The Ministry of Kisses

For a while I worked in an unofficial capacity for the Ministry of Kisses. If I had been clear-headed enough to spot it at the time I might have made more of my unique position. The irony was not lost on me – that my brief stint critiquing other people’s kisses and grading them according to governmental guidelines coincided with my own heartache.  I don’t mean to give myself airs—my heartache was like everybody else’s, unbearable and unoriginal but specific to me.  Surely no one suffered like I did blah blah blah.  I couldn’t eat. I smoked whole pouches of tobacco in a single sitting. Waiting in for a phone that would never ring, could never ring after what had happened, lying palely on my bed, an unhappy grub burrowed in among cushions and old magazines.

           During the briefing they told me that desire was identical. When broccoli boils it lets off steam and rattles the saucepan lid. We do the same. Our desire forms a continuous cloud, our lids rattle at different pressures and that’s all there is to it. ‘We want you,’ they said, ‘because we believe that heartbreak makes you far more critical of others. You’re at the crucial stage – super-sensitive to nuance. Besides you can’t sleep.’

        I shrugged my shoulders.

       ‘Diversion is good for you and your pain index…’

       ‘What’s that?’

        ‘The thing you associate with your ex -- what reminds you of her the most often…well?’

        Of all those memories I recited at night in case I lost their savour,  and that is the craziness of it—one hangs on to things in case they diminish, is appalled if they diminish because you will be made smaller by their loss and at the same time wants to forget— the one thing that had the power to break open the scab (and at the same time the most banal and insistent) was her marimba ringtone waking us up at half six so she could dash across London.

        ‘Yes, if you throw yourself into your work you won’t be surprised on the top deck of a bus when a phone goes off. The ring tone— it won’t bother you. Soon you’ll realise if that was her on the phone you’d hang up…’

        ‘We need you to report back on the quality of kisses on the street, assess the performances. Spot the fakes and the good guys. We want you to compile a short list. Free taxi travel and as much coffee as you can swallow. Best if you’re on the move. You can see alot from cab windows…’

        And then I was walking in the rain, along the railings towards Green Park. I glanced between buses at the café and saw the middle-aged couple, elegant, grey-haired, well-pampered. They were both voluptuous smokers, puffing away at their table, faces damp with drizzle.  While he smoked his electronic cigarette, she inhaled a Marlboro red and between them and the tablecloth was their fundamental incompatibility.  I was already at work.

It was a rainy night in November when I flagged down my first cab and flashed my government ID.  I got in. The cabbie looked at me in the rear view mirror and shook his head. We didn’t have far to go.  Just by the delicatessen – the one that sold woefully overpriced Italian sausage – I saw them, entangled around the bicycle stanchion. I knew they meant it. The rain was nothing to them. He held her face in his hands, cupped hands shepherding a flame and her face flared up at me, open mouth, head tilted back, black hair flying over a smart winter coat.  The cab braked.

         It was painful to watch happiness like theirs. I could only think of that time in the kitchen when swooping down towards her we kissed for twenty minutes. We revolved in the afternoon sunlight, ballerinas on a mirrored box, exposed to the opposite balcony with its stucco and olive trees.  The physical was spiritual and our tongues were tender, pressing down in time with the golden light on our eyelids. This couple were taking their time too, the kiss wasn’t necessarily a prelude to hands down trousers. It was a single nourishing thing, creating its own climate, warmth in the downpour and the liquefying brain, boundaries and pre-sets dissolving in this moment of mindfulness.

        ‘If I were you I wouldn’t gawp like that…’

         I met the cabbie’s eyes in the mirror.

        ‘Right,’ I said as my breath fogged up the glass, ‘what do you suggest?’

       ‘I’ll drop you on the corner and you can work your way back towards them…’

        I took notes by the window display of speciality sausage—there was a Christmas one  with its skin sprinkled with green sequinned glitter—it made me uncomfortable. Nature is as precise an accountant as any. Things hurt as precisely as much as they are worth. One would rather have the pain, the knowledge that it was something.  I could see suddenly a ledger with the emotional debits and credits of the last five years stacked up: the petrol, the road trip, a  box of green tea, a weekend in The Ram’s Head, sex once lasting forty five minutes after my initial outlay of £345 and then egg and cress sandwiches at the service station. If I could get her to pay me back would that help with the emotional cost? Or did I have the question the wrong way round. The fact that I went into such detail over the sandwiches suggested she was still preoccupying me and I was actually getting value for money. I would still be totting up the debits and credits when I was wheeled into the common room in the sheltered housing where I would end my days.

            The kiss was coming to an end, the rain was reasserting itself and the bodies disentangled from the stanchion. The girl had dead rabbit eyes and was absorbing the world with a wet nose crumpling at the man’s collar and aftershave, seductive scents of tobacco and alcohol and scallops fried  in butter. The prelude to sex. They were in love. They would stay close and feel the need to confess things to each other, not feel at peace until they’d carried home the banal workplace story and shared it at the dinner table as a rare find. And we were in our billions, each thinking their affair unique, this love the laser light to expose failings and frailties. Even the processed sausage had started out with a story. The Croatian family who had smoked it in a traditional way, had passed the recipe down the matrilineal line, had added paprika and garlic, juniper berries and finally green glitter for the holidays.