‘Well?’ she said. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’
‘No,’ he said. His voice was a whimper and he put his head in his hands.
‘Why not? You have to say something. I’ve said I’m going to keep the baby, and you—’
‘What baby?’ He heard the shout come from him, and then the slam of his hand on the coffee table. The room capsized in an angry blur. ‘It’s not a bloody baby, for God’s sake! It’s not a baby!’ He wondered what sounds would fall from his lips if he ceased to restrain them with words, what grunts and howls and strange language. He felt an eruption at his eyes, his face growing messy. ‘I don’t love you, do you understand? I–I barely know you, I don’t actually know who you are!’ A drop of mirthless laughter spilled from his mouth. ‘Please leave me alone. Do you hear? Leave me alone.’
He hadn’t been looking at her but he sensed her suddenly come at him, and then felt the dark flaps of her coat baffling around his head. He realized to his astonishment that she was hitting him with her fists and he put out his arms to protect himself.
‘How dare you?’ she panted, drawing back. ‘How dare you speak to me like that? I know about you!’ Her voice hauled itself higher on a new rope of initiative. ‘I know all about you!’
‘What do you know?’ he spat back, laughing. ‘You don’t know anything about me at all!’
‘Yes I do!’ she said triumphantly, folding her arms. ‘I know what you are — you’re a fake!’ She waited, watching him, and when he didn’t do anything she said it again. ‘You’re a fake! You act all superior and high and mighty, but you’re not, are you? Oh, I’ve found out everything!’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ said Ralph.
He felt all at once calm again. He wondered if she had actually lost her mind, but then realized that he was merely seeing more clearly into it: its accumulation of junk, its piles of magazines from whose covers trapped, vacant beauties stared, its reels of bad films, its numbing hours of television; all these broken, abandoned versions of reality strangling her soil, clogging her consciousness. She lived beneath a dictatorship of nonsense; she imitated that which itself was only an imitation, and try as he might to search for her in this hall of mirrors, he would find time and again only comical, distorted reflections of himself. The worst of it was that, despite everything, he saw she had been capable of dragging him down with her; for every soft, silly thing she threw at him concealed a sharp rock of implication, the fact that he himself had chosen her.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Her voice sung with affected mimickry. ‘Oh, very realistic. Is that what they taught you at your posh school, then?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Ralph gaily, suddenly finding the whole exchange hilarious.
‘It’s not how your parents talked, though, is it?’
‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ he replied, pausing with surprise. ‘I don’t really remember. Look, is that what this is all about? I hardly think it matters how my parents spoke.’
‘You lied to me!’ she shouted. Her fingers stiffened into fists and her face, hanging above him, was a lamp of anger. He saw that she was incensed, quite genuinely, and realized that she had expected him to be ashamed. ‘All this time you’ve been looking down your nose at me, acting like I’m not good enough, and it’s me who should feel sorry for you!’
‘Why’s that?’ said Ralph. He felt peculiarly unmoved, and it surprised him to notice that his heart was thudding.
‘Everyone feels sorry for you!’ She waited, watching him until he met her eye before she delivered her meaning. ‘Your father was a disgusting tramp and you came from a council house, and even your precious Stephen was only friends with you because he was forced to be!’
Something dropped through his centre like a pebble thrown down a well, a long, silent fall. He felt its faint impact down in the pit of himself.
‘That’s not true.’ He sat back firmly on the sofa and folded his hands.
‘Oh, yes it is! He told me so.’ Her face was excited now. ‘He told me it was his punishment, to be friends with you!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He got into trouble,’ said Francine victoriously. ‘And the master’ — she used the word carefully, and Ralph suddenly knew beyond doubt that she was telling the truth, that somehow Stephen had really told her these things — ‘the master said that instead of being expelled he had to be friends with you, because nobody else wanted to. He said he wished he’d been expelled,’ she finished matter-of-factly.
Ralph opened his mouth but found himself disarmed. The litany of Francine’s voice assaulted him, hammering against his thoughts and then slotting in amongst them, into spaces he had not really known were there but which now he saw fitted them perfectly. He saw the matrix of truth, touched its cold, steely walls, and knew himself captured.
‘He told me other things too, all sorts of interesting things about you. He took me out last night to a wine bar and we got drunk and talked about everything. I told him how bad you were to me and he said it wasn’t surprising, considering your background, and I should just feel sorry for you, like he does. He says you’re jealous of him because of Belinda, because she liked him more than she liked you. She was all over him, he said.’ He heard her laugh. ‘And you still go to the pub with him! It’s pathetic, it really is. Just pathe—’
Ralph saw himself spring to his feet and put his hands about her throat, but it was only the warm shock of his skin meeting hers that told him it was real, that he was now committing an impossibility, a physical rebellion which demanded to occupy seconds and space and would change everything. Her neck was surprisingly thick, resilient with cords. He squeezed with his hands, frightened by the sudden silence and then amazed by it, and as he looked into her startled eyes his heart flew to his fingertips and for the first time he felt locked with her in an unutterable intimacy. For a moment she was still, long, glorious seconds of quiet in which he looked at the petrified face in his hands and knew himself completely, but then she struggled, clawing at him with rigid fingers, and he let her go. To his surprise she didn’t recoil from him but stayed motionless where she was, the panting sound of her breath the only trace of what had happened. He waited for an aftermath, for something to flow into the vacuum of what he had done, but the room seemed just then to stand still with the evidence of his crime, and hers, the impossibility of retraction. He prayed for her to do something simple, cry perhaps, something which would retrieve them from this desolation where they were too far to be heard or rescued. Finally, she lifted a hand and touched her throat with her fingers, and he saw there the imprints of his own in a ghastly tattoo. His palms burned.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said, astonished at the familiar sound of his own voice, its politeness. ‘I don’t know what happened.’
To his surprise he saw her lips unfurl in a curious half-smile, and as her eyes grew excited again he realized that he hadn’t changed anything at all, merely delayed the progress of a strange campaign by which he had long been surrounded.
‘He did it to me too!’ she said, the wing of a shriek flitting across her voice. For a moment he didn’t understand her, but then his shame came back to him with redoubled force, dragging with it all the things she had said, the sound of her voice, the chasm into which he had for a moment frozen his fall. ‘He pushed me against a wall and did it to me right there in the street! I asked him to!’
A cry crowded fluttering in his mouth and he let it escape, hearing its soft progress through silence. With a painful grinding of joints he finally felt himself turn away from everything he knew, from the ugly, familiar place where he had always been, and it was as if something else, a clear and frightening range of vertiginous truths, had been there, just behind him, all along. He saw the sweep of it in seconds, exhilarated and despairing, and felt a rush of knowledge pass through him. He had done wrong, a terrible, intractable wrong reached by a steep stairway of mistakes and failures, from whose top he could view all the things he should have done and realize only how far he was from them. His helplessness could not absolve him: he had failed to defend what was his as it floated alone in its troubled sea, had abandoned where he should have protected, had cast away his fragile creation and left it to cower at the drip of wine-toxic blood, the rooting jabs of a stranger, the unfriendly air in which he himself was betrayed and reviled.