Well, fair enough. There was nothing in that. In fact, looking at it from a purely practical viewpoint, it was the only sensible place to choose. Not a lot of point in her sitting miles away in that cumbersome old armchair. If this was going to be a counselling session - and all the signs indicated that it was - then proximity was of the essence. He only hoped he would be able to hear what she was saying over the music. The driving, chopping beat was splintering his skull. He would have liked to ask that it be turned down, or even off, but was afraid she would think him square and middle-aged.
Edie settled, tucking her legs beneath her. Her shiny black tights had a single run, starting at the left knee and disappearing inside her leopard-spotted bandeau of a skirt. Somehow Brian dragged his eyes from the ladder and ordered his frenzied imagination to stop picturing its final resting place. Then he asked once more what he could do to allay her anxieties.
He spoke softly, knowing she would not be able to hear him, and, to his relief, the ploy worked. Edie got up and switched off the ghetto blaster at the plug. The fiery blooms on the television set also ceased their dazzle, wilting immediately into a tired bunch of dusty grey plastic.
‘Thing is Brian,’ she sat down again, surely fractionally closer than before? ‘I’m never going to be able to stand up in front of all them people.’
‘Of course you are. Once you step on-stage all those nerves will vanish. Believe me, I know.’
‘Then there’s my accent. I reckon she should talk better. More like a receptionist.’
‘Your accent’s perfect for the part.’
Even as he spoke it struck Brian that the remark might have been better phrased, for the character in question was a sluttish, foul-mouthed drug-addicted scrubber, on the dole and on the make when she wasn’t on the game. A type in fact not a million miles removed from Denzil’s deceased auntie, who made medical history, according to her nephew, by producing a death rattle in the vagina.
‘Actually,’ the fingers of her right hand, resting lightly on the edge of her skirt, curled inwards. Disappeared. ‘I find her whole personality difficult. She’s the sort that really gets on my tits. Know what I mean?’
‘Errkk ...’ Brian, mesmerised by the shifting movements beneath her skirt (was she stroking? scratching?), croaked, ‘Let’s hot-seat this one Edie, OK? Now - no pause for thought - one, two, three - why?’
‘The way she keeps pretending she don’t fancy Mick when it’s dead obvious she’s dying for it. Me - I’d come right up front and tell him.’
‘Ah - but that’s the fun of acting.’ He got the words out, though his voice had knots in. ‘Living the life, just for a while, of someone quite unlike yourself. You see, Edie, that’s the whole point of art. To sublimate brute facts.’
‘You’re really deep, Brian.’
Brian, about as deep as clingfilm but not nearly so useful, gave a falsely deprecating shrug.
‘But,’ continued Edie, ‘when you’ve finished sublimating, aren’t you just back where you started?’
Faced with this shattering perception Brian found himself lost for words. Edie looked at him hopefully for a moment then, with an air of disappointment, turned sadly away.
Shame that he had failed her jostled in Brian’s mind with a ravenous hunger as he studied that exquisite profile. Tiny parrots swung from golden perches in her ears. Wooden, brilliantly painted birds. Above one of them a question mark composed of punctures where all the studs and screws and pins had been. Observing this he became aware of a disturbing longing. A need to fondle, bite and kiss the grubby lobe. He put his hands together, trapping them firmly beneath his denimed knees.
‘Your wife know you’re round here, Brian?’
‘No.’ He arranged his features into a deep puzzlement, making it clear just how incomprehensible he found such a question. ‘She wasn’t in when I left. But I’m often out on school business. I don’t always give chapter and verse.’
‘Must be lovely to be married. Have your own little house and family.’
‘Don’t you believe it.’ Brian produced an arch but slightly anaemic hyuf, hyuf. ‘A man can die of domesticity.’
‘You’re not dead.’
‘I am inside.’
He regretted the words instantly. It was one thing for him and Edie to be equal when rehearsing. Be a hundred per cent open, there for each other and so forth. Quite another for him to reveal intimate and, worse, deeply unflattering aspects of his private life. It never occurred to Brian that displaying a deeply discontented and envious state of mind would endear him far more quickly to his group than the patronising jollity he familiarly employed.
‘Ohh Bri ...’ Edie sighed and rested her hand, laden with rings, sympathetically on his knee. ‘I’m ever so sorry.’
Brian flinched. His mouth was dry as sand. He stared down, almost cross-eyed with tension, at the badly chipped cyclamen nails.
‘All that was strictly entre nous, Edie.’
‘You what?’
‘I wouldn’t want you to tell anyone.’
‘What sort of person do you think I am?’ As quickly as she had leaned towards him she jerked away, her young face cold and hard. ‘You got a funny idea about friendship, you have.’
‘Oh - forgive me. I didn’t mean - Edie? Don’t go ...’ But she was already walking away. He watched her swaying across the sculptured whorls of purple carpet, watched the high, deliciously rounded leopardy buttocks jostling sweetly, cheek by cheek, against each other and thought that any minute he might well pass out. Now she was at the sideboard uncorking the Thunderbirds.
‘Wannanother?’
‘Yes! Yes, please. Thank you, Edie.’ He didn’t, but if it brought her back to his side perhaps he could ... Could what?
‘Then we can do my lines, if you like.’
She seemed to be pouring one for herself as well this time, looking across at him and smiling as sociably as if their sharp little exchange had never happened. This rapid and seemingly irrational change of mood, which was common to them all, was one of the things that Brian found hardest to understand. He himself was much given to sulking and withheld forgiveness relentlessly.
‘I gotta get them DLP,’ said Edie. ‘That right?’
‘Spot on.’
‘Remember what Denzil said it stood for?’
‘No.’ A lie, for even now, in fantasy, her lips and tongue nuzzled inside his jeans.
She put another tape in the ghetto blaster, this time disconnecting the florist’s lament. The music was slow, sweet and quiet.
‘Like it?’
‘Very much.’
‘So ...’ She gave him his drink, sat next to him and said, ‘Link up, then.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Like friends do.’
She slipped her arm through his then lifted her glass to her mouth, which movement drew their faces close. Her breath smelt of cigarette smoke and salt and vinegar crisps and an underlying pungency that reminded him of the science lab and that he recognised later as pear drops. Locked together thus, struggling and laughing, they drank. In his excitement and nervousness Brian spilled most of his.
‘Fuck,’ said Edie. ‘All down me jumper.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’ll dry.’
She drew away and, once more, her face came into focus. Mango lips, damp now with gleaming wine, huge violet-shadowed eyes, the lashes so thickly mascara’d they stuck out like tiny thorns. Her wonderful marmalade hair had been pinned up carelessly and several frondy, twisting curls escaped. She sat facing him, cross-legged, swallowing deeply and with languid relish.
Brian, bemooned, gazed back. He strove to come up with an innocuous remark, one that would neutralise the conversation and steer it firmly into strictly platonic channels. The only one that occurred (and recurred) was hopelessly inappropriate and much more likely to inflame than douse the situation. Tension clicking in his mind like a turnstile he delivered it anyway.