Fallout (40 page)

Her dark hair, longer, was tied back in a loose plait, her flowered skirt; rounded bottom moving through her hips, so female and intriguing, without knowing it, unaware as she walked what she looked like. Who she looked like. She was something like the woman he had written. Mary. Or the woman he had written was something like Leigh. He didn’t know what it meant. Or if it meant anything at all.

‘Leigh!’

She turned.

‘What?’

She was furious. He didn’t know why she was so angry.

‘We never made up,’ he said, walking towards her.

‘We never fell out.’

‘Yes, we did.’

He reached her. It was important he tell the truth, even if he didn’t know what it was yet.

Leigh was staring at him as if she were about to call the police.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ he said.

‘No, you haven’t.’

‘Have you not missed me? I miss you like . . .’ He looked around, trying to keep her, confused and searching for something to hold on to. He always wanted to kiss her and he wanted to now. He thought if he did she would probably smack him.

He knew she was angry – rightly – about
Diversion
and letting Paul down, but it felt so long ago to him, and they were in a different place, and he couldn’t believe she just wanted to leave when it was so precious that they had met like this. He had never thought of her as a vengeful sort of girl. He didn’t believe she had really forgotten how happy they had been, before.

‘Don’t you miss us?’ he said, trying to find out just what he meant by it. ‘All of us?’

And then she lost her temper.

‘Why do you
say
those things? Why do you just
say
those things you don’t mean? You’re like a . . .’

‘What?’ He couldn’t help smiling at her, he was so pleased to see her.

‘Just stop it! I have to go. This is stupid.’

She was pink, vibrating with anger or raw-edged feeling that he didn’t understand.

‘What is it that you think of me?’ he asked.

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

‘I think you’re ravenous,’ she said quickly, not coming any closer. ‘I think you’ve got pieces missing, like an animal. You’re stupid – your
heart
is stupid and it makes you cruel. You don’t care for your friends. You don’t care about me at all. And here you are, saying you
miss
me. It’s completely ridiculous. You go through the world like a plague. Unfaithful.
Unfaithful
. You’re a locust. You eat everything up. You’re dangerous and you’re—’

A couple walking past stared at them, enjoying the show. Leigh stopped as quickly as she had started. Her quiet voice that had dropped such accusation and had so much rage ceased.

She looked very pretty, Luke thought, for someone who had such cruel weapons. He wasn’t interested in defending himself. If she thought that of him, there wasn’t any point in saying it wasn’t true. It was her truth. But it hurt.

‘I thought we were friends,’ he said and began to feel sad. She ignored him. ‘I didn’t realise.’

She was rummaging in her bag. He remembered she always did that when she wanted to hide. She should know by now there was no point hiding, it was something he had always known.

‘My mother died,’ he said, after a while.

She looked up.

‘September before last. Paul came up and helped me.’

Leigh thought for a moment. ‘It’s just me that hates you now, then?’ she said.

‘You don’t hate me,’ he said. ‘And I don’t hate you.’

They stood there in the street, locked in their different battles as the evening chill cooled them. Then she shook her head and looked to the ground.

‘That was horrible of me,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘And I’m sorry about your mother.’

Luke shrugged. ‘Don’t say that. It makes it normal and small and then there’s nothing I can say back that isn’t banal or sentimental, or phony, or otherwise – you know.’

She seemed to soften.

It was a start.

‘Can we at least get a drink?’ he said, thinking she must have said all her worst things now. Hoping she hadn’t meant them.

She looked at him appraisingly for a moment, then she turned and started to walk along the pavement. He went with her. She didn’t tell him not to.

As they reached the corner three people came towards them, recognising Leigh and smiling. Luke took Leigh’s hand – without thinking – and noticed with surprise that she didn’t pull away.

They stopped as the people reached them, two women and a man, good friends; they kissed Leigh’s cheeks, halfway through a conversation, and expecting her to join them.

‘This is Luke Kanowski,’ she said.

They said their
hellos
and
hi-s
and Luke nodded to them, taking them in, and trying to fill out his picture of Leigh’s life. They could have been to do with the theatre, or artists – fringed jackets, longish hair.

‘We’ll see you in there?’ they said, and when they went, and the two of them were alone again, Leigh looked down at Luke’s hand holding hers.

‘Don’t chat up the stage management,’ she said, and pulled her hand away.

‘What?’

‘That’s what you said to me:
Don’t chat up the stage management
.’

‘Yes,’ said Luke, ‘in your flat. When you came to work at Graft.’

‘You remember.’ She seemed surprised.

‘Of course I remember.’

‘Why did you leave me that night?’ She was not accusing him now, but asking.

‘Well, there was this girl,’ he said, ‘the SM we had – I can’t remember her name, and—’ Then he stopped talking because that wasn’t it.

Leigh was looking down, waiting. She glanced up when he stopped speaking and then down again at her hands, as if she were in a courtroom waiting to hear her sentence, separating herself from him.

So Luke removed himself too. He left them both on the corner of the New York street and he took himself back.

It was easy.

He saw Leigh’s bedsit that night as though he were watching a film unspooling. He remembered sitting on the bed with her, as Paul slept, and – like a photograph – the Bob Dylan album under their knees; him and the girl in the Greenwich Village street in winter, the street that Luke, in escaping the adult discomfort of
Diversion
’s opening, had been seeking. He remembered his first impression of her eyes through the just-open window of the Mini, with the Seston rain falling down around them, and Paul shouting in the background. And how, at Paul’s flat, when she was there he had felt at home, could sleep; could feel her presence and still be safe from her, because she was Paul’s. He felt again the way she had felt to him that blackout night, the only time they had kissed, against the wall in her tiny room. He remembered her honesty and the frightening weight of her humanity. How badly he had needed to get away.

And then he came back to the present and looked at her standing in front of him now and waiting to hear why it was that in that moment he had known what they might be, and he had left her. He was wrong; they had never been friends. The distance between them had never been cool.

She looked so sad he had to stop himself from trying to touch her, knowing how angry she would be.

‘Was it because you didn’t like me?’ she asked; a small voice that was unlike herself.

‘I think it was because I liked you too much,’ he said.

She did look up then. She looked up and she – he looked closely at her expression – she sneered at him.

‘Really? Honestly?
Bullshit
is a very good word for moments such as this.
I liked you too much?
For God’s sake, Luke
Last
, can’t you do a tiny bit better than that?’

‘You should be arrested for assault,’ he said. ‘Actual bodily harm.’

‘Good.’

‘I just didn’t think you were for me.’

‘
Bloody hell
—’

‘You’re not
listening
. I’m trying to tell you—’ He struggled. And stopped. And tried again.

Leigh saw him struggle and she lost the taste for goading him. She had forgotten, in making him her enemy, the truth of him. It was not fair to push him. It was not fair to test his strength, because he was not sound. But then, he came closer and looked into her eyes very seriously. She could not breathe. There wasn’t anybody else who stopped her breathing by being so close. It didn’t seem something a person should want. But she did.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I had no idea what to do with you.’

She reached for her anger but it had gone. It wasn’t that he lied; he lacked. He lacked. She felt as sad for him as she had ever felt for anybody.

She had no choice. She said, ‘And now?’

‘Now I do. I think I do now,’ he said.

She had seen the damage he could do. She would have no assurance. She could walk away from him, if she wanted to. It wouldn’t make any difference. She put her hand lightly onto his shirt, just below his collarbone. He looked surprised – then stepped towards her. His heart beating under her hand. She felt shy. He bent his head down to reach her. And they kissed.

They kissed. Both smiled a little, then it was serious. He put his hand to her face to do it better. It felt very beautiful to him. There was the cliff. There was the abyss. There was the dark. There was the fall, just there, ahead of her.

And then the kiss was over.

They stood there with nothing to say for a moment. They did not look at one another, but he took her hand. The world came back slowly and they joined it. They began to walk along the pavement in the direction she had been going, but together. They didn’t talk. They were next to one another. It did not feel meant. It did not feel fated. It had not been written.

I am tremendously grateful to my editor and publisher at Chatto and Windus, Clara Farmer.

Also at Chatto and Windus, and at Vintage, to: Rachel Cugnoni and Tom Drake-Lee; Lisa Gooding and Susannah Otter; Dan Franklin, Gail Rebuck and Richard Cable; Suzanne Dean and Lily Richards.

And many thanks to Caroline Wood.

In the States, I would very much like to thank my editor at HarperCollins, Terry Karten.

Also at Harper, Jane Beirn and Jonathan Burnham, and at the Gernert Company, Stephanie Cabot.

To Tim Boyd, Richard Gregson, Rebecca Harris, Anna Parker, Nat Parker, Evan Jones, Joanna Jones, Melissa Jones, Brian Phelan, Jeff Rawle, Nina Rawle, Jodi Shields, Jon Summerill and June Summerill – thank you. Any faults and failures are my own.

In writing
Fallout
,
Modern British Playwriting: the 1970s
by Chris Megson was an invaluable resource, as were, among others:
A Theatre for All Seasons: Nottingham Playhouse 1948–78
by John Bailey;
Stage Directions
by Michael Frayn,
Looking Back: Playwrights At The Royal Court
by Harriet Devine, and
Kenneth Tynan
by Dominic Shellard; also Tynan’s diaries and writings themselves.

About the Author

Sadie Jones is the author of
The Outcast
, a winner of the Costa First Novel Award in Great Britain and a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the novel
Small Wars
; and the bestselling novel
The Uninvited Guests
. She lives in London.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by Sadie Jones

The Outcast

Small Wars

The Uninvited Guests

Credits

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Cover photograph: © Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos (couple); © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis (background)

Copyright

FALLOUT
. Copyright © 2014 by Sadie Jones, Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Chatto & Windus.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

Jones, Sadie.

    Fallout : a novel / Sadie Jones.—First edition.

        pages cm

    First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Chatto & Windus.

        ISBN 978-0-06-229281-0 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-06-229282-7 (paperback)—ISBN 978-0-06-229283-4 (ebook)

        EPUB Edition June 2014 ISBN 9780062292834

    1. Theater—England—London—Fiction. 2. Adultery—Fiction. I. Title.

    PR6110.O638F35 2014

823'.92—dc23

2013036944

14   15   16   17   18         
OFF/RRD
         10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1