Marcus felt very tired. ‘Bye, Lee. G’night, Mouse. Hang around as long as you like. There’s more booze in the kitchen.’
He undressed in the spare room and walked down the hall in his boxer shorts to brush his teeth. Philip and Lee were already on their way out, his arm around her thin shoulders. Marcus realised that Philip hadn’t taken off the leather jacket all night. Lee turned and waved unsteadily as they left. Marcus looked into the sitting room, where Mouse and the twins were playing some sort of drinking game involving the last of the whisky and a pack of cards. Marcus nodded at them and turned back down the hall.
Drunk, unthinking, he walked past the spare room towards his own bedroom. He opened the door and saw Abby sitting on the end of the bed, her shadow thrown across the room by the bedside lamp behind her. She was naked with her knees drawn up to her chest. She didn’t move when he came in. She was looking at herself in the ancient free-standing mirror that she had inherited from her grandmother. It was liver-spotted with age and misty in the corners. The white sheet beneath her was stained a deep red. She had stripped off the duvet and the blood had slowly spread out, soaking through to the mattress, and was now dripping where she sat at the foot of the bed, a single drop every few seconds that landed in a pool on the cream carpet with a noise like a ticking clock. She let out a sob.
‘Oh, Abby.’ He was suddenly sober.
He went to the bathroom and found a towel. Very gently he lifted her to sit upon it. Then he climbed up behind Abby and placed his arms around her, looking at their reflection in the mirror. He saw a thin mist over her face; long-dried tear-tracks led down from her eyes. Neither of them moved for a long while. Then, very slowly, he helped her to stand, holding the towel in place. She watched as he stripped off the sheet and used the unstained corners to soak up the blood on the mattress. Holding the towel between her legs, Abby waddled to the other side of the bed. She lay down on the clean stretch of mattress and Marcus lifted the duvet over her, tucking it in tightly as his mother had done for him as a child. He found some painkillers in a bedside drawer and held the water glass as she swallowed them. Finally, he left the room to fill a hot-water bottle in the kitchen. By the time he returned she was already asleep. He pulled a chair beside the bed and sat watching her gentle breaths which hardly stirred the thick duvet cocoon. He placed the hot-water bottle at her feet. He heard Mouse and the twins leave, heard the girls’ high young voices in the street below.
Marcus sat until the first fingers of light crept into the sky outside the window. A star shivered above the rooftops of the houses opposite, then faded into the dawn. Abby occasionally drew in the sharp yelped breaths of one who had recently been crying. Marcus smoothed his hand over her brow and mumbled soft words to her. He was still in his boxer shorts and he realised that he was very cold, his feet numb and clammy. Abby’s blood stained his fingers and was turning brown under his nails.
Marcus had known Abby for so long that when he looked at her face it was not like looking at a real person. Her face had the ridiculous familiarity of his own reflection, such that when he did try to consider her objectively, he found it both fascinating and frightening. Her skin was tanned, her dark hair unravelled on the pillow. She was striking-looking, but her size and the sharp intelligence of her manner meant that boys had avoided her during her teens. It had left her lacking confidence, nervous and suspicious when Marcus first started paying attention to her. But slowly she had fallen for him, and, despite the rows, he loved her. He felt a sudden rush of pleasure. He was proud to have her. He knew the child would arrive, and when he did — it was always a he in Marcus’s mind — they would raise him with boundless love.
He jumped as his alarm went off. Abby opened her eyes as he slammed down his hand on the trilling clock. He watched as she remembered, wishing that he could keep her trapped in the fog of waking, draw her back from the revelation that caused her lip to quiver, her eyes to widen as she peeled the duvet from around her and saw the umber towel knotted between her pale thighs.
‘I’m so sorry, Abby.’
She smiled weakly. He couldn’t find anything else to say. He crawled into the bed and drew her against him. He held her for twenty minutes until, regretfully, he lifted himself up and went to the bathroom to shower. He stepped into the glass cubicle and turned on the jet of water, feeling the hot needles stinging his skin. After a few minutes Abby joined him. The shower wasn’t really large enough for both of them, but they pressed closely together, slick with soap and shampoo. They helped each other clean away the traces of blood. Marcus rubbed at the back of her legs with a flannel and saw the skin redden under his touch. When they came out of the bathroom, the sun was coming into the flat and Marcus didn’t mind the wreckage of the sitting room and the kitchen, found he could ignore the brown stains on the mattress in their bedroom. He made them both tea and they sat and watched planes cut across the fragile morning sky.
‘Do you want me to stay? I don’t want you to be alone. Do you need to go to the hospital?’
‘No, I’m fine. This is just what happens. I’ll take the day off. I’m OK now, really I am. You’ve got that meeting. You should be going.’
He left her sitting on the sofa, the tea growing cold in her mug, the shadows of birds flashing across her as they passed on the way to the seed feeder that Abby hung outside the kitchen window. In the lift on the way down he adjusted his tie, picked at a spot and smoothed down the hair of his sideburns. Out on the street he looked up and saw Abby was watching him, the mug held out in front of her like a chalice. He turned and, walking backwards, raised his arm. She smiled as he tripped, regained his balance and finally disappeared around the corner.
Five
There were no curtains in Lee’s flat. She always woke early, with the first whitening of the sky outside her window. Philip was still sleeping. She reached for a glass of water and pinched her fingers to the bridge of her nose, frowning. Darwin regarded her with lazy dark eyes. The dog had climbed onto the bed soon after the noise and the movement stopped, and Philip had drawn his knees up to his chest to avoid kicking him. Now Philip’s legs half-hung over the edge of the bed. He gripped one corner of the duvet in his fingers and pressed it against his cheek. Otherwise he was naked. He groaned in his sleep.
She knew that she should fight the distaste that she felt whenever she brought a boy home. Or rather whenever she woke next to a boy. She wished she could persuade them to leave while she was still drunk. They violated the beauty of mornings in her flat, the privacy and serenity of feeling that she was the only person awake in the whole of Kensington. Their foul breath, stubble, demands for tea or — far worse — more sex left her feeling shot through with guilt, disgusted with herself, lonely.
Once, sex was all she thought about. In her last two years of school she had a string of boyfriends, all unsuitable, all much older than her. Her boyfriends would drive her to house parties around town where she’d sleep with them on badly stuffed sofas, cheat on them with their friends in dark spare rooms, dance with them on tables wearing only her pants. She was always drunker and louder than any other girl there, but she got away with it because she was also the youngest and prettiest. At the end of the parties, she would sit and rearrange her underwear beneath her jeans as the sun rose from the sea and the milk floats and fishermen and other early-morning movers made their way through the streets of the little town on the Suffolk coast.
She’d given up boys when she started the Course. Four years of near-celibacy. The occasional kiss, certainly. A few hands slipping under the waistband of her pants, but nothing more. Then, around the time she began her PhD, she’d started fucking again. Looking for the rush she’d felt as a teenager, the illicit coital glow. But now she couldn’t look at them when they came: she squeezed her eyes tightly shut when their breath quickened to a pant, terrified of the masks their faces became at the point of orgasm, unrestrained and beastly. She knew that she didn’t have a bad reputation at the Course yet. Her delicacy, the austere beauty of her features protected her against that, for the moment. But David was aware. She could feel him watching her, could sense the silent hum of his antennae tuned towards her.