by David Szalay
So they were alone in the warm studio, him and Felicity, a man and a woman, and it was late at night. And it was her idea to do the artistic shots. She was the one who said, as she stepped out of one set of transparent panties and into another, ‘When we’ve finished these, I want to do a few arty ones for my portfolio. Is that okay?’ And what was he gonna say? No, it’s not okay? I don’t think that’s a very sensible idea? Listen, this was his job. He and Felicity were working together. A household name on the UK high street was paying him for those shots. Those shots were paying the mortgage. (Though they were just test shots. Felicity and the other models were just on try-out. Only one of them would feature in the pictures which would be on the side of every bus in the country next year. And it’s possible that some of them, Felicity included, mistakenly thought that Fraser would have some say in deciding which of them it would be.)
They had just started the artistic shots—i.e. the nudes—i.e. he was in an isolated studio late at night with a naked underwear model—and she was making various pouts and swoony faces at the lens, and he was sort of squatting there over her, almost sitting on her legs, near enough to feel the warmth of her peachy skin, and telling her how sexy she looked, and how hot she was making him feel… No, there is no such thing as a purely professional situation.
When she started to undo his trousers he said, ‘Oh no,’ as if something terrible had happened. ‘No,’ he said, frowning tragically as she lowered the zip. ‘No…’ He was pleading with her, and she ignored him.
An hour later he drove her home.
And she invited him in.
And he sat at the wheel with a look of terrible pain on his face. Why did it have to happen when she was out of town? Why did this have to happen when she was in Madrid, for Chrissakes?
Well, he went in. And he has suffered for it ever since. Even when he was living with Felicity last summer, he was suffering. (And she threw him out as soon as she realised he wouldn’t be useful to her professionally, that was the sort of person she was.) Yes, he has suffered for it, and he needed to suffer. That’s the way he sees it now. To make himself worthy of her again, he needed to suffer. He needed to spend a year in purgatory. And now he had.
The VW Golf parked in the street out front was extremely old. It had the fully depreciated feel of its two hundred thousand miles, a semi-organic hothouse smell. Some sort of shy plant life seamed the window-seals. The top of the steering wheel and the head of the stick-shift looked like they had mange. He snapped his seatbelt on and started the engine—he had had some work done on it and it fired first time.
*
Fraser was late. From the living-room window, she saw him park a scrofulous Volkswagen Golf, silver, liver-spotted with rust, in front of the house. Instead of trying the doorbell, he took out his phone.
‘Hello?’ she said neutrally.
‘Hi, it’s me. I’m outside.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
She was still watching him as he produced his pack of Silk Cut and lit one. And he still didn’t look like a proper smoker; the cigarette still looked silly in his ursine hand. It had been his idea to spend a weekend together, somewhere out of London. ‘Why don’t we, uh… Why don’t we see how things stand?’ he had said. (Whatever that meant.) There was a long silence. Then she said she would think about it. She said it flippantly, without meaning it. It took her two days to see what some part of her had known all along—she would do it. It was the thing in the whole world that she most wanted to do. There was something hopeless about that. And also, she thought, staring sleeplessly out at the lobby the next morning, something uniquely hopeful.
She seemed tetchy as she slammed the front door and descended the four asphalted steps to the street with the handle of a shabby sports holdall in her fists. Smiling, he stepped forward and took it. ‘New car?’ she said.
‘Newish.’ He stowed the holdall. ‘I’ve had it six months or so. I mean, it’s not new new, of course.’
‘You’re smoking again.’
‘ ’Fraid so. Want one?’
She shook her head.
He took off his leather jacket and settled in at the wheel with enthusiasm. He seemed very pleased with himself as he turned the key.
The Golf was indeed not new new. He was talking about some work he had had done to the engine. (He knew about these things. She liked that about him. In Senegal, at Zebra Bar, he had been the unofficial onsite mechanic, spending most mornings hidden under the latest jalopy to limp into the stockade, helping hapless travellers, homme de la situation…)
The traffic was fairly light, and she did not say much as they negotiated their way out of London—Swiss Cottage, Finchley, signs for ‘the North’. She just sat strapped into the tattered passenger seat, flicking looks his way every now and then. Sometimes she would ask a simple question, and he would answer at length. For instance, ‘What sort of work are you doing at the moment?’ (A question that had its own particular intensity.)
‘Oh, this and that…’ It was mostly parties these days, he said. He would show up in his old leather jacket and jeans and spend several underdressed hours wandering around with a Nikon D70 shelved on his paunch, looking faintly seedy as he snuck canapés into his mouth and asked trios and quartets of party-goers to smile…
She was experiencing his presence as something pungently strange. It was true that they had spoken several times on the phone. Long meandering talks, mostly late at night. He would phone at eleven, midnight—she liked that. She liked the intimacy of it. She liked lying in bed, listening to his voice.
‘I miss you, Katie,’ he had said one night.
To that, she said nothing for a long time. She stared at the wicker fan.
So they had spoken a lot on the phone. To be sitting there next to him as they zoomed north, however, was a very different proposition. (He was pushing the Golf hard up the M1, squinting out intently at the motorway.) His eyes, his long jutting jaw, his hands holding the mangy wheel, his substantial forearms, his jeans—it was a very different proposition from the telephonic spirit she had been tentatively engaging with for the past week. For one thing, the telephonic spirit had no smell. His smell. His own smell, and the smell of the Davidoff scent he always used.
She had spent the night with James on Tuesday, and she had worried that that might interfere with how she felt, that it might interfere with her perception of how she felt. (An interesting idea, when she thought about it—her perception of how she felt. What was the difference between her perception of how she felt, and how she did feel? In what sense did her feelings exist when she wasn’t perceiving them—when she wasn’t feeling them?) It was not something she had planned, that last night with James. Toby had invited them for a drink, and somehow they had ended up sleeping together, and she had worried that she would find it harder to know what she felt about Fraser—and that was why she was there, on the M1 near Luton, torpedoing through a heavy squall, to work out what she felt about Fraser—so soon after spending the night with someone else.
She need not have worried. James was not in her mind at all as they tore north, water scrambling to the edges of the windscreen and peeling from the windows in long, nervous trails. What was in her mind was something else. The trouble was, this entire escapade was predicated on the idea that she had forgiven Fraser for that. The nocturnal talks might have misled her here. Somehow they seemed to have taken place in a parallel world, a world in which it had simply not happened. A world in which she had never phoned him from Madrid.
‘Where are you?’ she says, as soon as he answers.
‘I’m at home,’ he says.
‘Why haven’t you been answering the phone?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been phoning you all morning. You haven’t been answering the phone.’
‘I didn’t hear it.’
‘I’ve been phoning you all morning…’
‘I wa
s out.’
‘Where?’
‘The shops. Shopping…’
‘When? What time?’
‘Uh… I’m not sure. Why? What is it?’
‘Listen. You’re at home, yeah?’
‘Yeah…’
‘I’m going to call you on the landline. Okay?’ Silence. ‘Okay?’
‘I’m not at home.’
She is in Madrid—a ‘training week’—staying at her employer’s Madrid hotel. It is supposed to be a sort of prize as well as training, and there is all sorts of free pampering on offer. Now she feels light-headed and shuts her eyes. ‘You’re not at home?’ she says, without emotion.
‘No.’
‘Where are you?’ Another simple, unemotional question.
‘I’m at Nick’s place.’
‘Why are you at Nick’s place?’
‘We were out late,’ he says. ‘So I just slept on the sofa.’
‘Why did you lie to me then?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know. I’m sorry. It was stupid.’
‘Does Nick have a landline number?’ she says.
‘I guess.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘Well… will you ask him?’
He hesitates. ‘Are you serious?’ When she says nothing, he sighs. ‘Okay.’
He is off the line for a minute, then he tells her the number, and she writes it down, hangs up on him, and dials it.
He picks up immediately. ‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Okay? Satisfied now?’
‘Why did you lie to me?’ she says, suddenly distraught. ‘Why did you do that? Don’t you understand that I want to trust you? Don’t you see that if you lie to me that’s just not going to be possible?’
‘I’m sorry. It was stupid. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t lie to me! Just don’t!’
‘It was stupid. I’m sorry.’
‘Where are you?’
There is a momentary silence. ‘I’m at Nick’s.’
She thinks of asking to speak to Nick. Then she says, ‘I’ll be home tomorrow night.’
She had not asked for the number in order to prove, by phoning him on it from Madrid, that he was at Nick’s. It proved no such thing, though he seemed to think she thought it did. He was quite stupid sometimes. (She had always worried—it was one of the things she worried about—that he just wasn’t intelligent enough for her.) Perhaps he wasn’t so stupid, though. Perhaps, in his instinctive way, he understood that she did not want to know the truth. That she probably wouldn’t phone the number because she did not want to know that it was not Nick’s number. Which she didn’t. And since she didn’t, why do it? Why phone it?
‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice. ‘Hello?’ the woman says again. ‘Who is this?’
‘Is Nick there? Please.’
‘Nick?’ It is obvious from the way she says it that there is no Nick there, ever. And then she says, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number.’
She wrote it all down. In writing, Fraser was obviously a shit. And she, poor little thing, still loved him. What was so terrible was that she still loved him. She did not want to throw him out. It was something she had to force herself to do, in the knowledge that she should, like putting her fingers down her throat. And when she did, it was he who shed most of the tears.
What was so terrible was that she still loved him. She did not want to. She wanted to love someone else, and within a few weeks she tried. She was just about to tell him, this prospective lover, that she didn’t fancy him at all, that she had no interest in him whatsoever, when he was kissing her. She slept with him that very night. He was sweet, intelligent, had a BMW. Within two weeks it was a sad failure—and then there was someone else fighting his little trickle of tears, his wobbly mouth, and only just losing. There was someone else earnestly wanting to know what everyone always wants to know.
Why?
*
They stopped to fill up and have something to eat at a service station somewhere near the heart of England. The sky was mild. The sky was neutral. Neutral like the system of slip roads and parking spaces, like the sharp white arrows stencilled on the tarmac, like the lines of stationary HGVs, the surrounding flat land, the inveterate soughing of the motorway. A place of horizontals. A non-place. Fraser was paying for the petrol.
While they ate—toasted paninis that looked like they had been flattened by a truck tyre—he talked about various people she half-knew, friends of his. Filling her in on what they were up to. There was something fairly lugubrious about this. Probably it was the thorough, systematic way he was working through them. He was talking about Ed O’Keefe, the veteran pap who was also well known in the soft-focus world of ‘erotica’, and some tax difficulties he was having with the Inland Revenue—or was it the VAT man?—when she interrupted him with what immediately seemed like obvious hostility. ‘Should I drive for a while?’ she said.
He stopped speaking. He looked hurt.
‘Do you want me to drive for a while?’ she said.
‘If you want.’
They walked across the tarmac in silence and took their seats in the old Golf’s muffling interior, and she drove them through Yorkshire, as neutral Midlands afternoon sloped into northern evening. Until they stopped, Fraser had done most of the talking, and now that he had shut up they travelled predominantly in silence. It was to be expected, she thought—noticeably more philosophical now that she was occupied with wheel and pedals—that it would be like this. It would have been naïve to expect anything else. Except that she did seem to have expected something else—she looked quickly over her shoulder as she moved out to overtake—which presumably made her naïve… What had she expected? Just something… Something less painful. It was painful, that was the thing. Though the pain was low-level, it had been there since the morning, and she just wasn’t used to it any more. Since the end of last year, she seemed to have had the manage of it. She had filled up her time. She had left none of it vacant for pain to squat in, and in the process, she seemed to have forgotten the most obvious thing about pain—it was painful.
He was asleep now, in the passenger seat, with his head fallen and his hands in his lap. He had nodded off somewhere near Sheffield. He didn’t say anything for ten minutes, then there was a single short snore. Though her first instinct was to wake him, she did not. With him asleep, she was able to imagine, staring out at the motorway’s soothingly neutral space, that she was on her own, which had the effect of lessening the pain. When she did pick him up in her peripheral vision, though, it was stranger in a way to be there with him asleep than it was with him awake—with him just sleeping there, it was spookily as if the whole year of separation simply hadn’t happened.
She flicked on the headlights.
The traffic streamed north in slate-blue twilight. On the other side, the traffic streamed south. That would be them, she thought, in forty-eight hours…
Since this morning, he had been trying very hard to be light. Unfortunately he wasn’t light. He was heavy. It had been more and more obvious as the hours wore on. He just didn’t have the energy to keep up the jolly-jolly act. When she thought about it, it was not surprising that he seemed depressed. The facts were quite depressing. He was forty-eight and lived on his own in a studio flat, scraping a living from menial photographic work. He saw his daughters once a fortnight or less. Physically, he seemed to be losing it swiftly now—his hair, his shape, his je ne sais quoi… He still smoked. He had no savings. No prospects. She took her eyes off the surging motorway for a second and, suddenly feeling sorry for him—the feeling pierced her shockingly, made tears spring into her eyes—she placed her hand for a moment on his sleeping thigh.
A little while later he woke up.
‘Where are we?’ he said.
‘Nearly at Newcastle.’
‘Do you want me to drive
?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s okay.’ The driving was therapeutic, analgesic.
He moved in his seat. Yawned. Lit a Silk Cut. ‘Maybe we should have picked somewhere nearer London,’ he said, snapping open the ashtray.
‘Yeah, or taken a plane.’
He yawned again.
‘Anyway…’ she said. ‘It was your idea.’
*
The hotel was one of the most famous and expensive in Edinburgh. At about eight thirty—the last stretch, from Tyneside, had been surprisingly long—they strayed scruffily into the lobby with their sports holdalls. The lobby. A huge open fire. Stags’ heads.
‘I, uh… I got a reservation,’ Fraser said.
‘Okay, sir,’ said the man in the tartan tie. ‘What’s the nim?’
‘It’s uh… King.’
‘How much are you paying for this?’ she whispered frantically, while the tartan tie fussed with formalities.
Fraser shushed her with a hand on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it. To tell you the truth, I got a special deal. So don’t worry.’
A second tartan tie had been summoned and to this man—a Lithuanian—they handed their pitiful luggage.
‘Should we eat first,’ Fraser said, ‘or do you want to have a shower first?’
She said she wanted to eat first, and they went upstairs for a few minutes to freshen up. The Lithuanian, having shown them how to turn on the TV, waited for twenty seconds then withdrew untipped. She was feeling strange—she stood there in the air of plush expectancy (Fraser was in the wetroom) wishing she was at home. Or at least that home was nearby, escapable to at any time. She felt trapped there, standing next to the troubling question of the tartan-festooned four-poster. This, she thought, was the inevitable bed. This was what the weekend was all about. It was what they had been speeding up the M1 towards—he had had his foot to the floor the whole way, while he was driving—and what troubled her as she stood there was a sense that she might not want to sleep with him in it. She did not know whether she wanted to. Where once it was the most important, the most essential thing in her life, she felt, standing there, that she would need to think about it. She was just not sure what it would mean. What would it mean?
