by Lisa Jewell
Lydia’s house greeted her like an old friend as she approached it thirty minutes later. After the strangeness of the evening, it looked safe and familiar. She felt her body relaxing as she walked up the front path towards the front door. She pictured herself in less than a minute, collecting a glass of water, kicking off her shoes, padding up to bed, peeling off her clothes, laying down her head, closing her eyes, pondering the evening, letting it all sink in while making new sense of her life. But as she turned the corner into the kitchen she saw that Bendiks was sitting at the table there, wearing a white t-shirt and combat shorts. He had lit a candle and was reading a paperback which was held in the crook of one knee, and when he heard her walking in he looked up slowly and smiled. ‘You’re back,’ he said, somewhat unnecessarily.
Lydia smiled at him uncertainly. ‘I am,’ she replied.
‘I stayed up,’ he said, again somewhat unnecessarily.
‘Yes,’ said Lydia, unhooking her handbag from her shoulder. ‘I can see.’
Bendiks closed his paperback and uncrossed his legs. He looked at her warmly. ‘I know it is silly,’ he began, ‘but, I don’t know, I was worried about you. I know you sent me that message but that was a long time ago. And I just wanted to … well, make sure you got home all right. And that you were feeling OK. Are you,’ he continued, ‘are you feeling OK?’
Lydia put down her handbag and smiled a smile of relief. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling absolutely OK.’
Bendiks’ smile also softened and he leaned across the table towards her. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how was it? How did it go? Unless you’d rather not talk about it?’
‘No.’ Lydia sat down and ran her hands across the smooth table top. ‘No. I do want to talk about it. I’m just not sure what to say.’
‘What was he like? Was he nice?’
Lydia looked at Bendiks’ expression of concern and felt a rush of pleasure soar through her. How sweet, she thought, how very sweet. ‘He was,’ she said. ‘He was really nice. Quite shy. Quite quiet.’
‘Ah,’ Bendiks laughed and leaned back again against his chair, ‘just like you then!’
‘Well, yes, I suppose,’ she said. ‘He was very like me. Very like me when I was his age. But lovely. Really lovely.’
Bendiks eyed her thoughtfully, almost dreamily. ‘Wow,’ he sighed. ‘This is amazing! You know that, don’t you? What is happening to you, it’s amazing.’
Lydia smiled. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I know. It feels like a dream.’
‘It is like a dream. It is like an amazing dream. And now, you still have two more to meet. The other brother and the sister.’
Lydia rubbed her elbows and shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem quite real,’ she said. And it didn’t. The sister seemed less real than ever in the light of her meeting with Dean.
Bendiks smiled at her and then got to his feet. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he said. ‘A cup of coffee? Maybe a herbal tea?’
‘No, thanks, I’m fine. I think I’d better get to bed actually. I’m feeling a bit tired.’
‘Something stronger?’ he suggested playfully. ‘A schnapps, maybe? Come on, we could take them out on to the terrace, it’s not too cold out.’
Lydia considered the offer and then Bendiks’ motivation. He was staring at her not quite beseechingly, but certainly with some depth of intent. She wondered why he wanted to drink schnapps with her on the terrace and almost asked him, almost said: But why? Why would you? She cast her gaze around pathetically, looking for a suitable response. Part of her wanted nothing more than to sit on the terrace with the object of her desire and for them to get slightly drunk together. Another part wanted to grab her handbag and scamper upstairs to her room, closing the door firmly behind her.
‘Er, OK then,’ she said, somewhat involuntarily. ‘Yes, why not?’
He beamed at her and clapped his hands together. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘great. I will be back in a minute.’ She watched him through the kitchen door, taking the stairs to his room two at a time. She watched the muscles in his thighs straighten and harden with each flex and felt a lurch in her stomach at the possibility that lay ahead of her; that she might one day get to feel those thigh muscles straining against hers. She gulped and turned away from the door, staring through the blackness of the kitchen window and trying to talk herself down from a state of heightened nerves. When she heard him returning she breathed in deeply and greeted him with a fulsome smile. He was clutching a tall, thin bottle of clear liquid. She fetched two shot glasses and followed him out on to the terrace.
Lydia sat down first, and Bendiks chose not the seat opposite but the one right next to her so that his body was only a few inches apart from hers. He poured the schnapps into the shot glasses and told her something about its provenance but Lydia was not listening. She was instead running a scenario through her mind, in which she would open her mouth and say, ‘Bendiks, are you gay?’ And he would look at her askance and say, ‘No! Of course I’m not!’ And then he would prove it by bending her backwards over the arm of the sofa and kissing her neck urgently whilst simultaneously running his hand up and down her bare thigh. She shook it from her head as she sensed that he was waiting for her to answer a question, and said, ‘Sorry? What?’
He raised his eyebrows at her and laughed. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘nothing. I can see you are miles away. And it is perfectly understandable, given the evening you’ve just had.’
She smiled at him wanly. ‘Well, yes,’ she said, grateful for his misinterpretation of her silence. ‘It has been quite a night.’
‘Well,’ he said, handing her her glass and picking up his own. ‘I propose a toast. To your brothers. To your sister. And of course to you: the amazing Lydia.’
‘Ha!’ she snorted. ‘Right!’ She hadn’t meant it to sound so disingenuous. She genuinely did not know why anyone would refer to her as amazing. But he swooped on her self-deprecation anyway and quickly shooed it away. ‘You are amazing. You may not think so, but I can assure you, from my perspective, as an objective onlooker, you are quite remarkable. Seriously, it is rare to meet a woman like you, so independent and clever and sexy and young.’
Sexy. Lydia stared at him. ‘Oh, stop it,’ she said.
‘Why?’ replied Bendiks. ‘It is just the truth.’
Lydia felt almost nauseous with the density of his compliment. It was as though she had eaten six donuts in a row after years of living on cabbage. Delicious and remarkable, but too much. She smiled at him awkwardly and his expression changed. ‘I am really sorry,’ he said. ‘Have I offended you?’ And as he said this his hand moved towards her and caressed the skin of her arm. It was an innocuous gesture, no more than you might make to a stranger you’d brushed past in the street, by way of apology. But as his skin touched hers it was as if every light in the dark house of her body had suddenly been switched on. It was as though electrodes had been wired up to every nerve ending and activated. It was as though she’d been asleep and now she was awake. Wonderfully, terrifyingly awake. She brought in her breath so deeply and so quickly that it was audible. Bendiks looked at her in alarm. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, once again bringing his hand down against her skin, this time leaving his hand there, this time caressing her lightly.
‘Yes,’ she said, quietly, ‘I’m fine.’
His hand remained. And so did his gaze.
‘You can see it,’ he said, ‘in your eyes. You can see something … foreign.’
She blinked at him and laughed.
‘Seriously,’ he continued, ‘in most ways you are so very British. But when I look at you, like this, in there,’ he pointed out both of her eyes, ‘I can see something different. Something exciting.’
She flinched slightly at the word. She did not want anyone to think she was exciting, because she was not exciting. And anyone thinking that she was would be horribly disappointed.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, pulling away from her, releasing his grasp from her arm. ‘I am embarrassing you. I apologise. I am just
…’ He turned away and searched for words. ‘I am just slightly in awe of you. And slightly, well, I don’t know how to put it. I think a lot of you. That is all. Please forgive me.’
She smiled at him. ‘Of course I forgive you,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to forgive. I’m just tired, that’s all.’
‘Of course you are,’ said Bendiks. ‘Of course. You said you were tired and I still dragged you out here to drink with me. I just really wanted to spend a few moments with you, because I feel we are constantly like ships passing. And it would be a shame for me to move on from living with you not knowing any more about you than I did before I moved in. But if you’d rather just stick with the passing ships, just tell me. I won’t take offence.’ He threw her a sweet smile.
She smiled too and said, ‘No. I don’t want to stick with passing ships. It’s lovely having you here. And we should do this sort of thing more often.’
‘Good,’ said Bendiks, pouring another shot into each glass. ‘Good. Then another toast. To you and me. More than just ships. But hopefully also friends …’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘friends.’
And as she said it the luscious, illicit thoughts of legs entwined and lips parted and bodies conjoined slipped from her consciousness and away from her. Friends.
She tipped the schnapps down her throat and tried to look like she wanted nothing more.
ROBYN
Robyn stared at the paper pinned to the wall outside her homeroom with a sense of dread and disappointment. She had failed again. This was the third monthly exam in a row she had failed. The work was never-ending, three hours of study a day, plus lectures, tutorials, and more study to take you through the weekend. This weekend just past, she had been expected to read and memorise five chapters of text on physiology from a book so big it had made her hands ache just to hold it. She had got as far as the beginning of chapter two and given up. Her brain, which had always been better than everyone else’s, which had always absorbed facts and information without too much effort, was simply not up to the job of retaining all this terminology. And she herself had too many other things preying on her mind to find and practise new ways to learn. She was failing, Robyn Inglis was failing, and she had no idea what to do about it.
She unpinned the paper from the cork board and bunched it up inside her shoulder bag.
Robyn lifted the lid of the shiny silver bin in Jack’s kitchen – no, not Jack’s kitchen, her kitchen, she had to keep reminding herself – and recoiled. It was piled to the very rim, mountains of rancid rubbish, squashed down like a garbage Dauphinoise, slivers of paper and card forced down the sides, congealed teabags jammed into crevices, scrapings of flabby old cereal coating everything. It was a bin that should have been emptied at least twelve if not twenty-four hours earlier. Jack had left early this morning, 9.30, for a breakfast meeting with his agent at some trendy members’ club that Robyn felt she was supposed to have heard of but hadn’t. He was not due back until after lunchtime. Which meant that Robyn either had to sit in the flat with this rancid overflowing bin, or empty it herself.
Robyn had never emptied a bin in her life.
Which was not to say that she was unaware of bins or of the fact that they required emptying from time to time. She had watched her mother a hundred times, a thousand times, tear off the slinky black rectangle, divide it with her fingertips, whip it across the room, engorge it with air and then feed it effortlessly into the box that lived beneath the sink. She’d watched her pull a bulging bag from the container under the sink, sometimes it seemed with some effort, deftly manipulate the rim into a tight knot and then take it away. Somewhere. Robyn wasn’t entirely sure where.
Her parents had never asked her to empty a bin.
She studied this bin. It was twice the size of the one in her parents’ house.
She pulled out a few drawers, her eyes searching for a black cylinder. She went to the window to survey the front of the house for signs of places to put large bags of rubbish. She began to feel vaguely panicky. She should be able to do this. She was nearly nineteen years old. She was studying medicine. She should be able to empty a bin. She failed to find a bin bag but found a large carrier bag that seemed as though it would suffice. She took the top off the bin and then she started to tug at the edges of the bin bag.
‘Urgh, yuck,’ she hissed as her fingers brushed against soggy cereal.
She pulled again and the bag lifted a few inches. She pulled it halfway to the top of the cylinder and then let it fall. It appeared to be full of concrete and lead. She bunched up the corners and tried again, and finally, with some effort, she yanked it free of its container. As she did so the bag bulged ominously and then exploded at her feet. Jack’s waxed floorboards were awash with shavings and trimmings and scrapings and skins. A murky liquid trickled darkly from the mulch and dribbled away between the floorboards. The smell was acrid and Robyn put her hand across her mouth.
She was tempted then to pick up her handbag, leave through the front door and not come back until Jack was home. But instead she cried for five minutes and then found a pair of rather large yellow plastic gloves in a cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. She pulled them on, still sobbing, and proceeded to scrape the obnoxious compost from the floor and into the large carrier bag. She knew she was being pathetic. She knew there were barefoot children in India picking through other people’s rubbish for twelve hours a day in intense heat. She knew that she was spoiled and silly. But everything just seemed so hard these days.
On the tube on the way home from college last night the train had stopped for slightly too long in a tunnel and the carriage had quickly heated up to the point of discomfort and Robyn had felt her heart quicken unpleasantly beneath her ribs. The driver had made an announcement across the Tannoy to the effect that they were stuck and he had no idea when they would be moving again. She’d looked around the carriage at the strangers who surrounded her. She’d spied an empty seat a few feet away and wondered about the logistics of getting from where she was standing to there without drawing too much attention to herself. Her heart had quickened further until she was certain the man standing next to her would be able to hear it in her chest. Her peripheral vision began to cloud over and she saw herself collapsing against the side of the carriage; she envisaged being taken to a waiting ambulance, wrapped in a grey blanket, everyone staring at her. She saw all this and her heart beat faster and faster until she felt she was about to scream out for help when finally the train hissed itself back to life and she felt the carriage jerk forward and then they were moving again and her heart slowed down and she was safe. But for those few moments she had felt what it must be to lose your mind, to have no control over yourself. For those few moments she had lost sight of herself completely.
She had no idea why she should be feeling so disjointed. Here she was, back in the heart of her very own romantic novel. Here she was in her Holloway flat with her novelist boyfriend and her perfect face and perfect body and perfect life. She was Robyn Inglis, the luckiest girl in the world. But her world felt like that tube train yesterday: stuck in a tunnel. She could not seem to move on from the dark place she’d been in when she’d thought that Jack was her brother. She felt nervy and unhappy and strange. The only time she was happy was when Jack was here and it was just the two of them. The rest of the time she was lost.
She took the heavy bin bag and she bounced it down the staircase outside their flat, bang bang bang against each step. She pulled it down the garden path and found to her surprise two large green bins, just slightly shorter than she was, parked side by side near the garden gate. They were painted with the number of the house. She lifted the lid cautiously and was assailed by yet another rich and unhappy stench. She attempted to launch the bag from the pavement to the mouth of the tall bin, but failed. A middle-aged man passed the house on a bike. He slowed down and eyed her curiously and for a moment she thought he was going to stop and offer to help her. But he didn’t. He cycled on. Robyn watched him di
sappearing down the street and wanted to hurl the rubbish bag after him. She tried three further times to heft the bag into the bin, but eventually gave up and left it there on the pavement.
When she returned to the flat she considered the possibility of doing some coursework, catching up with herself, but decided instead to return to bed. The sheets were still tepid from her and Jack’s bodies and the bed was flamboyantly unmade. She remembered waking up this morning, she remembered the feeling of contentment on seeing the nape of Jack’s neck and then the feeling of disquiet and vague panic when he’d reminded her that he was out for the morning. She remembered how her day had broken in half at that very moment.
She lay with her head against Jack’s pillow and she inhaled his smell. And then she cried again.
What had she become? She hated this new version of herself. She’d turned into exactly the sort of person she despised; needy, clingy, hopeless. She could not empty bins. She could not travel alone. She could not function without her boyfriend. Every time he walked out of the room she collapsed. Only the smell of his pillow could rouse her momentarily from her misery. She was pathetic.
She cried herself into a rather fractious slumber. A dream unfurled itself inside her sleep, a dream of her sisters, their gaunt faces in their final days, their ravaged bodies inside the pretty, trendy dresses her mother insisted on buying for them. And then she dreamed of a boy. He was pushing one of her sisters in her wheelchair. He was smiling. And whistling. He stopped when he saw her and said, ‘Hop on,’ and she did, on to her sister’s lap. Except it wasn’t her real sister any more. It was another woman, taller than her, with long legs and long hair. She was aware of the contact between them and she felt the woman’s arms embrace her. She could hear the boy whistling, and saw that they were approaching a pair of doors in front of her. There was a sign on one of them but she couldn’t read it. She knew that if she wanted to get away from this whistling boy and this long-legged woman she would need to jump off the wheelchair before they reached the doors, but then she found herself relaxing, leaning back into the woman’s embrace, being wheeled slowly towards the doors. She clasped the woman’s hand in hers and thought that she smelled nice, she smelled like Jack. The doors opened and then Robyn was awake.
