by Alex Preston
‘Jesus,’ said Mouse. ‘Is it her?’
‘Yes. I think so. Quick.’
They pushed through the crowd and hurled themselves out into the night. Daffy was leering drunkenly over the woman who worked on the door. There was no sign of Carrington and the girl.
‘Did you see where Carrington went?’
Daffy turned to Marcus.
‘He got in a taxi. A bunch of them are going on to a party at his house. I think he invited me.’
‘Right, let’s go.’
Marcus flagged down a cab.
Carrington lived in a tall Victorian house on the Hackney Road. Marcus could hear the music as soon as they stepped from the taxi. They walked down the overgrown path to the front door and Daffy rang the bell. A girl answered.
‘Oh, hi, Daffy. Come on in.’
It was very dark inside. Marcus followed Daffy down a corridor which opened out into a large kitchen. Candles flickered on the work surfaces and patio doors opened at the back to the garden where people were dancing around a fire. The music was so loud that Marcus could feel his cheekbones vibrating with every thump. Daffy was already bent over the kitchen table cutting up lines of coke. Marcus couldn’t see Carrington or the girl. He and Mouse turned back into the corridor and made their way up the stairs. The rooms were full of people, some of them asleep, some crouched talking. Two girls were sprawled across the bed in the largest bedroom, snorting powder from the cover of a hardback book. One of them turned and caught Marcus’s eye, gesturing him over. He backed out of the room. Mouse was already on his way up to the second floor.
There was a closed door at the top of the stairs. Marcus edged past Mouse and turned the handle. They walked into an attic room. It was Carrington’s studio. There was a potter’s wheel and various unfinished works scattered around the floor. A huge skylight sat in the ceiling, revealing the orange glow of low clouds above. The artist was sitting in the far corner surrounded by ten or twelve others, a lamp on the ground behind him. He had clearly been holding forth upon something profound and looked up, annoyed at the intrusion.
‘Who are you? Go back downstairs. People aren’t allowed up here.’
The girl in the black fedora was sitting on a beanbag with her back to them. Marcus began to stutter. Slowly the girl turned her head and Marcus felt himself tense. Her profile was caught in the bright white light. Mouse leaned against Marcus, breathing deeply. Marcus could feel his friend shudder.
‘Let them stay, Hugo. Don’t be such a prick.’
The voice was not Lee’s. It was higher, posher. She took the fedora off her head and shook her hair out, and Marcus saw that she wore her hair as Lee had before she cut it. She was younger than Lee, perhaps eighteen. Otherwise, the similarity was uncanny.
‘Come and sit down, guys. Hugo was just telling us about his next great work. Do you want a drink?’
The girl poured red wine into plastic cups as Marcus and Mouse crouched on the floor beside her. Marcus felt dazed.
‘I’m Hugo’s sister, by the way. My name’s Rebecca,’ the girl whispered as her brother resumed his monologue.
‘Marcus Glass. I knew your brother at university.’
‘Oh, bad luck. He was an awful bore back then.’
‘I didn’t know him well. He left pretty swiftly.’
Marcus couldn’t escape the impression that he was speaking to Lee. He realised that the reason he had been so easily fooled by her resemblance to his friend was that he had been spending so much time looking at pictures of Lee from university. Rebecca Carrington looked like the Lee of those days: her hair was long and wild, her eyes wicked and flashing. Marcus felt suddenly very sad to think that even if Lee came back, it wouldn’t be this Lee, the person he thought of as the real Lee.
‘Shall we go downstairs? I’ve heard this so many times,’ she said, gesturing at her brother, who was holding up one fist and spinning the other around it in frantic revolutions, talking all the while.
Rebecca took Marcus’s hand and they made their way down into the hot pumping heart of the house. Mouse followed behind them. Marcus turned and smiled encouragingly at his friend, but he could see that Mouse had been sobered by the sight of this strange replica of Lee. His face was drawn and tired and he looked at Marcus with an expression that Marcus couldn’t quite decipher. Something between pity and scorn. Marcus raised his eyebrows questioningly, but Mouse just shook his head and hung back in the shadows.
When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Rebecca let go of Marcus’s hand and skipped down the corridor, laughing. Marcus followed her through the kitchen, where she stopped to grab a bottle of vodka from the fridge, and then into the garden. There were picnic blankets and cushions spread out on the grass around the fire, and Marcus threw himself down beside Rebecca, intent on drinking in her face, searing her likeness onto his memory. A gust of cold wind blew across the garden, carrying with it traffic fumes and dust. The fire’s flames danced. Marcus caught sight of Mouse standing in the kitchen talking to Daffy and a tall black girl with an afro. He turned back to Rebecca.
‘I hate these parties,’ she said.
‘Why?’
Rebecca took a slug of the vodka and passed it to Marcus.
‘Hugo always manages to find inspiration the next morning. So I’m left to clean up the place. It’s my payment for staying here during my gap year. I’ve become the de facto cleaning lady. Which makes me hate these parties. Whenever I see people having fun I just think about the mess I’m going to have to face, hungover, the next day. He manages to make me feel so bourgeois.’
Marcus drew out a cigarette and offered her the packet. She shook her head.
‘No thanks. I don’t smoke. So what do you do, Marcus? Are you an artist too?’ She looked at him with a wry smile. Someone stumbled over Marcus’s legs, apologised, and staggered off into the darkness at the bottom of the garden.
‘God, no. I’m a lawyer. I live in Notting Hill. Um . . .’ Marcus stopped. Rebecca yawned. He realised how uninteresting his life would seem to a girl like this. It wasn’t something he considered ordinarily, that he lived an existence that could make a girl yawn. Within the world of the Course he was seen as dashing, bright, a leading light. Here, as the fire burned down into embers, and the noise of the party still swept over them, Marcus felt suddenly old and dull.
‘Are you, like, a real lawyer? Murderers and all that?’
‘No. No, that isn’t what I do at all.’
There was a pause.
‘I secretly do quite want to be a housewife,’ Rebecca whispered, leaning over towards him conspiratorially. ‘It would drive my father wild, after everything he’s spent on education, but I’d like to live in a big house in Henley and have lots of children and dogs. I’d bake on Tuesdays and supervise the gardener on Mondays and Thursdays.’
Marcus laughed. He was slowly getting used to seeing Rebecca as herself, rather than as a reflection of Lee. She leaned towards him again.
‘So what else do you do? What’s your thing?’
Marcus sighed. ‘Do you know the Course?’
‘The cult thing? Yes, of course I do. You’re not involved in that, are you?’
He nodded. ‘I’m a Course leader, no less.’
Rebecca whistled. ‘Jesus . . . I mean, fuck. I had a couple of friends at school who went for a while. I always thought it was just a phase. Like anorexia or smoking pot. I didn’t think someone as old as you would still be doing it.’
Marcus winced and lit another cigarette.
‘Am I old?’
‘No, but I mean, you’re not really young, are you? The Course always seemed to me like a crutch that people leant on until they worked out who they were. Something to get you through those in-between years.’
‘I think maybe it was like that for me. But then it became my life. It’s not a bad way to deal with the world, even for someone as old as me.’
‘I’m not saying it is. Just that it seems a little bit easy.’
He could feel her
edging away from him. Where before she had been charming and conspiratorial, he now felt her looking at him from a distance, with a kind of anthropological interest.
‘To tell you the truth, Rebecca, I’ve been thinking about leaving the Course. Life just goes by, sometimes, and before you know it you’re thirty and the best things are behind you. I think I did need the Course when I first came to London. I’m not sure I do any more.’
She leaned towards him again.
‘I say my prayers quite often. When I’ve been really bad.’
Marcus looked at her, frowning.
‘That’s one of the things that bothers me about the Course, though. You have so many people who think that they can act without consequence. As long as God forgives them – which of course he always does – they’re in the clear. They can do almost anything – no matter how cruel.’
‘I suppose that’s what makes you Christians seem so otherworldly. You are cut off from the rest of us by your ability to be forgiven. Whereas, even though I try to pray, I never feel all that confident about it.’
Marcus sipped from the bottle and passed it to her. She took a long gulp and choked a little.
‘You look a lot like a friend of mine. A friend I don’t see any more.’
‘I get that quite a lot. I always take it as an insult. That my face is just this tabula rasa that people project their images onto. I want to be an actress, so I don’t suppose it’s the worst thing.’
‘No, but you look exactly like her. It’s bizarre.’
Marcus looked back towards the house, trying to make out Mouse through the kitchen doors. There was a thick pack of bodies in the room. Everyone was dancing and Marcus found it hard to distinguish between the dancers.
‘Shall we go inside?’ said Rebecca, rising to her knees.
‘Sure,’ said Marcus.
Rebecca took him by the hand again and led him into the surging mass of people. She still carried the bottle of vodka and passed it to him as they began to dance. She fixed her eyes upon his as they moved together, leading him through the sweating, gurning partygoers, spinning him in the darkness. A slower song came on, something deep and trippy, and Marcus felt Rebecca press herself against him. She snaked her thigh between his legs and looked up at him.
‘Here, have one of these,’ she said.
Rebecca emptied a small paper package into her palm. Two white pills. She picked one of them up between small finger and thumb and forced it gently between Marcus’s lips. The pill was bitter and caught in his gullet for a moment. He watched Rebecca take her own pill and then she leaned towards him and kissed him, pushing her tongue where moments before she had pushed her fingers. They continued to kiss as they danced, and he realised that she was smaller than Lee, her hands were like paws on his body, clawing away at him, burrowing under his shirt to twist the hair of his chest. He allowed himself to imagine her as Lee, though, and half-opened his eyes to see the pale skin marked by freckles along her cheekbones.
After fifteen minutes, Marcus began to feel the pill working on him. He seemed to hear the music more clearly, to sense the surge and life of the surrounding dancers. His skin tingled whenever Rebecca touched him and when he kissed her the world seemed concentrated in their mouths; then the music changed again, and he was spinning very quickly, and Rebecca took him by the arm and led him upstairs.
Carrington’s studio was empty when they walked inside. The bright lamp was still on in the corner, casting extraordinary shadows across the room, picking up small sculptures and exploding them against the wall as a violent Guernica of strange, dark images. Marcus took Rebecca in his arms and they began to kiss again. They danced in dreamlike patterns, feeling as much as hearing the music from the party below. Marcus thought suddenly that he could see the mist that had moved in the air that night with Lee. He lifted Rebecca’s jumper off and helped her to undo her shirt. Marcus’s heart banged hard in his chest.
It began to drizzle on the skylight above them. Rebecca, wearing only her underwear, dragged a beanbag to the centre of the room.
‘I love to look up at the sky,’ she said.
‘Lee . . .’ Marcus moaned, and then reached down to slip off her pants.
She looked very young. Marcus remembered kissing Lee in her room at university, and tried to imagine what would have happened if Abby had not come in that night. He realised he was still fully clothed. He knelt down on the wooden floor, took one of Rebecca’s ankles in his hand, and began to lick slowly up her leg. His tongue went dry very quickly. He suddenly thought of Darwin, and hoped that the dog wouldn’t be lonely without him there. He reached the top of Rebecca’s leg and slipped his tongue inside her. She moaned quietly, placing her hands in his hair. Marcus began to cry. At first silently, wetting the inside of her thighs with his tears, then in great gulping sobs as he licked hopelessly at her.
‘Oh, you poor darling. Come here, Marcus.’
Rebecca was very good about the whole thing. She held Marcus’s head in her lap until his sobbing receded, and then he told her the whole story. She listened in silence to the tale of Lee Elek, nodding sympathetically whenever Marcus looked up at her. The drizzle had turned into driving rain. Marcus lay down beside Rebecca on the beanbag and they looked up at the sky. She shivered and Marcus found a sheet and draped it over her. The effect of the pill was beginning to wear off and Marcus felt suddenly very tired.
‘I’m sorry. I’m such a mess at the moment. I’m so embarrassed.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s better than my usual experiences up here. I like you, really I do. I would suggest we see each other again. If you weren’t married, that is. And a religious nut.’
Marcus spluttered.
‘I’m joking, I’m joking. But seriously, you need to get out of the Course. Those aren’t good people you have been telling me about. You’re better than that.’
As it began to grow light above them, Marcus said goodbye to Rebecca and crept downstairs. People were sleeping everywhere. The last revellers sat smoking in the rain by the dead fire, umbrellas capturing the smoke as they exhaled it, forming foggy huts around them. Marcus couldn’t find Mouse. He walked out into the dreary morning and trudged up Hackney Road looking for a cab.
*
Marcus slept as the taxi made its way through empty streets across London, his cheek pressed against the cold glass. He woke with a start as they sped along Bayswater Road. It was only when they drew up outside his flat that he realised that he had lost his key. He searched through his pockets, turning out tissues, his phone, his wallet, and a packet of cigarettes, but the key was not there.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
‘No money, mate? Need a bank machine?’ The cabby looked at him in the rear-view mirror.
‘No. I’ve lost my key. Shit!’ Marcus remembered that he had given Abby’s key to Mouse. ‘Listen, would you mind taking me to the top of Ladbroke Grove? Just past the Sainsbury’s. A friend of mine has a spare key.’
‘No problem, mate.’
Marcus was feeling terrible by the time they got to the canal. His mouth was dry, his throat had begun to scratch and his sinuses ache; he could sense that he was coming down with a cold. He paid the driver and stepped out onto the bridge, then made his way down to the towpath. The wind sent the rain raking painfully down his cheeks. He held his arm up, shielding his face with his jacket, but the wind whipped around, and he found himself dancing to try to avoid the rain. Dark clouds raced across the sky as he squelched along the path, his shoes wet through, his socks damp and cold. The trees shuddered in the wind, sending spirals of their last leaves down onto the water to float among the cans and plastic bags. The canal was brown with fallen leaves, pockmarked by the rain.
Marcus reached the Gentle Ben and stepped down onto the deck. He banged on the door of the cabin. No response. He cupped his hand to the window where the curtains hung open a crack. He could see no one inside. He banged on the door again, then tried the handle. It swung open. Gratefully, Marcus flung
himself down the steps and into the dark cabin. It was cold inside and Marcus tried without success to locate the heating controls. He flicked the light switch and nothing happened. Marcus opened the curtains, but it was so dark outside that it barely altered the murky cabin.
Marcus made his way through to the small room at the back of the boat that Mouse used as a study-cum-wardrobe and found one of his Thomas Pink shirts. Mouse’s jeans would be too short for him, so he took off his own and hung them over a chair, hoping that they might dry a little while he searched for the key. He looked at the papers piled on Mouse’s desk. There were pictures from children’s fairy tales, scholarly articles on C. S. Lewis, a copy of The Way of the Pilgrim.
Marcus padded through the gloomy boat, checking whatever pieces of Mouse’s clothing he found, willing the key to appear from a trouser pocket, or perched on a sideboard. Marcus could picture his bed at home and longed to be back there with the heating turned up, a mug of tea and a book beside him, Darwin sprawled at his feet. He went back into the study and searched through the drawers in Mouse’s desk, looking with interest at the photographs he found. Many were of Lee, or had clearly been taken by her. Marcus realised that he should show Mouse his own collection of pictures. It had helped him to feel closer to Lee, to capture more accurately his feelings for her, when he saw her at her most beautiful, before the sadness set in.
Marcus was about to give up looking for the key when he noticed a small tortoiseshell box on the desk. It was the sort commonly used to house cufflinks, but Marcus thought that the key might have been placed inside for safekeeping. He fiddled with the tiny clasp of the box, opened it and stood staring at the contents, his tired mind suddenly racing. He held the box up to the window. Inside, against the black velvet lining, sat two earrings: one lapis blue, the other turquoise. Marcus picked them up and laid them in his palm. He sniffed them, not quite knowing why. Very gently, Marcus placed the earrings back in the box and carried it through to the main cabin.
Marcus pulled on his damp jeans and sat down. He found a slightly grubby pair of socks, and then wrapped a blanket around his still-icy feet. He felt the box in his pocket. There would be an explanation. There must be an explanation. He dialled Mouse’s phone. It rang several times, but there was no answer. Marcus sat on the bed, shivering every so often, and waited for his friend to come home.