She clears her throat and shifts uncomfortably in the chair, glossing over in her mind what had followed. The sudden movement behind her, the sharp piercing realization that she was no longer alone. What the fuck are you doing, Rachel? A strange look on her sister’s face, as if she were trying to decide whether to swing in the direction of horror or amusement, before she dissolved into drunken laughter. Tossing herself down on the bed, her arms stretched behind her head. Just put it back when you’ve finished. And Rachel already scrambling out of the dress, her cheeks hot, not caring if her sister saw her naked because even that was preferable to this.
She gets up and crosses the room swiftly, turning the lamp off with a snap. She’s going to bed.
SADIE
1999
It’s Friday night or Saturday morning, some indistinguishable time between the two. Sadie took the wrong night bus and she’s walked in the dark for what feels like hours in her four-inch heels, her tight silver skirt, and a heavy black jacket that she thinks may belong to a man she was dancing with and which smells of cigarettes and sweat. It’s taken so long to get home that she’s wishing she hadn’t bothered and that she’d crashed at the man’s place, although he would have wanted sex and she isn’t in the mood. It’s never easy to tell what effect the random cocktail of booze and drugs she downs on these nights out will have on her; sometimes she’s horny and insatiable, wanting to fuck anyone who comes within a hair’s breadth of her, and other times the whole business seems sordid and pointless and her body feels like an old coat that’s been left out in the rain for too long.
She staggers the final few yards to the tall building where the apartment is, stares up at the first floor. It’s only when she sees the unfriendly dark square of window that she realizes she’s forgotten her keys again. She pulls her mobile from her bag but it’s dead.
“Rachel,” she croons, softly at first, then louder. “Rachel!” She picks up a handful of gravel from the little artificial flower bed that sits at the base of one of the elegant lime trees flanking the road, and throws it in the direction of the window, but her aim is indiscriminate and she’s shocked and amused by the way in which it scatters. “Rachel!” she yells again. Her voice sounds surprisingly loud, shattering the silence of the street. She sees a couple of lights switch on in neighboring buildings, a couple of shadows angrily flickering behind curtains; a window banging shut with a muffled curse. But she’s got what she wanted—the front door of the building is swinging open and Rachel is standing there in her pajamas, rubbing her eyes and gesturing her over the threshold.
“Shhhh,” she hisses, pulling Sadie by the arm and closing the front door behind them. “Get upstairs. For Christ’s sake, do you know what time it is?”
Time to get that stick out of your arse, Sadie thinks, but instead she makes some vague noise of apology and stumbles up the stairs in the dark, falling through the door and heading straight for her bedroom. She sinks down on the bed, fumbling with the straps of her shoes. Something isn’t right; they snarl up in her fingers like barbed wires, resisting detangling. In the end she gives up and simply throws the jacket off her shoulders and lies down, rolling onto her side and seeing that Rachel is still watching her, standing in the doorway with her arms folded.
“This has got to stop,” Rachel says. “If you must go out, can’t you at least remember your keys? Or stay somewhere else?”
Sadie tries to think of an intelligent response, but instead she starts giggling. It’s something about the “if you must go out”—as if going out is the sort of thing that you’d only do if you had a gun held to your head and you couldn’t see any way out of it. “It’s the weekend,” she finally manages to say. “This is what people do, Rach. You should try it sometime.”
“Thanks, but I’m all right,” Rachel snaps, and with that she’s gone, flouncing back to her own bedroom and shutting the door with a bang.
“Night night,” Sadie calls in a saccharine falsetto, wanting to have the last word even if it doesn’t mean much. For an instant, the idea flits through her head that she is hungry. She wanders back into the open-plan living room, boils the kettle, and chucks a handful of pasta into a pot, then some tomato sauce she finds in the cupboard into another. But somewhere along the line she must have fallen asleep, because sometime later she wakes to the smell of burning and sees that the pots have boiled dry and that there are oxblood red splatters all across the stove, dark and volcanic. She stumbles over and switches it off, then wanders back into the bedroom and throws herself down on the bed.
She catches sight of herself in the long, low mirror on the dressing table, and stops. She has always liked looking in mirrors. It’s not that she’s vain. She takes no pleasure in what stares back at her: the heart-shaped face with its pouty, slightly asymmetric mouth, the blue-green eyes fringed by long curled lashes, the cheekbones that give the kind of startling definition that means it’s almost impossible to take a bad photo of her. Seeing herself is an anchor, that’s all. Ever since she was very young she’s been prone to a feeling of weightlessness that can attack without warning—a sudden spiraling away from the world, leaving her momentarily unsure of who or where she is. Looking in the mirror brings her back down. Here she is. Her face is grimly familiar. Nothing has changed.
But for once the sight of herself doesn’t soothe her. Instead she takes in the rumpled clothes, the long expanse of thigh where her skirt has rucked up, the long caramel-colored hair damp with sweat and the fine spattering of rain that she’s walked through—and she has the strangest feeling that none of it belongs to her at all. She’s a heartbeat away from toppling down into that dark sense of dread, the one that sometimes waits for her around the corner and sinks its teeth in when she least expects it. Rolling over onto her stomach, she presses her face down hard into the pillow and starts counting to a hundred, but before she even reaches fifty she can feel herself losing her grip and the world switches off again.
When she next peels her eyes open, sunlight is streaming through the window. She’s still fully clothed, one shoe hanging half off. There’s a sour taste in her mouth like bitter apples. She can smell bacon cooking and hear the sizzle as it turns in the pan. She drags herself off the bed and combs her fingers through the tangled mass of her hair, shaking it out behind her. Sidling to the door, she peers through the crack. The stove that looked like the scene of a murder a few hours ago is bright and sparkling, and beneath the cooking smells she can just pick up the sharp citrus scent of cleaning spray. Rachel is standing there, her hair in a tight, high ponytail, dressed in what looks like some kind of Lycra jumpsuit.
“Any left over?” Sadie asks cheerily. She finds that it’s best to skate over incidents like last night. Part of her hopes that perhaps they seem as hazy and unreal to her sister as they do to her.
“If you want.” Rachel doesn’t turn round and it’s hard to gauge the frost level in her tone. “Thanks for cleaning up,” she says. “Again.” This time the frost is unmistakable.
“Sorry,” Sadie says, because it’s very easy to say, even if she’s no longer sure of its value.
Rachel turns to face her wiping her hands at her sides and taking Sadie in with a quick flick of her eyes, head to toe. “You know, Sadie, I’m less than three years older than you.” She pauses, as if she’s waiting for her sister to pick up on some unspoken meaning, but Sadie’s mind is blank and it hurts to try to think, so she just nods, and after a while Rachel exhales and turns back to the bacon, easing it out from the pan and slapping it between the slices of buttered bread.
“After this,” she says, “we should go out and do something.”
“You and me?” Sadie queries. She and Rachel spend a lot of time in each other’s company, what with living in the same house, but they rarely socialize. A quick flash of memory: hours spent wandering around the shops in their early teens, trying on unsuitable and increasingly off-the-wall clothing until they were doubled up
in hysterics in the changing rooms, laughing so hard at the sight of each other that they could barely breathe. She’s no longer sure who those people were.
“Yes,” Rachel confirms. “You and me. Going out somewhere, like sisters do. I’ve got nothing much on today, and I assume you haven’t either. So let’s do something.”
“Okaaaay.” Sadie advances cautiously, taking the sandwich Rachel offers her, trying to divine if this is somehow a trap. “Camden?” she suggests, because she knows that her sister doesn’t like the place; the aggressive individuality of it, the rough-diamond feel of the streets.
There’s a fractional pause, but then Rachel nods. “If you like.”
“All right.” Backtracking now would seem weak, though she doesn’t want to go out at all. Her head feels as if it’s being splintered by a thousand subtle knives and she can feel the arches of her feet aching in protest at the long rambling walk last night. Even the autumn sun at the window is too bright and vivid. She eats the sandwich in silence, feeling the bacon crunch and stick against her teeth. When she swallows her throat is raw.
“Come on then,” Rachel says briskly. “Have a shower, and let’s get changed and go. Twenty minutes.”
“Yessir,” Sadie mumbles, but the sarcasm is lost on Rachel, who has already turned tail and hotfooted it into the bedroom. She’s regretting having fallen in with this plan, and as she drags herself through to the shower and stands underneath the fall of warm water, tipping her head back to wash the grime from her hair, she’s already looking forward to going back to bed.
Four hours later she’s dead on her feet, trailing round the streets of Camden with Rachel at her side, the whole world suffused in a haze of exhaustion that makes it seem as if she’s walking through a computer simulation, liquid and insubstantial. They have visited some shops, reconfirming their wildly different tastes. They have exchanged sound bites about their equally wildly different lives. Rachel has even tried to suggest a visit back to Durham to see their hermetic parents, who have barely left their house in years, which Sadie has treated with the deadpan scorn it deserves. It has all been painful, so much so that she has coerced Rachel into visiting a pub and downed three large glasses of wine in the space of an hour while Rachel watchfully sipped a single gin and tonic. She had hoped the alcohol would take the edge off but it’s only sharpened her sense of fruitlessness.
“Sadie,” Rachel cuts into her thoughts as they walk. “I know things are difficult. I’d be finding it tough in your position—with no real job, no sense of routine. But you’ve got to start sorting yourself out. You can’t stay in the apartment forever. I’m already scared about what Martine’s going to say when she gets back.”
Sadie nods vaguely. She’s well aware that she and her sister have different views on acceptable standards of living. It’s odd how something can matter so much to one person and so little to another.
“To be honest,” Rachel continues, “I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up. I’m tired of it. I barely sleep. You come in at all hours and don’t care how much noise you make. You shout at me and pick fights. I’ve had the police round about five times already complaining about your music, the run-ins you’ve had with people. I’m always having to make excuses for you. The neighbors all hate us. I don’t . . . I don’t want to live this way anymore.”
It’s a well-worn speech. Her sister speaks simply, with sadness. Sadie shoots a glance at her, and she notices that Rachel looks exhausted, with faintly violet stains beneath her eyes and pale skin. For the first time she grasps the edge of something—the sense of what it must be like to worry about someone in the way Rachel does. The helplessness, the impotence. She doesn’t like it, this thing she’s brushing up against.
“You’re right,” she says eventually. “I know, I need to change some stuff.” She doesn’t really have any idea what she can change or how.
“Yes, you do,” Rachel says, “and it needs to be now. It’s scaring me, the way you’ve been acting lately. It’s like you’ve got no off switch. I do care about you, but it isn’t easy, trying to deal with you when you don’t seem to—”
Sadie never hears the end of that sentence, because all at once they have rounded the corner of the street and he’s there, coming out of a tall black building with painted letters, kicking the door shut behind him. A stranger in a studded leather jacket and black jeans, maybe thirty years old, very tall and olive-skinned, his black hair shaved at the sides and swept into a stiff peak. He’s walking toward them, and in seconds he’s close enough for her to see the flat gleam of his eyes, dark gray like gunmetal; the contemptuous curve of his lips that softens, as he reaches her, into what seems like invitation. And all of a sudden the world has blazed into color and her nerves are on edge, leaping into action with the kind of eagerness she wouldn’t have thought her body capable of just seconds before.
He thrusts a flyer into her hand, and she takes it. Kaspar’s: the letters dark red and vital against the black background, the stroke of the K cutting down like the slash of a knife. She looks up at the black building behind them, and sees that stroke mirrored there, in crimson paint against the wall.
“My club,” he says. His voice is accented, harsh. “You should come along sometime. Yes?” His eyes sweep over her, unchanging, for an instant. Mutely, she nods. He is so close that she can smell his aftershave, the spicy cinnamon scent of it crawling over her like smoke.
“See you there,” he says, and then he’s gone, abruptly pushing past down the street. The speed of it has jolted her so much that she has to blink hard, willing the world around her to settle back into its familiar lines. Her head spins. She is more drunk than she thought she was.
Next to her she can feel Rachel’s eyes on her, sharply assessing and probing. “Something wrong?” she asks.
“No. No.” The words don’t come out easily: she can barely wrap her tongue around them.
Rachel glances at the club. “I wouldn’t bother,” she says. There is a brief, tense silence as they continue down the street. “And as for him,” she says, in a tone that Sadie knows is meant to be final and cutting, demonstrating absolute contempt, “he looks like seriously bad news.”
“All right,” she snaps. “I don’t care. He’s nothing to me.” She sets her teeth and clenches her hands into fists in her pockets. She has slept with on average two men a week since she was fourteen years old. They cycle through her life with bland predictability, one much like the next. It has been a long, long time since she has felt this sick, instinctive pull, these tremors of lust racing through her body like speed. It has come to her now with such force that she feels knocked out. Be careful, she thinks. She already knows that she won’t be.
* * *
• • •
LATE THAT SAME NIGHT she’s back in Camden, inching slowly forward in the queue for the club. She slips past the bouncer inside the heavy black doors, wriggling out of her jacket and flashing the flyer with its promise of free entry at the bored-looking girl behind the desk.
The girl examines it briefly, then glances up at her. “Did you get this from Kas?” she asks.
Sadie hesitates, but she remembers the name of the club and quickly puts two and two together. “Yeah,” she says confidently, and as she speaks she notices a letter lying at the edge of the desk next to the girl, the name on it printed in block capitals: KASPAR KASHANI. She commits it to memory, and there’s something bizarrely exciting about this new knowledge, as if already she’s one step closer to him.
“Through you go then,” the girl says, dipping her head, losing interest, and Sadie nods and moves on into the club.
Under the hot red spotlights, her white lace dress glows ultraviolet and bright, dramatically picking out the lines of her silhouette. She sees herself in the mirrors as she worms her way through the crowd, and her heart is hammering, sending her giddy with the thrill of the lights, the music, the scent of sw
eat and marijuana. The bass line throbs through her, making her instinctively sway her hips, feeling men’s hands brush against them as she passes. She rolls a little white pill in her fingers and pops it into her mouth. Her lips are sticky with thick red lipstick. When she licks them, the sweet chemical taste lingers on her tongue.
She has spied him already, up by the DJ box, and she keeps her eyes on him. Laser beams pass across his face, casting it in neon light. Seeing him again, she is struck by the iconic familiarity of that face, reminded of posters and photographs—Elvis, she thinks, only darker, with Persian skin and eyes. He is staring out across the crowd, unsmiling. As she draws closer, her eyes trace the muscular curves of his body, pressed tight against a white T-shirt. She is there, right in front of him, not speaking, keeping a few feet’s distance.
She dances, feeling herself carried along by the heady rhythm of the music, her eyes half closed. She feels his stare alight on her, the spark of recognition, and it sends a shiver down the back of her neck. Sweat trickles down her back. She’s breathing hard and fast, still moving to the beat. When she dares look over, he is still looking her way, unblinking, his strange hooded eyes inscrutably cold, and for a moment she feels afraid.
He speaks to her, raising his voice above the music. “What’s your name?”
“Sadie,” she says, and she has to come closer to make him hear her. “Sadie,” she says again. She can feel the heat coming off him, prickling around him like a force field. She knows how this goes. How it has always gone. He’ll take her hand and draw her toward him, pull her into a kiss. They’ll go back to some dark back room and do whatever they want, and then he’ll be out of her system and she’ll move on.
The Second Wife Page 7