"Do you remember that time when it was raining and you rang up from... a callbox, I think you said?" Sara interrupted.
Graham smiled. "Of course, you were under the bedclothes with your Walkman turned up full blast to drown out the thunder."
Sara shook her head quickly, briefly, so that the movement looked more like some nervous spasm than a sign. She kept looking down at her hands. "No. No, I wasn't. What I was doing underneath the bedclothes was screwing Bob Stock. When you rang, and rang and rang, he took his... stroke from the pulses of the bell." She looked up into his eyes, her face quite serious, even unpitying (while his aching guts turned inside him). A cold, uneven smile crossed her face. "As a third party, you were quite a good screw. Rhythm and staying power."
He felt he could not speak. It was not the fact of the tawdry revelation itself so much as the tone of its delivery which hurt; this clinical, deadpan expression, the flat voice, even if this outer calmness was belied by that tensioned neck, the jerkiness of her movements and gestures. She went on:
"That time I talked to you from the window, when you were down in the street, the day we went to Camden Lock... Stock was behind me; he put the window down on my back. All I had on was that shirt. He took me from behind, you know?" The corner of her lips jigged nervously twice, then twisted with a tiny dry hint of a smile. "He'd always said he might do it, one of the times he was there when you called. I'd dared him to do it. It was very... exciting. You know?"
He shook his head. He felt he was going to be sick. This was absurd, insane. It was like all Slater had ever joked about, like all the most sexist caricatures of female deception. Why? Why was she telling him all this? What did she expect from him?
She sat on the far side of the circular black table, her hair severely gathered back, that thin, nearly translucent face brought to its own point, decks cleared for action. She was watching him now, he thought, the way scientists must watch a rat; some animal with its brain exposed, wires into it, hooked up to a machine with its tiny, electric, animal thoughts bleeped and phosphoresced, recorded by glowing green lines and the smoothly unrolled lengths of paper and the thin metallic scribbling of scratching pens. Why, though? Why? (And thought, does the rat ever know, could it ever comprehend, the reasons for the cruel uses it was put to?)
"You do remember," she said, voice purring, "don't you?"
"I... remember," he said, feeling broken, unable to look at her, and stared at the table's surface and one or two small crumbs lying on it. "But why?" he said, looking up at her. He could not keep his eyes on hers for very long. He looked down again.
"... even that first time," Sara said, ignoring his question, "when we met at the party. In the loo. Would you believe that Stock was in there? We had arranged it all in advance. He climbed up the drainpipe. I left that room we were in and went down there to meet him. That's what I was doing in the bathroom; fucking on the floor with Bob Stock." She pronounced the words carefully.
"Really?" he said. He had forgotten it all, forgotten all he had ever felt for her. He would feel it again, he knew, and it would hurt, but for now he was putting it out of his mind. It didn't matter any more. She had changed all the rules, put the whole relationship that had existed between them into quite a different category. He stored the old self, the hurt young man for the moment, concentrated as best he could, while still reeling inside from the sheer force and extent of the change, on what was being said now, on this new set of rules, this role he was being forced into, for reasons he didn't yet understand. "But why?" he said, trying not to sound hurt, trying to play it the way she was.
"Decoy," she said, shrugging. She gazed at her fingers again, spreading them out on the black paint surface. "That divorce of mine... my husband was having me followed. Stock couldn't afford to be involved, but we didn't want... couldn't stop seeing each other. So we decided to use somebody else to seem to have an affair with me. You were seen to go upstairs with me at that party; we figured that whoever my husband had tailing me would be at the party, gate-crashing; following me. We thought that he would assume we'd been screwing. I really had, of course, but that was just a little extra. We've been stringing you along ever since. Sorry, Graham. Anyway, our man doesn't seem to be following you. Perhaps he's been called off the case or something. Maybe my other half just didn't want to spend any more money on me; don't ask me."
"So," Graham said, feeling faint, sitting back in the chair as though nothing was wrong, trying to stop his lips quivering, one hand on the top of the seat-back (where, he remembered for no good reason, the fly had been), his other hand still on the table, like some strange animal in a black and circular arena, on the far side of it from her pale fingers. His hand, trembling very slightly, scratched at a fleck of white paint on the black surface as he said, "I'm not... of any use any more, is that it?"
"Sounds rather mean, doesn't it?" Sara said. She was still trying to sound calm, but her words sounded clipped. Graham laughed, shaking his head.
"Oh no; no, not a bit!" He felt tears starting to come to his eyes, and stopped them, determined not to show her what he was feeling. He shook his head, went on laughing, still watching his finger scratching at the white-paint fleck. "Not at all, no." He shrugged.
He was aware of a sort of tingling itch all over his body, as though the heightened awareness of his earlier anticipation was with him, in a single sense only, once again, and every nerve in his skin was receiving a maximum intensity, pouring into his brain a mass of static, average signals, a bodily white noise giving an impression of unattenuated, unsifted, exaggerated usualness; a paradigm of the pain of clearly felt normality.
"So it was all just an act, was it?" he said, after a while, when she had said nothing more. He still couldn't show what he felt. He kept thinking, wildly, that it might all be a cruel sort of joke, or even a test, a final examination before he was allowed closer knowledge of this woman. He couldn't, mustn't over-react.
"Sort of," Sara conceded, voice deliberately lazy (he had the impression of her turning very slightly to the window, as though listening for something), "but I haven't hated it. I quite like you. Graham, really I do. But having set out to use you, there wasn't a lot else I or... Stock could do but go on with it. Maybe I shouldn't even be telling you any of this now. Maybe I should just have told you not to come here, and then not have seen you again. But I wanted to tell you the truth." She swallowed a couple of times, gazed at her hands on the table, clasped them.
Still there was that false coldness in her voice, he thought, as he scratched at the white fleck of paint; still she was not really telling the whole truth at all. She wanted to see what his reaction would be, how the words would affect him. He sat there and wondered what he could do. What was there to do? Break down and cry? Become violent? Just get up and leave?
He glanced quickly at her, then away. She sat looking at him, still but somehow tensed. Looking again, he saw what might have been a tic, near the edge of her jaw, under her right ear. A pulse on her neck, over the white scar on her upper chest, beat rapidly. He looked away, eyes blinking.
He could not, he would not break down. She would not see him cry. A furious, vicious, angry part of him, some deep, buried kernel of animal hatred, wanted to attack her; slap and punch that cold white face; rape her, leave her wrecked and battered; reciprocate and outbid her in this awful, hurtful game she had suddenly chosen to play. The only part he trusted (but the part that had got him here, now in this situation, even if through no fault he could see) was equally revolted by the idea of either type of assault; to embrace either of the sexually conventional reactions, adopt either of those segregated responses was... insufficient. Pointless. Nor was there a way to stay in the game with (he searched for a word, inside himself)... honour (that was the only word he could think of, though it was too old and tainted, too historically misused to be quite what he wanted or meant. But in more sense than one, it was all he had).