“Oh my God, Rob, what’s happened to you?”
He lurched away, tugging the edge of the hood as far down over his face as it would go, and now she noticed that he was wearing gloves, as if whatever had happened to him had affected not just his face but his entire body. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come. This was a mistake.” He started to go, and she really should have let him, but there was something so pathetic about him compared to the arrogance of the man she’d known that she found herself feeling sorry for him, and despite her better judgement she called out, “Wait!”
He paused, hunched against the chill.
“I can’t let you in,” she said. “It’s too late and I’ve had a long day, and it’s just… No, not tonight.”
“I understand.” A car drove past and he flinched in the glare of its headlights.
“But come back tomorrow, and we’ll talk.”
He nodded.
“I need to know—” She stopped suddenly. It was too much to go into, here on the doorstep. “We need to talk.” It was lame, but all she could offer.
“Thanks, Hannah,” he mumbled, and left.
She went inside, locked the door, then immediately went into the front room and peered through a crack in the curtains to see if he was still lurking out there on the street, maybe hiding in the shadows of next door’s hedge. But he seemed to have genuinely disappeared. Expelling a huge sigh of relief, she dumped her bag in the hall and went through to the narrow galley kitchen where she knew there was a half-finished bottle of red wine on the counter. She poured herself a generous glass, took it and the bottle back into the living room, plonked herself down on the sofa and then just sat there, staring into the sane, orderly silence of her empty home.
“Fuck,” she said quietly.
Sipping her wine, she took out her phone and started scrolling back through the history of her Instagram feed. A week might be a long time in politics, so it was said, but six months was virtually a geological age in social media. She’d deleted all her pictures of him and the two of them together – they’d only had a few dates so there weren’t that many to begin with – but there they were in the feeds of her friends, along with their congratulatory comments like “Girl he’s GORGEOUS you done GOOD”, “Oh come on, he must be gay”, and “Does he have any brothers?” He was (or had been, at any rate) fantastically good-looking, it had to be admitted: hazel eyes, stylishly careless dark hair, flawless skin the colour of lightly toasted cinnamon, and a body that was toned but not overly muscular. Her last few dates before Rob had been with men whose idea of dinner conversation seemed to consist of talking entirely about themselves and what they hated about their jobs, football teams, or favourite television programmes she’d never heard of. She’d been so surprised to find herself in the company of a man who actually paid attention to her and seemed to want to make an effort that she’d mistaken his vanity for self-confidence, and ignored the alarm bells until it was almost too late.
As she scrolled through the images, feeling that same mixture of confusion and self-blame, she became aware of an itching on her left knee, and that she’d been unconsciously scratching at it for some time. The skin was red and flaking, and a drift of silvery bits littered the sofa cushion underneath.
“Ugh, pratt,” she scolded herself. Falling into old bad habits again. She brushed the bits away and went upstairs to the bathroom to find her pot of Dermalex.
She’d first met Rob at a private dermatologist’s clinic on the Hagley Road, where she was having a check-up for her psoriasis – not that she told him that, of course. It was embarrassing and ugly and only localised to a few places like her knees and elbows, which were easily hidden, and why would you tell the gorgeous man sitting next to you in the waiting room that you were there because bits of you were flaking off like some kind of disgusting troll-like creature? She’d made up something about having a suspicious-looking mole examined, and he’d shown her a picture on his phone of that old cartoon of the guy in the doctor’s surgery with a small furry critter in sunglasses and a trench coat sitting on his shoulder, and they’d laughed. As it happened he actually was there to have a mole removed himself, he explained, and showed her an almost invisible blemish on the left side of his chin. To her mind it didn’t seem serious enough to need attention, but then she wasn’t the doctor and it was Rob’s money to spend and who was she to judge? When he asked her if she was doing anything afterwards and could he buy her a coffee, she almost refused because he was so obviously out of her league – but then she found that a small, brave part of her had taken control and was nodding yes, that would be lovely, thanks.
So there was coffee, and a week after that there was dinner, and three dinners after that there was a concert at the Symphony Hall. He was a senior credit analyst for a large multinational which had relocated its British headquarters from London to the Midlands, and she fantasised about taking him to meet her parents, because he was exactly the sort of handsome and successful young man that her mother aspired to seeing take her wallflower of a daughter down the aisle, and exactly the sort of prospective son-in-law who would take her father to task for his right-wing, Daily Mail-inflamed politics and still be respected for it.
The photographs of their dates were still there like ghosts in her friends’ timelines. They haunted her with fragments of forgotten conversations, and her skin tingled at recalling the light touch of his hand on her arm as he helped her out of a taxi, or his leg brushing hers as they sat in their seats for the concert. He was never less than respectful and attentive, but looking at the images now she saw the hints of what had been hiding there, like blemishes on the smooth façade of his charm. The way he dipped his head slightly down and to one side in every picture, as if he knew which was his best angle and presented it instinctively. The way he had, at the end of one taxi ride home with her head resting on his shoulder, plucked fastidiously and with a tiny frown of distaste at the single stray hair she’d left on his jacket.
He hid it well, but he was a vain man. She didn’t appreciate exactly how vain until the first and only time she went back to his apartment.
They were kissing even as they made it into the hall, one of his hands in the small of her back and the other tugging at her dress zip, but she broke from him long enough to ask him where his bathroom was; Feminine Mysteries and all that, she said, hoping that it sounded humorously arch but fearing that she just came across as pompous. He smiled, showed her and said that he’d be in the living room making them a drink.
The bathroom, like the rest of the apartment and the man who owned it, was tastefully and expensively decorated. It was more of a wet-room, with a shower head the size of a dinner plate and a natural slate floor, chromed fittings and a huge mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink. She took care of her own business and then, out of no impulse more noble than naked curiosity, had a quick snoop in the cabinet. She refused to tell herself that she was looking for evidence of another woman in his life, but all the same felt a swift shiver of relief when she found none. What she did find, on the other hand, was an Aladdin’s cave of male skincare products. There were moisturisers, wipes, balms and exfoliants, chemical peels and oil control serums, depilatory creams, anti-shine lotions, charcoal purifying daily face washes, and something called a hydra-energetic anti-fatigue system. There was a whole shelf glittering with stainless steel implements that would have shamed a dentist’s surgery: scissors, tweezers, clippers, cuticle trimmers, blackhead extractors, razors (safety and disposable), and on the topmost shelf something that looked like a Hallowe’en mask for a robot costume, complete with wires and a battery pack. Presumably he wore that at night, though hopefully not every night – she thought that if she woke up next to that she’d scream the place down.