‘You call walking into the shower on someone not odd?’ she asks.
‘Are we still on that?’ I retort. ‘It was a misunderstanding. Besides, Adam seemed to like it.’
I look at her. Her face blushes red, but she smiles.
‘Well, don’t do it again,’ she says.
‘I won’t.’ I pat her hand for reassurance. ‘Unless you invite me.’ She draws her hand away.
‘Anyway, Helen was different,’ I say. ‘Adam’s first love. Less baggage.’
‘Thanks,’ Nicole says drily. ‘You must know all about Adam’s baggage, right? From years back.’
I swing the dodgem round and narrowly avoid smashing into a kid in a green car.
‘Phew!’ I say.
‘You’re meant to crash into each other. That’s the point.’
‘Oh.’
‘You must know what he’s thinking, second guess what he does, way more than I can?’ Nicole says.
‘I suppose,’ I say. Obviously, the genuine answer would be ‘yes’, but boasting on this point won’t endear me to Nicole.
I drive round a bit more, crashing into other cars. They all have children in. The attendant puts two fingers to us, then to his eyes, then to us again, in an ‘I’m watching you’ gesture.
‘Any particularly juicy secrets you know about?’ she asks.
I drive the car slowly round the edge of the rink, while the attendant fulfils his promise of watching us. I see Nicole’s dress has ridden up, hoisted round her upper thighs.
‘May I?’ I ask.
Before she can reply, I pull her dress back down over her legs, being sure to graze her inner thigh as I do so. She tries to cross her legs away from me but there isn’t space.
‘No particularly juicy secrets,’ I lie. Why should I tell her what I know?
The siren sounds for the end of the ride.
‘Again?’ I ask.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘But I’ll have my own car this time.’
She escapes from the car, pulling her skirt down over her bottom as climbs out. Her new car is silver. Or is it grey?
The clang sounds for the start of the ride. I will not let her out of my sight. This is about the chase, the thrill of pursuit. Nicole takes the car up to the other end of the rink. I follow. Round the corner she goes. I am there. You’re meant to crash into each other, she said, so I do. She jolts forward in the car, casts a look behind her then sets off again. I am with her, there, behind her, then parallel. I bump her again, she jolts again. She looks back, then quickly steers away from me, up to the other side of the rink. I speed after her, and catching up with her, ram her into a corner.
‘Hey!’ she says.
I retreat, then ram the car again.
‘Stop it!’ she shouts. The attendant starts to come out of his little hut. I back off, and let her move away from the edge of the rink. I zoom down the opposite end of the rink, then do a U-turn. She is coming down the rink in the opposite direction. I carry on, full speed. She is closer, closer, tries move away but I am too quick. I ram into her full speed, a head-on collision, and she jerks forward in the dodgem, hair flying over her face.
When she looks up at me again, I see the edge of her lip is bleeding. Her skin is white and her eyes are wide. She looks like she is seeing me, all of me, for the first time. And doesn’t like what she sees.
Nicole is edgy, nervous, when we come off the ride. She won’t look me square in the face. Her eyes dart about. I can understand why, what she might be thinking, what suspicions me crashing the car into her might have triggered, but she will not be the one to mention it; she might just be being stupid, I imagine her thinking. Instead, she flits from conversation to conversation. I hear from her about the weather, the clothes people are wearing, what she plans to order from Ocado this week. In short, everything but nothing. I wish she’d shut up. I bet Adam must do too, sometimes.
I try to block out Nicole’s jabbering, working on book four in my head.
Luke takes the black scarf, similar to the one that binds his lover’s hands, and ties it round her mouth. It acts as a gag, and her cries are silenced.
Would a scarf act as a gag, though? Or would she still be able to cry out? Hands are best to drown out cries, but then you don’t have them to manoeuvre your lover. And they can bite, quite hard. So I’ve heard. Those ball things you get on gimp masks, that’s what they’re for, I guess. ‘A ball in the mouth keeps a lady silent.’ I could do advertising, if they sack me over the punching incident. I zone back in to Nicole’s conversation when she starts asking me questions.
‘Maybe you should learn to drive before you next go on the dodgems, hey?’ she asks, laughing. But the laugh doesn’t work. It is too forced and does not change that expression in her eyes, half fear, half excitement.
‘You don’t drive, either, do you?’ I ask, knowing the answer. But that is what small talk is – asking questions you don’t care about, to get information you already know, while a subtext bubbles underneath.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I didn’t before, and I certainly wouldn’t now.’
Now means, of course, post-Helen. The roads being too full of dangerously innocent cyclists.
‘In that case, we’re fully dependent on others, you and I,’ I say. ‘Let’s catch the bus back, see how Adam’s getting on.’
She pauses, then starts jabbering again.
‘Actually, do you know what? I think I’ll grab a cab. Save you the bother. There’s one!’
She raises her arm to flag down a passing taxi, desperate to get away. Her watch flashes in the light, a silvery-grey streak. I wonder what it would be like if that streak were red, how much blood there would be. The taxi stops and its lobster-orange light is darkened. Nicole disappears into it and slams the door, leaving me alone on the curb. Not, perhaps, a triumph for Luke, but it’s not over yet, his relationship with her.
I decide not to go straight home. Instead, I will do some more research. Some writers just sit at their desk, making up words, characters, scenes, but I know better. I know I need to live first. Writing is the after-life. I walk down the road to The Garden Gate pub.
I ask for a Jäger Train. I’ve never had one, but I’ve seen people having them, enjoying themselves. The barman suggests that I might prefer one of their fruit beers. I tell him I would not. He confesses they don’t cater for Jäger Trains at 3 p.m. on a Monday afternoon. So I order seven glasses of elderflower pressé and seven shots of Courvoisier brandy: the Hampstead equivalent. I order some lobster-tail scampi with it. Luke is no novice. He knows that eating is not cheating. The barman gives me a flower in a vase to signify my order. It is a rose.
While I’m waiting for my scampi, I line up my glasses and shots on the bar. I saw Adam do this once, at his first stag do. Or rather, he got a waitress to it for him: she just flicked her pen, and the shot glasses dominoed perfectly, nesting the shot glasses of Jägermeister into the amber of the Red Bull.
I am not inclined to ask the barman to flick his pen – as he may take it the wrong way – so I will need to do this myself. Or rather, Luke will do it. Because one night, I can imagine Luke going out to the bar with his City mates, his objective being to get very noticeably drunk. Far too drunk to drive.