The Exhibitionist, page 19
Where is Priya?
That she could have been so close by, and has probably already left, makes Lucia feel deranged. This may have been their last encounter; Priya’s liking for her is growing lighter. Lucia sits in the cold toilet, knickers down, thinks of not seeing, not breathing, not kissing Priya again. It’s stopped raining; there will be a new moon. She puts her hands over her eyes.
When Marie-Claude left, Lucia said, ‘Please will you run up and say something encouraging to Ray?’ Marie-Claude didn’t even bother to reply. Lucia took a great gulp of night air as the front door closed, looking out at the brown-lilac sky and thinking of escape.
She told Priya, last time, she’d do whatever was needed for them to be together.
‘Would you really?’ asked Priya.
Lucia was kissing her neck, hands still on Priya’s thighs. She lifted her face and looked at her carefully in the half-dark.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I really would. Wouldn’t you?’
And immediately she knew the answer. Something evaporated from her heart, her self-respect, when Priya, smiling kindly, replied: ‘How could I?’
Lucia, now standing beside the baize noticeboards, riotous art appreciation going on above her, thinks: bury me under the cool tiles and leave me here. There’s a sound round the corner, where, only an hour ago, so many people she didn’t care about were waiting for Ray. She hears it again, and her heart clutches: the tap of a shoe heel against clay.
‘There she is, my artist,’ says Priya.
32
Their feet on the frosty gravel sound like a radio play. Jess is obviously in a state; only after some minutes of sensitive auntly soothing does Gillian approach the subject of the exhibition.
‘I don’t understand,’ Jess says, ‘how he could have thought for a second, how any of them could think, it was a good plan. Not to cancel.’
‘It was . . . startling.’
‘My God. It’s all his horrible friends will talk about for years.’
‘Will they really?’
‘I guarantee. They are obsessed. With each other’s careers. Nothing they enjoy more than failure. Christ. How will we face him? How will Mum?’
Lucia and Priya, deep in the darkness of the Guildworkers’ Hall garden, are reaching a critical point.
Lucia has been crying; Priya, despite her dislike of extravagant emotion, of need, almost started too.
‘You knew, though, the limitations of whatever this would be,’ says Priya, ‘from the beginning. Full disclosure.’
‘I know,’ says Lucia.
‘When I said, wherever we were, would you choose this, even knowing all the obstacles ahead, or choose not to have it and have peace, and you said “yes” even before I’d finished the question – remember that I said “no”.’
‘I do know,’ says Lucia, looking for something to kick.
‘And then the next time we met you’d learned to say, “I love you” in bloody Hindi.’
Lucia hangs her head. ‘I tried not to,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ Stupid hot tears are giving her panda-eyes; her heart could split. There is no pain like being the more-loving one, and it’s all she ever is. ‘Bugger. I hate this.’
But even Priya must feel it, sometimes, or why would she risk so much for Lucia? It’s not small, what she could lose. And sex, the touching of a hand or mouth to anywhere on another person, is not a small thing. It changes the world for ever.
She thinks: what did I do before you? I was asleep. I was keeping myself asleep, for you.
I love you, she almost says, but manages to catch it.
Priya, however, puts her hand on Lucia’s shoulder. They are hidden under a ye olde propped-up willow tree; the ground beneath dank and yielding, as if it has been hoarding the winter. Like a teenager she thinks: if the rain holds off, that’s a good sign. Every edge glistens, peach-gold or wetly silver. She can smell cherry blossom just starting, black winter soil beginning to stir. The air is rich and she is in it, dangerously alive.
Priya’s hand; Lucia’s shoulder; Lucia presses her cheek against it, strokes it with her chin.
‘My sad brilliant horse,’ says Priya. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ and she kisses her.
She still doesn’t know my decision, Lucia thinks. Could I not tell her for a few more months, and keep her proud?
The willow bark gleams; slim sappy twigs she wants to rip off and keep, to remember. It smells of riverbanks and spring and fucking. She wants it all. Every part of Priya turns her on: her touching arm-hair, her veiny hands, the mole on her neck where the sternocleidomastoid muscle rises (how she longs for a chance to mention this). They kiss and kiss, their hands reaching deeper into their winter clothing, towards hot skin. Buttons, waistbands; the kissing is catalyst, accelerant. Lucia opens her eyes, closes them to avoid Priya noticing, pulls away so she can really look. She thinks: I will never get over you.
‘Tell you what,’ says Priya. Are her pupils dilated? The gelid surface of her eyes reflects the lights from the Guildworkers’ Hall, where nothing interesting could possibly happen. ‘I do think Bristol together might be good. I could . . . work on you.’
‘Oh God.’
‘I mean about the Bi-enn-ale,’ and Lucia is too far gone to correct her.
Her fingertip strokes Priya’s wristbone inside her cuff. She murmurs: ‘Do you mean it?’
‘Yep.’
‘Nights? Together? Jesus. I might explode.’
‘It’s a risk. You are an idiot,’ Priya says, and Lucia takes it. She has to. The thought of sleeping together is like finding gold in gravel. Her skin feels as if it’s stretching into the dark.
‘God, I love you,’ Lucia says, inadvertently.
‘Stand still,’ whispers Priya, and Lucia gasps.
Leah has always known that what she has, and her sister does not, is endurance. Her strength seemed limitless; she is a mast, upright and true, because that’s what her father deserves.
Something’s begun to crack.
The slump was inevitable once people started leaving, and maybe she brought it on by encouraging her father to hang around, in case Pablo showed. Pablo did not show.
‘I’m not being pushed in that thing like a vegetable,’ Ray says, when she can delay no longer. He’s mean-voiced, narrow-eyed, ready for Dr Mac. ‘So sorry to disappoint you,’ and Leah turns away to hide her face.
She doesn’t try to argue, or ask if she can bring it with them; it would irritate him. I’ll go back later to pick it up, she thinks, and knows not to say. So they leave the chair in the entrance; he tsks and sighs while she finds Laz-Nat to hand him the secret cheque, then walks silently and very slowly beside her.
Only once, hoping for understanding, she comments that ‘the caterer’ should still get some of the fee. Ray is always a champion of the underdog, the working man; she thought he’d agree. He rounds on her.
‘That family,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t know a tapas if it bit them on the arse’ and she senses that his patience, even with her, particularly with her, is up. She tries to be led by instinct with him. But, when it comes to what she wants, what she feels, it’s a vacuum. That’s love, she tells herself. Daughterly love.
But.
She needs another kind.
‘Dad,’ she says. They’re beginning the slope up to Brixham Gardens; he’s walking well but you never know, and she can’t remember how much Dr Mac left for the rest of the weekend. She has been going on and on about how great the pictures were, using every word she can dredge from her childhood to describe the brushstrokes, Tonking, alla prima, but it’s nothing like enough to soothe him. He is, her sister once said, a gaping maw.
Does he even realize how scanty his pictures looked? You can’t tell; he’s behaving exactly as he does whenever upset about anything at all, eyes straight ahead, body stony, responses like a dying cold beast. And what happens when Pablo does come to claim her, scooping her up like the hero she has been waiting for? Leah has always needed her father, but what happens when she moves on?
He has been still for what seems like hours. Wedged here in a corner of the soft orange brickwork he can listen to footsteps and talk, almost believe he’s among them. It is essential that nobody finds him; he’s holding everything tight, as if not being seen is a question of self-control. The throbbing in his ear and hand and wrists is company; it makes him alive to every scurry in the undergrowth, the little howls of pain. He worries about everyone in every lit-up window. The growl of the Junction Road and the lorries around Archway are so very loud; the half-hearted automatic peal of St-Mary-Cross; the clicks and tightenings of frozen soil. Dew pounds the rough grass. A garden spider crashes its tiny violent jaws.
Ray will not let him have this job. It was stupid even to ask. What he had hoped might be solid ground was mud and dust.
Is he drunk? He doesn’t remember drinking. The dark is pressing against his chest, his eyelids, filling his mouth. Blinking makes it blacker. He can’t have another breakdown, because that would include remembering the first one. The sky is too big. He is a man without purpose. He thinks: If I can’t have that, the one thing I wanted . . .
His blood feels very thick. Time to let it out. Time to do something.
Where is Ray, he thinks. I want a word with him.
‘If it wasn’t for Mum,’ Jess is saying, ‘I’d stay away completely. Well, and Patrick. I . . . do you think they are . . . is he actually mad? Dad, I mean.’
‘David thinks so,’ says Gillian. ‘If you mean medically.’
‘Really? Does he? Wow. Wow. I hadn’t . . . why’ve we never talked about this? Do you?’
Gillian smiles, shrugs. ‘I’d have thought indubitably. But I couldn’t possibly say.’
They pass splayed ferns, a grey wall knotted with vines, dipping down into mossy flagstones and round the side to another, higher, lawn, illuminated by an old-fashioned lamp-post.
‘Martyn feel the same?’
Jess gives her a look. ‘Are you joking? He’s Dad’s true son.’
‘I was wondering how life in Edinburgh is,’ Gillian asks carefully. ‘If you’re, I don’t know . . . Are you still renting? It must be frustrating, paying a fortune when there’s this big house down south.’
‘No,’ says Jess. ‘I love it. It’s brilliant being, you know, far—’ She hesitates, keeps her own counsel. Come on, thinks Gillian. They all have this irritating shiftiness, Ray’s lot, affecting not to care. Ray, David says, was always looking for someone to ruin. Poor Lucia; what was she thinking? It’s too late for her but, maybe, with a good man, Jess will be fine. At least, she thinks, Bex and Jake tell me everything.
‘You do have Martyn, though,’ she says. ‘He’s mad about you. Plural and singular.’
‘Do you think?’ Jess tips back her head, looks up at the mess of sodium-light and satellites. ‘Oh God. I suppose you’re right,’ she says, and winces.
‘It’s fine,’ says Gillian. ‘He’s a big boy.’ Jess gives her an awkward smile. No, thinks Gillian; she’s not too far gone.
‘I should probably get back. See how it’s going. Leah’ll be furious I haven—’
‘Do you think she’ll move out soon?’ asks Gillian too quickly, but Jess is turning back, squinting through the trees.
‘Isn’t that . . . ?’
‘Oh, look,’ Gillian says, ‘there’s somebody out here.’
33
In the hot bolt of contact, Lucia has lost herself. She is looking into Priya’s eyes, dry-mouthed; they are breathing each other’s breath.
‘Hello?’
The voice comes from behind topiary; someone must have walked all the way over the grass. Priya’s shining eyes dart as she looks for exits. She has not removed her hand, there in Lucia’s waistband. Lucia mouths ‘shit’ and grabs her wrist but, with the tiniest movement of her head, Priya stops her.
They stand, pinioned, waiting.
‘Who’s there?’ calls the voice again. ‘Leah, is that you?’
‘Shit,’ says Lucia silently again.
Priya extracts her hand, like a thief. Lucia’s clothes exhale. She needs a tree to lean on; her legs are perilously weak. Priya, however, is steel.
‘Hi,’ she says, her voice almost perfectly calm. ‘Just chatting out here. Don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret fag. Who’s that?’
‘Just Gillian. Fine. And Jess, of course.’
‘Mum?’
And Lucia says, ‘No.’
Ah, thinks Gillian. OK.
Gillian gives a laugh like a cough.
‘I mean yes,’ says Jess’s mother. ‘Hello. Just catching up on political gossip. You’ve met Priya um, Menon, haven’t you, Gill?’
She never calls Aunt Gillian ‘Gill’. Is she drunk?
‘Hello,’ says Gillian, much too loudly, but she stays exactly where she was. ‘Lucia! Here you are! I’d forgotten that you two were such good friends.’
‘I know, it’s been years,’ says Jess’s mother, stepping out from under a tree to see its branches. Jess has spent her childhood dragging her away from interesting lichen, gravel, bark. Tonight the stars are invisible under orange cloud, so what is there to look at?
‘Are they friends?’ asks Jess. ‘Since when?’
For a cool-blooded woman, Gillian’s all over the place. She keeps starting to speak, gripping Jess’s arm unnecessarily hard. ‘Come on, you,’ she says, trying to steer Jess back towards the Hall, as if she’s an interrupting schoolgirl.
Jess is thirty. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she says. ‘I need to ask—’
‘I really think we should go and check on everything.’
‘But, no, wait,’ Jess says. ‘Look, Mum, what are you doing out here? Seriously, you should be back at the exhibition. I don’t understand what he’s . . . Did you know? How could you let him s—’
A wash of dizziness, faintness, definitely not nausea but something very wrong, hits her so suddenly that she sways. ‘I – I need to sit,’ she says, and plumps onto the soaking grass.
Everything is perfectly clear. This is the sharpening of his mind.
Patrick will not go back to the house and the fury. He cannot do it. The exhibition will be blamed on him and that’s too many straws, nails, in the coffin. His spirit is barely a skin’s-thickness now, a meniscus over a brimming bowl. Even the chance of bumping into Ray, of being glimpsed by him, the side of his face, the top of his head, fills him with a wet trickle of horror. It must not happen, if he is to stay intact. He knows what he cannot bear.
What he should do is confront Ray. Shout at him about the selfishness; burst through this force field until they can have a reasonable discussion about Patrick’s job, which he deserves. It makes perfect sense, crystal, except that this is Ray and worms don’t turn: particularly worms raised by Ray.
It’s stopped raining, which is what gives him the idea.
‘Jess? Are you all right?’
‘She’s fine,’ calls Gillian.
‘Did she fall?’
‘Bit . . . spinny,’ says Jess, and Lucia starts across the grass towards her.
‘Lucia,’ says Priya and Lucia hesitates, as a dark figure bursts around the side of the building and charges up the path towards them.
‘Oh Christ,’ says Jess, closing her eyes.
‘Where are you?’ her sister is screaming. ‘Bloody hell, can you, I can’t even see . . . Larry said you were all out here. You have to come home. He needs you right now, as if there isn’t enough stupid fr—’
Their mother, in the trees, calls: ‘What’s happened? Leah?’
‘Don’t be all innocent. He predicted it, he knew you’d make a fuss about leaving. It’s not even your party.’
‘Slow down. Breathe. Is Ray OK?’
Leah pushes her hair back with both hands, like a priestess. ‘What are you doing in there?’ she yells, ignoring Gillian. ‘Can’t you show support? That idiot Dr Mac has totally let him down, he promised th—’
Jess’s mother steps onto the lit-up wet grass, rebuttoning her coat. By night she seems slightly transformed. She says, with a snap to her voice, ‘Oh love. Can’t it wait?’
Gillian catches Jess’s eye; she senses it too. Even Leah hesitates.
‘OK, OK,’ their mother says. She looks over at her friend, the MP. ‘No, of course we won’t tell the press you were smoking,’ she reassures her.
‘No one cares,’ says Leah, rudely.
‘Please, Leah, be polite.’
‘It’s an emergency,’ says Leah, but haven’t they been here before, so often?
Ignore it, Jess always begs her, but this time, as every other, their mother chooses to answer the tug. ‘I’ll see you,’ she says to this new friend of hers and, with only a backwards wave, as if they are strangers, almost too casually, the woman walks calmly off. Their mother is theirs again. But never, in the history of the Hanrahans, has something more obviously been up.
‘What,’ Lucia asks, freshly kissed, the taste of Priya’s palm on her mouth, skin to tongue-tip, salty and sublime, ‘is going on?’
‘What do you think?’ Leah half shouts. She is almost stamping with outrage beside the weird ornamental rose feature; my little savage, thinks Lucia fondly, before lurching back to the present disaster. ‘He’s in desperate pain. As usual. And that bastard Dr Mac got pissed and forgot to leave the script. He’s passed out upstairs like a—’
‘I thought you loved Dr Mac,’ says Jess.
‘Shut up.’
‘You shut up.’
‘Girls,’ says Gillian, ‘hang on a minute.’
Lucia has often thought that, with a co-wife, marriage to Ray would have been a breeze. Imagine having someone to discuss it with.
She needs to make things normal for the girls, but that option died long ago. ‘Enough,’ she says, calm as stone. Leah sounds as if she could go for Jess; her hands are clenched. There’s a whiff of adrenaline, like in a bad pub, and she remembers fragments of other fights: sofa-kicks; a fun-fair bite; more maternal failure and neglect.
