I said, ‘What else did we do together that was like this? By which I mean: totally fucking pointless?’
‘Not pointless.’
I wish I hadn’t raised my voice. I wish I’d had at least that much sense. ‘Well, what would you call it?’
She stared at me, the way you search a wall for a door that isn’t there. ‘Love,’ she said.
That shut me up.
She said: ‘That’s what we do together. That’s the point of it. That’s why it’s worth doing.’
It wasn’t that I disbelieved her. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. But we had started to talk of ourselves in the past tense and it was too late trying to change. ‘I know you’ve been slumming it with me.’
‘Oh, for crying out loud.’
‘Well, you have!’
‘According your friend Stan bloody Lesniak I have.’
I hadn’t expected that. ‘What?’
‘Your friend Lesniak. He’s shared his important thoughts about our relationship in his fucking student rag. I thought you’d seen.’
‘I don’t read Responses – I didn’t even know it was still running.’
‘He’s had a fine old go at us. In fiction, but it’s pretty bloody obvious who he’s talking about.’
That took the wind out of my sails. It made my blood run cold to think that Stan had so easily identified the breaking point in our relationship; worse, that he was actually finding something entertaining in it all. Was our being together so obviously unworkable? Was Stan the only one of our friends to be raising his eyebrows at the thought of us? I doubted it.
‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what’s it got to do with him?’ I wanted all of a sudden to paper over the cracks, to heal what was broken, to withdraw every complaint.
She gathered the cards up from the floor, split the deck in two and put it back in its box.
‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘His readership can’t number more than a couple of dozen.’
‘All our friends read him. All your friends, that is.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘When was the last time we went out with friends?’
‘We can do that.’
‘Not now we can’t.’
I gave her a minute to calm down. ‘What does he say? Exactly?’
‘Read it yourself. Only I threw it away.’
I tried not to smile. ‘Good,’ I said. Then: ‘Do you want to come back to bed?’
She shook her head.
I took her hand and led her to the sofa. We sat together, intimate but not touching. We had not sat like that before. It felt very grown up.
We both knew what this was. Knowing it, we managed to be kind to each other.
She said: ‘I know people, they get a lot out of having a kid. They get a different kind of relationship out of it. Satisfaction. A lot of fun. Being stuck in their little monster’s perpetual present – it makes them young again, in a way. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘But you don’t feel it.’
‘No.’
‘You like the life we have. The music, the books. You can work. We go out together in the evenings. It’s good for you. It’s what you want.’
‘Yes.’
It was the worst possible moment I could have chosen to be honest. Sometimes the words have to come before the feelings. You may not mean them, but that doesn’t make them untrue. They are a kind of promise to yourself. A challenge to yourself. And I failed that challenge. Even at the time, sitting there beside her as her tears came, and me there feeling so very sad, so very noble that I had managed to be honest, I knew that I had failed. ‘In time—’
‘What time?’ She got up off the sofa. She pointed out of the window. She screamed at me: ‘There is no fucking time!’
I looked where she was pointing, but there was nothing to see. Only the Moon.
She said: ‘I’d better go.’
Returning in the new year to the West Riding, to the valley, the furnaces and all those narrow streets, I decided to move back in with my dad for a while. Though Betty had left him years before, Bob was feeling especially lonely now that she had passed away. And despite Stella’s best efforts, her unwelcome letters and even less welcome day visits, he refused to let her reconcile him to the idea that there was another Betty waiting to see him, and talk to him, and reminisce with him over past happiness. Death was death to Bob: a boon companion he refused to abandon.
I told myself that I would not stay long. That moving in with my dad would be an opportunity for me to regroup, while giving Fel some much-needed space before she and I took up – in a more circumspect fashion – the next chapter in what was obviously going to be a lifelong friendship. We had made some brave noises about staying in touch and remaining friends.
Naturally, we never saw each other again.
THREE
-
The hatch closes on Jim Lanyon’s hand. He whips clear, catching his finger for a split-second between the hatch door and the sill. A dull compression pulses through the nail into the bone.
The tunnel lurches around him and his arm sweeps on a reflex, seeking something to cling to.
His hand finds something soft and lumpy and unmistakably alive. A face. His hand digs in, forefinger and bruised middle finger getting purchase around the arch of an eye even as he cries out in terror: he thought he was alone here.
The face joins in with Jim’s screaming and swivels free of his grasp. His fingers trace thick, dense hair, a woman’s hair, and his autonomous self, that diurnal part of him oblivious to events and circumstances, and which responds only to the routines and the givens of life, pulses out its interest.
The world lurches, throwing Jim and the face and a tangle of limbs and ducting into a new and radically different arrangement. It is as though they were the jumbled elements inside a kaleidoscope and someone is twisting the eyepiece, setting them to a new configuration.
The sound as it twists – this grinding, screaming corridor made kaleidoscope – fills Jim’s head with metal, and he presses his hands against his ears and screams along to the buckling tube like a child on a fairground ride, screaming to take control, to rise to the fear, to perform it, anything so as not to be consumed by it, sensation piling up on sensation as the corridor buckles and twists, every failure a jagged edge, a spark, a scream, a puff of vapour.
He remembers the last time he was afraid like this, and screamed like this. He was a boy, strapped into a fairground ride with his dad. He and his dad had screamed together, surfing together the wave of their imminent destruction, and here, too, there is a second scream accompanying his own and the lights come on again. How long have the lights been out? Jim does not know. He had his eyes tight shut, the better to scream, but his eyes are open now and he sees the face, bare inches from his own, hurtling into him, into his face, filling his vision with shadow, a dark and heavy presence filling his field of view. Then the collision, forehead to forehead in classic silent-comedy symmetry to a soundtrack of mutual screaming, and the corridor thrusts itself straight again, a limb kicking itself back into shape, and the lights go out again.
They breathe together, suck air together, paired in the darkness, and in the eerie blast of cold that stops both their mouths, they are joined in the terror of decompression. But the chill dissipates and, released for a second, their rhythms come apart, each pants to their own beat. Jim is first to speak, if you can call it speaking, a wet swallowing that approximates his name.