'I always do as I'm told, well, nearly always,' I said, and was glad to see his smile.
'What you say about contradictions,' he went on, serious again. 'You've come to that conclusion as a woman, not when you were nineteen.'
I heard the ping of an email arriving and thought what an evocative sound Apple had found for their laptops, sly and intrusive. I looked back into his eyes.
'Don't they say you should try everything once?'
'Everything except hurting people,' he replied; he started counting on his fingers. 'Everything except making arms, selling arms, putting arms in the hands of warlords, making wars because it's good for the corporations…good for the banks.' He paused. 'Don't you have a job in a couple of days?'
'A hedge fund seminar.'
'A what?
'I'll have to iron my black suit.'
'Black suit. Why do you think they build their banks to look like temples? Money's the new religion. They want you in black like nuns.'
'Nuns in short skirts, and they like a bit of cleavage…'
'Disgusting. Don't go.'
'I have to pay the rent. My bank hates me as it is.'
'Cancel it, Katie. Write an article. Do something else. Don't take their blood money. You're too good for that.'
He stood and crossed the room. I was sitting at my narrow desk below the window and rose into his arms.
'You know I'm off in a few days.'
'Don't go.'
'I have to…'
'I have to earn money waitressing.'
'It's different.'
'Why?'
'People are relying on me,' he said.
We kissed. I clung on tightly and felt bereft. I had watched birds in the park walking on the thin ice and felt the same, shaky, cautious, the ground cracking beneath me.
'You're not angry?' I said.
'About what?'
'My moment of dissolution.'
'At university?' he asked and I nodded. 'Bloody angry. I want to know how come it's always the wrong people who get into power? The narcissists, the psychopaths, the abusers – blokes who make a fortune in business and swing round the revolving door into politics for the hell of it?'
'It's the way it is. It's always been the same. What can we do?'
'What we can. You know what the Buddha said, you can't change the world, only yourself.'
'Is that what you're doing?'
He shrugged. 'I don't know what I'm doing half the time,' he said, an odd admission, or a concession, I wasn't sure. He kissed my nose and changed the subject. 'Now I know why you write erotic books, and so well. They get you off balance. You think they're about one thing, but there's a lot more going on. You have real talent.'
'Thank you.'
'I mean it. You make the characters so real, I can't help thinking they are all you.'
'They're not me, they're reflections of me.'
'That's why you wanted to go to the House of Mirrors, to look for yourself?'
'Tom Bridge, you are getting to know me too well, and you know what happens when that happens?'
'No, what happens?'
'People get bored.'
'We won't let it.' He stood back, holding my hands. 'Have you ever thought about writing other kinds of books?'
'Now you sound like my mother,' I told him and he laughed.
We were quiet for a moment. I could hear the heat pipes humming, the wind in the eaves.
'Do you want more tea?' I asked, and he shook his head.
'No. I want to go back to bed.'
Reading Bataille had opened my vocabulary to words like taboo, transgression, orgy, lust, temptation. My tutor had introduced me to Anaïs Nin with that Christmas gift wrapped in Le Monde, and at the spring break I had a tattoo inscribed on the back of my neck. It intrigued him. He ran the tip of his tongue over the spirals. I was a girl who had learned how to let go and Tom, with all his passion and energy, was able to let go, too. We made love recklessly, continually, as if time were running out.
Days clicked by like snapping fingers. Were the skies as blue as I remember? Did Mr Patel really keep up his New Year optimism? I recall seeing unlikely smiles on my face in shop windows, and realised that after my shower each morning I had neglected to clear the steam from the mirror. I had forgotten to check to see if I were too fat or too thin. I grabbed things from the closet without worrying if this shade of that colour went with that shade of another colour. We played what I call boutiques. I cat-walked my clothes and Tom helped me decide what to keep and what to take to Oxfam.
'A documentary team's going to turn up at some poor African village,' he said, 'and all the girls are going to be dressed for the Kings Road.'
'Kingsland Road,' I reminded him.
'You live here, but you belong there.'
'So I'm frivolous and a bit snobby, am I?'
He laughed and held his hands up defensively. 'No, I'm joking, I take it back.'
'You do know my cupboards are bare?'
'Doesn't it feel good?'
'No, I feel naked.'
'We're going to take a look at the shoes next.'
'Not in this lifetime,' I said, and he opened the wardrobe door.
He then stretched out on the bed. I cat-walked in low heels, medium heels, sandals, pumps, boots, espadrilles.
'I can't really tell when you're dressed, take everything off.'
We made love in the closet, on my swivel chair with the laptop pinging on the desk, in the bathroom with bankers watching from their glass temples. We made love with the clock ticking and the sun pallid in the winter sky.
We went to clubs, restaurants, bars, plays. We stood in the spooky light of the Rothko show at the Tate Modern and walked over the Millennium Bridge to see if it swayed. We climbed the 528 steps to the dome of St. Paul's and tried the acoustic trick of the Whispering Gallery. You mumble words against the wall, they rise up the dome, and you can hear them clearly across the other side of the gallery. He waved across the vacant space, turned away and cupped his lips.
'Katie Boyd, you're beautiful.'
'Tom Bridge, you're a flatterer.'
'Katie Boyd doesn't like compliments.'
'Oh, yes she does.'
'I love you, Katie Boyd.'
'Does that mean I'm paying for lunch?'
'Yes, and I'm hungrier than a pigeon.'
I laughed. There was a lot of laughter. Tears and laughter. We ran around the gallery into each other's arms like movie lovers. I led the way down the stone stairs worn thin by the long tromp of humanity, and I thought about those three words wondering what they implied. In Spanish you say Te quiero, which means both I love you and I want you, a safety valve. The French say j'adore, sensual, sexy, evasive. I love you is a carving on an old tree, like something made of plaster standing in the rain; girls kiss and squeal love you to their friends when they hate each other.
He gave me a sea shell from Sri Lanka and I could hear the waves slipping over the beach when I held it to my ear. The shell was patterned like a tortoise with two rows of blunt shiny teeth. I kept it in my bag with my iPhone and lip gloss. I called and cancelled my waitressing job, though Tom most mornings took the tube to the Médecins Sans Frontières offices in Saffron Hill. There was an Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Syria and Iraq were disintegrating. In South Sudan, 25,000 people in a refugee camp were sitting in floods of water from the monsoons. Blistering heat and biblical rains. Tom thought God weird to keep punishing the same region over and over again, but then, he didn't believe in God.
When we met at his office he had aching shoulders from carrying the weight of the world and I watched his spine grow straighter as we continued our pilgrimage. Another play, a Helmut Newton show of erotic images from the sixties. Like a camel taking on water before crossing the desert, he was filling up on culture, on London life, fusion food, strong beer from new breweries. At night we made love and slept and made love again, the moon peeping through the blinds, the sun rising with an X to stamp on th
e calendar.
*
Lizzie wore red. Her colour. Ray was long and gangly hauling himself out of the chair to shake hands. He looked awkward, hesitant, a sergeant dining with a doctor, a rank thing, the omnipresent whiff of class. We carried two bottles of wine, some red tulips flown in from warmer places.
'I hate it when people bring flowers. You have to stop what you're doing and go and find a vase.'
'They match your dress,' I said, as she turned away.
Ray got busy with the corkscrew.
'White to start?'
The cork popped and he poured the wine, filling the glasses on the coffee table. I admired the simplicity of Lizzie's flat, white cabinets free of photographs, a solitary abstract covering one wall. There was a narrow shelf containing two white china elephants supporting a modest row of books; once read Lizzie gave them away because authors, she believed, want to be read not lined up to gather dust like tombstones.
I left the men and went through to the kitchen with two glasses of wine.
'What are you doing in here?'
'I came to help.'
'That's a first.' She glanced at the boxes of lasagne from Marks and Spencer's ready to go in the oven, then back at me. 'Now I know why my number's been wiped from your phone.'
'Have I been remiss.'
'Remiss. I'm going to write that down.' She filled a vase with water and peeled the cellophane from the flowers. She turned. 'He's cute,' she added.
'How are things with Ray?'
'He's still a good fuck, if that's what you're asking.'
'Lisa?' I queried.
She sighed. 'Agh, Lisa. She reminds me of you, in a way, when you were young.'
'And innocent.'
'Katie, were you ever innocent?' She stopped what she was doing and gave me a long stare. 'You look different,' she said.
'You usually say I looked pleased with myself.'
'That's because you usually do.' She looked me up and down. 'You're wearing jeans and flat shoes. You look like the proverbial woman who's just got out of bed and can't wait to get back in again.'
'It's true.'
'There, done,' she said, and adjusted the flowers. 'How's the writing?'
'Like a bicycle with a puncture.'
'You must write every day, every single day, even if it's just a few paragraphs. Write a blog or something. They're usually amusing.'
'You're right. I will. I've been…'
'Don't tell me what you've been doing. I know what you've been doing.'
'And you?'
'I'm turning you into a novel, you know that.'
'I'll get my agent to sue.'
'You don't have an agent.'
'That's not going to stop me.'
'Nothing's going to stop you, Katie. Not when you know what you want.'
Lizzie placed the lasagne in the oven, set the timer, and I thought about what she'd said as we joined the men. It is, I'm convinced, the secret of life: knowing what you want and then setting about getting it.
I sat on the arm of the sofa beside Tom. There was music in the background, Arabian, mournful; Lizzie had obscure tastes. I watched Ray top up the glasses, an intense look in his washed out blue eyes. The skin stretched over his cheekbones, hair prison short, a scar on his jaw. The reserve he'd shown when we'd arrived had gone, diluted by the alcohol. He leaned forward with an unnerving expression and took a breath. It's fucked. Everything's fucked. There's nothing we can do about it. No point trying. The enemy's not over there in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's behind our backs in Whitehall, in Washington.
'The real war starts when the boys come home without legs and arms and eyes. And the Ministry of Defence spends years fucking them. No psychological care, rundown houses full of rats, pensions they can't live on. All these poor fuckers are going to have to rely on the National Health for the rest of their lives, and what are they doing with the National Health, fucking that as well?'
Ray was a paratrooper with special forces. They went in first, readied the terrain for occupation, or tidied up some mess before scarpering and denying they were ever there. He spoke quickly in spurts, as if his words were stuffed in a paper bag and were bursting to come out. He was a proselytizer, a man hurt and obsessed.
There was a silence. 'Sorry,' Ray added.
'No need,' said Tom. 'I don't disagree. I just don't think we should give up.'
'You're not on the front line, mate.'
'There's more than one front line.'
Ray sniffed thoughtfully.
'I'll give you that,' he agreed and finished his wine. 'I'll tell you something, the boys coming out are fucking angry, and fucking embarrassed. Why do you think we fucked up in Basra? It wasn't the fault of the men. It was the lack of equipment, vehicles without armour, not enough safety vests, officers who come out for three months to get their war medal and sit on their backsides doing fuck all and knowing fuck all…'
'If that's true,' Tom said, and Ray waved his hand.
'You think I'm sitting here making it all up? Thing is, no one gives a shit. The Americans had to come in and clean up after us in Basra. Same in Helmand. We like to think we're punching above our weight. What a joke. Two wars, thousands dead, and what have we achieved? Fuck all. The Taliban's back in Afghanistan and there's a civil war in Iraq. How do you think the mums and dads feel knowing their boys got fucked for nothing?'
'But you're going back?' I said.
'Can't do nothing else, can I? Eighteen down, two years to go.' He took another long breath. 'Then what?'
He shrugged, offered the bottle.
'Thanks,' I said, and knew as he refilled my glass that I was going to be taking Nurofen in the morning, but you do it anyway.
'The blokes who aren't injured when they get out don't want to sit on their arses, they want jobs,' he said. 'What do they do? What can they do? Go into security so they can get paid decent money to piss on all the poor fuckers in the Middle East, in Africa. Or they join the police force. I'm not joking. Half of them are fucked up here,' he tapped the side of his head, 'and they're out there patrolling our streets. And, I'll tell you something else: you see a beggar with dead eyes and ten to one he's an army boy.'
'I thought they were usually heroin addicts,' I said. 'I always feel guilty when I don't give them any money and feel stupid when I do.'
'Course they're addicts. After going to hell and back they want to escape from reality. Drugs help.' He held up his glass. 'You can see it when someone's lost their legs from an IED, you can't see it when they've got so much stress their brains have turned to shit. They can't put plating under our vehicles, but when it comes to talking bollocks, those cunts at the MoD are the best.'
'Why don't they put plating under vehicles?' I asked him and he shrugged his big shoulders.
'Because money's more important than lives, that's why. This country's been stolen from under our noses. We're owned by big business. London's a tax free zone for the mega-rich, the oligarchs, the oil barons.'
Ray had joined up because he was proud of being British and would come out in two years ashamed of being British. He was impassioned, convincing, he knew his subject, and it went through my mind like a lost piece of music that I wanted to write everything down, check the facts, write his story.
'It's hard to believe,' I said.
'That's what we're up against.'
The oven pinged. I helped serve the lasagne. Lizzie had made a bowl of salad with pine nuts. We sat around the table in the corner of the kitchen. Tom talked about Sri Lanka, South Sudan, and Ray was a good listener as well as a good talker.
'When you leave the forces, there's always work in the voluntary sector,' Tom said.
'I know that. One thing I really hate is land mines. They kill the women working in the fields. They kill children, not the enemy. Whoever the fucking enemy is? I'll go back to Afghanistan for a month every year, help the engineers clear the fuckers.'
'That's only a month, Ray,' Tom said. 'If you want to give me a
call, I can find plenty of things for you to do.'
'I'm not a medic. I know how to kill people, not cure them.'
Tom put his fork down and sat back. 'Tell me something: have you ever built a temporary bridge?'
'Yeah, course, fucking hundreds.'
'Ever put in a water pump?'
'What's your point?'
Tom was doing his finger counting thing. 'Do you know how to wire up a bomb?'
'Yeah, and it's a lot easier than dismantling them.'
'Is there a difference from wiring a bomb and wiring a house? I don't think so. When you get out, you're not going to go and start killing bankers, are you?'
'When I've finished with those fuckers at the Ministry of Defence.'
'I'm going to put you on Médecins' mailing list.'
'You can do that. Don't promise I'm going to read them, though.'
'We've got four hundred kids, really bright most of them, they pick up English a lot faster than I can learn their language. We need people who can do things, make things, build things. We pay expenses, though a lot of volunteers pay their own. They come out for three months, six months, live in barracks, muck in, and almost every single one comes back for another tour. They see they're making a difference, and it makes a difference to their own lives.'
Lizzie cleared the plates. I helped. She cut up some pears with goat's cheese.
'I did warn you. He can't stop beating the same drum,' she said.
'What he's saying is interesting. It needs to be said.'
'Not when you've heard it all a thousand times.'
'It makes me feel as if I'm living in a bubble.'
'Course you are, Katie. But you know that.'
18
La Bohème
Tom produced a pair of tickets for the Royal Opera House and I wasn't sure whether to be moved or furious as I watched Rodolfo first seduce and then cast Mimi aside in La bohème. A tic pulsed in my neck as we walked through Covent Garden after the final love duet. The Opera House had been packed and I couldn't imagine how Tom had found eighth row seats at the last minute. He put his arm around my shoulders.
'You okay?'
'Yes…No. I'm angry with Rodolfo.'
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 21