An hour passed and the gallery grew so full that it was hard to move. Mouse and Marcus had colonised a flight of stairs at the far end of the room where they sat looking down on the people below them. Daffy would rush past every so often, his eyes wild, a huge grin on his face.
‘All right you two? Fucking crazy, eh? Cheers!’
A DJ started playing pounding trance music and some of the younger people tried to dance, their elbows pressed against their sides, grimaces of bored hipness fixed on their faces. Marcus took an armful of beers from the bar and he and Mouse drank them until they were giddy and had to hold on to each other to keep from sliding down the stairs.
Finally, the music stopped and the lights went up. Mouse was asleep, his cheek resting against the banister. Marcus looked down from his lofty position at the crowd as they began to file out into the night. He saw Daffy talking to Carrington, his shoulders twitching as he spoke. The artist kept looking over Daffy’s shoulder and pushed past him to join a group that was about to leave. He took a girl’s arm and began to guide her through the door. The girl turned once to look back at the room and Marcus’s lungs emptied of air.
The girl had a black fedora pulled down over her head and had turned up the collar of her jacket against the cold, but Marcus was almost certain that it was Lee. He shook Mouse awake.
‘Mouse, look!’
He watched his friend’s eyes as he saw the girl.
‘Jesus,’ said Mouse. ‘Is it her?’
‘Yes. I think so. Quick.’
They pushed through the crowd and hurled themselves out into the night. Daffy was leering drunkenly over the woman who worked on the door. There was no sign of Carrington and the girl.
‘Did you see where Carrington went?’
Daffy turned to Marcus.
‘He got in a taxi. A bunch of them are going on to a party at his house. I think he invited me.’
‘Right, let’s go.’
Marcus flagged down a cab.
Carrington lived in a tall Victorian house on the Hackney Road. Marcus could hear the music as soon as they stepped from the taxi. They walked down the overgrown path to the front door and Daffy rang the bell. A girl answered.
‘Oh, hi, Daffy. Come on in.’
It was very dark inside. Marcus followed Daffy down a corridor which opened out into a large kitchen. Candles flickered on the work surfaces and patio doors opened at the back to the garden where people were dancing around a fire. The music was so loud that Marcus could feel his cheekbones vibrating with every thump. Daffy was already bent over the kitchen table cutting up lines of coke. Marcus couldn’t see Carrington or the girl. He and Mouse turned back into the corridor and made their way up the stairs. The rooms were full of people, some of them asleep, some crouched talking. Two girls were sprawled across the bed in the largest bedroom, snorting powder from the cover of a hardback book. One of them turned and caught Marcus’s eye, gesturing him over. He backed out of the room. Mouse was already on his way up to the second floor.
There was a closed door at the top of the stairs. Marcus edged past Mouse and turned the handle. They walked into an attic room. It was Carrington’s studio. There was a potter’s wheel and various unfinished works scattered around the floor. A huge skylight sat in the ceiling, revealing the orange glow of low clouds above. The artist was sitting in the far corner surrounded by ten or twelve others, a lamp on the ground behind him. He had clearly been holding forth upon something profound and looked up, annoyed at the intrusion.
‘Who are you? Go back downstairs. People aren’t allowed up here.’
The girl in the black fedora was sitting on a beanbag with her back to them. Marcus began to stutter. Slowly the girl turned her head and Marcus felt himself tense. Her profile was caught in the bright white light. Mouse leaned against Marcus, breathing deeply. Marcus could feel his friend shudder.
‘Let them stay, Hugo. Don’t be such a prick.’
The voice was not Lee’s. It was higher, posher. She took the fedora off her head and shook her hair out, and Marcus saw that she wore her hair as Lee had before she cut it. She was younger than Lee, perhaps eighteen. Otherwise, the similarity was uncanny.
‘Come and sit down, guys. Hugo was just telling us about his next great work. Do you want a drink?’
The girl poured red wine into plastic cups as Marcus and Mouse crouched on the floor beside her. Marcus felt dazed.
‘I’m Hugo’s sister, by the way. My name’s Rebecca,’ the girl whispered as her brother resumed his monologue.
‘Marcus Glass. I knew your brother at university.’
‘Oh, bad luck. He was an awful bore back then.’
‘I didn’t know him well. He left pretty swiftly.’
Marcus couldn’t escape the impression that he was speaking to Lee. He realised that the reason he had been so easily fooled by her resemblance to his friend was that he had been spending so much time looking at pictures of Lee from university. Rebecca Carrington looked like the Lee of those days: her hair was long and wild, her eyes wicked and flashing. Marcus felt suddenly very sad to think that even if Lee came back, it wouldn’t be this Lee, the person he thought of as the real Lee.
‘Shall we go downstairs? I’ve heard this so many times,’ she said, gesturing at her brother, who was holding up one fist and spinning the other around it in frantic revolutions, talking all the while.
Rebecca took Marcus’s hand and they made their way down into the hot pumping heart of the house. Mouse followed behind them. Marcus turned and smiled encouragingly at his friend, but he could see that Mouse had been sobered by the sight of this strange replica of Lee. His face was drawn and tired and he looked at Marcus with an expression that Marcus couldn’t quite decipher. Something between pity and scorn. Marcus raised his eyebrows questioningly, but Mouse just shook his head and hung back in the shadows.
When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Rebecca let go of Marcus’s hand and skipped down the corridor, laughing. Marcus followed her through the kitchen, where she stopped to grab a bottle of vodka from the fridge, and then into the garden. There were picnic blankets and cushions spread out on the grass around the fire, and Marcus threw himself down beside Rebecca, intent on drinking in her face, searing her likeness onto his memory. A gust of cold wind blew across the garden, carrying with it traffic fumes and dust. The fire’s flames danced. Marcus caught sight of Mouse standing in the kitchen talking to Daffy and a tall black girl with an afro. He turned back to Rebecca.
‘I hate these parties,’ she said.
‘Why?’
Rebecca took a slug of the vodka and passed it to Marcus.
‘Hugo always manages to find inspiration the next morning. So I’m left to clean up the place. It’s my payment for staying here during my gap year. I’ve become the de facto cleaning lady. Which makes me hate these parties. Whenever I see people having fun I just think about the mess I’m going to have to face, hungover, the next day. He manages to make me feel so bourgeois.’
Marcus drew out a cigarette and offered her the packet. She shook her head.
‘No thanks. I don’t smoke. So what do you do, Marcus? Are you an artist too?’ She looked at him with a wry smile. Someone stumbled over Marcus’s legs, apologised, and staggered off into the darkness at the bottom of the garden.
‘God, no. I’m a lawyer. I live in Notting Hill. Um. .’ Marcus stopped. Rebecca yawned. He realised how uninteresting his life would seem to a girl like this. It wasn’t something he considered ordinarily, that he lived an existence that could make a girl yawn. Within the world of the Course he was seen as dashing, bright, a leading light. Here, as the fire burned down into embers, and the noise of the party still swept over them, Marcus felt suddenly old and dull.