Lisa Tuttle has been weaving tales of quietly disturbing horror fiction for some years now and is finally gaining widespread acclaim. Of herself, she writes: “I was born in Houston, Texas in 1952 but have lived in the UK since 1980. After spending ten years in the London area I moved to the West Coast of Scotland with Colin Murray. We’re married and have a daughter who’ll be three next month—how time flies! My most recently published books were a short story collection, Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation (UK only; Grafton, 1991) and a novel, Lost Futures (also 1992; published as part of Dell’s Abyss line in the US, and by Grafton over here). Just before Christmas I finished a new novel called The Pillow Friend, and I’m now working on a horror story for slightly younger readers. I used to say I was a full-time writer, but since Emily was born I write when she lets me, which isn’t very often.”
I walked into the pub off the Gray’s Inn Road and saw him slouching at the bar, and it was as if no time had passed.
The pub was one where we’d often met, and which I’d not visited since. I went in there today because I wanted a drink. It wasn’t nostalgia or anything; to tell the truth, I’d hardly taken in where I was. The pub just happened to be the one I was passing at the moment I realized I really could not face the tube just then without a little lubricant.
With the end of our affair, we’d ceased to see each other. It wasn’t something that had to be arranged: we have never moved in the same circles, and our one mutual acquaintance had moved to America soon after she’d introduced us. About two years after the last good-bye I had seen Nick in Holborn Underground station: I was on the down escalator and he was ascending; I don’t think he saw me. The sight of him sent me into such a spin that I actually forgot where I was going.
Now at the sight, so familiar five years ago but not since, of my one and only adulterous lover, I came unanchored in time. I felt a little jolt, as if I’d seen a ghost, and then I shivered as that old sado-masochistic cocktail of lust and anger and loneliness began to spread throughout my system, and I went up to him with a sort of casual, sort of wicked grin, the way I used to, as if we’d planned this meeting and I was pretending we hadn’t.
He was exactly the same. Those might have been the same pair of jeans, the same denim jacket, the same Doc Martens he’d been wearing the evening I’d first put my hand on his thigh under the table in the Cafe Pacifico. It was maybe not quite the same haircut, but definitely the same wire-framed glasses, the same blue eyes, and the same slightly crooked front teeth that showed when he grinned the same loopy grin.
Which he did, hugely, at the sight of me, and I realized he was honestly pleased to see me. He’d never been one to disguise his feelings, unlike every other man I’d ever been with.
“You look wonderful,” he said.
“You look like a refugee from the seventies. Still. And I’ll bet they’re not even Levi’s—Marks and Sparks’ own brand, am I right?”
“I was never a slave to designer labels, and, as you can see, success hasn’t changed me.”
“You’re successful.”
“Meet my backer.” He introduced me to the man he’d been drinking with; despite my hopeful first impression, he wasn’t alone. I was about to make my excuses, but the man in the suit beat me to it: cordial smile and nods all around, and he was off. Nick ordered me a whiskey and dry ginger and I didn’t stop him, although I didn’t like the mixture. It was what I’d always drunk with him, and that he still remembered pleased me.
We gave each other cautious, curious looks.
“Well,” he said.
“Your backer?”
“I’m making a film. Didn’t you know? There was a piece about me in the Face. In April.”
“I must have missed that issue.”
“I did a film for Channel Four. Part of the four-minute film series. Ratphobia. Did you see it?”
“No. Sorry. I didn’t know. The TV Times is another one of those must-reads that I just don’t… You should have sent me a card.”
“I would have. But you told me once a long time ago never to darken your door again and that included your office mail.”
I didn’t know what to say to that because it was true, and he sounded hurt. I was always saying things to hurt and then feeling abashed by my success. An awkward silence fell, for about twenty-three seconds, and then my drink arrived.
“Cheers.”
“Confusion to your enemies.”
I would have to stay at least until I’d finished my drink, and all at once that seemed too long. We had nothing to say to each other; we never had. Back in the days when we were seeing each other, if we weren’t making love we were either flirting or fighting; there was nothing else for us, no comfortable middle ground, none of the common interests on which friendships are built. He hadn’t the least understanding of, or interest in, my work, and as for him, well, at the time when I knew him his film-making aspirations had progressed no further than production work on a couple of pop videos. He spent a lot of time talking himself up to various people who might help his career, and when he talked to me, too often the same well-practiced, self-aggrandizing phrases came rolling out. I hated it. Not only because I mistrusted people who tried to impress me, but because I felt he wasn’t talking to me at those times, but performing for an imaginary audience. So I would not admire; I refused to be impressed. And I did my best (in a phrase of my grandmother’s), to cut him down to size.
Sometimes I didn’t even have to try. How could the names he dropped impress me if I’d never heard them before? I know he found my ignorance of famous film directors and musical megastars difficult to credit. But although he was only four years younger than me, we belonged to different generations, culturally speaking. I’d stopped paying attention to pop music in about 1978, whereas Nick still bought singles and read things like the Face and NME.
“You still working in the same place?” he asked suddenly.
“And still doing the same thing.” I wondered if he remembered what it was.
“That’s good,” he said. “I guess you’re happy?”
“Well, I need the money. It’s easier working than finding a backer.”
“You’re not kidding! But really, it’s a great project. I’ve got a script by—d’you remember that book that came out a few years ago, the one everyone was talking about, a big novel about—”
I gulped at my drink and felt an unexpected pleasure at the warm, bubbly kick of it.
Then Nick was excusing himself, ordering another round before he left and before I could stop him. It occurred to me that I could slip away while he was in the loo. On the other hand, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I didn’t particularly want to go somewhere else and drink alone. The first drink had mellowed me, but I wanted more.
As I put my empty glass on the bar I looked up and saw Nick walking toward me, a sight from the past I never thought I’d see again. Maybe because we were both married and always met in the center of London, well away from both our homes, my most common image of Nick is of suddenly picking out his figure against a background of strangers in some public place, coming toward me along the Tottenham Court Road, weaving among the tables in a large restaurant, or between the other drinkers in this very pub.
He had one of those long, awkward bodies you often see on adolescents. Even now, past thirty, he looked as if he hadn’t quite grown into it. Totally unathletic, of course, with a stooping, hip-slung stance. Watching this once so familiar body come toward me, I was seized with lust.