Four

Lists and Boxes

During the weeks that followed her return from New Orleans Glade slept badly. Most nights, between the hours of two and three, she would hear the phone ringing in the corridor outside her room. She knew who it was. She could imagine him in his apartment in Miami, bright blocks of evening sunlight stacked against the walls, the ocean in the window, tropical, metallic-green. He’d be sitting with one leg thrown casually over the arm of a chair, a joint burning between his fingers. If you loosened his striped tie, then opened the top three buttons of his shirt and slid your hand inside, you’d feel sweat on the surface of his skin, a light, clean sweat, as pure as water …

At first she found it almost impossible not to answer — and he let the phone ring for a long time too, suspecting, rightly, that she was there. She lay in bed with her eyes wide open, listening. Some nights she counted the number of times the phone rang, and was surprised by his patience, his persistence; she wouldn’t have expected it. Other nights she pretended that it was a just another sound, and that it had no more relevance to her than a clap of thunder or a car-alarm. After a week, not answering became a habit. In the end, though, she had to unplug the phone before she went to bed. Even then, somehow, she could sense him trying to get through. And she knew what he would say if she let him speak to her. He’d say she was weird, changing her flight like that, behind his back, sneaking out of the hotel at dawn. And then not picking up the phone, not communicating. ‘Jesus, Glade, what’s going on? Are you having some kind of breakdown? Are you depressed?’ He’d start using words like ‘shrink’, which she didn’t like (why would someone want to make you smaller?). So what was the point? She missed him, of course she did — the whole inside of her was hollow with the knowledge that he was gone — but she needed to hold on to some initiative of her own, the feeling that she’d had in New Orleans at five-thirty in the morning. The airport, please.

Yes, she was right to have ignored Tom’s calls. If she’d made a mistake at all, it was in telling Sally why. They were sitting at the kitchen table late one night, the window a black mirror revealing a second version of the room, bleaker, more ethereal. Sally had been complaining about the phone ringing, how it woke her, and Glade felt she owed her flat-mate an explanation. She began to tell Sally about the party in the house on Chestnut Street, and what had happened later, in the car … Sally couldn’t believe what she was hearing. If something like that had happened to her, she said, she would have called the police. She would have sued. Though Glade felt uneasy now, she continued with her story, ending with the conversation that had taken place at the wedding, under the cedar tree. Afterwards, Sally was silent for a moment, then she sighed and lit a cigarette. ‘Well, I always said you should ditch him.’

Glade shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘After the way he treated you?’

‘I mean, I’m not sure if I ditched him,’ Glade said. ‘Maybe he ditched me.’ The word felt odd in her mouth, as if she had a different tongue. She ought to use her own words, she thought. Not other people’s.

‘Does it matter?’ Sally was saying. ‘As long as you get rid of him. For Christ’s sake, the man’s an animal.’ She paused, inhaled, tapped some ash into a saucer. Then she said it again: ‘He’s an animal.’

‘I don’t know,’ Glade said slowly. ‘What if I love him?’

She was thinking of the first night, when they left the bar on Decatur Street and called in at their hotel to collect the car. While they were in their room, she remembered the painting she had brought with her. She held it out in front of her, saying simply, ‘It’s a present.’ He had seemed perplexed at first, to be receiving something, but then he unwrapped it and carried it over to the tall lamp by the window. He looked at her, his mouth smiling, but his eyes and eyebrows puzzled, then he looked back at the painting again. He didn’t understand it, but he wanted to.

‘What is it?’ he said at last.

She moved towards him. ‘What do you think it is?’

‘I don’t know.’ He tilted the picture one way, then the other. ‘A pyramid?’

She grinned. ‘You remember the mountain I told you about?’

‘This is it?’

‘Yes.’ She joined him by the window. It was strange how light the colours had seemed in London, and how dark they looked suddenly, in New Orleans. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Yes, I do. I like it.’ He hesitated. ‘Has it got a title?’

‘It’s on the back.’

He turned the painting over. ‘Paddington.’ He nodded to himself, then turned uncertainly towards her, the blond hairs on his forearms crimson in the lamplight. ‘They took it away, though, right?’

When she thought about loving Tom, trying to decide whether she did or didn’t, this was one of the moments that always came to mind.

Sally stubbed her cigarette out. ‘Well, I’d ditch him if I were you.’ She yawned and then stood up. ‘I’m going to bed.’

After Sally had left the room, Glade sat at the table, wishing she’d said nothing. She listened to the taps running, the toilet flushing, the door to Sally’s bedroom closing.

She felt stupid, so stupid.

That night she dreamed the mountain had returned, and she woke the next morning with a lightness inside her, believing for a few moments that it was true. It isn’t there, she told herself as she dressed for work. You just dreamed it, that’s all. Somehow, though, her heart was lifting against her ribs in anticipation. Somehow, she had to check.

On her way to Paddington she tried not to think. Instead, she concentrated on the air in her lungs, the sun on her face, the paving-stones beneath her feet. As she crossed Portobello Road she saw a man juggling avocados. He winked at her. She walked on, through streets that smelled of exhaust-fumes, blossom and, once, deliciously, of toast.

When she peered over the corrugated-iron fence, the mountain wasn’t there, of course, only the ground it had once stood on, and no shadow on that ground, no charmed circle of dark earth, not one trace or memory of its existence. She felt something inside her slip, give way. Why had she come? All she had done was prove she was without something she had loved; she had reminded herself of a lack, an absence. She heard her own voice, thin but defiant, in a garden several thousand miles away. Do you think we should just forget about it completely? As she stood on the narrow strip of pavement, hands gripping the top of the fence, her mouth began to crumple. It’s all right. I won’t make a fuss. Then the tears came. She didn’t think she’d ever cried so hard, the sounds wrenched out of her, her whole body shuddering. She lowered herself into a sitting position, her back against the corrugated iron, her forehead resting on her drawn-up knees. Cars rushed round the curve in front of her.

When the crying stopped at last, and she looked up, the light seemed to have changed. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there. Twenty minutes? An hour? She stood up shakily. Wiped her eyes, her cheeks. She supposed she would be late for work. She thought of how she must look, her skin raw, her eyelids rimmed with red. What would she tell them at the restaurant?

At that moment a white van accelerated round the bend, its headlights flashing as it came towards her. The man behind the wheel showed her his tongue, just the tip of it; she saw it flicker in and out between his lips. His face was pale and damp, like mushrooms after they’ve been peeled.

She stared after the van, waiting until it had dipped down into the underpass, then she turned and walked in the opposite direction. For the next few minutes she walked faster than usual, past the timber yard, over the railway bridge and down into the station, using the back entrance, and it was only then, when she was under its high, curved roof, among the rushing people and the strange, burnt smell of trains, that she slowed down.

The sorrow that washed over her that morning stayed with her. At work she pretended to have hayfever — she even took the medication, so as to lend her story authenticity — but, in private, she cried so much that her eyes swelled and her throat tasted of blood. Sometimes, on the good days, she painted pictures of the mountain. Each picture was bathed in the same fierce orange glare. She wasn’t sure it was such a great improvement — the landscape now looked apocalyptic, the train in the background on its way to some terrifying destination — but she didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter. Then, towards the end of May, Charlie Moore sent her a postcard. He wanted her to visit him the following weekend. She could think of nothing she would rather do. This was the sign of a true friend, she thought, that he could time something so perfectly without even realising.

A Saturday, then. Just after two-thirty in the afternoon. The bus roared and staggered along the narrow, tangled streets of Camberwell. Outside, the heat pressed down out of a strangely dazzling grey sky. Everything she could see looked dusty: the buildings, the cars — even the grass. London could look like that in the summer, as though it needed wiping with a damp cloth. She imagined for a moment that the world was the size of a tennis ball, and that it was lying on a high shelf in her father’s caravan.

From the bus-stop on the main road she had to walk a distance of about a mile to reach the squat where Charlie lived. A woman called from behind a fence, a boy on a bicycle turned circles in a drive. The stillness of the suburbs. She stopped on a bridge and, leaning on the parapet, stared at the railway tracks below. A polished silver stripe down the middle of each rail, the bright-brown of the rust on either side. Nettles massed on the embankments and, further up, a stand of buddleia grew tall against a freshly painted fence. She supposed she was waiting to see a train, but she stayed on the bridge for fifteen or twenty minutes, the sun breaking through the high cloud cover, and no train came. Perhaps, after all, the line was disused. So many were, in England. And suddenly she realised that this was the feeling she would like to pass on, to her children, if she ever had any, the feeling of standing on a bridge somewhere, the sun warming the back of her head, her shoulders, and just the smell of buddleia, its blunt mauve flowers, the smell of rust and nettles too, and almost nothing moving. The feeling of being entirely in the present, with nothing to look back on, nothing to look forward to. A feeling of reprieve, a kind of grace. This feeling more than any other.

She arrived outside the squat to find the front door open. From the top of the steps she could see through the house to the back garden, an upright rectangle of sunlight at the far end of a long, dark hall. Four or five people sprawled on the lawn with their shirts off, their bodies white, almost ghostly. She recognised Paul, who used to be a skinhead in Newcastle, but she didn’t know any of the others. And Charlie was not among them. She thought he would probably be upstairs. He had two rooms on the fourth floor, under the roof. She climbed slowly, one hand sliding along the cool, curved wood of the banister rail. She could smell plaster and damp, a smell that hadn’t altered in the year since she’d last visited.

She opened the door to Charlie’s living-room and stepped inside. He was sitting in an armchair by the window reading a book. He wore a collarless shirt, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.

‘Glade.’ He closed the book and stood up. ‘As you’ve probably noticed,’ he said, ‘we’ve been invaded. I had to retreat indoors.’ He smiled his peculiar, straight-lipped smile.

While he was downstairs, making tea, Glade looked around the room. The pale-blue walls were so cracked in some places that they reminded her of china that’s been smashed and then glued back together. The floorboards had the bleached, grey colour of driftwood washed up on a beach. An oval mirror hung on a chain over the fireplace, and below it, on the mantelpiece, stood an invitation to a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, and a pair of green glass candlesticks that had once belonged to Charlie’s grandmother. On the opposite wall, above his work-table, there was a large black-and-white photograph of a famous Austrian philosopher. Glade put her bag on the floor and settled on the camp-bed that doubled as a sofa. Outside, in the garden, she heard laughter. She imagined they were stoned. That was what usually happened when they sat in the garden in fine weather.

Charlie returned with a pot of tea, some biscuits and a can of beer. Once he was sitting in his armchair again, he asked her how things had gone in America.

‘Not too well,’ she said.

‘Tom?’

She nodded.

‘It’s all right,’ Charlie said. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’

So she talked about the wedding instead — the old man in the linen suit, the creamy smell of the gardenias. Then, suddenly, she broke off.

‘I keep feeling strange,’ she said.

Charlie’s face didn’t alter. ‘What kind of strange?’

She told him about being on the plane and ordering a drink which, at that point, she had never heard of, and how, later that day, a similar thing had happened in the house on Chestnut Street. She seemed to know all about something she didn’t know anything about, if that made sense. She glanced at him. His face was lowered, and he was nodding. She told him that she sometimes saw orange. She didn’t notice it exactly (though that happened too). She actually saw it — when it wasn’t there. She told him that she’d mentioned it to Tom and that Tom thought she should see a psychiatrist.

‘It’s all part of the same thing, you think?’ Charlie said.

‘It feels like it.’

‘And you can’t control it?’

She shook her head.

‘Have you told anyone?’ he said. ‘Apart from Tom, I mean?’

‘No. Who else would I tell?’

He looked at his can of beer for a moment, then he lifted it to his lips and drank.

‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me, Charlie?’ She paused. ‘I think maybe there’s something wrong with me.’ It frightened her to think that she might have asked him a question he couldn’t answer. She waited a moment, aware of her heart suddenly, how it shook her entire body, and then, cautiously, in a low voice, she said, ‘I’ve started making lists.’

‘Lists?’ he said.

She reached sideways and down, into her bag, and pulled out a black notebook with a dark-red spine. It was a kind of diary, she told him, of all the orange things she saw. She gave him the first page to read. She could only remember two of the entries: Crunchie Wrapper, Heathrow and Man’s Tie, Piccadilly Line.

‘It’s just like a normal day,’ Charlie said when he had reached the bottom of the page, ‘only you’re telling it in orange.’

‘I know.’ Glade hugged her knees as if she were cold. ‘You don’t think I’m mad, then?’ She didn’t give Charlie time to answer; she was still too afraid of what he might say. ‘Tom would, if he saw it.’

‘Tom.’ Charlie turned his attention back to the notebook.

While Charlie was reading, Glade leaned on the window-sill. She realised she would never be able to tell him what had happened in the car on Chestnut Street. It was the way he’d just said Tom — his voice impatient, almost contemptuous. Sometimes people needed protecting from what you knew.

When Charlie came to the end, he closed the notebook and stood up. She was expecting him to offer an opinion. Instead, he reached for his wallet. ‘We ought to go to the shops,’ he said, ‘otherwise they’ll be shut. Don’t forget,’ and he smiled, ‘this is Penge.’

Outside, it was still light, though the colour of the shadows had diluted, the black of midday fading to a kind of indigo. Most houses had their windows open. It would be a warm night. They passed a girl in a pink T-shirt who was swinging backwards and forwards on her garden gate.

‘Are you ravers?’ she said as they walked by.

‘That’s right.’ Charlie grinned. ‘What about you?’

The girl slid down off the gate and hid behind a hedge.

When they returned to the squat, it was empty. They sat in the half-derelict, high-ceilinged kitchen and drank beer while the sausages they’d bought spat and sizzled under the grill. Someone had painted a large cow on the wall, and then drawn a big red line through it.

‘Paul’s given up dairy products,’ Charlie said.

He served the sausages on white china plates with mashed potato and red cabbage out of a jar. They ate in the garden, by candle-light. After Charlie had finished, he opened his tin of Old Holborn and began to roll a cigarette. Glade lay back on the grass. The sky looked close enough to touch, but she knew that if she reached up with her hand, there would be nothing there.

‘You know that notebook of mine you read?’ she said.

Charlie looked up.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s more.’

In her bedroom she had a cardboard box marked ORANGE (MAY). Every time she left her flat, she took a small bag with her. If she saw something orange — a sweet-wrapper, a piece of plastic — she would pick it up and put it in the bag. When she got home, she would transfer what she had found into the box. It was an ongoing process. May would soon be over. In a few days’ time she would be starting on her ORANGE (JUNE) collection.

Charlie was watching her carefully now.

‘All this is new,’ she said. ‘The last couple of weeks.’ She paused, pulling at a blade of grass. ‘Of course, the posters didn’t help.’

‘What posters?’

‘You must have seen them,’ she said. ‘They’re everywhere.’

First there had been posters of orange exclamation marks. Then, a week or two later, the posters changed. Suddenly they said NCH! in bright-orange capitals. Just NCH!. It didn’t make any sense. Finally, when she returned from New Orleans, the posters revealed the whole word: KWENCH!. Hadn’t he noticed them? He nodded. Yes, he had. And he must have seen the cans of Kwench! in every shop, she went on. Bright-orange cans, you couldn’t miss them — at least, she couldn’t. The word Kwench! her obsession with the colour orange … She had felt all along that they were linked, but until the drink appeared, until she’d actually heard of it, she couldn’t be sure. Now that she was sure, though, she was plagued by new uncertainties. Sometimes it seemed that she knew even less than she had known before.

‘I get these urges,’ she said. ‘This evening, for instance. In the off-licence. I almost bought a can of it. Did you notice?’

Charlie shook his head.

‘Well, it’s true. And I don’t even like the stuff.’ She stared down at the grass, which was green, green, green. ‘I don’t even like it,’ she said again.

Charlie lay back, one hand behind his head, the other holding his roll-up to his lips. His cheeks hollowed as he inhaled. He blew smoke vertically into the slowly darkening sky.

‘So you think there’s definitely a connection,’ he said at last.

‘There must be.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t really know.’

‘Suppose I investigate it for you …’

She looked at him hopefully, without really knowing what she was hoping for. Anything that would take the weight off her, perhaps. Even temporarily.

‘Listen,’ Charlie said. ‘There’s someone I know, he’s a journalist. I could get him to look into it.’ Charlie inhaled again, but his roll-up had gone out. ‘I’ll tell him exactly what you told me, see what he thinks. He’ll probably want to talk to you himself.’ Charlie placed the roll-up on the lid of his Old Holborn tin. ‘In the meantime, don’t tell anyone. About any of this.’

This was the way Charlie got sometimes, especially if he was talking about the government. His mouth would tense and straighten, his eyes would glitter between their lids.

‘Don’t worry, Charlie,’ she said, as if it was his secret she was keeping, not her own. ‘I won’t tell a soul.’

White China

Charlie opened a small plastic container that had once held tic tac mints and emptied the contents on to his palm. His fingers curled protectively around three white pills. ‘I thought we could do it this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Just talk. Relax.’

Glade peered at the pills. ‘Is that ecstasy?’

Charlie nodded.

‘I’ve only done it once before,’ she said.

‘Maybe you should start with a half.’ He broke one of the pills in two and gave it to her.

She looked at him for a moment, grinned, then swallowed it, washing it down with a mouthful of slightly dusty water from the bedside table.

He had arrived on her doorstep at midday. When he appeared like that, without phoning first, without any warning, it usually meant that he thought she was in trouble, or needed looking after. But he would never refer to it directly.

They sat on the floor in her bedroom with the window open and the red silk curtains closed. Outside, in the street, a warm breeze was blowing and, every now and then, the curtains hollowed as they were drawn into the gap, which made her think of belly dancers. The only light in the room came from four white candles that stood in a cluster on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.

‘If anyone comes to the door,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to answer it.’

Charlie agreed. ‘We’re out.’

She lay back on a heap of cushions, her hands behind her head. She could hear the hedge moving below her window; it sounded like somebody flicking through the pages of a book. The curtains were the same colour as your eyelids when you shut your eyes and stare into the sun. She was noticing everything in detail — in part, she thought, because she was curious, on edge, waiting for the drug to take effect. The smell of cut grass drifted into the room.

Summer.

Suddenly she felt as if she was being lifted towards the ceiling, not straight upwards, but in a kind of slow curve. She looked at the floor. She hadn’t moved.

‘I think it’s starting,’ she said.

Charlie looked up. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

He opened his tin of Old Holborn and took out a packet of Rizlas. She watched him peel a single Rizla from the packet and begin to fill it with tobacco. She was glad the Rizlas were green. If they had been the orange type she would have had to put them in her ORANGE (JULY) box. She wondered how many ORANGE boxes she would do in her life. Say she lived to be eighty. How many boxes would there be by then? Her lips moved silently. About seven hundred. She looked round the room. It didn’t seem as if seven hundred boxes would fit. She would have to move. And another thing. She’d have to start writing the year on the top of each box, otherwise she’d get them all mixed up.

She thought of her notebook. There was something she liked in it, something recent. She leaned forwards and pulled it out from under the bed. She showed Charlie her entry for the previous Thursday. Only one entry for the entire day. Betty.

Charlie looked at her quizzically.

‘Betty’s a new waitress at the restaurant,’ Glade said. ‘She’s got orange hair, masses of it. She’s from New Zealand.’ She paused. ‘I was working lunch that day and the sun was shining through the window and every time I looked round, the only thing I could see was Betty’s hair.’ She paused again, remembering. ‘It was like watching a fire move round a room.’

Charlie was staring at his shoe, and his mouth had stretched into a wide smile.

‘The walls are changing shape,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That happens.’

She stood up slowly, walked towards the door. Her legs felt solid, but artificial, as if they were made of the same thing all the way through. Some kind of plastic, perhaps. Or fibreglass. It seemed like an adventure, just to be moving. She opened the bedroom door and looked out into the corridor.

‘Long way to the kitchen,’ she said.

She heard Charlie murmur, ‘You want me to go?’

‘Maybe.’ Then she changed her mind. ‘No, it’s all right.’ The corridor seemed to slope downwards and then bend sharply to the right, though she knew that, in reality, it was both straight and level. At the end, where the kitchen should have been, everything was white and fuzzy, everything was glowing …

She left the room, walked halfway down the corridor. The gradient seemed steeper now, and she had to use the muscles in the front of her thighs to stop herself from breaking into a run. The white glow had intensified. She could have been a saint about to receive a vision: there was the same sense of suspended time, uncertain space. She thought she had better stay where she was — for a while, at least. She didn’t think she could make it all the way to the kitchen. And besides, she could no longer remember what she was going there for.

She looked over her shoulder. It was uphill to the bedroom, quite a climb; it tired her, just thinking about it. As she stood in the corridor, looking back towards her bedroom, she became aware that there was somebody outside the house. From where she was standing she could look down the stairs, one steep flight to the ground floor. The door to the flat was open — she must have forgotten to shut it when she let Charlie in — and she could see the turquoise carpet in the hallway and the white front door beyond. If she lowered her head a fraction she could see the top half of the door, with its two narrow panes of frosted glass. Part of that frosted glass had darkened. Someone was out there, on the other side.

As she moved backwards, feeling the cool wall against the palms of her hands, against her shoulderblades, she saw the letter-box downstairs begin to open. She stood in the shadows, her body motionless, her breathing shallow. A stranger’s eyes were staring into the house. Had he heard her walking down the corridor? Was he looking up the stairs? What if he could see her feet? She listened for a sound from him, but heard nothing. The house ticked and creaked. At least she heard the flap of the letter-box drop back into place.

She wasn’t sure how long she waited before she left the safety of the wall and made her way back up the corridor again. It must have been at least ten minutes — enough time, she thought, for that dark shape to vanish from behind the glass. In the bedroom nothing had changed. Red silk curtains, candles burning. Charlie Moore and his Old Holborn tin …

‘I’m not going out there again,’ she said.

Charlie looked up at her. His face had slackened, like the face of someone who has been through a long illness. His eyes were a strange colour, somewhere between fawn and grey. The colour of raincoats.

‘How do you feel?’ he said.

‘Fine.’ She lowered herself on to the cushions. ‘There was somebody at the door.’

‘It’s all right. He’s gone.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know. He was big.’ Charlie was turning a lighter on the palm of his hand. ‘He was wearing one of those nylon bomber jackets.’

‘Big?’ She couldn’t think who it might have been.

‘Maybe he had the wrong house,’ Charlie said.

‘Maybe.’ She was still trying to think. ‘He looked through the letter-box.’

Charlie put a roll-up in his mouth and lit it. ‘Did he see you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

A silence fell, broken only by the distant jangling of a burglar alarm. She was beginning to find it difficult to talk. The air had thickened, like fog; the corners of the room were disappearing.

‘That journalist,’ Charlie said after a while. ‘Have you spoken to him yet?’

‘Journalist?’

‘That friend of mine. I wanted him to look into the soft drink you were telling me about.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Apparently he’s been trying to call you.’

‘The phone’s been unplugged. Tom …’

Charlie nodded. ‘Maybe I should give him your number at work.’

Glade was quiet for a moment. ‘The man who came to the door,’ she said slowly, ‘you think that was him?’

‘No. He doesn’t know where you live.’ Charlie paused. ‘He told me he was having trouble getting anywhere. The company that makes Kwench! is American, and the people who work there, they have to sign a contract when they’re hired. They have to promise not to say anything that reflects badly on the organisation. It’s like an oath of allegiance.’ Charlie turned to look at her. ‘He thinks they’ve been doing something illegal.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘What?’

‘He wouldn’t go into it. He wants to see you, though. He’s got all kinds of questions.’

Glade undid her skirt and took it off, then climbed on to her bed and slid between the sheets. ‘I’m not going to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’m just going to lie down for a bit. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, I don’t mind.’

‘You can lie here too, if you like.’

Charlie thought about it. He put his cigarette in the ashtray and unlaced his boots. He half-sat, half-lay down next to her, on the outside of the covers, with his shoulders propped against the headboard.

‘Feels good,’ she said, ‘doesn’t it.’

He nodded.

They lay side by side, the window open, the red silk curtains billowing. They were quiet for what might have been an hour. The room felt timeless, though. Cocooned. As if it were actually a capsule floating somewhere high up in the dark.

‘Glade? Are you awake?’

‘Yes. I just couldn’t speak, that’s all.’

Later, she noticed a flickering to her left and turned, thinking it must be some new effect the drug was having on her. But it was Giacometti, her cat. He had climbed up on to the mantelpiece and, having eased himself between the chimney-breast and the four candles, a gap of only a few inches, he was staring down at her, his eyes round and yellow, utterly expressionless. She found it inexplicable, miraculous, that he should be so calm. Because he had caught fire. The whole of his left side was burning, and yet he didn’t seem to care, or even notice. He just stood on the mantelpiece, looking down at her. She reached across, touched Charlie on the shoulder.

‘The cat’s on fire,’ she said.

Charlie leapt off the bed. After lying still for such a long time, Glade had almost forgotten that movement existed. She had certainly forgotten it was possible to move so fast. Just watching Charlie cross the room left her feeling curiously breathless.

Giacometti was watching too. He watched as Charlie used the flat of his hand to pat out the flames. He didn’t move, though. Smoke lifted towards the ceiling, and the room filled with the acrid smell of burnt hair. Still he didn’t move. Only when Charlie had stepped back to the bed and was sitting on the edge of it did Giacometti drop softly to the floor, like snow falling off a roof, and make his way towards the rug that lay under the window. Once there, he began to lick one of his front paws, each stroke of his tongue measured and leisurely, preoccupied. He didn’t seem to be hurt at all, nor did he seem to think that anything unusual had happened. He showed no interest in the patch on his left side that had been blackened by the flames. Perhaps, in the end, it had been a protest of some kind, a protest that had had the desired effect. Perhaps he was merely satisfied.

On Sunday afternoon, when Glade came home from work, she walked in through the door to see Sally standing at the top of the stairs with the phone. Sally held one hand over the receiver and mouthed the words It’s him.

‘Who?’ Glade said.

Sally rolled her eyes. Tom.

‘I’m not here.’

‘I told him you just got in.’

When Glade stared at her in disbelief, Sally whispered, ‘I thought the two of you were talking again.’

Sighing, Glade climbed the stairs.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sally said, her voice hardening. She sounded wounded suddenly, even angry, as if it was all Glade’s fault, somehow.

Glade took the phone from her and sat down on the floor with her back against the wall. Tom. More than two months had passed since the weekend in New Orleans, but she still didn’t feel ready to speak to him. Holding the receiver on her lap, she stared through the doorway ahead of her, into the living-room. The gas fire with its thin, metal bars twisted out of shape, the threadbare carpet, the junk-shop photographs of strangers peering dismally from behind their dusty glass. She saw it the way Tom must have seen it when he first visited — as an untended place, squalid, almost derelict. Cautiously, she brought the receiver to her ear. ‘Hello?’

‘Glade! Jesus, is that you?’ His voice, which she had forgotten — or rather, deliberately not thought about. There was warmth in it, sunlight. A kind of safety. ‘I’ve been trying to call you,’ he was saying. ‘Has your phone been out of order or something?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? How can you not know, Glade?’

She struggled to find words. ‘I’ve been busy.’

It wasn’t true.

‘That painting you gave me,’ Tom was saying. ‘I hung it in the bedroom.’

She nodded. Yes, the painting.

‘It looks good,’ he said.

‘I’m glad.’

‘You know,’ Tom said, ‘I’d like it if we could see each other.’

Suddenly she had to concentrate. ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to do that,’ she said carefully, as if repeating lines she had learned. ‘I thought we agreed.’

‘Glade,’ he said, ‘don’t take everything so seriously.’

It was then that she noticed the lack of echo on the line. There was no hollowness at all, in fact, and no delay — none of the usual difficulty of talking across an ocean. Her neck felt hot and damp; she lifted her hair away from it with her free hand.

‘Where are you?’ she said.

‘I’m in London.’ He told her the name of his hotel. ‘I was thinking of coming over.’

She had to put him off. Quick. What would he say?

‘I’ve got rather a lot on at the moment …’

‘It’s almost one in the morning, Glade.’

‘I told you. I’m really busy.’ She waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she said.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’

‘What about breakfast?’

‘Breakfast?’ Tom laughed humourlessly. ‘Jesus, Glade. OK.’ He gave her his room number, telling her to be there no later than nine.

After Glade had hung up, Sally appeared in the kitchen doorway, a cigarette held vertically just to one side of her mouth.

‘That was great,’ she said.

‘Was it?’

Sally nodded. ‘You handled it really well.’

Glade wasn’t so sure. She suddenly felt sorry for Tom, all alone in his five-star luxury hotel in Knightsbridge.

‘That colour doesn’t suit you.’

Glade glanced down at her orange silk shirt.

‘It doesn’t suit you at all.’ Tom tilted his head on one side, as if objectively appraising her. ‘Maybe if you had a tan …’

‘I like it,’ she said quietly.

Tom shook his head. ‘It’s not you.’

When Glade arrived at the hotel that morning she had asked reception to call Tom and tell him that she was downstairs in the restaurant. This was Sally’s idea. Don’t go to his room, she said. You know what’ll happen if you do. And get someone from reception to call him. If you call him yourself, he’ll make you change your mind. For once, Glade was grateful for the advice: she hadn’t wanted to go to Tom’s room, but she would never have been able to think of a way round it, not on her own.

It had upset Tom to have his plans altered, as she had suspected it might. He was frowning when he walked up to the table, and he had been frowning ever since. He had attacked the waiter for bringing him scrambled eggs that were too dry. ‘I asked for wet eggs. Wet. Do you know what that word means? In my country it means moist, damp. It means runny. These eggs are fucking dry.’ The waiter was bowing, blinking, murmuring apologies, his eyes dazed and slightly watery as if he might, at any moment, burst into tears. ‘The coffee’s weak as well. How does anyone wake up over here drinking shit like this? Maybe they never do. Jesus.’ All this in a normal voice, but with an edge to it. As a waitress herself, Glade had sometimes come across people who behaved like Tom. They frightened her. She stared at her plate until he had finished, stared at it as if it interested her, when actually all she was thinking was white china, white china. She wondered if a harmless question might change his mood. She lifted her head. ‘So what did you want to see me about?’

Tom leaned back in his chair and fixed her with a long, sardonic look. ‘I just wanted to see you, Glade. It wasn’t about anything.’

‘Oh.’

She read the menu again, even though they were already eating. When she asked for Kwench! with her breakfast, Tom had looked at her, shaken his head and said, ‘Now she’s going Mexican on me.’ She hadn’t understood what he meant by that. It was irrelevant, anyway, because they didn’t have Kwench!. She had ordered tea instead.

‘So what have you been doing with yourself?’ Tom reached for a piece of toast, examined it.

‘Nothing really,’ she said. ‘Just working.’

He began to talk about a case he had been involved in recently, something to do with tax fraud on an unimaginable scale.

‘What about that man,’ Glade said, interrupting, ‘the one you found in Venezuela?’

‘Colombia.’ Tom smiled. ‘He got life.’

In her head Glade instantly released the man. She watched him emerge from a small door in a high grey wall, walk out into dazzling American light. When he was at a safe distance, the prison blew up behind him. She saw flames leap into the sky.

‘One thing happened, actually,’ she said.

Tom looked up from a forkful of scrambled eggs, which were now, presumably, wet enough. ‘What was that?’

‘You know my cat?’

Yes, he knew.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it caught fire —’

‘Your cat caught fire?’

‘Yes. And you know what happened then?’

Tom was staring.

‘We had to put it out,’ she said. ‘Put the cat out.’ She began to laugh. Her tea slopped over, her napkin fell on to the floor. Soon she was laughing uncontrollably, and the sight of Tom’s face, bewildered at first, and then annoyed, made it impossible to stop.

Towards the middle of that week Glade was at the restaurant, slicing olive bread for lunch, when the phone rang. Betty had been sent out to buy vegetables and ice, and the maitre d’ was upstairs in the office, so Glade answered it herself. It was Charlie, calling from a phone-box in South London. He asked her if the journalist had contacted her. She said he hadn’t. Charlie muttered something under his breath. Then he said, ‘I need to see you. Tonight, if possible.’

Glade leaned on the bar, looking out into the sunlit street. The glitter of spokes as a bicycle slid past. The heatwave lasting. She suggested the rose garden in Regent’s Park, which was one of her favourite places in the summer. Charlie seemed to approve of the idea.

‘The rose garden,’ he said. ‘At half-past seven.’

Later, as she smoothed butter into small china pots, she couldn’t help thinking that there had been a tightness in Charlie’s voice, a tightness that was unfamiliar. Throughout lunch the strained sound stayed with her. She found it difficult to keep her mind on things. When the woman wearing the gold hoop earrings wanted to know what was in the duck confit soup, she just went blank.

‘Confit of duck,’ she began, then faltered.

‘Well, obviously,’ the woman snapped.

Glade had to ask Betty to come over to the table and run through the ingredients for her — cavolo nero, dried haricot beans, carrots, and so on.

Not long afterwards, there was another awkward moment, this time with the man sitting by the window. He was in his late fifties, early sixties, and dressed conventionally in a dark-blue blazer and grey trousers. When she first saw him, she was sure she knew him; she couldn’t remember how, though, or from where. She must have waited on him recently, she thought. Yes, he was probably a regular. She smiled as she passed his table and asked him how he was, but he looked at her with such detachment, such a complete absence of recognition, that she realised she must have made a mistake. Just then, luckily, a much younger man arrived at the table. The man in the blazer stood up, saying, ‘There you are, James,’ and she was able to slip away, unnoticed.

At last her shift came to an end. She walked through Soho and over Oxford Street, enjoying the sunshine, the bustle of the crowds. At five-thirty she stopped at a pub on Great Titchfield Street where she ordered a double gin-and-tonic. For the next hour she sat outdoors, allowing all the tension to drain out of her. As she sipped her drink she began to think about Charlie’s friend, the journalist. She found herself imagining an office, with long corridors, fluorescent lights. The smell of radiators that had just been bled: that stifled, gassy air. She saw the journalist hurrying towards a door, which rattled when he knocked on it. He was a small, slightly agitated man, and he was wearing a brown suit with a mustard-yellow cardigan underneath. When he disappeared through the door, closing it quietly behind him, she remained outside, in the corridor, alone.

She finished her drink and left the pub. Instead of walking north, towards Regent’s Park, she decided to take a roundabout route. Near Portland Place the streets felt still and warm and dead, like rooms in a house that’s been locked up for the summer. She kept going west. On Marylebone High Street she called in at a small supermarket and bought a baguette, some French cheese and a bottle of white wine. As she passed the cooler, she noticed half a dozen bright-orange cans. She opened the door and took out three of them. ‘Kwench it!’ she muttered, moving up the aisle towards the counter.

By half-past seven she was crossing the park. There had been no rain for weeks and the grass had a scorched look; it crunched and crackled under her feet like straw. The rose garden seemed green, almost lavish by comparison. She loved the layered fragrance you breathed in there — the way it hypnotised you, slowed you down. You would often see people stoop over a rose and just go still, their heads at a slight angle; they could have been trying to listen to a sound. Then, after a while, they would step back, stare up into the sky, entranced, transformed. Though by August, of course, the scented roses had already bloomed, their petals brown at the edges, as if they had been dipped in coffee.

She found Charlie sitting on a wooden bench with his hands in his pockets. He smiled at her, but she could see that something was worrying him. It showed in his forehead, which was twisted, and in the paleness of his face. He looked cold, despite the weather.

She sat on the ground in front of him and unpacked the provisions she had brought with her.

‘A feast,’ he exclaimed. But his voice had no life in it; it sounded hollow, bleak.

‘What’s the matter, Charlie?’ she asked.

He sighed. ‘I’m not sure.’

She passed him the bottle of wine, which he opened with the corkscrew on his Swiss Army penknife. They began to eat. On the next bench along, under an archway that was smothered in voluptuous pink roses, a couple were kissing.

‘The journalist,’ Charlie said, then stopped.

Glade looked round. ‘What about him?’

‘He still hasn’t called you, has he.’

‘No.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of.’ Charlie swallowed some wine from the bottle, then offered it to her. She shook her head. His eyes veered away from her, up into the trees. ‘I can’t get hold of him,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried him at work, at home …’

Glade frowned. Every time she thought about the journalist she saw a man in a brown suit and a yellow cardigan disappearing through a door. She chewed thoughtfully on a piece of bread. Behind Charlie’s shoulder, the couple were still kissing.

‘No one seems to know where he is.’ Charlie reached for the bottle again and drank. ‘You see, if he was away on an assignment, I’d know about it. He would have told me.’ He was staring at the grass now. When he lifted his head, his pupils had dilated. ‘Something’s going on.’

She smiled. She couldn’t help it.

‘I’m serious,’ he said.

‘But, Charlie —’

‘I want you to be careful, that’s all. Be careful.’

‘Careful?’ she said. ‘What of?’

He peered out into the encroaching darkness. ‘I don’t know.’

Sometime later, she noticed that the bench the lovers had been sitting on was empty. At the same moment she remembered the man in the restaurant at lunchtime, the man wearing the blazer, and she realised that, although she didn’t actually know him, she had seen him before. It was during the two days she had spent in the sleep clinic. He was one of the researchers who had been standing in the doorway to her cubicle, and who had backed away, startled, when she woke up. No wonder he hadn’t recognised her. She was probably just one of thousands of people that he used in his research.

She was on the point of telling Charlie about the coincidence when she heard a rumble coming from beneath her, from under the ground. She couldn’t think what it might be. She glanced at Charlie, who seemed equally perplexed. There was a sudden, vicious hiss, and something landed on her. She jumped up, brushing at her dress. It was water. They had turned the sprinkler system on, and water was being flung in great loops from the tops of the rose arbours.

She had cried out the first time, in shock, but then the water kept landing on her, and it was so cold and violent against her skin, so like being slapped, that she cried out every time it happened. She tried to dodge it, find a place where the sprinklers couldn’t touch her, but the system was too efficient. Each square-inch of grass seemed to be accounted for.

In the end they had to gather up their things and run across the rose garden and out through the gates on to the road. They stood under a streetlamp, soaked to the skin and out of breath and shivering.

Then, looking at each other, they began to laugh.

The Colour of Real Life

Eight o’clock in the evening, a church bell tolling somewhere far away, across the valley, a shimmer at the limit of her hearing. Tired after the long journey north, Glade leaned on the five-bar gate and yawned. The sun had already fallen behind the hill, but its rays were fanning out against the sky, and the vault of glowing violet above her made her arms look tanned. On the way home from work that week, she had paused outside a house in Notting Hill, its garden lush and secretive, its front room empty but flooded with a warm gold light. As always, a feeling she didn’t understand passed through her. It wasn’t envy. She didn’t want to live in a house like that. No, it was closer to nostalgia. As if there had been a time when that had been her lot. As if she was being allowed a rare glimpse into some distant corner of her memory. Standing on the pavement outside the house it had occurred to her that her father hadn’t called for at least a month. She decided to pay him a visit. She would take food with her and cook for him. He would have no idea she was coming. He would be happy.

She lifted the stiff iron catch. The gate groaned open. Then, as she set out across the field, she noticed that no lights were showing in the caravan. Her heart quickened. Perhaps he had already gone to bed. Perhaps he was out. She felt a disappointment seep into her. The sky seemed to widen suddenly, expand. She couldn’t imagine where he might be. She knew so little about the life he lived when she wasn’t there. How he passed the time. Who he saw, if anyone. She stood still, the caravan a pale rectangle against the darkness of the hedge. Her eyes drifted upwards to the last lit shreds of cloud, thin red shapes on a mauve ground. They reminded her of the Easter she had spent with him the year before. He had hidden chocolate eggs in the field for her — but he had hidden them too well. By the time she found them, they had been attacked by animals. Some had been devoured completely, so that nothing but a twist of wizened, glittery paper had been left behind.

She crossed the field, making for the caravan. She could hear her own breathing, fast and shallow, and she knew then that she was hurrying. In that moment she sensed that something had altered. When she turned the door-handle, she was not surprised to find it locked. She peered through the window: it looked the same as always — tidy but cluttered, the contents veiled with a subtle fuzz of dust. At least he hadn’t moved. Was it possible he was trying to call her from the phone-box? Would that be too much of a coincidence? Even now, she thought, he could be trudging back along the road, cursing the fact that he had walked three miles for nothing. Then his eyes would alight on her, sitting on the steps. As if, simply by dialling her number, he had somehow cast a line and reeled her in. She reached into her bag and, taking out a can of Kwench! opened it and drank. She shivered at the taste, but finished it. Then opened another.

The sky had faded, the trees had blackened. An hour must have passed. The darkness was beginning to play tricks on her. She saw the gate swing open more than once. She saw figures appear — not just her father, but Charlie, Betty from the restaurant, even Sally James. At last she stood up, walked slowly back across the field. But instead of following the track that led to the road, she turned into the farmyard. Sprigs of Queen Anne’s lace glowed dimly in the hedgerows. She passed silent sheds, the air rich with manure and hay. When she reached the house she hesitated. There was a window next to the back door. Shadows shifted behind the curtains. She had never spoken to Mr Babb, the farmer. She didn’t even know what he looked like. At least someone was in, though.

An old woman answered the door. She had poor eyesight and thinning hair.

‘I’m looking for my father,’ Glade said. ‘He lives in the caravan. Up there.’ She pointed towards the field.

The woman turned and called over her shoulder. ‘Harry?’

Glade heard the scrape of chair-legs on a tile floor. The door opened a foot wider and a man in his middle-fifties stood beside the woman, wiping his mouth on the back of his wrist. He had the swollen eyelids of someone who had just been woken out of a deep sleep.

‘You Spencer’s daughter?’ he said.

Glade nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘He’s at the hospital.’

Her throat hurt suddenly, as if she had been shouting. She felt somebody take her by the arm.

‘You’d better come in,’ the woman said.

She sat Glade at the kitchen table, poured tea into a yellow cup. While Mr Babb finished his supper of cold roast meat and boiled potatoes, she told Glade what she knew. It had happened late on Sunday night. She was walking over to the sheds when she noticed what looked like a piece of washing lying in the field. She thought it must have blown off the line. There had been strong winds out of the north that day. Only when she got up close did she realise that it was Mr Spencer from the caravan.

‘If he hadn’t been wearing that white shirt,’ she said, ‘I’d never have seen him.’

She fetched Mr Babb, who carried Mr Spencer into the house. From there, they called an ambulance. A heart attack, it was. Nothing too serious. Still, they were keeping him in hospital for a few days, just to be on the safe side.

‘No one told me,’ Glade said quietly.

‘They tried to ring you from the hospital,’ the woman said. ‘They couldn’t get an answer.’

Glade felt her face flush. She stared at her tea-cup, which was chipped around the rim. Perhaps it, too, had been gnawed by animals.

‘There was music playing,’ Mr Babb said suddenly.

The woman looked up. ‘Music?’

‘Don’t you remember? In the field.’

‘Flamenco,’ Glade said.

The farmer and the woman peered in her direction, as if a sudden mist had filled the room and hidden her.

‘Flamenco,’ Glade said. ‘It’s Spanish.’

That night she slept in the caravan. It was too dark to make out any of her father’s possessions, but the pillow smelled of him, a smell that was both dry and sweet, like custard powder. After finishing her tea, she had asked Mr Babb where the hospital was, imagining that she could visit that same evening. The old woman answered first, saying that the hospital was twenty-five miles away. Then Mr Babb shook his head. He thought it was more like thirty. And anyway, he said, visiting hours would already be over. Glade gazed into her empty cup. That sudden heat passed over her again and she felt as if the table was easing out from under her. She scanned the room, looking for something familiar or reliable. The old stone sink, the gun leaning in the corner, the mud-streaked fridge. Her eyes struggled briefly with the curtains and their repeating twists of grey and brown and yellow. Through the half-open door she could see into a dingy corridor, sacks of grain slumped on the floor, the walls and ceiling painted green.

Mr Babb opened the drawer at the end of the table, sliding it all the way out until the delicate brass handle buried itself in his belly. His fingers moved clumsily among the jumbled contents. At last he produced a ring of grey metal that held keys of every shape and size. He could unlock the caravan for her, he announced. Or if she was worried about sleeping out there all by herself, she was welcome to the spare room. Glade thanked him, saying she would be happy in the caravan. She would feel closer to her father. She hesitated, then asked if she could call the hospital. A meaningful look passed between the farmer and the woman, the air seemed tangled for a moment, then the farmer nodded slowly and rose to his feet. He opened the cupboard behind the kitchen door and took out a plastic bag with Tesco written on one side. Reaching into the bag, he brought out a shiny, pale-pink telephone, an old model with a dial on the front instead of buttons.

‘It’s so it doesn’t get dirty,’ the woman explained. ‘Mr Babb, he just hates dust. Don’t you?’ And she looked up at the farmer who had the phone in his left hand, gripping it from above, with fingers spread, as if it were a tortoise or a crab.

He didn’t answer her, but wheeled sideways and, stooping abruptly, plugged the lead into a socket in the wall. He placed the phone in front of Glade, his face still flushed from the exertion. The woman told her the number of the hospital and they both watched greedily as she dialled. She spoke to a nurse on her father’s ward. According to the nurse, he was already sleeping. He was comfortable. She could visit in the morning, between ten o’clock and twelve.

She lay in her father’s bed with the lights out and the curtains drawn. She could feel the darkness all around her like a weight, a presence. It seemed to exert a pressure on the walls, the caravan as fragile as an eggshell in the night’s clenched fist. Sleep would not take her. After an hour she had to light a candle, wedging it upright in an empty whisky bottle that she found beside the bed. What happened, Glade? What happened? Her father’s voice spoke to her from somewhere above, under the roof. She remembered how her mother had smashed a bowl once, bits of china skidding across the floor. And she had shouted too, words with blunt endings, then the kitchen door slammed shut. Her father stood with his head lowered as though his punishment was only just beginning. What happened? She tried to hypnotise herself by staring at the flame. A strong wind swooped down, shook the walls. The world turned to water, hedge and trees and grass hissing like breakers on a pebble beach. Out in the field the journalist stood watch, his face earnest, conscientious, his notebook a white glimmer in his hand. He was wearing the brown suit again, with the yellow cardigan underneath, and in his breast pocket she could see a triangle of folded handkerchief, which was a subtle reference to the mountain, of course, his way of telling her that he was on her side. And suddenly she knew the truth. Charlie was wrong to worry. The journalist would come for her. Maybe not tonight. But he would come. She would talk to him, and he would listen. Everything would be explained. And with that thought the wind rose again, hiding all other sounds, and her breathing deepened and she slept.

She found her father in a ward with seven men. When he noticed her, he sat up, smoothing his bedclothes and smiling, as if she was someone he’d been told to please. But she had seen him first, through a gap in the curtains, his face slack and hollow, almost uninhabited, and even now, as she settled on the chair beside the bed, she thought the bones in his forehead showed too clearly through his skin: she could see the edges, the places where they joined.

‘Glade,’ he said. Then, turning to include the other men, he said, ‘My daughter.’ The men all came to life suddenly, nodding and smiling at the same time, like puppets.

‘Dad,’ she murmured, reproaching him.

‘Sorry. They’re not bad fellows, though.’

She took his hand, and he watched it being taken, as if it didn’t belong to him. ‘How are you?’ she said.

‘Oh, I’ll live.’ He gave her what was intended to be a jaunty grin, but his eyes seemed frightened.

‘Apparently they tried to call me,’ she said. ‘My phone wasn’t working.’

‘That’s all right. The Babbs looked after me.’

She couldn’t bring herself to ask him how he came to be lying in the field. Instead she simply held on to his hand and studied it. As a young girl she used to sit on his lap and learn his hand off by heart. The oval fingernails, the swollen veins. The dark-grey star-shaped mark on his left thumb, which he had always jokingly referred to as his tattoo (a boy had stabbed him with a fountain pen at school).

‘I slept in the caravan last night,’ she said.

‘Did you? You weren’t scared?’

She shook her head. ‘I came up yesterday. I wanted to surprise you. I didn’t know,’ and she paused, ‘I didn’t know about all this.’

‘I’m sorry, Glade.’

‘I was going to cook for you. Look.’ And, dipping a hand into her backpack, she took out half a dozen brown paper bags and tipped their contents on to the bed. She had bought the vegetables the day before, from the market in Portobello Road — tomatoes, squash, courgettes, green peppers, aubergines. Spilled across the hospital blanket, their colours seemed painfully bright, almost unnatural. The colour of real life. She watched him reach out, his fingers glancing weakly off their glossy surfaces. Tears blurred her vision for a moment, but she didn’t think he noticed.

‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

‘I went to the farmhouse.’ She blinked, then touched an eye with the back of her wrist. ‘They gave me a cup of tea. They were kind.’

‘They were kind to me too.’ Her father stared into space, remembering.

Glade wished she could lighten the atmosphere, make him laugh. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘They keep their telephone in a plastic bag.’

‘Really?’ Her father turned and looked at her. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It’s so it doesn’t get dusty.’ She paused. ‘They’d really hate it in your caravan.’

‘I suppose so,’ he said vaguely. ‘Ah well …’ His eyes drifted across the wall behind her.

A nurse appeared. She told Glade that her father ought to rest. Glade gathered up the vegetables and arranged them on the table beside his bed, thinking the splashes of red and green and yellow might cheer him up. Before she left she took his hand again and promised she would come up north as soon as she could. Perhaps she would even give up her job — for a few weeks, anyway. Then she could live with him, take care of him. In the meantime she would ring every day to find out how he was. He was looking at her now and, though his eyes were still unfocused and drained of all colour, she could tell from the faint pressure he exerted on her hand that he had understood, and was grateful.

When she stepped out of the bus that night she found herself wishing there was somebody to meet her, or smile at her, just smile, or even look, but no one did, and by the time she was standing on the tube platform at Victoria there were tears falling from her eyes. What’s wrong with me? she thought. I’m always crying. At last she felt as if she was being touched, though: fingers running gently down her cheeks, across her lips, over her chin.

She took the Circle Line to Paddington, then changed. The tube. A Sunday night. Some people drunk, some dozing. She watched a man peer down into a paper bag, then carefully lift out a box. Crammed into the pale-yellow styrofoam was a hamburger, its squat back freckled as a toad’s. The man took hold of it in both hands and turned it this way and that, trying to work out the best angle of approach. His mouth opened wide, his eyes narrowed. He seemed to be cringing, like someone who thought he might be hit. Then he bit down on the bun, releasing a warm, sour odour into the carriage. It occurred to Glade that she had eaten nothing since the hospital — and then only an apple and a piece of stale sponge cake. But she was so tired that her skin hurt. She couldn’t face the shops, not now. Not till the morning. She took her notebook and a pen out of her bag. Began to make a list. Fish fingers, she wrote. She paused and then wrote Hair dye. That was all she could think of. Somewhere just after Royal Oak she fell asleep. She was lucky not to miss her stop.

By the time she opened her front door, it was ten o’clock. She walked in, and then stood still for a moment. Loud music thickened the air inside the flat; she felt she could hardly breathe. As she reached the top of the stairs she saw Sally walking down the corridor towards her, wearing a pair of high-heeled sandals and a new black-and-white bikini. A suitcase lay in Sally’s bedroom doorway, its lid gaping.

‘What’s happening?’ Glade said.

‘I’m going on holiday,’ Sally said, ‘to Greece. I thought I told you.’

Glade shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Two weeks!’ Sally clutched her ribs. ‘I just can’t wait.’

Glade put her backpack down and stood against the wall, one hand touching her bottom lip. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she murmured.

If she had said this a week ago, she realised, it wouldn’t have been true. But suddenly it seemed as if nothing could withstand her presence. She only had to think of something and it disappeared. She felt like dynamite, but not powerful.

‘I’ll miss you,’ she said again.

But Sally wasn’t listening. Instead, she lifted her arms away from her sides and, smiling down at her bikini, placed her right leg in front of her left one, the way a model might.

‘So what do you think?’ she said.

Glade walked into her room and shut the door behind her, turning the key in the lock. There was a silence, then she heard Sally try the handle.

‘Glade?’

Glade stood halfway between the door and the window. Her hands had knotted into fists, and they were pressed against her thighs. She hadn’t switched any of the lights on yet; it just did not occur to her. The streetlamp outside the window flooded the room with a bright-orange glow.

‘No artificial additives,’ she said.

She stood in the darkness, listening. The voice was hers, and yet it seemed to come from outside her.

‘Just natural,’ she said. ‘All natural.’

That voice again. Hers.

‘What are you doing, Glade?’ Sally tried the door-handle again. ‘Is something wrong?’

Glade was still facing the window.

‘Kwench it!’ she said in a loud voice.

And then she smiled.

Perfect

On Tuesday morning she was woken by the shrill sound of the phone ringing. She waited to see if Sally answered it, but then remembered that Sally had left for Greece the day before. She stumbled out of bed on to the landing. Sitting on the floor beside the phone, she thought about the building with the corridors and the fluorescent lights. She saw a man in a brown suit hurrying towards her …

She lifted the receiver slowly towards her ear.

‘Glade? Is that you, darling?’

It was her mother, calling from Spain. Her eyes still half-closed, Glade could see her mother’s swimming-hat, white with blue-and-yellow flowers attached to it, and her mother’s toenails, their scarlet varnish slightly chipped. She supposed this must be a memory from years ago, when the family drove to Biarritz on holiday.

‘I’ve just heard about your father. Should I come over?’ Her mother’s voice was low and smoky, poised on the brink of melodrama.

‘There’s no need,’ Glade said.

‘Have you seen him? Is he all right?’

‘Yes, he’s all right. He’s comfortable.’

Her mother talked for a while about the stupidity of living in a caravan in the middle of nowhere, especially at his age. Then, abruptly, but seemingly without a join, she brought the conversation round to Gerry and the new apartment. She was beginning to wonder whether it would ever be finished. There was no end to the work that needed doing –

‘I saw him on Sunday,’ Glade said, interrupting. ‘In the hospital. He’s comfortable.’

On the other end of the phone, in Spain, there was a sudden silence, a kind of confusion, and Glade thought of the moment in cartoons when someone runs over the edge of a cliff and on into thin air.

‘Yes,’ her mother said, ‘you’ve already told me that.’

When the phone-call was over, Glade walked down the corridor and into the kitchen. The clock ticking, Sally’s dirty pans still stacked in the sink. A pale megaphone of sunlight on the floor. There was the emptiness, the astonished silence that recent frantic movement leaves behind it. Sally had slept through her wake-up call on Monday morning. She’d only just made it to the plane.

Sitting at the table, Glade pushed crumbs into a pile with her forefinger. She had dreamed about the house in Norfolk, the house where she had grown up. Her father was sitting in a downstairs room with rows of books behind him, the light tinted green by the ivy growing round the window. His clothes were drenched. She tried to persuade him to change into something dry, but he wouldn’t listen. He was too excited, he kept talking over her. His eyes shone in the gloom and, every time he gestured, drops of water flew from his hands like pieces of glass jewellery. In another dream she was buying Tom a drink in a hotel bar. She paid for the drink, which was pale-pink, a kind of fruit cup, but then she couldn’t seem to find her way back to where he was. She had so many things to do all of a sudden. Time passed, the location changed. She kept remembering that Tom was waiting for her in the bar. He would be wondering where she’d gone. She was still carrying his drink around with her, and she couldn’t help noticing that the ice was beginning to melt …

Turning in her chair, she opened the fridge and was confronted by twenty-four cans of Kwench! some stacked upright, others lying on their sides. On the inside of the door she found a half-empty tin of gourmet cat food, three squares of Galaxy milk chocolate wrapped in silver foil and a jar of gherkins. She picked up one of the cans and looked at it. They were holding a competition, closing date August 31st. You had to think of a slogan, no more than fifteen words. Then, in three sentences or less, you had to say why you liked Kwench! so much. If your entry won, you had a choice of prizes. Either you could fly first-class to Los Angeles and stay in a luxury beach house in Orange County for two weeks, with a free car and free passes to Disneyland. Or you could have a swimming-pool built in your own back garden. Based on the Kwench! exclamation mark, the pool divided into two sections: one would be long and deep, for adults; the other — the dot, as it were — would be shallow, ideal for children. The tiles would be orange, of course. Glade shook her head. She wasn’t the kind of person who could dream up slogans. She didn’t think she’d be winning any prizes, not even the Kwench! swimming costumes and beach-bags they were offering to runners-up.

She ate four gherkins and finished the chocolate, then she opened the can of Kwench!. It didn’t taste good to her. She swallowed two or three mouthfuls and poured the rest into the sink. It hissed as it went down, as though it was angry. She dropped the empty can on the floor, where it lay with several others. Her skin began to prickle, her vision seemed to melt. For a moment she thought she might be sick. She had to stand with her head lowered and her hands flat on the stainless-steel draining-board. She could feel the cool ridges against her palms.

Later when she felt better, she put the kettle on. Crossing the kitchen to the window, she caught a glimpse of herself in the small mirror above the sink, a blur of colour that was both familiar and strange. She turned back, approached the mirror cautiously, as if it were a person sleeping. The previous evening she had come home after work and dyed her hair. The directions on the packet she had bought said Leave for twenty minutes and then rinse thoroughly, but she hadn’t understood how twenty minutes could possibly be enough, so she had left it on for three and a half hours. There was some staining on her forehead, beside her left ear too, but otherwise she had done a pretty good job.

‘At least something’s going right,’ she said.

She sat down at the table again. Outside, the sky was white and gritty, made up of countless tiny particles, like washing powder. The tick of the clock, the hours stretching ahead of her. There was too much to think about and nothing ever happened. Tears waited behind her eyes. For days, it seemed, she had walked the corridors of the newspaper building. She had looked in every office, but found no one who could help her. She had called and called. The building swallowed every sound. That man in the brown suit — the journalist — where was he? Surely he’d be able to make sense of things?

Just then the doorbell rang. The first ring short, the second slightly longer. She felt a smile start inside her. There. That would be him now. What perfect timing!

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