Significance (14 page)

Lucy, her bag over her shoulder again – one hand still gripping it, her shoes in her other hand, peeked out of the doorway in the direction of the main road. Immediately she saw a couple standing in a pool of yellow streetlight. They were holding on to one another tightly, both with their arms wrapped around the other's back, their bodies seemingly locked together from head to ankle. They were just about the same height as one another which facilitated the exactness of the embrace. Then as Lucy watched they broke apart or at least unhinged themselves enough to allow for forward movement.

A young couple. In love. A man and a woman, they would help her surely? She ran on the balls of her feet, the contents of her bag jingling and rattling, the wallet crashing into the sunglasses case, sunglasses case bouncing silently off loose paper
-
wrapped tampons and scrunched
-
up tissues. Coins pinged and leapt, keys clanked, pens and lipsticks jumped about in the morass like noisy salmon. Faster and faster she ran. She was not impervious to pain; she felt small stones, sharp fragments of gravel underfoot, but ignored them.

Out of breath, and in less than a minute, she reached the place on the main road where she had seen the couple kissing, but they had disappeared. Had evaporated into thin air just as surely as if they'd been beamed aboard the Starship Enterprise. Or as if they had only been the fragile ghosts of a classic French romance, the fading afterimage of a photograph by Robert Doisneau, another of his famous kissing couples frozen in time for eternity.

Suddenly Lucy doubted that she had seen them at all. But, she considered, trying to garner some positive facts about the situation, at least she was now here out in the open instead of in that filthy doorway. And there was no sign of her pursuer.

She decided it was probably wiser to retrace her route from earlier that evening than to risk getting lost in a labyrinth of residential streets.

Seeing the lovers had been a sign.

Still barefoot and being careful to walk down the centre of the pavement away from bag snatchers on mopeds and dangerous men who lurked in doorways and down dark alleyways, she walked further and further from the bar where the working men had been, and as she walked she promised herself that she would never again be so stupid. If there was one good thing to come out of this awful night it was that she should in future always have a plan and the number of a taxi service. That being blonde wasn't all it was cracked up to be and drink provides false armour.

And night falls swiftly and changes everything.

Par
t Two

MORNING

When she looked around she saw that the summer was over and autumn very far advanced. She had known nothing of this in the beautiful garden where the sun shone and the flowers grew all the year round.

Hans Christian Andersen ‘The Snow Queen'

If I were turned out of my realm in my petticoat, I would prosper anywhere in Christendom.

Queen Elizabeth I

Song to the Siren

Florian was the first to wake. Although the blinds in Suzette's bedroom were shut, pale light leaked into the room and outlined soft grey objects whose actual form or purpose he couldn't make out in the half light. As his eyes adjusted he saw a chair with clothes thrown over it, a chest of drawers, a mantelpiece with a plaster statuette of The Virgin on it, a dressing table with bottles and containers of different sizes arranged on it; body lotions, face creams, deodorants, hair brushes and spiky
-
looking clips, barrettes and combs.

Despite the unfamiliar room, he immediately knew where he was and how he came to be there, and she was lying next to him. He lay on his back and grinned at the ceiling. Outside on the street he heard the morning begin, the sounds of delivery vans, cars and motorbikes; of chairs and tables being set out and voices calling to one another.

Suzette stirred and turned over. She had been lying curled up with her back towards him, but now half awake, half asleep, she seemed to be seeking him out. He turned to face her and pulled her to him. She sighed happily, and her eyelids flickered. He looked at her face with the closed eyes and the sleepy grin, ran his hand down her back, revelling in her warm soft skin. Her breathing was slow and heavy with sleep. He explored the round fleshiness of her behind, noticing that the surface of her skin felt marginally cooler there.

He drew his hand up and cupped her breast. She murmured and he ducked his head under the covers and licked, then blew on her nipple so that it immediately turned hard and he grazed it gently with his teeth.

Sighing as she began to fully wake up, her hands came down and touched his hair, his neck. She bent her head down towards his, and sensing this he looked at her. They gazed at one another for a second, unblinking, absorbing the details of the other's face at close range. Then they began to kiss.

He gently eased her onto her back, lay above her and entered her. Their bodies moved together, rocking and undulating. Awake and alive.

Like drowning, dancing, clinging to one another. Eyes watching eyes, seeing pleasure, breath coming faster, noisy with sighs, with each other's names.

The light changed from soft diffuse grey as brighter shafts cut across the room in stripes as the sun moved higher in the sky and burned more intensely.

Then peace.

The quiet holding.

Then.

‘What time is it?'

Suzette wriggled free, leaned over to pick up the alarm clock from the floor by the bed.

‘Nine
-
thirty.'

Florian groaned.

‘Have you got work?' Suzette asked, snuggling in closer.

‘Not 'til twelve.'

And then they hear a siren in the distance. It drew nearer. The sound expanded in the room. Passes. Shrinks.

Suzette and Florian barely notice.

‘So,' Florian said, grinning, ‘am I the consolation prize?'

‘Huh?'

Another siren.

Its sound explodes. Stops. Explodes.

An air horn sounds.

‘So?' Florian says, his grin broader, teasing.

‘What?'

‘You and the Canadian guy?'

Suzette grins back, ‘What about me and the Canadian guy?'

Florian moves closer, holds her tighter.

‘You know.'

‘Oh, do I?'

Another siren joins the cacophony. Loud. Insistent. This time they can't ignore it.

But only acknowledge it by meaningful looks. Looks that say something is out there, something is going on. A car crash. Serious. A fire. A crime of some dimension.

The sounding bell which calls people to their doors and windows.

If Florian were not there, with his legs entwined in hers, his arms around her, one under her neck, her head on his chest, she would go to the window.

The sirens die away.

He kisses her forehead affectionately.

‘Didn't you promise me coffee?' he said.

‘No.'

‘Yeah, you did. You said, “Do you want to come to my place for coffee?”'

‘Oh. Last night.'

‘Yeah, and I didn't get my coffee so…'

‘Oh, okay.' Suzette gets up. She is aware of her naked body. Aware of Florian's eyes following her. Suzette loves her body, loves being watched. Idles deliberately in the room before going through to the small adjoining kitchen to make coffee, leaves the door open as she does so.

Remembers last night. The casual suggestion that maybe he'd like coffee. Him answering, ‘Yeah, why not?' just as casually. Then the way they'd kissed and kissed and kissed some more on the walk back. Her unlocking the door downstairs while he stood behind her kissing her neck. Then up the narrow stairway clumsily, stopping halfway to kiss again. The timed light going out, leaving them in darkness. Then into her apartment. Undressing one another awkwardly, throwing each other's clothes on the floor, and her falling and him trying to catch her, but both of them winding up on the floor, laughing and kissing. Growing more serious and kissing with fierce concentration. Then making love on the floor when the bed was only a few feet away. Beneath her body at one point, digging into her back, one of Florian's shoes and also the pretty cardigan she'd found.

Then they had gone to bed and lain beside one another talking for a long time. For some reason their conversation had all been about their childhoods; the TV programmes they used to watch, the toys they owned and those they'd always longed to own. Suzette had wanted a space hopper. ‘I'll buy you one,' Florian boasted.

‘I'm too big for one now.'

‘So?'

‘Where would I play with it?'

‘Wherever you want.'

‘People would laugh at me.'

‘I wouldn't let them.'

‘I'd be embarrassed even if they didn't laugh. I'd look silly. A grown woman on a space hopper.'

‘Okay, I'll buy you a big playground with high walls so no one could see you.'

‘I think I'd still feel silly.'

‘Okay stubborn girl, I'll buy you one now, then just so it doesn't go to waste, we'll have some children and they can play with it.'

‘And I'll have to ride it so they can see how it's done. And because I'll be with the children no one will think I'm crazy.'

How was it, Suzette thought, that she and Florian could talk so carelessly about having children together. For him it must be just talk. But for Suzette it opened up the whole vista of a future life. Not real of course, but worth lingering over in her imagination. She had been glad the room was dark, as she didn't want him to see her expression too clearly, to see how much it had been transformed by this idea of not only Suzette and Florian, but Suzette and Florian and a clutch of children.

Then they must have fallen asleep.

She could fall as easily into love, yet she was guarded, wary.

She poured the coffee into mismatched bowls, one with navy stripes, the other patterned with rose and gold fleur
-
de
-
lis and wished she had something nice to go with it – fresh bread or croissants, but all she had was four
-
day
-
old sliced factory bread, which was beginning to grow blue
-
green splotches of mould.

She carried the coffee through and set the bowls on the floor by the bed, then snuggled under the covers to find, once again, the delicious skin
-
warmed sheets and Florian's languid body, which engulfed her as soon as she was within his reach.

‘Come here, sexy,' he said, giving her a little squeeze and kissing her shoulder, then he leaned across her and picked up one of the coffee bowls from the floor, blew on it before he began to suck at it noisily. He smacked his lips together to get the taste of it better.

‘Great coffee, Suzette, really good,' he slurped some more. ‘A guy could get addicted to coffee like that.'

Her back was to him, she leaned out of bed to pick up her bowl; she drank hers quietly, wondering what it was he was really saying to her with his remark about the coffee, but still determined to remain cool.

‘Are you working tonight?' he asked, after they had showered and were dressing.

‘Yeah,' she had been searching on the floor for her bra and found it underneath the white cardigan.

‘So shall I come in to see you?'

‘Sure.'

‘Okay.'

She held up the white cardigan by the shoulders; it was every bit as pretty as she remembered from the night before, but she felt guilty about keeping it suddenly. It was slightly rumpled looking as if it were shocked to find itself so misused. ‘Can you remember where we found this?' she asked.

‘Oh yeah,' he said glancing at it. ‘Outside the Café de Trois, wasn't it?'

‘I feel bad about keeping it,' she said. ‘Maybe I should put it back where it was, then whoever lost it might find it.'

He wrapped his arms around her again, trapping her so that the cardigan was pressed between them.

‘You're not bad,' he said. ‘You're good.' Kissed her again.

They left the apartment together and walked hand in hand back to the Café de Trois. Neither said anything, but when Suzette draped the cardigan over the geraniums outside the café, each had a sense of ceremony about the act. It was as if by doing this they were proving something to one another, that in being good, they were investing in their future together.

‘There,' Suzette said and smiled at Florian. He grinned back.

‘I'll see you later,' he said, pecked her cheek and took off at a jogging pace. Late for work, but he'd make up the time.

Suzette set off for her flat and glanced back once to see if she could still see Florian, but he'd gone.