With a slight lurch I recognised one of them, a woman walking in the same direction as me, on the other side of the road. I didn’t know her at all, had merely noticed her a few times as I dully marched down the road to work in the mornings. I hadn’t seen her for a while, in fact: not since Jenny and I had come together. We tended to leave the flat slightly later than had been my custom, for a variety of reasons.
The woman was tall, and slim, with rich chestnut hair. She appeared very together, a fully-fledged adult, but also as if she might remember how to smile, given the right incentive. She’d been the focus of a few utterly platonic daydreams in the days when I’d been single: the idea of walking with her, of turning to see her face, of simply sharing a life, had all seemed rather appealing. It was odd to see her again, now that I had someone with whom I could have those things. For a moment I was pulled back to the previous year, and it felt strangely comfortable there, like a broken sofa which you’ve got used to sitting on, a tangle of stuffing and springs which nonetheless knows your shape better than some plump new divan.
I stopped to light a cigarette, partly because I felt like one, and partly to put more distance between us. In the old days I’d often covertly kept pace behind her to the station, and shuffled along the platform to be closer, so I could think my wistful thoughts. But that was then, and this was now.
The ruse worked, because when I got to the station I had just missed a train and the platform was deserted.
I waited, irritated by the weight of the bag on my shoulder, and stared belligerently at the advertisements on the opposite wall of the tunnel. One proclaimed the charms of California, and as I read it my heart sank unexpectedly. Another of my fantasies of the last few years, a key support mechanism, had been the daydream of moving to America, of quitting my job and finding a life. That wouldn’t happen now, of course. I didn’t only have a job. I had a girlfriend. I had a life. Or would have very soon. A life and a bigger flat and someone with whom to jointly send Christmas cards.
I walked further along the platform so I couldn’t see the photographs of the redwood forests.
The morning went fine, in that I did all the work I was supposed to do. It wasn’t especially good in other respects. Not bad, just not good. Jenny and I went out again at lunch, and had a nice time. Things were alright between us.
But the very fact that I considered the question, that I thought of things being alright between us, showed the day wasn’t really gelling. Until now we’d been like one person. Today felt like a step back from that. Not far, but a step. It was the kind of day you have when you’re going out with someone: nice, but not special. Another day in a life that was presumably mine.
We talked a little more about the idea of finding a flat, and I was happy to sound interested, but didn’t mind too much when the rather frank gropings of a nearby couple turned our attention away from the subject. Almost all of me wanted to turn it back again, but a little frozen piece did not, and so we covertly giggled at the clandestine romping at the next table until we were feeling rather intense ourselves. We held hands as we walked back to the office.
The afternoon was better, not least because I knew I was working from home the next day, which meant a day off from the hysteria which everyone else seemed to enjoy whipping up. Jenny and I could talk on the phone, and there’d be the evening to look forward to. By the time we were walking up Leighton Road towards the flat I was in a reasonably good mood.
When we were passing the spot where I’d seen the girl the previous evening, I remembered the dream from the night before. A feeling of hot, nervous haste, of yielding to impulse, of letting something hidden inside peep out and touch the world. It was a horrible idea, offering a disadvantaged woman money for sex. I was quite prepared to believe it went on, but hated the fact my dreaming self had remembered it, or thought it. I could imagine the kind of man who might do such a thing, and felt nothing but revulsion.
For him, anyway. Not so much for her. Again I found I could picture her body within the loose cotton clothes, imagine the slightly rough texture of her pale skin and the firmness of her limbs. And her hair, of course, her stringy blond hair.
Suddenly I realised something. Jenny also had blond hair.
Glancing across as we walked arm in arm, chatting about the day, I noticed her hair as if for the first time. Before all I’d thought about it was that it was beautiful. Now I realised that while that was true, it was also blond. Trying to keep my walk casual and my banter smooth, I struggled to incorporate this.
It may not seem important, in fact it seems kind of stupid, but I’d always sort of assumed I’d end up with someone with brown hair. I don’t know why, and it’s not that I’m obsessed with it, or even find it particularly attractive. It’s just that in my mind, in the region where the dream girl lived who’d got me through drab months, I was sort of banking on brown hair.
It was irrelevant, unimportant. As a matter of fact, Annette had also been blond, as had most of the girls I’d been out with. The brown-ness wasn’t the important, but something was. It was almost as if my life had been alternating for years between two possible states, and now it had settled on one, as if a roulette ball had finally come to rest on black. It was a high-scoring number, a jackpot in fact, and I was very happy with it. Jenny was all I had ever wanted in a friend, and far more. She was intelligent, and loveable, and funny and beautiful. She had a clean laugh and a dirty one, and I could be however I wanted to be with her. I felt very seriously about her, and maybe that was it. A realisation that the ball had come to rest, and that winning on red wasn’t an option any more, that there had been so many other numbers it could have landed on, and now I had only one.
The flat welcomed us warmly. Jenny gave me a hug and then disappeared into the bathroom to wash the day away.
I had a cigarette by the window and then, in a fit of domesticity, corralled up the rubbish in the kitchen and took the bin bag outside to stow. I’d just finished kicking the bag into the recess by the side of the steps, when I sensed movement on the other side of the street and glanced up. Then I stopped, foot still poised.
It was the girl.
She was ambling down the other side of the road, dressed in the same clothes as the day before. I felt my heart beating as I watched her bend to stroke a cat. Though she wasn’t tall her back was long, and flared into an attractive triangle at her buttocks. Her face was covered by her hair hanging down and suddenly I wanted her, wanted her briefly, pornographically and completely.
She straightened again as the cat sloped off, and looked across at me. She seemed to smile, though whether in recognition or simple friendliness it was impossible to judge. I gave her a small and distracted nod, and then turned back towards the house.
When I was back in the flat I stood by the window. She was still outside. The cat had returned and she was rubbing its neck, sitting cross-legged on the pavement. She looked lost, and found, in the middle of a moment of contentment.
I went into the bedroom to chat to Jenny though the half-open bathroom door. We didn’t talk about flats.
Mid-afternoon the next day I went to the corner shop, to buy some cigarettes and the local paper. As I walked back I was thinking about Jenny, and the puzzled half-grin with which she’d said goodbye when she left for work, standing with me on the step. She’d picked something up from me, from the way I’d been the previous evening. Some smile had been slightly too narrow, some hug too considered. When she’d turned the corner I stomped back into the flat, feeling wild and panicky.
Something was going wrong. I’d tried to calm myself in the shower but it hadn’t worked, and I’d achieved next to nothing that morning. I called her before lunch and we chatted, but it seemed hollow to me, though there was no difference in the things we said. I even said I loved her, and meant it as much as ever. But it made me realize something I’d forgotten in the last month: that you could say those same words and not really mean them. That they could become merely sounds, rather
than a statement of everything that was true about the world. There was a distance between us which hadn’t existed before. Not between us, in fact, but within me. Some part of me was retreating. Some power source had been interrupted for a flicker of a second, and I was falling back from the front of my mind, trying once more the doors to what had gone before. After cruising in glorious automatic for a month, suddenly my mind was back on manual shift, jerking and racing, subtly out of my control.
The more I tried not to think about it, the more the thoughts popped and squirmed into my mind like gleeful and brightly-coloured worms. Some part of me was anxiously trying to patch and mend, turn my thoughts back to the front, but even he couldn’t ignore the rising panic. I had the chance to have everything I’d ever wanted, had the chance to be happy. And yet instead of staying safely in the present and the future, I wanted to try those doors, to look back again, though I knew what would happen if I did. The past was too recent a neighbourhood for me, and the locals would still recognise my face. It wasn’t safe for me there, not yet: if I went back my old friends would come and find me, take me back into darker corners to kick me to pieces once again.
As I neared the flat, completely blind to the world around me, I could almost see those thoughts, those friends, gathering round me like the bullies of childhood.
‘You looked back too soon,’ they were saying, hearty with affectionate hatred. ‘But maybe it would always have been too soon, my son. You like it here. You know you do. So come back. We may hurt you a little, might even cut you up, but at least you’ll be at home. And we know how you like it.’
I didn’t know how it had all started, why on earth I was reacting this way, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I was falling. I was back in my own mind, my old mind, and couldn’t remember how I’d ever got out.
When I saw who was sitting outside the flat I literally dropped everything I was carrying.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said.
The girl reached down and picked up my cigarettes.
I took them from her. She smiled, and then turned away slightly, to look down the street.
I scrabbled to come up to speed, to react. Against my will my eyes dropped from her face to her pink top. My subconscious had captured her image very accurately: her breasts were indeed small but prominent, stubby nipples discernible against the cloth. With a flush of embarrassment I realised she was looking at me again.
‘I’m thirsty,’ she said.
Eager to have something to do, some way out, I shoved into my back pocket and discovered it was empty. I’d used up all my change in the shop. All I had was a few pence, which was derisory. And I couldn’t offer her a note. All I had was ten pounds. I couldn’t offer her that.
‘Don’t you have anything inside?’
‘Er, yes, I do actually,’ I stammered, with wild surprise, as if she’d scored right with a lucky guess. ‘You know, tea, Coke, that sort of thing.’ I couldn’t believe I was answering, and certainly not in that way. I didn’t seem to have any choice.
‘Fat or thin?’ she asked. I didn’t understand. ‘Regular or Diet Coke,’ she explained patiently, with another smile, as she stood up to let me open the door.
She didn’t like Diet Coke, so I made her a cup of coffee. Meanwhile she walked round the living room behind me, examining the books. I dithered over whether to make a cup of coffee for myself. It would seem odd to only make one for her, but wasn’t there an air of complicity about having one together? Did I even want a cup of coffee? What was she doing here?
What if Jenny called?
In the end I didn’t make a cup for myself, but just handed one to her. By then she was sitting on one end of the sofa, looking comfortable. I cast an anxious glance at the phone and wondered whether I should switch the answer phone on. Not because I didn’t want the girl to know about Jenny, but because I didn’t want Jenny to hear me sounding strange. And I most certainly would if she called. What on earth did I think was going on? Clearly the girl must have recognised me when I’d been putting the rubbish out the night before, but what was she doing here now? What did she want?
The girl took the coffee and sipped it, smiling at me in an odd way. I tried to smile back, but I couldn’t. My eyes kept finding her top. The pink, I saw, wasn’t consistent. Some areas were a deeper hue, making it look almost tie-died.
‘Oh, this is for you,’ she said suddenly, and slipped her hand into a small pocket in the top of her trousers. She held out her hand toward me, palm up. She was holding £4.71 in small change. I stared at her.
‘That was nice,’ she said. ‘But I don’t need it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘I thought you were begging.’
‘I was,’ she smiled. ‘Old habits die hard. Don’t they?’
She moved slightly, and her legs parted a little. They were slim, but powerful, and the feeling they provoked in me was more like fear than anything else. I could sense Jenny, on the other side of town, could almost see her sitting at her desk. Was she thinking of me? Was she thinking of Chris? I stared at the girl’s face, wondering what on earth to do.
She looked me in the eyes, and then pulled mine downwards with her own, until I was looking at her chest again. There were streaks of darker colour amongst the pink. I hadn’t noticed them before. Perhaps it was a different shirt.
‘It’s yours if you want it,’ she said. I realised suddenly that I didn’t, but it was too late. She reached down and took hold of the bottom of her shirt.
‘No,’ I said, but she was already pulling it up.
For about a couple of inches the skin was white and smooth. I could see it very clearly, the tiny goosebumps and the varying shades of pale. The area from her navel to immediately below her breasts was a churned mass of dog meat. The flesh had been gashed wide by some massive impact, laying bare the purples and greys of internal organs. A drunken stumble in front of a car, the lost fury of a damaged boyfriend, whatever. Blood ran slowly in the cavity, so dark as to be almost brown. In a way, it was beautiful.
‘You can go back if you want to,’ she said. ‘You can remember what it’s like.’ Her eyes were dry, their surface like a winter’s overcast sky, and her head held at an abrupt angle. For a moment she was motionless, T-shirt still raised, and I mourned the terrible life that I had lost, the slow and pointless death I could have had, and to which I had become so attached.
Then I shook my head.
Her face moved again, and she almost looked alive.
‘Good call,’ she said, and disappeared.
I turned to look out of the window, and saw she was crouched down on the other side of the road, hand held out towards a cat that was no longer there.
Then she was nearer the corner, caught once more in summer light, laughing at something said six months ago, when it was all still an adventure.
And then she was gone.
By the time I’d had a cigarette I was calm again, calm and almost smiling. I phoned Jenny. She knew why I was calling before I said a word, and I could feel her happiness down the phone.
‘About this flat idea,’ I said.
They Also Serve
The years had shown that 5:35 p.m. was the most likely time for Mr Torrence to have a shower, and so the cubicle turned itself on to save him the trouble. The vertical LED strips by the sink unit flickered into life, the towel rail began to warm, and water issued at a predetermined rate from the four nozzles placed equidistantly around the shower area itself. After a moment the water’s temperature was exactly equal to the average of all those to which it had previously been adjusted, and there it stayed. Preparations complete, the cubicle waited for the man to arrive, with the brute patience of no-patience: the patience of a machine.
In a very small room just off the bridge area, David Torrence put down his bitflip wrench and looked at his watch. The watch was analog, as had several times been the fashion, and told him it was time to knock off for the evening. Torrence knew the shower cubicle would be warm and
ready, as it always was: after thirty years he was no longer sure whether it took its schedule from him, or vice versa, but supposed that it didn’t really matter. He poked the straggling mess of fibre optics and boards back into its nest in the wall. On a ship that did nothing but revolve slowly around its axis, day in and day out, a routine service of the optical backup matrices could wait. The only wear and tear the damned things suffered was through his testing of them.
As he stood, Torrence winced comfortably at the sound of his joints creaking. An unwelcome reminder of advancing years, but somehow satisfying nonetheless. Another day’s work completed, another day fought and won.
After replacing the access panel and dusting off his hands he turned to his android, who had been sitting in the corner all afternoon, companionably watching him work.
‘I’m done, Cat,’ he said. ‘That job will have to drift into fifteen minutes of tomorrow.’
‘They’ll survive, Dave.’
Torrence grinned. Cat was the only machine on board the ship who called him by his first name. When he’d come on board, three decades ago, all the machines had been factory-set to call him by his surname, prefixed by ‘Mr’, and Cat was the only one it had occurred to him to tell to call him Dave. All the rest were still calling him Mr Torrence, because he hadn’t told them not to. They were like that. They were all very much like that.
Cat raised himself a few inches off the ground and quickly hoovered up a few stray pieces of plastic. This done, he followed the man out of the service room.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 34
