What's Yours Is Mine (3 page)

I squint at the design. “Yeah. It'd fit better on your shoulders, but I can do it on your neck if you don't mind me changing things up a little. You been inked on your spine before?”

The kid bristles. “I can take it.”

I take the sample off the wall, and work it up a little to fit the confined space on the back of the kid's neck. It takes me half an hour, and then I transfer a preliminary outline onto his skin and show it to him with the aid of a mirror. He's already got an armful of badly drawn tatts, inked by scratchers like Dex who go in too deep or at the wrong angle and end up blurring the outlines or scarring the skin. A really good tattoo should last a lifetime and look as clean and clear on your corpse as it did the day you got inked.

I'm not surprised when the kid faints in the chair as soon as I get near bone. It happens more often than you'd think, and the bigger and tougher the guy getting inked, the louder he squeals. Girls never complain.

We close at eight, and Oakey inks me for a couple hours. I turn down his invitation to hit the bar afterwards, and drive home alone along the beach road. The seat belt digs into my raw shoulder, but I daren't risk taking it off
and getting stopped by the cops. My insurance lapsed two months ago, and I'm behind on my car registration, too.

A warm breeze blows in off the Gulf as I park beneath my apartment block, and I turn off the engine and stare out across the black ocean. I don't like thinking about home. It brings back too many bad memories.

I get out of the car, but instead of going up to my condo, I head out across the dunes onto the white sand. Late night joggers thud along the beach, swerving around couples holding hands and watching the horizon. A few kids kick a ball around by moonlight, and several families are sitting around campfires, toasting marshmallows and making s'mores. I go down to the water's edge, then slip off my flip-flops and allow the silver waves to lap gently over my feet. I'd strip off and go in if I wasn't so shit-scared of sharks.

Fuck it. I don't want to leave all this. Florida suits me: nobody belongs here. We're all from somewhere else—tourists, retirees, drifters. What's waiting for me back in England?

Maybe I'll head down south to Miami, talk Oakey into coming with me. His reputation will open a few doors. I'll have to work on the downlow, which means I'll get paid a pittance, but I don't need much out here to get by. If worse comes to worst, I can always sleep on the beach.

As I cross the boardwalk back to my apartment, a red Mustang pulls into the parking lot. I duck behind a concrete pillar, but it's too late.

“Hey! Punk girl! I see you!”

Reluctantly, I step back out. “Mr. Varthaletis. I was just coming to—”

“You owe me rent! Three weeks overdue!”

“Yes, I know, and I'll get it to you, I promise, but—”

He pokes me in the chest, copping an eyeful while he's at it. “I come back tomorrow! You give me rent, or you give me keys, OK?”

“Look, I'm not sure I can do it tomorrow, but I'll get you the money soon, Mr. V. I swear. If you could just give me a little more time—”

“Maybe we come to arrangement, hmm?” His sweaty hand slides up the back of my thigh beneath my miniskirt. “I do you a favor, and you do me a favor. We scratch each other's backs.”

Fucking pervert
. His poxy apartment isn't worth shit. I don't have to take this.

I have no money, nowhere to go, and thirty days before I've got to hit the road or leave the country. I
so
have to take this.

“No panties,” the landlord pants. “Dirty bitch.
Dirty bitch.
”

He shoves thick fingers inside me. I force myself to stand still and concentrate hard on a crack in the concrete pillar behind him. It looks like a serpent's tail. I imagine it in green, coiled around a shoulder or forearm, its scarlet eye unblinking. Grace hates my tattoos and piercings. She calls them tramp stamps. When she first saw the thick metal hoop in my eyebrow, she slapped my face. She always wears a pair of neat diamond studs that Tom gave her on their
first wedding anniversary. I don't suppose she's ever gone out without knickers in her life.

She would never end up in a situation like this.

I swing back my hand and whack the pervert's cheek hard enough to leave a red skull-and-crossbones imprint from my ring.

“You little whore! You give me all money you owe, tomorrow, or I call the cops!”

“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” I retort.

He spits on the ground, but backs away towards his Mustang. I flip him the bird, then storm upstairs to my apartment.

There is
no
way my day can get any worse.

Tom is stirring the contents of a large zinc bath on top of the Aga, looking like one of the witches in
Macbeth
when I push open the kitchen door a little after seven. Steam fills the warm room, billowing around us like a thermal spring. His face is red and sweaty, his fox-brown hair plastered to his head.

I toss my Birkin on the kitchen table, and shrug off my sleet-frozen coat. “What color are you doing this time?”

“Kelly green,” Tom says. “What d'you reckon?”

I glance over his shoulder into the pot. “Nice. Matches your eyes.”

“Thank you kindly, ma'am. I thought I'd do those canvas trousers with the grass stains.”

We smile as our eyes lock, remembering a long, lazy afternoon by the towpath, two summers ago, when we still just made love for the hell and pleasure of it.

Bleakness washes over me. Deliberately, I break the moment, leaning forward and stirring the bubbling green cauldron on the stove top. Tom watched a program about
recycling a couple of months ago, and has been on a kind of Good Life conservation kick ever since, saving every twist of string, displaying his (rather fine) legs in cutoffs like a gawky eight-year-old, and brewing his own beer. Adolphe-Napoleon Didron's quote “It is better to preserve than to repair, better to repair than to restore, better to restore than to reconstruct,” takes pride of place on the kitchen notice board.

I'm rather enjoying his conservation efforts. The other night, he came to bed in a pair of glorious purple pajamas (“I think there was still some red in the pot when I added the blue”), and a number of his more psychedelic tie-dye efforts have added a certain character to our washing line, the energy-guzzling tumble dryer now being off-limits.

“You're later than I expected,” Tom says, giving the pot a final stir and turning it down to simmer. “How was the dentist?”

My body floods once more with nervous adrenaline. Only I can ever know how close I came to doing the unthinkable this afternoon.
Oh, God
. What if I'd pushed the little girl's stroller in the opposite direction today? What if I'd walked away from her mother, and kept on walking until we were lost from sight, instead of maneuvering through the crowds towards her and explaining that her daughter had been crying, frightened by the crush of people?

The young mother just shrugged and went back to her conversation. She didn't even bend to comfort her child.

I can't believe what I nearly did. I always thought
people who gave in to their impulses were fundamentally different from me. I suppose I thought they were weak. Lacking in discipline and control. I thought they were people like Susannah.

It's a shock to know they're just like me.

“Tom. I need to talk to you—”

He's running cold water into the sink, ready to set his green dye, and he cups his hand to his ear to indicate he can't hear me. I feel sick at the thought of what I have to tell him. He's a pediatric anesthetist, for heaven's sake; he chose to spend his life working with children. Why must I be the one to deny him the chance of his own?

How will he feel about me, once he knows?

I turn off the running tap and suck in a deep breath. “Tom, I wasn't at the dentist.”

He looks surprised, but waits for me to continue.

My nerve fails me. How do I even begin? First, I have to tell him I went to see Dr. Janus without him. I know Tom will be hurt by that, though it'll be as nothing to what comes next. But even though he's my husband and this affects him deeply, it's peculiarly my tragedy, not his. I didn't want him there because I knew it was going to be bad news, and I didn't want to have to bear his pain and disappointment along with my own.

For a fleeting moment, I wish Susannah was here. As if she could help. I haven't talked to her in five years. I don't even know her phone number.

My fingers dig into my palm. “Tom—”

The kitchen door opens, and Blake, Tom's best friend
and the husband of mine, blows into the room on a gust of sleet and sexual energy. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the reprieve.

“Fucking freezing out there,” Blake says cheerfully, flinging himself sideways into a kitchen chair. “Claudia'll be along in a minute, Grace. She's just putting the girls to bed. Next door's baby-sitting for an hour. Any danger of a beer, Tom?”

“Been waiting for you to show your face.” Tom grins, disappearing into the basement. His voice echoes sepulchrally up the stairs. “Got this new brew I've been working on. Should be about ready now.”

He reappears with two pint glasses filled with equal parts sea foam and cloudy amber liquid, and hands one to Blake. They raise them in mutual salute, then take healthy gulps.

Even with a foam moustache, Blake exudes a raunchy glamour. I've had a bit of a crush on him for years. Tall and rangy, all angles and tousled dirty blond curls, he looks like a rock star on his weekend off. He was born in New York, and although he was raised in England from the age of two, he's somehow managed to retain that indefinable American gloss. Even in the depths of an English winter, he has a tan that sets off gleaming white teeth just crooked enough to be sexy, and eyes the soft slate-gray of the sea after a storm. He just has a way of … 
noticing
… you. I don't know how Claudia manages him.

Tom drains his glass, then fishes in his cauldron with a pair of huge laundry tongs, and heaves the emerald jeans
into a bucket. He staggers across the kitchen and dumps them into the cold water in the kitchen sink. He looks like Widow Twankey.

There's a sudden tightness in my throat. His old pink shirt may be tight across his stomach these days, rather than his chest, and the boyish features have blurred, but he's still my Tom, still the man I've loved for the better part of two decades. He doesn't have Blake's flashy charm or movie-star good looks, and after all this time together, there are few surprises left. But he's my best friend. I trust him completely. I know where I am with Tom.

If that sounds unromantic, it shouldn't. A good marriage, like a good business, is outwardly ordinary. Tom and I have grown up together. We know each other inside and out.

We met seventeen years ago at the start of our second year at Oxford University. It took me a little while to find my feet, and though I had some good female friends, I was still painfully shy with boys. Claudia, one of the eight students with whom I shared a house, had decided we should throw a Halloween party, and I'd volunteered to man the front door, since this enabled me technically to participate without actually having to make much conversation beyond, “The kitchen's through there.”

Tom was unfashionably early. I had a fleeting impression of a russet-haired boy with green eyes and unexceptional looks, before he dropped his bottle of cider—that eighties student party staple—at my feet, showering the two of us with shards of glass and sweet-smelling alcohol.

“You're the girl from the library,” he gasped. “You spend every Tuesday morning in the Duke Humfrey Reading Room with the hippie black girl. You get out very dull books about Anglo-Saxon literature, and then spend most of your time reading your friend's history books. You had a birthday three weeks ago—I saw your friends' cards sticking out of your bag.” He was smiling now. I liked his smile. “You always leave just before twelve and go across the road for a hot chocolate.”

No one had ever paid me that kind of attention before.

It wasn't love at first sight; but it was
something
. Recognition of a kindred spirit, perhaps, of someone just as unsure and uncertain and determined as I was. We dated earnestly for three months, and then I woke up one morning and realized I couldn't imagine my life without Tom in it.

The following weekend, I lost my virginity to him. Tom was scarcely more experienced than me, having had the benefit of just two lovers, but we applied ourselves diligently to the task of learning our way around each other's bodies, and experimented freely. We'd soon graduated to the advanced chapters of
The Joy of Sex
, and congratulated ourselves on our racing start. Certainly, if my friends were to be believed, we were more adventurous than the average novice, and were in the happy, if unusual, position of finding that familiarity with each other in bed bred satisfaction rather than contempt.

It wasn't long before we'd become one of those ampersand couples: Grace&Tom. A composite, the sum greater than its parts, long before Brangelina.

At the start of our final year, we moved in together, sharing a narrow terraced house with six other impoverished students, Blake and Claudia among them. After Tom and I graduated with our respective Firsts, there were a few years of commuting between my flat in London and his digs near University of Edinburgh's Medical School, which was a little trying, but eventually Tom returned south to take a job at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, and later in London. By then, I'd had time to establish myself as a forensic accountant and was in the process of setting up my own independent consultancy. Marriage seemed the next logical step: we were both twenty-nine, and had got any playing-the-field impulses out of our systems; although, to be honest, neither Tom nor I had ever been what you might call wild.