Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  But you can forget all that, he told himself—she does know now. You can stop being afraid. He gave her the whisky and noticed how the wilted leaves hung off the tree outside the window onto the garden. It tapped a spiny branch on the glass as if it was asking to be let in. He went over and drew the curtains.

  'What are you going to do?' she said.

  'I don't know.'

  'You can't work any more, I suppose.'

  'No. Not after this—no.'

  'Perhaps you should move to France or something. Spain.'

  'Perhaps. Perhaps I should just move away.'

  As he said this, he felt a deep cleft of regret and confusion open inside him. He was falling into it, falling into himself.

  Had he done this deliberately? After a life of exercising such intense control, it was as if he had suddenly indulged the part of himself that told him, 'Stand up! Shout! Spit!' in the middle of the stalls at the latest play. He might still have been a respectable member of the audience.

  Late that night, as he shut the door of the spare bedroom and switched on the bedside lamp, he remembered saying his prayers once with his mother. It was the first occasion on which he had realized that she did not know all the answers. 'Why do you, though?' he had asked her.

  'Because that's what you do at night.'

  'But why?'

  'What do you mean "why"? Because everyone does. Do you want to be the only litde boy who doesn't say his prayers before bed?' She looked at him with pantomime horror on her face.

  He had thought about it for a moment, kneeling by the bed in his pyjamas, holding his favourite toy soldier. He opened his mouth to argue.

  'Oh, just say them, Al, there's a good boy. I'm tired out.'

  What a lot of trouble he had been to her. He could not bear to think how tired out she must really have been.

  Chapter 4

  The first time Luke saw Arianne she was standing on a table at a bar called Noise. She was holding up one of her stiletto-heeled boots and laughing at the man on the floor beneath her. He seemed to be talking to her through gritted teeth, his hunched shoulders jerking with each word, and he pushed his hands into his pockets with a violent kind of casualness. Just then, a glass by the girl's foot tipped over, rolled off the edge of the table and smashed. She noticed this and kicked another one after it.

  When the second glass smashed, the scene responded—as if that was the signal it had been waiting for. It was as if the car-chase music had begun. There was a flurry of movement; a man jumped up unexpectedly from the shadows of the leather banquette behind the table. Now that he looked Luke could see that, incredibly, three people were just sitting there, still drinking, while all this was going on. The new man shouted above the music, 'OK, why don't you leave her alone now, Dan? I really think that's enough, don't you?' He took off his jacket with enough difficulty to suggest that he was very drunk. The sleeves got pulled inside-out and he had to tug his hands free; one of his arms flicked back with a jerk and put him off balance. In his T-shirt, he provided a reference by which you could judge the incredible height and width of the other man. One of the girls from their banquette stood up now. No one paid any attention to her. She eased her way round the two men as apathetically as if they had been large rocks and made her way over to the bar for another drink.

  'Leave her alone?' the larger man shouted back incredulously. 'She's gone completely fucking mental. Look at her. She's standing on a fucking table, Andy. What do you mean, leave her alone? To what? Smash the fucking place up?'

  'Um—hello?' the girl shouted. Her voice was piercing, furious.

  'You're just upsetting her more. That's all I'm saying, man.'

  'So what? She's been a litde bitch this evening. Do we care if she's getting upset? She's having a tantrum. Oh, poor baby.'

  'Hello? I am actually here, you know?'

  'Are you, Arianne? Are you here—on the same planet as the rest of us?'

  'Oh, fuck you.'

  'Fuck you. What makes you think it's OK for you to stand on a table and kick glasses on the floor? When did you get a letter from fucking God saying it was OK for you to do that? No one else did. I never got that letter.'

  He sounded Dutch. It was an Americanized Euro voice. His sense of the dramatic had obviously been acquired from action films: it was lead-weighted with portentousness that no real-life circumstances could have fulfilled. His posture was studied, dumbbell refined. But you could have had nothing but respect for the breadth of his shoulders.

  Luke turned abruptly to the friend he was standing with at the bar. 'Is that Andy Jones?' he said.

  The DJ let one tune recede and another take over, and the dancing became faster in the background.

  'Who? Where?'

  'That guy. By the table behind us—with the girl on it. Andy Jones.'

  'Andy Jones...'

  'That guy. The one on the right, in front of the door. You must be able to see him.'

  'I can see him, Luke, I just can't remember who the fuck Andy Jones is. Do I know him? Is he famous?'

  'We were at fucking school with him. Didn't he, like, act or something? Something artistic and vaguely poncy. Was it the choir? You did all that stuff. I know you remember Andy Jones.'

  What was Andy Jones doing with that incredible girl? It was against nature somehow. Not that he was with her—just near her, really. She was an independent figure in the scene.

  Arianne would always give him that impression—even much later, when she angled the mirror so they could see themselves making love on the bedroom floor. He watched her watching herself, analysing her own performance. He felt fascinated and lonely. Was Narcissus drawn to his own reflection as much out of fear of others as love of himself?

  In spite of her beauty there was little genuine conceit in Arianne. Her self-obsession was born of alienation, of the early disappointment of realizing her parents had an 'open marriage' and that the word 'love' was liable to interpretation by sophisticated minds. Her consultations of all reflective surfaces were made with the intention of reinforcing self-sufficiency. Arianne feared that she could not surrender herself to dependence on another person, no matter what superficial trappings of it she allowed to exist. In fact, she was increasingly aware that the superficial trappings—financial, practical—were merely conjuror's diversions she had developed over the years. These were ultimately destined to fail in convincing both her and the men she chose.

  'So, I think I'll go over,' Luke said.

  'You think you'll go over. Right. What for, exactly?'

  'To say hi to Andy Jones.'

  'Oh, I see!

  'So, back in a minute, OK?'

  'Luke?'

  'Yes?'

  'I'll bet you a million quid that big one's her boyfriend.'

  Luke grinned and finished his drink. 'Look, this is Andy Jones we're talking about. I can't miss an opportunity like this.'

  'Yes. What you can't do is chat up girls who are plainly insane and who are obviously with other men!

  'I know that. I do know that,' he said.

  He put down his glass and turned to move off towards the table, but before he could, something else was said—something quiet between the two men—and the big man knocked Andy Jones off his feet.

  It was a perfectly timed right hook to the jaw; a punch Dan had always affectionately termed his 'classic'. The atmosphere in the bar changed immediately. It liquefied. A wave of bar staff crashed at the edge of the bar and the distinction between dancers and drinkers dissolved as people stopped moving. 'Where? Where?' they said to one another as they strained to see what had happened. They wanted a bit of blood, a bit of human drama to mark out this evening among all the others. The strobe light was more apparent, slower and more sinister without the dancing. For a moment it was like cold, flashing moonlight, bouncing off all the hard surfaces—the glasses and table edges, the geometric aluminium chairs. The small act of violence had changed the room into a store of weapons.

  To Luke, it seemed
that the whole scene had spun out from the girl on the table, that she had effortlessly choreographed everyone around her. An entire bar full of people. He would have liked to make this observation to his friend James, but James laughed at him for the grandiose things he said about girls. James thought girls were for sex and men were for friendship, and it amazed Luke how many women his friend had to brush off.

  Arianne got off the table. Now that he no longer had an opportunity to introduce himself to her, Luke felt invisible and drifted over towards her with the litde crowd of people who had been near the bar. They stood less than a metre away. People were using the word 'ambulance'. He heard the girl say, 'Oh, for fuck's sake, why do you do this shit, Dan?'

  She was tall, about five eleven, so the large man—Dan—did not tower over her in her high heels. Somehow she managed to look impressed while she put her boot back on; she kept her eyes fixed on Dan's while she pulled it into place. She had an accent, too—it might have been French.

  'Really, why are you such a total wanker?'

  'Why? Because that's what you fucking turn people into,' Dan said.

  Luke remembered that exchange—often. He remembered the unexpected pulse of anxiety across the girl's face and the instant softening of her manner. 'Hey, come on,' she said. 'I'm wasted. Let's stop fighting, baby. I want to go home. Let's go to your place, shall we?'

  Luke was astonished by her voice. In a matter of seconds it had gone from searing anger to honeyed fragility. He couldn't help imagining that such range might have other applications.

  All of the others in the little crowd were trying to catch sight of Andy, but Luke just watched the girl. They were separated by less than a metre—but there was no reason in the world for her to notice him. She put her hand on Dan's face. 'Oh, Daniel, you hurt him. What have you gone and done now?' she said. The big man slumped for her like a circus elephant. Then she turned to Andy, who was being comforted by the other girls from the banquette. His nose was bleeding and he was sitting on the floor. She leant down to him: 'Andy, honey, are you badly hurt?'

  Following her, Dan shook Andy's knee back and forth in a vigorous, playful way. 'Hey, look, I'm sorry, man,' he said. 'I totally lost it there.' Then he raised his arm to give Andy a genial slap on the shoulder.

  Arianne caught his wrist. 'Dan's sorry,' she said. 'He's very sorry and he's a total wanker. I will call you tomorrow, Andy. We will speak about this, sweetie. Don't worry.'

  She made it sound as though this unforgivable act would not go unrecorded. And then she looked around for her handbag and left—with the perpetrator.

  This was not so much a sense of justice as one of composition.

  Luke walked back to the bar and picked up his drink. He felt as though he had been dancing right by the speakers for hours but, of course, he was not deafened and it was not sound that had affected him. His mind was reverberating with longing, as if it was a bell, struck by lust. Behind a vacant stare, his imagination laboured shamelessly. James was speaking about something, but all Luke could picture was the girl stopping, as she just might have done, half-way up the stairs to the exit. The boyfriend went on up to wait for her outside while she ran back down to the loo. Before she got to the doorway on to the corridor, she caught Luke's eye. A nod: yes, you.

  He was not used to playing this submissive role, because he could get any girl he wanted, you could ask any of his friends, but he found it strangely sexy—in thought, anyway, where it was secret.

  By the time he got out into the corridor, where it was cool and dark and muffled, the very long girl was hitching up her very short skirt. There was a store cupboard with a lock and she slammed the door behind them and the light burned round the edges in a dazzling line. He got his fingers all deliciously confused in her suspender belt and she tore them away impatiently, kicking and wriggling, her heel spiking her knickers into the carpet. He had never met a girl more desperate to give him a blow-job. She couldn't wait: she licked her lips and pulled down his boxer shorts with her teeth. But, on the other hand, Luke thought, was this wise? Maybe, he decided, he just pushed her away and she looked slightly disappointed for a second until he thudded her up and back against the wall and she was forced to sink her teeth into his neck to stop herself screaming.

  'Luke?' said James. 'Am I interrupting something? I can come back if this is a bad time for you. Luke?'

  'Sorry. What?'

  Just then the bouncer came running down the stairs, looking angry. He had been up the road buying some cigarettes. One of the bar-girls had texted him to come back right away. He went over to the bar and Luke heard the bar-girl tell him they wanted to see him upstairs in the office immediately. 'Babe, you might have really fucked it this time,' she said.

  'Why? What the fuck? Was there an incident?' The bouncer peered around the room frantically—as though he might still catch the last moments of it. 'I knew there was an incident. I'm gone for two fucking minutes and there's an incident.'

  An incident. It was the right way to describe a story without a beginning or an end. Just the middle was there, the comical climax—the girl on the table, holding up her boot as if she was going to take out that big man's eye with the heel of it. Luke wondered what had made her so angry. He was surprised by how exciting he found the thought of her anger—and by how reluctant he was to acknowledge the false note in the scene. The truth was that when he watched her walk away up the stairs, hand in hand with her enormous boyfriend, it occurred to him that it might all have been an exciting game before bed. The jealousy this inspired was unbearable, directly proportionate to his lust.

  Arianne had long, muscular legs and he watched them climb the stairs, imagining the feel of her skin, picturing her standing above him in killer heels, letting him do whatever he wanted to her inner thighs.

  When he lay in his bed that night, blushing and exhausted after he had done full and appropriate justice to their time in the store cupboard, he thought about Arianne kicking the glass off the table. He smiled to himself. Smash. He loved these sassy, violent women. You envisioned their gratifying orgasms—you heard their gratifying orgasms; you conjured up the gorgeous shame of passing the neighbours on the stairs the next day. His girlfriend Lucy favoured pastel colours; she reminded him about dry-cleaning; she said, 'Oh, that was so lovely, darling,' after sex.

  And he was very lucky to have her, given the long hours he worked. He mustn't forget that, he told himself. No, Lucy was great. She was very pretty and she loved him and these qualities brought a lot of satisfaction—even if the subject of marriage had become more and more of an unspoken issue since her best friend had got engaged. How many times had he heard about the darling Tiffany diamond ring? But at least she was forgiving—even when she cooked for him and he fell asleep, too tired to eat at eleven thirty when he got home from work.

  Would he prefer to be alone? This was a rhetorical question he asked himself from time to time. He considered the idea of being alone with horror, with the sensation of free-falling through darkness. Like many English boys, he had, at great expense, been expelled from the home at an early age and sent to a boarding-school. 'Alone' was a sensation never more perfectly represented than by sitting in his school bedroom on the first day of term, the last traces of his glossy, silk-scarfed mother on the air, knowing he must just get on with it and unpack his trunk.

  All that week at the ad agency where he worked, he had played a recently invented game. It involved a vastly complex set of rules, which were just confusing enough to mean he could almost always win without being absolutely certain he was cheating. For the third time in a row, he got the balled-up chocolate wrapper into the ten-point zone between the computer monitor and the phone. That, added to the work-experience boy's four trips to the photocopier before the clock read a quarter to, and to his colleague Hamish's three sniffs in three minutes, meant the score was now high enough to allow Luke to alter history.

  What had actually happened now was that he had walked over to the table and said hi
to Andy Jones. And Andy, of course, had remembered him perfectly because Luke had been a big figure at school—captain of rugby and cricket and tennis. (He had actually been the first person in school history—other than a vast-jawed, bovine-looking boy named Dorian Anderson who featured in ancient crackly photos from the 1960s—to be captain of three sports at once.)

  Andy said: 'Shit, how amazing to bump into you like this!'

  Luke lit a cigarette distractedly. 'Yeah, it's good to see you again, too, Andy.'

  'Fuck. I mean— Luke Langford!' Andy slapped his forehead and laughed. At this point Luke raised his hand at a girl he happened to know. (This girl was beautiful and fashionably dressed in maybe a miniskirt or hot pants. She looked as though she would like to come over but was afraid to interrupt—she assumed he was talking business, perhaps.)

  Andy was still staring at him. 'Sorry, I'm really blown away,' he said. 'It's been, what—ten years? Listen, let me introduce you to everyone. I mean, d'you want to meet my friends?'

  'Well ... sure—OK. But, listen, I can't stay long, Andy.'

  'No, of course. Of course. Just quickly.' He put his arm round Luke's shoulder. 'Everyone? This is Luke Langford. This is the school fucking hero!'

  And it was then that Arianne had looked down from her pedestal and smiled at him, with a kind of recognition in her eyes.

  It was really hard to concentrate on the Calmaderm shampoo account. He knew he would have to do better that afternoon because, in an ad agency full of neurotic creatives, he was the one who held it all together. Everybody relied on him. Just the day before there had been a scene between Adrian Sand, one of the creatives, and the head of marketing at Calmaderm. Adrian had presented an idea that had been deemed, with a sarcastic smile, 'Just a bit too way out,' and he had thrown up his hands and said what the hell was he supposed to do, this shampoo was just like every other fucking shampoo and he might as well shoot himself in the heart. There had been a stunned silence.

  It was only a shampoo, for Christ's sake, Luke thought. But it was his job as account executive to liaise between the warring factions and—as his boss, Sebastian, said, with a hand on Luke's shoulder—to help get the fucking money in. Luke was renowned as a 'people person'. He knew perfectly well that he had been so successful by the age of twenty-eight because of his sportsman's calm in a crisis, because of his placid, unifying smile and because of his cufflinks.