Two

Mountains in Paddington

On the tube Glade fell asleep, as usual. She had worked six shifts that week, including a double shift the day before, so perhaps it was no wonder she was tired. When she first left art school she had waited tables at a café in Portobello Road, but then, six months later, she had got a job at a small but fashionable restaurant in Soho, and she had been there ever since. She liked the place as soon as she walked in; though it looked formal — the starched white tablecloths, the low lighting, the slightly malicious gleam of cutlery — it didn’t feel tense. The hours were longer, of course, and she had to travel further, but she earned good money, never less than two hundred pounds a week including tips — and anyway, what else would she have done?

She woke as the tube was slowing down. Her head felt numb and foggy. Turning round, she peered out of the window. The line had climbed into the daylight, though the towering embankment walls and cantilevered walkways of the station made a gloom of it, an underworld of gravel, weeds and shadows. Paddington. Four stops to go. As the tube clattered on, she glimpsed a stretch of barren land to the north, beneath the blunt, pale pillars of the Westway. This was a place she often thought about — a kind of sacred ground.

Four years before, on her nineteenth birthday, she had invited some people to her room on Shirland Road, which was where she lived at the time. They drank Lambrusco out of plastic glasses and then, at midnight, she opened the door to her wardrobe and reached inside. The rocket she drew from the darkness behind her clothes was almost as tall as she was, the blond stick slotting into a heavy blue cylinder that had a pointed scarlet top to it. It had cost eight pounds, and she had kept it hidden in the wardrobe since November.

That night they walked down Shirland Road, talking and laughing and smoking cigarettes, three or four girls from art school, and Charlie Moore, who was Glade’s closest friend. The girls were wary of Charlie, she remembered, one of them whispering about his hair, how it looked like stuffing from a sofa, another wondering why he hardly ever spoke. Shirland Road opened into Warwick Avenue, Glade leading the way. Warwick Avenue — so wide and spacious suddenly, with that church at one end, like a ship, somehow; she always imagined sea in front of it instead of road. Sometimes she sat outside the pub and drank a half of cider or Guinness, and she watched the church sail right past her, white spray breaking over the high porch, soaking the dull brick walls. On that night, though, the moon was almost full and in the aluminium light the church looked as if it had been moored, it looked anchored, and they walked on, past the grand houses, shadows draped over the cream façades like black lace shawls. Something seemed to snatch at her when she stared in through those windows, their curtains tied back with silk cords and their lights switched on, the edges of amber lampshades intricate with tasselled fringes, and deeper into the rooms, gold mirrors over fireplaces, sofas, Chinese vases. Something seemed to snatch at her insides and twist. Then one of the girls touched her elbow, asked where they were going.

‘The mountain,’ she said.

She ran over the main road and, climbing through a fence of corrugated iron and barbed wire, slid down a bank of grass and rubble on to the flat land behind Paddington Station. The noise down there surprised her. The rush of traffic from the Westway overhead, the strange mingled hiss and whine as trains leaving the station gathered speed. She stood at the foot of the mountain and looked up. Mud, as she had always thought. By now the others had caught up with her, Charlie at her shoulder, the corner of his mouth puckered, slightly crooked, perhaps because he had guessed what she had in mind. One of the girls had torn her skirt. She was laughing, her mouth stretched wide, her pale sixties lipstick almost phosphorescent in the half-light. Glade explained her plan. They had to climb the mountain, all of them. It was from there that she was going to let the firework off.

At the top and panting, out of breath, she felt much closer to the sky, as though she could reach up and touch it, the mass of brown cloud that covered London, tawdry and crumpled as jumble-sale velvet. She could see a train stumbling like a drunk in the maze of tracks outside the station, only the windows visible, a murky row of yellow squares. Each square had faces in it, looking out, going home, and she thought of her father, who lived in a caravan in Lancashire, her father’s face in that single melancholy window, one yellow square in the darkness of a field. She bent down. Pushing her hair behind her shoulder, she worked the tail of the rocket into the mud until it stood up on its own. She asked if anyone had matches. Charlie handed her a battered Zippo lighter. She snapped the lid back, thumbed the flint and held the trembling flame against the touchpaper. For a moment nothing happened. Then it caught. At first it burned modestly, innocently, as if it was just ordinary paper and would soon falter, die out, crumble into harmless ash. The flame had an odd greenish halo, though. Somebody yelled at her. Get down.

She crouched, arms round her knees. And suddenly it went. The noise reminded her of the moment when you take a plaster off a wound — a rasp, a tearing sound, a gasp ripped from the air. It burned a bright-orange line into the darkness, curving high into the soft, brown London sky, rising, always rising, and burst somewhere over Westbourne Grove, the explosion bouncing off the houses behind the station, off the Westway’s fluted buttresses, and then a spray of red and green and gold that seemed half a city wide, rushing towards her, drawing her in.

Her best birthday ever.

The tube staggered, then stopped. Westbourne Park.

You used to be able to see the mountain from Harrow Road if you were heading west, just after the timber yard and just before you dipped down into the underpass. You could see it from the tube too, if you were travelling on the Hammersmith & City Line, as she was now. It was about the height of a four-storey house, and the ground all round it had been levelled. A few bricks lay about, a few broken bottles. Weeds flourished at the foot of the mountain in the summer, those city weeds, bright-yellow flowers on coarse, grey-green stalks. In winter, when it rained, the steep flanks of the mountain glistened, and puddles hid the bricks and bottles at its base. She would never forget how beautiful and unlikely it had looked one February, when it seemed, for a few days, to imitate Mount Fuji, its perfect summit covered with a light dusting of snow.

Four beige tower-blocks, a pub called The Pig and Whistle. Latimer Road at last. She rose from her seat, almost losing her balance as the tube lurched to a sudden standstill. A bored guard yawned on the platform, his teeth bared fiercely in the pale autumn sunlight. She stepped past him, the tube doors grinding shut behind her. Down one flight of spit-stained stairs and out on to the street. She stood still for a moment, taking in the cool grey air, the peaceful rush of traffic, a black man relaxing in a strangely buxom maroon armchair on the pavement outside the mini-cab office.

Walking north, she remembered the night the mountain disappeared — or, rather, the night she noticed it had gone. One of her fellow waiters, Hector, had given her a lift home on his motor bike. As they turned left off Edgware Road and raced towards the roundabout, she realised they would have to pass the mountain and she prepared herself, as always, a smile held just inside her mouth. But when they leaned into the bend and she looked down, there was nothing there. She must have flinched, or perhaps she had even cried out, because Hector braked slightly, thinking there was something wrong. Shouting into the wind, she asked him if he could take a left at the lights, go round again. The second time they passed the place, she was struck by how normal it looked — more normal than it had ever looked before, in fact. The wasteground, the railway tracks. Part of a canal.

Later that night, in her bedroom, she had opened her A-Z and studied the area of white space between Bishop’s Bridge Road and the blue-and-white stripe of the Westway. She could find no tiny triangle to indicate the presence of a mountain, no number to let you know how high it was. She sat back, thinking about the space and how its whiteness was a kind of lie. She thought of spies, and how they learn to empty their faces. The mountain was a secret the world refused to share with her. Soon it would become hard to believe it had ever existed. But these were the very things you had to cling to in the face of everything, the things that vanished without warning, without trace, as if they had never been.

She passed the school and then turned right, into a street of red-brick houses. If people ever asked her where she lived, she always said Wormwood Scrubs (though Sally James, her flat-mate, claimed they lived in Ladbroke Grove). She liked the name. Also, she felt an affinity with that bleak area of grass and swings and men out walking dogs, the sky too big, somehow, with patches of white showing through the insipid greys and pale-blues, like an unfinished water-colour. She felt she understood it better than Ladbroke Grove, with its pink neon video boutiques and its fast cars shuddering with music.

When she reached her house, she stopped by the gate and looked up at her bedroom, a small bay window on the first floor. A face stared down from the gap between the curtains. This was Giacometti, her cat. The name was supposed to be ironic: as a white, long-haired Persian, he had nothing in common with the stick figures Giacometti was famous for — though, curiously enough, beneath his soft exterior, there lurked a disposition that was both brittle and perverse.

She unlocked the front door and, closing it behind her, climbed the stairs. She found Sally sitting in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. A saucepan of water heated gently on the stove. The kettle stood beside it, steam still rising from the spout.

‘I had a shit day,’ Sally said.

Glade poured hot water into a cup, dropped a herbal tea-bag into it and took it over to the table.

‘Shit,’ Sally said, ‘from start to finish.’ She sharpened the end of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. ‘Temping,’ she said. ‘I fucking hate it.’ She stared at Glade until Glade began to feel like something in a shop window. ‘You’re really lucky, you know that?’

Glade reached up and trained one strand of her long hair behind her ear. Then she simply, and rather nervously, laughed.

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Sally said. ‘I really don’t.’

‘Do what?’ Glade said.

‘I don’t know. The way everything works out for you. That job in the restaurant, for instance …’

Glade waited.

‘And a boyfriend,’ Sally went on quickly, ‘in Miami.’ She smiled bitterly and shook her head.

Glade looked down into her cup. She had been going out with Tom for two years — if you could say ‘going out with’ about somebody you hardly ever saw. It wasn’t Tom’s fault that he lived in America. He was American. But still. If you added up the amount of time they had actually spent together, what would it have come to? A month? Six weeks? She rolled the little paper tag on her tea-bag into a cylinder, rolled it until it was so tight that there was no air left in the middle, nothing you could see through.

‘He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?’ Sally said.

Glade nodded. ‘I’m not sure what kind exactly.’

‘That’s what I mean, you see? You’re so vague, so wrapped up, in yourself. You don’t even try — and yet you end up with someone,’ and Sally paused, ‘someone like that …’

The water had boiled. Sally sighed and, rising from the table, seemed to fling herself across the room. Glade was reminded of old war films: planes that had benches along the walls instead of seats, tense men with parachutes — and then that moment when they have to hurl themselves through an open doorway and there’s nothing there, just black sky, roaring air. She watched Sally drop four pieces of broccoli into the saucepan. During the last week Sally had started eating broccoli. On its own.

‘It must be wonderful, though,’ Sally said over her shoulder, ‘being flown out to Miami for the weekend.’ Her voice was softer now, more buttery. ‘I mean, being flown.’

It didn’t seem particularly wonderful to Glade, it was just what happened. Sometimes Tom flew to London and they would stay in five-star hotels in the West End, or there was a place with a strange short name in Knightsbridge that he liked (and one weekend, when Sally was away, he had stayed at the flat; ‘slumming’, as he called it), but mostly, it was true, Tom flew her to Miami. He would ask his personal assistant to post the ticket to her or, if it was last-minute, which was often the case, she would pick the ticket up at the airport. If anything was wonderful, that was — walking up to the sales desk, TWA or Virgin or Pan-Am, and saying, ‘I’m Glade Spencer. There’s a ticket waiting for me.’ At the other end, in Florida, a man would be holding a placard with her name on it. He would take her case and lead her to a limousine parked outside (once — the first time — Tom had filled the back of the car with flowers), then drive her to Tom’s apartment in South Beach. They would go to restaurants and parties, houses with swimming-pools. She sat in the shade in charity-shop sunglasses and hats with crumpled brims, and American girls walked past in clothes that always looked too new, somehow, the way clothes in costume dramas look, and an unusual but not unpleasant sense of displacement would come over her, the feeling that the present was not the present at all, that it was actually a recreation of a period in history; she would feel artificial suddenly, self-conscious, as if she was acting. And there Tom would be, standing in the sunlight with a cocktail. She’s so London, isn’t she, he would say, and a peculiar half-proud, half-mocking look would float on to his face. But it wasn’t often all this happened.

Glade sipped her tea, which was almost cold. ‘We don’t see each other much,’ she said. ‘Hardly ever, really.’

That was why she had bought Giacometti — for company. If she was out, he would wait at the window, his face expressionless and round, not unlike an owl’s. At night he slept on her bed. Sometimes, when she woke in the dark, he would be sitting beside her, staring down, his yellow eyes unblinking, one of his paws resting in the palm of her hand.

‘It must be three months since I saw him.’ Raising her head, she realised that, finally, she had said something that made Sally feel better.

Sally had been going out with someone, but only for the past two weeks. He had a complexion that reminded Glade of balsa wood. If you pressed his forehead, it would leave a dent. Or you could snap his ears off. Snap, snap. What was his name? Oh yes. Hugh. A word that looked odd if you wrote it down. Like a noise. Hugh.

She watched Sally lift the saucepan off the stove and take it over to the sink. As the broccoli tumbled clumsily into a colander, the phone began to ring.

‘Could you answer that?’ Sally said. ‘It’s probably for you, anyway.’

Glade walked out into the corridor and picked up the phone. For a moment the line sounded empty, dead. Then she heard a click.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Glade? It’s your dad.’

‘Do you want me to call you back?’

‘No, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some coins.’

He didn’t ring often. It was difficult for him because he didn’t have a phone of his own. If he wanted to call her, he had to walk to the nearest phone-box, which was one and a half miles down the road. Three miles there and back, and sometimes it was out of order. Glade always felt guilty when she heard his voice.

‘Are you still coming up to see me?’ he said.

‘I’m going to try and come next weekend.’

‘On Friday?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I won’t be there till late.’

‘Not too late?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll cook.’ His sudden enthusiasm touched her, saddened her. It took so little to excite him. She saw him standing in the dim light of the phone-box, his head bent, his shoulders hunched, and darkness all around him, darkness for miles.

Sally looked up from her empty plate when Glade walked back into the kitchen. ‘I’m going to a party tonight. You don’t want to come, do you?’

Glade hesitated. ‘I think I’ll stay here.’

‘It’s all right for some,’ Sally said.

That night Glade cried herself to sleep. She had built a fire in the grate, but it stubbornly refused to burn. The few small flames seemed unconvincing, leaping towards the chimney, then falling back, shrinking, dying out. Sometimes, while she was crying, she thought of Tom, though she didn’t necessarily connect the one thing with the other.

Lancashire Flamenco

The window of her father’s caravan showed through the darkness, one block of blurred light at the far end of the field. Though Glade had promised she would not be late, it was already after nine o’clock. It had been raining for most of the day, the bus moving sluggishly along the motorway as if wading through tall grass. After Birmingham the clouds had thinned a little, and she had watched a patch of pale-blue appear — that pure washed colour you sometimes see in the sky after a downpour. Further north, though, the rain had come down again, whipping at the surface of the land until it seemed to cower. The journey had taken more than seven hours.

Walking in the dark without a torch, she had the feeling she was dropping through the air, a kind of vertigo. She felt she might crash through that yellow window, land on the frayed scrap of carpet in a sprinkling of glass. Standing still for a moment, she looked around. A raw night, no moon. She thought she could smell the smooth wooden handles of farm tools. Probably she was just imagining it. She walked on. The sodden ground winced and flinched beneath her feet. By the time she reached the caravan, her shoes were soaked.

The door creaked open. Light spilled into the field.

‘Glade? Is that you?’

Her father stood in the doorway, a stooping, uncertain shape, his white hair oddly lopsided. She supposed he must have slept on it, but from below he looked like a king whose crown was being worn askew and might, at any moment, slip right off his head. A wisp of steam lifted from the wooden spoon he was holding in one hand.

‘Hello,’ she said.

They embraced awkwardly, Glade reaching up from the bottom step, her father bending down, their bodies forming a precarious arch.

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a casserole.’ He stood back, looking gleeful, but sheepish too; he might have been confessing to a crime — something minor, though, like tearing up a parking ticket.

Philip Spencer had gone strange. Everyone said so. It started when his wife — Glade’s mother — ran off with an estate agent, a man eleven years her junior. The change in her father was sudden and profound. The week after the divorce he bought a caravan, hitched it to the back of his saloon car and drove out of Norfolk, which was where the family had always lived, leaving the house empty and the bills unpaid. He did not return. Once, about three months later, he passed through London on his way to the South-West. Glade was staying with his sister that winter, in a quiet area near Parliament Hill. Though he ate dinner in the flat with them, he insisted on sleeping in his caravan, which he had parked on the street outside. That night he fell out of bed. When he stood up, half-asleep, not knowing where he was, it seemed to him that the floor was tilting. He thought he must be dreaming. In the morning, though, the floor still tilted. It turned out that somebody had slashed one of his tyres. It was the first of many adventures. For the next two years he travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles, always sleeping in his caravan, which he had christened the Titanic in honour of that night in London. He sent Glade postcards from Ben Nevis, Lake Coniston, Penzance. Then, halfway through her final year at art college, he called her from a phone-box somewhere in Lancashire. It’s time for me to put down roots, he told her. He had towed his caravan into a field and replaced the wheels with piles of bricks. He had sold his car. The man who owned the land, a farmer by the name of Babb, was only charging him a few pounds a week. His overheads were low — so low, in fact, that he could easily live off his pension. From now on, he would lead a simple life. Babb kept himself to himself, and so, her father said, would he.

Glade pulled her shoes off and stood them by the door. She sat at the narrow formica table in the galley while her father peered down into his casserole and stirred it with the wooden spoon.

‘How long can you stay?’ he asked.

‘Only till Sunday. I’ve got a double shift on Monday.’

He nodded. ‘This waitressing, are you enjoying it?’

‘Sort of, yes.’

‘It’s good you don’t commit yourself to anything just yet,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of time for that.’ He stopped stirring and stared at the wall above the stove. ‘I learned the hard way.’

She watched him for a moment, puzzled, but he chose not to elaborate. She looked around. Every object in the caravan seemed to be covered with a fine coating of dust; it was as if all the things he owned had furry skins, like peaches. She hadn’t visited since June, she realised, and it was now October.

‘Like a drink?’ Her father was standing in front of an open cupboard, looking at her sideways. ‘I’ve got some wine.’ He held it up. Valpolicella. ‘Not very good, I’m afraid.’ He put the wine on the table and reached into the cupboard again. A self-conscious, crafty look appeared on his face. ‘A drop of whisky?’ He showed her a bottle of Teacher’s.

‘I think I’ll have some wine,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Some whisky for me.’

He could only find one glass, which he gave to her. It had the word BLACKPOOL written on it in red block capitals and, above that, a picture of a tower etched in black.

‘Spent a week there once,’ he said mistily. ‘Nice people.’

He poured an inch or two of whisky into a blue-and-white hooped mug, then touched the mug against her glass and drank. When he put the mug down he sighed theatrically like someone in an advert or a film.

‘How was the journey?’

‘OK.’ Glade sipped her wine. It was cold and sour, and tasted of blackcurrant.

‘No trouble getting here?’

‘I caught a bus from the station. Then I hitched.’

He thought about that, and then he nodded. He lifted the lid on the casserole again, the way somebody might light a cigarette — for something to do. Steam rose in a thick column, mushroomed against the roof.

‘There’s lamb in this,’ he said, and smiled at her.

The smile was so quick, she almost missed it. He didn’t seem to know whether or not he should be smiling. Whether he had the right. Whether he should dare.

When Glade travelled back to London on Sunday afternoon she had a hangover, her first in months. The headache seemed inflicted on her from the outside, as if someone had fastened a ring of wire round her left eye and was gradually tightening it. She had drunk whisky with her father the night before, whisky on top of wine. And now the oddly cushioned motion of the bus. It was overheated too; stale air lodged in her throat and would not shift. She slept for half an hour, but felt no better when she woke.

Your mother wrote to me.

Her father’s voice. Her mother, Janet, had written him a letter — from Spain, of all places. He showed Glade the envelope to prove it. ‘España,’ he said, and shook his head in a display of wonderment. Then he touched the stamps and said, ‘Pesetas.’ The estate agent owned a flat on the Costa del Sol, apparently, and they were thinking of living there all year round.

‘I don’t blame them, do you? The sunshine, the maracas …’

Her father’s mouth gaped wide, and she could see the teeth perched high up in the dark like bats in a cave. His laughter had a strained, wild sound. It was the laughter of a man unused to company, a man who could no longer see himself in the mirror of another person’s face.

‘It’s castanets, isn’t it?’ she said.

Her father thinking, his eyes lifting to the ceiling.

‘Perhaps you’re right.’

He handled the envelope the way a conjuror might handle a pack of cards, only in her father’s case she knew there was no point waiting for a trick. He just turned it and turned it, trying to see it from a new angle, hoping to learn more. He had the hapless, artificial grin of someone who’s been told a joke he doesn’t understand.

‘Sometimes I think it was the best thing. You know, her going.’ He placed the envelope on the table — deliberately, as if he’d been asked to put it down. He couldn’t stop looking at it, though. ‘Sometimes it surprises me that we were together in the first place.’

He eyed her expectantly. Yes, he wanted her to say, I know what you mean. It always surprised me too. Instead, she looked past him, out of the window. Light from the caravan fell on part of the tall hedge that separated the farmer’s garden from his land. The leaves were small and glossy, the shape of fingernails. She could feel cold air reaching through a gap in the wall, pushing against her face.

‘España,’ her father said again, his eyes unnaturally bright, almost glittering, as if they had been given a coat of varnish.

She didn’t understand why he seemed so excited.

The bus swayed through the draughty darkness. Sunday evening. She leaned her forehead against the window, the glass shuddering, and faintly greasy. The lights of unknown houses, unknown towns. She thought of her father stretched out on his narrow bed, the curtains drawn, the field quiet and still. At least the caravan would be clean tonight. She’d spent most of Saturday with a damp cloth in her hand, wiping the fuzz of dust off everything she saw. She’d washed all the kitchen surfaces — the shelves, the cooker, the inside of the fridge. She’d swept the floor as well, pushing rolls of fluff out through the door and down into the field, where they lay looking odd, astonished, the way snow would look if you saw it in a library or on a plane. While she was cleaning, her father mended the table he’d broken the night before, his hands moving tenderly over the formica and the wood, as if they were bruised. He kneeled on the carpet with his tool-box, hair swirling on the crown of his head like a nest, an oblong plaster taped over one eyebrow. She liked being with him most when they both had something to do. Then he didn’t try so hard. She could talk if she felt like it. Or she could let her mind drift. There was none of the usual pressure on her to think of things to say. She imagined he’d be eating beans on toast for supper. A little whisky in his blue-and-white hooped mug. She hoped he found a radio programme to listen to — an opera, or a play. She hoped he didn’t feel too lonely.

At Edgware Road she had to change from the Circle Line to the Hammersmith & City. Pale men stood on the platform in raincoats; one of them stared at her sideways, his eyes urgent, strangely shiny. She could smell ashes and burnt rubber. The clock on the wall said ten to nine. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so tired.

The train came at last. She stepped into the nearest carriage and sat down. A black girl in wrinkled leather trousers was playing the guitar. Everyone ignored her, pretending to be fascinated by something high up or low down; the dread Glade saw on their faces seemed out of all proportion to the threat. She gave the girl a pound coin, which was more than she could afford, and the girl smiled at her in the gap between two lines of a song. When the girl left the tube at Ladbroke Grove, Glade followed her. Down the gritty steps and out into the street. The girl slung her guitar over her shoulder, then stepped on to the zebra crossing. Glade noticed how she lifted one hand at hip-level to thank the car that stopped for her. On the far side of the road, the girl glanced round. Saw Glade watching her. She gave Glade another smile, broader this time, quicker, and then walked on, taking a right turn into Cambridge Gardens.

Glade turned left, away from Ladbroke Grove, the girl’s smile staying with her as she hurried home. When she unlocked the front door, though, a chill settled on her skin. She called Sally’s name. The word hung in the damp, slightly sticky air; for a moment she felt as if everybody in the world had disappeared except for her. She climbed the stairs, dropping her coat and backpack on the floor. In the bathroom she turned on the taps. While the bath was running, she looked for Giacometti. He was sprawled full-length on her white bed, his huge yellow eyes half-open, the one flaw in his camouflage.

She undressed and wrapped a towel round her, then walked back down the corridor to the bathroom. She lay in the hot water for half an hour, not thinking of anything. By ten o’clock, she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of raspberry tea. It was so quiet, she could hear the fridge change gear. If Sally had been in the room, she would have turned the radio on. Sally always said that silence was depressing.

On Saturday night, when they had drunk half the whisky in the bottle, her father had put some music on. It was the first time he’d ever done anything like that, and Glade felt faintly uneasy. He must have noticed the look on her face because he said, ‘Saturday night,’ and then he grinned and lifted his arms away from his sides, his way of signalling that he couldn’t help it, there was nothing he could do.

He bent close to his battered ghetto-blaster and pushed a tape into the slot. ‘Something new I found,’ he said. ‘Something to cheer us up.’

She asked him what it was.

‘Flamenco.’

He looked at her as if she ought to understand, as if this was something a father and daughter might be expected to have in common. She’d heard the word before, of course, but she had no idea what the music would sound like.

Then it began. An acoustic guitar played very fast, a kind of frantic, rhythmic strumming that was difficult to listen to. She felt as if the inside of her head was made of knitted fabric and somebody with nimble fingers was trying to unravel it. She wondered what flamenco meant in Spanish.

‘Do you like it?’

She twisted her face to one side. ‘Kind of.’

‘You can dance to it. Look.’

And he started to dance. Her father. His arms up near his head. Like candlesticks, she thought. Or antlers. His fingers snapped and clicked in the air beside his ears. She stared at his feet as they stamped on the floor, stamped in time to the guitar.

‘If you were a proper audience,’ he panted, ‘if you were a flamenco audience, you’d be clapping now.’

Clapping? She gazed at him anxiously, confused.

Then he must have slipped on something or tripped over because he toppled sideways suddenly and his elbow caught the edge of the formica table, which splintered loudly, almost happily, and then detached itself from the side-wall of the caravan, bringing their dinner plates with it, the bottle of tomato ketchup, three small cactuses in plastic pots, the radio and a jam-jar bristling with pens. He sat on the floor, blood trickling crookedly from a cut just above his eyebrow.

‘Dad?’

‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’ Eyes almost shut, he shook his head. ‘Those Spaniards,’ he said. ‘They must really get through the furniture.’

That laugh again, high-pitched and wild.

She put an arm round him and helped him struggle to his feet. She thought of deckchairs, how you have to arrange the pieces of wood and cloth in the right shape, otherwise they won’t stand up. Under the whisky her father had a strong vegetable smell. Like tins of soup when you first open them. Before they’re cooked.

He leaned against the wall for a moment, gathering himself, then reached awkwardly into his pocket and pulled out a soiled handkerchief. Each time he dabbed at the blood, he held the handkerchief at arm’s length and studied it. Finally, when the bleeding had slowed down, he turned to her and said he thought a breath of air might do him good.

Outside, they stood on rough clumps of grass and looked up into the sky. A dark night: the moon in hiding, stars masked by clouds that shifted in great pale slabs like fields of ice. The wind lifted Glade’s hair away from her neck, then let it fall back into place. Then lifted it again. After a while she glanced sideways at her father. He was still staring up into the sky, staring hard, as if he believed there was something there to be discovered or received. And, all the time, that Spanish music playing …

‘Not famous for its flamenco, Lancashire,’ he said at last.

Then, shivering a little, they both went back inside.

From the table by the kitchen window Glade watched planes sliding diagonally across the London sky. At night you could easily believe they were just arrangements of lights, optical effects. It seemed strange to think there were hundreds of people up there.

Her raspberry tea stood at her elbow, going cold.

After a while she realised that her focus must have altered because she was no longer aware of the planes. Instead, she could see herself, a reflection in the dim mirror of the glass. Her long blonde hair, her ghostly skin. She noticed her right ear. It stuck out more than the left one, as though she was listening harder on that side of her head. According to her father, she had slept on it when she was young.

Her father.

She wondered what it was like with just a radio for company and nobody except the farmer for at least a mile around. The darkness, the cold. The brown owls swooping through the field. She didn’t mind sleeping in the caravan, though sometimes the walls seemed a bit too thin. They offered no protection. In a caravan your dreams could frighten you.

During the weekend she’d had a nightmare. She must have cried out because, when she opened her eyes, her father was standing above her in his pyjamas. He was holding a candle. Behind his back, his shadow pranced and capered, mocking him. If he turned round, she thought, it would have to stop.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘It was just a dream.’

He reached down, touched her hair. She could feel his hand shaking slightly, tremors underneath the skin, an earthquake taking place inside his body.

‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

‘You didn’t wake me. I was already awake.’ He took his hand away. ‘I miss her, Glade.’

In the candle-light his face was all black hollows and odd polished places. He seemed to be gazing into the far corner of the caravan. Not seeing it, somehow. Not seeing anything. She didn’t know what to say to him. She’d never been much good at comforting people; when they cried in front of her, she usually just stared at them.

‘It’s lovely that you’re here, though. It’s probably why I’m being like this.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

He held her head against his chest for a moment and, just then, he smelled like her father again, not the stranger she had smelled an hour or two before.

‘Oh Glade, what happened?’

Her head against his chest. His heart beating fast.

‘What happened?’

The next day, when she said goodbye to him, he held her tight and spoke into her hair, making her promise to visit him again before too long. With her thin arms circling his waist and her head turned sideways, she seemed, from a distance, to be holding him together. She could see beech trees at the edge of the field, their branches webbed with mist. One bird called from somewhere behind her, its song thin and wistful in the morning air. She felt his reluctance to let her go.

He waved as she walked away across the grass and he was still waving when she reached the five-bar gate at the bottom of the field — though, by then, his face had shrunk to almost nothing, becoming featureless and pale, the colour of a fruit or vegetable when it’s been peeled, when it has lost its skin.

Spaces

That winter the weather stayed cold, the sky over London opaque and grey; the trees looked scratchy, a tangle of random pencil marks, like the pictures children bring home from school. March came, and nothing changed. If you had asked Glade what she had been doing, she would probably have shrugged and said, ‘Not much.’ She was still working at the restaurant — in fact, she was working harder than ever: Hector had broken his leg in a motor-bike accident, and she had agreed to cover for him. Once or twice, during those months, she dreamed about the mountain in Paddington, her dreams set in the past, among people she no longer knew. Then, on her birthday, Charlie Moore gave her an old black-and-white print of Mount Fuji. Things seemed to be accumulating, fitting together. Like evidence. For the first time in almost eighteen months she began to draw. The subject was always the same: the mountain, the wasteground. Some of her efforts were openly nostalgic, simple recreations of a reality that had once delighted her. Others were less emotional, more abstract — compositions that depended on the careful balancing of triangles and straight lines. In the afternoons, during the gap between shifts, you could often find her sitting in a café on Old Compton Street with her head bent over a sketch-book. When she got home at two or three in the morning she would carry on, sometimes until dawn, her red curtains closed against the daylight. The drawings didn’t satisfy her, though. She felt there was something missing. She didn’t know quite what it was.

One night in early April she was woken by the sound of the phone ringing in the corridor outside her room. The fire she had lit earlier had burned low. In the window she could see pale clouds floating past the rooftops of the houses opposite. She looked at the clock. 2:05. Only one person she knew would call this late. Three thousand miles away, in Miami, Tom would have just returned from work. Her heart seemed to drop inside her body and then bounce. She remembered the first time she met him, on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute, in Venice. The same feeling then. He had asked if she could take his photograph. His hands as he explained the workings of the camera. His voice. An hour later, on a vaporetto, he put an arm around her waist and kissed her. He wanted her to fly to Istanbul with him, but she was on a college field trip, studying Renaissance art, and she couldn’t just abandon it. She had such beautiful skin, he told her. Like the whiteness you find when you cut a strawberry in half. Like that special whiteness at the centre …

Out in the corridor the phone was still ringing. She pushed the bedclothes to one side and put her bare feet on the floor. Her throat tightened. It was always the same with Tom. When she first answered the phone, she hardly knew what to say; though she loved him, he felt like a stranger to her. ‘Jesus, Glade,’ he would say, ‘your voice is so fucking small.’ But he would talk, he was good at talking, and gradually it came back to her: the shape of his head, the smell of his skin. He would be lounging on a sofa, the top two buttons of his shirt undone, his tie askew. He’d be drinking bourbon (sometimes she could hear the ice-cubes shifting in his glass). She could see the apartment, with its windows open, a thin cane of sunlight leaning against the wall, as if some elegant old man was visiting. Outside, the ocean had a metallic finish to it, less like water than the paintwork on a car, and the palm trees showed black against the soft mauve glow of the sky. She found pockets of memory inside her, which she could reach into, and then her voice grew in size and she could tell him about her life and make him laugh. They would talk for an hour, often more, even though it was night where she was, and she was sitting on the floor, no lights on, her back against the cold wall of the corridor. She could never bring the phone-calls to an end; when something only happens rarely, you have to make it last. But the beginning, that was always difficult for her.

This time he said he couldn’t talk for long. He told her that he had been invited to a wedding in New Orleans, and that he wanted her to come. It was at the end of the month. Would she be free?

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think so.’

She smiled, thinking of the difference in the way they lived. His life resembled a car-park that was full, and people drove round and round it, looking for a place. Her life, you could park almost anywhere. Sitting in the dark, she saw vast areas of empty asphalt stretching away in all directions. The white lines that would usually separate one car from the next seemed hopelessly optimistic, comical, even cruel, and above the entrance, in green neon, you could always see the same word: SPACES.

But Tom was saying something about five hundred people, and she realised she hadn’t been listening; she’d been too busy imagining his life, and how it must say FULL outside, in red.

‘You got something to wear, Glade?’

‘I think so.’

‘One of those crazy dresses.’ He laughed. ‘You’re sure? You don’t want me to wire you some money?’

‘No. I’ll be all right.’

After she had put the phone down, she stayed sitting on the floor and shook her head. ‘Damn,’ she whispered. Now she thought about it, she was pretty sure she didn’t have a dress she could wear to the wedding — and she didn’t have the money to buy one either: all the bills had come that month and Sally, who was broke, had asked Glade to pay her share for her. A wedding. In New Orleans. She walked back into her bedroom and turned on the light. Her eyes hurt in the sudden yellow glare. Opening her wardrobe, she began to look through her clothes. After five minutes she stood back.

Stupid, stupid.

But he was always so fast on the phone, his life happening at a different speed to hers. She thought of the photograph she had taken of him, standing on the steps of that white church in Venice. When he showed her the picture some weeks later, she was struck by how confident he looked, how easy. It was hard to believe that the person behind the camera was not a close friend of his, or a lover — and yet, at that point, they had known each other for less than a minute. He seemed ahead of where he should be, even then; he seemed to be operating on a different time-scale, somehow.

She closed the wardrobe and switched off the light. The darkness was printed with the shapes and colours of dresses that were no use to her. She crossed the floorboards and climbed back into bed. The sheets were still warm. She lay down, but her mind wouldn’t rest. In the distance she heard a man shouting and felt he was doing it on her behalf, his bellowing strangely monotonous, with gaps in it, like some kind of Morse code signalling despair.

‘What am I going to do?’ she said out loud.

Her white cat stretched and settled against her hip.

That weekend Charlie came to stay. He appeared at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon with six cans of lager in his hand and a copy of the Evening Standard wedged under his arm. He had grown his hair since Glade last saw him and it hung in a thick plait down the centre of his back, exactly where his spine would be. He was wearing a grey-blue RAF greatcoat and a pair of motor-cycle boots. When she hugged him, she could smell mothballs and tobacco and the raw spring air. Upstairs, in her bedroom, she had lit a fire to welcome him. While she stooped to add another log, he told her about the London plague pits, whose sites he’d been visiting. The breadth of Charlie’s knowledge seldom failed to astonish her. You could ask him about Karl Marx or phone-tapping, any subject at all, and he would talk for fifteen minutes, his voice even, almost monotonous, a roll-up in his slightly shaky hand. Though Glade would listen carefully to what he said, she didn’t often remember much about it afterwards. Still, it was a comfort to know these things could be understood.

She didn’t usually drink beer. That afternoon, though, its metallic flavour suited her; she thought it tasted as if it had come from somewhere deep below the surface of the earth, as if it had been mined rather than brewed. By seven o’clock they had run out. They decided to go to the off-licence on North Pole Road and buy some more. On the way she mentioned that Tom had called. Charlie liked listening to stories about Tom. His favourite was the one about her ear. Once, in a bar in San Francisco, Tom had leaned across the table and said, quite seriously, ‘You know, Glade, you could get that ear fixed.’ The first time she told Charlie the story, he didn’t say anything, which unnerved her. Turning the right side of her head towards him, she had lifted her hair and showed him her sticking-out right ear. ‘Do you think I should get it fixed, Charlie?’ By then he was laughing, though, and opening his tin of Old Holborn so he could roll himself a cigarette. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of question he would think of answering.

As they walked back to the flat, carrying a new six-pack of lager and three bags of crisps, Glade explained her predicament: a wedding in New Orleans, no money for a dress.

‘Didn’t he offer to buy you one?’ Charlie asked.

‘Yes. But I told him I had something.’ She saw the look on Charlie’s face. ‘Well, I thought I had.’

‘You can’t ring him back, I suppose.’

‘No.’

Charlie didn’t speak again until they reached her front door.

‘You know,’ he said slowly, ‘I saw something in the paper that might interest you …’

Upstairs he showed her an advertisement, no more than two inches square. EARN £100, it said. Underneath, in smaller letters, it gave a phone number. One hundred pounds, she thought. It was the right amount. She would be able to buy a dress, maybe even a pair of shoes as well.

She looked at Charlie. ‘What would I have to do?’

He shrugged. ‘Could be anything.’ He reached for the phone and dialled the number, but nobody answered.

On Monday Glade took Charlie’s paper into the restaurant with her. She waited until she had finished setting up, then she called the number again, using the pay-phone near the toilets. The first three times she dialled, the number was engaged, but she kept trying. At last a man’s voice answered.

‘I’m calling about the advert,’ she began.

‘Yes?’

‘This money,’ and she paused, ‘what am I supposed to do for it?’

Like so much of what she said, it came out wrong and yet the man didn’t laugh at her. Instead, he explained that he was a member of a medical foundation which was attached to the university. At present they were researching sleep staging — polysomnography, to be precise. They were advertising for subjects who might be willing to participate in their research.

‘I see,’ Glade said uncertainly. ‘And what does it involve?’

The man told her she would be required to spend two nights at a clinic in North London. While she was sleeping, she’d be monitored.

‘Is that all?’

‘Think of it like this,’ and the man sounded as if he was smiling, ‘we’ll be paying you to sleep.’

Glade stared at the advertisement until it began to vibrate, slide sideways off the page.

‘We’re starting a new programme on Wednesday,’ the man went on. ‘You could come in then. Or Friday, if that’s more convenient. What do you do?’

‘I’m a waitress,’ Glade said.

‘May I take your name?’

‘Glade Spencer.’

Still holding the receiver to her ear, she turned and stared back down the corridor. The restaurant’s double-doors stood open to the street. The sunlight that shone into the building reflected off the polished floor and almost blinded her. She watched two people walking in. They looked insubstantial, weightless, like pieces of burnt paper. They didn’t appear to have feet.

We’ll be paying you to sleep.

She could think of nothing better.

When Glade returned from work that afternoon, she found a letter on the door-mat in the hall. It was from her mother. She bent down and picked it up, handling the envelope much as her father would have done, she realised, turning it over in her fingers, trying to discover what its purpose was, what it meant. ‘Glade Spencer,’ she murmured. ‘Inglaterra.’ With its loops and dashes, her mother’s handwriting seemed to convey both generosity and carelessness.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Glade opened the envelope. One neatly folded sheet of mauve paper. She unfolded it and began to read. Glade, darling, I know I should have written before now, but I’ve been so busy with the new apartment. Gerry says — Glade lifted her head and stared out of the window. Whenever she received a letter from her mother, she always felt as if she had opened someone else’s mail. Though she could see her own name on the envelope, its contents never seemed to be addressed to her. But she read on. Her mother talked about whitewash and seafood. About Gerry’s friends, who all had swimming-pools. About the heat. She seemed to expect Glade to understand, to enthuse with her — to agree. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I don’t blame them, do you? The sunshine, the maracas

That evening Glade built another fire, even though the weather was warmer and the trees outside her bedroom window were beginning to release their blossom; the winter had lasted so long that she had forgotten spring might be a possibility. At half-past six Charlie rang, to thank her for the weekend. She described what had happened when she called the number in the paper, then she asked him what he knew about sleep research. He began to tell her about sleep laboratories, somnolence, electrodes –

She interrupted him. ‘Electrodes?’

He laughed. ‘You won’t even know they’re there. They’re like bits of sticking-plaster with wires attached to them. Or sometimes they use physiological glue. They monitor your brainwaves. Your eye-muscle movement as well.’

She shuddered slightly. ‘It won’t do me any harm, then?’

‘I can’t see how. And it’s a hundred quid, remember.’

‘That’s what the man I spoke to said.’ She poked a piece of wood deeper into the fire. ‘So you think I can do it?’

‘Why not?’ Charlie said. ‘It’s a dress.’

She felt much better for having talked to Charlie. He seemed to bring clarity to situations that she found confusing. You needed people like that — people who would tell you that everything was all right, that you weren’t mad.

Or if you were, then they’d look after you.

The front door slammed; her bedroom windows rattled in their frames. She turned round, looked out into the corridor. She saw the back of Sally’s head rise into view. At the top of the stairs Sally stopped and kicked off both her shoes. One of them flew in strange slow-motion through the air, glancing off the wall, which it marked with a precise black tick, as if to prove that it had been there. Sally vanished into the bathroom. The sudden, vicious crash of water on enamel.

Glade moved cautiously out of her room and down the corridor. ‘Sally?’ As she reached the doorway to the bathroom, Sally brushed past her, trailing steam. Glade followed her into the kitchen. ‘Sally, would you do me a favour?’

‘Don’t tell me. Feed the cat.’

‘It’s only for two days.’

Sally looked at her for the first time since arriving home. ‘Miami, I suppose.’

‘No,’ Glade said. ‘I’m going into a clinic.’

‘Nothing wrong, is there?’ Sally’s eyes widened and glittered. She lit a cigarette. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ Glade said. Which almost made her feel guilty. She felt she should have invented an illness, a disease. Something an American might give you. ‘I’m taking part in a sleep-research programme.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘They’re paying me. I need a dress —’ Glade bit her lip. She had given it away.

‘You are going to Miami.’

‘I’m not. It’s just that Tom’s invited me to a wedding.’ Glade hesitated, then she said, ‘In New Orleans.’

‘New Orleans? I don’t believe it.’ Sally turned away and stood at the window, her cigarette held just below her mouth. ‘New Orleans,’ she said, more mistily this time. ‘The French Quarter, Bourbon Street …’

Glade looked puzzled. ‘Bourbon Street?’

‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’ Sally’s voice was faint, as if she was very far away — or even dead, perhaps, and appearing to her flat-mate in a dream. ‘You don’t know anything.’

Hot Wings are Back!

Shortly after take-off, Glade felt thirsty. She waited until a stewardess was passing, then she reached out and touched the woman on the arm.

‘Do you have any Kwench!?’

‘Kwench!?’ The stewardess bent down, smiling.

‘It’s a new soft drink,’ Glade explained.

‘I haven’t heard of it.’

No, Glade thought. Nor have I. How odd.

‘Would Coke do?’ the stewardess asked her.

‘Just water,’ Glade said. ‘Thank you.’

Kwench!? She must have seen the name on TV. Or in a magazine. Her water arrived. It tasted faintly of chemicals, but at least it was cold. She drank half of it and sat back in her seat. There were things in her mind she knew nothing about, things she didn’t even realise were there. She looked out of the window. The Atlantic Ocean lay below, bright-blue in the spring sunlight. Something disturbed her about seeing water from so high up, something about the way the surface wrinkled. Like watching lice. Or maggots. It happened every time she flew. She leaned back, closed her eyes.

She thought of Tom, who she hadn’t seen for months, who she had hardly spoken to, not recently, and wondered how it would be this time, in New Orleans. He would sound so enthusiastic on the phone, while they were planning things, but when the moment came, when they actually met, she always had the feeling that she wasn’t quite what he’d imagined, that she was somehow less than he’d expected, and she would catch him looking at her, his eyes puzzled but amused, as if he’d fallen for some kind of trick, or even, sometimes, resentful, as if she’d deliberately deceived him. Once, she had arrived at his apartment in Miami to find a group of people sitting round a low black coffee table. They were sitting close to each other, as if trading secrets, or taking part in some complicated game. She remembered their shoulders, which were raised against her, like barriers, and she remembered the angle of their necks, haughty and forbidding. When she first entered the room, they peered at her, but only their heads moved, somehow their shoulders and necks stayed in the same place, and there was nothing in their eyes, their eyes were like the eyes of dead fish, hard and shiny, blind. And Tom looked no different to any of the others, who she had never seen before and did not know. Tom’s eyes were as dead as theirs. She backed out of the room, away from that black table, those dead eyes, and, closing the apartment door behind her, walked quickly down the stairs. Tom found her sitting on a cane chair in the lobby, among the potted palms.

‘Glade?’

She smiled up at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘You didn’t see me?’

‘I walked into the room and it was dark suddenly. There were so many people.’ She nodded to herself, remembering. ‘I didn’t see you. I thought you weren’t there.’

It’s my apartment, Glade.’

She was still smiling at him. ‘I thought you weren’t there.’

Confused, he glanced down at his shoes, which were like moccasins, only made of straw. He shook his head. When he looked up again, though, he was smiling too. ‘Jesus, Glade,’ he said. ‘You scared the hell out of me back there.’

It was all right after that.

He had this idea about her, though, which he kept attempting to fit her into, and since he spent far longer with the idea than he did with her, it had become more familiar, more real than she was. She didn’t know what the idea was exactly, but every time she saw him she felt her corners bump against the smooth, round shape of it; she felt the awkwardness, the gaps. It was strange because, when she was in London, she forgot what he was like as well — only she didn’t try and make him up. Seeing him again, after months, she often found it too much for her, literally too much, to see everything so completely realised, to see all of him at once, when she had only been able to remember his teeth, or the blond hairs on his wrists, or the way he said her name. It was this sudden avalanche of detail — a surfeit, really — that made her hesitate in doorways.

Tom.

She wondered how it would be this time. She wondered how often in her life she would fly to him like this. She wondered what he would think of the picture she was going to give him.

Jesus, Glade.

She walked out of the air-conditioned building into the heat of early afternoon. A highway lay in front of her, its surface pale-brown, four lanes of traffic travelling in each direction. Airport Boulevard. It had been a fifteen-hour flight, with a connection in New York, but she didn’t feel tired yet. She stood on a strip of grass at the edge of a car-park, the sun bright and fierce against the right side of her face. She liked the way American air always seemed to glitter.

Tom had told her to take a cab to the Hotel Excelsior, which was in the French Quarter. He would be waiting there for her. They could spend the afternoon on the roof, he said. They could order Mint Juleps and watch the sun go down over the Mississippi. But somehow she found herself out by the road, beyond the line of taxis, wanting to delay things. She thought she’d have a drink first. Perhaps, if she had a drink, she wouldn’t hesitate in front of him. Perhaps, if she had a drink, her voice wouldn’t be so small. She was proud of herself for having the idea. For thinking like him.

She looked around for somewhere. Silver-bellied planes drifted over every few seconds, no more than two or three hundred feet above the ground, bringing everything into a strange, unnatural proximity. A van painted a metallic dark-blue coasted past, bass notes shaking its smoked-glass windows. She couldn’t see anything resembling a café or a bar. Maybe there wouldn’t be, out near the airport.

Then, almost opposite her, she noticed an Italian place. Café Roma, it was called, the letters alternating red and green on a white background. She crossed the road between rows of hot, slow-moving cars. Once on the other side, she peered through the plate-glass window. There was no one to be seen. She tried the door. It was locked. She was about to walk away, disheartened, when she heard a loud click. A man was standing behind the door, unlocking it. There must have been three different sets of bolts, but finally he managed it.

‘We’re not closed.’ The man stammered slightly. ‘We’re open.’

‘No,’ Glade said, ‘it’s all right.’

‘No, really. We’re open.’

He was about thirty, with smooth, light-brown hair that fitted the shape of his head so closely that she thought it might be a wig. Though he wore a long white apron, he didn’t look like somebody who ran a restaurant. Perhaps she should just get in a taxi, like Tom had told her to.

‘This city,’ the man said, and his eyes moved past her, shifting constantly from one part of the highway to another, ‘I don’t know. In the last six months it’s gone crazy. I have to keep the door locked all the time. You never know what’s going to come in off the street.’ His eyes veered back to her, deep in his head and bleached of all colour, and then he smiled. It was too sudden to be entirely reassuring, which was what she thought he intended it to be. She found that she was no longer wary of him, though.

‘I don’t want to eat,’ she warned him. ‘I just want a glass of wine.’

‘We have wine. Please,’ and he held the door for her, ‘come on in.’ He looked into the empty restaurant. ‘Sit anywhere you want.’

Stepping past him, into the room, she was reminded of her own life: the quietness of it, a green neon sign that said, simply, SPACES. She sat at a table in the corner, her suitcase on the floor behind her chair. The plain brick walls had been decorated with posters of the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. Bottles snugly cupped in faded raffia hung from the ceiling. Every table had a red-and-white check cloth on it. You would never have imagined there was an airport right outside the door.

‘Would you like white wine,’ the man said, ‘or red?’

She decided that she wanted red.

‘Would you like some music? I have records.’ He brought out a selection — Mozart, Verdi, Bach.

She chose Verdi, because he was Italian.

As he was putting the record on, the man glanced over his shoulder. ‘You’re sure you’re not hungry? We have fresh linguine, with shrimp. It’s very good.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I ate on the plane.’

‘How about a little bowl of gumbo? It’s a speciality of New Orleans. I made it myself.’ He saw her hesitate. ‘Just a taste. It’s on the house.’

She smiled. ‘All right. Thank you.’

The man’s name was Sidney and his wife was called Consuela. Consuela was much older than Sidney, forty-five at least. They could have been mother and son were it not for the fact that they looked so unalike. Sidney was tall and spare, with that strange, close-fitting head of hair and those pale, haunted eyes. Consuela came from Puerto Rico. Short and thick-waisted, she had hair that was so black, it looked wet, and skin that had a sickly, olive tinge to it. Every now and then she would shuffle into the restaurant in a pair of pale-blue flip-flops and smile in a distant, abstract way, as if she was amused not by them but by something inside her head, a memory, perhaps, then she would step back through the curtain again, hidden by the strings of amber beads.

When Glade had finished her bowl of gumbo, Sidney joined her at the table and began to talk.

‘Last week Consuela was shot,’ he said.

Glade stared at him, her glass halfway to her mouth.

Consuela had gone home at lunchtime to find a man in their apartment. The man shot her twice and then escaped. When Sidney discovered her, at five o’clock, she was lying on the bedroom floor, bleeding from wounds in her forearm and her shoulder.

‘She was lucky,’ Sidney said.

Consuela appeared from behind the bead curtain. Sidney spoke to her in Spanish. He took her hand as she came and stood beside him, putting his other arm around her waist. She stood quite still, staring past him, at the floor. He was still looking at Glade.

‘I don’t know what I’d do if I lost her.’

A minute passed. Then Consuela gently disengaged herself and moved away. The curtain clicked as she passed through it. Sidney got up to change the record. On his way back to the table he poured two glasses of a clear liquid, handing one to Glade. She watched him drain his glass in one. She sipped at hers. The drink had an unusual consistency. Like oil.

‘Two days later my car was stolen.’ Sidney told her.

In broad daylight, from right outside his house. It was only an old car, a Dodge Dart, but it would cost him five hundred bucks to get another one like it. Then, at the weekend, these guys who were on something, PCP or crack, he didn’t know, they’d come into the restaurant, broken a chair, some plates, then they’d walked out without paying. There were three of them, big black guys with leather vests and chains around their necks. What was he supposed to do?

‘I can understand why you lock the door,’ Glade said.

Sidney was watching the street again. ‘You just have to knock,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’

She looked at him curiously. The way he talked, it sounded as if he thought she’d be coming to the restaurant quite often.

‘We’re moving apartments next week. Consuela, she can’t sleep.’ He looked at Glade, his eyes pale and unsteady in his face. ‘You should be careful here. Keep to the centre. Where are you staying?’

Suddenly she had a picture of Tom sitting on the roof of the Hotel Excelsior. The sun was sinking into the Mississippi. An empty chair stood beside him. Her chair. There was a quick flash of gold as he lifted his wrist to look at his watch.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s just after five.’

Glade put a hand over her mouth. ‘I must go.’

‘You have to be somewhere?’

‘Someone’s waiting for me. I’m very late.’ Glade stood up. ‘I’d better get a taxi.’

It took twenty-five minutes to reach the Hotel Excelsior and Glade wound the window down so the warm air blew into her face. Before she left the restaurant, she had parted the bead curtain to say goodbye to Consuela. The woman was sitting on a wooden chair, her hands resting on her knees. She wasn’t doing anything, just staring. The walls in the kitchen had been painted pale-green, which gave the room a melancholy feeling. Outside, on the pavement, Glade looked back. Sidney was already fastening the bolts. She waved, but he didn’t see her. There are people who seem to come alive when you appear and die the moment you are gone. It’s as if they’re machines and you’re electricity.

You just have to knock, that’s all.

She left her luggage with the man in reception and took a lift to the top floor. She saw Tom as soon as she stepped through the french windows on to the roof. He was sitting in a low deckchair, facing away from her. He seemed to be staring at the pool. He looked as though he hadn’t moved for a long time. The water in the pool was motionless as well, a perfect surface. She didn’t hesitate at all. It had worked, the alcohol.

‘Tom,’ she said.

He didn’t look up, not even when she was standing in front of him, her shadow masking the top half of his body.

‘The plane got in four hours ago,’ he said. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the pool.

She glanced at her hands, then looked away, into the sky. She smiled quickly. ‘This city,’ she said. ‘It’s gone crazy in the last six months.’

It wouldn’t have been her choice to drink Margaritas, but Tom always drank tequila when he wanted to be drunk, and she went along with it. It was part of the price she had to pay for being what he called ‘flaky’. She knew she would probably be ill at some point, but that too was part of the price. They were sitting in a bar in the French Quarter, the dark wood doors open to the street, and if she looked past Tom’s shoulder she could see bright neon signs, cars glinting as they glided past, the teeth of people laughing. She had been telling him about the mountain in Paddington. She thought it might intrigue him, change his mood. Watching him across the table as she talked, she couldn’t tell whether she had been forgiven yet. At least they were out together, though. And he was looking at her now, the way he always did, his eyes moving restlessly from one part of her face to another, as if he was trying to take in every detail, no matter how small, as if he was trying to learn her off by heart. She wondered if it had something to do with his work, this habit he had of cross-examining her face. Then, suddenly, he was leaning forwards, both forearms on the table. There was something he hadn’t understood.

‘This mountain,’ he said. ‘You can climb it, right?’

‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘Well, not any more, actually. They took it away.’

‘They took it away?’ Tom stared at her with his mouth open.

‘Yes.’

‘They took a mountain away? How could they do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Glade said. ‘I always thought of it as a mountain, but I suppose it was just a hill, really.’

Tom was shaking his head. ‘I don’t get it.’

She smiled downwards, into her Margarita. A funny colour for a drink. Almost grey. And that frosting round the rim of the glass. Like Christmas.

‘What’s the joke?’ Tom was grinning at her now, salt grains sticking to his upper lip. ‘Did I say something?’

She couldn’t tell him what she was thinking, that she’d known he would react like that, exactly like that, so she just shrugged and smiled. In any case, she liked it when he floundered. She found his uncertainty attractive.

‘Fucking Glade,’ he said, and shook his head again. He was still grinning, though.

He finished his drink, then told her the plan for the evening. They were going to visit a friend of his who lived ten minutes’ drive away. He’d rented a car.

‘You’re not too drunk?’ she said. ‘I mean, we could always take a taxi.’

‘They all drink down here. It’s a different culture.’

‘Oh.’ He could make her feel so cautious, almost dull. She decided not to mention taxis again.

They collected the keys to the car from hotel reception and took a lift to the basement. She thought Tom might try and have sex with her on the way down — when he was thinking about sex, something seemed to go missing in his face — but they reached the car-park and he still hadn’t touched her.

The rental car was a convertible, an ugly dark-red colour. She sank low in the seat, her head weightless, her vision slightly blurred; she could taste the drinks on her lips. The car trembled, roared. Tom scraped the wing on a concrete pillar while he was backing out, but he just laughed and said, ‘Insurance.’

They drove through narrow streets with the roof down. At first she felt she was on display. Then, abruptly, the feeling reversed itself, and she could stare. The noise astonished her. Music, voices, fights. Once, through a half-open door, she saw a woman dancing topless on a bright zinc counter, her bottom quivering above a row of drinks. The lighting in the clubs and bars had the sultry glow of charcoal-dusted gold, and when she sank still lower in her seat, feet on the dashboard, coloured neon poured over the curved glass of the windscreen as if it were a kind of liquid, and wrought-iron balconies hung above her head like eyelashes caked in black mascara.

She asked Tom where they were going.

‘Chestnut Street,’ came the reply. ‘It’s in the Garden District.’

The Garden District. She saw Sally standing at the kitchen window, planes slowly dropping through the wet grey London sky. You don’t know anything.

‘What’s the name of your friend?’ she asked.

Tom turned to her. ‘What?’

They were driving fast now, along a road that reminded her of Airport Boulevard. The lights above their heads were yellow, but everything else, everything beyond them, glistened like a lake of oil.

She repeated the question, moving close to Tom so he could hear her. The wind blew her hair into her mouth, her eyes.

‘Sterling,’ Tom shouted. ‘As in pounds.’

They passed a supermarket, then a pizza parlour. In a restaurant window she saw a sign that said HOT WINGS ARE BACK!. She wanted to know what it meant, but she didn’t feel like shouting again and by the time they stopped on Chestnut Street she’d forgotten all about it.

She supposed she must have met Sterling that night. Afterwards, though, she couldn’t remember him. Drawn deep into the house, she noticed mirrors, their silver exploding at the edges, her own face almost hidden in a garden of brown flowers, and then she found a veranda that was open to the darkness, all climbing plants and shadows, the wood rickety, the white paint flaking under her fingers. Something slowly came unhinged. The flight, the drinks, more drinks, the sights and sounds. She moved from room to room, the air resisting her. She was very tired, and yet she didn’t want to sleep.

She was telling somebody about the clinic.

‘I don’t know what happened. I was asleep for two days.’

The man said something she didn’t catch. She thought she heard the word princess. No, she couldn’t have. She felt she had to keep talking.

‘They paid me a hundred pounds,’ she said. ‘I bought a dress with it.’

The man’s eyes dropped below her chin.

‘No, not this dress.’

He had the habit of holding his glass on the palm of one hand and turning it with the fingers of his other hand. In the end, this was all she could see — the glass revolving on his palm. It made her feel dizzy. She asked him what his favourite drink was, hoping to distract him, but then she didn’t wait for his reply.

‘Mine’s Kwench!’ she said.

The glass revolving, and his face above it, crumpled. Like something that needed air in it. That needed blowing up.

‘It’s a soft drink, but it’s healthy. It’s made with special ingredients …’

And then the man was gone — or maybe she just left, she couldn’t tell. His face peeling away, high into the room, like a moth …

When she found Tom, it was much later, and he was lying lengthways on a sofa, smoking a joint. She was surprised to see him; she had forgotten where she was, who she’d come with. He offered her the joint and she said no. ‘Don’t be boring,’ he said. She shook her head. It was the wrong thing to say, but she took the joint anyway, drawing the smoke back over her tongue and down into her lungs, knowing she shouldn’t, but knowing it from a distance, like someone in another country knowing something, too far away to make any difference. She seemed to be the only person standing up. The room was too big. It had too much furniture in it.

‘I was asleep for two days,’ she said. ‘I had electrodes attached to me.’ She smiled. ‘I think it did me good.’

She had to try not to think about the size of the room, or how much furniture there was.

‘They shaved a little piece of my head. Only a quarter of an inch.’ She reached up with both hands and felt her hair. ‘It’s here somewhere.’

‘Who’s that?’ she heard someone say.

‘That’s Glade.’

‘Everything’s gone orange,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Glade?’

Somebody laughed.

‘Yeah, Glade. Have a seat.’

Glade, Glade, Glade. The sound of her name made the walls spin. The room dissolved into a kind of froth. Suddenly there was nothing she could think of without feeling ill.

She seemed to fall out of the room headfirst. As if the door was a hole in the ground. Her legs clattered down a flight of stairs. They had no strength in them, no bone.

Then she was in the car.

She leaned over the door, watching her sick land on the road. The sick kept shifting sideways, shifting sideways, but somehow it stayed in the same place too. Her hair was cold and wet with sweat. Her cheek rested against the back of her hand. Blurred fingers. She wanted it to stop. She couldn’t move.

She smelled the perfume on her wrist. That made her sick again. Straining, spitting, straining. Almost nothing coming out. She felt her dress being lifted from behind. Lifted over her head. Suddenly she couldn’t see. Somehow she struggled free, found air.

‘Tom?’

She tried to look round, but only caught a glimpse of him. He was kneeling on the seat behind her, his face contained, intent, the way people look when they’re alone. Trees above him, overhanging trees. Black and torn and flapping, like umbrellas in a wind blown inside out. That turning of her head. Her stomach rose towards her throat again, and she bent over the door, both hands on the outside handle, her face halfway to the road.

While she was being sick, she felt him pull her knickers down, into the backs of her knees. He worked himself into a position between her thighs, forcing them apart.

‘What are you doing?’ She wasn’t sure whether she had actually spoken. It might have been a thought.

Then he pushed into her.

She cried out because it wasn’t the usual place. She couldn’t give it her full attention, though. She was still vomiting on to the road.

Once, she noticed his hands. They were gripping the top of the door, the tendons stretched taut over the knuckles, like somebody afraid of falling. It was hard to bring her head up. He had pressed himself against her, pinned her so she could scarcely move, the top of the door cutting into her, just below her rib-cage. It was hard, at times, even to retch.

She didn’t know how long it took, only that her hair hung in her eyes and her mouth tasted sour and the trees still moved above her, great antique umbrellas broken by the wind, but she remembered hearing a kind of creaking coming from behind her, then a sigh, and she knew then that he had finished.

She woke up. At first she couldn’t tell whether it was night or day; she had the feeling she might be trapped somewhere in between. She realised she was staring at a concrete pillar. She looked round. They were in the car-park under the hotel. The headlights were still on. Tom was asleep beside her, his head resting against the back of the seat. She sat still, like a person who’s just had an accident, trying to work out how she felt, if she was hurt. Both her knees were burned, and Tom’s stuff had trickled out of her, on to the back of her dress. Her hair had dried and stiffened. She had no knickers on. She didn’t feel too bad, though, considering, and it was cool in the car-park, with a smell of cement which she found soothing. It occurred to her that she was probably still drunk, and that her hangover hadn’t started yet — or perhaps, in being sick, she’d already rid her body of the poison. She reached across and turned the headlights off, and then sat back. She wondered if they were going to miss the wedding. Tom’s eyes opened, closed. Opened again. He asked her what the time was. She had no way of telling; she didn’t wear a watch. He slowly lifted his right wrist and peered at it. Twenty to seven.

‘Ah Jesus,’ he muttered.

She tried to remember the drive back to the hotel, but it was all a blank. She couldn’t even remember the car starting. She supposed it must have been late by the time they left. Three, at least. When she thought of the house on Chestnut Street, with its ancient flaking mirrors and its big dim rooms, it seemed as if she had spent a century there.

‘Who is Sterling?’ she asked.

Tom had closed his eyes again, though she didn’t think he was asleep. Since he wasn’t going to answer, she answered for him.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she murmured, ‘just a friend.’

She opened the car door and stepped out. She walked a few yards, the click of her shoes echoing against the wall to her left. Her legs didn’t feel too steady. She looked down at her knees. The burns were maroon, with slightly raised black edges. Rothko, she thought, and almost laughed out loud. Then she thought of the dress she had bought for the wedding, and how its skirt only came to halfway down her thighs (Tom liked to see her legs). She doubted whether she would be able to wear it now. She’d have to improvise.

Tom was staring straight ahead, through the windscreen, one hand clutching the buckle of his seat-belt. His eyes looked as if they’d rusted solid in their sockets.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said.

Slowly, he hauled himself out of the car and began to walk towards the lift. She followed him. He moved awkwardly, like someone with an injury. Looking back over her shoulder, she noticed that she’d forgotten to shut her door — though, with a convertible, she couldn’t really see what difference it would make.

Upstairs, in the room, Tom took off everything except his boxer shorts and climbed into the bed. Almost as soon as he lay down, he was asleep, his face turned away from her, the shape of his body impersonal, anonymous. Standing by the TV, she watched him for a few minutes, listened to his breathing. Then she walked into the bathroom and closed the door.

It was a spacious bathroom, with a pale-blue carpet, pale-blue walls. A mini-chandelier hung from the ceiling. Lots of mock-gold metalwork and dangling, pear-shaped glass. Against one wall stood a cane sofa heaped with cushions. Against another, a dressing-table, its mirror framed by naked bulbs. She sat on the edge of the bath and turned on the taps. There was no sound in the world she liked better than the sound of running water. She noticed a tall, thin window to the left of the dressing-table, its glass frosted and opaque. Curious, she reached across and opened it.

She was high up, looking out over the city — a view of TV aerials, helicopters, hot polluted sky. The new day glittered and roared fifteen or twenty floors below. To her right, in the distance, she could see a bridge, its latticework of struts and girders arching into the haze. On top of many of the buildings there were rust-coloured huts with pointed roofs. They stood on stilts, and had no doors or windows. She supposed they must be something to do with the water system. Or air-conditioning. Between two glass buildings she could see the Mississippi, a dull blue-grey, the colour of the overcoat that Charlie always wore. Stepping away from the window, she moved back into the middle of the room, unbuttoned her dress and let it fall away. She stood in front of the dressing-table mirror, studying herself. With her two grazed knees, she looked like somebody who prayed too much. She wondered where her knickers were. On the floor of the car, maybe, beneath the glove compartment. Or outside Sterling’s house, on Chestnut Street.

She lay in the hot water, her left hand on her belly. Her knees had stung at first, bringing tears to her eyes, but now she could hardly feel them at all; her limbs floated beneath the surface, weightless, almost numb. She was reminded of the two days she had spent in the sleep laboratory. On the first evening a nurse had fastened a yellow rubber tag around her wrist. Spencer, Glade, it said. 00153. ‘Your hospital number,’ the nurse informed her, smiling. Glade lay still, staring at the tag. She remembered feeling valuable, important. Safe.

She had arrived at the clinic at four o’clock that afternoon. In reception she was handed several forms with the heading SLEEP STUDY ADMISSION FOR 48 HOURS. She had to give details of her medical history, including previous illnesses and current allergies. One of the forms was interested in what it refered to as ‘daytime somnolence’. The questions amused her. If she was ‘sitting and talking to someone’, for instance, how likely was she to fall asleep? She wanted to write ‘Depends who it is’ — but she had to answer seriously, on a scale of 0–3, 0 being ‘would never doze’, 3 being ‘high chance of dozing’. When she had completed all the forms, she was asked to sign a disclaimer, which freed the clinic of any liability. The document was a formality, the nurse assured her; the law required it. Still, it worried Glade for a moment, the sight of that dotted line. Then she remembered Charlie telling her no harm would come to her. She picked up the pen and, bending over the paper, wrote her name.

Afterwards, she was shown into a room where her blood pressure, her pulse rate and her temperature were checked. Once that was over, she was taken to a ward that had been divided into cubicles, each cubicle with its curtains drawn, for privacy. All her anxiety lifted. It seemed like a kind of paradise to her, room after room of people sleeping at five in the afternoon. She had a single bed with a painted iron frame and a small clothes-locker that doubled as a bedside table. On the wall above the bed was an adjustable reading-lamp and a panel of power-points. Her window looked into a tall, grim courtyard, a kind of air-shaft. She could see rows of windows identical to hers and, higher up, stretched against the sky, a net to keep the pigeons out. She lay in bed and waited. At six o’clock she was given a meal on a tray, the food packed in silver containers with lids of white card, like an Indian take-away.

After that, it was surprising how little she could remember.

Once, she woke to see two men standing in the doorway to her cubicle, one with light-brown hair, about forty years old, the other older, completely bald. They seemed startled when she opened her eyes, almost frightened, the bald man stepping backwards, into the ward. They must be sleep researchers, she thought. She noticed there were wires attached to her, electrodes, just as Charlie had described. On the admission form, in the box marked ARRANGEMENTS FOR DISCHARGE, she had nominated Charlie Moore as her escort, if she should need one. Everything was taken care of. She sighed and closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.

When the two days came to an end, she found she didn’t want to go. She had slept through both nights with no trouble at all, through most of the intervening day as well. Sleeping was curiously addictive. You were part of the world, but not in it, and somehow that seemed just right. It seemed enough. She remembered that her muscles felt as if they’d spread out inside her body. They had the laziness of old elastic; she hardly had the strength to leave. But the nurse was firm with her. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘you don’t want to make a habit of it.’ Yes, I do, Glade thought. I do.

Half an hour later, standing on a pavement in North London, she was astonished by the movement, the urgency — the sheer speed of things. That man with the belly, for instance, elbowing his way on to a bus. And what about that girl in the brown leather jacket? She was walking so fast and chewing gum so fiercely, you could almost believe that her mouth was the motor that was driving her along. Glade wanted to take each of them by the arm and ask them what was so important. Within a day or two, of course, this feeling faded and, out on the street, she probably looked no different to anybody else. She bought the dress she needed, and a pair of shoes to go with it. Her ticket arrived by Federal Express. Exactly one week after leaving the sleep laboratory, she was boarding a plane to New Orleans.

She lay in the bath and tried to bring back something else from those two days, but nothing came to her. Outside, far below, she could hear cars’ horns, a tune played on a whistle, the stutter of a pneumatic drill …

She woke suddenly, uncertain of her whereabouts. The water was cold, but she was used to that. She often fell asleep in the bath. (Now why hadn’t that been one of the questions on the form? If you are in the bath, how likely are you to fall asleep? She would have given that a 3.) Looking down, she noticed her knees. Then she knew where she was. Then she knew.

She climbed out of the bath and wrapped herself in a towel. A bad headache lurked nearby. She could feel it above her like a weight, suspended, but only by the flimsiest of threads. It could fall at any moment. She found her painkillers and swallowed two with water from the tap. As she passed the mirror she caught a glimpse of a tall, pale girl with smudges under her eyes and stringy hair. She walked to the window. The sun had lifted high into the sky, and the river had changed colour. She thought it must be about eleven.

Opening the bathroom door, she peered out. Tom was still asleep. She dried herself and put on a clean T-shirt and a pair of knickers, then she crept across the room and, lifting the covers, slipped into the bed. After waiting for a few minutes, she eased towards him, fitting her body to his, until she could feel the shape of him against her, his shoulderblades, his bottom, the backs of his knees, even his heels. Breathing him in, the salt-water smell of him, she dropped into a deep sleep.

She woke once. He was on the phone, his back to her.

‘When’s the wedding?’ she murmured.

He didn’t appear to have heard.

She lifted her head. ‘The wedding,’ she said. ‘Is it today?’

He covered the receiver with one hand and looked at her over his shoulder ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

She settled back into the pillows, fell asleep again.

When she woke up for the second time, it was almost dark and Tom had gone. She looked for a note, then shook her head, remembering. Tom never left notes. People who kill themselves, they leave notes. That was what he’d said once. Such a strange thing to come out with. Something like that would never have occurred to her. But now, every time she wrote a note, she thought of it. He’d told her something else that day, during the same conversation. ‘I don’t commit anything to paper unless it’s absolutely necessary.’ He paused and then he said, ‘I’m a lawyer.’ And it was true. He never did. He didn’t write letters. He’d never even sent her a postcard. If he wanted to contact her, he phoned — or his personal assistant phoned. She wasn’t even sure what his handwriting looked like. She’d only seen his signature, on credit-card slips. He was always signing those.

She sat up and switched on the light beside the bed. She could never tell how long he’d be gone. Sometimes he just went out for air. But he was also quite capable of going to a bar or a restaurant or a cinema without her. Then it could be hours before he returned. Once, when they were in Miami, he flew to New York and back, and she never even knew. ‘It was a meeting,’ he said later. ‘Kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.’

She picked up the remote and turned on the TV. It took her five minutes to make the Video Checkout Facility disappear. Then she channel-hopped until she found an old black-and-white film, the women in shiny, tight-fitting dresses that almost touched the floor, the men in dinner jackets, black bow-ties. Everybody in the film talked very fast, and almost everything they said was funny. She wondered if there were really people like that; if there were, she hoped she would come back as one. While she was watching TV, she happened to notice her face in the mirror that hung on the wall directly opposite the bed. She was smiling. She realised she’d been smiling the whole time.

As soon as the film was over, she became aware that she was hungry. When was the last time she had eaten? Twenty-four hours ago, in the Café Roma. She looked through the hotel information booklet for a menu, then she called Room Service. This was something she had learned from Tom, and the novelty of it still delighted her. She ordered a bowl of oatmeal with honey, some wheat toast and a glass of milk.

‘In fact,’ she said, ‘make that two glasses.’

It was almost midnight when Tom came in. He had changed into jeans, a black shirt and a pair of snakeskin boots with Cuban heels. She’d never met anyone in London who dressed like him. She thought he looked good, though.

‘It’s dark in here,’ he said.

She moved her tray of empty plates and glasses on to the floor. He turned two lamps on and sat down on the edge of the bed, facing away from her. He ran both hands through his hair, then he picked up the phone and started dialling. She watched him as he talked. Odd phrases reached her, meaning nothing. She could only see parts of him from where she lay — his hair cut short at the base of his neck, almost razored, his shirt stretching tightly across the muscles of his back, his right hand gripping the receiver low down, near the mouthpiece. He had such strength in his hands. In his body altogether. When they were making love, he would sometimes hold her down so hard that she had bruises on her upper arms for days, bruises the shape of fingers, thumbs.

He was on the phone for a long time. In the end she stopped watching him and watched the TV instead. They were showing a Western — the old-fashioned kind, with wagon-trains and Apaches. When, at last, Tom finished, he put his feet up on the bed and sat beside her, with his back against the headboard.

‘What’s this?’ he said after a while.

‘I don’t know. A film.’

‘This all you’ve been doing? Watching TV?’

She looked at him. ‘I ate something.’

He didn’t take his eyes off the screen.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘What did you do?’

‘I went out. Saw some people.’

‘Friends?’

He nodded.

She looked away. This was a typical conversation. He would trap her into questions and answers, and the answers told her nothing. And she knew there was a limit to the number of questions she could ask; if she kept on at him, he would only lose his temper. She knew something else as well: there would be no more sex. Often, with Tom, it happened once, on the first night. After that, it just didn’t come up. He would lie on his back under the covers in his white vest and his boxer shorts, silent and withdrawn, untouchable — at times like that she imagined a veil stretched over him, a veil she couldn’t penetrate, still less remove — or he would turn on to his side, facing away from her, a few strands of hair showing, an ear too, perhaps. She watched a spear thump into the chest of a man wearing a dark-blue jacket. His eyes closed and he fell backwards, both hands clutching at the shaft as if it was precious to him, as if he couldn’t bear to part with it. The Indians were riding their horses over the fallen wagons now, the makeshift barricades. They always did that, didn’t they.

The wedding reception was being held in the country, about an hour’s drive from New Orleans. That was all Glade knew. They set off in the convertible at midday, after a breakfast eaten in near silence. Once they left the city suburbs behind, the roads were almost empty, and Tom drove fast, as though impatient to have the whole thing over with. She sat quietly beside him, wearing sunglasses, her hands folded on her lap. It was a hot day. Trees steamed gently in the dull yellow light. Leaves drooped. She saw a lake of pale-blue water, its surface motionless, and dense as mercury. Everything seemed to weigh too much, including the air above her head, and for once she was grateful that he didn’t expect her to talk; she wasn’t sure she could have heaved the words out of her mouth.

At last they turned through a gateway on to a narrow, curving road. She noticed a glimmer of whiteness beyond the thick wall of trees to her right.

‘Is that it?’ she asked.

Tom didn’t answer.

She watched as the trees thinned and fell away, revealing the house, which stood on a gentle slope, the ground behind it rising to a smooth green ridge. The house itself was entirely white, and looked, to Glade, at least, as if it had been decorated especially for the wedding. It had shutters on the windows, a flat roof and a high front porch that was supported by two Doric pillars. On the left side of the house three verandas had been built one on top of the other, and a huge oak tree reached its branches towards their railings, deepening the shade.

Inside, the house was cool and dark, and filled with faces Glade didn’t know, people of all ages. Standing near the bottom of the stairs, she watched a silver tray glide at head-height through the crowd with a steadiness that seemed supernatural. She lifted a glass of champagne from it as it passed by. As usual, Tom had disappeared, and she found herself talking to the father of the bride, a man with flawless manners and hair the colour of ivory. When he learned that she was English, and that she had never visited the southern states before, he linked her arm through his and led her into different rooms. The floors were American elm, a hardwood that was now rare, and the sideboards gleamed with candlesticks, clocks, cigar-boxes. White flowers floated in wide silver bowls, releasing a creamy perfume into the air, almost too rich to breathe. They were gardenias, the first that she had ever seen.

The house was old, he told her — though not by her standards, of course. It had been built in a style known as ‘antebellum’, which, literally translated, meant ‘before the war’. His family had owned the property for more than one hundred and fifty years.

‘Don’t ever lose it,’ Glade said.

He gave her a curious look, moving his head a little to one side, as if he couldn’t quite see her from where he was standing, as if, with that one remark, she’d disappeared round a corner. Which in a way, perhaps, she had. Because she was thinking of the house in Norfolk, the house that had been her home, its pebble-dash walls and its window-frames painted green, the airless dusty silence of the attic in the summer where, lying on your stomach, you could contemplate the mysteries of the back garden — the rows of pear trees bearing fruit with strangely freckled skin and, just beyond the fence, the stream in whose clear water she had once discovered a man’s gold pocket-watch. The house her father had abandoned when his marriage fell apart.

‘I only mean that it’s beautiful,’ she added quickly. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a beautiful house.’

The man thanked her, lowering his chin towards his chest in a way that seemed nineteenth century. ‘And if I may compliment you in return, Glade,’ he said, ‘that is a charming dress.’

‘You think so?’ She glanced down at it uncertainly.

That morning, in the bathroom, she had hesitated, but in the end she had no choice. It was a long dress that reached almost to her ankles, the fabric light, and patterned with flowers, not fashionable at all. She couldn’t think why she’d packed it in the first place, but she was glad now that she had. When she walked back into the bedroom, though, Tom took one look at her and asked her what she was wearing.

‘It’s the only thing I’ve got that covers up my knees.’

‘Your knees?’ He was looking at her as if she’d lost her mind. It was a look she was getting used to.

‘You don’t remember?’ She lifted her skirt and showed him.

He turned away, towards the window. He had hardly spoken to her since.

She followed the bride’s father up a wide staircase of dark wood, noticing the slight curve of his spine through his pale linen jacket. On the second floor, in rooms that were used less frequently, the air smelled of walnuts and vanilla. The man talked about his daughter, who was studying to be a dancer in New York. She was the youngest of his children. ‘She must be about your age,’ he said, and looked at her sideways, with his head at an angle, and smiled with one half of his mouth. Through the windows she could see bright pieces of the countryside, their colours almost in relief against the soft gloom of the interior. Then, as they descended, she suddenly felt trapped and breathless. Each sound she heard seemed to have an echo attached to it. And, just for a moment, the staircase and the hallway far below it blurred in front of her, as if she was looking through water. She touched her forehead with the fingers of one hand. It was damp.

‘Are you feeling faint?’ His voice sounded so distant that she thought he must have risen, like an angel, towards the ceiling.

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘A little.’

‘It’s become rather warm in here. All the people.’ He was trying to be kind. Where they were standing, which was halfway down the stairs, it wasn’t warm in the slightest, and the hallway was almost empty. Still, she allowed him to guide her towards a chair. He told her that he would go and look for Tom. She sat down. Propping her elbows on her knees, she held her forehead in both hands and stared at the floor.

When Tom came, he took her outside into the garden. Though he didn’t complain, she could tell that he resented it. Being seen as somebody whose girlfriend wasn’t well. Having to leave the party, even if only for a moment.

‘I’m all right,’ she said, wishing he would go back in.

‘How much did you drink?’ he asked.

‘One glass of champagne. It’s not that.’

At the far end of the lawn they found a bench, its wrought-iron painted white and peeling slightly. They sat side by side, with their backs to the house. A cedar spread its curiously flat, dark branches above their heads. Tom leaned forwards, forearms resting on his knees, hands clasped together.

‘Talking of drinks,’ she said, ‘have you ever heard of Kwench!?’

‘Kwench!?’ He paused. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it.’

‘I keep thinking about it.’

He turned slowly and stared at her.

‘I don’t know why,’ she said. ‘It’s not normal, is it, to keep thinking about a drink you’ve never seen. And the colour too. Seeing the colour.’

Tom was still staring at her. ‘Maybe you should talk to someone.’

‘Talk to someone?’ She didn’t follow. ‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. A shrink, I guess.’

She thought about that for a moment.

‘A shrink,’ he said, nodding.

From where they were sitting, the land stretched away to the horizon, and the distance was blue, the same blue as the smoke that rises from a bonfire. Louisiana, she thought. I’m in Louisiana.

After a while Tom stood up. He walked a few paces, hands in his pockets, then he stopped and seemed to be looking at the view. ‘I can’t figure you out, Glade.’

She smiled. ‘People are always saying that.’ But she had never expected to hear it from him; she’d thought that it was one of the things he liked about her, the fact that he found her mystifying.

Tom faced her across the grass. ‘I think maybe it’s best if we don’t see each other for a while.’

‘We don’t anyway.’ She was smiling at the ground.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s been four months. Since the last time.’

He was silent. Then she heard him breathe out.

‘You think it should be longer than that?’ she said.

His silence lasted. And, though she knew she shouldn’t be talking, she couldn’t help herself. He was clever that way, making her talk when he knew she was no good at it. Her love for him, it still existed, she could feel it, but it was the hero held prisoner inside her, it had been tied up, gagged, and her talking, that was the bad men winning.

‘If it was any longer,’ she went on, ‘it would hardly be worth it.’

There. She had said it for him. And it had been so easy that she thought she might as well go further.

‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that we should just forget about it completely?’

He seemed to wince at the idea.

‘You can leave me. It’s all right. I won’t make a fuss.’

What else could she say?

‘I won’t cry.’

She had used up all her words. If she opened her mouth again, nothing would come out. She decided she would wait for him to speak. However long it took.

‘Maybe it’s best,’ he said eventually, ‘for both of us.’

‘It’s good for me.’ She took a deep breath and looked into the distance, the place where the landscape vanished, not the horizon exactly, more like a kind of haze. ‘I’d like a drink of something.’

Tom stood over her. ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’

She suddenly remembered the words she had noticed in a shop window on her first night, while they were driving to the Garden District. She could see the exact shape and colour of the letters, and the way the sign tilted, as if a poltergeist had been at work.

‘Hot Wings Are Back!’ she said, and laughed. She still didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant.

Tom’s eyes darkened, and he turned away and ran one hand through his hair. She leaned back on the bench, looked up into the sky. This was something she had always done, ever since she was a child. She never ceased to be astonished by the quality of that blue. All depth. No surface to it whatsoever.

‘How do you feel now?’

She could hear no tenderness in his voice, no real concern. He just wanted information. Facts. She nodded to herself. ‘Better. Much better.’

‘In that case,’ he said, ‘maybe we should go back in.’

That evening, while Tom was downstairs in the bar, Glade called the airline and asked if she could bring her flight forwards, from Tuesday afternoon to Monday morning, early. If she’d been holding a discount ticket, she wouldn’t have been allowed to change it, the man told her, but since it was Apex, there was absolutely no problem. Seats were still available on the seven-thirty to New York. She should check in no later than six-thirty.

At nine o’clock that night Tom took her to a restaurant on the edge of the French Quarter. He ordered two dozen oysters and a bottle of Dom Perignon. The waiter smiled, saying it was his wife’s favourite champagne. Glade was staring at her glass; it was so tall, so slender, that it looked like a vase designed to hold a single flower. Throughout dinner Tom talked about a case he’d been working on, which involved narcotics and embezzlement. They’d had to employ a detective agency to track the defendant down. They had located him, eventually, in a small town in Colombia. Tom raised his eyebrows, then lowered them again and reached for his champagne. Glade found herself wishing that the defendant, whoever he was, had got away.

They returned to the hotel and Glade ran a bath while Tom called San Francisco and LA. Lying in the water, she could hear him talking, a low murmur in the next room. Is that what I’ll remember, she wondered, the sound of him talking to other people? By the time she finished in the bathroom, it was almost one in the morning. Wrapped in a hotel bathrobe, she turned out the lights and opened the door. Tom was lying on the bed, watching MTV. The whole room flashed and flickered. When she fell asleep, he was still watching.

She woke just after five and slipped into her clothes. She didn’t need to switch the lights on; she’d already packed her case the night before. Standing by the door, she looked back into the room. ‘Tom?’ she said.

He didn’t answer.

‘Tom, I’m leaving now.’

‘Where are you going?’ he murmured.

She felt stupid saying London, but she said it anyway.

He sat up in bed, one shoulder edged in cold grey light, and she thought for a moment that he might try and stop her. Then he said, ‘It’s early,’ and fell back among the pillows.

In the lobby the clock above reception said 5:25. A porter in a red tail-coat carried her case out to the semi-circle of driveway at the front of the hotel. He spoke to her kindly, but kindness wasn’t something she could think about. A taxi curved towards her out of the darkness. The porter held the door for her. She thanked him and climbed in.

‘The airport, please.’

She wound the window down and settled back. A thin stream of air washed over her, cool and slightly stagnant. To the east the sky had cracked open, and pale-pink light showed through. Above it and below it, only dark blue-grey. She had been tempted to leave Tom a note, but at the last minute she’d decided against it. She didn’t want him thinking she was going to kill herself.

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