Sucker Love

“Like the naked leads the blind.
I know I’m selfish, I’m unkind.
Sucker love I always find,
Someone to bruise and leave behind.”
“Every You, Every Me” - Placebo

I saw her. As I hurried along the passage to enter the room, I saw her and her alone.

The restaurant was full but it was as if nobody but Iris was there. She wore a crimson-red shawl of rich texture and her oh-so-delicate face was framed by auburn-black curls.

Her face didn’t so much light up as it was aroused in recognition of my red hat. Caveau was abuzz and we needed somewhere quieter to talk of broken wings and love lost.

“Should we go to the courtyard?” I asked. “If it’s too cold, we can come back.”

“Yes, let’s try it,” said Iris, looking as though the most benign nippiness might snap her stem.

We found a table in the passage next to the courtyard in which the country’s oldest surviving grapevine defies Father Time. It was getting drenched for the zillionth time by a monsoon moodswing.

The light of the candle was soft, carving in deep relief the paper-thin structure of Iris’s face. Translucent skin pulled tight around her intense and pretty eyes, a pre-Raphaelite mouth and her nose, oh the nose, sat in the middle of all this, triumphant in its uniqueness, a sculpted thing of wondrous curve.

Iris had talked poetically of her “broken wing” on her facebook profile and Dr Fred moved almost too hastily into a counselling canter.

That is how it felt to me, but Iris was ready to tell someone her story, her molten-brown eyes welling up as she talked of separation from her children, her antique furniture, her home, her reservoir of art photography and how she had been slung out of her house at 4am on a black and cruel night. Because she made photographs of herself in the nude.

“He couldn’t handle it. He just couldn’t understand why I would take pictures of myself without clothes. We had an argument about it and he threw me out. My computer is still at the house and I worry that he might delete my pictures. “

Iris’s eyes were unsmiling. The light bounced off her wine glass, highlighting the heavy tears which swam without falling.

“I haven’t cried about any of this. It’s as if it is too big, too black in my life to allow myself to give into it. I am just hanging on, trying to start again.”

Iris is 28. In the six years since she left university, she has tasted all of the sweet and bitter fruits of love, hate, birth, death, happiness and resentment.

“While all of this was happening,” she said, staring across the puddled courtyard at the wizened grapevine, “my father died.”

“I haven’t had a chance to mourn him. But the way my family reacted to his slow crumbling into death told me that I had to get away, to find the truth. My truth.”

“The truth of what the universe is telling you is that it is time to be true to yourself,” I said. “Be kind to you, allow yourself to be Iris, woman, mother and photographer of her body.”

She smiled thinly. “That’s what I need to do. It’s all I can do. Nurture myself, my children and my art.”

I looked into her face and saw many women I have known. Women, the carers and nurturers, pushed away, floored by the flaws of men.

I wanted to hold her, tell her everything would be all right. I told her everything would be all right, that she would heal, regenerate into the woman she wished to be. Iris, I said, now had a piece of blank paper on which to print a photograph of her new life.

She took comfort and we fell quiet, in reverie at the rains of regeneration falling on Caveau’s ancient vine. We drank wine.

Eventually, she said: “I haven’t had a night like this in a long, long time. I feel like dancing. There’s a cool nightclub near where I live. Will you go with me?”
“Er, I was supposed to meet my friend Lofty for a drink but, yes, I’d like to go. I’ll need to go home for some money.”

When we entered my apartment, I was feeling far more sloth than any pale imitation of goth. I suggested tea and Iris, perched like a broken bird on the edge of my orange futon chair, nodded. “I feel so, so tired,” she murmured.

I gave her tea and she looked up at me, foggy-eyed with wine, weariness and woe. “I have to sleep.”

“This chair folds out...” I started to say. Iris wobbled toward the stairs going up to my bedroom.

She slipped, fully clothed, under the duvet and her only words were: “I want you to hold me, Fred. Just hold me. I want to feel warm and fuzzy.” And she was gone.-
With thanks to The Weekend Argus