by Luke Tredget
‘Let’s play a game,’ he shouts.
‘I thought we already were.’
‘Let’s play a different one.’
‘Okay,’ she says, taking off her heavy jumper, beneath which is only her bra. She feels a pang of regret for the pinchable loose flesh around her belly, no longer the effortless firm slab of her early twenties. He resumes walking, as does she, until they are facing each other across the width again, Geoff now beside her stale boots. He can probably smell them from where he stands, but so what? He is an 81, and she can do no wrong. She unbuttons her jeans and tugs the denim from her thighs and calves before stepping out of them. Her half-nakedness is enhanced by Geoff remaining fully clothed in his pale suit.
‘What shall we play for?’ she says, mirroring his hands-on-hips stance.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In your game. What’s at stake? What do we stand to win?’
‘Oh, everything,’ he says. ‘We stand to win everything.’
‘Both of us?’
‘Both of us.’
‘And what do we lose?’
‘The same. We stand to lose everything.’
She laughs at this exchange; it seems they are simultaneously talking nonsense and making code for the deepest meaning. Then she waits for him to walk again, before realising he isn’t going to. He stares fixedly, and she now understands the purpose of the game: it is all about her; it is her turn to move, he is just here to watch. If she doesn’t like her life, she can change it.
‘Okay,’ she says, emboldened by his gaze. ‘I’m game.’
Without hesitation she steps forwards, pushes off her toes and leaps into the air, stretching her body into a straight line that knifes into the cold waiting water, swallowing her whole.
*
It is almost midnight when she unlocks the front door; the flat is dark and silent. She leaves her boots on the mat and then tiptoes up the hardwood stairs. In the bathroom she compensates for her drunkenness by taking excessive care when brushing her teeth, washing her face, drinking a glass of water. She sniffs at her damp ponytail and tries to determine whether the smell of chlorine is actually there, or whether she can only smell it because she knows it should be there: impossible to say.
There’s no way of reaching the loft bedroom quietly, but somehow she climbs the ladder, flips the hatch and clambers onto the floorboards without waking Pete, who is fast asleep – his snores sound like gravel being crunched by slow steps. Still, she doesn’t want to risk turning a light on and, unable to find her vest and shorts in the dark, she strips naked and slips into bed. Pete’s breathing splutters as she lies down next to him; his lips smack together and he sighs through his nose. Anna holds her breath, willing him to remain asleep, but then his hand reaches for her beneath the duvet. His sleepy fingers land on her ribs and become alert, as if surprised to find bare skin. They scan down to her hip and then up to her chest, where they hesitate, as if pondering the meaning of her being naked. Then they begin kneading her right breast.
Anna lies completely still, her eyes closed.
He squeezes and pinches her nipple for a time. Then, perhaps reading her lack of resistance for compliance, his fingers trace across her belly and into her tangle of pubes, where they nestle for a moment, as if thinking. Then one finger hooks around and neatly fills the hole that, to Anna’s surprise, has become moist and swollen.
‘Huh,’ she gasps.
His finger moves in and out and the soft friction causes a kernel of energy to sprout within her groin. Instinctively, she tilts her pelvis upwards into the press of his palm and clenches her buttocks, causing the kernel to grow until it has an insistent will of its own. She pulls his hand away by the wrist and whispers: ‘Fuck me.’
An invisible rustling and shuffling takes place, as Pete removes his shorts and T-shirt with the haste of a sentry called to sudden action, after months of bored, redundant waiting. Then his full naked weight is upon her. His lips are warm and slack with sleep, his wet kiss tastes of toothpaste and something acidic, perhaps alcohol. He is already hard, and she opens her legs and after a fumbling alignment they fit together.
‘Mmmmph.’
‘Yes,’ she whispers, her lips grazing his ear. ‘Yes. Fuck. There. Shit. Yes.’
She repeats these words in random order and without meaning, only to give shape to the air being forced in and out of her. The duvet slips to the floor. Pete speeds up and the kernel in Anna’s groin grows with each thrust, gaining size and weight and heat. Anna’s talk is smothered by another kiss, and this time she recognises the tangy flavour on his tongue: wine. Pete has been drinking wine. This prompts an unwanted image of Pete sitting alone in the living room, waiting for her, and she is seized by guilt.
She forces her mouth from the kiss and turns her face on its side. Pete continues thrusting, he is almost there already, but for Anna it is over. The kernel and the lust have vanished, leaving only a catalogue of pleasureless sensations: liquid sloshing in her stomach, goosebumps spreading along her bare legs, the bed frame creaking beneath her, a chafing on her inside thigh … She is grateful for the dark, small mercy, so she can’t be seen grimacing as her mind flits between the lonely image of Pete on the sofa and its counterpoint, her chinking glasses with Geoff.
He kissed her twice. First, as they climbed the stairs from the Gymnasium back to ground level, having been interrupted by the caretaker, he pushed her against the wall and they kissed in a firm, closed-mouth way that reminded her of black-and-white films. Second, after more drinks at the Waldorf, they cowered from the resurgent rain beneath the awning of a closed jewellery shop. This time it was prolonged and elaborate, a series of kisses. She stepped onto the shop’s raised doorway to equalise their height, her arms around his neck.
‘See me on Thursday,’ he said, during a momentary break, a pause for breath.
She said nothing, just leaned her face back towards his.
‘Thursday,’ he said, breaking off again a few moments later, holding her at arm’s length. ‘We can go somewhere really special, have dinner …’ And we can fuck, was the third suggestion, unspoken. He smiled and they carried on kissing, while rain drummed against the awning.
Pete makes a noise, something between a groan and a grunt, that restores Anna to the present moment: she is being fucked. Vigorously and noisily fucked. Surprisingly, the kernel has returned to her groin. She thinks again of Geoff’s kiss and the kernel swells, pushes upwards to her abdomen.
‘Yes,’ she says, feeling she will make it after all. ‘Fuck. Shit. Yes. There. Yes!’
She thinks of Geoff’s tongue in her mouth, she thinks of his long fingers tucked into the arse-pocket of her jeans, and she thinks: Thursday.
‘Yes!’ she says, raising her legs and scissoring them behind Pete’s back. This is his cue, and he lowers himself to enter from a more oblique angle, finding her spot, his belly pressing against her pubic bone. The kernel is now a hot ball of energy that begins to split, the heat spilling outwards and spreading into her chest, her legs.
‘Now,’ she says, clamping herself to him.
He grunts, she gasps and the word Thursday resonates through her mind as the hot energy fills her legs, her arms, her head, and then her whole body is gripped by a heat that gathers into a red blaze and then dissipates in a slow series of shimmering waves.
Afterwards, they lie together beneath the retrieved duvet. Pete’s heavy arm is laid over her chest. He is clearly tired but seems to want to stay awake, to keep hold of the moment.
‘And you came?’ he says.
‘Yep. Uh-huh.’
‘But you’ve been drinking?’
‘Yes,’ she says, only now realising how rare this is. ‘Funny, huh? Who knows what controls these things?’
‘It’s probably all in your head,’ he says, shuffling closer to her.
‘That’s what Zahra thinks,’ she says and then, fearing this could prompt him to ask about her evening, she rushes to speak again. ‘I’ve g
ot to sleep, Pete. It’s gone twelve.’
‘It’s true. It’s tomorrow already. Tomorrow is Thursday.’
‘Yes,’ she says, hearing a breathy panic in her voice. She turns away from him and rearranges herself on the pillow, the duvet folded up around her head and transmitting the sound of her rapid, fluttery pulse. Pete takes his arm back and she listens to his breath become slow and raspy, as he sinks away from her into sleep. While she lies there, alone, her eyes wide open in the dark.
Wednesday
Anna scrolls up and down the article on her computer – ‘Sahina_v.6’ – and wonders if she has done enough for the day. It is 7.30 p.m., and the third floor is almost empty. While the newsroom downstairs will still be ticking away, with the night shift getting into their stride, the sports and sponsored content desks go to bed for the night – even the twenty-four-hour news screens shut off at 9 p.m., leaving just the big board projecting away through the night, refreshing its stats every ten seconds, to nobody.
Ingrid is still there though, typing away; as always she is sitting up straight with her face close to the screen, and Anna feels herself having adopted a similar posture these last few days, as opposed to her usual slumped imitation – it is like her and Ingrid are nose to nose in some stationary race. Anna decides to do one more comb through the document. The structure of the article has taken shape, the overarching logic and beats; she can see them beginning to grow distinct and sharp within the swamp of words. The article begins with a summary of Sahina’s supposedly cutthroat rise to the top of global architecture, rehashing most of the scary and ruthless stories Anna read about her in the other articles from Vogue and Time and Newsweek. Then she undermines this stereotype by zooming in to the moment she stepped from the dark hallway to Sahina’s office, showing this open-plan, idyllic space in which the young, fashionable and doting staff giggle and make kissing sounds at Sahina as they pass. The article follows this same pattern, zooming out to talk of her career from a familiar cool distance, mentioning her most famous buildings and the awards she’s won, before flicking to a jazzy section that seems to contradict this, such as her saying that young people shouldn’t be architects, or that she doesn’t want her buildings to be sophisticated. Anna has discarded all the mean bits – the stuff about the tasteless government officials and when she questioned Anna’s competence – because she’s decided that the main angle, the all-important scoop, will be to show that Sahina isn’t such a bitch after all.
All this is in place. What isn’t yet complete is the writing itself: sentences end without warning, run into each other and generally wouldn’t make sense to anyone but Anna. But this is nothing to worry about. For her, making the sentences cohere and flow is one of the final, brainless elements of writing – comparable to checking for typos – that happens once the real business of threading the ideas into a logical order has been taken care of.
‘Enough!’ says Ingrid, pulling her headphones out and pushing back from her desk. ‘You win.’ Anna watches her shut down her computer and pull her coat on, accompanied by the little sighs that have become her aural trademark since her boyfriend Sam left for his latest Amazon expedition, to spend six weeks in some tree to capture a few seconds of footage of poisonous frogs fucking or fighting.
‘I’m going to beat you in the morning,’ says Anna, and Ingrid just laughs and says that some things are sacred, before walking off.
Anna is alone. In fact, no. She spins her chair and sees that Stuart is still in, over at his desk, his back to her. It is weird for just the two of them to be here. Being the last two workers alone in the office has an inescapable sexual subtext, irrespective of the fact that they have zero sexual tension. It is unpleasant to think of this, but she cannot help it. There was that one time, well over a year ago, they passed each other on the stairs – him going down and her going up – and in the reflective glass of the landing she saw him turn his head and unmistakably check out her backside. Worse still, his eyes then clicked with hers in the glass, so he saw her seeing him, and then turned away rapidly, already flushing with embarrassment. For the next month it felt like he only spoke to her in person if it was absolutely necessary, didn’t come over to her desk once, emailed for everything, and she imagined him privately burning with shame.
At that moment an email pings onto her screen, from Jimmy in AV. Since it has ‘Sahina’ in the subject header she opens it, and then downloads a file of the best stills taken yesterday, when he went himself to Sahina’s office. There she is standing beside a plant. There she is standing beneath the ‘Never Stop Exploring’ mural. There she is stood outside the warehouse in the sunshine. All are taken on a wide lens, and Anna wonders if Jimmy was alarmed by Sahina’s skin as well, and was looking for a tactful means of avoiding a close-up. But even from a distance, Anna can still detect that sly aspect in Sahina’s eye, the live spark at the centre of the ruined face, and a shiver goes through her, remembering the feeling that she could see into her soul.
Anna looks over her shoulder and sees Stuart peering close to his screen, and supposes that he is clicking through the stills as well. In a moment he will stroll across the clearing and ask Anna which she prefers and, as an offhand aside how the copy is coming along. He might even ask to have a look, and she will have to assuage his concerns about the garbled syntax, absent grammar and the sentences that run off the edge of a cliff. She imagines his arse perched beside her on Ingrid’s desk, and the fact that it’s just the two of them in the whole big office, and with that she is saving her document and shutting down the computer, all of a sudden unable to leave quick enough.
It is almost 8 p.m., but the bus to Kilburn is still packed with homebound workers. Instead of her usual seat at the front of the top deck, she gets the first seat behind the stairwell, in front of the CCTV monitor that cycles through a dozen or so crackly images from cameras secreted in all corners of the bus. Anna can see herself in three of them – from the front, side and back – and she is interested by the sight of herself; it is like in clothes shops, when the double reflection in changing-room mirrors gives an unexpected insight into how the rest of the world sees her.
She supposes she looks ordinary enough – perhaps a handful of the guys would look twice, but otherwise she is entirely unremarkable, an extra, a face from the crowd. But what if they knew she worked for the website, and was writing an article on Sahina Bhutto? Would they be impressed if they knew? Most people seem to be professional and successful, and half of them probably have a credential or claim to fame that is equally impressive. The CCTV video switches again to the frontal view of her, and experimentally she overlays the idea of the Twitter meme instead: she imagines herself as a quirky social media star, the young woman who reunited a lost suitcase with its owner, four years later. This time the idea resonates – she can see herself stand apart from the crowd, talking proudly at dinner parties – and she takes her phone from her bag to check on her key stats. It is only an hour since she last checked, and already there are a handful of new followers; the total is now over three hundred. Today there have been several more suggestions and ideas, the most interesting being from someone called @bilboa_baggins, who says that his brother works for the Spanish airport authorities, and they keep a database of all flyers; if there really was a limited number of flights going between Heathrow and Mozambique in February 2013, then all their names should be on a spreadsheet at BAA HQ. He rounded off with an estimate that a weekly flight, using a Boeing 737, would mean there are just a few hundred possible candidates. A few hundred, she thinks. Just four days ago it was seven billion; now it is down to a few hundred, or less, considering it is a medium-sized but muscular man. She imagines how great it would be to find him, to actually find him, and how surprised everyone would be, and what Geoff said about giving the number of followers a push. Maybe she should take him up on the offer, if it really is legal, and everyone is doing it—
This thought is interrupted by her phone making the short buzz of a Kismet mes
sage. It is from Geoff 81, of course. It is uncanny how all the messages he has sent today have corresponded with her thinking about him, but then perhaps not that surprising, given how frequently, or constantly, he has loomed in her mind. She opens the message:
I’m going to take your silence as agreement. 6 p.m., London Bridge. The Tooley Street entrance, street level. Bring your laptop.
Below this are two other messages he has sent today, which she hasn’t answered. The first thanked her for last night, and for being such a good sport when the caretaker interrupted her swimming. The second, sent a few minutes later, told her to meet him at London Bridge, and that he would make up for the embarrassment of yesterday by taking her somewhere really special.
Anna wonders for the hundredth time today what ‘really special’ means, given his trick with Somerset House. Perhaps the country residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Lord Mayor, which Geoff somehow knows can be accessed by a key hidden in a plant pot. Or maybe an underground bunker somewhere in Kent, decked out for the military top brass and political leaders in the event of nuclear war. Most likely, she thinks, he will show her the pipe, or the place that he has managed to sluice it to, some theatre or gallery space where the entirety of the internet’s data can be seen surging across a giant screen. She goes to reply to the message and then realises that he isn’t asking her to. He knows she will be there. The number 81 is a proof that he knows what she thinks, that such messages aren’t necessary; it is almost a cord of communion that stretches from her to him, wherever he is …
She tries to shake herself free of this thought and looks out the window, only for the bus to stop beside the billboard for the Kismet Love Test. The glass is beaded with raindrops, and every few seconds one of these gains sufficient mass to slide smooth and straight down the glass, warping and smearing the bright billboard lights behind it, so it looks like the colour is bleeding out of the letters on the Kismet advert. She reminds herself that he can’t be an 81. It must be inflated, a Kismet miscalculation. They certainly do happen. During her twenty-minute lunch break today she searched online and found dozens of stories. As well as the high-profile case of the disgruntled Austrian who is demanding Kismet release his profile data, she found many similar stories, mainly on local news websites, of people complaining about crazy scores and mismatches. Each story concluded with a generic response from a Kismet spokesperson, saying they never claimed their scores were perfect, that mismatches were inevitable, but that, on the whole, the algorithm is the best means possible of determining someone’s compatibility.
