He checked her eyes. “At times.”
She paused for precisely long enough to please him very much. “OK.”
Amanda had offered a pen but no paper and all of the cheese wrappings, they’d discovered, were greased and wouldn’t take ink, so he’d rolled up his sleeve, delighted, and let her write her number on the inside of his wrist.
He’d kept the secret on him all that evening: had taken it, and never mind the risk, with him into bed. The tickle of her nib had set his skin ringing for hours until he had to pad off, voluntarily, into the other room and stretch out on top of the covers, stiffer than he’d been in years. And for almost fifteen minutes he’d only tensed, spread like a starfish, and concentrated on reclaiming the scent of her hair. Then, locked silently in the bathroom, he’d come twice: the first time through a kind of wrenching haze, the second more melancholy, empty. By the time he’d got back and into bed, he’d been completely lonely. He’d dreamed briefly of an undefined apocalypse and gasped back awake with the idea of kissing her throat.
Greg couldn’t be here now without a trace of that night pressing through, as if she’d really joined him somehow and this had become their bed. As if his loneliness had been sweated into fragments in this room and not another.
“I want to see everything.”
“What?”
After he’d had coffee with Amanda, and then after they’d met for lunch, he’d chiselled out one complete evening, to have for his own. They’d eaten dinner in Amanda’s flat, his imagination ceaselessly bolting and clambering, and then she’d gone through to the kitchen to fetch their dessert.
“I said I want to see everything.”
He’d been rolling an olive gently between his forefinger and thumb, hoping that if he made the bloody thing seem vaguely horny he might fancy eating it. He’d only been able to kiss Amanda once, a little, since he’d arrived and perhaps this was all there would be now: perhaps women, once they knew him, didn’t find him attractive, perhaps he’d got too old: he couldn’t tell and it was all just worrying. But this was when she’d called, “I don’t want us to put the lights out.” She appeared in the doorway and paused, holding out two plates of lemon cake. “I don’t want us to close our eyes, or run and hide under the duvet, as if it wasn’t really happening. I want to see everything.”
“Oh.” He would have swallowed, but had no spit. And he didn’t want any cake.
“Was that the wrong way to say it? I didn’t mean to be—”
“I want to see everything, too.” This not the kind of stuff that he would ordinarily admit. “I’ve wanted to …” Perhaps because there was, ordinarily, no point.
“You’ve wanted to what?” She put the plates down on the table as he turned in his chair to face her. He watched her walk towards him, only halting when her knees were touching his. “I don’t mind. I don’t think I’ll mind—what?”
With the crook of one finger he stroked her stomach through her blouse, easing down, aware of a nice, taut heat, “I just wasn’t sure …” and he understood why she hadn’t touched him at all this evening, “I didn’t know how to put it …” She’d known that if she started she wouldn’t stop. He hoped that was it. Or maybe she’d known that, if she started, he wouldn’t stop. “You wouldn’t be offended if I told you that I wanted to fuck you the first time we met.” She laced both her hands at the back of his head while he looked up and his mouth made declarations he’d never expected, “Now that … we’ve properly introduced ourselves and I like you and I think I love you, probably, I do want to make love to you, but I still want to fuck you. I want both.”
Amanda nuzzled the top of his head. “All right.”
“You mean that’s all right?” He was whispering, in case he made this go away.
“That’s what I said. Yes. That’s all right. Do you want your cake first?”
“No, I don’t. I really don’t, definitely. No. I do not.”
“You don’t like lemon cake?”
“Amanda, please.”
They didn’t have long enough, really, not as long as he’d have liked.
I’d have liked a week. Seven days, with little breaks for nourishment, that would have been what I needed to get myself used to it, to her. I mean somebody, a woman, who would …
His mind pitched back into the catalogue of daring things he’d wanted to try. With Amanda they were taken for granted, done. In fact, she had opinions on each one, along with small habits about their execution. Every time he tried to shock her, she shocked him back, stripped and splayed his favourite imaginings with her clinical enjoyment, her reality. All this, when he couldn’t help wincing defensively the first time that she simply sucked him, even though she did so in a way he could not have anticipated that anyone ever would, with such a beautiful, soulless determination. She didn’t hurt him, was only impeccably, firmly smooth, the close of her putting a tourniquet on the last of his sanity.
Very quickly, Amanda had worked him adrift from anyone he could have thought he’d like to be. Greg remembered pulling back the curtain of her shower and seeing them both together, caught in the sweat of her bathroom mirror, his face staring back at him from a soaped configuration of shuddering pinks, his eyes unmistakably afraid.
He’d made it home by two and had ducked directly into the spare room, feeling beautifully bruised and scandalised. Still awake, he’d seen the dawn crawl across the ceiling and was almost surprised: a part of him had imagined the day would start differently now, or just not happen any more, everything necessary being over. A chill of anticipation jumped in his chest and perhaps this was the fear of discovery, of being forced to stop, or perhaps this was the fear of successful concealment and having to carry on. He didn’t feel right, that was all—he didn’t truly feel what he’d call right.
“Hung over?”
Naturally, at breakfast, he’d imagined that Karen would guess just what he’d done. She didn’t.
“No, I think I’m getting flu.” This was a gift and he meant it to be, the kind of lie that she enjoyed dissecting.
“You weren’t in before one, I’m sure of that—this would be the flu to do with being up all night? Is this going to be a habit?”
I could get used to this, yes. It’s nothing I should be scared of.
“No, it won’t be a habit. The people from Sales—you know what they’re like. I have to keep them happy, now and then.”
It’s only, currently, unfamiliar. I will get my second wind.
“Well, I’m glad you’re keeping someone happy.”
Greg, producing a suitably hangdog frown, had felt it curdle slowly when he glanced at Karen and found that she was smiling. She had decided to be teasing, but sympathetic. He couldn’t begin to guess why and, frankly, didn’t want to: he’d been too busy indulging a good, low beat of preparative thinking.
I can’t plausibly get another evening soon enough. We could fuck on a Saturday, though, on a Saturday afternoon.
His wife had made him take a Beechams’ powder and kissed him on the lips before he left for work. He had not felt remotely guilty, only slightly peculiar, as if he were moving in a predirected path, one that gripped him, gleeful, that left him raw and luminous, under the skin.
Greg had almost the same feeling now, a similar chafing of weighted expectancy. Although there was also the rash: that did have to be considered, a nervous thing he hadn’t suffered from in years. In the fold of each elbow and on each shin he’d grown an irritable patch of crimson pinpricks. The doctor had given him ointment and, no doubt, the trouble would pass and Greg hadn’t needed to hear it was stress-related. Sometimes, he’d stare at one patch or another and wonder if it might not cohere some morning, arranging itself to spell out Amanda’s name. Or something worse, some message he didn’t want to bear.
The digital red of his alarm clock showed 05:42 and he’d set it for six, but he might as well start, get up. Karen wouldn’t surface before seven and by then he should really have everything done.
&n
bsp; He didn’t shave because it wasn’t necessary, applied his ointment as directed on the tube, dressed quickly in a shirt and jeans and then took his bag from the bottom of the wardrobe. There wasn’t much in it: a paperback, toothbrush and paste, another shirt, a pair of underpants and a Gideon’s bible he’d stolen from a hotel recently. In the kitchen he added a packet of chocolate digestives and two apples, as if it really mattered what he took. When he’d been a promising youth of good moral fibre and hill-walking for his Duke of Edinburgh Awards, he’d always made sure to pack chocolate digestives and apples in his regulation haversack and he’d always come to no harm. Which was an adequate reason for taking them with him today—they might bring him safety, which was much more important than luck.
It was only half past six when he washed up his coffee cup and realised that he could go, because there was nothing else left for him to do. So he folded his raincoat over his arm, eased out of the back door and closed it, quiet behind him. A street away, he’d parked the car so that Karen wouldn’t hear him when he started up the engine and drove off.
In an hour he was well clear of the city and rolling between dark stands of conifer. The daybreak had been smothered almost immediately in cloud and by ten it was raining hard, the peck of water overhead making his car seem cosy and sound. He turned on the radio and bounced across the frequencies, neither more nor less happy with any of them, but finally staying with one which conducted its business solely in Gaelic. This morning he wanted information that he could not understand, news that brought no disturbance, that didn’t concern him. Every now and then a crow would fling itself into a sinking flight across the road, only to perch in a wet hump once it reached the sombre plush of the opposing trees.
When Greg noticed he was hungry he stopped in a small, rain-shuttered town and ate lunch in a gift shop café. The food was dreadful: oily tea, a mournful cheese sandwich, a forbidding raisin scone: but he didn’t mind it, the nature of these things was the nature of these things and needn’t be argued with, not any more. He loitered in amongst the available gifts along with a brace of sodden tourists and, inevitably, three hill-walkers. He bought the most pointless things he could find, then beamed while the assistant duly bagged a ceramic stag’s head, a video tape of pipe bands and a pink Pringle golfing sweater.
“Is this for you?”
“Hm?”
“This is an extra large. A medium is quite big …” She eyed him appraisingly.
“That’s fine. I’m not going to wear it.” He grinned in what he hoped was an unbalanced way and eyed her in return. She didn’t flinch.
Back in the car with his prizes, he pushed north, this time without turning on the radio.
The thing about this is, I can’t be sure I’m right. In fact, I can be almost certain that I’m not.
But if I am right.
If I am right, I should be like this when it happens—with myself alone, contented. As close to contented as I get.
The idea must have nested in him for a while, only showing itself in needling little pieces, opening and spiralling out into his undefended sleep: here the taste of ash and there the sense of an absent sky. It finally, completely demanded his attention during his third time with Amanda—their hotel début. As far as Karen was concerned, he was leaving Glasgow fairly early one Saturday morning and driving to Edinburgh in order to meet a friend and get a cheap computer. The computer in question was already sitting in his office, bought with cash from a man in Sales. In reality, lovely reality, he was driving to Edinburgh fairly early one Saturday morning with Amanda and the intention of spending several hours in a hotel bed, or thereabouts. She would then take the train home, believing that he had a business dinner to attend, followed by a highly boring, all-Sunday conference. He would wait half an hour or so, check out with an excuse he’d never fully fixed on and go home once he’d picked up the computer. This was all rather complicated, but meant that he would have roughly five hours free for sex. Not counting whatever she did while he was driving.
As it turned out, she was an unexpectedly docile passenger.
“I don’t like to distract you while you’re driving.”
“Distract away.”
“I want all of your mind on what we’re doing when we do it. I can wait.”
So he had to, but as soon as they’d booked in and made it as far as the lift she compensated him for his patience.
“I’m not wearing any. Look.”
“Jesus Christ, what if it … if someone comes in?” Although, as soon as he’d said it, he didn’t care. “Fuck, that’s gorgeous.”
“I know.”
His plan for the day only foundered, that waiting idea only slipped its claws inside, when he looked down at Amanda, bent over the chair, the pale flesh of her back cool under his palms. She felt so ideal against him and her spine made such an adorably undulating arch and there was absolutely no way she could turn her head to face him and meet his eyes, so that was when he told her, “Actually, I’m married.”
Karen slowed their pace, but didn’t stop, “I know,” seemed to ask him to go deeper.
And he did so, bewildered, but rather more turned on than he had been all afternoon. “You know? How?” Rather more turned on than he could bear.
“You wear clothes you’ve picked to please someone else. They’re not you, or not the whole of you.”
He was going to come soon, if he wasn’t careful. “And?” She was making it hard to be careful.
“We’re fucking in a hotel room on a Saturday afternoon.”
Which did it, which just did it, and left him faintly rocking, laid forward over her back, only gradually aware of a rolling sweat. “You don’t mind?” His mouth seemed awfully gritty, odd.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“But you won’t …” It was tricky to speak.
“This is what I want.”
“God.” Words bouncing numbly in his skull, “I love you.”
“You’re very sweet.”
Then Greg had rested across the bedspread with Amanda drowsily beside him and fitted to his shape remarkably. They had another two hours left and then she would set off home, but now he felt unnaturally sleepy and had begun to slip adrift when something seemed to hit him inside his head. An audible colour. A twist of light.
No. Not now. No.
That feeling of nearing extinction, the threat of heat under each of his lurching and unsatisfying dreams, the horrible conviction that he might reach out, unconscious, and touch the end of everything—here it was, with him, nakedly clear.
But that would be ridiculous.
Still, the moment slapped him awake, put a spasm in his neck.
“What’s the matter?” The voice of Amanda. “Greg?” The woman who’d sprung the terminal lock, who’d shut him up alone with this.
“Nothing. I dreamed. Nothing.”
“Do you want to start again, then? Hm?” The woman who could lick and tug and buck him away from it. “My greedy boy?” And now she’d have to, she owed him that.
So, although he didn’t want to, not right then, although he actually needed to hug her, to hug someone, to be only held, “Oh … Yes,” he made himself begin, “Why not?” because she would let him do that, “Yes.” Because it was something to do. “Yes. Let’s start again.”
The end of days. Dear Lord, it’s coming, the End of Days.
He’d pushed them both hard, harder than he liked, then decided to steal the bible as they were leaving.
“What on earth do you want that for?”
And he hadn’t been able to tell her that this was foolish, but nevertheless, he would just feel safer if they had it with them in the car.
There are so many dates for the End of the World: you read about them in the paper when they’ve already gone and you hadn’t been remotely aware, would have got no warning if they’d been right …
Nobody would know for sure. They couldn’t. I couldn’t.
Despite this, he’d dropped off
Amanda, uplifted the computer and delivered it—and himself—home, with his head reeling round and round the list of every animal he thought he could remember that was said to sense coming earthquakes, or was forewarned of calamities.
And some people get this feeling when close relatives have died. And twins …
It was silly, though, to expect he’d be the only one, the only human to be aware of something this monumental. It was ridiculous. Ever since the day in the hotel he’d tried to think that.
And he did now, almost wholeheartedly, believe that his repeated premonitions and that single afternoon’s burst of certainty did no more than prove he had a highly masochistic type of arrogance. This drive he was taking up north, it was primarily therapeutic. It really wasn’t so very much to do with the end of the world. He was going away to relax—and his rash hadn’t bothered him a bit since he’d started out—that was proof that he’d needed a break and here he was having it. From the coming midnight until the next, he’d decided that he would stay up here by himself, but it would be much more for a necessary rest than because he expected the close of recorded time.
I didn’t believe the Millennium would trigger it, that would have been too neat. I wasn’t anxious, then. Only averagely anxious, anyway. The way a person in my position would be anxious.
It was over eight months, now, that he’d known Amanda and more than seven since they’d started to have sex. They’d settled into a pattern, her variation on normality.
“I don’t need that. I’ve told you, I have what I want.”
He’d tried to give her presents, “It’s only a scarf … You don’t have anything from me.”
“Yes, I do.” She started to unbuckle his belt.
“You wouldn’t like to talk? Anticipation …” Sometimes, when she touched him, he thought it might happen again: the outbreak of emptiness, of ending. “We could go and have coffee and then …”
“We’ve done that.”
“We’ve done this.”
“But this is much more interesting. I don’t suppose you’ve ever sodomised anyone.”
“Ever …? Uh, no.” She would always do that, nudge through his fear and his better nature with something impossible to resist. “Do you think I will soon?” She made him forget himself.
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