My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Aidan presses his forehead to the cold, slick glass, and peers into the distance at the four pale columns of Battersea Power Station rising above the low city skyline. It’s weird, unaccountable and bizarre. He’s known this city all his life and suddenly everything looks rejigged, Battersea Power Station north of the river, Harrow-on-the-Hill in Leytonstone. Someone has clearly moved the river.

  He’s in a glass capsule of the London Eye, a huge white wheel that circles slowly next to the Thames. He’d had an hour to kill before meeting his friend Sam and, curious about this strange structure that’s appeared since he was last here, bought a ticket and climbed on.

  People line the sides of the oval capsule, taking photos, unfolding maps. The wheel is surprisingly silent and slow. He’d been expecting a faster, more fairground ride, not this rather sedate amble through the skies of London. As they approach the apex, two American girls leap up from where they were seated and indulge in a frenzy of photographing each other. They approach him with their camera and he takes it, trapping them together in the viewfinder, clicking the shutter.

  Aidan looks out at Canary Wharf tower, glinting like mica in the sun. When he’d left London, three years ago, it had been alone on the skyline, a tall, shimmering blip in the levels of buildings. But now other structures, half built, are crowding in next to it, blurring its outline. A friend of his died in the bombing there a few years ago. Sam, who’d also known him, said recently that he sometimes still forgets he’s dead, still gets the urge to call him, to tell him things. Ridiculous, he said, isn’t it?

  Aidan turns northwards again and, as the city rises to meet him, thinks about how he nearly slipped from a high-level footbridge as a child. His father caught him by the straps of his dungarees just in time, and he saw his feet swing out over lanes of traffic, parks with children on climbing frames, roofs of houses, fishponds in back gardens, people shopping on a busy street.

  Shuffling out of the capsule and back through the barriers, he sees Sam waving at him. Next to him stands a woman whose eyes are still searching the crowd. Lisa. Sam’s been seeing her for almost a year, but Aidan’s never met her before.

  When Sam introduces them, with a mock-formal flourish, Lisa grips his hand in hers and says, ‘At last, the elusive Aidan.’ They talk about where to go, what to eat, the geographical dislocation you get from being in the Eye, how cold it’s suddenly become.

  As they are walking to the nearest pub, Sam asks: ‘How’s Marcus?’

  Aidan sees Lisa glance up at him quickly, then look away. Sam’s told her, he sees. Not that he minds. He just forgets sometimes that couples, like body cells, have a kind of permeable barrier between them.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ says Aidan.

  ‘And I said to him,’ Diane, Lily’s mother, is saying, ‘I said, Graham I really don’t think it’s on if I’m here for the evening and she calls up and you spend three-quarters of an hour on the phone to her. I mean, it’s not that I’m jealous because I’m not the jealous type, am I, but I think basically that it’s just not on.’

  Lily holds the phone to her ear with one hand and, with the other, twirls a length of hair around her index finger. The office is empty, the agents out at lunch. She’s supposed to be sending out a stack of letters to casting directors, but has phoned her mother instead for a chat.

  ‘…and he replied that I shouldn’t feel threatened. That it’s not an issue for him any more…’

  Lily is being calm today. Very, very calm. All this shit about ghouls and ghosties is just nonsense. Nonsense. She knows that. It was just a product of an overwrought mind – she was having sex with Marcus for the first time, she’d just looked at those photographs (and how stupid was that, she can’t believe she did that, what an idiot), the whole affair with Marcus has that discombobulating feeling of turning into something big, and so on and so on. Nothing to worry about. It won’t happen again.

  She stares at the hair wound around her finger. Her nail is filling with blood, turning a bright pink. She releases her hair and it unravels quickly, settling back into place. What is it that makes hair curl anyway? Isn’t it something to do with the follicles?

  ‘Did you ever see your father after he died?’ She hears herself interrupt her mother’s monologue.

  There is a short silence.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Um…Grandad,’ Lily says. ‘I mean, do you think ghosts…er. Nothing. Forget it.’

  ‘Ghosts?’

  ‘It’s nothing. I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Why are you asking me that?’

  ‘No reason. Sorry. Carry on with…with what you were saying.’

  ‘Well,’ Diane doesn’t need a great deal of encouragement, ‘anyway, so after that he decided to buy an answerphone. And I said…’

  Lily zones out again. Lights hum above her head; phones ring in rooms down the hall; outside, cars wait in line for the lights to turn.

  She walks fast, her feet skimming the pavement, her lungs filling and emptying. When she’d reached the turning into the courtyard, the flat was obviously empty, its windows dark and hooded. Something failed her. She couldn’t go in, she just couldn’t. She’d stood there for a while, tussling with herself. This was ridiculous. She was being stupid. There’s nothing there. It’s all in her imagination. All this alarmist shit about ghosts and apparitions. She needs some time out, a holiday maybe. She doesn’t really believe she saw anything. Does she? Before she was even aware of deciding to do it, she had turned on her heel and run back down the street.

  Cars pass, lifting her hair with their backdraught. At the end of the road, she turns in the opposite direction to the tube station. She passes a Victorian iron bridge that drips cold, slimed water into her hair, a milliner’s shop with hats poised on featureless, smooth dummy heads, a closed flower stall, the ground strewn with severed stalks, a church with its façade illuminated in greenish light and ‘Ever thought about what might happen after death?’ emblazoned on a sign outside. She finds it hard to understand how small turn-of-the-century terraces, industrial warehouses, huge powering roads and bars filled with boys with mobile phones can all exist together in one space.

  She returns clutching a carton of milk against her jacket. A triangle of light is slanting out from the warehouse window. Marcus must be back. Relief opens out around her like wings.

  Before letting the front door close, Lily is careful to turn on the light. It lasts just long enough for her to make it up the narrow staircase to the first-floor landing where she turns on the next. As she is climbing the flight of stairs that leads to their door, she hears, or she thinks she hears, something behind her. Later she’ll go over and over it in her mind, trying to identify it, reclaim it, clarify what it was. But at the time, she stops on the stairs and turns her head. And as she does so, it’s as if a very fine mist is brushing over her face, leaving the surface of her skin cool and moist.

  I am not afraid, she tells herself, I am not. But her legs move under her like pistons and she hurls herself at the door.

  Aidan had heard the footsteps pounding up the stairs, but the door crashing open still makes him jump. Lily bursts into the room as if she’s been pushed, losing her footing, stumbling to her knees. Aidan stares at her, astonished. A second ago he’d been deep in his book and now there’s a woman sprawled across the flooboards in front of him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he says, after a moment. He wonders if he should go over and help her up, but he hardly knows her for heaven’s sake.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, getting up and dusting down her skirt. ‘Sorry about that. I must’ve…er…I must’ve tripped or something.’

  ‘Right.’

  She brandishes a milk carton at him in the manner of a terrorist with a hand grenade. ‘Do you want something to drink?’ she asks, her chest still heaving from her run up the stairs, the words jerking out between breaths. ‘Hot chocolate?’ she demands.

  He hesitates. ‘Um…’ This girl really is quite odd.

  ‘I’m ha
ving some.’

  ‘OK.’ He nods. ‘Why not? Thanks.’

  He hears her banging through the cupboard of pans, then the milk gulping out of the carton. He steals a surreptitious sidelong glance just as she is striking a match against its box – one, two, three times. When the flame catches, she puts her thumb quickly into her mouth, wincing. It must have burnt her.

  She stands above the cooker, absorbed in watching the simmering milk, blowing her fringe away from her eyes. Her attraction, Aidan decides, as he watches her across the room, lies in her embodiment of opposites. The way her fragile, slight frame and her apparently meek silence are belied by that restive, elf-like glimmer in her eyes. She may not say much, but Aidan reckons she keeps an awful lot to herself; he’s seen her with Marcus, listening to whatever he’s saying, her lips shut and expressionless, but her eyes veiled, moving about his face, her mind churning over, thinking, thinking, always thinking.

  Suddenly she’s there beside him, handing him a mug with oiled, coloured bubbles at the rim. He takes it, looks up to thank her, and as he does so sees that she’s young, can be no more than twenty-two, twenty-three. He gives a minute shake of his head as she takes a seat opposite him.

  ‘Aidan?’ Lily says. She is aware of the air around them, like a kind of soundless buzzing, but she doesn’t care. She has to ask. This division in herself, between the rational and the irrational, has to end. She has to put a stop to it. And the only way to do that is with hard, immutable facts.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What happened…with Sinead?’

  His head jerks up from his book. He looks at her for a moment, then starts blowing on the surface of his drink.

  ‘How much do you know?’ he says quietly.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then that’s something you’ll have to talk to Marcus about.’

  ‘I don’t feel I can. Can’t you—–’

  ‘Lily,’ and his voice is sharp-edged, ‘I don’t…I hardly know you. It’s really none of my business.’

  She looks at him. His eyes are so dark that his pupils are lost in the liquid ebony of the irises.

  ‘What was she like?’ She can’t help herself.

  Aidan sighs. His fingers work at a dog-ear on his book’s cover, his nail flicking at the white-creased triangle. He’s not going to tell me, she thinks, then something is released in his face. His fingers stop flicking. He gets up, shoving a bookmark into the pages.

  ‘She…’ He places the book on the table, carefully, as if it’s a fragile artefact, and pushes his hands into the back pockets of his trousers. ‘The kind of woman people fall in love with. Just like that.’ He pauses, then adds: ‘The kind of woman who collects broken hearts.’

  Lily doesn’t know what to say. Jealousy clots inside her like frog spawn, and she is surprised by it, discomforted.

  He gives a little expellation of air, like laughter, yet not. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘what I will say is this. If you have any sense you’ll stay well away from Marcus.’

  Later, Aidan and Marcus stand in the pooled light of the kitchen, Marcus stirring something on the cooker, Aidan clattering dishes around. Lily sits at the table, a newspaper spread before her, her fingerprints stained with its ink. Her mind clings to what Aidan said and images of those hearts keep appearing in her head. She imagines them, small, damp and pulsating, lying at the bottom of a handbag, or skewered together in rows on a kebab stick. Lined up on a windowsill like pot plants. Packed into the glovebox of a car.

  ‘So if you wanted to render it in 3D, you’d have to – what? – use Quark?’ Marcus is saying.

  ‘Nah,’ Aidan replies in a monotone. ‘Quark wouldn’t do it.’

  There is a silence.

  ‘So what would?’ Marcus prompts.

  ‘You could design it in Quark, if you wanted to. But CAD is what you need.’

  ‘CAD and what else?’

  ‘An animation package. But if you’re going to download that – which you can off the internet – you’re going to have to get a memory upgrade. It’ll just keep crashing otherwise and you can’t have that while you’re rendering because it’ll just get fucked and pixellated every five mintues.’

  ‘How much will that be?’

  ‘Couple of hundred quid. Maybe more. It depends.’

  ‘Lily,’ Marcus says suddenly. She is deep in an article about a woman who disappeared the previous month, so that when she looks at him she feels disconnected and distracted. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘Not yet, but I’ll cook when you’ve finished.’

  ‘Have some of this. There’s plenty. I’ve made far too much for just me.’ He gives a short, mirthless laugh. ‘Can’t seem to get used to cooking for one person,’ he mutters, more to himself than either her or Aidan.

  ‘Well…if you’re sure.’

  ‘I am. It’s curry. Do you like curry?’ He is looking at her, eyebrows raised, the muscles in his arm clenched from his stirring.

  ‘Lovely. Curry. Yes. Thanks very much.’

  Aidan swills water over a plate in the sink. Their terse and incomprehensible conversation seems to have come to a standstill. Marcus walks from the fridge to the table and holds out a green bottle. ‘Beer?’

  She raises her eyes to his. His mouth is curved into a half-smile. As she looks, it splits into a full, expansive grin. She looks away, smiling herself, and sees two things happening simultaneously: Aidan seeing them and his face contracting in something like disgust, dropping the plate into the sink; and, in the reflection in a chrome bowl on the table, an elongated shape, behind her.

  Marcus nudges the rim of the fridge-cold bottle into the flesh of her upper arm. ‘Beer? Lily?’

  ‘Um.’ She is twisting around, despite herself, to see behind her. Where is it? Where does it go when it’s not here, when she can’t see it? Does it lurk behind doors or – the idea horrifies Lily – in other rooms, waiting for her? ‘Beer. Er, yes. Please.’

  Aidan passes them, heading for his room. The walls of the huge space boom and resound as he slams his doors shut.

  Marcus heaps rice then yellow curry on to two plates. He is talking – something about the curry and a place in Kerala, but she is finding it hard to concentrate on what he’s saying. The room around them seems live, dangerous with possibility, like a severed electrical flex. As she is raising her first forkful to her mouth, she feels his thigh against hers and she lurches back, food falling off the fork.

  Marcus laughs, ‘You’re very nervy, aren’t you?’ And he moves in closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Are you afraid of me?’

  There are curry-stained grains of rice scattered around Lily’s plate. She plucks at them. ‘Afraid? Of you?’ From here she only has a vista of the end of the warehouse, half of the kitchen and the door to the bathroom. There’s a whole mass of air behind her, stretching to the long windows and the bedrooms, that she can’t see. She casts a quick look over her shoulder. ‘Afraid?’ she repeats. ‘No. Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘What went wrong, then?’ His voice is a murmur now, and his hand is pressing down on her thigh.

  ‘Um, well.’ Lily does a swift all-round check. Still nothing. ‘I thought I saw…I thought I saw something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Er. Well, I’m not sure.’ She looks again over her shoulder. The end of the room is in darkness. It’s the black void that frightens her. There could be anything in it.

  ‘Marcus.’ She turns back to him. His face is inches from hers. He is looking at where her shirt opens at her throat. This has to stop, she tells herself, you have to know the truth. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  Something alters in his expression. Tiny muscles round his eyes tighten. Lines appear at the side of his mouth. ‘Sure,’ he says, leaning back, ‘ask away.’

  ‘Well.’ Lily swallows. The roof of her mouth feels dry. Her fingertips clutch at the cold, wet column of her glass. ‘You see, I was wondering—–’

  Two feet away, the phone rings.
They look at each other. She closes her mouth.

  ‘’Scuse me,’ Marcus says and gets up, walks away from the table, lifts the receiver. She hears him say, ‘Hi. How’s it going?’

  Lily lifts the food to her mouth and chews. Then, with that kind of sentience where information is elided with knowledge, when even without any proof or warning you just know something to be true, she realises that Sinead is sitting in the chair next to her. Lily swallows, the lump of food scraping at the soft part of her throat. There is a strange, collapsed feeling at the front of her face, like tears or hayfever. Her hand, grasping a fork, shivers in mid-air. She has never felt colder. She glares down at her plate, lecturing herself fiercely and rapidly with words like gunfire: This is nothing, get a grip, come on, Lily, this is nonsense, you know it is.

  She slides her eyes inside their sockets. Sinead is there at the table, opposite Marcus’s abandoned plate. She is staring, with great concentration and intent, into Lily’s face, one hand covering her mouth.

  Then Marcus is pulling back his chair with an atonal scrape against the floor. ‘Sorry,’ he is saying, ‘it was some guy at the office who’s having a problem. They’ve got this big hand-in and they’re all gearing up for an all-nighter and—–’ He breaks off. ‘What’s wrong?’ he says. He leans towards her, his face creased in concern, putting his hand over hers. ‘You look…What is it?’

  Lily looks from Sinead to him and back again. Sinead has removed her hand and her lips are moving, as if she’s speaking, as if she’s trying to tell her something. Marcus can’t see her. He can’t see her. He doesn’t know she’s there. How can she tell him that sitting opposite him is—–

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, with an attempt at a smile. He mustn’t know. He mustn’t ever know. ‘I’m fine.’

  Lily stands at the basin. Marcus has disappeared into his study to take another call from the office, and Aidan has stayed in his lift-shaft room since dinner. She has listened for him coming out to make a cup of tea or to go to the toilet even. But nothing. What on earth is he doing in there, and what is it animators do anyway? And why would he say that about Marcus? Marcus is supposed to be his best friend.