Suddenly she is alone and walking down the stairs and she can hear him calling her name, over and over, and the strap of the bag is cutting into her shoulder and she concentrates on this – and how she wishes she couldn’t hear him shout – and putting one foot down below the other until she is out in the street.
‘Why don’t you come and live with me in London?’
I was appalled. It was said in exactly the same, conversationally curious voice as his other enquiries. I looked at him and this time his blue eyes were directed right to the retinas of mine.
‘What?’ I said, nervous. Maybe I’d misheard him. He couldn’t have just asked me to move in with him. Could he?
‘I’ve got this space,’ he said. ‘My parents are going to lend me the money. To do it up. It’s my first ever project.’
‘Space?’ I repeated stupidly.
‘Yeah, you know, a warehouse. It’s an old Victorian garment factory. Top floor.’
‘Victorian?’
‘Well, thereabouts. Early Victorian, I think. Big.’ He holds wide his arms, then drops them. ‘It’s in a bit of a state right now. It’s a bit like camping, living there. There’s no bathroom, or kitchen, or anything. But it could be beautiful – will be beautiful. It’s near—–’
‘Look,’ I shouted, pushing him away and staggering to my feet, ‘you can’t just…just go around doing this all the time.’
‘Doing what?’
‘You know what I mean.’ I was standing with my hands on my hips. I almost started wagging my finger at him. ‘This…this…upping the ante all the time. Saying things…like that.’
‘But I’m in love with you.’
‘There!’ I shrieked, putting my hands over my ears. ‘That’s precisely the kind of thing I mean! You can’t say that!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because – because we’ve spent exactly one afternoon together…and…and you hardly know me.’
‘I don’t care. I do love you. You know that.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I blurted childishly.
‘Yes, you do. I would hardly have asked you to come out to China otherwise, would I? You knew that when I called you from the Friendship Store.’
I was silent, ruminating.
‘And you know what else?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You wouldn’t have come unless you loved me.’
That was too much. Temper fizzed in my sternum, kindled by incredulity and outrage. I snatched up the bag of lychees and began pelting him with the hard, pink orbs.
‘You arrogant swine,’ I shouted. ‘I’ve never met anybody so…fucking cocksure in all my life.’
The lychees were bouncing off his face and head. He lunged at me, catching me round the waist. I battered his back and shoulders with my fists. ‘Get off me! Let go!’
Straightening up, he grasped my flailing wrists in his hands and, with one of his feet, hooked out my feet from under me. Suddenly the sky was wheeling above my head and the ground came up to meet me. I didn’t land hard on my back – he was holding on to me, breaking my fall – but as soon as I reached the ground, he had me pinned down. Astonished and infuriated, I wrestled and fought under his grip, but he remained effortlessly above me, laughing.
‘Temper, temper,’ he said. ‘I misspent lots of my youth in judo classes. You might want to remember that. For future reference.’
I tussled and snarled, twisting my head round, trying to bite his wrist. ‘I’d never live with you!’ I spat. ‘Never!’
‘Really?’
‘And I don’t love you – I hate you!’
‘Is that right? Well, I love you.’
‘Fuck you! Let – me – go.’
‘No. Not until you promise to move in with me.’
‘I’d never live in your poxy, stinking warehouse – especially not with you.’
‘Not even if I paid you?’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Sweat was soaking into my hair and into the T-shirt, which was clinging to my ribs. I stopped struggling, exhaustion simmering down my fury. ‘How much?’
‘I don’t know. What’s the going rate for a concubine these days?’
‘How about a tenner an hour and extra for sex?’
‘You drive a hard bargain, Sinead Wilson.’ He sat back on his heels, pretending to think. ‘But your rates seem reasonable.’ He nodded. ‘It’s a deal.’
‘OK.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise,’ I said meekly.
He released his hold from around my wrists. Sensation surged back into my hands. I got up and began brushing grit, twigs and small stones from my back. Marcus picked bits of leaves from my hair.
‘You know what?’ I said, slowly and quietly.
‘What?’
I raised my hand to his face and held it before his eyes. The second finger was crossed over the first.
‘Looks like you’ll be very lonely in your Victorian warehouse.’
He snatched at my arm, but I was too quick for him, darting from his reach and setting off down the winding path, my boots pounding the stone steps. I heard him thundering after me. Laughter tore up from my throat and my heart sent spurts of blood shooting round my system.
Further down the path, he’d catch up with me and I’d shove him into the stream. He’d be so wet he’d have to take off his clothes and then we’d both disappear for a while into the thick undergrowth where no one could see us.
But for now we were chasing at speed down a twisting path on a hill in south-west China, the light of the day draining out of the sky above us.
Sinead is waiting on the platform for the train that will take her to Michael’s house. She hasn’t called him to say she’s coming: she didn’t know how to explain it, how to phrase it in words.
Minutes flick by on the station clock above her head. Blackened pigeons roo-coo in the metal beams of the roof arch. A man opposite her stares with brute curiosity as she cries, tears soaking her coat front and gloves.
It is very simple. Yesterday you had a boyfriend; today you don’t. Yesterday you had a flat where you lived; today you’re homeless.
She would have been going to Phoebe’s launch tonight. She imagines that, in some parallel universe, the person she was yesterday afternoon still exists, that somehow her identity has bifurcated and somehow somewhere she – or someone who looks and sounds like her – is holding hands with Marcus as they walk through the streets to Phoebe’s gallery. She can see this Sinead: she is dressed in a tight-seamed skirt, black-tongued boots and a coat with ostrich feathers curled into the neck. She is holding a bottle of wine under her arm. She and Marcus are talking about Phoebe’s funny friends, about Phoebe’s gallery; they are saying that they won’t stay long, that they’ll go for a bit then they’ll walk back, get a mini-cab, maybe, from a small, lighted room at the side of a road, and when they get back home they’ll unwrap each other like gifts.
part three
We live our lives, for ever taking leave
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Lily pushes the ends of her fingers, nail deep, into a slit between the planks of the table top. The wood is crusted with the delicate fractals of frost, but somehow doesn’t feel as cold as it should.
Sinead has stopped. Her breath leaves her body in grey-white streams. She is shaking, either from the cold or from the effort of not crying, Lily can’t tell which. She sits turned away from her, legs straddling the bench. Behind her, the Thames slips through the city, a black ribbon splintered with light. Ink-dark clouds race over their heads.
It seems peculiar to be sitting on the South Bank at a picnic table on a winter night. They are surrounded by other, identical tables, all deserted and whitened by frost. A strange muffled silence stretches between the river and the high concrete wall of the Royal Festival Hall. When people pass, giving them no more than a quick glance, their footsteps make no sound.
When they’d sat down together like this, Lily’s head had been filled with t
he protocols of other meetings – you buy a coffee, a drink, discuss where to sit, engage in chat about how you are, what you’ve been up to. But with this there was nothing – no drink on the table between them, no preamble. There was only one purpose, and Sinead launched straight in.
Lily clears her throat. Sinead looks up, as if she’d forgotten she was there.
‘So you left,’ Lily says. She finds she cannot look into her eyes. Sinead must feel the same because as she talked she stared dead ahead of her. When their eyes do meet, it feels too acute, almost dangerous.
‘Yes.’
‘The next day?’
‘The next morning.’
Lily rubs her chilled fingertips against her sleeve. ‘And you haven’t been back?’
Sinead shrugs. ‘I came back to get my stuff.’
Lily nods, remembering. ‘But after five years,’ she struggles to control her incredulity, ‘and that’s it? One conversation and then you went?’
Sinead presses her teeth into her lip. ‘There was…I didn’t exactly have much choice.’
Lily senses their conversation is over. Part of her has a weird impulse to reciprocate, to tell Sinead something – a secret, a story, anything. To stop herself, she stands up, ‘I must go.’
‘Lily,’ Sinead says her name quickly, in a new, thin voice.
‘Yes?’
‘Would you mind…’ she begins unsteadily, her teeth gritted, as if the words are being dragged from her against her will. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Sure.’
Sinead breathes in. ‘When did you meet Marcus? I mean, when did things between you and him start?’
Lily feels in her pockets for her gloves, somehow knowing that whatever she says won’t be the right answer. ‘It was at a party. At a gallery.’
Sinead stares her straight in the eye. ‘Phoebe’s exhibition launch,’ she murmurs.
Lily nods, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘Well, I must be off,’ she says awkwardly. ‘Thanks.’
As soon as the word leaves her lips, she regrets it, wants to snatch it back from the air. Sinead gives a short laugh. ‘For what?’ she says. ‘For Marcus?’
‘No. I meant—–’
‘You’re welcome to him,’ she snaps.
Lily scratches her head. ‘Goodbye, then.’
Sinead doesn’t reply.
She climbs the worn metal steps of Hungerford Bridge two at a time, resting a hand on her knee for balance. At the top she stops, reaches into her pockets and drops what change she has into the battered polystyrene cup of a boy wrapped in a sleeping-bag. ‘Thanks,’ he calls after her, then returns to his mantra: ‘Spare some change, please, spare some change.’
Half-way across she stops, leans on the metal barrier, and looks back to the Royal Festival Hall. The glass front of the building glows with yellow-orange light and people stream out of its doors. Sinead is still sitting at the wooden table, hunched against the cold. As Lily watches, she sees her stand, step clear of the bench, sling her bag on to her shoulder, and walk away towards Waterloo.
These things happen.
Sinead’s words are only now beginning to sink in. As they sat together, all Lily could think was, there she is, right in front of her, talking, telling her. But it’s only now, as distance stretches between them again, that Lily can start to turn over in her head what she’d said.
She looks down into the water. Boats glide, lit up and vibrating with music, under the bridge. She remembers, years ago, a story in a newspaper about two students – law students, were they? – who got into a fight on this bridge and were thrown over, their bodies washed up by the Thames Barrier days later. She wonders if Sinead had been watching her.
By the time she gets back, Marcus is asleep, the flat dark. She pushes at his door and peers into the gloom. He is lying on his back, one arm flung above his head.
Exactly. I wasn’t exactly.
She kneels on the mattress. Marcus sighs and turns his head, his neck flashing white in the dark. But his eyes are still closed. Lily, scanning the room quickly, stretches out beside him, fully clothed.
Her hand moves out to touch his face, her fingertips meeting the ceraceous, heated skin of his cheek. She leans over him, watching his eyes flicker beneath the lids. Her hand moves up towards the fragile, membranous pale of his temple where the bone of the head is at its thinnest. She pictures his skull, grey-white, minutely pitted, fused along meandering lines. Just beneath her fingers cells swell, pulsate and quiver.
Lily has never had a secret before. Not a big one. At breakfast the next morning she feels it curled inside her, hot and breathing. Marcus has an architectural magazine propped up against the teapot, folded vertically, the pages furled. His eyes zoom from one side of the column of words to the next. Then he is talking, saying something to her about a job he’s working on, a film he wants to see, a person he spoke to yesterday. With one hand, he stirs milk into his cereal with a spoon. The other rests on the table top, the nails blunt and clipped. Lily pours tea into her mug but lets the heat ebb out of it.
She breathes in through her mouth, feeling the air rushing past her teeth, and holds it. There are sentences crammed into her throat, waiting. Marcus has stopped speaking. He is transfixed by an invisible point midway between the sofa and the fridge, his jaw held in a crooked, concentrated set, mid-chew, his spoon still, resting on the side of his bowl. He is thinking about Sinead. Lily sees this and the secret twitches and vibrates inside her, the sentences twisting helix-like into confusion. She exhales, allowing the air to pass out through her nostrils. It makes a louder rushing sound than she intended and Marcus is roused from his reverie. He blinks, glances towards her, then down at his breakfast. His spoon hand resumes.
‘I’m off now.’ She walks towards the door. She hasn’t eaten any breakfast. There is a kind of ascetic pleasure in her light-headedness, her hollow abdomen.
Aidan stands in the middle of the skeletal structure of his new, semi-erected bed. Metal struts lie scattered like jack straws all over the floor. In his left hand he holds an Allen key – ridiculously small, he feels, for the magnitude of this operation. In his right is an unfolded sheet of instructions. So-called instructions. He doesn’t have the right kind of brain for this sort of thing, or doesn’t speak the right language. He’s not the right species with the right set of adapted physical features. If survival of the fittest depended on furniture construction from flat-packs, the Aidan Nashs of this world would have died out long ago. He only has to glance at the instruction sheet – large, white, with complex, incomprehensible diagrams of unidentified parts of furniture fitting effortlessly into other equally unidentifiable parts – and his mind just melts into a horrible, stultifying mix of boredom and frustration.
‘Jodie,’ he calls.
There is no answer. He can hear her and Rory, who appears to have a temporary reprieve, unpacking crockery in the kitchen, the click of china against china that takes him back to his teenage years, in his bedroom, listening out for when dinner would be ready.
‘Jodie!’
His sister appears round the door, her arms folded. ‘Hey, flat-pack king, how’s it going?’
‘I am not the flat-pack king. If flat-packing were a feudal system, I’d be the lowliest serf in history. I wouldn’t even be a swineherd,’ he mutters, looking around for something called ‘axel B’. ‘I’d be the swineherd’s…au pair.’
Jodie laughs. ‘Why are you putting the table up in the bedroom, Aide?’
‘Very funny.’ He is forced to take small, mincing steps through the heap of metal struts and packaging material towards her. ‘Hilarious, in fact. Now, can you help me find axel B? It looks like this.’ He stabs the instruction sheet with his finger. ‘Do you see anything like that here?’ He waves wildly at the heap of metal and wooden objects. ‘Anything at all? No. Do you know why? Because you don’t actually need it. Why would any bed need anything that resembles a small egg whisk? It’s all a conspiracy to make you think it�
��s worth spending an extortionate amount of money on a heap of junk.’
‘Stop being silly,’ she snatches the paper out of his hand, ‘and give it to me. Honestly, sometimes I really think—–’
The doorbell sounds, shrill and unfamiliar. They look up, surprised.
‘Shall I get it?’ Rory calls from the kitchen.
‘No, I’ll go.’ Aidan dashes from the room. ‘It’ll be Sinead.’
He hardly has any time even to lay eyes on her before she is over the threshold and pressing her glass-cold cheek to his. Then she is off down the hallway, hanging up her coat with the others on the pegs, and into the front room.
‘God, Aidan, it’s such a nice street,’ she is saying, ‘really close to the tube. And that amazing ivy all over the front of the house.’ She turns to him and smiles. The light in the empty room, filtered through the ivy leaves, seems to oscillate around her, green and cool as river water. ‘Can I have a guided tour?’
She is silent in every room: the hall, the kitchen, the lounge. She walks the perimeters, looking up, looking down, looking from side to side – verywhere but at him. Anxiety begins to pulse at his temples. On the stairs, she presses her palm to the wallpaper of dark, twisted, sinuous fronds and branches growing up the stairwell, then moves on. At the top, she turns.
‘Aidan, it’s beautiful. Really beautiful.’ Her voice is serious, modulated, her eyes rapt.
His heart opens like a book and he climbs the last two steps to reach her. ‘You think?’ He has to be looking at the stretch of the banister, back down to the front door, as if checking it for straightness.
‘Yes. Absolutely beautiful.’ She enunciates each syllable. He can almost taste them on the air between them.
‘Come and see the bedroom, and meet Jodie.’
His sister appears around the door. Sometimes their twinness strikes him as an odd impossibility: he looks at her and cannot imagine their bodies pocketed together in the same womb. And sometimes – often when he is alone – he feels an absence in the air around him, a chill down one side of his body that makes him shiver. Their mother told them that, in the final days, Jodie’s foot had been pressed against Aidan’s right ear, folded like an envelope against his head; and that when he was born it stuck straight out. They had to bind it back with ‘the gentlest Sellotape’. He touches it now, his right ear, as Jodie leans forward and takes Sinead’s hand in hers. He wants these two to be friends so much he almost can’t bear them to meet.
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