Tom was away more often. It suited them. When they were together they were content and when they were apart they were busy. They did intend to make another visit to Grand-Moulin the following summer, but after her recital at the Royal Albert Hall, Marie-France was in demand and was whisked off to Prague, Glyndebourne, Salzburg, Edinburgh. She was booked for the opening night of the Proms in July. Tom had arranged his diary so that he could return from Sri Lanka and planned to meet Kamarovsky so that they could attend the concert together.
Tom paused and took a long breath. His eyes were cloudy. 'You know, I wonder sometimes if we ever get to know another person, I mean really know them.'
He glanced out from the carriage window. It was snowing, large flakes, the sort that settle, and I remembered that morning when we were walking to the garage and I'd asked him his deepest desire. He had grown serious: that you're for real, Katie, he'd said. That I'm not going to wake up all of a sudden and, poof, you're someone different.
The train was slowing into Waterloo. The girl down the carriage had removed her headphones and I watched her rub the steam from inside the window to look out. I turned back to Tom. He buttoned his coat, as if to delay the end of his story, to think about what he was going to say.
'My work was unpredictable. I was more involved back then in raising funds than caring for the kids,' he continued. 'I had to fly back to London unexpectedly. I called and sent a text, but Marie-France isn't a telephone person. She turns them off when she's practising and forgets to turn them back on again. I thought I'd surprise her.'
He bought flowers at the stall outside Putney Station. He strolled along the river, the light golden in the trees. There are moments in July, on sunny days, when London becomes the most beautiful city in the world. The house was silent. The downstairs neighbours were away. He heard the sound of laughter as he opened the door and it stopped as he walked along the passage to the bedroom.
He paused. The lights of Waterloo were grey like mist.
'They were in bed together,' he said, and I knew he was going to say that. I had been holding my breath.
'Kamarovsky,' I gasped, and he shook his head.
'No, no. She was with Nicolas. She was in bed with her brother.'
'That's...' That's what? I had run out of words.
'I shut the door. I wasn't sure what to do, what to say. I mean, what do you say?' He was shaking his head. 'She came out in a dressing gown a few moments later but in those few moments, something had gone, broken. It was over.'
'They were...' again my words ran out but he knew what I wanted to ask.
'She said no, it wasn't what I thought. When I was away, Nicolas got the train from Paris. He lived in a room Kamarovsky paid for and told everyone he was writing a book. Her brother needed her. They were linked by the past, by death, by the life at Grand-Moulin, by something...existential.'
'What does that mean?'
'I don't even know. Nicolas had always climbed into his mother's bed. Marie-France allowed him to continue. It was what he needed, to feel her next to him. She had been born with the gifts, the beauty, the thing you need to get through it all. It was fucked up...'
'I'm sorry.'
It's what English people say when we don't know what to say. When someone bumps into you, you turn and say sorry. If you don't understand something you say sorry. I didn't understand, not really, and I was sorry.
'When I said I didn't have anywhere to go on New Year's Eve, it was true. I moved my stuff into my folks' place next day. I never saw her again.'
'When was it?'
'July, last summer.'
'You kept the photograph.'
'It's gone now. In every way.'
I wasn't sure what he meant. The train jerked to a halt. Doors slammed. The cold moved like an ice drift along the platform.
The girl with the headphones was just ahead of us. She tripped and fell, landing on her knees. Tom rushed forward to help her and she looked disappointed when she realized he was with me.
We took a taxi. The snow fell and kept falling, coating the pavements, the roofs, the parked cars. It sat in white bonnets on the trees and blew like white butterflies against the windscreen. The sky was black and a single star glowed on the horizon.
12
Thirteen Days
I felt trapped inside my clothes. I shed my coat and jacket, long scarf, woolly hat. Night had come. Snow coated the windows making it feel as if we were in a tent on an ice drift cut off from the rest of the world, from the tolling bells of the past. The Victorian lamp created a warm glow and the smoking man still waited, the same ironic look on his thin face.
'Are you rushing off?' I asked him, and he shook his head.
'No, Katie, I'm not rushing anywhere.' He took a step closer. 'It's the past. Dead and buried. You wanted to know. I wanted to tell you.'
'Yes, thank you.' I wasn't sure what to say. 'Thank you,' I said again.
'For what?'
'I don't know. For taking me to see your sister.'
'I probably shouldn't have. She can be so over the top.'
'No, not at all. It was nice. The children are lovely.'
'They're great.'
'I wanted to eat Hugh, he's like chocolate.'
'He's quite something.'
We were saying those things people say when they don't know what to say. There was a cloud in the air, a small cloud, almost invisible. He hung his coat on the back of a chair. I sat and removed my boots. My toes were cold.
'Did you ask Tamsin to mention Marie-France?'
'No,' he replied. 'But it's just the sort of thing she would do.'
'She's very…protective.'
'That's one way of putting it.'
I stood. It was still snowing. 'I'm going to take a shower.'
I left him in the living room studying my corkboard and wondered if I had pinned up anything too personal or frivolous or stupid? And what did it matter? We dream of letting go, of being, not thinking, but remain attached to our chains. I dumped my clothes on the wicker basket and stood below the jets of water, turning the hot tap higher. My head throbbed. My finger hurt. My stomach burned. Red wine at lunch. It always does that. My thoughts whirled like cars at a funfair ride, a glimpse of the future. Time's flow was out of sync. I saw film clips from a long July night, a cello pulsing on the soundtrack, slender legs around the instrument's thorax, a haze of yellow hair, nude bathing in the moonlight.
Phantoms of steam escaped as the shower door opened and he stepped inside like the genie from the lamp. I was glad he'd come, like this. He looked into my eyes and we kissed. We kissed and we kissed. His hands curled around my body, gathering me in, and I thought not only this moment is present, the past is always present. The way he kissed my neck and shoulders is an echo of the way he kissed her shoulders. Life is a continuum, a landscape we cross with the future ahead and the past a breath away behind. The water beat down, scalding like needles, and I clung to his neck like a dancer in a night club. His cock slid across my tummy and I imagined a bow crossing cello strings. We are prisoners of our thoughts. He clutched my shoulder blades.
'They are like wings,' he said.
'You didn't know I was an angel?'
'I had my suspicions.'
'We have strict orders to keep it secret.'
He zipped his lips with his index finger and I turned off the tap.
We dried.
'Give me a few minutes,' I said.
I went through to the bedroom, glanced at myself in the long mirror and saw a girl with green eyes and an expression I had never seen before, neither happy nor sad, not blank, not expressive. It was the expression you might have staring at an equation, a stray date that means something, but you can't work out what, and it probably doesn't matter. I crossed the room. I opened the drawer containing the mask and a memory dropped like a leaf into my head, wearing it at Pink, feeling more confident now that I knew I was going up to Cambridge, now that Mr Devlin had removed the unnecessary; the clutter
. You always remember your first, it's true, but I no longer thought of him as the tempter, the seducer, but a messenger summoned from my own psyche, the key to a cache of infinite possibilities.
I held the mask out and the vacant eyes stared back. Naked I felt as if my soul was exposed, my thoughts could be read. In the mask I felt protected. I eased the elastic strap over my head, adjusted the fascia to my cheekbones and glanced again at the mirror. The acid in my tummy had gone. Masked I am me. Masked, I can do anything. Be anything. I had worn the mask for him before, but it was different now. Something had changed, as a dress changes with a different pair of shoes. I coiled my left hand into the Louis Vuitton velvet handcuffs then, behind my back, slid my wrist into the velvet casing and closed the snap. My shoulders straightened, my spine bowed in an inward curve, and the dead cells in my head drifted from my parted lips like funeral ash.
That New Year's morning when he left my bed, I fell into a restless sleep and saw in a dream an imaginary future with Tom and pale blonde children and a white horse that may have been a unicorn, his sister's life, or someone else's life. The dream came back into my mind and it seemed now, as I stood masked and cuffed before the mirror, that it wasn't only someone else's life, it was someone else's dream. The story I was writing was no longer my story. It was her story.
The door opened. I watched the mirror's reflection and remained with my back turned as he approached through the thin light. He ran his palms down my arms, describing the narrow v to my bound wrists. He kissed the nodule at the top of my spine below the tattoo and stroked my rib cage that concealed a red bird that fluffed up its wings. My heart beat faster.
'You are beautiful, Katie,' he said, and turned me towards him, turning away the past like a thief at the door.
Time had been in stasis.
It races now. Like clouds before the wind.
Our lips touch. He holds my hair away from my face, above my head. He cups my cheeks. His hands are potter's hands that move me, warm me, shape me, turn me towards the bed and down on my tummy. I wriggle to my knees and bury my head in the pillows, my legs open in an arch ready to receive his tongue that glides into the wet delta of my sex as a bird homes to a nest. He reached the dome of my clitoris, his touch lighting a million stars. My stomach muscles tense and a spasm of unimaginable pleasure passes through my body to my eyes that loosen tears beneath the mask and run unseen down my cheeks.
He takes a grip on my thighs, his palms with fingers spread pulling me back, his cheeks buffering against the cheeks of my bottom. The motion is rhythmic, musical, each pulse sweeping me higher like a kite free in the sky. I give everything, all I can find in my shallow being bred from a shallow life conjuring words. I understand the psychology and doubts and shortcomings of my characters. I know why they do things, what they are striving for. I create their problems as I create my own. I have on the edge of my perceptions that Black Dwarf feeling that nothing means anything, that I am trapped in an eternal search for something that doesn't exist.
It is January, the time for new beginnings. I feel on the verge of a resolution, a turning of the page, a time to metamorphose, and be someone else. I am swimming under water. Contractions ripple through me in delectable tremors tinted by an odd sort of irony, a contradiction. My half-hidden face is pressed into the bed, my hands locked in velvet cuffs. I am for a moment floating, suspended, all feeling, all sensation, and my orgasm comes in a seismic roar that makes me weep.
I roll over. He pulls the mask back from my eyes and licks the tears from my cheeks.
'You're crying.'
'You know I always cry when I'm happy.'
'Then I am happy you are crying.'
He drops the mask on the floor, rolls me on my side and releases the catches on the handcuffs.
'You don't need these now.'
He stares into my eyes and I wonder who it is that he sees. He draws closer. His cock slides up inside my cleft and it seems at that moment as if I am her and she is me and we are one, my twin, my avatar, my nightmare. He comes quickly, warmly. We lay there panting and I feel as if I am waking from that dream with the white horse that may be a unicorn, that the future containing the creature, whatever insight or symbol it represents, contains him, too, Tom and me, and perhaps I am the white horse with spreading wings.
*
We went out, stamping through the cold night like two figures in a snow dome. Our boots crunched. Our breath froze. A bus grated by, ghostly faces hidden behind misted windows, and I wondered who those people were, where they were going. So many people, so many lives. I remembered after grandpa's funeral going to his study filled with books and bibelots that had meant so much to him and now meant nothing at all. I took his old hardback Roget's Thesaurus to remember him by but never use it. It's quicker on the net and words like people go out of date and die.
We chose the Turkish restaurant. I picked at some cheese, black olives, sipped a glass of white wine I didn't want. The light was yellow. Four men in the window seat sucked on a shisha that bubbled like indigestion, smoke curling over the low ceiling. Tom ate hungrily and drank beer, his knee bobbing below the table, a bundle of revved up energy. Jangly music. Candles in red glass holders. A vinyl tablecloth. He tells me about a boy of twelve who had lost his entire family in the war, mother, father, siblings, cousins. The boy, his name was Ghanan, never uttered a word for two years and the first time he did speak he spoke in English. 'Thank you, Doctor Tom,' he said. 'I will become a doctor. Like you.'
He called for another beer.
'All the time he wasn't talking, he was listening. We can learn so much if we just remain quiet.'
I looked back into his restless eyes and remained quiet. On the wall next to him was a poster with a picture of the Blue Mosque. He drank his beer, holding the neck of the bottle. We had known each other a few days and it seemed as if we knew everything about each other and nothing about each other, that no one ever really knows anyone else. He reached for my hand.
'You okay?'
'Perfectly.'
'You seem different,' he said.
'Different from what, from when?'
'More…thoughtful.'
'You said this morning, God, it seems like a hundred years ago, you said you didn't want to turn around suddenly and find I was someone else. You said you didn't like moody girls.'
'I don't.'
'I'm a moody girl…'
'No you're not…'
'Yes I am. I was sad on the train. Now I'm happy. My moods change. They change in a second. When I see someone begging in the street it makes me feel instantly upset and confused…it makes me depressed for the rest of the day.'
'That's a lot of reactions?'
'I am upset because people are forced to beg in the streets and we are such a rich country. This isn't Sri Lanka. I am angry with myself because I always have the same set of thoughts: I should give this person money, £5 one way or another makes no difference to me. And, at the same time, I'm thinking: he's probably a heroin addict and he'll just get another fix, or buy a can of beer. I should give my £5 to the Salvation Army. The whole cycle is repetitive. It's boring. It's confusing. We want to do the right thing, but what is the right thing?'
'Katie, most decent people think like that, it's normal.'
'That's good. The last thing I want to think is that I'm special.'
'You are special.'
'I am not Marie-France.'
He sat back in his seat. 'She's not special, Katie.' He paused. 'No one is.'
We were quiet for a moment. He reached for the basket of pita. I thought about Marie-France playing the cello at the Royal Albert Hall, her brother creeping to her mother's room, to her room, the mystery of incest, the ultimate transgression, if that's what it was. I watched him scoop up the last of the humus. He looked back across the table.
'Why the mask?' he asked.
'I like it.'
'Me, too.'
'Why?'
'I'm not sure…you seem more r
elaxed, freer, I suppose,' he said.
'You don't wear a mask to disguise yourself but to show who you really are. In the mask I am me, Tom, without it I am moody and don't always know who I am.'
'Well, whoever you are, I think you're amazing.'
'I'm in my amazing mood. It could change at any second.'
'I wish I'd never said that, about, you know, moody girls,' he said and there was a touch of laughter in his voice. 'It's not easy meeting someone new and trying to find out who they are.'
'Tell me about it.'
He swigged his beer. 'You're the writer.'
'You're the doctor.'
'I fix broken bodies. Heads are your department.'
I glanced up at the Blue Mosque and he followed my gaze. 'When we leave Troy, we should go to Istanbul,' I said. 'I have a friend there who paints murals.'
'I can't wait.'
'Let's go home,' I said and he waved his hand for the bill.
There is nothing like making love after you have made love. I have said this before. It is the nature of our minds to keep coming back to those truths that guide us. We carry in our heads readymade sentences and phrases like snatches of music, jingles that repeat themselves. When you make love after you have made love there is no urgency. It's like the last swim before sunset when the water is warmest and your skin prickles with salt and sun.
I woke with the morning light and listened to his breathing. It was slow, regular, untroubled. His eyelashes were long and thick. I could see the rapid eye movement behind his closed lids and judged by the faint smile on his lips that he was dreaming about something without myths and monsters. He was leaving in thirteen days and I was greedy to have him with me and inside me every one of those days.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 15
