‘Don’t run off, I do care, come back to bed — it’s still early.’ I touched his forearm with my hand. He looked so anguished, his face all twisted and reddened with anger and pain.
‘Oh, fuck it. Fuck it. Just fuck it.’ He swore flatly. The flap of towel that I was holding against my breast fell away, and I pushed the nipple, which dumbly re-erected itself, against his hand. He didn’t seem to notice, and instead stared fixedly over my shoulder, up the stairs and into the bedroom. I pushed against him a little more firmly. Then he took my nipple between the knuckles of his index and forefinger and pinched it, quite hard, muttering, ‘Fuck it, just fucking fuck it.’
He turned on his heels and left. I doubled over on the stairs. The sobs that racked me had a sickening component. I staggered to the bathroom and as I clutched the toilet bowl the mixture of coffee and mucus streamed from my mouth and nose. Then I heard the front door slam.
‘I don’t know why.’
‘Then leave. You can stay at your own place — ‘
‘You know I hate it there. I can’t stand the people I have to share with — ‘
‘Be that as it may, the point is that you don’t need him, you just think you do. It’s like you’re caught in some trap. You think you love him, but it’s just your insecurity talking. Remember,’ and here Grace’s voice took on an extra depth, a special sonority of caring, ‘your insecurity is like a clever actor, it can mimic any emotion it chooses to and still be utterly convincing. But whether it pretends to be love or hate, the truth is that at bottom it’s just the fear of being alone.’
‘Well why should I be alone? You’re not alone, are you?’
‘No, that’s true, but it’s not easy for me either. Any relationship is an enormous sacrifice. . I don’t know. . Anyway, you know that I was alone for two years before I met John, perhaps you should give it a try?’
‘I spend most of my time alone anyway. I’m perfectly capable of being by myself. But I also need to see him. .’
As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn’t hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it alclass="underline" his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the café at couple after couple, each confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.
Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn’t down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there. . It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony.
After he had left that morning I went back to his bed and lay there, gagged and bound by the smell of him in the duvet. I didn’t get up until eleven. I listened to Radio Four, imagining that the deep-timbred, wholesome voices of each successive presenter were those of ideal parents. There was a discussion programme, a gardening panel discussion, a discussion about books, a short story about an elderly woman and her relationship with her son, followed by a discussion about it. It all sounded so cultured, so eminently reasonable. I tried to construct a new view of myself on the basis of being the kind of young woman who would consume such hearty radiophonic fare, but it didn’t work. Instead I felt quite weightless and blown out, a husk of a person.
The light quality in the attic bedroom didn’t change all morning. The only way I could measure the passage of time was by the radio, and the position of the watery shadows that his metal sculptures made on the magnolia paint.
Eventually I managed to rouse myself. I dressed and washed my face. I pulled my hair back tightly and fixed it in place with a loop of elastic. I sat down at his work table. It was blanketed with loose sheets of paper, all of which were covered with the meticulous plans he did for his sculptures. Elevations and perspectives, all neatly shaded and the dimensions written in using the lightest of pencils. There was a mess of other stuff on the table as welclass="underline" sticks of flux, a broken soldering iron, bits of acrylic and angled steel brackets. I cleared a space amidst the evidence of his industry and taking out my notebook and biro, added my own patch of emotion to the collage: I do understand how you feel. I know the pressure that you’re under at the moment, but you must realise that it’s pressure that you put on yourself. It’s not me that’s doing it to you. I do love you and I want to be with you, but it takes time to forgive. And what you did to me was almost unforgivable. I’ve been hurt before and I don’t want to be hurt again. If you can’t understand that, if you can’t understand how I feel about it, then it’s probably best if we don’t see one another again. I’ll be at the flat this evening, perhaps you’ll call?
Out in the street the sky was spitting at the pavement. There was no wind to speak of, but despite that each gob seemed to have an added impetus. With every corner that I rounded on my way to King’s Cross I encountered another little cyclone of rain and grit. I walked past shops full of mouldering stock that were boarded up, and empty, derelict ones that were still open.
On the corner of the Caledonian Road I almost collided with a dosser wearing a long, dirty overcoat. He was clutching a bottle of VP in a hand that was blue with impacted filth, filth that seemed to have been worked deliberately into the open sores on his knuckles. He turned his face to me and I recoiled instinctively. It was the face of a myxomatosic rabbit (‘You’re like a little animal in there. A little rabbit, snuggled down in its burrow’), the eyes swollen up and exploding in a series of burst ramparts and lesions of diseased flesh. His nose was no longer nose-shaped.
But on the tube the people were comforting and workaday enough. I paid at the barrier when I reached Camden Town and walked off quickly down the High Street. Perhaps it was the encounter with the dying drunk that had cleansed me, jerked me out of my self-pity, because for a short while I felt more lucid, better able to look honestly at my relationship. While it was true that he did have problems, emotional problems, and was prepared to admit to them, it was still the case that nothing could forgive his conduct while I was away visiting my parents.
I knew that the woman he had slept with lived here in Camden Town. As I walked down the High Street I began — at first almost unconsciously, then with growing intensity — to examine the faces of any youngish women that passed me. They came in all shapes and sizes, these suspect lovers. There were tall women in floor, length linen coats; plump women in stretchy slacks; petite women in neat, two-piece suits; raddled women in unravelling pullovers; and painfully smart women, Sindy dolls: press a pleasure-button in the small of their backs and their hair would grow.
The trouble was that they all looked perfectly plausible candidates for the job as the metal worker’s anvil. Outside Woolworth’s I was gripped by a sharp attack of nausea. An old swallow of milky coffee reentered my mouth as I thought of him, on top of this woman, on top of that woman, hammering himself into them, bash after bash after bash, flattening their bodies, making them ductile with pleasure.