The truth is I’m waiting, and the righteous are rewarded, for as I scan the camera over the wooden trestle table by the far wall of the garden, I hear a sound behind me. There is movement in the heavy air, the waft of a body cutting through the stillness of the kitchen, a local voice cooling my neck.
‘Aren’t you bored, Tom, taking films of the baby? I didn’t think to find you here on a day like this.’
She can make me blush, Lucy can. It’s stupid, but everything she says to me makes me prickle with embarrassment. Does she know this? Am I ahead of her, London boy to Devon girl? Not a chance.
‘You look hot.’ I don’t know what else to say. Her face is shining, her hair damp at the edges with sweat. She’s not exactly beautiful – certainly not as pretty as Jessie – but she has a sense about her that’s quite unmissable. Whereas Jessie is totally aware of what she can do with her whole body, the power it gives her, Lucy looks as if she might fuck on the stairs while cleaning house for us without missing a beat. They’d each have their own importance for her, the screwing and the cleaning, she’d take them in the same matter of fact way she seems to take everything. But what do I know? I just wish she would.
‘I am hot,’ she says, as I lay the camera on the kitchen table, next to a pile of Jessie’s junk. Lucy has the fridge door open, kneeling as she drops ice cubes into the lime cordial she’s made. ‘I think I stepped on a wasp on the way over, but it was too tired in this heat to sting much.’ Her feet are bare. She turns and looks at me, straightening up. She lifts a foot to show me; the sole is black, but I can just make out a small red welt.
‘You should clean that,’ my mother shouts from the garden, all seeing when it comes to injuries and health.
Lucy goes outside. I follow her, wishing she were six or seven years younger, my age.
Mum puts aside the headset and the book and looks up. She has a smoothness, Mum, a healthy and refined sheen which makes Lucy look coarse. I think it’s the coarseness I like.
‘I’ll wash my feet in your bath, if that’s all right,’ Lucy says. She crouches for a moment, next to Mum, glass in hand, the light bleaching her off-white dress and shadowing the outline of her legs. I don’t know what to do with myself. I just want to stare, but I think Lucy suspects this, so I take myself off to the broken stone wall which edges two sides of our scraggly lawn and sit on it, arching my back to throw my face and chest up to the sun.
Jack stirs and Lucy says, ‘I’ll get him,’ her voice sounding further away than it is, swimming with the sunspots inside my head.
‘What’s your problem?’ she says a moment later. ‘Too hot – or hungry?’ Then, to Mum: ‘How is he?’
‘He’s fine. He’s in charge, why shouldn’t he be? But at least he sleeps at night. Apart from feeding, he doesn’t wake.’
‘He looks like you.’
‘I think he looks like himself. He’s his own person.’ I open my eyes as Mum slips a tit in his mouth. Lucy is standing over them, watching Jake suck furiously. Sensing the moment, I make a move for the house.
‘Already he’s got a strong will,’ Mum says, trying to shift Jack into a more comfortable position in the shade.
I walk past, unnoticed, and dart into the house.
‘And a strong mouth,’ Lucy says, still with Mum. ‘Does that hurt?’
I hear Mum laugh. ‘He doesn’t care if it does.’
When Lucy comes in, I have the camera in my hand again, trying to look as if I’m doing something when all I want is to be inside while Lucy’s inside. She starts vacuuming and I shoot her, hoping she won’t know there’s barely enough light to see anything. I follow her as she pulls the lead out of the vacuum and finds a socket, then lugs the machine to the top of the stairs and starts working her way down. She always does the stairs before anything else, maybe because she wants to get them out of the way first, because they’re the most boring part of cleaning the house – although in terms of vacuuming, I can’t imagine that one thing is more boring than another. Lucy is too bright to be a housekeeper, and yet somehow I don’t think it matters much to her. God knows what she thinks life is about, but I don’t think cleaning enters into it. Then again, she has a curious respect for the oddest things. Maybe she knows something I don’t?
I position myself at the bottom of the stairs, pointing the camera up at her.
‘You’re wasting your time on me,’ she says, not irritated but not really interested in the camera either, the way some people are.
‘It’s reality TV,’ I say.
She pauses a moment and runs a hand across her face, wiping it dry. ‘How come you’re always around the house when I’m cleaning?’
She knows. She must do. ‘Do you like to get in my way?’
I want to say yes. I want to say, ‘Lucy, I think you’re amazing. Please come up to my room and let me touch you.’ I stare up at her, forgetting about the camera. As she leans forward over the vacuum on the stairs, her dress hangs from her. I feel hot, flushed, almost paralyzed with fear or something as I see a nipple brush against the fabric inside and disappear back into the darkness.
I force myself to speak. ‘It’s better watching you work than doing anything myself,’ I say, desperate for her not to see what an absolute moron I am.
She twists her mouth, frowning at me as the vacuum head sucks noisily at the worn stair carpet. ‘Lazy little sod.’ She looks away, dismissing me from her thoughts. ‘Do you think you could get me another drink, or would that be too much effort?’
I get it, my mind only on the image of ice cubes sliding down against that small dark nipple. I run a cube over my forehead and chest, feeling its cold edge draw a sharp line across my skin, then watch it bob in the glass, believing that by this feeble, not entirely hygienic, magic I might communicate to Lucy what I seem totally unable to say.
I must spend ages over all this, because by the time I get back to her, Lucy has finished the stairs, gone back up to the top and has vacuumed the better part of my room.
My room doesn’t look like my room – I have so far refused to admit to any permanence in terms of being here – but there is one magazine picture stuck on the wall by my bed, a two-page spread of some kids in Afghanistan, ripped down the middle and taped together.
‘You’re a strange boy, aren’t you?’ Lucy remarks, looking at this as I come in. She takes her drink, turns off the vacuum for a moment. ‘What do you want a picture like that for on your wall?’
I glance at it, the bombed-out village, the fresh blood on the ground, the fear and doubt on the children’s faces seeming both a lot like I feel and like an antidote to the blandness of my life.
‘I thought it might annoy Mum and Dad,’ I say, feeling strangely guilty all of a sudden. Lucy makes me feel as if I’m using the picture, using their suffering, which I suppose in a way I am. ‘It didn’t work,’ I add. ‘They don’t seem to mind.’
I watch Lucy drink, unsure what to do next. She’s here in my room and there seems to be some point of contact between us, but I feel ridiculously young. I turn to go.
‘You’ve caught the sun, haven’t you?’ she says, before I can leave. ‘Your shoulders are all red. You should get your mum to put something on them.’
‘She’s got Jake to look after.’
‘Jack. Jake doesn’t suit him.’
I look at her, standing rolling the ice cubes – my ice cube – around in her glass. ‘Are they really red?’ I ask.
‘Maybe you could help? I’d do it myself, but it’s difficult reaching behind…’
She watches me curiously. I catch my breath, not quite believing this is going to get me anywhere.