Exposure (31 page)

After lunch, Luke dropped Alistair at the old boarding-house. The surveyor, a thin man in a slightly shiny grey suit, was waiting on the doorstep with a clipboard tucked under his arm. From the car, Luke watched his father greet him and lead the surveyor inside.

Luke thought it was a horrible-looking little house, with greying net curtains and dark green paint peeling off all the window-frames in large curls. The garden in front was all weeds and people had thrown rubbish into it. A black bin-bag flapped in the hedge. At least half the mosaic paving stones were missing on the path up to the door. It was a total mess and probably riddled with damp, and Luke wondered if his father would get anything for it anyway.

Luke knew a bit about property—after all, he had bought two flats for himself in London. Yes, his father had stumped up for the first one, but Luke had gone on to make a good profit by selling it at just the right time. For this reason he thought of the second flat as the fruit of his own labour. It gave him a great deal of satisfaction.

He sighed and hoped his father was thinking clearly about selling this dilapidated litde house. He wasn't sure why he hadn't brought the subject up at lunch, as it was one area in which he might actually have seemed worthy of his father's attention.

But he could never assert himself in front of Alistair. He became what Alistair had decided he was: the stupid, sporty one who didn't even understand wine the way his sister did.

He looked at his watch and wondered—as he did every time he looked at his watch—what Arianne would be doing now, and who she was doing it with. He could taste the food she was eating, the cigarette she was smoking, when he thought about her. He had heard nothing from her. But she had not been in touch with Ludo or any of their other friends either. She had disappeared. She had run away on her incredible legs.

The thought of her legs sent lust through his body like a wind through long grass and he put his head into his hands and lost himself to memories. She was lying naked underneath him on the hall carpet, her legs circling his hips, her calves banging against the back of his thighs as if he was the winning horse. It had all been such a delicious panic.

But there had been times when the urgency was even greater: when she arched herself over him, her hand pressed against his chest to keep him still and he felt her tense every muscle one by one in a ritual of agonizing precision. It was like being children, playing a game of blinking, or eating doughnuts without licking the sugar off your lips—who would give in first to the body's desires? Slowly, slowly, she would build the longing in their nerve endings—and then, shaking and crying out, she would kick and slap it away.

It had all been so wonderful—his designer lamps got knocked over, wine bottles rolled, pouring wild streams across the floor, and they shouted out all kinds of passionate nonsense without caring what it meant or who heard it through the wall. At last she would fall exhausted on to the pillow beside him, saying, "Hanks, baby,' in her baby voice.

Why the baby voice? he wondered. It had always been slightly sinister, belonging to the realm of things he didn't understand about her, like her rages and her sudden fits of crying.

One thing he knew with absolute certainty was that he would never again experience as much physical pleasure as he had with Arianne. She had a capacity for total sensual abandonment that he had not seen in any other girl he had slept with. He had never heard a girl cry like she could, either. She cried as voluptuously as she made love. He had felt as inadequate before her sadness as he did before her sensuality and had not known how to help when she bawled and rocked, hugging her knees.

He had let her down time and again. At the end she had seemed to hate him most of all when she cried and he laid his stupid, inadequate hand on her back. She jolted it off, saying, 'Oh, just
fuck off,
Luke.' Once, in one of their last arguments, she had actually punched him in the face.

Girls could really hit. Luke knew this because his sister had hit him once, too. Not just kids' play-fighting, but a genuine attack just a couple of years ago. Sophie had caught his cheek and his nose with a sweeping backhand after a row about who had lost the remote control and who, by extension, was the more spoilt and irresponsible. The impact made a comic-book
thwaaack!
and his nose started to bleed. He stared at his sister's shocked face, saying, 'What the .. . what the .. .' until she ran out of the room in tears.

Luke thought: What if, fundamentally, women consider men an enemy and basically want to humiliate and destroy them?

But—he loved girls! Were they getting back at men for making them do the vacuuming and the cooking for all those years? He felt on the verge of deep understanding and rubbed his head and his eyes. Then he thought fondly of Lucy, who said things like 'Oh, you are such a lovely
man,
aren't you, darling?' when she undid his shirt and stroked the hair on his chest. He thought of his mother and the way she had hugged him that morning in the kitchen, relying on him.

No, it was just these crazy women who hated men. He wondered if his sister was good in bed like Arianne and decided immediately that she would be. This was a profoundly disturbing thought and he got out of the car quickly, slammed the door and locked it.

 

He walked down towards the crowd of people on the seafront. The demonstration had grown. Sixty or seventy people stood along the marina, holding placards and shouting. Their physical anger seemed unreal to Luke. He had spent so many sleepless nights surfing the Internet that real life was like a complex website and he felt his index finger twitch for 'click here' when he opened a door or reached for something. The Internet, the TV and the weird moonlit reticence of his parents were many times removed from these loud voices and raised fists.

'Out! Out!' they shouted.

 

'Out!
Out!
Scream and
shout!
Dover residents,
use your
clout!'

 

Luke read the placards as he got close enough to see.

'Illegal Invasion!'

'Swamp France Instead!'

'Dover is not Asylum Alley.'

It was one of the demonstrations his aunt Suzannah had mentioned seeing on the news—a mixture of local residents and nationalist groups campaigning against the influx of asylum-seekers. He had read about the latest in a series of government 'crackdowns', which had involved giving police man-sensor machines to help catch smugglers as they drove off the ferries. The machines were passed against the sides of goods lorries; they could detect the sound of a human heartbeat.

Luke stared out at the crowd, all pink-faced and squinting angrily in the sunshine. On the wall in front of a TV camera and a reporter was a girl in a tight T-shirt with a swastika on it. She had large round breasts, which distorted the obscene symbol; her legs were fat and white and muscular. She glanced in Luke's direction and the idea of eye-contact with her frightened him so much that he hurried on with his head down. Two men wearing 'Save Dover' baseball caps came briskly across his path, their bodies already attuned to the vigour of the demonstration. A police helicopter circled and buzzed threateningly overhead. Mounted officers in riot gear, like space-age knights, flashed sunlight off their plastic shields as their horses jogged and stamped.

Luke walked on past the crowd and stopped by one of the seafront boarding-houses where three teenage girls stood smoking and observing from a safe distance. 'Matt's down there,' one said, nodding her mirrored sunglasses at the crowd.

'Yeah?'

'Yeah. He done his big sign this morning.'

'Yeah? Matt did? What's it say?'

'He nicked one of Mum's sheets—she went mental.'

'What's it say, Michelle? What did he put?' the youngest-looking one asked.

'It said,"Scum down the drain not in Dover."'

'What's
that
got to do with anything?'

The other two laughed and rolled their eyes at each other.

'Asylum scum?
Ring any bells, Saz?'

'Fuck—I'm still mash-up from last night.' She shook her head as if she was clearing it of a blockage.

'You always say that. D'you know you always say that?'

'No.'

'Well, you do. We ought to get down there, really. Don't you think, Jem?' A litde way off, two police officers had stopped a young man and asked him to empty his pockets. One searched through his wallet, while the other watched him take things out of his jeans and hold them up in a pantomime of scandalized innocence.

'Don't, Michelle,' Saz said, eyeing this spectacle. 'It's dangerous.'

'Ooooh,'
laughed the other girl. 'I wonder who sounds just like their mum. Like their do-goody leftie mum.'

'Come on, I don't,' Saz said, knowing full well that, unlike her weirdly passionate mother, all she felt was fear of physical harm.

'Yeah. Your mum's a loony leftie, Dad says. She'd let all the dross in to take all the jobs and housing in Dover. She'd probably give them her
bed,
too. Bit of money for a fucking
ice-cream.'

Michelle and Jem laughed.

'No, she wouldn't,' Saz said. 'That's just crap. We
hate
them.'

Jem spat her chewing-gum into the road suddenly and said, 'They should burn. They should petrol-bomb the lot of them, the scroungers.' She looked right into Saz's face as if it had been discovered that she was to blame and this was the moment of confrontation. 'Taking all our fucking jobs and money,' she said, 'bringing in AIDS.'

Luke walked quickly away from them along the seafront. He had never heard anything like this before. English people hating like this. Girls hating like this. Young girls—no more than fourteen years old. Behind him the crowd shouted, 'Out! Out! Out!' and he walked as fast as he could until he could no longer make out the words.

He wound his way back towards the town centre where it felt safer. He could not believe this was where his father had grown up. He walked past the slot-machine arcade and the pawnbroker with its shamefaced-looking watches and rings and televisions and the 'Everything under £1' shop where you could get dusters and plastic laundry baskets and hairspray and felt slippers. There was the sweaty smell of onions and burgers frying and in a nearby street an ice-cream van played its melancholy, tinkling music.

When Luke thought of his own childhood and schooling and the house he had grown up in, he knew he carried them with him wherever he went. His mother's taste was evident in his choice of ties; his father's professional authority was behind his capacity to send bad food back in a restaurant; his school sporting victories had given him the physical confidence with which he swung open a door or caught a bunch of keys that were thrown to him across a room. Where had his father allowed his past to contribute to
his
personality? Looking around, it was impossible to say.

It had never occurred either to Luke or to Sophie before that their father did not refer to his childhood and had only mentioned vaguely that he went to a school in Sussex that they would never have heard of. Luke imagined Sophie had also pictured a minor boarding-school—a litde like their schools, but smaller. But his father's life had been nothing like theirs. Their father had been poor. He had grown up alone with his poor mother in the kind of house that poor people lived in, with damp stains and rust and worn-out furniture.

What did it mean to hide that much about yourself? Wasn't it pretending to be someone else? For a moment, Luke felt as if he had been burgled. He had frightened himself and he pictured his father and thought:
Who are you?

But Luke had recently had reason to become passionately conscious of how easy it was not to be yourself, to become a fake or an approximation. He felt that he had not been himself at all since Arianne left. In fact, he distinctly remembered feeling that he had not been himself until the day she arrived. This meant he had been himself (except in the presence of his father, in front of whom he was always someone shy and awkward and hateful) for a total of about twelve weeks.

Twelve weeks, out of all his twenty-eight years. This was plainly ridiculous. Wasn't it? He did not like the idea—and this would apply to his mother, too—that other people were as chaotic and unfixed as he had proved to be.

Automatically he had made his way back to the seafront again and the broad, flat sight of the Channel was consoling after his intricate thoughts. He stood still and ht a cigarette.

'Hello, excuse me? Do you have free cigarette, please?' said a foreign voice. Luke spun round to see a tall, black-haired man with a deeply furrowed brow. He was wearing a woman's anorak over a threadbare blue jumper. A dirty handkerchief was tied round an injury to his wrist. On the wall, a litde way off from him, was a starved-looking girl. Something mutually affirmative about the angle of their bodies suggested they were together.

'Yeah, sure,' Luke said, fumbling in his jeans pocket. 'D'you both want one?' He glanced at the girl. Her skinny legs dangled like one at peace in her daydreams, but the heel that banged the wall in triplicate from time to time gave her a tense, military air, as if a marching tune was playing in her head. The man called out, 'Mila,
cigaretu?'

She was gazing out to sea and at first she seemed to be squinting at the distance or because of the strong sunshine, but when she turned her pinched face in their direction her expression remained the same.

'Thank you,' she said, as she arrived beside them. Luke handed her the cigarette and she waited for him to light it, saying, 'Thank you', again in exactly the careful way Luke said,
'Grazie',
all the time in Italy, because it was all he really knew how to say.

'Can you speak English?' Luke asked her.

"Very bad,' she said, and lowered her eyes.

'I speak,' the man said. He put out his hand. 'Goran. Great to meet you.'

'Luke,' said Luke, a litde unnerved by the man's unexpected American accent.