The Exhibitionist, page 21
‘And Sukie went to look for her.’
‘Oh.’
‘And guess who she spotted her talking to?’
‘Tell me.’
‘The Frog!’
37
Jess’s mother should have known instinctively that Jess needed her.
Martyn seemed unbothered when she went off alone. ‘Though we have,’ he said, looking over Jess’s shoulder, squinting into the night, ‘so much to discuss. Don’t you want to hear what I thought?’ She felt too bleak, too monstrously ashamed, to talk; he said she was being rude and sullen, which would hurt Ray terribly. ‘He’ll be waiting for your reaction,’ he said. ‘Mine too, of course.’
He’s a good loving man. It’s her fault, for having imagined a world together, for a week or two.
‘I’m going back,’ she said. ‘To the house. Are you coming?’
‘In a bit,’ he said. ‘Just finishing up.’
And now Martyn, cat-burglar, foot-pad, highwayman, is stalking his prey.
Jess will be fine walking home. It’s a very nice area.
He’s merely here as an observer; a peace-keeper, if you will. His quarry hurries from the scene, edges through a high metal gate and, unexpectedly, they’re in what seem to be suburbs: empty mounded avenues with glistening lawns and signposts, big solid Tudorish homes. It’s absolutely quiet, dewy with prosperity, with pools of misty lamplight where even the most happily coupled person can imagine odd encounters: a satyr, a wartime intimacy. Better still, if one of them were one’s future home . . .
No, he reminds himself. Be satisfied; remember the flimsy wood-veneer making-do, the hush, of the scrimping world I’ve left behind. The Hanrahans’ house, with new grout and better radiators, will be a very paradise.
He read spy books as a boy; it’s a happy accident that his smarter shoes have crêpe soles. He treads on the outer edges, like a professional, and it shows; they walk along in almost-silence, as if the followee accepts his presence. There’s definitely something stalwart in that stride.
You’re drunk, he tells himself, but it’s just the night air, the dazzling mist.
But where are they going? If only they could have discussed it, because it’s actually quite cold and Martyn is not at his most relaxed out here in unknown alleyways, where anything could happen. He couldn’t find his anorak in the Almoners’ Hall so he’s borrowed Jess’s overcoat; he must be looking weirder than he has time to think about.
Left out of another set of gates, and they seem to be heading towards open country; no, wait, isn’t that the pizza place, where you go to the toilet and emerge in the Middle Eastern restaurant next door? London’s careless cosmopolitanism will never lose its thrill. So they must be at the corner of Hampstead Heath, the Heath is where they’re heading, and a chill fingertip of worry touches his skin.
And, when Lucia was driving, did she feel the reckless ecstatic thrill of a woman in a passionate affair? Yes. Definitely.
Was she happy?
Not exactly, no.
By the time she’s heaved open the shop door, held out the prescription in Leah’s special shaky doctor-writing, smiled steadfastly into the pharmacist’s suspicious eyes even as police sirens whizzed past, she’s beyond caring. She could snuggle up here in a bed of tartan hot-water-bottle covers but she gives a firm, non-addicty nod. She must protect Priya, who can’t be entangled in her family’s mess.
No, she must protect herself. She could have been, as Marie-Claude said, a famous artist.
Walking back to the car, the familiar curl of the paper bag in her paw, she tries to focus on this concept; it barely lasts a second. She’d forgotten that she has to drive back.
Jess, alone outside the Hanrahan house, is counting weeks on her red cold fingers.
If her friends have done this, or had it done, whatever you say, she’s never asked. She hasn’t ever needed to think about it; she was always too shy, too unsuccessful, for accidents. It’s only just occurred to her that dates matter, that there is an age limit, of . . .
Hang on.
It was the twelfth, ish, of November. Now it’s the tenth of February. Thirteen weeks. Oh, thank God. That’s legal.
But what if the timing’s different in Scotland?
Is it agony, even if it’s not an evil doctor, Dr Mac with a crochet-hook? Once, off Oxford Street, she was so enraged by the sight of an idiot with a placard, picketing a clinic, that she ran up the stairs and said to the receptionist: thank you for being heroic, it must be hard, would you like one of these pears?
‘Er, it’s fine,’ said the receptionist, and the thought still makes Jess’s toes curl: her earnestness, her desire to impress.
There must be places in Edinburgh. What if you have to take someone with you? If it has to be the father?
Patrick is jogging through the darkness, rain slicing his face.
He still feels watched, as if even here Ray can see his failures, his stupid, stupid hopes. His back is in a state of dread; his ear hurts like a burning coal on a rug, which is what once happened because he’d moved the fireguard to roast a potato and then there was a hole. Ray took to his bed for two days; that rug was a present from his mother. The thought makes him retch, but there’s nothing left. Significance halos every car, each tree. Could the man following him be his real father? He left a message for Mrs R’s nice publican daughter at the Good Intent; that’s over now.
Over the icy grass, slithering past a pale poisoned tree-corpse. He manages not to touch it but his knee bangs the side: numb and now poisoned too. It’s hard to remember better times but soon, Patrick is sure, calmed by the soothing ripple of the Fleet, he’ll start to improve. That’s how it works for people like him.
Lucia could go home and tell Ray she can’t do this anymore. Or tell Marie-Claude she’s changed her mind.
Or she could drive to Priya’s and present herself, for their second time.
The first time, Lucia seized the day. Ray was at the cinema. By the time she’d rung the doorbell, she was a beacon, flames shooting towards the London sky. It seemed, by her grin, that Priya was too. They’d only just arranged it; Lucia was already hanging around outside the Tube when she sent her casual message.
‘OK, then,’ said Priya, as if it were a small thing.
Lucia pressed her to the hallway wall. She hoped that Priya would like it, this new bold version. But Priya skilfully turned them both round, took charge of the kissing. It made Lucia’s knees weak. How did she earn this luck?
‘I can feel you smiling,’ said Priya. ‘Time to take you upstairs.’
On the bottom step, Lucia stopped.
‘Come on, woman.’
‘Wait,’ said Lucia.
‘What?’
‘The thing is . . . hardly anyone has seen, you know. It.’
Because, after a couple of months where she couldn’t look at it, but it was at least roundish, smooth, it had become even worse. She bought Bra Boosters, for excited small-titted girls with high hopes. By the time she faced careful Dr Shah again for polite squeezes with his cold gentle hands, Lucia’s body, protecting itself from the alien item, had encapsulated it, the implant, in a net of scars. Maura the nurse has seen it; she exclaimed at Lucia’s bra-booster rash, went with her to buy a medical prosthesis in a sad hushed shop near Old Street: German, size XL. ‘I know you shouldn’t need it, but I think the reconstruction didn’t take into account your, your . . . volumptuousness.’
Ray was kind but afterwards mostly avoided it. He still comes into the bathroom for a chat, tells her off about covering it with her arm. ‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ he says. ‘It’s not as if anyone else will ever see.’
‘Does it look OK?’ Jess had asked her on the phone, maybe six months later. Jess is young, deserves to love her breasts, not fear them, which Lucia will do for her, so Lucia said: ‘Yes! It’s very realistic,’ and neither of them referred to it again.
So that’s everyone, until Priya. She knows what happened but cannot possibly visualize this lump of repurposed muscle and synthetic flesh, the asymmetry, the excuse for a nipple. Women their age have imperfections, not areas of horror.
Priya said: ‘You are lovely.’
Fear and disgust fell to the floor like leaves. ‘I might have to keep my bra on,’ Lucia said.
‘Well you may,’ said Priya. ‘At first.’
And then, when she took her into her bedroom, pressed her on the cool white bed, Priya wasn’t sweet about it. She didn’t tenderly kiss and weep and croon. She behaved as if every part of Lucia was worthy of lust.
Which, thinks Lucia, wondering what to do in the cold of the car, unfortunately has blown my mind.
Then, like God, her phone rings.
Leah’s father says he has too much pride to let this rest, however much pain it will cause him. He phones up several of his gang, then makes Leah call her mother.
‘Why’s she engaged? Who’s she talking to? Find out, can’t you?’
‘There’s no—’
‘Decent people don’t behave like that. I haven’t raised you to be a traitor. I’m not having this. That deserter has pushed me too far.’
‘I know,’ Leah says, watching the future spinning out of her hands. If he’s thinking of leaving her mother, he will sink to the bottom and pull Leah with him.
‘Simple solution. Find my address book.’
‘Oh, Pa, don’t ring Marie-Claude. It’s late. She might f—’
‘It’s classic Lucia,’ says Ray. ‘Talking to her dealer at my PV? You couldn’t invent it, that kind of betrayal.’
‘We don’t necess—’
‘You know what Barry Nolan used to tell me? “Ditch the bitch”.’
‘Wait, Dad. There’s something I wanted to . . .’ Cruel to be kind. ‘Remember what Coralie said about Mum outside Moorgate station, talking to someone from, get this. Telly.’
‘Hold on,’ says Ray. ‘What are you on about?’
‘This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. Yesterday? I didn’t think anything much of it, but Mum’s been so weird, and even more private, sort of defensive . . . Anyway, that’s what Coralie said.’
‘What would Coraline know about this?’
‘Dad. Coralie. You’ve known her since Reception. Anyway, I reckon it was that mayor, or minister, or whatever that woman is who came along tonight.’
‘Well, there we go. I attract stars. Though Cora always was thick, let’s face it. So,’ he says, rubbing the sides of his big nose with his knuckles, giving a raggedy sigh. ‘Where even is Moorgate? I’ll tell you this; I don’t give a toss about chats outside Tube stations. That Indian politician? Fine, if she wants to suck up to her. But if your mother can sneakily engineer something professional at my own show . . . well, what choice is there? I have to ring Marie-Claude and find out what the hell is up.’
‘But—’
‘You won’t leave me, little one? No, of course you won’t. We understand each other. I can rely on you.’
‘I am slightly drunk.’
‘Me too,’ says Lucia into the phone.
‘Excellent,’ Priya says, low and promising, and Lucia’s body lights up.
38
He’s snapping through the pages of his tiny address book for Marie-Claude’s home phone, while Leah thinks about how Coralie’s always had it in for her family, envied her. Who cares about her gossip; it’s Lucia, Leah’s own mother, who’s messed up tonight.
It is not a long conversation.
Afterwards, chin lifted, lips compressed, Ray sits, quiet and still. Leah waits. Very, very occasionally, even in this mood, like a falling person miraculously caught on a flagpole, some chance will save him. The storm will pass.
Not tonight. Stiffly and painfully he moves to the edge of the bed, then downstairs. She follows. He inches to the living room, lifts up papers, puts them back.
‘Dad?’
No response. You can see that great brain chuntering. Then, like a small birth in the garden, just a pink wriggling furless thing, she remembers the conversation her mother had earlier, on the phone.
‘Dad,’ she says, and already it’s making her breathless, with dread but also an answer, delivered. ‘Was there something about . . . it sounds mad. But . . . when Marie-Claude rang earlier sh—’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘Well, no. But . . . I think she might have mentioned . . . Venice?’
Lucia is still on the phone. ‘What are you up to?’
‘I’m in bed, with sixteen million parliamentary reports. I’m eating cereal.’
‘Tonight was . . .’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, interrupted but . . . You were . . . wow.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Driving! I mean, not at this second. But I had to nip out,’ she says, hoping to suggest a rich and vivid social life.
‘I thought you hated the car,’ says Priya.
‘I do.’ She sounds pathetic. But Priya’s reaction is not as she had expected.
‘Well done,’ she says. ‘You brave woman.’
‘Thank you!’
‘I’m proud,’ says Priya. ‘Look at you, all famous, roaring around London like a boy racer. Sexy. So, what next?’
‘Oh,’ says Lucia, grinning her head off, ‘I thought . . . stripping?’
‘Easy,’ says Priya but, in her heady state, Lucia is imagining several worlds along; standing together at Lucia’s next show, Priya saying, ‘I’m very proud of her.’ It could even have been the Biennale, if she hadn’t said no to Marie-Claude, if that wasn’t absolutely final.
‘I meant it, earlier,’ Priya says, confidingly, and Lucia’s stomach lurches, that swoop of lust. ‘You could come to Bristol.’
‘Oh! I thought you . . . Seriously?’
‘Yep. Imagine. A big hotel bed. Two solid nights of . . . well, probably just sleeping,’ she says airily. ‘Those of us with actual jobs will be shattered.’
Lucia swallows. ‘Well . . .’
She’s been creeping up the stairs to the loft, avoiding the creaks. Now her sister and father have fallen quiet. If he hears her, Jess will have to go in there and praise him, even if she’d rather crawl to Scotland on bleeding stumps. He will be reeking with need.
But what if, for once, he’s properly ill?
She couldn’t find her coat, couldn’t face borrowing Martyn’s anorak and the drama when he realized, so she hurried home, freezing. The door, of course, was on the latch. Her back still aches with the cold; she leans softly against the bannister outside her old bedroom, hears her father picking up the phone again.
‘Dad, you can’t r—’
‘Shh,’ he hisses at Leah. ‘Yes,’ he’s saying, sounding suddenly politer, as if he’s talking to a man. He’ll be sitting deep in his squashy chair, ready to hold out a hand to be pulled up, little table beside him crowded with glasses. How can Leah stand it?
And what about her mother? She should be mortified, furious about that mad non-exhibition, that absolute shit-show pyre of Ray Hanrahan’s career but, last time Jess saw her, chatting calmly in the garden, she looked . . . unaware.
Jess has spent her life telling people she doesn’t want to turn into her father. But, Martyn being what he is, so determined to force their world into his template, if she’s with him, could she become her mother? Smoothing things over, tiptoeing as he gets madder, never ever telling the truth?
And there’s the slur in her father’s voice. Why does Leah always say it is exhaustion, even when it’s only family, when they all know?
The rage is back; sod Leah. Let her give her life to him, if that’s what she wants.
‘I don’t care, Julian,’ he’s saying. ‘I don’t give a toss about your gallery etiquette. I will ask you one thing, as her husband,’ and Jess stops breathing.
Up on the Heath, despite the lashing rain and brambles, Patrick is smiling. Weather is power. The muddy gravel clasps his shoes; are there anglers at the ponds this late? Lovers? He won’t be alone; the Heath is always full of passion.
People do break in. When he was at school some of the scarier lads would dive-bomb in the men’s pond on summer nights; the next day they’d laugh about the flashing white bums they’d seen in the wooded bits off Millfield Lane. Patrick wants fuller darkness, the skeletons of bulrushes, a stew of rot. At the edge of the biggest pond, in deep wet black, he hesitates. Clothes seem cowardly. Water dripping from his eyebrows, guiding his stone fingers, he begins to unbutton his shirt.
‘Where are you going?’ Martyn calls.
Patch turns round calmly, as if he had known he was being followed. He’s not dressed appropriately for this foul weather; something’s shining at his chest like silver foil. Has he already been rescued? Martyn squints, sways, tries to stand tall and firm although the planet is spinning faster than usual, and he could easily fly off. He peers a little closer; it’s bare skin.
‘Oh God!’
But Patch turns his back, takes off his jacket. It looks as if he’s going swimming; transfuse this scene with daylight, a buzzing haze of honeyed sun, and there they are, lolling on the grass. It’s time, Jess would say, to cut down on the drinking, but she’s not one to talk. Not usually.
Hang on.
‘I’m so confused,’ Martyn murmurs.
He can’t see Patch properly; the night, far from civilization, is so intensely dark, like a soaked sponge. If there is a moon, it’s behind a shield of cloud.
This isn’t what he envisaged, not at all.
‘Tell you what,’ he says loudly. ‘Mate. You’re not going in there, are you? There must, must be heated places, somewhere. Swimming pools. We could, no, bit late . . .’
But his teeth are chattering and Patch clearly can’t hear him. Martyn swipes rainwater from his face and edges closer, although the slope is a death-trap. Imagine dying to save Jess’s brother.
‘Easy now,’ he says.
Inexorable, unconcerned, Patch keeps his back turned. This has, Martyn wants to point out, gone some way past normal. Jess should have been clearer that her brother was prone to outbursts of instability; when Martyn took her on, he should have been warned. Although, to be fair to Ray, he’s always offering to reveal the details of Patrick’s teen misery, his daughters’ poor romantic selections.
