Читать книгу The Howling Girl: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff - Laurie Penny - Страница 7

IN THE END, IT was the edge of panic in Jamie’s voice that decided her.

‘Hey, it’s good to talk to you. Really good. I’ve missed you, G.’ The number was unlisted, so for Grace the greeting was an ungloved fist, right up under the ribs, no warning. How many years had it been since he’d said her name like that? Her initial in his lovely long-ago-and-far-away mouth like that?

He had a problem, he said, something he was working through, and it would be wonderful if she could help out – but it would be better face-to-face. Would she come up?

Somewhere inside her a barricade started to dismantle. A white flag waved after months and years of siege. We’re starving in here. Let us come to terms.

Jamie laid it on thick. Unusually thick. The new place was so lovely, even in winter, so healing – the perfect place to write, or – was she still writing? Anyway, it was a nice place for a break, and they could talk in private. Could she make it?

Grace made a noise that gave what she hoped was a convincing impression of looking at her calendar and thinking it over. Jamie would absolutely pay the train fare, least he could do at short notice, he’d book it now, no problem at all – but could she come soon? Next weekend?

She could.

The cottage was a two-mile ride from the deserted station. She asked the taxi driver polite questions about his life, and didn’t really listen as he told her how old his kids were, how many years he’d been in the country, and what the weather would be like this time of year wherever it was that he was from. He asked her the same sort of questions about London, and she stared out at the rushing darkness, and contemplated lying about having a husband, having a child, or at least plans for one or the other. In the end she simply said that she was working too hard to think about those things. Concentrating on her career right now. Maybe some day.

‘London,’ said the driver, making a sympathetic clucking sound. ‘You young women can have a very bad time there.’

She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing, and eventually he turned on the radio.

She was going to see Jamie again, and he needed her. She couldn’t resist that. Not even after ten years, and he probably knew that well enough, she acknowledged to herself, as the taxi took knuckle-whitening turns through the blood-black tunnels of grasping trees that all country roads turn into at night.

The thing was, he really had sounded glad to hear her voice.

Later on, she would remember that, and wonder.

Jamie was waiting on the threshold. His hair doing that thing. His face doing that thing. Casual trousers low on his hips, and a cup of tea in one hand as he took her coat and gave her ‘the tour’.

‘The tour’ took quite a while. The house was old, old enough for a lot of people to have lived and died in it, refurbished with that soft, warm lighting everywhere, calm and quiet, like an upscale restaurant before the punters come in.

‘The tour’ was an excuse for Jamie to show off, which he did graciously, and also for them to talk, for the first time in a long time, about a lot of things that didn’t matter, like how it made sense that you weren’t allowed to just knock out a wall of a four-century-old cottage, no matter how much you wanted a kitchen island, or how much it cost to have original hardwood floors stripped, re-sanded, and painted – a lot, but you should have seen the carpets. The previous owners had been vandals, truly, people who put paisley on floors ought to be shot, and he was only ninety-nine per cent joking, he’d do it himself, he was ethical like that.

The cottage was warm – almost stuffy, all the windows were shut and locked, and Grace supposed it made sense. The wind stampeded over the moors outside, bitter, and the windows were all single-glazed, old-style, just thin glass between you and the terrible dark. Still, she remembered how much Jamie used to long for fresh air, when they’d lived together.

In the terrible one-room studio in Turnpike Lane – you couldn’t call it a bedsit these days, but that’s what it was, no turning-around room between the end of the bed and the oven – he used to creep up onto the windowsill, perch among the ashtrays, and sip down the dirty traffic-stinking air from the crack in the skylight. Sometimes he’d do it in the middle of the night, after they had fucked, before they fucked again, the streetlight making his skin luminous and alien, his flat white bum and the signature-line of his spine, as he turned to look at her like a drowning kid looks at a life raft.

She really had loved him.

It was important, Jamie was explaining now, to have simplicity, comfort, minimalism, if you were doing real creative work. Grace was waiting, just waiting, for him to use that Danish word that had been in all the lifestyle magazines, but of course he would never be that obvious. He simply led her into the living room, with its low, squashy sofa covered with sheepskins, its low-burning fire, the delicious rich scent of pine and cinnamon from some hidden, noiseless diffuser.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ she said, meaning it. ‘It feels so—’

‘—so safe, doesn’t it?’ Jamie liked to finish people’s sentences.

It was only after you really knew him that you discovered how special this ability really was: Jamie could finish your sentences without listening to a word you’d been saying. He had a natural ear for the rhythms of speech – it was part of what made him so good at what he did – he could predict people’s words. Most people are tragically predictable, she remembered him saying, more than once, wafting a spliff between slim fingers, conducting the conversation.

Jamie had what songwriters called a lean and hungry look – a boy who wanted so much from life. You wanted him, and more than that, you wanted to be the thing he wanted, even as he stared over your shoulder at the curve of his own future strutting by.

In the downstairs toilet, which Jamie referred to bizarrely as the half-bath – as if she were intending to buy the house – Grace checked herself in the mirror and decided she would do. People told her, approvingly, that she looked young for her age, and she worked out to videos, and she kept herself just a little bit hungry all the time, not being silly about it, not like she used to, but still, the regular empty noises inside were a growl of approval: tomorrow you will take up no more space than you do today.