25

I lay awake and watched her sleep. Not so much watched, really, as felt. I listened to the rise and fall of her breathing, inhaled that musty odour of hairspray, face cream and day-old beauty products, together with something older and more primal, a mixture of clay and newly mown grass. If I turned my head to the side I could see her profile, against the dim, cream-coloured wall behind. She slept on her back that night. She normally slept sideways, her body curled into a curve that used to match mine. Her finger brushed off her nose in her sleep, as if an invisible fly had irritated it. She shifted her head and said the word ‘church’ as if she was dreaming of one. I took her hand in her sleep and brought it close to my face. I could see the dark line of something underneath her painted nails and wondered if it was clay from the dig.

I had the kind of dreams that felt like waking. There was a naked body with skin the texture of leather trying to rise from a riverbed of slime. It was as thin as a handbag or the kinds of chaps that rodeo riders wear. The hands curled round my face like old calfskin gloves and the legs wrapped round mine like broad flaps of seaweed underwater.

I awoke to find her already dressed, bringing Jenny’s face to mine in a goodbye kiss.

We’re late, she said. And it seemed you needed to sleep. I’ll do the necessaries.

And then they were gone.

There was a strange peace in the house with its Tyrolean pretensions and its garden through the French windows with the parched grass and the linden or laurel trees. A car drifted by outside with its horn pressed in a long wail that reminded me of the cry of a peacock. We had walked through a ransacked palace in the months when we first met and the same damaged cry echoed round the empty halls and there was a miniature zoo visible through the windows with the ruined walls and cages and a peacock took to the air and flapped its way to freedom, its tail hanging backwards like a feathered diadem. I rolled out of bed and was washing my teeth when my mobile rang and I saw the name Frank come up on the display. I went to turn it off and must have pressed the wrong icons because a GPS map of the city revealed itself, with a pulsating red dot, and I remembered the system we had installed, with their mutual tracking devices, so that each phone could situate the other. So I knew where he was now, I realised with a kind of dull, subdued surprise, and I wondered why I hadn’t used such a tool when I most needed it. I poured myself juice and cereal and was drinking tea and chewing the crust of a piece of buttered toast when I saw the dot begin to shift and realised he was on the move.

I drove into the city then, and kept one eye on that red dot and its movements. I kept the phone perched by the dashboard and saw it was moving as slowly as I was, approaching the river from the other side, stuck in a matching lane of traffic. In the future, I thought, we will all be traceable at all times and then I realised, with whatever is the opposite of déjà vu, that this future had already arrived. Was I following him? No, not yet. I was merely following a similar path to his. Jealousy, like love, works in strange ways. It’s only after some time that we come to realise we are living under its influence. So I drove as I would have driven any normal day until I saw that his red dot had stalled, somewhere on the river’s left bank, and I put two and two together and realised he was parking his car. So I parked mine. I walked then, along the grey concrete banks, and kept pace with his dot as I moved along the opposite side. He was heading towards the suspension bridge with the huge metal hawsers arcing from the giant pillars and the stone angels blindly facing the river below. I walked up the stone steps under the archway and lost the signal for a moment, under the weight, I supposed, of the granite from above. So I kept walking up and the red dot reappeared, coming towards me now, so I walked across the traffic to the opposite side. I walked through the morning crowds, the buskers already squatting on their chosen spots, the young businessmen with the short white sleeves and the designer backpacks, the cyclists dodging the mid-morning tourists, and then I saw him for real, silhouetted against the green water, walking the other way. There was a purpose to his stride, but no particular speed. Then his mobile must have buzzed, because he took it from his pocket and began to talk to someone as he walked. I stopped and watched him pass me by. If he had turned he would have waved, I suppose, in some collegiate greeting, crossed the road to speak to me, and asked how things were going. But thankfully he didn’t. The conversation kept him engrossed, kept his head to one side, and I crossed the road and followed.

So I was a follower again, a real one; he was five or six pedestrians in front of me and as he approached the steps I had ascended, he looked to his left and waved to somebody on the riverbank below.

I looked down and immediately wished I hadn’t. But I had known what the outcome would be, I suppose, when I began following that red dot. It would be something to do with her. It would be everything to do with her. If it had been someone else down there, waiting for him, it would have still been to do with her. But it wasn’t someone else, it was Sarah. She was wearing the clothes she had left the house in, with a new addition, a straw sunhat which shaded her face and the phone that she held to her ear. She looked up. She nodded, but she didn’t wave. And I stepped back behind the shield of oncoming pedestrians in case she saw me too.

He walked on, and walked down, and soon vanished. She stood there, waiting, and looked down at her feet and kicked a pebble into the water. There was a barely perceptible splash. She was quite alone down there, on that band of cement littered with detritus from the river. She waited, her shoulders slumped, something sad about her posture, and I felt sorry for her, from my perch way above, as if she was as lost and as lonely as I was. As he was, perhaps. I remembered how I had pulled the girl to the other cement walkway on the other side. Then he appeared beneath the bridge, a lean dark shadow walking towards her, and I turned away. However they would greet each other, I didn’t want to see it.

It was only love, after all, no one had died, the crime was the familiar one and the only victims were ourselves. I felt a strange, wintry sense of release and didn’t like it at all. I was cold, for some odd reason, in that city heat. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to sleep. I wanted anything but the skin I had to live in.

And so I walked. I was following nothing now, just a remembered sound. I crossed to the other side and traced my way through the boulevards to the tiny streets where I had heard it first. But there was nothing playing. I found the courtyard, walked up the stone steps to the now silent door. I pushed it. It was open. And when I entered, there was no one inside.

There was the sofa, without the cello. There was the open door to the bathroom. There was the bedroom inside, with the mattress on the floor. And I lay down on that mattress and did what I should have done last night. I slept.