Kate replaced the coal-tar soap in its dish and dried her hands on her jumper. Downstairs, she squinted at the clock on the oven: 10.23 a.m. Much earlier than usual–no wonder she felt like shit. Sunshine from the patio window illuminated the kitchen in all its squalid glory.
Up yours, Charles. Come and get me and see if I care.
She skidded over the discarded laundry and ready-meal sleeves, nearly retching as she felt the cold contact of an ancient linguine between her toes. She bent and wiped her foot with a stiff tea towel and felt her head ready to explode. The hangover was growing in confidence now, summoning reinforcements of nausea and heartburn to bolster the headache. She opened an eye-level cupboard and reached for the blessed silver box of painkillers. As her fingers made contact with it, she saw a paper bag from the local pharmacy on the shelf above. These were the antidepressants that her GP had prescribed four months ago, after her friends had mounted their only successful intervention. She had gone along with it just to shut them up. The obviously overworked doctor was given the minimum information as neutrally as possible. He asked a few questions over those ten minutes and his expression had turned from a stock performance of concern during which he kept interrupting her to say ‘Mmm’ to an expression of badly concealed alarm. The pills he gave her were of a type and dosage that Kate’s friend Amy–a lifelong handler of anxiety and depression–described in her broad Sheffield as ‘fucking hardcore’.
‘Kate, that bloke is an idiot,’ Amy had said. ‘You need to bin those buggers and see someone else. What’s stopping you?’
Kate had nodded in full agreement and did nothing of the kind. The second doctor’s opinion remained unsought, the pills untouched. Tonight she would do more than touch them. Her eyes lingered on the paper bag.
Not yet. At least not this morning.
She brought down the Nurofen and closed the cupboard.
A few moments later she had cleared a space just big enough to nestle her mug of coffee within the mountain of junk that used to be a kitchen table. She flipped a discarded bra from the chair and sat down heavily. The spring sunlight glinted off her house keys, half-stuffed into a dead jade plant.
The memory stick.
She reached for the little plant pot. Why had she stuck her keys in it? Some colossally drunken notion of a security measure in case Petrov had sent a bunch of heavies to burgle the place. She surveyed the encircling crap-heap. Maybe they had burgled the place already. It was difficult to tell. She took her keys and inspected the memory stick dangling on the Tiffany keyring Luke had bought her years ago. The drive itself was just a cheap little 16GB she’d picked up somewhere in the office. She extended it the centimetre out of its Union Jack plastic casing and instinctively looked behind her. Just the window onto the tiny urban garden. She was tempted to watch the stolen video again.
No, not now. Hide it. I’m hiding.
She tossed the keys into a bowl half-lined with fossilised rice and turned it over as if trapping a wasp. She tapped the space bar of her open laptop.
Something of a post-sacking session here last night, she surmised. Another evening spent in the tranquillising embrace of Spotify’s Easy 90s playlist. And the photos, of course, some of them old enough to be scans–the latest binge with Luke in 2D. Since literally everything reminded her of Luke, she could at least choose certain times to remind herself deliberately. Better to jump willingly into the vortex than to be sucked in by a TV weather report, or the conkers on the ground outside, or the smell of cinnamon, or any overheard mention of the words ‘cancer’, ‘tumour’, ‘dishwasher’, ‘collapse’, ‘pulse’, ‘panic’, ‘ambulance’, ‘hospital’, ‘DOA’, ‘sorry’… The deliberate seeking of memories didn’t lessen the frequency of those that came unbidden, but it gave Kate an inkling of control.
Here he was, then. Luke posing over a huge saucepan of student Bolognese; Luke gesturing with pride to a single string of green tinsel pinned to the ceiling of his room at the end of their first term at York; Kate and Luke in the same room giving a solemn military salute while dressed in each other’s clothes. Who had taken that? Probably Toby.
Luke in a bandana, the prat, playing his guitar–topless in his parents’ Wiltshire garden, his shoulders absurdly golden in the late afternoon sun. Kate and Luke on their graduation day in 1995; Kate and Luke in Brighton; Kate and Luke in Ibiza. Luke frowning with concentration at an old school textbook of The Tempest, his six-foot-two frame folded awkwardly into the tiny bath of their first flat. A sneaky shot of Luke asleep on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, his wavy dark hair cropped to an Action Man fuzz, his eyelashes (‘Wasted on a boy,’ Kate’s mother had said) quite black against the pillow. Kate and Luke on their wedding day outside St Nicholas Church, Deptford; their friend Toby standing to one side, resplendent in his kilt and velvet jacket.
Kate closed the laptop gently and sipped her coffee.
Toby. The shiny sixpence we lost down the back of the sofa.
A movement interrupted her reverie and she held her breath as a mouse made its way casually through the garbage tip of the table: a house mouse, light brown with a white belly, about two inches long not including its hairless tail. Kate fought down a mild wave of revulsion and formed an ‘ooh’ shape with her lips, breathing out calmly. ‘Who breathing,’ her first karate instructor had called it.
‘Hello then, you,’ she said in a soft monotone. ‘Sorry, you won’t find me very good company. I mean, you’ll be nice for a while but you can only spend so much time with depressed people. Eventually we just annoy you and you go away. Or we go batshit and you give us the sack.’ She brought the coffee to her lips but put it down again. ‘I wonder where you came from?’ she asked.
The mouse had found an upended box of Ritz Crackers and immediately got to work on the spilled crumbs. It emitted a squeak in between mouthfuls.
‘Sorry, I can’t place your accent,’ Kate replied. ‘I assume you’re local. Not one of those North London mice. They can be a bit snooty. You’re not from my neck of the woods, are you? Deptford way?’ The mouse ignored her. She dropped an elbow on the table to rest her face in one hand and the movement sent her unbalanced phone clattering to the floor. The mouse vanished in an instant. ‘Bugger, sorry.’ She slowly leant down to reach the phone, groaning and seeing multi-coloured emojis with the effort of putting her head under the table. To her delight she found an unopened bottle of Merlot lying on its side. She heaved herself up and plonked the bottle down on the table, inspecting the time on her phone. The echo of her personal standards had left her with a vague ‘wait until lunchtime’ rule, even though lunchtime would seldom involve any actual lunch. Fuck it, she thought as she unscrewed the cap and took a swig from the bottle.
The order of business as usual was to get drunk enough to go back to sleep.
The mouse reappeared, now scrambling onto a dirty plate and sniffing the dusty remains of a microwave risotto.
‘Aren’t you a bold one?’ she said and then, glancing at the wine, added, ‘You’ll have to excuse my boozing at this hour. Hair of the dog, you understand.’ She took another swig, tired and inaccurate, the wine spilling down the left side of her chin.
‘Of course I’d never say that to a dog. That may well be doggist and we can’t have that.’
The action of swigging from a red wine bottle and having a one-sided conversation with an animal reminded her of a movie she and Luke both loved. She followed the thought.
What happened to Withnail after those credits rolled?
She replaced her elbow on the table more gently this time and palm-settled her face, sighing with the greatest fraction of sadness that she allowed herself these days.
‘“I have of late,”’ she recited slowly, ‘“but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory…”’
She gazed around the room. ‘Actually I know exactly wherefore. It doesn’t mean “where”, by the way, it means “why” as I’m sure you know. Not “Where are you, Romeo?” but “Why are you Romeo?” Like, why do you have to be Romeo? Why couldn’t I fall in love with someone… safer?’ She nodded at the dishwasher. ‘Anyway, it was right there.’
That’s where the hidden tumour had finally announced itself. A slow-growing meningioma, the pathologist had said. A remarkably slow-growing cancer.
‘About this size by the end.’ She made a circle with her thumb and finger about the size of a grape. ‘He’d been dying since before we met. And I didn’t notice. I did nothing.’ She found an empty mug amongst the rubbish on the table, wiped it almost clean with the sleeve of her jumper and then filled it with wine.
‘Do you know how many days it is since I met him?’ she asked the mouse, whom she now loved for being incapable of giving the first toss about whether she lived or died. ‘Since the most gorgeous man alive walked into the college bar and we talked for three hours and then I got him to strip his clothes off in a student room that night?’ The mouse was sniffing a hard hillock of chewing gum. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve been counting, obviously, but I could work it out in my head from scratch. I’m quite good at sums, you see. And computers and languages and all sorts. Always have been and I’m afraid it doesn’t make me popular. Certainly didn’t at Deptford Comp. Hate me for being a coward if you like, but don’t hate me for being a freak.’ She took a large sip of wine and closed her eyes as she swallowed, welcoming the acid against the back of her throat. Taking a breath, she resumed. ‘Anyway, it’s exactly ten thousand days. I met him ten thousand days ago today.’
The mouse scurried to another part of the table but Kate kept talking.
‘The dream always goes wrong. But it didn’t go wrong that night. We were in my room, not his. And he took his top off and then I said, “Sorry, I can’t draw trousers or socks either–you’re really going to have to help me out. Look, there’s a loo just through there.” I think he knew what I was up to by then but went along with it. He came back from the loo wearing just his flags-of-the-world boxer shorts. Bit of tension going diagonally down to the left. Norway, Finland and Denmark taking most of the strain, as I recall.’
She sipped her wine and found a pack of cigarettes under a lost cardigan. Since the funeral she had gone to considerable trouble to take up smoking again. It had been tough work but she had managed it. She lit a Marlboro Gold and saw with disgust that last night she’d been using one of her old karate trophies as an ashtray. Oh well. What did any of it matter now? There was no ash yet but she rehearsed a flick onto the floor.
‘Hope you don’t mind the old lady telling you sexy stories, my young friend. Bit grim, I suppose. I was young too then. I’m only forty-five now. It’s just that I feel a million.’
She had pretended to ignore the beginnings of Luke’s Scandinavian erection as he shyly padded back into her room and retook his position on the bed. ‘Oh yes, that’ll be much easier,’ she said.
All men are created equal. It sounds plausible until you’re sharing a small room with Luke Fairbright in just his pants. It wasn’t so much his beauty that staggered her as the fact that he seemed completely unaware of it. Maybe slimmer, a touch less muscular than Michelangelo’s David but Kate didn’t think the comparison ridiculous. And unlike David, Luke breathed. He had a scent and a spirit and an attitude: nervous, golden, diffident. He was alive.
Kate had made a few swift marks on the A4 pad for form’s sake. ‘So I bet you’ve had loads of girlfriends, right?’
‘Yeah, one or two.’
Kate smiled into her drawing. ‘Is that one… or two?’
‘Two,’ he said solemnly. Their eyes met again and they both laughed. ‘Well,’ he added, ‘if you mean “sexual partners”, it’s more than two. But proper girlfriends–yeah, exactly two.’
‘Same here, more or less.’
‘Sexual partners?’
‘Stop saying “sexual partners”. I’m trying to concentrate on my art.’ They sat in an enjoyable silence for a moment, the atmosphere charged with irony as well as the wooziness of their three hours in the college bar.
‘It’s about trust really, isn’t it?’ Luke said.
Kate stopped drawing and looked at him. ‘Trust?’
‘Well,’ Luke shifted position slightly, ‘when someone you like turns into someone you love. Or when…’ His wide hazel eyes searched the orange curtains of her window as he found the words. ‘… you share anything intimate, like your secrets. Or your body.’
‘Or the secrets of your body.’
‘Yeah,’ he said simply.
‘You’re quite mature, Luke, if I may say so. For a boy.’ He slightly bristled at that but his smile was never far away. ‘Boy? Excuse me, I am nearly twenty, you know.’
‘Oh, your advanced years are not in question. I meant for someone of your sex.’
‘Stop saying sex. You’re concentrating on your art.’
She raised a hand in solemn apology.
‘Well,’ Luke shrugged. ‘Yeah, fair enough. Girls do seem to understand mysterious stuff in a baffling kind of way. Why do you think that is?’
Kate wasn’t sure if she was being humoured or if this guy was the real thing. She replied, ‘My mother would call it women’s intuition. I call it paying attention. Women are interested in how men’s funny minds work because we might need that knowledge to survive. So we end up anticipating things and it looks like a magic trick.’
His expression didn’t falter–another encouraging sign. He could take a bit of feminism on the chin without moaning. Just about. ‘I see–all is revealed! You’re the Girl from the Future.’
Kate smiled ruefully to herself and murmured, ‘All girls are.’
She had encountered the boundaries of her artistic talent. Which is to say she had drawn a stick man with an acid-house smiley face and a massive knob and balls. She was considering the exact moment to reveal her masterpiece.
She said: ‘Actually, you’re almost elderly–I only turned eighteen last week.’
‘Happy birthday. Hang on, so… in your year, you must have been…?’
This was a mistake. Kate didn’t mind telling guys about the karate championships–they were usually more fascinated than intimidated and most of them didn’t believe her anyway. But York was a clean slate–these new students didn’t need to know about her early A-levels. She was determined that no one here was going to call her a freak.
‘Dunno,’ she said, ‘some kind of admin thing when I started school.’ He had been charmingly open and she regretted the evasion. She thought he deserved a secret of her own. ‘Anyway, you’re right about trust. The fight stuff we were talking about in the bar…’
‘The Deptford Karate Kid!’ Luke exclaimed.
Kate wrinkled her nose but went on. ‘Indeed. Well, that all started as a self-defence thing after an unpleasant experience with a man that I trusted.’
Luke’s face fell a million fathoms. ‘Oh Christ, I’m sorry.’
Kate wondered what the hell she was doing. Rule number one of getting laid was: Don’t Tell Boys You’ve Been Assaulted. ‘Thanks. It’s all right.’ She sensed him trying to control his alarm and came to his rescue. ‘It was just a groping: nothing serious. I mean, it was serious–you’re really not supposed to feel up a thirteen-year-old on a Geography field trip…’
‘Bloody hell… a teacher?’
Kate nodded. ‘But nothing horrifying. At least I didn’t think so but maybe I was playing it down.’
‘Maybe you still are.’
Kate inspected the blunt point of her pencil. There it was again–his emotional boldness. There was considerably more to this boy than a pretty face. And chest. And legs.
‘Sorry, that was…’ he started.
‘No, you might be right.’ Kate liked to think of herself as being difficult to offend: one of the few qualities she admired in her mother. ‘Anyway, Dad was all for killing the bastard.’
‘Naturally.’
‘I couldn’t tell Mother. She’d have just said, “Darling, this is what comes of wearing scarlet leg-warmers.” But I could talk to Dad. He was going to run the fucker over in his taxi.’
Luke compressed his lips to stifle a laugh.
‘I know,’ she grinned. ‘Anyway, I said that would be a bad idea and asked him to get me some sort of self-defence lessons instead so that he didn’t have to worry. All for his sake and very silly. You can be Rambo but still freeze in the moment if you get blindsided by… well, by a betrayal like that.’
That didn’t seem to compute in Luke’s head: why wouldn’t she fight? But she watched him reach out for it with his imagination. ‘Yes… yeah, I think I see.’
‘And I know it’s corny but I did love The Karate Kid and David Carradine on TV so I spent weeks with Dad and the Yellow Pages, driving around in his cab after he finished a shift. We must have covered half of London before we found a sensei who would teach a girl.’
She was quietly pleased to see that Luke was now gazing at her like he was sharing a room with Debbie Harry. ‘Anyway, blah blah, me me me. But you’re right: it’s all about trust.’
‘I trust you,’ said Luke.
Kate stared at him. ‘Why on earth would you trust me? You’ve only known me for three hours.’
He shrugged good-naturedly but his innocence was invincible. ‘I just do.’
They looked at each other then–both allowing a pause to open up. A long one. Kate dragged her eyes away from his and they wandered again over his body. She said softly, ‘I’m afraid I can’t do boxer shorts either. You’re going to have to take those off too.’
Luke hesitated. He looked down at his knees and a vulnerable smile played around the corners of his lips.
Kate asked, ‘Do you really trust me?’
Luke met her eyes and answered by slowly hooking both thumbs into the waistband of his underwear. He took a breath and leaned back, suppressing a shiver as his shoulders made contact with the cold wall behind him. His heels found the edge of her bed and he levered himself up for a moment, the flags of the world sliding forwards towards Kate as they passed up his thighs, over his knees, down his shins and off the ends of his feet. In a moment of bravado he chucked them to one side like a shy stripper but they landed on her pillow, which he immediately thought inappropriate so scrambled to toss them onto the floor. Kate laughed, chewing the end of her pencil. He sat up against the wall, his right leg still arched, his wavering semi-erection emerging from dark pubic hair, finding a temporary resting place against his left thigh.
He said, ‘Sorry, I think I’ve changed position, haven’t I?’
‘What?’
‘I was supposed to stay still.’
‘Oh yes! Well, that’s okay,’ said Kate, rediscovering some composure. ‘Not… all of you has to stay completely still.’
Luke’s lips parted and his breathing became faintly audible as the astonishing girl he’d just met leaned forward and stared frankly at his nakedness. She saw that he was still fighting his own modesty but stayed where he was for her enjoyment, his hard-on growing and climbing towards his navel with languid throbs. She crossed her legs in response to her own arousal but then uncrossed them and stood, moving towards him and slowly hitching up the skirt of her denim dress. Careful not to tread on his bare feet with her oversize boots, she straddled him on the bed, her knees either side of him and her fingers wrapping around the hard warmth of his cock. She leaned in to his ear as she felt his hands on her breasts and uttered the first serious thing she ever said to him.
‘I trust you too.’