by Rosie Price
He noticed the plasters that sometimes appeared at the tops of her thighs, and the half-healed cuts that, in time, she was willing to bare. Once or twice when he saw a new injury he asked her how she had done it, and she told him she’d scratched her leg on some thorns outside; on a loose piece of metal, at work; it was an accident. The lies were open, empty, intended not to deceive but to tell him they didn’t need to go there, and as she told them he ran his fingers along the red-brown lines, tracing the ridge of scabbed skin, before taking his hand away.
The second time they had sex, they were both sober. She’d gone to his flat again, which she was starting to prefer to her own, since there were fewer memories there. Without alcohol to deaden her, it was harder for Kate to slip back into the safety of submission and self-relinquishment: Andrew pulled her on top of him, lay back, and told her to lower herself onto him slowly, her hands on his wrists this time. This way, she found that she could control the rush of pain she had come to associate with sex, and that just as Lewis had broken down the distinction between pain and pleasure, she began slowly to delineate the two.
As they fucked, she used the strength of her thighs to move slowly onto him until she could relax her weight entirely, and when the fear came, the intensity of having him completely inside her, and the flood of icy panic that started at the pit of her stomach and spread upward to her chest, she leaned forward and made him look at her, his face bathed in deep blue light that came through the curtain in the dark, and he reached out for her, his hands on her hips, her back, pushing his body farther into hers but at the same time touching her with both of his hands, silently reminding her that hers was a whole body of skin and flesh and bone, complete, not just the rawness between, and he brought her back to him, moving her on top of him, slowly so as not to bring too sharp an awareness to his presence inside her, then pushing her hips back so that instinctively she resisted him, bringing herself toward him until warmth rushed in and she began to move on him in the same rhythm, faster, more ragged, until she came, the shudder of him in her indistinguishable from her own pleasure.
31
Two weeks after Max had skipped dinner with Rupert at his parents’, his uncle wrote to him. His instinctive response, on seeing Rupert’s name and email address on the screen of his phone, was dread. But, Max reasoned, it was the middle of the afternoon, not three in the morning. Rupert had been stable for a while now, and email was not his usual mode of emergency communication. Nonetheless his stomach knotted as he waited for the message to load, and when it appeared on his screen he scanned it through once for signs of a pending crisis before slowing down and reading it properly. The message, unremarkable in its contents, was significant only because Rupert had chosen to send it. He wanted to know how Max was, to tell him how sorry he was to have missed him the other day, and to ask him to explain the rationale behind “this fucking app.” He signed off: Sounds like you’re doing splendidly, boy. Do remember me when you’ve made your first million.
Rupert hadn’t written to him with such inane chatter for years now. Max saw, when he searched his inbox, that the last email was before his car crash, and for a moment an image came to Max’s mind of his uncle hunched over his phone, scrolling through the numbers in his address book. He didn’t want to think how many times Rupert might have thought about calling, before calling a helpline instead. He scanned the email once more, trying to read between the lines some deeper significance: reproach, perhaps, for Max’s recent distance, or regret, for the role Rupert’s own actions had played in pushing Max away. But this was not a reflective message, this was a message about the future: a future in which Rupert appeared to be telling Max he had a stake.
Max didn’t reply straightaway, but went to charge his phone and to pour himself a drink. This moment felt like something that needed marking, and he needed a little alcohol to numb out the feeling in the back of his mind of having forgotten to do something important. Max’s phone vibrated again; it was Elias this time, texting to say that he was coming over in half an hour and would Max please go and buy some of the branded tonic he liked from the shop on the corner. Max left his phone charging and took his wallet and keys. As well as tonic, he bought a bottle of gin to replace the one he’d just finished. By the time Elias arrived, Max was more than a little pissed, and he was putting up more resistance than usual to Elias’s suggestions. Elias, though, was as stubborn as Max was drunk, and by the time Kate and Nicole had both arrived home from work, they had made little headway on the first point on the agenda Max had optimistically assembled that afternoon.
“I just don’t see how you can means-test a dating app,” Max was saying. Elias, who was sitting next to him at the kitchen table, was leaning over his shoulder and looking at the notes Max had written on the screen of his iPad.
“These people are already very bad-looking,” Elias said. “They can’t be poor as well.”
“They’re not bad-looking, they’re distinguished.”
Elias zoomed in on the photograph Max had pulled up to show him a gray-haired man’s ruddy and multi-jowled face smiling against a gray seaside setting.
“They are bad-looking. He looks like he’s been divorced at least three times. And that photograph was probably taken about ten years ago by his ex-wife.”
“Distinguished. And looks like he’s rich as well. Guys? Distinguished?”
Max held the screen up toward the sofa, where Nicole and Kate were slumped, watching a documentary about the deep-sea life forms of the Pacific Ocean.
“Loaded,” Nicole confirmed.
“At least get them to submit a health check when they sign up,” said Elias. “What if they find love one month and then fucking die the next?”
“Elias,” Max said, his voice reproachful.
“Forgive me,” Elias said. “What if they fucking pass away, I mean. And you’re going to have to be careful about promising lifelong partnership when we decide on the tagline, too. It needs to be clear that ‘lifelong’ is only ever as long as the shortest life. Do you think we can fit that under the logo?”
“That seems unnecessarily pessimistic.”
“Whatever. Stick with ‘lifelong,’ if you want. Wait, unless you go back to ‘Stoke the embers of your dying days’?”
“We decided that was too morbid, didn’t we?”
“I thought it captured a potent sense of longing,” said Elias. Inexplicably, he had brought with him an avocado and spinach smoothie, which he sipped now, and which Max waited for him to spit out. To Max’s immense surprise, he smacked his lips and sat back in his chair, opening his laptop.
Max took his pen out of his mouth. “What about,” he said slowly, “ ‘Embers: Find your fire.’ ” Being creative was exhausting.
“Yes,” Elias said, pointing to Max’s screen. “Make a note of it.”
Max, who did not want to dislodge Elias’s impression that he had on his iPad extensive documentation of the development of their business venture, opened a blank document and saved it under the title of “Thoughts.” “Embers: Find your fire,” he wrote. And then, beneath it, “Stoke the embers of your dying days.” He hesitated, before typing next to this second quotation “(E.C.),” and then adding, in bold, his own initials after the first tagline. It was important to look like he knew what he was doing: he needed to be sure that he was taken seriously. Surprisingly, he had been doing reasonably well on this front. Elias had helped to bring on board a small handful of investors, and they had a developer working on a prototype.
“Have you seen?” Elias got up and brought Max’s tablet over to the sofa. He sat down heavily next to Kate and showed her the screen, which was freshly cracked. “I’ll show you.”
“Did you drop this again?” Kate said to Max as Elias started typing Kate’s name.
Max waved his hand dismissively. “Elias sat on it.”
A photo of Kate taken years ago by Max
filled the screen, with a short text box at its foot and an empty white circle in the top left-hand corner.
“What a honey,” said Kate to the photo.
“This is you,” Elias said, “if you ever get old enough to sign up. So if you get rated by the other person, and you rate them too, then that’s a match, and you start glowing.” Elias pressed the screen and the white circle on the screen began to glow red. “The more embers you have, the more matches. So people know you’re in demand, baby.”
“Wait,” said Max, “let’s match her with Andrew. We can see what you’ll look like in sweet old age. Do I have any photos?”
“Why would you have photos of him? Let me see.” Kate took the tablet from Elias and began to flick through the boxes displayed to the left of her image. It looked as though Max had uploaded every portrait photograph from his phone onto the app to make hypothetical profiles. The patination of shattered glass ran from the top left-hand corner across the screen, overlaying both Kate’s face and her hypothetical matches. She flicked absently to a photograph of Max’s dog.
“Hah. Perhaps I should go on a date with Titus. Do you think Andrew would mind?”
She swiped once more, and a photo of Lewis appeared, face-on, his head tilted slightly backward as he looked into the lens of the camera. She swiped back to the previous image and put the tablet on the sofa beside her.
The shock of seeing his face forced her to her feet, and instinctively she backed away from the tablet all the way to the sink. She turned on the tap and put her hands under it; filled a glass, drank it, filled another, felt too sick to drink it. She needed to be outside, desperately needed space. She opened the lid of the kitchen bin and emptied it of its bag, took it downstairs without saying anything to the others.
The outside bin was always filled by passersby with miscellaneous waste: tied-up shopping bags, half-eaten fast-food and drinks cartons, empty cigarette packs. There was hardly enough room for her to add the half-empty bag she had brought down, so Kate untied it and began to fill it with some of the bin’s contents: the larger plastic bags first, then the polystyrene carton that contained what looked like weeks-old jerk chicken, and the sturdier coffee cups that had not yet disintegrated. But beneath the top layers of fresh rubbish was a mulch of refuse, half decayed and submerged in a thick black liquid from which rose the overpowering stench of shit.
Kate moved the bin, which was heavy with rainwater, saw floating there what looked like the remnants of a barbecue whose coals explained the tarred liquid, more collapsed drinks containers and cans, what she feared might be a used condom, and several of what could have been the bags used to collect dog shit. Something, small and white, just visible on the bloated surface of one of the blue bags, appeared to move. She stepped quickly back and sat on the low wall outside the flat.
More than anything, more than fear, panic, or even sadness, she felt weary. She put her heavy head in her hands. She didn’t know how long she’d been there when she heard the latch click. She straightened up, quickly, wiped her eyes, felt an arm fall on her shoulder. He smelt of gin, and he held her tightly with a clinging, drunken strength. He didn’t say anything but pulled her head against his chest, and stayed there, still, watching the street, she rising and falling with his breath.
32
The director who had been originally lined up for Late Surfacing, the film Zara had inherited, hadn’t begun her preproduction in earnest, and that summer Zara started work on an unmarked script and an empty shot list. On the first day she shut herself in her office on the top floor of Latimer Crescent, read the script again from beginning to end, her pen in her right hand, and found that she was unable to make a single mark. By lunchtime, she’d read it through again, and a hole had opened up in her chest. She thought about phoning her agent, or maybe her producer, but she didn’t know how to voice what it was she was feeling: she was not in the habit of asking for help.
As she turned her phone facedown on her desk, it started ringing. Zara looked at the screen and saw that it was Kate. She put the phone back down, on a pile of notes, so that the vibrations were softened. She couldn’t speak to Kate now. Even the thought of her was a distraction when she was trying to claim for herself the experiences laid out in the script in front of her. This vibrantly detailed rape, this fiction, lay just beyond her grasp, and she could not counter Kate’s claim to it if she heard her voice. Her phone buzzed with a notification: Kate had left a voicemail, but instead of listening to the message, Zara went downstairs and made a coffee. That afternoon, she stayed with it a little longer, made her first mark on the script: a small question mark in the margin of the fifth page. Still she did not listen to the voicemail, but she kept on working.
Only once she’d finished this third read-through did she listen to Kate’s message. She sounded a little nervous, though she was trying to disguise it, asking Zara how she was, explaining that Max had told her about the film, and asking whether she needed any help. Zara drafted a text message in which she explained that they would not be at the production stage until the autumn, but that she would let Kate know if anything came up. She reread her message and saw clearly that it would only invite interest in a few months’ time, so instead of sending it she deleted it and returned to her notes. But now Kate was in her mind, she couldn’t stop thinking of her, of the divulgences Kate had made to her, of the vulnerabilities she had exposed both in herself and in Zara. She wrote late into the night, and the next morning she got up and started again before breakfast. That day and the following one she wrote from seven until seven breaking only for coffee, and by the end of the week she’d completed her notes for the first full read-through.
The exertion consumed her. The skin on her hands became dry, and in the mirror her face looked more tired, skin sagging below her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Because she didn’t want to make her usual fortnightly visit to the hairdresser, silvery roots began to appear at her scalp, and she sent William to the chemist to buy some dye. He helped her shampoo the dye into her hair as she knelt on the floor in the bathroom, he lathering it as she held on to the sides of the bath with both hands, her dressing gown loose around her elbows. When she dried her hair it had a synthetic shine to it.
Kate did not follow up on her message, and the more time that passed, the less able Zara felt to respond. Unless it was Max or Nicole calling, or her agent, she would let her phone go to voicemail. One Sunday, though, Rupert rang three times in a row, and on the third time Zara picked up, preparing—just as she had when she used to call Kate—to modulate according to the level of distress she could hear in the voice on the other end of the line.
“She lives,” Rupert said.
“I’m working,” Zara said, taken aback by the levity of Rupert’s tone.
“So I hear,” Rupert said. “William tells me you’ve shut yourself in the attic.”
“When did he say that?” Zara said. It surprised her to hear that her schedule had been the topic for family discussion.
“I saw him last week for supper, and I realized it’s been such a long time, so I thought I’d call.”
“And I’m so glad you did, darling.”
“I don’t want to intrude, but I thought, if you wanted company—”
“Oh, that’s so kind of you, Rupert, and you wouldn’t be intruding. But I’m fine, really. It’s just the schedule, keeping me chained to the desk like this. It’s nothing sinister. You know, I do my best work under pressure.”
“I’m sure,” Rupert said. “Well. Call anytime.”
Zara knew she would not call, and neither did she tell William that his brother had phoned. How things had changed since Rupert wouldn’t even pick up the phone, let alone go out for a dinner: she had been too taken aback by the call to ask him how he was feeling, though from his voice she could tell that he was better than he had been in a while. When William got home that evening she came downstairs
to make a sandwich and to speak to him briefly about his day before going back to her office, and it was the same the following day: she wrote, she worked, quietly she read, and gave nothing of herself away, while William waited patiently to receive whatever it was she would be willing to give him when the time came.
* * *
—
One Thursday in September, while William was at the hospital, the doorbell rang. Zara had been stuck on a scene all week that she couldn’t block. Every shot list she compiled had gone in the bin, and her office was filled with scrunched-up paper and angry Biro scribbles. She’d been on the sofa since lunch and unwilling to get up to find the remote, was watching a documentary about the indomitable rise of flat-pack furniture. At the sound of the door, she shifted herself and shuffled downstairs. It was too late for the postman, and only when she knew that her silhouette had appeared on the other side of the glass and it was too late to turn back did she consider that it might be Kate, whose call she had ignored, who she had invited into her life before hiding herself away; Kate, who was the same as Zara, and who Zara did not want to face.