A Very Private Life by Michael Frayn

Author:Michael Frayn [Frayn, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571329861
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2015-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Her first night with him

Uncumber falls asleep while the others are eating. They put a plate of stuff from the cooking-pot in front of her—a nightmare mess of solid brown greasy lumps and green vegetable matter, like some piece of paranoiac imagery off one of the violence channels, which she cannot even bring herself to look at. The others bend over their plates, hack at the loathsomeness with handfuls of tools, and pack it into their mouths until they can scarcely speak. The scrape of eating-tool on plate, the slop-slop-slop of lips, the uneven sound of incomprehensible, half-articulated conversation have a hypnotic effect on Uncumber in her deep exhaustion. The noises become intimate but remote; the room slips and crumples before her closing eyes.

When she wakes it is dark, and the room is full of noise of a different sort. S-n-o-o-o-o-r-e … Snort! Grunt! Nkgh! Kh-n-n-n-n-n-n …! For several panic-stricken moments she cannot think what it is, or where she can possibly be. Slowly she works it out: it is the noise of ten people sleeping, and she is in a bed. A very narrow bed; she can’t move. Something warm and solid is pressed against her, all the way down her right side. Cautiously she feels it. Another human being! Of course! Noli! With a shock of pleasure she runs her hand over the cloth covering his broad, powerful back … his shoulders … the back of his neck (smoother, touchingly smoother, than she’d have supposed!) … and up into his hair (more luxuriant, voluptuously more luxuriant at the back than you’d think from his baldness!). She catches her breath in her growing excitement. He stirs and groans. She feels an irresistible impulse to run her hand through the fuzzy hair on his chest…. But there isn’t any hair! It’s smooth—and it bulges and folds…. Suddenly it jerks away from her hand, struggles to sit up, turns on the light … is not Noli at all, but the thinnest and dourest of the queens!

Everyone wakes up. The children cry. The thin queen points at Uncumber and accuses her of—well, Uncumber can imagine what. Everyone shouts and waves his arms. Uncumber fails to explain even in her own language, and at last the light is turned out again.

After that Uncumber lies awake for hours, scarcely daring to breathe, for fear of touching the thin queen again. Her swollen ankle and her bruises have started to throb, the room is unbearably stuffy, and the noise and smell of all this sleeping humanity becomes overpowering. Sometimes she falls into a sort of delirium of overtiredness, in which she keeps moving from one weird room filled with bare-eyed people into the next, driven by the feeling that there is some correct arrangement of people and rooms and that if only she can find it everything will come out all right. At other times she surfaces and worries about Noli. Her heart aches for him, trapped in this crowded room, surrounded by these surly queens and screaming children.

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