by Sarah Rayne
They make their way through the wine in the methodical manner of people aware that sex is on the cards. Gemma ransacks her limited stash of conversation-starters and the two of them labour gamely to keep each ball in the air, but they are both grateful for the distraction of an incensed shriek from downstairs as Jamie, having fallen asleep on his small arm, wakes to the impression that it has disappeared. A few seconds later Mel can be heard shuffling around.
Xavier grimaces.
‘You don’t like kids?’ Gemma guesses.
‘Sorry?’
‘Do you not like kids?’
The question grabs Xavier by the throat and holds him like that for a few seconds. He sees, as if right there in the room with them, Russell and Bec’s child Michael, three weeks old, in a tiny one-piece outfit, resembling the cub of some woodland animal.
‘Er . . .’
‘It’s just, you looked like you were thinking, oh my God, that bloody kid.’
‘Oh.’ Xavier collects himself and the almost-vision fades. ‘No, no, I just . . . just feel a bit sorry for the lady that lives down there. She’s a single mum and the kid is pretty lively. But no, I do like them.’
‘It must be a nightmare being a single mum.’
Xavier agrees that it must be.
‘I’m no way ready to do anything like that,’ Gemma adds.
That’s probably good news, thinks Xavier.
When they get to the bedroom, Gemma undresses Xavier with a practised ease and then gets him to undress her. Xavier feels what he felt when she first touched him in the cinema: a sort of reluctant arousal. She is an energetic lovemaker, she bites his shoulder and claws at his back, and he, caught up in it all, begins to enjoy himself. For a little while he forgets himself and everything, and is just a person making love to another person, like hundreds of people across the city at this time of night – like Jacqueline Carstairs’ friend Roz, who cried off the dinner date to have sex with a man she met last week at her salsa class, or like the Indian shopkeeper’s daughter and her boyfriend, who are about to get engaged. It feels to all these people, for a few minutes, as if there is nothing else worth doing in the world. When it’s over, Xavier and Gemma lie there for a little while in the silence, listening to miscellaneous noises, the rattle of a lorry on the main road outside, a heated conversation beneath the best efforts of the TV upstairs.
Xavier goes to the bathroom and when he returns, to his surprise, Gemma is sitting partly clothed on the edge of the bed.
She pulls her top over her head and looks, coolly but without acrimony, at Xavier.
‘I think I should go.’
‘What? Why?’
She shrugs.
‘You know . . .’
‘Did I do something wrong? I’m sorry, I can be a bit . . .’
Gemma spreads her hands in a wry, rueful gesture.
‘No, no, it was great, but you know.’ She shakes her head vigorously, whether to express something or to reanimate her hair he’s not sure. ‘We haven’t got much in common.’
‘Well, maybe not, but . . .’
‘I’ve had a really nice time but – you know, we both did it for the sex. We’re not soulmates or whatever. So I don’t really believe in staying the night and then having that whole awkward thing in the morning over breakfast. So, anyway, we should leave it there.’
He starts trying to argue, out of politeness, and then realizes that he is relieved. He gets dressed and walks Gemma down the stairs to the door, as if he had just shown her around the flat as a prospective buyer. He offers to call her a cab, but almost at the same moment she spots one at the lights, fifty metres down the road, and sticks an arm out with the confidence of someone whom taxi drivers rarely ignore.
‘It was really fun,’ says Xavier, and now that it’s ending so suddenly he does indeed look back on the encounter with some affection.
He kisses Gemma on the cheek. She slips nimbly into the back of the car.
Although half an hour ago she had his penis in her hand, this is the last time they are ever to see each other. She will return to Australia in eight months, sleep with ten more people, then meet and marry an orthodontist named Brendon. She will have two children and work part-time in a tanning salon once they have grown up. She and the orthodontist will retire to Tasmania and die within a few weeks of each other. Xavier watches the cab disappear, a streak in the dark, and turns back to the house.
Only after lying sleepless in the disarranged sheets for a couple of hours does Xavier fully feel the distinctive emptiness familiar to those who take part in one-night stands more regularly, the jolt of the transition between strangers and lovers and strangers again. Since relocating to Britain, most of Xavier’s sexual encounters have been much like this, even if it’s a bit unusual for time to be called quite so abruptly afterwards. There was the girl from the British Film Institute bar who approached his genitals like crockery to be cleared away, firmly but without sentiment, even muttering, ‘Sorry, love,’ at one mishandled manoeuvre. There was the travel agent Murray introduced him to at a party: neither of them could quite relax during sex and afterwards they admitted they were both thinking of Murray, and giggled, and then felt very guilty.
There have been others, too, but it’s all been much like this: as Gemma said, no question of any connection of souls or anything nearly so dramatic; not even a physical connection of anything more than a few moments’ duration. The final, overriding impression is of having made little more impact on each other than if they had simply shared a train carriage. He knows that it’s his own doing, this incompleteness; that he holds something back, refuses to be entirely immersed, the same policy as he applies to the rest of his life these days. He knows that it’s out of some reverence for old times in Melbourne, a subconscious refusal to admit that all that is really over, and he knows too that five years is an awfully long time to be so perversely disengaged with one’s own life. If he were advising a caller on the radio show he would talk about ‘moving on’, ‘living in the moment’, valuing the present over the past, no doubt, and a fair number of people across the city would nod at their radios.
But, again, it’s much easier to know these things than to act on them, and as he sleeps, Xavier finds himself trapped in the most revisited memory of his former life.
It was a summer party at Bec’s parents’. Russell, big and square-shouldered, in a shapeless T-shirt, stood by the barbecue. Bec, tall, graceful, in a vintage grey floral skirt, was here and there among the kids, building a tower of bricks with one, carrying another to sit on the wall and look into the neighbours’ garden.
Russell watched her, his eyes mournful.
‘She’s so good with kids. She just always has been. Even when she was a kid.’
It was true: as a thirteen-year-old Bec directed Matilda in schoolyard games where they ran a crèche, or were Girl Guide leaders. She would wade in her stately way into fights between slightly smaller boys and cuff the surprised aggressors, comfort the weaker ones. Her mind had been on starting a family since they were all teenagers. This was deeply unfashionable among their peer group, full of aspiring rock stars, world travellers and dedicated drifters, but so were many of Bec’s tastes: at school she had earned funny looks by snacking on salami or raisins instead of chocolate, she wore long skirts even in the heat of summer, she did yoga. More than anyone else Chris had ever met, she appeared to know precisely what she wanted, and not to care how her desires struck the rest of the world.
Russell swigged from his beer.
‘It would just break her heart if we couldn’t have one, mate.’
Chris patted him on the back.
‘Of course you’ll have one.’
‘It’s been three bloody years.’
‘It takes a lot longer than that, sometimes.’
‘But it’s just – you know. Typical of me.’ Russell’s tongue flicked out fretfully over his wide lips.
‘Bullshit. It’s pure luck. It’s nothing to do with you.’<
br />
Chris fought back the chastening memory of last summer’s camping trip, how he and Matilda had joked at the ungainly sounds coming from the next tent.
‘I don’t think this is going to be the night,’ he had whispered. ‘Shall we just make a baby and give it to them?’
She’d laughed back: they were still not an official couple. There had been so many jokes about Bec and Russell’s failure to conceive, and only now was it becoming apparent that this was not a joke at all.
‘I just worry I’m not doing it right.’
‘How can you not do it right? Are you accidentally putting on a condom?’
Russell stared at the ground.
‘They say it’s – it’s more likely if she has an orgasm. I don’t think she normally does.’
Chris ruffled Russell’s hair.
‘They say a lot of things. It’s all crap. It’ll happen when it happens, mate. I don’t reckon it’ll be long.’
He wandered over to the other end of the garden, where Matilda stood clutching a cocktail glass and gazing skywards. She grabbed his elbow and pointed.
‘Hey. Look.’
In the sky, which was a cloudless, almost gaudy blue, a plane, buzzing in a determined little arc, had begun streaking a cottonwool trail. The letter C hung in the sparkly air above Melbourne.
‘It’s going to be your name!’ said Matilda, jiggling his arm playfully.
Chris laughed.
‘What, it’s a C, so it’s going to be Chris? Why the hell would someone write Chris in the sky?’
‘Why would anyone write anything in the sky?’
‘Well, it’ll be an ad or something.’
‘You’re so unromantic. What will you bet me that it doesn’t say Chris?’
‘Unless you commissioned it yourself, I’ll bet you whatever you like.’
‘All right.’ Matilda grabbed and shook his hand. ‘If it says Chris you have to do whatever I say. If it doesn’t, I’ll do whatever you say.’
The pilot sliced horizontally through the air to join two upright lines into a pair of rugby posts, and Matilda cooed with pleasure.
‘CH!’
‘Are you sure this isn’t a set-up?’
Matilda grinned.
‘Where would I get the money to hire one of those guys? How do you even get in touch with one?’
Behind them, Russell and Bec were holding hands, there was laughter over a spilled beer and shouts from inside the house where a football game was on. The late afternoon was warm and good-natured and everyone else was oblivious to the tiny airborne drama.
The next letter was an R. Then an I.
‘This is the best thing that’s ever happened,’ said Matilda, raising her glass to the spirited sky writer, hundreds of metres above.
‘It could still be an advert.’
‘You idiot.’ She landed a series of light blows on his arm.
As the plane began the single helix that was, at a moment’s glance, obviously bound to become an S, the two of them began to laugh euphorically, the way they might have laughed ten or twelve years ago, when making fun of the world still felt like an idea that they were the first people ever to stumble on.
‘What are you going to make me do?’ asked Chris.
She put a finger over his lips. He stiffened.
As the pilot completed his swivel into the final gentle incline of the S, Matilda took his face in both hands and said quietly, ‘Kiss me.’
‘What?’
‘I said kiss me. Not like friends. Kiss me properly.’
Chris looked at her, her eyes huge and vulnerable as if she had caught herself doing something rash, her hair in uneven pigtails. He stared at her old-man’s shirt and baggy jeans, the pretty constellations of freckles painted, as if with flecks from a fine brush, across her arms and neck and nose. He could feel himself trembling. He had known her fifteen years. She dropped her hands to her sides and looked straight back at him.
Far above them, the pilot swooped again, and on the ground the two of them turned involuntarily to see him complete a new letter: T.
‘Christ!’ they both said.
They watched, holding hands, for three long minutes as the far-off calligrapher finished off his message: CHRIST LIVES. After the tension of that first S, the second was full of bathos. Chris imagined the pilot landing the plane, hauling his cramped limbs out of the seat, looking back up at the already faded contrails of his handiwork.
‘Well,’ said Matilda, raising her eyebrows, ‘so, I guess I have to do what you say.’
And he grabbed her and kissed her, the two of them kissing there on the porch until everyone was watching and applause broke out, applause and whistling, and all their friends saying that this really should have happened years ago.
When Xavier wakes, it takes a few moments, as ever, to realize that Matilda is not here, that she is in Sydney with her fiancé; and a few more moments to remember what happened last night.
He gets up, thinking about anything to dispel the dream: Murray’s rather subdued mood over the past week, the kitchen does need a bit of a clean, the way Gemma tore her nails into his back last night, the argument between Tamara and her boyfriend upstairs – or did he dream that too? It’s half past eleven. He goes into the bathroom. The crumpled towel is still lying in the corner like a tramp in a doorway.
The shower runs, capriciously veering between hot and cold as it always does at first, as if it were a performer low on confidence, needing to settle into a rhythm. As he’s about to step into the tub, the doorbell rings. He withdraws his foot with a short sigh and stands, listening. There’s an external bell for each flat. Xavier’s and Tamara’s simply read First Floor and Second Floor, respectively: Mel’s, which once said THE CARPENTERS, now defiantly reads JAMIE AND MEL. Mel, of course, normally ends up answering the door for everyone, as she’s on the ground floor, and sure enough Xavier can hear Jamie crashing around excitedly as she comes out into the hall downstairs. It will be a parcel or something, he thinks, and Mel will sign for it, and I can stay right where I am. Or a Jehovah’s Witness, in which case Mel will say I’m out. But to his alarm, after a conversation – he hears a strongly accented female voice alongside Mel’s – there are footsteps on the stairs. He pulls his boxers back on (the shower, slighted, keeps going as he leaves the bathroom) and is wearing a shabby ensemble of clothes, like a temporary display in a shop, when he answers the door.
A woman stands on the threshold of his flat with a huge blue-and-yellow-chequered laundry bag on her arm. She has shoulder-length hair so blonde it is almost white. Her breasts are large and pendulous, making themselves known even through the shapeless raincoat she’s wearing. She has a collection of pale freckles which give him a strange flashback to Matilda and the recently dissipated dream.
‘I’m here to do the cleaning,’ she says.
‘Oh!’ says Xavier. ‘Yes, I mean—’
‘Did you forget I was coming? My name’s Pippa, you probably forgot that too, what with all the comings and goings that night, it was chaos, wasn’t it, and that bloody DJ afterwards, what a racket!’
As she comes in, Pippa keeps talking, and Xavier takes a step back, like a boxer on the defensive.
‘It was a bit of a waste of time, wasn’t it, no time to meet anyone, but then what do you expect, it’s the social aspect that people go for, isn’t it?’
She’s about his age, perhaps a little younger, which Xavier finds faintly embarrassing: it feels somehow decadent to engage a cleaner who could have been in the same school class as him. She has a Geordie accent which rips the consonants off the ends of words, and sometimes kidnaps them from the middle. Even after a few years in Britain, Xavier has never stopped being amazed by the diversity of accents he hears on the show. Pippa is standing in the kitchen doorway, casting what he can only imagine are appraising professional looks around the ill-tended flat.
‘Yes, to be honest, I, er, did forget you were coming, so the place is, er, pretty messy . . .’<
br />
‘Well, that’s why you hire a cleaner!’ says Pippa brightly. ‘You don’t go to hospital if you’re well, do you!’ He feels it’s a line she has used before; everyone probably apologizes for the state of their houses. ‘Where d’you want me to start?’
Xavier remembers the shower running.
‘Well, I was just in the bathroom actually, so perhaps don’t start there . . .’
Pippa laughs raucously as if this were a much dirtier joke than it is. She is already unpacking from the laundry bag an arsenal of spray-bottles and cans, detergents and polishes.
‘I can assure you it wouldn’t be anything I’ve not seen before! Cleaning in a hotel, you see everything!’
‘I’m sure you do,’ says Xavier.
‘Only the other week,’ she continues, the anecdote arresting Xavier as he attempts to leave the room, ‘I had to clean a room a rock band had been in. They had an all-night party after their show, booze, drugs, there were probably forty people, mostly girls, of course, those pathetic creatures who attach themselves to rock stars, as if there was something impressive about poncing around with long hair and playing the guitar . . .’ (Doesn’t this woman ever breathe when she’s talking? Xavier wonders.) ‘I go in the next day – at two o’clock, mind, they check out two hours late, to be extra difficult, and you cannot imagine. Pools of vomit. Condom-wrappers. Bottles everywhere, I mean everywhere. They’d damaged the table. There was shit on the floor of the bathroom, I mean, if you’re going that close to the toilet, why not go the whole hog and use it! And they’d done graffiti in the hotel information pack.’ She says this as if it is the most damning offence of all. ‘Drawn penises on it.
‘And then, of course, I go down and complain . . .’ (This word, rather than being shaved down by her accent, is drawn out to a considerable, indignant length, com-PLAY-ahn.) ‘And do you know what they said? You’re the cleaner! We expect you to clean the room!’
‘You didn’t, though?’
‘I did.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I can’t afford to lose the contract. But I can tell you, I was mentally punching the hotel manager in the face the whole time, believe me.’