The After-party
The downpour began a little after four. She was used to the rattle of rain on slate roofs, even enjoyed the sound because she rarely stepped out into it, one of those Londoners who avoid rain as vampires avoid sunlight. Here on the surface of the great lake, the downpour sounded like a great, exasperated exhalation, as if even the rain was disappointed by all the rain.
She had been restless all night. The quaint inn creaked and groaned, and through thin walls real-ale drinkers snored and farted, fibre-glass duvets billowing like sails. A pint was an absurd quantity to drink but she’d played the game and drunk three, practically a bucket, her taut belly sloshing like a hot-water bottle. How could she drink so much yet feel so thirsty? The fat and the salt and the gin and the beer had drawn all the moisture from her body so she lay there, smacking her lips, feeling her breath go bad, trapped in a circular critique of her evening.
The brandy had been a mistake. When they’d called last orders he’d asked, ‘One more?’ then ‘Shall we take it upstairs?’ to the after-party in Stickleback, and soon she was propped against his padded headboard, a brandy snifter wedged into her cleavage. Yes, of the five in their party, they were definitely the coolest, cooler than the teenage maths whizz and his mum, way cooler than the geography teacher. Conrad had put on seductive music, a compilation of what she thought might be called slo-jams, and she’d felt like a teenager again, sneaking into a bedroom at a house party with a popular boy from the sixth form. Should she bounce on the bed, instigate a pillow fight? She’d already made a stupid joke about his camouflage hoody (Whoa, where d’you go?) and yet when she’d tried to talk meaningfully about life and relationships and whatever, he’d seemed distracted, changing the music, moving from bed to chair to bed, putting his clothes on hangers so that it was like being backstage with a model. At one point he’d dived on to the bed, lying next to her, head on hand (oh, hello) and she’d mirrored him and thought, Might this be the moment? But, fat-tongued and drunk, she’d peppered him with sloppy questions without responding properly to the answers, so that the exchange had the uneasy, one-sided feel of a red-carpet interview.
‘So – do you wear pyjamas or …?’ She’d asked, brandy on her chin.
‘Hm. Bit personal, Marns!’
Hm. She wasn’t sure about Marns. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just trying to paint a mental picture …’ She squeezed her eyes tight.
‘No, I do not wear pyjamas. I sleep au naturel.’
‘Whoa, hang on, you sleep outside?’ She opened her eyes, hoping to see him smile but he was moving on.
‘How about you?’
‘Depends. October to May I wear this white thing, from the MS “Shroud” collection, big, like a decommissioned wedding marquee, then in summer if it’s sultry, just this thong I found on the floor of a betting shop …’
Was this turning him on? It seemed not because he’d rolled off the bed to fiddle with charging cables, and soon after that she’d given up any hope of some grand seduction. Past my bedtime, at midnight I turn back into a pumpkin, thanks for a fun night, oops, kiss on the ear. Goodnight. Back in her own room she’d heard the murmur of Conrad’s voice, low and earnest, probably a phone call to his ex, and she’d considered pressing her ear to the wall, perhaps with a glass like they do in movies. Why not? She’d already laughed him out of bed.
Jokes. The popular girl at school had once told her she was funny, one of those casual, half-meant compliments that can knock a life off-course: You could model; You have a lovely singing voice; You are funny. Her husband had said the same thing, back when he’d claimed to find funny women ‘sexy’. But then he’d once said he’d liked her ‘curves’ too – his word, sometimes ‘luscious curves’ – and both had later joined the litany of things he’d grown to dislike, self-deprecation in particular, huffing and sighing at every joke. ‘If you tell people you’re crap,’ he’d said, ‘why shouldn’t they believe you?’ But if she couldn’t laugh at herself and she couldn’t laugh at him, what was she meant to laugh at? For a long time, she’d not laughed at all.
Long time ago. She was free of that now and free also to lie here at four and five and six, watching the battery warning flash on the smoke alarm, listening to the rain, finding hope in the notion that it rains more at night. Was it true? Why should that be? She would ask the geography teacher on the walk.
From seven a.m., new sounds, a dawn chorus of toilets flushing, the crack of productive coughs like small-arms fire; it was like living with trolls. Now the TVs were coming on, bad news through thin walls, and she reached for her laptop. It was too early for the sex clubs of LA and she’d made a vow to avoid social media while in nature but she thought perhaps she might do some online yoga in the gap between the wardrobe and the trouser press.
But now a new problem presented itself. In the night her ankles, knees and hips had somehow been welded into a single unit so that the whole lower half of her body was frozen, like one of those cheap plastic dolls that hinge at the shoulder and nowhere else. She swung her legs out of the bed and stumbled to the bathroom as if on stilts, sitting on the toilet with legs out straight ahead, rolling her neck where the bones had also been compacted from the weight of the rucksack so that she was horribly aware of each one, could even hear them grinding into each other, like walnuts squeezed in a fist. Standing again, she noticed that the skin on the soles of her feet seemed to have separated from the flesh, like baggy socks. Yoga was out of the question.
Instead, she stood at the window. Outside was like a room with heavy curtains drawn, the rain kicking up a mist from the lake so that it was impossible to tell where the water ended and the sky began. The sun must be up there somewhere but she saw only heavy swags of grey with no hope of brightness burning through. She had never quite lost the habit of taking the weather personally. If washing windows or leaving her umbrella at home could bring on the rain, what could she do to make the sun shine?
She would shrug off this self-pity but shrugging hurt and here it was, creeping in again like damp in the walls, the loneliness, present even in company. What had happened to the hope she’d felt in Euston station? Less than twenty-four hours later she felt the pull of home, secure and dry, with her books and radio and blankets, sure of what the day would hold. Through the walls she heard the eight a.m. headlines, though still nothing from Stickleback. They were due to set off at nine thirty: if she was quick she could eat breakfast alone. She showered, put on clothes as if dressing a mannequin, walked downstairs sideways, placing her feet gingerly one step at a time, like a marionette, to the bar, which smelt of beer and fish.
Of course he was there already, sitting at a corner table. She did not want to talk to him but it felt rude to sit elsewhere. Thankfully …
‘You don’t have to sit with me,’ said Michael. ‘It’s too early to talk.’
‘Oh. Really?’ She was grateful and a little offended.
‘I’m not very good in the mornings.’
‘Me neither.’ Spotting a compromise, she sat at the table diagonally opposite, easing herself in with a groan.
‘How did you feel, waking up?’
‘Like Gregor Samsa,’ she said, a gamble, but he laughed.
‘How was the private party?’
‘Party?’
‘In Stickleback?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, did we keep you awake?’ For some reason, she did not want him to think Conrad’s room had been a failure. Not a success either, whatever success meant. ‘Pretty wild. Isle of Wight vibes.’ He smiled and opened his individual box of cereal. ‘You look like a giant.’ He seemed confused. ‘With your tiny box? Scale?’
‘Oh. Yes. I see.’
‘Fruit and Fibre,’ she said, ‘together at last!’
‘Classic combination.’
‘Like Lennon and McCartney.’
‘By themselves, fine, but combined …’
‘Yeah, who’d eat a bowl of something called just “Fibre”?’
He thought a moment. ‘Well, in fairness I would eat that.’
She laughed. ‘Yes, you would,’ she said, as if she knew him. ‘Anyway.’
‘What are you going to …?’ He nodded towards the continental buffet.
‘Oh.’ She stood, scraping her chair. Orange juice the colour of jaundice, a hazelnut yoghurt floating in a bowl of melted ice as if it had drowned there in the night. ‘Ah, Paris,’ she said. ‘Well, I’m far too sophisticated for Frosties.’
‘I won’t tell anyone.’
‘No. No, it’s Fruit and Fibre for me too.’
He raised his miniature box in salute.
She sat and the landlord, an angry ghost, came and took her order: eggs and bacon, which, still queasy, she both wanted and dreaded. The rattle of her spoon in the bowl, the gargantuan crunch of her cereal. To mask it, she asked, ‘What are you reading?’
He held up the book. ‘It’s about the changing face of sheep-farming.’
‘Whoa, sheep-farming’s changed its face?’
‘I know! Again! You?’
She held up Wuthering Heights. ‘D’you know it?’
‘Only the theme tune.’
‘That’s got all the best bits. I think there are some sheep in it, if you want to—’
‘I’m all right, thank you.’
‘My second time. I read it when I was fifteen.’
‘You love it?’
‘Heathcliff’s more of a dick than I remember. I’m rolling my eyes more than I did first time, but it’s wild and northern.’
‘Wrong side of the Pennines, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s all the same, though, isn’t it? Once you’re past Coventry.’
‘Don’t start. The batter was bad enough.’
Time passed, tap, crunch, tinkle. ‘It’s certainly wuthering outside today!’ she said idiotically.
‘I think technically wuthering means windy and there’s no wind. So.’
‘Thank you, Branwell.’ He seemed to be eating his cooked breakfast largely with his hands, folding a piece of bread like a sock puppet then using this to pinch a sausage and scoop up beans. She felt her stomach lurch and perhaps he heard it because he now unwrapped his knife and fork.
‘I’m sorry. Manners. I’ve definitely let myself go. Too much time eating alone.’
‘I know about that. At home I just trowel in the hummus,’ and she mimed two scooping claws.
‘Plates, eh?’
‘Who needs ’em? I’m also a little hung-over.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ rubbing the top of his head.
‘But we’re still walking?’
‘Of course! Well, I am.’
‘Okay. Well, me too!’
‘Really?’ he said and, stung, she replied, ‘Of course!’
‘Well, visibility’s bad but it’s not windy. It’s a clear path and we’ve got satnav, two satnavs, and you know what they say.’
A little time passed, chewing and swallowing. ‘Go on.’
‘There’s no such thing as bad weather …’
Crunch, crunch. ‘Go on.’
‘… only unsuitable clothes.’
‘Who says that?’
He thought a moment. ‘The Norwegians?’
‘Okay.’ After a while, ‘Okay, Norway, let’s find out!’
‘Personally, I don’t mind the rain.’
‘Of course you don’t.’
‘It’s too foggy for views but you put your hood up and have this quiet little private world around you and you … carry it with you.’
‘A cold, wet little private world.’
‘It’s not cold if you keep moving. Or you could call a taxi and go straight to the hotel.’
Did he think she wasn’t up to it? ‘Let’s see how the others feel,’ she said. Her breakfast arrived, the same brown hues of last night, even the eggs, and she ate what she could, then went up to get ready and to work out what to say to Conrad.