by Sean Thomas
— She can see us!
— Jesus!
— How long’s she been there?
Jaguar eyes pierce the jungle undergrowth; Rebecca has been spotted, and she panics. Should she make a stumbled apology for watching the men’s sexplay? Or what? Rebecca coughs, a timid cough, as if to convince them she is just standing here accidentally and she has not noticed they are having gay sex; then she hastily backs down the path and backs down some more, stumbling backwards on a tussock, tripping over a trailing root. She hears footsteps behind her; gaining on her. Gaining.
But not. At the last she turns, exhales, runs on, and pants out loud as she rounds a copse and steps out and finds herself out on another lawn once more; she listens acutely: the noises behind her have stopped.
A path lies before. Rebecca breathes and breathes easier as she walks the pathway, as a cool breeze from Highgate or Crouch End makes her shiver, makes her wrap the cardigan a little tighter.
Phone?
Rebecca reaches in her handbag and takes out her trilling cellphone.
Of course …
MURPHY
This time Rebecca answers her phone. She says:
— Yes, hello?
There’s a surprised silence at the other end; then Rebecca hears Murphy yelp:
— BEXX?!!
— Yes?
— Where have you been we’ve been Jesus your parents they’re freaking
— Murphy …
— They’re freaking out and I’ve been trying to get you for weeks and you’ve not been answering and
— I’m on the Heath. I went for a walk
— Sorry? On the Heath?
— Yyyyes
Murphy yelps again:
— Bex you’re not, like, going to the flat, are you?
Rebecca pauses, looks at the sky, says:
— No … but why?
— Just don’t go there
— Why? I don’t understand
— … He might be there
— Who, Murphy? Who?
— PATRICK!
— What??
Surprised, shocked, furiously working this out, Rebecca leans against a metal railing and slowly asks her heavy-breathing friend:
— Murphy … please tell me … what are you talking about?
— Rebecca … they told me
— Uhn?
— Your parents, I’ve just rung them, they told me you dropped the charges
Feeling relief and despair at once, so it’s out, it’s known, Rebecca gets an urge to sit down on the grass, despite the dew. The air is cool. Murphy is gabbling:
— Why Rebecca? Why do that? Why the fucking hell did you do that? Rebecca thinks, replies:
— I don’t want to talk about it
— Oh golly, Bex
— Please
— But why, Becca darling? Fucksake
— Please??
— Rebec
— Please!
At last: a pause. Murphy sounds like she is sorting something in her head. Then Rebecca’s best friend comes back, still gabbling as fast as before:
— Look anyway, sweetie, it doesn’t matter now what matters is they’ve let him out early
— Who, Patch?
— Yes! Patrick! They let him out of prison this arvo, today, early, by mistake or something – Still gabbling – And so I think the police rang your folks this evening to tell ‘em and when your dad found you’d done a bunk they asked me to ring you and …
— So where … is he … then …?
— Where else, Bex? He must be going to your flat, no? Where you lived? Where else would he go?
Lifting herself away from the railing, Rebecca walks towards the edge of the Heath, towards Hampstead High Street. Murphy is now burbling on about revenge, about: Patrick, prison, two years, rape law, knives, and who-knows-what-he’ll-do. Rebecca listens, half dazed, half distracted with thoughts of her ex. Patrick? Patrick?!
Stalled by the weight of traffic, Rebecca stands on the curve of Heath Street, counting the taxi lights, not really listening to Murphy.
Then she hears Murphy say:
— So what the hell did you retract the charges for anyway?
Thinning her lips, Rebecca kills the phonecall; and walks on.
28
The moon is slung low over Rosslyn Hill, a white geisha-face beyond the skiddy clouds. It is a lamp hung up to show Rebecca the way downhill towards Belsize. The way she intends to take to their flat, towards Linden Street.
Why not? Because her phone keeps ringing?
Bag down, phone extracted, Rebecca lifts the maddened mobile to her face and irritatedly reads the read-out. It says MURPHY.
Murphy?
MURPHY …
This is the fourth time Rebecca’s friend has rung since Rebecca spoke to Murphy on the Heath. Staring down at her phone, Rebecca watches her phone ring and flash, ring and flash, hypnotically. What is it that makes Murphy keep ringing so? Ring, flash, ring, flash, ringring, flash …
Aware that a couple of American tourists with white sneakers and very pale-blue jeans are watching her as she stands here looking at but not answering her phone, Rebecca waits for the thing to quit ringing, then she slips the phone back in her bag, continues walking down the lamplit High Street, down Hampstead High Street.
The High Street is a George Grosz painting: crowded with drunks and Jewesses. Girls in lip gloss, sequiny skirts, flip flops and Italian woollens are standing and smiling sarcastically outside the pizzeria; boys in expensive loafers and cotton strides are getting off on the girlfriends’ sardonic laughter. Further on, a fey English boy with a black rucksack is standing beside a Coke sign written in Arabic as he squints at couples eating red stuff with pitta bread on tables set up outside the Moroccan restaurant.
Stepping around a young Hispanic drunk kid, who is standing on a red and wickerwork faux-French-café chair so as to abuse his equally Hispanic friend, Rebecca looks inside the open doors of the faux-French café and sees drunk German tourist families drinking espressos, shimmying waiters in black and white aprons, phoney Michelin tyre signs all metal-yellow and rusty, and shiny-foreheaded girls with pinned-up blonde hair serving big blond frothy glasses of Alsace beer to shouting American students …
Gazing into the interior of the café Rebecca can also see, right at the back, a young couple.
The girl is in black, with a soft, costly jumper slung about her shoulders; the boy has a brown leather jacket and absurdly tousled hair. As Rebecca watches, rapt, she sees the boy stoop a beery, stubbly jaw to nuzzle the girl’s neck; he seems to whisper something to the girl’s collarbone. Rebecca keeps watching, still rapt, as the girl sighs and smiles and creases her ticklish shoulder, and giggles in a fatuous, naive, innocent, coquettish, joyous, not-yet-raped way.
Aiiii. Rebecca steps back, aghast at her own stupidity, nostalgic for her own happiness. She was always like this with him, wasn’t she? Always ready to melt and swoon as he looked at her and joked; as he did fingery things with her hair, and kissy things with his lips, as he did the sexy things, the Patricky things …
But why? Why was she like that, with him, and with him alone? Why was it only to him that the rose-heart of her would open, why was his the only wind to which she would bend? Perhaps because … she so enjoyed the way he patted her arse after they fucked. Like she was a difficult but lovely new boat he’d just successfully berthed.
But: why? Still: why? Why did and does no-one else make her feel like that? Trying, squinting, shivering in a summer-night breeze coming up the road from Chalk Farm, Rebecca pulls her woollen around herself and tries to think of all the first nights and last nights, the first-and-last nights she’s had since, all the OK dates, all the nice sex, all the mild romance, all the blond, loving, kind, young, pleasant, tediously-insistent-on-foreplay men she’s seen in the two years since then. Is it Patrick’s fault that she is now unable to pin down a proper, wholesome relationship? Or is it her fault, and Patrick simply the kin
d of lover she likes?
Shivering, although there is no breeze now, Rebecca wonders if she is sick, ill, mismade, marred.
PHONEPHONEPHONEPHONE
OK! Impatient and irritated Rebecca snatches the shrill and insistent cellphone with HOME flashing on and off on the little screen, and she makes it go quiet, by pressing it into Silent mode.
Then Rebecca turns and continues walking, trying to forget her recent linkage of thoughts. Onwards, and downwards, she walks. Past the King of Bohemia pub, all purple and neon, past the smell of crepes from the little stand across the way. Curious, nostalgic, remembering her own youth, her own good times spent in Hampstead, Rebecca passes the lines of yellow- and lime- and loganberry-coloured sports cars all full of rich Arab kids laughing and taking their shirts off as they shout at the tan-ankled Jewish girls kitten-heeling down Downshire Hill.
Kitten-heeling? Caught by the sight of some pink-and-sequin shoes in the richly glowing L.K. Bennett shop window Rebecca pauses, looks, breathes, covets: and remembers. How Patrick used to delight in her shoes, her clothes. He used to love the way she spent hours choosing clothes, buying clothes, selecting knickers, wielding lipsticks, rubbing perfume into her elbows and wrists and other places. He loved it so much she used to find herself overdoing things, overemphasising the girly behaviourisms. Sometimes she used to dawdle at her dressing, take hours putting her panties on, flick languidly through fashion mags with her dress halfway up her thigh: merely to wind him up, and to relish the sight of him all wound up. Sometimes she would walk barefoot when it was too cold; let fall a dishonest dress strap before breakfast; lick her already lipglossed lips when they were only nipping to the bank, just because she loved the way it gunned his engine. She would accentuate the feminine so as to inflame the masculine in him. Make him crazy. Make him need her like air.
Outside Rosslyn Chapel a girl in mules and short skirt is tilting on her toes to kiss her tall blond white-tee-shirted boyfriend but he is pushing her away and looking at Rebecca.
Guilty now, a little sick and guilty of all the sex, all the sex everywhere, all the evidence of sin, of sinning humanity, Rebecca walks on, turns right, turns left, walks quicker. She walks through the streets of Belsize Village, where green plane trees are gilded by lamplight, where crack willows flourish outside yellow-lit bay windows, where, in an unkempt front garden, a florid old rose glows cream and vermillion: like a barmaid bursting out of her red satin blouse. Yes. This place calms her. Rebecca knows and likes these affluent middle-class streets; she loves these streets of South Hampstead and Belsize and the Finchley Road as she loves herself: because in a way they are her, they are hers, they are her past, her childhood; from Belsize Square Synagogue to the gates of University College School, this is where so much of Rebecca’s past unfolded.
Even Avenue Road is populated by her … and by … Patrick.
Staring at a telephone box Rebecca ruefully recalls. This is where she once had sex with Patrick. In that telephone box. And down the road is where she once parked the car and … had sex with Patrick. And over there in Regent’s Park is where she and Patrick … once had sex.
Oh God. Rebecca condemns herself. Why does everywhere remind her of them; every street in London have some blue plaque? Some little shrine? With candles?
Rebecca doesn’t want to know. Running across the street Rebecca runs from the endless upset of these memories, the difficult questions, towards the inviting blackness of Regent’s Park. As soon as she is over the lowslung railing, she starts to feel better. The park is hushed and darkened, welcomingly tranquil; the trees are a dark silent green in the lamplight, in the far car light. Calmer, cooler, Rebecca strides on, using the distant red lights of Telecom Tower as a skymark.
Right in the middle of the blackness, Rebecca pauses, and looks up at the dark dark sky. Here, in Regent’s Park, she thinks, is one of the only places in central London where you can ever see stars in any true way, see the constellations. But as Rebecca looks up at the constellations she wishes she hadn’t. Yes, she can see all the constellations they made up, all the constellations they used to lovingly title, she can see Using The Phone On Avenue Road, or Borrowing Dad’s Tennis Racquet. But she can also see others, too; new ones, new constellations.
Rebecca blinks; Rebecca blinks again. From the square of dark green that is Queen Mary’s Gardens at night, Rebecca can see scattered across the dark Heavens of London entire new constellations. Constellations like: Patrick And Me Arguing, and Patrick Being Led Away By The Cops, and I Still Fucking Love Him.
And then, quite near the Pleiades, north east of Orion, Rebecca spies the constellation she perhaps always knew was there, but never really wanted to acknowledge. Due east of Sirius B, hard by the Great Bear, not far from Sagittarius, Rebecca can see He Never Raped Me.
29
At the junction of Marylebone Road and Baker Street Rebecca pauses for the traffic. A large black car is turning left, throwing a bridal veil of white car light across Rebecca’s darkened face. When the car is gone, Rebecca crosses, turns left, walks south.
All is silent. The 3 a.m. city is quiet around her. Nearby she can just about hear a streetlamp buzzing; like there’s a hornet trapped inside. Rebecca turns and half looks at these buzzing lamps and lights, stretching down the High Street. Red, Yellow, Green, Yellow, Red. The darkened street lined with streetlamps is the nave of an Orthodox church, she thinks. Here are the Byzantine colours of the city’s mosaic; here are saints’ haloes glowing around the halogen bulbs.
Steeling herself, Rebecca walks on. She is very near now, she is very close. She can see the bookshop, Waitrose, the upmarket kebab place. And their street. She is at the corner of their street. The street with the flat they shared; the flat she still lives in; the flat she should perhaps have quit years ago. Just around this corner is the door against which they slumped, that time …
Thinking of the bugle, of the flat, of them, Rebecca remembers; she remembers it all. As she stands here, stuck, afflicted, rooted to the pavement, Rebecca remembers the lot. She remembers the handcuffs in the fridge; the sea bass he cooked once so badly. She remembers his smile; his aversion to umbrellas; when they were in the country with her niece and they chucked snowballs. She remembers him in that stupid coat; buying him a new coat; the time they were throwing water at each other like lovers in an advert for car insurance; his eyes of marlin-fishing blue; the way she once shaved him and he blew foam from under his nose and they laughed together; the way he held her around the waist that time when they walked to Selfridges to buy some smoothies and it was hot; his eyes always above her; his eyes; looking up at him like she was looking at her father as a child; her sweat when they fucked; the sun of his love above her that made her sweat; two buttons he did up for her; her doing his bow tie for a dinner they hated but he kissed her when she did the tie; crap songs they both liked; the tape of Dead Singers’ Songs he made for her and they sang it together in her garden; reciting Yeats to him; the Aztec book he bought for her only he wrapped it so badly she knew what it was; her kissing him in a phone box and it was awkward; his hand on her breast when she took him to the opera, once; that muscle on his upper arm one time when he was trying to fix the fridge; the twin tattoos they planned; the one single time he kissed her like he was about to ask her to marry him and didn’t; the dances they tried to learn that night when they drank grappa; the way she was too embarrassed to take her tampon out in front of him; the way he took it out anyway; the weekend in Paris they never went on; a poster she saw once of a tropical island with couples on it laughing together and she had thought I am as happy as that and I’m just on Euston Road and it’s raining and I’m happy because of Him; the smell of his hair when he washed it in her shampoo; the way he lied to her then always laughed and admitted it immediately; his blue shirt; his eyes; an argument about politics which ended with him fucking her rapily and she liked it; sharing toothpaste for the first time; him; his eyes; the presence of him in her life; the ballet of sex with him;
the sultry tango of their fucking; the fascist jitterbug; his eyes; his whisky breath; the suit he wore that day; the underwear she so lovingly and slowly chose because she knew it would make him happy and the fact that she was doing something that made him happy made her simply simply simply happy and that was enough and for the first time and the only time in her life love had been enough.
Tears? Here? In the street?
Rebecca can’t help herself: she feels like giving in; like crying, even sobbing. Maybe she even feels like ululating, like really wailing like some bereaved Palestinian mother.
Instead she swallows and looks across the road. At the door.
30
Key in the lock, shaking a little, Rebecca pushes open the door, ignores the mail, climbs the did-he-rape-me-here stairs to the maybe-he-raped-me-here sitting room. Then, after a quick anxious scout, she takes more stairs and makes her way to the let’s-face-it-he-never-raped-me-anywhere bedroom.
Dust everywhere: no Patrick. Rebecca glares at the bugle sitting on the sill, the dark uncurtained window, the fulsome moon, Marylebone. There is no evidence of Patrick. No mug for a late-night coffee; no noise; no bags, no shoes, no clothes chucked carelessly the way he liked to in a corner. The room is sans rapist. What was Murphy talking about?
As soon as Rebecca remembers her friend, the cellphone starts vibrating and trilling and Rebecca lifts her cellphone to her ear and hears Murphy:
— So?
— What?
— Are you there?
— Yes, Murf. I’m at the flat …
Silence. Fraught silence. Then Murphy exhales; then she says:
— Look, you mad cow, it’s your life, your choice
— Thanks but
— I’m not going to do anything, I’m not going to ring your parents, I just …