That evening they went out to a pub in Soho, a birthday drink for one of Chris’s mates. Chris had several different groups of friends, Richard had discovered. He had also discovered that the ones she regarded as her closest were the ones he loathed the most. It wasn’t because of anything intrinsically unpleasant about them, more their insufferable air of having known each other since before the dawn of time, like some heroic group of Knights of the Pine Table. Unless you could remember the hilarious occasion when they all went down to the Dangling Cock in Mulchester and good old ‘Kipper’ Philips sang ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ straight through while lying on the bar with a pint on his head before going on to amusingly prang his father’s car on the steps of the village church, you were clearly no more than one of life’s spear carriers — even after you’d been going out with one of them for nearly a year. In their terms, God was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately, and the Devil, had he turned up with a card and a present, would have been treated with the cloying indulgence reserved for friends’ younger siblings.
Luckily that evening they were seeing a different and more recent group, some of whom were certified human beings. Richard stood at the bar affably enough, slowly downing a long series of Kronenbourgs while Chris alternately went to talk to people or brought them to talk to him. One of the latter, a doctor whom Richard believed to be called Kate, peered hard at him as soon as she hove into view.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, bluntly.
Richard was about to tell her that what he was holding was called a cigarette, that it consisted of the dried and rolled leaves of the tobacco plant, and that he had every intention — regardless of any objections she or anyone else might have — of sticking it in his mouth and lighting it, when he realized she was looking at his left hand. Too late, he tried to slip it into his pocket, but she reached out and snatched it up.
‘Been in a fight, have you?’ she asked. Behind her Chris turned from the man she was talking to and looked over Kate’s shoulder at Richard’s hand.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a bizarre moving accident.’
‘Hmm,’ Kate said, her mouth pursed into a small moue of consideration. ‘Looks like someone’s come at you with a knife, if you ask me.’
Chris looked up at Richard, eyes wide, and he groaned inwardly.
‘Well, things between Chris and I haven’t been so good lately. ’ he tried, and got a laugh from both of them. Kate wasn’t to be deflected, however.
‘I’m serious,’ she said, holding up her own hand to demonstrate. ‘Someone tries to kill you with a knife, what do you do? You hold your hands up. And what happens is often the blade will nick the defending hands a couple of times before the knife gets through. See it all the time in Casualty. Little cuts, just like those.’
Richard pretended to examine the cuts on his hand, and shrugged.
‘Maybe Kate could look at your ribs,’ Chris said.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing she’d like better,’ he said. ‘After a hard day at the coal face there’s probably nothing she’d like more than to look at another piece of coal.’
‘What’s wrong with your ribs?’ Kate asked, squinting at him closely.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just banged them.’
‘Does this hurt?’ she asked, and suddenly cuffed him around the back of the head.
‘No,’ he said, laughing.
‘Then you’re probably all right,’ she winked, and disappeared to get a drink. Chris frowned for a moment, caught between irritation at not having got to the bottom of his rib problem and happiness at seeing him get on with one of her friends. Just then a fresh influx of people arrived at the door and Richard was saved from having to watch her choose which emotion to go with.
Mid-evening he went to the gents and shut himself into one of the cubicles. He changed the dressings on his penis and chest, and noted that some of the cuts on his stomach were now slick with blood. He didn’t have enough micropore to dress them, and realized he would just have to hope that they stayed manageable until he got home. The cuts on his hands didn’t seem to be getting any deeper.
Obviously they were just nicks. Almost, as Kate had said, as if someone had come at him with a knife.
They got home well after midnight. Chris was more drunk than Richard, but he didn’t mind. She was the only woman he’d ever met who got even cuter when she was plastered, instead of maudlin or argumentative.
Chris staggered straight into the bathroom, to do whatever the hell it was she spent hours in there doing. Richard made his way into the study to check the answerphone, banging into walls whose positions he still hadn’t really internalized.
One message.
Sitting heavily down on his chair, Richard pressed the play button. Without noticing he was doing it, he reached forward and turned down the volume so only he would hear what was on the tape. A habit born of the first weeks of his relationship with Chris, when Susan was still calling fairly regularly. Her messages, though generally short and uncontroversial, were not things he wanted Chris to hear. Again, a programme of protection, now no longer needed. Feeling self-righteous, and burping gently, Richard turned the volume back up.
He almost jumped out of his skin when he realized the message actually was from Susan, and quickly turned the volume back down. She said hello, in the diffident way she had, and went on to observe that they hadn’t seen each other that year yet. There was no reproach, simply a statement of fact. She asked him to call her soon, to arrange a drink.
The message had just finished when Chris caroomed out of the bathroom smelling of toothpaste and moisturizer.
“ny messages?’
‘Just a wrong number,’ he said.
She shook her head slightly, apparently to clear it rather than in negation. ‘Coming to bed then?’ she asked, slyly. Waggling her eyebrows, she performed a slow grind with her pelvis, managing both not to fall over and not to look silly, which was a hell of a trick. Richard made his ‘Sex life in ancient Rome’ face, inspired by a book he’d read as a child.
‘Too right,’ he said. ‘Be there in a minute.’
But he stayed in the study for a quarter of an hour, long enough to ensure that Chris would have passed out. Wearing pyjamas for the first time in ten years, he slipped quietly in beside her and waited for the morning.
The bedroom seemed very small as he lay there, and whereas in Belsize Park the moonlight had sliced in, casting attractive shadows on the wall, in Kingsley Road the only visitors in the night were the curdled orange of a streetlight outside and the sound of a siren in the distance.
As soon as Chris had dragged herself groaning out of the house, Richard got up and went through to the bathroom. He knew before he took his night clothes off what he was going to find. He could feel parts of the pyjama top sticking to areas on his chest and stomach, and his crotch felt warm and wet.
The marks on his stomach now looked like proper cuts, and the gash on his chest had opened still further. His penis was covered in dark blood, and the gashes around it were nasty. He looked as if he had collided with a threshing machine. His ribs still hurt a great deal, though the pain seemed to be constricting, concentrating around a specific point rather than applying to the whole of his side.
He stood there for ten minutes, staring at himself in the mirror. So much damage. As he watched he saw a faint line slowly draw itself down three inches of his forearm; a thin raised scab. He knew that by the end of the day it would have reverted into a cut.
Mid morning he called Susan at her office number. As always he was surprised by how official she sounded when he spoke to her there. She had always been languid of voice, in complete contrast to her physical and emotional vivacity — but when you talked to her at work she sounded like a headmistress.