Afterward there were sandwiches in the back of The Green Knight. People from school sliding looks over. They were there. Say they don’t know anything. That she was just wandering about out there on her own and fell over.
Em’s mum came over and hugged all three of us.
“You’ll come by the house, won’t you?”
I promised that I would. Knew I wouldn’t.
“She’d made you all Christmas presents. She’d done tapes for you.”
When we left, she came and hugged me again, crying, her round face wet and wobbling. “I think she was out there hiding them again, so you could have another go at that game. That would be like her, wouldn’t it? Doing something nice for you all. What will we do without her, Andy? What will we do without our Em?”
I got in the van, into the back next to Peter, and Marcus drove us to the station at Great Bedwyn in silence.
As Peter slipped away, up the steps and onto the platform, I could see his eagerness to be off and I envied him. Back in Oxford no one had heard of Em, and its libraries and lecture halls and greens would be untainted by her and by the grief of those who had loved her, and at times he would, I imagined, be able to forget any of it had ever happened.
* * *
The darkness was coming in as we drove back in the rain, down the Roman road, through the ancient forest. I was in the passenger seat. At the lights in town, I stole a glance at Marcus and could see a tear flexing from the surface of his eyeball, until the light changed from red to green and he blinked and it broke. He didn’t take me home, he drove on, taking the Swindon road to Chiseldon and then up to Barbury Castle.
The car park was empty. It would close in another hour if the caretaker could drag himself away from his cottage to padlock the gate. The windscreen misted up, obscuring the view of the winter wheat, the dun hedgerows, the bulk of the aerodrome and beside it the gray cracked tarmac of the runway from where Mrs. East’s pilots had taken off on their wartime bombing missions. Beyond the mist, raindrops fell and ran together to create ripples of descending water. When the joint was rolled, I plucked it from his fingers and got out, briefly feeling the wet slap of the wind before I slid open the side door and got into the back. After a minute, I heard him open his door and get out on the driver’s side. He was gone minutes and when he finally came in, his hair and face were wet with rain.
Marcus gave me a smile that was just a movement of the lips. I sparked up and we smoked, passing the joint to and fro, but that wasn’t what we were there for. The rain fell on the roof and the radio, tuned as always to Radio One, played deeply inappropriate songs—Ricky Martin was “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Britney Spears was “Born to Make You Happy.”
When the spliff was halfway down, I pinched it out and, without meeting his eye, I crawled over to where he was sat, back against the wall panel, legs stretched out. I’d bought a black dress for the occasion and now I knelt in it before him, my knees either side of his thighs, his face at the height of my breasts. I stayed like that for a moment or two and then leaned in to press against him. His hands came up around me and I pushed against him and kissed him hard, and felt a quiver of triumph as he reacted, as his mouth opened and his grip tightened and I pulled back only long enough to pull my dress over my head.
All the sorrows and hurts were outside and couldn’t get in for now. I felt them circling, pressing against the windows, but they could not reach me. In the past, I had struggled to want to fuck Marcus often enough or at appropriate times. It took drink or a spliff, a fight, another woman eyeing him. But I wanted him now, even though I knew it was the end. It was like burning the house you live in, when there is a storm raging outside in the middle of winter. Don’t say you haven’t wanted to, never had the inkling, the almost-knowledge that everything you love and hold dear is holding you back. Back from what? I was going to find out.
He got there. I felt him go, but there was still time, a little time. I held the dead weight of him, counting the seconds. A sudden and terrible comprehension of everything I was losing. My mouth was an inch from his ear. I wanted to say something, use words to hold him hostage. I knew the secret name he had given his bike when he was eleven. I’d seen his face, green with leaf light as we lay beneath the willow trees. But I wanted to keep those things safe too, sealed off from the present, so I said nothing.
Marcus had a few words for me.
“It’s over. I don’t want to see you.”
I said I was sorry about David. I managed that.
“I used to be jealous of him, of what you had between you. God, I wished you’d fucked off with him all those years ago, instead of hanging round to poison everything. I don’t want to worry about you or look after you anymore. I’m sick of it.”
“I’m sick of you looking after me too.” Like all the gratitude I had to feel, all the guilt for not getting better, had gone bad. Resentment, that between us he always got to be the noble one, the knight, and what that made me. For a glorious second, it felt that I was slipping my chains and riding off on the back of the dragon, but then it lurched back to feeling like I was in a film, that all that was keeping me from falling forever was Marcus’s hand gripping mine, and his grip was slipping, and then I had that odd dreamlike sensation, like in the second before you wake up, when you are finally falling and it’s such a relief.
“Well, hope you enjoyed the fuck, Marc. Are you glad you got it in before you told me you don’t want to fucking see me anymore, your last-minute sightseeing?”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“Em—”
“Don’t fucking say anything about Em.” Shouting in my face, spit flying. I got my dress on and opened the van door.
“It’s not like it’s ever any good with you anyway.” And this was unfair and untrue. Or it was only true sometimes, and when it was, it was not Marcus’s fault.
He did look at me then, ugly with hate, like I was a criminal, a robber who had stolen something precious from him and sent him a video of myself shitting all over it before destroying it forever.
Marcus blinked. When he opened his mouth, his voice came out hoarse. “And every day you get more and more like your mum.”
He drove us back. I got out, floated down the path toward the house, like one of those cyclists who get back on their bikes after an accident, not realizing yet the bones they’ve broken. Inside, I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. I wanted to call Em. I wanted Em to come and hug me, and make me tea and tell me it would all be all right. I would want the same thing a thousand times. I want it now.
There was a knock a couple of minutes later. When I didn’t open up, Marcus pushed the letterbox open with his fingers and peered through to confirm I was there. Then he told me to find a new job, to do it quick, and not make him get his uncle to sack me.
CHAPTER 14
GENTLEMEN’S CLUB
After my night at the bar, the inevitable episode. I woke curled around my laptop, next to the tail end of a ketchup sandwich and the burned-out telephone box. It went downhill from there. Episodes could begin innocuously enough. I would get the idea that I deserved a duvet day as reward for my long hours and professionalism, a bit of telly in bed with a bowl of ice cream, but they always ended the same way: binge-watching series or films while binge-eating whatever was in the house, first addressing the fridge and cupboards, eventually the freezer.