‘No—fuck you. I think you should walk on by, sir, and leave me alone.’ The ‘sir’ took even her by surprise. He took a step back and shrugged, still bemused.
‘Well look, I’m sorry but—’
‘If you try anything, I will kick you. I will kick the shit out of you. I’m not interested…’ She trailed off. Her American accent, minimal normally, sounded loud and false and ridiculous to her own ear, but she held his eye and nodded, to assure him she was serious. He sank his hands back into his anorak and leant against a lamppost as if he could quite happily wait there for eternity.
Upstairs David picked up the intercom handset: ‘Hello?’
‘Open the door. A man followed me and he’s right here.’
‘What? The buzzer’s broken. I’m coming down.’
Three floors up, in a steamy kitchen, David grabbed the first heavy thing to hand and descended the stairs three at a time. When he yanked open the front door, Ruth pawed at his arm, pulled him out onto the porch.
‘This man has been—’
David patted the fist that gripped his shirtsleeve. ‘Ruth, meet James,’ he said, there and then corrupting the future. She made a series of fathoming blinks and offered a panicky smile. David repeated: ‘This is James, my lodger.’
Ruth stood stiff with embarrassment, both hands clutching her shoulder bag.
‘Flatmate,’ Glover corrected, signing Don’t shoot, as he came up the steps. Ruth shook his outstretched hand, and noticed his engaging smile, his steady blue eyes.
‘I’m so sorry about freaking you out. I’d no idea…’
David backed against the hallway wall to let her pass, knocking unclaimed post from the radiator. Behind her, Glover widened his eyes at him as if to ask Who the hell’s this nutter? Ruth tugged the weapon David had picked up, a blue oven dish, from his hands.
‘And what’s with this? Were you gonna make him a casserole?’
They climbed the stairs to dinner in procession—Ruth, then David, then Glover. It had been some time since the communal hall had seen any love. Handlebars, furniture, umbrellas and shopping bags had scored and scuffed the once-white walls until now they resembled the notepads in stationers used to test pens. The bare bulb hung limply. The radiator had leaked last winter and rust in the pipes had left a dark blotch, Africa-shaped, on the carpet. The man who came to read the meter had asked David if it was a bloodstain.
‘I’m sorry—James—I’m sorry for getting so hysterical down there.’
‘No, not at all. As much my fault as yours.’
‘You really should have said something and reassured her.’
‘I tried but she told me to shut up. In fact she threatened me.’
‘I did, it’s true.’ Ruth laughed. ‘You know what it is? I think it’s that everything’s so terrible everywhere, I’m just waiting for something to happen to me.’
She looked around the kitchen, taking in the slatted calendar for the Fu Hu Chinese takeaway, the cupboard with the missing door, the tannic stains of damp on a corner of the ceiling. David would have felt embarrassed, but he had a hunch that Ruth liked to slum it occasionally. She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.
She leant against the steel sink, peering out of the window, and David stood beside her and followed her gaze down to the lit squares of distant kitchens, the empty trays of pale grey garden.
‘If I lived here I’d spend all my time looking at this view.’
He helped her off with her yellow wool coat, and she was tiny inside it and dressed, as expected, in black. He felt he’d removed the protective cover of something and was inspecting the intricate machinery. There was something raw and breakable about her. Things had not, David knew, been going at all well. In New York someone called Paolo had broken her heart.
‘It’s great you could come round.’
‘Oh, I have vast amounts of free time. New city, no social life. And didn’t we have fun in Larry’s club?’
‘Do you remember that basement bar afterwards? With all the bikers?’
‘They sang “Happy Birthday” to the barmaid.’
Glover left to change out of his work clothes, and David felt a pang in case his flatmate missed something, some further evidence of how close they were. Yet when he looked back to Ruth he could think of nothing to say. He eased out the cork with a pristine cluck. It would take some time to remember how they fitted together. She was reading a poem on the door of the fridge, standing with her hands on her hips as if she might start stretching. Her hairstyle was shorter, blonder, straighter-edged, the clothes more fitted; it was as if the focus had been sharpened.
‘So what have they actually got you doing, then, as artist-in-residence?’
David had served up the pasta bake, cut the baguette, forked out the spinach and rocket salad, and now stood holding the back of a kitchen chair, rocking gently on the balls of his feet. He felt curiously passive and wanted to exert some dominion over the room.
‘Walter’s organized this great flat in the Barbican, and a studio ten minutes away. As a space it’s wonderful, this washed-out English light coming through the skylights—it’s an old factory of some type, though I’m not sure what it made.’ She frowned at the mystery of industry.
‘But what are you going to make?’ Glover said, pouring more wine. The confidence with which he addressed her struck David as slightly presumptuous. He wasn’t even supposed to be in tonight. He was meant to be at work.
‘Which reminds me,’ David said, ‘we should talk about our project at some point.’
‘I can’t think about that at the moment.’ She gave a little shiver of her shoulders, and David tried hard to keep smiling. ‘I’ve got a million things to do right now. Did I tell you they’re doing a retrospective here in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts? And yesterday I spent three hours talking to students, though that was actually kind of fun. I forgot about that.’ She threw David a wide-eyed glance, and he looked away. Each time his eyes met hers he felt a charge of something, a little rolling emotion that would gather, if he let it, to an avalanche.
‘I was very young, of course, when I taught David—not much older than him, really.’
You were twelve years older, a small, uncharitable part of him wanted to say, exactly the same as you are now.
‘David’s teacher. So it’s you we should blame.’ In his laughter, Glover’s eyes became two slits in his face, two scars.
‘Not all the blame, I hope.’
David felt an uncomfortable passivity again. The oven had made the kitchen hot and he hoisted up the steamy sash window behind the sink; immediately September began to cool the room.
‘You only taught me for a few months, and to be honest,’ he laughed—at what he wasn’t sure, ‘I think the damage was already done.’
They were christened that evening. After dinner they adjourned to the living room and Ruth’s phone rang.