I couldn’t have said exactly when I noticed the girl sitting on the stool beside me. Midnight, maybe. Maybe later. It seemed to me that she’d been sitting there for some time. Not saying anything. Just sitting there, like me. Her elbow touching mine. But I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. Not any more. I’d been stood up. Whatever dream I’d had, it was in pieces. The girl was still there, though, even after I’d registered all that.
‘Have you got a light?’ she said.
I found a lighter in my pocket. She cupped her hand round the back of mine and guided it towards her cigarette.
‘Thank you.’
She inhaled, drank from her drink, then blew the smoke out. She was still sitting there. Dark-brown hair, with gold in it. Dark eyelashes.
‘Can I kiss you?’ she said.
I stared at her. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.
She leaned closer. ‘I’d like to kiss you.’
And before I could say anything, one of her hands reached up and rested on my shoulder, then her lips touched mine.
That girl from the wedding. Inge. Her small mouth. That tremor in her voice. You don’t have to. She was actually, now I thought about it, pretty ugly. Repulsive even. Old, too. Thirty-five, at least. What had I ever seen in her? There was a kind of revenge in the way I kissed the girl who was sitting next to me, a vehemence that tasted sweet. And after that, another kiss. Longer this time. And suddenly all thoughts of revenge had lifted and there was only disbelief. That this girl, who was beautiful, had kissed me. That this was happening at all.
‘There’s something I should tell you,’ I said.
She pulled back. ‘You’re married.’
I smiled at her. ‘No, not that.’
‘It’s some disease then.’
‘No.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You don’t like girls.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘I can’t think of anything else.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m blind.’
She laughed. ‘I knew that.’
I wondered how.
‘That white stick of yours,’ she said. ‘Kind of gives you away, doesn’t it.’
‘You don’t mind?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’
The city was deserted. It must have been late.
Wide streets, silver tramlines bending off into the distance. A cold wind blowing.
Spiral staircases rose into the air, built out of newspaper, sweet-wrappers, empty bags of crisps. And sometimes there was a van parked on a street-corner with a flap open in the side of it. One fluorescent light. A man in a white jacket selling sausages, chips with mayonnaise, soft drinks.
Then just houses with dark windows, leaves on the pavement. The moon high up in the branches of a tree.
Nina, I whispered to myself. Nina.
That was her name.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Hers was not a perfect beauty — she had a slight swelling on her upper lip, where she had run into an open window once, and there was a small right-angled scar on the bridge of her nose — but it was close; and that closeness made it better than perfect. Heads had turned when we left the bar.
‘Are you tired?’ she said.
‘No, not at all.’ I told her how I lived — going to bed at dawn, getting up in the afternoon.
‘I do that, too.’ She lit a cigarette, then talked with it in her mouth. ‘I work in a club. It’s south of here. The Elite.’ Her chin lifted as she took the cigarette from between her lips and blew the smoke into the top corner of the car. I watched the street-lights edge her throat in orange. ‘What were you doing in that place?’
‘Waiting for someone.’
‘Not me?’
I smiled. ‘No, not you. Though it feels like that now.’
We were driving through the north-west suburbs of the city. Out there all the houses stand in gardens the size of parks, and the streets are silent, narrow, sinuous. Through the window I could see a field sloping upwards to a solid bank of trees. We were almost in the country. She was taking me to see a friend of hers whose parents were away on holiday.
‘She’ll be awake,’ Nina said. ‘She’s always awake.’
But when we walked in and Nina called her name, there was no reply.
‘The door was open. She must be here somewhere.’
Nina took my hand and led me through the house, a huge old place that smelled of the oil they used for heating it. There were double-doors between the rooms, and walls hung with tapestries, and stuffed animals with eyes that looked real (I stared at the otter in the hallway and it stared back, hostile, wary). There were mirrors two metres tall, with frames that seemed to have spent a century under the sea (I watched the two of us, shadows moving past the glass). There were fireplaces with gargoyle faces carved into the marble. At last we heard something. Nina said it was coming from the kitchen. A rhythmic creaking that was unmistakable. I thought I could hear Nina’s friend too. The clicking sound she was making in the back of her throat was like the ticking of a bicycle wheel when the bicycle’s been thrown down but the wheel’s still turning.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘She’s definitely awake.’
We decided not to go to bed, not yet. Maybe those two people in the kitchen had wrongfooted us. We crept back to the drawing-room instead and poured ourselves some drinks.
‘Do you smoke?’ she asked me.
‘Sometimes.’
She rolled a joint and we smoked it on the sofa, her head against my shoulder. She told me what she thought when she first saw me. She said I was like ice, the way my eyes just kind of slid over the top of everything. Her included.
‘I didn’t notice you,’ I said. ‘I mean, not right away.’
‘And then you did?’
‘Your elbow. It was touching mine.’
‘I had to do something.’
Can I kiss you?
I heard a siren in the distance. The sudden urgency seemed exaggerated, lonely, even pitiful, in the deep silence that surrounded it.
Later, as we climbed the stairs, she told me it excited her, knowing that I couldn’t see. She said it was better.
‘Better?’ I didn’t understand.
‘Men can be so brutal,’ she said. ‘Looking at your tits or your ankles, telling you what’s wrong with them.’
‘They wouldn’t say that to you,’ I said, ‘not the way you look.’
‘I’m not good-looking. I never was.’
‘You must be joking,’ I said. And then, ‘You are to me.’
She laughed softly.
‘Martin,’ she said.
It was dark in the bedroom. I watched her lift her blouse over her head. Her face was hidden temporarily; her stomach muscles hollowed, stretched. I undressed quickly. My clothes fell to the floor. Then she was pushing me gently back on to the bed. I watched her lower her body on to mine, her nipples touching me first — my thighs, my hips, my ribs. Her lips touching me next. We rolled over. I ran my tongue down the centre of her, through the sudden growth of hair, to where the skin delicately parted, to where it started tasting different. I saw the damp trail that I had left behind on her, and thought for a moment of my father. It was a strange time to be thinking of him.
‘What is it?’ she murmured.
‘Nothing.’
She was looking at me over her breasts, her eyes half-closed. She had a triumphant expression on her face, almost greedy, as if we were playing a game and she was winning. Her breathing shortened and accelerated. ‘I think I’m turning into a man,’ she said.