Seconds pass and the intensity of the moment ebbs away to a moderate stinging sensation. She opens her eyes, shame and disgust replacing the delirium. The bath water has cooled, the mirrors weep with condensation. Her dark nipples skim her legs as she leans forward to drain the tepid water, now tinted salmon by blood. She covers the wound with a flannel, then steps on to the bathmat and into the chill of the newly tiled bathroom.
A cutter, she thinks, remembering the pretty girl in the razor blade. Cutting to cope. To forget the past. To replace the pain inside her head with one she could see. To watch it seep away. But what of the woman? The one called Antonia? Cutting to feel. To stop the numbness, the isolation. To scar the perfection. She is addicted to the high.
Or perhaps she just wants to see what’s beneath her skin.
‘My Friday night treat,’ she mutters. She glances at the woman in the mirror, flawless and perfect, no history, no past. With a small sigh, she peels away the crimson-stained flannel to study her artwork, then she blows out the candles and reaches for a towel.
‘Where’s bloody Sami?’ David Stafford asks, looking at his watch. ‘With his flunkeys, do you think? Mo and Salim and the rest of his ever-changing entourage?’ He scrapes back his chair across the slate floor as he stands. ‘Same again?’
Mike Turner glances down at his third pint: it’s hardly been touched and he already feels pissed. Bloody hell, David’s going for it tonight, he thinks. David’s breath has the acrid smell of an all-day session. But that isn’t particularly unusual.
He looks up and smiles. David appears as he always does. Tall, slightly overweight, tanned. Jeans with a stripy shirt tucked in. But something’s not quite right. His eyes, he decides. David’s eyes seem lifeless.
‘No, you go ahead,’ Mike replies. ‘I’m pacing myself. You’re a thirsty man tonight. Everything all right?’
‘It’s nothing that another pint won’t cure. Come on, Mikey, it’s the start of the weekend. I’ll get you one in.’
A busy September Friday night at the Royal Oak pub, composed of the usual mix of students and the long-standing faithful. Not a convenient venue for any of them now, but David, Mike and Sami have all lived in the leafy Withington area of South Manchester at some point in their lives. ‘Probably the only thing we have in common,’ Sami once joked, which wasn’t entirely true.
David walks away, slightly unsteady, and dips his head to evade a low oak beam. He lifts his arm and wafts his empty pint glass above the heads of several people already waiting at the bar.
‘Yep, I’ve still got the famous left foot.’ Mike can hear the deep tone of David’s voice from the bar despite the clamour of the heaving pub. ‘I’ll be there on Sunday as usual. Of course they’d be lost without me. Are you having another? I’ll get you one in.’
David can never hide for long, the boom of his voice betrays him. The benefit and the curse of a private education, Mike has decided.
‘Another two pints of your best, Mrs L. You’re looking as beautiful as ever, might I say? Off to Barbados for Christmas as usual?’
Mike turns his glass in his hand, wondering if he’ll finish this pint, let alone another. The conversation drifts around him. ‘Mrs L’ is so David. She’s Misty to everyone else, flame-haired bar manager and wife of the affable and obese landlord, Seamus. For a moment he wonders whether Misty is her real name – it seems such a cliché for a woman who once was a model of some sort but whose battle with the booze is evident from the slur of her voice to the tremor of her expensively ringed fingers.
‘So you were thirsty,’ David says, back in his seat. Mike’s pint glass is empty. ‘Been off with the fairies again, Mikey?’
Mike shakes his head, laughs and wonders where he’s been without the dog, the black dog of depression, christened when it first snuck up on him at sixteen.
A black dog, he thinks, not a stork.
‘Probably,’ he smiles, shaking the unwelcome thought away. ‘How’s Antonia?’
‘Fine, she’s fine,’ David answers, glancing towards the bar, the sparkle back in his bright blue eyes. ‘At home with a DVD and guacamole. Jennifer Aniston’s my bet. Actually Mikey, I wanted to ask you. Her birthday’s coming up and I want to buy her something special, maybe something different for a change. Got any ideas? What would you buy Olivia?’
Mike scratches his chin, still smooth from its second shave of the day. He laughs. ‘You mean, what do you buy the woman who has everything?’
‘He treats her like a bloody doll,’ his wife Olivia often remarks, spot on as ever. The statement reminds him of a cardboard dolly set his sister was given one Christmas. She asked him to play, and despite his desire to try out his new bicycle in the biting Irish winter outside, he knelt beside her and joined in the game at the warm kitchen table, detaching the paper outfits from the booklet, the dresses, the hats, the scarves and the shoes, then dressing the doll in different designs for each season of the year.
‘I’m serious, Mikey.’ David interrupts his thoughts. ‘What would you buy Olivia?’
Mike takes a swig of his beer, then wipes the rim of the glass with his thumb. David’s assumption that their respective wives fall into any remotely similar category makes him smile to himself.
‘Vain and vacant. The sort of woman I can’t stand,’ Olivia said of Antonia after meeting her for the first time at one of David and Antonia’s dinner parties. ‘But as it happens, she’s nice and I like her, which is really annoying.’
So what would he buy Olivia? What had he bought her last time? Mike can’t remember, probably something she’d asked for, but then they don’t make a fuss of their own birthdays, preferring to concentrate on their two lovely girls.
And there it is: like Winston Churchill’s dog, his own black dog of despair, bounding back into the pub and sitting by him. Close, comfortable and devastating. He hears his own voice not long after it happened, trying for rationality: ‘I didn’t even know him. It could have been so much worse.’
There are times when Mike wonders if he’s spoken aloud, made his words to the dog public. For a moment he’s forgotten the question, but he’s saved from an answer; David has turned towards the door.
‘What bloody time do you call this?’ he bellows, standing up and gesticulating towards the bar. Mike looks at his watch. It’s getting on for last orders but Sami Richards grins and shrugs, holding out his palms in a dismissively apologetic gesture. Elegant and handsome, he strolls past the Friday regulars clustered at the bar, the turned-up collar of his black leather jacket matching the sheen of his skin.
‘Why does he always look as though he’s walked off the page of a fucking magazine?’ David says, a little too aggressively, as he turns back towards Mike. He knocks back his pint, ready to get in more drinks.
‘Things to do, people to see,’ Sami replies easily as David walks away. He takes off his jacket and leans over the table to shake Mike’s hand, careful as always not to catch his crisp cuff on the spillages. ‘Hey, man, I bumped into Pete on site the other day. Sends his regards. He mentioned the Boot Room.’
Mike smiles. Bloody hell, yes, the Boot Room. It’s what they named Sami’s tiny office when they were working together
