Читать книгу Huddleston Road - John Toomey - Страница 8

Vic left Dublin for London when he was twenty-one. He’d been rattling about the place for a few years by then, going nowhere in particular. Having dropped out of two courses, a degree in journalism and a diploma in tourism, he’d found himself a three-day week in the local supermarket, working the fruit n’ veg under the foulmouthed eye of a Belfast man, a good twenty years his senior.

Although the prospectless apprenticeship at the supermarket was never likely to last, it did, given his contribution-free tenancy with his parents, afford him a decent disposable income. So off-days were spent at the cinema, alone bar a handful of other lonely buffs, munching on popcorn and absorbing the gigantic intimacy of the virtually empty theatre. The aimlessness of it was apparent to him, but there was contentment too in those midweek hours nobody else had available to them.

In the evenings, during the week, when he wasn’t out with friends who had determined to persist with third level education, he sat alone in his bedroom listening to albums over and over until he knew them inside out. He read biographies of famous musicians and actors, and struggled through the odd novel that he found reference to in somebody’s life story. He wrote reams of self-indulgent poetry, and got drunk in the dark.

By the time of his twenty-first birthday he’d become restless, bored with himself. He ripped up and burned all the poetry and began to want for more, insisting to friends that what he craved were new encounters. He applied to several universities in England and, surprisingly, found that almost all of them were willing to accept him.

In mid-September, with his only fallback a phone number, he boarded a flight to London. The number was inscribed onto the inside cover of a hardback writing pad that he used for a journal. He drew a thick rectangle around it in red pen. The pad was about the only thing he deemed valuable among his travelling trinkets and clothes. Having by then forsaken poetry, he had begun to record, with meticulousness, the important and, it should be said, the mostly extraneous details of his life; substituting the purged poetry for pedestrian prose – one kind of conceitedness for another. He packed everything into a large rucksack and half expected to be back home by the New Year.

London and the university years were good to him. It thrilled and humbled, alternately. His journal entries from London were filled with a distinct excitement, constantly aquiver in every sentence. In those words, as self-obsessed and unexceptional as they read, the faintly recalled essence of scintillating promise was close to palpable; it was in the air each morning of that first winter, and in the warmth of the long May evenings where his gaze fell out the ramshackle sash-window, and across the park, with the sky ripening to red. Apprehension was bound up in there too, with all the emotions heightened by the experience of being out on his own, cut off from all homely comforts and security. London was everything he’d intended.

He stayed in halls of residence, sharing five storeys with a few hundred other students hailing from a range of cities and homelands. The only commonality they shared was the collective claim to have originated more than twenty-five miles from campus. The first few weeks were a blur of cheap beer, fleeting associations – feeling strangers out and up, wary of jumping in too quick with any one crowd – and looming loneliness.

Lectures, seminars and essays took a backseat, until the first round of assessments were handed back, stinging criticisms in tow, of the sort that propitious school teachers can never prepare you for. He came to realize his own ordinariness. Some people pack it in then – too much effort – and leave university with no degree and a student loan that was profligately squandered on booze, drugs and the rest. Others get their pride stung by near failure and pull the finger out. Vic surprised himself by falling in with the latter.

Despite his stated desire for new experiences, he survived largely within the confines of halls of residence and the route to campus, a closeted world of pseudo-reality; all that hippy idealism regarding the broadening of horizons was unrepentantly jettisoned in favour of subsidized student bars and frivolous associations. From time to time he took the Underground to Camden on a Sunday, or walked in. He ventured into Leicester Square and Oxford Street too, during that first winter, with a spirited group of fellow squatters from halls, to take in the seasonal lights. But there wasn’t much more to his pursuit of the city’s perspective.

Toward the end of the first semester, with the bitter cold outside and suffering some degree of malnutrition, he rang that number so carefully copied to the inside of his writing pad. His cousin Orla was the only person in the city he could consider family. She was ten or eleven years his senior and the last time he’d seen her was at her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. He was five or six and she was a confident teenager, polite and assured. By the time he arrived in London she was married with two kids and living in Hampstead.

Although they could have passed on the street and not known each other, such was the time that had passed since they’d last met, Orla’s innate geniality made quick work of any uncertainty. Within minutes she had invited him over for dinner. After nearly three months of toasted, cheap-cheese sandwiches, baked beans and beer, he enthusiastically accepted. Orla introduced him to her husband, Geoff, and the two kids. They were awfully bloody hospitable and charming. Had he not been so grateful, he might have been sickened by the greed – why must some people get it all? His super-animated recollection of Orla’s blissful life could be dismissed as the famine induced hallucinations had it not been for the fact that the perfect looks, manners and fortune willfully withstood the weathering of the years; their perfection constantly adorning itself with still more resplendence and zest.

Their hospitality, in the thick of London’s aloofness, affirmed Vic’s faith in human kind. The ludicrously homely home in fashionable Hampstead became a safe-house for him; a place where his innards could be warmed by roast potatoes, vegetables and rare tastes of premium meat, so that he could return to student- world rejuvenated. In reciprocation, he babysat for them once a year, on their anniversary, when they would go out to dinner and see a show. A gesture of gratitude that over the course of his university years established itself as tradition.

With first year skippered successfully, and after spending a summer at home wondering whether he’d bother going back, he returned to London for his second year. He remained in halls of residence, as was his wont as an international student, and thus avoided all the pitfalls of renting in the open market with people you don’t really know as well as you thought, and inevitably falling out with them in the kind of mini-dramas where the last dribble of semi-skimmed milk is a deal-breaker. There was more security for him in halls of residence. It afforded him a level of independence and solitude when needed, retreating to his room for days at a time when assignments needed writing, while also providing the opportunity to be with others at the bar, or share half an hour in the communal kitchen.

Knowing the ropes already, in a building populated mainly by first years, mostly kids fresh out of school, he was confident enough to resist rushing in. He stood back, mixed sparingly, and worked in a way that was more focused than before. By third year he was a seasoned student; an oasis of clarity and focus among the chaos and melodrama; a marvelous, sovereign entity in a vortex of sex and crying and puking. Occasionally, he cut loose and joined in, celebrating the end of each round of assignments.

The next step was just laziness. He’d enjoyed London and didn’t want to leave. He didn’t have the appetite for a Masters and he was, despite a degree, unqualified for everything. A few people he knew were going into teaching and he decided, in the absence of anything better, that it would do for him too. Accepted into another London university, he began the following September, his fourth in London, and trudged half-interestedly through a PGCE, passing with relative ease, and took up a post at Downwood the following September.

He met Lali at James’ birthday celebration. At thirty, or soon to be, and with seven years service behind him, James was an old hand at Downwood. Vic, with only one full year in the job behind him, was still fairly fresh-faced and also, at twenty-five, still firmly in his youth. In a London school with an astonishingly high turnover of staff, James was considered an experienced teacher, and embraced the responsibility of such an impish title with appropriate rectitude; dismissing all his students as unthinking baboons, planning lessons on torn-off strips of cereal boxes, and meeting acronyms, initiatives or pilot anythings issued from the local council – ultiultimately dismissed as either ‘unworkable’ or ‘fuckology’ – with immeasurable contempt. James believed in the text, the power of a text itself. His first advice to Vic was, ‘Pick a book you like, talk about why you like it. They’ll learn more from that than a million storyboards, word searches, tableaux, role-plays or diary entries. And when you’re done, pick something you hate. But make it short, an extract, and have a proper fucking rant about that. That’s teaching.’

Vic came to notice her through a series of evanescent movements. She was something in his peripheral vision, a graceful flicker among the greater body of James’ birthday guests. There was something about her coffee skin and jet black hair that beguiled. She was small and skinny, naturally skinny though, not in that anaemic, chronically delusional Hollywood starlet kind of way.

‘She’s an alright, girl. A bit feisty,’ James said. Vic took this summation to be an endorsement, something James would later insist it was never intended as. Endorsement or disclaimer, it didn’t matter. Vic would have taken his chances anyway. He swaggered across the flat, slinked his way onto the balcony, and stood between Lali and another man. ‘Hi, I’m a friend of James’. From Downwood.’

Lali smiled and laughed a little. Promising, Vic thought. But then, devoid of modesty, she replied, ‘Sorry, friend of James, but I don’t do freckles.’

The bristling competition all but fell off the balcony laughing, and Lali stared contemptuously at him until he walked away. For weeks afterwards, Vic thought of all the things he should have said, all the lightning responses that might have redeemed him. But in the moment he was dumbstruck by the blatant arrogance of her assumptions.

For a while after the episode with Lali, he bore the scars of her malice. He was less sure of himself, and in worrying about how he stood or walked or spoke, he inadvertently contrived to make his every move ungainly and overtly self-conscious. In turn, this had the effect of making his conversation with girls in bars slump awkwardly to a standstill every time Lali’s face revisited him, her clinical sneer sliced across it. They’d excuse themselves to the ladies, or anywhere, just to be free of Vic’s unsettling babble, as he degenerated into chronic ineptitude.

He knew his confidence should be more robust and that Lali’s reduction of him possessed no more sophistication than that of playground politics, but he struggled to dismiss it. And although in the rationality of his own mind he could overcome her and persevere, the memory of her affront retained the ability to undermine him at a glance.

The self-conscious inadequacy that Lali had unearthed in him was still dimly observable, several months later, when James set him up for dinner with another girl. James assured him that this was a ‘good girl.’ Vic nearly bolted at the sound of those words. But James convinced him that she was nothing like Lali.

They met in The Commons, in Blackheath, on a busy Friday, and she was sumptuous company. She was very interested in the fact that Vic was an English teacher, and wrongly assumed that he had extensive knowledge of his subject. She questioned him on novels and authors, and it became clear that the vivacious date was more widely read than the ambling English teacher. He bluffed his way through the literary minefield and then suggested they catch a train, or a taxi, into London and get something to eat.

The taxi set them down on Charing Cross Road. They agreed, since it was their first meal and there were no guarantees of anything, to go easy on Vic’s wallet; the proviso being that were they to make it to a subsequent date, he’d have to push the boat out a little. So The Pizza Parlour it was.

A few hours later, Vic paid the bill and they walked out into London’s winter evening. Students, groups of workers on nights out, theatre habitués, fell cheerfully in and out of restaurants and pubs. The streetlights twinkled above them, the wind had calmed, and the rain, now only drizzling, trip-trapped on the ground. The promise of warm, musty-smelling pubs lured them through one last doorway.

When her phone rang, she looked at the screen apprehensively. ‘I’m just going to take this outside. Home.’ On her return she explained that she had to leave, candidly expounding, ‘My father’s sick. I said I’d be home by midnight.’ It was just past one a.m.

She apologized and Vic asked for her number. She took his phone in her hand and tapped her name and number into his contacts. Pulling on her coat and buttoning up tight and warm, she leaned in and kissed him softly and wetly on the lips. He offered to take her home, but she declined.

He stayed a few minutes longer to finish his drink. As he stood up to leave he was met by a chesty stare; snarling, lithe, alluring. Lali was standing, her back against the bar, arms folded, cigarette between her fingers – cocked and wavering about her chin, as if poised to take another drag. A glass of wine in her other hand was tucked in beneath her elbow. He sighed and, in uncertainty, looked behind him to make sure she wasn’t looking at somebody else. But there was nobody. The bar was emptying as people began to choose between clubs and night-buses.

With a fleetness of foot that only men so flippantly spurned can know, he turned to take his coat from the stool. But as he turned back around Lali was standing beside him, a pint in one hand, which she placed down beside his empty glass, and her own drink and cigarette in her other. She sat down on the vacated stool, kicked her right leg over her left knee, and said, ‘Sit down. Have a drink. On me.’ He looked at her in unimpressed disbelief. Somebody from the crowd of people she had been with was mouthing something at her. ‘Relax,’ she shouted over. ‘I’ll buy you another.’ He was still standing, still not quite gone. ‘Oh, sit down. Come on,’ she said. ‘Did I scare you that much?’

‘No thanks,’ he replied. He started to go, fixing his coat.

She stood up quickly and took hold of his arm and turned him towards her. She seemed taller than he remembered. ‘Come on, James’ friend, have a drink with me. One drink.’ There was something kinder in her voice and it was unexpected. She asked for his name – the bare-faced cheek.

With the drinks knocked back and the bar closing, he accepted her invitation back to a party in her flat. The party raged on into the small hours. It was five, or later, before Lali directed him to her bedroom, pushing and shifting him by the hips, from behind, through the made up beds, and the empty cans and bottles, and the leaden bodies of the collapsed, that were strewn across the floor.

The bedroom was lit by a tiny lamp in the corner of her room. With the door closed behind them, she backed him to the edge of the bed, and gently but forcefully tipped him over. She hovered over him. Precariously. Pouting suggestively. She nuzzled her knee between his legs as he lay on the bed looking up at her. She leaned down, still looking into his eyes, and unbuckled his belt and undid the first two buttons of his jeans. Her black hair fell down over his hips. Then she stood up, as if drunkenly forgetting her routine, and began unbuttoning her top. She tossed it to the corner of the room and stood there above him in her bra, his partially unbuttoned trousers left like a job half done. Then she undid her own, let them slide down her thighs and drop onto her ankles, bunching up around her soaring heels, before stepping out of them and kicking them to one side. She stood for a moment, in her underwear and shoes, swaying drunkenly above him in the amber lamplight. It was something other-worldly – the abandon of those hours preserved in that image of her, that iconic pose. He was in a haze. Her body, burnt umber against her brilliant white underwear, and the anticipation, imprinted itself on his psyche, and remained there through all the years and discolouring experiences that followed. She lowered herself again, undid the last buttons, and slid his trousers and underwear off in one go. Her long hair rained down black on his midriff, once again, crashing from a height onto his alabaster thighs, lucently pale next to her cheek, and cascading over his hips, as he undid his shirt, wriggled free of it, and flung it at the foot of the bed.

A firm and repetitive slapping of his cheek brought him round.

‘Time to get up.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah. I’m already late.’

Awake then, Vic surprised himself with his capacity for small talk. He felt altered, physically, by having slept with her. He was conscious of how his breath now filled the depth of his lungs. Conscious of standing taller, and of speaking less dementedly. It was as if he had stolen back what she had taken from him.

She was on her way to work, she said, and advised him that it would be better if he left the flat before her flatmate got up. She didn’t explain any further and was oblivious to Vic’s renewed self-possession. She herded him from the bedroom with a steady flow of prompts: ‘Here’s your trousers . . . Here’s your shirt . . . Shoe’s over there . . . Are we good to go? . . . Station’s at the top of the road . . . ’

There was further urgency in her manner as she picked up his coat from the arm of the sofa and handed it to him, brushing her hair as they walked to the door. He tried a little more small talk but she didn’t have the time. He leaned in and kissed her and she let their lips meet, flatly, and then withdrew, before offering the kind of smile you might get from an elderly aunt; disingenuous, intangibly dismissive. The illusion of self-possession that he’d enjoyed only moments before, corrected itself.

Within ten minutes he was standing alone at Deptford Station, feeling strangely stunned. It was cold and he was sleep-deprived, and still a little drunk. The first stage of the journey, on an empty train to London Bridge, was undignified enough, but the twenty minute bus journey to Camberwell was torturous. It seemed to creep from stop to stop and take five minutes at each one, offloading and boarding no more than a handful of passengers. Riding on the shuddering swagger of the bus’s vibration, he slipped between peaceful half-dreams and lewd remembrances.

Then he missed his stop. He woke up at Denmark Hill and cursed every yard back to Camberwell Green. Once home, he fell asleep with the Saturday sports on his chest and a half-eaten bacon sandwich by the side of the bed. He slept well into the afternoon. Sometime in early evening, completely disorientated by the fractured day, he came back to life. Awake and thinking more lucidly, he began to consider Lali, to remember events and apply meaning.

When James phoned, Vic divulged everything. Boastfully. ‘I’m glad you’ve got the gloating out of your system. Now, what about this evening?’ James asked.

‘I think I’ll stay in.’

‘Bad idea. Terrible fucking idea, mate.’

‘Why? Watch Match of the Day, have a beer, maybe. Enjoy my Sunday.’

‘Oh no, Vic. This is all wrong.’

‘I got all my work done last night. What more could I realistically gain from the weekend?’

‘A clear mind, that’s what. You stay in and you’re fucked. At best you’ll have a miserable week ahead, wishing and wondering.’

‘I don’t see that. I’d just like to have a quiet night.’

‘No, no, no. If you stay in you’re going to end up replaying last night in your head. It’s all going to start looking fantastic as you sit in alone with nothing but football and shit beer. You’ve lost all perspective, mate. You need to come out and get rejected by a handful of girls and go home with a fat one. You need to demystify last night. She skewed everything by waking you before you’d even had the chance to have a hangover.’

‘I’m staying in.’

‘Never let the memory of last night’s tramp prevent you from nailing tonight’s. You know who said that?’

‘Robert Frost?’

‘No. A man with no worries, Vic. A man who knows the limits of men. Me. I said it.’

‘Goodnight, James.’

James had read the situation accurately enough, although his prediction that Vic would be near collapse by midweek was over-blown. Lali did occupy his thoughts, and more so as the week progressed. He tried, at length, to recall her face. In obsessive detail – from the isotropic flawlessness of her nose and cheeks to the dark iris of her eyes, to the pores of her peachy chin and the hairline nick of scar tissue on the curve of her jaw.

Even travelling to work, on public transport, when the form, smell and sound of an attractive woman would appear in his field of vision, he could objectively appreciate her attractiveness, only for Lali to intrude. The objective beauty of a stranger on a train became suddenly wooden when placed in the context of Lali’s animated exaltation. Her beauty transcended any kind of dispassion and had already begun to inhabit a space in his soul that was both real and aspirational.

His conversations with James in the week that followed were like archaeological digs, careful and slow, without any obvious yield. He learned that she owned and managed the coffee shop where she worked. ‘For a good few years, at least,’ James said. ‘In Greenwich, but she’s a North London girl. I knew her little in the early days.’

When James spoke of the early days what he was recalling were his years as a stray in London. He’d travelled from Swansea with nothing but a paperback novel stuffed into his jacket and worked in various areas of the service industry to get by.

‘She was sleeping with a friend of mine, on and off,’ he told Vic.

On the subject of Lali’s flatmate, who Vic never met and wrongly imagined to be a male friend, James told him he had no idea who she lived with or what her eagerness to have Vic out of the flat might have been about. ‘Who knows, Vic? I’m telling you, leave this notch on the bedpost. The fuck of your life. Now move on.’

‘Why do you need to punctuate every sentence with filth?’

‘I punctuate my sentences with facts, my Celtic cousin. Look, you fucked her, she fucked you. Who cares? The point is that you need now to forget about her. Anything else is just your ego. She hasn’t asked for anything more, and she has atoned for her very public humiliation of you. Leave it there, I say.’ James stood up from a stack of loose pages on the desk before him as he said this, drawing the conversation to a close. ‘Have I ever told you that I hate teaching? I’ve run out of red pen for all the inadequacies of this lot. A set of papers two inches high, with answers twice as fucking thick!’

By the middle of the week, he was refusing to engage with Vic at all. Vic had probed, directly and indirectly, and relentlessly, in pursuit of some missing essence of Lali, to the point that James lost patience. He was no longer able to conceal his irritation with Vic’s interest in Lali and declared, ‘I’m done now, Vic. Okay? I’m not talking to you, about anything, until she’s off the table.’

Vic’s solution to this impasse was to spend a Saturday morning on a self-directed walking tour of Greenwich. It wasn’t long before he spotted Lali through the glass facade of a trendily poky coffee shop. She was behind a counter, taking money at the till.

He bought a paper from the kiosk on the far side of the street and sat down on the wall. Pretending to read the sports, he watched her as she worked, shuttling between till and tables, and then behind the counter where she was hardly visible for the shine on the window. The name above the shop was in a royal blue, baroque scrawl – Rococo’s. He wondered did she inherit the name with the premises and was unsure whether it mattered.

Every time he caught a glimpse of her, he remembered and had to look away, unnerved by the voyeuristic composition of his burgeoning obsession. He got lost for minutes at a time, pretending to read his newspaper.

Just as he began to think it would be a better idea to forget about her, beginning to doubt the veracity of his recollections – time had surely embellished the experience – a pair of plump feet appeared on the path in front of him. Looming over him was a large woman in her late twenties, or early thirties, maybe, with curly brown hair. She handed him a cardboard cup with tea in it.

‘On the house, she says.’

‘Thanks.’

‘She said she owes you a breakfast.’

The large girl turned, looked right and left, and crossed the street and went back into Rococo’s. When he entered the shop, Lali was busy with a couple of customers at the till. He took a sip of the tea and tried to control the palpitations, the racing adrenaline of embarrassment and trepidation. Then he presented himself to her, wide open and breath held.

‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘I’ll take my break.’

Vic took a seat at an empty four-seater table by the window and heard her call into the kitchen, ‘Continental breakfast, tea, large coffee, and a muffin, Aldo. Table two.’

She untied and removed her apron and sat across from him. Her eyes looked tired but intense; inquisitive, street-smart, hazel whirls of impenetrable murk. The shop was warm and the straps of her black bra were visible on her shoulders from beneath her casual, grey vest-top. Her bare arms revealed skin as sleek and toned as he remembered. Swept back off her forehead by a hair-band, her lustrous mane, fixed in a hurry, was slightly less perfect than the rest of her.

She lit a cigarette but said nothing. Vic looked back at her, posing as if calm and cool but actually clammed-up and unable to speak. Having come so far in pursuit of her and having then found himself paralysed, he was on the verge of standing up and walking out, without explanation, afraid that the frenzied flicker in his eyes had already betrayed him.

But then she broke the silence with the kind of simple salutation that he had been pathetically incapable of. ‘So, how’ve you been, Vic?’

He received those simple words with disproportionate gratitude and they continued from there, for several vapid minutes, exchanging equally mundane conversation starters that somehow failed to have the desired effect. Eventually it was James, their only common point of intersection, that succeeded in moving the conversation from this rut.

‘Let’s not dwell on things,’ she said, putting her hand on his at the mention of James’ party. The gesture halted any recriminations. It appeased, softened her in his eyes, and also seemed to transform the previously inconsequential encounter to one of intimate significance; it felt like there was some kind of history at work, the way her hand touched his and asked him to look forward now, to forget what couldn’t be helped.

They were soon interrupted by Aldo, a short and scrawny and heavily bestubbled man about Vic’s age, delivering the breakfasts. Lali took her coffee and lit up another cigarette, looking across at Vic as he ate. With her cocky indifference, she bound him in another silence. Vic was just noting the imbalanced dynamic at work between them, wondering whether it could be considered a pattern at this early stage, when she let him off the hook again.

‘There’s a party next week. A friend of mine. Why don’t you come along?’

The invitation redeemed her, redeemed them both. It allowed them to talk some more, for him to ask questions, to have something to say. The tremors and licks of her beautiful face in motion was given body and realness by her taut voice.

Then, at a point, it occurred to Vic that he would like to leave, that the breakfast with Lali was a decent start and it was time to withdraw and regroup. He sensed that another uncomfortable silence was on its way, when the plump girl from earlier arrived tableside, telling Lali there was a call.

Lali stubbed out her cigarette and introduced Vic to Donna. ‘I’ll call you during the week,’ Lali said to him, as she stood up.

It was just Vic and Donna then; her, a wall of reticence. Before he had a chance to take his leave, Donna lifted his unfinished breakfast from the table and left.

The following Saturday came but with no haste. The week was pock-marked by Lali’s intrusion into almost every waking thought. Vic considered what it was about her, specifically. His attraction to her was underpinned by what seemed to him a purely salacious motivation. At the same time, his need for her was not the simple stuff of anonymous lust, taking her and leaving her. He wanted more of her than just that, but a long habit of conformity required him to search for some other, deeper motivation. It didn’t necessarily need to be love, he told himself, just something more profound than carnality.

Lali, though, appeared completely at ease with the shallowness of it. She almost reveled in the debased individualism. The inherent self-indulgence of such promiscuity hung from her delicate shoulders like a chiffon dress, and, somehow, her disregard for etiquette enhanced her irresistibility. It liberated her to do things like just sit and watch him eat, and take unusual pleasure in the rising panic of his eyes. She could do that because what was useful in him wasn’t sacred; it could be found throbbing somewhere in the minds and between the legs of any man. If Vic didn’t fuck her, somebody else would.

Vic spent much time trying to make a better story than that of her. Something that would ameliorate the arrogance, make sense of her ardent dislocation. But his efforts were wholly unsuccessful and he reached the Saturday of the party more perplexed by her incompleteness than he had been at the beginning of the week. Somehow, peering into the depths of Lali made her less comprehensible.

Vic eventually convinced James that the party’s opportunities outweighed the folly of Vic’s ambition, and he agreed to go along. They met at London Bridge before taking the Underground to Archway. The journey gifted James a captive audience and he took the opportunity to impress upon Vic his gloomy prognosis; without a single specific detail or incidence of proof, he forcefully implied Lali’s unsuitability. He discouraged Vic, repeatedly, without ever actually defaming her.

‘I just don’t see it, mate,’ James reasoned.

‘See what? We’re just meeting up to see how it goes.’

‘I don’t like the balance of this dalliance,’ he said. ‘You started on the back-foot and now . . . ’ He had to pull his head back in as another passenger passed toward the door with the Underground rattling and heaving to a stop. When she had passed and he had looked her up and down, he leaned back across, elbows on his knees and his head jutting across the carriage at Vic. The doors hissed and closed, and the dry grime of the Underground was in the air, as James picked up his point. ‘I just don’t think a girl like this is for you.’

Vic raised an eyebrow, quizzical, and sceptical. ‘From what I know, I don’t like it,’ James continued, then paused. ‘I can’t have my wingman in a relationship. She’s already fucked up one Saturday night.’

‘Let’s just go to the party,’ Vic responded. ‘I’m not holding your hand here, mate. If you go around moping . . . I’m here for women. Pure and simple. Friendship is for weekdays.’

It was a typical North London house; tall, narrow, three floors and an attic. It seemed to be falling apart from the inside; cobwebs in high corners, cracked plaster on the ceilings, a wafer blanket of dust on every surface, manky furnishings, drafty windows and crocked doors. But above all the mess, in every room, the walls were dressed in the wildest paintings; violently vibrant in colour, curlicues and hard edges thrown together, parts of images merging with seas of indiscriminate pattern and chaos. They were arresting and incomprehensible, and juxtaposed against their creator, and the evening’s host, who was typical. You would have guessed what he looked like just by the aspirations of his work; tall, gaunt, elaborately limbed, flowing scarf, dismissive of the minions on one hand and fawning on the other.

Lali was sitting on the artist’s lap when they arrived. She had a glass of wine in her hand, dancing in the air to the rhythm of her seduction – in to her lips for a suggestive sip and then waltzing back out to the beat of her vexing refrain. The artist looked enthralled, his own party playing out around him, without him, as she wrapped his overlong scarf one more time around his neck.

When Vic caught her eye, she curled her lip and nodded at him. He acknowledged her with a casual wave but when she just turned back to the artist, Vic was left wondering what to do with his hand, now that it was out there, conspicuously. He glanced about for James, but he was already moving away toward a group of mostly girls by the fireplace.

As he watched Lali kiss the artist, Vic was already on his way to the door. But then she stood up, patted the artist with condescending lightness upon the cheek, pulled her skirt straight, and walked over to Vic. She gently moved people to the side as she crossed the room; parting human seas to ruin him.

There were no awkward kisses on the cheek. She kissed Vic on the lips, just like she had kissed artist, only these lips were Vic’s, and asked, ‘Alright?’

She came and went over the course of hours and Vic didn’t feel as lost as he usually would in a house of strangers. James disappeared around midnight, out the door with two giggling girls and some old Uni friend he’d met. He pleaded with Vic to come with him and sighed when Vic opted, instead, to remain talking with a group of strangers, waiting for Lali to come back to him, to sustain him for another hour.

Some time later she descended on him, drunk and amorous, and ushered him to a bedroom. She closed the door behind them and led him to the bed. She leaned intently against him until he toppled onto it. He was among a pile of coats. She reached through the darkness and placed a hand on his chest, then crawled on top of him. As she straddled him, Vic could feel her sharp heels digging into his thighs. He felt her breath in his ear and the flesh of her cleavage resting on his chin. She whispered, ‘We need to find my coat. It’s home time.’

It seemed familiar, already.

One Saturday night became two, and three, and gradually developed into whole weekends spent together. As the weekends then crept into the weekdays, Vic came to stay over at her flat a couple of evenings during the week. Their social circles started to contract and amalgamate, and they became something more than casual.

Vic felt as though he was acquiring what he had sought from the start, an understanding of who she was, of her mystery. The mere accumulation of time spent together gave him a false sense of knowing. He thought that in meeting more of her friends and browsing her music collection, and knowing how she took her coffee and what she wore to bed, that he was getting closer to her. He mistook, in a very modern way, information for knowledge.

He thought that having visited Buckingham Palace together, for instance, and worked out that they both liked the horses, that he liked some of the paintings and she just didn’t care, and that neither of them had any interest in the gardens, that they were in some way known to each other. And this feeling was buttressed by its location in one of her energetic, gregarious phases. A time when Vic had forgotten the flippant meanness that she had first shown to him.

She was busy and dynamic, engrossed in the project that was the prying open of his closeted world, his self-contained and tiny contentment. Vic imagined that he must have seemed quaint to her, a young man of roughly her age but utterly anachronistic; he didn’t embrace London’s vastness, preferring, instead, to survive in tiny pockets of the place that were familiar and safe. He didn’t like clubs or any kind of music that didn’t involve a guitar, and he certainly didn’t like city tours. He was swallowed up by the city, in many respects, softly anonymous among the flash and the tittup. Not lonely exactly, or independent, but not unhappy either.

The visit to the Palace was one of her attempts to broaden Vic’s world.

‘I thought you were a man of education,’ she said, as if that was the trammel to catch him.

‘I’ve no interest.’

‘You don’t have to curtsy to Her Majesty on the way through or anything,’ she gibed.

As they walked along Constitutional Hill, flanked on the right by Buckingham Palace Gardens and on the left by Green Park, Vic began honing in on the core of his disgruntlement. ‘It’s the false reverence of the term. That bowed-head kind of paying homage . . . I mean what has she ever done? You pay for all her privilege with your taxes. With my bloody taxes! And just because somebody decided that they were a special family hundreds of years ago, or because they killed off some other family that thought they were special. I don’t get it. It infuriates me. The French had the right idea – lynch the bastards!’ he finished, bringing his loosely conceived republican tirade to an end as they came to the gates of the palace.

‘That’s beautiful, Vic,’ she said, a little impatiently. ‘Now, come on.’

The frisky argumentativeness, characteristic of what they seemed to be developing into, emboldened Vic’s trust in Lali. His initial fear that their relationship lacked commonality was allayed by the feeling that their differences might turn out to be as capable of sustaining them as any illusive commonality. This promise stripped her unpredictability of its foreboding, freed him to invest everything in her honed aesthetic.

The extravagance and decadence of the palace confirmed for him the righteousness of his indignation. ‘A gold effing coach!’ he hissed into her ear, as they toured the Royal Mews. The royal collection held not a single painting he recognized but he enjoyed the hour of culture he would otherwise have ignored. The horses, pronounced in their muscularity and bay colouring, were less contentiously impressive; naturally awesome, dignified, and calm as they trotted past. But beyond the horses and the art, there was only what they dismissed as the royal shrubbery and pigeons, and Lali wasn’t for pretence. Her anarchical impatience had them through the gardens and on their way down Buckingham Palace Road, towards Victoria Station, before Vic could voice his own disinterest.

They stopped for cigarettes and Lali grinned at him as she lit up.

‘You see, I could be good for you.’

To Vic, this was further encouragement. It indicated that she had a future, for starters, and that she considered him a part of it. It suggested that he wasn’t out there alone, laid bare; she was too. For the first time, his conception of her existing in a state of perpetual certainty fell away, and she stood before him like anyone else – self-doubting, reliant on nothing more substantial than hope, or a gut feeling for the decency of the person you chose to be with. It was as if she wanted to let Vic in, as if there was an in.

On the Underground home there was only standing room and the noise of the rickety carriages meant they didn’t try to speak. Lali just hung her arms around his waist and plunged her hands into the back pockets of his jeans, as he held them steady on an overhead rail. Another gesture. Meaningless, perhaps, but not lost on him. She leaned against him for a few minutes; almost but not quite a perfect metaphor for love. It was enough to convince him of what he wanted to believe. Then, on the train to Deptford, they managed to get seats and they both closed their eyes.

During the first months Lali was more or less the girl she seemed from the outset – fleetingly mean with a turn of phrase, but confident, unpredictable and breathtaking. They attended informal dinner parties, visited all the naff tourist attractions that Vic had never bothered with, picnicked in Hyde Park on roasting summer days, went pubbing and clubbing, went to concerts, and took long weekends away in Cornwall and Southampton.

Lali revealed herself by degrees. Information, a story, a memory would emerge from her, and he was allowed a few quick questions before she shut the lid on it again. The purposefully obscured depths of her, and the false impression of intimacy, were illuminated by her discretional revelations.

Lali’s uncloaking of her grandmother was the most notable of the early disclosures. Vic was shocked, first by the discovery that Lali had a family, and only then by the fact that it had taken him that long to notice she’d never spoken of them. What was it about her that precluded those questions? he later wondered. How was it that she could stand before him in all her beauty without ever prompting him to ask, Where have you come from? What forces of human fusion created you?

‘Gail used to do this to me,’ she told him, raking her fingers through a matted clump of his hair as they lay in bed. His head was tilted back and lay on her breast bone. Her fine, toothy fingers glided through his hair, as if she were mapping the potted and lumped landscape of his skull. She smoothed it back, first into a quiff and then flattening it further with each stroke; long, weaving movements across his cranium. ‘To relax me.’

‘And who’s Gail?’

‘My grandmother.’

Having quickly established that Gail was not long dead, as was natural for him to have assumed, given the months they had been together and this was Lali’s first mention of her, he sat up in the bed. ‘I can’t believe I never asked any of this,’ he said, aloud and to himself. ‘Are there others?’

‘No. Just Gail.’ There was nothing in Lali’s voice, not pain or resolve, just an impervious matter of fact. ‘I’m up early in the morning, by the way. Stock-take.’

She rolled away from him and turned on the bedside lamp, rupturing the moment. In the dull glow her remarkable symmetry was enhanced, but the moment had been quashed. The conversation was over. She took some nail varnish from the bedside locker and began painting her toes.

Then there were the stories that recurred. He heard many times about how, as a child, she had escaped Gail’s watchful eye and hid among the bushes and trees that lined the path through the park. She watched the people as they passed and read a million stories into their facial expressions, gestures and mannerisms; a formidable capacity to unearth the lugubrious in the mundane, finding its beginning. He didn’t know how old she would have been but he could imagine her, observing and questioning. Couples, small families, old people, even children – ‘They all made me feel hopeless,’ she told him. Though what she meant was sad, or melancholy. It wasn’t what they did or how they acted, she said. ‘It was their state of . . . What awaits whoever. The inevitability.’

‘Being human,’ he sometimes put to her. ‘To wonder what it’s all for.’

‘I hate it. I fucking hate it,’ she repeated, as if his interjection had gone unheard. And then she was back – strong, defensive, unforgiving. As before. Without sympathy, even for herself.

The first seismic shift in her came unannounced. They had been in Marlowe’s, in Catford, the night before. A karaoke night experiment.

Vic saw the DJ warming up – peach shirt tucked into his jeans, beer gut, hair slicked back, running through a few lines of his favourite crooner classics – and he thought, Oh no, this isn’t going to work out.

There was Lali and Donna, and a few of their staff from Rococo’s, and Vic had asked James and a couple of other friends from Downwood to come along.

Donna was her usual abrupt self, which Vic put down to it being her weekend to open up Rococo’s for Saturday business, and so tainting her Friday night with the prospect of an early morning. But Lali was at her most vivacious.

Crammed into a corner of the packed pub, they were all sitting on top of each other. Lali was buying drinks for everyone, kissing Vic across the table, or squeezing his arse as she passed behind him to the ladies, while he stood talking football at the bar with some burly, tattooed stranger. He indulged the moment. There was still so much to be enjoyed, so much newness and excitement to them. That night in Marlowe’s he just wanted to enjoy Lali as she was – infectiously energetic, sultry, drunk.

But he refused to sing. He was adamant. He couldn’t.

‘You’ve got to do this,’ she insisted. They were at the bar, away from the others, and she was leaning all her weight against him. She puckered up, pleading mock-submissively. ‘Please, Vic? It’ll be fun. Don’t be an asshole!’

‘Seriously, I can’t sing,’ he told her, again.

‘Don’t be a fucking grouch, Vic! It’s karaoke – nobody can sing. Come on, we’ll find you a good old Irish rebel song. No need to sing them, you just growl ‘em,’ she said.

‘In all seriousness, now, you don’t want me to sing,’ he warned her.

‘I’ll make it worth your while,’ she said, tugging his lower lip with her teeth as she broke away.

‘Elaborate.’

‘Vic, there’s a lot more to come, believe me.’

When they went back to the table Lali put her drink down and strutted up to the raised platform. She said a few words and the karaoke man handed her the mike. It crackled as she switched it on. ‘This one’s for my man, Vic.’ Fiddle and drum came barreling out of the speakers, and Lali, bow-legged and elbows out, rocking on the pins of her majestic heels in simulation of the choppy sea, did her finest sea-beaten sailor impression, while growling out lyrics in the worst Irish accent he’d ever heard – The Irish Rover. When she’d finished, she took a bow to lively applause from their table.

She held Vic’s regard as she crossed the floor, until her attention was caught by two men. One of two brave suitors had said something to her over his shoulder. It caused her to stop and turn back.

Without the grip of Lali’s gaze, an undistorted vision actualized. Existing momentarily outside himself, he saw what the cold-eyed observer would see; all eyes had followed Lali from the stage across the floor, and all eyes now watched, apprehensively, to see what happened to the brave. The power of her, the draw, was demonstrable. It was evident in the nervousness she set off in other people. Her stupefying beauty, as every eye in the room looked on, cried out across the room, commoving and stifling simultaneously.

They circled her then; somehow, with just the two of them they circled her. They were drawn in close about her as she spoke. He couldn’t see her face but he could imagine it as he watched the two men gaping back at her and jostling for her attention; clinking glasses, throwing fraternal arms around each other, trying to reach out to her with searching touches. Whatever she finally said to them, it caused feigned offence. They raised their palms to her and leaned back with contorted expressions, and everyone breathed easy. As she ambled back to the table, unaware of the ripples of relief flowing, like a wedding train, back through the room behind her, Vic felt exhilarated by his closeness to her. Once back at the table, she promptly sent out the call for a round of shots.

They stumbled into her flat around three in the morning, made toasted cheese sandwiches and did what all couples at that stage of knowing each other do.

When Vic awoke in the morning, his throat was raspy. He leaned over her and whispered in her ear. Obviously suffering, she remained entombed under the duvet. He left the flat for the local mini-market.

He hoped that by the time he got back she’d have come round and they’d pick up where they left off the night before. But when he returned, the latch was on the door. He rang the bell. He called in the letterbox. It was all he could do just to get her out of bed and let him back into the flat.

Finally, she staggered to the door with the duvet wrapped around her, pulled up over her head so that only a few unkempt strands of tangled hair could be seen, as they drooped down over one of her eyes and across her nose. She turned the key, undid the latch, and let him in.

‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘you’re back.’

‘That’s nice,’ he replied.

She turned and went for the sofa, where she lay out. ‘I thought you were gone,’ she said, turning on the TV.

‘I told you where I was going. To get us breakfast. I got some bacon and eggs. I’ll make breakfast.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I meant for the both of us. I’ll make breakfast for the both of us.’

‘Not for me.’

The offhandedness unsettled him but he made her coffee anyway.

‘I told you – I don’t want anything!’ was her irascible response. He placed it down on a coaster on the floor beside the sofa. In the kitchenette, he fried breakfast for himself and took it to the living area on a plate. After hovering around the sofa, thinking she might lift her feet and make room for him, and being disappointed, he took a seat in the only other proper chair in the flat. It was a battered old chair in the corner of the room, with no view of the TV.

‘Is there anything on?’ He waited. ‘No?’

‘Oh,’ she said, surprised he was talking to her. ‘No. Nothing.’

‘Jesus, I’m fairly wrecked today. Heavy old night, last night.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Heavy night, I said. A lazy day ahead I’d imagine. I wouldn’t be fit for much else.’

She said nothing.

With his appetite lost, he gave up and took the breakfast to the kitchen and dumped the plate, unrinsed and including the food, into the sink. He told her he was going home for a shower and a change of clothes.

‘Oh, right.’

‘Have you any plans for later? For tonight?’ he asked, with saintly reserve, making one last attempt to wrest some sense from the confounding experience that was the night before and the morning after; a single happening, yet completely discrepant.

‘No.’

She was impregnable in her quilted cocoon.

He went home wondering what he’d done wrong. She’d just flipped. They had dropped off to sleep, spooned air-tightly together, with his hand lightly caressing her upper-thigh. No worse than light snoring had passed between them, but when he awoke she’d transmogrified; alien, dislocated.

For a moment he did what all men do when they’ve just slept with a woman who fails to express sufficient gratitude – he wondered had he been no good. Did she lie there awake after he’d fallen asleep, wanting more? Disappointed? Unsatisfied? Or had her head been turned by the two men at Marlowe’s? Had she grown tired of him already?

Several days passed before she called him. She was at Rococo’s when she rang, which provided her with a conveniently short window for conversation. She asked whether he’d like to come over for dinner with her and Donna; some Thai food and a film.

When he asked was she okay, attempting to open up the issue of her irrational indifference to him, she evaded it. She had customers to attend to, she said, and needed to go. ‘But come over,’ she insisted.

Her insistence on him coming over put his mind at rest. She’d been out of order and she just wanted to move on, he thought. It was as good as an apology.

* * *

An invitation to Geoff ’s forty-fifth birthday was met with suspicion and reluctance. It had been extended as a matter of courtesy, after Vic had told Orla about Lali. Vic viewed it as an opportune occasion for Lali’s casual induction; a few drinks and some finger food.

‘I don’t think so,’ was Lali’s response.

She moved then from not wanting to go, to the barely more substantial inability to go. She cited a pre-existing arrangement with Donna for the same night.

Vic saw the excuse for what it was and called it as such: a sham. He tried to impress on Lali the significance of Orla, and the decency of her. But Lali could be moved to nothing through obligation.

Then the girls, Lali and Donna, fell out in a dispute over working hours. Lali cut Donna to pieces, turning on her closest friend for having the gall to question the roster. It was so personal that Vic suspected their friendship was over. Donna objected to being rostered for both the Saturday and the Sunday, and was unusually adamant that it was Lali’s turn to open up on the Saturday.

‘Owner’s prerogative, surely,’ Vic said.

‘Exactly! She said I was taking advantage. I’ve been carrying that whale since we were kids. And I pay her well. Especially considering she’s a fucking liability.’

‘Is that the line of diplomacy you went with?’

‘Not exactly.’ Then, beginning to laugh, Lali said, ‘But I did threaten to take her doughnut allowance away.’

Donna irritated Vic greatly. She seemed always to be in the way. To a significant degree, and wrongly, he viewed her as an obstruction. So he laughed along, indulging Lali’s cruelty, because it suited. And because it was always nice to know, with certainty, that you were on the same side as Lali.

‘But now you have to open up yourself, Saturday and Sunday,’ he said, thinking that any chance of her accompanying him to Orla’s was gone for sure. But Lali always had a distinctive logic, distinctive in its utter deficit of reason.

‘Yeah, but I suppose that means I can come to your cousin’s lame party now.’

He just accepted. ‘Good. We’re to be there for eight.’

He met her after work and as they made their way back to her flat she was quiet. He had been braced for resistance, or manic hyperactivity, fuelled by earlier than usual drinks, but not for her open but seemingly unconscious lassitude.

At her flat, Vic began by showering and dressing, and having something small to eat, while Lali pulled her knees into her chest and propped her head on some cushions on the sofa. The sound of the TV lapped over her and there was no indication that she would initiate anything any time soon. He wondered was she preoccupied by her fight with Donna, or whether she was daunted by the prospect of meeting his cousin and her family, by a perceived formality of occasion. Whatever it was, a morose stillness hung about her. Then, around a quarter to eight, she finally began readying herself. Vic said nothing, resisting the urge to move her along more swiftly.

On the doorstep of Orla’s house, with the doorbell already rung, Lali spoke. ‘So what do these people do with themselves?’

Through the frosted glass of the front door Vic could see the undefined shape of Orla coming down the hall. Rushed and ill-prepared, he condensed what he knew down to as few words as possible. ‘Orla writes. And she’s a mum. Geoff ’s some kind of I.T. genius. They’re nice,’ he assured her. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Although Lali had turned to face the door as Orla opened it, she didn’t have time or wasn’t inclined to replace the look on her face with anything better. Orla’s welcome stuttered, confronted by Lali’s indiscriminate glare. But Orla promptly regained her composure and welcomed them both, ushering them into the hallway.

Lali managed a muted hello and handed Orla the bottle of wine. Taking their coats, Orla called into the living room for Geoff. His mop of gritty blond hair, beginning to whiten and grey, framed his cheerful face, as he reached out for a manly handshake and clapped Vic on the shoulder. ‘Now, how did you fool this beautiful lady into accompanying you?’

Geoff ’s mild flirtation soothed Lali’s tension, but she remained on Vic’s shoulder for most of the evening. She sipped away quietly on glasses of wine as Vic tried to integrate himself among the guests. On several occasions, Vic discovered Orla beside him, offering crudités, tiny quiche slices, canapés, filled tortilla wraps, or more wine, and softly enquiring how they were doing. She seemed aware of Lali’s discomfort. Vic encouraged Orla to go and enjoy the party herself. Lali’s sole acknowledgement of Orla’s concern was to shift her gaze from whatever absent task it had set itself. Once she smiled, but in a manner that seemed insincere.

Nervousness. Fear, maybe, came next. An anxiety regarding the unknown came over him – what would she do now? how should he react or intercept? He felt Lali drift off his shoulder, word by word. He could feel the menace of her head beginning to lift, the bravery of inebriation. Before he knew it she was wading into the small crowd of visitors, becoming more loquacious with each step.

Vic was talking with Geoff, watching her carefully, when she stumbled against a bookcase, trying to squeeze toward the hallway. She bounced off it and put her hand out to steady herself. It worked but as she took hold of some woman’s arm it sent the woman’s drink down the front of her top and caused her to screech. Lali’s apology echoed hollowly below her hysterical laughter. The woman did her best to remain calm. But when Lali saw the look of annoyance on her face, she had what she desired – indignation!

‘What’s your fucking problem?’ she snarled. ‘I apologized. It was an accident.’

‘My top is ruined,’ the woman began, expecting, surely, to be the aggrieved in this situation, but finding that the Lali was already sky-high on a victim complex.

Lali leered toward her. ‘It’s just a bit of wine.’

Vic moved across the room, apace, to lead Lali away before it descended into worse. She shuffled along, with minimal resistance, but kept looking to Vic and then away, toward the woman’s tie-dye wine stain, and back again, in disgust.

While Lali puffed and sulked in the hall, not sure where to begin her assault but certain that she would, Vic waved Orla away to fetch their coats.

‘Be easier if we left, would it?’ Lali challenged, as Orla returned with the coats over her arm.

‘I’m not sending you away,’ Orla said, defensively. ‘I thought you might want to.’

‘Why? Because you want me to?’

‘I asked her to get our coats, Lali. You’ve made an arse of yourself,’ Vic cut in.

‘I’ve made an arse of myself?’ she said, stressing the idiom, as if the expression was the essence of a xenophobic ganging-up; the very language they used excluding her, making her feel inept. ‘I’m the asshole?’ Then she turned her attention back toward Orla. ‘It was an accident. They happen. Probably not at parties like these, but they happen all the time. And I apologized, for fuck sake!’

‘Calm down,’ Orla said.

‘Calm down? Why don’t you calm down, you spoiled bitch!’ Lali snatched her coat and turned for the door.

Vic called out and walked a few steps in pursuit of her, but she was moving too fast. ‘Lali,’ he shouted after her as she walked out. ‘What do you want me to do here?’ She wasn’t hearing anyone.

Orla, standing behind him, let an involuntary sigh. Confounded, they both watched as Lali faded away among the dim street lights, passed over the road and flitted in and out between telephone poles and the foliage of thinly erect roadside trees.

Vic was left embarrassed and angered. And flummoxed. ‘Sorry, Orla,’ he said, again, as Geoff appeared in the doorway behind her, a look of sympathy and understanding on his face. ‘Sorry about that, Geoff. Too much to drink, maybe. I’m going to go.’

The Sunday came and went. Vic refused to call her. Then Monday arrived and he was distracted by work, purposely leaving his phone in his locker. Out of sight. But still, by the end of the day, there was nothing from Lali, not a missed call or a text message. He became angrier as Monday evening developed but remained steadfast in his refusal to break the deadlock.

By Tuesday lunchtime he was feeling hurt to think that as easy as that she could walk away and he left school early, for a fictional dentist’s appointment, to travel into Greenwich. He wanted confrontation. Wanted his say.

Standing as tall and certain as possible, he entered Rococo’s with the possibility of definitive ending on his mind. Donna came to the counter.

‘She’s not here,’ Donna began.

‘When will she back?’

‘I think you’d know that if she wanted you to.’

‘So she’s not in today?’

‘No.’

‘Tomorrow?’ he asked. Donna looked at Vic, pofacedly. ‘We had a fight. I want to talk to her,’ he said.

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Donna!’

‘She’s not here.’

He was planted on the path outside when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Aldo had come out after him. ‘We haven’t seen her since early Sunday, Vic. She opened up, made up the week’s roster and called Donna. It happens.’

‘Was she upset?’

‘She looked rough. But she was okay.’

‘Okay, Aldo. Thanks. When she turns up, can you tell her I was looking for her.’

Over the next two days the stated roughness of Lali’s appearance and Aldo’s ominous declaration that, ‘It happens,’ combined to complicate Vic’s instinctive response to her disappearance. Gradually, concern came to outweigh anger. He left several voice messages on her phone. He texted her a dozen times. If her decision was for them to cease being, he confided to her answering service, then so be it, but he’d like to know that she was okay.

By Thursday evening he could think of nothing else but Lali, and when her phone didn’t ring out but instead was interrupted by her voice, he was completely at a loss. When she spoke, it was plain and unaffected. Not her, somehow. As if somebody else had come back in her stead, armed only with her accent.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked. ‘Of course.’