In Search of the Missing Eyelash E-Book

Karen McLeod

• Herausgeber: Muswell Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 332

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Both comic and moving as it explores ideas of self, of gender, identification and loneliness'. Observer. First published in 2008 by Vintage this Betty Trask Award winning novel; a humorous LGBTQI+ coming of age story, is available for the first time in 17 years. Lizzie is lonely. Her parents have gone and her brother, who believes he is a woman, is missing. Most of all, though, Lizzie misses Sally, her former lover, who has gone off with a man with a fat neck. She starts to stalk Sally, collecting bathroom fluff, dust and pubes from Sally's bed – all the things that prove that somewhere life is taking place without her.

Leseprobe

iii

IN SEARCH OF THE MISSING EYELASH

Karen McLeod

v

Through photos, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself, a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness. It hardly matters what activities are photographed as long as photos get taken and are cherished.

Susan Sontag, On Photographyvi

Contents

Title PageEpigraph1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738Acknowledgements Copyright

1

1

I woke up in a foreign armpit.

Her arm is a pale orange from the street light outside, and as I lift up my head, her arm stays there, unmoved across the bed. From what I can see there is a few days’ stubble in her armpit, as her breast has rolled sideways off her chest almost covering it up. Her chest doesn’t appear to be going up or down. But in the same moment it takes me to recall her wetting herself at the end of my road last night, she’s opened up her mouth and a gentle snore reveals that she isn’t dead at all.

My tongue is dry and my teeth are all furred up. I roll out of bed onto the floor and find my clothes there in a pile. I realise from the air that I am naked. Her bra is on top of my clothes, it is large with two smiling wires under the bulletproof-like silvery cups. I remember she’d put her wet trousers in my bath, and I was drunk but very accommodating, as I had given her my only flannel to have a wash. I crawl to the door and then along the corridor and I can still feel the alcohol in my veins. I feel like laughing as I don’t recognise myself. I am a naughty bachelor in a bad American film who, in the rude glare of the fridge light, might drink juice out of a carton messily in his socks and 2baggy underpants. A rock song will come on and I will have ruffled hair and a look around my lips like I have just done it, and because I have a strange girl in my bed, will move my head up and down to the wild guitar playing, knowing I had been fucking great.

But film studs need an audience and I would have to wait until morning to tell Petula downstairs.

When I find and flick on the light switch, I am pleased to find it is my kitchen. I haven’t lived here long enough to know the flat as if it is my outer body; the house I lived in before, the house we grew up in, is still where I think I live when I am half asleep. It’s the place I dream about. I turn the light off and look at the night, set like a jelly outside the window. It’s that lovely hour when I can believe that the sun will never appear and maybe time has stopped, and there is no pressure to think or not think about her or to find Simon.

You remember? Yes. Si, as I called him is/was my brother and I’ll tell you about her later.

So I shiver on the lino and open the fridge door and look for the juice from the stud film and find a familiar comfort in how my fridge door opens and how the light comes on. It makes me feel real. I can see parts of myself lit up. In the house I used to stay in with her, the bulb had gone in the fridge and it was wrong opening the fridge to no light (a lot of things stopped working around that time, I got blamed for the sandwich toaster and doorbell).

Among the crumbs on the empty glass shelves there is a carton of fresh grapefruit juice, out of date by a few weeks. When I first moved in I’d bought it as a cocktail mixer. I close the fridge door, and fill two glasses with water from the tap, one for me and one for the stranger. Through the window above the sink I can see that everyone is asleep in 3the houses opposite, their curtains pulled tightly together holding in their lives.

I go back into the bedroom and get slowly into bed. She isn’t snoring and has turned over. I can see her back, her hair is long and it has stretched across to touch my pillow. I hold my breath as I don’t know what else to do, but I want to warm my feet on her. I’m not sure how we had got from dancing near one another to her coming home with me last night. I think I might have winked a few times. I never thought winking worked but it’s easier than speaking, especially if you’ve practised in the mirror.

And here she is in my bed, proof that winking works and I’m not too pear-shaped, as she had called me just before the whole lasagne affair unfurled. I’d met someone else and out of all the girls in the club the stranger had picked me.

My eyes have now adjusted to the light and I lift up the duvet to examine the stranger’s body. She has a swimmer’s figure as far as I can tell from her back, which is hunched away from me, broad shoulders and dark wavy hair. Her bottom isn’t full like mine, it is a bit like a man’s and very pale, almost blotchy in the light. I decide not to close my eyes for the rest of the night, because that would make the morning come and she would wake up and be who she is and not who I can make her into, for now.

I think about touching myself but I suppose it might be disrespectful, like masturbating with a dead person next to you. So, I lift up the duvet again and look down and am shocked to see that my hip bone has disappeared. I press where it used to jut out and can feel the buried bone underneath a layer of fat. My legs are like sausages near to bursting in a dimpled skin that is too tight. I brush my hands over my soft stomach and squeeze two handfuls of flesh and then find another around the base of my ribs and push the two 4rolls together and I find I can create different folds and a face with the line which marks my belly button. I turn on my side and feel my belly spill onto the mattress in front. I can’t remember how I’d got so fat or when it started or when I wasn’t. But I have no long mirrors in the flat; the ones I have all cut me off from the neck down. I put my hand back onto my thigh and then go to touch the stranger’s back, but stop myself. Instead, I close my eyes and with my hand rubbing between my legs make the stranger her for the brief while it takes to lead me to gasp and feel my head pop with the feeling that heats up my toes.

I’ll confess to you now that I have fancied garlic bread for three months, uncontrollably and often late at night, which is unusual for spring when we are told we naturally want to take a good look at ourselves and say no to seconds. My body is still set on padding itself out like it does in early winter.

Lately, when I know it’s my bedtime, I have taken to raiding the freezer, banging in the ready-to-bake garlic baguettes pumped with garlic butter and, because I can’t wait, removing them when they are still pale-looking, not able to wait for it to drip down my face, dipping my tongue into the semi-frozen centre of the bread. It used to be jamfilled doughnuts, pinged ready in the microwave in seconds and I am worried that I am leaning towards phallicshaped food, in case it is a secret desire to sleep with some man which I haven’t yet realised. But that would make me as bad as her wouldn’t it?

I have noticed flesh has grown under my arms and my thighs gently rub together when I walk down the street. I haven’t looked at myself for weeks, which means I go out not knowing what I look like. It’s easy if you don’t have a long mirror. I still study my face in the one in the bathroom 5and I don’t think it has got that much bigger, but then again you see you those large ladies with their faces still pretty and perfectly formed on top of their big bodies, don’t you?

And yet there is a woman in my bed, who out of all the other women in the club liked me and came home with me. Except I’m not sure if anything happened and I can hardly ask her in case it was amazing sex and I’m her best yet and she has already fallen in love with me. I don’t want to spoil what might be, in her mind, a perfect night, so I won’t ask.

My life is different. In one night it has changed and moved a little, maybe not that far forwards but certainly not backwards, to how it’s been, which I’m always afraid of. It’s just like the night when Petula met her secret boyfriend, Ewan, and she said the predictability of the next day vanished. She’d said people on the train had stared at her as if there was something different about her … as if her skin was telling them her secrets.

6

2

Si, as I often called him, is/was my brother.

But then you know that, don’t you?

In the photo I have of him he is holding a snooker cue and grinning from ear to ear. His jumper is a little too small for him and his friend Colin, who is black, has his arm loosely around his shoulder; the way men do without being gay-looking. They are in front of a snooker table at the holiday camp near Brighton that we went to every year. I took the photos then, as that week I was dreaming of being a fashion photographer. I had turned the camera to a forty-five-degree angle and pressed the button without care and then wound it on very fast and took another shot, winding it on speedily again, making my thumb hurt on the grooves, wishing I had an automatic.

Simon is missing.

There is a poster with his face on it outside the police station. I pass it every morning on my way to Ruby’s caff, where I work, and know that it doesn’t look anything like him. It says underneath:

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

Simon Rodgerson has been missing for three months. He has brown eyes and brown hair, is 23 years old, slim 7build and 6ft tall. He was last seen on Christmas Day at home when he left after a family dispute. If you have seen him please contact us.

What I would write underneath his picture is:

Simon, otherwise known as Amanda, was last seen as his mother threw him out of the house on Christmas Day with the dinner hot on the table and Simon dressed as a woman, in a wonky black bobbed wig and fake tan leather shoes that pinched him. He has lovely elegant hands but incredibly knobbly knees and is afraid the world will reject him, which it will because she did.’

Mum had called him disturbed, although it was her that was disturbing him. And then when I told her I’d known for a while and that I didn’t find it that strange, she didn’t react at all but sat herself in your armchair, which we still have, with a bottle of sherry, staring at the label as if it were instructions on what to do next.

‘Didn’t I love you enough?’ she had said as I packed a chocolate orange in my leaving rucksack.

And then she bent forward as if in chronic pain and cried, ‘My children are both ill.’

And that was enough for me to never want to see her again, which of course would have been easy if she had not been our mother.

8

3

Three miles away, two bus changes, past a chained-up dog who doesn’t bark and a short cut through the park where men rustle in the bushes at night, is where she lives. He sleeps there too with his fat neck. Exactly where I had slept, I bet. She always liked the side by the door, more roomy she’d said.

For twenty-one days now Sally has been my ex-girlfriend and shockingly there are still no signs of her stalking me, so I am up the road from her house behind the tree watching her doubleglazed porch. So far, she hasn’t rung and put the phone down when I pick it up and she hasn’t begged me on my doorstep to take her back. Every song on the radio means something to me so I have taken out the batteries.

She is acting like she never cared at all.

It took just one night for me to fall in love and then nine weeks for her to tell me it wasn’t working and that I couldn’t give her what she wanted as ‘You don’t have a penis, you do realise?’ or words to that effect.

I had tried to ignore her late-night phone calls as she whispered and giggled in the bathroom with the taps on full. Biting my tongue, not wanting to know but straining to hear anyway, my stomach shifting at the constant 9arrival of new text messages, beeping and vibrating on the kitchen worktops. Without having to be in the same room, I could hear her fingers, silently, expertly texting back and I kept my hand over my mouth so that my heart wouldn’t jump out.

Relationships are about trust, so the magazine Agony Aunt I’d written to had said. She’d replied that I didn’t have any hard evidence not to trust Sally and maybe I should look at myself and whether I had something called low self-esteem. And I was very conscious that I didn’t want to have that, so I ignored the distance in her eyes and how she slept with her back to me.

When I touched her it was as if she held her breath until I was finished.

And on her birthday, when I should have been sticking pastelcoloured candles into their pastel flower-shaped holders, I had tried not to look at things I shouldn’t have. I didn’t want to be jealous or overreact and I thought I was doing ever so well until I found myself spying on her, that evening, in the pub across the way from where she issued British passports.

10

4

Not washed, but dressed in last night’s clothes, the stranger sits on my sofa nursing a mug of tea, her annoying wavy hair tucked behind her ears. She is staring, motionless, at the telly which is not on and I try to ignore her, hoping she will take the uncomfortable hint.

The clock is ticking louder than normal so I put the radio onto silence it. The radio doesn’t work and then I recall hiding the batteries from myself. Instead I open up the kitchen window to let the outside in.

A car boot shuts, a child yells and a plane flies over oddly low in the echoey blue sky and my hangover claps over my eyes as if someone has tied an elastic band around my brain. I stand at the kitchen sink and wash up the glasses left from the night before. We must have had a drink when we came in. Two glasses stand neatly next to one another by the sink. The stranger must have put them there as I would have left them on the floor. There is a cigarette butt in the British Rail ashtray. One of your stolen ashtrays.

I am wearing my Christmas present from the year before last, a luxury white towelling gown, the sort that only stays white if you never wear it or if it is hung in 11hotel rooms. I had asked Mum for it and she had splashed out. Across my chest I can feel a tightness as I can see the girl on the sofa never leaving (there is no wall dividing my kitchen from the lounge) and us being married, her staring down at her slippers and mentioning through a mouth full of something home-made that we haven’t had sex for a month. The stranger does go in the end, rather awkwardly and without asking for my number. Although I didn’t want her to have it I was offended that she hadn’t asked.

As soon as I see the girl turn the corner of my road from the kitchen window (she hadn’t looked back meaning she wasn’t in love with me), I rush down to the flat below, still in my dressing gown, to see Petula, the only friend I still have from school, who had given me the wink when the old couple died leaving the flat empty. I tap on the door and let myself in with the key Petula has given me in case she accidentally dies in her sleep. I am impatient to tell her that my winking practice had paid off the previous night and that the girl has just left. My hair isn’t brushed and all of a sudden as I close the door to Petula’s flat I am feeling like that stud from the middle of the night (even though I wasn’t sure what we had got up to).

At last I have my audience, but once in the kitchen I find Petula in her tartan pyjamas and Jackie O black sunglasses at the kitchen table staring at a letter. It is from Ewan, her secret boyfriend, the words written with great force creating a sort of Braille on the flip side of the page. My winning moment is spoilt.

Without looking at me, she lifts up the letter. I read it in my head; it is one of his poems scribbled in sloped handwriting in blue biro.12

‘Pickled Onions’

Iamapickledonioninajar

Leftaloneattheswingingparty

And through the sour vinegary brown haze

I look on at the sociable crisps and peanuts

And the popular short-lived lives of sausage rolls

Quicker than the life of an ice cube.

AftertherevellershavegoneI’m

Shutawayagaininthedarkofthefridge

AndTimepasses,until

The pregnant woman dips her fingers in

And crunches me

Sucking the bitter juice off her fingers

AndIambrokendown

Tobeginagain

Inthebellyofachild

Whoisleftaloneatparties.

Then there is a little note at the bottom of the page which says

I can’t bear it any longer so I’ve gone to Wales to find my inner Dylan.

Thanks, Petula, you were lovely. Ewan xxx

I have heard lots about Ewan but I’ve never actually met him. I know he is Welsh and a depressed part-time unpublished poet who designs wallpaper for a living. And I am told he is insatiable in bed. But insatiable to Petula sounds a bit rough to me. He likes to throw her against the wall 13and speak all gravelly like he is in a French film. Once, he asked her to wear a beret before she began a blow job. He smokes Gitanes; I can smell them sometimes in my flat. From the start they’ve had a stormy relationship and Petula has never explained exactly why I can’t meet him, except that I won’t like him. She has six rolls of his wallpaper. They are all plain and I have spent much time studying them, trying to imagine how someone can design patternless wallpaper all day.

‘Stupid bastard,’ she says, as I sit down in the chair opposite her. ‘It’s the best thing he’s ever written.’ She starts to cry and holds her head in her hands, her hair pouring between her fingers. I want to tell my story but, ‘Do you think he’ll be back?’ I say. ‘It’s too late,’ she says, pulling her sunglasses back onto her head, revealing bloodshot eyes. ‘He took back the six rolls of wallpaper last night.’

And that is that, Ewan has won.

The day is going to be all about him. I make tea which should have eased the situation except Petula stands up and empties her mug of tea down the sink and gets out a bottle of vodka from her pasta cupboard and pours it into the mug without rinsing the tea out first. This is unlike her as normally she is very hygienic.

‘You see, I knew this would happen,’ she says, looking up. ‘I bet he goes onto be the next Poet Laureate or something. I have always felt that I am destined to live the life of an artist’s wife. I thought all his other poems were shit until this one. I mean, he sat feeling what it was like to be a pickled onion. It’s so deep.’

‘Look,’ I say. Can I possibly get a snippet of last night in?

‘I know what you’re going to say, Lizzio,’ she says, swigging at the mug. ‘You’re gonna say at the end of the day it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. You’re gonna say that 14his nose was too big and that he smelt funny and I’m a sex addict whose life is totally out of control.’

‘I wasn’t going to say any of that. I never met him, remember?’ I say.

She’s pours more vodka into her mug.

‘You’re gonna say it’s because he reminded me of Dad and I want to sleep with someone who reminds me of my long-lost cheating father and accuse me of incest and all sorts. But you see … -he was nothing like Dad apart from the holes in the socks and the way he likes his home cooking.’

She looks at me and says, ‘I didn’t sleep with my father before he left if that’s what you’re thinking.’

I’m not thinking at all. Considering I have known Petula for over fourteen years I am continuously surprised how little she does know of what I think.

The vodka bottle is making me feel sick. I am sat somewhere within myself as if I have layers of lard coating my skin and am about to swim the Channel. Protected by the morning-after numbness, I have a flashback of the stranger weeing outside the house in between two parked cars. She hadn’t pulled down her jeans far enough and it had ended up going all inside of them, and because I was too drunk, I hadn’t particularly cared. I start to think about crossing the Channel at night and how you’d be glad of anyone else’s urine to keep you warm and how you might see a whale like Tom Hanks did in that Cast Away film and you would become friends who could communicate without speech or vodka.

‘It’s not far to Swansea, is it? Do you think I should go after him?’ she says, suddenly brightening up. Petula works for a travel agent. She can get cheap deals.

‘Yeah,’ she says sitting up straight, her eyes tracing the 15wall upwards, ‘I could go wearing my green neckscarf. The one he said was the same beautiful colour as the Welsh hills.’

The drink in my body is now making me feel shaky. I haven’t eaten anything since the rushed beans on toast before going out. ‘Look, Petula, why don’t we go into the lounge and we can watch a video and I’ll make us a roast dinner with Yorkshire pudding and garlic bread.’ And in my mind the Yorkshire pudding puffing and swelling and the garlic bread browning and dripping in her gas oven fills my heart with a rare satisfied feeling, something like being at home, as I recall it.

The oven timer jolts me with its piercing beep just as Tippi Hedren playing Marnie has washed the black out of her hair, returning it to blonde, and locked the remains of that identity in a suitcase in a locker at a train station and pushed the key, with her foot, down the grate of a drain. It is Simon’s favourite Hitchcock film and I am reminded why by the huge number of handbags and identity swaps that go on during the film. It’s all insides and outsides and how Marnie just wants to be able to rest her head on her mother’s knee.

Petula falls asleep face downwards on the sofa, one foot nearly touching the carpet, just as the colour red flashes on the screen and Marnie has a turn in Sean Connery’s office. In the kitchen I scrape the knob-ends of the garlic bread into the bin and eat the last bit of Yorkshire pudding from Petula’s plate. After clearing her kitchen up and hiding the vodka behind the cereal boxes I return to the lounge with a glass of water for her.

I stroke the hair from off her face and I kneel down beside her, placing the water on the floor below her head. Separating the strands over her ear, I bend over and whisper, 16‘Last night someone wanted me. They came home and stayed all night.’

Her breathing stops for a bit and I wait until it deepens again before letting myself out.

17

5

We are on Brighton Pier, poking our heads through the holes. Simon is a mermaid and I am a diver. We thought it would be funny that way round, uncanny now with the way things have turned out. We are standing on tiptoes and our chins are straining to stay in the holes. Mum took the photo and managed to get it all in this time. I can remember her leather handbag on her shoulder, with a packet of mints and travel tissues in it, always there as if they bred themselves. The travel tissues used to smell of mints as if they’d had an affair.

It felt like it was the first sunny day of the year. Maybe because it was the first day we saw Mum laugh for a long time. She was laughing as she took the picture as there is a little camera jolt to remind me. Then there is an underexposed photo of me beside some fruit machines. You can see three gold bells lit up above three red cherries and I am the dark figure in front smiling. That week, I wanted to work on the pier behind the plastic window that says ‘change’ above it, giving out stacks of twoand ten-pence pieces in exchange for pound coins, surrounded by the lights of the fruitees and the smell of hot doughnuts and chips.

But then again that week, at home, I also wanted to be 18a cleaner at the office where Mum worked. Simon and I had to go with her after six when all the workers had gone home. It was in the paper factory round the corner and we were allowed to take home any leftover paper which had gone wrong. We could never work out what was wrong with it apart from it was peachor green-coloured and never white. It was our drawing paper. I would swing round in the manager’s black leather chair and Simon would sit at the desk outside lightly touching the keyboard of the secretary’s electric typewriter, imagining it was on, playing with her pencils in the pot.

Then some nights we would collect a bag of chips from the fish and chip shop to take home to have with fried eggs and baked beans. Mum always remembered a plastic-lined bag for the pickup. As we walked back, I liked holding the bag as it felt grown up and also if you hugged the bag to yourself it was hot and a bit sweaty, like another person would get if you hugged them for too long. Once, the Chinese man behind the counter wrapped up a large piece of cod in batter and a buttered crusty roll for Simon on his birthday. There was a fruit machine in the fish and chip shop which we weren’t allowed to touch as it was only allowed to be a seaside thing. Also chips weren’t allowed to be eaten in the street at home whereas they could be by the seaside with wooden forks.

We would go down to Brighton at least twice a summer on the train, as well as the week at the holiday camp. It was where Simon and me put on our first eyeshadow, a smoky blue colour, in the wet sandy-floored toilets under the pier. Mum was sat on the pebbles minding the picnic. Simon had snatched the eyeshadow from me as soon as I had smeared it onto my eyelids. I’d watched him plant his finger into the pot and close his eyes and stroke his eyelid 19with his forefinger. I watched the other children watch him as I squirmed. As soon as Mum noticed she got out a tissue and with her spit rubbed it off of us, saying we were too young and then, looking at Simon, that it was only for girls anyway. He ran off and threw pebbles into the sea while I had a sausage roll. But, between the application and her discovery of the eyeshadow, we’d both walked separately out of the toilets along the promenade, me first, like models, to see who would watch us. I saw a man stare at me and pretended that I hadn’t. Then I heard some jeering and ran back to pull Simon away from a group of older boys. From somewhere we knew that if we were looked at it made us successful, that we were winners of a game we could only guess at.

Was that the same day that I cut my foot on the pebbles and blood appeared in my knickers? Would you even know that from where you are? Simon was jealous that I had special packages wrapped in little plastic envelopes bought for me; I think he used to take them and hide them or wear them.

It was all very secretive and annoying.

20

6

Nine weeks with Sally, and the magical morning was just the same as it had always been. The alarm set for seven went off at seven. I rolled over and kissed her back, her seven o’clock kiss. She’d turned over, still asleep, and loosely draped her arm across my ribs. Waking quickly, I’d examined her face with my eyes and noticed one white eyelash over her left eye that I’d never seen before. When had this appeared? Can this sort of things happen overnight or had I not been observing? Then there was the new growth of tiny black hairs by her eyebrows, soon to be plucked, no doubt. A spot had surfaced on her chin, only faintly swollen though. It might not come to anything.

She opened her eyes and turned away sighing. Suddenly, it felt wrong to be looking at her.

It was her birthday and I’ll tell you now that I’ve always liked birthdays.

So, I got up and fed her lazy fish downstairs and pulled back the curtains, watching for the postman. He wore short sleeves all year round and appeared always rosy-faced, a clear sign of an alcoholic. Only the eternal optimist (or the child) likes the rattle of the letter box and letters still excited me, especially ones with handwritten addresses on 21the front. It reminds me that people are still using pens. But since nobody knew I was there I wasn’t about to get anything good.

I switched on the kettle and then the oven and took the card out of my bag. It was her birthday, but also our anniversary. It was Nine weeks today since we’d met and soon it would be three months, a whole quarter of a year. Maybe then who knows? A year, for ever?

Above the kitchen ceiling I could hear her feet padding around her bedroom.

‘Stay in bed!’ I shouted up the stairs and I heard her get back into bed and the beep of her mobile phone as she turned it on. The kettle had finished boiling and there were three more beeps, which signalled messages had arrived, before I’d got the tea bags in the mugs. No doubt birthday messages, one from her mother and two from the tennis club maybe.

As a treat I had bought and then hidden behind the sofa a packet of four pains au chocolat from Marks & Spencer’s. While I was thinking about what to write in her card, I took the pastries out of the wrapper and put them in the oven. The card was a cartoon of a penguin surrounded by the night sky looking into a hole in the ice. It was silly, I know, but underneath the ice you could see all the fishes having a wild party. Some were wearing eyeshadow and smoking cigarettes. Two had bras on and there was a table with little fish nibbles and Martini cocktails. The light was all yellowy and warm compared to the dark night sky above the ice. Sally loved penguins.

To my Sally,

Happy 33rd Birthday …

Yours for ever xxxx

22I put the pen down and decided against tea. Today was a coffee day, not instant but a cafetière day, a day to take a bit of time over, pore over, like my love for her. Sliding the card into the silvery envelope I licked the gum and realised I hadn’t yet cleaned my teeth. Some days the fuzzy taste of sleep in your mouth is worse than on others, more eggy and rancid, but today was a good day, not too much taste on the tongue and nearly no aroma.

Yet time was short. She would soon have to be in the shower and dressed in her grey pinstripe suit. I had got it from the drycleaner’s yesterday along with a bunch of daffodils from the stall by the butcher’s.

As I walked up the stairs, I started humming the Happy Birthday tune quietly thinking I would rise to a full singing version by the time I’d reached the bedroom. On the breakfast tray were the four pains au chocolat on a plate, her card, a daffodil in a little tiny vase like they do in pizza restaurants and the proud unplunged cafetière with two cups.

The bedroom door was shut. My two hands were on the tray and there was not another to open the door.

So, I put the tray down on the wooden floor and swung the door open. Sally was stood in front of the wardrobe mirror naked, her hands on her hips, examining her body. Her bottom was facing me, small and pert, not really a trace of cellulite to be seen.

I started to hum the Happy Birthday tune again and brought in the tray and squashed a square of white duvet with it.

She hadn’t turned round by this point and was putting on her Japanese-style silk dressing gown with the tie around her waist knotted tightly.

‘Come back to bed. You’ve got to open your card. The postman hasn’t been yet,’ I said.23

She turned round but didn’t face me. Her head was turned to the side and she was staring through the bedside lamp and she breathed in heavily as if she was about to announce something. Then she glanced at the tray and looked at me and then away.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I haven’t really got time, I’ve got to get in the shower.’

‘Oh come on,’ I said. ‘It’s not every day it’s your birthday, is it? And I’ve never got to share it with you before.’ I patted the bed, then I pushed the plunger on the cafetière down, watching her out of the corner of my eye. Coming towards me, she picked up the card and opened it.

She sort of smiled at the picture of the penguin and I felt pleased that I’d made her happy, but still she didn’t give me that look I was waiting for or the kiss I’d expected. The thank-you kiss you get for doing something thoughtful for someone.

And then she’d left the room with a coffee in her hand and I was sitting on the bed feeling the tears fizz in my nose. I could smell antiseptic wipes although there were none in the room. The breakfast tray began to swim on the bed and it was all too much to think about and I know I shouldn’t have done it and I know when characters in soap operas do it you know it’s wrong, but it was irresistible.

Her mobile phone was on the bedside table.

And I knew she was in the shower for as long as it takes to shave her daily legs.

She was washing her hair as there were splats of water shooting against the shower curtain and I knew I had to have at least a few minutes before she’d dried herself and her hair with the towel, brushed through the knots, tied a towel up in a turban and rubbed in the expensive body 24lotion which the report in the magazine says contains the same substance as explosives.

So there it was:

Messages

Inbox

S

happy birthday can still smell u

on my skin from last nite wonna

do it again tonight?:-) am hard

thinking about u c u later xx

Messages

Sent

P

hello u feel the same too don’t

wanna shower in case I can’t smell

ur sweat on me meet after work

and I want a surprise! ;-) xxx

25

7

Ruby’s caff is called Ruby’s Cafe. I calculate it was there when you were around, wasn’t it? The sign above it doesn’t have an accent over the e like the French do as she is from round here and she says she thinks that would be pretentious.

I am across the street from the police station on the way to work and I can see Simon’s face in the glass box next to the normal faded crime prevention pictures and advice on window locks in it.