My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  So she has three jobs – none of which she cares about and none of which invades and colonises her mind when she’s away from it – which she does from nine until six, six days a week. Monday to Thursday she performs various administrative and organisational tasks for a group of actors’ agents; Friday she has charge of a mostly silent toddler, Laurence, from Stoke Newington so that his mother can attend her yogacise and pottery classes. Lily is supposed to be teaching him French, but there is a limited amount of conversation to be had with an eighteen-month-old, French or otherwise. On Saturdays she works as a bra fitter in the lingerie section of a big department store with Sarah, who is supplementing her weekday incarnation as an art student.

  Lily tells her mother that she’s saving to do an MA. Sometimes, she tells herself she is saving to go travelling. Or for her own place. Or for a computer. Or for some course that will train her to do something brilliant and interesting. She’s saving for something, she knows that, some indistinct future as yet unformed in her mind. When whatever it is presents itself to her, she tells herself, she’ll have the resources to do it. And, besides, the jobs have a way of soaking up time, giving life a structure, a momentum.

  Lily’s phone rings, making her jump.

  ‘Hi, it’s Reception. There’s a man here to see you. He says he’s got a key for you.’

  Marcus. It’s Marcus. Lily sits still for a moment, her pulse thudding past her ears. Then she saves her work and gets up. In the smoked glass of the office wall she is bleached black, walking in the opposite direction to herself, moving towards a head-on collision with a darkened doppelganger.

  At the front desk, under the candid stare of the receptionist, stands Aidan, a large bag on the floor next to him. Lily stops where she is. ‘Hi,’ she says. Aidan seems taller, broader than she remembered him. He’s not skinny, as the image she held of him in her head, but well-built, with shoulders that obscure a large section of the room behind him.

  ‘All right,’ he says, raising his chin in a kind of nod.

  The receptionist taps a biro against her nails, grins at Lily and winks. Lily ignores her.

  Aidan holds out his hand, palm up. ‘I brought these for you.’ Hooked around his middle finger is a ring of keys.

  Lily moves towards him and slides them off. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘The big one’s for the outside door. The silver one’s for the top lock. And the other’s for the…well, the other.’

  ‘OK. Great. Thanks a lot.’

  He shrugs, reaching for the bag.

  ‘So…where are you off to?’ she asks, hoping to stall him. It seems odd for him to leave just like that. They are going to be living together, after all.

  ‘Japan.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘For work.’

  ‘Right.’ She is gripped suddenly by an urge to laugh and has to pretend to cough, putting her hand over her mouth so that he doesn’t see her smile. She is aware that for some reason, this man has taken a dislike to her, and she wants him to know she knows. And that she doesn’t care. She decides to keep asking him questions, to prolong his agony. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m an animator.’

  ‘What do you animate?’

  ‘Er…adverts.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Music videos.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And some films.’

  ‘That must be great.’

  ‘It’s…well, yeah…it’s all right.’

  Lily smiles at him effusively. He looks away, at his feet, at the pavement outside, at the veneer of the reception desk. She decides to let him off the hook. He’s suffered enough. ‘Well,’ she passes the keys from one hand to the other, ‘I suppose I’ll be seeing you when you get back.’

  ‘Uh, yeah. See you then.’ He backs away and out of the door, his bag held awkwardly over his shoulder.

  ‘’Bye!’ She waves at him until he disappears from view.

  As she returns to her desk, she is accosted by Sonia, the woman who had been swearing at the malfunctioning photocopier. ‘Who’s the GLM?’ she demands, hands on hips, blocking Lily’s path.

  Lily suppresses a sigh. Sonia has an irritating habit of giving everything an acronym. GLM meant Good Looking Man.

  ‘Who was that?’ another woman shouts from her desk. ‘He is gorgeous.’

  Lily laughs and sits down in her chair. She glances to where she and Aidan had been standing, as if she might see some after-image of him there. ‘He’s my new flatmate.’

  ‘Nice,’ Sonia says, shuffling pages around, dropping some to the floor, ‘very nice. Can I come round for dinner?’

  ‘Sure,’ Lily says, picking up her next payment form. ‘But he’s not a GLM. He’s an RPITA.’

  Sonia looks up. ‘A what?’

  ‘A right pain in the arse.’

  She must have moved, jerked her arm or shifted in her seat or something, because the keys suddenly fall from the desk to the carpet. Lily bends to pick them up and for the first time she wonders if they were once Sinead’s.

  Aidan walks away, the white level light of the low winter sun obscuring his view of the street ahead. The air is still today, unmoving, cold, amplifying the sound of his footsteps, the crack of a car engine further down the street, the staccato shout from a window above. He shivers inside his clothes.

  Outside a shop, he thinks he might go up to the men’s department to buy a shirt. He stands in front of a display of identical shirts in twelve different colours and finds he is unable to make a decision. A wordless version of a pop song trickles from speakers hidden in the suspended ceiling. He circles a stand of ties and touches a pair of socks. Then he takes the escalator down, surrounded by tourists and rich, jobless women with expressionless faces.

  The warehouse is empty when Lily arrives. She struggles up the narrow stairs, a rucksack on her back, heaving at the handrail, the suitcase banging against her leg. Her mother, Diane, had offered to drive her there and help her ‘settle in’ but Lily couldn’t think of anything worse. After the flat she’d been renting had flooded, she’d been forced to move back into her mother’s, shrinking herself down to fit the life she’d had as a teenager, living in the house in which she’d been born – ‘Right there in that bed,’ Diane was fond of saying to almost anyone who would listen. Her father had left them, in what Lily always considered a flagrant disregard for male cliché, for his secretary, years ago.

  She’s forgotten, or failed to pay any attention to, Aidan’s lesson on the keys, so spends ages at the door, fiddling with locks and latches.

  Inside, it seems unnaturally quiet and still. The fridge trembles, notes pinned to its outer skin. A mercuried bead of water collects on the kitchen tap. The red lanterns overhead cast the room in a hellish, kiln-like glow. Her footsteps on the boards make a crashing, echoing sound as she walks towards the room that is now hers. She pulls at the handle, but nothing happens; she tugs harder. The wood seems to have swollen into the frame. She puts the keys in her pocket and pulls with both hands. Then she is falling back on to the floor, landing hard on the base of her back. Lily sits for a moment in agony, rubbing her back, cursing. Then she stops, because she can see through into the room. Slowly, without taking her eyes from what she sees beyond the doorframe, she slides her rucksack off her shoulders and staggers forward into the doorway, clutching with one hand at her injured back.

  Everything is stripped bare. It could be a different room. The blue walls are empty, the desk is gone, the nail varnish and books from the shelf, even the bed has gone. In the place of the big, rumpled-sheeted mattress is a new bed, still in its clear plastic wrapping. Just beside it, near the corner, is a small hole in the wall – a dent, as if something has been pulled out of the plaster, a distracting flaw in the wall’s perfect block of colour. Lily sits down on the bed, the polythene crinkling beneath her. The bareness makes her jumpy, wary, as if in all the emptiness there is space for something else, something other than her.

  Sinead must have met someone el
se, she decides. Maybe it had been going on for a while, Marcus had found out and kicked her out. Why else would she leave so suddenly? She wonders who came and packed everything into boxes to take away and whether Marcus was there, whether he and Sinead did the packing together, whether they argued or silently avoided each other, and whether the other man was there. Lily pictures him outside on the pavement, jiggling his keys impatiently, looking up at the windows, his car boot open, ready and empty, waiting to receive the boxes and take them to another room, another flat, another life. How could Sinead have done that to Marcus, when it was obvious to anyone that he’d loved her? What kind of a woman could she be?

  Lily gets up and drags in her bags from outside. She unfastens the catches of the suitcase and up-ends it. Clothes tumble out: socks, knickers, jumpers, trousers, shirts. She steps over them all and pulls open the door of the wardrobe. Empty hangers clatter against each other, but in the middle of the rail is something that makes her flinch in a kind of fear: a dress, strung by narrow straps, swaying slightly from the movement of the doors. She watches it until it is once more still. Then she puts out a hand and runs her fingers down its length. The material is cool and moves like liquid. It is dark blue, darker than the walls, and if it is pulled one way, the colour bleeds into black.

  Lily curls her hand around the hanger, lifts it over the rail and draws it towards her. In the mirror inside the wardrobe door, she holds the dress against herself. Sinead is slim, Lily can see, thin even. Lily morphs the image she has of her in her head. Why, out of everything, has it been left? Did she want Marcus to see it? Was it some kind of message, a private sign?

  She presses the material with the flat of her hand to her body, and moves closer to the mirror. A floorboard behind her creaks as her weight shifts and she gets that crawling feeling where her hair meets her neck that someone is watching her. Her head jerks round, as if she is expecting to find Marcus standing there, looking at her with Sinead’s dress. But there’s nothing there.

  As if it might burn her, Lily places the dress on the rail so quickly that it slips off the hanger to the floor. She leaves it there, slumped in a puddle of material like a discarded skin, and walks out of the room, fast. It’s another hour or so before she can bring herself to go into it again.

  Marcus returns just as she is putting sheets on the bed. The swathe of polythene lies crushed into the corner, rustling and uncurling. The acoustics of the place distort and deaden sound, and she doesn’t hear him until he’s knocking on her open door.

  ‘Hello?’ he says, leaning into the room.

  ‘Hi!’ Lily leaps across to slam the wardrobe door shut. She has shoved the dress to one side and crammed her clothes in alongside it. ‘Hi.’

  They stand a few feet apart.

  ‘So how’s it going?’ he says, looking about. ‘All unpacked?’

  ‘Almost. I’m sure I’ve forgotten everything.’ She is going to mention the dress to him, she really is, but she sees that his face looks exhausted and white, and it somehow doesn’t seem the right time. ‘But I can always go back and get stuff I need.’

  He nods. She finds she wants to look at him for a long time, memorise the set of his jaw, the way his shirt sits on his chest, how he grips his thumb in his opposite hand, as if she’s going to have to sit a test on him. She had forgotten the way his hair parts just to the left of his crown and how he presses his teeth into his bottom lip. She is surprised at how pleased she is to see him, at how strong the pull of her attraction for him is. And she is surprised at herself. She always thinks of herself – prides herself almost – as having no illusions about men or the reasons for her need of them. She has them sometimes, and other times she doesn’t. But this one seems to have got round her cynicism somehow, circumnavigated it, short-circuited it. She feels self-conscious suddenly, gripped by an irrational fear that she may, in that second, have become transparent, as if he can look at her and see her veins, spread out like webs, and her heart, pulsing, caught in the branches of her ribs.

  He smiles at her. Has he read her thoughts? He suddenly seems a lot closer than he did, as if the room has shrunk around them. She has to bend down, pick up a book from the floor and place it on the bed so that he doesn’t see the rather inane grin that has spread over her face. ‘So,’ she says assertively, then realises she has no idea what she is about to say. ‘Um…thanks very much for having me,’ she improvises.

  ‘It’s a pleasure,’ he says quickly, and touches her arm. ‘It’s really good to have you here.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, her hand moving involuntarily to meet his, ‘well, thanks.’ Their fingertips bump, his thumbnail touching the healing grazes on her palm.

  Marcus breathes in deeply, passes his hand through his hair. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘That would be great.’

  He disappears out of the door. Lily slumps to the bed. This is ridiculous. How long is it going to be until they sleep together? About two hours, by the way things are going. Sarah had been dubious about her moving in with Blond Man, as she called him. Sex with flatmates was never a good idea, she’d said on the phone yesterday, don’t shit where you eat, Lily.

  Not yet, Lily is saying to herself, as she walks towards the kitchen. At least, not tonight.

  ‘I’m working on site this week,’ he says, as he fills a kettle at the sink. ‘The builders are really messing things up, and I’ve got to be there to sort it out. I’ve been away working on this building in New York, you see, so I’m getting all the shitty, tying-up-ends jobs until they put me on to something big again.’

  He takes two mugs down from a shelf and shoves a tea-bag into each. She watches the way he does this – his thumbs flicking open the lid of the chrome tea caddy, his hands gripping the tea-bag like tweezers before he drops it, the two cups next to each other on the counter.

  ‘I don’t even know what you do, Lily.’

  ‘I…er…’ She laces her hands into each other. ‘I do a few different things.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m…I don’t really know what I want to do yet.’

  He hands her a mug of tea. It is too brown and steeped for her liking. She chases the bloated tea-bag around with her spoon, trying to hook it out.

  He crosses the room and sits on the sofa. ‘Do you have any ideas?’ he asks.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you know, it’s a bit of a thing with me—–’

  ‘What?’ he interrupts. ‘Jobs?’

  ‘Yeah. People are always saying “What are you going to do with your life?” and I hate that. It doesn’t mean anything to me. What about what life is going to do with you?’ She takes a sip of her scalding tea. ‘Have you ever—–’

  She stops. Across the room, Marcus has pulled out from under a cushion a single black leather glove. A woman’s. It has taken on the shape of its owner’s hand, its fingers curled slightly, its thumb almost touching the middle finger. He holds it up in front of him by its narrow wrist. His face is strained, set, but somehow unreadable. As she watches, he places the glove on the arm of the sofa beside him, smoothing the leather flat.

  Lily puts down her mug on the counter, walks through the room and sits down next to him.

  ‘What happened?’ The words have slid out of her before she can check them or stop herself or decide if indeed she should really ask. ‘Something happened, I know. Did she meet someone else? Is that it?’

  Marcus shakes his head, then inhales and holds his breath, rubbing his fingers over and over his forehead. ‘She…’ His face is stiff, pulled, as if he’s trying to prevent any expression making its mark. ‘She’s no longer…here.’ He speaks the words with great effort and attention, as if there are many, many more inside him that he’s holding back. ‘She…’ he hesitates, as if unable to decide how to put it ‘…she’s no longer with us,’ he finishes.

  Lily’s heart is giving long, drawn-out thuds. She feels as if she may very easily stop breathing. The euphemism sounds odd to her. It feels like somethin
g she’s either never heard or hears every day. She can’t quite remember what it’s supposed to mean. He pronounces it with a heavy, almost ironic emphasis. She stares at him, baffled, her brain resisting whatever it is he is trying to tell her. His mouth is twisted into what might, under other circumstances, pass as a smile, and she is experiencing a variety of impulses: to shout, ‘What on earth do you mean?’, to place her hand comfortingly on his arm, to laugh. Somewhere behind them a bluebottle rattles, butting its head again and again against a pane.

  Marcus raises his eyes to hers. It’s then that she knows, and horror crawls over her skin like ants.

  ‘How did she…?’ Her voice sounds strange to her, as if someone else is speaking through her. ‘How?’ she whispers, as if sound itself might hurt him, injure him.

  But Marcus cannot speak. Lily hears herself saying she is sorry, she is so so sorry, and presses his hand between both of hers. To touch any other part of him at that moment would have seemed inappropriate, a trespass.

  Lily pushes through the ticket barrier at Warren Street. A fine drizzle hangs in the air, suspended. She can’t be bothered to walk down to the pedestrian crossing so she dodges the traffic, weaving between the cars that slough past her, slicked with rain.

  Sarah’s art school is a grey building arranged round three sides of a square. As Lily walks across it, the spiked green casings of conkers split and crack under her feet, revealing swirled, polished brown. She bends and breaks them from their impossibly white pods. There is something about their weight, their firm temperaturelessness, the way they fit exactly into the curve of her palm that pleases her. She fills her pockets, aware of them as she climbs the stairs, shifting and resettling inside her clothes.