"Yes."
"This?"
"Yes. Don't stop."
We didn't stop. We looked at each other the whole time, sometimes smiling at each other. When he came, he cried out like a man in pain. I gathered him to me and held him close. I kissed his damp hair.
"It can't have been better than that," I said.
He put his lips against the pulse in my throat and then he groaned something into my neck.
"What was that?"
"I said, not an hour's gone by without me missing you."
"Perhaps I've been missing you, too, but I didn't know it."
"How did you know?"
"The bonsai tree." I drew back and glared at him. "So why the fuck didn't you tell me?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't know what to do. I wanted you to feel something, not be told you had felt it. If that makes sense."
"I don't know. There's a bit of me waiting to be furious with you. Really furious. That's not a joke. I've been searching and searching for bits of the me that I lost, blundering around like a terrified blind woman, and you knew that, and you could have helped me all along. But you didn't. You chose not to. You knew things about me that I didn't know about me. You still do. You can remember fucking me and I've got no memory at all. You know the other me, the me I keep hidden, and I don't know the other you, do I? What other things do you know about me? How will I know that you've told me everything? I won't. You've got bits of my life. That's not right. Is it?"
"No."
"Is that all you've got to say?"
"I'm sorry. I didn't know what to do," he said helplessly. "I wanted to tell you but what would I have said?"
"The truth," I said. "That would have been a good place to start."
"I'm sorry," he said again.
I stroked his chest softly. Before I had been grabbed and shut up in a cellar, I had been happy. Everyone had said so. I'd been happy because I'd left a man who beat me up, left a job I disliked, and met Ben. Since coming out of hospital, I had been haunted by the fact that the days I had lost were ones full of lovely memories. I had lost the bits I wanted to keep; I had kept the bits I wanted to let go. Thoughts flitted through my head, or fragments of thoughts. Something about saying yes to life, something about not spending the rest of my life being scared.
Later, we had a bath together. Then he went downstairs and made us both sandwiches, which he brought up on a tray, with a bottle of red wine. I sat against the pillows.
"You're always making me meals," I said.
"We had oysters before."
"Did we? I love oysters."
"I know. That's why we had them. We'll have them again."
I picked up his hand and kissed it, then bit into the sandwich. "So it was a Wednesday evening, right?"
"Monday."
"Monday! You're sure? Straight after we first met?"
"Sure."
I frowned.
"But you didn't wear a condom?"
"I did."
"I don't get it. You said earlier .. ."
"You came back."
"On Wednesday?"
"Yes."
"You should have fucking well told me that."
"I know."
"And you didn't
"No."
"Why?"
"You came on an impulse. With the tree. We'd arranged to meet the next evening Thursday because I had several people round on the Wednesday. Clients. They were there already and you knocked on the door and handed me the tree. I kissed you."
"Yes?"
"And then I kissed you some more."
"Go on."
"You undid the buttons on my shirt. We could hear my guests talking to each other in the next-door room."
"And?"
"We went to the bathroom and locked the door and we fucked."
"Standing up?"
"Yes. It took about thirty seconds."
"Show me," I said.
I stayed the night with Ben. In spite of everything, I slept heavily and when I woke in the morning, I could smell coffee and toast. Through the curtains, the sky looked blue. I was frightened by my sudden happiness. It was like the coming of spring.
Nineteen
We had toast in bed. The crumbs spilt on to the sheets, but Ben lay back on the pillows and pulled the duvet under his chin, looking very comfortable.
"Don't you have work to do?" I said.
Ben leant across me to look at the clock by the bed. Funny how quickly you could feel comfortable with another body. "Eighteen minutes," he said.
"Won't you be late?"
"I'm already late. But there's someone coming in to see me. He's come all the way from Amsterdam. If I'm not there to meet him, I'll be a bad person as well as late."
I kissed him. It was meant to be just a peck.
"You'll have to stop doing that," he said. "Or I won't be able to go."
"You see," I said, whispering it, because my face was almost touching his, 'if I were you and you were me, I'd think that you were mad. Or I was mad. If you see what I mean."
"You've lost me."
"If somebody I'd met disappeared and turned up a fortnight later and seemed to have no memory of even having seen me, I'd think they were completely mad. Or a liar. As you know, the police are torn between the two theories."
"I thought I was mad. Then I thought you were mad. Then I just didn't know." He stroked my hair. It made me shiver with pleasure. "I didn't know what to do," he said. "It seemed an impossible thing to explain. I suppose I thought that I had to make you like me again. In any case, the idea of me saying to you, "You're attracted to me, or at least you were, you don't remember it but you really were" ... It didn't sound particularly sane."
"You don't have hands like a designer," I said.
"You mean they're rough and scratchy?"
"I like them."
He contemplated his own hands with curiosity. "I do a lot of my own manufacturing. Things get spilt on my hands. They get scratched and hammered and scraped, but that's the way I like it. My old man is a welder. He's got a workshop at home and he spends all his weekends taking things apart and putting them back together. When I was younger, if I wanted to communicate with him, the only way was by going in there and passing him the wrench or whatever it was. Getting my hands dirty. That's what I still do, on the whole. I found a way of getting paid for what my dad did as a hobby."
"It's not quite like that for me," I said. "Not with my dad or with my work."
"You're fantastic at your job. You pulled the whole thing together. You scared us all shitless."
"Sometimes I can't believe the things I do or did. You know, risk assessment for an office? You can imagine risk assessment for an oil rig or a polar expedition but the insurance company wanted a risk assessment for the office so I did it. Just at the moment I'm a world expert on every bad thing that can happen to you in an office. Did you know that last year ninety-one office workers in the United Kingdom were injured by typing-correction fluid? I mean, how can you injure yourself with typing-correction fluid?"
"I know exactly how. You use the fluid, you get some on your fingers and then rub your eyes."
"Thirty-seven people injured themselves with calculators. How do they do that? They only weigh about as much as an egg carton. I could tell them a thing or two about risk."
It didn't seem so funny any more. I sat up and looked at the clock. "I guess we both need to get going," I said.
We took a shower together and we were really very disciplined. We just washed each other and dried each other. We helped each other dress. Putting Ben's clothes on him was almost as exciting as taking them off had been. On the whole it was better for him, no doubt. He had fresh clothes to put on. I had the same ones from the night before. I had to go back to the flat and change. He came over to me, ruffled my hair, kissed my forehead. "It's a bit creepy seeing you in Jo's clothes, though," he said.
I shook my head. "We must have the same taste," I said. "These are mine. In fact, this shirt is the one I was wearing when I was kidnapped. I would have thought I'd have thrown it in the bin, or burnt it but it's quite a nice shirt, and I figured that I'm not going to stop thinking about things just because I set fire to some clothes .. ."