‘Mik,’ said a voice from the aisle; in the shuffling after the first set of departures from the carriage, a fellow student from his Business Management course had ended up standing beside him. ‘Did you take notes for Clark’s two o’clock on Organisational Behaviour?’
‘Yeah. I’ll be in the library tomorrow morning, if you want to have a look.’
‘Great, thanks.’
He wanted to get Nicky to run through all the names and personalities he would be meeting again, but the presence of the student – whose name he couldn’t even remember at that moment – stymied him. It was only after the next stop, and the desertion of another raft of bodies while others fitted themselves into the freed seats, that the aisle was clear and Mik felt able to ask.
She rattled the names off, and provided neat little descriptions that amused him, including exact details such as a favourite film or a predilection for olives. They passed out of his head upon the instant of hearing them.
‘And you really love all of them?’
‘Yeah. I can’t explain it. We all bring something different to it. I don’t have to be everything to one person. It relieves the pressure.’
‘But would you love them if they came as individuals?’
She thought about that for a while, her hand still on his knee. ‘I don’t know. I met Howard and Liz first. They were a couple, and I rented a room from them in my second year at uni. Sunetra was already living there, and then I realised they were all together, and I guess I fell for Sunetra, and it grew from there. Then Dan came to mend the boiler one day.’
‘That is bizarre,’ said Mik. ‘It’s amazing, though. I’ve never heard of anything like it before, not in Russia, not here. Does it happen a lot, do you think, secretly?’ He often felt that life was not exactly how it was represented to him by the older generation, and suspected one day he would discover the real facts that everybody else was already in on.
She shook her head. ‘Only in romantic literature. But all those stories end in tragedy.’
He changed the subject after that. The next three stops passed through Birmingham’s centre; the students left and the shoppers boarded, and by the time they got to Erdington he felt a little ashamed of his long, loose hair and tight, ripped jeans. Nicky, in a flowing skirt and sky-blue top, swept slowly from the train, and she left a trail of lavender for him to follow.
He had complimented her on her perfume when they first met. It had been at a drama club audition for roles in a turgid play of skin atrocities and pornography written by one of the postgraduates. The declamatory style insisted upon by the director got them both giggling, and later, in the Union bar, she had told him that she took a bath every night, dropping lavender essence in the water. If it had been a deliberate come-on, it had seriously worked. He had pictured her alone, soaping a leg in her tiny student-rental bathroom, but now he wondered – does she bathe alone? Perhaps they had an enormous decadent tub and washed each other’s backs.
But walking through Erdington, in Nicky’s aromatic wake, it seemed to Mik that it was not the kind of place to hold a vast palace in which the five of them lived. She stopped on the street outside one house in an unremarkable row of tall houses with steep sloping roofs, and squeezed between two cars parked close, bumper to bumper, in a long line of cars that all faced the same way.
‘Here we are,’ she said, and took his hand to lead him inside.
The immediate impression was of unseen activity. ‘Want a drink?’ called a man from the end of the hallway, and a woman immediately shouted, ‘Tea please!’ from upstairs. The man appeared, a blue mug in hand. He was dressed in a business suit and wore a gold tie, loosened at the knot. He was heavy-set, his fingers meaty around the mug, and his sandy brown hair was unkempt. Mik felt a surge of awareness. I know him. I will know him.
‘I wasn’t talking to you!’ the man called back up the stairs, but he was smiling. ‘Right. Coffee, Nick?’
‘Yep,’ said Nicky. ‘And Mik drinks coffee too.’
‘Milk? Sugar?’
‘Both,’ said Mik.
‘I’m Howard.’
‘He knows that,’ Nicky said, rolling her eyes, and the dynamic of the house felt so clear to Mik in that moment, sketched perfectly in this first meeting with daily life, small actions given and taken, teasing and talking, knowing each other so well. Surely this was the ideal way to have a relationship; it was so different from his parents’ dry silences, long after moulting had taken place but they had made the decision to not ask for anything further from love. But here was an excess of love, and it was risky, and beautiful for that. When their skins loosened it would fall away.
It would be worth it, though. To have felt so cherished, and to have that memory. Yes, it would be worth it.
‘We’re just popping upstairs,’ said Nicky.
‘Cool,’ Howard said. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but he acted like a much older man. Perhaps it was the suit. ‘I’ll leave the coffees outside the door. Don’t let them get cold.’
‘Right.’
‘Dinner at seven,’ he called, as she pulled Mik up the stairs, and another smiling face craned around a door on the landing, and murmured something that he didn’t catch; this woman’s eyes were bright, calculating, and her close-cut black hair caught his attention.
‘Hello,’ she said.
He felt the same pull to her, too – as if he already had knowledge about her, about what was going to happen next.
Before he could speak Nicky pulled him up the next flight of stairs and into the first room on the right. It was wood-panelled, the ceiling sloping, a skylight letting the sun pour through on to the double bed, giving it a hot, close feeling like a sauna.
She took a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign from the small bedside table and hung it on the door before closing it.
‘Is this your room?’ he asked. It was impersonal, undecorated.
‘We don’t have rooms. We just have signs when we want to be left alone. Like, right now. I want to be left alone with you.’
She undressed him, pulled down his tight jeans before he had removed his shoes, and left him in an awkward tangle, which seemed to take ages to sort out. It was, crazily, the first time he had been alone with her. It felt to him that she and her companions, fate included, were rushing him along to a preordained destination.
But it felt good. The speed of the journey, and the hands that wanted to hold him, bring him along, as they travelled.
She finished removing his clothes and then reached up under her skirt to remove her knickers, placing them on the bedside table.
‘You’re mine for now,’ she said, ‘just for now,’ and knelt on the bed, gathering up the folds of her skirt to her waist.
‘I don’t know if I can—’ he said, but it was a lie and he was already hard. He knelt face to face with her, crushing the material of the skirt between their upper bodies, and found her so eager for the taste of his skin, her lips finding his shoulder, sucking at his neck, moaning without shame of being overheard.
When he heard Howard’s steps on the stairs, measured, deliberately loud, he timed his strokes to each footfall. And the placing of the mugs, and the soft knock on the door – that was when he came, his senses filled with the house, the presences who were listening to their fucking, who would be part of it if he let them, and if they wanted him. He was desperate for them to want him.
SATURDAY, 20 JULY 2022, 7:31PM.
ROSE: So it was about the sex, for you?