What Red Was

by Rosie Price

  Kate liked to let him in, but only so far. She was glad she hadn’t told Andrew about seeing Zara. She hadn’t even told him that she and Claire had gone over to Bisley House in December, since part of her knew that he would consider such actions to be a form of self-harm. He didn’t understand the need she had for recollection, nor did he understand the sense of control it gave her.

  She didn’t quite put her meeting with Zara to the back of her mind, but she did at least find a way to rationalize it. She told herself that Zara had resurfaced not to force some kind of a confession out of Kate, but because she genuinely believed that Kate would feel better if she put her status as a victim to good use. Zara did not know about Lewis. It was possible that she suspected, but she had no way of knowing for sure. She knew that if Zara ever asked her outright, she would deny it. In protecting him, she was protecting herself. This had always been her instinct, and she was more certain of it than ever.

  * * *

  —

  In early spring, Kate invited Max and Nicole for dinner. This, she told Max over the phone, was as close to a flat-warming as she was willing to offer.

  “You can even bring Elias,” she said and then immediately regretted it.

  Neither Nicole nor Elias had been to the flat before, and they both did their best to find nice things to say about it as Kate showed them round. Elias unfurled the blackout blind in Claire’s bedroom.

  “These are really good,” he said earnestly. “They really don’t let in any light whatsoever.”

  Kate felt unexpectedly moved by his sincerity and took him to the bathroom to show him the window from which it was possible to see the fruit and vegetable shop on the street below while showering.

  “You’ve lost weight,” Nicole said to Kate when they were back in the kitchen. “You’re a shadow of your former self.”

  “That’s not what that means,” said Max.

  “No, I mean it. You look really well,” Nicole insisted, ignoring Max.

  “Yeah, but a shadow of your former—”

  “Where’s Andrew?” Nicole cut across Max. “Did Max tell you I’m heartbroken? George and I broke up.”

  “Oh, I’m really sorry,” Kate said. She did not know who George was.

  “It’s fine, actually he’s much more heartbroken than I am. Poor guy. But you’re still with Andrew?”

  “I am. But I don’t know if he’ll be able to come,” Kate said. “He’s working on this film. He’ll come if they finish on time, though, and he might bring his flatmate, too.”

  Kate had invited Shona for dinner when she’d been at Andrew’s flat the week before, but she realized now that she was half hoping Andrew wouldn’t bring her. She’d made a curry she knew Shona would like, just in case she did turn up, but she wasn’t at all sure what she would make of Nicole and Elias, or even Max. Elias was wearing his velvet jacket again, and Kate was relieved that she’d managed to maneuver Claire into the seat next to Max. Nicole wanted to know all about Andrew’s film, and Kate told her and Elias the gist of the story as she understood it, playfully pulling a face when she got to the part about the semi-naked woman walking into the water.

  “Does that bother you?” Nicole said.

  “Oh no,” Kate said, shrugging. “It’s just a film.”

  “Hm,” Nicole said.

  Opposite, Claire was giggling at something Max had told her about his app. Kate reached for the wine and topped up Nicole’s glass, and asked her what had happened with George, knowing that this would fill the time between now and dinner being ready. As she set the timer for the rice, she checked her messages, but Andrew hadn’t texted, so she turned her phone facedown on the table.

  * * *

  —

  When the doorbell rang, they’d nearly finished dessert. By now, Kate was no longer expecting Andrew to arrive and had stopped checking her phone, but at the sound of the bell she leapt straight up to get the door. He was drunk, and he grinned when he saw her, picked her up in a bear hug.

  “I’m here!” he announced. “Happy birthday!”

  “It’s not my birthday,” Kate said, “so you can put me down. Is it just you?”

  “Shona says she’s very sorry she can’t come,” Andrew said diplomatically, “but she has somewhere better to be.”

  He carried her across the threshold and then dumped her, with a dull thud, in the hallway.

  “You’ve had a head start,” Max said as he got up and found himself gathered in the same bear hug with which Andrew had greeted Kate. Max patted him on the back a little desperately. “Put me down and I’ll get you some food.”

  Andrew sat in Kate’s chair and started to eat. Kate, who was a little startled by his drunken apparition, went into her bedroom to get another chair. When she came back, Max was asking Andrew about the shoot that day.

  “Big day today,” Andrew said, his mouth full of food, “big shoot. It was so fucking good, oh my God.”

  “So you’ve been celebrating?”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “Yuh,” he said.

  “Kate was just telling me about your film,” Elias said, sitting back in his chair.

  “Yeah, it’s really good,” Andrew said, nodding again.

  “You look a bit demented,” Kate said. Andrew ignored her.

  “It sounds good,” Elias said. “Particularly with all the nudity.”

  Andrew turned to look at Elias, noticing him properly for the first time.

  “All the nudity?” he said.

  “The scene in the pond.”

  “Oh, yeah, but that’s only a bit.”

  Elias smiled knowingly. “Sure. Did you get to pick the actress, too?”

  Andrew frowned, put down his fork. Kate looked at the fork. She’d never seen him interrupt a meal before. He turned back to Elias.

  “What are you saying?” he said. “It’s not a porno.”

  “I know, mate,” Elias said. “I’m just interested in the casting process.”

  “There is some really good feminist pornography, actually,” Nicole said breezily. Andrew and Elias both turned and looked at her. “What?” she said. “Women wank too.”

  Max took advantage of the momentary stunned silence to swoop in and grab Elias’s arm.

  “Let’s have a cigarette,” he said.

  “I’ve given up,” said Elias.

  “OK, so come and watch me have a cigarette,” Max said, jerking Elias to his feet.

  “Who’s the wanker?” Andrew said as Max and Elias went downstairs.

  “He’s a liability,” said Nicole imperiously. “I don’t know why Max still hangs around with him. Probably makes him feel better about himself.”

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t long after their cigarette that Max and Elias left, Max hugging Kate and apologizing to her.

  “We’ll do something just the two of us next time,” he said. “Come to Latimer Crescent. You haven’t been there for ages.”

  “Years,” Kate said, knowing that Max would not understand what she meant by this. She was tired, and she was glad that everybody was leaving. “Thank you for coming,” she said to Max. Not long after they’d gone, Claire went to bed, and Andrew went to have a shower. They could hear him, singing and colliding with the walls of the cubicle. Nicole, though, stayed with Kate to finish the rest of the wine. She sipped at her glass, unhurried.

  “I could see that what Elias said upset you,” she said when they were alone. Her directness reminded Kate immediately of Zara. “I’m sorry about him.”

  “It’s OK,” Kate said. “There are people like him everywhere. I’m glad Max took him outside, though.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Nicole said. She sounded a little more like a proud pet owner than sister, but Kate saw that she was being sincere. “He’s really got his shit together t
hese last few months. I think you helped him, you know.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true.”

  “You did. He looks up to you. And you getting back on your feet after, you know, whatever you’ve been dealing with. I think he wanted to do the same.”

  Kate was touched.

  “He’s always had a sore spot for you,” Nicole said.

  “You mean a soft spot.”

  “Precisely. I don’t think we need to worry about him, though, Kate. He’s going to be fine. Well, so long as he doesn’t get a freaky tattoo. That’s when we know shit’s getting bad.”

  Kate looked at Nicole. “What?” she said.

  Nicole laughed. “Oh, hah, didn’t Max ever tell you? That’s what Lewis did when he had his little breakdown a few years ago. Just after his parents got divorced; he was still a teenager.”

  “Max never mentioned it to me,” Kate said cautiously.

  “Some pretentious quote,” Nicole said. “Right next to his dick, so he says. I’ve never seen it, obviously.” She grimaced; put her wineglass back on the table. “Lewis only told me about it because he was pissed. But that’s real breakdown territory. Can you imagine?”

  42

  Kate had not been back to Latimer Crescent since the rape, and when Max messaged her the morning after the dinner party to ask again if she would come and see him, she replied that she would meet him in town. She had avoided returning to the house in order to protect herself from the inevitable reminders it contained, but she also knew that while she stayed away, there were parts of her memory she could not properly access. Without returning, there would be no means of recovering that part of herself that she had left there, embedded in Zara’s mattress, two summers before.

  She knew that she could not avoid it forever. At the beginning of summer, when Max had mentioned that his parents were traveling, she phoned and asked him if she could come and visit. She’d hardly had reason to go to west London this past year, and as she walked from the Tube to Max’s road she realized that she had forgotten its contradictions: the bright white mansions dwarfing tower blocks, hash cutting through the smell of expensive perfume, the ubiquity of dog shit.

  As she turned onto Latimer Crescent she knew that she was seeking some form of completion rather than an ending. But to her frustration, she found that she could not remember whether it had been this side of the street or the other that she’d walked on when she and Lewis had come back from the corner shop that night. The road did not curve quite as she remembered it, and the houses, which she always thought of as standing alone, were in fact semi-detached. She had not realized how little care she had taken over her memories.

  When Max opened the door he was wearing a fleece-lined sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms, and even though it was sunny that morning his skin looked pale, a little gray beneath his eyes, which were bloodshot. He stretched and smiled, and hugged her; his neck smelt of roll-ups and laundry. He apologized for the state of the house: he’d been inside all week, working on a deadline. She followed him through to the kitchen, where the sink was full of dirty dishes and cold cloudy water. Max made Kate a coffee by pouring an undetermined quantity of instant granules from an open jar straight into a mug, the rim of which he rubbed on his jumper before filling from the kettle.

  “Mum went mad doing this film,” he said. “But it’s finished now, so they’ve gone away. It’s been quite fun without them.” He brushed the kitchen table with its light dusting of white powder.

  “She told me about the film,” Kate said. “You didn’t say it was about rape.”

  “Didn’t I? I think I thought it would be triggering,” Max said. “Cigarette?” He looked at her.

  The air inside the house was sticking in her throat, and Kate did not want to disrupt the delicate balance of their interaction, so she went with him out to the table in the back garden, where Max rolled them each a cigarette. Kate hadn’t smoked in a while, didn’t really want to now, and the tobacco gave her a light head rush which settled quickly in her stomach as sickness.

  “So Embers is going well,” Max said. “We’ve been trialing it in Bisley—they’ve got the right demographic. I’m thinking of pitching it a little bit more like a social network for the older generation, rather than a dating app. Sort of Friends Reunited but with the potential for romance.” He flicked his ash. “You and me, maybe, meeting on Embers in our seventies.”

  Kate was struggling to concentrate. She had been out here, over there, by the wall, when she’d told Lewis she was going for ice, when he’d told her he was coming with her. Or had he asked her if he could come? She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. She realized that Max had stopped talking; silence grew between them.

  “I need to piss,” she said.

  She went back through the kitchen and instead of using the ground-floor toilet she climbed the carpeted stairs. She climbed as she had climbed before, but with the knowledge now that this was an act of self-determination, that she was acting both out of herself and for herself. And she saw her body and her clothing not as it was now, but as it had been that day two summers before: ripped jeans, bare feet, face fuller and rounder, hair longer, the flesh of her thighs unmarked by the knives she had since put in it. That woman had been so much a child, but more vulnerable for her belief that she was already fully grown. Twenty-two, still living at home. How she wanted to warn away that soft shadow, gather it up and carry it back down the stairs, away from this place. But it could not be discouraged, and its home, if it had one now, was the ground beneath her feet, the path they were taking.

  On the first-floor landing, she pushed open the door to Zara’s bedroom. Still the crisp white sheets, still the softly piled cushions, the glass-topped dressing table with its neatly boxed powders and creams, and the far doorway to the glistening white bathroom closed. The smell was the same, too, of amber, spiced powder, the window opened just a crack to let the fresh air circulate. It had been through that crack that Kate had sent her soul to join the voices in the garden as Lewis had moved on top of her, so that it might carry on without her. In her mind the room was always in the half-light, as it had been that night. But now, of course, it was late morning and it was bright and she saw that the room was sparser: only the radio by the bed, dimmer lights set into the white ceiling rather than the lampshade she had pictured. What else had she misremembered?

  From the window, she could see Max playing with his lighter. Kate stepped back into the middle of the room and lay down on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. She had been lying like this, perpendicular to the edge of the bed. She had thought afterward that if they both had wanted this to happen, rather than just him, then they might have got into the bed, lying with their heads on the pillows, or bodies under the covers, rather than at this perverse angle, her legs hanging off the side of the bed, pressed together but pulled roughly apart.

  The anxiety grew as she lay there, but she inhaled slowly and deeply, blanketing the metallic tautness with new breath so that it dulled just a little. Memories crowded. The smell of aftershave, the burden of an immovable weight. That red ribbon, that rawness. But they did not undo her. If her perception really was so delicate, if it had been shattered once before, then she could shatter it again. There would be other shades of red, other filters through which she could apprehend the world, and she would be more powerful for her knowledge of them. These images would never leave her, but they could be reshaped, written into new narratives, overlaid with new meanings—meanings that were not the end of her.

  Slowly, still breathing deeply, she unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, pulling the waistband down around her hips and putting her hand in the front of her knickers. Taste yourself, he had said, and she did so now, rubbing where she had become wet and then putting her fingers in her mouth. Your cunt is tight, he had said. Your cunt is tight, those words a knife, any of the knives she had held since then. His readings of her bod
y, of the involuntary welcome it offered him: tight, wet, warm, this was what she could stand the least, and where the memory of those words seared through her body there was pain, guilt and pain, mingled indistinguishably with the horrors of bodily pleasure.

  Afterward, she went back downstairs, giving Max no explanation for her prolonged absence. She wondered whether she was somehow using him by apparently coming here to spend time with him when instead she was creeping around the upper floors of his house, exploiting his openness to gain access to her own obscure memories. But she did not care; she was feeling reckless. Max opened beers for them both, and Kate sat back, watched him as she swigged her drink.

  “Do you know,” she said, “I think the last time I came to your parents’ house was for that party. Do you remember?”

  “Christmas?” said Max.

  “No, not Bernadette’s house. The last time I was here.”

  “Didn’t you come here last Christmas too?”

  “No,” Kate said again. “It was summer. Two summers ago.”

  “Oh,” Max said, “is that really the last time?”

  Kate nodded. “And do you remember, I left in the morning before you woke up.”

  Max shook his head. “Maybe,” he said. “Not sure. I remember a lot of limes. I think that was at the height of my mojito era.”

  “A good era.”

  “Among the best. That must have been just after Rupert tried to kill himself.” His directness took Kate by surprise; he, unlike her, usually avoided using such blunt markers. “You looked after me that year.”