My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ Lily says. The people mill and sidestep, chatting and calling to each other; Lily stumbles through them and, as she turns to go up the second flight, she looks up.

  Sinead is standing on the bridge, looking down.

  Lily doesn’t move, poised like a cat. Sinead turns and disappears from view. Lily leaps up the stairs two at a time. Did she see her? Was she looking at her? Did she imagine it?

  When she reaches the bridge, it is busy, people ambling, holding hands, roller-blading, pushing bikes and buggies. There’s no sign of Sinead. She’s lost her. Lily shoves her way through the crowds, searching for the woman now so familiar to her.

  Then, without warning, she’s there, bearing down on Lily, her eyes flashing fire. ‘Why are you following me?’ With every word, Sinead gives Lily a shove until she’s pressed up against the barrier, the metal pushing into Lily’s back.

  ‘I—–’

  ‘What is your fucking problem?’ Sinead towers over her. ‘Leave. Me. Alone. Do you hear me? And tell…’ she falters ‘…tell your boyfriend as well.’

  ‘Marcus?’ Lily says, the word coming out more loudly than she’d planned.

  ‘Yeah. Marcus. Every time I turn around it’s either you or him. Is stalking a thing for both of you?’ Her bravura cracks. Lily sees her face collapse, tears spring down her cheeks. ‘Leave me alone,’ she whispers. ‘I want nothing to do with either of you.’

  There is a kind of ringing, like tinnitus, in Lily’s head. ‘Do you mean Marcus has been…in touch with you?’

  ‘In touch?’ Sinead repeats hysterically. ‘In touch?’ She holds the barrier for support. ‘Christ! He—– he phones me twelve times a day. He follows me to work. He follows me from work, I’m surprised you haven’t bumped into each other.’

  There is a pause. Sinead presses her hands to her eyes. ‘Look,’ she says, more quietly, ‘I don’t know what you want from me, but…but I really have nothing to say to you.’ She walks off.

  ‘Wait!’ Lily goes after her. ‘I just want to know what happened. I thought you were—–’

  A train thunders past them, overhead wires crackling, lighted windows throwing bluish light on to Sinead’s wet and furious face, its roar swallowing Lily’s words.

  ‘What?’ Sinead yells.

  ‘I thought you were DEAD.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yes!’

  The train rattles past, receding into the night. Sinead is incredulous, disgusted. ‘Is that what he told you?’ Her hands are shaking, Lily sees, as they tug at imaginary folds in her jacket. Below them the Thames twists black in the dark.

  ‘No…he…no.’

  ‘Then why on earth would you think that?’

  ‘I…I…’ Lily stammers ‘…he…I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ she says. ‘Sorry to inconvenience you,’ and she moves away again.

  ‘Sinead,’ Lily catches up with her, ‘please tell me what happened. Please. You have to.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Please. I just…I need to know.’

  Sinead stops and gives a short laugh. ‘You need to know?’ she repeats. ‘Well, why don’t you ask him?’ She spits out the last word as if it tastes bad. ‘Why haunt me?’

  Lily blinks and a part of her almost laughs. ‘I’m…he doesn’t…he won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Well, that’s really not my problem.’ She is walking faster now, sidestepping people. Lily hurries after her, the butt of blows from people’s shoulders and bags.

  ‘I know,’ she says, breathless, ‘I know it’s not. But, please. What happened? Just tell me what happened.’

  Sinead stops, her teeth set against each other. Fury seems to have flared again within her. ‘Look,’ she almost shouts, ‘I refuse to have this conversation. This is nothing to do with me. You are nothing to do with me. I don’t want…I don’t want to…to see you ever again. I want you to leave me alone. Just…just go away! OK?’ Without waiting for an answer, she dives into the crowd.

  Lily follows, blind now, and seizes a fistful of her jacket sleeve. ‘Listen—–’

  ‘Get off!’ Sinead splutters, appalled, trying to wrench her arm free, Lily sees a kind of panicked astonishment in her still-wet eyes, feels the hardening of sinew and muscle beneath her grip. ‘Let go of me!’

  ‘No!’ Lily grips her arm with all her strength, aware that this is her last and only chance. ‘I want you to tell me. Please!’

  A sob tears from Sinead’s mouth, her fist batters Lily’s hand, then scrabbles, trying to peel away her fingers. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she whispers hoarsely. ‘You’re mad.’

  Lily feels the fabric of Sinead’s sleeve slipping from her grasp. Sinead gives one final, vicious wrench to her arm: she comes free and reels backwards, colliding heavily with the rail. There is a dull clunk as the side of her pelvis impacts with the metal. She gives a small, bewildered, ‘Oh’, bends away from the pain, her hair swinging over her face, then tries to straighten herself, one hand pressed over her back, and limps away.

  Lily watches, shoulders slumped, tears aching in her throat. ‘Sinead!’ she calls after her.

  She doesn’t look round, doesn’t falter.

  ‘He told me you walked out on him!’

  She takes two more strides. Then another. Then her left foot slows, hesitates, and comes to rest next to her right. Lily moves forward. When she reaches her, Sinead is turning slowly towards her. Lily waits. Her eyes lock with Lily’s, flick from one to the other. She frowns slightly, appears to be thinking.

  ‘He told me that one day…you just went,’ Lily says quickly, the words tagged to each other. ‘That he didn’t know why.’

  Sinead swallows. She looks down at the river for a moment, then back. ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yes. That you…just walked out.’

  ‘I just walked out?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘He said I just walked out?’

  Lily nods.

  Sinead touches her forehead with her first two fingers, stretching the skin next to her hairline. ‘So…you have no idea why he and I…why I left?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘He won’t talk about you. Not to me anyway. He just told me you left him. That’s all.’

  Sinead stares again at the river. ‘If I tell you,’ she begins, and Lily’s pulse quickens with something between excitement and triumph, ‘will you promise never to come anywhere near me ever again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or to any of my lectures?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘All right.’ Sinead nods. Twice. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  part two

  If I told you the whole story it would

  never end…What’s happened to me has

  happened to a thousand women

  FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA, Daña Rosita

  The shower-head gasps as she turns it off and the silence of the empty flat rushes in on her. She grips handfuls of wet hair and squeezes rivulets of water down her body, shaking herself like a dog, misting the glass bricks with spray. Then she steps out of the steam and, winding a towel around her, leaves wet soleprints marking out her route, which are already evaporating by the time she reaches the bedroom.

  Sinead towels herself roughly, tugging a comb through her hair, grimacing as the teeth snag on knots. Then she pulls open her desk drawer and rummages about for a pair of scissors.

  The new dress hangs on the outside of the wardrobe. She bought it weeks ago when, numbed by the idea that she was not yet half-way through the allotted two months of their separation, she’d gone on a shopping spree. She’d returned to the flat with that heady feeling of glee and guilt that comes after a major spend to find Aidan and his friend Sam cooking huge amounts of food in the kitchen. They’d taken an amused interest in the contents of her various plastic bags, and made her hold up her purchases one by o
ne as they sat at the table and ate their way through their labours. ‘God, I’m so glad I’m not a girl,’ Aidan had said after a while. ‘It’s so complicated.’

  With the scissors, she clips off the price label and flings it into the bin behind her. Humming now, she pulls the dress over her head, drawing the zip up through the fabric. Then she wanders through the flat, turning the CD-player up to volume ten, filling the air with sound.

  Her bloodstream is full of bubbles, tiny pockets of pure oxygen hammering round her system. Marcus is coming back.

  My birthday fell almost exactly half-way between the Christmas and Easter vacations, when post-grad students like me had a break from the carousel of giving lectures and tutorials, and had a chance to catch up on the supposed real matter in hand – the thesis. February in that city was the worst time, the fog rolling for miles over the flat, ditched fields to collect in the hollow where the city cowers. Icy moisture hung in the air. It rained constantly, the streets wet and polished like sealskins, the sky getting dark at half past four. I lost my gloves and my bare hands would ossify round my bicycle handlebars in the freezing damp air as I cycled from my house to seminars, tutorials, the faculty. I had to insulate my books in layers of plastic bags to keep them dry on my rides to the library. When I arrived, I headed for an out-of-the-way wing, piled my books into a towering ziggurat beside me and risked chilblains by resting my wet feet on the tepid, vibrating pipes. As I flexed my back up from the desk, I could see my face thrown back at me in the window opposite, teeth biting the inside of my cheek, left index finger twirling my hair.

  I was, at this time, bored with my life. I was teaching two days a week, giving three lecture courses, and I was, on and off and usually more off than on, seeing an art historian called Antony who lugged great A3 illustrated books around everywhere he went, and refused to cycle because he couldn’t buy a bicycle basket big enough to fit them in. It was the second year of my Ph.D. I’d given up the freedom, and the mind-crushing tedium, of an underpaid job to come to this insular city to study. At that very moment I couldn’t think beyond or around the five-thousand-word chapter I had to write by the beginning of March. Thesis hand-in, in two and a half to three years’ time, seemed like a distant, mystical grail. This annoyed me. I wanted to be able to project myself beyond these lodestones, which sucked all my thoughts towards them and repelled any others from my head.

  I wasn’t sure about this city, about this university, about this library, about the people who taught me or the ones I taught, about being here among stacks and stacks of spine-indexed, recorded, catalogued books that smelt of mice and rotting leaves. Could I see myself here for another two years, maybe more? Was this what I wanted when I’d vaulted that blind hurdle of my thesis?

  I didn’t know. All I knew was that when I read the late-medieval texts I was studying for my Ph.D., my mind latched on to something: it caught and sent a fly-wheel spinning somewhere, which then cranked another movement, slow at first, then bigger and bigger until it filled all space with noise and momentum until there was no space left at all, until when I looked up again at the window it was pitchy black outside and my face, puzzled and unfamiliar, was suspended out there in the dusky branches of the trees surrounding the library.

  Three weeks before my birthday, I was sitting with my hands curled round an empty blue china teacup in the library café with my two housemates, Kate and Ingrid. Ingrid was slumped over, her forehead resting on the table’s chipped surface.

  ‘Get me out of this place,’ she groaned.

  Kate and I didn’t respond, both staring into space, Kate jiggling her foot up and down on the spar underneath the table.

  ‘Hello?’ Ingrid said, raising her head. ‘Are either of you two listening to me?’

  Kate’s attention zoned in on her. ‘Huh? What did you say?’

  Ingrid scrumpled up her chocolate wrapper viciously, and flicked it towards the bin. She missed, but didn’t go and pick it up. ‘Nothing. Sorry to interrupt your reverie. I was only attempting some, you know, conversation.’

  ‘Do you know what I think?’ I said suddenly.

  Kate sat up, stopped jiggling; the cups, knives and teaspoons were still once more. She looked at me, expectant.

  ‘I think we should have a party.’

  Kate and Ingrid were silent. They turned to look at each other, then back at me.

  ‘Now that,’ Ingrid said, ‘is a fantastic idea. When?’

  ‘My birthday.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Kate breathed, in her oddly feverish way, ‘a party. Oh, yes.’

  ‘God, that’s such a good idea. Let’s get everyone down from London. We need a really good—–’ Ingrid broke off, staring at something over my head. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘don’t look now, but lover boy’s just come in.’

  I ducked down and rested my chin on my hands, folded on the table. ‘Has he?’

  ‘Yup. It’s all off again, I take it?’

  ‘Um. Kind of.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised if he’s taken to wearing those in public.’ Ingrid pointed and, despite myself, I turned round. Antony the art historian was standing with his back to us and was wearing a pair of dungarees.

  ‘Oh, my God.’ I swung round again.

  ‘He probably bought them in a spate of lovelorn grief over you. Think about it. You’re sleeping with a man whose choice of garment is dungarees. What does this say about you? Oooh, he’s coming over.’

  ‘I quite like them,’ Kate said.

  ‘You would,’ muttered Ingrid, then trilled, ‘Hi!’

  Antony dropped his books down on the table with a thud. ‘Hello. Kate. Ingrid,’ he nodded at us in turn. ‘Sinead.’

  ‘Hi.’ I turned up my face to look at him. ‘Are you going to sit down?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Ingrid said, ‘we’re off. Come on, Kate.’ Ingrid seized a fistful of Kate’s jumper and dragged her up off the seat. ‘See you later, Sinead.’ They disappeared, Kate protesting mildly at Ingrid’s manhandling.

  ‘So,’ Antony said, ‘how are you doing?’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘How’s medieval romance?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Have you got any further with it after that critical essay you were telling me about?’

  I shifted impatiently in my seat. I had a policy of not talking about work during my tea breaks.

  ‘We’re having a party,’ I said, hoping to distract him.

  ‘Really? When?’

  ‘My birthday.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was your birthday.’

  ‘Well, it is.’

  He emptied a small packet of sugar into his murky cup, releasing a fine spray of tiny crystals all over the table. ‘You didn’t tell me,’ he said, looking down as he stirred his tea.

  ‘I’m telling you now.’

  ‘I see.’

  For something to do, I flipped open one of the covers of his art books and pretended to be reading the frontispiece.

  ‘Do you want to come?’ I said, and realised the book was upside-down. I turned it round.

  ‘To what?’

  I glared at him. ‘The party.’

  He glared back. ‘Do you want me to come?’

  ‘Do you want to come?’ I batted the question back at him like a forcefully aimed ping-pong ball.

  ‘I want to come if you want me to come,’ he said quickly, a smile beginning to curl his mouth. He was good at this, I remembered. I sighed and shut the book. This could go on all afternoon. I had work to do.

  ‘All right.’ I gave in. For now, ‘I’d like you to come.’

  ‘Great.’ He smiled and, under the table, I felt his knee brushing mine. ‘I’ll come then.’

  Sinead crams a carton of juice into the fridge door and a vodka bottle into the freezer, the ends of her hair brushing the layer of white, steaming ice. Then she slumps down on a chair at the table. She wonders where Aidan is and if he’ll be in tonight. She thinks, idly, that
she’s hardly seen him since he came back from New York. He must be busy with his new job.

  She lays out on the table a sheaf of student essays, some pens, and a volume of poems she needs to read for a seminar she’s giving next week. She looks at her watch. Only seven fifteen. His flight doesn’t even land until seven thirty.

  She fiddles with the chair, getting a cushion from the sofa and settling it behind her back, shifting the chair towards the table and then back again by increments. She leans her elbows on the tabletop. Is she supposed to bend slightly or have a straight back? She can’t remember and spends several minutes trying to conjure up those X-ray pictures that show bad positions for the spine. She picks up a pen and tests it several times on the back of an envelope by writing her name over and over again in a variety of different handwriting styles.

  Then she gets cross with herself and slams down an essay in front of her, pen poised. ‘Aphra Behn wrote in a time when women didn’t write, about things that women didn’t write about,’ she reads. Sinead frowns, shuffles the essay to the back of the pile, and looks at the next. ‘What one must always be asking oneself is whether one’s sexuality can be read and understood by one’s’ – Her eyes slide away from the page and, putting down her pen, she examines her bare feet, her beetle-green toenails. Looks at her watch again. Rolls a mango from the fruit bowl beneath her hand. Jumps up again. Changes the CD.

  I was standing in the hallway. This was the only reason. In the years in which I will look back at this moment and trace back why it happened and how it happened like it did, I will think: I answered the door, not because it was my party, but because I was standing in the hall. I won’t be able to remember why I was standing in the hall. I just was. There are always points of collision – moments at which it is possible to say, yes, if I had done that differently or I had been standing slightly to the right or I had left the house two minutes earlier or if I hadn’t crossed the road just then my life would have taken a completely different course.

  So I was – for whatever forgotten reason, or maybe for no reason at all – moving through the hallway of the house I shared with Kate and Ingrid during the party celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday when the doorbell rang. And I moved towards it, ignorant of the effect it would have on my life.