Chris grinned and folded the laptop.
He got off the flight with a bounce in his step, grabbed a sauna and a shower in the exec lounge while he waited and slept naturally on the shuttle back to London. He dreamed of Liz Linshaw.
At Heathrow, leaning on the barrier at arrivals, made up and dressed in clothes that hugged at her figure, Carla was waiting.
‘No, it’s just. You didn’t need to. You know, I’m running on the Shorn clock. They’d pick up the tab for a taxi all the way home.’
‘I wanted to see you.’
So why the fuck’d you go to Tromso? He bit it back, and watched the curving perspectives of the road ahead. Saturday morning traffic on the orbital was sparse, and Carla, with the easy confidence of the professional mechanic, had the Saab up to a hundred and fifty in the middle lane.
‘How was your mum?’
‘She’s good. Busy. They want to bring out an interactional version of the new book, so she’s been rewriting, slotting in the GoTo sections with some datarat from the university.’
‘Is she shagging him?’ It didn’t quite come out right. Too harsh, too much silence around it. There was a time Chris could get away with these riffs on Kirsti’s sex life, and Carla used to laugh in mock outrage. Now she just looked across at him and went back to watching the road, tight lipped. The chill filled the car almost palpably.
‘Sorry, I—‘
‘That was nasty.’
‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ Helplessly.
What the fuck is happening to us, Carla. What the fuck are we doing here? Is it just me? Is it?
He saw Liz Linshaw again, the easy smile in the spare room, face and hair dappled with street lighting through the tree outside, the glass of water in her hand. She had navigated the moment with the same ease that Carla drove the Saab. Stepping closer than necessary to hand him the water, the warm tang of whisky on her breath. A soft, surprised oh, in ladylike tones her newscasts had never seen, as he pulled at the raw silk belt and the gown fell open. Broken street light across the curves within. The feel of her breast, as he laid one hand on it, was burnt into his palm. The soft sound of the laugh in her throat.
Highgate.
Involuntarily, he opened the hand at the memory. Looked at it, as if for some sign of branding.
I, uh, I can’t do this, Liz, he’d lied, I’m sorry, and he’d turned away to stare out of the window, pretty sure this was the only way to stop the landslide. Trembling with the force of it.
Fair enough, she told him and in the window he watched her bend to leave the glass on the table by the futon. She stood for a moment at the door before she left, looking at his back, but she said nothing. She had not retied the gown. The gap between its edges was black in the reflected image, empty of detail that his own mind was feverishly happy to fill.
In the morning, he woke to find the gown draped across the quilt he had slept under. At some point during the night she had come in, taken it off and stood naked, watching him sleep. Even through the layers of mild hangover, it was an intensely erotic image and he felt himself hardening at the thought.
The house was silent around him. Birdsong from the tree outside the window, a solitary car engine somewhere distant. He lay propped up on one elbow in the bed, vague with last night’s drinking. Without conscious thought, he reached for the gown, dragged it up the bed and held it to his face. It smelled intimately of woman, the only woman’s scent outside of Carla’s that he had breathed in nearly a decade. The shock was visceral, dissolving the hangover and dumping him out into reality like an exasperated bouncer. He threw off the gown and the quilt in a single motion, threw on clothes. Watch and wallet, off the bedside table in a sweep, stamping into shoes. He slid out of the spare room and paused.
There was no one home. It was a feeling he knew well, and the house echoed with it. A handwritten note lay on the kitchen table, detailing where breakfast things could be found, the number of a good cab company and how to set the alarms before leaving. It was signed stay in touch.
He got out.
No appetite for breakfast, no confidence that he wouldn’t do something really stupid like go through her things or, worse still, wait around for her to come back. He triggered the alarm set-up and the door closed him out on a rising whine as the house defences charged.
He found himself on a tree-lined hill street that swept up behind him and down then up again in front. A couple of prestige cars and a four track were parked at intervals along the kerbs, and down near the base of the parabola the street described, someone was walking a German Shepherd. There was no one else about. It looked like a nice neighbourhood.
He didn’t know Highgate, had been in the area only a couple of times before in his life, to drink- and drug-blurred parties at the homes of HM execs. But the air was mild and the sky looked clear of rain in all directions.
He chose the downslope at random, and started walking.
The Saab jolted on a badly mended pothole. Dumped him back into reality. The memory of Highgate dropped away, receding in the rear-view.
‘Carla.’ He reached across the space between them. He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything about your mother. It was a joke, alright.’
‘Ha fucking ha.’
He held down the quick flare of anger. ‘Carla, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve only been in each other’s company half an hour, and we’re fighting already. This is killing us.’
‘You’re the one who.’ She stopped, and he wondered what she was biting back the way he’d bitten back words a few moments earlier.
Is this it, he wondered dismally, is this the only way to survive a-long term relationship? Hide your thoughts, bite back your feelings, build a neutral silence that won’t hurt. Is that what it’s all about? Neutrality for the sake of a warm bed?
Is that what I turned Liz down for?
Liz, waiting, wrapped in the white silk that carried her scent.
‘Carla, pull over.’
‘What?’
‘Pull over. Stop. There, on the hard shoulder. Please.’
She shot him a look, and must have seen something in his face. The Saab bled speed and drifted across the lanes. Carla dropped a gear and brought the car under a hundred kilometres an hour. Onto the hard shoulder and they crunched to a halt. Carla turned in her seat to face him.
‘Alright.’
‘Carla, listen.’ He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling his way towards what he needed to say. ‘Please don’t run off like that again. Like you did. I missed you. I really did. I need you, and when you’re not here I really. I miss you so much. I. I do stupid things.’
Her eyes widened.
‘Things like what?’
And he could not fucking tell her. He couldn’t.
He thought he was going to, he even started to, started with Troy Morris’s party, even got as far as talking about Liz and her book proposal, but he couldn’t do it, and when she knew there was more behind it and pushed for it, he veered off into the zones and what he and Mike Bryant had done to Griff Dixon and his friends.
She whitened as he told it.
‘That can’t be,’ she whispered. ‘You, they can’t,’ scaling almost to a shout. ‘People can’t do things like that. It’s not legal.’
‘Tell that to Mike. Ah, Christ, tell it to the whole fucking Shorn corporation, while you’re at it.’ And then it all had to come tumbling out, the morning after, the NAME contract, the fuck-up with Lopez and Langley, the dead in Medellin and the quick-fix burial of the facts, Panama and Barranco and his quiet insistence. You do not belong. Chris found he was trembling by the time he got to the end and there was what felt like a laugh building in his throat, but when it finally came out his eyes were wet. He unfastened his belt and leaned across the space between the seats. He pulled himself across and against her, teeth gritted on the fraying shreds of his control.