The Body Lies Read online

  “We’re both telling our partners this weekend,” he said again. “Clean sheet, everything out in the open, no more lies.”

  “No more lies?”

  “I owe it to you to be open with you, to tell you the truth.”

  I turned my face away. “Please don’t.”

  “I feel dreadful,” he said. “I really do. But I can’t go on like this forever, in limbo, in transit. Nowhere’s home.”

  “I didn’t leave you.”

  “But you’re gone.”

  “Come to bed,” I said. “Just come to bed, Mark; we’ll sleep on it, we can talk in the morning. We can work something out. Come to bed.”

  “I’ll sleep down here.” Those sweet blue eyes. The day’s haze of stubble.

  So I went upstairs and took a pillow and a blanket off my bed. He was sitting there on the blue sofa, the throw crumpled underneath him, when I came back down and handed the bedding to him.

  “For what it’s worth,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  I nodded. A grey hollow space swelled in my chest. I couldn’t swallow and I could hardly breathe. Sammy would be…God, it didn’t bear thinking about, how Sammy would be. “You’ll—what, go back to London in the morning?”

  “I told Mum I’d bring Sam down to see her.” He dropped the pillow down at the end of the sofa. “Well,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good night.”

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t sleep.

  In the morning he asked where the towels were kept and I walked away. His bag was already by the door. When he broke the news about a trip to Grandma’s, Sammy nearly burst with excitement. Grandma’s house was Liberty Hall. Things on ration at home—sweets, telly, junk food—were always in glorious overabundance at Grandma’s. But oh God I didn’t want to let go of Sammy. I couldn’t bear for him to be away from me. And there would be so much more of this, over the years to come. Handovers in train stations and pickups and drop-offs at front doors and sometimes she’d be there; him and her together; the new “we.”

  “Make sure he gets to bed at a decent time.”

  “I will.”

  “He has his routine, so you have to stick to the routine, otherwise it’ll take me ages to get him back into anything like a sensible bedtime.”

  “Okay. I do know.”

  “And make sure he eats something green.”

  “Of course.”

  “Every day, I mean.”

  “I know.”

  “And give my love to your mum.”

  “I will.”

  “Okay, bye.” And the words came out by reflex: “Love you.”

  It hurt. Mark reached out a hand to me.

  “Look,” he said. “I didn’t want, I don’t want to— Can we just—get along?”

  “Give it a while, yeah?”

  “Okay. Yeah.”

  “It’s hard.”

  He nodded. I could see that he felt bad.

  I waved to the departing car, holding it together for Sam’s sake, but as soon as it was round the bend, my face broke, and I ran inside. I slumped to the floor and covered my face with my hands, and cried.

  When I had cried myself out, I washed my face and put on makeup. Things were no worse than they had been, after all; I’d just not known how bad they were. This was, at least, information. I knew where I stood now.

  I couldn’t stay alone in that place. I gathered up my stuff, locked up, and made my way to the bus stop. My hands felt empty. I felt like I’d forgotten something. That I’d left something behind.

  Chemistry

  The American girl used to send book reviews and accounts of her day and questions about his and observations of the quirks of English English, the oddities of English people and of England in general. She’d send emojis of sunshine and ice cream and animals, photographs of where she was or things that took her fancy. She’d text quotes from Plath and de Beauvoir and Camus. She became teasing, passive-aggressive, then transparent, pleading, and then faded out altogether into silence as she finally got the message in that she wasn’t going to get a message, not from him.

  And now he waits, watching his phone. Wanting an emoji, a message, a few words. Anything.

  Thinking of that night is like the crash of a wave over him he stands shocked and sharp-awake and breathless. He wants to see her, he wants to be near her. What he feels now is different from what he has felt before. After the dark waters he has struggled through alone for so long, all this time this feels different again not the cleanness of his lost girl but something else again, something astringent, salt.

  He tries something uncomplicated and noncommittal; that is how to start. Hey there you.

  He watches his phone and she does not reply.

  She has work, she has the boy, people always say that they are busy especially at Christmas, they go on and on about how busy they are, family, shopping, all that stuff. He catches the bus into town. He wanders round the shopping centre, past the queue at Greggs, past Poundland and in through Boots and out again. He scans Neros and Costa and Starbucks since people shop and drink coffee and shop, and she is in none of these places when he goes into them. He walks into The Hall and stands there, just on the scuffed wooden floor like a school gym scanning the echoing space and noisy with talk and coffee-grinding and steam and vintage pop and the boys with beards and the girls with pixie cuts and the customers with their MacBooks or babies and the twinkling prettiness of Christmas lights. He wants her to be there, wants the joy and miracle of it in the last place that he’d looked, anticipates the thrill and has the thrill wash from him, because she is flatly not there. He could talk to the pretty girl behind the counter who has tattoos like the flourishes of Uncle Toby’s walking stick, he knows he could catch her interest but doesn’t want to. Now that the anticipation has washed away what’s left behind is anger. Anger that he has been hijacked like this.

  You busy? he texts. Thought we could meet up in town. Go for coffee. Bring the boy.

  He keeps it light, keeps it friendly, keeps it easy-going. Like he’s okay with fitting in around her life.

  And he watches his phone and she does not reply.

  And he watches his phone and still she does not reply.

  That’s it. He’s done. Won’t text her again. He doesn’t have to take this.

  Christmas Day is wet. After church his parents get quickly drunk. Gideon has not come home for Christmas this year; he says he has to go to Hannah’s; he says it is an obligation, one year he has to be there, one year he can be here, but the truth is there will always be a good reason to be elsewhere and who’s to blame him. Nick feels the absence of his own girl; this is when he misses her most, in the long hours trapped with his own family. Time passed differently with her, together they could swallow hours whole, drink down days and still not have had enough. There was never quite enough time.

  Taking the dog out, he says.

  Up the village street and up the hill, along the lane and through the farmyard and up to the very edge of the moors. Where the little house stands with the faint glow of one light left on in the hall, announcing its emptiness. No Christmas tree, no decorations. The dog snuffs around then stares up at him and then sits down then lies down at his feet on the damp tarmac.

  She has gone back to London, of course she has taken the boy and gone to be with him with that man. Husband. And it comes to him that this is why she has had to absent herself so entirely from him. The man, the necessity of covering and appeasing and behaving as normal. When she gets back, though. Leaving the husband behind. But the jealousy the anger. That she does as she pleases and does what she needs as though it doesn’t concern him.

  He fumbles with umbrella lighter cigarettes. He smokes looks out across the fields to where the city casts an orange glow up i
nto the sky, and the old hay barn stands a black block in front of it. Metcalfe has let the building fall into ruin, wraps up his silage now in black plastic and leaves it standing in the fields. Can’t even see the worth of things themselves, the old man, of stone and slate and timber. Can’t see what matters when it’s right in front of him.

  He drops his cigarette butt it fizzles out in the rain. The dog is shivering. He jerks her to her feet and they head off home.

  Days pass. When he writes he imagines her reading his words, imagines her reading this, the words that he is writing for her. He never thought that he cared about being read; the point was to write, but now the idea of her reading is everything, he imagines the words entering her mind and shaping her thoughts and making images swell and he knows himself to be in charge of that and it makes him feel better. His writing will get inside her and change her leave her different.

  New Year’s Eve and he has not slept a whole night in he can’t think how long. Head falls, swings up again, he writes and he walks and then there is a party in town and there is a girl there, and he gives her some of the stuff he’s got and then they are kissing chewing the faces of each other and then they are in one of the bedrooms, and they are fucking, and she is arching her back and gasping and he knows, cold, watching her and watching himself watch her, in his gut he knows that she doesn’t feel it, couldn’t feel that, high or not she just knows what she is expected to feel and so she does what she is expected to do. He is watching himself watching her and it is not at all real or true and doesn’t mean a thing. He pulls out of her and gets back into his clothes and she is what the fuck and then she is shouting crying too so much feeling here but he doesn’t believe a word of it not a tear of it it’s just market-stall fakery he gets away from her down the stairs and out the front door and out into the street and up the hill out of town and along the dark lanes, and it is silent, since everyone has got where they are going to tonight and is with the people that they want to be with. He goes by the moonlight and the shadows and it occurs to him that if he had stayed there in that upstairs room at the party and finished in her, if he had given her his number, then in time he would get a text, he would get an emoji, he would get a little waving ghost, a glass of wine, a cup of coffee. He would get a ream, a raft, a bundle. His phone would be bursting with balloons and chicks peeping out of eggs and glasses of fizz and party-streamers. He hears the bells peal out from the town hall clock; fireworks streak into the sky and burst. It is New Year’s Day.

  He texts her. Because he misses her. He is such a fucking pussy. He is such a girl.

  Happy New Year.

  He stuffs his hands into his pockets. He stumbles on along the dark lane, and the fireworks break overhead and burst into stars, and fall, and die.

  He is forgetting about his lost girl. The only reason he ever had for writing. The only reason he ever wrote at all.

  He hates her for making him forget. The anger and the jealousy and the making him forget.

  You know this now. You cant not know it. You cant pretend that it isn’t true.

  A tap on the door. I yelped.

  Mina was frowning in through the glass panel. I closed the document and waved her in, then slid my hands under my thighs, and sat on them, because they were shaking.

  “It’s Sunday?” She stood there on the threshold, looking beautiful, in a soft dress printed with leaves and birds of paradise. Today her nails and lips were Morello cherry.

  “Um. Yeah.”

  She made a baffled expression, gesturing round the office: “Should you really be here?”

  “Mark’s got Sam. So I’m—you know—catching up.”

  “Yeah, but Day of Rest and all that?”

  “You’re here too.”

  “Needed a book.”

  “Would that be a work-type book, I wonder? Or are you reading for pleasure?”

  She smiled, caught out. “Reading for pleasure? What’s that? It rings a vague bell…”

  “There you go then, you haven’t got a leg to stand on.”

  I put the computer to sleep. Didn’t know what to do next. I had nowhere else to go. I’d been half-considering crawling in under my desk to sleep there.

  “We have this age-old tradition round here,” Mina was saying. “I don’t know if this is something you southerners will have ever heard of.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s called Going to the Pub.”

  “Northerners don’t have a monopoly on that.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Alright.”

  The lights blinked out behind us down the corridor. I wondered if I could miss the last bus home. I wondered if I could crash that night on Mina’s sofa. But that still left tomorrow, and I had no idea how to deal with it.

  * * *

  —

  The pub is instinct made solid. Faces to the fire, backs turned to the weather, chugging calories and dis-inhibitors—that’s human survival right there in a nutshell, through ancient migrations, through the ice ages and bad winters: that’s keeping on going to another spring, to better times, and better places. It was the fellowship I needed, not the drink. I bought myself a lime and soda, bought Mina a glass of pinot grigio, and we went to find the rest of them.

  They were collapsed in two sofas near a wood-burning stove, just half a dozen from the department; some of the younger teaching assistants, as well as Patrick, Kate, and Lisa. There was shuffling and the dragging up of extra stools.

  I ended up being talked to by Kate Speirs, who I hadn’t seen in a good while despite us having next-door offices: our timetables just didn’t overlap. She had just got funding for research leave and had this joyous post-coital flush about her. She never managed to get any research done while she was teaching, she told me: “Because it’s all drawn from the same well, isn’t it? The teaching and the writing, and if you keep on drawing from the well for other people then there’s nothing left for you.”

  I said, “But also maybe teaching renews the water, keeps it fresh?”

  She gave me a look. “You’re new,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  “Ooh, there’s Laura.” Mina was on her feet and squeezing out past people’s knees. “Scuse me.”

  She headed across to join a group of women standing by the bar, slipped an arm around one of the women’s waists, and kissed her. I got a glimpse of blond hair and cheekbone and a soft green sweater. Me and my knee-jerk heteronormative assumptions. I felt a bit stupid.

  “They got married last summer,” Patrick said.

  He and I were sitting side by side on a sagging sofa, too close to actually look at each other without it being awkward.

  “Ah, that’s lovely.”

  “Never seen so many flowers.”

  He smelt Christmassy, of oranges and spice. I remembered how’d looked at me, that time I’d met him in Greggs. How he’d seen me shattered, threadbare and panda-eyed and said that I looked lovely. And now it turned out that he wasn’t Mina’s. I wondered if he was anybody’s.

  “Mark couldn’t come then?”

  “He’s, um—No. He’s taken Sammy to visit his grandma.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Family.” I shrugged.

  “Yeah, but how are we supposed to judge him if he doesn’t show up?”

  I laughed; and it continued from there, the two of us talking, gazes parallel at the fire, as the logs collapsed into bright coals, people gathered and drifted away, and the music changed, and then went off. Last orders.

  “You want another drink?”

  I glanced at my watch and then around the almost-empty bar. My heart kicked into panic: “Did Mina go already?”

  He peered across the room with me. “Looks like it. Was she giving you a lift? Shall we ring her?”

  “Uh no, don’t bother.”
/>   “You want to go get a cab?”

  I bit at a thumb. “I guess so.”

  “I’ll walk you down to the rank.”

  He grabbed his jacket, and we pushed out of the pub doors. Outside the air was speckled with rain; the streetlamps looked like dandelion clocks. It was peaceful, quiet. Fear twisted up inside me.

  “You don’t miss it? London?”

  I just said, “It got difficult.” I let him imagine house prices, schools, commutes, all of which was also true. “My—Mark loves it though. London. He says it’s too quiet for him here.”

  And then I thought of Amy, and felt sick.

  Then Patrick said: “I read an article recently about Antarctica.”

  “Antarctica?”

  He touched my arm to direct me down a side street. The wet cobbles gleamed in the lamplight like tiger’s eye.

  “Yeah. There’s this tiny human population there. Four thousand people in the summer, and maybe just a thousand or so in the winter; there’s one cinema on the whole continent; seats sixty people, and it only shows South American films. And beyond that, there’s just hundreds of thousands of miles of wilderness. Snow and ice, and penguins.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what I’m thinking, to some people, that might sound like a cold version of Hell. But to someone else, if you were really into ice sculpture or penguins or Latin American cinema, you’d be happy as Larry.”

  We came to a junction, and there was the taxi rank. The fear twisted tighter.

  We crossed the road together. “Or as someone already put it, and rather better than I did: There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

  We’d reached the pavement. The cabs were lined up beside us.

  “Well here we are. See you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Goodnight.” I should have headed up to the top of the rank and got in a cab, but I was stuck fast.

  “Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “You know what…” Patrick said. There was rain on his glasses; the droplets caught the light. He dug into his pockets.