and a steely professional-looking kitchen. There was goat’s curd and tomatoes, there was a tilting bowl full of razor clams and regular clams with little dots and dashes of chorizo. The clams had been purchased in Selfridge’s, after a trip to the Russian embassy. The wines kept changing, Kathy was already drunk, there was loud jazz, you had to keep hold of your fork. Guineafowl, bread sauce, Kathy argued with the long-eared man about Trump. He hasn’t done anything yet, the man kept saying, which was like arguing with an ostrich about the sky. They talked about digging out basements to build libraries, they talked about literary magazines, they drank further glasses of burgundy and then abruptly there were differently tilting bowls of roast peaches and clotted cream, Kathy was jovial, she might even have slapped the home cook on the arm. She and her husband were so thoroughly drunk when they got home, so completely saturated in alcohol, that they fell asleep on their bed fully dressed and with all the lights on. She woke at 2 and rolled out of her clothes. At 6:30am she got up, mounted the stairs to her study and filled in several complicated immigration forms for the non-resident alien co-ordinator at the university where she was teaching next term. She was going back to America, soon, not for good. Movement caught her eye. There was a glossy orange fox in the garden, digging for worms. It ran smartly towards the house and reappeared with a blackbird in its mouth. A brief tussle and the blackbird escaped into a bush. The fox looked baffled and spent a moment bouncing at the bush on its hind legs. Her husband had appeared by this time, wearing a rumpled white T-shirt, no pants. He was very warm, she pulled him back to bed. Two days to go. 53 hours.