by Rosie Price
“Oh, yeah,” Max said, and then: “What idea?”
Elias leaned across the table toward Max, and said, again, in a dramatic whisper: “Embers. Tinder, but for the over-sixties. The pensioners’ dating app of choice. Geriatric romance. It’s fucking inspired.” Elias brought his fist down emphatically, crashing through the pile of popadams that had been placed between them, and paused to belch softly. “But if you don’t own it, I can tell you right now, someone else will.”
“Yeah, right.” Max was too drunk to recall whether this had been his terrible business idea or an ingenious joke, but seemingly Elias thought it could be both. “I can’t code, though,” he said.
“I can code, Max. I’d love to code this. I’m gonna learn to code. Let’s fucking do this—you’re the idea, and the money, and I’ll be the executor.” Elias closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, savoring his ingenuity. “Fuck,” he said.
Max’s mouth and hands took the initiative at that point and disregarded the pleas of his brain and stomach, ordering a bottle of the most expensive wine to mark the beginning of their new venture.
After the second bottle, things began to get a little confused, and his memory of what happened once they left the curry house was blurry. It was not at all unlikely that he had knocked a drink from the hands of the Goliath figure standing next to him in the Soho bar that he and Elias had stumbled into. Such was his excitement that, instead of apologizing, it was also entirely possible that he had attempted to proposition Goliath as a potential investor in his new business.
“Embers,” Max slurred, slapping his hand on the man’s upper arm with an unexpectedly dull thud. “Whaddya say?”
“I’d say you’ve ruined my fucking shirt, mate,” Goliath said. “This is dry-clean only.”
“Mate, mate,” said Max, smiling benevolently and spreading his arms wide, “it’s embers under the bridge.”
Elias later told Max that in fact it had been not Goliath but the doorman who had delivered the hefty shove that had sent him crashing out the back door of the bar, his head slamming limply into the brick wall on the opposite side of the alleyway. Elias, who had called an ambulance and had then canceled it when the operator refused to guarantee that the driver would be willing to drop Elias at a private address before taking his friend to the hospital, booked a taxi for them both instead.
It was past one when Max got back to the flat. When at last he had remembered the number of the building, he put a deep scratch with his key in the freshly painted door as he was trying to unlock it, before stumbling inside. Because he went straight to his room and passed out on his mattress, he didn’t see that Kate was asleep on the sofa.
16
Kate found a job in a café bar two streets away from the flat. She didn’t want to be a waitress, but she needed to pay rent, and it was the first thing she applied for. She was interviewed on the spot by Mark Cummins, who had her sit and wait while he made himself a cappuccino, before sitting down opposite her, reading her CV, and then tearing it up while looking her in the eye.
“I don’t care about your MA or your MBA,” he said, which was fortunate, because Kate had neither, “the only thing I want to know is this: is your bedroom tidy?”
Suppressing her visceral dislike of this man, Kate said coldly that yes, her bedroom was impeccably clean. He told her to start that afternoon. The satisfaction she felt was only temporary: she reminded herself that if she had managed to make that deadline at the end of the summer, she might have been about to start at film school rather than a waitressing job. But the work would fill the void that was threatening to open up in front of her: this city was hostile to purposelessness and, unlike Max, she did not have much of a social life to fill her time. Most of the people she knew here were Max’s friends and she had no particular desire to make herself vulnerable to new strangers.
“Why don’t you move here?” Kate said to Claire, when she phoned to tell her how her first shift had gone. Kate knew her friend was about to move into a flat in Bristol with her boyfriend, but she wanted Claire to know that she missed her. “You’d love it.”
“And live with your very handsome friend?”
“If you want. You’d have to sleep on the floor, though.”
“Tempting, but I think Alex would be upset.”
Kate was managing to function, but there were bad days. Her new boss was not often in the restaurant, but he did have a disconcerting habit of appearing unexpectedly in the middle of a busy shift. On these days, he would lean on the bar watching how his waiting staff interacted with his clientele and would sometimes slip behind it to help himself to a Scotch. She could tell that Mark was in a particularly good mood when he met the confused looks of the customers and reassured them that he was the owner and so was entitled to be there. Once or twice, he began pouring out drinks for those customers, which he later made Kate add to their bills—settled, conveniently for him, long after he had gone for the evening.
At times, the unpredictability threatened to destabilize Kate. One day, Mark came in during the post-lunch lull and was watching Kate, his fingers steepled, as she poured freshly ground beans from the coffee grinder, pressing firmly on the powder with the tamper and wiping the edges so as not to clog the machine, just as he had taught her to do. She surprised herself by how easy it was to keep going, particularly if she’d had a bit to drink, and particularly if she was applying herself to repetitive, mentally unchallenging tasks.
“Do you know who Alexander Fleming is?” said Mark as Kate started to steam the milk. She did not take her eyes off the quickly thickening milk, determined not to be distracted and to let it boil.
“The scientist?”
“Alexander Fleming was a great Scottish scientist, whose discovery of penicillin transformed the face of modern medicine.”
“Right,” said Kate. She put down the metal jug, which was now too hot to hold in both hands, and turned off the steamer, blasting it once or twice before she did so to get rid of the skin of milk that had formed over its nozzle.
“Fleming discovered penicillin entirely by accident, having left a petri dish out in his laboratory for three days unattended, upon whose surface a thin mold began to form, and which, during those three days, began to produce the antibacterial substance we now know as the first antibiotic, or penicillin.”
Kate poured the milk slowly into the warm espresso, moving the lip of the jug carefully backward and forward to create a creamy marbled effect on the surface of the coffee. Mark was trying to distract her, but she felt quietly triumphant that she succeeded in creating a small masterpiece under his interrogation.
Mark was unperturbed. “And do you know how they used to mass-produce penicillin in the early days of its discovery?”
“No,” Kate said.
“Milk,” Mark said. “Warm milk, in which bacteria thrive.”
Kate looked at him blankly.
“How long did you leave that out for?” Mark said, putting the back of his hand against the milk bottle that stood on the bar.
“I don’t know,” Kate said, “it was here earlier.”
Mark pulled Kate’s coffee across the countertop toward him, walked around the bar, and tipped it deliberately down the sink.
“I can’t have my staff serving petri dishes to my guests,” Mark said. “Start with cold milk. Straight from the fridge.”
When Mark disappeared into his office, she drained his whisky and marked one more and a vodka on the ledger as customer spillages before topping up her glass. There was something pleasantly annihilative about the bleach-like purity of distilled alcohol. The way it seemed to flood her lungs, counteracting the dull, icy weight there with fiery warmth, spreading to her stomach, satisfyingly empty these days, and sending an obfuscating mist up her spinal cord to shroud her busy brain. She would have to start bringing her own bottle to work if Mark was going to insist on bei
ng so unbearably present.
* * *
—
“Cunt,” Max said when Kate saw him later that evening and told him what Mark had done. “He sounds like a total cunt.”
“And the worst thing is that coffee was for our creepiest customer, so he wasn’t even put off by the fact that it was fifteen minutes late. He actually gave me a tip.”
Max shook his head. “Cunt.”
“It made me feel anxious.” Kate’s hand was hovering absently in the space just above her chest, trying to detect the noxious energy lingering there. “It made me feel like a naughty child being told off by her father.”
Max raised his eyebrows. “There might be something in that.”
“No,” Kate said, “I don’t mean it has anything to do with my dad. It has more to do with the feeling of being diminished.”
Max grunted indifferently. “Well,” he said, pouring more vodka into her glass, “you know what kills bacteria.”
They drank and fell silent. This was not what either of them had envisaged when they’d decided six months earlier to move in together. They were losing sight of one another, but still they carried on, started using different drugs. For Max, taking coke was liberation: high, he only ever thought as far ahead as the next bump, the next song. Kate was drinking still, but had also gone to a doctor and told him that she had been feeling anxious about traveling on public transport so that he would give her beta-blockers. When that did nothing except make her feel more tired, she went into Nicole’s cabinet in the bathroom when the others were out and emptied half a bottle of Valium and a packet of Xanax she had brought back from a work trip to America. Prescription drugs, Nicole had confided to Kate, were easy to get hold of in the States. Kate’s logic was clear. To survive, she needed to not inhabit herself. Every time she began to think about what had happened, she took another of those pills, another swig of whatever she had hidden in a nearby cupboard, and these, hard in her esophagus, dammed the memories that rose like a tide whenever sobriety threatened.
17
If Nicole noticed that Kate had been using her medication, she didn’t say anything—at least, not explicitly. But when she saw Kate watching her pop three beta-blockers out of their packet onto the kitchen table, she began, very casually, to explain to Kate what panic attacks felt like to her.
“Like the pavement is gonna open up and fucking swallow me whole,” Nicole said. She had just woken up and was wearing underwear and a T-shirt and eating peanut butter straight from the jar. Max had stayed at Elias’s, so it was just the two of them in the flat. “I used to just leave work and go home. I don’t even get embarrassed about it anymore. No point in making things any harder than they already are, you know?”
Nicole looked into the bottom of the jar as she spoke: her openness seemed to be an invitation, but Kate did not know how to take it. This was the closest she’d come to any kind of acknowledgment that there was something wrong.
“I do know what you mean,” Kate said carefully. “But don’t you sometimes think it’s easier just to carry on?”
“That’s how it gets you,” Nicole said, sucking her spoon, now looking at Kate across the table. The look felt like a challenge. Nicole stood and lifted her arms to tie her dark, wiry hair into a bun on the top of her head. “You know who knows a lot about this sort of thing?” she said. “My mother. She seems so together, but she’s been through it.”
“What does she know about?” Kate said. She was aware that she was failing to engage with the hints Nicole was offering, but she didn’t know how to be more direct. Nicole was unfazed, though.
“Anxiety,” she said, “panic attacks. If you want to stop having them. Or maybe just go to the GP. They’ll probably try to put you on a million pills, but at least you’ll get a bit of rest.” She screwed the lid back on the peanut butter jar and threw the spoon in the sink. “I slept like a light when I first went on anti-anxieties.”
Kate was confused. “Like a light?”
“Yeah,” Nicole said. “Completely out.”
Before Kate had had the chance to ask Nicole if she meant “log” rather than “light,” she had left the kitchen, and as Kate watched her go she wondered whether the skin on the backs of her thighs was as butter-soft as it looked. At moments like this, Kate feared that she had somehow become a misogynist, that when Lewis had fucked her, he had left something of himself in her. Perhaps that was why she found it so difficult to look away when Nicole walked around the flat in her black cotton underwear, the bones in her thighs looking like they might very easily snap.
Nicole’s apparent fragility was, for Kate, another source of anxiety. She had a new boyfriend, and sometimes, when he came over, she could hear them fucking; the sound of the headboard banging against the wall of the room directly above her, heavy breathing, escaped groans: these noises found their way into Kate’s bed, and even if she put headphones on and turned up the radio and pulled her duvet over her head, she still felt the thudding in her bones, the screws beneath her rib cage tightening.
Once, when she couldn’t sleep, disturbed by the sound of Nicole being drilled to the bed, Kate decided to commit fully to her wakefulness and went up to the kitchen to make tea. But the noise there was worse—the walls were thinner than the floors—and as the kettle began to boil over the sound of rhythmic thumping, she heard what she was sure was the sound of an open palm colliding with bare flesh, a smacking sound that grew louder and louder, accompanied by a low, animalistic moaning. In that moment she was overcome by an impulse to burst into the bedroom, to tear this attacker from Nicole, to kick him and to stamp his chest into the floor so that he would know how it felt to have his ribs crushed.
The kettle clicked, and Kate, instead of pouring the boiling water into the mug, poured it quickly and deliberately over her bare hand. Her instincts overrode her intention, however, and she immediately drew her hand away and thrust it under the cold tap. When the desire to burn and to be burned had abated, she sank down onto the floor of the kitchen. Only the sudden silence from Nicole’s room and the fear of being discovered there on the floor could move her, and she lifted herself slowly to her feet, pouring what was left of the water into her mug and taking it and her blistered hand back to her bedroom.
* * *
—
Despite the vulnerability Kate had projected onto Nicole, she had insight that Kate did not. Denial, just as she had warned, would only delay the inevitable. In early November, Kate’s least favorite customer, the creep she had told Max about, overstepped. He had his little rituals, calling Kate over because he was ready to pay and then spending five minutes rooting around in his pocket for change so she would have to stand there, waiting for him.
“Only you can make the milk so silky,” he would say when Kate put his coffee down in front of him. “Just how I like it.”
He must have been about sixty, and he walked into the restaurant cock first with his little chest puffed out and his narrow hips jutting forward. His name was Vernon, and he came there once a week every week and sat in his favorite spot by the window reading the paper for a full hour, buying only one coffee before leaving Kate with an inelegant tip and fast-growing nausea. He had a habit of looking at her legs, and she detested this. Today, Vernon had been upset, because his spot by the window had been taken by a mother who was breast-feeding her baby, and Vernon had taken out his venom on Kate, who had refused to ask the mother to move.
“It’s Broken Britain, I tell you,” said Vernon, shaking his head as he threw a ten-pound note on the table, “it’s disgraceful, vulgar.”
Kate said nothing, but took Vernon’s money. As she leaned forward she saw that along the inside of his collar was stitched a thin ribbon of red fabric.
“They can’t even get staff without ladders in their tights,” he said loudly as she walked away.
Kate didn’t go back to his table. Inste
ad, she took off her apron and, with that particular clarity that only primal terror affords, put on her jacket, detached the key to the front door of the restaurant from her chain, and left it on the countertop before ducking out the back door of the kitchen. She was numb, her mind as if suspended in a viscous fluid, disjointed from her body that itself moved without weight, and she crossed the road, following her feet along the pavement and through the alley that led to the front door of her flat.
Time flatlined; she knew then what red was. She was on Zara’s bed, she saw the ribbon in Lewis’s collar. But this red was not a color, a warning sign or provocation, the bull’s rag; no, red was the filter through which she apprehended everything; it collapsed the time between her present and that moment that refused to remain in her past, so that her whole being, from the dilation of her pupils to the rhythm of her breath and the ice in her chest, recalibrated to respond to the sight of the world through it. And she saw then that if she had been so wrong about what a color could be, then there was little about the world that she had understood correctly.
Only later, in the safety of the bathtub with blistering water on her skin, did she begin to come back into herself, and still she could not fully comprehend the sudden lunacy that had overwhelmed her. Max. It was time, she knew, to talk to him and to tell him that something was happening to her; it was not possible to go on this way. By the time he came back, maybe an hour later, she was a little calmer. She had managed to get out of the bath and had dried herself gently, cautious because her body was still tender and still felt like it belonged to a stranger, but anxious to go to Max and tell him before she changed her mind. She put on a tracksuit whose thick flannel material hung loosely around her hips and thighs. But still her body was consumed by that strange iciness, her chest tight and frozen, and the wire embedded within her tautening whenever she thought about what she was going to say; what could she possibly say to Max other than that she needed him, that she needed help?