What Red Was

by Rosie Price

  “See,” he said, “my friends are in there.”

  “Take him home,” the bouncer said, “and we won’t call the police.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Elias said, “nobody’s calling the police.”

  “I am.” The bouncer held up the little white bag of powder he had in his hand. “If somebody doesn’t put him in a taxi in the next thirty seconds.”

  “That’s not his,” Elias said.

  “That’s why he was snorting lines in the ladies’, then, was it?” The bouncer appeared to be more offended by Max’s use of the female toilets than of the drugs.

  “The signs are very confusing,” Max said, frowning, before adding, assertively, “gender fluid.”

  “They should sell that,” said Kate, who was still flying high from her conversation with Andrew. “It’ll be the new almond milk.”

  “Will you take him back?” Elias said to Kate. “I’ve got another party.”

  Abruptly, Kate landed. “I guess,” she said wearily. “Can you wait with him? I just need to give someone something.”

  Andrew was where she’d left him. She told him that she had to leave, so she’d come to give him back his headphones.

  “That’s a shame,” he said. “Will I see you again?”

  As he got up to hug her, she lifted her face to his, not caring that there were still people here they’d both worked with. It was nearly three in the morning, and nobody was in a state to remember anything much. He paused, as if to pull away, but then kissed her, briefly, on the lips.

  “You can see me. If you want,” Kate said.

  * * *

  —

  When they’d got back, and Kate had waited for Max to throw up on the pavement outside their flat, she got straight into bed, her chest pounding: not the panic-driven, fearful pounding, but lustful, alive. She put her hand between her legs and, feeling that she was wet, started rubbing slowly, closing her eyes. She could still feel the pressure of Andrew’s against her lips. She pressed her hips into the mattress, not wanting to come, wanting to make this last for as long as she could. Her phone was on the pillow next to her in case he texted her, though presumably he wouldn’t tonight, presumably he would wait; she was making herself wait for him, too. Wanted to wait, wanted to make it last, to remember the full softness of his mouth, the smell of mint and something sweet, berry-flavored. She was close, now, still with him pictured in her mind, hearing his voice. She slipped her fingers inside herself: that was when he flickered and disappeared, and another voice, clearer, sharper, came into her mind, telling her her cunt was tight, telling her to taste herself. A searing pain shot through her, iciness spreading up through her stomach and her chest, and she pulled her hand away, turned her face into the pillow to stop herself from crying out, rolled onto her side, and curled her arms around her knees, her body smothered by the guilty heat it had created.

  26

  Lewis was putting on weight. It was a fact that he had been trying to ignore—wearing loose-fitting scrubs all day, working full twelve-hour shifts without catching sight of his reflection—until he had seen himself in a photograph one of the nurses had taken and had seen that he was fat. There was no denying it: his stomach had softened and a full inch of fat had gelatinized beneath the skin of his back, his shoulders, and his hips. He’d grown stubble, too, which went some way to disguising what he suspected were the beginnings of a double chin. The causes were clear: his diet was starchy and sugar-loaded; the hours, the lack of sleep, and the constant fatigue left him with a shortened attention span and no motivation to exercise. Though in his first year of being a doctor he’d worked hard to keep his weight from increasing, this second year had worn him down. The disdain with which he was regarded by everybody in the hospital from the porters to the consultants, the presumed position of incompetence from which he was constantly trying to elevate himself, the general ingratitude with which his every benevolent act was met: all of this made it extremely difficult for him to be content and in control. He was unhappy, and he was lonely, and it seemed to Lewis to be entirely unreasonable that he might be expected, as well as this, to put up with being overweight. He realized, when he could no longer fit into his favorite pair of jeans, that it was time to do something about it.

  It was a Saturday morning in June, and Lewis was standing in front of the bathroom mirror of his father’s Fulham flat, where he had been living for the last two years now, despite having told himself that this was only a temporary arrangement. He was going to meet Nicole in north London for a music festival. She had invited him after the third text he’d sent to tell her that he had his first weekend off in a month and wanted to get out of the flat: with women, persistence paid off. He’d slept for ten hours the night before but even after a shower and a shave he felt uncooked; the bathroom light was not flattering, exposing the dry skin on his chin and jaw, a few ingrown hairs, and the blemishes that had developed on his pale forehead during the weeks spent sweating and sun-deprived in the hot, concrete cuboid where he worked.

  Lewis put the jeans in the laundry basket and considered briefly raising the subject with his father, since there was the slim possibility that Alasdair’s cleaner, who came to do the laundry twice weekly, had managed to shrink them. But he thought better of it, not least because he suspected that Alasdair—who spent most of his time nowadays staying at his girlfriend’s flat in Notting Hill—had forgotten how frequently the cleaner came and might use the opportunity to cut her hours. It wasn’t jeans weather anyway, so Lewis put on a pair of elasticated rugby shorts and a polo-shirt whose thick cotton went some way to disguising the rippling movement of his flesh beneath it. From some angles one might even be fooled into thinking that the swelling of his chest was actually muscular.

  The festival was in Finsbury Park. Lewis had never had reason to travel this far north before, so he had taken a taxi, which cut to the front of the ant-crawl of twentysomethings spilling out of the Underground and toward the park’s iron gates. A lot of the men were wearing backward caps, patterned shirts, pastel-colored shorts, and the girls were in festival uniform: shorts that hugged tight to their hips and cut high across their thighs, tops with mesh inserts, hoop earrings, and faces decorated with glitter like war paint. At the gates Lewis had spread his arms wide and looked down at the female security guard as she leaned over to frisk him before strolling up the path, following the sound of the speakers.

  The afternoon was turning out to be less fun than he had hoped. He was sprawled on the grass next to Nicole and her friends, each of whom was a permutation of the generically attractive and thin twentysomething, skin exposed to a more or less degree, hair more or less glossy, all pleasingly emaciated. He was usually quiet in groups, and he had been led to believe that women understood his silence to signify strength as opposed to stupidity or shyness, and he sipped thoughtfully from his tinny while zeroing in on the girl—who was looking down at her drink, and who had shorter, thicker legs than the rest—sitting to Nicole’s left. He caught the girl’s eye; there was time yet to brighten this dull afternoon, and after twenty minutes or so of waiting for his cousin to move so he would have an in, Lewis took matters into his own hands and got up.

  “Drink?” he said, looking around the group, but pausing pointedly as he looked at the girl, tipping his hand to his mouth.

  “Yes!” Nicole said, grabbing his leg to steady herself. “Four, no, five gin and tonics. I’ll come with you.”

  On the way to the bar, he asked Nicole the name of the girl who had been sitting next to her.

  “You mean Ellie?”

  “I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking,” Lewis said. Nicole could be fairly idiotic for a lawyer. Oblivious to his condescension, she began ducking through the crowd to the front of the bar.

  It was then, as Nicole disappeared, that Lewis saw Kate. It was the first time he had seen her since they had slept together. She was o
ver the other side of the bar, and she hadn’t seen him, but he noticed straightaway that she was thinner, and it suited her. She looked good. The top she was wearing showed her shoulders, clinging to her small tits, and her hair was tied back from her face to show the freckles that ran from the tops of her cheekbones to the bridge of her nose. She was looking down so he couldn’t properly make out her face, but even seeing her silhouetted from the side like that stirred something in him; he remembered her pale blue eyes looking up at him, wide with awe, as he had fucked her, and he had known then that she’d never been done like that before.

  The crowd shifted around her, and Max came into view, and another man Lewis recognized as a friend of Nicole’s. Lewis hesitated. He didn’t know whether Kate had told Max anything about them, whether it was a good idea to approach her with him there. He saw too that Kate was laughing, hanging off Max’s arm, glowing. That was not how he remembered her; he couldn’t remember what she looked like when she laughed or what her laugh sounded like. Not for the first time, he wondered whether Kate and Max had slept together.

  It was then that Kate turned and looked directly at him. She froze. Instinctively, Lewis made to move toward her, but before he could, his path was disrupted by a flailing limb and a cry of rage from Nicole as she was jettisoned from the crowd by a pair of angry women.

  “I’ve been waiting for nearly half an hour,” Nicole lied, pushing Lewis in front of her. “Bitches,” she hissed at the women, before looking up at Lewis, expectantly. Lewis shrugged. Obviously, he was not going to hit a girl.

  “Whatever, we’ll have to go to the other bar,” Nicole said. She led him away from the crowd, and when he looked back, he couldn’t see Kate.

  “I think I saw Max,” said Lewis.

  “Oh yeah, he’s here somewhere. With Elias.”

  “He is. I saw him. Why don’t you call him?”

  “I can’t be bothered.” Nicole sounded a little sulky.

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head. “He’s with Elias,” she said again. “They’ll both be fucked. I can’t deal with either of them right now.”

  Lewis let it slide after that. By the time they’d got their drinks and gone back to the group, the women had been surrounded by male friends of Nicole’s. Even Ellie, the runt of the litter, had some stringy guy lying on the grass next to her. Lewis wasn’t in the mood to compete, and he was preoccupied with thoughts about Kate.

  He got up, without saying goodbye to Nicole and her friends, and tried calling Max. The line went dead as soon as it started ringing. Either Max’s phone was out of battery, or there were too many people here, disrupting the signal. Lewis circled the park a couple of times, looking for them. When, after half an hour, he still hadn’t found them, he went to the park’s perimeter and called a taxi.

  In the taxi he was still thinking of Kate. There was weakness in her that he’d seen in other women before her: the way she’d clung to Max’s arm, pulling her body close to his, the way she animated herself when he turned to talk to her. She craved approval, and that was what had led him to her that night last summer—her need to be validated. He’d seen today that very little had changed: she had been clinging to Max in just the same way, was probably letting him fuck her for the same reason, using him, letting him worship her, all the while feeding off his attention.

  When he got back to the flat, he resolved that he would have to better himself. He stripped his father’s cupboards and the fridge of the family-sized bars of chocolate and overpriced ready-meals and booked a grocery shop to arrive at the flat the next morning: chia seeds, quinoa, bananas, eggs, avocados, chicken breasts and minced turkey, protein shakes and energy powders, some fillet steaks to treat himself on the weekends. Lewis got into bed bloated, filled with beer and a sense of failure, but satisfied with the knowledge that tomorrow would be a new beginning, a fresh start.

  He was woken on Sunday morning by the sound of Alasdair banging on his bedroom door.

  “What the fuck is this chicken feed you’ve bought on my credit card?”

  “It’s our weekly shop,” Lewis said once he had made it through the shower and into the kitchen.

  “You buy this shit every week?” Alasdair picked up a half-kilo packet of linseeds and peered at the label.

  “Not every week, we were running low,” Lewis said.

  “Christ, don’t they pay you anything at the hospital? I thought you were supposed to be saving people’s lives. Fucking NHS.”

  “I usually use my own card, yours must have been saved on the system,” Lewis said sulkily; somehow he always seemed to revert to his child’s self with his father. “I’ll make us both breakfast,” he said, determined to be the bigger man—metaphorically, at least: it would do Alasdair no harm to go back on a diet.

  “No, no,” Alasdair said, dropping the linseed back into one of the overflowing shopping bags at his feet. He hadn’t taken off his coat. “I only came back here to get some papers. House stuff.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, that’s the problem,” said Alasdair. He made his way to the fridge, opened it to look inside, and then closed it again. “Willie doesn’t want to sell. Absolutely no business mind. All sentimentality. Won’t get it into his woolen head that some of us could really do with the cash.”

  “I didn’t realize you wanted to sell it,” Lewis said tentatively.

  “I don’t see a sane alternative. We’ll get a massive payout if we sell it straight to developers. Willie wants to turn it into a guinea-pig sanctuary or a fucking toenail recycling center.”

  “Really?”

  Lamenting not for the first time that Lewis hadn’t inherited his own excellent sense of humor, Alasdair left his son in the kitchen to make his gruel. In the study was Alasdair’s private stash of Fruit & Nut chocolate, which he tore into as he began rifling through his drawers. Alasdair had in fact had Bisley House surveyed some years earlier, just after his father’s sudden death. At the time he had assumed that Bernadette wouldn’t last much longer without Gregor, and he had very charitably invited her to London while, with the help of Lady Caroline, who had kindly offered to keep a set of keys while Bernadette was away, he had arranged for an architect, a chartered surveyor, and two rival estate agents to have a free rein on the place over the course of two afternoons.

  He had of course been grieving, his ability to make good judgments impaired by his father’s sudden passing, and when, six months later, Bernadette had developed a new appetite for life inspired by a romantic obsession with her physician, fucking NHS, Alasdair had reluctantly called off the second valuation and had filed the documents somewhere safe and, most importantly, secret. It was only now that he really felt he had the strength to look at them again, after everything he had been through.

  Absently, Alasdair picked an almond skin from between his molars with his tongue and flicked through the paperwork buried in his desk. He had always failed to understand why they couldn’t skin the fuckers before putting them in their products: he ought to write to their investors; perhaps he should just buy the company. Marriage certificate, birth certificate, divorce paperwork, more divorce paperwork. There wasn’t one piece of paper in this drawer that hadn’t cost him in the thousands, and what did he have to show for it? A son with no sense of irony and a worryingly effeminate fixation on nutrition, an absconded spouse, and a set of dead parents whose most valuable assets were being monopolized by his younger brother’s prolonged and very expensive grieving process. Only the company had brought him any lasting pleasure, and it was the company that was in desperate need of a large cash injection. Alasdair finished his Fruit & Nut and threw the empty packet in the wastepaper bin. He stuffed the valuation, which he had found at the bottom of the second drawer of his desk, into his briefcase and left, shouting goodbye to Lewis as he slammed the front door.

  27

  Kate had fl
ed after she saw Lewis that day. This was the first time she had seen him since the rape, and she had been waiting for this moment for nearly a year now. During this time she had begun to hope, even to fantasize, that if only for this first time, she would be able to see him without him seeing her. She supposed that if she was always waiting for him, then at least he wouldn’t be able to surprise her, and so the inevitable violence of her reaction would perhaps be tempered.

  When at last she saw him, though, or rather when at last they saw each other, what overwhelmed her was not fear, but simple astonishment at the fact of his presence: the fact that he existed outside the realm of her imagination. What shocked her was how real he was, now that he was no longer just a memory. And if he was real, then the rape was real. When she’d seen him, she’d had no choice but to allow her instincts to take over. As the crowd closed back around him, she put her hand to the ice in her chest, feigning sickness for Max. She told him she was going back to the flat, that he didn’t need to come with her, and she ran: getting to the edge of the park as quickly as she could, running out the panic that was rising within her, dulling her senses. Max did not follow her.

  Her heart was still pounding when she got to the Tube. She imagined Frieda’s voice telling her to breathe, to fill her lungs, and her heart began to slow. She was still foggy, but thoughts, distant and blurred, began to form. Since the rape, and until this point, she had come to believe that there were two distinct worldviews available to her: either the world was at fault for what she had suffered, or she herself was to blame. If, as she often suspected, the latter was true—for whatever reason, genetic fault, inherent weakness, or the disease or defect Lewis had left in her—then she was deficient.

  This image of herself she had thought she could just about accept if it meant that the world was a place of safety. If she could just face up to her own flaws, weaknesses, then at least this meant she had some measure of control because only she was culpable. But seeing Lewis in the flesh collapsed not only all the time that had passed and the progression she had made between the rape and now, but also this carefully drawn distinction. The look on his face, which to her was something akin to anger, told Kate that she was not safe.