Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [55]
I glanced at Emma. She had become very still, though tears gleamed in her eyes. I shrugged.
‘Were you sleeping with him?’ said Jerome to Emma.
I felt my body glittering with embarrassment.
‘Of course not,’ said Emma.
‘You’re lying,’ said Jerome.
‘Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot,’ I said, suddenly impatient with him. This is why I don’t have a boyfriend, I thought. Jerome was not beautiful at all. His face was rigid with anger, his lips pinched righteously together. What a waste of time, all this to and fro, this fighting over nothing. I picked my bag up again. ‘I’m going out.’
I had already planned to meet Karen; we were going to see another band. I forgot my umbrella again; I ran across the road in the rain, through a clot of cars, and went into the off-licence. I called her on the payphone and asked her to come straight away. I put more lipstick on, looking at myself in the door of the fridge, and bought a four-pack of tall, strong beers. I waited for Karen in the doorway and drank one of the beers. A double-decker bus trundled around the corner, Karen leaned out of a top window and shrieked at me, and I made a run for it, half-blinded by rain.
I climbed to the top floor, my beers banging against my leg. You were allowed to smoke upstairs. Karen lit a cigarette as I sat down beside her. She was smoking Silk Cut.
‘If it rains again tomorrow,’ said Karen, ‘I’m going to kill everyone in London with an axe.’
‘You’ll be tired,’ I said, staring through the rain-streaked window at the crowds forcing their way along the pavement.
‘It’s a big job,’ she agreed, exhaling smoke.
We started to laugh at the idea of her wearily hacking her way through the populace. It was so hopeless. We were having such a terrible time. We hated London, and ourselves. I leaned my forehead against the seat in front of me, and laughed until I was weeping with it.
‘Forget the band,’ said Karen, when we had wiped our eyes. ‘Let’s just go and get drunk.’
When I got home the flat was quiet. The kitchen light had been left on. I padded down the hall carpet to our bedroom. I swayed a little. Jerome and Emma were asleep in her single bed. He lay behind her with his knees bent up behind hers, as though they were one shape. I pulled the covers off my bed and dragged them down the hall to sleep on the couch.
We didn’t get any more letters from Peter, and Emma didn’t mention him, or the fight with Jerome. She had successfully sealed that rupture in the smooth surface of her existence; sealed it so that nothing about Peter and his unhappiness could leak into the rest of her life. We were sisters, Emma and I, which meant we were the same, even though so different. I knew what she was doing, and even wished for some of her strength, her separateness. I understood how important it was for her to keep herself apart from people like Peter, who made a mess of things, who spoiled love with their silliness. I understood, too, that I would always have something to do with the Peters, that awkwardness and trouble would always follow me, because awkwardness and trouble are a part of being alive.
Still, I didn’t want Peter, and I didn’t want Rory, but I didn’t want Jerome either, for all his beauty. I wanted Tony, who’d put his hand on me gently, lovingly. Who’d smiled at me in the food hall. Who’d spoken to me with his body, without needing to be grandiose, without desperation, without the kind of anger that so often mars a man’s attraction to a woman. But I still wasn’t ready for him. I smiled and blushed whenever I passed him, and once he winked at me over the shoulder of Annabelle, who managed the bridal registry, but we didn’t speak. I wasn’t even sure that he knew my name. What he’d done probably meant nothing to him—it was an unconscious gesture, a small comfort, a way of avoiding conversation. But none of that mattered: he had touched me, kindly, and the relaxing it had brought about in my body would go on for a long while.
THE SINGULAR
ANIMAL: ON
BEING AND
HAVING
Ashley Hay
This