Significance (4 page)

Her friends would laugh and gaze at her wide
-
eyed. They wouldn't choose to holiday alone, not unless they had to for some reason. Maybe she'd add a few adventures – sexual liaisons, romantic interludes, complications with jealous wives, intrigue. Why not? It would keep them on their toes. Keep them in awe of her. No one would dare challenge her or call her a liar.

But then it might get back to Thom and he might not see the funny side. Might object to looking like a cuckold, even if he knew it wasn't true. But then again, she and Thom were finished. Over. And no, he didn't love her. Never had.

She'd picked up her glass and raised it to her lips ready to drink, when a shadow fell over her.

‘Did you follow me here?'

He was standing with the light behind him so at first all she saw was a dark silhouette, his blond hair haloed in the light.

‘Pardon?'

‘You heard me.' He shifted his weight onto one foot, cocked his head to one side so that now he was illuminated by the light instead of obscured by it.

‘Oh, hello,' she said, and smiled at him.

‘Did you follow me?'

She stared at him, feeling caught out, but also to no small degree, entirely innocent. She hadn't known he was here
precisely
. She'd followed him, but given up when she lost sight of him. The finer point of the matter was debatable and she resented his accusation and particularly the unfortunate loudness of his voice. Her smile fell away.

‘Quite honestly…' she began to say, then stopped and shook her head. She shrugged her shoulders as if shaking him off. She would not deign to even speak to him, leave alone utter a denial. She sipped her wine and without looking at him took a cigarette from her bag and lit it, using the matches he'd given her the day before.

Silence is a useful tool, she had often found, no one could ever accuse her of protesting too much.

Roughly, he pulled out the chair opposite, scraping it noisily over the concrete slabs. He sat.

‘Do sit down,' she said, meaning to convey sarcasm, but somehow failing. He leant back in the chair, put his elbows on the armrests and laced his fingers together, then stared at her.

‘Look,' she said at last. ‘I'm sorry about your brother. I'm sorry if I upset him in some way…'

‘He's not upset…'

‘Well, then I'm sorry if you think…' She stopped herself as she was about to say,
I'm sorry if you think that I look down on him, on you because he's…
She didn't want to vocalise that. Somehow mentioning any form of social judgement seemed to expose the truth of her feelings.

He waited, then turned his head, signalled the waiter and ordered a beer.

‘Why did you say I was angry?' she asked.

‘Because you were.'

‘I wasn't. Why would I be angry?'

‘Everyone is.'

‘That's not true.'

He made a quick snort of contempt.

‘Maybe you're the one who is angry and so you view the world that way. You imagine everyone thinks like you,' she said.

‘I know what I see.'

‘That's ridiculous.'

‘Why did you follow me?'

‘I didn't. I've already told you I didn't.'

‘I saw you. You were in the phone box near our house spying on us. Do you think I'm stupid?'

‘I didn't know you were here,' she said and with this small truth, found that she was able to meet his eye.

They gazed at each other for almost a minute, then he unlaced his fingers, reached for his beer and took three big gulps. She didn't know why men drank in that way, pouring liquid – it could be water or milk as much as beer – down their throats while their Adam's apples worked up and down like slow pistons. Maybe it was a form of sexual display. Or alternatively it was a show of power – drawing attention to a vulnerable part of the body – the throat – and saying in some oblique way – you dare!

Or he was just thirsty. Then again, displaying his needs, his wilfulness in satisfying these needs, was a way of signalling to her that he might, if he chose, consume her.

There was, despite his accusations and insults and anger, an indisputable sexual charge in the air between them – had been since the start. She was emboldened by this idea, it galvanised her into playing the role of the minx. ‘So what if I did follow you?' she said. ‘I mean, why would I do that, do you suppose?'

He raised one eyebrow; an enviable trick

She had finished the last of her wine. Had drunk enough to be feeling wired up and full of energy. Time to go dancing, time to laugh with just a soupçon of too much gaiety. The devil
-
may
-
care adrenaline pulsing in her temples, invading her brain with elaborate dreams and schemes.

Why, if she offended him so much, had he chosen (however gruffly) to sit with her? He was as much drawn to her as she was to him.

But she kept her head.

‘Do you want another drink?' he asked her.

The waiter was hovering by the table. Here was a debatable situation – was he merely alerting her to the waiter's presence or was he asking if he could buy her a drink? The money – who paid for what – had nothing to do with it really – it was more a question of whether they would continue with this – whatever
this
was exactly.

‘I should have a coffee I suppose,' she said, addressing him rather than the waiter.

‘Another of those,' he said, nodding at the empty carafe. ‘And a beer for me.'

The waiter turned on his heel and was gone.

‘I said I'd have a coffee.'

‘No, you didn't. You said you
ought
to have coffee, which suggests that you really wanted wine.'

‘God! – What are you – a psychologist?'

‘How did you guess?'

‘Very funny,' she said, though it occurred to her that he wasn't joking and was indeed a psychologist. The last thing she needed.

A second carafe of wine was placed before her. She half
-
filled her glass, determined to take it easy. She should have had coffee, but he was right, she wanted wine.

‘What's your name?' she asked, twisting the stem of her wine glass slowly, watching how the dense ruby
-
coloured liquid moved and caught the light.

‘Scott.'

He didn't reciprocate by asking her name, which made her momentarily angry at the oversight, but then she took to the idea of being without a name, the mystery of it.

‘So, Scott,' she said, unable to resist trying out his name on her tongue. ‘What do you do for fun around here?'

‘I let strange women follow me, then I fuck them.'

Before she had a chance to really absorb this remark, let alone respond, he stood up and crossed quickly to a nearby table where he picked up a discarded newspaper.

He'd left his last remark hanging in the air. Had abandoned it like a lost balloon, ‘I let strange women follow me, then I fuck them…'

He came back, sat down and carefully opened, then refolded the newspaper so that the front page was uppermost. It was a copy of
The Guardian
, a day or so old, with a brown ring marking the word ‘Guantanamo' in the headlines.

She frowned, watching disbelievingly as he fussily smoothed the newspaper's cover page with the flat of his hand. She could not now say ‘Pardon?' or give him some coquettish riposte, but neither could she forget what he'd said. Nor what it implied.

He was, she supposed, a not very nice human being.

Why did that come to mind? The phrase ‘not very nice'? It was the sort of thing her mother would say, had said about Lucy's best friend, Tracy. ‘That girl's not very nice. I don't like her.' Whereas for Lucy that was the very essence of her friend's appeal. Tracy smoked and drank and read the NME and did things with boys that she described to Lucy in graphic terms afterwards. So when Lucy's mother said that Tracy wasn't very nice, it almost acted as a recommendation, a character reference. Who wanted nice when
not nice
was so exciting and dangerous?

‘So why did you come here?' he asked, shaking Lucy out of a reverie in which she was thirteen again and wearing Converse baseball boots and ripped jeans, with an old plaid flannel shirt tied permanently around her waist as she cried extravagantly over a newspaper photograph of Kurt Cobain.

‘I just wanted a drink.'

‘No,' he said. ‘I meant why did you come to France?'

She shrugged.

He shrugged back, then turned to gaze down the street as if she bored him.

Why had she not just answered him? He was perhaps only making conversation, attempting to be friendly, to undo the aggression that had marked the start of this acquaintance.

‘I'm sorry,' she said – why was she apologising – she hated saying sorry. ‘I didn't understand what you meant.'

He turned slowly to face her, his gaze seemed to track her features, moving between her eyes and mouth, only once dropping down to glance at her breasts. A beat of time passed, then he spoke.

‘I meant what I said. The question was clear enough, surely?'

‘Yes, but the answer is so simple. Why does anyone come to France? Or go anywhere for that matter? Dull as it may seem I'm here for a holiday. To get away. To relax. To have some fun.'

‘Ah,
fun
,' he said and he might as well have made that clichéd hand sign which marks two inverted commas in the air around the word. She felt belittled – which must have been his intention.

‘Well, you asked the question,' she said.

What had made her say that damn cliché about fun? Momentarily she pictured herself throwing her glass of wine in his face.

But her glass (she had automatically, as if she were really about to pick it up and throw it, looked at it) was empty. Empty and she couldn't remember drinking it – a worrying sign.

‘Who are you here with?' he asked then.

‘No one.'

‘Ah.' He raised that one eyebrow again as if to show that some assumption he'd had about her had been confirmed.

‘I prefer it that way.'

‘Do you?'

‘Yes.'

‘You don't like people?'

‘No, that's not it.' Why was he making her feel so defensive, so exposed?

‘You just like your own company?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘Hmm.' He absorbed this. Maybe he was, as he had claimed, a psychologist.

She emptied the carafe into her glass, filling it to the brim. To hell in a handcart, she thought, then not caring how it looked, she bent her head to her glass and drank a quarter of an inch of the liquid without lifting it from the table.

He stood up.

‘Are you off, then?' she said.

‘Yeah.' He stretched himself, sighed, shrugged. A rapid succession of signs which were contradictory and unreadable. Except that leaving was in and of itself the most uncomplicated sign of all.

He disappeared inside the bar. She watched as he stood there chatting for a few minutes with the man behind the counter. He looked more relaxed, threw his head back and laughed at something the other man had said. Then the man on the stool next to Scott leaned towards him – evidently in order to say something private – and as he spoke he flicked his eyes in her direction. Scott turned and glanced at her. She looked away quickly. She heard laughter again, but had no way of knowing if it was about her.

She gazed up at the large plane tree on the pavement outside the café, noticed for the first time that curling up its trunk and hung about its branches were unlit fairy lights. It would look so pretty if they were switched on, she thought. She took it personally that no one had made the effort – it was as if the world had conspired to always deal her the third
-
rate experience, the uninspired. The unadorned.

She glanced once more into the bar. Scott was now half
-
sitting on a bar stool, one foot on the rung, his knee sharply bent, the other leg straight, foot planted firmly on the floor with the toe pointed towards the exit. A waitress was standing next to him smoking a cigarette.

Lucy looked at the wine in her glass and realising that she had already drunk too much, she picked it up and added it to the coffee in the planter. It was swallowed up quickly; the plant was as thirsty, as empty as she was.

The House with the Yellow Shutters

A phrase had popped into Marilyn's head as she stood at the sink peeling potatoes. She watched her hands as they denuded each mud
-
caked potato with a string
-
handled peeler. She tried saying the phrase aloud in a whispered chant, ‘like quicksand's kiss, that draws me in…' She knew that she should stop what she was doing and jot the words down, but somehow, an element of self
-
consciousness or duty stopped her and she continued to peel potatoes.