This time he said he couldn’t talk for long. He told her that he had been invited to a wedding in New Orleans, and that he wanted her to come. It was at the end of the month. Would she be free?
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think so.’
She smiled, thinking of the difference in the way they lived. His life resembled a car-park that was full, and people drove round and round it, looking for a place. Her life, you could park almost anywhere. Sitting in the dark, she saw vast areas of empty asphalt stretching away in all directions. The white lines that would usually separate one car from the next seemed hopelessly optimistic, comical, even cruel, and above the entrance, in green neon, you could always see the same word: SPACES.
But Tom was saying something about five hundred people, and she realised she hadn’t been listening; she’d been too busy imagining his life, and how it must say FULL outside, in red.
‘You got something to wear, Glade?’
‘I think so.’
‘One of those crazy dresses.’ He laughed. ‘You’re sure? You don’t want me to wire you some money?’
‘No. I’ll be all right.’
After she had put the phone down, she stayed sitting on the floor and shook her head. ‘Damn,’ she whispered. Now she thought about it, she was pretty sure she didn’t have a dress she could wear to the wedding — and she didn’t have the money to buy one either: all the bills had come that month and Sally, who was broke, had asked Glade to pay her share for her. A wedding. In New Orleans. She walked back into her bedroom and turned on the light. Her eyes hurt in the sudden yellow glare. Opening her wardrobe, she began to look through her clothes. After five minutes she stood back.
Stupid, stupid.
But he was always so fast on the phone, his life happening at a different speed to hers. She thought of the photograph she had taken of him, standing on the steps of that white church in Venice. When he showed her the picture some weeks later, she was struck by how confident he looked, how easy. It was hard to believe that the person behind the camera was not a close friend of his, or a lover — and yet, at that point, they had known each other for less than a minute. He seemed ahead of where he should be, even then; he seemed to be operating on a different time-scale, somehow.
She closed the wardrobe and switched off the light. The darkness was printed with the shapes and colours of dresses that were no use to her. She crossed the floorboards and climbed back into bed. The sheets were still warm. She lay down, but her mind wouldn’t rest. In the distance she heard a man shouting and felt he was doing it on her behalf, his bellowing strangely monotonous, with gaps in it, like some kind of Morse code signalling despair.
‘What am I going to do?’ she said out loud.
Her white cat stretched and settled against her hip.
That weekend Charlie came to stay. He appeared at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon with six cans of lager in his hand and a copy of the Evening Standard wedged under his arm. He had grown his hair since Glade last saw him and it hung in a thick plait down the centre of his back, exactly where his spine would be. He was wearing a grey-blue RAF greatcoat and a pair of motor-cycle boots. When she hugged him, she could smell mothballs and tobacco and the raw spring air. Upstairs, in her bedroom, she had lit a fire to welcome him. While she stooped to add another log, he told her about the London plague pits, whose sites he’d been visiting. The breadth of Charlie’s knowledge seldom failed to astonish her. You could ask him about Karl Marx or phone-tapping, any subject at all, and he would talk for fifteen minutes, his voice even, almost monotonous, a roll-up in his slightly shaky hand. Though Glade would listen carefully to what he said, she didn’t often remember much about it afterwards. Still, it was a comfort to know these things could be understood.
She didn’t usually drink beer. That afternoon, though, its metallic flavour suited her; she thought it tasted as if it had come from somewhere deep below the surface of the earth, as if it had been mined rather than brewed. By seven o’clock they had run out. They decided to go to the off-licence on North Pole Road and buy some more. On the way she mentioned that Tom had called. Charlie liked listening to stories about Tom. His favourite was the one about her ear. Once, in a bar in San Francisco, Tom had leaned across the table and said, quite seriously, ‘You know, Glade, you could get that ear fixed.’ The first time she told Charlie the story, he didn’t say anything, which unnerved her. Turning the right side of her head towards him, she had lifted her hair and showed him her sticking-out right ear. ‘Do you think I should get it fixed, Charlie?’ By then he was laughing, though, and opening his tin of Old Holborn so he could roll himself a cigarette. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of question he would think of answering.
As they walked back to the flat, carrying a new six-pack of lager and three bags of crisps, Glade explained her predicament: a wedding in New Orleans, no money for a dress.
‘Didn’t he offer to buy you one?’ Charlie asked.
‘Yes. But I told him I had something.’ She saw the look on Charlie’s face. ‘Well, I thought I had.’
‘You can’t ring him back, I suppose.’
‘No.’
Charlie didn’t speak again until they reached her front door.
‘You know,’ he said slowly, ‘I saw something in the paper that might interest you …’
Upstairs he showed her an advertisement, no more than two inches square. EARN £100, it said. Underneath, in smaller letters, it gave a phone number. One hundred pounds, she thought. It was the right amount. She would be able to buy a dress, maybe even a pair of shoes as well.
She looked at Charlie. ‘What would I have to do?’
He shrugged. ‘Could be anything.’ He reached for the phone and dialled the number, but nobody answered.
On Monday Glade took Charlie’s paper into the restaurant with her. She waited until she had finished setting up, then she called the number again, using the pay-phone near the toilets. The first three times she dialled, the number was engaged, but she kept trying. At last a man’s voice answered.
‘I’m calling about the advert,’ she began.
‘Yes?’
‘This money,’ and she paused, ‘what am I supposed to do for it?’
Like so much of what she said, it came out wrong and yet the man didn’t laugh at her. Instead, he explained that he was a member of a medical foundation which was attached to the university. At present they were researching sleep staging — polysomnography, to be precise. They were advertising for subjects who might be willing to participate in their research.