Ordinary Thunderstorms

48

RITA WOKE AND SAW Primo looking at her, his face a foot away on the pillow. She stretched and groaned with semi-conscious pleasure, flinging a leg over his thigh.

“Good morning,” she said. “Hello, there.”

He kissed her gently and she smelt and tasted toothpaste: thoughtful man. She felt his hands on her breasts, then on her back. She reached down and touched his cock, gripped it.

“I’ve got to go to work,” he said. “Nobody’s sorrier than me.”

“I am.”

“Take your time. Just pull the door behind you.”

He kissed her again and slid out of bed, Rita turning to watch him dress. She recalled, in her drowsy, morning-after euphoria, the night before, remembering them sitting on the terrace of the pub looking over the river as the dusk gathered, feeling the almost intolerable anticipation of the lovemaking that she knew was coming. They had chatted about her job, about her family — she had done most of the talking, she realised — their fingers intertwined, kissing from time to time and drinking just a little too much before they bussed back to Stepney and the Oystergate Buildings.

He leant into the doorway of the bedroom.

“I’ll call you,” he said. “I’m on late tonight.”

“Bye, Primo,” she called after him, raising her voice. “Thank you!”

She heard the front door close and then a minute later the distant popping noise of his scooter starting. She turned over, wondering whether she should doze off again. It was a kind of bliss she was experiencing, she realised, and she thought that if she went back to sleep she might not wake again for hours.

So she washed her face and dressed, made herself a cup of coffee in the small kitchen and then ate some buttered toast, speculating — could she live here in Stepney with Primo?…Then she mocked herself — slow down, girl, don’t let your heart run away with you, you barely know him.

Which was true, she thought, as she wandered around the small flat, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter with him, for some reason. She stood in the living room — it was as if he had moved in yesterday. There was a bed, a TV, a black leather sofa. He seemed to keep his few clothes in cardboard boxes: some shirts, a sweater, a suit, a pair of jeans and some trainers. Another box contained underwear and socks. The flat was clean, the kitchen barely stocked — a few tins, a pint of milk, cornflakes. It was a place that could be abandoned in minutes, she thought: no books, no pictures on the wall, no ornaments, no mementoes, none of the personal detritus that someone accumulates in life without even trying. What sense of Primo Belem, she wondered, would you retrieve from these four rooms?

In the sitting room there was another cardboard box, full of newspaper clippings, printouts and, the first thing that came to hand, some kind of advertisement for a drug company. She felt a little guilty sifting through these papers but then again he was the one who had left her the run of his flat — he must have suspected some casual snooping would take place. She riffled through the documents in the box — they all seemed to be about medical matters, and there was a glossy brochure for a pharmaceutical company, Calenture-Deutz — the name seemed familiar, somehow. All to do with his hospital work, she supposed, and put everything back as carefully as she could. She glanced around the flat again, spotting a small picture that she had missed, propped behind a chopping board — an image cut from a magazine: a congregation of oddly shaped clouds in a blue sky over some parched desert landscape. In the middle of this mountain range rose some kind of obelisk. She looked closer — no, it was a building, a thin skyscraper in the middle of a desert. What was left of the caption said, “The world’s largest, tallest cloud chamber. Part of the western campus of—” The scissoring had removed the rest of the words. She put it back carefully. Take him as you find him, she said to herself — you like him, he likes you, end of story.

She closed the door behind her. Primo Belem was either a man who had nothing to hide or a man who had everything to hide. She was in no hurry to find out what category he fell into.

♦

It turned out to be one of those hazy days on the river, with a layer of thin, high clouds partially screening the sun, turning the light thick and golden, blurring the hard edges of buildings, making the trees on the Chelsea shore seem dreamily out of focus. Rita stood on the deck of the Bellerophon watering her plants, thinking back to the previous night, remembering and registering that they had made love three times — a record for her — and wondering when they had fallen asleep. Four o’clock? Later? Not surprising that she felt so tired, as if she’d been in the gym for some endless workout.

“So why have you got a stupid smile on your face?”

She turned round to see her father step stiffly on to the foredeck. He seemed to be walking more easily today — or else he’d forgotten he was meant to be using a crutch.

She said nothing, just smiled more broadly.

“Enjoy yourself last night?”

“Yes,” she said. “I had a nice time.”

“Off with your Italian porter.”

“As it happens.”

He began to roll himself a cigarette.

“He doesn’t look Italian to me.”

“He’s a third-generation immigrant. You don’t look English to me, come to think of it.” She turned off the tap and coiled her hose neatly beneath it, ship-shape.

“Dad,” she said, thinking, as she uttered the words, that this was becoming ridiculous, “what would you say if I moved out?”

“About bloody time.”