Graham took out a book on Marxist economics, opened it about a third of the way through, started reading. His eyes took in the words, but it was dry, hard, complicated stuff, and the meanings flowed over the surface of his mind and off again like water from a sun-creamed shoulder.
"Graham," Sara said from the doorway. He turned round, heart thumping, to see her just leaning in from the hall, a white towel round her head like a turban, a thin blue dressing gown round her body. Her face looked white and painfully thin without its usual aura of black hair. "I won't be long. Have a seat." She went into the room across the hall, which he assumed must be the bedroom. He put the economics book back.
He sat down, looking around the room. After a while he rose to look at the record collection. It all seemed very dated; a lot of old Stones records, but much Led Zeppellin and Deep Purple: middle period Floyd and early Bob Seeger. Meatloaf was about the latest stuff. Funny. The collection must have belonged to the girl who actually owned the place, the one who was in America.
He inspected the bookshelf again.
At that moment, on St John Street, near the buildings of the City University and about a quarter of a mile south of the junction of Pentonville Road and Upper Street, a figure in black leathers, wearing a black full-face crash helmet with a smoked-glass visor, was crouched by the side of a BMW RS100 motorbike which was propped against the side of the kerb. The man in the black leathers sat back, looked up the road, north, in the direction he had been heading when the bike had suddenly started misfiring a quarter of an hour ago, while he was making his way, as arranged, to Half Moon Crescent. He cursed, leant forward again, quickly turning a small screwdriver as he fiddled with the settings on the carbs. STK 228T was the registration number of the bike.
Graham took out a book on ethics. It looked like the sort of book to be found reading, too. Slater, naturally, had his own views on ethics as on everything else. His philosophy of life, he said, was founded on Ethical Hedonism. This was the moral system virtually every decent, unblinkered, reasonably informed human able to scrape together a quorum of neurons lived by, but they didn't realise it. Ethical Hedonism recognised that one had to enjoy oneself where one got the chance these days, but that rather than immerse oneself totally in such diversions, one ought always to behave in a reasonable and reasonably responsible manner, never losing sight of the more general moral issues and their manifestations in society. "Have fun, be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking, is what it boils down to," Slater had said. Graham had nodded, and observed that it sounded like it was easier done than said.
He got bored with the book on ethics, which was even more obscure and difficult than the economics book, and replaced it in the bookcase. He went back to the couch and sat down, looking at his watch. It was four twenty-five. He took his portfolio up, set it on his knees. He thought about opening it up so that he would be looking at the drawings when Sara came in; perhaps even doing some last-minute alterations to them; he had a pen and pencil in the portfolio, too, in the bottom. He decided not to. He didn't have Slater's natural acting ability, that way of just adopting a persona. "You should have been an actor," he'd told Slater, late last year, sitting in Leslie's sandwich bar over a couple of cups of tea and two sweet, sticky pastries.
"I tried that," Slater had replied huffily. "They threw me out of drama school."
"What for?"
"Over-acting!" Slater had said, dramatically.
Graham put the portfolio down again. He stood up, looking at his watch again, and walked back to the kitchen part of the room, to the window. A slight breeze blew the thin white curtains softly towards him. The view outside, round the corner of Maygood Street, was still. A couple of parked cars, closed doors, the usual grainy sunlight of the summer city.
A fly buzzed in through the window, and Graham watched it for a while as it flew around the kitchen area, hovering over the cooker, flying down underneath it, wavering in the air around the door of the fridge, floating over the black surface of the round table near the window, criss-crossing the air in front of the food cupboard. It settled on one of the thin plastic chairs pulled in around the table.
Graham watched as it stretched its two front legs over its head, cleaning itself. He picked a magazine up off the table and slowly rolled it up until it was tight, then he stepped slowly forward, towards the chair where the fly was. The fly stopped cleaning itself; its front legs went back down to the surface of the seat-back. Graham stopped. The fly stayed still. Graham moved into firing range.
He drew the clenched magazine upwards, tensing himself. The fly didn't move.
"Graham," Sara said from the doorway, "what are you doing?"
"Oh," he said, putting the magazine down on the table. "Hello." He stood there, embarrassed. The fly flew off.
Sara wore baggy olive-green dungarees, a black T-shirt underneath. On her feet were a pair of pink trainers. Her hair was still swept back from her face, held at the rear of her skull by a pink ribbon. He hadn't seen her with her hair like that before; it made her look smaller, thinner than ever. Her white skin glowed in the light coming from the window. Her dark eyes, the heavy lids like hoods, regarded him from the far end of the room. She was putting her watch on; a black band round the thin cord of wrist.
"Are you early, or is my watch wrong?" she said, looking at it.
"I don't think I'm early," Graham said, glancing at his own watch. Sara shrugged and came forward. He watched her face; he knew he could never draw it properly, never do it justice. It was flawless, precise, perfect, like something carved out of the finest marble and possessing an ultimate elegance and simplicity of line, but yet containing a promise of such softness, a tactile transparency... I'm staring again, he told himself. She stepped up on to the raised kitchen area, still fiddling with the strap on her watch, and went to the window, looking out of it for a moment. Then she turned to him.
She looked into his eyes, and he felt he was being assessed in some way; she took a deep breath, nodded at the table between them. "Shall we sit?" she said. It sounded like an odd thing to say. Sara drew out one of the small plastic chairs, her back to the window, and sat down. She watched as Graham sat down too. She had her hands on the table; he put his there, spread out like fans, thumbs just touching, as hers were.
"When do the rest of the people for the seance turn up?" he asked, then wished he hadn't. Sara smiled at him in a strange, distant sort of way. Graham wondered if perhaps she was on something; she had something of the disengaged look people often have when they've been smoking dope.
"I didn't have time to get the salad together," Sara said. "Do you mind if we have a talk first?"
"No; on you go," Graham said. There was something wrong; he felt bad. Sara wasn't the way she usually was. She kept looking at him with that odd, vacant, assessing gaze which made him uncomfortable, made him want to curl up and protect, not be himself and open out.
"I've wondered, Graham," she said slowly, not looking at him but looking at her own hands where they lay on the black surface of the table, "about how you... see the sort of relationship we've had." She looked up at him briefly. He swallowed. What did she mean? What was she talking about? Why?
"Well, I..." he thought as hard as he could about it, but he had had no time to prepare, to think about the subject. With some warning he could have talked about it perfectly easily and naturally, but just to be asked outright like this... it made things very difficult. "I've enjoyed it, to some extent," he said. He watched her face, ready to alter the way he was expressing himself, even alter what he was saying, according to the reception of his words on the white surface of her face. Sara gave him no clues, however. She was still gazing at her pale, thin hands, the lidded eyes almost hidden from Graham's view. A small white section of the scar tissue round her neck showed from the square neck of the T-shirt, by the pale column of her neck.