But now, as they stare at my arms in the kitchen, I am suddenly defiant. They are scared of me for the first time in my life. I have stepped beyond their control. The discovery gives me strength. I sit with half my school uniform torn off. I know I cannot explain these scars but now I don’t want to. I hate Mammy for being weak and I’m ashamed of her illness. I hate Gran because I need someone to blame and because no matter how hard I try I can never achieve her dreams heaped on my shoulders.
Even as a baby they had forced me to choose, playing a game where they called from different sides of the playground to see who I’d run to. I remember tottering back and forth until I sat down crying with my arms over my head. Now I stare at their faces, then arch my fingers to scratch my neck with nails I have let grow jagged. I don’t notice whose hand grabs my arm. I call out with what sounds like a shriek of pain but is a cry of freedom.
My cry echoes in this hotel room. I open my eyes, surprised by the sound, like someone waking up. Luke has entered me. He stops, his scared eyes looking into mine.
‘What’s wrong?’ he says. ‘Have I hurt you?’
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ I say. ‘I didn’t ask you to stop.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Last week you said you just wanted a fuck,’ I tell him. ‘This is private. My life is none of your concern.’
I close my eyes, feeling Luke hesitate, then enter me, deep and deeper. Once these memories start they will not stop. I even know the sequence they will follow: the rows as Gran forcibly cut my nails, the dark games where the closer they examined my body the more secretively I hid my scars. Then the doctors and specialists, hours of queueing for professional voices to probe why I was asking for help. The ink dots and idiotic tests, folders crammed with pictures of the moon which I sullenly drew in their offices. And the suspicion that fell about our house, the rumours I could set into motion, making my grandparents live in fear until I controlled their lives for the next three years. Yet, even at the summit of that power, I still lacked courage to speak about the man in the moon and nothing could touch the core of pain within me.
That pain should be banished, now because I am twenty-two, a new person with a new life. I open my eyes. I’m in a hotel bedroom, being fucked – like my mother at that age – by an Irishman. I don’t know why the memories have returned, or why my mother seems close, as if watching now. But when I close my eyes an adolescent image returns: dark bogland and sweating leather, grey hairs around a penis jutting out and in. I stretch my arms out, wanting to be held. Can they not see what’s happening before their eyes? Can they not even try to understand?
But Luke doesn’t understand. I feel him withdraw and his arms turn me over. The bedspread is ancient and frayed. It grates against my breasts. He grips my hips, raising them to meet his thrusts. I press my face into the pillow and the ache is as insatiable as it always was, and the gulf between me and the world is like a scar that can be hidden but never healed.
SEVEN
FOR THE FOLLOWING nine Sundays I made that journey. I saw less and less of Honor and Roxy, despite only being with Luke once a week. But, although I resented him for it, that time had become increasingly central to my life. The job in Wilkinson’s finished in late October and I was on social security again. I hated the dark evenings, the rain keeping me isolated in my flat and the secrecy of our relationship.
I know it is irrational, but some Sundays I varied my connection from Angel and changed at Euston instead of King’s Cross. I knew no one was following me, but such manoeuvres formed part of a mental foreplay, adding to the illicitness of our encounters. I had done the same after leaving Harrow, convinced my grandparents were searching for me.
At first I had once or twice arrived late, just to let Luke sweat. But recently my anxiety that he mightn’t turn up had grown so acute that I hated the uncertainty. We were crazy to cling to this location, where Luke might be spotted, but we seemed unwilling to initiate any change. The temporariness of the hotel suited us, keeping further commitment at bay. Yet this arrangement couldn’t be indefinite. Eventually one of us would arrive and instinctively know that the other wasn’t late, they had simply ceased coming.
It was early December before we quarrelled. My period wasn’t quite over yet. The receptionist eyed us more inquisitively every week and, although I wasn’t bothered by her glances, I didn’t want her prying at bloodied sheets after we left. Sex had been the reason for our dates and so, although I wanted to see Luke, I almost didn’t turn up that week. Perhaps I was afraid of the vacuum its absence might leave, but Luke said that the sex wasn’t important, for him at least, and it would be nice to talk for a change.
We did so in bed with the light out, smoking and sharing a bottle of gin. I wanted to roll a joint but Luke was old-fashioned about something as harmless as dope. As always, Luke talked while I probed. Our conversations had become a contest of wills where I tried to needle him into revealing more than he wished to. I told him almost nothing of myself and, although Luke initially appeared open, I soon realised how tightly he defined the world he chose to tell me about.
His talk was mostly about childhood in Dublin, yet the younger self he described seemed removed from the Luke I knew. Silences punctuated his stories so that they made little chronological sense, while nothing was said about the current occupations of his two brothers, who populated every story he told, and his own life in London might not have existed.
‘Why did you really come over here?’ I asked as we lay, with the bottle half-empty. Somehow the sensation of being in bed without having made love felt more intimate than anything we’d done before.
‘You get sick of living in people’s shadows,’ he replied, taking another slug and staring at the ceiling. ‘Over here you’re nobody, everyone lives their own life. My neighbour has stupid bloody pillars outside his house with ornate balls on top. Last Christmas I was reversing into my driveway when I knocked into one them. He came running out and it was the first time he’d bothered speaking to me after eight years there.’
‘What did he say?’
‘How dare you reverse into my balls!’ Luke’s English accent was perfect. I laughed.
‘He did not.’
‘No.’ Luke agreed. ‘Nothing as original as that.’
‘What would it be like in Dublin?’
‘Different.’ The humour drained from his voice.
‘Why?’
‘It just would be. People think they have your measure there, they point the finger.’
‘All the same, would you be happier there?’
‘Happy?’ he snorted. ‘What the fuck has happy got to do with it? I came here tonight to forget that shite, all right.’
I knew by his tone that the conversation had steered out of bounds. Luke turned, his hands sliding down my back and probing into my knickers. But I also knew he didn’t really want sex, he just wanted any intimacy kept at bay. It made me feel cheap and I pushed him off.
‘We agreed,’ I told him, ‘so don’t start.’
‘A few specks of blood never hurt nobody,’ he replied. ‘Besides, there’s more ways than one.’
‘Just go and fuck yourself.’ I began to climb from the bed, angered by his deliberate mockery. ‘Fuck off and play with yourself.’
I started getting dressed, as angry with myself as with him. I had helped set these rules, knowing our relationship couldn’t survive beyond these walls. I had never wanted soppy confessions or post-coital angst. But I didn’t know what I wanted any more.
‘Listen, Tracey.’ Luke’s tone was conciliatory. ‘I didn’t mean …’
‘You did,’ I said. ‘Be honest, that’s all you see me as, a tart, a piece of fluff on the side.’
My back was turned. I had just ripped my skirt in my haste to put it on. I didn’t want him looking at me half dressed.
‘Is that how you really see yourself?’
I turned, my hand holding closed the blouse I hadn’t time to button up. I was
trembling.
‘You’re so clever, aren’t you?’ I sneered. ‘You always know how to shift it back on to me.’
‘You should never think of yourself like that.’ Luke sounded like a concerned father. He had retreated into his watchful, non-committal self.
‘Just how do you think of me?’
‘You don’t need to ask.’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s obvious you’re using me. Once you come you’d sooner wave a magic wand and make me vanish.’
‘You never wanted lies before.’
‘I want the fucking truth.’
‘The truth is I’ll be here for you next week and every week.’ He watched as I managed to do up the last buttons on my blouse. I hated myself for shaking, but who the fuck was Luke anyway? I wasn’t asking him to leave his wife, I didn’t want more of his precious time, but just that once he might show a shred of affection.
‘You’re wasted in tiles,’ I said, grabbing my coat. ‘You should have gone into plastics. You could have simply moulded a likeness of me to blow up.’
I slammed the door. I could imagine the receptionist lifting her head. But when I got downstairs I found that for once I couldn’t stare back at her because that was how I felt, a cheap tart, some man’s weekend piece of fluff. I kept my head down until I reached the street and ran.
I didn’t go back the following Sunday or the Sunday after that. I did nothing, except sit in the flat and smoke roll ups. I stared blankly at titles in the video shop. I splashed out on cheap wine but couldn’t even seem to get drunk. Roxy and Honor had stopped calling, perhaps guessing at all the times I was really in with the light out. I could have called for them or taken off by myself like I used to, but I seemed drained of emotion.
There were Christmas lights everywhere, late night shopping and office parties. I considered phoning Harrow, but I didn’t want to think of home or Christmas or anything which might drag the past back. One night I dreamt about that old black monkey and woke scared and unsure of where I was. Our affair was over, I told myself. I needed my own life, not some other woman’s cast-offs. In Gran’s pet phrase, gleaned from years of specialists, I had an addictive personality. Luke was the latest addiction to break.
But Luke was the first encounter to really affect me since my mother’s death. Everything else had a second-hand flavour. I wondered if his wife had consented all along. Was that why he had been so open in the Irish Centre? But I knew she didn’t know, because wives never do, and I was trying to justify something which had increasingly disturbed me. Every day I told myself it was finished and yet that statement seemed too definite for something as vague as our relationship. Some days I decided I was just playing it cool and letting him sweat for a while. I could break this habit whenever I wanted, but perhaps I should use Luke to get me over the loneliness of Christmas. The problem was that his absence made me realise how empty my life was.
On December the fifteenth I decided to visit his shop. I was on a tube and impulsively stayed on after my stop. I watched the stations flash past, not certain if I’d actually go in or what I expected to happen if Luke was there. Maybe I wanted to haul our relationship out into the wintry light of a Wednesday afternoon and see if anything remained. I just knew I couldn’t leave matters as they stood and I couldn’t walk back into that hotel any more than I could break away from Luke.
The store was crowded with serious-looking DIY folk beautifying their houses for Christmas. Piped carols were interrupted by special offer announcements. I felt an almost vengeful enjoyment in being there, setting the agenda for once. I moved around the aisles, watching his staff work and wondering if he was here or in the smaller shop a few miles away. The staff were young and well trained, marked out by red company jumpers and enthusiasm. I could hear them repeat the same soothing phrase, ‘I’m not trying to sell you this but it might just suit …”
A supervisor in a dark suit checked off a stocklist with a visiting sales rep. I passed him twice before I stopped to look back. It was Luke. I watched his eyes flick between the printed order form and the shelves. I felt chilled. I hadn’t recognised him and now, when I did, I realised that I didn’t know this man and I could never have slept with him. The rep was leaving. Luke called something after him. Even his voice sounded different. I was watching a chameleon. Luke turned to look straight through me for several moments before it occurred to him who I was. His face changed but only slightly. It showed neither encouragement nor surprise. I realised I couldn’t talk to him here, I had nothing to say to this man. I backed away, fleeing down a side aisle to escape.
The following Sunday I left it late before deciding to visit the hotel. There were delays with the tube and when it finally came three girls stood by the door laughing hysterically at their own inane comments, as if anxious to antagonise the whole carriage. After Wednesday’s visit I had sworn never to go near that hotel again. Yet at King’s Cross I raced through the passageways connecting the Northern and Circle lines.
I got stuck behind an old man struggling up the escalator with a suitcase. The case stuck out, blocking the left side where people tried to rush past. They cursed him silently and not so silently as he ignored the log-jam behind him. There was something unnerving in his stillness as he stared up the escalator as though a great fate awaited beyond the ticket barrier, which he had only to haul his battered case across the forecourt to confront.
Honor once told me she believed in angels after seeing one pass her window as a little girl. Momentarily I forgot Luke as I watched the old man, fixated by the notion that he was a soul on its ultimate journey. Perhaps this underground was full of ghosts that nobody noticed as they vanished down tunnels at the end of deserted platforms. I couldn’t remember if I had read about such a notion, but, as a child, shabby old men with cases had fascinated me with the unspoken fear that they were my dark father come back.
The suitcase bumped over the rim of the escalator and the old man stumbled, trying to hold it. I pushed past and ran down more stairs just in time to catch the train pulling out on the Circle Line. Yet all the way to Edgware Road I felt an obscure foreboding that I hadn’t stopped to help him.
There was no guarantee that Luke would have come or would wait this late. But I felt he would have taken my appearance in the store as a sign that I wanted to talk. If he didn’t show up then at least I’d be freed from the illusion that I had found somebody who needed me.
I emerged at Edgware Road into light rain and walked quickly on. Looking back, I realise that if I had paused to help the old man with his case I might have missed my connection and arrived so late that I would have run past the shops opposite the Irish Centre. Instead I slowed to stroll casually past so as not to attract attention. Apart from the restaurant with its bored belly dancer, only the newsagent was open, although even he had one shutter down. I saw him closing up, with a huge rack of foreign newspapers pulled in out of the rain. An Irish Sunday paper was there, incongruous among the mass of Arabic newsprint. I could hardly see the photograph in it and had gone past when the eyes drew me back. I leaned against the glass. It couldn’t be Luke, I thought, starting to panic. It was like him, but the face was stockier, the eyes more cold. Ironically it was the suit I recognised first, because, as suits go, Christy Duggan’s taste was pretty appalling. The photograph was obviously a family one, taken at a christening or wedding. I banged on the glass. At first I thought the shopkeeper wasn’t going to bother opening up. The paper was folded, but I could still make out the headline, Dublin Gangland Murder.
I stood outside under a streetlamp, reading the account of his killing over and over until the rain distorted the newsprint. Now I knew that Luke wouldn’t be in the hotel. He would have no way of letting me know the news and no way of guessing that I knew. But I walked on anyway, in case there was a message at reception. I wanted there to be a different receptionist, but the same one eyed me coldly, sensing she had the upper hand.
‘Is there a letter for me here?’ I asked.
She turned a page of her magazine, deliberately not looking up until I’d gone. I reached the top of the stairs. I hadn’t expected this. I must be important if Luke had found time to see me tonight. We had always kept emotions at bay and now I felt ill-equipped to console him. It didn’t seem right to walk in on his grief. I knocked twice before he opened the door. If he had been crying it was well hidden. He stepped back to allow me in.
‘Luke, I know and I’m sorry,’ I said.
He gave a half shrug. ‘It was all my fault.’
Even when confronting death he seemed composed. His suit was immaculate although the shirt collar looked scuffed. His manner was more apologetic than mournful.
‘You can’t blame yourself,’ I said. ‘I’m just surprised you came tonight.’
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘We can’t let setbacks get in our way.’
He took a pull of his cigar and I realised that my suspicions were right all along. He was a total chameleon, a conman who felt nothing for anybody. I remembered his hands on my neck that first night. He could have killed me and thought nothing of it. Luke studied my face, concerned.
‘What’s wrong, Tracey?’ he said. ‘I’m here to apologise for the row. I’m sorry about the shop, but we’re so busy before Christmas that I was miles away. You were gone before I’d time to say anything.’
He hadn’t realised I was talking about Christy. He thought I didn’t know what had happened.
‘I don’t fucking believe this,’ I sneered. ‘You don’t even let death get in the way of a quick fuck!’
I backed away, ready to flee and Luke reached a hand out.
‘Don’t fucking touch me,’ I shouted. Then I looked at his eyes and realised that Luke hadn’t heard the news from Dublin.
‘Where have you been all day?’
He looked confused by the question. ‘I was in Holland since Friday, buying stock from a tile shop closing down over there. I took the van across. It’s parked outside still.’
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