She steps back, away from the door, shading her eyes against the dull glare of the sky. The top windows look blank, impervious, throwing back reflections of their counterparts opposite. She looks out beyond the mouth of the courtyard and down the street. Two elderly people in beige mackintoshes are crossing the street at a painfully slow pace, followed by an arthritic-looking terrier in a tartan coat. She could just go. She could just walk away, get on the tube, go home, take off her makeup and tights, which are cutting into her middle, and sit under the flickering blue gaze of the television. She could just forget the whole thing and go. She jiggles keys inside her pocket, considering this idea.
But then she inhales deeply, imagining her alveoli filling out, darkening with oxygen. ‘MARCUS!’ she bellows. It comes out much louder than expected, and she giggles in surprise and a kind of private pleasure at the noise she’s capable of making. His name bounces off the wet cobbles, the polished panes, the windscreens of the cars hunched along the pavements. Then, above her, a window swings open and a man appears. It’s not Marcus. He’s got black hair. He’s also frowning. They examine each other for a moment.
‘He’s not here,’ he calls down, leaning with one hand on the sill, the other holding his hair out of his eyes. He looks as if he’s been interrupted from a deep sleep.
‘Oh,’ Lily says. ‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’
The man shakes his head and shrugs.
‘I was meant to meet him here at seven.’
The man looks at his watch. Lily doesn’t look at hers. She knows it’s about ten past.
‘No idea.’ He gazes down at her. Lily waits. ‘Maybe you’d better come in.’
‘Thanks,’ she mutters.
Moments later, the heavy grey door opens on to the street. It swings outwards, the man pushing it with his foot. Lily has to duck in under his arm. ‘Thanks,’ she says.
He is examining her curiously, unsmilingly; she beams back at him. Sulky people always make her want to do this – annoy and irritate them out of their glumness. Then he lets the door slam closed and they are plunged into complete darkness. Lily starts and puts up her hand to feel for a wall, a surface. She would never admit it to anyone, but she’s never liked the dark. She is locked into the foyer of a large warehouse in darkness with a man she’s never met. She has a dim memory of seeing some stairs climbing up and turning a corner, but are they to her left or to her right?
‘Dark, isn’t it?’ she hears herself say to the grumpy bloke, but her voice sounds high and thin.
There is no response. Lily shuffles her feet towards where she thinks the stairs might be, holding her arm outstretched. The floor surface feels grainy. Something crunches underfoot.
‘This way.’
The voice is very close to her ear, and on the other side of her head. He must have moved around her and she didn’t even notice.
‘Is there a light?’ she says, turning her face towards the direction of his voice.
‘There’s one up here.’
His voice is further away now, higher up. He must have started climbing the stairs. An inexplicable fear infiltrates her like a chemical, her head hot, her breathing fast. She is telling herself off for being stupid, but salted water is prickling at her eyelids when there is a burst of light like a flashbulb going off: the front door opens, and someone – Lily is too blinded to see who – comes in. The door slams shut and a light is snapped on, and in front of her, holding a bicycle helmet under his arm, is Marcus. His hair is wet, velvet-short, holding webs of drizzle.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m late, aren’t I?’ He pushes back the cuff of his jacket to see his watch. ‘I am. I’m really sorry. I got held up by this idiot person I work with and I couldn’t get away and…’ He comes close to her, so close that she can smell the rain off him, seizes her arm, and pulls her towards the stairs. ‘Let’s go up. We mustn’t waste another second. Did Aidan let you in? Where did he go to anyway? How come he left you standing in the dark?’
She follows the backs of his shoes – different from the ones he’d been wearing at the party – up the stairs. The stairs are rickety, narrow and steep: thin, bendable boards and a wooden handrail slippery with cheap paint. They go up two floors, three, four, and on the fourth is a door left ajar. Marcus pushes it, and holds it open for her.
‘There you go, Lily.’
‘Thanks,’ she says, and they inadvertently catch each other’s eyes as she passes close by him in the doorway.
But she isn’t thinking about that because she’s looking around the room she’s been shown into. She would never have imagined that such a worn, dirty building could contain something like this vast, echoing space. Scrubbed, polished floorboards stretch away from where she is standing to a kitchen in one corner, a big table in another, to huge windows at the other end. Red lampshades hang from the double height of the ceiling; the wall from the door where she is standing to the kitchen is painted a pale green; the rest is white, with shelves and shelves of books.
Marcus has walked in, and is taking off his coat, slinging his bag into a chair. Lily advances across the boards, her shoes clacking on the polished wood.
‘Lily’s come about the room,’ Marcus says.
Aidan, standing at the long kitchen counter, drops something. ‘The room?’ he snaps, his head jutting out as if Marcus has said something obscene. ‘What do you mean?’
His anger pulls her up short like a dog that’s reached the end of its leash. She looks at Aidan and then Marcus.
Marcus says nothing, levelly regarding the other man. Then he shrugs. ‘Well, you know, we need someone to help pay bills and stuff.’
‘Oh.’ Aidan picks up an ice tray and cracks it between his hands. It steams as he slams it against the rim of a pint glass of water. Lily hears the ice cubes splinter on contact. ‘Do we.’
Marcus seems unconcerned by the venom in Aidan’s voice, rubbing his palm over his head. They watch as Aidan snatches up the glass and strides across the centre of the room. He then opens some heavy double doors and disappears like a magician’s assistant into a box.
‘Don’t mind him,’ Marcus says, searching for something in a drawer.
‘Where’s he gone?’ she asks.
‘Gone?’
‘Yes, gone.’ She points. ‘Through those doors.’
‘Oh,’ he laughs, ‘that’s the lift shaft. It’s his room.’
‘The lift shaft?’
‘Yeah. It’s quite big. About twelve by fourteen.’
‘Oh, right.’ She has no idea what size that is.
‘Have you never been in a warehouse before?’
‘No. Seen pictures of them, but never anything like this.’
‘When we found it,’ he has moved into the kitchen area now, and is putting the ice tray back into the steel-fronted fridge, ‘it was just a shell.’
Lily leans against the other side of the counter. ‘A shell? Really? None of this,’ she waves her arm, taking in the kitchen, the lights, a small area boxed in by glass bricks that she assumes is a bathroom and, down past Aidan’s lift shaft, near the windows, two doors leading off the main space, ‘was here. You built all this?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You and Aidan?’
‘No.’ His voice drops, diving down to sound low in his body, making her look up. There is a pause. Marcus runs his finger along the side of the counter, his head bowed. ‘Me and my girlfriend.’
The words make Lily feel as though she is standing on a floor made of rice paper. He has a girlfriend. He has a girlfriend. The fact turns over and over in her head, and, aware that he is looking at her, she has to smile and nod when she actually feels as if she is missing a skin. ‘Sinead?’ she asks, and the word feels odd in her mouth. She’s never said it before, she realises, her lips and tongue have never conspired together to perform this series of shapes.
Marcus looks at her and the blue of his eyes is like the thickest, coldest block of ice. ‘Yes. How did you—–’
<
br /> ‘It’s on the bell.’
‘Oh. Oh, yes. So it is,’ Marcus says, his voice still unsteady. Lily feels confusion swarm at the back of her head. He stands up straighter, seems to push something off his shoulders. ‘Why don’t I show you the room?’
She walks after him, deeper into the flat, and as she does so she builds an image in her head. She’d be Irish with a name like that, so Lily gives her flowing skeins of burnished red hair and quick, green eyes. She is small, neat and petite, and her skin is the colour of buttermilk, with a snowstorm of freckles. She has a soft, full, voluptuous body. She says his name with a soft, drawn-out R. Lily is trying to assemble these elements in her head but somehow the image won’t meld, won’t coalesce.
When he stops at a door right at the other end of the warehouse, Lily sees that a partition has been built, floor to ceiling, across what would have been an alcove. She turns her head and sees that there is another room, built in exactly the same way, directly opposite the one they are about to enter.
‘You’ve done a lot of work, haven’t you?’ she says.
‘Yeah, we did. But it’s not too difficult for me,’ says Marcus, ‘I’m sort of…in that line of business.’
‘You’re a builder?’
He shakes his head. ‘An architect.’
She is working up to asking what Sinead does, but she steps into the room and for a moment she can’t say anything. It is rectangular and the ceiling seems even higher in this enclosed space. The outer side is dominated by an expanse of glass. The curtains are drawn right back; and across the courtyard, Lily can see into a room where a woman in a lilac dress is leaning on a computer, talking to a man with his back to them.
But it’s not the space or the dimension or the aspect or the deep indigo blue of the walls that stuns her, but that this room is obviously still very much lived-in: there’s a half-open wardrobe from which a tangle of clothes – female, from what Lily can see of their texture and shape – is strewn on the floor. The desk is covered in a tumble of loose sheets of paper and piles of books; nail-varnish bottles are lined up on the window-sill, their iridescent colours of blue, orange, purple, green, deep red glinting like cats’ eyes. The bed looks as if whoever it is has just got up, the sheet whipped up into peaks, the duvet flung back, the pillows with rounded indents, crumpled tissues scattered across the mattress. Up on the walls are black and white prints of Marcus running with his arms outstretched along a beach, of an older woman with a hissing tabby cat tucked under her arm, of Marcus again, this time balancing on one foot on the roof of what could be this building. A glass of water stands by the bed, and a book with a pen stuck in to mark the reader’s place. It seems as if someone has just left it for a moment, to fetch something from the kitchen or to answer the telephone. Lily feels uncomfortable, as if this person will at any moment return and find them standing there and ask, ‘What are you doing in my room?’
Marcus moves, and Lily sees him take two steps into the room. He stops by the desk and takes a leaf of a succulent plant between his finger and thumb. The tendons in the back of his neck arch up through his skin.
‘I don’t understand,’ Lily bursts out. ‘Is this the room? I mean the room you want to rent?’
He nods.
‘Then why – Whose is all this stuff? Whose room is this?’
Marcus goes to fold his arms, but he seems rather to wrap them round himself, his hands tucked under his arms, his fingers clutching at his own ribcage. ‘It’s…it was…’ his voice is barely audible ‘…it was Sinead’s.’
‘Sinead’s?’ Lily repeats, before she can stop herself, before she realises the import of his words. ‘Oh,’ she says, thrown, ‘I—–’
‘I’m sorry…all this,’ he gestures around him, ‘is still here. I intended…I thought it would be…cleared away by now. But…’ He trails away, touches the plant again.
‘She…she…’ Lily attempts to take hold of the situation, to steer the conversation away, but her throat is blocked. Part of her wants to touch him, and the other part wants to get the hell out of here and never come back. Whatever it was that had made this girl leave in such a hurry could not have been good.
‘What?’ he says, and his face seems weirdly altered in the bright light from the bulb.
‘She…er…she painted the room a good colour.’
‘Yes.’ Marcus presses his hand to the vertical, vibrant blue slats. ‘She did.’
They shut the door behind them with the pressure of both their weight, and as it clicks into its frame, they move closer to each other.
‘So, you like it?’ He touches her shoulder, but doesn’t draw her near, the space between them the width and length of a third body.
‘The room?’ She presses her lips together. It disturbs her, unsettles her; she wants to ask what happened, why did she go, when did she go. What on earth could make someone leave in such an evident tempest? What could end a relationship so quickly that you don’t even take your clothes with you? The room feels to her like the scene of an accident – perversely compelling to look at, but not something you’d ever want to be a part of. His face, close to hers, is tense, waiting for her answer, and his hands, pressing hot on her arms, confuse her. Something is telling her to leave, leave now, walk away down the stairs, through the mouth of the courtyard and never come back. ‘I love it,’ she hears herself say.
‘Then you’ll move in?’ he says, a smile breaking across his features. ‘You’ll come and live here?’
‘Yes,’ she says, nodding, more for herself than for him, ‘I will.’
He leans his forehead to hers. They don’t kiss, but their hands move over each other, slow and tentative, like skaters unsure of the ice.
When Aidan was a child, he stopped speaking for a year. Not for any reason – he just wanted to see if he could. One morning he woke up and decided that this was how it was going to be, his lips shut over his teeth, his tongue flat and still, a white, pure silence around him, and the clamour in his head just his, private, shuttered up.
His parents turned like litmus paper from exasperation to anger to concern. He wrote them notes in blue pencil on a notepad held together with a metal spiral. He was sent to a psychiatrist who asked him to write down what personalities he thought colours had. The children in his class at school called him ‘spaz’ and ‘mongol’ until his sister Jodie gripped fistfuls of their hair and rattled their heads like maracas. And when the year was up – he remembered the date, but nobody else did – he sat at the breakfast table and felt the words rising up in him like the thin thread of mercury in a thermometer.
Aidan sits in a chair, one leg resting on the other, one hand supporting his temple. He is regretting not taking off his jacket like the man suggested: he always forgets that the air-conditioning in this country isn’t as fierce as it is in the States. The chair is soft, with hard plastic arms, and is digging into the space between his shoulder-blades. He can’t find a way to be comfortable in it. Which is ridiculous, he reflects, because an orthopaedic specialist probably spent months working on the optimum ergonomic design for this swivel-based, seat-adjustable, back-supporting contraption.
Wardour Street hums, six floors below. He is sitting in the personnel office of the company for which he’ll be working. In front of him a man on the other side of a desk is talking. The human brain is capable of decoding up to forty-five different speech sound units per second. Maybe, Aidan thinks, this man is talking at twice the normal speed because he’s not hearing anything he’s saying; his voice is reaching Aidan as a low, incomprehensible drone. The man is trying to persuade him to sign the contract between them on the desk. He has got Aidan to drop in here discuss this. But Aidan isn’t going to sign it. Don’t you have anything better to do? he wants to ask him: take off your suit, go out, meet some people, have some fun.
Instead he makes an elaborate looking-at-my-watch gesture, and is surprised. He’s meeting his sister in fifteen minutes for lunch. The movement has caused a clink of metal a
gainst metal in his pocket. The keys. He’d almost forgotten.
‘I really must be going,’ Aidan says gently, edging forward in the uncomfortable chair.
The man looks alarmed. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Thank you for coming in at…at such short notice.’ He picks up a pen and proffers it hopefully.
Aidan smiles and shakes his head. ‘When you’ve made the changes,’ he gestures at the pages filled with tightly spaced type, ‘I’ve marked them in pencil, we’ll talk again.’
‘Oh.’ The man looks crushed, fingering the silky nap of his tie. ‘Oh. OK. I’ll let them know.’
Aidan nods. ‘Thanks.’ And he walks away, out through the sprung-hinged metal door, taking the stairs down to the street.
Lily is processing photographer payments at the agency where she works. A pile of unfolded papers sits next to her left wrist. She picks them up, one by one, types a number in a column, hits the return key and waits as the sluggish hard drive turns over. In one hand she fiddles with a paperclip, unwinding it from its tightly set form. Across the office, a woman wrenches open and slams shut the photocopier doors, swearing.
Lily doesn’t believe in careers. She had a ‘proper job’, as her mother referred to it, or the beginnings of one a few years ago, working as an interpreter, translating the strange desires, beliefs and objections of diplomats and politicians. But – and she hadn’t admitted this to anyone – she’d found that after a few weeks she’d become unable to switch off the translating synapse in her brain. Like a tap left running somewhere, it became the constant background noise to her life. Having conversations with her friends, watching TV, listening to the radio, some small, inaccessible, ungovernable part of her mind would persist in translating whatever she heard into French. And when the translating devil within her began to give a running commentary on each and every tiny act in her life (Ouvres ton porte-monnaie, prends les pièces – tu as la monnaie? oui – et mets les l’une après l’autre dans la machine, appuies sur le bouton, et maintenant ou vas-tu encore? it would crow at her as she stood in front of the ticket machine in the Underground station) she decided she had to take some drastic action. These days, she has it largely under control; only occasionally does her inner interpreter start whispering to her about herself in French.
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