She did that thing, that girl thing of dipping her head and looking up at him through her eyelashes, and he felt his stomach twist. He was out of practice, but still he knew you couldn’t invite a girl back to your place, couldn’t spend hours together in conversation, and not expect something to happen. Part of him must have wanted this.
Only, once her tongue was in his mouth, he knew that he didn’t. He didn’t want it. Even if it wasn’t technically cheating, it felt all wrong. Her taste was wrong, and her smell, her long trailing hair, and the whole situation – but when he pulled back, he could see her packing herself away, hear the locks turning, the bolts slamming home.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and that must have been the wrong thing to say because she stood up and folded her arms.
‘What for?’ she said. ‘My mistake.’ She was on her way to the door – he’d messed up everything—
‘No, wait,’ he said, following her. Reached out, placed his hand on her arm, and she stared like a bird had shat on her until he let go, but at least she was standing still. Waiting to hear his excuse. ‘It’s my fault,’ he said. ‘I’m just – I’m sort of, recently out of a relationship. It’s a bit complicated but … I’m not ready, basically.’
She shrugged, like it didn’t matter, and perhaps to her it didn’t. ‘No law against changing your mind,’ she said, reclaiming her jacket from where she’d left it hanging over her chair. But if he let her go now it would be over before it had even begun. She wouldn’t want to see him again, not after he’d screwed things up like this. Once more he spoke without thinking, trying to rescue things.
‘Look – you should stay.’
She pulled a face. ‘Why would I stay?’
‘Because it’s late. Because it’s chucking it down out there. I’m not going to throw you out into the rain, am I, in the dead of night?’
‘How very gentlemanly.’
‘And also, I’d like to carry on getting to know you. I’ve enjoyed tonight. Talking about stuff.’ He saw her considering it. ‘Please. I’ll sleep on the sofa, you can have the bed.’
She sighed. ‘Alright, I’ll stay – just because, it does sound like it’s pissing it down and it’s, like, a forty-minute cycle. But I’m not stealing your bed. We can share it – if you’re ready for that?’
He would have preferred the couch, but he couldn’t say so. Couldn’t turn her down for a second time. ‘Deal,’ he said.
He lent her a T-shirt, and they took turns in the bathroom; she emerged bare-legged and unselfconscious, and he wasn’t sure whether or not he should avert his eyes. She was a strange mix: brittle defensiveness, with a kind of indifferent confidence that made him wonder if she did this sort of thing all the time. It made him feel less bad about the situation, the idea that she made a habit of sharing beds with strangers.
When he switched out the light, the dark came as a relief – except that every sound seemed so loud. The drag of the quilt as she turned her back on him. Her breathing, and his. He lay straight as a plank, wondering if she felt anything like as weird as he did. Expecting at any moment that she might move closer, might touch him. But it wasn’t long before her breath grew slower, deeper. He stayed motionless, ignoring the urge to change position, wary of waking her. Resigned himself to a sleepless night.
It was early when he woke, his dreams still clinging, and he must have been dreaming of Cassie: a tender dream that meant she didn’t feel, now, like a stranger. Her head on his pillow, her mass of hair. Blonde in the light, mouse in the dark, in-between in the half-light of dawn. It was the dream-residue that let him recognise her, reach for her. Let him pull her close, wrapping them both in the leftover feeling of comfort, of consolation. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this, but he breathed the warmth of her neck, the smell of her hair, and all those things about her that had been wrong the night before were somehow familiar. Were deeply, irresistibly right.
CHAPTER FOUR
Cassie waited for Nicol in their usual place, the grassy square that lay right at the heart of the university. The morning promised sun, an early haze just beginning to lift so the edges of things – of buildings and trees, of people – seemed to shimmer. The shimmering was inside her, too: an unsettled, buoyant feeling that threatened to tip her off balance.
She had gone to the meeting yesterday because she wanted stability. Familiar faces, the reassurance of ritual. And she’d come away with the opposite: with everything changed, and uncertain. But for a few hours, at least, she’d felt like she wasn’t alone.
Too much of a coincidence, Lewis had said, for the two of them to meet as they had. But coincidences did happen. They had talked, remembering fragments of their previous lives – how it had felt, that first time, to hover an inch off the ground, and then lift and lift and imagine yourself free from the anchor of gravity, and by imagining to become so, wind rushing through your hair and stroking the soles of your bare feet, soft wet of clouds veiling your skin – to spin and feel your stomach lurch, see the ground pitch and tilt, and to fly so entirely that the armchair or bed where you’d left behind the drag of your body, that was the place that became unreal … They had talked, and she’d almost felt safe. Because, for all that the company had left its traces irrevocably inside her skull, how could Imagen know what she was doing? There was surely no way for their words to be overheard. With Lewis last night, she’d felt safe enough to sleep in his bed, to sleep all the way through – or nearly. Just once she’d woken from a dream of him to find his hand on her hip, and she’d shifted towards him and he’d turned to spoon her and she could feel his erection against her back. Not so complicated now, she’d thought as she pushed back into him so his breath came faster, but he hadn’t moved his hand from the safe zone of her hip, hadn’t pushed back, and eventually he’d softened and she’d fallen into another welcoming dream. And when she woke again in the morning, it was from the most comfortable sleep she’d had in a long, long time.
But feeling safe was not the same as being safe. Cassie pressed her lips together, caught the lingering, bitter taste of the espresso Lewis had made with his fancy machine. Just because she’d felt it, didn’t mean that she was. Didn’t mean she should see him again.
She looked up from her thoughts as a shadow slipped across her face.
‘Morning, morning,’ said Nicol. Without taking his hands from the pockets of his hoodie he dropped his skinny frame onto the bench beside her. Leant back, eyes narrowed against the sun. ‘Nice day for it, eh?’
‘Here.’ Cassie delved into her satchel, handed him a package.
‘What’s this, then?’ he said.
‘Breakfast meeting. It’s breakfast.’ Lewis’s flat had been a lost world of ordinary luxuries. Spotless kitchen. Cupboards stacked with food. Fat soft kitchen roll in a special counter-top holder. Croissants for breakfast.
Nicol took his pastry, slightly misshapen, from its buttery kitchen roll wrapper. He looked baffled but pleased: breakfast had never been part of their arrangement. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Thanks, man.’
He should be able to see the difference, she thought: Cassie on Friday, and Cassie today. He should spot her shimmering edges. But he was oblivious. ‘This is good,’ he said, mouth full. ‘I’d forgotten about croissants.’
‘Funny,’ she said. ‘So had I.’
‘Don’t s’pose I can put in an order for the same again next time?’
She gave him a look. ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’
Nicol crammed the tail of the croissant into his mouth, swept pastry flakes from his hoodie and into the folds of his army cut-offs. Then he opened his bag and started to rummage. The backpack he carried was studded with logo pins, some of them familiar to Cassie (three downward-slanting arrows that stood for antifascism, the encircled A for anarchy) and others less so. She had asked him once to explain the more mysterious symbols: a reverse copyright symbol, a grid with five black dots. Copyleft, he’d said; means maximum freedom, free distribution, open source, all that. And the grid, that
was a glider – a configuration of a particular two-dimensional cellular automata, and a means of transmitting information. Then he’d cracked a smile at her blank expression. Simpler version, he’d said: it’s kind of a hacker emblem. Means sharing is good. Co-operation leads to complexity. To the unpredictable.
Now, from the depths of the bag, he retrieved his memory card. ‘That’s Watts, Valencia and Tan,’ he said, his mouth still full. ‘Deadline for the other two’s Friday, right? I’ll have them done midweek.’
Cassie took her screen from her satchel. She skipped past the ads – one for easy credit, another for discounted pizza – then she clicked the card in and copied the files. It was an archaic format, but more secure than wireless transfer. ‘You’re a star,’ she said. ‘Hang on and I’ll pay you now.’
‘And mind you still owe me for the last lot …’
She clapped her hand to her head, tapped out the instruction. ‘There. All done.’
Nicol was her best employee, without a doubt – her best operative. That was how she thought of them, the PhDs and the postdocs, the unemployed graduates, the odd genius dropout fuck-up, all making pocket money working for her. Operatives: it made the whole thing feel like playing at spies. She chose them carefully, recruiting on word of mouth, tested them on dummy assignments before she let them go live; but still they ranged wildly in reliability. One or two, she’d no idea how they’d ever made it through their degrees. Nicol, though, was solid. He kept her on track when her system of lists failed her, reminding her about deadlines and payments. She paid him more than any of the others, a full fifty per cent.
Nicol was almost a friend.
‘There might be another coming up that’s in your ballpark,’ she said. ‘Third year history and philosophy of science. Sound like you?’
He shrugged. ‘Aye, could be.’
‘Deadline would be—’ She checked the message. ‘Next Monday. Would that work?’
‘Nae bother.’ He stood up, shedding crumbs. ‘Right then, duty calls. Later …’
She watched him amble off in the direction of the science buildings. His patch. She wasn’t sure how long Nicol had been at the university; the best part of a decade, she thought. His slow progress, she suspected, had nothing to do with a lack of intelligence, was more a consequence of time he spent on other, informal, commitments – not just the work he did for her, but the various activist networks he was part of.
For all that she saw him most days of her life, more than she saw anyone else, there was a lot she didn’t know about Nicol. He’d told her and she’d forgotten, or else she’d never asked. Wasn’t sure what, exactly, he studied, though she knew his specialist subjects – computer science, programming, artificial intelligence – and passed on assignments accordingly. If there was a module in conspiracy theories she’d have sent it his way too.
Of course, there was just as much he didn’t know about her.
In her pocket, Valerie’s memorial card was no longer sharp-cornered. Cassie studied the envelope, her name and address, wondering who had written it. Someone who didn’t know who she was, who had simply copied her details from Valerie’s address book. Not Alan, that was all she could say for sure. It was nothing like his spiky scrawl. Which meant … She shook her head. It didn’t have to mean the worst.
There was nothing on the card to say how or even when Valerie had died, no suddenly, or after a long illness. That was more for death notices. But it must have come unexpectedly. Otherwise, surely, she’d have been in touch. She would have asked Cassie to look out for her son, after she was gone. No matter that it was over a year since Cassie had really seen Alan; no matter how bad that looked. Valerie would have known – wouldn’t she? – that Cassie would always have Alan’s back.
She would go, of course, to the memorial. St Stephen’s: the church round the corner from where Alan and Valerie had lived, from the house where Cassie had lived too, aged sixteen to eighteen. Where she had been happy. It had been no real decision to move in with them: she’d been spending most nights there in any case, and when she did go home the house was still full of her mum’s stuff, pulled out and half-sorted for hand-ons and charity; was full of a thin grey fog that chilled every room, spreading silence and the sad smell of damp, so that when her dad had told her he was leaving – a fresh start close to his sister in Melbourne – she had thought of leaving Alan behind, and known there was no contest.
She did leave, of course – later. Did travel to the other side of the world, did leave him behind, even if she hadn’t meant to. But don’t think of that now. Think instead of that house of Valerie’s where she’d lived in all seasons, though somehow in her mind the leaves were always turning: the world turning gold, and Alan gold beside her, golden hair and freckles. Always Alan, right there at her side. The hills and woods around the house. Back seat of the school bus. Shared bed at night. There had been a conversation, very adult, around the kitchen table. Alan crucified with embarrassment, face burning, long legs kicking the table and catching her shins, Sorry, sorry, as he squirmed in his seat. His mum heroically rising above the awkwardness: I’d rather you do it safely under my roof than off somewhere in the woods … Hadn’t stopped them doing it off in the woods. Sixteen, seventeen. The smell of it still. Damp and deep. Heightened, and blurred. Grass honeyed into hay. Clover. Clover.
She hadn’t meant to close her eyes. Opened them, blinking. High above, a gull was coasting, drifting like a cursor across a screen.
She stood, pocketing the card. Routine. That was what she’d needed yesterday, and it was what she needed now. The streets around the square had filled with students and staff on their way to lectures and seminars, to the library and the labs. She fell in with the stream heading towards the library: swerved to avoid the bio-touch panels, and swiped her card instead through the visitors’ gate. A ‘borrowed’ visitor’s pass; a hefty tip at the 3D-repro shop, and she’d been able to get it duped, return the original before its owner reported it lost. All she’d needed then was for Nicol to hack the control system, altering her security clearance to allow access across the university estate and resetting the expiry date to ten years from now, and: freedom. It was as if she didn’t exist.
While he was at it, Nicol had loaded her pass with limitless print credit. Now, she logged in to an idle printer and, after a quick glance to check she was unobserved, ran off two dozen flyers. She had spent a long time on the wording, making sure the target market would understand what was on offer while the university authorities would find nothing irregular in her sales pitch. Bespoke academic editorial services, that was all. Support with writing essays on a wide range of subjects. Assignments to order: it had been a lucrative sideline back when she was a student, and in the year since Imagen had sacked her she’d gone back to what she knew. Help with meeting deadlines. Qualified experts. Improve your grades! Call now.
With the flyers stashed in her satchel, she left the library, taking a small pleasure in navigating the lobby so she walked straight through a 3D recruitment ad: a group of graduates talking and laughing soundlessly, looking forward to a bright future with a global corporation. The ads were new since she’d been a student. So much was new. In four whole years of study, she had thought for perhaps as many hours about careers. About money. About the future. Had she been lucky? Or stupid? She was the last of something. Last to have it so good, to live fully in the present – or to fail to understand that something important had changed. As she passed through the visitors’ gate she caught chatter in Korean or Mandarin, in US-accented English. The students looked like brand-new businesswomen and men: the boys in pale chinos, the girls in this year’s summer dresses, shifts and A-lines in bright fruit-chew colours. Groomed and glossy, advertisement-ready. In contrast, she doubted she could pass for even a mature student: face bare, clothes pre-worn from the charity shop.
She overtook a slow-moving clutch of women in headscarves, swiped in to Philosophy and worked her way up the building, checking the noticeboards
on each floor. Though her flyers promised nothing illegal, week after week they disappeared, torn by disapproving staff from scores of noticeboards. It was cheating, of course, the service she provided, but still it frustrated her that her posters were targeted while those recruiting for night-shift dancers and medical guinea pigs remained untouched, week on week. From one department to the next, she slipped unobserved up stairs and along corridors, waiting for lobbies and hallways to empty before delving into her satchel. English Lit. Languages. Sociology. She targeted her promotion according to her own resources as well as client demand, and she had a wealth of arts grads on her books with no money and no prospects. Psychology – her own field, which reminded her she had an essay to finish for a waiting client. Environmental factors in addictive behaviours. She was in danger of becoming her own least reliable operative. The business school: her biggest frustration. There was potential to rake in the money, but business graduates tended to have prospects so recruitment was tricky. Certain modules she could manage herself – Advertising Theory and Practice, Consumer Behaviour, Contemporary Marketing. And some she could farm out to Nicol, though he sniffed a bit at Managing Technology. But if she could just get her hands on a qualified expert, she could make a killing. In the meantime she kept on advertising, building brand awareness.
Last on her circuit, the union. By now she was out of flyers, so she unpinned an old one from the board in the cafe and put it up in the bar. Her theory: wealthy students were likely to eat in regular cafes, and instead visit the union to blow their cash on booze. More money than brains, that was her target market. Or perhaps they weren’t brainless. Perhaps it was just that they saw nothing wrong with outsourcing the more tedious obligations of life. They would pay for a cleaner to mop up the mess of their New Town flats, a caterer to manage their pompous dinner parties. If you could pay someone to write your assignment, what was the difference? And that was fine – more than fine, for her own personal economy. Without the rich and the lazy, she’d have drowned by now in an ocean of debt. So she did try not to feel contemptuous towards them. Apart from anything else, if she despised her customers she’d have to despise herself too.
A User's Guide to Make-Believe Page 3
