He looked at me. ‘Do you like wine, Laura?’
Hm. Hm hm hm.
The anteroom was sentinelled with heavy-legged tables and lit by standing lamps with Christmassy shades: emerald, crimson, gold. As in the main room the walls were thickened with dishevelled bookshelves. It felt cosy and clever. We sat down opposite each other at a table for four. He enjoyed his teaching job well enough, he lived in Islington, his book, Widening Gyres, had been published ten years ago to little effect. We drank two bottles of wine. We were halfway through the second when he said: ‘You’re engaged, aren’t you?’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you’re not wearing a wedding ring and I’m only ever attracted to irreversibly attached women.’
I burned for that. I was engulfed. Ambush No. 2 of the day. I topped up our glasses for something to do. The second bottle was empty. I set it down. Stop shaking.
‘So you said not poetry, but you are writing something?’
For once I was glad of this particular conversational trench.
‘A novel.’
‘Got a title?’
‘Bacon. Why is that funny?’
‘I’m not laughing. What’s the story?’
‘It’s about a priest who falls in love with a talking pig.’
‘Why?’ His mouth was slightly lopsided, his features untidier, the wine showing on him. Good.
‘He can’t help it.’
‘No, why do you want to write?’
I dismissed Moira Shearer, pre-fantasia: Why do you want to live? He leaned forward and his teeth flashed, or something in his mouth did, and looking at his mouth even briefly felt very inappropriate. I composed myself and said solemnly: ‘How else to rage around the dark mansion?’
‘You know I’m going to kiss you if you keep talking like that. What does your fiancé do?’
I should have sat back, should have objected, shouldn’t have acquiesced by ignoring that thing he said but — I failed the test. I didn’t care.
‘He’s a pianist.’
‘A penis? Great.’
The wine. The wine was making him slur.
‘So I take it you’re not married?’
He laughed like I’d asked him whether he played the spoons or did topiary on his pubes. ‘No no no. Too selfish. Too much to do.’
‘Girlfriend?’
‘No one that regular.’
I felt it, then: a tremor down my spine; a cold spot at the back of the courtyard. A cat lying in the shade, flicking a caught bird with its claw over and over and over. He felt me feel it. A bolt of recognition. He drained his glass and without looking at his watch said: ‘I should get to the station.’
‘Thanks for the chat, Marty. It was—’
‘Yes, you too. All that. Don’t suppose I can take your number?’
I shook my head. He smiled, saluted, left.
An undrunk blob of wine, like a glass eye, stared at me from the hollow where the stem met the bowl. I felt the need to talk to Jim. I pulled my phone out of my bag. Three long, flat rings and then he answered. ‘Hello, you.’ A rush of air on the line said he was in a moving car.
‘Where are you?’
‘Dubai. Where are you?’
‘A library in town.’
A pause. ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘A bit.’
Another pause. Was there some kind of satellite delay?
‘Is Tyler with you?’
‘No, she stood me up.’
‘You know, if she was reliable she’d be dangerous… ’
‘Jim.’ He tutted. ‘Don’t tut at me! This is driving me fucking insane.’
‘All right, all right, calm down. There’s no need—’
‘DON’T FUCKING TELL ME TO CALM DOWN.’
‘You’re shouting now. Are you in a library, shouting?’
‘I DON’T GIVE A FUCK, EVERYONE’S A—.’
‘Take a breath.’ I almost hung up. Oh, white wine. White wine. I was so excited and so angry and so myself. I took a breath. ‘Look, why don’t you invite her over for dinner or something when I get back? Does she eat, or do any of the other normal human things?’
I didn’t say anything to that. He’d invalidated his gesture. He didn’t deserve praise.
‘I’ll cook. I’ll even buy the wine.’
I maintained a haughty hush.
He said: ‘I had a really good wank this morning thinking about you.’
This was more like it. ‘Tell me.’
‘Later.’
He hung up. As I focused on the phone screen the room bulged in my peripheral vision. I put on my jacket one arm at a time and walked carefully through the library, smiling at the woman on the desk as I passed. She didn’t smile back. I walked down the stairs like a toddler, one foot then both together, next foot then both together, holding on to the wall and then the handrail.
Outside: rush hour. How had four hours passed? I weaved along Portland Street, past the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, and waited to cross the road on the corner. I wanted Tyler. Tyler, with her eyes and elbows, could have easily guided me through the heartless scrum of 5.30 P.M. The lights took too long to change so I crossed anyway, dispatching an elaborate double bird to a honking hackney cab, and carrying on up the street, where the Odeon cinema used to be, now just a fly-postered deco wreck with peeling paint and, I imagined, dusty staircases and huge vaulted rooms inside, like a run-aground liner. Someone banged into me as they passed, not on purpose but they didn’t say sorry, I turned to see him turning his briefcase back round to his side. The impact of his arm or case or whatever had struck me and knocked me sick and I had to veer towards the wall, to the side of the Odeon building, and place my palm flat on the peeling blue paintwork for a moment, breathing deeply until the air pumped all the nausea out. I did not want to be sick at rush hour. Once, at a boutique music festival, I’d been walking along with Tyler when she emitted a neat curve of projectile vomit onto the grass in front of her and just carried on walking, resuming what she was saying exactly where she’d left it, barely missing a beat. I don’t think she even wiped her mouth. It was an adept expulsion — not so impressive for the twenty people sitting at picnic benches outside a food stand, wooden cutlery held aloft, unable to finish their falafel. We’d christened it the ‘walk and puke’. It was the epitome of styling out. I wasn’t up to it. All I wanted to do was lie down.
I walked through St. Peter’s Square, past the Midland Hotel, down Peter Street towards Deansgate, a nonsensical, higgledy, mindless route, walking for walking’s sake. Only when I got to the Free Trade Hall building did it dawn on me that a) I was making my way to Jim’s and b) he wasn’t there. Just before Deansgate there was a place called Lion Bar, built beneath an old Methodist church with an organ and, according to Most Haunted, who had investigated in 2005, a disapproving ministerial spirit. Previously, Lion Bar had been a club called the Red Room. I’d worked there for a few months in my early twenties and had started refusing to go upstairs after another waitress, Jacqueline, saw a mop bucket fly across the abandoned church of its own accord. She was always helping herself behind the bar, but still, with that and Yvette’s findings…
I’d had a laugh with Jacqueline. The club had a regular fetish night and one night I’d almost swept up a gimp on the mezzanine. There was all sorts to clean up after those nights. They turned the downstairs area into a dungeon complete with nets, chains and a corrugated cardboard ‘rock’ wall we put up with a staple gun. The interesting thing to me was that hardly anyone drank there; all we really sold was diet coke. I guess you have better aim when you’re… anyway. I was sweeping away, stacking chairs, dragging tables, working my way from the steps to the back corner. As I tried to sweep the broom into the corner it struck against something hard. I pulled the broom back and peered into the darkness, thinking it would be an upturned chair or forgotten handbag. It was a shoe. Or rather, a patent leather socklike thing. Up from the shoe was an ankle, and, following on, ankle bone connecting to leg bone, leg bone connecting to knee bone, etcetera, etcetera, until the shape of a whole adult person was discernible, crouched like a frog. I screamed. The gimp scurried out from the corner, and this was someone who had gone full-gimp, zipped up to the chops, and ran down the stairs and almost through the glass front door. The door was locked and the gimp began bashing the glass with its fists and Jacqueline had to abandon her dishwashing duties to release it. The gimp scarpered down the street, patent leather flashing orange under the streetlamps. I wondered what that gimp was doing for nights out, now that Red Room had become a cocktail bar. Suburbia, I concluded. Suburbia would offer gimps something. And what about Jacqueline — what was she doing now? We’d always got on. I still had her number in my phone. I’d scrolled past it a few times when I was drunk and thought about her for a moment. If I was on Facebook I wouldn’t have to wonder about these things. But then, if I was on Facebook I wouldn’t have to wonder about these things.