She gave me a date and a time — an inconvenient date and time — when she would need me.
A breakthrough.
She was breaking through.
It was mainly gorgeous.
And she’d placed a minute kiss against his ear. ‘I would like it.’ Sober and giggly and energetic. ‘I would.’ This was Emily showing herself as a credible companion away from the bedrooms. She’d made a promise of ways they might be and he’d accepted it.
I think we both knew that.
‘But a demo, baby. . Not a concert, or an opera, or the movies, or the zoo.’ It occurred to him that he could only guess at the majority of her pastimes. She remained largely closed to him. ‘Or a club with naked ladies dancing that I would enjoy, but not as much as I enjoy you. .’ Kissing her in return across her stomach. ‘I haven’t been on a demo since I was a student and that, as we’re allowed to mention, is a long, long time ago.’
Emily had shaken her head like a woman who loved him and only couldn’t say so because it was too much. ‘Not that long. And if you’ve done it once, then you’ll know how.’
It made sense — drunks run their lives backwards: from unintimate intimacy to revealing commonplaces.
He’d had no intention of denying her, but he knew she would like if he teased her. ‘Say “Go with me, darling Mark, and make love to me first for at least an hour.” Go on.’
‘Then you’d have to stay the night.’ She offered this as if it were an ordinary sentence and didn’t scald his breath and then remove it. ‘Because we’d have to set out early. Please, darling Mark.’
Staying the Friday night with her and waking and getting the Saturday morning, too.
If I allowed it, then I’d want it again.
She would start to show on me and I’d like that and let it happen.
Sweet Emily.
I belong to sweet Emily. She’s the girl who has broken me. Wide open. You could park your car inside my chest.
Watching her light while she rolls out this story about being kettled and the cops pressing in and it’s turning a bit lairy before these kids — she called them kids — start up singing some daft protest song — I can’t recall any protest song that wasn’t a dirge — and the crowd laughs and the cordon pauses and it’s clearly this golden moment for her, proof of something. Hope.
And I wanted her to hope.
My generation is at fault — not active like the one before it, not active like the one behind — and she tasks me with this slightly.
I don’t believe that direct action makes any difference, but she did and it was lovely that she did.
Her expectations of happy change were as sexy as fuck.
Emily had kept on, more enthused than he’d known her, while he bled joy and horror invisibly into the sheets. ‘Please, darling Mark, and make love to me first. Yeah? Have I asked like you’d like?’ She was becoming a woman he’d want in her entirety.
He could have taken out a full-page ad. A Sunday feature. ‘Yes, well, okay. Okay.’ Her lips parted for him, still sticky with the darling that was him translated. His tongue tried to taste the word and failed, because it was given and gone. ‘You’re a funny girl, bad girl. I’ll have to plot like anything, so we can get away with that. Maybe Kempson will let me do colour on the anarchists, or the school kids, or something — the reality of modern unrest. He’ll tell me what reality he wants: brave and sexy sixth-formers with compassion for the urban poor, or home-grown barbarians who want to piss on war graves and buy anthrax. . Both. .’
And this rushing, magnificent lurch in his thinking when he saw her frown, fully display her disapproval. At last.
Because opposition is a proper part of love.
Or maybe I was a pervert: finding a new source of desire because there was finally something I’d done that offended her. And, in recompense, I could utterly apologise, abase myself.
He’d made a point of kneeling, pressing his mouth to her ankles, her feet. Kissing for forgiveness, all bared skin and making himself plain. ‘I don’t write what I believe, Emily. I should. Probably. But I’m not sure about that.’ His words and good intentions at the soles of her feet, plump, grubby. He was being devoted. ‘Newspapers aren’t something that people take seriously, not now. They’re dying.’ And hauling this, mining it from his bones, ‘I think you could teach me to branch out, though.’ Nothing but sincere. ‘Maybe I could write a book.’
Nothing, but sincere.
A tingle racing the length of me when she accepted this and grinned.
Funny girl, bad girl, best girl.
‘And I’ll have to be briefed by the Met — midnight updates, I’d imagine — midnight updates, I’ll tell Pauline — so I wouldn’t want to head home and trouble her when I’d only clatter off again at dawn. . That would do me in, so I’d want to avoid it. I would have to stay in town. On site. What if something happened in advance of the main event and I wasn’t there?’
‘You’re good at lying.’
‘Ssssh. Not with you. Not ever with you.’ This overtaking him for a while, driving him back into bed. Into Emily. Into his love.
Then he let her be and managed, ‘I’ll get us a nice hotel for it. In Mayfair. Would you like that?’
She had changed and so could I.
‘I don’t mind.’
‘A big bath. We’ve never been in a bath together.’
‘I don’t mind.’ But her eyes on him and apparently glad about it.
‘And, baby. . If neither of us. . We could meet early and have a room-service dinner and we could be just us and we’d make lots of love and I’d be as nice as nice to you and you’d be as nice as nice to me and, if you could, would you be able to not drink? Baby? Could you? For me? I’d like if you could be there for me. If I was very nice? I don’t insist and it’s not a problem. . Emily? Could you be my sober girl? And we’ll talk about what you could wear and. . Could you not drink?’
As he finished, her eyes were cooler. ‘I could do that.’
She did sometimes lie to me.
Not that it wasn’t his failure as much as hers.
We had to have wine with our dinner, we are grown-ups, that’s what grown-ups do.
And we were grown-ups being as nice as nice, if not nicer.
While he took calls and checked his email she’d hold him. Occasionally she’d sip her wine.
One bottle between us and that was it. Extremely moderate.
Our perfect night.
We didn’t sleep.
Any rush about joining the protesters evaporated in a long breakfast with crumbs on the pillows and their skin. They didn’t get outside until noon and Mark’s concentration was shredded with his body’s protest, its missing her, yowling because he wasn’t naked and clasping her wants.
‘Shit, I’m not. . Do you mind if we back out a bit and get a long bead on it? We will join the parade in a while, but I’ve got to get my head straight. Okay, Sweet?’
Piccadilly was thick with marchers when Mark gazed beyond the hotel doors. He was slightly puzzled and slightly moved by the old-school brass bands passing, the embroidered union banners that kicked things back into the 1930s, or the 1970s — those little brackets between which self-respect had probably become a more widespread delusion. It was all making the hotel doormen nervous.