‘Don’t bother.’ (A sob.)
‘Mr Evans.. are you in there?’
‘You don’t want me to touch you?’
‘Go away. Just go away.. ’
‘It’s just that I feel a bit wound up. I get all stressed out during the day — you know that. I need a long time to wind down.’
‘Mr Evans, we have a court order that empowers us to take these children away.’
‘It’s not that — I know it’s not just that. You don’t fancy me any more, you don’t want to have sex any more. You’ve been like this for weeks.’
‘I don’t care if you’ve got the bloody Home Secretary out there. If you come in that door, I swear she gets it!’
‘How do you expect me to feel like sex? Everything around here is so bloody claustrophobic. I can’t stand these little fireside evenings. You sit there all hunched up and fidgety. You bite your nails and smoke away with little puffs. Puff, puff, puff. It’s a total turn-off.’
(Smash!) ‘Oh my God. For Christ’s sake! Oh Jesus.. ‘
‘I bite my nails and smoke because I don’t feel loved, because I feel all alone. I can’t trust you, John, not when you’re like this — you don’t seem to have any feeling for me.’
‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t. I’m certainly fed up with all of this shit. . ‘
I left my bag in the room. I could come back for it tomorrow when John had gone to work. I couldn’t stand to listen — and I didn’t want to go back into the room and sit down with them again, crouch with them, like another vulture in the mouldering carcass of their relationship. I couldn’t bear to see them reassemble the uncommunicative blocks of that static silence. And I didn’t want to sleep in the narrow spare bed, under the child-sized duvet.
I wanted to be back with him. Wanted it the way a junky wants a hit. I yearned to be in that tippy, creaky boat of a bed, full of crumbs and sex and fag ash. I wanted to be framed by the basketry of angular shadows the naked bulb threw on the walls, and contained by the soft basketry of his limbs. At least we felt something for each other. He got right inside me — he really did. All my other relationships were as superficial as a salutation — this evening proved it. It was only with him that I became a real person.
Outside in the street the proportions were all wrong. The block of flats should have been taller than it was long — but it wasn’t. Damp leaves blew against, and clung to my ankles. I’d been sitting in front of the gas fire in the flat and my right-hand side had become numb with the heat. Now this wore off — like a pain — leaving my clammy clothes sticking to my clammy flesh.
I walked for a couple of hundred yards down the hill, then a stitch stabbed into me and I felt little pockets of gas beading my stomach. I was level with a tiny parade of shops which included a cab company. Suddenly I couldn’t face the walk to the tube, the tube itself, the walk back from the tube to his house. If I was going to go back to him I had to be there right away. If I went by tube it would take too long and this marvellous reconciliatory feeling might have soured by the time I arrived. And more to the point there might not be a relationship there for me to go back to. He was a feckless and promiscuous man, insecure and given to the grossest and most evil abuses of trust.
The jealous agony came over me again, covering my flesh like some awful hive. I leant up against a shopfront. The sick image of him entering some other. I could feel it so vividly that it was as if I was him: my penis snagging frustratingly against something. . my blood beating in my temples. . my sweat dripping on to her upturned face. . and then the release of entry. .
I pushed open the door of the minicab office and lurched in. Two squat men stood like bookends on either side of the counter. They were both reading the racing form. The man nearest to me was encased in a tube of caramel leather. He twisted his neckless head as far round as he could. Was it my imagination, or did his eyes probe and pluck at me, run up my thighs and attempt an imaginative penetration, rapid, rigid and metallic. The creak of his leather and the cold fug of damp, dead filter tips, assaulted me together.
‘D’jew want a cab, love?’ The other bookend, the one behind the counter, looked at me with dim-sum eyes, morsels of pupil packaged in fat.
‘Err. . yes, I want to go up to Islington, Barnsbury.’
‘George’ll take yer — woncha, George?’ George was still eyeing me around the midriff. I noticed — quite inconsequentially — that he was wearing very clean, blue trousers, with razor-sharp creases. Also that he had no buttocks — the legs of the trousers zoomed straight up into his jacket.
‘Yerallright. C’mon, love.’ George rattled shut his paper and scooped a packet of Dunhill International and a big bunch of keys off the counter. He opened the door for me and as I passed through I could sense his fat black heart, encased in leather, beating behind me.
He was at the back door of the car before me and ushered me inside. I squidged halfway across the seat before collapsing in a nerveless torpor. But I knew that I wouldn’t make it back to him unless I held myself in a state of no expectancy, no hope. If I dared to picture the two of us together again, then when I arrived at the house he would be out. Out fucking.
We woozed away from the kerb and jounced around the corner. An air freshener shaped like a fir tree dingled and dangled as we took the bends down to Chalk Farm Road. The car was, I noticed, scrupulously clean and poisonous with smoke. George lit another Dunhill and offered me one, which I accepted. In the moulded divider between the two front seats there sat a tin of travel sweets. I could hear them schussing round on their caster-sugar slope as we cornered and cornered and cornered again.
I sucked on the fag and thought determinedly of other things: figure skating; Christmas sales; the way small children have their mittens threaded through the arms of their winter coats on lengths of elastic; Grace. . which was a mistake, because this train of thought was bad magic. Grace’s relationship with John was clearly at an end. It was perverse to realise this, particularly after her display in the café, when she was so secure and self-possessed in the face of my tears and distress. But I could imagine the truth: that the huge crevices in their understanding of each other had been only temporarily papered over by the thrill of having someone in the flat who was in more emotional distress than they. No, there was no doubt about it now, Grace belonged to the league of the self-deceived.
George had put on a tape. The Crusaders — or at any rate some kind of jazz funk, music for glove compartments. I looked at the tightly bunched flesh at the back of his neck. It was malevolent flesh. I was alone in the world really. People tried to understand me, but they completely missed the mark. It was as if they were always looking at me from entirely the wrong angle and mistaking a knee for a bald pate, or an elbow for a breast.
And then I knew that I’d been a fool to get into the cab, the rapistmobile. I looked at George’s hands, where they had pounced on the steering wheel. They were flexing more than they should have been, flexing in anticipation. When he looked at me in the office he had taken me for jailbait, thought I was younger than I am. He just looked at my skirt — not at my sweater; and anyway, my sweater hides my breasts, which are small. He could do it, right enough, because he knew exactly where to go and the other man, the man in the office, would laughingly concoct an alibi for him. And who would believe me anyway? He’d be careful not to leave anything inside me. . and no marks.