‘Poor thing,’ he muttered, hardly knowing what he said. ‘Poor little thing.’
‘Oh, don’t feel sorry for me!’
Their eyes met. Ralph endured the final, fatal collision of their differences and felt laughter jump in his throat. He saw Francine pick up her bag and he gasped, putting out a hand to stop her.
‘Don’t you touch me!’ she shrieked, skipping from the compass of his arm.
‘Please don’t go, not yet.’
He fixed her with his eyes, trying to fill them with some as yet unspoken promise, some prize which might lure her back to him. For a moment he held her, but then the knowledge of his own emptiness leaked from him and her eyes grew bored and looked away. She turned and left the room with his voice still ringing in her absence as if it had been the signal of her liberation, and seconds later he heard her shut the door.
*
‘Is that you?’
Ralph’s voice was barely more than a whisper. Stephen’s phone had rung for a long time, hundreds of rings, each one pounding like a hammer in his heart. Then finally there had been the click of someone picking it up, and now just the sound of breathing.
‘Is that you?’
‘Who’s this?’ barked Stephen suddenly. ‘Speak up whoever you are or bugger off.’
‘It’s me. Ralph.’
‘It’s Ralphie! It’s my old friend Ralph,’ said Stephen, shouting as if to a room full of people. Ralph could hear static in the background and beyond that, nothing. Stephen was drunk, or stoned, or both, he could tell from his voice. ‘This is a bit of a late night for you, old chap, isn’t it? Rebelling at last?’
Ralph felt himself break again, a strange sensation of inner collapse, something giving beneath him like a rotten bridge and then the blurred velocity of falling. He had felt it several times in the hours since Francine had left.
‘Still there?’ Stephen tapped comically at the receiver.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s up?’
Ralph waited, but nothing came. Now that he was here, claiming what was owed to him, his injury seemed fluid and ungraspable, impossible to lift from the mire which surrounded it and hold dripping above his head.
‘You’ve — wronged me,’ he said finally, and then instantly regretted it.
‘I what? Speak up. Can’t hear you.’
‘You’ve wronged me.’
Stephen was silent for so long that Ralph felt himself begin to disappear. He heard a dry cough in the receiver, a clearing of the throat.
‘Look, what’s this all about? Are you pissed or something?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve gone a bit nuts, then, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘You’ve wronged me.’
‘Yes, so you keep saying. Can’t help you, I’m afraid.’
Ralph tried to speak and felt a terrible constriction at his throat. He thought of Francine’s face above his hands, the face of a doll, her eyes empty as marbles.
‘She told me,’ he said, his voice strangled. ‘Everything you said to her, she told me. I know everything.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Stephen. His laugh rattled in Ralph’s ear. ‘Well, I wouldn’t take it to heart if I were you. We were both a bit pissed, that’s all.’ He laughed again. ‘My God, she was—’
‘You told her things about me,’ interrupted Ralph. The sound of his own voice excited him.
‘Did I? Can’t say I remember.’
‘Private things. You told her private things.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’
He muttered something else which Ralph couldn’t hear. He sounded distracted, as if he wanted to be off the telephone.
‘All my life,’ began Ralph; but then he stopped, unable to say something so portentous.
‘What was that?’
‘I said, all my life you’ve fucked me up.’ He strained over the words, finding them hard and unnatural. ‘All my life.’
‘Nothing to do with me. Fucked yourself up. Pathetic bastard, that’s your problem. Nobody forced you.’
Tears sprang to Ralph’s eyes and he put a hand to his forehead.
‘You’ve taken things from me!’ he said desperately.
‘Look, you only ever had one thing worth taking. She wasn’t yours anyway. As for the other one, she wasn’t worth the trouble it would have taken to shag her. Those are the facts. Now, why don’t you just toddle off to bed and get off my bloody case?’
‘She’s pregnant!’ burst out Ralph.
Stephen paused for a long time.
‘Not by me, she’s not,’ he said finally. ‘Anyway, you’re well shot of her.’
Ralph felt himself smelted down to his hot, thudding heart, saw the room around him and dissolved into its walls, evaporated in its corners.
‘And you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’m well shot of you.’
Ralph could hear the measure of his breathing, up and down.
‘Oh. All right, then.’
‘I don’t want to see you again.’
‘Righty-ho.’
‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, yes, I think you’ve made yourself quite clear. Goodbye.’
The line went abruptly dead and Ralph replaced the receiver. The silence around him was towering, enormous. He lay back on the sofa, stretching himself out so that he lay flat. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. He closed his eyes and waited.
Seventeen
It was better than she’d expected, especially after the long, unnerving walk through a vast catacomb of cavernous, neon-lit corridors in which she had distinctly heard the dungeon sound of dripping, its echo ghostly behind her footsteps. On the way she had come across two or three berobed old women stranded in wheelchairs like spectral, crippled sentries at isolated outposts. She had followed signs to the clinic, pinned intermittently on walls down which green limous streaks ran like eccentric beards, and had finally arrived after what seemed like miles at a newer and more hospitable door made of wood and chrome. She pushed it and entered a hushed and carpeted enclave where telephones quietly chirped and potted plants proudly proclaimed the tiny region’s luxurious independence. Its immediate resemblance to offices in which she had worked, or even the agency where she used to go to collect her cheques and receive news of her next assignment, at first soothed and then disturbed her. She instantly warmed to the superiority of her treatment, but remembering the collapsed and crumpled faces of the corridor’s abandoned residents, their lumpy, useless forms rooted like unattended overflowing bins in concrete wastelands, she wondered at the severity of her own condition that it should elicit such reverence.
‘What name is it, dear?’
She turned and saw a woman standing near her with a clipboard in her hand. She was wearing a white uniform, with a stiff white veil of the same material covering her head. For a moment she thought nervously that the woman was a nun, for the soft, coaching tone of her voice and her ready, pliant face seemed to anticipate tearful confessions.