My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Outside, it was raining – a heavy, sudden downpour with drops like coins – but the air didn’t feel any lighter.

  ‘I love tropical rain,’ Marcus said, as we stood at the window together, looking out. ‘It’s so serious. It makes British weather look really weedy and half-hearted.’

  In the street below, umbrellas bobbed along the pavements. The bicycles wore bright plastic ponchos. When we ran to the shower-room, a grey, boxed-in building behind the hotel, we were soaked in seconds.

  We showered. Everything seemed slow. Cockroaches scudded over the floor, disappearing into crevices. Marcus turned the thin streams of water down to tepid, and then he washed me, carefully and solicitously, soaping my legs and arms, rubbing shampoo into my hair, scooping up water to rinse off the strings of bubbles that spiralled down the drain. I was suprised again by his gentleness. My nipples creased into themselves as he washed my breasts. As the rain rattled the tin roof, I braced myself against the wall, grainy and cold, one foot holding shut the door.

  A thought occurs to her, making her sit up straight, making her wonder why she hadn’t thought of it before.

  ‘Have you ever done this before?’

  He looks puzzled, seeming not to understand.

  ‘Marcus, we’ve been together for five years – have you ever, in that time—–’

  He stands and comes across the room, towards the bed. He seems taller, bigger somehow in this room she’s slept in alone for two months.

  ‘Don’t,’ she orders, holding up her hands, ‘don’t come anywhere near me.’

  But she hears the lack of conviction in her voice, and realises she is cold with the craving for physical contact. He crawls over the bed towards her, pulls her to him and as she registers the familiar breadth and smell and weight of him, she feels the first tears come. They surprise her – rapid and hot, they wrench up from her stomach and spill down her face.

  ‘No,’ Marcus is saying, as he holds her head to his chest, ‘never, Sinead, never.’

  ‘But how do I know?’ she sobs against him. ‘How do I know you’ve not been doing this all the way along? You might have been shagging left, right and centre the whole time.’

  ‘I haven’t. I promise you I haven’t.

  ‘But how can I believe you?’

  ‘Because I wouldn’t do that to you.’

  She shoves him away from her so hard he falls back on the bed. ‘You just have,’ she says.

  Washed and dressed in clothes that still smelt of my house in England, I sat opposite him in a café. He hadn’t eaten for a whole day, and ordered amazing amounts of food from the menu. Steamed dumplings in bamboo pots kept arriving, their tops pursed together like pale lips. I was feeling a bit peculiar, disjointed: my hunger had vanished and I seemed to be having difficulty in catching up with my life. Every time I glanced around me, and saw buffalo-drawn carts, a whole family on a single bicycle, a man dragging a goat on a string, I’d get a slight shock; I’d look at him, and think for a split second, who are you, and what I am doing here?

  He pulled from his pocket a pair of metal chopsticks; with one hand he levered torn strips of dumpling into his mouth, with the other he sketched a diagram of a teacher-training college he’d seen in Beijing.

  ‘The roof isn’t fluted,’ he was saying, ‘like a pagoda, but slanted like this.’

  I shifted in my seat, drawing up one leg under the other. It was late afternoon but we’d just emerged from bed. A secret ache pulled at the insides of my thighs. I felt a strange urge for cigarettes I’d given up four years previously.

  Things have degenerated into cyclical exhaustion and worn tracks of unsatisfied anger. She is sobbing. Pain is bleeding across her forehead into her temples. The bed is covered in wet tissues. Marcus is lying on his front, his head propped up between his hands. They are both shouting.

  ‘Are you telling me,’ he is demanding, ‘you’ve never, not once, in all the years we’ve been together, thought about sleeping with someone else?’

  ‘No. Of course I’m not saying that. The point is—–’

  ‘Who?’ he says sharply. ‘Who have you wanted to sleep with?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Marcus, listen to me—–’

  ‘Tell me. Who?’

  ‘Shut up. Just—–’

  ‘I want to know. Which men, out of all the ones we know—–’

  ‘All I’m saying is—–’

  ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because you’re being stupid and jealous and because it’s not important and because—–’

  ‘Look,’ he says, slamming the sides of his hands into their mattress, ‘if we split up—–’

  ‘If?’ Sinead interjects. ‘If?’ And before she’s even aware of having made the decision, she says: ‘Marcus, I’m walking out of here tomorrow morning.’

  There is a silence. The air is filled with the noise of their panting breath. There’s no traffic on the road outside. They stare at each other in shock.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘you can’t. Sinead, you can’t.’

  She nods, miserable, tears sliding down her face to soak into her clothes and the bed and him. Pain and exhaustion and grief overwhelm her and she curls into herself as if with stomach cramps. She kicks her legs off the bed and lets her bodyweight carry her to the floor. Marcus leaps for the door, putting out his hand to keep it shut. She feels as if she might fall, but he holds her to him and suddenly she is face to face with him, the length of her against him.

  ‘No,’ he whispers, ‘you can’t leave. You mustn’t. How can you say that? You mustn’t ever leave.’

  And she has to close her eyes to keep on nodding because she can’t look at him at that proximity. He seizes her head between his hands, desperate, and turns her nodding into shaking, and she lets him, but as soon as his hands fall away, she starts nodding again.

  When he leaned back in his chair to catch the eye of the waiter, I saw his loose-limbed easiness, the calm well-being that permeated his whole form. It gave me a kind of anxiety. I wanted to ask him: what would you have done if I hadn’t come, or if I’d gone by the time you got here? I wanted to say: why did you ask me to come? And: what do you see for us, where will it all go?

  But I didn’t. When he said, ‘Shall we go?’ I nodded and started gathering up my things.

  And then she is tired and his body close to hers is painful and familiar. She moves away, towards the window. Dawn is greying the light behind the blind. Consciousness of the streets, the people and the city beyond those glass panes filters back to her. The blue walls look black still, but morning is only a few hours away. She has to work tomorrow. She has to give a lecture in four hours.

  ‘I have to sleep,’ she says, and her voice sounds flat and deadened.

  Behind her, Marcus steps towards her, but she draws away. The sudden movement from the bed has made the blood curdle in her head and she presses her hand to the wall for balance.

  ‘I’m going to bed now,’ she says.

  ‘OK,’ he says, and sits down on the bed, bringing up his foot as if to start untying his shoelaces.

  ‘Marcus!’ she says sharply. ‘What are you doing?’

  His head jerks up. ‘Taking my shoes off.’

  She stares at him, incredulous. ‘You’re not sleeping in here.’

  Guilt and confusion criss-cross his face like car lights across a room at night. He gets up slowly and shuffles to the door. Stops. Turns. ‘Sinead…’

  She is getting undressed. She doesn’t care. She just wants to be in bed, under the covers, her face pressed into the pillow. She lifts the dress over her head, lets it fall to the floor, unsnaps her bra, slides it off each arm. Eases the pants down her legs and kicks them into the corner. Climbs into bed.

  He is still in the doorway. He hasn’t finished his sentence. She doesn’t care. He has watched her. She doesn’t care. She pulls the covers up over her head. He leaves, closing the door behind him.

  Sinead cries again almost immediately. She
doesn’t sleep, but pleats the cotton of the duvet into itself, winds her fingers into her hair, worries at a dent in the plaster with a pair of tweezers until, as the dawn light bleaches the room, there is a cone of dust on the mattress next to her.

  We climbed a hill with a spherical hole through its centre. Marcus wanted to reach the top before sunset. The heat of the day had passed, scorching stones until they cracked open; but here, on a path next to a twisting, orange-bedded stream, under the dense vegetation, the air was dank and cool. There was the heavy smell of things rotting and regenerating. Monkeys chattered and shrieked overhead. A woman with a pole balanced on her shoulders and two round-eyed toddlers in buckets, fingers curled over the rims, jounced past us. Ni hao, ni hao, ni hao, we said.

  At the top, Marcus pulled a paper bag full of lychees from his backpack and passed them to me, one by one, juggling their pitted, pinkish skin between his palms. I sat with my back against a tree. The sun swung across the hole in the hill. A virulently green beetle landed on my arm, its antennae extended and reeling in the air. I shook my wrist and it fell to the ground, legs scrabbling frantically. I flipped it over with a twig and it flew off, drunk with relief, wings invisible with movement.

  The lychees had tough skin that could be pierced with a thumbnail, then peeled off like the shell of a boiled egg. Underneath was grey-white flesh, viscous, wet, the texture of eyeballs. In your mouth, they felt huge, almost choking, until your tongue split the sweet slipperiness and found the smooth, mahogany-coloured stone.

  ‘Sinead,’ Marcus said, his head in the crook between my thigh and stomach, ‘if I ask you something do you promise to tell me the truth?’

  I held a coil of lychee skin between my fingers. Its inside was already dry in the heat. When he’d arrived he’d had three-day-old stubble. He’d shaved after the shower and his face looked younger and softer now. His head was heavy. My innards shifted and resettled under the weight of it.

  ‘That depends on what it is.’

  Marcus opened his eyes, but focused on the tree branches and not me. ‘What was someone like you doing with someone like Antony?’

  I laughed and looked at how the paddy-fields below us were pulling down fragments of the silver-blue sky. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was just wondering how he managed it. What’s his secret?’

  I laughed again. ‘He’s not that bad,’ I said.

  ‘No. Believe me, he is. He’s an idiot. And smug into the bargain. After we’d all met that day in the supermarket, he used to talk about you to me all the time.’

  I looked down at him. ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yeah. Every time I bumped into him at the department, it was Sinead and me this, Sinead and me that.’ He closes his eyes and smiles. ‘I wish he could see us now.’

  ‘Now who’s being smug?’ I broke a twig into pieces with one hand. ‘He’s not that bad,’ I said again. ‘And you have to admit he’s nice-looking.’ Marcus grunted. ‘But I suppose, if I’m honest, I’d say that there’s not a great deal of choice in a place like that.’

  Marcus smiled again. ‘I thought so.’

  When the bedside clock has unwound to seven thirty, Sinead gets up. She pulls out from under the bed a bag. She keeps her thoughts very practical: pants. I’ll need pants. Bras. She lines the bottom of the bag with underwear. Trousers. Socks. Address book. Where is address book? In desk drawer. Pen? Also in drawer. Comb. By bed. Alarm clock. Next to comb. Toothbrush. In bathroom. Will get later. Also get cleanser, moisturiser, shampoo, pill packet—–

  She stops, hurries her thoughts along. OK, won’t be needing pill packet, what else, what else? Tops! My God, can’t go with only trousers. Red blouse. Green T-shirt and blue shirt. Blue sweater – oh, no, is in wash. Tears are falling now on to the blue shirt at the top of the bag. She scrubs at her face angrily. Panics. Starts dragging out the clothes she’ll have to leave for now and come back for, but when, and how, and how can she leave all this and where is she going? Um, um, take that vest top and need my diary and – and – and—–

  I’m leaving.

  I’m leaving.

  Marcus is already in the kitchen by the time she comes out of the bedroom. She walks down the length of the room on her bare feet. He doesn’t hear her and she can observe him as he rinses a glass at the sink, his neck curved, his shoulders hunched over, until he lifts the glass to the draining rack and his body uncurls, opens out, his back straightening. She wants to say: do you know how much I missed you, do you know how I longed for you all that time, do you know that I ticked off the weeks until your return like a traveller counting down the strung-out telegraph poles to home?

  But she doesn’t. She drops the bag to the floor. He jumps and looks up.

  ‘OK. My turn,’ I said, ‘When did you decide you liked me?’

  He crumbled a shard of lychee peeling between his fingers. ‘The first moment I met you. When you opened your front door.’

  ‘Really?’ I was impressed.

  ‘Sinead, I—–’ He sees the bag at her feet, and stops. She waits. He says nothing, so she goes into the bathroom and starts collecting her things. Toothbrush. In a mug with Aidan’s and—–

  Toothpaste? No. Wherever she goes will have toothpaste. Face cream. By the bath. Razor – no, will get later. Later? Another time. Whenever. Makeup remover. Open cabinet, avoiding reflection, which looks puffed and swollen and old: cotton wool, vitamin pills, hair serum, conditioner. These things she piles into her arms. Her pill packet she hurls, with a flick of her wrist, to the top of the cabinet.

  Back in the kitchen, Marcus is sitting at the table. She walks across the room and empties what she is holding into the open, waiting mouth of the bag. Zips it up. Ready to go.

  ‘I made you breakfast,’ he says.

  ‘Why didn’t you come and find me sooner?’

  ‘Because…’ Marcus blinked into the sun, thinking ‘…because I didn’t think you were interested. I mean, I thought you might be, but I wasn’t sure. You’re quite hard to read, you know.’

  ‘So it wasn’t the fact that I happened to be with someone else?’

  ‘Oh, God, no.’ He grinned. ‘I wouldn’t let a little thing like that stand in my way. Especially if it was only Antony.’

  Sinead sits opposite him at the table. She doesn’t look at him but looks down. Two slices of toast are on a plate in front of her. A yellow slab of butter. A jar of marmalade, twists of stippled peel suspended in orange jelly. A thin, blunt-bladed knife with a bone handle. Water in a glass. Is it the same one he was washing a minute ago? No, there it is, still drying on the rack. It’s the same type – a thick bottom like a lens, and octagonal sides. She’s always liked the solid, geometric-ness of them. They bought them together in—–

  ‘I know you’re not really going,’ she hears him say.

  She is surprised. And doesn’t know what to say. So she says nothing. He scrapes the blade of his knife over the surface of the toast. Skkklllrrrufff. Reaches the end of it into the marmalade pot.

  At that moment, Aidan appears out of his room. Marcus lets his knife fall into the pot and turns quickly, almost nervously. ‘Aidan! Hi!’

  Aidan grunts. Sinead doesn’t look up, but sees his feet pace towards the kitchen, hesitate, then move towards her. He is bending over her, very close, close enough for her to catch a wave of him – soap, washing-powder, leather from the jacket he’s holding. She turns to him involuntarily and sees that he is looking right into her face. His hand is outstretched for the car keys on the table next to her. His fingers curl round them, then he is dropping them into his pocket, struggling into his jacket, crossing to the door, through it, and gone.

  Sinead stands, pulls a cardigan around her, pushes her feet into her shoes, and goes over to her bag. She can’t find a way to hold it that’s comfortable: gripped in her hand it knocks against her leg; over her shoulder it pulls too much on her neck. Stupid design for a bag. Where did she get it anyway? She settles for it hooked over
her forearm and makes for the door.

  ‘Why did you agree to come?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Not good enough,’ he retorted. ‘Try again.’

  ‘Um,’ I writhed under his head, shifting my legs, readjusting the curve of my body, ‘I…er…Well,’ I said, suddenly cross, ‘you just disappeared. One minute I couldn’t even go shopping without you appearing to tell me what and what not to buy and then suddenly you fell off the end of the earth. And…I…well…I don’t know.’

  Marcus rolled up on to his knees and kissed me, his tongue cool, sweetened with lychee juice.

  Marcus reaches the door before she does. ‘Sinead, don’t go,’ he pleads, in a low, panicked voice. ‘Please don’t go. I’m so…so sorry. What I did was so fucking stupid, Stupid.’ He bites down on his fingers. His face is wild, afraid. ‘I don’t know what came over me. Please. I can’t…I can’t bear the thought of losing you. Please don’t go. Please.’

  ‘I’m going,’ she says simply.

  ‘But just for a few days. OK? Then we’ll talk. You can’t just leave. Not like this. We need to talk about this more.’ He clutches her arm.

  ‘No.’ She shakes him off. ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Well, where? Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Sinead,’ he says, ‘for God’s sake. You can’t just walk out on me like this. You can’t. OK, I did a stupid thing – a really stupid thing – but you can’t just leave. After five years, for Chrissake, you can’t just drop me like this. Please.’

  She pulls open the door and she can hardly see the staircase in front of her, which leads down into the depths of the building, and before she heads off down it she turns and slides her arm around Marcus’s neck and presses her mouth to his because now she is leaving and not coming back and because it will be the last time, and it feels strange because she is crying and they are both shaking and her face is soaked and slippery and it doesn’t feel like it should and she pulls away in case it starts to and before his arms can imprison her and pull her to him as she knows they will.