Lee eased herself slowly out of bed and stood naked in the soft blue glow of the morning. She was still wearing her earrings: lapis in the left ear, turquoise in the right. The hair between her legs was the colour of damp sand. The floorboards were ancient beneath her bare feet; she could feel the circling grain of the wood through her soles. She lifted Darwin to the floor and stepped quietly over to her desk in the corner of the room. It was 5 a.m. She was careful not to knock the pile of books that sat on the desk: reading for her PhD that she had been putting off for weeks. A new life of Julian of Norwich and a collection of essays on Anglo-Saxon literature that she had ordered from a Midwestern university press. She picked up her camera and checked the lens, adjusting the settings for the dim light. Then, moving silently, she approached the bed, lifted the duvet, and took photographs of Philip.
His cock looked like a baby mouse. Not that it was small. It was not large but she had seen smaller. It was the colour that did it, the vulnerability, the sense of something not yet ready to see the world. It was curled back on itself, hiding beneath the tightly wound coils of hair that tapered in a line up to his belly button. His toenails were too long. She remembered that he had scratched her legs with them when they first went to bed. He had a tattoo on one shoulder — a Chinese symbol that looked like an insect. She could see how the ridged pigment protruded from the skin; she had to fight to stop herself touching it. Checking the pictures on her camera’s monitor, she judged that she had taken enough, and replaced the camera on the cluttered desk. She picked up her clothes from the floor and, followed by Darwin, made her way through to the sitting room to dress.
Only one boy had surprised her in the act of photographing him, six months earlier. He was a softly spoken black boy from her critical theory seminar group called Paul. She had dropped the camera when he opened his eyes, those dark brown eyes that reminded her of Darwin. His nipples were the most extraordinary violet colour. It was the nipples that had made her linger too long over him, trying to get a shot that did them justice. Even in her morning-after guilt she recognised that Paul was very beautiful. They had stared at each other for several moments before Lee backed away, picking up the camera and holding it in front of her as if it might hide her nakedness and shame.
‘Why are you doing that?’ He had still been half-asleep. She thought later that she might have been able to pretend that he was dreaming, but she liked Paul, and had tried to explain.
‘I’m sorry. You scared me. It’s. . It’s just that it helps me try to understand why I’m doing it, when I can see it in the third person.’ She looked down at the camera and saw that her hands were trembling. Paul lifted himself up and rested his head on his palm, his elbow pressing into the pillow.
‘Was I that bad?’
‘No, it isn’t that. But I’m a Christian. I’m supposed to believe in not having sex before marriage. But I keep doing this.’ She went over to the desk and drew out a large red photograph album. She held it out to Paul and he spent some minutes flicking through it. Twenty-five men in all. Each of them had his own page with his name and the date inscribed in Lee’s neat, looping handwriting. The first was her supervisor at university, an older man, thickset with wispy grey hair, the date just over two years earlier. Paul handed it back to her with a raised eyebrow.
‘So you want to remember the boys you fuck? I can understand that. I’d like a photograph of you, too. Something to carry around and look at when I’m down. Remind me I’d done it with a girl like you.’
‘No, that’s not it. I mean, maybe a little bit. I just feel like I need to keep a record of this, that’s all. This time in my life. I tried to stop it when I first went to church. Had this bizarre period of celibacy. But it didn’t work. I just couldn’t do it.’
What she didn’t admit to Paul, barely even expressed to herself, was that she needed the guilt. She had been the first of them to attend the Course. She went with friends from school one Wednesday night in the summer holidays before she started university. An unassuming church sat on a hill above the harbour in her home town. One of her childhood friends was the daughter of the vicar and Lee and a few others had gone that evening out of solidarity. She sat in the hall of the church and listened to the gentle words of the priest. When they were asked to pray Lee could hear the sea in the distance booming against the breakwaters along the front. She thought of all the boys, all the ugly drunken writhing, all the cheating and the guilt and suddenly she found herself sobbing.
In the discussion group afterwards, Lee sat and listened to her friends talking about how they prayed in secret, how they felt that they needed to believe in something, how the modern world disappointed them. She realised that she had given them little credit for their intelligence. Her friends would sit and listen as she played the piano, stare down at their plates while she and her parents indulged in long and spirited dinner-table conversations; she shone so brightly that they never got the chance. She felt ashamed as she looked into their kind, open faces and saw a huge amount of love for her. The priest sat and smiled as Lee spoke. She told them everything. Every sin and slip and all of the shame that stained her. All of the boys — too many to count — but never any love. The boys who she knew were in love with other girls, the boys whom other girls loved deeply. Her friends waited for her to finish and then they all hugged her. Finally, the priest put his hand down on the soft pile of her golden hair and blessed her.
She had walked from the church glowing. She felt new-made, humble. Her wickedness seemed a thing of adolescence, meaningless in the light of her new-found faith. But slowly it came back. And she got drunk and fucked more boys and she needed to be cleansed again. So she went back to see the priest and slowly she began to believe very deeply, grew to feel that she had a personal and precious relationship with God. The priest gave her the details of a Course session that took place in the chapel of one of the neighbouring colleges when she went up to university. For several years she followed the rules of the Course with great seriousness. But then the slumps set in, and she found her bad old ways returning. And this was why Philip, long and bony, was lying in her bed, snoring gently.
Lee dressed, fed Darwin and sat on the balcony drinking coffee until Philip stumbled out in his boxer shorts, his skin very pale in the first rays of the sun.
‘Hi,’ he said, looking past Lee and out over the city, hands clasped to his shoulders in the fresh morning air.
‘Hi.’ She left a pause. ‘Do you want coffee?’ Her voice was cold and there was only one chair out on the balcony, expressly to discourage any early-morning company.
‘No, I’d better. . I should just go. I’ll see you at the Course next week. It was good to meet you.’
‘Yes. Can you show yourself out? Mind Darwin doesn’t follow you.’
*
She knew that it would be awkward during their next discussion session, and it was. The following Tuesday night, when a warm rain wrapped the church in a swirling veil, she saw him watching her as she walked down the aisle to take her place for David’s speech. She was wearing a black jumper over a white T-shirt, black jeans and trainers. She could feel Philip’s gaze across her back, in the nerves of her neck, in her hair. She thumbed through The Way of the Pilgrim. Mouse came to sit beside her and she hugged him gratefully, then turned to the pulpit, still vaguely aware of Philip’s gaze. David looked down at her and smiled, then out to the rest of the room, his grin widening as he took in the rows of eager, upward-looking faces.