baby had said. Ross, her husband, was dull but decent.
‘Well, she did.’
He kept his anger in check. Frankie had always liked Edith, out of all Rooker’s girlfriends. And Frankie had his postal address, because she had sent him a book on his birthday. It was The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It stood on the shelf behind him now. He had read some of it.
‘Rook?’ Edith breathed. She put her glass on the table and came to him, holding out her hands. When he didn’t take them she grasped the front of his shirt and lifted herself on tiptoe so she could kiss him on the mouth. She tasted of whisky.
‘Don’t do that,’ he ordered. He disentangled himself from her grasp and turned away. The room was too small, there was nowhere to get away from this.
‘I love you,’ Edith said, in a new jagged voice that was raw with accusation.
‘No, you don’t. You’ve just forgotten.’
He hadn’t forgotten. The last time he saw her was in Dallas. He had arrived in Dallas as a pilot for an air charter company but that job had stopped working even before it had started, so he was filling in on yet another building site. Edith had found work as a dancer. They had been living together, an arrangement that only lasted a few weeks this time, and they had gone out drinking one night.
Edith always set out to attract attention, particularly from men in bars, and that night was no exception. She was wearing a tiny skirt that showed her toffee-coloured thighs and a stretchy top that exposed most of her breasts. Before they left the apartment she was shimmying around in front of him, laughing too much and darting hard little glances at him from under her eyelashes. Rooker knew that even if he had loved her, even if he smothered her with enough admiration and affection to suffocate them both, it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy Edith. She was born to be dissatisfied and doomed always to want more than she could get. If she had him, she wanted other men as well, for reassurance. If she didn’t have him she wouldn’t stop wheedling and threatening and seducing until he gave way to her. They had already split up twice before the night in Dallas. But Edith always knew which buttons to press.
That night she had been wild, fuelled by her anger with him and her contempt for the rest of the world. She had barely tasted her first drink before she had her tongue in some guy’s mouth. The man’s hands went straight down inside the little stretchy top and Rooker had hauled him backwards and pinned him against the bar. Even as he did it he was wondering why. He didn’t care who Edith rubbed herself up against. He didn’t want to be here with her, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else that he wanted to be.
‘Don’t do that,’ Rooker had said quietly to Edith’s new friend.
The man tried to smile. ‘Hey, I’m real sorry. I just thought…’ There were beads of sweat in the bristles above his top lip.
Rooker felt as though he was standing beside himself, watching his own actions in boredom and disgust. His hands dropped back to his sides.
‘Come on,’ he said to Edith.
Outside, she moved up against him. She was lithe and taut, like a cat. ‘Hey,’ she breathed in his ear. As always, his aggression excited her.
The evening that had begun badly grew steadily more evil. There were more bars, much more drinking. They found themselves in a place where there was lap dancing and the next thing that happened was that Edith was dancing too, out of her mind and out of her stretchy top and tiny skirt. There was a man whose thick red arms were matted with coarse gingery hair, and Rook saw one of these arms slide between Edith’s thighs. With a weight of sadness on him Rook grabbed her by the back of the neck, just as if she really were a cat, and pushed her out of reach. Then he squared up to the red man, seeing out of the corner of his eye the bar’s security staff heading towards them.
‘Fag,’ the red man sneered.
‘Outside,’ Rook answered.
The night was thick and hot. At first Rook could hardly move against the pressure of ennui and disgust, but when the man’s fist smashed almost casually into the corner of his eye the pain lit a phosphor-white blaze in his head. He hit out, and hit again. The man went down instantly and when Rook looked at him he saw that his face was split wide open. There were teeth and bone in a mess of blood, and Rook was certain that he had killed him. Sick horror and a wash of memories rose up in him and he staggered backwards, hands up in a vain effort to shut out the sight.
He left the man lying on the ground. He left Edith still inside the bar somewhere and he made his way home in painful and blurred slow motion. On the floor of the bathroom were the prints of Edith’s feet outlined in talcum powder. He rubbed them out with the side of his fist as the floor seemed to tilt sideways and the man’s smashed face stared out at him from the mirror on the wall.
When Rooker woke up again he was lying fully dressed on the bed with Edith asleep beside him. He squinted at her, because he could only open one eye. There were black pools of mascara darkening her eye sockets and her breath bubbled through her slack lips. The light in the room was dirty grey and the air was hot to breathe. He sat up very slowly, wincing with pain. There was dried blood on the pillow where his head had rested. Sour-tasting saliva flooded his mouth.
I have to get away from here, from this, he thought.
Before he could move again, Edith stirred. She blinked at him and briefly focused. ‘Dear Jesus,’ she muttered.
Rooker stood up and slowly turned his head to the mirror on her dresser. His left eye was puffed up, the skin crimson and shiny. His eyelashes were crusted black spikes embedded in the bruised tissue. A ragged cut with oozing margins ran from the centre point of his cheekbone to the corner of his eye. The man must have been wearing a heavy ring. He put his fingers up to touch the place, memories of the night before coming back to him in small unwelcome fragments. Edith lay motionless.
‘What happened?’ he mumbled. He meant what had happened to the man he had killed.
‘You ran off and left me in some shitty bar with a bunch of creeps, that’s what happened.’
‘The guy, Edith. Is he dead?’
She coughed and then groaned. ‘Dead? No. But he needed some help getting home. So did I, but you’d gone.’
Rooker gathered his thoughts.
Of course the man wasn’t dead. Of course not. Immediately he felt reprieved. He had a chance after all, provided he grabbed it immediately. Leave now. The words pulsed in his head, taking on neon-bright colours that hurt the insides of his eyes. Just leave, get out of here and away from this.
He went to the closet and took out his old canvas holdall. He began stuffing clothes and books into it.
Edith raised herself on one elbow. ‘What are you doing?’
‘You can see what I’m doing.’
‘Where are we going?’
It came into his mind how much he hated we. All the bars and street corners, all the beds and apartments in different cities that were contained in that small word, all the arguments and reconciliations and half-hearted bargains struck and reneged upon, not just with Edith but with other women, and to what end?
‘We
