Grey Area

The End of the Relationship

‘Why the hell don’t you leave him if he’s such a monster?’ said Grace. We were sitting in the Café Delancey in Camden Town, eating croques m’sieurs and slurping down cappuccino. I was dabbing the sore skin under my eyes with a scratchy piece of toilet paper — trying to stop the persistent leaking. When I’d finished dabbing I deposited the wad of salty stuff in my bag, took another slurp and looked across at Grace.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I don’t leave him.’

‘You can’t go back there — not after this morning. I don’t know why you didn’t leave him immediately after it happened. .’

That morning I’d woken to find him already up. He was standing at the window, naked. One hand held the struts of the venetian blind apart, while he squinted down on to the Pentonville Road. Lying in bed I could feel the judder and hear the squeal of the traffic as it built up to the rush hour.

In the half-light of dawn his body seemed monolithic: his limbs columnar and white, his head and shoulders solid capitals. I stirred in the bed and he sensed that I was awake. He came back to the side of the bed and stood looking down at me. ‘You’re like a little animal in there. A little rabbit, snuggled down in its burrow.’

I squirmed down further into the duvet and looked up at him, puckering my lip so that I had goofy, rabbity teeth. He got back into bed and curled himself around me. He tucked his legs under mine. He lay on his side — I on my back. The front of his thighs pressed against my haunch and buttock. I felt his penis stiffen against me as his fingers made slight, brushing passes over my breasts, up to my throat and face and then slowly down. His mouth nuzzled against my neck, his tongue licked my flesh, his fingers poised over my nipples, twirling them into erection. My body teetered, a heavy rock on the edge of a precipice.

The rasp of his cheek against mine; the too peremptory prodding of his cock against my mons; the sense of something casual and offhand about the way he was caressing me. Whatever — it was all wrong. There was no true feeling in the way he was touching me; he was manipulating me like some giant dolly. I tensed up — which he sensed; he persisted for a short while, for two more rotations of palm on breast, and then he rolled over on his back with a heavy sigh.

‘I’m sorry — ‘

‘It’s OK.’

‘It’s just that sometimes I feel that — ‘

It’s OK, really, please don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t talk about it.’

‘But if we don’t talk about it we’re never going to deal with it. We’re never going to sort it all out.’

‘Look, I’ve got feelings too. Right now I feel like shit. If you don’t want to, don’t start. That’s what I can’t stand, starting and then stopping — it makes me sick to the stomach.’

‘Well, if that’s what you want.’ I reached down to touch his penis; the chill from his voice hadn’t reached it yet. I gripped it as tightly as I could and began to pull up and down, feeling the skin un- and re-peel over the shaft. Suddenly he recoiled.

‘Not like that, ferchrissakes!’ He slapped my hand away. ‘Anyway I don’t want that. I don’t want. . I don’t want. . I don’t want some bloody hand relief!’

I could feel the tears pricking at my eyes. ‘I thought you said — ‘

‘What does it matter what I said? What does it matter what I do. . I can’t convince you, now can I?’

‘I want to, I really do. It’s just that I don’t feel I can trust you any more. . not at the moment. You have to give me more time.’

‘Trust! Trust! I’m not a fucking building society, you know. You’re not setting an account up with me. Oh fuck it! Fuck the whole fucking thing!’

He rolled away from me and pivoted himself upright. Pulling a pair of trousers from the chair where he’d chucked them the night before, he dragged his legs into them. I dug deeper into the bed and looked out at him through eyes fringed by hair and tears.

‘Coffee?’ His voice was icily polite.

‘Yes please.’ He left the room. I could hear him moving around downstairs. Pained love made me picture his actions: unscrewing the percolator, sluicing it out with cold water, tamping the coffee grains down in the metal basket, screwing it back together again and setting it on the lighted stove.

When he reappeared ten minutes later, with two cups of coffee, I was still dug into the bed. He sat down sideways and waited while I struggled upwards and crammed a pillow behind my head. I pulled a limp corner of the duvet cover over my breasts. I took the cup from him and sipped. He’d gone to the trouble of heating milk for my coffee. He always took his black.

‘I’m going out now. I’ve got to get down to Kensington and see Steve about those castings.’ He’d mooched a cigarette from somewhere and the smoking of it, and the cocking of his elbow, went with his tone: officer speaking to other ranks. I hated him for it.

But hated myself more for asking, ‘When will you be back?’

‘Later. . not for quite a while.’ The studied ambiguity was another put-down. ‘What’re you doing today?’

‘N-nothing. . meeting Grace, I s’pose.’

‘Well, that’s good, the two of you can have a really trusting talk — that’s obviously what you need.’ His chocolate drop of sarcasm was thinly candy-coated with sincerity.

‘Maybe it is. . look. . ‘

‘Don’t say anything, don’t get started again. We’ve talked and talked about this. There’s nothing I can do, is there? There’s no way I can convince you — and I think I’m about ready to give up trying.’

‘You shouldn’t have done it.’

‘Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I fucking know that?! Look, do you think I enjoyed it? Do you think that? ‘Cause if you do, you are fucking mad. More mad than I thought you were.’

‘You can’t love me. .’ A wail was starting up in me; the saucer chattered against the base of my cup. ‘You can’t, whatever you say.’

‘I don’t know about that. All I do know is that this is torturing me. I hate myself — that’s true enough. Look at this. Look at how much I hate myself!’

He set his coffee cup down on the varnished floorboards and began to give himself enormous open-handed clouts around the head. ‘You think I love myself? Look at this!’ (clout) ‘All you think about is your-own-fucking-self, your own fucking feelings.’ (clout) ‘Don’t come back here tonight!’ (clout) ‘Just don’t come back, because I don’t think I can take much more.’

As he was saying the last of this he was pirouetting around the room, scooping up small change and keys from the table, pulling on his shirt and shoes. It wasn’t until he got to the door that I became convinced that he actually was going to walk out on me. Sometimes these scenes could run to several entrances and exits. I leapt from the bed, snatched up a towel, and caught him at the head of the stairs.

‘Don’t walk out on me! Don’t walk out, don’t do that, not that. ‘ I was hiccupping, mucus and tears were mixing on my lips and chin. He twisted away from me and clattered down a few stairs, then he paused and turning said, ‘You talk to me about trust, but I think the reality of it is that you don’t really care about me at all, or else none of this would have happened in the first place.’ He was doing his best to sound furious, but I could tell that the real anger was dying down. I sniffed up my tears and snot and descended towards him.

‘Don’t run off, I do care, come back to bed — it’s still early.’ I touched his forearm with my hand. He looked so anguished, his face all twisted and reddened with anger and pain.

‘Oh, fuck it. Fuck it. Just fuck it.’ He swore flatly. The flap of towel that I was holding against my breast fell away, and I pushed the nipple, which dumbly re-erected itself, against his hand. He didn’t seem to notice, and instead stared fixedly over my shoulder, up the stairs and into the bedroom. I pushed against him a little more firmly. Then he took my nipple between the knuckles of his index and forefinger and pinched it, quite hard, muttering, ‘Fuck it, just fucking fuck it.’

He turned on his heels and left. I doubled over on the stairs. The sobs that racked me had a sickening component. I staggered to the bathroom and as I clutched the toilet bowl the mixture of coffee and mucus streamed from my mouth and nose. Then I heard the front door slam.

‘I don’t know why.’

‘Then leave. You can stay at your own place — ‘

‘You know I hate it there. I can’t stand the people I have to share with — ‘

‘Be that as it may, the point is that you don’t need him, you just think you do. It’s like you’re caught in some trap. You think you love him, but it’s just your insecurity talking. Remember,’ and here Grace’s voice took on an extra depth, a special sonority of caring, ‘your insecurity is like a clever actor, it can mimic any emotion it chooses to and still be utterly convincing. But whether it pretends to be love or hate, the truth is that at bottom it’s just the fear of being alone.’

‘Well why should I be alone? You’re not alone, are you?’

‘No, that’s true, but it’s not easy for me either. Any relationship is an enormous sacrifice. . I don’t know. . Anyway, you know that I was alone for two years before I met John, perhaps you should give it a try?’

‘I spend most of my time alone anyway. I’m perfectly capable of being by myself. But I also need to see him. .’

As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn’t hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it all: his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the café at couple after couple, each confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.

Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn’t down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there. . It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony.

After he had left that morning I went back to his bed and lay there, gagged and bound by the smell of him in the duvet. I didn’t get up until eleven. I listened to Radio Four, imagining that the deep-timbred, wholesome voices of each successive presenter were those of ideal parents. There was a discussion programme, a gardening panel discussion, a discussion about books, a short story about an elderly woman and her relationship with her son, followed by a discussion about it. It all sounded so cultured, so eminently reasonable. I tried to construct a new view of myself on the basis of being the kind of young woman who would consume such hearty radiophonic fare, but it didn’t work. Instead I felt quite weightless and blown out, a husk of a person.

The light quality in the attic bedroom didn’t change all morning. The only way I could measure the passage of time was by the radio, and the position of the watery shadows that his metal sculptures made on the magnolia paint.

Eventually I managed to rouse myself. I dressed and washed my face. I pulled my hair back tightly and fixed it in place with a loop of elastic. I sat down at his work table. It was blanketed with loose sheets of paper, all of which were covered with the meticulous plans he did for his sculptures. Elevations and perspectives, all neatly shaded and the dimensions written in using the lightest of pencils. There was a mess of other stuff on the table as well: sticks of flux, a broken soldering iron, bits of acrylic and angled steel brackets. I cleared a space amidst the evidence of his industry and taking out my notebook and biro, added my own patch of emotion to the collage: I do understand how you feel. I know the pressure that you’re under at the moment, but you must realise that it’s pressure that you put on yourself. It’s not me that’s doing it to you. I do love you and I want to be with you, but it takes time to forgive. And what you did to me was almost unforgivable. I’ve been hurt before and I don’t want to be hurt again. If you can’t understand that, if you can’t understand how I feel about it, then it’s probably best if we don’t see one another again. I’ll be at the flat this evening, perhaps you’ll call?

Out in the street the sky was spitting at the pavement. There was no wind to speak of, but despite that each gob seemed to have an added impetus. With every corner that I rounded on my way to King’s Cross I encountered another little cyclone of rain and grit. I walked past shops full of mouldering stock that were boarded up, and empty, derelict ones that were still open.

On the corner of the Caledonian Road I almost collided with a dosser wearing a long, dirty overcoat. He was clutching a bottle of VP in a hand that was blue with impacted filth, filth that seemed to have been worked deliberately into the open sores on his knuckles. He turned his face to me and I recoiled instinctively. It was the face of a myxomatosic rabbit (‘You’re like a little animal in there. A little rabbit, snuggled down in its burrow’), the eyes swollen up and exploding in a series of burst ramparts and lesions of diseased flesh. His nose was no longer nose-shaped.

But on the tube the people were comforting and workaday enough. I paid at the barrier when I reached Camden Town and walked off quickly down the High Street. Perhaps it was the encounter with the dying drunk that had cleansed me, jerked me out of my self-pity, because for a short while I felt more lucid, better able to look honestly at my relationship. While it was true that he did have problems, emotional problems, and was prepared to admit to them, it was still the case that nothing could forgive his conduct while I was away visiting my parents.

I knew that the woman he had slept with lived here in Camden Town. As I walked down the High Street I began — at first almost unconsciously, then with growing intensity — to examine the faces of any youngish women that passed me. They came in all shapes and sizes, these suspect lovers. There were tall women in floor, length linen coats; plump women in stretchy slacks; petite women in neat, two-piece suits; raddled women in unravelling pullovers; and painfully smart women, Sindy dolls: press a pleasure-button in the small of their backs and their hair would grow.

The trouble was that they all looked perfectly plausible candidates for the job as the metal worker’s anvil. Outside Woolworth’s I was gripped by a sharp attack of nausea. An old swallow of milky coffee reentered my mouth as I thought of him, on top of this woman, on top of that woman, hammering himself into them, bash after bash after bash, flattening their bodies, making them ductile with pleasure.

I went into Marks & Sparks to buy some clean underwear and paused to look at myself in a full-length mirror. My skirt was bunched up around my hips, my hair was lank and flecked with dandruff, my tights bagged at the knees, my sleeve-ends bulged with snot-clogged Kleenex. I looked like shit. It was no wonder that he didn’t fancy me any more, that he’d gone looking for some retouched vision.

‘Come on,’ said Grace, ‘let’s go. The longer we stay here, the more weight we put on.’ On our way out of the café I took a mint from the cut-glass bowl by the cash register and recklessly crunched it between my molars. The sweet pain of sugar-in-cavity spread through my mouth as I fumbled in my bag for my purse. ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ It was only three-thirty in the afternoon but already the sky over London was turning the shocking bilious colour it only ever aspires to when winter is fast encroaching.

‘Can I come back with you, Grace?’

‘Of course you can, silly, why do you think I asked the question?’ She put her arm about my shoulder and twirled me round until we were facing in the direction of the tube. Then she marched me off, like the young emotional offender that I was. Feeling her warm body against mine I almost choked, about to cry again at this display of caring from Grace. But I needed her too much, so I restrained myself.

‘You come back with me, love,’ she clucked. ‘We can watch telly, or eat, or you can do some work. I’ve got some pattern cutting I’ve got to finish by tomorrow. John won’t be back for ages yet. . or I tell you what, if you like we can go and meet him in Soho after he’s finished work and have something to eat there — would you like that?’ She turned to me, flicking back the ledge of her thick blonde fringe with her index finger — a characteristic gesture.

‘Well, yes,’ I murmured, ‘whatever.’

‘OK.’ Her eyes, turned towards mine, were blue, frank. ‘I can see you want to take it easy.’

When we left the tube at Chalk Farm and started up the hill towards where Grace lived, she started up again, wittering on about her and John and me; about what we might do and what fun it would be to have me stay for a couple of nights; and about what a pity it was that I couldn’t live with them for a while, because what I really needed was a good sense of security. There was something edgy and brittle about her enthusiasm. I began to feel that she was overstating her case.

I stopped listening to the words she was saying and began to hear them merely as sounds, as some ambient tape of reassurance. Her arm was linked in mine, but from this slight contact I could gain a whole sense of her small body. The precise slope and jut of her full breasts, the soft brush of her round stomach against the drape of her dress, the infinitesimal gratings of knee against nylon, against nylon against knee.

And as I built up this sense of Grace-as-body, I began also to consider how her bush would look as you went down on her. Would the lips gape wetly, or would they tidily recede? Would the cellulite on her hips crinkle as she parted her legs? How would she smell to you, of sex or cinnamon? But, of course, it wasn’t any impersonal ‘you’ I was thinking of — it was a highly personal him. I joined their bodies together in my mind and tormented myself with the hideous tableau of betrayal. After all, if he was prepared to screw some nameless bitch, what would have prevented him from shirting where I ate? I shuddered. Grace sensed this, and disengaging her arm from mine returned it to my shoulders, which she gave a squeeze.

John and Grace lived in a thirties council block halfway up Haverstock Hill. Their flat was just like all the others. You stepped through the front door and directly into a long corridor, off which were a number of small rooms. They may have been small, but Grace had done everything possible to make them seem spacious. Furniture and pictures were kept to an artful minimum, and the wooden blocks on the floor had been sanded and polished until they shone.

Grace snapped on floor lamps and put a Mozart concerto on the CD. I tried to write my neglected journal, timing my flourishes of supposed insight to the ascending and descending scales. Grace set up the ironing board and began to do something complicated, involving sheets of paper, pins, and round, worn fragments of chalk.

When the music finished, neither of us made any move to put something else on, or to draw the curtains. Instead we sat in the off-white noise of the speakers, under the opaque stare of the dark windows. To me there was something intensely evocative about the scene: two young women sitting in a pool of yellow light on a winter’s afternoon. Images of my childhood came to me; for the first time in days I felt secure.

When John got back from work, Grace put food-in-a-foil-tray in the oven, and tossed some varieties of leaves. John plonked himself down on one of the low chairs in the sitting room and propped the Standard on his knees. Occasionally he would give a snide laugh and read out an item, his intent being always to emphasise the utter consistency of its editorial stupidity.

We ate with our plates balanced on our knees, and when we had finished, turned on the television to watch a play. I noticed that John didn’t move over to the sofa to sit with Grace. Instead, he remained slumped in his chair. As the drama unfolded I began to find these seating positions quite wrong and disquieting. John really should have sat with Grace.

The play was about a family riven by domestic violence. It was well acted and the jerky camerawork made it grittily real, almost like documentary. But still I felt that the basic premise was overstated. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe a family with such horrors boiling within it could maintain a closed face to the outside world, it was just that these horrors were so relentless.

The husband beat up the wife, beat up the kids, got drunk, sexually abused the kids, raped the wife, assaulted social workers, assaulted police, assaulted probation officers, and all within the space of a week or so. It should have been laughable — this chronically dysfunctional family — but it wasn’t. How could it be remotely entertaining while we all sat in our separate padded places? Each fresh on-screen outrage increased the distance between the three of us, pushing us still further apart. I hunched down in my chair and felt the waistband of my skirt burn across my bloated stomach. I shouldn’t have eaten all that salad — and the underdone garlic bread smelt flat and sour on my own tongue. So flat and sour that the idea even of kissing myself was repulsive, let alone allowing him to taste me.

The on — screen husband, his shirt open, the knot of his tie dragged halfway down his chest, was beating his adolescent daughter with short, powerful clouts around the head. They were standing in her bedroom doorway, and the camera stared fixedly over her shoulder, up the stairs and into the bedroom, where it picked up the corner of a pop poster, pinned to the flowered wallpaper. Each clout was audible as a loud ‘crack!’ in the room where we sat. I felt so remote, from Grace, from John, from the play. . from him.

I stood up and walked unsteadily to the toilet at the end of the corridor. Inside I slid the flimsy bolt into its loop and pushed the loosely stacked pile of magazines away from the toilet bowl. My stomach felt as if it were swelling by the second. My fingers when I put them in my mouth were large and alien. My nails scraped against the sides of my throat. As I leant forward I was aware of myself as a vessel, my curdled contents ready to pour. I looked down into the toilet world and there — as my oatmeal stream splashed down — saw that someone had already done the same. Cut out the nutritional middlewoman, that is.

After I’d finished I wiped around the rim of the toilet with hard scraps of paper. I flushed and then splashed my cheeks with cold water. Walking back down the corridor towards the sitting room, I was conscious only of the ultra-sonic whine of the television; until, that is, I reached the door:

‘Don’t bother.’ (A sob.)

‘Mr Evans.. are you in there?’

‘You don’t want me to touch you?’

‘Go away. Just go away.. ’

‘It’s just that I feel a bit wound up. I get all stressed out during the day — you know that. I need a long time to wind down.’

‘Mr Evans, we have a court order that empowers us to take these children away.’

‘It’s not that — I know it’s not just that. You don’t fancy me any more, you don’t want to have sex any more. You’ve been like this for weeks.’

‘I don’t care if you’ve got the bloody Home Secretary out there. If you come in that door, I swear she gets it!’

‘How do you expect me to feel like sex? Everything around here is so bloody claustrophobic. I can’t stand these little fireside evenings. You sit there all hunched up and fidgety. You bite your nails and smoke away with little puffs. Puff, puff, puff. It’s a total turn-off.’

(Smash!) ‘Oh my God. For Christ’s sake! Oh Jesus.. ‘

‘I bite my nails and smoke because I don’t feel loved, because I feel all alone. I can’t trust you, John, not when you’re like this — you don’t seem to have any feeling for me.’

‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t. I’m certainly fed up with all of this shit. . ‘

I left my bag in the room. I could come back for it tomorrow when John had gone to work. I couldn’t stand to listen — and I didn’t want to go back into the room and sit down with them again, crouch with them, like another vulture in the mouldering carcass of their relationship. I couldn’t bear to see them reassemble the uncommunicative blocks of that static silence. And I didn’t want to sleep in the narrow spare bed, under the child-sized duvet.

I wanted to be back with him. Wanted it the way a junky wants a hit. I yearned to be in that tippy, creaky boat of a bed, full of crumbs and sex and fag ash. I wanted to be framed by the basketry of angular shadows the naked bulb threw on the walls, and contained by the soft basketry of his limbs. At least we felt something for each other. He got right inside me — he really did. All my other relationships were as superficial as a salutation — this evening proved it. It was only with him that I became a real person.

Outside in the street the proportions were all wrong. The block of flats should have been taller than it was long — but it wasn’t. Damp leaves blew against, and clung to my ankles. I’d been sitting in front of the gas fire in the flat and my right-hand side had become numb with the heat. Now this wore off — like a pain — leaving my clammy clothes sticking to my clammy flesh.

I walked for a couple of hundred yards down the hill, then a stitch stabbed into me and I felt little pockets of gas beading my stomach. I was level with a tiny parade of shops which included a cab company. Suddenly I couldn’t face the walk to the tube, the tube itself, the walk back from the tube to his house. If I was going to go back to him I had to be there right away. If I went by tube it would take too long and this marvellous reconciliatory feeling might have soured by the time I arrived. And more to the point there might not be a relationship there for me to go back to. He was a feckless and promiscuous man, insecure and given to the grossest and most evil abuses of trust.

The jealous agony came over me again, covering my flesh like some awful hive. I leant up against a shopfront. The sick image of him entering some other. I could feel it so vividly that it was as if I was him: my penis snagging frustratingly against something. . my blood beating in my temples. . my sweat dripping on to her upturned face. . and then the release of entry. .

I pushed open the door of the minicab office and lurched in. Two squat men stood like bookends on either side of the counter. They were both reading the racing form. The man nearest to me was encased in a tube of caramel leather. He twisted his neckless head as far round as he could. Was it my imagination, or did his eyes probe and pluck at me, run up my thighs and attempt an imaginative penetration, rapid, rigid and metallic. The creak of his leather and the cold fug of damp, dead filter tips, assaulted me together.

‘D’jew want a cab, love?’ The other bookend, the one behind the counter, looked at me with dim-sum eyes, morsels of pupil packaged in fat.

‘Err. . yes, I want to go up to Islington, Barnsbury.’

‘George’ll take yer — woncha, George?’ George was still eyeing me around the midriff. I noticed — quite inconsequentially — that he was wearing very clean, blue trousers, with razor-sharp creases. Also that he had no buttocks — the legs of the trousers zoomed straight up into his jacket.

‘Yerallright. C’mon, love.’ George rattled shut his paper and scooped a packet of Dunhill International and a big bunch of keys off the counter. He opened the door for me and as I passed through I could sense his fat black heart, encased in leather, beating behind me.

He was at the back door of the car before me and ushered me inside. I squidged halfway across the seat before collapsing in a nerveless torpor. But I knew that I wouldn’t make it back to him unless I held myself in a state of no expectancy, no hope. If I dared to picture the two of us together again, then when I arrived at the house he would be out. Out fucking.

We woozed away from the kerb and jounced around the corner. An air freshener shaped like a fir tree dingled and dangled as we took the bends down to Chalk Farm Road. The car was, I noticed, scrupulously clean and poisonous with smoke. George lit another Dunhill and offered me one, which I accepted. In the moulded divider between the two front seats there sat a tin of travel sweets. I could hear them schussing round on their caster-sugar slope as we cornered and cornered and cornered again.

I sucked on the fag and thought determinedly of other things: figure skating; Christmas sales; the way small children have their mittens threaded through the arms of their winter coats on lengths of elastic; Grace. . which was a mistake, because this train of thought was bad magic. Grace’s relationship with John was clearly at an end. It was perverse to realise this, particularly after her display in the café, when she was so secure and self-possessed in the face of my tears and distress. But I could imagine the truth: that the huge crevices in their understanding of each other had been only temporarily papered over by the thrill of having someone in the flat who was in more emotional distress than they. No, there was no doubt about it now, Grace belonged to the league of the self-deceived.

George had put on a tape. The Crusaders — or at any rate some kind of jazz funk, music for glove compartments. I looked at the tightly bunched flesh at the back of his neck. It was malevolent flesh. I was alone in the world really. People tried to understand me, but they completely missed the mark. It was as if they were always looking at me from entirely the wrong angle and mistaking a knee for a bald pate, or an elbow for a breast.

And then I knew that I’d been a fool to get into the cab, the rapistmobile. I looked at George’s hands, where they had pounced on the steering wheel. They were flexing more than they should have been, flexing in anticipation. When he looked at me in the office he had taken me for jailbait, thought I was younger than I am. He just looked at my skirt — not at my sweater; and anyway, my sweater hides my breasts, which are small. He could do it, right enough, because he knew exactly where to go and the other man, the man in the office, would laughingly concoct an alibi for him. And who would believe me anyway? He’d be careful not to leave anything inside me. . and no marks.

We were driving down a long street with warehouses on either side. I didn’t recognise it. The distances between the street lamps were increasing. The car thwacked over some shallow depressions in the road, depressions that offered no resistance. I felt everything sliding towards the inevitable. He used to cuddle me and call me ‘little animal’, ‘little rabbit’. It should happen again, not end like this, in terror, in violation.

Then the sequence of events went awry. I subsided sideways, sobbing, choking. The seat was wide enough for me to curl up on it, which is what I did. The car slid to a halt. ‘Whassermatter, love?’ Oh Jesus, I thought, don’t let him touch me, please don’t let him touch me, he can’t be human. But I knew that he was. ‘C’mon, love, whassermatter?’ My back in its suede jacket was like a carapace. When he penetrated me I’d rather he did it from behind, anything not to have him touch and pry at the soft parts of my front.

The car pulls away once more. Perhaps this place isn’t right for his purposes, he needs somewhere more remote. I’m already under the earth, under the soft earth. . The wet earth will cling to my putrid face when the police find me. . when they put up the loops of yellow tape around my uncovered grave. . and the WPC used to play me when they reconstruct the crime will look nothing like me. . She’ll have coarser features, but bigger breasts and hips. . something not lost on the grieving boyfriend. . Later he’ll take her back to the flat, and fuck her standing up, pushing her ample, smooth bum into the third shelf of books in his main room (some Penguin classics, a couple of old economics text books, my copy of The House of Mirth), with each turgid stroke. .

I hear the door catch through these layers of soft earth. I lunge up, painfully slow, he has me. . and come face to face with a woman. A handsome woman, heavily built, in her late thirties. I relapse back into the car and regard her at crotch level. It’s clear immediately — from the creases in her jeans — that she’s George’s wife.

‘C’mon love, whassermatter?’ I crawl from the car and stagger against her, still choking. I can’t speak, but gesture vaguely towards George, who’s kicking the front wheel of the car, with a steady ‘chok-chok-chok’. ‘What’d ‘e do then? Eh? Did he frighten you or something? You’re a bloody fool, George!’ She slaps him, a roundhouse slap — her arm, travelling ninety degrees level with her shoulder. George still stands, even glummer now, rubbing his cheek.

In terrorist-siege-survivor-mode (me clutching her round the waist with wasted arms) we turn and head across the parking area to the exterior staircase of a block of flats exactly the same as the one I recently left. Behind us comes a Dunhill International, and behind that comes George. On the third floor we pass a woman fumbling for her key in her handbag — she’s small enough to eyeball the lock. My saviour pushes open the door of the next flat along and pulls me in. Still holding me by the shoulder she escorts me along the corridor and into an overheated room.

‘Park yerself there, love.’ She turns, exposing the high, prominent hips of a steer and disappears into another room, from where I hear the clang of aluminium kettle on iron prong. I’m left behind on a great scoop of upholstery — an armchair wide enough for three of me — facing a similarly outsize television screen. The armchair still has on the thick plastic dress of its first commercial communion.

George comes in, dangling his keys, and without looking at me crosses the room purposively. He picks up a doll in Dutch national costume and begins to fiddle under its skirt. ‘Git out of there!’ This from the kitchen. He puts the doll down and exits without looking at me.

‘C’mon, love, stick that in your laugh hole.’ She sets the tea cup and saucer down on a side table. She sits alongside me in a similar elephantine armchair. We might be a couple testing out a new suite in some furniture warehouse. She settles herself, yanking hard at the exposed pink webbing of her bra, where it cuts into her. ‘It’s not the first time this has happened, you know,’ she slurps.’ Not that George would do anything, mind, leastways not in his cab. But he does have this way of. . well, frightening people, I s’pose. He sits there twirling his bloody wheel, not saying anything and somehow girls like you get terrified. Are you feeling better now?’

‘Yes, thanks, really it wasn’t his fault. I’ve been rather upset all day. I had a row with my boyfriend this morning and I had been going to stay at a friend’s, but suddenly I wanted to get home. And I was in the car when it all sort of came down on top of me. .’

‘Where do you live, love?’

‘I’ve got a room in a flat in Kensal Rise, but my boyfriend lives in Barnsbury.’

‘That’s just around the corner from here. When you’ve ‘ad your tea I’ll walk you back.’

‘But what about George — I haven’t even paid him.’

‘Don’t worry about that. He’s gone off now, anyway he could see that you aren’t exactly loaded. . He thinks a lot about money, does George. Wants us to have our own place an’ that. It’s an obsession with him. And he has to get back on call as quickly as he can or he’ll miss a job, and if he misses a job he’s in for a bad night. And if he has a bad night, then it’s me that’s on the receiving end the next day. Not that I hardly ever see him, mind. He works two shifts at the moment. Gets in at three-thirty in the afternoon, has a kip, and goes back out again at eight. On his day off he sleeps. He never sees the kids, doesn’t seem to care about ‘em. . ’

She trails off. In the next room I hear the high aspiration of a child turning in its sleep.

‘D’jew think ‘e’s got some bint somewhere? D’jew think that’s what these double shifts are really about?’

‘Really, I don’t know — ‘

“E’s a dark one. Now, I am a bit too fat to frolic, but I make sure he gets milked every so often. YerknowhatImean? Men are like bulls really, aren’t they? They need to have some of that spunk taken out of them. But I dunno. . Perhaps it’s not enough. He’s out and about, seeing all these skinny little bints, picking them up. . I dunno, what’s the use?’ She lights a cigarette and deposits the match in a free-standing ashtray. Then she starts yanking at the webbing again, where it encases her beneath her pullover. ‘I’d swear there are bloody fleas in this flat. I keep powdering the mutt, but it doesn’t make no difference, does it, yer great ball of dough.’

She pushes a slippered foot against the heaving stomach of a mouldering Alsatian. I haven’t even noticed the dog before now — its fur merges so seamlessly with the shaggy carpet. ‘They say dog fleas can’t live on a human, yer know, but these ones are making a real effort. P’raps they aren’t fleas at all. . P’raps that bastard has given me a dose of the crabs. Got them off some fucking brass, I expect, whad’jew think?’

‘I’ve no idea really — ‘

‘I know it’s the crabs. I’ve even seen one of the fuckers crawling up me pubes. Oh gawd, dunnit make you sick. I’m going to leave the bastard — I am. I’ll go to Berkhamsted to my Mum’s. I’ll go tonight. I’ll wake the kids and go tonight. . ‘

I need to reach out to her, I suppose, I need to make some sort of contact. After all she has helped me — so really I ought to reciprocate. But I’m all inhibited. There’s no point in offering help to anyone if you don’t follow through. There’s no point in implying to anyone the possibility of some fount of unconditional love if you aren’t prepared to follow through. . To do so would be worse than to do nothing. And anyway. . I’m on my way back to sort out my relationship. That has to take priority.

These justifications are running through my mind, each one accompanied by a counter argument, like a sub-title at the opera, or a stock market quotation running along the base of a television screen. Again there’s the soft aspiration from the next room, this time matched, shudderingly, by the vast shelf of tit alongside me. She subsides. Twisted face, foundation cracking, folded into cracking hands. For some reason I think of Atrixo.

She didn’t hear me set down my cup and saucer. She didn’t hear my footfalls. She didn’t hear the door. She just sobbed. And now I’m clear, I’m in the street and I’m walking with confident strides towards his flat. Nothing can touch me now. I’ve survived the cab ride with George — that’s good karma, good magic. It means that I’ll make it back to him and his heartfelt, contrite embrace.

Sometimes — I remember as a child remembers Christmas — we used to drink a bottle of champagne together. Drink half the bottle and then make love, then drink the other half and make love again. It was one of the rituals I remember from the beginning of our relationship, from the springtime of our love. And as I pace on up the hill, more recollections hustle alongside. Funny how when a relationship is starting up you always praise the qualities of your lover to any third party there is to hand, saying, ‘Oh yes, he’s absolutely brilliant at X, Y and Z. . ‘ and sad how that tendency dies so quickly. Dies at about the same time that disrobing in front of one another ceases to be embarrassing. . and perhaps for that reason ceases to be quite so sexy.

Surely it doesn’t have to be this way? Stretching up the hill ahead of me, I begin to see all of my future relationships, bearing me on and up like some escalator of the fleshly. Each step is a man, a man who will penetrate me with his penis and his language, a man who will make a little private place with me, secure from the world, for a month, or a week, or a couple of years.

How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer? I won’t be the same person when I come to lie with that man there, the one with the ginger fuzz on his white stomach; or that one further up there — almost level with the junction of Barnsbury Road — the one with the round head and skull cap of thick, black hair. I’ll be his ‘little rabbit’, or his ‘baby-doll’, or his ‘sex goddess’, but I won’t be me. I can only be me. . with him.

Maybe it isn’t too late? Maybe we can recapture some of what we once had.

I’m passing an off-licence. It’s on the point of closing — I can see a man in a cardigan doing something with some crates towards the back of the shop. I’ll get some champagne. I’ll turn up at his flat with the bottle of champagne, and we’ll do it like we did it before.

I push open the door and venture inside. The atmosphere of the place is acridly reminiscent of George’s minicab office. I cast an eye along the shelves — they are pitifully stocked, just a few cans of lager and some bottles of cheap wine. There’s a cooler in the corner, but all I can see behind the misted glass are a couple of isolated bottles of Asti spumante. It doesn’t look like they’ll have any champagne in this place. It doesn’t look like my magic is going to hold up. I feel the tears welling up in me again, welling up as the offie proprietor treads wearily back along the lino.

‘Yes, can I help you?’

‘I. . oh, well, I. . oh, really. . it doesn’t matter. . ’

‘Ay-up, love, are you all right?’

‘Yes. . I’m sorry. . it's Just. . ‘

He’s a kindly, round ball of a little man, with an implausibly straight toothbrush moustache. Impossible to imagine him as a threat. I’m crying as much with relief — that the offie proprietor is not some cro-magnon — as I am from knowing that I can’t get the champagne now, and that things will be over between me and him.

The offie proprietor has pulled a handkerchief out of his cardigan pocket, but it’s obviously not suitable, so he shoves it back in and picking up a handi-pack of tissues from the rack on the counter, he tears it open and hands one to me, saying, ‘Now there you go, love, give your nose a good blow like, and you’ll feel better.’

‘Thanks.’ I mop myself up for what seems like the nth time today. Who would have thought the old girl had so much salt in her?

‘Now, how can I help you?’

‘Oh, well. . I don’t suppose you have a bottle of champagne?’ It sounds stupid, saying that rich word in this zone of poor business opportunity.

‘Champagne? I don’t get much of a call for that round here.’ His voice is still kindly, he isn’t offended. ‘My customers tend to prefer their wine fortified — if you know what I mean. Still, I remember I did have a bottle out in the store room a while back. I’ll go and see if it’s still there.’

He turns and heads off down the lino again. I stand and look out at the dark street and the swishing cars and the shuddering lorries. He’s gone for quite a while. He must trust me — I think to myself. He’s left me here in the shop with the till and all the booze on the shelves. How ironic that I should find trust here, in this slightest of contexts, and find so little of it in my intimate relationships.

Then I hear footsteps coming from up above, and I am conscious of earnest voices:

‘Haven’t you shut up the shop yet?’

‘I’m just doing it, my love. There’s a young woman down there wanting a bottle of champagne, I just came up to get it.’

‘Champagne! Pshaw! What the bloody hell does she want it for at this time of night?’

‘I dunno. Probably to drink with her boyfriend.’

‘Well, you take her bottle of champagne down to her and then get yourself back up here. I’m not finished talking to you yet.’

‘Yes, my love.’

When he comes back in I do my best to look as if I haven’t overheard anything. He puts the bi-focals that hang from the cord round his neck on to his nose and scrutinises the label on the bottle: ‘Chambertin demi-sec. Looks all right to me — good stuff as I recall.’

‘It looks fine to me.’

‘Good,’ he smiles — a nice smile. ‘I’ll wrap it up for you. . Oh, hang on a minute, there’s no price on it, I’ll have to go and check the stock list.’

‘Brian!’ This comes from upstairs, a great bellow full of imperiousness.

‘Just a minute, my love.’ He tilts his head back and calls up to the ceiling, as if addressing some vengeful goddess, hidden behind the tire-resistant tiles.

‘Now, Brian!’ He gives me a pained smile, takes off his bi-focals and rubs his eyes redder.

‘It’s my wife,’ he says in a stage whisper, ‘she’s a bit poorly. I’ll check on her quickly and get that price for you. I shan’t be a moment.’

He’s gone again. More footsteps, and then Brian’s wife says, ‘I’m not going to wait all night to tell you this, Brian, I’m going to bloody well tell you now — ‘

‘But I’ve a customer — ‘

‘I couldn’t give a monkey’s. I couldn’t care less about your bloody customer. I’ve had it with you, Brian — you make me sick with your stupid little cardigan and your glasses. You’re like some fucking relic — ‘

‘Can’t this wait a minute — ‘

‘No, it bloody can’t. I want you out of here, Brian. It’s my lease and my fucking business. You can sleep in the spare room tonight, but I want you out of here in the morning.’

‘We’ve discussed this before — ‘

‘I know we have. But now I’ve made my decision.’

I take the crumpled bills from my purse. Twenty quid has to be enough for the bottle of Chambertin. I wrap it in a piece of paper and write on it ‘Thanks for the champagne’. Then I pick up the bottle and leave the shop as quietly as I can. They’re still at it upstairs: her voice big and angry; his, small and placatory.

I can see the light in the bedroom when I’m still two hundred yards away from the house. It’s the Anglepoise on the windowsill. He’s put it on so that it will appear like a beacon, drawing me back into his arms.

I let myself in with my key, and go on up the stairs. He’s standing at the top, wearing a black sweater that I gave him and blue jeans. There’s a cigarette trailing from one hand, and a smear of cigarette ash by his nose, which I want to kiss away the minute I see it. He says, ‘What are you doing here, I thought you were going to stay at your place tonight?’

I don’t say anything, but pull the bottle of champagne out from under my jacket, because I know that’ll explain everything and make it all all right.

He advances towards me, down a couple of stairs, and I half-close my eyes, waiting for him to take me in his arms, but instead he holds me by my elbows and looking me in the face says, ‘I think it really would be best if you stayed at your place tonight, I need some time to think things over — ‘

‘But I want to stay with you. I want to be with you. Look, I brought this for us to drink. . for us to drink while we make love.’

‘That’s really sweet of you, but I think after this morning it would be best if we didn’t see one another for a while.’

‘You don’t want me any more — do you? This is the end of our relationship, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you’re saying?’

‘No, I’m not saying that, I just think it would be a good idea if we cooled things down for a while.’

I can’t stand the tone of his voice. He’s talking to me as if I were a child or a crazy person. And he’s looking at me like that as well — as if I might do something mad, like bash his fucking brains out with my bottle of Chambertin derni-sec. ‘I don’t want to cool things down, I want to be with you. I need to be with you. We’re meant to be together — you said that. You said it yourself!’

‘Look, I really feel it would be better if you went now. I’ll call you a cab — ‘

‘I don’t want a cab!’

‘I’ll call you a cab and we can talk about it in the morning — ‘

‘I don’t want to talk about it in the morning, I want to talk about it now. Why won’t you let me stay, why are you trying to get rid of me?’

And then he sort of cracks. He cracks and out of the gaps in his face come these horrible words, these sick, slanderous, revolting words, he isn’t him anymore, because he could never have said such things. He must be possessed.

‘I don’t want you here!’ He begins to shout and pound the wall. ‘Because you’re like some fucking emotional Typhoid Mary. That’s why I don’t want you here. Don’t you under-stand, it’s not just me and you, it’s everywhere you go, everyone you come into contact with. You’ve got some kind of bacillus inside you, a contagion — everything you touch you turn to neurotic ashes with your pick-pick-picking away at the fabric of people’s relationships. That’s why I don’t want you here. Tonight — or any other night!’

Out in the street again — I don’t know how. I don’t know if he said more of these things, or if we fought, or if we fucked. I must have blacked out, blacked out with sheer anguish of it. You think you know someone, you imagine that you are close to them, and then they reveal this slimy pit at their core. . this pit they’ve kept concreted over. Sex is a profound language, all right, and so easy to lie in.

I don’t need him — that’s what I have to tell myself: I don’t need him. But I’m bucking with the sobs and the needing of him is all I can think of. I’m standing in the dark street, rain starting to fall, and every little thing: every gleam of chromium, serration of brick edge, mush of waste paper, thrusts its material integrity in the face of my lost soul.

I’ll go to my therapist. It occurs to me — and tagged behind it is the admonition: why didn’t you think of this earlier, much earlier, it could have saved you a whole day of distress?

Yes, I’ll go to Jill’s house. She always says I should come to her place if I’m in real trouble. She knows how sensitive I am. She knows how much love I need. She’s not like a conventional therapist — all dispassionate and uncaring. She believes in getting involved in her clients’ lives. I’ll go to her now. I need her now more than I ever have.

When I go to see her she doesn’t put me in some garage of a consulting room, some annex of feeling. She lets me into her warm house, the domicile lined with caring. It isn’t so much therapy that Jill gives me, as acceptance. I need to be there now, with all the evidence of her three small children spread about me: the red plastic crates full of soft toys, the finger paintings sellotaped to the fridge, the diminutive coats and jackets hanging from hip-height hooks.

I need to be close to her and also to her husband, Paul. I’ve never met him — of course, but I’m always aware of his after-presence in the house when I attend my sessions. I know that he’s an architect, that he and Jill have been together for fourteen years, and that they too have had their vicissitudes, their comings-together and fallings-apart. How else could Jill have such total sympathy when it comes to the wreckage of my own emotions? Now I need to be within the precincts of their happy cathedral of a relationship again. Jill and Paul’s probity, their mutual relinquishment, their acceptance of one another’s foibles — all of this towers above my desolate plain of abandonment.

It’s OK, I’m going to Jill’s now. I’m going to Jill’s and we’re going to drink hot chocolate and sit up late, talking it all over. And then she’ll let me stay the night at her place — I know she will. And in the morning I’ll start to sort myself out.

Another cab ride, but I’m not concentrating on anything, not noticing anything. I’m intent on the vision I have of Jill opening the front door to her cosy house. Intent on the homely vision of sports equipment loosely stacked in the hall, and the expression of heartfelt concern that suffuses Jill’s face when she sees the state I’m in.

The cab stops and I payoff the driver. I open the front gate and walk up to the house. The door opens and there’s Jill: ‘Oh. . hi. . it’s you.’

‘I’m sorry. . perhaps I should have called?’ This isn’t at all as I imagined it would be — there’s something lurking in her face, something I haven’t seen there before.

‘It’s rather late — ‘

‘I know, it’s just, just that. .’ My voice dies away. I don’t know what to say to her, I expect her to do the talking to lead me in and then lead me on, tease out the awful narrative of my day. But she’s still standing in the doorway, not moving, not asking me in.

‘It’s not altogether convenient. . ’ And I start to cry — I can’t help it, I know I shouldn’t, I know she’ll think I’m being manipulative (and where does this thought come from, I’ve never imagined such a thing before), but I can’t stop myself.

And then there is the comforting arm around my shoulder and she does invite me in, saying, ‘Oh, all right, come into the kitchen and have a cup of chocolate, but you can’t stay for long. I’ll have to order you another mini cab in ten minutes or so.’

‘What’s the matter then? Why are you in such a state?’

The kitchen has a proper grown-up kitchen smell, of wholesome ingredients, well-stocked larders and fully employed wine racks. The lighting is good as well: a bell-bottomed shade pulled well down on to the wooden table, creating an island in the hundred-watt sun.

‘He’s ending our relationship — he didn’t say as much, but I know that that’s what he meant. He called me “an emotional Typhoid Mary”, and all sorts of other stuff. Vile things.’

‘Was this this evening?’

‘Yeah, half an hour ago. I came straight here afterwards, but it’s been going on all day, we had a dreadful fight this morning.’

‘Well,’ she snorts, ‘isn’t that a nice coincidence?’ Her tone isn’t nice at all. There’s a hardness in it, a flat bitterness I’ve never heard before.

‘I’m sorry?’ Her fingers are white against the dark brown of the drinking-chocolate tin, her face is all drawn out of shape. She looks her age — and I’ve never even thought what this might be before now. For me she’s either been a sister or a mother or a friend. Free-floatingly female, not buckled into a strait-jacket of biology.

‘My husband saw fit to inform me that our marriage was over this evening. . oh, about fifteen minutes before you arrived, approximately. .’ Her voice dies away. It doesn’t sound malicious — her tone, that is, but what she’s said is clearly directed at me. But before I can reply she goes on. ‘I suppose there are all sorts of reasons for it. Above and beyond all the normal shit that happens in relationships: the arguments, the Death of Sex, the conflicting priorities, there are other supervening factors.’ She’s regaining her stride now, beginning to talk to me the way she normally does.

‘It seems impossible for men and women to work out their fundamental differences nowadays. Perhaps it’s because of the uncertainty about gender roles, or the sheer stress of modern living, or maybe there’s some still deeper malaise of which we’re not aware.’

‘What do you think it is? I mean — between you and Paul.’ I’ve adopted her tone — and perhaps even her posture. I imagine that if I can coax some of this out of her then things will get back to the way they should be, roles will re-reverse.

‘I’ll tell you what I think it is’ — she looks directly at me for the first time since I arrived — ‘since you ask. I think he could handle the kids, the lack of sleep, the constant money problems, my moods, his moods, the dog shit in the streets and the beggars on the Tube. Oh yes, he was mature enough to cope with all of that. But in the final analysis what he couldn’t bear was the constant stream of neurotics flowing through this house. I think he called it “a babbling brook of self-pity”. Yes, that’s right, that’s what he said. Always good with a turn of phrase is Paul.’

‘And what do you think?’ I asked — not wanting an answer, but not wanting her to stop speaking, for the silence to interpose.

‘I’ll tell you what I think, young lady.’ She gets up and, placing the empty mugs on the draining board, turns to the telephone. She lifts the receiver and says as she dials, ‘I think that the so-called “talking cure” has turned into a talking disease, that’s what I think. Furthermore, I think that given the way things stand this is a fortuitous moment for us to end our relationship too. After all, we may as well make a clean sweep of it. . Oh, hello. I’d like a cab, please. From 27 Argyll Road. . Going to. . Hold on a sec — ‘ She turns to me and asks with peculiar emphasis, ‘Do you know where you’re going to?’