Venetia McGarry.
The first time he saw her, she was driving a white Ford Fiesta. She had pulled up at the junction with Victoria Road and was signalling right. She looked him in the eyes, but only for a moment, then she leaned forwards in her seat to see whether anything was coming. She had a bald tyre, he noticed. Front left. For some reason, he didn’t book her, though; he simply stepped back from the kerb so she could look beyond him. Once she had established that the road was clear, she smiled at him, and he waved an arm out sideways, meaning not just that he was letting her go first, but that she should go with his blessing. The whole incident lasted fifteen seconds at the most, and though he thought about her on and off for the rest of the day, he certainly never expected to run into her again.
When he saw her the second time, in a pub in Liverpool, more than six months had passed, and she had no memory of ever setting eyes on him before, not even when he told her exactly what had taken place and where. She was surprised that he remembered it all in such detail. Flattered too. Later, she said that although she found his story extremely convincing she didn’t believe it, not for a moment. She assumed he was making the whole thing up. Though that, in itself, was quite charming, she thought. Romantic even. That he should go to the trouble of inventing a previous encounter. Not at all the kind of chat-up line she was used to. Spooky that he’d guessed the colour of her car, though. What was he? A mind-reader? Giving her an ambiguous smile, he looked away. Had he not remembered seeing her and been able to describe it, had he not been equipped with that memory, it was quite possible that nothing would ever have happened between them. As it was, he could turn back to her and tell her something else: her front left tyre had hardly any tread on it.
“It was illegal,” he said, “but I decided to let you go.”
“Wasn’t that dangerous?” she said.
And with those words something began.
Three months on, when it was all over, he couldn’t rid himself of the suspicion that she had remembered more than she had led him to believe. That morning in Widnes, as she looked through her car window, she would have noticed the uniform he was wearing. The idea could have occurred to her there and then. Not that she necessarily thought she would run into him again. Someone like him, though. A policeman. But if that was true, it undermined every moment they had spent together, and no matter how sceptical he felt, or how bitter, he couldn’t bring himself to admit that the entire relationship might have been a sham. It was just too much to lose.
Billy had gone to Paradise Street with Neil Batty, and when Neil left the pub at around nine, he started talking to Venetia, who was sitting at the next table. She had friends with her — Simon, her flatmate, and Beryl, who was on the dole — and after a while the four of them went upstairs. On the first floor was a bar that had a pool table. Something by the Specials was playing as they walked in, Terry Hall’s voice floating high above a typically nervy but hypnotic beat. Venetia was drinking Southern Comfort on the rocks. He was captivated by her, but paralysed; as in a dream he felt that if he reached for her she’d always be an inch beyond his fingertips. All he could do was gaze at her when she wasn’t looking. He couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t gazing at her. She was that gorgeous. Then, without any warning, she moved towards him through the smoke-filled air, and suddenly she was up against him, sideways-on, like a conspirator, and he felt a heavy object drop into his jacket pocket.
“That’s for you,” she said.
Off she went again, with her long hair pouring down her back and her double Southern Comfort on the rocks. Halfway across the bar, she turned and smiled at him over her shoulder.
Christ.
He fell in love with her right then — or was it moments later, in the privacy of the Gents, when he reached a hand slowly, tentatively, into his pocket and watched it emerge with the black ball from the pool table?
The most important ball in the game. The one that’s worth more than all the others. The difference between winning and losing.
“Where the fuck’s the black?” a man yelled.
Nobody knew. The ball had disappeared.
It was a mystery.
The second he took that ball out of his pocket he knew what it meant: she had decided she was going to sleep with him. His heart jerked, as if his body had been speeding and he had just stamped on the brakes, and he stayed in the Gents for longer than he needed to. He was putting off returning to the bar, delaying the look that would surely pass between them, and the understanding they would have.
But nothing happened that night. In fact, nothing happened until the following Tuesday, and even as she left his flat on Wednesday morning she told him not to get used to anything because it might not happen again. Her life, she said, was complicated enough already. Though disappointed, wounded too, somehow he had seen this coming. He knew he was lucky to have been with her at all, and he was already grateful for the little he’d received. At the outset, then, she learned a couple of things about him: one, he didn’t feel that he deserved her, and two, he was entirely at her disposal.
She would visit his flat. He was never allowed to visit hers, though. She didn’t want her friends to see them together. She wouldn’t meet his friends either. She gave him her phone number, but didn’t tell him where she lived. She didn’t let him take any pictures of her and wouldn’t even go into a photo booth with him; she didn’t want their relationship recorded. What went on between the two of them was to remain private, secret. Hidden. If the world found out, pressure would be brought to bear on them, and that, she said, would be the end of it. He did his best to abide by her rules, but as the weeks went by it began to seem unnatural, stifling, even cruel. When he tried to tell her how he felt, she interrupted.
“Look, this isn’t serious,” she said. “We’re just having fun.”
He nodded gloomily. Fun.
Once, in early March, she let him take her away for the weekend. To spend two consecutive nights and days with her was unheard of, but even as he counted his blessings he knew the weekend would never be repeated, so his mood as they drove up the motorway that Friday evening was one of thinly disguised despair. It was late when they arrived at the hotel, and the bar was already closed. Luckily, Venetia had brought some champagne with her. After the long drive north, he needed a drink, but the simple act of following her into an unfamiliar room excited him so much that he had to make love to her immediately, before they could even open the bottle. In the past, she had always insisted on having the lights off and the curtains closed, as if she belonged to a different generation, another time. That night, though, they did it with the TV on, and he could see her as she lay beneath him on the quilted counterpane, her narrow, boyish hips, her thin legs, almost stick-like, and her surprising breasts, which were out of proportion to the rest of her. Her body seemed more voluptuous than usual, in fact, and he wondered if she was having a period, but when he was inside her, it didn’t feel like it. Afterwards, she smeared his sperm over her nipples with the tip of her forefinger. “I like the feeling when it dries,” she said. “It goes all tight.” And he was so tired and dreamy that he barely noticed this veiled reference to previous experience, other men.
Rousing himself at last, he popped the cork on the champagne and poured her a glass. Later, he sat on the floor beside her while she had a bath. From the bedroom came the lurid, almost delirious soundtrack of a Hammer horror film. When she stretched out in the water, with her head resting against the side of the bath nearest to him, her black hair hung over the edge, and he touched the ends of it without her knowing. Violins played a high, thin note. A woman screamed, then screamed again. Venetia’s hair balanced on the palm of his hand like something standing upright. He still thought she was holding back — even in that moment, when he seemingly had everything he could possibly have hoped for. Was she just too lavish for him? Or was she only giving a part of herself, the least she could get away with? Even before that weekend, he had started hoarding items that belonged to her — lip salve, nail varnish, a pair of laddered tights. She didn’t notice: she was always losing things. He even kept some split ends that she had cut off in his bathroom when she was drunk one night. If she had known that he had some of her hair in a plastic film canister, and that he opened it from time to time and smelt it, she would probably have called him a weirdo and left him on the spot. But he was only trying to fill the gaps, get closer. We’re just having fun. He didn’t want it to be fun. He wanted it to be for ever.