He leans back on his heels. ‘Well, there are no lumps. But I think you might have a big bruise here tomorrow.’ His thumb brushes her cheekbone.
‘Yeah. I think…I think I just passed out. Fainted, I mean.’
‘Right.’ He nods, frowning, then asks: ‘Do you faint much?’
‘Er…no. Don’t think so. Can’t remember having fainted before.’
‘My sister does.’ He moves off into the kitchen, the cone of his light bobbing over the walls and ceiling. ‘She faints all the time.’
Lily follows the jittering beam of light. Relief is ebbing through her. She is indeed in front of the mirror behind the door, and she can’t believe that the flat is all still here, still intact, still existing. ‘Does she?’
‘Yeah. Always has done. Always will probably. She has low blood pressure.’ He wedges the torch on top of the fridge between a pile of magazines and a jam jar. ‘It takes an hour or so to fix,’ he is saying, as he moves about, opening drawers and rattling boxes of matches, ‘or so they said.’
‘What will?’ Her brain is disordered: she seems unable to follow the thread of the conversation. Does he mean his sister?
‘The electricity. Idiots,’ he mutters, as he stands two half-melted candles on the table and holds a match to them. The wicks catch and vertical shadows reach up and touch the ceiling. He comes back over to where she is propped up. ‘You know, you ought to go to the doctor. Get yourself checked out. Just to be sure.’
Lily moves her feet, preparing to stand. Aidan leans down and, grasping her by both forearms, pulls her up. She sways, her legs feeling frail. But he catches her round the waist and, his arm supporting her, walks with her to the sofa. When she sinks into it, he remains above her, standing. ‘You must go to the doctor,’ he says again, looking her over, ‘tomorrow. You really must. You’re white as a sheet.’
‘I will,’ she lies. ‘I promise. But I’m sure it’s nothing.’
‘Yeah, well, let the doctor be the judge of that.’ He turns and goes to his doors. ‘Right. I’m going to pack, but if you need anything just shout.’
‘Pack? Are you going away?’ she asks, hearing the dismay in her voice and hating it.
‘Not exactly.’ He pats his trouser pocket and a metallic clink answers. He smiles. ‘I got the keys to my new flat today. At last.’
She watches as he walks to and fro in the quivering candlelight, piling up by the door suitcases, bags of books, and boxes of computer screens, leads, hard drives, scanners, CD-ROMs. A cup of tea appears at her elbow, heavily sugared, and, feeling guiltily better, she gets up, laying his jacket carefully over the arm of the chair.
‘Do you want a hand with anything?’ she calls.
‘No. I’ve just about finished.’
Keeping the bathroom door open to catch the flickering of the candles, she washes her face, examining the faint mark on her cheek. As she comes out of the bathroom the lights rise up to meet her as if she’s just walked on stage. Aidan is standing at the table, hands shoved into his back pockets. Behind him, the CD clicks and whirs in the machine, and then loud, inappropriate trip-hop fills the space between them. For some reason, they both laugh.
‘Let there be light,’ he says.
‘Power to the people,’ she returns quickly.
‘If music be the food of light,’ he says, just as quickly.
‘And so put on the light.’
‘It’s lighter than air.’
‘Here’s some light relief.’
‘Eine kleine lichtmusik.’
That makes Lily giggle. ‘Er…’ she can’t think of one. ‘Let them eat cake!’ she blurts wildly.
Aidan laughs. ‘I win,’ he says. Then: ‘Look, I’ll…I won’t go tonight. I’ll take my stuff over to the flat in the morning.’
‘Oh.’ She is suddenly sober, knowing she should protest, that he should go, but she can’t find the words, for him leaving now seems like the worst thing that could ever happen to her. ‘Thank you,’ she says meekly, ‘thank you so much.’
‘No, it’s fine.’ He scratches his head. ‘Marcus’ll be back soon. So you’ll be…fine.’
The next morning their awkwardness is back. Aidan stands at the door with a cardboard box.
‘I hope…you’ll be all right,’ he says, holding out his hand. She is set off balance by the formality of this gesture but she takes it anyway, presses it in hers, knowing that she should say something. He drops his eyes, easing his hand out of hers, turning away.
Lily realises that she’ll probably never see him again. She wants to ask him for a phone number, or an address, whether he’ll be happy now. But she doesn’t.
‘Good luck with…’ she can’t think how to end the sentence ‘…your new flat,’ she adds in a moment of inspiration.
‘Thanks,’ he says, and without looking back, ‘’bye, then.’
The instant the door closes, she whips round to face the room. The tap drips, water tap-tapping into the well of the sink. Underfoot, a central-heating pipe sighs and shudders. At the far window, a breeze fills a shirt with her shape.
She stares at it for a second then jerks herself into action, running towards her room, fear tightening her scalp. She seizes her bag from the floor and starts snatching up objects to shove into it: tube pass, purse, book, keys. Where are her keys? She storms about, lifting clothes, magazines, books and hurling them in to the air. No sign of them. She leans around her door. The flat looks impossibly long from this perspective, the bathroom and kitchen stretching away into the distance. She makes a sudden dash across the floorboards, her footsteps crashing and bouncing off the walls. Keys, keys, keys, she is intoning to herself. Where the hell are they? Not on the table, not on the sofa, not by the door. Keep looking, Lily, she tells herself, they’ve got to be somewhere, can’t be far away.
In another part of her mind, a terrible thought is growing. She is struggling to ignore it, keeping her mind on the search, but it’s getting louder and louder. If she can’t find her keys, she can’t open the door, which is fitted with a stupid self-locking mechanism. If she can’t open the door, she can’t leave. If she can’t leave, she’ll be stuck in here all day. And all night. And all the next day. And the next. Until Marcus gets back.
And around her the room is suddenly quiet and still, the kind of stillness she has come to hate. The tap is silent, the sink dry. Her shirt is pressed flat at the window. She darts a glance at the door, six feet away. Maybe it won’t be locked after all. Maybe, just maybe, it didn’t lock after Aidan. She almost tries it, just to make sure, just on the off-chance that the mechanism hadn’t worked for once. But the idea of her tugging in vain at an unyielding handle isn’t a good one. She runs briefly through other means of escape – the lift shaft, the windows – and then a very cold focus descends on her brain: I have to get out of here. I have to find my keys.
She scatters objects from the table to the floor – unopened mail, Marcus’s note, newspaper supplements. She wrenches open the kitchen drawers and ransacks their contents. She runs her hand along the shelf where the plants sit in a neat row. She empties out the chrome bowl on the counter and matchboxes, elastic bands, corkscrews, a tiny silver earring, some hairgrips scatter over the Formica and on to the floor.
‘Come on!’ she shouts to the air. ‘Where have you put them?’ Then mutters, ‘Bitch,’ as she strides to the bathroom and pulls open the cabinet. By the sound system, she pulls CDs from their shelves. She hurls the sofa cushions to the floor. She lifts up the corners of the rugs. Then she walks slowly and deliberately to the large windows at the end of the flat, where the bulbs are pushing up through the soil.
On the sill is a mug. Lily has seen it before but never really thought about it. It has a black ‘S’ printed on its side. She pushes her fingers into its cold porcelain mouth and lifts out her keys.
Laurence has found a stone and is bashing it against the hollow iron leg of the swing. He takes his steadying hand away from the swing for a moment to look back at her,
delighted.
Lily smiles at him and waves. ‘That’s a good noise, Laurence.’
He turns back to his labours and the dull, metallic thud rings out again over the misty park. A mother in a pink bobble-hat, bouncing a miserable-looking child on a see-saw, glances at her disapprovingly. Lily is tempted to stick out her tongue.
She feels light-headed and edgy, and a heavy knot of dread is tensing her stomach, like the feeling before an exam. What is she going to do? She can’t go back to the flat, and she can’t very well move out either. How would she explain it to Marcus?
Laurence is coming over the grass towards her, with the emphatic, solid stagger of a toddler, grinning. His mother has dressed him in so many clothes that he is quite spherical.
‘Hi,’ Lily says, ‘what happened to your wonderful stone?’
His fists grip the material of her coat. He extends the index finger of his hand towards the bench she’s sitting on and looks up at her enquiringly. He’s going through what his mother refers to his ‘acquiring verbalism stage’.
‘Bench,’ says Lily.
He points again.
‘Bench.’
He points up.
‘Sky.’
And behind her.
‘Tree,’ Lily says. ‘Tree. You try.’
He points instead at the mother beside the see-saw who is involved in a struggle with her child. It is weeping piteously and trying in vain to get off the see-saw.
‘Horrid lady,’ Lily says.
He points again.
‘Silly hat.’
Laurence jiggles at her leg. ‘Up,’ he commands, in his throaty growl. ‘Up.’
Lily scoops him off the ground and on to her knee. ‘Shall we go home?’ she asks him. ‘Are you cold yet? No, probably not. You’re dressed for a Himalayan expedition, aren’t you?’
He twists round in her arms to gaze at her. She sees his slate-grey eyes fix on the bruise that has bloomed on the side of her face.
‘What do you think will happen?’ she asks him, straightening his hat on his soft, blond hair. ‘Eh? What’s your view? What am I going to see next? And the million-dollar question: am I losing my marbles?’
Laurence extends his finger towards the bruise, frowning.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ she says, pressing her face into the silky skin of his neck. He wriggles, laughing his emphysemic old-man laugh. ‘You ask too many questions, that’s your problem.’
‘How much does he earn?’ Diane says, attempting to hold up a burgundy shirt against Lily. Lily pushes it away from her. She is regretting telling her mother about Marcus. She’s spent the night back in Ealing and, in a weak moment, Diane had extracted a promise from her to be a shopping companion the next day.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t asked him, have I?’
Shoppers flow around them, bumping bags and umbrellas and elbows. Diane places the shirt back on the rack. ‘Must be considerable. An architect.’ Diane rolls the word around her mouth, giving it about five syllables. ‘It’s wonderful, Lily. I’m so pleased.’
‘It’s not…like that, really.’
‘Not like what?’ Diane demands. ‘Serious, you mean? Lily, nothing is serious at first.’
Diane makes her way through the racks and carousels of clothing with the weaving gait of an expert department-store shopper, leaving Lily stranded among the cardigans. Nearby another mother and daughter study a blue angora twinset with religious intensity. ‘Is it me?’ the daughter asks.
‘Well,’ her mother replies, ‘it could be.’
‘I hope you’re taking care of yourself, Lily,’ Diane shouts, from the sock and hosiery department. Lily starts to calculate whether she can get to her mother’s side quickly enough to stop her continuing in that vein. ‘You are taking precautions, aren’t you?’ she bellows. ‘What are you using?’
‘Mum,’ Lily hisses, stumbling to her side, plastic bags flapping from her arms like angel wings, ‘for God’s sake. Do you have to? Everyone can hear you.’
‘Who?’
‘Everyone.’ Lily gesticulates around the shop.
‘Well, it’s important. I have to ask. You don’t have to give me any details if you don’t want to. Just tell me, put my mind at rest, are you being careful?’
Lily closes her eyes. ‘Yes. Of course. Of course I am.’
Half-way through the morning they have coffee. Lily stacks up her mother’s bags on a spare chair. Diane swirls white cream from a tiny carton into the black of her decaff, agitating the surface with a spoon. Lily watches the colour sink into brown.
‘You don’t look well,’ Diane announces, peering into her daughter’s face. ‘What is it? PMT?’
‘No.’
‘When’s your period due?’
Lily stares at her mother. ‘Why are you so annoying?’ She glances at the surrounding tables, but everyone is engrossed in shopper’s conversations. ‘It’s…I don’t know…two weeks or something.’
Diane flattens her fingers against Lily’s brow. ‘Are you off-colour? Do you feel ill? What’s that mark on your cheek from?’
Lily ducks away, ‘It’s nothing. I…I fell, that’s all. Tripped. I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look it. You look like you’ve got tuberculosis.’
‘Thanks.’ She sips at the slick black surface of her coffee. ‘He had a girlfriend,’ she says.
‘Really?’ Diane is immediately there, listening. ‘A serious one?’
‘Yeah. I think so. They lived together.’
‘How long for?’
‘Four years? Five, maybe. Don’t know.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Well, haven’t you asked?’
‘She died.’
‘Oh.’ Diane frowns as if this information is irksome to her. ‘When?’
‘I’m not sure. Quite recently I think. She’s still…sort of…around the flat.’
‘Around the flat? In what way?’
‘Er,’ Lily breaks the Danish pastry on her plate into smaller and smaller crumbs. ‘Um. Well, all her stuff was still in my room…when I first saw it.’
‘I see.’ Diane considers this, displeased. ‘What did she die of?’
Lily sees paving slabs, regular and neat as fields seen from an aeroplane. She closes her eyes. ‘Don’t know.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Lily,’ Diane takes an exasperated swig from her cup. ‘Don’t you and this Marcus ever talk to each other? Hold a conversation?’
Lily eats her Danish slowly, dipping it into her coffee until her mother tells her to stop that, it’s disgusting. A waitress comes, an orange pencil gripped between her teeth, and slides the crockery on to a tray. Diane starts looking at her watch.
‘She was really beautiful,’ Lily says.
‘Who?’ Diane is searching in her handbag for something.
‘The girlfriend. Marcus’s girlfriend.’
‘Ex-girlfriend,’ Diane corrects her.
‘Can you be an ex if you died?’
‘Of course,’ Diane snaps. ‘You’re his girlfriend now…’
‘Well—–’
‘…so that makes her his ex.’
‘Mmm,’ Lily picks at a loose thread in the seam of her shirt, ‘maybe.’
‘Look, Lily,’ Diane leans across the table and takes hold of her daughter’s hand, ‘don’t worry about this, this…girl.’
‘Sinead.’
‘Sinead? What kind of a name’s that?’
‘Dunno. Irish, I think.’
‘Well. Anyway. Don’t worry about her. Put her out of your mind. She’s gone. He’s yours now. He’s a good catch.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about him as if he was a fish.’
Lily weaves in and out of the crowds on Oxford Street. Diane has gone home. Three hours’ shopping is ‘just her limit’. Lily’s bought a blue shirt of sheer, flimsy fabric. She folds it up into a small, square parcel and crams it into her bag.
She walks down Ch
aring Cross Road and, turning left, wanders through Covent Garden. It begins to drizzle and Lily realises she’s forgotten her umbrella. At a pharmacy on a corner she stops and peers through the window at a woman having a makeover. She’s tilted back in a chair like a dentist’s, her hair pulled into a grey, clinical band. A woman in a grey overall and orange foundation is standing over her smearing something white and foamy on to her face. She’s wearing a badge that says, ‘Ask me about options for lips.’
Suddenly, something beyond the woman having a makeover, something through the window that faces out over the perpendicular street makes the depth of focus in Lily’s eye flicker and stretch. Then her stomach drops to the pavement she’s standing on.
Sinead passes the window without looking her way, a hood obscuring most of her face. Then the window is blank again, veils of grey drizzle sweeping across its greenish glass.
Lily edges to the corner and peers round. Is this how it’s going to be now? That she’s going to follow her everywhere? That Lily will see her everywhere – outside, in shops, at work, on the tube? Is this how it’s going to be?
The figure is walking at a steady pace away from Lily. She has a rucksack on her back. A smaller woman with blonde hair is walking beside her. The blonde woman is saying something to her and now Sinead is nodding, unfolding her arms and turning her face towards her friend, her right palm upturned in a gesture of affirmation to whatever it is she’s saying. They stop at a zebra crossing. They are still talking. The friend is shaking her head. Lily finds that her feet are moving under her and the scene where Sinead and Sinead’s friend are standing waiting to cross the road is getting closer. Lily feels incredibly calm, as if somehow she had always known this would happen, had always seen this coming.
They cross the road. Sinead adjusts her hood, pulling it further over her face against the steady rain. Lily is five maybe four paces behind them. Sinead’s jacket rustles as her body moves inside it. At the tube station they stop and face each other on the pavement.
‘…but I should be back by Thursday,’ the friend is saying. ‘I can’t believe it will take longer than that.’