Charlie listened to the angry burr of the dialling tone before slamming the phone back into its cradle. Pushing the hair from his eyes he stood up, took a tie from the wardrobe and lifted a brown corduroy jacket from the back of the door. He shrugged it on, checking the elbows for holes. A yellow crust of egg clung to his cuff and he scrubbed at it with his fingernails, but the stubborn glaze stayed fast to the fabric, so he lit a cigarette instead.
The problem with the same old story is that you’ve heard it once too many times: a drama that leads always to the bottom of a bottle of vodka. When the phone had rung just after seven, he’d known it would be her. No one else would have rung reverse-charges in such a slurring stupor of obscenities and tears on his sister’s wedding day. It wasn’t as if you could blame Annie for not inviting the woman. She had been almost unintelligible with rage and drink, and when he tried to calm her she’d turned her venom to him: more swearing, more incoherent keening, something about being just like his father. She’d hung up before he’d had the chance to cut her off, his finger still hovering above the phone’s switchhook as he listened to the echo of the open line against his ear.
In the living room, dust floated in the shards of morning light. Outside, a milk float was whirring its tin-pot way along the street, empties clinking, and some time soon, he guessed, the post would arrive. Since Beth had been in France, his weeks were shaped by the post: a day could be transformed by the sight of a handwritten envelope, a foreign stamp. Beth’s letters sustained him in a way that a phone call could not, as if the ink held part of her, the deft strokes on the page inseparable from the slim fingers that had made them. Even the envelope could tug his desire as he imagined her tongue passing over its gummed edge.
He heard the creak of a floorboard and the rattle of a pipe from above. Other people were stirring around him, their days easing into the simplicity of this October Saturday. They had not been woken by the phone and the shrieks of his mother. They were lucky.
For a moment he allowed himself to picture what Beth would be doing now, in her flat above the sand-coloured streets of Montpellier. He imagined her asleep, soft tanned limbs curled about one another, dark hair falling across the curve of her cheek as her lips shaped semi-silent words. He closed his eyes, trying to hold onto the image, and a hollow bloomed between his heart and his stomach, a space so tender with longing that he imagined it had actually been carved from his flesh.
The first time Charlie had seen Beth she was sitting by the canal in Camden swinging her legs against the warm stone. She had been luxuriant beneath the early evening sunlight, her taut skin glossy as a ripe plum. As she’d swept her dark hair from her face, he’d noticed her eyes, green with a golden aura around each pupil, a pair of sunflowers floating on the sea. A Jewish princess she’d called herself, laughing over her beer in a pub garden on Haverstock Hill and telling him of a childhood in Hampstead, school days at Haberdashers’ and high days and holidays with an extended family that ran into hundreds. ‘Though we were not,’ she’d said, ‘all together at once.’ Exotic words and festivals with their own exotic foodstuffs. Honey cake, rich and cloying. The crass heat of horseradish offset by watery-sweet sugared apple. Her body, too, he came to discover was a rare indulgence; the firm heaviness of her breasts, the silken curve of her back, the salty tang of her soft thighs.
On that first evening he had walked her home.
‘How gallant of you,’ she’d deadpanned as they’d stood in the doorway of her flat, her face half hidden by shadow, a faint gleam of sweat on her forehead. She had turned her eyes up towards him and pulled his hands around her waist. Charlie had longed to say something that wouldn’t make him feel like he was speaking from a script shaped by bad films and second-rate novels. But how could he explain the hunger wrestling with fear, the unscratchable itch of his desire? The words that he reached for felt empty and sordid, a cheap imitation of the purity of his feelings. In those eyes and that body he saw his world transformed by a force as elemental as fire. When she’d pressed her mouth to his he’d breathed coconut oil and cigarette smoke and felt his hands shake as they ran the length of her back. She had smiled, her face patrician in the dim light as she’d opened the door and led him to her bedroom where, for a time, Charlie hadn’t thought in words at all.
There was a crash from the kitchen and Charlie pulled his hand from his trousers where he’d been rearranging himself. A lean man with a cloud of brown hair appeared in the doorway, naked beneath an open dressing gown.
‘Sorry, man, I smashed a mug.’
‘Limpet! What are you …? Shit! Do your fucking dressing gown up, man!’
Limpet tied his belt, put a cigarette between his lips and stood, thin arm outstretched until Charlie slapped a lighter onto his palm.
‘Thanks, Chaz.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Like Charlie, Limpet had graduated from Edinburgh University three years ago. But unlike Charlie, who was slogging away in the menial backrooms of a literary agency, Limpet slept late, worked evenings in the pub down the road, and played his guitar for most of the time in between.
They sat together, smoking. After a while, Limpet rubbed his eyes and looked at Charlie.
‘What’s with the suit?’
Charlie scratched at the egg stain. ‘It’s Annie’s wedding today. You’re coming, right?’
Limpet drew hard on his cigarette. ‘You want a lift?’ he asked without looking up.
When Limpet had turned up with his mother’s Hillman Imp last month, Charlie had wondered how the old car had made it down the M1. It was so rusty around the door frames and the fender, he was surprised that nothing had fallen off. But the car seemed to be indestructible and Limpet, to Charlie’s surprise, turned out to be a keen mechanic, tinkering away with the engine when he wasn’t playing his guitar. Still, Charlie was certain that the car was an accident just waiting to happen.
‘Hm, thanks mate, but I’m going to take the Tube.’
Charlie liked the Tube. He liked to imagine that all of London flowed through its tunnels: past, present and future. He loved the descent into its warmth and the way he could emerge a short time later in another part of the city. It had taken him years to match the spread of the city above ground to Harry Beck’s inspired but misleading Tube map and, like any seasoned Londoner he loved his insider’s knowledge of the short cuts and the simplest changes. He adored the smell and the pace of that world underground, the warm blast of air when the train was about to arrive and the giddy rush of the carriages as they drew in just inches from your face. Down below the surface, Charlie found clues of the city’s past everywhere: at Marylebone, where the old station name ‘Great Central’ was tiled along the platform wall; at Charing Cross, where torn layers of posters dated back a quarter century to the Festival of Britain. In the constant motion of the Tube trains and commuters Charlie saw a cascade of lives and times: the tight-lipped Edwardian lady, the bowler-hatted Metrolander, the demobbed Tommy, the East End families sheltering on the platforms, the Mods and Rockers picking fights with each other, the punks picking fights with everyone. The Tube, he thought, was the keeper of the city’s secret history, written in the footfalls of the people who’d passed through it.
The jangle of the phone made them jump. Shaking his head, Limpet lifted it from its cradle. His eyes widening as he passed it to Charlie.
‘Hello?’
There was a hiss and muffled breathing. Then his sister’s voice. ‘Charlie?’
‘Annie – you OK? – what’s up?’
‘I – it’s – I’m—’
Charlie could picture her holding her hand over the receiver, trying to compose herself.
‘Annie, it’s OK.’
‘I’m frightened, Charlie.’
She was scared that their mother would turn up uninvited to the wedding.
‘She might get it into her head to get on the Tube and it’s