My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Just what are you hoping to gain from this?’ she persists.

  Lily scrapes her hair back into a band, avoiding Sarah’s eye.

  ‘I don’t understand you!’ Sarah cries, still cross, crushing her clothes into a tight bundle. ‘Why can’t you just let it lie? Leave the poor woman alone.’

  There is a tense pause. Lily pushes stray strands behind her ears and straightens her skirt. Then Sarah sighs: ‘OK,’ she relents. ‘I shouldn’t do this. I really shouldn’t do this. But I have this friend. An investigative journalist on a tabloid. A real door-stepping, garbage-sifting rat. Nice guy, though, otherwise. He’ll know what to do.’

  Lily grabs her hand and squeezes it.

  ‘Don’t,’ Sarah says, snatching it away. ‘I’m only doing this to shut you up. This doesn’t mean I agree with it.’

  ‘I know.’ Lily grins.

  Sarah shakes her head. ‘Just…give me her name.’

  ‘Wilson,’ Lily says. ‘Sinead Wilson.’

  Aidan is drifting, his mind running over thoughts like water over stones. If he does buy a flat in Kentish Town should he spend a bit more for the one with a garden? Does he have time for gardening? He can’t quite picture himself digging and planting things somehow. He’d have to start visiting those funny places…what are they called? They smell of peat and compost, and have rows of plants with roots bursting out of black plastic containers. Garden centres. Would having a garden involve the purchase of a wheelbarrow? Then he has the alternative vision – alternative to the one of him in wellies in the pissing London rain shovelling clods of manure around – of him in a deck-chair in summer. Behind him, someone is tending a barbecue, and music floats from his open ground-floor windows…He must remember to get that CD Jodie wanted. What was it called? He has it written down in a notebook back at his hotel. Something FunkMasters. Or FunkMasters Something. And he must call Sam when he gets back. What else is on that list? Something about—–

  At the sound of his name, Aidan jerks his swivel chair round from the window and the Tokyo skyline, its monoliths gleaming in the sun, and looks at the row of faces around the table, all angled at him expectantly. The man next to him is clearing his throat with a discreet, scraping sound. Was it him who’d been talking? Or someone else? Who’d just said his name? And what had been said during his little zone-out? He tries to arrange his face into a thoughtful, rather than panicked expression, busying himself with stabbing a drink carton with the sharp end of a straw.

  ‘So,’ he says, in what he hopes is an unruffled voice, looking round the table, ‘shall we just run through that once more?’ He leans back in his chair, raises the carton to take a drink, and misses his mouth with the straw.

  Lily is balanced on a display pedestal, embracing an armless dummy. She can’t get the bra fastener done up behind it. She wrestles with the two strips of elastic, her knees aching, her face pressed against the steel-hard fake tits, but the hooks refuse to connect with the eyes.

  She yanks the bra off the dummy and examines the label. She’s brought the wrong size up from the storeroom: a 30B, for God’s sake. What was she thinking? Shop dummies are always a 32C. Temper tightens like a coil inside her. She doesn’t like knowing things like that, doesn’t like the fact that this job is, no matter how much she tries to resist, filling her head with useless, pointless crap. The average width of stocking tops. The number of bras British women buy per year. Which manufacturer caters for which type of figure. How to recognise those figures at a glance. The pros and cons of underwiring, adjustable straps, front fasteners, seams.

  Lily climbs down from the display, leaving the dummy naked, and stamps over to the storeroom, the 30B hooked around her wrist like a catapult. Minutes later, she emerges with the same but ever so slightly bigger bra, this time stretched between both hands. This sour, furious mood, she’s aware, is fuelled by an impatience for information about Sinead. The desire for it moves within her like a pulse.

  She hitches up her skirt and climbs on to the display again, pins gripped between her lips, just in case. The bra slides easily over the dummy’s shoulders, but she has to struggle with the back fastener again. She has just managed to hook it together and is straightening the cups over the hard swell of the fibreglass breasts when she notices a man watching her, his head on one side. He is wearing a tailored woollen coat and suit, and has a long, furled umbrella clamped under one arm. He smiles and arches his eyebrows when she catches his eye. She is pulling back her lips in a snarl and, as she does so, forgets all about him and all about the bra and the dummy and all about the humiliation prickling at her because she is suddenly struck with a thought. A thought so obvious and so thrilling she doesn’t know why it hasn’t occurred to her before.

  She runs most of the way from the tube. By the time she pounds up the stairs, her legs feel like liquid and her lungs like fire. When she throws open the front door, the flat is dark and Lily almost cheers. She needs the place to herself.

  She knows exactly what she’s looking for. She scans the bookshelves first – art books, novels, random magazines, CDs. Nothing. She opens the long, thin doors of the cupboards opposite the kitchen, and finds shoes, coats, a dismantled desk, boxes of tools, a tent in a bag. She’s going to have to do what she was hoping she wouldn’t.

  She stands on the threshold of Marcus’s room. It’s exactly like her own, but reversed, like the reflection of a room in a mirror. Two plan chests sit in the corner, with architectural models, sheets of cardboard, tins of paints, pens and cutting tools heaped on top. The walls are a bright magnesium white. Bits of paper, plans, diagrams, sections, maps, are stuck around the area where he works. It has a slightly temporary, unlived-in feel: an unshaded bulb hangs from the ceiling; clothes are stacked in boxes; electrical flexes criss-cross the floor like tripwires. He lies on that bed every night, she thinks. Then she recognises it as the bed that used to be next door, in Sinead’s room. Shoving that thought aside, she strides across the room and sits at his desk. Surprisingly comfortable chair. Slightly splintered edge to the desk.

  She cocks her head, listening out for any tell-tale noise, then leans over, pulls open the drawers and begins sifting through the contents with bent, anxious fingers: staplers, pens, stanley knives, screws, batteries, rulers, set squares, glue, erasers, bills, postcards, letters addressed to Marcus Emerson (Lily can’t bring herself to open these, but peers briefly into their folded, inked depths before putting them back). Files containing A3 sheets of drawings. Folders stuffed with tracing paper, bits of newspaper articles, contracts, official-looking letters. At the bottom of one drawer, she finds among paperclips and pencil shavings, face-down, a business card: ‘Sinead Wilson, Lecturer, Department of English Literature’. She holds it between her fingers. It’s light, flimsy card, the letters raised. If Lily pressed hard enough she could push them back into themselves. But she doesn’t. She looks up, looks round the room, and sees her own face outlined in the grey of Marcus’s shut-down computer screen. Then she turns towards the shelves, and sees what she’s been looking for – the gold and red spines of photograph albums, five of them, arranged in a row.

  Lily pulls down the first. It’s one of those flip ones where you slot photos into little plastic sleeves. She opens it, starts flicking through it. Her initial apprehension melds into disappointment: buildings. It’s just buildings, one after another after another. She skims through them, faster and faster. Gutters, windows, flooring, staircases, doorhandles, paving slabs, marble walls, light fittings, ceilings. A large, undulating, silver building, all waves and shimmering expanses. A low, white, angular one with a gap in the middle as if a bite’s been taken out of it. She shuffles through them, perplexed. Then something makes her stop, go back two to a black and grey building with wide steel girders on its exterior. At the building’s base, near the entrance, very small and very far away, legs blurred as if she was walking too fast for the camera’s shutter, face angled towards the camera – or its owner – a rucksack on her back, her hands p
ushed into her pockets is a thin, tall woman with dark hair. The black dots of her eyes stare out at Lily, fixed, inquisitive.

  She replaces the album, takes down the next. It’s more buildings. She puts it back, tries the next. More buildings. She replaces it and opens the last and as she does she gasps and has to clutch the album so as not to drop it. The top photograph is the woman from the other photograph at the bottom of the building, the woman who used to live in this flat, the woman who helped create this flat, the woman who wore the blue-black dress that is now hanging among Lily’s clothes, the woman who is now dead.

  She and Marcus are on a pavement somewhere. A city that isn’t London. It’s evening-time; angled rhombuses of sunlight lie over the street and gutter. Cars pass them, frozen into blurs. She has her arm curled round his neck, her fingers in his hair, her nails a dark red. The person behind the camera has just said something funny because she is facing the lens, eyes wide, laughing, the coils of her hair swinging into her face so that it’s partially obscured. Wherever it is must be hot because she is wearing a red dress with thin straps over her shoulders. It has beads sewn into the material filled out by her breasts. Her lips, painted the same red, are parted to show sharp, precise teeth. Sinead was beautiful. Lily sees this, sees the length and turn of her neck, the dark, rather wide-set eyes, the narrowness of the waist, the long, long legs that end in shoes that tie around the ankle. Marcus is side-on to the camera, slightly behind and to one side of her, his hand is held flat against her solar plexus, as if he is holding her upright, as if he is holding her to him. He is looking at her, ignoring the camera, ignoring the photographer, ignoring everything else going on around them. His face, unlike hers, is solemn, intense.

  Lily shuts the album, pushes it back into its space on the shelf. Terror, inarticulate and obscure, is surrounding her like a force field. She bolts from the room, through the flat, out of the door, down the stairs and out into the darkening streets. She twists round to look up at the flat as she leaves, and its windows look blank, innocuous.

  She gets back late. She’s been sitting at a corner table in the pub down the road, tearing beer mats into the tiny, identical squares of confetti. When she opens the door, Marcus is walking from the kitchen past Aidan’s door.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, ‘good day?’

  ‘No. Shit actually.’

  ‘Oh. Well. You’re back now, at least. Don’t bring the office home with you – that’s what Sinead always said.’

  Lily, caught in the act of taking off her coat, panics. She’s never heard him refer to her voluntarily. Does he know what she’s been doing? Has he sensed it? Did she leave signs? She can’t have done – she remembers replacing the album, shutting the drawers, pushing the chair back under the desk. She did. She knows she did.

  Marcus, also, seems taken aback, confused, blinking rapidly as if he can’t quite believe what he just said. They stare at each other in mutual shock. Lily looks at his hands, resting on his hips and she suddenly sees, suddenly understands, their sinewed strength, their flex and power. As she looks, she finds she is wondering at their stretch and capability.

  She goes into the bathroom and picks up her toothbrush. Her arm is shaking slightly. Her face looks out at her from the mirror – porcelain white beneath the remnants of her summer freckles. She makes herself pick up the toothpaste, keeping things normal, keeping herself calm, and squeezes out a length on to her brush and starts scrubbing at the flattened tops of her molars. She rinses her mouth, spits, rinses and spits again. The splashing of the tap echoes round the boxed-in room. It’s all gleaming metal and reflectiveness, like an operating theatre. Or a morgue. Nothing would leave a mark in here that couldn’t be washed or sponged away. Stainless steel lines the walls, seamless concrete covers the floor. Male things are lined up on the shelf – shaving foam, deodorant, razors. Half of it is noticeably empty. Lily wonders what happens to the cosmetics of the dead.

  She is about to go back into her room when she stops, turns and presses open Marcus’s door. He is sitting at his desk, writing something on a pad of paper and he looks up, surprised.

  ‘You know,’ Lily begins uncertainly, ‘my grandfather died two years ago.’

  He looks startled. ‘Oh,’ he says, and crosses his legs. ‘I’m sorry…I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Yes.’ She waits. Marcus looks at her. She looks back. What is he thinking? What does he keep wound up behind that brilliant, fathomless blue gaze?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says again.

  ‘It’s OK. I didn’t…it wasn’t as upsetting as…’ She tails off expectantly.

  Marcus doesn’t seem to know what to say. His hand moves slightly on the paper.

  Lily sighs. She’s never been any good at the softly-softly approach, never been one for pussy-footed game-playing. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I just wanted to say that if you ever wanted to talk to me about Sinead, you can. I…I’d be happy to listen. Or to help. If I can.’

  The pen drops from his hand and rolls away from him on the sleek surface of the desk. He makes a grab for it, managing to catch it just as it is falling to the floor. When he is holding it fast, trapped by four curled fingers, he looks at her again. ‘What do you know about Sinead?’ His voice is steady, toneless.

  ‘Not much, but—–’

  ‘Well, there you are, then.’

  Lily turns on the pivot of her heel. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘OK. See you later.’ Her foot strikes a box of nylon-tipped pens on the floor, their coloured casings skittering away over the boards, but she doesn’t stop. As she is reaching for the handle she thinks she hears him say: ‘Don’t go.’

  Two words. Just like that. So quiet that Lily is convinced she imagined them. But her hand hovers over the door-handle, and without looking round she tries to gauge the silence behind her. It stretches, elongates and swells. Lily presses the cold metal of the door-knob into her fingers. He said nothing, he said nothing. She imagined it. Must have done. But she half turns. He is looking at her, uncertain, almost shy.

  ‘Did you…did you say something?’

  ‘I said don’t go. I don’t want you to go. I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t mean to be…’

  Lily has left the door and is crossing the floor towards him. He pushes the letter he is writing into a drawer. You always—– Lily catches sight of before he closes the drawer and stands up. He puts his hands around her neck, his fingers in her hair. His breath is hot on her face. He lifts her arm and presses his mouth to the blue river delta of veins at her wrist.

  They reach the bed quickly, her hands finding their way through his clothes to the hard smoothness of his back, his mouth against her neck, her cheeks, her hair, her eyelids, her throat. There is the sweet burning, the confusion of limbs and fabric before the relief of skin upon skin. He feels his way about her, his face intent, concentrated. She shuts her eyes against the glare of the electric light, lifts herself from the mattress to allow the layers of clothes to be peeled away.

  The weight of him on her is a relief, a release. As he arches the upper part of his body away from her to pull off his T-shirt, Lily opens her eyes to take the shortest glimpse of him, to store the snapshot into her memory. What she sees, though, makes the blood stop in her veins.

  Standing beside the bed, near enough so that Lily could reach out and touch her, is a girl with black Medusa curls and an angular white face. She is looking straight at Lily.

  Lily jolts as if electrocuted, and she screams, the noise stretching at the walls of the room. It seems easy to push Marcus off her and to turn away and leap in one fluid movement from the bed. The thing is behind her then, as far away from her as possible and she can’t see it and she never wants to lay eyes on it ever again.

  ‘What the hell…?’ She hears Marcus say and she looks back at him. She doesn’t want to, she wants to keep her gaze and her face and her body – naked and cold now the warmth of Marcus’s is leaving her – averted, but she cannot ignore his voice and the sound of it drags her eyes to
him. Marcus is kneeling on the bed, staring at her, dishevelled, perplexed. Beneath him, between his thighs, is the imprint of her body. She’s left a kind of negative space behind her, a vacancy where, if she’d kept her eyes closed she’d still be lying. The room is empty apart from the two of them.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he says, his face flushed. ‘Are you OK?’

  Lily blinks, looks down at the crumpled outline in the sheets below him. There is just Marcus in front of her, the air behind him blank, clear, hollow. It was nothing. She imagined it. It was nothing. ‘I saw…I thought I saw…’

  He reaches out to her. ‘What?’

  At that moment, there is a swift knock at the door and someone outside saying, ‘Marcus?’

  Marcus struggles over the bed to get to the door. But Aidan opens it before he reaches it.

  ‘Marcus, I—–’ Aidan stops short on the threshold and stares at them – semi-clad, clothes strewn about the room, the thrashed-about bed. Lily bends to gather up her things, holding them to her front. Aidan says nothing and doesn’t move, just turns his head to look Marcus full in the face.

  ‘How was Japan?’ Marcus says.

  There is a pause. The two men’s eyes are locked on each other. Lily walks towards the door.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says.

  Aidan steps aside and she passes through into her room. She gropes for the lamp on the desk and switches it on. It sparks blue, the bulb filament exploding with a hollow pop, pain streaking up the fibres of her arm. Through the dark air of the room she can make out the black outline of her reflection in the mirror. She stares at it wildly: in it she has no face, no features, no dimension. She moves and it moves with her. She feels a bit crazed, light-headed, and struggles with a desire to burst into giggles. This is ridiculous! What was that? Did she really just see Marcus’s dead girlfriend? During sex? Or did she imagine it? Was it real? And what does ‘real’ mean, in terms of a dead girl?

  At a noise behind her, she leaps into the bed, scrambling beneath the covers, pinning them to her with her fists. Her mind gallops, falling over itself. I don’t even believe in ghosts, she wants to shout.