My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘I looked what?’ Lily scoffs.

  ‘Hollow,’ Sarah says, quiet now.

  ‘Hollow?’

  ‘Yes. Hollow.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. Hollow? You can’t look hollow.’

  ‘You did. You looked…empty and…and worn out and…you looked hollow, I’m telling you. Like a part of you was gone or missing or something.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s too cold to stand around having a stupid conversation. Let’s just go.’

  Sarah seizes her wrist. ‘What is it, Lily?’ Lily tries to withdraw, but Sarah holds her tighter. ‘Is it Marcus?’

  Lily pulls her wrist free. ‘No.’ She looks down at her feet. ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘What then?’ Sarah sighs. ‘Look, Lily, for weeks now you’ve been…all funny and preoccupied. And you look like death warmed up. And I can’t take it any more. What is it?’

  Lily shrugs, silent.

  ‘It’s Marcus, isn’t it? It must be.’

  ‘No,’ Lily says, ‘it isn’t him, it’s…’

  Sarah leans closer to her. ‘What? It’s what?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Yes?’

  Lily closes her eyes. ‘It’s his girlfriend.’

  ‘Sinead?’ Sarah says.

  Lily nods.

  Sarah takes her arm. ‘Let’s get a coffee.’

  They sit on a wooden bench in a narrow alleyway filled with hard-edged winter sunlight. Sarah has bought coffee and rolls from a small kiosk in the brick wall behind them.

  ‘But, Lily,’ she is saying, ‘everyone has a past.’

  ‘I know that,’ Lily says.

  ‘And the people who haven’t aren’t interesting enough to bother with.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Then what is it? That you still don’t know what happened to her? Is that still bothering you?’

  ‘No,’ Lily says, then: ‘Yes. I don’t know. I suppose,’ she leans her head on the back of the bench, ‘I suppose it’s that it doesn’t feel like she is past.’

  Sarah looks at her. ‘You mean you don’t think he’s over her?’

  Lily flicks crumbs from her lap. ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Well, she did die, for God’s sake. I mean—–’ Sarah stops. ‘What I mean is, it’s not a situation…I mean, it’s unusual. However she died, it’s unusually difficult…not difficult…heavy. It’s an unusually heavy situation for…him to be in. For you to be in.’ She fiddles with the zip of her coat, agitating it up and down its track. ‘What I mean is,’ she says again, ‘that you shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry?’

  ‘You shouldn’t worry that you worry.’

  Despite herself, Lily smiles.

  ‘It’s a big, huge thing. Bigger than anything you or I have ever faced. And of course he’s going to take time to…to get right.’ Sarah drains her cup and regards her friend. ‘And he’s worth it, isn’t he?’

  ‘Worth what?’

  ‘The wait. Worth allowing him a bit of time. I mean, you like him a lot, don’t you?’ She zips her coat all the way up to her throat. ‘I’ve never seen you like this about anyone. You’re in deep.’

  Lily shakes her head. ‘Nah.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Sarah says, accusing, turning on her.

  ‘I’m not,’ Lily protests.

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Sarah leaps to her feet and strides off down the alley. ‘Are too,’ she throws over her shoulder.

  Lily gets up and, struggling with the pot, shouts, ‘Am not!’

  ‘Are too.’

  ‘Am not.’

  They run through the crowds, shouting to each other and, at the edge of the market, Sarah has to stop, breathless and laughing.

  A note on the table:

  Dear Lily and Aidan,

  I’ve had to go away for a couple of days – maybe more. Work stuff, mainly. The project’s going to tender and I’ve got things to sort out and it looks like I’m going to have to be on site. See you both next week.

  Take care of yourselves, M x

  She picks it up. On the back is an architectural drawing, or part of one; a slip torn from a larger sheet. It’s a bathroom from above. She is amazed at the detail: the oval sweep of the bath, the sunken dip of the sink. Taps, shower-head, plug-holes, door handles. Two toilets. Two? Why would anyone need two toilets in one room? Then she realises that one is a bidet. She wonders if Marcus did this drawing. If this arrangement of bathroom appliances is his design. If he laboured over every measurement, every angle, every inch of the flooring.

  Turning over the piece of paper, she runs the words around her head. Tender. Going to tender. On site. Work stuff. Mainly. Things to sort out. Take care. She lets it drop back to the table surface and looks about her, letting her coat slide off her back. The buttons clunking on the metal of the chair makes her jump. The air movement caused by the coat pushes the note off the edge of the table and down to the floor. She bends over and it’s only after she’s put it back on the table that she notices a long coil of black hair attached to its corner.

  She holds up the hair between fingerpad and thumbnail at arm’s length. She moves towards the kitchen where she gropes on the surface for matches, never taking her eyes away from that sinuous black spiral. She strikes the match and holds the flame to the hair. On contact, it sparks and sputters upwards into nothing, leaving only a bitter scent in the air.

  She seizes the broom by its neck and sweeps each floorboard in long, skating movements. The brush-head clunks like a croquet mallet against the skirting boards. What she collects in the metal dustpan – an aerated clot of dust and hair and indefinable fluff, from the quick glance she allows herself – she empties into the steel sink and drops in a lit match. The flames flare blue, briefly. From under the sink she gets a bucket and a tall, squeezable bottle of fluid. She squirts a thin, green stream into the ridged bottom of the bucket and directs a jet of hot water after it. Foam froths and masses around the top. She pulls on a pair of pink rubber gloves, their insides furred like moleskin, and she cleans. She scrubs the table, the counter surface, the sink area, the front of the washing-machine, the cooker hob, all the door-handles, the shower, the toilet seat, the bathroom mirror, the shelves, the window-sills, and then gets a mop and, starting from one corner and backing towards the opposite one in the way her mother always taught her, cleans the floor in wide, damp sweeps of the string-headed mop.

  When she’s finished, she perches on the arm of the sofa, her feet buried in the cushions, watching the floorboards lighten in unexpected patches.

  She is tired out by love, tired of love.

  He’s hot in the sun, which is pouring in through the large frostedglass window. He’d quite like to move out of it, into the shade, but there are no other chairs. The solicitor who’s dealing with Aidan’s house-purchase has disappeared with a sheaf of paper, leaving Aidan sitting there with nothing to do but fiddle with the cap of his pen, and think – follow trails of thought like a dog does smells. It’s like trying to keep a virus at bay, he decides, trying not to think about it and what happened. If you feel the warning signs of an infection filtering through your body, you take drugs, stay in bed, keep warm. But this is like a more virulent disease than anything else Aidan’s ever experienced.

  At the back of the solicitor’s office two men are baiting another, younger man. The victim, still in his late teens, is sitting at his desk, eyes fixed on his screen, giving the impression that he is working so hard he hasn’t noticed what the other two are saying. A deep red stain rising from his collar to his cheeks betrays him. Aidan sees that if they carry on much longer he might burst into tears.

  ‘Why haven’t you got a girlfriend, Matthew?’ one of the men with an even fuzz of sand-coloured hair covering his head is demanding. ‘Just tell us, Matthew. We’re interested. Is it because you’re boring? Is it because you’re ugly?’

  ‘Or is it because you’re gay?’ the other one join
s in, flexing a ruler between his thin, white hands.

  ‘Are you gay, Matthew? Are you? Just tell us, Matthew. We want to know.’

  Aidan shrugs himself out of his sweater and shoves it into his bag, which is lying at his feet. Tell them to fuck off, Matthew, he wills him, tell them to fuck right off. Matthew, shrunk into his keyboard, mutters something soundlessly, his hair stuck into sweaty strips across his forehead.

  ‘What was that, Matthew?’ The one with the ruler. ‘We can’t hear you.’

  Aidan gets up quickly, unable to stand any more. The two men, sensing a movement in the room, shift and turn towards him, their faces wary, defensive. Aidan holds their gaze for longer than necessary, until they look away, until one of them puts down the ruler. Then Aidan walks very slowly and deliberately across the carpet to the water cooler. He pulls a paper cup from the holder and fills it, silver bubbles streaming up into the inverted bottle. He drinks. The three men watch.

  Aidan’s solicitor bursts back into the room, shirtsleeves rolled back, shuffling pages in his hands. ‘Sorry about that, Mr Nash,’ he says, as he passes him. ‘I think we’re all set now.’ He stops midway to his desk, looks back at the men. ‘Have you boys got no work to do?’ he demands.

  Aidan sits again on the hot plastic of the seat in the sun, watching as his solicitor collates pages and staples them together. It is ridiculous, he decides: he tries all the time not to think about it, not to dwell on it, not to be always ruminating on the ‘if I had’ or ‘if he hadn’t’. But even today, when he’s completing on his new flat, when he can finally move out of that accursed warehouse, when he should be the happiest man in London, he can’t shake the unease that’s rooted itself within him.

  Lily is watering Marcus’s plants, which are lined up in rows along the kitchen shelves. She knows they probably aren’t his at all, but is choosing to call them Marcus’s plants all the same. She found a little, sharp-snouted watering-can at the back of a cupboard behind cloths, old newspapers and cleaning-fluid bottles, and every few days she gets it out and drips water into the dried-out soil.

  She is standing at the sink, the CD-player turned up loud, refilling the watering-can when, suddenly and without warning, the flat is plunged into darkness and silence.

  Lily freezes, her hands under the tumbling water of the tap. It’s as if she’s fallen down a hole. The dark is so black and so dense that she can’t tell if her eyes are open or not. She feels for the tap and twists it off, trying to ignore the adrenaline kicking at her ribs. It’s the key, she tells herself, the blue electricity key that Marcus showed her when she first moved in. It needs to be taken to the garage down the road and recharged every couple of weeks or so. That’s why the electricity has cut out. It must have run out. No other reason.

  No other reason, she mutters to herself, turning in the black, fathomless space, no other reason at all. She is, she estimates, facing the length of the room now. All she has to do is walk through the kitchen, between the counter and the units, past the table, through the living area and down to the electricity meter, which is in a small, high-up cupboard on the wall outside Marcus’s studio. That’s all. Simple. She knows the flat. She could do it with her eyes closed.

  Putting out her hand, she touches the counter top more quickly than she imagined, and she snatches back her hand in shock. She rubs her palm against her hip, feeling its definite fleshiness, its corporeal realness. It was just the counter, that’s all, it just means she is further to the right than she thought.

  Lily shuffles her feet and shunts forward a few inches. She battles silently with herself about putting her hand out in front of her. She doesn’t want to touch something there, to feel anything brush up against her palm. But, then, she doesn’t want to walk face first into anything either. She dithers, rubbing the edges of her shoes against each other then stretches out her arm into the black beyond and edges forward, the other hand resting on the counter edge.

  At the end of the counter she lets go of it. To her right now should be a dining chair with her coat over the back. She gropes towards it, just to feel the cool solidity of its metal spar. Nothing. Her hand flails in a black void. Panic jags at her chest. To her left should be the fridge and she pushes her hand towards it, and almost falls sideways when she comes into contact with nothing, a vacuum.

  Her breathing is fast and shallow now and she steps back, hoping to regain her bearings by finding the counter end and starting again from there. But she steps back and back and back again and there is nothing behind her. Just space and more space.

  Lily whirls round and then whirls back, not wanting to lose the way she was facing, the way to the electricity cupboard, the way to light and release, but she is so disoriented now that she can’t remember which way she’s facing and which way she should be going. She’s experiencing a kind of inverted, negated perception. Usually, it’s her environment and the people in it that seem firm and immutable, while she just passes through it, wraith-like. But now it feels as though the flat has dissolved into a black miasma and she is the only live, complete element in it.

  She stands on one leg and moves the other in a semi-circle around her, to see if it comes into contact with anything. Nothing. Her heart is beating so fast and hard that she feels dizzy and breathless. She tries clearing her throat, tries humming the song that had been playing, but can’t remember it and what comes out of her mouth sounds so disjointed and echoes around this sightless space so much that it, too, frightens her.

  She shakes her head, presses her hand against her leaping heart in an attempt to calm it. All she has to do is walk in one direction and she’ll come across something that will tell her where she is. It’s simple. It’s easy. She does live here, after all. It’s only electricity.

  She strikes out in the direction to her left. She expects any second to encounter the fridge or the bookshelves. But nothing happens. She keeps moving, one hand held in front of her, knees bent. She thinks about how ridiculous she must look. Then the idea that she is being watched plants itself in her head, spreading deep, gnarled roots. Watched by something that can see in the dark. Or something that doesn’t need light, is beyond light.

  Still nothing, and she continues to shuffle in her chosen direction, a small whimpering noise escaping into the air every few seconds, and, knowing it’s coming from her, she chooses to ignore it.

  Then her fingers meet something. She flattens her palm against it. A cold, smooth, hard surface. Glass. Which means she’s reached a window or the mirror near the door. She doesn’t get the chance to move her hand up or down to find a window latch or a mirror edge because there is a tingling, stinging feeling at the centre of her face. The very back of her nose. A familiar, dreadful scent is itching at her.

  Lily has never experienced pure fear. She thought she had, but realises now that it was some weaker, poorer relation of what she is feeling now. Pure fear is clean, flawless and contourless, almost tipping you over into the sensation of nothing at all. It doesn’t so much take over your whole body as deprive you of one.

  The scent gathers in the air around her. Lily screws up her eyes, trying to see something, anything ahead of her. Nothing. She can see nothing and all the time the smell is getting stronger, closer. It’s as if her heart has stopped beating now and Lily wonders if she’s going to die, if that is what this has all been leading up to, what it’s all been about. Maybe she should dart aside, run, struggle, fight it, but her mind seems to be divorced, elsewhere. She wants to say the name aloud, just so it knows that Lily knows it’s there, just to hear it, just so both of them hear it together. Lily is drawing in breath, her mouth ready to form the strange word when something light and damp seems to wreathe her ankles. Balance, then body tension desert her; her hand slides down the cold skin of the glass and her last thought is that her head is cracking against what, for a micro-second, she believes is the wall but is in fact the floor; and everything doesn’t go black but blank – formless and infinite.

  Something is to
uching her stomach and Lily leaps the rest of the way to consciousness.

  Aidan is leaning over her, his hand flat on her front, his other hand holding a torch, which he is directing not at her but near enough to her for them both to be in a capsule of yellow light. His face is shocked, concerned. Lily tries to sit up but her vision merges everything together.

  ‘Don’t,’ Aidan says gently, his hand pressing her down, ‘just stay still for a bit. Lie flat.’

  He puts the torch down on the floor next to them and pulls himself out of his leather jacket, which he spreads over Lily. The heat left in it warms her hands and she moves them under it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asks, picking up the torch again. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I – I – the electricity key ran out and…’

  He is shaking his head. ‘No, the whole street’s out. Didn’t you notice? There are no streetlights. They’re digging up the pavement down the road and they cut through the electricity cables by mistake.’ He laughs but it’s shaky – pent-up and relieved at the same time. ‘You scared the life out of me, Lily. I’d been in here for a bit, looking for the torch before I found you. I thought you were…’ He bites his lip. ‘Can you sit up?’

  He helps her upright against the wall, his hand around her arm. Then he rests his thumb and index finger across her cheek and peers into one of her eyes, then the other. Lily has never seen him at such close range and finds she wants to study his face.

  ‘Well, I don’t think you’re concussed. But did you just faint or did you hit your head?’

  His hands are exploring her skull, gently moving her hair aside as his fingers search and press different sections of her head. His touch is so assured, so tender and so unexpected that it seems to hit some exposed spot in her. Her throat closes and liquid swims into her eyes.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he is ducking down to look into her face, ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’

  ‘No, no, not at all.’ She rubs her hand over her face. ‘I’m fine. I really am.’