My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Aidan?’ His eyes flick over her face quickly. ‘What’s he got to do with your interrogation?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she croaks, still coughing. ‘I’m just interested.’

  ‘Well, what do you want to know?’

  She tries to swallow, but she keeps on coughing. Marcus asks her if she’s OK. The peanut bounces around the inside of her mouth. She takes a swig of her drink. When she’s gulped it down, the peanut has disappeared. She’s so relieved she grins at him. ‘How long have you known him?’ she asks, with her new, empty mouth.

  ‘Years. We were at school together.’

  ‘Are you good friends?’

  ‘Me and Aidan?’ Marcus shifts in his seat, picks at the label on his bottle. ‘Yeah. He’s my best friend.’

  Without warning, a violent cough erupts from her oesophagus. She hacks and splutters, water springing into her eyes, her hand clamped over her lips, her lungs labouring for air.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she hears him ask, concerned. ‘Do you want me to bang you on the back?’

  ‘Nh-nh,’ she manages, shaking her head. The peanut seems to have reappeared in her mouth. She pushes it with the end of her tongue between two teeth and crunches it into powder. She breathes in deeply, then says, as if nothing has happened, ‘How long has he lived with you?’

  ‘Not long. A couple of months. He’ll be moving out soon. He’s been living all over the place for years – the States, Japan, Germany – and now he’s moved back here permanently, and he’s bought a flat. He’s only staying with me until he gets the keys for his new place.’

  ‘Oh. I find him…’ She pauses. ‘He’s a bit…unapproachable, isn’t he?’

  ‘You think?’ He considers this. ‘Perhaps. He’s…he’s been slightly…going through a funny time recently. Moving back here and…and everything. He’s a very talented man, you know, our Aidan.’

  ‘Is he? What does he do exactly?’

  ‘He’s an animator.’

  ‘I know, but what does that mean? What does he do all day? Draw cartoons and stuff?’

  ‘Well, a bit of that. But he works on films mainly. Animated feature films. That kind of thing.’ Marcus drains his bottle swiftly. ‘Another drink?’ he asks, getting up.

  In the cab on the way back, he reaches over, takes her hand and folds it into his. She stares at her hand in his lap as if it is no longer connected to her. How did it get there and what is it doing there? He leans over and his lips brush her face. Tarmac rumbles beneath them. The taxi dips in and out of cones of orange light. In the rear-view mirror, Lily sees the eyes of the driver swivel towards them, then away. Marcus lifts her hair and presses his mouth to her neck. It’s an expansive gesture, and there is something about it that makes her uneasy. The ends of her hair fall back into his face too soon. His hand travels up too far into empty air. She thinks: My hair is too short for that. She thinks: that gesture belongs to Sinead.

  At the flat, he pulls her into his room and takes off her clothes one by one, dropping them to the floor.

  ‘Let’s turn the light off,’ she says.

  In the morning she is waiting for Lily, sitting on the washing machine. Lily nearly cries out, but clamps shut her mouth just in time. Her throat is prickly with thirst after the alcohol last night, but she cannot bring herself to go near her. The kitchen taps are only a short reach from the washing-machine, and to get to the bathroom, she’d have to pass through the gap between the counter and the machine. What if she reached for her, touched her, grasped her?

  Lily brings her clothes into the big room and dumps them on the floor, getting dressed with Sinead sitting just ten feet away. Lily stares at her and she stares at Lily as Lily slides on her underwear, yanks a sweater over her head, pulls up the side zip of her skirt. Dressing in the bedroom while this is out here would be worse. At least she knows where it is if she keeps her eyes on it. One foot dangles over the washing-machine’s convex, eye-like door, the other is tucked underneath her. Her fingers rest in her lap, twisting, curling, knotting into each other.

  After that, it gets worse.

  Lily wakes with a jolt, knowing somehow that she’s been standing there for some time. She is lying in the sarcophagus hollow made by Sinead’s body in the mattress. Marcus sleeps next to her, the covers pulled up round his shoulders.

  Sinead is standing, pressed in between the bed and the wall. Lily’s leg lies alongside her. She is dressed only in a vest and knickers. Her arms and legs are pale and smooth as soap. Lily’s breath rattles in her throat. She’s been staring at them while they slept. Her face is drawn, the texture of candle-wax, a small V between her brows. Lily cannot look at it for long, but she sees more misery there than she can ever imagine.

  The moment stretches. The room is jagged with the dark mounds of furniture; a vase looms on the table, the lamp’s face is angled towards her. Sinead seems to be breathing, the blunted peaks of her breasts rising and falling beneath the vest.

  ‘Please, please, please.’ The muttered words break from Lily’s lips. ‘What is it that you want?’ She clenches her eyes shut, her fingers gripping Marcus’s shoulder. He sighs and turns towards her. Everything is icy: her hands, her hair, her limbs. The heat from Marcus fizzles out as it reaches her skin. She can feel, metres and metres below the infrastructure of the building and the streets, the shaking of the first Underground trains of the morning.

  When she opens her eyes again, she sees that Sinead is creeping in slowed-down, mesmeric steps, as if walking through water, towards the door.

  Lily moves her dry tongue over her lips. Her teeth are banging against each other with the cold, trapping wedges of her mouth. There is a swelling pressure in her bladder, but nothing, nothing would persuade her to leave this bed.

  Then she is everywhere: leaning against the fridge, behind doors, reflected in the windows, standing at the basin, crouched in the wardrobe in the morning, hanging around the flat door, sitting straight-backed on the sofa. She is always watching Lily, fixing her with a look that seems to veer between sadness and a kind of soft frown, almost like confusion or concern.

  And it seems to Lily that the flat itself is conspiring against her. Doors swing back in her face. Locks stick around her key. Plugs spark under her touch. The refrigerator refuses to open, then yields easily to Aidan’s hand. The hot-water taps give only cold water then scalding, skin-peeling jets. Stacked arrangements of tins crumble and clatter if she so much as passes. The blue flame of the cooker ring gutters out, leaving wreaths of sour gas hanging in the air. The phone rings then cuts dead. A bike in the hallway crashes to its side. Her clothes slip their hangers and lie in creased, lifeless heaps at the bottom of the wardrobe. Stair-edges seem to shift and multiply beneath her feet, tripping her, leaving a grey-mauve line along her forehead. Table corners leap out at her. The kettle boils but won’t switch itself off, filling the kitchen with burning billows of steam that condense in a transparent slick on the walls that makes Marcus tut and run his finger down it.

  It’s as if she seethes from every door lock, every cupboard hinge, every lightbulb, every nail, every brick, the putty holding in the windows, the water that circulates in the radiators.

  Sleep eludes Lily. Waking hours gnaw at those she spends unconscious. Violet shadows leak into the hollows under her eyes. She tears at her nails until the skin is pale, peeled and raw, her fingertips tender, her fingerprints blurred. Headaches pincer her temples by the afternoon. She dozes on buses, misses her stop, and trips as she stumbles off to the pavement. She finds she has begun forgetting words: in the middle of a sentence, she’ll be pulled up short by a blank in her mind. She’ll know the shape of the word, she’ll be able to envisage the object, but its syllables aren’t where she usually finds them.

  She is sitting on her bed one morning, getting ready to pick up Laurence, bending over to tie her trainers when her nose catches a scent: faint, sensual. Jasmine? But she knows it – it clings to the room she lives in, to certain cushions on the sofa, to a sh
elf in the bathroom. She doesn’t move, but crouches over her shoes, waiting. The air around her seems to thicken and curdle. The scent becomes stronger. She feels it scorching a path along her nose and the back of her mouth until she can almost taste it, feel it smarting at her eyelids. She blinks, water rimming the edges of her vision. In front of her there seems to be a shadow. Or less of a shadow than a shape, as if oxygen is densifying, its molecules buzzing faster and closer and closer together. She can’t see it if she looks straight at it, but if she blinks at it askance, the elements in the atmosphere seem to be pulling themselves into a shape. A definite shape. The shape of a pair of feet, standing on the boards before her.

  Lily gulps at the air, but the scent is so strong she almost chokes. She wants to shut up her lips and nostrils like a seal under water. She can’t look up, can’t raise her head to see what she knows will be towering above her. Her fingers fumble with her laces, which have become as slippery as liquorice between her frozen knuckles. She doesn’t wait but makes a run for the door, laces snagging at her feet.

  ‘Relax,’ Jodie commands, her body curved like a comma over the steering wheel.

  ‘I am relaxed,’ Aidan replies and, as if to prove it, spreads his fingers out on his thighs. ‘I’m calm.’ He pulls his face into a fixed, false grin. ‘I am enjoying myself,’ he says, in the robot voice they invented as children.

  His sister shoots him a look. She is clearly trying to come up with a retort.

  ‘Eyes on the road, please,’ he incants, in the same voice.

  ‘You are so––’ Jodie begins, and the car veers towards the line of parked vehicles at the side of the road. Aidan puts out his hand and nudges the wheel.

  ‘Get off!’ she shrieks. ‘I’m driving!’

  ‘I know you are. I just don’t want you to take all those wing mirrors with you.’

  ‘Like scalps,’ she says, with relish.

  ‘Er, perhaps. Hang a left here, would you?’

  ‘Hang a left?’ she repeats, mocking. ‘You’ve spent too much time in America.’

  ‘I’d never deny it,’ he says quickly, then: ‘Handbrake. Into neutral. OK. First gear. Foot off the clutch.’ The car leapfrogs forward then judders to a halt. Someone behind blasts their horn, three perfect semi-quavers.

  ‘You impatient bloody bastard boy racer!’ Jodie yells at the rear-view mirror, yanking at the handbrake, then mutters to herself about the restarting procedure.

  ‘Road rage,’ he warns.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Foot off the clutch slowly,’ Aidan says, ‘slowly, slowly. That’s it.’ The car glides forward in a steady curve. ‘Perfect.’

  Jodie pulls the gearstick back into second. ‘I have to pass this time, I have to,’ she moans softly.

  ‘You will.’

  ‘I have to,’ she repeats. ‘I’ll never get promoted otherwise. And I really don’t want to be one of those women who can’t drive. You know the ones.’ She sighs and slumps down in the driving seat. ‘Oh, God. I’m never going to be able to drive.’

  ‘Stop being such a doom queen,’ he says, eyeing a beige Mercedes approaching down the middle of the road. ‘Cut your speed for Mr Swanky up ahead.’ Jodie presses the brake. ‘You’re going to be fine. Is Rory taking you out much for practice runs?’

  ‘Ha,’ she barks.

  ‘What do you mean, “ha”?’

  ‘Ha.’ She shrugs. ‘Just ha. You know.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  They pull up rather abruptly at a zebra crossing. Her face, when he looks across at her, turns from orange to pale and back again in the flashing Belisha-beacon light.

  ‘Oh,’ she shrugs again, ‘I just didn’t think it would do our relationship much good, him teaching me to drive.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Aidan puts his head on one side, watching her. ‘I can see that.’

  People stream in front of the bonnet, pushing prams, bikes, scooters.

  ‘He’s being a bit…’ she scratches at the raised red parabola of an insect bite on her upper arm ‘…wearing at the moment.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her fingernails scrabble at her arm. ‘Too attentive,’ she says at last.

  ‘Too attentive?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How?’

  She considers this while she moves the car over the zebra crossing and out into a river-like expanse of empty Tarmac. ‘The other day, for example…you know I’ve just moved into my new flat?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well, he goes out and buys me an Ordnance Survey map of the area from 1884 or something.’ She looks over at him, pointedly. ‘And the house is on it.’

  Aidan frowns, puzzled. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well,’ she sighs, exasperated, as if he’s just said something really stupid, ‘don’t you think that’s just a little bit…too much?’

  ‘It sounds nice.’

  ‘Nice!’ She pounces on the word like an aggravated cat. ‘Nice! Exactly! That’s exactly my point.’ She sits back, satisfied.

  ‘But, Jodie—–’ He stops. They are pulling up behind a car at a large junction. A building site looms up on one side of them; a park sweeps away from them on the other. Coming out of the green, curlicued gates of the park is a figure that makes his words evaporate, dissipate into his lungs. A familiar figure is walking along the pavement, arms crossed over a bag held in front of her. The low, cold wind blows her hair flat against her head. Aidan watches as she waits for the pedestrian crossing lights to change.

  She passes within six feet of the car. He is nervous, afraid that she might turn her head and see him, sitting, hands idle, in the passenger seat of his own car. And as she comes closer to them he sees that her lips are animated, moving slightly, almost imperceptibly. For a moment he thinks she must be listening to her headphones and mouthing the words to a song only she can hear. But he sees her hair, stretched sleek behind her ears. No headphones. She looks white, gaunt, ill even. Her lips conduct a secret conversation with something or someone, her eyes fixed to the paving stones in front of her.

  ‘Co-pilot Nash,’ Jodie is shouting, ‘calling co-pilot Nash.’

  Aidan turns, blinking, towards his sister. ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  ‘What’s up with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Who is that woman?’ Jodie demands, leaning forward to look after her.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘No one.’ He claps his hands together, rousing himself. ‘Green light,’ he points up through the windscreen. ‘Let’s go.’

  As the car pulls away, he looks into the side-view mirror and sees Lily’s back receding into the distance, moving away from him. He feels somehow ashamed at having seen her here, as if in some way he’s violated her privacy, her secret self. Then the car moves around a corner and she is gone.

  Lily’s lost her. She’d been right there, right beside her, just a few seconds ago, saying something about how her sister has torn the ligaments in her ankle. But now Lily has found herself suddenly alone in the crowd, a man with a toddler on his shoulders to her right where Sarah should have been, and in front of her a woman with a large wicker basket hooked over her arm.

  Lily hefts the weighty terracotta pot holding the lemon geranium from one hip to the other and strains up on tiptoe in search of Sarah’s red-hatted head. They are in a Sunday-morning flower market near the flat. The pavements are lined with stalls, plants, shrubs, star-faced flowers, trays of herbs, ferns, bunches of holly. People seethe along the road in groups and currents, holding foliage and blooms aloft. Music pumps from one stall and a young boy thrusts a cluster of pink petals into her face. ‘Gladioli!’ he yells. ‘Four for a pound!’

  She turns round, turns back, then heads for the pavement, which is lined by the bare wooden backs of the stalls, where the crowds are thinned out. Sarah’s lemon geranium is covered in fine, invisible hairs, which prickle and itch at her. She walks the length of the market, then back, along the other side of the street. No sign of Sarah. The sun strains
through the piled, grey cloud and beneath her feet there are stray, blackened flowers, flattened to the pavement. When she reaches the place where she’d last seen her, irritation overtakes her. She stamps down the pot and sets her fists on her hips. This is ridiculous. She’ll never find her again. She’ll take the bloody geranium and go back to the flat and hope that Sarah follows her there.

  She lifts it again and starts forcing a path through the people, sidestepping bodies, turning sideways to get through. And suddenly she sees her, standing beside a stall crammed with lurid, sharp purple flowers.

  ‘Where were you? I lost you,’ Lily says when she reaches her. ‘Here, take this,’ she hands her the geranium pot, ‘it weighs a bloody tonne. Where did you…’ she falters, then stops. Sarah is gazing at her, frowning. ‘What’s the matter?’ Lily asks.

  Sarah sighs, looks up the road, twiddling her hair, then back at Lily. ‘What’s the matter with me?’ she says. ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Apart from the fact that my closest friend never tells me anything.’

  Lily is taken aback. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You. I mean you.’

  ‘What about me? What haven’t I told you?’

  ‘You haven’t told me anything!’ Sarah cries.

  Lily is baffled. ‘About what? I don’t—–’

  ‘I want to know,’ she cuts across her.

  ‘Want to know what?’

  ‘What’s wrong.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lily shoves her hands in her pockets crossly. ‘Nothing’s wrong. Why are you being so weird?’

  ‘I’m not being weird.’

  ‘Neither am I!’

  The two girls glare at each other. Sarah crosses her arms and then, just as quickly, points her finger at Lily’s face. ‘Something’s going on with you,’ she says.

  Lily swallows. ‘This is ridiculous. Come on,’ she turns round, ‘let’s go.’

  Sarah holds her ground. ‘There is,’ she asserts. ‘Something’s going on. I know it.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘I know it,’ she says, ‘because I know you. I was standing here and I saw you before you saw me, and I was watching you come along the road. And you looked…’ She hesitates.