He turned towards her and changed the subject. ‘What’s that you’re reading?’
She turned the page. ‘Something about Hélène Cixous. She’s this brilliant French intellectual. I’ve read all her stuff, but it’s difficult. She’s very controversial. She won’t even call herself a feminist because feminism’s too bourgeois.’
Connor looked down at the plate on the floor. ‘What sort of cheese did your mother say this was?’
Sylvia sat on the end of her bed and drank her tea. The weather was turning. The day had started off warm and sticky. Now the sky was clouding over, was grey, heavy, lowering. The birds – at least a hundred or so – had flown inside as a consequence, in anticipation of the storm to come. They lined the walls of Sylvia’s room, chattering and bickering. Several bounced to and fro across the carpet, scratching, preening and flapping their wings.
Sylvia thought, Above the bird noise I can hear Sam talking with that man. What are they discussing? What are they doing?
Sometimes she imagined what it would be like to have a male companion, but she couldn’t really conceive of herself doing the things that normal women did. She couldn’t imagine herself wanting the things that normal women wanted. She tried to feel pride in her abnormality, but she often felt as though her abnormality had become the only normal thing about her, the only relevant thing.
She sat on the end of her bed and drained the cup of its last few drops of tea. As she swallowed her tea, the incident in the park popped into her mind. The tea turned into dirty water in her mouth. She tried to swallow in air as the tea went down but she could not. She gagged on the liquid and it choked her. She imagined herself in the lake, with the mud and the slime and the tin cans. She imagined that she was the young girl and that she could not swim. She did not feel remorse, just fear. She wished that she could tie a tourniquet around her imagination, a piece of strong rope or cloth that could effectively cut off all dangerous ideas and fanciful notions, stop the flow of her thoughts from streaming, frothing, flooding and overwhelming her.
She could hear Brera singing in the living-room with her guitar. She tried to concentrate on this sound and to block out everything else. Then she heard Sam’s voice. Sam had been laughing and talking before, but now she too had started to sing. Her voice toned in with Brera’s perfectly. Brera sang in a higher register with a Celtic twang. Sam sounded very low and clear, like a soft, brown thrush – intense and lyrical.
She heard Sam emerge from her room and walk towards Brera’s voice, still singing herself. She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. They infuriated her. She found them unbearably smug and confident, like nuns or traffic wardens – self-assured and immensely self-motivated. Pure.
She inspected the eczema on her hands and wrists. The skin here was bumpy and itchy, some of it moist and shiny. She pulled off a scab which covered the tender flesh that linked the space between her finger and thumb. Her eyes watered. She enjoyed this strum of pain, lost herself in it and savoured its tone.
Suddenly she saw the little girl’s face in the chafed and pinky pattern of her flesh, imagined for a second how the cold water would have felt entering her nose and throat, covering her eyes.
The sound of Connor’s hesitant tread in the hallway distracted her. She stopped breathing for a moment and listened out for the slight noises he made, her head to one side, eyes closed. He had a light tread. Must be thin, she thought. His step seemed tentative, well-meaning, self-conscious. She heard him enter the living-room and began breathing again. The air she drew into her lungs felt dry and coarse. It rattled in her throat. She coughed for a short while then swallowed down a mouthful of phlegm.
Connor was singing now too. He was doing a comic version of Dolly Parton’s ‘Love is like a Butterfly’, in a low, brash voice. She could hear the two women laughing. She put her hands over her ears, imagined that her hands were like shells, and the noise of the blood, the compressed air in her ears, the wail in her head, was really the sea. She stood on a bone-pale beach. It was an airless place.
Ruby awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing. She opened her eyes and tried to pull herself up straight. She’d been slumped over sideways on to her bedside table. Her face felt strange, like warm wax that had set overnight into a distorted, lopsided shape. Her neck ached, even her tongue ached and her body felt, in its entirety, distinctly askew.
Vincent was there. Ugh! She looked at him. A horrible face. Dirty. Phlegm, mucus, special smells. Blood, dried. Everything inside spilling out.
His face was a solid bruise. He was a car accident, still jumbled. She had no clear impression of him. Not mentally, not visually. It was bright in her room, a yellow-white brightness, reflecting unkindly off him.
She sprang out of bed to answer the ringing. She was still wearing her cardigan, which she pulled close around her, and her T-shirt, which she noticed had coffee stains down the front.
The telephone – it had a long extension cord – was situated in the centre of the draining-board next to the sink. She picked up the receiver. ‘Yeah? Ruby here.’
She licked a finger and applied it, somewhat hopelessly, to the stain.
‘You sound rough.’
She didn’t recognize the voice. ‘Hold on.’
She put down the receiver, turned on the cold tap and stuck her head under it, inhaling sharply as the water gushed over her hair, into her ears and down her neck. She turned it off and shook her head, like a dog after a dip, then picked up the receiver again. ‘Hi.’
She felt the water dripping down her back and her face. Eventually a voice said, ‘Hello, Ruby?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Donald Sheldon. Is it too early?’
‘I’ve been up ages,’ she lied. He’d never phoned her before.
He said, ‘Actually, I’d like to see you. This afternoon if it’s possible.’
‘Oh. OK.’
‘There’s a café near Seven Sisters tube.’ He described its precise location. ‘We could meet twelve-ish.’
Twelve was too early.
‘Yeah, that’s fine. Seven Sisters. Twelve-ish.’
‘See you then.’
She put down the receiver and walked into the bathroom to look for a towel. She found one slung over the edge of the bath and wrapped up her dripping hair in it before putting the plug in the bath and turning on the taps.
Back in her bedroom, she rooted out a pair of jeans, a black vest and some clean underwear. Vincent lay across the bed, his legs spread, his feet dangling off the end. His arms, she noticed, now held a pillow over his face. She said, ‘I wouldn’t do that. Someone might be tempted to press down on it.’
He said nothing.
She returned to the bathroom. While she undressed, she debated how soon it would be acceptable to ask him to leave. She tested the water with her hand, climbed in, then lay back and relaxed, staring abstractly beyond her breasts, her knees,
