My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She is surprised at how easy it is to dismantle her life. She leaves a message on the agents’ voicemail saying she’s not coming back. She writes a letter to the shop. She visits Laurence and his mother, and hugs him goodbye. He squirms in her arms, affronted by this sudden display of emotion. She inserts her card into an auto-teller to find her bank balance. She calls up a number she finds among adverts in a newspaper and buys a flight out of Heathrow. She buys a rucksack and guidebooks. She changes money into foreign currency and finds the notes are too long for her wallet. She and Diane sit hunched on the floor over a world map. Sarah comes round and gives her a length of string: ‘You always need string,’ she says. Diane buys her travel wash, mosquito repellent and diarrhoea tablets. Lily packs and unpacks her rucksack three times.

  On her last morning in London, finding she’s done everything she needs to do and having several hours of dead time to kill, she goes swimming, rolling her costume tight into the length of a towel, and taking a bus to the pool. She used to like swimming. Her father would take her when she was a child, sliding the armbands on to her arm before blowing them up, his teeth around the transparent nozzle. ‘They’re uncomfy to put on when they’re blown up, aren’t they?’ he would say. In the water, her feet would pedal wildly beneath her, excitement making her shiver. Before long, her father no longer brought the armbands. He kept his palm under her abdomen and the water swung underneath her as she moved her legs in measured, symmetrical flexes. ‘The water will always support your weight, Lily,’ he said then, ‘remember that.’ When she was tired she was allowed to rest the curves of her feet on his leg. He would crouch in the water and she would stand, waist-deep, feeling like those women on the prows of pirate ships. But later, at school, there were girls with speed-racing bathing suits and taut glossy skin who could do strokes that churned the water into white froth, and she lost interest.

  At the pool, she shuts her eyes and jumps through the surface into a wide, long, mercury-ceilinged room that sways with trapezoids of light. Whitened, bleached bodies flail through the slow blue. She pushes up and, breaking into the echoey heat, does backstroke, a tiny replica of herself in the glass ceiling following her up and down the lane. When she gets out, she finds that water has got trapped in her ear.

  Half-deaf, she goes home and packs up her last things. When she catches the train to the airport, her mother runs beside it as far as she can, saying something Lily can’t hear, her face distorted with fierce grief, her hand, clutching a shopping list, waving or flailing in the air.

  As the plane rises and falls through the night, Lily’s ears block and unblock, but always in her left ear is the muted, secret roar of water. She shakes her head, pulls at the soft nub of her ear-lobe, tilts her neck and, in the toilet, hops up and down with her head on one side. But nothing. She bundles up her cardigan and sleeps against it, hoping to wake to a clarity in her left hemisphere. When she arrives and stumbles down the metal stairs, she has to lean in close to hear the immigration officer over the shifting swell of chlorinated water.

  Later, she’s found a hotel, left her bag, and is walking down a hill through the city’s heat. People in bright clothing on motorbikes swish past her and wave. Her rubber-soled shoes feel soft against the melting tarmac. She buys a prickly pear from a streetside seller, who cleaves it with a blade, revealing the wet orange flesh for her.

  As she walks away, pear held gingerly in her palm, there is a sudden break, a release, then a hot rush: water from a London swimming pool drops to the curve of her breast, where it quickly evaporates in the heat of the afternoon.

  After checking the number, Aidan turns in at the gate and walks down the unfamiliar garden path, tiles loosened from the concrete plinking under his shoes. He tries to ignore his heart, which is sending blood around his system at a rate that is far too fast. Stop it, he tells it, stop it now. You’re not helping.

  He rings the doorbell, his heart openly and brazenly defying him. I’ll talk to you later, he is saying to it when a man opens the door.

  ‘You must be Aidan,’ he says. ‘Hi. I’m Michael. This is Lindsay.’ He points to a heavily pregnant woman behind him, who smiles as she buttons up her coat.

  ‘We’re off out,’ she says. ‘Sinead’s through there.’

  Aidan passes quite close to Michael. There is very little of his sister in him: the line of the nose, perhaps, and the slightly fragile chin, but otherwise nothing.

  ‘See you,’ he says, as he closes the door after him.

  ‘’Bye,’ says Aidan, ‘nice to meet you.’ He stands for a moment in the hallway. His pulse is so quick and light he wonders if he’s about to faint. That would be just great. Perfect. How to win women and influence lives. He hears them whispering to each other on the doorstep and Lindsay exclaim, ‘He’s delectable! Why don’t you have friends like that?’ and Michael, laughing, telling her to shush, he’ll hear you.

  ‘Sinead?’ he calls.

  ‘In here.’

  Aidan walks down the corridor and into the first doorway. It is a small basement flat. Sinead is sitting crosslegged like a tailor in the middle of the floor, surrounded by heaps of clothes. She holds up two jumpers.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asks.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Should I take this one or this one?’

  Aidan sits on a sofa. ‘Can’t you take both?’

  ‘No! I’m going to Australia, for heaven’s sake. You don’t need more than one jumper in Sydney.’

  Aidan looks around. They are in a small sitting room. White linen blinds cover the windows. A cat lies curled like a lifebuoy on a patchwork cushion. There is a pile of boxes in the corner labelled things like ‘Sinead’s books’, ‘Sinead’s crockery’, ‘Sinead’s winter clothes’.

  ‘Are those going too?’ He points at the boxes.

  ‘No. Michael’s going to store them for me.’ She flings down the clothes she’s holding, gets up and, bending over at the waist, gives him a brief hug. ‘How are you? It’s nice to see you.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m…pretty good.’

  ‘Do you want tea? Wine? A whisky?’

  ‘Whatever you’re having.’

  She wanders from the room and a few moments later he hears clashing glasses, a fridge door opening, liquid glugging out of a bottle neck. He gets up, paces the rug. He has to do it. He’s going to do it. He’s going to do it now. When she gets back from the kitchen. He knows what he’s going to say. He has it all laid out in his head. He rehearsed it in the car. Now he’s here, though, it’s doesn’t quite hang together. She seems preoccupied, distracted. And the words he’d selected so carefully in the car now sound hollow and trite. But he has to do it. He has to. She’ll be on a plane to Sydney this time tomorrow.

  ‘Is this where you’ve been sleeping?’ he calls, trying to ignore the waver in his voice.

  ‘No. Michael’s got a spare room.’ She appears in the doorway, a glass in each hand. ‘Well, it’ll be the baby’s room when it arrives. So it’s about time I was out of here.’

  He takes the wine and sits down in a chair next to a table. A bouquet of red roses is spilling out of its wrapping. They are limp and wilting under the cellophane. She sees him looking at them.

  ‘I should put them in water, shouldn’t I?’ she murmurs, stroking the velvet of their petals with her thumb. Then she tilts the glass to her mouth, swallows, walks over to her heaps of clothes, picks up a pink T-shirt, and lets it fall. ‘Do you think I’m doing the right thing?’

  Aidan wets his finger and runs it around the rim of the glass. ‘In going to Australia?’

  ‘No…’ She hesitates. ‘I mean…I mean…’

  ‘Marcus?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I…’ the glass beneath Aidan’s thumb begins to hum and vibrate, making her look up, ‘…I really can’t say.’

  She nods, her mouth pressed shut.

  ‘Are you…’ he begins, ‘…do you think you’ll take him back?’ His heart hurls itself against its cage
. He is sure she’ll be able to hear it.

  She sighs. ‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘I just don’t know. Sometimes I can’t envisage a future without him. Sometimes it seems…inevitable…that he and I will be together again. Like I can’t see a way around it. But I don’t know, Aidan. What he did was so…well, it was so unnecessary and…and so painful.’

  Aidan says nothing. The glass murmurs and cries in his hand.

  ‘But I just have this feeling that I can’t get around him. I was talking to someone about it the other day,’ she continues, ‘and they said, “Well, you need to weigh up whether you’ll be happier with him or without him.” And that if I thought I’d be happier with him I should try to get over it and forgive him.’ She shakes her head, tugging at one of the ends of her hair.

  He puts down the glass, his fingers brushing against the flowers. He stands and crosses the room to the window where he can see slices of the street between the blinds. He is foolish and deluded, coming here thinking he could say those things to her. He must be mad. What kind of a response did he expect? He is ridiculous, but still wants to say to her, it’s not inevitable, if you take him back he will only do something worse, can’t you see he doesn’t value you, and what am I to do when you are gone, what shall I do with this weight in my heart and why did you have to infiltrate me like this.

  ‘I should go,’ he says instead, turning back from the window.

  ‘Already?’ She is looking up at him, surprised.

  In the hallway, he puts his arms around her, he knows for the last time. She won’t come back and even if she does it won’t be for him. He touches her hair, pressing her forehead to his shoulder, then pulls away, reaching for the door lock, because starting up in him is a pain so deep, so profound that he feels it will never leave him.

  ‘’Bye,’ she calls after him. ‘’Bye!’

  He doesn’t look back, but climbs the spiralling concrete steps to the pavement. He walks past his car, past the end of the street, and on. And he feels as though she is holding on to the end of one of his essential fibres and that every step he takes away from her is, bit by bit, unravelling him.

  part | four

  To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom

  EVELYN WAUGH

  The earth was red here, sodden clay that sucked and pulled at the soles of her feet as she walked to the side of the road. The colour had ingrained itself everywhere – her hair, her backpack, her trouser bottoms, and the grooves of her palms, where scarlet rivers flowed from her wrist to the base of her fingers.

  Yesterday there had been sand, and wind that flung and sprayed the minute particles into her eyes and mouth. Lily had sat at the front of the truck, a scarf swathing her head, sunglasses jammed down on to her face, teeth gritty against each other, her skin grained with the surface of the desert that was rolling past.

  The other people were jumping down from the truck, their feet thudding on the soft ground. The driver sat on his heels beside his open door, flexing his shoulders, a cigarette poised between his fingers. Lily peeled off her hat, soaked her scarf with water from her bottle and held it against her face and neck as she wandered off the flattened dirt track into the uneven scrub. The soles of her sandals clacked against her heels. A small, sweet-voiced bird swung overhead on a high thermal draught. She could see so far she was sure she could almost make out the curve of the earth.

  She shaded her eyes, her gaze travelling along the vanishing point of the track. In the far distance there was a black, heat-haloed spot or fleck. It shimmered and wavered on the horizon. The light glanced off it, and staring at it brought salty water to sting at her eyes, her lashes forming coloured prisms around her vision. She blinked, pressing her eyes shut then opening them again. Light flooded her retinas, putting everything in negative, the scene before her dancing with hundreds of white spots. The fleck, when she located it, had got larger, and was swirling with dust and speed. A truck.

  The water held in the fabric of her scarf had warmed to air temperature. She glanced back to her own truck at the side of the road. The driver was standing up and waving at her to come back, to get on. The other travellers were staring and pointing in the direction of the oncoming vehicle. Lily moved back towards the road, the red earth caking her shoe soles. At the side of the truck, a Belgian man offered the cradle of his entwined hands; she put her foot into them and felt the ground fall away and her rising past the wooden side of the truck. She gripped it, her feet finding the foothold of the wheel, and swung herself into the back of the truck, which was littered with backpacks, people, water-bottles, tents, sacks of food.

  The other truck ground towards them. Lily leaned out over the side to watch it. It was moving fast, its wheels kicking up dirt, its glinting radiator grinning like teeth. It was newer and faster than theirs, a gleaming blue, and was close enough now for her to see the faces of the two drivers and a leather doll that was suspended as if on a gibbet from their rear-view mirror. The noise of its engine clapped like thunder around her ears. Twenty yards or so from them it slowed suddenly as they realised the narrowness of the track. Her own driver stood out on the road, watching, his arms folded. The blue truck rumbled on to the opposite side of the track and began easing itself past them. She saw the drivers eyeing the narrow gap between the vehicles and then the people in the back were sliding past her, as if on a slow conveyor belt.

  What Lily saw next was an image that would be sealed up inside her for ever like the packed pod of an unborn twin. She would never speak of it to anyone, never refer to it, and would only think about it when she was alone. It had been a long time – months, perhaps over a year, she couldn’t remember. Long enough for it to seem like something she’d read or seen in a film, or something that had happened to someone else. But as the truck jolted past her in the desert, it was as if that time had been telescoped shut into itself. Just in front of her, close enough for her to reach out and touch her, was Sinead.

  She was standing in profile, looking out over the top of the cabin to the road ahead, one hand gripping a spar of the tarpaulin roof above her. The air around Lily seemed suddenly hot, too hot to breathe in. Her eyes travelled again over the long neck, the thin arms, the coils of hair. It was a sight so familiar that it tipped over into strangeness. It seemed at once the most natural thing to see in the middle of the desert and the most preposterous. Lily stared, put her fingers up to press her cheek. Was she really seeing this, or not? Sinead half-turned, her gaze taking in the other truck, the people she was passing. Her lips curved slightly. If she had turned her neck just an inch more, she would have seen Lily standing there.

  Lily watched as she turned back to the road, watched as she saw something, and as she exclaimed, pointed, and reached her hand behind her, like a relay runner stretching back to grasp the baton. Lily knew even before she looked at the man she’d failed to notice before. He withdrew his hand gently from Sinead’s and passed it instead around her waist, pulling her towards him, looking out to whatever it was she was pointing at. Just before they slipped out of sight, Lily saw that she was saying something to him and that Aidan was turning, laughing, looking Sinead full in the face.

  The truck vanished in an eddy of dust and fumes. Lily didn’t lean out to watch it go. The air around her settled back to its still, simmering heat. The woman next to her was spreading sun lotion over her arms and relating an elaborate story about a hotel manager. The Belgian man was offering round a packet of dried apricots. Lily took one and bit into its dense orange flesh. Beneath her, the truck quivered into life, the engine straining and pulling against the brakes.

  The scenery slid into motion. There was no wind, just a vertical sun, and miles of red, red earth, the trees writhing up from the ground, bone-white, like petrified forks of lightning. Lily shaded her eyes against the glare. Far away into the distance, a large-eared dog-like creature was standing on the crest of a rock, nose high, reading the air for her scent.

 

  Maggie O'Farrell, My Lover's Lover