by Jo Baker
“Two-fifty,” she said, placing the drink down in front of him.
He handed over the money, picked up his glass, and walked away.
Tommy’s pint was two-thirds gone. His glass was ringed with stout-suds. Claire shifted her weight onto the sides of her feet, leant back against the counter, easing her insteps. Paul sat at the corner of the bar. Dermot had arrived in, sat down, was talking to him. Claire, listening to the looping, dandering tracks of Dermot’s speech, wondered suddenly if he fancied Paul. And if he did, did Paul know, and did Gareth suspect. Dermot eagerly waved his cigarette in circles, talking. Paul nodded slightly, looking off across the room. He didn’t seem to be listening at all. Gareth rattled the change in his pockets. She glanced round at him, grimaced. Between them, the till sat silent, almost empty.
“Quiet night,” she said.
“Dead,” he said. “Shouldn’t have bothered. The whole fucking town’s deserted.”
“It’ll pick up.”
“Not till August. Might as well shut up shop now.”
“What d’you think’s going to happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“Here. D’you think it’s going to be okay?”
“Jesus. Now you’re asking.”
“It’s just I don’t know anything at all about this stuff.”
“Who does.”
“What do you think, though?”
“It’ll be okay. It has to be.”
“Right.”
“But don’t you quote me on that.”
“Right.”
“And having said that, I’m not sticking round for the fun and games. We’re off to Lanzarote for the duration. Got one of those last-minute deals.”
“That’s nice.”
“What about yourself? You going to head off somewhere?”
“I think,” she said, “I’ll stay here. I think I might do some drawing.”
THIRTEEN
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
“No.”
“You’re here for your stuff.”
“Yes.”
“You’d better come in.”
Claire could still hear her moving around downstairs. Doors opening, footsteps, floorboards creaking, the oiled tick of Claire’s bike. Grainne was wheeling it out through the house. Claire heard it bump down the front steps, a moment’s pause as it was leant against the wall. Then the gritty sound of Grainne’s feet on the steps, then the scrape of the latch as she came back in and shut the door behind her.
Then silence. Grainne standing still, leaning back against the closed door, breathing. Upstairs, Claire pushed the drawer shut, pulled open the one beneath it. She began lifting out her T-shirts.
A creak. Footsteps muffled by the carpet, then loud on kitchen lino, and the floorboards still protesting. She must be pacing out the length of the house. Hallway, dining room, kitchen; kitchen, dining room, hallway, living room. Stopping dead at the window and staring straight out across the street. Gnawing at a thumbnail. Digging her nails deep into her forearms, bringing up the skin with little red crescent moons.
Claire picked the photograph up off the top of the chest of drawers. She wiped the dust off with a sleeve. The footsteps started up again: across the living room, down the hall, through the dining room, back into the kitchen. Hands on the worktop, looking out across the narrow yard at the brick wall opposite. The wall was painted white. Grainne had bought pots and plants and a trellis. Tried to grow things. Would the clematis be in flower, or was it too shady back there? Claire dropped the picture into her bag, drew the drawstring tight. She hefted the bag up onto her back. Heavier than it had been for a long time. She glanced round the room.
The bed was rumpled, untouched since she’d heaved herself out of it last. Whenever that was. Years ago, or days. Hairs still clung to the pillow, the duvet was still moulded to the shape of her leaving. She couldn’t abandon it, leave it for Grainne to deal with. She dropped her bag down onto the floor, crossed over to the bed. She stripped away the sheet, pulled off the pillowcases, peeled the duvet from its cover. She carried the heap of linen to the bathroom, stuffed it into the laundry basket. She folded the duvet on the end of the bed, piled the pillows up on top. She heaved up the window-sash, letting air and sunlight in, and looked around the room again. The circles in the dust were where her things had stood. The smear of foundation on the chest of drawers carried her fingerprint. Her hair was tangled into the carpet. The whole place must smell of her. She heaved the window higher, picked up her bag. She closed the door behind her.
The stairs were dirty again. Dust and fluff and grit had already crescented the corner of each tread. Green blue red light filtered through the stained-glass door, stretched out along the hall carpet like spilt inks. She reached out a hand towards the bright new latch, turned it, pulled the door open.
“Claire—”
Her fingers were already hooked around the lip of the door. Her bagstrap was dragging at her shoulder. A pool of green light bathed her eyes. She turned. The backpack brushed against the wall, made her stumble forward slightly. She saw Grainne standing in the dining-room doorway. She looked bent, thin, slightly crumpled.
“Grainne—I’m sorry—” Claire heard her voice crack.
“I just want to know. Are you two—”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am—”
“I just want to know—”
“I’m really sorry. I’ve—”
“Are you two together?”
“What?”
“Are you going out with him?”
“No.”
Grainne exhaled, leaned against the doorjamb, her head falling forward a little. As if her strings had been cut, Claire thought. Claire took half a step towards her, stopped. Grainne lifted her head, but didn’t look at Claire. She stared at the wall in front of her, seemed to be studying a join in the paper.
“Have you seen him?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
Claire hesitated.
“Yes,” she said.
Grainne seemed to absorb this slowly, thinking.
“Will you be seeing him again?” she said.
“He’s been in. At Conroys. He’s in most nights now. I’m still working at Conroys.”
Grainne nodded, swallowed.
“I’m really sorry,” Claire said. “I’m really sorry.”
Grainne nodded again, slowly. She turned to look directly at Claire.
“Don’t come back here again,” she said.
Claire caught her breath.
“Right.”
Grainne looked at her, blinked. She turned and walked back into the dining room. Claire reached out to touch the sunlit wall with a fingertip. The useless phrase “I’m sorry” came back up to her lips again, but she didn’t speak. Her hand fell back to her side. I’m sorry. Slowly, she turned, walked back through the translucent colours, through the open door.
The pieces shifted, grated, would not slide into place. Like some massive 3-D jigsaw, like a Star Trek board-game going on inside his head. And he just couldn’t get the pieces into a new pattern. He couldn’t get so much as a toothpick into their surfaces. He understood the argument. Of course he understood it. He just couldn’t make it different. He couldn’t make it his.
He hadn’t touched a key for ten minutes. After three minutes his screensaver had blinked into life. Multi-coloured Spirograph and Etch-a-Sketch lines spiralled and squared and formed solids and suddenly folded away on themselves into dark. He had chosen the screensaver himself when he bought the computer. It was, he had come to realise, the most infuriating screensaver he had ever come across.
He cupped a hand round his neck, leaned his head over, easing out the muscles. Stiff and sore and tired and bored and ever so slightly panicky. A bad day, he told himself. Just a bad day. Nothing to worry about. Everyone had bad days. He had been working too hard, he had lost focus: what he needed was a break. A breath of fresh air, a lea
f through Camera-Europe in Easons, a packet of Mintola to eat on the way home and he would be fine. He would, in fact, be refreshed and revitalised. Ready to tackle the problem, to write the article, to get his argument straight. And he had to get it straight. It had to be good. It had, in fact, to be perfect. Because people were so unkind. There was no generosity in academia. If anyone found the slightest hole in his argument, they would, he knew, tear it to shreds, just to get another article out of it in the process. The principle was ruthless, Alan had realised; it was Darwinian. The academic journals arranged the regular cull of the weak, and they hosted the feast that followed. It was kill or be killed. And you couldn’t hide in the long grass: you had to get out there and show yourself. Even if you knew you were a bit feeble; even if you were, like Alan, having a bad day. If you didn’t publish, you lost your job. This was, as far as Alan was concerned, a no-win situation. He was beginning to feel there was a case to be made for conservation, because everyone, sooner or later, had bad days.
He stood up from the computer, stretched. One of his vertebrae clicked. He was getting old. Arthritic. Or was it rheumatic. Definitely one or the other. These things crept up on you, joint by joint, and before you knew it you were in a terrible way. His knuckles would swell up, his knees would creak, his hipbones would grind in their sockets. This was what he had to look forward to. It was, he realised, downhill from here. Aching bones and excruciating academic articles and everyone already busy whenever he suggested going for a drink. He hitched up his trousers, cracked his knuckles, and the doorbell rang.
Which wasn’t usual. Not at half-past three on a Friday afternoon. At half-past three on a Friday afternoon the doorbell was uniformly silent. In fact, during the vacation, he could spend the entirety of Friday afternoon lying on the sofa with a volume of The American Journal of Philosophical Studies splayed open on his chest, meditating on the articles he had just read, safe in the knowledge that he would not be disturbed by the doorbell. Even during term time he could be pretty sure he would not be interrupted. He would be halfway through first-year Ethics, a faint whiff of alcohol coming off the students, their heads heavy, their eyelids drooping. Locked into his snug little office, windows pulled tight against draughts, he could be quite confident that—short of the genuine urgency of a fire drill—there would be no sudden noises to shatter his concentration.
There it went again. Harsh, confident, demanding. And incredibly annoying. What on earth could they want at half-past three on a Friday afternoon? He hadn’t rung for pizza. He looked round the room. The slithering heaps of TV Times, the unwashed cups caked with cup-a-soup and the smeared plates pushed halfway under the sofa gave nothing away. He rubbed his hands down over his jumper, brushing at biscuit-crumbs, at the streels of coffee and yoghurt on his grey cableknit.
“Coming—” he muttered to himself.
His socks had got twisted round. The place where his heel was meant to go was now on top. It was saggy, like a drained blister. And the toe of the other sock hung loose: flipper-like, it flapped as he walked. But he wasn’t, he thought, going to stop and pull his socks up. Whoever it was, calling round at half-past three on a Friday afternoon, they could take him as they found him.
“Coming,” he said again, and turned the doorlatch.
It was so bright outside. The trees were so green and the sky was so blue that they stung his eyes. And warm. Much warmer than the flat. He blinked, dragged his glasses off his nose, pulled a corner of his T-shirt out from underneath his jumper and wiped the lenses. The air smelt clean and dry. He pushed his specs back up onto the bridge of his nose. He blinked.
Claire. She’d cut her hair again, or grown it, or lost weight or done something to herself, he wasn’t sure what. He didn’t know what to say.
She laughed; a startling, unfamiliar sound, almost as bad as the doorbell, and Alan, quite understandably, jumped.
“How are you, Alan?” she said, and smiled.
Why was she here, and smiling at him, when last thing was she’d hated him and he’d hurt her. He winced. The memory of blood and goosepimples and her floundering hopelessly in the bath came back to him, and tacked onto it the unexpected image of a spindly, longlegged crab he’d seen in the Ulster Museum when he was little, that couldn’t move without water to hold it up. Why was she here? Was she going to insist on them again, ask him “what about me” again, slip past him into the flat and then be there, just be there, all the time? When he went to bed at night, when he got up in the morning. While he fried his eggs in lard, while he cut his toenails in the living room. The thought made him shiver with guilt. He reached out across the doorway, placed his hand flat against the doorjamb, arm barring the way. She wouldn’t get past him easily. He would put up a fight this time.
“I just called round,” she was saying, “to collect my stuff.”
“Oh.” Alan straightened. “Is that all?”
She smiled at him. Broadly, sunnily. What was it? Was that a new top? Had she got a tan? Had she grown? She was too old to grow, of course. How old was she? He couldn’t remember. As he looked down at her, Alan realised he should be feeling something else. Different emotions jostled inside him uncomfortably. A sense of satisfaction glowing underneath the unmistakable burn of indignation and the creeping nauseous consciousness of loss. He was left feeling slightly sweaty. He had been right about her: that should make him happy. She had slept with Paul: that was the unpleasant corollary of being right. He realised he might rather have been wrong. He found that uniquely upsetting.
“Yes,” she was saying, almost laughing again, and he found himself lowering his arm. She stepped past him, into the hall.
She laughed because she was nervous. She could hear it in her laugh. It sounded thin, tinny, like a bad recording. And Alan must be able to hear it too. And if he had noticed, was that better than if he thought that she was laughing at him? It kind of depended on how he felt already. Whether he was angry and wanted to be more angry, or whether he was hurt and didn’t want to be hurt any more. She felt her face freeze over as she looked up at him. Her grimace was beginning to make her cheeks ache. He wasn’t just hurt or angry: he was right. That night, when she had sat and rolled till receipts up like cigarettes, had twisted her hair into knots, had turned the rings round and round on her fingers, she had wanted to lean across the table and say to Paul, this is not me. And that, in itself, was bad enough.
“Oh,” Alan said. “Is that all?”
“Yes,” and she didn’t know why she almost laughed again.
His arm sank to his side and she slipped past him, into the communal hallway. Dark, musty and familiar. She stepped over the scattering of flyers and junkmail, almost shivered. Quick as possible, she told herself. Grab the bags and go. Don’t talk. Don’t get tangled up in anything. Get back out into the sunshine. March up to Gareth’s and don’t look round. She put a hand against the door to the flat, pushed through.
That slight sour smell of old onions. She remembered the weight of Alan’s body, his damp skin. She mustn’t wince. He mustn’t see her wince.
She came to a halt in the middle of the bedroom, trying not to see the crumpled bedlinen, the soiled heaps of clothing. She couldn’t see her bags. They weren’t there. He’d dumped them in the skip. His breath frosting the early spring air. Rubbing his hands together as he walked back towards the flat. Job well done.
“They’re in the wardrobe,” Alan said. He was behind her; he had followed her in. He stood between her and the wardrobe. She couldn’t turn and go past him. She couldn’t stay where she was. One way or another he would trip her, tangle her up. He would talk.
“Right.”
She walked pointlessly over to the dresser, put a hand down on the surface, stood there.
“I’m surprised you came,” he said.
Beside Alan’s black and bitty comb was the plastic cap of his deodorant, the aerosol elsewhere. She flicked it; it spun around in a circle. Don’t answer, she thought. Don’t say a word. Grab the bags and
run. Fuck the bags. Just go. Don’t get sucked in. Don’t start discussing.
“I mean,” he said, voice heavy, slowish, thinking as he spoke. “I’d begun to think you wouldn’t ever bother.” He came across the room, passed her, sat down on the edge of the bed. The springs creaked. She turned her head a little to look at him. He smiled. “You’ve managed all this time without them,” he said. “So it’s a bit of a surprise that you should decide you need them now.”
She stared at him a moment in silence, watching his smile falter, his lips begin to twitch and quiver. Go, she thought. It’s not too late. Walk out through the door and into the sunshine and keep on going. You don’t have to explain yourself.
She turned towards the wardrobe and tugged on the door. Her bags were on the floor, underneath fallen ties, winter boots, and greying trainers. She grabbed the straps, heaved them out in a muddle of laces, belts and ties. She turned to go. Alan was still perched on the unmade bed, still smiling, and the smile was still unsteady, flickering. He blinked.
“I think at least you owe me an explanation,” he began. His voice sounded unnaturally deep and dusty.
Claire hesitated, looking at him. His lips were, she realised, actually beginning to tremble, his eyes were wet.
“I think it’s probably best if we just leave it.”
He stood up. “This isn’t like you,” he said.
She hefted one bag onto her shoulder, gripped the straps of the other. She watched his fingers flutter slowly at his sides, like butterflies, watched his eyelids bat gently till they became still. She shifted the weight in her hand but didn’t put the bag down.
He had made sure there was somewhere for her when she’d left. Made sure she wasn’t completely lost. And she remembered also, I think I made him go out with me and Gareth’s Poor soul, and the cold, outside emptiness of Oxford, and the fog, and how she’d stumbled upon him, and clung to him. It wasn’t, she knew, his fault. Certainly no more than it was hers.
