“I used to live like this. I slept in other people’s houses for three years. We ate their food, used their lavatories, read their books, used their baths.”
“Didn’t you ever think about the people you were trespassing on?”
“For God’s sake!” She snatched her hand away from his. “Why do you think I tried to get out of this? I was just a kid. Don’t you understand that ever since I met you I’ve been trying to put all this behind me? This is how Niall lives now, and how he’ll live for the rest of his life. We’re here because you wanted your damned proof!”
“All right.” He kept his voice low, knowing he could be heard. Thinking of her sexual excitement, he said, “But the truth is, you still get a kick from it.”
“Of course I do! I always did. That’s the curse of invisibility. It’s like a drug.”
“I think we should get out. Let’s talk about it back at your place.” He held out his hand for her to take.
She shook her head and sat down on the bed. “Not now.”
“We’ve been here long enough.”
“Richard, I’m not invisible anymore. It started to go, after we made love.”
“Then get back into it,” Grey said.
“I can’t … I’m drained. I don’t know how.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t just make it happen anymore. Tonight was the first time in many weeks.”
“Can’t you do it long enough to get us out of here?”
“No. It’s gone.”
“Then what in hell are we going to do?”
“We’re going to have to run for it.”
“The house is full of people.”
“I know,” she said. “But the front door’s at the bottom of the stairs. It might be all right.”
“Come on, then. That woman will be back at any moment.”
But Sue did not move. She said quietly, “I always used to be scared this would happen. In the old days, with Niall. That we’d be in someone’s house, like this, and the glamour would suddenly leave us. That was always the kick, the danger of it.”
“We can’t just wait for something to happen. This is crazy!”
“You could try, Richard. You know how.”
“What?”
“Make yourself invisible—you’ve done it before.”
“I can’t remember that!”
“We were on a beach … there were some girls sunbathing. You pretended to film them. What about the pub in Belfast? Imagine you’re here filming. We’re in a corner, but you’ve got the camera and you go on using it.”
“I’m too scared of being found here! I can’t concentrate on that!”
“But that’s when you did your best filming, when you were stuck, when people were throwing petrol bombs.”
Grey narrowed his right eye, half closing the lids to approximate the narrow field of a viewfinder. He suddenly imagined the familiar touch of the sponge-rubber eyepiece, the faint vibration of the motor transmitted to his brow. He hunched a shoulder, taking the weight, and cocked his head slightly to the right. There was a power pack on his hip, a cable looping down and behind him, knocking against his shoulder blade. He imagined the soundman beside him, the gray-wrapped mike prodding up and above him from behind. He thought of the Belfast streets, a mass picket outside factory gates, a CND demonstration in Hyde Park, a food riot in Eritrea—all still vivid in his mind, moments of surging and unpredictable danger glimpsed through the lens.
Sue stood up and put a hand on his shoulder. “We can go now.”
They both heard the sound of the toilet flushing, a door opening, and then footsteps on the landing outside. A moment later the woman they had seen undressing walked into the room, the half-burned cigarette dangling from her mouth. Grey swung the camera to follow her, tightening the focus. She stepped around them, and went again to the wardrobe.
Grey led the way to the top of the stairs, then walked slowly down, one step at a time. They could hear the sounds of the televised soccer match coming through the open door of the front room. Grey panned to the room, glimpsing the backs of the men’s heads. Sue reached past him and unlatched the front door. When they were outside, she pulled it to behind them.
Grey filmed until they were on the street, then he slumped, feeling tired. Sue took his arm and brought up her mouth to kiss the side of his face, but he turned away from her, angry, worn out and repelled.
VII
There was always a next day, a waking to the realities of the present. Richard Grey rarely remembered his dreams when he awoke, although he was always aware of having dreamed. He understood them instinctively as a reorganization of actual daytime memories into a kind of symbolic code that was stored away in the unconscious. When he was at home by himself, each morning was therefore a fresh memorative start. As he muddled sleepily through the first two or three hours, glancing at his mail, reading the headlines of the newspaper, sipping hot coffee, he was aware of a kind of oneiric stew in his mind, an amalgam of mostly forgotten dreams and snatches of the day before. Conscious memories rarely came to him until he forced himself to think properly. Only after he had drunk the second cup of coffee, and had dressed and shaved and was beginning to wonder how to spend the rest of the day would he start seeing the new day in the context of the old. Continuity would return.
In the morning after the visit to the house, Grey found it more difficult than usual to wake up. He had not been especially late to bed, but there had been a long and grumpy conversation at Sue’s before he left. Somewhere in it was a conflict over sex: Sue had wanted to make love again, and he had not.
He felt disagreeable on waking. There was nothing in the mail, and the newspaper depressed him. He fried an egg and made a greasy sandwich of it, then drank coffee and stared through his window at the street below.
When he dressed he put on clean clothes and transferred the contents of his pockets. Amid the litter of coins, keys and bank notes he found the slip of paper Alexandra had given him, stuffed negligently in his jacket pocket.
He opened it carefully, flattening it with his hand on the table, and read it through. It began with the words:
The departures board showed that my flight was delayed, but I had already gone through passport control and there was no escape from the passenger lounge.
The passage continued with a description of the lounge, and concluded in the following way:
There was nowhere to sit down, nothing much to do except stand or walk about and look at the other passengers. I diverted myself with a ga—.
It was at this point that Hurdis had stopped him. The last word, which Grey knew was “game,” was only half written and there was a line scored lightly beyond it. He knew all of the rest; the story was familiar to him. Staring idly through the window Grey remembered the long journey through France, the meeting with Sue, their falling in love, their separation over Niall, then their reunion and return to England. The memories ended with his accidental involvement in the terrorist bombing.
It was all very real to him still, the only knowledge of the period he had subsequently lost. Whenever he dwelled on it, images came starkly and convincingly from it: the first time he and Sue had made love, how it had felt to be in love with her, how it felt to miss her, that long and fruitless wait in SaintTropez and the consolation of the girl from Hertz, the enervating Mediterranean heat, the taste of the food, Picasso at work in Collioure. These memories had an inner conviction, a sense of story and of events unfolding. Earlier he had thought of it all as a piece of film already edited, but thinking again it occurred to him that a closer analogy was that of seeing a movie. A cinema audience accepted on trust that the whole thing was a fiction, that it was written and directed and acted, that a large crew was somewhere out of sight behind the camera, that the film had been edited and synchronized, and music and sound effects had been added … but they nevertheless suspended their disbelief and went along with the illusion.