by Zoe Strachan
Look at them all, Luke said, when she’d gone. With their flats and their cars and their fucking easy fucking lives.
I thought I saw the angry sparkle of moisture in his eyes, but he was a little drunk, and we’d halved a pill earlier then taken another when we’d arrived and seen the same old snobby faces. I reached out and gripped his arms, just above the wrist, felt the soft hair and the sinew underneath.
Coming up? he said, and I nodded. His fingers reached around my wrists in return, and we stood like that for a moment or two, talking about something else, something inconsequential.
I could see newly-single Katie glancing towards us, towards Luke. She was wearing her embroidered top again, this time with a denim miniskirt that revealed bare, tanned legs. I didn’t think the tan was natural. She smiled and started to walk towards us but he turned away and said to me, You know, I don’t think I like that sort of thing after all.
We both gazed out of the window at the street, dim and empty below us.
No? I said, the damp den under the bridge flickering through my mind, how afterwards I’d walked Wendy to the end of her street without either of us saying a word. How Luke had asked, did you do it, did you fuck her?
Lay there like a sack of tatties, he said. No wonder her boyfriend’s dumped her.
Reflected in the window, I saw Katie walking away from us. She couldn’t have heard him, with the music so loud, but the slight was unmistakeable.
Later on, inhibitions relaxed, I got caught in conversation with a nice boy called Julian, who’d also been captivated by that infamous adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.
I hope you don’t mind my asking, he said, but when did you realise you were, you know …
Gay? I said.
Yes, he said, and smiled at me so brightly that I was sure my luck was in. All that eye contact, the way he brushed against me.
Oh, I said, I suppose I’ve always known.
When he said he was finding the party too hot and noisy I agreed wholeheartedly and said I didn’t want to stay too late anyway.
Will we walk together, he said, a little shyly, and in my mind I punched the air in triumph.
I’ll just say goodbye to my friend, I said, nodding over to where Luke was standing with a blonde girl who appeared to be trying to corral him against the wall.
Oh yes, Julian said. What’s his name again?
Luke.
Of course! Good Samaritan or Prodigal Son, what do you reckon?
Couldn’t hazard a guess, I said, and Julian laughed and held my arm just for a second as he said he’d wait on me outside. When I turned round Luke had gone. I walked along the hallway, glancing into each room. In one bedroom, Sara stood with her hands on Katie’s shoulders, trying to quell her drunken sobs.
What do you expect, darling, I heard her say, from someone of that sort?
I found Luke in the kitchen, twisting the cork from another bottle of Prosecco.
Are you off then? he said, excusing himself from his blonde companion. Have fun. He was looking me straight in the eye, a half smile playing across his lips.
I will, I said, determined not to look away until he did. He gave in to the smile but it was me that broke the gaze, aware that Julian was waiting for me, not wanting to miss my chance. But I hesitated and said, I saw Katie. Crying.
He sighed and looked pained. Collateral damage.
Oh, I said, and turned to go but he called me back. Yes? I said.
Will you go back to his?
I think so, I said. I knew Julian had a room in a flat, and surely that was more appealing than my wire-framed single bed in Herrick.
Is Calum still ill?
Complicated by his asthma, poor sod, I said, then caught his drift. Want my spare key? I’ll take it off the ring for you.
Yeah?
No probs. Just remember, Calum’s bed’s the one on the left, eh?
He pulled his key chain from his pocket and clipped my spare key onto it, then squeezed my shoulder.
You’re a superstar, he said. I’ll knock first. Just in case.
Julian was waiting for me by the door, talking to one of his friends from choir, a toothily enthusiastic girl who didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on (or perhaps she had more idea than me). Julian and I walked along the promenade in the direction of his flat, then spent the best part of an hour sitting on the bandstand in testicle-shrivelling cold while he banged on about something amorous or, depending on your point of view, abusive, that had happened at school and whether it might possibly mean he had gay tendencies. What did I think, he asked. I said something soothing, while feeling resentful and used, and wondered if Luke was getting on better with the blonde he’d been cosying up to when I left. In desperation I put my hand on Julian’s thigh, in a gesture that could’ve been construed as simple affection. From the way he tensed and froze, I knew the game was a bogey. I walked him home as promised, and we exchanged manly hugs at the door while he thanked me for being so understanding.
A damp chill had come in over the sea and was skirling around the buildings, fingering its way under my clothes as I started walking back the way I’d come. I pulled my jacket closer around me but still chose the long route to Herrick. Walking at night was still a novelty, being ill-advised at best back home. Here I could indulge myself with dimly lit rambles over the cobblestones and down the back streets, peering between railings and in lighted windows. I never felt so close and curious when the streets were crowded, so many other lives displayed in daylight. Besides, even though I’d crashed and burned with Julian, I was trying to wear out the tingling, buzzing feeling that insisted it was too soon to go to bed, that something might still happen, a chance encounter in the magical hinterland between where I’d been and where I was going.
Three weeks before, emboldened by my ‘little brunette’, as Luke had called him, I’d succeeded in picking up a French postdoc who was over for a conference. He’d walked past me as I was sitting on a bench on the front one evening, watching the waves, doubled back and asked if I had a light. A clichéd pattern, I suppose, but at the time it felt deliciously Wildean. The memory warmed me as I walked. We’d gone back to his hotel, where he displayed an exhaustive – and exhausting – sexual vocabulary that suggested that pornography was truly international, describing in precise, present tense English everything we did. It had the opposite effect to the one he intended, imbuing our liaison with a childlike innocence that nonetheless I managed to overcome. He kept calling me ‘Rick’, which he pronounced ‘Reek’: this is your cock here, Reek, you would like me to touch it, Reek? Oui, Patrick, s’il vous plaît, I said, and he laughed at my accent and formal construction. After a very thorough night amid the chintz, I crept away, too uncertain of form and wary of discovery to wait until Patrick woke up.
No such luck, tonight. I heard laughter and raucous shouts from over towards The Yards, but the only person I saw was a man who might have been wearing pyjamas under his coat, waiting with his hands thrust in his pockets as an elderly bulldog sniffed around the trunk of one of the barren cherry trees on College Road. He looked as if he was on the brink of alerting neighbourhood watch so I said good evening, which made him frown. My Ayrshire accent was slipping, I knew, as I tried to be understood in tutorials, and somehow I made such pleasantries sound downright sarcastic. I cut down Minister’s Vennel, doubtless arousing the man’s suspicions even more. The wind whistled and swooped down between the narrow walls, and fallen leaves made the cobbles slimy underfoot. Guessing that chance meetings were likely to be thin on the ground, I picked up pace. I wondered if Luke was still at the party, or if maybe he’d gone home alone. I’d seen him accept a jolly slap on the back from Guy, who turned out not only to be whatever in line to the throne but Honourable to boot; noticed too their retreat into a corner and the interplay of folded banknote and something slipped in the pocket of the Honourable’s pale blue jeans. Next to him Luke was all edgy allure, in his drainpipes and Sonic Youth t-shirt.
; Soon the streetlamps I’d found so charming when I first came to university seemed to cast an eerie, moth-filled light. If Luke was already back, I’d go to the TV room. At least it would be warm there. My restlessness had transformed itself into nerves, and I was glad to emerge onto the wider street which curved round to meet the back way to Herrick. I climbed the stairs to the attic level with some trepidation, knocked lightly on my door. I needn’t have worried. Luke wasn’t there.
I was just dozing off when I heard the click of the Yale lock. I opened my eyes ever so slightly, saw the angle of light from the corridor shooting across the floor. I was about to say Luke’s name when I heard him whisper:
It’s all right, he’s asleep.
There was a silent hesitation, then his voice again.
He sleeps like the dead. Honest.
The door closed behind them and I felt the darkness deepen, then his bed creaked once, and again, and there was a moist noise of kissing then a sigh. I’ll roll over and mumble, I thought, as if I’m about to wake up. They’ll get the message and go away. But before I had a chance there were two quick zipping sounds followed by soft thuds, as if someone had taken off a pair of boots, an almost giggle then a shooshing noise.
I thought you said he slept like the dead, she whispered. I couldn’t tell if it was the blonde girl or not.
He does, Luke said. But take it easy anyway, yeah?
A second later I heard the clink of change and the drop of first one fifty pence piece then another in the slot for the electric bar fire. Small mercies, I thought, having been too frugal to feed the heater when I’d stumbled in earlier. Moving ever so slowly, I tried to get my right ear under the duvet. Nevertheless I still heard the rustle of bedclothes falling to the floor and a succession of ghastly smoochy noises. After a while she said:
Hang on. You’ve got a ragged nail or something.
Sorry, he said, and a little later I heard a sharper noise from her, and then he groaned, and the bed started to creak as they moved. Right, I thought, that’s it. They’re the ones who should be mortified. I’ll cough politely then say, excuse me, but would you mind doing that elsewhere? I’m trying to sleep. The bed kept on creaking and I found myself thinking of the muscles in his arms, how they’d tauten to bear his weight.
Oh god, I thought I heard him say, so swiftly I could hardly make it out. She made a noise which was cut off as though she’d been muffled, and a new note entered the creaking as his pace quickened and one of the springs twanged in protest. I pictured the metal straining under the combined pressure of bodies, the way the wire mesh would stretch and distort underneath the mattress. Then the noise stopped and he said:
Turn over.
There was a flurry of stifled giggling, then he said:
Please.
After some disturbance and undecipherable whispering, I heard him make a noise, a gasp, I suppose it was, a sound of such startling intimacy that I felt ashamed, almost, to have overheard it. The girl said in a louder voice: No, no, I can’t.
Luke said something soothing, and I heard her say no again, so that it sounded like an apology. After a few seconds the creaking started again, coupled with the twang of the spring. His breathing was very clear now, and I could imagine – couldn’t help but imagine – the sweep of his back, the muscles in his thighs. Embarrassment, or fear, quelled my erection but when I heard him utter an abrupt and wordless groan it firmed again until the desire to get some kind of relief was almost unbearable. Except I knew, lying there with every sinew stretched, that there was nothing I could do.
As they quietened I realised I’d forgotten all about keeping my own breathing steady, but as I tried to regain the right tempo I must have inhaled a stray feather from my pillow because all of a sudden I knew I was going to sneeze. The sound was smothered under the duvet, but the silence from the other bed suggested it had still been audible. I made a kind of murmuring noise and shifted position, then started breathing even more deeply – and, I hoped, convincingly – than before.
You’d better go, I thought I heard Luke say, and maybe he said my name as well, though now I was tired and groggy. There was shuffling and the floorboard by the sink squeaked and this time my eyelids didn’t register the glimmer of light from the corridor outside, though I heard the yawn of the door opening. My muscles were still tense, but I didn’t realise it until I felt them relax with the click of the snib. A little later on I thought I heard a whisper:
Richard?
I stayed still, kept concentrating on my breathing, slow and deep.
You’re awake, aren’t you?
But by then I was slipping in and out of sleep, and I might have imagined or dreamed that Luke was speaking, that I heard him laugh quietly to himself. Maybe it was the same as after a nightmare; you lie there frozen, forcing your eyes to stay closed, thinking you’ll never sleep again. And the next thing you know it’s morning, and the night before seems intangible, unreal.
13
A new set of possibilities for OFFICER rampaged across Richard’s computer screen, ones which would allow the character to sacrifice his men to protect himself rather than vice versa. And COLONIAL, he could now seek revenge for injustices perpetrated by his supposed superiors. WOMAN might be a bloodthirsty psychopath, or else unveiled and transformed into a damsel in distress, ripe for rescue. And why shouldn’t romance blossom between OFFICER and INFANTRYMAN? Lars wanted edgy, didn’t he, and that would offer a nice twist for the hetero gamer, take them ‘out of their comfort zone’; something which was, according to marketing, desirable within the genre. Richard scrawled a two-way arrow between the two on his mind map. There were plenty of means of dying: by mortar, by bayonet, by blood poisoning, by gas, by drowning. He scored the last option out – flooding the trenches was too complex, too thorough – and returned to the character flowcharts, each one still lunging towards blank white space. Escape was unfeasible: there was nowhere to go. Even if the geographical boundaries of the game were extended further across Europe the action would become meaningless if an AWOL character successfully evaded the military police and kept going, alone. It would turn into another game entirely, one with new territories and new modes of play.
Richard’s headache had returned, though it was now more to do with frustration than any residue of excess alcohol from the night before. He had a sudden urge to bring up a website he knew, as a reward for working so late, but he couldn’t look at anything like that when his sister might come back at any moment. His sister and her friend. The only thing worse would be his mother. He’d never forget her inopportune delivery of his ironed school shirt, without knocking on his bedroom door. At least the magazine he’d been looking at had women in it, even if he had been trying to obscure them with his free hand in order to concentrate on the various disembodied appendages that were approaching them from beyond the edge of the page. His father had defended him, relieved perhaps by the apparent evidence of his son doing ‘just what boys do, Moira’.
As Richard backed up his files he checked the time. Rab made his last journey back from the island at quarter past six, docking at quarter to seven at the latest, and it was now approaching eleven. Tourists often assumed that the proprietors of isolated establishments liked nothing more than presiding over all night binges, but George the landlord was more likely to call last orders at ten than keep serving into the wee small hours. Richard thought of the bottle of Sancerre nestling on top of the vegetable drawer in the fridge, of splashing some of the icy wine into a glass and taking a sip. But Stephie and Loren, unused to the blanketing darkness of the countryside, might phone asking for a lift home. He’d driven back from the picnic at the beach with meticulous care, knowing he was over the limit. Smashing a headlamp on the tight turn onto the small bridge was considered the most likely pitfall of driving under the influence, especially as the Northern Constabulary had recently completed their quarterly purge, but Richard had been conscious of Stephie lolling in the passenger seat and he hadn’t forgotten George�
�s nephew Davy. It was ‘gey unlucky’, people said, that he’d taken a corner at speed and skited on black ice. That stretch of road was unforgiving, rocky outcrops on the one side and a drop to the sea loch on the other. He’d hit his head, they said, unconscious at least before the car went into the water.
Wishing he’d left his computer on, Richard rotated the dial on the radio through a cacophony of poor reception before rejecting a sententious religious programme which seemed to be the only comprehensible option. He’d have to read, something soothing and familiar that would help him wind down. He scanned the meagre array of fiction squatting between his sensible histories and biographies. Yellowing paperbacks bought in the secondhand bookshop when he was at uni, often with an eye to Luke’s taste as much as his own: Gogol and Kerouac, Camus and Ballard. Drawn to a familiar silver spine Richard plucked a book from the shelf and allowed it to flop open where the binding had broken. He skimmed the page until a line leapt up to stall him. A description of ‘that faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city’. How those words had resonated in his mind, once upon a time, when he’d searched for just such a low door in the wall of his university town, ready to stoop and enter, willing himself to be enchanted.
A crash and the clamour of voices startled Richard. He could hear Stephie’s voice rising exasperated into what sounded like the two syllables of her friend’s name. Then, more distinctly: ‘For fuck’s sake’. He dithered, closing the book and putting it back on the shelf, collecting his empty coffee cup from his desk, taking care to close his study door as noisily as possible. In the kitchen he found Stephie sitting at the table looking thunderous while Loren swayed against the worktop, hacking at the foil around the neck of the Sancerre. He watched her drop the corkscrew and realised she was likely to stab herself; there was also something pathetic in her clumsiness that made him say, ‘Just what I was about to do,’ and take the bottle from her.