Dan said. ‘You could have written a lot more. If you hadn’t been such a madman.’
‘Comes with the territory, I suppose. A sane writer’s probably an oxymoron. Anyway, journalism’s writing. Although I’m not even a real journalist. I just write a column. But I’m not knocking it. I need it. I’ve got into the habit of eating.’
‘What about the poetry? You never try to publish any of that?’
‘I don’t write poetry. Who are we kidding? I write daft verses. Light verse, my man.’ He said it with a BBC accent, or what had once been a BBC accent. ‘So light, if you breathe on it too heavily you could blow it away. The only place I might get it published would be on a greetings card.’
She had crossed the room to the windmill in the chair. She seemed to be trying to reason with him, which couldn’t be an easy trick. They were obviously going to be leaving soon. He had missed his chance to connect seriously with her. When he had done the thing with the gin and tonic, it had felt dramatic and peremptory. Now it felt stupid. What was that supposed to achieve? I’m the drink-delivery man. Boldness was what was needed.
She had partly succeeded in calming the man down. He had gone into muttering mode. Now she was talking to Sylvia, who had been hovering – hostess in a state of mild alarm. Sylvia brought her a piece of paper and a pen, and began to use her mobile. It was taxi time.
She was writing something. He had hoped it would be a love letter to him but it was too short for that. Dan rose and went to talk to Sylvia. Putting the pen down, she started to walk. He was taken aback by how exciting it was to know that he was the one she was coming towards. She came and stood beside him, her back to the wall, and so close that her dress overlapped on his outstretched trouser leg. She sighed. ‘I’m going to have to leave soon,’ she said. ‘He’s just a friend. He asked me to partner him tonight. But I’ll have to see he gets back safely to his place.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said and put his hand under her dress.
He thought: What the hell am I doing? Get the handcuffs ready.
She thought: Ooh. No. That can’t be what I thought it was. It is. It is.
In the time it took her to believe the incredible, what she thought would have been her response was displaced by pure sensation. His hand was resting at the top of her calf. The hand didn’t feel aggressive. It felt as gentle as a bird nestling there. It was less threat than plea. By not rejecting him immediately, she became part of a conspiracy of two against the rest. She found that she was enjoying the conspiracy. She had wanted him to make some kind of move all night. Well, he had certainly done that. They were standing in a busy room sharing a secret intimacy.
Not having been arrested, he began to stroke her calf gently. She wanted to talk casually, about anything, she decided. She felt it was a way of adding to the clandestine sensation.
‘I still think you made up that stuff about Snarl,’ she said.
‘Only the name. Sadly enough,’ he said.
‘And Bruce?’
‘Bruce was real. Probably realer than most of us. Although this feels quite real.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘The weather’s been pretty mixed, eh?’
‘I see they’ve had rain in California.’
‘This is a lovely way to spend an evening.’
‘I feel as if I could sing that.’
‘Feel free.’
Sylvia was signalling over.
‘Why do taxis always come at the wrong time?’ she said. ‘I have to go. No, don’t get up. I want to remember you this way. But I do think you should leave now.’
His hand gently squeezed the back of her calf and then was gone.
‘Here,’ she said, giving him the piece of paper she had written on. ‘I was wondering whether to give you this. Now I’m sure. I’m going to check that article sometime for lies.’
He watched her get her coat and usher the man out with the help of Dan. He looked at the paper she had given him. It contained her phone number and her name: Mary Sue. Mary Sue.
His hand closed round the scrap of paper as if it were a nugget of gold. He leaned his head against the wall. He folded the paper and put it carefully in his hip pocket. He hoped he would still want to phone her when he was sober. Then he saw her come back in, taking off her coat. She said something to Sylvia. He watched her mix two drinks at the table. One seemed to be whisky and water. She turned and walked towards him until she was standing beside him, exactly where she had stood before.
‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘The taxi-driver was nice. Said he’ll look after him.’
She handed him the drink that looked like whisky and water.
Sometimes the gods smile upon the lunatic, he thought.
‘Cannamore?’ Alison said. ‘Ends of the earth? It’s about an hour on the ferry.’
‘Her sense of geography is prehistoric,’ Kate said.
‘At least my sense of men isn’t. Like you, Kate. Dark pasts and romantic figures wrapped in mystery. Like a bloody opera-cloak. What’re you waiting for? To meet Byron in Tesco’s? He’s dead. Long time dead. Look at them.’
She indicated the young men at the bar. Kate followed her nodding head. She saw, first of all, the living representation of a thought she had often had: the physical variety of people is amazing. Wasn’t it incredible that, with all the people there were in the world, you couldn’t find two exactly the same? Even identical twins weren’t really identical. The term didn’t describe the reality, just the carelessness with which people observed the reality. And beyond a category like that, all was blatant and mind-blowing difference.
What life managed to do with limited materials was astounding. After all, how many different shapes could you give to something as basic as a nose? A bone, a lump of skin and two breathing holes. It wasn’t exactly, you would have thought, the stuff of infinite variation. How many eye-colours could you get? Not a lot, and you weren’t allowed to have different colours within any one iris. You couldn’t, for example, have striped eyes. That might have helped to vary things a bit. And mouths. Two soft folds of flesh around a set of teeth or the lack of them, as the case may be. It really was amazing.
Look at those men at the bar. Everything was slightly different about each of them. Height, weight, hair, features – everything. Looking at them, she realised what exactly she had against Dolly the sheep. Well, not against Dolly personally but against the whole idea of cloning. (Come to think of it, could you have anything against a clone personally, since it was not itself in the first place but merely an imitation of somebody else? It would be like, say, standing in a cave with someone. And they insult you. And the insult has an echo. It would be like starting an argument with the echo. Instead of with the person who insulted you. Something like that.)
But that was what was wrong with cloning. People were always discussing the ethics of it. It didn’t seem to her it was so much a matter of ethics as a matter of the nature of experience. The whole nature of life, it seemed
