cards that she has never used: when she applied for the mortgage on her flat three years ago, the broker told her it would be good for her credit rating to have a couple of cards, or even a small loan, as long as she made the repayments on time. The mortgage companies liked evidence of an ability to service debt. This amused Maria at the time, the idea of a company thinking that being in debt already made her a more attractive proposition. She never uses the cards, and, as she pulls one out of her purse, she takes a quick look to check that she has even bothered to sign on the back. She hands it over. That’s how easy it is, she thinks. She can’t use the joint account, but she has the credit cards. The bill won’t arrive for a month.
Why didn’t I think of this before?
The deluxe room is medium-sized and has mushroom-coloured walls. There is a huge sash window, almost floor to ceiling, that looks straight out over a narrow ornamental balcony with rusting ironwork, across the dual carriage-way to the sea. Maria drops her backpack, sits on the bed, and stares at a distant oil rig, blurred against the horizon, the brown-and-grey water still chopping and falling, the red flag furling and snapping repeatedly. After a while, she closes her eyes, begins to breathe deeply, and falls into a short but intense sleep.
When she wakes it is still daylight: just. She rises from the bed, switches the kettle on, makes a cup of tea, and returns to the bed, sitting upright and sipping the tea while she stares at the flag, the oil rig, the rearing waves. She thinks to herself, quite distinctly, So this is what it feels like, a breakdown. She thinks, To get the full benefit, I must not attempt any decisions, not even small ones.
She sips her tea. She watches the flag.
After a while, she needs the loo. The small bathroom also has a huge sash window looking out to sea, with a net curtain. She thinks, I can watch the sea while I pee, and feels a disproportionate amount of pleasure at this unexpected bonus. She thinks, In the short time I have been in this room, I have become obsessed with watching the water. I never want to take my eyes off it.
She lowers her jeans and sits. The bruise on the front of her right upper thigh has spread and altered: it’s now the size of a side plate, the centre of it still purple but fading to red, almost lacy, at the edges. By tomorrow, she knows, it will be tinged with yellow and green. She finishes on the loo, pulls up her jeans with haste, returns to the bed without washing her hands. She sits there, then, staring at the sea until the light fades and the beach darkens and the flag and oil rig become invisible and there are only the sounds in her head: the blur and blare of traffic beneath the window; the crashing of the waves that peaks above the cars and lorries intermittently; the occasional tinkle of something blowing against a nearby balcony – just the sounds, the lift and fall of them in the dark, that’s all there is. She cannot move.
Eventually, with a certain effort of will, she goes back to the bathroom, pees again, and brushes her teeth. She removes her shoes and her socks and her jeans – folding and placing them neatly on the chair in the corner for easy access – and gets into bed, pulling the thick duvet with its slightly shiny cover up over her shoulder, tucking it beneath her chin. Decide nothing, think of nothing. She’s hungry, but she can’t order room service, doesn’t even know if they do room service, as she can’t get up to look at the hotel information folder. Just before she falls asleep, she reaches out to the bedside table and checks that her phone is still turned off, as she has done several times an hour since she left her flat that morning. She falls asleep to the crashing of the waves.
In the morning, she wakes gently. She lies still for a while, eyes closed. The sounds are still there, they colour the room like tea leaves steeping in water, and as they do, she is filled with a sensation she realises she hasn’t felt for a long time: calm. She is lying on her side in a foetal position. Very, very slowly, she unfurls.
She makes an instant coffee, pulls back the curtains, watches the sea in the morning light: it, too, is calmer. The sea is me. Or I am the sea.
Eventually, hunger gets the better of metaphor.
Over breakfast in the deserted dining room, which also overlooks the sea, she does some calculations. In the grey light of day, rested, she feels amazed that she has spent eighty-five pounds on a good night’s sleep. View or no view, she thinks, you could get two pairs of shoes for that. Decent shoes. Paying that much long term is out of the question. She can put it on credit for the time being, but sooner or later that bill will roll in, and she has eight hundred and thirty-three pounds of savings. That won’t do ten nights, let alone the rest of her life.
The rest of her life is too large a thought to grasp. She tries, momentarily. She sips her pleasingly hot coffee, which has come in her own little silver pot, pursing her top lip over the white china cup and taking it in in tiny amounts, inhaling it almost. She tries again: but when she looks beyond the next few days, the weeks and months to come, the enormity of what is to be accomplished, it is as if her imagination shudders and baulks like a nervous horse approaching a high fence.
Six hundred and seventy pounds of her savings came from her Uncle Malcolm – her father’s cousin, who lived alone in a council house in Loughborough and always used to say to her, ‘When I’ve gone, all I’ve got is yours.’ Her father had taken the precaution of warning her not to get excited – Uncle Malcolm was a car park attendant for Tesco, and scarcely had a bean. All the same, when he died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-two, Maria felt guiltily excited to inherit a few hundred quid – poor old Uncle Malcolm. It was the first time she had ever inherited or won anything, the first time anything had come her way that wasn’t earned. She was so excited she had put it in a building society account and done nothing with it because she didn’t want it to be gone. ‘That’s right, duck,’ her father said. ‘Save it for a rainy day.’
Maria and her father both believed in rain. Maria’s mother had died of leukaemia when she was fourteen, and her father had heart disease and hadn’t worked for years. Maria had grown used to the idea that orphanhood was looming, had grown into it, and in due course her father died when she was twenty-two, leaving her just enough for the deposit on a one-bedroom flat in a new development on the edge of the Recreation Ground, where, on Sundays, she was woken by the malice-free shouting and swearing of the local five-a-siders and the occasional bump of a football against the boundary fence.
That was one of Matthew’s observations of her, very early on. On their second date, they walked along the canal towpath after dark, and in a tunnel he stopped and pushed her against the wall. They kissed for a long time in the cold and dank. He pressed on her, his weight, the rough cloth of his jacket with its folds of pockets and buttons and zips, and murmured into her hair, ‘Maria, Maria, you’re an orphan, you’re all alone …’ She cried, then, a little drunk from the wine at dinner, and he held her for a long time, until her feet began to go numb inside her thin suede ankle boots. After a while, he pushed the dark, crinkled locks of hair away from her damp face and looked at her, and she closed her eyes then, knowing he was watching her. He bent his head, to kiss the butterfly-fragile skin of her closed lids, one after the other, then her salty face, and said, ‘You’ll never be alone again, now,’ and something inside her melted and let go.
And even now, sitting sipping coffee in this crumbling wedding cake of a hotel, she can feel that warmth, inside, if she thinks about it, how good it felt, the release of it, to give it all up after all those years of being brave.
After breakfast – a fat sausage, surprisingly good and herby, bacon a little flaccid, a glistening fried egg, and congealed beans – she goes back to reception. A pale young man is on duty, tall and thin, body like a long drink of water. She wonders if this hotel only employs pale people with fine skin. She hesitates, waiting for him to look up and wondering if she can remember how to be charming. The young man carries
