‘Can we take it a bit shorter?’
The stylist put down the hand mirror. She looked annoyed. ‘Shorter than that?’
‘Yeah, a bit, yeah.’
‘If I take it shorter it won’t look feminine.’ She seemed exasperated. This was the last appointment; Thursday nights there was a special offer.
‘I want it shorter,’ Leela said.
‘I’ll have to use clippers.’
‘Fine.’
No one else was left in the salon. Its chrome fittings glinted in the night. The steam that lingered smelled vanilla, like hairspray, or teen perfume. Leela went into the cold, defiant but suspecting once again she’d done herself a bad turn.
She stood outside Amy’s door ringing the bell and ignoring the waiters who came out of the Indian restaurant downstairs to smoke.
‘Not there, ah?’ said the waiter on the doorstep of the Bombay Tandoori.
‘She is there,’ Leela mumbled. ‘We arranged. She – I –’
There was a heavy flurry down the stairs. The door shot open.
‘Sorry! Come up. I just – aw!’ Amy hugged Leela.
The waiter looked on with interest. The rain carried on falling, cold and sharp, just enough to make Leela’s neck glow.
‘Come in, come in, sorry, I was just on the phone to Mum.’
Leela followed as she ran up the stairs. At her door, Amy turned. ‘Oh my god, your hair! Come inside. I’ll get the kettle on.’
Leela sat on the broken futon and the rain rained. What if there were floods, and she had to stay here forever? She had a sudden urge to text Richard. She typed, ‘Hi sweetie’, then dropped the phone when Amy came back in.
‘Do you hate it?’
‘Well, gosh! It’s short, isn’t it? But it’s cool! Very cool!’ ‘Cool’ was a word Amy used to denote things that were foreign to her. She now used another. ‘It looks really trendy.’ She peered at Leela. ‘It’s very short, isn’t it?’
Leela knelt on the futon so she could see herself in the mirror. She pushed her hair around. ‘Do I look like a 1980s footballer?’
‘No! Don’t be silly. You look lovely. It’s just –’ Amy’s eyes narrowed, and she darted back into the tiny kitchen to hasten out the tea bags, slop the tea, put in skimmed milk, and bring out the mugs.
‘Can I have sugar?’ Leela asked accusingly.
‘Oh shit, sorry.’ Amy went back into the kitchen and returned with an aged packet of caster sugar and a spoon. ‘Here.’ She plonked it next to Leela and turned up the music. She sang along, then turned it down, lit some candles, and sat next to Leela.
‘It’s just –?’
‘It’s just probably a good idea to, to, definitely wear make-up. And, you know, more skirts and stuff. Which you’re doing anyway! You dress so much better than you did. What made you do it?’
Leela pushed bits of hair around to see if there were ways of looking more mysterious, less startled. ‘I don’t know. I’d been thinking about it. I thought it might feel lighter, it’d be fresh. Why not?’
‘Do you think Richard’ll like it?’
Leela sat down. ‘Yeah,’ she said. She caressed the near-shaven back of her head, and felt uneasy.
At some point in the night, Richard joined her in his bed; his cold hands and feet crept towards her legs. She flinched and withdrew. He chuckled and persisted.
‘What time is it? Stop it, your hands are freezing.’
‘I don’t know, about two. We had to work late. The presentation’s done though.’
He fell asleep soon. Leela lay watching a parallelogram of light, ugly, indifferent, from the road. Slowly it moved across the ceiling. She felt helpless against the threat of loneliness, and replayed part of her conversation with Amy.
The morning was both more and less frightening. Grey light came under the blinds; she made out the comforting shape of the large duvet, but the day was about to begin. She woke with Richard’s hard-on tucked between her legs from behind. He sighed, and rocked closer as though to jog her memory. Leela tried to edge away. She craned her neck to look at the clock on the bedside table, but couldn’t see it for his head.
‘What time is it?’
‘Come here.’
‘I don’t know if I –’ The duvet, the room depressed her, but she would have liked to stay in bed for a long time, and get up after he’d left, as on days when the agency had no work for her and she sat in the flat, using the internet, reading, or writing things on pieces of printer paper. By mid-morning, all traces of him gone, she could wash up, tidy, then enjoy a sullen complicity with the furniture, and the blush-coloured carpet.
His fingers rooted about between her legs.
‘Your nails –’
‘Sorry sweetie, I’ll trim them today.’
She tried not to think of the infection she’d had, which never showed up in tests, but reappeared to make her sore. She’d begun to simulate orgasms a while ago, she’d forgotten why; now she worried she couldn’t remember how to come normally.
‘I’m really turned on,’ he said.
‘Do you want me to go down on you?’
‘Do you want to?’
‘I can.’
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
‘I want to.’ She wanted to pretend the morning hadn’t yet happened. She snaked under the duvet towards his crotch, and he began to masturbate and to palpate one of her breasts, eyes closed, while she stuck out her tongue. His fist accelerated; she moved back so it wouldn’t hit her nose. Underneath the duvet, the air was warm and humid, a strange alternative world. When he came it was salty and viscous.
She resurfaced. He put an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. ‘That was lovely.’
‘Did you smoke yesterday?’
‘Only half a sneaky fag outside the office. Could you smell it?’
‘You taste different.’
She lay against the pillow, the padding of her sleep gone.
‘I’ve got to have a shower, sweetie.’ He got up, mock-groaning, and peeked through the blinds. ‘Ugh, still raining.’
She watched him walk, tall, hairy, thin, out of the bedroom. Suddenly his head reappeared. ‘Jesus. What have you done to your hair?’
Leela watched his expression. ‘I cut it.’
‘Yesterday?’ He came closer.
She turned to show him the nape. ‘I like the back.’
‘The back’s nice.’ He stood, irresolute and naked, a towel in his hand.
‘It’s my hair.’
‘It makes your shoulders look nice,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get ready.’
Leela, unbreakfasted, opened her bag. Yes. Lurking at the bottom, with a couple of wrapped tampons and one glove, was a slim dark chocolate wrapped in cellophane. ‘Merci,’ said the label in faux-cute serif font. Richard’s ex-girlfriend had left them for him on a visit. Leela had mocked the name; she ate the chocolates with cannibalistic satisfaction when she was hungry, which was often. Richard ate irregularly, though he ate well, and his fridge was full of things Leela didn’t consider food, like smoked cheese and salami.
The phone call came when she was returning from the park at the end of her lunch hour.
‘Hi sweetie!’
‘Hi sweetie,’ he responded. ‘Listen, I’ve had an email from Dad.’
She took the news well, stopped in the doorway of a shop, and had to move aside when young men came out with cigarettes and bottles of Lucozade. Friday, the end of the week.
‘When’s he here? How many days?’
Richard’s father lived in Germany. He owned the flat where his son and, unofficially, Leela lived. He would be coming to London on work the following afternoon, and staying for a few days. Leela would have to gather her things and take them back to her house.
She didn’t say, ‘Are you going to tell him about me?’
Richard had a strange relationship with his father. Typically, when he and Leela fought about his not having disclosed Leela’s existence, he would say, ‘I’m not even that close to him. There are a lot of things I don’t tell him.’
But Leela suspected he enjoyed the time away from her and with his father, out to nice dinners and strolling around exhibitions. She had more or less moved in with him, and abandoned the daily carrying of a change of clothes, toothbrush, hairbrush etc with her to work, then out, then back to his house. She wanted to be settled; she didn’t want to have to think so often about the small objects that supported her life.
In the afternoon, while the rest of the office grew skittish after a Friday lunch in the pub and sent round droll email forwards, she brooded on those objects. Her hairdryer. Her underwear. Socks, tights, clothes, superannuated make-up, shoes, trainers, a disposable camera that wasn’t yet ready to be disposed of. She dreamed of having few possessions. But it would be the usual degrading scramble of things stuffed in supermarket plastic bags, and Richard, probably, left holding out to her a pair of knickers that had fallen from one of them.
‘Come home and I’ll cook you a nice dinner tonight,’ he said at the end of the call.
‘It’s not my fucking home, is it.’
She left work, disregarding the injunctions from her temporary colleagues to have a good weekend. Was a weekend not merely an opportunity to have long, unfurling arguments and dilatory sex; to spend a long time apologising for things one had said, and a shorter time in the warmth of apparent forgiveness?
On the tube, she was distracted by the profusion of stuff. She tried to read the magazine she’d bought, and scanned the pictures of things with alluring, slightly threatening legends: Pointy-toed boots, Dune, £49.99. Should she wear different nail polish? Change her eye make-up?
She surfed, too, the body parts around her. One day, in bed, Richard had said that when he looked at women it wasn’t in the way she had feared. Or rather, that her fears weren’t sufficiently comprehensive. ‘It’s not necessarily just someone who looks really beautiful,’ he said. ‘Half the time, I’m looking at their clothes, or how they’ve put together a look.’
‘But not all the time.’
He’d giggled, perhaps at his own audacity. ‘When you look in a more sexual way, I suppose there’s an element of looking at individual body parts. Sometimes you see a great arse, or a nice pair of breasts. You’re not really looking at the person as a whole.’
One cold afternoon, when she was in between jobs, Leela had gone to her house and surfed porn on her flatmate Jon’s computer. The images of women with exaggerated breasts, tans, and open orifices presented to the viewer had aroused her, but in a way she found embarrassing, as though she’d protested a lack of hunger, then, pressed to eat junk food, overeaten anyway. There was no elegance to this desire.
Still, since that conversation, she’d found herself trying to replicate Richard’s ruthless gaze; in public places, she let her eyes rifle women’s bodies. Breasts? A bit saggy. Bum? Large. But the girl over there had buttocks that rose in a high curve like those in underwear advertisements. She now turned, as though subliminally aware of Leela’s thoughts, and gave Leela a hard look. Leela, embarrassed, turned away. The tube thundered through its endless tunnel.
‘Hi sweetie.’ Tall, friendly, he opened the door for her, ran a hand through his hair, smiled. Leela leaned across for a kiss. She was seething.
‘How was the day?’ she asked.
‘Good. I thought I wouldn’t get off early but I did. We’ve submitted the presentation, so they’ve got to get back to us.’
‘Great.’
She followed him to the kitchen.
‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Mm.’ She put down her bag. ‘I’m thinking I’ll pack and get to my place tonight.’
‘Oh, really? Dad isn’t getting here till around lunchtime tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, but, whatever, it’d be nice to wake up at home, have the day.’
‘Okay.’
Glass in hand, she went to the bedroom and began to take clothes out of her drawer.
Richard appeared in the doorway, hand in hair. ‘I could put some stuff in the spare room under the bed if you want.’
Leela, on her knees amid a collection of Tesco bags, ground her teeth. ‘Why?’
‘If you don’t want to carry it all back.’
‘Oh, I think it’s simpler.’ She stuffed the errant leg of a pair of tights into another bag, and began to carry several of them towards the hall.
‘You don’t have to go tonight,’ Richard repeated.
‘I’d rather.’ She turned on her heel and went back towards the bags.
‘Okay.’
They sat with plates of saffron risotto in tiny servings. Leela drank more, and poured more wine into Richard’s glass, then into her own. She didn’t care, anyway. The wine’s taste altered; from dry and reminiscent of lemons, it became sourer. Richard went to the kitchen to get the next dish, skate with capers and tomatoes. They’d eaten something similar in France in the summer, when they’d gone to the wedding of one of his friends. The bride had asked Leela if she and Richard planned to marry.
‘I don’t know if he wants to,’ Leela had said.
Catherine had looked at her directly, and tucked her blonde hair behind her ear. ‘Set yourself a time limit,’ she advised. ‘I did that with Tom. I told myself, three years and you’re out. By the time he asked me, I was mentally dividing up our furniture.’
Leela had laughed, but the conversation had stayed with her.
‘Why can’t we just move in together?’ she now asked Richard for the millionth time.
He grinned. ‘We basically do live together.’
‘But this isn’t my space’, a term he favoured, as in, “I like what you’ve done with this space”.
‘You have your stuff here.’
‘I have to move out when your dad’s here.’
‘He’s hardly ever here.’
‘That’s not the point.’
They sat down with the fish, which was excellently cooked.
‘The fish is nice,’ Leela said.
Richard looked troubled.
‘What?’
‘I feel like you’re never satisfied.’
‘What?’ She felt apprehension mixed with the usual rage.
‘You’re never grateful.’
‘What?’
‘I think you should think about all the things I do for you,’ he said doggedly.
‘What about all the things I do for you?’
He looked doubtful, in the slightly aquiline way only a thin person with a long nose can. ‘My point is, you only look at the things that upset you,’ he said. ‘I think you should look at all the things I do that are nice. Like cooking for you.’
‘Practically speaking I cook for you more often.’
‘You virtually live here.’
‘Is that supposed to be some sort of favour?’ She shot up from the sofa.
‘Well,’ he said, quietly indignant, ‘you probably have a better lifestyle than you otherwise would because of it.’
‘What’s wrong with my lifestyle?’
‘This flat. It’s nicer than yours.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my flat. At least I don’t have to shunt out of it every time your dad comes to town.’
He folded his arms. The oval glass table, which he’d coveted for weeks before he bought it from the antiques market, stood between them like a punctuation mark.
‘Oh, hi. I thought I heard you come in last night.’ Jon walked past a still-sleeping Leela, fumbling for the coffee powder in the kitchen, and opened the fridge. The phone began to ring. He bounded out. ‘Jesus! More people trying to sell me something.’
It struck Leela that these calls were the result of marketing strategies like those Richard and his colleagues put in place, with much plying of PowerPoint, for their clients. Jon, she heard, was having an animated conversation.
‘No, he’s not. He’s away. Where? Uh … he’s skiing. Yes. Well, in Colorado. It’s a different season there.’
Leela grinned.
‘But what’s it about?’ Jon enquired tensely, a man on the scent of a falsehood.
The kettle boiled. Leela tipped a small mountain of coffee into her individual-sized cafetière. A bird sang outside. The day was grey.
‘Okay, I’ll tell him, but he’s pretty fucking acute, yeah?’ Jon ended. Leela giggled, spilling coffee powder. The kitchen needed cleaning.
‘Did you mean “astute”?’
‘Thank you,’ said Jon reprovingly. He took the kettle from her and poured hot water into a mug containing a single round tea bag. Immediately the water became dark and rank-smelling.
Leela sat on the counter, rubbing her eyes and waiting for coffee powder and water to turn into coffee.
‘Time for a drastic change?’ Jon said.
She started. His face was innocent of anything sly.
There was a long pause. Leela ran a hand through her short hair. ‘Oh. You mean the hair. Yeah – dunno. It seemed like a good idea.’
‘Well, it’ll grow,’ Jon pointed out. He looked at her again, as though deciding whether to speak. ‘So Richard’s away?’
Leela felt herself blush. ‘His dad’s here, so he’s spending time with him.’ She wondered if she’d left any of her plastic bags in the hall.
Jon nodded, and smiled at her. He stopped stirring his tea, and went back to his room.
Leela spent a quiet day, each part unfolding with tedious languor. She regarded the bags she’d deposited in her room, and considered unpacking. She cleaned the bath. She went to the small supermarket on the High Road, and bought avocadoes, bread, butter, lemons, coffee, milk, cereal. She came home and put away the food. She phoned Amy.
‘It’s not so much that I miss him. It’s that I resent that he doesn’t miss me.’
‘Maybe he’s just not as insecure as you.’
Leela brooded. She sipped her tea. ‘Can I have sugar?’
‘Oh, sorry. It’s in the kitchen.’
Amy was often free at weekends, because the man she was seeing was attached. Leela, however, was usually busy, having an absorbing, miserable weekend of social engagements, arguing, and sex, with the odd good meal thrown in.
‘Do you actually want to spend all your time with him?’ Amy asked.
‘No. I just feel better when he’s there.’
Richard usually took Leela along when he met his friends. ‘There’s nothing I’d say to them if you weren’t here that I wouldn’t say when you are,’ he said. As if in retribution, he tended to come along whenever Leela met a friend; this went down badly with her friends.
She put in the sugar, stirred it, went to the mirror over the mantelpiece to check how her hair looked today, then turned away before she looked. ‘How are things going with Andrew, anyway?’
Amy made a face. ‘He’s away for the weekend, with Laura.’
When she was on her way home, Richard called. She listened to the message as she walked from the tube to her house, through the shadows of trees and other houses on the back street.
Richard’s voice was warm, slightly hesitant. ‘Hi sweetie, it’s me. I’m sorry we parted on a bad note. Give me a ring if you get this soon. Otherwise, talk to you tomorrow. And Dad’s out for a bit in the afternoon so we could meet up if you want. Anyway, hope you had a good day, and speak to you soon.’
Leela looked at the screen of her phone. It was almost an hour since his call. The message sat in her heart like ballast, something to be held against the vast flow of indifference, time, transience. He had called. In the moment of freedom from her usual sense of lack, she felt she could do anything: tell him it was over, be alone. She wouldn’t call now, she’d call back tomorrow. She remembered, too, as she let herself into the darkened hall of her house – a place she now considered home but which she’d pass through just as she’d passed through other rented accommodation, other rooms, and made conversation with other flatmates – the time Richard had called her over when his father had last been in town. Richard had moved to the spare room, which had a single bed. They had repaired there, and begun to kiss: he had coaxed Leela into bed. It had struck her that he’d invited her over for an hour so they could have sex and that this was – was it? – an insulting way to treat her. She’d submitted, completely callously, closed her eyes, and thought without guilt of anonymous bodies, large-breasted women, images from pornography: dark, hot openings. She’d come silently and with satisfaction. Afterwards, Richard had said, ‘You felt slightly absent during sex.’
‘What makes you say that?’ she’d asked.
‘You weren’t completely engaged. I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think you’d like it if I did that.’
But he did make love with his eyes closed, and she was reasonably sure he thought not of her but of other people, and other images as he moved. Did she care? Occasionally she realised she was more detached from the experience than she admitted. Didn’t she, too, think of other things, other pictures, animated by the desire of other, unseen but multiple people?
She closed the door, leaving behind her the shifting panel of light from the street that came through the stained glass. She went towards her bedroom to get a towel. She’d shower, wash her hair, dry it, put some gunk in it, so she wouldn’t make herself even later in the morning. On her way to work she would, she thought, call Richard, and apologise for the things she’d said.