Saturday, 7th July 1990, 12.06 am

In moments of crisis, Bethany Wilder always thinks of America. Or more accurately, she thinks of New York City. It is just past midnight and she is lying in the bath, smoking a cigarette, imagining its streets and buildings, the sights and sidewalks. Open in her hand is a guidebook that lives permanently in the bathroom and has become bloated and warped from the damp. Whenever she turns a page, the spine cracks and crumples. She’s read the book so many times she knows its words as surely as song lyrics.

The first sentence is her favourite: New York City is a metropolis of unimaginable contrasts; a haphazard, beautiful, maddening construction that cannot help but entrance even the most jaded of travellers. In her edition there is a pencil annotation alongside the words haphazard, beautiful, maddening that reads Just like you. Usually those smudgy letters give her a small kick of pleasure; but now she avoids even glancing at the looping script. She doesn’t want to be reminded. Not tonight.

The bathroom is up on the top floor of the house, a dark space with peeling claret wallpaper and stained oak floorboards. The bath – a claw-footed tub with a complicated shower attachment – sits in the middle of the room. Bethany flicks ash from her cigarette and imagines that the room looks out onto an autumnal Central Park or perhaps a sun-bleached Washington Square. Unlike the rest of the house, the bathroom has not been renovated: it is easy, then, to persuade herself that it has been transported across the Atlantic and into an East Village brownstone or tenement.

Her cigarette is almost down to its filter, the orange paper sagging as she takes her last drag. The coal hisses as Bethany drops it into a coffee cup, closes her eyes and blows out a long, fading trail of smoke. She hears herself talking to Daniel, his eyes wide as she speaks, her chin leant on her fist, a cigarette almost to her lip. In the bath, she colours; shocked almost as much by her confidence as by the recollection of what she said. She shakes her head and opens her eyes. She reminds herself that she doesn’t have to go through with it, and turns the page.

The water is cooler now, she has been in there for almost an hour, and her skin is puckered and lightly pink. No matter what happens, he will not see her naked. This she has decided. If he wants to imagine her body, Daniel will have to piece her together from touch, like a blind man. Assuming she lets him do anything to her after all.

Bethany knows three girls who have slept with Daniel. One afternoon, while they were outside school, smoking, Claire admitted that she’d been with him. She said that his cock was thick like a gym rope. Bethany had rolled her eyes, but she’d been intrigued enough to kiss him around the back of the Red Lion, intrigued enough to almost put her hand there. When she’d seen him again, he’d called her ‘the one that got away’. He was the kind of boy who could say that; a boy then, a man now; twenty-something and no longer at home, twenty-something with his band and his unshakable belief in himself. The other night, he’d called her ‘the one that got away’ again and she’d looked him up and down and said, ‘Good things come to those who wait.’

She turns the page to a street map of Manhattan. The lines look so crisp and defined. With a slender finger she traces a route across the island, from Port Authority down to the Bowery. Around mid-town, she pauses for a moment and forces herself to think about Mark.

*

Three nights before he smelled of refuse and garlic, his hands scrubbed raw from the restaurant kitchens. They were in her room. It was late and despite everything – not least the smell – they made love with some urgency. She started it, pushing him onto the bed and removing her top with a determined swishing movement. It was over quickly. They shared a cigarette looking up through the skylight, watching the stars and aeroplane tail lights as they flew over.

‘How long now?’ Bethany asked.

‘Five days,’ Mark said. ‘Four once we get to midnight.’

‘I still can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You dream about something for so long, and then . . .’

‘Don’t you ever worry?’ he said. ‘You know, that you’ll be disappointed?’

She kissed him just below the ear.

‘Sometimes. But then I think, hey, it’s New York fucking City.’

They laughed and talked for the hundredth time about what they’d do, what they’d see; how they’d find a way to never come back, to never return. They kissed, fooled around a little more, then looked at the clock. He would have to leave soon. The thought made her light-headed.

*

Bethany is eighteen years old and this memory already feels like nostalgia. She has lived in the town all her life. She talks at length to anyone who will listen about why this place is the worst of all worlds, a penitentiary – she uses the American deliberately – for those with a lack of imagination. She can trace it back, this desire to escape, to idly listening to her father’s record collection: Simon & Garfunkel first, then Dylan. She listened to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan over and over, the album sleeve in her hand, wishing she was the woman on Dylan’s arm. As a lonely fourteen-year-old, her greatest friend, or so she liked to think, was the idea of New York City: neon-lit, coffee-scented, like a far-away lover with whom she had scant contact.

Downstairs the phone rings but she does not move to answer it. It will be Mark, she suspects. It keeps ringing while she dries her hair with a towel, then it stops. Wearing a bathrobe she pads across the narrow hallway and into her bedroom, trailing an ellipsis of water behind her.

Her room is cluttered with things: records and cassettes, books and shucked clothes. The wardrobe door is half off its hinges and more clothes spill out of the gap. On the wall there’s a Ramones poster that Mark bought for her. She puts on the Velvet Underground and sits at her desk. She picks up a book then sets it back down.

There is a knock on the door, a pause, and then her father walks into her room. He is dressed in a salmon-pink polo shirt and grey slacks. He is red-faced from the wine at dinner.

‘We’re back,’ he says, though there’s only been him for some years. ‘Everything okay?’ he says.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Just had a bath.’

He scratches at his stubble as she applies moisturizer to her face.

‘How was dinner?’ she says.

‘Fine, thanks,’ he says. ‘Saw lover boy there.’

‘Oh?’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t say anything. He looked busy. I do like him, though, that Mark. He’s a good egg.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t say that,’ she says, shuddering. ‘It makes you sound like an old man.’

Her father sits down on his daughter’s bed. The sheets smell freshly laundered and he wonders at how he has managed to raise a child that changes her own bedclothes without having been told.

‘I don’t know how you listen to this,’ he says pointing toward the hi-fi. ‘It’s like nails scraping on a blackboard. Proper slit your wrists stuff.’

‘You always say that,’ she says, her face oily with the cream. ‘Don’t you ever get bored of saying the same things over and over again?’

‘I wish I had the time to be bored,’ he says. ‘Being bored is a luxury only afforded to the young.’

‘You always say that, too,’ she says.

‘Well, I’m nothing if not predictable.’

Bethany shakes her head. ‘And that.’

He stands and puts a hand in his pocket, feels the money there, the sharp edge of another business card. He puts his hands on Bethany’s shoulders. They look at each other in the mirror. As the track changes there is a crackle from the vinyl.

‘Would you like a glass of wine, love?’ he says. ‘I’m going to have one. We could watch telly for a bit. Or a video or something.’

‘Oh, come on, Dad,’ she says, looking at the clock on her dresser. ‘It’s after twelve and I’ve got to be up early for this bloody carnival that I’m only doing because—’

‘I know, love, I know,’ he says calmly, and begins to massage her shoulders. ‘But I just wanted to know what’s new with you. We don’t get to speak so much these days.’

She could tell him, but doesn’t.

‘Well, I’m up the duff,’ she says. ‘And I still owe my dealer for the last of the skag.’

He laughs and kisses her on the top of her head. ‘And you say I’m predictable.’

He looks over to the easy chair where a ballgown billows under cellophane wrapping. The dress is white with pastel-pink and blue petticoats. He can’t recall the last time he saw her wear anything that wasn’t black or grey, and can’t quite imagine her frame clad in this puffball of fabric. He picks it up and feels the softness of the material. It reminds him of the satin slips that her mother wore in bed, of how he would stroke her as she slept.

‘I do appreciate it,’ he says. ‘I really do.’

‘You’d better,’ she says with a smile. ‘I still can’t quite believe you talked me into it.’

She was not talked into it. It was the last thing she could do for him, the last thing that will pass between them before she leaves. He’ll cope, she thinks. He can cope with anything.

‘Anyway,’ he says putting down the dress. ‘What time do you want waking?’

‘Seven,’ she says. ‘With a cup of coffee.’

‘Done.’ He kisses her again on the top of her head, squeezes her shoulders one last time.

‘Night then,’ he says.

‘Night,’ she says, as he leaves the room.

‘And stop smoking in the bathroom,’ he shouts as he walks down the stairs. ‘It stinks like a bloody ashtray up here.’

*

Bethany Wilder looks out of the window, out onto the rooftops and chimney stacks. There isn’t much to see from here: the Town Hall’s clock tower, the spire of a church, in the distance the brown brick and long windows of the factory where she’s worked since finishing her A-levels. She puts her last cigarette to her lips and thinks of Daniel. She imagines how it will feel to be under him, his unfamiliar body, his unknown breath in her ear.

Earlier that night, she and Daniel had found themselves alone in the back room of the Queen’s. They were waiting for people to get back from the bar. Mark was at work. For a moment the two of them sat in silence, smoking and listening to the soft rattle of other people’s conversations.

‘So, I hear you’re going to be carnival queen tomorrow,’ he said eventually. She nodded and sucked on her cigarette, noticing for the first time the lines on his forehead, the creases at the corner of his eyes. He had a strong accent which made him sound a little slow. But she liked how deep his voice was, how thick.

‘I’m only doing it as a favour for my dad,’ she said. ‘Last-minute stand-in. The real queen got in a fight on Thursday at the Fox and apparently the Rotarians take a dim view of carnival queens beating the shit out of people.’

Daniel laughed and toyed with his Zippo.

‘Any road, I bet you’ll look a right picture up there,’ he said.

‘Judging by the photos of last year’s queen, I’ll probably look like a whore,’ she replied, enjoying the slight look of surprise on his face.

‘That girl were a right boot, though, love,’ he said. ‘Captain fucked her once. Said she needed to put make-up on with a trowel just to get rid of all the zits.’ He checked his watch and stubbed out his Embassy, then lit another.

‘Are you going to the carnival?’ she asked. ‘I’m hoping no one I know’ll be there.’

He shook his head and blew a couple of smoke rings.

‘Don’t you worry about that. I never make it up in time for the procession.’ He’d leant into her then. ‘But we always go, me and Captain and that. Drinks in town first, few cans at the fair and then . . .’ He laughed and leant in even closer, as though to confess.

‘Then what?’ she said.

‘Oh, I can’t say,’ he said, his face behind a wash of smoke. ‘Can’t be seen to be corrupting the carnival queen, can I?’

She took a long drag on her cigarette.

‘I don’t need much corrupting,’ she said as she blew out the smoke. ‘Well, maybe a little . . .’

She looked around for a moment and then told him to meet her on Saturday. To pick her up in his van at the far end of Greenliffe Field, close to where they were building the new community theatre.

*

Now, with the window open and the cigarette in her mouth, she realizes that this is the right thing to do. She will sleep with Daniel and then she and Mark will make good their escape. Fucking Daniel will mean neither of them can ever come back.

For a moment she considers phoning Mark and telling him that she loves him; instead she flicks the cigarette across the roofing tiles and watches it skitter into the guttering. Leaving the window ajar, she gets into bed. She is dressed in one of Mark’s old T-shirts. She turns out the bedside light and thinks of America: of America and New York City.