by Emma Curtis
‘I need to be somewhere,’ he says.
‘OK,’ Rebecca shrugs.
She is way past caring who sneaks off and who stays, but she doesn’t want him to know she’s going in case he suggests sharing a taxi, so she walks back into the party. The lights feel as though they are out to get her.
David is talking to Guy, shouting in his ear and gesticulating. Rebecca makes her way over and taps David on the shoulder. He turns and smiles, his eyebrows raised.
‘I’m off,’ she says. ‘Sorry to leave you playing dad to this lot, but I’ve got a horrible migraine.’ She decides not to mention the puking. It’s not a good look.
He nods and kisses her cheek. ‘Look after yourself and have a lovely Christmas.’
‘You too,’ she responds. ‘See you both in the New Year.’
It’s too noisy to say anything else, so she leaves them. She finds Laura standing by the door, scanning the crowd.
‘You OK? No problems?’
She can see why Laura hates this sort of thing. It must be so confusing for her. She feels a twinge of guilt but absolves herself. She made her come for the sake of the company as a whole, because the team is more important than the individual.
‘Just catching my breath.’
‘Well, I’d better …’ She indicates the stairway that Laura is blocking, and the girl moves and stumbles.
‘Oops.’
‘Laura, perhaps you should slow down a little. The night is young.’
‘I will. Don’t worry about me.’
Rebecca pauses, then decides to leave it. She is not her mother. But when she gets to the top of the stairs and looks back, Laura is still standing there. Fight or flight, Rebecca thinks instinctively. Poor thing.
Upstairs in the public bar, there’s another Christmas party in full swing, this one possibly even more raucous than theirs. The revellers make room for her, holding their glasses out of the way, wishing her a cheery farewell. ‘Fairytale of New York’ is playing, the crowd bellowing the words.
Someone shouts, so close to her ear that she jumps, ‘Stay with us, gorgeous!’
Rebecca pushes through to the doors and bursts outside with a sigh of relief, the cold temporarily easing her headache. Her taxi is waiting, the ticking of its engine cutting through Kirsty MacColl’s voice. She gets in, tucks herself into the corner and closes her eyes.
5
Laura
AT THE END of the night, we fetch our coats. Mine is the lightweight down jacket I use for winter cycling. My bike is still on the roof. I think that’s a good thing. I can’t stand straight, and I don’t want to land in the gutter. That would be bad. I have a feeling there’s more vodka in my veins than blood. I wish I hadn’t drunk the GZ as well.
The cold air on the street is great after the stuffy basement. Really great. I press my hands against my cheeks. This is red-nose weather. I hope I don’t have one. I touch the end of my nose and Pink-Shirt laughs and kisses my mouth.
‘Damn. Forgot my scarf,’ he says. ‘Don’t move, I’ll be thirty seconds.’
He’s gone. I stand on my own, feeling like an idiot, surrounded by loads of people I don’t recognize puffing out fog and bellowing, ‘Happy Christmas!’ at each other. It’s like I’ve walked into my worst nightmare. I edge away from the kerb, steadying myself against a bollard. Fortunately, no one expects me to say their name, they’re all too drunk.
‘See you in the new year, you jammy bastard!’
‘Has anyone seen Kerry?’
‘Got to run, I’m going to miss the last tube!’
‘Someone check on Guy, he’s absolutely hammered. He shouldn’t be cycling.’
Eddie appears in front of me and gives me a huge hug. ‘Aren’t you glad you came tonight?’
‘Yes.’ I kiss his bearded cheek. ‘How’re you getting home?’
‘I’m not. I’m staying the night with my brother. What about you? I’m going in the opposite direction, or I’d share a cab. You’re not getting on your bike, are you?’
‘Uh … no. I don’t think so,’ I laugh, gripping his arm to steady myself. ‘I’m practically seeing double.’
This is major for me, this human contact, the hugs and smiles. Someone else speaks to me, grips my shoulder, her mouth pulling into a wide grin. I don’t know who, but it doesn’t matter. I wish her a happy Christmas.
Pink-Shirt should be back, but I can’t find him amongst the other men in their overcoats. I start to panic, my gaze darting from face to face, frantic, thinking I’ve been abandoned, that I read the signals all wrong. It’s only seconds but it feels like minutes before he takes hold of my hand.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I’ve got us a cab.’
I grin with relief and hold on tight. He steers me along the kerb and around the corner, where the minicab is waiting. He opens the door and I get in and collapse into the seats, my eyes closing as my cheek comes to rest against the window. There’s a slight delay and I think I may even have nodded off in the few seconds before he asks me for my address. Figuring out where the hell I live wakes me up. The driver pulls out and moves off, braking with a curse as a man sways across the road into his path. Pink-Shirt automatically throws his arm across me. I allow him to leave it there for a while, and then to curl it around my shoulders. I lean on his shoulder, snuggling into the warmth of his coat, and breathe in the mixture of wool and frost. When he turns and tips my head up and kisses me I don’t protest. My mind is blurry, but I do know what’s happening, what I want. I’m fed up with my life; fed up with being careful all the time. I want to cut loose, misbehave for once, and I’m in no fit state to argue myself out of it. I let my lips part on a sigh. I am really, really hammered.
He makes a funny noise in his throat, then drags me against him. I don’t care what the cab driver thinks. We kiss all the way back to Kentish Town, his hands exploring under my jacket, warm and firm against my ribcage, my hands curved round his neck and jaw.
Outside my flat, he presses me against the wall at the top of the stairs while I fumble for my keys and drop them. He scoops them up and unlocks the door without letting me go. It flies open and we collapse inside. I reach for the light switch, but he grabs my wrist and stops me, and then it’s like in the movies as we strip off each other’s clothes with clumsy hands and leave them in a trail that snakes along the corridor to my bedroom. He moves me backwards, step by unsteady step, kissing my neck, barely managing to keep us both upright. I kneel on my bed and twitch the curtains closed as he undoes my bra and removes my knickers.
‘Do you have anything?’ he whispers.
I reach into the pine drawer beside the bed and riffle through hair elastics, pens, packets of Nurofen and other miscellany until my fingers touch a small square of metallic wrap. He rips open the condom packet with his teeth and rolls it on while I watch, grinning. This is the first sensible thing I’ve done all evening.
We tumble on to the mattress, an ungainly tangle of legs and arms, and make love like animals. He’s strong and a little aggressive, but I like it. I have never had sex like this before, never had anyone do to me what he is doing to me, never been so brazen in my life.
Later, I pass out with my head on his chest and his arms around me, my world revolving.
6
Laura
The Present
WHO IS THE man in my bed?
The man I thought I brought home was wearing a pink shirt. I know that for a fact. It’s the only fact I can rely on.
Under the white glare of the halogen spots, I stare down at my naked flesh, at the invisible tracks of his lips. There have been times when my face-blindness has caused excruciating embarrassment on my side and resentful confusion on someone else’s. There have been farcical mix-ups; dates when I’ve met one man, thinking I’m going to meet someone entirely different, our conversation at cross purposes until he realizes that it wasn’t him I wanted. There have been family functions, weddings and funerals when I’ve had to feign a sudden and intense headac
he to avoid the risk of introducing an aunt to a cousin, my brother-in-law to a friend of long standing. There have been countless times when I have wanted the ground to swallow me whole. But never in my wildest imaginings could I have come up with this.
The fan is even louder and more erratic than usual, then I realize that what I am hearing is my own breath. I look around me, trying to wake up properly, to bring some order to my mind. Am I the victim of a crime? At that thought, tears suddenly well and spill down my cheeks. Whatever has happened isn’t good, it’s wrong. I smear the tears away with the back of my hand and blow my nose. I’m confused. Is this something I should report? But what would be the point, when I don’t know what it is? An echo of last night suddenly ricochets through me, an erotic charge that I cannot stop, that sends a hot flush into my cheeks. I see us writhing on the bed, and I see myself kissing his jaw, licking the salty sweat from his skin. What will it prove? Someone is going to look like a liar, and in all likelihood that someone will be me. And there are those uncomfortable truths: I consented. I participated. I enjoyed it.
If I do tell the police, I can imagine how the conversation will go.
So, what makes you so sure this is not the man you spent the evening with?
The man in Hoxton 101 was wearing a pink shirt. The man in my bed stripped off a blue shirt.
Are you telling me that he changed his shirt?
No. It was two different men. One in a pink shirt and one in a blue shirt. I liked the man in the pink shirt, I did not like or encourage the man in the blue shirt. He tricked me.
Are you sure you didn’t get it wrong? Are you sure the disco lights didn’t affect the colour of his shirt? It can happen.
I did not make a mistake. His shirt was pink.
Did you or did you not consent to have sex?
I did, but I didn’t know it was a different man.
I imagine the policeman leaning back and scratching his head. He will study me for a few seconds and then he will say something like, Let me get this straight. You were under the impression that the man you invited into your home was the same man who had been paying you attention all night. You had drunk at least five vodka tonics, if not more; not to mention the glass of GZ you forced down to please your bosses. You were, by your own admission, out of your skull. You wake up the next morning and discover the man you slept with had been wearing a different shirt to the one you remembered him wearing. Despite enjoying your sexual encounter, you would be willing to destroy a man’s reputation based on the colour of his shirt and a drunken memory?
Yes. No. I don’t know!
I think that deliberately concealing your identity from the person you have persuaded to sleep with you could be a criminal offence. I’ll have to look it up. But even if it is, can I prove that he did that? He could just as easily swear that I knew who he was, that he told me. I run my fingers over my body, pressing at the tender areas. We were rough with each other, me as much as him. He is all over me; his saliva, his skin cells and traces of semen. If I get in the shower and wash those traces away, then they’re gone for ever, along with my credibility. I sit on the side of the bath and make myself work through last night, examining what I can remember about the man I danced with. It isn’t much. I need to go through his coat pockets.
I slide the bolt across, careful not to let it click, but as soon as I cross the threshold my stomach heaves. I slap my hand over my mouth and throw up into the loo. When the retching stops, I hear something and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
A dull click. The familiar sound of my front door closing. He’s left the flat. I burst out on to the landing, but I’m naked, so I scoot back in and run to the front window, wrap the heavy curtain around me, clutching it together over my breasts, release the bolts and shove it up, shouting, ‘Hey!’ at the figure sprinting down the road. He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t look back.
In the hallway, my shirt and my black jeans sprawl like a deflated version of me. My tasselled ankle boots are leaning against the skirting.
I wander back into my bedroom, stand over my bed looking down at the rumpled sheet and duvet, the pillow with the imprint of his head in it. I pick it up and bring it to my nose and inhale the scent of my own shampoo. I press my face into bedding that smells of sex.
He’s been busy. The condom is nowhere to be found. I pull back the duvet and search for evidence that he has been here, but there is nothing, not even a stray hair or a scrunched-up tissue. He must have woken up when I did and realized the trouble he would be in if he didn’t run. Coward.
I open the curtains. In the time that I have been shut in the bathroom, a grey, hung-over dawn has broken. It’s raining, not frozen like yesterday, and the clouds hang low and dark. The street feels dead, shut down for Christmas, the families packed up and gone to grandparents with houses in the countryside, the flat-sharers back to family homes. I glance at the digital clock. Was it only twenty minutes ago that I thought I might be spending the whole morning with him? I drag the duvet off the bed and take it into the sitting room, where I spread it on the sofa, crawl underneath it and curl up in a ball as tears spring to my eyes. I don’t know what this means. My head aches, and when I try and work through the muddle I get a wave of anxiety, an urge to push it away, to shovel it under the carpet.
I fall asleep and when I wake it’s almost eleven. I get up and wander into the bathroom, lean over the basin and stare into the mirror. Why is my brain this way? Why do I not recognize this woman? I know her hair, so why don’t I know her eyes? Why the hell do I not know who I slept with last night?
I pull aside the shower curtain and reach to turn it on, watch the steam rise and fill the room. I climb into the bath and stand back from the water so that it only hits my ankles and feet, hold out my hands and let it beat on my palms and cascade through my fingers. Then I release my breath and step under the shower. I won’t go to the police. I am not prepared to be ridiculed, dragged through the gutter by the press and humiliated. It doesn’t mean his actions will go unpunished; although precisely how I’m going to make him pay is unclear. I’ll get there though; I’ll find out who did this to me and think of something.
I head out to the station, pulling my wheelie case, striding along the pavement, trying to think about GZ and not let the flashbacks interrupt, because when they do, they throw me so badly that my vision mists. I’m proud of myself for making it to Waterloo without breaking down, for getting on my train and stashing my case without visibly trembling, for smiling at the child sitting opposite me with her father and not bursting into tears.
And then my mobile rings.
7
Rebecca
IN THE MORNING Rebecca’s migraine has dissipated, as it does if she’s lucky, leaving no trace. Her head is clear, her body relaxed. Christ, she’s tired though; it’s been a tough few weeks, chasing that contract. It’s age. Thirty-nine; that Plimsoll line between floating and sinking. Thank God for the Christmas break.
Rebecca sits up, drops her feet to the floor and stands, stretching her arms above her head and arching her neck backwards, feeling the feathered ends of her hair tickle between her shoulder blades. Yawning, she pads into the en-suite and splashes her face with cold water, then leans forward and stares at her reflection, homing in on details like a scientist peering through her microscope at a collection of amoebas. She has no idea why she does this. Her boyfriend hates it, frowning when he catches her transfixed by a tiny clogged pore below the corner of his eye. But, mostly, she looks at herself, her eyes scanning for signs of deterioration, for loss of elasticity, for the deepening of the lines at the corners of her eyes or between her brows.
She has been thinking about Botox. She works in an industry where she regularly has meetings with people theoretically young enough to be her children and every year brings more of them. Advertising values youth over experience, but maybe that’s the same everywhere. She wonders what she’s doing; she could be married by now; she could have had children
and been back at work for the last five years. She presses her hands to her flat stomach and imagines it swelling, her smooth skin riven with spiralling crescents of puckered scars, like her mother’s.
After she brushes her teeth, she unrolls her yoga mat in the drawing room in front of the French windows, and lights candles. They cast their glow into the hazy darkness of the December morning. She does her Surya Namaskar, her Downward Dog, her Warrior and the rest. She allows herself five minutes of relaxation afterwards, lying on her back listening to the radio, staring up at the elaborate coving that borders the high ceiling, a Kelly Hoppen cashmere rug shrouding her body.
The French windows overlook communal gardens iced with frost, the denuded trees fuzzy in the washed-out dawn. The houses on the other side are far enough away that anybody wanting to watch and giggle would need a pair of binoculars. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks anyway.
Or maybe she does. Sometimes she doesn’t know who or what she is. She has lied to colleagues, friends and family for so long that it’s as though her personality has had to contort itself to stay inside the box. She suspects her parents think she’s a lesbian.
She is Rebecca Munro; the youngest daughter of a surgeon and a stay-at-home mother, although they’re divorced now, the baby of the family; petted and spoiled. She is the princess for whom only a prince will do. Well, her two siblings are happily married with seven children between them and the princess is sitting in her ivory tower waiting for a married man to get a move on and decide.
Breakfast is porridge and fruit. She has trouble getting the claggy mess down, but it stops her snacking and sees her through till lunch. Rebecca Munro does not do flab. She eats, wrinkling her nose like her five-year-old nephew faced with the pale green flesh of an avocado, drinks the coffee, then brushes her teeth and rinses with mouthwash to stop her teeth from staining.