‘I started again in Peru, I thought the fag smoke might drive away the mosquitoes. It didn’t, but I got hooked. Don’t tell Arlo – he’ll be scandalized, and refuse to go down on me.’
Her face is still very red from the heaters. Demonic. Satanic. Or is this image in my head? She speaks, the teeth even whiter, contrasting with the red. I think of fangs. Vampiric fangs. Sucking blood from my neck as I sleep. Tabitha. Who was there in the tent with me that day. I wonder if she has told Arlo about what happened with Jamie Trewin, all those years ago? I long to ask. Instead, I say,
‘Guess you’re staying at his place tonight?’
She nods, and frowns my way, refusing to be embarrassed.
‘Yes. You know, I am allowed to, it is my choice.’
‘Oh?’
She sighs smoke. ‘You think he controls me.’
‘No. I think he infantilizes you. Like he’s your parent. He looks after you. Punishes you for infractions.’
‘Well, yeah,’ she says, exhaling unconcerned coils of smoke quite exuberantly. Breathing demon fire. ‘Sure. WhatEVAH. Look, let’s not have some hideous falling out, darling, not on my first day back. And please don’t tell Arlo about the smokes. He would definitely give me a telling off if he found out.’ She fumes more smoke into the cold night air. ‘The fact is, Jo, I don’t mind being looked after, even ordered about, when I’m off duty. You see? You do understand why? I have to be super-controlling in my job, so when I get back to town I quite like being the little woman. Or the princess.’ She smirks shamelessly. ‘Isn’t that terrible? I actually like to let him do everything. Let him take care of me, let him decide which restaurant we go to. Let him choose the wine, even the food. Then I let him pay. Is that so very bad? Am I a terrible feminist? Oh well. Fuck it.’
I try not to see the unsettling red glow of her face and instead I gaze in her friendly eyes and think: maybe she’s right. Someone to look after you? I consider the idea of someone to look after me. I’d love that. Someone special, someone of my own, someone who makes me feel secure. Someone to buy me a nice meal in a nice restaurant then make love to me, nicely.
I sigh. Defeated. ‘You’re right. And I’m hardly in a position to criticize: my love life is a desert. The bloody Atacama. You think I should get a sugar daddy? He’d have to have his own hair though.’
We fall silent as she finishes the cigarette. I feel a need to say something about what is happening. We’ve been talking for ages and I haven’t even touched on it. And somehow it’s 10 p.m. and I might not get another chance, if she’s going back to Arlo’s tonight. Later I will walk down silent solitary Jackson’s Lane, listening for footsteps behind me, to get the lonely Tube at spooky Highgate. I hate Highgate Tube, buried like a tomb under that little enclave of snowy urban woods. Like a place in a frightening fairy tale from Romania where there’d be wolves. Loping. Howling.
‘Tabitha,’ I say, quickly, airily, casually as possible. ‘You know all those Home Assistants at Delancey.’
She is grinding another cigarette butt into the soil of a small potted tree.
‘Uh-uh. What about them?’
‘I was wondering how they got there.’
Tabitha frowns as she squirts minty breath-freshener into her mouth.
‘Sorry? What do you mean?’
‘Like: who bought and installed them?’
The frown persists, but only for a second.
‘Arlo, natcho. Arlo bought them, for me. But he didn’t install them – far too mechanical.’ She twists her mouth into a thoughtful pout. ‘Come to think of it, it was your ex-husband who installed them. Did it as a favour. You don’t remember?’
‘Sorry? What?’
‘Your ex, darl, your ex. You haven’t forgotten him already? Simon! He came over one day. He set it all up. The smart home. The entire system.’
And with that she turns and goes back into the pub. The red glow of the patio heaters shines on the smoke left behind, a fast disappearing scarlet ghost, shivering into nothing in the cold. I wait, and think about Simon, and about this peculiar revelation, because he never told me he did this: came over and did this favour for Tabitha? He never mentioned it once. Not while we were married, not since.
They did this, all three of them, without telling me. Then Tabitha asked me to move in. And the rent was so ridiculously low, I was obliged to agree. How could I possibly resist?
Such a wonderful offer. Impossibly tempting. Come and live here, with all that technology.
A big grey moth has got trapped in the patio heater. I look at it, unable to help. The poor creature was attracted by the light, but the light and heat have lured it to a terrible end. I stand and watch it burn to death in fluttering agony. The antennae are the last things to stop twitching.
The glasses are drained, the air is kissed, Arlo’s friends have gone back to their own beautiful period houses with underground swimming pools. Waving goodbye to Tabitha, I walk out into a midnight frost that is predatory in its iciness. Like the sky, the air, the entire world is made of cold blackness, waiting to shatter. Highgate tonight is a glass daguerreotype, some historic and fragile photograph from the 1840s; huddled grey figures are slowed and blurred and lifeless in the freezing mist, and far away down Highgate Hill, past the cemetery, the car lights turn left, and right, and always further away, always departing.
Diminishing into nothing.
Most of the bars and restaurants of Highgate Village are already shut, at 11 p.m. Why? It feels jarring, though I suppose it’s that post-Christmas lull of early January when everyone is too poor or torpid to brave the chill. It does, however, mean my walk down Jackson’s Lane is lonelier than ever.
The eighteenth- and seventeenth-century houses crowd closer, the gardens get smaller and older, then I am walking down a slender path of frozen mud, with eroded bare redbrick walls on either side, my footsteps echoing as I go. My isolation is pure.
Instinctively, I take out my phone. I want to see if my loneliness is about to be diluted. Are there any messages for me on OKCupid?
No. Not a single one. What have I done wrong? Is it the photo, was I too sarcastic? Probably I need to refine the profile.
And yet as I walk slowly to the Tube, breathing the cold cold air, despairing of my love life, an obvious thought occurs.
Liam.
I feel deep guilt about my online flirtation with Liam, what it did to my marriage, yet there’s no denying the flirtation was fun. We never actually met – my marriage collapsed before I took the final, fatal step – but the texts, messages, and emails were many and they were sexy. They just were. He was funny. Clever. Self-deprecating. And the photos showed a very good-looking man.
Why not get in touch? We ended so abruptly. After I told him that Simon had discovered my sexts, our erotic dialogue, and that I was headed for divorce, I disappeared on him. It seemed best. The guilt was too much.
I guess I ghosted.
But now I am divorced, and single. Perhaps dashing Liam is still single, too?
Stopping on Jackson’s Lane, in the chilling mist, I look for Liam. And there he is: WhatsApp. And it looks like he’s