She managed a smile. Shook her head. ‘You bastard. You’ve turned into a real bastard, Chris. You know that?’
‘You left me in the middle of the fucking zones, Carla. At two o’clock in the fucking morning. You’ve got some apologising to do.’
‘You called me a whore.’
‘And you called me.’ He gestured helplessly, not remembering how the row had stoked so high. ‘You said—‘
‘I said I couldn’t recognise you any more, Chris. It wasn’t an insult, it was the truth. I don’t recognise you any more.’
He shrugged. Ignored the tiny acid drip at the centre of his chest. ‘So why come here at all? I’m a write-off, I’m unrecoverable. Tender trash. So why waste your time?’
‘I told you why I came.’
‘Yeah, to apologise. You’re not making a very good job of it.’
The Laphroaig came. He signed for it, sipped and put it down on the table between them. He looked back up at Carla.
‘Well?’
‘I didn’t come to apologise for leaving you in the zones.’ He opened his mouth and she made a slashing gesture to silence him. ‘No, listen to me, Chris. I’d do it again if you spoke to me like that again. You deserved it.’
She stared away across the bar, assembling what she wanted to say. Absently, she reached across the table for the whisky tumbler, recognised the automatic intimacy for what it was and stopped herself rigidly. She blinked a couple of times, fast.
‘That’s not what I have to apologise for. I have to apologise because I should have left you a long time ago. I’ve spent the last year, the last two years, I don’t know maybe even longer than that, trying to turn you back into the man I thought you were when we first met.’ She smiled unconvincingly. ‘And you don’t want to be that man any more, Chris. You aren’t that man any more. You’ve found something harder and faster, and you like it better.’
‘This is crap, Carla.’
‘Is it?’
Silence. A tear broke cover under her left eye. He pretended not to see it, reached for his whisky instead. She found a wipe in her jacket.
‘I’m leaving you, Chris. I thought maybe. But I was right the first time. There’s no point.’ She gestured at the hotel around them. ‘You’re happier like this. Living on room service, locking out the rest of the world. It isn’t just the job you do any more, that fucking tower you run your remote control wars from. It’s everything. Twenty-four, seven, insulated from reality. How long would you have gone on sitting in this place, if I hadn’t come here tonight? How long would you have shut me out like everyone else?’
She got up abruptly. He sat staring straight ahead, out of the windows of the bar to the street outside.
‘You fucking left me, Carla. Don’t try and turn it around.’
She gave him a bright, brittle smile. ‘You’re not listening to me, Chris. I’m leaving you. I’ll need a couple of weeks to get my stuff out of the house—‘
‘And where are you going to go?’ It came out ugly.
‘I’m going to stay with,’ she laughed a little. ‘Not that it’s anything to do with you any more. I’m going to stay in Tromso for a while. Until I can get the divorce sorted out. I’m assuming you aren’t going to contest it, you’ll probably be happier than I am to get free. Give you plenty of room for your new penthouse playmate, whoever she is.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Oh, please. I’m not stupid, Chris. I saw the way the people at the desk looked at me when I asked for you. I hear the way they react when I try to call you. I’m not the only woman you’ve got coming here. I just hope whoever it is is worth what you’re paying.’
He shrugged. ‘Think what you like. Better yet, check the credit-card accounts. Spot all the charges to escort agencies I must be making. You never did have a very high opinion of me, did you?’
She shook her head, drew a hard breath that had tears in it. ‘You don’t know how wrong you are about that, Chris. You’ll never fucking know.’
‘Yeah. Whatever.’
She turned to go. Paused and turned back.
‘Oh, yeah. You’d better come out and collect the Saab. Some time soon. I haven’t touched it, but I’m not sure how long I can stand it sitting there in the drive while I know you’re here fucking some moan-on-demand tit-job. My maturity’s wearing pretty fucking thin.’
She walked away from him.
Chapter Forty-One
Liz Linshaw came over the following evening, and walked bang into the aftermath. Chris was moody and snappish, and when they got into bed he needed a hand-crank start. They fucked, but it wasn’t much fun. He went through the motions, wrestling irritably over choices and changes of posture, and only finally managed to lose himself in the pay-channel perfection of her body as he came. Scant seconds later, he hit the real world like concrete from fifty floors up. No post-coital warmth, no chuckling or smoothing of sweat-soaked skin. There was a raw hollow behind his eyes and in his chest.
They unplugged and lay apart.
‘Thanks,’ she said, staring at the ceiling.
‘Sorry.’ He rolled towards the juncture of her thighs. ‘Come here.’
She pushed his head away. ‘Forget it, Chris. Just tell me what’s wrong.’
‘You don’t want to hear it.’
‘Yes I do.’
He rolled onto his back again. He blew imaginary cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘Carla came to see me,’ he said finally.
‘Great.’ she sat up against the headboard, arms folded under her breasts. ‘Fucking great. You seeing her again?’
‘Told you you didn’t want to hear it.’
She looked down at him, angry. ‘You’re wrong. I do want to hear it, I want to hear all about it. Every fucking detail. You’re what I do in the evenings now, Chris. Anything that’s going to ruin it this badly, you better believe I want to hear about it. Are you seeing her again?’
‘Doubt it.’
He recounted the conversation in the bar, almost word for word. When he came to Carla’s parting line, she grimaced.
‘Nice.’
‘Yeah.’ Chris stared off into a corner of the room. ‘Used to scare me sometimes, how she could get inside my head like that. Just read stuff out of me like I was a screen.’
Liz Linshaw’s gaze twitched around. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I mean, the way she knew that—‘
‘That’s what I am in your head? A moan-on-demand tit-job? Well, thanks a fucking lot, Chris. Thank you very much.’
‘Liz, I’m not. That’s not what I meant. It’s.’ He groped after some explanation of what he meant, the way she seemed to form an integrated part of the smooth-lined hotel-suite reality he was living. ‘Christ, you’re beautiful, that’s what I was trying to say, too beautiful to be real, it seems like. Okay? And that must have been what she picked up on in my head. I mean, look, she was right about the tit-job, wasn’t she.’
Liz cupped her breasts at him. The anger on her face robbed it of sexuality. ‘You got a problem with these? Funny, because you didn’t seem to earlier when your face was fucking buried between them. You know, Chris, this is me. I’m here for real, all of me. I’m not trying to sell myself to you as some piece of fucking merchandise.’
‘No?’ A little of his own anger was starting to seep back through the emptiness under his ribs. ‘So why send me the edited highlights of your porn career? Good old airbrushed girl-on-girl action? You wouldn’t call that merchandising the goods?’
She stared at him. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Oh, come on Liz. You’re trying to tell me you didn’t do porn?’
‘No, I did.’ Something in her face had changed. ‘Back when it was the best way I knew to make money. I just want to know how come you never told me you’d been jerking off to it.’
‘Liz, you fucking sent it to me.’
‘No, Chris. I didn’t.’
‘You’re saying you didn’t mail me a videoclip of you and some blonde bimbette on a, like, an exercise rack or something. You never sent that?’