Other than those strange six months with Dr Dixon and his creepy insects, your childhood was good. You liked being brought up where you were, in the border expanse. It was rural and difficult, and you felt hardy and capable because of that. You and Danny ran wild. The fells were on your doorstep, those brown and red massifs that your dad brought into his studio and undressed and made profitable. You swam in the rivers and waterfalls, made dens, climbed trees. You took over the tumbledown barns, swung off the beams, and reared yourselves among the bleating livestock. It was an exterior childhood, and you and Danny were exterior children. There were gales, floods, hardships, funerals; you were taught that this was nature, and you’d better respect it.
The north of your youth was practically pre-industrial. You are always amazed when you hear people’s ideas about idylls and pleasure grounds, the myths of the sublime. Back then it was a landscape of filth loosened from fields, ringworm, walls of snow, and long, sickening bus rides to school. It was bad weather, burning carcasses, kids with disabilities, black-eye Fridays and badger baiting; collecting wood off the fell and trying to keep it dry under tarpaulin so the logs didn’t fizzle with sap, hiss and blacken on the grate, because that was how you stayed warm. No Economy 7. No piped gas. Fowl were strung from hooks in the outbuildings by your parents’ cottage. In another shed trout was smoked. The heating range, which was installed by your dad when you were fourteen to run some radiators, was bought from a local farmer, a cut-and-shunt boiler, previously used to incinerate stillborn lambs. Your mother washed all the clothes by hand until that same year, when his paintings started bringing in good money, and a machine was bought and plumbed into the greasy, goose-hung bothy.
And when your best friend Nicki collapsed with an asthma attack on the moor, she was airlifted to Newcastle Infirmary by helicopter, after forty-five minutes of lying under a witch-hazel bush, her brain bluely solidifying. It was January. The black furrows were frozen and an earthy winter scent radiated from the ground. You ran back from the phone box along the road and wrapped Nicki in your coat and held her hand. It was the first and only time you’ve had to dial the emergency number. You waited for help, so insanely long, it seemed. Then the sky was ripped open by noise. You watched the Sea King buzz down through sleet, and you opened Nicki’s mouth because the wind from the propeller blades seemed strong enough to re-inflate her lungs. The witch-hazel carried pale orange flowers on its bare twigs, the blossoms impossibly delicate in the storm of the landing.
And that was that for Nicki. Deep Indefinite Unconsciousness. Technically, she is still alive. Officially, she was lucky. They got to her just in time to scrape up off the hillside the last biological part of her life. It’s not hard for you to associate the north with tragedy. Nicki. Danny. There’s always half a truth to cliché.
You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you. For example, when will Nicki’s family finally give up hope and switch off the machines? She lies there, day after day, as she has for years, living by medical proxy, her hair glossy as conkers, electrically retrograde behind her skull. You still visit her when you are home. You’ve got used to it–being chatty and fey, nothing but the sound of your voice in the room and the soft flushing of the ventilator. You tell her what is going on in the world, wondering if she has any notion what year it is now. After the nurses leave her room, you ask her to wake up. There is never a response. You whisper down into her ear. It’s like making a confession to the oblivious ground, or blowing across the top of an empty bottle.
Her sisters send you Christmas cards each year on her behalf–the secretarial custodians of Nicki’s half-life. How could they know if a week after The Decision was made–after they had brushed her hair and changed her nightgown a last time, and told her goodbye we love you darling girl–that this was not the week she was due to sit up, finally, and ask what she got for her A level history, say she fancied a Rich Tea biscuit, and wonder if her boyfriend Andy had been in to see her. Only to find out the prick had married her younger cousin, a year after she went under.
The doctors measure her brain activity. From time to time there are electrical spikes, heat blooms. There’s no way of knowing how aware she is, what she is hearing, what she is feeling. The doctors say the green flares might be dreams. They say: don’t dismiss her existence in case she is trapped within herself. Her spirit rattling around mutely, like a pea in a dead whistle.
On your fifth date you told Nathan about Nicki, about what happened when you were teenagers. You were in a café on Betterton Street. There was a plate of cheese on the table in front of you, a basket of bread, two glasses of red wine. Downstairs there was a reading going on. Every few minutes you could hear thin choppy clapping, like the clapping at a village cricket match. His face fell. I know it’s sudden, but I love you, will you marry me? It was as if it was you who had survived near-death in the winter snow, as if the true miracle was that you were sitting there eating cheese, and it was vital that he ask you.
He reached over and put his hands behind your neck, and in doing so caught a finger in your hair-band and pulled out your ponytail. It was an awkward moment. Your hair spilled forwards. He kissed you. You said nothing. There was silence for a while, then sporadic clapping. He has never asked again. He was hurt, you’re sure. But you kept going out, regardless. You became comfortable, dependent, you enjoyed mutually satisfying sex. You cooked fresh pastas in the evenings, slept against each other’s backs, holidayed abroad. Then you moved in together. You upgraded from two shared suburban houses with fox-skunked gardens to one stylish sky-lit conservation-area flat, right by the heath.
Here, you have domestic security. The mortgage goes out by standing order; sensibly you pay more than the interest every month. Laundry collects in a wicker hamper and is regularly washed. The floors are slick, dust-free; in the cupboard is one of those click-together devices to sweep, with detachable cloths that attract cobwebs like magic. Ladles and spoons live in the second down of four fitted pine drawers, below a sophisticated granite counter. Everything in the flat is ordered, utilised, pleasing. The second bedroom, with its expensive pro-photo lighting rig, umbrellas and snoots, serves as a small studio. The bathroom, a makeshift darkroom. You like to develop yourself, check temperatures, make timings; you’re old-school. You still work with film whenever you can. You like the bursting shutter, the winding motor, the choice of lens. None of the equipment has recently been used.
There is a roll of film in the bottom-loading rangefinder, your first decent camera, which contains Danny. He is sitting on a bench in the train station, surrounded by pigeons, on his last visit to London.
Over the last few weeks you haven’t been spending much time at home. You’ve been at Borwood House organising the new exhibition, or out running on the heath. You’ve been going up north to see your mum and dad, to make sure they are managing OK. A few times you’ve gone into the city to meet your lover, in the bars in Soho, or by the lock. Once the two of you went to a club down a flight of stairs in Shoreditch with an entry fee and dark letterboxed rooms. Afterwards you fell upon each other in the church grounds nearby. A few times you’ve used a hotel. You let him undress you, and put pillows beneath your stomach. You watched the local movement of his hips and waist in the mirror opposite the bed. You were hurried and left your phone switched on. The ringing didn’t stop you. Afterwards there were messages from Nathan, which you deleted.
In the beginning things were fine with Nathan, and you felt happy. You used him as a muse. You photographed him, exhibited the prints, exposed him to the scrutiny of the public. He was good-humoured, sat for you nude, let you manipulate his poses. His body was interesting; he wore his muscles tautly against his skin. You got right into the polished crevices, the brackish ghylls. He was the subject of your most acclaimed series of compositions, which was short-listed for a major prize, and widely reviewed. The press compared you to your father, talked about geo-portraiture. There was talk of fetishes. Reviewers wondered whether this was a response to the legacy of Peter Caldicutt, whether you were trying to be difficult and controversial.
Once, when you were shooting the series, you put Nathan in your best tie-top stockings. Agent Provocateur. The hairs of his legs broke through the black mesh and his muscles gave the material an interesting look. It excited you both, and you went to bed and didn’t speak, but instead took turns doing whatever you wanted, with urgency and experiment. You tried it again a few more times, but the eroticism lessened, then failed, and you stopped.
The two of you are different now, calmer. There is still sex, occasionally, but it is no longer a priority to seduce or be seduced by him. You recognise him more as a housemate, a person who becomes gently furious at the news every night, a decent cook. All the powers you have for capriciousness, all the potency you wield-and you do wield it, with dark sedge eyes, good legs, the ability to turn male heads on entering a room, and talent–seem superfluous to the dynamic of the relationship now. You still bring him tea every morning, and comfort his headaches with paracetamol. You are generous with birthday presents. But there’s no entitlement to your body any more, granted through arduous solicitation, an obvious hard-on when you undress. Now you wear your best lingerie to work, the silk dampening, the lace cuffs stiff under your dress. Your mind tracks to someone else when you touch yourself, and you think of that time in the churchyard, his mouth nuzzling against your soaked underwear, the desperate thrusts. At night sometimes the ache becomes unbearable. You leave the room where Nathan is sitting reading or watching television. You OK, Suze? he calls. To leave a room abruptly might still mean a sharp descent into sorrow. You say you’re fine, just going to the bathroom. You lock the door; lean forward against the cold mirror. You feel down inside your bra, unfasten however many buttons on your jeans you need to.
The first time it happened was at Borwood House. You’d been thinking of Danny. You were downloading the certificates of objects that are being sent to the gallery for the new exhibition-the odd little artefacts that once belonged to the great twentieth-century painters and are somehow relevant to their legacies. Angela had just decided on a title for the show: In the Artist’s Shoes. She had gone to buy you both coffees from the café on the heath to celebrate, and you were thinking about Danny, about the red trainers he always wore, like a man ten years younger, like a boy. He had multiple pairs. For a moment you thought about crying. You knew it would make you feel better, but the distance to the emotion seemed too far to travel.
Something came over you, a different impulse. You shut the laptop, stood up, and went to the snug room at the back of the gallery where Tom was making notes on the texts. The door was closed. You didn’t knock. You opened it, and went inside. He was working as usual with the curtains drawn, in lamplight, bent over the documents on the table. You moved behind him, and stood there. Then you leaned over and kissed the back of his neck, just beneath his dark hairline. He made a soft-throated noise, and turned slightly. Perhaps he didn’t see that it was you, perhaps he didn’t smell your perfume. Perhaps he knew. But he did not recoil. Instead he reached up and held the back of your head so you wouldn’t pull away. Then he stood up and drew you to him. You felt a rush of chemical gold overwhelm you, like something taken intravenously.
There was only the humidity of your mouths as you kissed. The excitement passed between you on your tongues. He put a hand round your neck and pulled back. Where is she? She’s not here? You looked at his mouth, glazed from your own, his beautiful lips, with the tiny white scar on the membrane. He put a hand underneath your dress. Non voglio fermarmi.
You pushed him back on the desk, unzipped his trousers. He was hard, the skin smooth over the tightness. You kept him in your mouth even at the end when he tried to gain polite release before coming. It was easy. It was inexcusable.