Does that sound totally insane?
A bit. Lesbian. Christ. He’d never met a lesbian, never really thought about them outside porn, except they weren’t really lesbians. Too good-looking. Or was that being prejudiced? Does this mean you’re not a Christian any more?
I’m scared, Alex. She was going to cry. And now you have to say something. Please?
He had to think about this and it was complicated. If she was male it would freak him out, trying not to picture the sex part. But this? He imagined her having a girlfriend which would be sort of like having two sisters. Unless the girlfriend was horrible, or ugly.
Please?
He tried to sit down on the toilet seat beside her but it was too small, plus he was half naked, so he knelt beside her and gave her an inelegant hug.
I kissed Melissa.
What?
I kissed Melissa.
Holy shit. Is she a lesbian, too?
It was kind of an accident. She ripped off four squares of toilet paper and blew her nose.
He moved to the edge of the bath. I kissed her, too. She wasn’t too keen on that, either. He expected Daisy to laugh but she didn’t seem to have heard. She is pretty fit, though.
She called me a fucking dyke.
And suddenly he got it, why she was terrified. The shit she was going to get. Losing all her friends because of the church, those sanctimonious arseholes kicking her out, maybe. He wanted to slap Melissa’s face. Is this, like, a new thing?
No. Yes. I feel like such an idiot.
They were silent for a few moments. This flatness. Surely the moment deserved more, mariachi trumpets, a thunderbolt striking her dead. I told Mum.
And…?
She was crap. As usual.
Christ, said Alex. This is one bizarre day. Daisy looked offended. Bizarre in a good way. You know, Richard not being dead after all, and you… What? You not being dead either?
Alex? Dominic was calling from downstairs.
Alex stood up. OK, now I really have to pee. Go and tell Dad I’ll be down in a couple of minutes, yeh?
She didn’t move. He felt it, too, a sense that the event should be marked in some way. But how?
Dad shouted again. Alex…?
♦
He lay on the sofa, big jumper, mug of sweet tea, left leg up on Louisa’s lap. She put the bag of frozen peas aside and began winding the elderly bandage around his ankle. First aid box under the sink from circa 1983. The door of the fire was open so that he could feel the heat on the side of his face. Franck in the background, the violin and piano sonata, Martha Argerich and Dora Schwarzberg. There, that should do it. He felt a little queasy on account of the Mars Bars Alex had forced him to eat in the bath, that jittery fatigue and joint ache like when you had flu. Louisa fastened the bandage with a safety pin. Little waves of anxiety rose and fell, the body’s alarm system saying, This is not right, though he knew, objectively, that he was recovering. Just clipped the edge of severe hypothermia, if he remembered the textbooks correctly. Louisa lifted his ankle and slipped a cushion under it to raise it a little higher. Paradoxical undressing and terminal burrowing in the final stages. Always unnerved him that image, the body of the old man naked in the cupboard. Bit of a shock to find that dying might be unpleasant after all. He’d always assumed that the brain shrank to fit the little door you left by, Montaigne being knocked off his horse and so on. Die in a hospital, that was the lesson. Decent morphine driver. But it felt good, being looked after like this. Louisa laid the frozen peas back over his ankle and picked up her Stephen Fry. Ridiculous that it should take such a big adventure to make them do this, simply sit next to one another doing nothing. But that pillbox, the one behind his father. They went inside, didn’t they? He and Angela. He can remember the smell of urine and a smashed Coca-Cola bottle. Camping or caravan? Chips out of newspaper, trying to surf on a blue lilo.
Richard? She touched his shoulder.
He came round. I’m just tired. She was examining him but he couldn’t read her expression. Her words of last night. Your plays. Your films. He was selfish, wasn’t he? All those years with Jennifer, two single people sharing a house. You’re right. I do expect you to fit in with my life.
I shouldn’t have said those things.
But they’re true. Up there on the hill, he had forgotten about her, hadn’t he? He thought he might die and he didn’t remember that he had a wife. I worry that you might have married the wrong person.
Hey. Come on. She rubbed his shoulder.
Trade Descriptions Act and all that. I wouldn’t want you to think…It’s not a binding contract.
You’re exhausted. She put her arm around him. Let’s talk about this later, when you’re warm again.
♦
How extraordinary that it should happen so quickly. Like flipping a coin. Inexplicable that she had not known before. Had it been standing behind her all along like a pantomime villain, visible to everyone apart from her? What strangers we were to ourselves, changed in the twinkling of an eye. Jack, too, of course, she understood now, that sense of betrayal, stone circles at midsummer, all those signs that meant nothing till the sun poured into the burial chamber. Katy Perry, Maurice, that article in the Guardian magazine, Mulholland Drive. She wanted to be held by someone who had been here before. Lesbian. The word like some creature lifted from a rock pool, all pincers and liquids and strangeness. Melissa of all people. What a fool she’d been. The church. There wasn’t really an argument, was there? Meg, Anushka, Lesley, Tim. Fait accompli. And the walls came tumbling down. So who was she now? She sank down so that she was squashed into the nook beside the wardrobe. The safety of a tight space. She hadn’t done this since she was six, hiding from the monsters. She lifted Harry from the carpet and hugged him tight, rocking gently back and forth. Seedy passageways and sad hotels. Dogshit through the letter box.
Bizarre in a good way. No mariachi trumpets, no thunderbolt. But he just shrugged and accepted it. Mr Normal. What more did she want? When you get the chance to be saved, you have to take it. Silvered Bible flashing on the beach. How quickly she had found her faith. The twinkling of an eye. And now the footmen were turning back into mice and she was sitting in her sooty rags by the fire.
♦
Dominic stopped halfway up the stairs. He imagined Alex in hospital, imagined Benjy in hospital. Like a lump of meat he couldn’t swallow, finding it hard to breathe. His own fear of anything medical, just that blood pressure cuff at the doctor’s, the tear of the Velcro and that squeezy black bulb. Maybe she was moist and wretched, but when was the last time he had felt real joy? She’d wanted to move to New Zealand, but he could feel the same pull, clean air, blank slate. And how far had he got? Life is not a rehearsal. The irksome truth of barroom platitudes. He had to call her.
♦
Richard was falling asleep against her shoulder, twitching gently like a dog dreaming. What was it about this house? Throwing everyone out of kilter, her and Richard, Angela in the kitchen at night, Daisy and Melissa being enemies then friends then enemies again, her own stupid confession. That chill, maybe it was our own ghosts. Maybe that was why she hated old houses, because we all had past lives that rose up. As if you could wipe out history with downlighting and scatter cushions. You might have married the wrong person. Perhaps he could see what she had spent so long trying not to see, that she was still the girl with the second-hand shoes, hanging over that woozy drop at the Hanwell flat, scooters and discos and Penny flashing her knickers so they could steal packs of John Player Special from the corner shop. Working in a petrol station now, that weird chance encounter last time back. The fire was going out, but if she moved she might wake him and she was scared that this might be the last time she was able to hold him like this.