wanted to do today was write his novel, not go to work. Business was slack this time of year – early March, thick frost, too cold for tourists, too close to Easter for more hardy holidaymakers; too close to Christmas and Valentine’s and Mother’s Day for locals to fritter any more of their money. The irony was Malachy could very well not open the gallery because, after all, he owned it – but the fact that he owned it compelled him to keep it open, never take time off, never get sick. Tuesday to Friday, 10 till 6. Saturday 10 till 5. Summer Sundays 11 till 2. Closed Mondays. If the gallery was as quiet as he anticipated, he’d work on his novel from there today. He left the apartment, glancing guiltily at the house. He ought to do the rounds, really. He hadn’t done so for a couple of days.
Paula de la Mare waved at him, before she hopped into her car, belting down the drive. Malachy followed, absent-mindedly creating acronyms from the letters on her car’s registration plate. At the bottom of the drive, she turned right, taking her girls to school. Malachy followed her a little way before joining the main road into Blenthrop.
Some idiot had dumped litter in the doorway of the White Peak Art Space; yesterday’s chips lay like flaccid fingers in the scrunch of sodden paper. He rummaged in his satchel for something suitable like a plastic bag. Phone. An apple. Slim leather diary (he refused to use his phone for anything other than calls). A tin of pencils, a spiral-bound notebook and a flashdrive. He had no plastic bag. The toe of his shoe would have to do. He shoved the takeaway detritus into the gutter and opened up the gallery.
It was always the weirdest feeling. It never diminished and it engulfed Malachy the moment he entered. The immediate stillness and quiet of the space contradicted by the undeniable sensation that, up until that very moment, they’d been alive; the paintings, the sculptures. If he’d turned up a minute earlier, or sneaked in through the back, he was certain he’d have caught them at it. Now, as every day, they were just figures frozen into their canvases, others quite literally turned to stone, bronze or, in the case of Dan Markson’s work, multicoloured polymer. It was like the characters in his novel – Malachy sensed they existed without him but whenever he returned to the manuscript, he found them exactly where he’d left them.
In the gallery, he straightened a couple of frames and adjusted the angle of a spotlight that was glaring off the glass of a watercolour. There were few emails to respond to and within the hour Malachy felt justified in inserting the flashdrive and clicking on the folder called ‘novel’, selecting from within it the file called ‘novel10.doc’.
‘Tenth draft in only fifteen years.’
He said it out loud, with contrived loftiness, laughed and took the piss out of himself, receiving the abuse well. All residual effects of the dream had gone, the details were forgotten. Until the next time.
* * *
Jed
None of his girlfriends knew this, but whenever Jed had sex in the morning, he always had Ian Dury playing in his head. He’d grown used to the soundtrack. It wasn’t a distraction and it didn’t irritate him; it was a brilliant song after all – as sexy in its funk as it was funny in its lyrics. It had started with Celine. She had been French, intense and passionate, and when she’d purred in his ear in the middle of his sleep, wake up and make love with me, that’s what kicked it all off.
Jed knew his current relationship was on the way out; from fizz to fizzle in eight months. It had been as awkward as it had been depressing last night, to be the only non-conversing table in a packed and buzzing restaurant. They checked their phones, ate, gazed around the room, checked their phones again, eavesdropped on other people’s conversations and barely looked at each other. Fiona went to bed when they arrived back at his flat. I’m tired, she’d said, as if it was Jed’s fault. He’d sat up late, finishing off the red wine he’d opened the night before, even though he’d forgotten to put a stopper in it and it really didn’t taste very good. Jed had thought, I’m too young to be one of those couples that go out for dinner and don’t speak. And then he thought, I’m too old to be frittering away time on a relationship like this. I have a headache, he thought, collapsing into bed and drifting to sleep before he could remember to kiss her goodnight let alone check she was even there.
But he woke, horny. It was natural, chemical. Ian Dury was goading him to have a proper wriggle in the naughty, naked nude. He sidled up to Fiona, his cock finding the soft dale between her buttock cheeks to nestle in. Unlike Ian Dury, however, it wasn’t lovemaking he wanted. Just a fuck. She moved a little, her breathing quickening as he ran his hand along her thigh, up her body, a squeeze of her breast before venturing downwards and between her legs. She was warm and moist and she let him manoeuvre her so that he could work his way into her from behind. No kissing. She had a thing – paranoia – about morning breath, which initially he’d found charming, then irritating but today just useful, as he didn’t want kissing and eye contact. He just wanted to come because soon enough she’d be gone.
She dumped Jed in a stutteringly over-verbose phone call that lunch-time. It’s not you, it’s me. I just need some space. Let’s just be friends. It’s fine, he kept saying, I’m fine with it. I agree. If something of such little substance was finally over, it really didn’t warrant this level of analysis or justifying. Don’t worry, he told her, don’t worry. I feel the same.
‘You feel the same?’ She sounded affronted, as if her self-esteem was dependent on him being crushed.
Jed sensed this. ‘I mean,’ he qualified, ‘if you’re sure. Take all the time you need.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK.’ And for her benefit, he dropped his voice a tone or two. ‘Take care,’ he said.
‘You too,’ she said. ‘Friends?’
‘Friends.’
He had too many of these ‘friends’ with whom he had mercifully minimal contact. None had truly made the transition from girlfriend to friend. None had even re-formed into useful booty calls. Ultimately, none meant that much to him because none was the one who got away. He hadn’t seen her for such a long time, not since she moved to America a decade and a half ago.
Nine o’clock. Oriana felt pleased with herself. Apart from a vaguely recalled period of wakefulness in the small hours and despite the nap that her mother had tricked her into taking the previous afternoon, she’d slept through the clash of time zones and she’d slept well enough for it to feel truly like morning. There was no need to count the hours backwards and figure out what the real time was. She accepted that nine in the morning, GMT, was now the true time in her life. She looked at the dressing gown her mother had laid out for her. It was white towelling and had the crest of a hotel embroidered in navy on the breast pocket. My mum has become one of those people who actually buy the hotel robe. She didn’t know whether she should laugh or cringe at this. She did know she’d rather get dressed than put the thing on. This wasn’t her home and it wasn’t a hotel and she wasn’t comfortable mooching about in borrowed towelling robes. She opened the bedroom door and listened hard. The house appeared to be empty but still Oriana padded quietly, self-consciously, along the corridor to the bathroom. She thought, this is the type of carpet I fantasized about as a child. The colour of butterscotch and as softly dense and bouncy as a Walt Disney lamb. And the bathroom itself; warm, bright and spotless, with hotel toiletries placed neatly on the sink and the bath – additional prerequisites of her childhood dreams. And yet she could not
