by Jo Baker
The taxi took the left-hand turn, then almost immediately turned right into a poorly lit side street. The trees here were bigger, heavier. There were cars parked nose-to-tail the length of the street. The taxi pulled over, engine rattling. In the dark, between parked cars and trees, Claire could see a flat-faced redbrick terrace.
“We’re here,” Alan said.
The bedroom smelt as if it were permanently dark. The bed was small, not quite a double. She lay awake beside Alan’s heavy body, listening to the calls and laughter and shouted conversation on the street. She couldn’t quite catch the words. Footsteps passed and repassed the window. Alan’s breath became heavy and slow. She heard a distant car alarm, a door bang shut.
Cautiously, she turned on her side. She lay, eyes open, facing the wall.
She woke with the buzzing of the alarm clock and the lurch of the bed as Alan heaved himself out. She watched him walk away, down the room, scratching his hip. His blue-striped pyjamas were crumpled. She heard him lock himself into the bathroom.
She lay for a moment, becoming aware of her body. The blankets had got pulled up in the night, leaving just a sheet covering her feet. Her toes were cold. Her nose had an outdoors kind of chill. She stretched a hand over to Alan’s side of the bed. It was warm, but faintly damp and uninviting. She crawled over the crumpled sheet and out of bed. Her bags were in a heap by the door. She padded over, dragged out a jumper and pulled it on over her pyjamas. She went through to the living room. Alan had already flicked on the electric fire. One bar glowed in the dim room. She walked down the corridor, past the bathroom, into the kitchen. Dark, dirty and cold. She heard the toilet flush, the burst of water as the shower was turned on. She set out things for breakfast on the kitchen table. Bowl, spoon, Weetabix, milk. The shower’s hiss ceased. She heard the rattle and splash as he ran a basinful of water, then the tap of razor against ceramic. The cistern groaned and gurgled, refilling itself. She put the kettle on, heard the scrape of the bathroom door-lock, then Alan’s footsteps as he walked back to the bedroom. She dropped teabags into the teapot. The kettle clicked off; she poured the water over the teabags. She watched the brown dye seeping out.
She heard his heavy tread as he walked back down the corridor. He came into the kitchen. He was wearing a black poloneck and trousers. She had never seen the clothes before. His hair was scraped back, the tooth-marks of his comb still visible; his scalp showed pinkly through the hair. He sat down at the table. He peeled the plastic wrapping off the Weetabix, dropped two biscuits into his bowl. He doused them with milk.
“Sleep well?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Alan leant low over his bowl, spooning Weetabix into his mouth. She sipped her tea, watched the wallpaper-pattern dance.
“I’m teaching at nine,” he said. He glanced at his watch.
“Are you all sorted out for it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Claire nodded.
“I told you you’ve got to go down to Conroys sometime today.”
“Conroys?”
“I did tell you. I got you a job.” Alan spooned up more of the milky slush. Liquid dripped from the spoon back into his bowl. He looked up at her coldly. Claire took another sip of her tea.
“What kind of job?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I left the address by the phone. Any time after eleven, he said. You’ll have plenty of time to find the place.”
“What kind of place is it?” she asked cautiously. “What do they do?”
“It’s a pub,” Alan said. “They sell beer.”
He had finished his breakfast. He stood up, scraping back his chair. Claire put his bowl in the sink and stood there numbly, looking at the bowl, the tea-stained metal sink, her own cold hand. He walked out of the kitchen. She heard him moving around the flat. The wardrobe door opened with a squeak, was shut again. The bedroom door tapped shut. She looked up from the sink, up the hallway towards the living room. She couldn’t see him, but could still hear him moving around. The creak of his jeans, a sharp exhalation as he bent down to pull on his shoes. He muttered a few words under his breath, reminding himself of something. She walked cautiously down the hall. He was pulling on a tweed jacket, tugging down the sleeves. It was neat, new. She had never seen it before. He picked up an armful of papers from the coffee table.
“I’ll be back around six.”
“Right.”
“There’s a spare set of keys in the kitchen drawer.”
“Right.”
He turned towards the door.
“See you,” she said.
“Yeah. See you.”
The flat door slammed behind him, then, a moment later, the door onto the street. She didn’t move, didn’t think. The cold made her gradually aware of herself. A shiver was gathering between her shoulder blades. Her toes were almost numb. The skin on her legs crawled. Her nose was icy. But the mug in her hand, she realised, was still hot. It was burning her skin. She looked round for somewhere to put it down.
The shelves were full. Alan’s books. Hardback covers black like carapaces, paperback thrillers, broken and papery along the spines. The table was covered in computer; pale tangled wires and flexes trailed away from the machine like worms. The coffee table was cluttered with files and papers and polythene envelopes. On the narrow mantelpiece, above the boarded-up fireplace, was Alan’s graduation photograph.
She walked through to the bedroom. Three paces. She set her mug down on the chest of drawers. Alan’s comb, deodorant and aftershave were arranged on a cotton doily on the top. She sat down on the bed. Her feet looked pale and bluish. Beneath her feet, the carpet was dirty and patterned with obscure red whorls. She followed the pattern with her eyes across the room, towards the door. Her bags still piled up in a heap. Clothes, books, linen.
Any time after eleven, he had said.
She stood up slowly, walked across the room. She took her rucksack by the strap and, backing away, dragged it out to the middle of the floor. She knelt beside the bag and took the metal tab of the zip between her thumb and forefinger. She could hardly feel it. She dragged the zip across, pushed her hand down through the layers of fabric. She picked out her clothes one by one, laid them out on the carpet. Small piles formed around her. T-shirts, knickers, trousers, jumpers. Her other pair of shoes.
It seemed to take a long time. It seemed to be inordinately hard work. It took an incredible effort just to take hold of a corner of a cotton T-shirt and drag it out of the bag. Her feet and legs grew numb underneath her. The rucksack emptied. She saw sand-coloured canvas at the bottom. She reached in, felt around: there was nothing left. Around her the clothes had piled up like fortifications, walling her in. She wanted to stand, to step out over the ramparts, but when she heaved herself up she found that her legs had gone dead and there was nowhere to put her feet. She lurched, staggered, stumbled on her clothes, then subsided onto the bed. She sat looking vaguely at the emptied bag, the precarious piles of clothing, at her pale numb feet. Everything looked odd, like it wasn’t hers, like it belonged to someone else. She became dimly aware of the blood beginning to prickle through her numb muscles. It was unstoppable; it would flush them pink and full. And that too felt somehow wrong, somehow distant. As if she were not feeling it herself. As if she were feeling it felt. And as the nerves in her toes and feet and calves came back to life, they registered an ache, they registered cold. And that, at last, seemed real.
She heaved herself up off the bed, bent down again, slid her hand under a heap of clothes and crushed them up against her chest. She walked stiffly over to the chest of drawers. She opened each drawer in turn, then closed each of them again. Every one of them was full. Slowly, she turned to the wardrobe, took the metal handle between her fingertips and pulled the door open. Jackets and trousers jammed up tightly together. No space. She looked back across the room at the dark open mouth of her rucksack, at the uneven stacks of clothes. She walked back over to the bag, dropped her armful back into it, th
en bent to shovel in the rest of the clothes. She pushed the rucksack back into the corner.
She picked up her mug and walked the three paces back through to the living room. Her tea had gone cold.
She went over to the window, drew back the curtains. Light came in slices through the treads of a metal fire-escape. Beyond, the algaed green of a damp back-yard wall. She felt unclean, as if covered by a thin grey film of dirt. Her hair, hanging round her face, felt heavy, greasy. She walked through to the bathroom. She felt as if she was watching herself walk through to the bathroom.
She turned on the shower. The room began to fill with steam. The shower was above the bath. The bath was pale yellow, greasy with dirt. There were two oily marks where Alan’s feet went every morning. A bottle of medicated shampoo, its lid off, stood on the side of the bath. On the wash-hand basin, a bar of Shield lay in a clotted pool of blue slime. The taps were spotted with spat-out toothpaste. Sandy-ginger stubble stuck to the greasy ceramic. Lying on its side in a pool of gritty foam, was a silver-handled, fixed-head razor.
Beside it was a neat little plastic box. Claire watched her pale hand pick the box up. She watched her other hand move across to open it. The fingers pulled out a precise paper envelope, an inch long, and unfurled it. A clean cold razorblade. It was unfamiliar, odd-looking: the sharp edges looked innocent. It was the gap inside, the absence, that looked threatening, that looked like it might bite. Claire watched herself pick up the blade, fingertips pressing together through the space. She saw herself walk across the room and slide the bolt across the door. She sat down on the edge of the bath, but didn’t feel the hard plastic through her thin pyjamas.
Slowly, almost thoughtfully, as if to see what would happen, Claire lifted her left leg, laid her ankle on her right thigh. Her pyjama leg fell back and revealed the smooth swelling of the calf muscle. Short, stubby hairs grew out of the skin, lay flat against it, where she had shaved herself, two days ago, in England, with a disposable blue razor. The anklebone seemed to press out against the membrane; the bone seemed almost visible. She cut a straight line across the thin skin.
She was surprised by the quantity of blood. It welled up immediately, before she had even finished the cut. It ran down over the ankle, dripping onto the knee, splashing onto the dirty lino. For a moment she just sat and watched, fascinated and delighted by the brightness and the heat that was pulsing out of her. Then she began to giggle. Because it looked so dramatic. Because she had made such a mess. Because it was, in fact, so easy.
She glanced round the bathroom for something to sop up the blood. The toilet roll was sitting on top of the cistern. She hobbled over, wound tissue round her hand, held it against the cut. With her free hand she rummaged in the mirrored cabinet for plasters. She found one, lying flat on the shelf, probably left by the previous tenant. She opened it, stuck it on.
She glanced back across the room, saw a trail of blood, dot-and-carry-one, across the floor. Droplets of blood clung to the panel of the bath. There was a tiny red pool by the toilet, another one at her feet. There was blood on her pyjamas, blood on her hands. Next time, she thought, I’m going to have to be more careful. But looking at her bloody skin, feeling the cut glow with pain, she knew at last that she was alive, and real, and hurting.
Alan sat at his office desk and drank deeply from his cup of instant coffee. His throat was sore and his mouth was dry from the morning’s work, but he was happy. The two-hour seminar had passed quickly. He had not stopped talking the entire time. And, as usual, it had gone right over their heads. He remembered the look of glazed incomprehension on his students’ faces and smiled to himself. Philosophy was supposed to be difficult. It was supposed to be a rigorous, demanding, scholarly subject. He had sweated blood to get where he was. And he was buggered if he was going to make it any easier for anyone else.
He lifted his legs up, crossed them on the desk. He congratulated himself on arranging the job at Conroys for Claire. It amounted to foresight of prodigious proportions. Spooky almost, since he had done it before the meeting at the bus station. Or perhaps he had suspected her all along, subconsciously. Anyway, Gareth was an old friend. He wouldn’t let her get away with anything. And he would probably notice what Claire was up to long before Alan would. Because, Alan had come to realise, he was not particularly observant. Gareth would be better at keeping an eye on her: he wouldn’t suffer from abstraction in the way Alan did. And, perhaps most importantly, Alan realised with a shudder, Gareth wouldn’t fancy Claire himself. He was, he thought, the ideal boss for his girlfriend. The pub situation was not perfect of course; lots of pissed men looking for an easy shag. But she would be busy, and she would be tired. She wouldn’t have the time or energy to flaunt herself. Alan, if he hadn’t been holding a cup of coffee in one of his hands, might have rubbed them together in satisfaction. Instead, he smiled grimly to himself, pulled open his desk drawer, and reached in for his packet of shortbread fingers.
Now, he thought, as he munched stickily on his biscuit, was the time to start calling people up. Now was the time to start socialising. Now she was here, he could display his happiness. He’d show them. Everyone who ever thought they were doing better than him. He listed his achievements in his head. Ph.D., job, girlfriend, flat. Claire was the only one that he could bring out for the evening to show people, unless of course he took his letter of appointment with him and wore his gown to the pub. And now, he thought, he had another reason to call people up and arrange a night out. He would show her how reasonable he was. How forgiving. And how popular.
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny plastic-covered address book with the university crest on the front. He licked his finger, leafed through the pages. He picked up the telephone, dialled a number.
“Hello. Can I speak to Paul Quinn please?”
Alan was aware of something different in the flat. He closed the door softly behind him, listening. He could hear voices—she must have the radio on—but that wasn’t it. He could smell cooking—rich, warm scents—but that wasn’t it either. His stomach grumbled. He was hungry. He went through to the bedroom, hung up his coat in the wardrobe, saw her heap of bags on the floor. She hadn’t put anything away. Her stuff took up the entire corner. She was cluttering up the place. She was occupying too much space. That was what he had noticed. A psychic shift. He congratulated himself for once on the fineness of his senses, but decided that he would not take the issue up with her tonight. She could be as inconsiderate as she liked, but he was not going to allow himself to get angry about it. Tonight, he was going to be happy. He was going to be content. He was not going to let her spoil his evening. He closed the bedroom door behind him, walked through the living room and down the corridor to the kitchen.
She was standing at the cooker, her back to him. Her arm, shoulder, hip, moved slightly as she stirred something in a pan. Another pan, lidded, rattled gently on the back ring of the cooker.
She was dressed in dark trousers and a jumper. She looked neat and clean and soft. Her hair was caught up in a ponytail; he could see soft fine hair feathering the nape of her neck. He stepped towards her, put a hand on her hip, kissed the back of her neck.
She jumped. She dropped the spoon. It clattered against the side of the pan.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said, irritated. He turned away from her, switched the radio off.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said.
“I noticed.”
He sat down at the kitchen table. Her back was to him, so she couldn’t see him, but he forced himself to smile anyway. He was determined he wasn’t going to let her annoy him. He was going to be happy. He was going to be magnanimous. He was going to be the very model of patience. And he was going to show Paul and all the rest of them what true contentment really was. He smiled more broadly. It was beginning to make his face ache.
She fished the spoon out of the pan, began to stir again. Underneath the dark wool of her jumper her breast sho
ok slightly with the motion of her arm.
“How was your day?” she asked. She did not look round.
“Fine,” he said. “Busy.”
“I’m making pasta. Is that okay?”
“Fine by me.”
“It’s just I didn’t have much money.”
“Right. How did it go at Conroys?”
“I start tomorrow.”
Alan nodded. “Good. Just as well. I’ve arranged something for tonight.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re heading out,” he said grandly. “I’m meeting an old friend.”
“Oh.”
“Paul. Went to school with him. Then uni. He did architecture.”
“Oh.”
“He’s got a girlfriend, apparently. When I told him about you he said he’d bring her along. We’re going to Bar Twelve.”
The stirring slowed. Her breast stopped shaking.
“Alan, I’m skint.”
“Don’t worry,” Alan said generously. “My treat.”
She lifted the other pan and held the lid on at an angle. She drained the starchy water off into the sink. A cloud of steam rose around her. She put the pan down, opened a cupboard, looking for plates.
“Down the bottom there, by your feet,” Alan said. Her feet were bare, he noticed. They were stained grey with dirt.
She bent down, opened the cupboard, slid two plates off the pile. She dished out the pasta, poured sauce over each heap. She put a plate down in front of Alan, placed the other across the table from him. Alan waited while she fetched the cutlery.