‘It’s ever so cold outside,’ she said.
‘Is it?’ Janice received the message with wonder. ‘God.’
‘I went to that park, but it was pretty boring,’ Francine confessed.
Janice picked up a packet of cigarettes which lay beside her and offered one to Francine. The gesture conveyed a certain intimacy and Francine took one gratefully. As she did so, Janice touched her arm lightly.
‘Ralph called for you,’ she said, keeping her hand there as if it were the conduit for her information.
‘Ralph?’
Janice had pronounced the name with such familiarity that for a moment Francine was confused.
‘Ralph.’ She nodded darkly. ‘He says can you call him back.’
Francine felt the pleasurable anxiety of an emergency. Janice held a lighter towards her and in its piquant illumination she ignited her cigarette and inhaled deeply. How had Ralph got her number? A dim memory of giving it to him promoted itself faintly but she pushed it back, enjoying instead the dramatic movement of Ralph from the shadows of her thoughts to their foreground. His assertion constituted a surprise, administering a forceful shock to her vanity. For a moment he glittered, but then his glory began to ebb as she admitted disappointment to her calculations. Why hadn’t Stephen called? She summoned her memory of the evening’s final exchanges from its confinement. It had been outside, on the pavement, while she was waiting for a cab with Julie, and Ralph had just been standing there on his own. Julie had written her number down on a piece of paper and given it to him, and he had acted as if he were surprised and then asked if he could have hers too. On the way home Julie had asked her what she thought of Ralph and she had shrugged.
‘He’s OK. I prefer his friend.’
‘They both like you,’ Julie had said miserably.
‘He’s got a heavy energy,’ Janice said now through a thoughtful cloud of smoke. ‘I could tell, even over the phone.’
Francine had looked for Stephen, glancing around secretly, but he had disappeared towards the end of the party and hadn’t come back to say goodbye. She had given her number to Ralph, the moment dulled by disappointment, and then realized afterwards that Stephen could always get hold of her that way. It was probably for the best, she had thought on the way home, while Julie stared mournfully from the window of their cab. If she had given him her number herself, he would have thought she was desperate. This way he might even get a bit jealous. She had felt the satisfaction which customarily arose from the discovery of a personal advantage in the work of forces outside her control, and before long had gained the impression that the work had been her own.
Two
Ralph Loman woke to find he had become his best friend Stephen Sparks. The room — Stephen’s room? Yes, he supposed it must be, although he had never been in Stephen’s room before, an odd thing really — the room was cold, deathly cold, and blue with too-early light. It had been such a long night, a night busy with dreams. What a lot he had done! Just now he had been at a party — he had only just left, in fact — in a great glass place, a glass beehive filled with people. Everyone had been so kind. At one point a girl had given him an injection and for a while he had been terrified as something crept unstoppably along his veins, about to invade his heart; but then he had remembered that he was Stephen and felt an inquisitive rush of joy. It had gathered in him while the party murmured distantly, a beautiful, refracting thing, a lovely crystal suspended in his centre like a chandelier. He felt it there now, fading. His head hurt terribly. In fact, his whole body — Stephen’s body, he supposed you’d say — his whole body hurt. He closed his eyes and sang silently. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. It sometimes helped to calm him on those occasions when he was not feeling himself.
Crewe, Crewe. He was awfully tired. Stephen’s body tugged at him, weighted, escaping, a leaden anchor free-falling beneath the surface of things, then graceful as a dancer as sleep began to take the slack and he became light. He heard the rustle of bedclothes, felt one unfamiliar knee strangely bony against the other, and for a moment his mind raced and struggled. Stephen, yes. He opened his eyes again. Something loomed at the foot of the bed and a gorge of fear mounted in his throat. The chest of drawers. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. He closed his eyes. The submarine light swam at his lids and he knew that when he opened them again Stephen would be gone and he would be alone, waking into the dead hours of an urban dawn as he always did. He kept them shut and waited, hoping that the ebbing tide of fatigue would drag him back down into unconsciousness with its diminishing fingertips; but the growing pressure of alertness in his head was forcing itself against his eyes in the effort to pry them open. As a child he had often lain like that in terror, knowing he was about to surface into the blue light, that awful, deathly light, his father lumpish and inert in the bed beside him, with hours to wait before sunlight broke like a raw egg over the room, ameliorating its unfamiliarity. There was never anywhere for him to go at that hour in the hotels they stayed in, nothing for him to do but lie still in that light which made it seem as if this time night would not progress to day, and which made monsters of the furniture while the patterned walls seemed alive with unspeakable creatures. He had seen spiders, crabs, even a lobster there. Once he had noticed a man lying on the floorboards during one of those dark dawns, a man in a bowler hat who was flat as if he were made of paper. He had smiled cheerfully at Ralph and tipped his hat, and Ralph had lain cataleptic with fear for a time which he could not quantify, his father sleeping beside him like a dead man, and had waited for this certain alchemy of night becoming day. There had been a picture on the wall opposite the bed and he had fixed his eyes on the black square of it until coloured lights danced before them. He remembered that picture still. As he watched it evolve from the darkness, he had known it primordially, off by heart. For a while it had been the only thing he knew. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe.
*
He woke again some time later. Cars were passing on the road outside and he heard a door slam, someone shouting. A beam of sunlight poked through a gap in the curtains. He had just been dreaming, something about a cripple and a horse, one of those wooden fairground horses with a shaft through the middle. It had been bobbing up and down, the way they do, except that there was no carousel. It had just sort of pogoed madly down the street. He turned on to his back and the warm ray settled across his face. A certain ripeness in the light made him suddenly suspect that it was late, and he jolted up in bed before remembering that it was Sunday and he didn’t have to go to work. He looked at his watch anyway. The hands pointing at one o’clock seemed so impossible, so wild in their assertion that a great swath of time had gone by without his supervision, that he immediately got out of bed to look at the clock on the chest of drawers. Its remarkable confirmation filled Ralph with a curious elation at his feat of oblivion. The telephone began to ring in the sitting-room and he went obediently to answer it. He liked the feeling of running around after himself, the compact air that delay gave to a day. There had been times recently when he had felt imprisoned in the glass sphere of every passing hour, crawling from one orb to the next in an inescapable chain he sensed was taking him far from where he wanted to go.