The fourth day I was glum. I sat in a café. On the table in front of me was a mug full of shavings of ginger and scalding water, and an exercise book. On the first page, I had written ‘Fact: he is not coming. Fact: you haven’t got enough money for this on your own.’ I had crossed out ‘on your own’ and written ‘trip’ instead. I had five mosquito bites the size of ten-pence pieces on my leg. They progressed up my shin in a meandering line like a child’s dot-to-dot drawing. The New Zealanders arrived and started teaching me the Chinese numbers and the hand-signs that went with them: ‘yee, er, san, si, wu, lui, chi, bah, jiu, xi.’ The broad palms and cracked fingers of the New Zealander curved, crossed and straightened. I copied them, repeating the words.
‘What you writing?’ one asked, nodding towards my book.
‘Nothing,’ I said, flipping the cover closed.
After they’d gone, I rested my head on my cupped hand. Yee, er, san, si, wu. He wasn’t coming. Lui, chi, bah, jiu, xi. What was I going to do?
A week ago I’d been to see my supervisor, Dr Hilton. He was a tall, ungainly man with over-large hands and a barely audible voice. When I had described my Ph.D. to him he had murmured, ‘I’m very excited indeed.’ But on this day I sat in front of him and said, ‘I’ve decided to go away. To China.’
His forehead had creased, his hands darting to the edge of his knitted waistcoat. ‘China?’ he’d whispered, as if it was a swear word. ‘What for?’
‘For…’ I picked my words ‘…a break.’
‘I see.’
There had been a pause. Dr Hilton had adjusted and readjusted the height of his chair. ‘Sinead,’ he’d said, then stopped. ‘You are going to come back, aren’t you?’
‘Of course,’ I’d said quickly. Was that too quickly?
‘You must,’ he’d said, ‘your work is…very important. Very important indeed.’
I scratched at a mosquito bite with the ineffectual, heat-softened curve of a fingernail. I’d spent my living allocation for next term in coming here. A girl in a red tracksuit passed, waving at me. I uncurled my fingers in reply. I drew a line in green biro up my leg, connecting my reddened bites. The New Zealanders were away down the street, in conversation with a man with a cart piled high with striped melons. I recognised the bartering gestures. Yee, er, san, si…I carried on staring down the street. A man with sun-whitened hair was walking quickly up the hill, a rucksack on his back. In his hand he held a camera and a piece of paper. I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, knocking my ankle on the table. Then I stood up. Called his name. Watched him coming over the square towards me.
‘Where in God’s name have you been?’ I shouted.
‘Sorrysorrysososorry,’ he was saying. Then his arms were around me and his mouth was next to my ear, the strap of his camera knocking against the green graph-line on my shin.
They topple on to the sofa. Marcus half falls on to the floor and Sinead holds him fast and he has his face stuck in her neck and she is grappling with the belt on his trousers when she realises she wants to look into his face. She wriggles backwards, making her back twinge a little because all their limbs are tangled up, and grabbing his head between her hands, pulls him away from her so she can look at his face.
His eyelashes part, Marcus opens his eyes and looks into hers. She wants to examine every feature, every contour, every millimetre of him. It’s him, it’s really him, she wants to gaze at his face for a very, very long time until she’s had enough and can turn her eyes away again. His face is beautiful to her, but a strange, shifting kind of beauty. It moves across him like clouds over a landscape. The French have a word for it – joli-laid. Marcus has always had a protean quality about him: sometimes he can look quite different from one moment to the next, just the subtlest alteration in his facial muscles switching his features from a serene, absorbed beauty to a harder near-ugliness. It’s never an unattractive ugliness, merely a recast version of his face. She’s always found that—–
Then he is arched between her legs, his hands behind her head. Her breathing sounds far off to her, as if in another room. She holds him to her, her hand in the dip of his back and his spine labours and flexes under her palm. Laughter bubbles somewhere inside her, which comes out into the air as shortened, staccato gasps.
Suddenly his back is still, straight, taut as a sprung trap. He rests on his elbows, motionless, his torso held over her. She waits, peers up, but can see only his neck, grizzled with stubble, and the wishbone curve of his jaw. She twists her head to try to see his face, but his elbow is leaning on her hair and she is trapped there. An image of Gulliver is flitting across her mind, making her smile, when he says something and she feels him shrinking inside her. He says the something again.
‘Huh?’ she says.
‘Sinead, we need…we need…’ He rears up above her, straightening his arms. ‘We need to talk.’
This is not what Sinead was expecting. ‘Do we?’
He nods.
‘OK,’ she says, ‘but later, all right,’ and goes to pull him towards her.
‘No.’ He adjusts his balance, and she feels him pulling away from her. ‘Now, I think.’
Sinead sits up, puzzled, straightening her dress. Marcus, his back to her, pulls up his trousers, fastens his flies and belt, and walks about the room for a few seconds, his hands crossed behind his head. Then he slumps down in a chair opposite her.
‘The thing is…’ he begins, and stops. ‘Have you seen Aidan?’
Sinead laughs at this strange non sequitur. ‘The thing is have I seen Aidan? What – ever? Today? This week? What are you on about?’
There is a pause. Sinead tucks her legs up under her, waiting. Marcus has tipped back his head and is staring at the ceiling. She drums her fingernails on the soles of her feet. What is all this?
‘Marcus—–’
‘The thing is,’ he says again quickly, ‘the thing is, I wasn’t exactly faithful to you in New York.’
I didn’t know how to pitch things when we got back to the room. Should I leave him to unpack, shower? Should I pretend we were just here as friends? Or should I just seduce him and get it out of the way?
Marcus stood at the window, one hand resting on his hip, the other behind his neck. I kicked the loose clothes on the floor into a rough heap. Sat down on the bed. Stood up. Sat down again. I was being pulled in the directions of two opposing impulses: to remove all my clothes or to suggest we go for a brisk, edifying walk. Femme fatale versus Brown Owl.
I tucked my hands underneath my legs to prevent myself acting on either. Marcus’s back was towards me. The backs of his legs, his neck, his arms were brown, his boots muddied.
A shuffling sound. The soles of his boots swivelling on the wooden floor, leaving dusty, whitish compass marks on the boards. His boots creaked slightly, I noticed, as he walked towards me. Leather that had been wet, had expanded and then contracted. The toes had a grey tidemark on them.
‘How was Beijing?’ I was horrified to hear my voice braying. Brown Owl appeared to be winning.
Marcus crouched in front of me. Rested his fingertips on my knees to steady himself. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he began, his voice low, ‘how glad I am that you’re here.’
There was a pause.
‘You can’t tell me?’ I said. ‘Why not?’
Marcus shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just can’t.’
‘Well, how am I meant to know, then? I mean, just how am I supposed to guess that’s how you feel?’
‘Other things.’
‘What other things?’
Marcus leaned forward on to his knees, brushing against my legs. Outside a band of mist drifted off a limestone peak. A woman called for her child in the street below.
‘This, for example.’ He put his hand on my waist, thumbs at the front, fingers around the back of my pelvis. Then he leaned forward and pressed his mouth to where my neck met my shoulder. He didn’t lean back again, just stayed there, breathing into my hair. ‘I’ve wanted to do that ever si
nce I first saw you.’
‘Is that right?’
‘You’ve got an amazing neck.’
‘Have I?’
My first kiss missed his mouth, catching him below his cheekbone. But for the second he had his hand cupped round the back of my head and our lips met just as I was inhaling. We were both shuddering, bodies vibrating with each blood-beat.
I always love the first time you sleep with someone. No matter what happens later, there is always that clarity, that amazement, that steep learning curve – how to deal with someone else’s body, how it likes to be touched, how it wants to fit into yours, how it responds to the things you do. There are always surprises, always idiosyncrasies, always things that differentiate it from other, similar acts. I believe you could sleep with a hundred people and still be surprised.
Scale enlarges and distance shrinks. What I can never get over is that change: how, before, you know them at a certain range – in clothes, over the other side of tables, with no further touch than perhaps a brush on the arm or a momentary kiss on the cheek. But then suddenly you are pressing your lips to theirs, their eyes blurringly close, touching their teeth, their palate, their gums with the tip of your tongue. You are looking into the one blind eye of their penis, seeing the lie of their body-hair, the creases of their skin, tasting their sweat, their saliva, their tears, their semen. You are knowing them more closely than even they do.
What I would always remember about my first time with Marcus: that we giggled over which bed to use. That he pressed his cheek to mine. That he was tenderer, gentler than I’d expected. The rasp of his stubble on the skin of my inner thigh. The first, unpeeled, round, silk push of him. That I knew, half-way through, or maybe not half-way but somewhere in the middle or near the end or maybe not near it at all but right after the start, that it was going to be good, very good, in that way that things that are right feel already familiar, that I knew what to do before I knew I was doing it, and that this was just the beginning, that they would get better, and keep on getting better and would be better, perhaps for a long time.
The room stops like a lift.
Sinead stares at Marcus. It is a sentence that will return to her over and over again – for months, for years. It will echo round her head. She’ll hear it again during the many, many sleepless nights ahead of her. Right now, though, she is attempting to process it. The sentence seems to have lots of different bits: the thing is; in New York; exactly faithful; I wasn’t. That weird negative understatement bothers her: I wasn’t exactly faithful. Exactly faithful. What does that mean? Why ‘exactly’? Does it mean he wasn’t faithful or that he was unfaithful? And what’s the difference?
The answer pops up in her head like a price total displayed on a cash register: it means something between the two. It means he kissed someone somewhere. Maybe he was drunk. He kissed someone. That’s all, and he thinks he should tell me. But Sinead continues to stare at his face. He drops his eyes and that’s when she knows. This isn’t just about a random, drunken encounter. This is more. Much more. I wasn’t exactly faithful. To you. In New York.
‘Are we talking just one,’ she is astonished at how calm and even her voice sounds, ‘or lots?’
Marcus shakes his head and shrugs simultaneously. ‘Lots,’ he says.
Sinead has never been surprised like this by anything before. If someone had said to her, what’s the most unlikely thing for Marcus to do, she might have come up with this, but probably would have felt it was so unlikely as to be off the scale of things Marcus would do. She looks down at the way her body is arranged – legs curled under her, one hand resting on her feet, the other laid across her front. She hardly recognises it. She can’t remember how long ago it was that she sat herself down in this position.
She feels hollow, but something flutters around the space inside her: her lover has metamorphosed into some strange, cruel being. Marcus has gone mad. Or this is some tanned imposter, a destructive double. Or he’s possessed by some evil spirit. She looks at him closely. He looks the same. A little tired, maybe. A little deadened around the eyes. But how can this be Marcus, her Marcus?
‘Why?’ she hears herself ask. ‘Why?
He slumps further into the chair, as if she’s physically assaulting him. Sinead is getting up, standing, spinning away from him across the floor like a gyroscope, hair and dress whirling round her. She reaches the kitchen and doesn’t know what to do there, so she turns again and looks at him, her mind returning to the sentence: why didn’t he come out and say it properly, instead of that cowardly negated, roundabout way, why didn’t he just say it: Sinead, I’ve been unfaithful to you.
And then she is remembering a time at the beginning of their relationship when she’d been considering ending it. She’d arranged to meet him in a pub and when she arrived, he was sitting with some people he knew, playing a game involving sticking cigarette papers on their foreheads. She had sat on a stool, hands folded in her lap, staring at him in disbelief as he talked too loudly and laughed and made jokes she’d never heard before. It was as if she’d never met him, never had anything to do with him, as if she’d just spent weeks in China with someone else entirely. He was a different person, not the Marcus she knew and was starting to love. This one – whoever he was – was louder, brasher, cockier. She looked around at the rest of the table and slowly began to realise that what he was doing was being like them. He had just morphed himself to fit in with these people. It reminded her of a species of bird she’d read about once that had no predators because it could mimic the calls of whichever birds were around it, surviving by dint of imitation. As soon as they were alone again, walking to catch a bus, he switched back instantly to the person she knew. But she was unable to look at him, unable to let him take her hand, unable to touch him. It appalled her that there was such a lack of solidity, of permanence, in his sense of himself that he could be so easily swayed. He hadn’t understood, was hurt and angry, and they’d stayed awake until dawn, arguing. She’d got used to his plasticity, in time, but it never ceased to shock her. And as she stands in the kitchen in her new dress, she finds herself wondering what kind of people he must have been spending time with for him to do this.
‘I don’t understand,’ she says, quiet and still now. ‘I don’t understand. Why have you done this?’
Across the yards of space between them, she sees him flex his shoulders as if shrugging something off. He scratches his head and says with an odd, worldly bravura that doesn’t sit well on him, that looks as though it’s a gesture he’s borrowed from someone recently: ‘It’s hard to say.’ He shrugs, turning his palms up to the ceiling. ‘It was a bit of a strange time. You were so far away and everything here seemed so distant and y—–’ He glances at her, his mouth open, half-way into forming the next word. But something in her face must have made him falter, because the word vanishes into the air between them like steam. He stares at his hands, mutely, moves his lips as if he’s about to say something else, but changes his mind. ‘You see, I…’ he begins uncertainly, sitting forward, then stops. ‘These things happen,’ he mutters.
She is filled with fury – pure, molten, towering fury. ‘Do they?’ she shouts. ‘Do they really? They just happen. Just like that. One minute you’re walking along and the next, before you even know it, my God, you’re shagging someone. What — they slipped and fell on your dick? Is that what you’re telling me?’
Her mouth is suddenly full of rushing, sweet-tasting saliva. She’s going to be sick. She darts to the sink and waits, but nothing happens. The nausea subsides. She realises that she hasn’t eaten since lunchtime, and is wondering why, when she remembers that she was going to cook a meal for her and Marcus. Artichoke hearts. They are still sheaved into themselves, hard petal against hard petal, at the bottom of the fridge. Then she feels a hand pressed into her back.
‘Sinead, are you—–’
She whips round, smashing the side of her fist into his arm. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she hisses. ‘Don’t ev
en lay a finger on me.’
She sees him flinch with pain, covering the place where she’d hit him with his other hand, and something pulls at her. How could she hurt him like this? How could she strike him? But then the knowledge that the hand, the body she knows like her own, has touched another woman’s is agony.
There is a noise on the stair outside – the measured footfalls of someone walking up the stairs, the tinkle of keys. Aidan. They both look at each other and, despite everything, Sinead is surprised to see panic in his eyes.
‘What do we do?’ he whispers.
Sinead sidesteps him, runs towards their bedroom. ‘Do what you want. You always do anyway.’
I was listening to Marcus’s story of why he was four days late. It involved a long queue for tickets, a thirty-eight-hour bus journey, a man with a goat, and a minor traffic accident.
‘I heard a squeal of brakes and I woke up to find myself, and all the bus – goat included – flying forward through the air. The bus’s front wheels had got stuck in a muddy ditch like this.’ He demonstrated with his hands. ‘I thwacked my thigh on a bus seat when I landed.’ He showed me a blackened, purple patch at the top of his leg, uneven and adrift in the white of his skin like a continent that had been shifted by tectonic plates. I’d seen it earlier, but hadn’t asked.
‘I was terrified I’d missed you,’ he said, and his hand on my arm twitched tighter. ‘That you’d have gone before I got here, disappeared into China without trace.’
My head was resting on the joint between his shoulder and his arm, my eye facing the aureole of his nipple. I was listening, not to his voice, but its reverberation through his body, my ear pressed to his ribcage.
I turned over on to my front, the rucked sheet catching at my elbows and hips. Marcus turned with me, his hand coming to rest in the hollow of my back.
I reached for his passport on the bedside table, flicked it open.
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