‘I’m not having a baby, Dan. You knew that when you married me.’
He nods slowly, and then adds, ‘You weren’t a big fan of getting married either, I seem to remember. At first.’ He loves bringing that up — that she didn’t say yes on the spot and faint away into his arms. Tells it to all and sundry as a self-deprecating anecdote. That she said she had to think about it.
‘No, Dan. The answer is no.’
‘I hope this is okay,’ says James, as they take their seats in a modest little bistro, after descending Arthur’s Seat in drizzle and dying light. ‘If you want to be taken to posh restaurants, I’m the wrong guy.’
‘I loathe posh restaurants,’ says Brenda. ‘You can’t imagine how much I loathe them.’ James could shout for joy: Project Q at a bargain price. Once settled, their eyes meet across the table. They smile, and nobody speaks. Two introverts on a first date, and there’s no awkwardness. Just energy. Charge.
‘You were going to tell me your story,’ suggests James at last. Brenda shrugs.
‘I’m not brainy. I’m not a people person. I like the outdoors — cold, rain, snow, whatever. I enjoy what I do. That’s it, really.’
‘Tell me something you like about being outdoors,’ says James, as the young waiter, sensing romance, pours house red with a flourish.
‘Something I like. Hmm. Well, yesterday I was thinking about the wind.’ She laughs. ‘Yes, that’s my world. How it doesn’t just slide smoothly over you. It has invisible fingers. It strokes you and tickles you and bumps against you. If you could see it, it would be all swirls and feathers, but you have to feel it instead.’ As she speaks, her eyes shine. Maybe she should be the writer.
‘Did you always want to work outdoors?’
‘I was never a girly girl, if that’s what you mean. My brother — not Mike, I mean my younger brother, Austin — we like all the same things. He lives in Australia now. Works on a farm.’
‘And Mike?’
‘He’s my half-brother. He’s a fund manager, or something. Earns megabucks. Prances about. Plays the field. We went to different schools, had different friends — we have nothing in common but he’s always been there for me.’
James feels a waft of possessiveness: Mike be damned — he wants to be the one who’s there for her now. At the same time he detects an echo of past emotion, of Becks’ ghost. Fascinating.
Natalie and Dan are still on the sofa. Natalie is writing an email to an old school friend, Lisa, whom she hasn’t seen for, what, five years? Could it really be ten? She has heard that Lisa is now both a teacher at a snazzy boarding school and a mother. Hard to imagine. At any of a dozen parties, Lisa was the one who drank too much or smoked too much and had to be carried home. Not in a wild-child way, but in an annoying, embarrassing way.
Lisa was in Laos, on that hike. Afterwards, she followed them around half of Asia, ignoring hints. When they finally shook her off, leaving her with some wacko Americans on Phuket, Natalie was struck by remorse. But annoying Lisa has done just fine.
Lisa kept in touch with the backpacker crowd, Natalie recalls, and always knew who was doing what with whom. She’ll put the crucial enquiry in a casual, gossipy postscript. She glances at Dan but he’s miles away, poring over a complicated diagram on his tablet. She and Dan don’t read each other’s emails: it’s a privacy thing, a respect thing, like not using the toilet while the other person’s in the shower. Or it’s a trust thing.
As she types, her heart flutters. But the involvement of that organ is incidental biology.
May God bless Brenda, who has the key to a friend’s empty flat, and who, without asking where James was planning to stay, positively encouraged their evening towards that destination. His booking at the youth hostel won’t be needed. In her friend’s grubby kitchen, which is miraculously provisioned with booze, fruit and ice, they make cocktails that would have cost him dear at a bar.
After a raid on the kitchen cupboards, he returns to the sofa to find her lying on the floor on her front, eyes closed. Surely she hasn’t passed out on him?
‘Brenda?’
‘When I was little,’ she says, wide awake, her eyes still closed, ‘if my dad was riding his luck, we’d go on holiday to Spain. The Costa Brava. I remember lying exactly like this on the beach, eyes closed, head on my arms, listening to the waves breaking — that slow, irregular rhythm, sometimes a big wave, sometimes a small one — and feeling the hot sand between my toes, the breeze coming and going, nothing to do but soak it all in, thinking, “This is now. You wanted this, you waited for months for this, and here it is. Soon it will be over and you’ll be home, with lessons and homework and people you hate, remembering this moment and wishing you were back here. But this is now, right now.” I was just thinking the same thing: “This is now.”’
Not much later, they’re in Brenda’s friend’s bed. James is in the stupor of any starved man presented with a feast, and content to follow Brenda’s lead. She won’t stay underneath him, but rolls him this way and that, laughing, until they lie side by side in an awkward tangle.
The laughing troubles him. To James, sex is about as funny as appendicitis or the Cuban Missile Crisis. He has a vivid memory of Becks once laughing in his face. There he was, desperate, defenceless — ethereal, you might say, flush’d and like a throbbing star — and she laughed. Couldn’t help it, she said. The look on his face. She apologised lovingly but he never quite forgave her. Anything but that. Brenda’s laughter isn’t so bad: she isn’t laughing at him. Is she?
Gradually, these thoughts fade as his mental field collapses into a point. He unthinkingly takes hold of her hip, tries to turn her to better direct his efforts. She disengages. Did he go too far? ‘If you want it that way,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice, rising onto hands and widely-planted knees, ‘we might as well do it properly.’ Her eyes flash a friendly challenge. Christ, this woman means business, after all. How long will he last? He finds his gaze fixed on the knotted contours of her upper back, the deep valley between muscles drawn together over her spine. For a brief, weird instant he’s fucking a guy, not a girl. This distracting notion helps to delay his moment of crisis, which nevertheless rushes upon him all too soon.
The sheet splits loudly, right between his knees. A few stunned seconds follow — deep, slowing exhalations — before they both dissolve in laughter.
Brenda wakes before James. The flat is cold. She pees, brushes her teeth, and then lies back down to watch him for a while. Every morning after every social interaction, her impulsive habit is to pick over each mortifying episode — the wrong things she said, the people who laughed at her or ignored her, the witnesses to her freakish symptoms — and work herself into a delicious agony of shame. But this morning is different — she casts her mind back over the previous day and doesn’t feel any trace of her signature emotion.
James doesn’t snore. He’s dead to the world. These writers get up late. He probably has a cheap ticket only valid on one train.
‘Hey. Morning. When’s your train?’
‘Hmm.’ He sighs, moistens his mouth, opens his eyes. They wander down over the small breasts that for some reason she isn’t ashamed of, the washboard stomach, then back up to meet hers. ‘Love is pleasin’,’ he sings, in a soft, Irish lilt. ‘Love is teasin’. Ten fifteen.’