Chapter 5 chapter Five

It took Ruth a while to get Flossie back in her seat.Her cries woke up all the children.Anna had been comforting her sister, which made Ruth feel even worse, as if she had committed double negligence.After Polly got into the car, she just encouraged Yanis and Nico, and then just sat there, waiting for Ruth to finish her work. Ruth managed to get into the cab.It was almost seven o'clock now, and she wanted to go home and settle them down after entertaining her guests with meat stew from the Aga stove.She was a little angry that Polly hadn't told her about Flossy sooner, but she put it down to Polly being too tired and grieving.By the time they got back to the highway, she was relieved.

"What are your plans so far?" she asked Polly, who was silent.She glanced back and saw Polly curled up asleep with her seatbelt on.She looked so calm, so innocent—at least ten years younger than her real age.Ruth came to a screeching halt as her attention returned to the road.The cars ahead were motionless, forming what appeared to be a long convoy. While waiting in the car, Ruth felt a growing sense of responsibility to these guests.Her and Polly's pasts are so tied together, it's hard to figure out how one started and the other ended.I used to live in an area of ​​London in Notting Hill.It was through Ruth's introduction that Christos met Polly during those days in his apartment, and it was because of Polly and Christos that Ruth and Gareth came together.

In the early 90s, Polly was very successful.She once topped the indie charts with raw but poetic music, and pictures of her beauty have been plastered on the walls by punks.When Ruth came to London for teacher training, she rented a room in Polly's velvet flats in Notting Hill.Those days were really exciting.Polly is Ruth's ticket to enter the charming and exciting London. A primary school mathematics teacher like Ruth who came to participate in the training is supposed to be unable to enter.I can still vividly feel the feeling of it: the loud and noisy class of seven-year-olds, and inside her — in her nostrils, on one very memorable occasion — the remnants of the previous night’s cocaine.Everyone knew she was Polly's friend, and she was pictured in magazines, in backgrounds, or in the back of taxis, all because of Polly.

Later, everything went wrong.Polly's universally hated fourth record, written mostly for piano, is the most downbeat of her oeuvre. "Music that makes you want to kill yourself," said one reviewer, "is not well written." Polly was overwhelmed by the blow and depressed, and the cocaine and heroin they used to entertain quickly became Polly's. Li's daily necessities.Even when things were going well she was sullen and corpse-like, with gray skin, rickety legs, and hair falling out.Even so, she still had an innocent lust for a man to get close to her. Ruth got tired of the people Polly was hanging out with—drug addicts—and for the first time in her life she started going out alone and making friends of her own.She and a couple of M.Ed students were among a group of older boys who were doing their MFA at Goldsmiths.They were both studying at Goldsmiths College at the time.She loved being with them, spending half term in the smoky New Cross pub every afternoon, drinking Red Ribbon beers and debating minimalist art 1950s-60s versus pop The trend of western modern art, which is developing at the same time, reduces the painting language to the relationship between color and shape, and advocates the use of "very few colors, very few images" to simplify the picture, remove unnecessary things that interfere with the main body, and use more Ordinary things in everyday life (such as targets, star-spangled banners, maps, etc.) are treated as artistic images. , Structuralism and Postmodernism.She was fascinated by the concepts and left-brain stuff they kept babbling about, but was at a loss as to how to turn it into something creative.This kind of time both confused her and envied her.

These art boys were romantics, with scuffed fingers and stained Dr. Martin boots, constantly wrapped in cigarettes.Christos had noticed her early on, and it wasn't long before he asked her to follow him to "this little Greek place run by his uncle Stavros." It's the height of summer, and everything in London is a bit exaggerated.The night they went to the restaurant did little to ease their oppression because of the humidity, but it was a very special night in Ruth's life. For dinner that night they had char-grilled meat, garlic ricotta cucumber and baklava sweet enough to make your teeth ache, after which Ruth and Stavros drank wine and Greek coffee until the restaurant closed.Uncle Stavros worked for hours, unceasingly opening cold beers and chilled pines, and passing them to the waiter, while he turned up the music, cleared the tables, and turned the restaurant into a dance hall.On weekend nights, Kristos explained, this is normal.

The night was long and tiring.Ruth hopped unknowingly next to a sweaty, dumpy Mexican boy who was a dishwasher, and a waitress, and the girl, who she had long since discovered was a great beauty.That's when Christos came in, with his arms around Ruth's waist, in a dignified, romantic gesture, like a scene from an old movie, and he took her aside so he could keep her for himself. They danced for hours, their groins pressed together—skin to skin: she slipped her arms under his T-shirt and rubbed on his back.She remembers smelling the top perfume, eaux-de-vie, onions and sweat, and she still remembers it vividly to this day.Now, ten years later, he has entered the grave, but whenever she thinks of this scene, her throat always chokes.

At four-thirty, before sunrise, his uncle called a bunch of taxis, and everyone walked out of the restaurant into the wet night and piled into the taxis. "It's the end of the night!" Christos grinned as he helped her into the taxi. They came to Hampstead Heath Park, and giggled like children, over the fence and into a pond.That's how they always end up on a hot Saturday night, Kristos said.It was a habit inherited from his uncle's restaurant in Plaka, Athens, and they would all go south to Rafina to see the dawn on the Aegean Sea, then head to the fish market to buy the next day's food.

"Hampstead Heath Pond is different. The fish here are brought in in dirty white vans. What can you do?" Having seen too much of the black hairy body of roast beef and lamb, he entered the cold, murky water on his belly. Others followed suit and jumped into the water.They were all so hot that the water almost creaked as they jumped into it. Christos swam across the pond and led Ruth away from the crowd to a dark corner.As the shouting and laughter faded away and everyone left, Ruth and Kristus lay naked on the grass after making love in the morning light.Just now he jumped at her like a hungry animal, licking and eating, and she reacted quickly.

Thinking back on that night, she guessed that Christos must have ignited something inside her that she had never known before, and she was grateful to him for that. As they walked back through Hampstead Heath in the warm morning sun, Ruth had high hopes for their relationship.From time to time, they stopped to kiss affectionately and greedily. The tiredness of their lips and faces hadn't receded yet, and new pain was added. "Would you like to come in for a coffee?" she asked with a broad smile when they came to the door of the apartment where she and Polly lived. "I want to come in and fuck you a little longer," he said softly, "and then sleep with you."

So he went in.As usual, Polly spent another night of drinking and drinking, leaving a place to sleep that looked like an atomic bomb, and this time Ruth paid no attention to the spectacle. It was evening when they awoke, and they lay in bed, listening to the silence of Sunday.Ruth got up and made them a cup of tea, annoyed that Polly hadn't woken from last night's hangover.She also noticed, among the beer cans and vodka bottles on the coffee table, a set of dirty tools and spilled white powder.Ruth had thought more than once that if Polly did not pick herself up soon, she would have to consider taking steps to leave the flat and live alone, though it was almost unbearable.She was still having a little daydream as she walked across the room to Polly's: she and Christos had moved to a cottage on the sea cliff, and were finally able to support themselves.

As she knocked on Polly's door she was still thinking about how many children they were going to have. "Polly? Are you awake? Would you like a cup of tea?" There was no response.Ruth knocked again.Surely she wouldn't leave a big pile of trash there and go out. She opened the door cautiously, only to see Polly lying naked on the bed with her feet on her back, with strips of dry vomit left on her black hair, blood stains on her face and pillow.It was the same color that Ruth and Gareth would later choose for the walls of their living room: duck egg green. Ruth ran over and felt the pulse.She felt like she touched something, but couldn't tell because her heart was beating so hard.She grabbed a mirror from Polly's bedside table and held it up close to Polly's face, and the white powder from the mirror sprinkled Polly's face.There is fog on the mirror, which proves that she is still breathing, although very lightly. Ruth began to shake her, trying to revive her, but Polly fell like a day-plucked bluebell, plopping down. Then Christos came to her side.He is also naked. "That's—" he asked. "Yes, it's her." "Polly Novak?" he asked breathlessly.Ruth has kept her friends at Goldsmiths from sharing a flat with the famous figure. "Yes. You see, she's not very well. You'll have to call an ambulance." Ruth held Polly tightly in her arms, feeling overwhelmed.Christos put his arm gently around Ruth and kissed her hair. "Go ahead, Ruth. I know what to do. It happened to a friend of mine. I got her up and let her walk around. You go, I'm stronger, you know the address What." So Ruth went to hail a cab, and the operator asked her a bunch of questions about what Polly had been eating, when, how much, and so on.Although Ruth was not sure of many cases, she tried to answer these questions as faithfully as possible.Who cares what gossip it creates?Polly needed to end her current behavior, or, the next time Ruth found her, she might not be breathing.For all the mess she made in the living room and the chaos of her lifestyle, Ruth really couldn't imagine life without her. The operator finally let Ruth go, saying an ambulance would arrive as soon as possible.A call to the operator quieted Ruth.She was about to go in and tell Christos the news, but stopped at the door.Christos stood in the middle of the room, naked, holding Polly, also naked and limp, in his thick arms.She wakes up a little bit, with a weary, ecstatic smile on her face, like the Norwegian artist Munch (1863-1944), whose work includes many etchings, lithographs, and painting."Death and the Maiden".She looks beautiful.Christos stroked her hair while singing one of her songs. Seeing this, Ruth knew that there would never be a house for her and Christopher on the cliff, and they were together like two worn but still beautiful jeweled belt buckles. And she was right: Christos was by her side almost throughout Polly's hospitalization, during the media fuss, and during Polly's recovery.Ruth had been thrown out of the sky by him, and the only time she had him was that night.In his absence, his best friend, master's student Gareth Cunningham, barges into her life.Soon there will be the graduation exhibition, and then there will be no time to reminisce about the past. Ruth should have resented Christos for running away with Polly, but she knew that once they were introduced, they had no choice.It was hard to say that Polly had stolen him from him—after all, she hadn't been aware of it when he fell in love with her. It was one of those things Polly did to men. "Why did we stop?" Anna woke up, leaned forward, and patted Ruth on the shoulder. "Who knows. Maybe it's road work, or maybe there's been an accident," said Ruth. "Go to sleep." "I want to look out as the car drives away. I like the lights in the rain." Ana leaned back, pressing her face against the cold drops of water on the window glass. They were off again, plodding along the gleaming road, the exhaust fumes like a swirling fog. Ruth saw the lights of an ambulance ahead and the blue lights of a police car flashing rapidly. "It was an accident. Turn your face away, Anna." They drove slowly past the scene of the accident, which looked as if a truck had crashed into a family van parked on the shoulder of the road, nearly smashing it to a halt in the traffic on the road behind the truck. "Turn around, Anna!" Ruth yelled as they passed the coach.The accident was on their side, and despite her better instincts, she couldn't turn her head away.She saw the accident workers trying to get the people out of the car, like puppets cutting string.There was a man, small in stature who seemed to be the first to be rescued, sprawled and covered with a blanket.Ruth stared blankly at the edge of the lawn illuminated by floodlights, and saw a little girl lying flat on top, one leg bent under her body, her head at an unnatural angle, her eyes wide open.One or two medical staff stood by, looking down at her, one of whom seemed to be crying.