My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She has a length of waxed cotton wound round each finger and she is sawing it through the gaps in her teeth. She makes herself hum fragments of a song she heard earlier in the day on the radio at the office. Without warning, something falls from the top of the bathroom cabinet, striking her on the head. The floss jerks up to cut into her gum. Red soaks quickly into the white string. Lily looks down. In the basin is a a medicinal-looking foil-covered strip with the word ‘Femodene’ emblazoned across it, days of the week connected by tiny black arrows. She picks it up. The strip’s purple foil crackles in her hand. Tiny round pills rattle inside their sealed foil holders. About a third of them have been punctured from their casing.

  Anger swarms at the back of her head, unexpected and potent. ‘Right, that’s it!’ she shouts. ‘I’ve had enough of you!’

  She flicks the blood-stained floss into the toilet bowl and, with both hands, twists the foil strip until it cracks. Pills pop out and bounce around the basin’s curves, disappearing down the eye of the plug. She pushes any remaining pills out of their cases and turns on the taps full so that the basin is flooded with icy water. She imagines the tiny white pills dissolving into milkiness as they are flushed far, far away. Then she crumples the strip into itself, piercing her palm as she does so, and flings it into the bin.

  ‘See that?’ she cries to the empty room. ‘See that? I’m not afraid of you! I’m not! So just – just piss off!’

  Her voice sounds reedy and weak to her, the high ceiling above her swallowing her words. The shower curtain moves slightly.

  Lily pushes out through the door, not wanting to look back into the room, not wanting to see the mirror – she has this fear that the reflection thrown back might not be her own. She marches down the dark warehouse and through Marcus’s door. In the semi-light she can see that he’s lying on his back in bed, his face turned away.

  ‘Marcus,’ she whispers, climbing into the bed and wrapping herself around his warmth. He’s naked and she is wondering if he always sleeps naked, if he never gets cold in this unheated crypt of a flat, if he always slept naked with––

  And she is keeping her eyes shut tight because she doesn’t care if she’s there, she doesn’t want to see, because this way even if she is there she is winning because she’s not going to open her eyes to see.

  ‘Hang on a sec,’ he says, and leaves the bed, and the surprise makes her eyes lift and she sees the darkened room and it seems to be tilted slightly but maybe it’s only because her head is tipped back on the pillow, and there is only her on the bed and Marcus leaning over a drawer in his desk. She turns her head fractionally and before she can clamp her eyes shut again she sees a minuscule draught run along the wall, lifting the papers stuck there, one by one. But he is back, and she is going to do this, she will do this, this will happen. And then he is inside her very suddenly, it seems all the way, and the shock makes her gasp and before she realises it her mouth and her eyes are stretched wide open and she can’t shut them again because everything is happening at once, and right beside her, crouched down next to the bed, is Sinead, her head angled to look right into Lily’s face, her features as clear as if she were real and alive and flesh.

  Lily has to clamp her mouth shut and press her face into Marcus’s shoulder, which is damp with salt and moving over her. It’s as if she’s split into two separate existences, one that can only feel and the other that can only listen to the other’s breathing and think of the thing crouching right next to her. But she is in the grip of determination to do this thing, to get it done, to have it out of the way and behind her. Somewhere in her mind is the conviction that, after the first time, she’ll go, she’ll leave them alone, she’ll vanish and never come back, that the very act of Marcus sleeping with another woman will make her disappear.

  When it is finished she waits until she feels back in herself before she opens her eyes. It takes a while for her to be able to see anything through the thick, pitchy dark that surrounds her. Then objects start sinking into grey – the chair in front of the desk, the window frame, Marcus’s form next to her, asleep. Nothing else.

  Because she’s not sure if she should stay, she returns to her room. She puts her hand to the wall next to her bed. The paint feels ridged, unreadable as Braille. Sinead painted these walls. Those imperceptible ridges were made by the fibres of her brush dragging through the paint. At some point, Sinead stood on this very spot and daubed wet, vibrant blue colour on to these walls, utterly unaware that Lily would ever sleep within them.

  Lily would like to scratch them with her nails, over and over, scraping off the paint, paring them back to the bare, colourless plaster.

  When she returns to the flat the next evening, six or seven people are sitting around the table. Plumes of blue smoke rise to the ceiling and low, throbbing music plays in the corner. Marcus turns. ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘This is Lily,’ he tells them all, ‘our new flatmate.’

  They nod or say, ‘Hi’ or ‘Nice to meet you.’ Lily nods from the door then walks around them to the kitchen.

  She pulls two slices of bread from a bag, their texture damp and spongy, and slots them into the toaster, eyeing the group. A woman with a short red bob and black hipster trousers is saying: ‘Frankly, Tim, I think they should be paying you at least five grand more. I mean, you got your Part Three – what was it, two years ago? You want to know what I think? I think you’ve long outgrown their design strategy.’

  Lily smears butter on to her toast. The knife edge rasps against the crisp surface. Bob-haired woman glances her way.

  ‘Has anyone seen the new Parks and Simpson building in Manchester?’ says a man in a grey army fatigue shirt. ‘Designed by some year-off students, apparently, and signed off by one of the partners.’

  ‘And you can tell,’ says Marcus, standing with a wine bottle gripped between his legs, pulling at the cork with a slim, steel handle. ‘Looks like a self-build scheme.’

  Everyone laughs. Lily swallows down clods of toast, watching as the gathering breaks up into smaller conversations. From the other side of the room is a shrill, insistent ringing. The phone.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ she says, putting down her plate. Marcus glances up at her and smiles. As she walks towards it, she hears the grey-shirted man ask him, ‘How are things?’

  Marcus’s back is towards her so she can’t make out his reply. She hears him say, ‘Well,’ but the rest is lost: she can make out ‘she’ and ‘me’, then ‘she’ again, and ‘each other’.

  She lifts the receiver. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Lily, it’s Sarah.’

  ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ The connection crashes and wanes. ‘Sarah? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yeah. Can you hear me now? I can’t talk long, I’m about to go into a film. But I spoke to that friend of mine.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘The journalist.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lily glances back at Marcus, but he’s standing up, cutting up something on the table with a long silver knife in each hand.

  ‘He says there’s nothing on her. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Really?’ She turns back to face the wall, whispering now. ‘Are you sure? You got the name right?’

  ‘Yeah. Wilson, Sinead. He couldn’t find any deaths registered under that name. He went back two years.’

  Lily bites her lip, pressing the phone to her ear.

  ‘Lily? Are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’m here.’

  ‘He says that it could mean she died abroad or…’

  ‘Or?’

  She hears Sarah sigh. ‘Or that her death might be unresolved.’

  ‘Unresolved?’

  ‘If the coroner’s still investigating it. Or the police. Or if they haven’t got a body yet, in the case of disappearance or…or murder.’

  Lily stares at the framed picture in front of her. It’s made up of rows and rows of people’s faces, all grinning for the camera. So many teeth, strung across their faces like necklaces. ‘Right,�
� she says. ‘I see.’

  ‘Listen, I have to go. You’ll call me later, won’t you?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Lily wakes to feel Marcus’s hand on her breast, his mouth on hers. She turns over, the sheet tightening around her. She is aware of being very hot. Things seem to be quite far on: Marcus is naked and so is she. She can’t quite work out in the dark the orientation of his body in relation to hers. Bits of him float and collide, disembodied, against hers, and her hands flail like webbed feet against the sheet, searching for a hold on him.

  She hears his breath next to her ear and she forgets, in her vague and bleared state, that she has to close her eyes. But there’s nothing there. Her room is empty. The walls, the ceiling, the door, the windows all look blissfully as they should. Her mind is a sheer, measureless blank as she comes; he holds her to him very tightly, cradling her head in his hand, as if comforting her.

  She sits bolt upright suddenly, decisive, determined. Marcus is stumbling about the room, trying to locate some clothes, muttering about needing the toilet.

  ‘Marcus,’ she says, ‘I have to ask you this. What happened to Sinead?’

  The name makes him flinch as if she’s slapped him, and he freezes. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Why do I ask?’ she repeats, her impatience leaking out. ‘Marcus, for God’s sake, we’re living together,’ she gestures around the room, ‘sleeping together and…I mean, this was a huge thing that happened in your life and I know nothing about it. Nothing at all.’

  He ties the dressing-gown cord slowly, and she sees that his hands are trembling. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘the thing is…’ In one movement he reaches his palm towards the bed and lowers himself on to a corner of it. She can see only his profile, etched against the glow of the streetlight outside the window. ‘It’s quite difficult to talk about.’ His voice is even, level, reined in. He doesn’t look at her, but winds the cord round and round his wrist. ‘When something like that happens it’s hard to…to organise it…in your own thoughts so that you comprehend it, let alone trying to put it into words so that somebody else can. I’m sorry.’ He shakes his head as if he has water trapped in his ears. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I will…I will tell you…at some point. I promise. Just not at the moment. If that’s OK with you.’ He grips her ankle through the duvet. ‘Is that OK with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, struggling to sound kind and understanding, when what she really wants to do is yell, no of course it bloody isn’t, just tell me. ‘Of course.’ She pulls her face into a strained smile.

  He gets up, stopping in the doorway. ‘I’ll be back in a sec,’ he whispers.

  She looks up. He is framed by light, half his face illuminated, half invisible in dark. Behind him, at the window where the building falls away to the pavement, a black-haired girl hovers, moving, shifting, crackling, agitation simmering in her face, her hands pressed to the xylophone bones of her chest.

  Aidan waits in line, a newspaper in one hand and the money to pay for it in the other. A man at the front of the queue is paying by credit card, and making very heavy weather of finding a pen to sign his name. People around Aidan tut and sigh and shift from foot to foot.

  From his back pocket his phone gives a single, plaintive cheep. Aidan pours the coins into the hand clutching the newspaper and pulls it out. He has a deep love, combined with a certain admiration and gratitude, for the items of technology in his life that he would never admit to anyone. He believes the person who designed his phone a genius: sleek but durable aluminium casing, tiny aerial, curved but unslippery buttons, and a blue light that comes on when he touches the keypad. The tiny screen tells him that he’s got a text message from Marcus.

  Aidan looks around the cramped shop. An undergrown teenager with hair shaved down to his skull is standing by a stand of CDs, staring straight ahead of him. There is something oddly fixed and static about him. Then Aidan sees that with one hand, he is shovelling CDs into his coat. Their eyes meet for a second: the boy’s arm hesitates, then reaches to button his coat. Aidan looks away, looks back at his phone. The boy flits past him and out of the door. Aidan hits the erase button on Marcus’s message.

  ‘There’s a bar that’s just opened, done by someone I really like. I’m going there now to have a look.’ Marcus is pulling on his jacket. ‘D’you want to come?’

  In her room, she kicks off her shoes and slides her feet into a different pair. She pulls off her sweater, which smells of the Underground and traffic fumes and air-conditioning, and puts on a cardigan from a pile beside her bed. It’s just been washed so she has to stretch and resettle it to the shape of her torso. Her hair crackles with static as she walks back towards Marcus, standing by the door.

  She is heading for the road to the tube, but Marcus reaches for her hand. ‘Let’s get a cab,’ he says, nodding towards the main road.

  The bar has a floor made of glass bricks, lit by bulbs from the basement. The expanse of light underneath her and no discernible floor makes Lily feel giddy and malcoordinated. She has to suppress a desire to cling gecko-like to the grey walls, has to force herself to balance on this skinless block of light.

  They sit at a table in the corner and she touches the angled join where the walls meet. Marcus has placed in front of her a tall glass filled with pink liquid. Cubes of ice shift and jostle in its depths. She puts her lips to its surface and her teeth and tongue fill with the bitter tinge of citrus fruit, then the afterkick of vodka. Marcus is drinking beer from a bottle, its neck foaming around a sliver of lime.

  He has met someone he knows. A man with very tight green trousers. The corner of his mouth drools a cigarette. His ash falls in flecks to the surface of Lily’s drink until she moves it out of his way. At her eye level is his exposed navel. A very neat line of black hair, so neat it could have been drawn on with a marker pen, runs from his belly button to disappear into the waistband of his trousers.

  ‘I’ve never been to Dallas,’ Marcus is saying.

  ‘You must go,’ the man says, with a kind of religious fervour, and, as if to emphasise Dallas’s wondrousness, touches Marcus on the shoulder with his cigarette hand. A snake of grey ash is left on Marcus’s sleeve. He doesn’t notice.

  Dallas. Funny word. Backwards, it spells ‘salad’. Almost. She takes in another mouthful of her drink and looks at Marcus. His brow is creased and he is holding himself slightly away from this man. He doesn’t like him, she sees.

  ‘But have you seen the one in Reykjavik?’ Marcus asks.

  Reykjavik? He’s been to Reykjavik? When did you go to Reykjavik? she wants to shout. Her mind is filled with an image of him and Sinead swimming naked, hair slicked to their heads, in a steaming, sulphurous pool. She thinks: I don’t know anything about you.

  ‘Sorry about that.’ Marcus turns back to her when the man finally leaves.

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Oh, some bloke.’ He flicks his hand in the man’s direction. ‘He goes out with someone I used to work with.’

  ‘When did you go to Reykjavik?’

  ‘Reykjavik?’ He has to think. ‘Two years ago? Something like that.’

  ‘Right.’ She nods. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, how old are you?’

  Marcus laughs. ‘Why? What is all this?’

  ‘I just realised I hardly know anything about you. So I thought I’d ask.’

  ‘Oh.’ He smiles. ‘Well, I’m thirty.’

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘France.’

  ‘Any brothers or sister?’

  ‘A sister.’

  ‘Younger?’

  ‘Older.’ Marcus laughs again. ‘Anything else?’

  How did your girlfriend die? Lily thinks. ‘When did you decide to become an architect?’ she asks instead.

  ‘When I was nine.’ He up-ends his bottle, taking another swig. ‘I w
as ill, off school, lying on a sofa. My mum had, you know, brought down the duvet while I watched TV. I had chicken pox. Anyway, I saw this Open University programme about architecture, and that’s when I decided.’

  ‘I envy you,’ Lily says.

  ‘Do you?’ He is surprised. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ve got a vocation.’

  ‘But doesn’t everyone? I mean, on some level?’

  ‘No.’ She shakes her head emphatically. ‘Not at all.’

  He looks confused, as if he wants to ask more but is unsure what. Lily doesn’t want to talk about it, so she says, ‘Do you like this place, then?’

  Marcus looks up at the ceiling, his throat whitening with the tilt of his head, then at the wall ahead of them. ‘It’s very fashionable, all this brutal, utility stuff. And I do like it. But this place,’ he rubs the underside of his wrist with his fingers, ‘is too contrived. It’s a bit formulaic.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s like they’ve got a list of all the elements a trendy bar should have and ticked them off one by one. Exposed pipes, distressed concrete walls, iron banisters, back-lit bar, glass brick floor, aluminium furniture. You know?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lily looks around again, ‘yes. I see what you mean. What are your buildings like then?’

  Marcus laughs. ‘My buildings? Non-existent. I haven’t built anything yet, only bits of buildings. That’s how it works. The one I was working on in New York – I designed the staircase and the ceiling.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You need to set up on your own if you want to build your own stuff, but I’m not really ready to do that yet. Got to put in a few more years in other offices first and do competitions in my spare time.’

  Lily plucks a peanut from the bowl on the table between them and drops it into her mouth. ‘Tell me about Aidan,’ she says, then coughs. The peanut is covered in a kind of dusty coating.