I unlatched the lock and swung back the door. What I saw: two blokes, shivering in the fog-laden air, blinking in the light cast by my hall lamp. One was taller than the other, hanging back. Dark eyes with dark hair hanging over them. The other had short but soft-looking yellow hair, blue eyes, a duffel coat, and cans of lager under his arm.
‘Yes?’ I said. I had one hand on my hip and the other on the door jamb as if at any minute I might slam it shut.
The men shifted uneasily. The short-haired one transferred the cans to the other hand, then back again.
‘Hi. We’re friends of…of Sinead.’
I looked them over again, just for effect. ‘Are you now?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded, gaining confidence. Even grinned.
‘Well, I’m Sinead,’ I said, ‘and I’ve never met either of you before in my life.’
Their faces wilted. But I smiled. ‘It’s all right, you can come in.’ I stepped back into the hall to let them in, they passed me, the cold from their bodies brushing my skin. ‘Who are you anyway?’ I called after them over the music.
‘This is Aidan,’ the short-haired one said, pointing at his friend, ‘and I’m Marcus.’
She decides to do the washing-up, her hands disappearing beneath hot frothy suds, the glasses and plates knocking against each other under the surface. Water and stray bubbles slide from drying crockery down the draining-board and back into the sink.
Lying on her back on the floor, she calls Ingrid, leaves a message on her answerphone, and then calls her brother. ‘Michael Wilson,’ she says, ‘it’s me.’
‘Hi,’ he says, sounding surprised, as he always does. ‘Wait a sec. I’ll turn the music down.’
She hears the receiver drop to the table and his feet slapping over the room and the music dim, as if it’s been sucked into the distance.
‘So,’ his voice is back, close to her ear, ‘how are you?’
‘OK. I was trying to work but I appear to have the concentration of a goldfish, so I thought I’d call you instead.’
‘Oh. Thanks. So I shouldn’t be alarmed if you suddenly forget who I am and what you’re doing on the phone to me?’ There is a sudden cracking, crunching noise, followed by the sound of loud chewing. ‘Anyway,’ Michael says with his mouth full, ‘I thought—–’
‘Are you eating?’ Sinead shouts. ‘How many times have I told you not to do that when you’re on the phone?’
He laughs, chewing again. ‘I know, I know. I only ever do it with you.’
‘Is that supposed to comfort me? Or flatter me? It’s foul. I feel like…I feel like you’re filling my ear with saliva.’
‘OK,’ he swallows, ‘sorry.’
She balances the soles of her feet against the wall, and they speak of their grandmother’s operation, of when Michael will go home next, of a film Sinead saw last week, of meeting up for coffee on Saturday. And Michael tells Sinead how his girlfriend had a scan today and how the baby was lying in an invisible hammock, its thumb between its jawbuds, and how they could see the small, electronic flicker of its heartbeat.
There were walls of pounding music surrounding everyone and everything. I wanted to slice through the sound with a knife, pull its edges apart and step through into the silent beyond. The kitchen was crammed with bodies and flesh. Kate had wrapped the lampshade in blue tissue paper, and people were swimming through the slow, aquarium room, holding drinks aloft, mouthing words, the music blanking out any sense of what they were.
On my razor-blade shoes, I slid round the walls, the skin of my bare back to the grain of the wallpaper. I’d put my glass down somewhere but had no idea where – I recalled the feeling of its hard curves leaving my palm, but couldn’t dredge up where that happened or why or who I was with. I could also remember the sensation of the crackling, membrane-thin paper of a joint between my fingers. But that had gone too now.
Suddenly Antony was next to me, smoke wisping from his mouth and nostrils into the blue light surrounding his head. Then his lips were making a moist crescent shape on my neck, his fingers dragging through my hair. I slithered out from underneath him and through the doors into the garden.
It was cold. Mist hung just above my head. The back lawn, enclosed on all sides by an uneven brick wall, was full of people holding sparklers. The fizzing, crackling fires scorched trails of light on to my retinas, and I blinked, still seeing the streams behind my eyelids.
Holding up my dress, I climbed on to the wall and, holding out my arms, I stepped, one foot at a time, along the length of the wall, my heels digging into the loose plaster. The air felt clearer up here, I seemed to be above the mist and closer to the stars. Below me, people shrieked and laughed and the sparklers jittered through the dark like fireflies. I peeled my feet off the wall one by one and placed them in front of me; and I progressed gradually the length of our ramshackle and weed-choked garden. I’m twenty-five, I thought, twenty-five, I have existed in this world for a quarter of a century. When I reached the intersection with the back wall I heard a voice below me: ‘Jump.’
I snapped my head around, and lost my balance: suddenly stars and tree branches and sparklers were swerving before me, and I didn’t know which way I was facing or if I was falling. My arms whirled in the air around me. The scene stilled. Balance returned. I was amazed to find myself still on the wall. Below me was the man who had gatecrashed the party. The one with the blue eyes. Arms outstretched. Duffel coat open to reveal a slippery red lining.
‘Jump,’ he said again.
‘No.’
‘Go on.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I said so,’ he said.
‘That’s not a good enough reason.’
‘Because I want you to.’
‘Neither’s that,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘A good enough reason.’
‘Why do you need one?’ he asked.
I was silent, flummoxed.
‘Go on,’ he urged again. ‘Jump.’
He narrowed his arms to about the width of my waist, and then I was passing through the air, under the stars but above the sparklers and I felt the impact of his hands on my ribcage and my arms were about his neck and before I was even aware of it happening he was swinging me round and round.
I would remember this when, sometime in the dead hours of the next morning, I woke with Antony’s arm heavy across me and the light grey behind the curtain. Antony’s frame was holding the covers away from me, and there was a channel of freezing air between us. I got up, put on layers of clothes from my drawer, padded to the bathroom through the party debris and drank from the tap, holding the ends of my hair out of the flow. Looking into the mirror at my smudged face, I recalled not an image but a sensation of the gatecrasher’s body imprinted on my front, and his fingers pressed into the spaces between each of my vertebrae.
When she puts the phone down from Michael, the roots of her hair are still damp so she opens the window in the bedroom, and leans with her elbows on the wide, stone sill, looking down into the street. Through the open door of the pub down the road, she sees the barman laying out mats on the tables and lifting down upturned chairs.
A group of people who live a few doors down pass below her. One of them jumps from paving slab to paving slab, avoiding the cracks, singing a song Sinead recognises. The rest laugh. She looks up, up over the roofs of the buildings opposite, over the dome of the Hawksmoor church two streets away and up into the sky where planes are circling over the city, pulling lines of vapour though the ether.
I walked down the aisle of a supermarket, pushing a trolley with wayward wheels. Antony trailed me, three or four paces behind.
‘The thing is, Dr Jarvis just isn’t a Vermeer expert at all,’ he was saying, ‘and that’s the kind of person I need. I don’t need some bloody cowboy like Jarvis. Do you know what he said to me the other day? Tony, he said, because remember I told you he always calls me Tony…’
I came to an abrupt stop in front of the pul
ses. Antony nearly fell into me, then wandered towards the cereals, still talking. To quell an urge to ram the trolley into his ankles, I snatched up a packet of red lentils and pretended to be reading the instructions.
‘I wouldn’t bother with those if I were you.’
I turned. My instant reaction was the thought that there was the most beautiful line between his lips; undulating, curved up at the ends. When he smiled, the pointed tips of his incisors showed – something I have always found peversely sexy.
‘Why not?’
Marcus shrugged. ‘Too much effort for too little taste.’
His face altered after he said that. His eyes slipped from mine. He seemed nervous and cleared his throat, as if about to say something yet afraid to.
‘It’s nice to see you again,’ I said.
‘Yes. I was thinking—–’
But a proprietorial hand on the small of my back interrupted us.
‘Hello, Marcus.’
I was appalled to find Antony next to me, leaning on the handle of my trolley, letting fall a box of cereal into its chrome meshing.
‘Oh.’ Marcus made no effort to hide his surprise. The beam of his vision swung from me to him to me again to our joined bodies, comprehension percolating through his face. ‘Hi, Antony. How are you doing?’
‘Not bad. Yourself?’
‘Er.’ He glanced at me again. ‘All right.’
Antony didn’t say anything further. I moved away from his hand, but it followed me across the new space between us. The three of us stared at each other, then Antony turned round and shoved at the trolley.
‘Well, we must be off. See you.’
‘Yeah, see you later. ‘Bye Sinead.’
As we walked away, I asked, ‘How do you know him?’
‘He’s an architect. Part Three, I think, or maybe diploma year. They’re in the same faculty building as us. He thinks he’s pretty hot shit. Doesn’t deign to mix much with us hoi polloi. He lives in some derelict factory in London somewhere and commutes in when he needs to.’
At the end of the aisle, I turned, hoping to see him still standing there. But he must have walked away fast, because it was empty, the metres and metres of shiny grey lino stretching out underneath the strip-lighting.
I turned back to Antony, saw the way his hair grew away from the whorled flesh of his ear, saw his hands curled round the trolley handles, saw his lips moving over his teeth. Later that afternoon, in his high-windowed room, I told him our affair was over.
Sinead closes the window. Night air is settling over the city like a sheet of damp muslin. Further down the street, she sees a teenager lighting a sparkler, which spits sharp white darts into the gathering dark. He spins around, shrieking, a fiery dervish, his friend watching, a lit match in his fingers. The window sticks so she has to reopen and slam it closed three times.
She waters her plants, gives the floor a sweep, straightens the rug. She leans over the fridge and the cupboards, and takes out things she’ll cook with later: a purple-black aubergine, hollow-centred and taut-skinned, onions, a limp sheaf of basil, a china mortar with a chipped pestle, a chopping knife with a thin, lithe blade.
If you lived for any length of time in that city, you knew that if you bumped into someone once, you’d bump into them again. But Marcus disappeared. I didn’t go out of my way to find him: I could have looked him up on the post-grad directory, could have asked for him at the architecture faculty, could have reached him over the internal e-mail. But I didn’t. That wasn’t the way I did things; my pride prevented me. But that didn’t mean I didn’t look for his shape in the library or on pavements as I passed on my bicycle, or for the gleam of his hair in bars when I sat at night round tables with my friends. By April I’d given up hope of seeing him again; by May I’d banished him from my thoughts.
I was cycling along the main street. It was car-free so I could weave about in the middle. It was, I’d decided that morning, the first day of summer: my side-split skirt rippled and tugged like a kite around my legs as I rode; the students were all in post-exam frenzies so I could spend the day back at work on my thesis. I was heading for the library, which would be cool and silent and empty.
I was about to turn off into a cobbled laneway when I felt a restrictive tightness round my thighs. Then it was as if I’d hit a brick wall: my bike wheels screeched to a sudden halt, I nearly fell over the handlebars, my front wheel veering to the right. I had to slam my foot on the ground to stop myself toppling over. For a moment I thought I’d hit a fissure in the cobbles, but then I bent over to look down at the bike.
‘Shit.’
The panel of my skirt had tangled itself up in the back wheel, winding its length round and round the hub. Not only was the bike now immovable but I was tied to it.
‘Shitshitshit,’ I cursed, through gritted teeth, as I lifted as much of the bike as I could, dragging it towards the kerb. Holding the handlebars with one hand, I tugged ineffectually at my skirt, but the material just tightened, pulling at the spokes.
I straightened up, assessing my options. Bicycles crunched past me, chrome glinting in the sunlight. The pavements were full of shambling groups of tourists, dressed in leisurewear, clutching maps and cameras. I calculated in my head the distance to the nearest cycle shop and whether I could prevail on any passer-by.
‘Excuse me,’ I wailed, in the general direction of the people on the pavement. A small man with a neatly clipped moustache and a blue cloth hat hesitated. ‘Excuse me?’ I repeated, hopefully, trying not to lean over and seize his arm. ‘Excusez-moi? Français? Non?’
The man frowned.
‘Deutsch?’ I hazarded.
He nodded, unsmiling; relief swept through me, then I trawled my mind for German phrases I hadn’t spoken since I was sixteen. ‘Um…meine bicyclette…’ No, that was French. ‘mein Fahrrad ist…ist kaput.’
The man and his tight-lipped wife lowered their eyes to my bicycle, then looked back at me.
‘I…er…ich brauche…’ I felt sweat beginning to moisten my back. ‘I NEED HELP!’ I shouted, suddenly losing patience. Wasn’t it obvious what had happened? ‘Hilfe! PLEASE!’
The Germans flinched, stepped back, then began sidling away.
‘Wait!’ I yelled after them. ‘Don’t go! Please! Bitte!’
Then, first wandering into my peripheral vision and now standing smack bang in front of me, was Marcus. He was wearing shorts and a grey shirt, holding a folder under one arm, sunglasses hiding his eyes, a half-eaten apple in his hand. All the blood in my body seemed to heat and rise to the surface of my skin.
‘Hello,’ he said, in a conversational tone, ‘how are you?’
My relief and pleasure transmuted into irritation. ‘How am I?’ I shouted heatedly. ‘How am I? Well, I’m great. Never better. How are you?’
He nodded, flinging the apple into a bin. ‘Pretty good.’ Stepping forward, he lifted a book from the basket on the front of my bike and flipped it over in his hand. ‘Maidens and Sorceresses: the Representation of Women in Medieval Poetry,’ he read, and grimaced. ‘Is that what you spend your time doing?’
I snatched it back and slammed it into the basket. ‘Much as I would like to discuss my work with you, right now isn’t a good time.’
Marcus stepped up close to me, pushing back his sunglasses to rest on his cropped hair. ‘Why not?’
‘Why not?’ I shrieked. ‘Look at my fucking bike! I’m trapped! I can’t move! I may never walk again!’
He considered me from our very close proximity. He had smooth, even-toned, blemishless skin. I’d forgotten about the curve of his lips. I felt the heat rising again to my neck and face, but was too cross to acknowledge it.
‘Which one are you?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Maiden or sorceress. Which one are you?’
I ran through my head the pros and cons of slapping him: it would make me feel an awful lot better but he might run away without assisting me. I decided, on balance, again
st it. ‘I need your help,’ I said instead.
‘What’s happened to that boyfriend of yours, then?’
‘What are you talking about?’ I snapped, taken aback by the direction the conversation had taken.
‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ he changed tack again, ignoring his earlier question and my lack of answer, ‘where’ve you been?’
‘Here. I’ve been here. Where’ve you been?’
‘Here too.’
‘Look.’ Flustered and completely wrongfooted, I attempted to take command of the situation: ‘Marcus, will you please help me, please?’
He stepped back, surveyed the bike, my tangled skirt, the jammed wheel, then shoved his folder into my basket. ‘Wait here,’ he said – unnecessarily, I felt, as I clearly wasn’t going anywhere. ‘I’ll be back in a sec.’
I stood, tethered to my bike, watching him go. If there had been a heat-sensitive camera on me at that point, you could have seen a plume of fiery red flaring up from the top of my head.
When Marcus returned, he was deft, serious and efficient – and clutching a monkey wrench. I tried to take it from him. ‘It’s all right, I can do it.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Marcus said. ‘It’s easier if I do it.’
We fought over it, tug-of-war style, like toddlers over a doll.
‘I can’t let you.’
‘Why?’
I struggled to formulate an answer. ‘Feminist guilt,’ I said eventually.
‘Bollocks to your feminist guilt. Just stand still and shut up.’
Marcus pulled it from my grip and, squatting down, wrestled it against the wheel.
‘So,’ I said, not looking at him, ‘have you finished for the summer?’
‘No. I’ve finished for good.’
‘For good?’
‘Yep. That’s it. Eight years of architecture training in the bag. Thank the Lord.’
Marcus rolled the wheel away from the bike and, lowering the back end, started unravelling the twisted, oil-smeared cloth of my skirt. It was concertinaed into black folds. There were translucent tears in its crosshatched fabric like stretchmarks. I plucked at it. ‘Oh, God, look at the state of that. You don’t have a penknife, do you?’