"We value your interest, comments and queries about our site. In response to one of the most frequent requests, we will feature full texts from a variety of Michael's books over the next several months. The current featured book is the novel, Did You Miss Me? (Crysis Books, 2002). A link will guide you to the previous chapters posted. Enjoy!"

Did You Miss Me?

Chapter 4

Like an alarm clock, but not an alarm clock: a siren. Police siren, ambulance siren. Dawn light? No, a dream. Stay in the dream. Warm. Patches of people. There’s mother. Mummy. A short blue skirt and blonde-brown hair. Very even complexion, nice to touch. She loved touching mother’s face. It was a bed, deep as snow, soft. Hugging Mummy. And Daddy. She is in the middle now, sunk in love. Pillows of love cushioning the world. Mummy says, “I’ll bring you to school today.” Daddy says, “No, my turn.” The dog, Fiji Foo, is talking, not barking. He says, “When I grow up and you grow up, we’ll run off and get married...”

“... quarter past nine.”

David now. Talking time. That sober edge. The race. Then the phone brrrrring. The phone buzz at school much better.

“What? What? How? Hold on, I’ll put her on. Patricia.”

One last clutch for rest: the valley between Mummy and Daddy, the Lethe, forgetfulness. She pulled up in the bed, eyes blinded by morning. Hungover funny. Took the phone.

“Deborah’s dead. Hung herself.” It was Margaret Madden, who lived on the cliffhead near Deborah’s. “It’s just unbelievable.”

“When?”

“Just as I was leaving for school. The ambulance, the police. The cleaner found her. She hung herself in the bathroom. I couldn’t get in, the police people said no. Policewoman told me she was freshly made up and dressed in that black Armani – remember, the one we teased her about, the one we said looked like a mourning suit? She said she looked so... pretty.”

Muddled hours followed. A call from Schumacher, who had heard, commiserated, and wanted to know whether or not Patricia was going away for the weekend, tersely. Patricia said yes, but her plans were askew. David, due for a meeting now in Canterbury, but offering to cancel – though why he should connect in any way with any sense of tragedy was beyond her: he disliked Deborah – no, ignored her, felt nothing. Phones. Someone called someone and informed Mark, who rang to see if Mum was fine, which of course she would be. Just Deborah, the alco, the unsafe bet. Other calls. Breakfast started – muesli and juice – abandoned: then fried eggs – something to fill the stomach and drown the drink and the drug. The drug. A couple of snorts. Even a little laughter in the dark. Somehow Patricia got rid of David – some aimless errand – and took the kitchen for herself. Wrapped in her oversize dressing gown she hugged the ache and ate the eggs with appetite. Deborah dead. Some ease. Some pleasure, almost. For what? For the absolution of last night? The confessional rage, the hysteria shared, some great inflated false reality burst like a balloon. Some resolution, by strange means. The coke. Why had she done that? Why, what instinct? In the silence of the kitchen she said a loud “Ha!” The absolute absurdity of the notion: of her, Patricia-of-the-Faith kowtowing, submitting without hesitation to the darkest sin of ennui. Switch-off. Soma. Out. And it felt perfectly good, it bonded them tighter than wedding bells and of course that was it – this comforting ease – that there had been recognition of the aimlessness of it all, that it is meaningless, godless, and the joys we have in our temporal lives are corporeal and allusive. You grab what you can. You take nothing, because nothing is of any lasting value; maybe of any value at all.

The phone again, ringing for a long time. She took it up and wasn’t surprised by brother William’s voice, haughty-evolved for Harley Street. “Jesus, Girth, you should have given me some indication. I might have been able to help. When we were there at your New Year’s buffet I knew there was something wrong. Jack and her. The amount of booze consumed was horrifying. Why didn’t you call?”

She felt a rush of rage. “None of my business, nor yours, William.”

“Of Christ. Do you know how that sounds? Did you see Jack on the TV news? Absolutely like death warmed over...”

“She’d had enough.”

There was a long pause.

“Are you all right? You sound sedated.”

“How’s Ciara and Caitlin, William?”

“They – we – we’re all fine. Girth, you sound in shock.”

“Don’t. There’s no need. I am OK. It’s very sad, terribly sad. But no one could stop her. These things happen.”

“Yes, I suppose they do,” he offered blandly, winded, it seemed. Another pause, and a shift in voice tone, to the pleasantries, the Blitz spirit. “Kitty invited us down. We were thinking, maybe...”

Ubiquitous Kitty. An invitation, based on an introduction at New Year’s, based on Kitty’s hubris. How foolish of her to indulge Kitty. Within a fortnight, naturally, Kitty and her husband were ‘patients’ of William’s. Kitty’s enthusiastic read, after the first Hampstead consultation, breathless call at one a.m., was Jesus, Tricia, where did you hide him? He’s like, seriously gifted!

“Sounds like an event.”

“You should know.”

“I don’t, didn’t, really. Last to know.”

“Ciara said it could be a gasser. Big marquee affair, apparently. Kitty offered to put us up, she and Geoff.”

“William, do you mind if I jump off this call? I have a friend - "

“Sure, Girth. I may see you then.”

“Yes.”

The interrogative hesitation once more. “Any problems?”

She wanted to respond, to talk about Alva. But then Alva was all she wanted to talk, or think about, these days. Alva, like a puberty crush.

“No, I may see you so.”

She put the phone in its cradle and reflected on the cold conversation. No questions about funeral services or eulogies. A party. Still Girth. Life goes on. And as she moved about the fine kitchen, meticulously cleaning sink and spoons, loading the dishwasher (must get those laminated surrounds replaced) she thought that the most potent, unrefusable gift of middle age is fatalism. Forget religion or philosophy, you learn to take what you get, and death is ladled in the biggest scoops: you take it, ingest and like it, or you lie down yourself. It means nothing. Different when Mummy had died. Then, she was just nineteen. In fact, the week of her nineteenth birthday. A child, in hindsight. Now, looking back at photographs, she looked a different human being. Even in bone structure. Mummy and Daddy were separated five years to the day. Five miserable, clawing years of emptiness and silence. Five years of an aride map. Nothing, except the cancer. No love affairs, no acrimonious phone calls. Fights, tiffs, talks. A gulf. Silence of the valley. Then the Bad Word. Hospital waiting rooms. Sickly flowers, shrunk-wrapped like supermarket discount ware. Waiting rooms. And the last night. Endless night. William Blake. Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night. Lily, that was her mother’s name. Lillian, after her grandmother’s favourite, Lillian Gish. And she looked like a film star of ancient cast, monochromely blonde-black, amorphous, vaporous, until the night she died. Now, brush-washing a solitary coffee mug, intent, Patricia saw every vivid detail of that final night. The room, eight-by-eight. The rayon draperies. The mean-framed print of Manet’s poppy field, unctuous, overabundant and disgustingly exaggerated. The final days had been morphine days, days of languorous exchanges in which the only coherent acquisition was her story of Mava, the Indian woman who was Daddy’s first love. Mava was the one who introduced Mummy to Dad, but Patricia never knew about that. No tears, no broken hearts, but a change of heart, just a change of heart and Daddy fell in love with Mummy, his student at Richmond, and Mava was their mutual friend, till Mava was knocked down and killed crossing Marble Arch at Christmas. The strangest thing, Patricia recalled, was the lucidity of the Mava story, the details Mummy remembered, like Mava’s birth sign, and the rose tattoo on her hip. “I owe so much to her,” Mummy had said, caressing Patricia’s lips with hard, emptied hands. “I have to thank for your father, and for William, and for you, precious you.” And, throughout the death days, in spite of the pain, Mummy never wept, but she wept when she talked about Mava.

Patricia was weeping, convulsing. Crying so hard she had to wedge herself in the space beside the dresser. There were so many times she had tried to tell Daddy about the Mava story, about the reconciled calm in Mummy’s last days, but she had never quite got it out. By the time Mummy died, in the last year of her illness, Daddy had shut down to the point where the only talk permitted was talk of the future. Literature as history, substituting personal history – and the future. The day she died he wasn’t there. She had phoned with William when the IC sister said there were only hours left. But he never came. At the cremation service he wore a red tie, declarative in some conclusive, angry way that closed the door. No verbal post mortems, just flashes of warm goodbyes – “a wonderful woman”; “a lady” – and the future.

The phone jangled and stopped, pulling her back. She dried her eyes with a dish towel and poured cold coffee. Omissions. The big omissions. Elisabeth and Alva. Word was out. How was it possible? But before the thought was processed there was the phone again with Elis. Breathless, surfing the wave. “Have to be quick. Got Jack. Doing story. She speak with you after midnight?”

Patricia’s tone, by contrast, was churchlike. “You’re talking about Deborah?”

“Yeh. Hurry up, Tricia, my card’s out.”

“No, Elisabeth, she didn’t.”

“The piece will be on the early news. Watch it. I’ll get national out of this.” Burst of conscience: “A tragedy.”
Her call card went out and the line disconnected. Patricia looked at the phone, sipped cold coffee, wondered. Alva. Should she call? Why even hesitate? Why the edginess? – as though parrying teenage love. Will she be in? Will she care? She stopped the thought by dialling, from memory.

The phone rang long, was finally answered with a clunk. “Uh?”

“Alva?”

“Uh.”

“Alva? It’s Patricia. Are you awake?”

Of course she was awake, awake and struggling in a paroxysm of weeping. An unnatural hacking horror in the voice, striving, striving for control.

“It’s just terrib ... terrible.”

“Who called you?”

No answer.

“Alva? You sound very upset.”

“Just... doesn’t... nothing. Deb... nothing. So sad.”

“Can I come over?”

No answer.

“Alva, are you all right? You don’t sound all right.”

“I’m just... it’s just... I know I didn’t know her...” (which was what Patricia was thinking, panicking in face of panic, this crescendo of confusion, this attraction to the void)” ... I know how good her heart was.”

“I’ll come over.”

“Don’t.”

“But you sound – "

“Other things.”

They talked on in a lockstep staccato, Patricia determined to anchor Alva. Little by little, bit by bit, the tone subsided and conversation became manageable, Elisabeth had called her too (first? Why?), might there be a big service, who should coordinate with whom? After ten minutes the communicants were of a tone, equalised. Alva seemed dreamy. “You should go back to bed,” Patricia said affectionately.

“Today, yes - " with heartrending exhaustion.

As Patricia rang off the doorbell buzzed. Still dressing gowned, she assumed the postman. She went to the side door and shouted his name. Footsteps sounded on the gravel, light as lamb, and Patricia physically recoiled from the fight of James walking round the corner. Her reflex system failed, neurotransmitters, something not connecting. Shouldn’t he be...somewhere?

“I just came to check in,” he said with a self-conscious, twitchy effort at affability. She couldn’t hold his eyes. But he was at the door, in parlous proximity, expectant. Astonishing herself, she opened the door and let him into the kitchen. The perfect host-friend, she immediately started the coffee-routine, opening new filters and the Blue Mountain Mark sent from a deli near campus.

“I drove over to Deborah’s,” James said softly. “Alva wanted me to. There were lots of police. Coroner arrived. Did they call here? They will.”

“No, why?”

“She left notes. One for you.”

“How do you know?”

He shifted nervously from foot to foot, till she pulled out a kitchen chair and offered it. “Alva told me.”

She didn’t believe him.

“I’m making toast. Do you want some?”

“Yes, thank you. We didn’t get time for breakfast. Elisabeth called.”

“Did Alva go over to Deborah’s?”

“No, she spoke to some people. It was upsetting. You girls spent the night together.”

“I thought you were away. Some work thing?” The intimacy implied made Patricia blush. She turned away from James and felt suddenly nude. Could he see her bottom in this thing? The fabric was silk weave, clingy. She had no knickers, her arse was too big. Cycling, swimming, that would do it. Is he watching?

She brought the unready toast to the table and sat quickly.

“I was in London, took the train back. Tomorrow I’m in Strasbourg. Till Tuesday. Tiring stuff.”

Patricia started buttering toast and pouring coffee, like a mother, or a lover. She could finally restrain herself no longer: “Alva sounded very distressed. I was worried more about her. She never called, I called her.”

James’ turn to avoid her eyes. Great torment in this, Patricia thought. Gathering spiritual energy? Fuck! Menopause. Omission of reason. Fuck it! He made her skin crawl! What was it about him? Something repulsive in the idea of him holding Alva, touching, kissing, love-making. Whoa!!! Where is this going, woman? Stop it now. These people are strangers to your world – to your meticulous Burano-glass, blown, honed, glazed, petrified world. Get out! What are you doing in my home, in my hole in the earth? – me sitting naked, moist-thighed, sweat-smelling, buttering your toast; you askance?

“Patricia.” Her name, with a newness to it. And formal. Uptight. Like the start of a dissertation. “Alva is a unique personality, very sensitive and caring.”

“I know that.” How would she? Ridiculous.

“She overextends and it worries me.” He didn’t touch the toast but pulled deep on the coffee. “Truthfully, I don’t think we fit here. We don’t belong.”

And – ridiculously – she found herself instantly reassuring him: “This thing that happened, it happens all over the world. You can’t let that affect you, or Alva. It really has nothing to do with you. Or me, for that matter. Yes, we were friends, Deborah and I, but friendship takes all shapes. Around here, the way our lives seem to operate, friendship is a ...” She looked for the word: “functional sort of thing. Village life. Rural life works like that. We are, how do I say it, friendly but independent. Which is how it should be. Friendship allows people... no, more... part of being friends are allowing people to ... just be what they want to be. So no one breathes down anyone’s neck. And people do with their lives what they want to do.”

He was staring, drilling eyes, into her. “That’s a very ... firm judgement on friendship.” Before she responded – she started to, defensive-aggressive – he took up: “The township I was born in, friendship and family were interchangeable. They meant the same thing.”

“Yes, of course, don’t take me up wrongly. Love - "

“Love is misused. Misunderstood. Do you ever wonder, Patricia, if it exists at all?”

She drank so fast the coffee bubbled out of the side of her mouth, like a child, and dropped in huge blotting globs onto the peach silk of her gown.

“Dammit.” She hurried for napkin paper.

James started eating the toast. Good deflection, she thought, flirting.

“Maybe I’ll go over to Alva. I’m not in work today.”

“Really, do you ever wonder?”

“About love? Of course it exists. I mean, we all know that. How would we live? What is a family about, but love?”

“Very traditional. Puritan traditional. The community of family.”

“That sounds cynical.”

“Sceptical. I think love is everything we live for, I agree –" (She didn’t want him to ‘agree’: this wasn’t equitable or valuable; he should leave)” – but I also think it is elusive, like ... electricity. I mean, the air around us was full of electricity for millennia, but until Faraday, or whoever, we never really grasped it.”

“Well, all interesting philosophing. It’s all good fun, but –" (But what? – she had no ‘but’ to offer).

“I’m an animist. I believe that love, God, is in everything. But the love that binds people is purposeful and sometimes it is within a family, and sometimes it is with a dog in the street, and sometimes it is with a total stranger.

Now it was all vaguely shocking. She started clearing up in a hurry and he saw her alarm.

“I’m writing a novel," he said.

“Oh, is this what I’m hearing? Plotline?”

“Yes. I just wondered, about your opinion.”

Her opinion? Her back again to him, at the sink. Knickerless bum, sweating. What was this uneven connection between this man and Alva? Something unreal. Abuse relationship? Were they lovers? Or related in some secret unsuitable way? What did she think when she thought about them? – and yes, she thought about them, not just Alva – both of them. Welcome colourants in her middle-life? Friends or foes? Even the proposition was horrifying. This strange presence, familiarly and unnecessarily in her inner world, eating her bread and drinking her wine...

They both reacted to the clank of the gate and car tyres on gravel. James with nervous tension, Patricia with relief. David, returned from a postponed meeting, in a comfortable, predictable flap. He entered the kitchen on good behaviour, aware of the foreign car outside.

“Damned grad students. Most disorganised idiots. Postponed till the twentieth. James. How are you? What brings you?” And the fascinating thing, thought Patricia, was the honesty of his interest. Ten years ago – one year ago – naked jealousy would have burst like sulphur from his pores. Now, suspicion, doubt, concern – but hardly jealousy. She made him coffee and offered toast but he sat in her seat and immediately took the castle, pouring wise effusions on the events of Deborah and Jack Fowler’s lives, and the inevitabilities of alcoholism.

The talk squarely found its tracks: dangers of work, and work related stress, booze and drugs do nobody any good, jury out on the prozac generation, our remedial age wanting, no answers in eastern pick-me-ups. Patricia waited for the polite moment to make her exit – her style was the conscientious housewife, first beyond all – but David suddenly grabbed her, an arm around her buttocks in a way that shouted chattel-possession. She felt her buttocks rise under his forearm and the fabric of her gown buckle at the waist. She watched James’ eyes flick down and the emotion was briefly erotic and appalling at the same time.

“What you finally learn in life,” David said, “is how much we miss. You need to stop counting your blessings. Smell the roses. Be thankful for what you have.”

She ruffled David’s hair dutifully. “Got to get dressed, get over to Deborah’s.”

“I don’t think you need to, “James said, leaning back in his chair, peering out the side casement. “Here they come.”

“Do you play golf?” David asked James brightly.

***

Collected, assertive, reasonable people – two plainclothes men in their middle twenties and a woman of forty with reptilian eyes, seen it all so many times. David made tea and took firm control, of course. The story, from the police viewpoint, told in short, censored strokes; great effusions from David, as though the Deborah they were talking about was his favourite sister. Patricia answered all the questions asked by one of the two men, conceding to a tape recorder. Then the woman gave her plastic gloves and asked her to open the sealed note Deborah had apparently written. Her name on the cover looked like a child’s handwriting. She opened it with a kitchen knife while David, James and the police watched her. Awkward moment, undignified. Was this the way to do it? Was she being helpful and cooperative, or abused? A private letter. What if it talked about the cocaine? But she ripped it in a fast, efficient slash and opened the single folded lace-effect page. It said, in a scrawl:

The one thing I can say is you tried.

She read it, reread it, to herself. Didn’t seem appropriate to read it aloud, she had conceded enough to this violation. The woman police officer read it out, and James lowered his eyes respectfully.

“Any idea what she’s specifically referring to?” the woman asked, dumb-cow.

“Yes, I tried to comfort her. The disintegration of her marriage, her life. Everything I have already told you.”

“I see.”

“What did the other letters say?” David asked.

The younger policeman dove in: “Some very long and windy. She was obviously out of it. Lot of foul accusation stuff, about how people worked her over – "

“DC Parks!”

“Oh - sorry.”

After they’d gone James left, walking to his car with David. Patricia functioned automatically, cleared the kitchen table, went to her shower. Under the freezing spray some human feeling came back. She scrubbed ferociously with a seaweed luffa. They hadn’t let her keep the note, which was probably understandable, but she’d asked them to return it when the inquiry and post mortem were over. She dried and dressed, scribbled on make-up and came down to the kitchen, where David was fitting a 250 zoom on his Pentax. “You’re not on, today, are you? Help me in the yard, it’s a mess. But that birdbath really does it. Finches out there. An unusual little – "

She helped him, took pride in it. The yard, the garden, she loved. Soft mouldings of links-like golf turf. Some heather, and the west and south facing beds chock full of exotics, from simple New Zealand grass to parrots-beak climbers and, despite the breezes, acacia trees. While David used his long lens on the birdbath, she knelt on a rubber mat and dug out the geraniums that hadn’t made it through the winter. All the time David blabbed sotto voce, in the voice of a day like normal days, nothing worth breaking a sweat for. He didn’t mention James, which seemed odd to her: it seemed they had ‘clicked’, some common ground found – the meritocracy? – and David liked him. She tuned back into his murmured monotone and it was about Deborah, and the police: that the police said someone would ‘itemise’ the possessions in the house, because it had been made clear by Jack that the marriage was over, it was only a matter of legal agreement. Possessions? She thought, as she stabbed the soft dirt. What was that about? She thought of Deborah and her attraction, the commonality, with Jack. The astroturf. And when she sat back and looked around her garden it suddenly looked just like that, cliché, the hedge against loneliness. They should be talking. About Deborah, about the feelings and loss. About the imminent weekend. Would the children come down? About Kitty’s party. For God’s sake, that meant so much to him.

“I want to go to Plascassier," she said suddenly.

He was bent double, still fit and nimble, trying to creep closer to an unusual blue-black bird drinking at the well.

He stopped and lowered the camera. “We are going. Next Friday, I told you.”

“Oh, right, all right.” She threw down the garden fork. “I’ve had enough of this for today. “I’m going out.”

“Where?”

But she was almost inside the kitchen, and didn’t feel like humouring him. She got her linen jacket and left by the front door.

She drove like a homing pigeon – intent on Alva’s or back to the school – then, at the village crossroads, the rear of a familiar car, a Volvo station wagon, caught her attention. She shook herself alert. Again, her car was musicless, no radio. She switched it on – news – then flicked to the tape deck. Old song. Childhood again. Jimmy Somebody:

“What becomes of the broken hearted?
Those whose lovers are now departed
I know I got to find
Some kind of peace of mind
Help me...”

It was Johnnie Collingham’s car, with the gardening flash on the bumper. Inside was Johnnie, his long brown hair ponytailed, with a woman. Agnes. The car moved through the crossroads, turned left towards High Park. Patricia indicated right, for Alva’s and school, but turned left. A bread van slipped between Johnnie’s car and hers. She angled herself cautiously behind it, a perfect mechanical calculation. They drove for ten minutes, until the village outskirts melted away and they were in the park. Lombardy poplars, giving way to dense sycamore forest. Lanes opening left and right, signposted towards walking trails and picnic areas. The bread van choosing fate. Now she couldn’t see Johnnie’s car and she told herself it could easily have diverted, but knew it didn’t. It was there, on its missions; she on hers. Three miles into the park the Volvo broke formation and turned right into a hollow of heavy-leaved tress. Patricia followed. A dark passage, mottled, mythic shadows. She stood on the brake. The Volvo had stopped at the end of a hill, pulling onto the tail grass verge, and already Agnes was on top of Johnnie. Patricia cut her engine. She was camouflaged perfectly by the weight of the leaves on meshing sycamores. As the trees moved in the breeze she received alternate images, like flickering film. Agnes’ plaid skirt, the one she wore last week. Her rump in the rear window. Johnnie opening his shirt, facing her. Disappeared. Agnes’ head, the back of her head, touching the back window. A seat pushed back. Agnes’ shoulder, astonishingly naked. And then a flesh bundle – his face kissing hers. His forearms, her blouse in place but her skirt rucked, and his hand, like a starving man, clawing the big hard mound of her naked backside. Patricia switched the tape deck off and the noise of her own breathing shocked her. The leaves wiped away the intimacy and when she saw the car again all that was visible was a foot against the forward headrest. She sat motionless for fifteen minutes. The sound of a motorbike. She quickly turned her ignition and hit reverse. Through the trees, still, the solitary in flagrante foot. She reversed the car past the approaching motorbike – a teenager with his red-head date – and found the road.

It was starting to rain, and she was glad for that; she was in mood for rain, for primordial forces of disassembly and reorganization. She remembered her favourite album cover: the rain in Central Park on Oscar Peterson’s Cole Porter Songbook. Mummy’s favourite jazz. Oscar Peterson day and night. Woody Allen; she liked Woody Allen, the intelligence of the romance, expressed always as a question; his quote in some movie about liking the rain, “because – " in a he-man voice " – it washed memories off the sidewalk of life.” And Raymond Chandler. In those detective novels, the Santa Monica of the 1930’s, it always rained. Phase when all she read was Agatha Christie, Chandler, Hammett, Sayers, Ngaio Marsh – as if the locked-room mystery, the enclosed question, might offer some solutions in the simple arc of a yarn.

Memory omission. Listening to a recent Paul Simon, and thinking how, truly, little fits to form:

“Phone’s ringing and I realise
We are time zones and oceans apart
The words I speak in the middle of my night
Fall on your yesterday’s heart...”

Omission, and now she was in Kitty’s living-room – a palace of lime – with a drink in her hand. Kitty, in shameless leotard, had been working out with her trainer. Through the panorama window was an ornamental oriental bonsai-ringed lake. Surprising taste, her first time here. The excuse – what was the excuse? – for calling unannounced was Deborah. But it didn’t matter – words exchanged, but it didn’t matter – because Kitty’s ‘thing’ was spontaneity. They had quickly moved past Deborah. Kitty was pointing out the wall decorations: framed discs. “Twenty, actually. I don’t know how they make up these things, don’t care. You get gold records, then platinum for sales of more than a zillion, I dunno. Geoffrey’s got the touch, no question. Fusion’s the trick. Do you listen to that kinda stuff, like Search & Destroy?”

“I like modern music. Della, the kids, keep you up to it.”

“He did Search & Destroy. And Martha Rackley.”

“Part of me’s still stuck in the Seventies. Soundtrack of your teenage romance, all that kind of thing, I suppose.”

“Sure. I’m Lionel Ritchie and – “She doubled up in amusement and did a hop-slip dance” – LaToya, man. She towelled her curly blonde hair, patted off the sweat. “So, shower.”

“Yeh, I should go.”

“You just came. You have the day off. Come with me. I’ve to go to CapCom, see this deejay Geoff wants. Come with me.”

CapCom, by reputation not much more than a lap dance club. Sleaze.

“Did you read the H G Wells?”

For a long moment Kitty stared at Patricia with a question: is this a bust? Is this the deputation that arrives to say, Having considered your application...?

“I like literature,” she said in a hurt, calmed voice. I did very well at Birmingham. I planned a career in teaching. Don’t put the body with the brain.”

“You took me up wrong. I’m sorry, Kitty, You’ve been here a while ... I admire you, your extrovert nature. I wish I could be ...” She quit that track. “I think you have many talents and I know you love books. It was a genuine question.”

“Yes, I read it. I read the others, too. The autobiographies. I like his politics. The World State, non utopian. I like that he met Stalin and Roosevelt and had that socialist thing but never finally settled it. I like that he had so many lovers and spoke of them as muses. I like the sound of him, the Renaissance man. I read the Rebecca West too. She reminds me of me. He was the kind of fella I would have shagged.”

The both laughed.

While Kitty was in the shower, Patricia – by invitation, of course – rambled through the book shelves. Impressive eclecticism. Nature Through the Seasons (read, thumbed), Walden, Jack London, Hardy, Henry James, Richard Ford, Carver, McEwan and a lot of biographies. She took down Alfred Barr’s Matisse and was looking at it, the disturbing sketches for the Blinding of Polyphemus, an early illustration for Joyce’s Ulysses, when Kitty returned fresh-dressed.

“Alfred Barr is the only one worth reading on modern painting.”

Patricia was dashing, computing – Lionel Ritchie, Alfred Barr, Kitty’s sixteen-year-old voice and style, the half-dress she was wearing, the blue sling-heels, the blue lipstick: what age was she?

“Let me lend you something.”

“Lend me?”

“For CapCom. You can’t go in that. And I know that man of yours. If we drive back he’ll mutiny. Your colours are like mine. I like no patterns, nothing primary.”

She had never worn another woman’s clothing, not even during college days. Now she found herself in a beige DKNY, elegant but shorter than anything she had ever worn. Her legs surprised her. A vein here and there, ankles too thick, always too thick – but she felt slim and safe. Ironic. Bewildering, really. Fifty.

In the car, Kitty’s jeep, en route, the music was a tribal bass-beat. Patricia looked at the clash clock and shocked herself: eight o’clock. Still bright, but night time. What happened to today? Jolting talk, strangers, neon images, whiteout.

“I left my mobile,” she said. “I should call David.”

“At the club.”

CapCom was a building like Frank Lloyd Wright or I.M Pei, outside the village, near the hotel. An anomaly, creeping Europe, homogenised suburbia. They walked into a lobby that looked like an airport concourse, pumping dance music, then into a warren or carpeted corridors with increasingly abstract wall art, then into what looked like a den-bar in a fifties American movie. Good wood, brass, some leather books, high stools. Tow raised daisies amid intimate tables. About twelve people in the room, drinking, whispering, and a girl in a thong and short top dancing off one of the daises. “What’s inside, there?” Patricia asked, a little terrified.

“Club. Big floor. Party place. Prefer here. And they have a cowboy lounge. You want to see that?”

“No, it’s ... fine.”

A barman Kitty knew gave them vodka shots. Kitty talked to him about the deejay called Vance or Vince, and learned he wouldn’t be here till nine. An explosion of noise, and suddenly a group of men, like a rugby team, barrelling through the main doors. Hilarity, shouting, bonhomie. One or two women, middle thirties maybe, in the middle. One woman, who looked vaguely familiar, said Hi and elbowed Patricia to order drinks from a Vance or Vince.

Memory omission. She was sweating hard. The music filling the universe, majestic heartbeats maintaining her like a life support. Kitty up and dancing with about four men. The room overfull, overhot. Riddles of sweat between her breasts, her armpits damp-stained. That aroma of wellbeing. Someone grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. She liked to dance, but danced alone, in her sun room. Dancing here, with this man, young man – twenty, thirty? – was like dancing nude. She danced. Occasionally he clasped an arm around her and spun her. He smelled fresh. The girl on the dais was topless now. Long leathery nipples, escaped daughters and wives. He swung her violently and she crushed back into his body. Someone crashed into her back and she was in the man’s arms, tight, undercover of the music.

It was hard to breathe on the floor. No air conditioning. Where was Kitty? Someone else crashed into her, laughed very loud. She laughed back. The girl on the dais was with a man now, dancing knee to knee. Swinging her hips in time with his, huge hoops, then slamming their groins together. He was feeling her. Touching the long nipples, kissing her. His hands were down on her hips, fingers feeling every ripple. Down to her buttocks. Music faster. She felt the middle of her own partner’s body, and the strength of his erection. I have never felt anything like this. Nothing. David in the dark is a soft-hard slug of urgency. ‘Rub my balls, stay on my balls.’ The constant tension of effort. Keep it safe, keep it going. ‘No, under my balls. Not that far. Stop, no, go. Faster. Faster. I’ll lose it. Keep it up. Hard. Harder. My balls. No, OK, that was OK, that was good.’ Not what it could be, but good. Better. Better every day. ‘I could do with that ten times a day.’ But this was an animal, hard, long and searching. Her face, she found, was in his neck, where he smelled best. And then it slowly came to her to he was feeling her up her skirt, that his small. Boyish hands were inside her panties and inside her labia, spreading them with expert care. The music had slowed, but the crush was tighter. Everyone crushed. The man – boy – took out his hand, and she lazily watched him lick his fingers for lubrication and reinsert them. With his free hand he placed her hand inside his jeans. She held it. Rigid. But he was working on her, tenderly massaging the stone of her clitoris, then sliding her wet along the crack and up inside her anus. She pulled him to the music and knew he wouldn’t hold it. In just seconds it was over. He pumped his hips, like a dog, moaned into her ear, and settled. His hands were out of her skirt, but he kissed her cheek. They were dancing, dancing. Her hand, her right hand, was a handful of cum, but she didn’t dry it; she danced on till the music ended, then escaped him and went into the bathroom. A cave of serenity, silver tiled prism, her reflection coming back at her from everywhere. She ran the cold water and looked at the sperm in her hand, thick, viscous like dairy cream. She moved it around her palm with a forefinger, examining its constituency like a baking ingredient. She lifted and stretched it till it thinned to a hair’s-breadth and plopped.

She smelled its ammonia. Then, almost regretfully, she put her hands under the running water and washed it away.

***

He didn’t argue, he was too drunk to argue. No, not too drunk. It was tactics. To argue would be to violate the harmonious partnership scheduled to harmoniously attend Kitty’s marquee. A wedded man is a safer bet. Plus community appearances. The college don. The immutable honour of the ruling class. Enter smiling. Exit smiling.

Cigar smoke hung from the walls and ceiling, and he was dozing in front of a slide projector showing tropical bird images one of which he would select for the cover of his book – pamphlet – called Dinosaur Bird which, OUP assured him, would make the pop market. But the slide of the mackerel-speckled nene-goose was upside down, the palm fronds growing out of blue sky, the sea on the ceiling.

“You made it,” he grumbled. She sat on the footstool beside him, within arm’s reach. It seemed important: not in contrition, but in submissions, in accepting status quo, the Puritan way it was. Or should be; in re-offering herself to him.

After a moment the nene-goose was replaced by a right-side-up fairy-tern, a bird she loved. “Do you remember the poster of the fairy-tern with the long black beak I bought you for the flat, when we met?”

But he was asleep.