Chapter 12 Four
What Emre did was get up off the floor, which took a while, because six foot four does not get up off a floor quickly, and go and put the chain on the door.
“That’s it?” Yusuf said. “That’s your contribution? Health and safety?”
“Housekeeping come at seven.”
“It’s ten past eight at night.”
“Some of them do a turndown,” Emre said, and sat back down on the floor, and that was the whole speech.
Shona laughed so hard she had to put her hand over her mouth, and it broke something in the room the way a bad laugh in a line check breaks something, and after that it was fine.
That is the part nobody tells you. She had spent three days running the tidy version of this in her head — some silent, enormous moment, everybody grave about it — and what it actually was, was four people in a chain hotel with a plate of cold chips on the desk and a man on the carpet worrying about a turndown service.
“Boots,” she said.
“Boots what?”
“I’m taking my boots off, and I want it on record that I have not taken my boots off in a room with other people in it since 2011, so nobody watch.”
All three of them watched.
She got the first one off and it made the noise that a boot makes, and Yusuf said “Lovely,” and Solomon said “Genuinely a lovely noise,” and she threw the second one at Yusuf, who caught it, because he catches everything.
Then Yusuf sat down next to her on the end of the bed, and he did not stop talking, and she understood inside about four seconds that he was not going to, and that it was not nerves.
“Right, so, ground floor,” he said. “I’m going to say the thing that everybody’s thinking and then it’s said, and then it’s not sat there.
There’s three of us and there’s one of you and the maths of that goes wrong in about nine different ways if nobody says it out loud, so: nobody’s got a go.
It isn’t a queue. If it turns into a queue I’m going to put the big light on. ”
“God,” said Solomon.
“I will put the big light on.”
“He will,” Emre said.
“And you,” Yusuf said to her, “are going to manage this, because that’s what you do, you’re going to be in here reading all three of us and handing everybody exactly what they want at the exact second they want it and never once—”
“Yusuf.”
“—never once saying a—”
“Yusuf. I know.” She turned her head and looked at him from about eight inches away, and his eyes were doing the thing they had done on the floor a few minutes ago. “I know I’m going to. I’ve known that about myself for three days. Let me have tonight and shout at me on Sunday.”
He opened his mouth. Then he shut it, and laid his hand open on the bedspread between them, palm up, and left it there, and did not touch her with it, which was the first genuinely unbearable thing that happened.
She put her hand in it.
“There we are,” Yusuf said, mostly to himself.
Solomon got out of the chair.
That was the other thing. He does not stand up; the man had sat through fifteen years of green rooms and a fire alarm in Cologne, and he crossed nine feet of carpet and sat down on her other side, and the bed went down under him, and he said, quite mildly, “I’d move the lamp.”
“Why would I move the—”
“Because you’re going to knock it off with your elbow in about ten minutes and then everybody’s going to have to be sensible about a lamp.”
“You’re a horrible man,” Shona said, and moved the lamp.
And then there was no more admin, and the room got very quiet, and Yusuf — who had talked them all the way to it, every step, the way he talked a crew through a load-in — said, “Can I,” and she said “Yes,” and he kissed her.
He kissed exactly the way he ordered food: everything offered, nothing assumed, one hand at her jaw and the rest of him giving her the whole of the room to move in.
She got a fistful of the back of his shirt and moved in.
Somewhere to her right Solomon said something very quietly that she did not catch and did not need to, because his hand had arrived at the back of her neck, under the pinned-up weight of her hair, and stayed there, warm and flat and entirely unhurried, just holding her head the way you hold a thing that is worth something.
She heard herself make a noise she had not authorised.
“There,” Solomon said, into her ear.
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what.”
“Say things.”
“I said one word.”
“You said it like a sentence.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got,” he said, “and I’m not taking it back,” and she heard her own voice say it out loud — “I’ve not been held in about a decade” — and then, appalled at herself, “and the last thing that managed it was a flight case,” and she laughed with her mouth against Yusuf’s and felt Yusuf laugh back, and then Solomon’s mouth was at the join of her neck and her shoulder and she stopped finding any of it funny at all.
Emre had not moved off the floor.
She got one hand free and looked over at him, and he was watching her — not the way the journalists wrote him, not menacing, nothing like it: a very tall man sitting against a radiator with his elbows on his knees, absolutely still, waiting to be told where he was wanted, which he would rather have died than ask for.
“Emre.”
“Yeah.”
“Come here.”
He came. He did not say a word about it, and he did not make her say it twice, and when he got to the bed he did not go for her mouth or her hands or any of the places the other two had taken; he knelt down on the carpet in front of her and took her left foot, which was the only part of her nobody was holding, and put his thumbs into the arch of it, where fourteen hours of concrete lives, and pressed.
It was the most articulate thing anybody had said all week.
“Oh, that’s filthy,” she said, and her voice came out in pieces, and Yusuf said “What is he doing,” and Solomon said, “He’s being clever,” and Emre said nothing whatsoever and did it again.
After that it stopped being orderly.
Her jacket went somewhere. Yusuf got the shirt over her head with the confidence of a man who had never once in his life done it smoothly, and narrated the whole failure, and Solomon reached round without being asked and did the clasp she and Yusuf had between them turned into a two-man job, and said, “Fifteen years of in-ear packs,” when she stared at him, which was the funniest thing anybody said all night.
“Take that shirt off,” she said to Solomon. “It’s criminal, that shirt.”
“That’s about me, that.”
“It’s about the shirt.”
“That’s the second thing you’ve asked me for tonight,” Solomon said, taking it off, “and I’ve counted them, which tells you more about me than it does about you,” and she did not have an answer, so she pulled Yusuf’s mouth back down onto hers instead, and Yusuf went, and for a while the room was only breathing and the ring road.
She had Solomon behind her, holding her up, one hand flat under her jaw and his mouth at her ear, saying very little and every word of it exact, the other hand closed over her tit, rolling the nipple between finger and thumb until she pushed back into him.
She had Yusuf in front of her doing what he had been asking to do since Wednesday, unhurried, saying it out loud while he did it, filthy and cheerful in her ear—“There. That’s the one.
That’s what I’ve been asking for since Wednesday, and listen to the noise you just made, so I’m taking that as a yes”—his mouth open at her throat and then lower, closing on the tit Solomon had left him, one hand spread wide on her ass holding her hips exactly where he wanted them.
And she had Emre, who came up the bed without a word, and put his hands where his hands had been going to go, his fingers on her clit until he found the rhythm that made her hips jerk, and found out — the way he found out everything, by doing it and watching her face — what she liked, and then did only that, exactly, until she was not managing anything at all.
She came apart very loudly, with Solomon’s voice going on quietly beside her ear and Emre’s hand still working her through it, and knocked the lamp off the table with her elbow anyway.
There followed four people, two beds, one dead arm and a conversation about whose knee that was, and Shona leaning out of the whole of it to get the strip of condoms out of her bag and put it on the bedside table where anybody could reach it without having to get up.
“Provision,” Yusuf said, approvingly, into her shoulder. “Someone always has a hand free. That’s the finding. Write it down.”
And then he stopped.
He got hold of her chin and turned her face and said, “What do you want,” in exactly the voice he had used at ten past eight, and then he shut up and let it go quiet, and Solomon did not finish it for her, and Emre’s hand stopped moving on her hip and stayed where it was, waiting, and all three of them just lay there in the wreckage of somebody’s turndown service and let her have the silence.
She got about fifteen seconds of it this time.
“Emre,” she said, to the ceiling, because she could not look at any of them. “Emre, and I want—” and she said the rest of it badly, four words, plain, her whole face hot with it, and heard how small her own voice was in the room, the way you hear a voice come up four decibels and not recognise it.
Nobody made anything of it. That was the thing that nearly finished her.
Emre did not say a word — he moved, and was there, and was careful in a way that no journalist would ever get printed about him, working his dick into her pussy by inches, stopping where she needed him to stop, letting her take the rest at her own speed, and Yusuf said her name once and then said, into her neck, “Told you. Someone’s always got a hand free,” which was so unhelpful that the noise she made started as a laugh and did not end as one, and Solomon kept her head in his hand and watched her face the entire time, and being watched like that was the best and the worst of the whole night.
She got there again, harder, and this time she was not running one single thing.
After that it went quickly, and in an order nobody planned.
Emre finished first and had nothing to say about it, which surprised no one.
Yusuf got there in her hand, loudly, his forehead down on her shoulder and his mouth going the entire time—“fuck—that’s—right, that’s me, that’s me retired”—her fingers still closed round his cock when he had stopped making sense.
And Solomon, who had not once let go of her head, took her other hand and put it where he wanted it, and said, “Third thing you’ve asked me for tonight,” which was not true, and she let him have it, and then it was just him, hard against her palm, and his breathing going and going and then stopping altogether for a second at the end.
“Tightest the four of us have ever been, that,” Yusuf said, into the pillow. “Mix-wise.”
“Shut up.”
“Shit monitor mix, though. Couldn’t hear myself at all.”
“Shut up,” said Shona, and put her hand over his face, and he laughed into it.
Then the lamp stayed on the floor where it was and somebody turned the other one off.
The dark in a chain hotel is never dark.
The ring road kept going round under the window, and the wet lights went over the ceiling every few seconds, and the extractor fan ticked in the bathroom, and Shona Hasker lay in the middle of three men with her hair down out of the grips and somebody’s arm going numb under her shoulders.
Her whole body had come loose. She could feel the exact places where fourteen hours of concrete usually sat, and they were not sitting there.
Emre was already asleep. He had gone under like a man stepping off a ledge, inside four minutes, flat on his back with one hand on her hip, and she thought: he has not slept like that in years, and nobody in this room is going to be told that he hasn’t.
“Shona,” Yusuf said.
“Mm.”
“What do you want.”
Third time. The man had asked her the same four words three times in one night and she had got away with it twice.
And she lay there in the dark with her heart going, and it was right there, the true one, sitting in her chest fully formed: this, and not for four days.
Six weeks of the run. The Tuesday gone, the money gone, the call to Cardiff made.
It was so close to the surface she could feel the shape of it against her teeth.
“I want a decent wedge mix for you on Saturday,” she said.
Her voice came out warm and easy and pleased, and it was not even a lie, and she heard it leave her and knew exactly what it was.
“Because that room’s got roof glass and a hard back wall and your voice is going to want another two dB at the top and Fielding’s room was showing me nonsense on the Manchester—”
“Shona.”
“—and I’d rather sort it at four than at six.”
“That’s a good answer,” Yusuf said, slowly.
“It’s a true answer.”
“It’s a good answer,” he said again, and he was too tired to push, and he kissed her shoulder and let it go, and inside a minute his breathing changed.
On the other side of her, Solomon Rakoff was awake.
She knew he was. She could tell by nothing at all — he had not moved, he had not made a sound, his hand was exactly where it had been on her arm, his thumb doing a slow arc over her shoulder — and she knew, the way she had known about the midrange in an hour, that he had heard the whole of that and taken it apart in about the length of a bar and found the join.
He did not hand her the word. He had done it for her once already that week — same fault, quieter, the one you are reaching for and cannot get to — and the true sentence was sitting in the middle of her chest with nothing whatever in front of it, and he left it there, and she understood immediately that he had left it there on purpose.
He lay there in the dark with his hand on her arm and let the silence go on, and went on letting it, and the lights went round the ceiling, and the fan ticked, and Shona understood, lying in the middle of the best hour of her adult life, that the cheapest seat in the house was the one she was in, and that Solomon Rakoff had just got out of his and taken the view with him.