To Vic, this was further encouragement. It indicated that she had a future, for starters, and that she considered him a part of it. It suggested that he wasn’t out there alone, laid bare; she was too. For the first time, his conception of her existing in a state of perpetual certainty fell away, and she stood before him like anyone else – self-doubting, reliant on nothing more substantial than hope, or a gut feeling for the decency of the person you chose to be with. It was as if she wanted to let Vic in, as if there was an in.
On the Underground home there was only standing room and the noise of the rickety carriages meant they didn’t try to speak. Lali just hung her arms around his waist and plunged her hands into the back pockets of his jeans, as he held them steady on an overhead rail. Another gesture. Meaningless, perhaps, but not lost on him. She leaned against him for a few minutes; almost but not quite a perfect metaphor for love. It was enough to convince him of what he wanted to believe. Then, on the train to Deptford, they managed to get seats and they both closed their eyes.
During the first months Lali was more or less the girl she seemed from the outset – fleetingly mean with a turn of phrase, but confident, unpredictable and breathtaking. They attended informal dinner parties, visited all the naff tourist attractions that Vic had never bothered with, picnicked in Hyde Park on roasting summer days, went pubbing and clubbing, went to concerts, and took long weekends away in Cornwall and Southampton.
Lali revealed herself by degrees. Information, a story, a memory would emerge from her, and he was allowed a few quick questions before she shut the lid on it again. The purposefully obscured depths of her, and the false impression of intimacy, were illuminated by her discretional revelations.
Lali’s uncloaking of her grandmother was the most notable of the early disclosures. Vic was shocked, first by the discovery that Lali had a family, and only then by the fact that it had taken him that long to notice she’d never spoken of them. What was it about her that precluded those questions? he later wondered. How was it that she could stand before him in all her beauty without ever prompting him to ask, Where have you come from? What forces of human fusion created you?
‘Gail used to do this to me,’ she told him, raking her fingers through a matted clump of his hair as they lay in bed. His head was tilted back and lay on her breast bone. Her fine, toothy fingers glided through his hair, as if she were mapping the potted and lumped landscape of his skull. She smoothed it back, first into a quiff and then flattening it further with each stroke; long, weaving movements across his cranium. ‘To relax me.’
‘And who’s Gail?’
‘My grandmother.’
Having quickly established that Gail was not long dead, as was natural for him to have assumed, given the months they had been together and this was Lali’s first mention of her, he sat up in the bed. ‘I can’t believe I never asked any of this,’ he said, aloud and to himself. ‘Are there others?’
‘No. Just Gail.’ There was nothing in Lali’s voice, not pain or resolve, just an impervious matter of fact. ‘I’m up early in the morning, by the way. Stock-take.’
She rolled away from him and turned on the bedside lamp, rupturing the moment. In the dull glow her remarkable symmetry was enhanced, but the moment had been quashed. The conversation was over. She took some nail varnish from the bedside locker and began painting her toes.
Then there were the stories that recurred. He heard many times about how, as a child, she had escaped Gail’s watchful eye and hid among the bushes and trees that lined the path through the park. She watched the people as they passed and read a million stories into their facial expressions, gestures and mannerisms; a formidable capacity to unearth the lugubrious in the mundane, finding its beginning. He didn’t know how old she would have been but he could imagine her, observing and questioning. Couples, small families, old people, even children – ‘They all made me feel hopeless,’ she told him. Though what she meant was sad, or melancholy. It wasn’t what they did or how they acted, she said. ‘It was their state of . . . What awaits whoever. The inevitability.’
‘Being human,’ he sometimes put to her. ‘To wonder what it’s all for.’
‘I hate it. I fucking hate it,’ she repeated, as if his interjection had gone unheard. And then she was back – strong, defensive, unforgiving. As before. Without sympathy, even for herself.
The first seismic shift in her came unannounced. They had been in Marlowe’s, in Catford, the night before. A karaoke night experiment.
Vic saw the DJ warming up – peach shirt tucked into his jeans, beer gut, hair slicked back, running through a few lines of his favourite crooner classics – and he thought, Oh no, this isn’t going to work out.
There was Lali and Donna, and a few of their staff from Rococo’s, and Vic had asked James and a couple of other friends from Downwood to come along.
Donna was her usual abrupt self, which Vic put down to it being her weekend to open up Rococo’s for Saturday business, and so tainting her Friday night with the prospect of an early morning. But Lali was at her most vivacious.
Crammed into a corner of the packed pub, they were all sitting on top of each other. Lali was buying drinks for everyone, kissing Vic across the table, or squeezing his arse as she passed behind him to the ladies, while he stood talking football at the bar with some burly, tattooed stranger. He indulged the moment. There was still so much to be enjoyed, so much newness and excitement to them. That night in Marlowe’s he just wanted to enjoy Lali as she was – infectiously energetic, sultry, drunk.
But he refused to sing. He was adamant. He couldn’t.
‘You’ve got to do this,’ she insisted. They were at the bar, away from the others, and she was leaning all her weight against him. She puckered up, pleading mock-submissively. ‘Please, Vic? It’ll be fun. Don’t be an asshole!’
‘Seriously, I can’t sing,’ he told her, again.
‘Don’t be a fucking grouch, Vic! It’s karaoke – nobody can sing. Come on, we’ll find you a good old Irish rebel song. No need to sing them, you just growl ‘em,’ she said.
‘In all seriousness, now, you don’t want me to sing,’ he warned her.
‘I’ll make it worth your while,’ she said, tugging his lower lip with her teeth as she broke away.
‘Elaborate.’
‘Vic, there’s a lot more to come, believe me.’
When they went back to the table Lali put her drink down and strutted up to the raised platform. She said a few words and the karaoke man handed her the mike. It crackled as she switched it on. ‘This one’s for my man, Vic.’ Fiddle and drum came barreling out of the speakers, and Lali, bow-legged and elbows out, rocking on the pins of her majestic heels in simulation of the choppy sea, did her finest sea-beaten sailor impression, while growling out lyrics in the worst Irish accent he’d ever heard – The Irish Rover. When she’d finished, she took a bow to lively applause from their table.
She held Vic’s regard as she crossed the floor, until her attention was caught by two men. One of two brave suitors had said something to her over his shoulder. It caused her to stop and turn back.
Without the grip of Lali’s gaze, an undistorted vision actualized. Existing momentarily outside himself, he saw what the cold-eyed observer would see; all eyes had followed Lali from the stage across the floor, and all eyes now watched, apprehensively, to see what happened to the brave. The power of her, the draw, was demonstrable. It was evident in the nervousness she set off in other people. Her stupefying beauty, as every eye in the room looked on, cried out across the room, commoving and stifling simultaneously.
They circled her then; somehow, with just the two of them they circled her. They were drawn in close about her as she spoke. He couldn’t see her face but he could imagine it as he watched the two men gaping back at her and jostling for her attention; clinking glasses, throwing