Chapter Fourteen

What a scumbag! It wasn’t enough that I’d broken into Cally’s home and snooped through her things, I’d then got trashed and let her deal with the fallout. The mere sight of me should have had her running away screaming, but she’d stayed. And I’d let her.

After a difficult start we settled into stilted conversation – I plied her with innocuous questions about her job and she told me about the club, the other girls she worked with and the music the DJ played. I didn’t let on that I was familiar with The Electric Fox; that I’d been a regular visitor in the past; in the days when all I did was bar-hop, get high and fuck lots of women. She already had enough reasons to dislike me.

Cally looked exhausted. As she began to relax I shifted over to the other side of the bed so that she could stretch out and rest her head. My shirt did a good job of covering her, but it was too little too late – I’d already had a tantalising glimpse of the body hidden beneath and I couldn’t get it out of my mind, despite how shitty I felt.

Before long it was Cally’s turn to question me:

‘Which band is this?’

‘Nine Inch Nails.’

‘Why do you play it so loud?’

‘I can barely hear it now you’ve turned it down so low. It’s good loud – even better live.’

‘If you say so. Was that your girlfriend who just left?’

‘I don’t have a girlfriend. Why?’

‘No reason,’ she blushed.

I cruelly left her defensive response hanging awkwardly in the air while she tried to think of something else to say.

‘Tell me about your tattoos.’

‘What do you want to know?’

Her ultramarine eyes travelled across my skin as she considered where to start, and the hairs stood up all over my body.

‘Why do you have so many?’

‘You don’t approve.’

She didn’t try to deny it. ‘When did you get this one?’ She pointed to the moon on my left shoulder, but stopped short of actually touching me, though I wanted her to.

‘When I was fifteen.’

‘Fifteen? Is that legal?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

‘The artist was a friend of my brother’s and knew I wouldn’t rat.’

‘I bet you were a real hell-raiser as a teen.’

‘You have no idea.’

She smiled. ‘How old’s your brother?’

‘Now? About forty-one I think.’

‘And you?’

‘Thirty-six. You?’

‘Thirty.’

‘Do you have a brother?’

‘No.’

The rugby player from the photo in her bedroom flared up in my mind and I worked to keep a ridiculous sense of disappointment from my face.

‘So why did you get it – this tattoo?’

I shrugged. ‘I just liked it.’ I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she let it go and I steered the conversation back to her. ‘When did you start dancing?’

‘My Mum signed me up for ballet classes when I was five.’

‘Five! Fuck.’

‘Yeah, but I loved it – it made me feel like a princess and a part of something; I made good friends there. When I was thirteen I almost gave it up. Ballet dancing wasn’t ‘cool’, but I missed it too much – the steady discipline and the physical challenge of it. So I kept going to ballet classes and took up other forms, too – contemporary, jazz, hip-hop, even pole dancing.’

We talked for a while, or rather Cally did and I kept prompting her so that she would continue. As far as I could tell, her background was typically middle class, suburban, and uneventful. She was an only child, but her parents were still together and had recently retired to Spain. Cally’s conventional upbringing had resulted in an intelligent and seemingly well-adjusted woman with the freedom and potential to do anything she wanted, but she was no less intriguing for all that. Her passion for dancing went some way towards explaining her current bizarre career choice, but nothing she said made sense of her sudden move to London. Of course I couldn’t ask her personal questions without expecting her to do the same, so for the most part we stuck to safe topics; music, art and movies. I revealed nothing of my past or my family; why should I? We were never going to be best buddies. It was bad enough that I’d let slip I had an older brother, even that was too much.

Cally made buttered toast, which helped to settle my stomach, but I was still wrecked and at some point, much to my consternation, I must have fallen asleep.

When I woke up in the evening, Cally was gone. She’d washed up, turned off the lights and taken her dress, handbag, and heels next door with her. And my T-shirt. I felt too ashamed to knock on her door and thank her for looking after me – I thought about it constantly, but something always stopped me. Self-preservation, perhaps. And yet I found myself hoping that she might bring my shirt back.

As the days crawled by I lost that hope.

Listening to Muse albums on repeat I threw myself into my work instead. On my windowsill I found a peacock butterfly. I had no idea how it had managed to fly in through a twelfth floor city window, but I carefully trapped it under a glass so that I could study it’s velvet markings more closely. It reminded of Cally; the vibrant cadmium scarlet of its wings; a clear warning; both delicate and alluring, and the whorls; cerulean blue and softly hypnotic, like her eyes. Inspired, I embarked on a new set of paintings; recreating parts of the butterfly; weaving the patterns and the sense of flight and fragility into the canvas with a fresh intensity that left little time to sleep or think about anything else.