About Last Night

by Ruthie Knox

  “I was.”

  In order to avoid thinking about Nev, Cath put on a pair of gloves and picked up one of a pair of kilt hose. Knit in the traditional cream wool, the stocking was absurdly long and nearly as big around as her waist at the top. It must have been made for a very tall, very brawny Highlander. She wondered if the dolt had known that whoever knit him these socks loved his hairy kilted ass. No woman would make dressy kilt hose for a man she didn’t love. There were tens of thousands of stitches in the damn things.

  But even love had its variations. Had the artist spent the eternity of rounds counting all the ways she adored him, or had she resented the waste, knowing he’d only sweat in her masterpiece and wear through the heels in no time flat?

  God, even kilt hose depressed her.

  Judith gave her an inscrutable look. “I got a strange phone call this morning from Christopher.”

  “Oh?” She tried to sound as though she cared, but her voice had all the verve of a funeral director’s. She was going to have to get better at faking things if she planned to survive this breakup.

  “Richard Chamberlain called him at home last night and said he’d be making a hundred-thousand-pound donation to our exhibit. Any chance you had something to do with that?”

  She crushed the stocking in her hand, suddenly nauseated. Richard had called last night? But that was long after she’d left, long after he’d learned who she really was. Why would he do that?

  Maybe he’d done it out of duty. He’d felt honor-bound to make the donation despite his disappointment in her, so he’d gotten it over with as quickly as possible. The thought upset her so much, a helpless, mewling cry escaped her throat, and she covered her mouth with her hand, breathing in the smell of musty wool.

  “You can’t take the money,” she said through the stocking. “I’m sorry, but it’s all a big mistake.”

  Judith gave her a long look, then resumed peering at a red patch of darning on the toe of an undistinguished man’s work sock. Someone had embroidered a tiny, perfect owl onto it. Another I love you rendered in stitches and string.

  “The money is a done deal,” Judith said. “I would be congratulating you, only you look like you’re about ten seconds from offing yourself.” She frowned deeper and mumbled, “Maybe you should tell me what happened.”

  “No.”

  “Fine.”

  They played with socks, pretending absorption.

  She’d spent six hours yesterday on buses and trains, aimlessly traversing the countryside north of London, trying to wipe Nev’s haunted expression from her mind.

  He’d left seven messages on her phone before she turned it off. She hadn’t listened to any of them. She was tempted to throw the phone away in order to eliminate the possibility.

  “We broke up.”

  Judith scratched behind her ear and said nothing. They were deeply inept at this, both of them. Sharing information with emotional freight was well beyond the bounds of their limited friendship.

  “It was for the best,” she added.

  Judith snorted.

  “The whole thing was a mistake.” She wondered who she was trying to convince.

  Her boss walked around to her side of the table, and for an awful instant Cath thought Judith might try to hug her. Instead, she gently extricated the stocking from Cath’s strangling grip, laid it flat on the table, and smoothed out the wrinkles Cath had made in the fabric. “It didn’t look like a mistake,” she said.

  “Yeah, well. Looks can be deceiving.” She thought of how he’d seemed to her before she knew him, cold and polished as a marble statue at the train station. How he really was when they were alone. Hot and messy. Intense and conflicted. Vulnerable and real.

  Judith said nothing. She began pairing the socks and placing them in piles.

  “We can’t take the money,” Cath told her. “I couldn’t stand it.”

  “We need the money. Unless you committed a crime to get Chamberlain to promise that donation, we’re accepting it.”

  “I’ll quit.” She said it quietly, but she meant it, and Judith must have heard the conviction in her voice, because she stopped fussing with the socks and stared.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I absolutely would.”

  “You’d never find another job. You’ve been killing yourself for months to turn this crap job I gave you into a career. You’re almost there. Why would you sabotage that over a donation?”

  “I won’t if you don’t make me. I’m going to get the money. I’m just not going to get it from Richard. I have a plan.”

  Judith folded her arms over her chest. “Let’s hear it.”

  So Cath told her. She’d worked it out around dawn—what she needed to do to bring in the stream of visitors required to get their catalog into print. It would involve writing some new copy, and they’d have to tweak the displays a little, but mostly it would be a matter of putting herself out in the public eye and using the only currency she’d ever been any good with: sex. Only this time, she’d be smart about it. She’d channel Amanda’s showmanship and Judith’s ruthlessness, and she’d do it in the service of something she really believed in.

  “It will work,” she said finally, still unsure whether Judith’s lack of expression was a good sign or a bad one.

  “It might. It’s both our asses on the line if it doesn’t.”

  “Yeah.” She hadn’t thought of that. But she could do this. She was smart enough, savvy enough to pull it off. Stupid at love, but competent in her work. The work would save her. She needed it if she was going to keep herself from flailing around in pain. She needed to prove to herself that she could do something right.

  “I’ll talk to Christopher this morning. If he approves it, you can give it a shot.”

  Christopher would approve it. He’d been after them to sex up the exhibit from the beginning.

  “I won’t disappoint you.” She grabbed Judith’s arm on an impulse and found that her skin was as warm as anyone’s. Why that surprised her, Cath couldn’t say. Maybe this was what it was like to lose your mind. You still felt perfectly lucid, but you had crazy-person thoughts and a body as twitchy as a rabid raccoon’s.

  Judith gave her hand a pat. “You never have.”

  “It’s the wrong color. This wall is meant to be Honeyed Almond. It’s the far one you were to paint with the gray. Do it again,” his mother said. “Do them both again.”

  When the workman opened his mouth to protest, she said, “Tonight, or you won’t be paid. And do it properly this time, with two coats.”

  Evita walked away from the laborer, who sighed and checked his watch. Clearly, he’d been hoping to get his work approved so he could knock off by four o’clock. Now he’d be here half the night.

  “Honestly, these people are idiots,” she said, loud enough for everyone in the cavernous space to hear. Her heels tapped as she crossed the concrete floor to badger the lad Nev had hired to do odd jobs. “Gary, tell me you aren’t touching those price lists with your filthy hands.”

  Nev turned to his father. “If she carries on harassing them this way, I’ll have to hire all new people before we open.”

  “Don’t worry,” Richard said. “She’s excellent at buttering them up after she’s destroyed them. By Friday, they’ll move heaven and earth for her. Now, where do you think you’ll hang the work portraits? Over there? I think the light’s better on the east wall …”

  Nev let his mind wander as his father offered his opinion about the best placement for the pieces. He couldn’t be bothered to care, really, so long as the five paintings that mattered most went up front and center.

  A hand gripped his shoulder, and his father said, “Nev?”

  He looked up into brown eyes as familiar to him as his own. “Sorry. I’m rather distracted. Hang them wherever you like.”

  “Have you invited her?”

  It was the first time Dad had mentioned Cath since the morning she’d left, when Nev had walked back into his
parents’ house, packed up their things in silence, and returned to London. He’d phoned her over and over again, knowing all along that she wouldn’t pick up. It was a mercy she hadn’t. He’d left messages, rambling incoherently, too dumbfounded and enraged by everything that had passed between them to make any sense. Finally, the battery on his mobile had gone flat, and he’d opened a bottle of whiskey and drank until he passed out.

  When he woke up, he’d had a hell of a headache, but he’d also had the presence of mind to understand what he’d somehow missed the day before. He’d been acting like a complete and utter wanker.

  Twenty-eight years old, and he’d behaved no better than a spoiled child. Where did he get off suggesting he was entitled to know every detail of her sad, difficult life story? Cath had been right to call him a despicable coward. Why should she have trusted him when he didn’t even possess the courage to be honest with her about what he wanted from life? To be honest with himself about it?

  He’d sat down at his computer, typed a letter of resignation, and faxed it to Winston and every member of the board. In the course of ten minutes, he became a painter. Maybe a bloody awful painter, though he hoped not. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t waste the rest of his life dancing to someone else’s tune. Not the board’s, nor any member of his family’s.

  “Yes, of course I invited her,” he told his father. “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Well, if I send her an invitation, she won’t turn up. I phoned her for days. I went to her office and her flat. I hung around the station waiting for her to show. She won’t speak to me.”

  He’d pounded on the door of her flat for so long, she’d opened it eventually, but her politeness had been the sort reserved for door-to-door salesmen. Regardless of what he said, she’d behaved as if they were the next thing to strangers. She said “please” a lot, and she offered him polite smiles, and every word that came out of her mouth meant “no.”

  “Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but given your lack of success in all those attempts, what makes you believe she’ll come to the show?”

  “She’ll be here. I haven’t given her a choice.”

  She had to come. He hadn’t touched her or had a real conversation with her in twenty-six days, and he’d been off his head with missing her for every one of them. The only thing that distracted him from thinking about her was painting, so he’d been painting as much as possible. When his arm grew heavy and his vision began to blur with fatigue, he dropped into unconsciousness on the couch in the studio. He couldn’t sleep in his bed or eat in his kitchen. There were too many memories.

  He painted, and he planned. With his parents’ help—his father’s knowledge of the art world combined with his mother’s legendary ability to browbeat people into submission—he’d nearly pulled together his first art show. Mother was handling the publicity, and she’d promised the space would be filled with interested buyers on Friday evening. God only knew who she’d invited. Dreadful people, no doubt.

  It didn’t matter. So long as Cath made an appearance, Mother could fill the room with her friends from the club or her charity partners or every member of Winston’s polo team. Though it would be a boon if the people she invited brought their checkbooks. He’d taken out a loan against the building in Greenwich to cover the rent on this warehouse space. He had a mortgage to pay now.

  “I saw her on that variety program last night,” Richard said.

  “Me, too.” His lips wanted to smile, remembering Cath in her pink hand-knit cowboy hat, a tiny knit bikini patterned after the Union Jack, and a pair of red knitted high-heeled boots. She’d been sassy and beautiful, and she’d had the popular television presenter eating out of her hand for the entire ten minutes the interview had lasted.

  The first time he’d heard her on the radio a few weeks earlier, it had been an accident. He’d flipped it on while making tea in the kitchen, hoping to find a way to get out of his own head. Instead, he’d heard her voice over the airwaves. For a moment, he’d thought himself delusional, and it hadn’t surprised him in the least. It had been ages since he’d slept. But no, it had been a real program—they’d called the segment “Knitting in the Bedroom”—and Cath had spoken at length about sex, love, and knitting, making a passionate argument that for all its practicality, knitwear had a saucy side. She was witty and sexy on the air, and they’d had her back on for a second time a week later.

  It was when the Daily Mail ran a large, full-color picture of her in the cowboy getup that Cath had really begun to attract attention. For the photo, they’d slung pistols from holsters cinched low on her hips. Assistant Curator Cath Talarico of the Victoria and Albert Museum takes aim at stereotypes about knitters.

  The photo taught him two things about Cath. First, she was a survivor. He’d stomped on her spirit, trying to force her into a mold in the hope of winning his family’s approval. She’d come out shooting.

  Second, she had a new tattoo. The formerly empty canvas of the left side of her stomach was now filled with an urban skyline, jagged and post-apocalyptic. He’d been able to make it out quite clearly, the word CITY in crimson centered beneath the buildings. And below that, a small, anatomically correct human heart.

  Her heart, he thought.

  “It’s working, you know,” his father added. “Her campaign, I mean. The exhibit will be a smashing success.” He hesitated. “I did try to make the donation.”

  “Did you?”

  “Christopher phoned me back and said they weren’t in a position to take it.”

  “She didn’t want it.”

  “No. I assume she decided she’d rather get the money on her own terms.”

  “That is how she prefers to operate.”

  At the bus stop, when she’d first told him her story, the unrelenting misery of it had blasted him speechless. To the extent he’d been able to think at all, he’d thought it meant he didn’t know her. But he’d been wrong. He knew her inside out. It was his own character he’d been too blind to see properly.

  Now he had his head screwed on straight. Whatever she said, however many times she told herself he was a mistake, she was wrong. She’d tattooed City’s name onto her body, not his. He wasn’t City. Not anymore.

  “Shall we hang the new ones?” his father asked. “The paint is dry, I think.”

  They walked over to the false wall he’d had erected directly in front of the building’s entrance—the first thing people would see when they came into the room. It was painted a stark, bright white, with five large Copperplate numerals in black. One for each tattoo.

  Imagining how it would look in two days’ time, he allowed himself to hope. He smiled as he said, “Not yet.”

  She loved him. He would show her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sharing dumplings with Judith and Christopher was weird, but taking a walk with them afterward was even weirder.

  When Christopher had dropped by the office and insisted they accompany him to dinner, Cath had wanted to say no. Exhausted from juggling public appearances on top of the crazy final-week-before-the-exhibit-opens workload, the last thing she needed was to have to spend the evening in the company of her boss and her boss’s boss.

  Sadly, unwritten employment etiquette said that when the big kahuna invited you to dinner to celebrate your smashingly successful guerrilla PR campaign, you had to go. So she’d gone, and now here she was, strolling the artsy streets of Shoreditch with the voluble and opinionated Christopher on one arm and the prickly, offbeat Judith on the other. She played Monkey in the Middle and wondered how soon she could politely excuse herself and go home.

  “Where are you taking us?” Christopher asked Judith. They’d left Hoxton Street behind several minutes ago, and the neighborhood was getting more run-down and eclectic, industrial spaces mixing with tattoo parlors and art galleries and tiny restaurants that smelled of curry powder and emitted clouds of dishwasher steam.

  “There’s an opening around here some
where tonight. I thought we could check it out.”

  Cath tried very hard to keep her sigh internal, but some of it might have escaped. Judith’s knowledge of art openings was bizarre and encyclopedic. They were like church for her, both tedious and mandatory. On Monday mornings at work, she often reported back on the terrible food and the talentless artists, relishing her own disdain.

  Please let Christopher not want to go.

  “Sounds lovely,” Christopher said.

  Crap.

  They rounded a corner, and a warehouse came into view. Expensive cars choked the narrow street. It was the rich-people-slumming sort of opening, then, not the humble kind. Maybe there would be champagne. She could use a drink.

  They made their way toward the entrance, weaving among people who seemed to be waiting to get in and others who’d simply chosen the single most obstructive place to plant themselves. Nearly everyone in attendance wore black tie, making Cath feel seriously underdressed in her black shirtdress, fishnets, and ankle boots. “Whose show is this?” she asked as they neared the door.

  Judith didn’t answer. Maybe she hadn’t heard the question.

  Cath was about to ask again when she overheard the name “Chamberlain.” Suspicion tightened her shoulders. “Judith.” She grabbed her boss by the arm. “Whose show is this?”

  But she didn’t need an answer, because just then the last two people standing between her and the inside of the room stepped aside, and she saw a wall full of paintings that sucked all the air out of the night sky.

  Oh, shit. She set me up.

  Cath wanted to get angry so her righteous indignation could propel her back down the street and onto the Tube and home. She intended to. In a minute. As soon as her feet stopped marching her directly at those paintings for a closer look.

  “Hey, that’s her,” someone said.

  “Don’t be such a gobshite,” a man answered.

  It was her. The white wall presented five large images, each labeled with a numeral in the same font she’d used on her skin. Each featuring one of her tattoos, a thick, black swirl of pigment resembling wrought iron, like a gate. And behind it, a scene from her life.