by Alex Preston
‘Of course, sport. Have you got the car? Is Abby chauffeur tonight?’
*
It was ten o’clock. Neil went home. Mouse and Maki rode in the back of Marcus’s Audi while the others followed in a taxi. Abby, almost crying with tiredness and worry, drove. Mouse and Marcus played a ridiculous word game, with Marcus shouting answers over his shoulder as Maki laughed and Mouse bellowed. Abby began to sweat. There was a party being held at the Natural History Museum. Paparazzi gathered on their mopeds, shot long lenses out of car windows. The boys pressed themselves to the glass to see who was there. They continued their game, Marcus screaming now.
‘You repeated. You can’t repeat. You forfeit. Shame! Shame!’
‘I bloody didn’t. You lie! Prove it. Did I, Maki? Did I repeat, Abby?’
Abby felt as if she were floating. She gripped the steering wheel but was rising up above it, vertiginous. She leaned hard on the accelerator and sent the car rocketing along Queen’s Gate, up Kensington Church Street and on to Notting Hill Gate. When she had parked, and Marcus and Mouse had steered Maki to the front of the ugly block of flats, she rested her head on the steering wheel and allowed herself one deep sob. A growling taxi pulled up beside her and she saw the twins get out, watched Lee stagger towards the door on the arm of the tall young man with dark hair she had been talking to all night. Mouse would be jealous. Abby rose wearily from the car. Lee held the door for her and they took the lift up together.
*
Marcus had opened a bottle of wine and passed glasses around. Already there was music playing from the laptop on the table. He heard Abby slam the bedroom door; he turned the music down a little and told Mouse to blow his smoke out of the window. Mouse drew himself up onto the wide windowsill and looked down on the empty street below. The flat was on the seventh floor of a brutal square block that was notably unsightly among the cool white mansions of Notting Hill.
Marcus went to the kitchen to get some olives and saw Abby standing in the hallway, her toothbrush raised to her mouth. She reached her head into the bathroom, spat into the sink and then spoke to Marcus.
‘I thought you had a meeting tomorrow.’
‘I do. I’m fine.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m just very tired.’
‘I know you are. I won’t be much longer.’
‘Will you sleep in the spare room? And try to keep the music down?’
‘Of course I will. ’Night. Sleep well.’
‘’Night, Abby,’ Mouse yelled from the sitting room.
She shut the bedroom door softly this time, and Marcus turned the music down until it was barely audible, opened more windows and moved Mouse’s ashtray to the windowsill.
The night began to dissolve around them. Maki left after the second bottle of wine was finished. She seemed to be quite sober, even though she had drunk as much as the others. Marcus walked her to the lift, whistling as they waited for the creaking machinery to ascend. He stood looking at her in the lift; as the doors closed, she bowed very formally. He mirrored her and held the bow until the doors met.
When Marcus came back into the sitting room Mouse had opened a bottle of whisky and was pouring it into tumblers, thrusting the glasses urgently into the girls’ hands, bellowing at Lee and Philip who were sitting in the corner, talking earnestly. Mouse turned the music back up and began to dance in a strange, rhythmic shuffle, his arms twitching at his sides, his stomach wobbling, his bulging eyes rolling. Marcus took his arm and steered him over towards the window. The twins danced together, expending little energy, occasionally leaning towards each other to whisper something and laugh.
Marcus and Mouse sat along the windowsill smoking, swirling the ice in their glasses, and watching the twins dance. Lee was sitting on Philip’s lap in the corner. He moved his lips very close to her neck, whispering to her. Time passed. They saw people coming back from bars, stumbling along the middle of the street, arms around shoulders in the false bonhomie of midnight drunkenness.
*
Marcus had put a film in the DVD player – something of Abby’s in black and white that was bleak and Scandinavian. The twins were half-asleep, slumped across the sofa. He was still sitting in the window with Mouse, cold but not wishing to move or recognise the stiffness of his joints and the iciness that was creeping through the glass. Philip and Lee continued to talk in soft, serious voices in the corner. Marcus tried to follow the film. The camera swooped low over a lake, a man looked out to a range of mountains, a girl cried in her room, the film ended. Marcus stood up.
‘I’ve got to get to bed. It’s two. I can sleep for four hours. Five if I don’t go for a swim. Feel free to stay. Or go. I mean, do whatever.’
Mouse looked up at him, stretched out his short legs and lit a cigarette. The twins woke at the same time and yawned, rubbing their eyes and smiling as colour crept back into their cheeks.
‘We have to leave now,’ said Lee suddenly. Her eyes were watery, red lines clustered in the milky corners. She groped on the floor for her bag, stumbled as she slipped on her heels and leaned over to place a wet kiss on Mouse’s lips. She stood back, grinning.
‘I’m shitfaced,’ she said proudly.
Marcus felt very tired. ‘Bye, Lee. G’night, Mouse. Hang around as long as you like. There’s more booze in the kitchen.’
He undressed in the spare room and walked down the hall in his boxer shorts to brush his teeth. Philip and Lee were already on their way out, his arm around her thin shoulders. Marcus realised that Philip hadn’t taken off the leather jacket all night. Lee turned and waved unsteadily as they left. Marcus looked into the sitting room, where Mouse and the twins were playing some sort of drinking game involving the last of the whisky and a pack of cards. Marcus nodded at them and turned back down the hall.
Drunk, unthinking, he walked past the spare room towards his own bedroom. He opened the door and saw Abby sitting on the end of the bed, her shadow thrown across the room by the bedside lamp behind her. She was naked with her knees drawn up to her chest. She didn’t move when he came in. She was looking at herself in the ancient free-standing mirror that she had inherited from her grandmother. It was liver-spotted with age and misty in the corners. The white sheet beneath her was stained a deep red. She had stripped off the duvet and the blood had slowly spread out, soaking through to the mattress, and was now dripping where she sat at the foot of the bed, a single drop every few seconds that landed in a pool on the cream carpet with a noise like a ticking clock. She let out a sob.
‘Oh, Abby.’ He was suddenly sober.
He went to the bathroom and found a towel. Very gently he lifted her to sit upon it. Then he climbed up behind Abby and placed his arms around her, looking at their reflection in the mirror. He saw a thin mist over her face; long-dried tear-tracks led down from her eyes. Neither of them moved for a long while. Then, very slowly, he helped her to stand, holding the towel in place. She watched as he stripped off the sheet and used the unstained corners to soak up the blood on the mattress. Holding the towel between her legs, Abby waddled to the other side of the bed. She lay down on the clean stretch of mattress and Marcus lifted the duvet over her, tucking it in tightly as his mother had done for him as a child. He found some painkillers in a bedside drawer and held the water glass as she swallowed them. Finally, he left the room to fill a hot-water bottle in the kitchen. By the time he returned she was already asleep. He pulled a chair beside the bed and sat watching her gentle breaths which hardly stirred the thick duvet cocoon. He placed the hot-water bottle at her feet. He heard Mouse and the twins leave, heard the girls’ high young voices in the street below.
Marcus sat until the first fingers of light crept into the sky outside the window. A star shivered above the rooftops of the houses opposite, then faded into the dawn. Abby occasionally drew in the sharp yelped breaths of one who had recently been crying. Marcus smoothed his hand over her brow and mumbled soft words to her. He was still in his boxer shorts and he realised that he was very cold, his
feet numb and clammy. Abby’s blood stained his fingers and was turning brown under his nails.
Marcus had known Abby for so long that when he looked at her face it was not like looking at a real person. Her face had the ridiculous familiarity of his own reflection, such that when he did try to consider her objectively, he found it both fascinating and frightening. Her skin was tanned, her dark hair unravelled on the pillow. She was striking-looking, but her size and the sharp intelligence of her manner meant that boys had avoided her during her teens. It had left her lacking confidence, nervous and suspicious when Marcus first started paying attention to her. But slowly she had fallen for him, and, despite the rows, he loved her. He felt a sudden rush of pleasure. He was proud to have her. He knew the child would arrive, and when he did – it was always a he in Marcus’s mind – they would raise him with boundless love.
He jumped as his alarm went off. Abby opened her eyes as he slammed down his hand on the trilling clock. He watched as she remembered, wishing that he could keep her trapped in the fog of waking, draw her back from the revelation that caused her lip to quiver, her eyes to widen as she peeled the duvet from around her and saw the umber towel knotted between her pale thighs.
‘I’m so sorry, Abby.’
She smiled weakly. He couldn’t find anything else to say. He crawled into the bed and drew her against him. He held her for twenty minutes until, regretfully, he lifted himself up and went to the bathroom to shower. He stepped into the glass cubicle and turned on the jet of water, feeling the hot needles stinging his skin. After a few minutes Abby joined him. The shower wasn’t really large enough for both of them, but they pressed closely together, slick with soap and shampoo. They helped each other clean away the traces of blood. Marcus rubbed at the back of her legs with a flannel and saw the skin redden under his touch. When they came out of the bathroom, the sun was coming into the flat and Marcus didn’t mind the wreckage of the sitting room and the kitchen, found he could ignore the brown stains on the mattress in their bedroom. He made them both tea and they sat and watched planes cut across the fragile morning sky.
‘Do you want me to stay? I don’t want you to be alone. Do you need to go to the hospital?’
‘No, I’m fine. This is just what happens. I’ll take the day off. I’m OK now, really I am. You’ve got that meeting. You should be going.’
He left her sitting on the sofa, the tea growing cold in her mug, the shadows of birds flashing across her as they passed on the way to the seed feeder that Abby hung outside the kitchen window. In the lift on the way down he adjusted his tie, picked at a spot and smoothed down the hair of his sideburns. Out on the street he looked up and saw Abby was watching him, the mug held out in front of her like a chalice. He turned and, walking backwards, raised his arm. She smiled as he tripped, regained his balance and finally disappeared around the corner.
Five
There were no curtains in Lee’s flat. She always woke early, with the first whitening of the sky outside her window. Philip was still sleeping. She reached for a glass of water and pinched her fingers to the bridge of her nose, frowning. Darwin regarded her with lazy dark eyes. The dog had climbed onto the bed soon after the noise and the movement stopped, and Philip had drawn his knees up to his chest to avoid kicking him. Now Philip’s legs half-hung over the edge of the bed. He gripped one corner of the duvet in his fingers and pressed it against his cheek. Otherwise he was naked. He groaned in his sleep.
She knew that she should fight the distaste that she felt whenever she brought a boy home. Or rather whenever she woke next to a boy. She wished she could persuade them to leave while she was still drunk. They violated the beauty of mornings in her flat, the privacy and serenity of feeling that she was the only person awake in the whole of Kensington. Their foul breath, stubble, demands for tea or – far worse – more sex left her feeling shot through with guilt, disgusted with herself, lonely.
Once, sex was all she thought about. In her last two years of school she had a string of boyfriends, all unsuitable, all much older than her. Her boyfriends would drive her to house parties around town where she’d sleep with them on badly stuffed sofas, cheat on them with their friends in dark spare rooms, dance with them on tables wearing only her pants. She was always drunker and louder than any other girl there, but she got away with it because she was also the youngest and prettiest. At the end of the parties, she would sit and rearrange her underwear beneath her jeans as the sun rose from the sea and the milk floats and fishermen and other early-morning movers made their way through the streets of the little town on the Suffolk coast.
She’d given up boys when she started the Course. Four years of near-celibacy. The occasional kiss, certainly. A few hands slipping under the waistband of her pants, but nothing more. Then, around the time she began her PhD, she’d started fucking again. Looking for the rush she’d felt as a teenager, the illicit coital glow. But now she couldn’t look at them when they came: she squeezed her eyes tightly shut when their breath quickened to a pant, terrified of the masks their faces became at the point of orgasm, unrestrained and beastly. She knew that she didn’t have a bad reputation at the Course yet. Her delicacy, the austere beauty of her features protected her against that, for the moment. But David was aware. She could feel him watching her, could sense the silent hum of his antennae tuned towards her.
Lee eased herself slowly out of bed and stood naked in the soft blue glow of the morning. She was still wearing her earrings: lapis in the left ear, turquoise in the right. The hair between her legs was the colour of damp sand. The floorboards were ancient beneath her bare feet; she could feel the circling grain of the wood through her soles. She lifted Darwin to the floor and stepped quietly over to her desk in the corner of the room. It was 5 a.m. She was careful not to knock the pile of books that sat on the desk: reading for her PhD that she had been putting off for weeks. A new life of Julian of Norwich and a collection of essays on Anglo-Saxon literature that she had ordered from a Midwestern university press. She picked up her camera and checked the lens, adjusting the settings for the dim light. Then, moving silently, she approached the bed, lifted the duvet, and took photographs of Philip.
His cock looked like a baby mouse. Not that it was small. It was not large but she had seen smaller. It was the colour that did it, the vulnerability, the sense of something not yet ready to see the world. It was curled back on itself, hiding beneath the tightly wound coils of hair that tapered in a line up to his belly button. His toenails were too long. She remembered that he had scratched her legs with them when they first went to bed. He had a tattoo on one shoulder – a Chinese symbol that looked like an insect. She could see how the ridged pigment protruded from the skin; she had to fight to stop herself touching it. Checking the pictures on her camera’s monitor, she judged that she had taken enough, and replaced the camera on the cluttered desk. She picked up her clothes from the floor and, followed by Darwin, made her way through to the sitting room to dress.
Only one boy had surprised her in the act of photographing him, six months earlier. He was a softly spoken black boy from her critical theory seminar group called Paul. She had dropped the camera when he opened his eyes, those dark brown eyes that reminded her of Darwin. His nipples were the most extraordinary violet colour. It was the nipples that had made her linger too long over him, trying to get a shot that did them justice. Even in her morning-after guilt she recognised that Paul was very beautiful. They had stared at each other for several moments before Lee backed away, picking up the camera and holding it in front of her as if it might hide her nakedness and shame.
‘Why are you doing that?’ He had still been half-asleep. She thought later that she might have been able to pretend that he was dreaming, but she liked Paul, and had tried to explain.
‘I’m sorry. You scared me. It’s . . . It’s just that it helps me try to understand why I’m doing it, when I can see it in the third person.’ She looked down at the camera and saw that her hands were tremblin
g. Paul lifted himself up and rested his head on his palm, his elbow pressing into the pillow.
‘Was I that bad?’
‘No, it isn’t that. But I’m a Christian. I’m supposed to believe in not having sex before marriage. But I keep doing this.’ She went over to the desk and drew out a large red photograph album. She held it out to Paul and he spent some minutes flicking through it. Twenty-five men in all. Each of them had his own page with his name and the date inscribed in Lee’s neat, looping handwriting. The first was her supervisor at university, an older man, thickset with wispy grey hair, the date just over two years earlier. Paul handed it back to her with a raised eyebrow.
‘So you want to remember the boys you fuck? I can understand that. I’d like a photograph of you, too. Something to carry around and look at when I’m down. Remind me I’d done it with a girl like you.’
‘No, that’s not it. I mean, maybe a little bit. I just feel like I need to keep a record of this, that’s all. This time in my life. I tried to stop it when I first went to church. Had this bizarre period of celibacy. But it didn’t work. I just couldn’t do it.’
What she didn’t admit to Paul, barely even expressed to herself, was that she needed the guilt. She had been the first of them to attend the Course. She went with friends from school one Wednesday night in the summer holidays before she started university. An unassuming church sat on a hill above the harbour in her home town. One of her childhood friends was the daughter of the vicar and Lee and a few others had gone that evening out of solidarity. She sat in the hall of the church and listened to the gentle words of the priest. When they were asked to pray Lee could hear the sea in the distance booming against the breakwaters along the front. She thought of all the boys, all the ugly drunken writhing, all the cheating and the guilt and suddenly she found herself sobbing.
