Exposure (58 page)

'No, of course,' said Luke. 'Of course you did.' So, she had spent her hard-earned pennies on ingredients for a
cake.
For
him.
It was pitiful and somehow sickening. He said, 'Thank you, Mila. It's lovely.'

'No, you do not know! Is just to look.You try? You think crazy, but I tell to you cakes it is good in late night!
Yes?'

'Yes,' he said, smiling with her, wondering how life could be so menacingly strange, experience so diverse. The truth was, though, he had eaten nothing that day, having thrown away each of the meals his mother had left for him in the fridge while she was out at work, and his stomach rumbled at the sight of the cake. He could smell almonds ... honey, was it?

Mila spoke in a sing-song voice as she unwrapped the clingfilm: 'You think,
Mila she is crazy,
but is
very good ...!
she said. She giggled as if they were being very wicked together.
'Cakes in late night!'

Experience was diverse and yet it was connected. He grinned back at her and remembered Arianne, wearing nothing but a fluorescent yellow G-string that was almost blinding against her deep tan, sitting brazenly in a room full of people after a dip in Ludo's pool. Water streamed off her hair and quietly ruined the silk cushions. She was cutting up lines of coke on the coffee-table. He remembered her swivelling round to admire a compact, muscular man walking across the room. Then she had tossed over the rolled fifty. 'Baby? Have a sniffle? It's
very good ...'

Mila handed him a slice of the cake. He looked at her face. Was this innocence? He would not have trusted himself to know. He tightened his fist and said, 'Thank you. It's lovely.'

'First you
eat,
Luke. Maybe you are ...' She mimed cartoon sickness, goggle-eyed, tongue lolling, throttling herself. It was slightly obscene.

'No, no,' he said, wanting her to stop.

He began to eat. The cake was delicious—it was moist and heavy with almonds; it compacted in sweet, dense pieces between the fingers and poured honey into the mouth. Mila watched him with an expression of insuperable pride. 'More?' she said, before he had even finished the last piece.

Luke had realized that the intense sensation racking his body had in truth been nothing more than simple hunger. He was a little dismayed by this as he had thought his heart was breaking. Actually, he wanted more cake. 'Um, OK. Yes, please,' he said. 'It's delicious.'

Mila giggled with pleasure and hurried to cut him another slice. Her bare feet danced, swaying the hem of her skirt, and she was singing a song in her own language, which he had sometimes heard Goran sing.

'Samo nebo sna, koliko te volim ja ...'

The act of eating had returned Luke to his body. As Mila came back with the cake, her face so astonished and dumbly grateful, he was instantly overwhelmed with sexual desire. He touched her cheek and, before he could withdraw his fingers in astonishment at this behaviour, she had turned towards him and closed her eyes. He studied the face: was this innocence?

Then he pulled her down on to the sofa beside him and undid his belt.

He had never treated a girl like that before and disgust made him unable to ejaculate. She did not seem to notice. He rolled off beside her and she pulled him close, then kissed his hair and his hot forehead. He wanted to run away from her, but she clung to him, her skinny arms and legs holding him down like a baby monkey on its mother's back. He waited in agony, watching a cloud of flies circling and circling in the light outside the window.

Though it felt like very much longer, it was just ten minutes later that he said, 'Mila, I have to go now.'

She tightened her whole-body grip for a second and pressed her cheek against his. She sighed. 'Yes. You must to go in your house.'

He did not understand her implication. 'Yes,' he said.

'It is beautiful in there?'

He watched her dreamy face, feeling irritated. What did she want? He only wanted to get away. 'I have to go, Mila,' he told her, lifting her skinny arm off his chest.

'Yes, Luke,' she said, moving aside. Then she smiled at him sweetly and he felt his stomach churn with fear.

He knew immediately that this was not just ordinary, physical fear. He remembered the time Sophie's ouija board had spelt out 'D-I-E-S-O-O-N-L-U-K-E'. Ludo had been so convincingly afraid that Luke had believed him when he swore he hadn't pushed the glass.

He felt himself beginning to shake again, just as he had in front of Caroline at Lapis-Lazuli. He pulled up his trousers but was unable to fasten the belt. As he leant down for his jacket, he allowed Mila to catch him in her arms and kiss his impassive mouth. Then he went out into the dark garden and closed the door behind him.

Mila lay still for a minute or two, smiling in the darkness, embellishing the short, brutal experience with all she knew about hope. Mixed into the rough action of Luke's arms and hips were thoughts of huge boxes of earrings and bracelets, of pots of nail varnish in every colour of the rainbow and of big, white houses in Holland Park from which you never heard guns. She laughed with excitement at the possibilities her body had received.

She knew she was being silly, but she couldn't help it. What was wrong with getting a little carried away? Was it better to be like Goran and think everyone was a liar and that even your mother would betray you? The world wasn't like that. If Luke married her one day—not straight away but one day, when everything was different—then she might have a cleaner herself. Goran would always be her best friend, of course.

She cut herself a slice of the cake and ate it hungrily. It really was one of the best she had ever made and it was almost half gone now. And why had so much of it gone? Because Luke had
adored
it! She had known he would. She could not believe Goran had been so against her giving it to him. He was just jealous, though, she knew that. But she really didn't want to think about that right now. She told herself she was far too excited and happy to think about arguments with Goran. And yet she found that this was exactly what she was doing ...

One of their most recurrent arguments—in fact, it had contained the essence of all the others—had been triggered by a picture of the Virgin that her mother had on the kitchen wall. Goran had wanted to know
why,
if you please, were Mary and Jesus always
beautiful,
always
cutie-pies
like Hollywood stars? When he had first brought it up, he said, 'You Bible-bashers are so simplistic! It's dangerous!' and she had to put her hand over his mouth to make him shut up because her mother might easily have heard and she already disliked Goran.

He had never been able to leave her parents' faith alone. Pick, pick, pick. It was typical of him. Nothing could be beautiful in his world, could it? There was just work and sleep and stupid pride and the big, empty sky at night, waiting to swallow you up.

Now she laughed secretly as she tipped cake crumbs off the palm of her hand into her open mouth, her arm pressed lovingly against her stomach. Goran had been wrong about the Virgin, as he had been about so many things. Of course goodness and beauty went together—you only needed to meet Luke to see that.

Are we really so separate from one another that in spite of all we say about the great nuclear forces of love and hate we actually forget one another's existence from time to time? The truth is, great tracts of experience are taken up in breathing and blinking, in sweating and digesting and not in loving or hating at all. No one who loved Luke—Ludo, Jess, Rosalind, Sophie, Alistair, even Suzannah - had any idea how unhappy he was. And not one of them was thinking of him at three in the morning. He might as well have not existed, so far as the rest of the world was concerned.

Outside the house, neatly parked cars shone in the streetlight. Dustbins had been lined up for collection the next morning. A light went on and then off again in a window and there was a distant hiss of air-brakes from the main road. Inside, the house was dark and warm. The window from the drawing room on to the garden was slightly open, but the air was so still that the sky seemed to be holding its breath. The spiny tree that tapped inces-santly against the glass if there was a storm was entirely motionless. In the hallway, an umbrella, which had not been touched for months, slipped and rotated in the umbrella stand, knocking against the hall table. A few rose petals drifted off the huge blooms Rosalind had put in a vase.

The house was at peace. There was linen folded in the airing-cupboard, bottles of milk lay cool in the fridge, houseplants budded in the conservatory, and in the pantry were new jars of strawberry jam, which Carol made each summer and gave out to each of her friends. Rosalind had never had the heart to tell her that Alistair always took marmalade and that she would never get through more than a jar a year on her own. But the huge jars stacked up, bright red and jewel-like, the sweetest of each year's strawberries and a proof of friendship.

The church clock at St Ignatius, which went unheard in the noise of the day, carefully struck the wrong hour. Rosalind turned in her sleep and muttered the words 'In a minute'. On her bedside table was the pile of newspaper clippings about Alistair, which she had put into an envelope. A car skidded by the traffic-lights on Holland Park Avenue and raced off towards Shepherd's Bush. It was still dark.

Luke sat in his bedroom with the gun in his lap. In his hand was a cigarette, and although he did not often remember to raise it to his mouth, he watched the way the smoke was drawn helplessly through the open chink in the window, only to be lost in the trees.

It had not occurred to him before to kill himself. Of course, he had always enjoyed the notion of how sorry everyone would be as much as the next man; he had made mental drafts of suicide notes during melancholy bus journeys or rainy afternoons, and he had even imagined what music should play at his funeral. But he knew perfectly well that his fantasies lacked authenticity, because when it came to the actual dying bit, he always imagined being safely discovered.

What would it
feel
like actually to
mean
it?

His sister had almost meant it. She had meant it to the extent of effectively demonstrating how not to do it. Starving yourself was obviously extremely slow and painful. With painkillers the nurses just pumped out your stomach and then you were still alive and there was kidney damage on top of the rest of it.

But Sophie always overcomplicated things. That poetic, artistic side of her nature, which Luke knew she blamed for all the trouble she had in accepting the harsh world, was, in fact, what saved her from it. To kill yourself you did not need poetry or art, you needed one of two charmless gods: the Great Height or the Loud Bang.

He wondered dispassionately what exactly was wrong with him and his sister. People met them and thought they had everything. Once, someone had said precisely that. Who? Luke thought for a moment, while he exhaled smoke, and then he remembered that it had been Ludo, when they were about twelve. Rosalind had just put out some ham sandwiches and orange squash for them. They were playing ping-pong in the cellar, or 'The Cave', as it came to be known. There were James Bond posters down there and a chemistry set and a dartboard and Sophie thought it stank of 'boys' smelly trainers' and never intruded. It was a haven.

Ludo flopped on to a beanbag and said, 'You know what?'

'Nope.'

'OK. So what I think is, basically my family might have better cars and the swimming-pool and all that, but I think you don't really need all that stuff. I've worked out you only actually
need
to have a Gamesman and a decent colour TV and a nice house like this.'

Luke stared at his friend while he crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth. He wondered if Ludo was going to eat his, because it didn't look like it.

Ludo took a philosophical mouthful and spoke through it: 'Basically, Luke, why you're really lucky is because you've got all the stuff you
need
and also you all live here together. And plus your mum
cooks well
and everything.' Ludo held up the sandwich, which was cut in neat triangles, crusts off, to add undeniable weight to his point.

Luke had always known Ludo mythologized the happiness of the Langford family. Ludo's parents - Sandro and Isabella - were engaged in a long and acrimonious divorce, which dragged on from Ludo's tenth birthday to well past his fifteenth. At Ludo's house in Knightsbridge there were always telephone arguments to overhear - 'No, no, no, darling. That is
my
fucking villa, Sandro, you
hijo de puta madre'—
while you played on the Gamesman and ate duty-free jelly babies for dinner. Luke was sometimes embarrassed by these phone calls, but Ludo appeared not to notice. It was as if rows were just the background music of his childhood and he continued to be his usual mischievous self, always the daredevil at school. For a while the daredevilry bordered on kleptomania—until a pillowcase of stolen pop-music cassettes and chocolate was discovered in his room and Isabella sent him to a Harley Street psychiatrist.

Luke adored Ludo and found nothing but charm in his friend's childish psychoses. The ruleless paradise of Ludo's home life only added to his glamour, so when he went and said something about how he wished his family could be just like Luke's it was very unsettling. Luke's entirely reasonable envy was interrupted. The BMX bike, the video-player in Ludo's bedroom, being allowed to order takeaway pizza whenever you wanted it and to watch 18-rated films—these were the things that mattered, weren't they?

Luke felt unhappy and asked if he could have Ludo's last bit of ham sandwich—if he wasn't going to eat it, of course. The sandwich was duly chucked into his lap.

'You've got everything, really, you and Sophie,' Ludo said. 'Sometimes I wish I
was
you.'

As he got older, Luke realized that this was unquestionably the way it seemed to an outsider. You pulled up outside the gleaming white house in Holland Park, you saw the sun on the bright red door and you thought safety. You thought family Christmas, birthday suppers, a mother who remembered to ask about your doctor's appointment. It was ten million miles away from the wars on the news; there were no stinging flies, no monsoons, no bombs, not even any volatile Continental-style emotions and divorces.