Scissors, Paper, Stone (28 page)

‘Oh, fine, fine, you know.’ He was sweating slightly across his top lip. ‘Fine,’ he said again for no reason. There was a pause. ‘Are you hurrying back for something, Anne, or can I tempt you to a quick drink?’

And although she knew that she should have refused, Anne found herself agreeing. For the first time, she realised that she wanted Marcus’s undivided attention. She craved his uncomplicated adulation because it required no effort from her, no exertion of emotion. She knew, even then, where it would end.

In the pub, he had stared at her fixedly while she downed two double gin and tonics in quick succession. The jukebox was playing something thumping and heavy with the twang of guitar. After a while, Anne realised she recognised it from a jeans advert on television featuring a stupidly handsome man undressing in a launderette. The pub was too noisy to make out the words but she snatched bits of the chorus, which seemed to be about someone deciding whether to stay or go. She smiled to herself, just drunk enough to believe that the lyrics seemed especially pertinent to her situation. As she drummed her fingers gently against the table, Marcus moved his face closer to hers so that she could see the thin bloodshot lines criss-crossing against the whites of his eyes.

‘Anne,’ he said, his hand trembling as he placed it over hers. ‘If ever you need someone to turn to . . .’ Marcus let the thought cloud the air between them. ‘You must know that I’ve always been –’ he searched for the right word, ‘extremely fond of you.’ He started to stroke her hand so softly that his fingers felt like limp lettuce against her skin. ‘Oh Anne,’ he said, looking at her imploringly with shiny eyes. He sighed deeply and shook his head, turning away as if to hide the extremity of his feeling.

Anne looked at him. There was something melodramatic and insincere about his posturing: he was a man obsessed with the idea of being in love, a perpetual romantic who believes he is destined for a grand passion, without being aware of his own limitations. She felt that the only reason he had chosen her to be the recipient of his unfocused attentions was because she was safely attached to someone else. Marcus could indulge his whimsical bursts of ardour and then return to an undemanding wife who counted herself lucky to be with him. He was, if anything, strengthened by the realisation that their supposed love affair could never be because it dovetailed with his storybook ideals of doomed love, pitched against the odds.

She believed there was a small part of Marcus that genuinely thought, despite all indications to the contrary, that Anne loved him. He told himself that it would simply cost her too much to admit how she felt.

In fact, Anne, giddy-headed from too much alcohol, felt nothing but faint revulsion for him, for his hypocrisy, for his unthinking betrayal of his stupid wife, for his hang-dog stare and his misplaced belief in his own poetic heroism. And yet she also felt an overwhelming need to be reassured of her own sexual attractiveness, to be desired by someone who did not threaten her.

Ever since that awful morning when she had stumbled across Charles and Charlotte in the car on her way back from collecting a donation of clothes for the Red Cross shop, Anne had been seeking revenge. Revenge against Charles, yes, but most of all revenge against herself for being so weak, so gutless, so hopelessly in thrall to a monster of a man. She was sickened by her inaction and crippled by her guilt, but she could not face up to it. She could not bear to look at Charlotte’s thin, pale face, at her silent, accusing eyes across the breakfast table. She had done what she thought was best: to carry on as if nothing had happened, to ensure the daily routine was as normal as possible, to wipe clean the surfaces of their consciousness and to make them all believe in it. And so, gradually, she blotted everything out. If she had not seen it, she reasoned, it need not exist.

But the pretence was thin and the varnish of it was cracking. She found that she wanted to do something to wound herself, that would give her a physical pain to match up to the emotional turmoil. And so she had arranged to meet Marcus one weekday lunchtime: a seedy rendezvous in a grubby little hotel with a proprietor who sold rooms by the hour. She told herself that this was all she was worth. Curiously, this knowledge made her feel better.

Room 235 smelled of stale cigarette smoke and the mustiness of rising damp. There was a television mounted in one corner and a bobbled pink bedspread edged with tired-looking frills. Marcus was sitting in a foam-filled armchair by the window, reading a newspaper, when she walked in. He stood up hastily and the newspaper fell to the floor with a whispering crinkle. He did not say anything, but walked straight across the brown shag-pile carpet and pressed his mouth firmly against Anne’s before she had a chance to close the door.

His lips were wet and soft and loose like overstretched elastic. His tongue delved into the back of her throat, a thick eel swimming against the current. Anne found she could not breathe until he pulled back from her and then she saw he had a sickly smile on his face and that his chin was streaked with saliva.

‘My darling,’ he said, and the words were so incongruous with the setting that Anne wanted to laugh in his face. Instead, she started to undress. She wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

‘Anne, there’s no rush,’ said Marcus softly, attempting to stop her from unbuttoning her skirt. ‘We’ve got all afternoon.’

‘I haven’t,’ she said flatly. ‘I’ve got to get back.’

He looked crestfallen but started to unlace his shoes and slid out of his trousers. She noticed he was wearing tight blue briefs, the hems slightly frayed, and that his thin legs were covered in a mat of black hair. Anne stripped down to her bra and pants and Marcus walked up behind her, folding his arms around her stomach and drawing her so tightly towards him that she could feel his erection in the small of her back. His breathing was rapid and panting and she could taste the bitter ammonia smell of his sweat.

She turned to him and started to kiss him with such force that their teeth clashed and she felt the thin skin at the corners of her mouth begin to tear. She could hear him groaning, a sound like the creaking of a tree before it falls. She wanted to block him out completely, but Marcus kept drawing back and looking at her face, placing one hand on each cheek and shaking his head in self-conscious wonderment, as if he could not quite believe she was there.

Anne pulled him towards the bed. He began to kiss her neck and shoulders before moving with a slippery insistence down to her breasts. She could feel the edge of his teeth scratching against her nipples. She noticed that the top of Marcus’s scalp was dry and flaky and that spores of dead skin were nestled along his parting. A wave of nausea rose up from her stomach and she shut her eyes, but she found that she could still smell him: a pungent steam of unwashed shirt collars and fried food.

He felt bony and insubstantial against her and his skinny arms were pitted with raised brown moles. He had none of Charles’s strength or power and Anne found she was repelled by his constant fondling of her. It was as though he had read a manual and was executing each instruction to the letter, expecting her to moan in grateful surrender, but instead she simply wanted him to take her, as roughly as he could. She wanted it to be swift and emotionless, a vicious transaction that gave them both a physical release and nothing more. She wanted him to be callous towards her, to dominate her, to pin back her arms and force her into submission. She wanted to be punished and for it to hurt.

But Marcus was too soft. When he finally pushed his penis into her, she could barely feel it inside. He slid in and out, in and out and his eyes were half-closed in an approximation of bliss. His groaning got louder and more rhythmic.

‘Anne,’ he said hopelessly through gritted teeth. ‘Oh Anne.’

She gripped on to his back with her fingernails and wound her legs round his buttocks to try and bring him closer, to crush his body against her hip bones, to flatten herself underneath his weight, but however much she tried she couldn’t feel anything. After a few seconds, he gasped and rolled off her, the thin stream of his semen trickling out of her on to the bedspread.

Anne got up and went to the bathroom. She wiped between her legs with a towel and washed her hands. She walked back into the bedroom, gathered up her clothes and wordlessly got dressed. Marcus was staring at her, one bent arm resting against his forehead, a light sheen of sweat covering his thick chest hair.

‘Will I see you again?’

Anne laughed sharply. ‘Of course you will.’

‘When?’

She looked at him coldly. ‘I’m sure the Trenemans will be having a lunch party soon.’

Marcus flinched but he did not move. ‘Why do you stay with him, Anne?’ he asked, his voice laced with anger.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘With Charles,’ Marcus said, and she saw that his eyes were narrow and black. ‘Everyone knows he’s fucked half the street.’

Anne did not react. She ran her hands through her hair, carefully tucking the stray strands behind her ears. She put on her jacket and retrieved her handbag from the floor. She got out her lipstick and unscrewed the top and applied a glossy coat of pale red to her mouth. She smiled, as if to try it out.

‘Thank you, Marcus,’ she said. She left the room with his eyes still following and closed the door with a soft thud behind her.

PART II

Charlotte

For a brief period in her early twenties, Charlotte had been to see a psychotherapist She was called Roberta Mill and her offices were on the first floor of a nondescript terraced house in Queen’s Park, surrounded by off-licences and dingy newsagents. Roberta Mill (Charlotte never referred to her by her first name alone, even in the privacy of her own thoughts) had been recommended by a friend and was an inscrutable woman of indistinct age. She had shoulder-length, rough blonde-brown hair that looked as though it would be brittle to the touch. Her eyes drooped at the corners, as if weighed down by invisible, tiny weights. She wore loose-fitting velvet clothes, capacious skirts and sensible shoes that looked vaguely medical.

Every time that Charlotte went to see her, she found herself increasingly desperate for Roberta Mill to like her, but the therapist seemed impervious to any sort of charm. The most uneasy moment of every session came at the very beginning – Roberta Mill would come downstairs to open the front door; she would say hello and smile, casting her eyes over Charlotte as if evaluating her, and then she would say nothing more for several minutes. They would walk up the staircase in a silence that felt desperately uneasy. Charlotte would try to make conversation – banal, polite comments about the weather or the traffic or something to lift the atmosphere – and Roberta Mill would remain utterly wordless with an enigmatic smile fixed in place.

Inside the small consulting room, Charlotte perched on a two-person Ikea sofa (she recognised it as being from that season’s ‘Fjord’ range) and Roberta Mill seated herself in the single armchair opposite and then she would simply look at her until Charlotte felt like speaking. It took several weeks to get used to but Charlotte came to value Roberta Mill’s silence. In a funny sort of way, it made her feel safe, as if she did not need to make the effort to charm, as if she were not being judged on her likeability or her small talk, but was simply being given the space to speak freely about whatever came to mind.

But still, she wanted Roberta Mill to like her. She became obsessed with it. Any insignificant personal detail that the counsellor let slip into the conversation was filed away in Charlotte’s memory. Once, when Charlotte had said she wanted to get a cat, Roberta Mill had responded with an approving, ‘Cats are very nice animals to have’, and Charlotte was thrilled when she realised it was one of the most intimate confessions she had ever made. Charlotte began to depend on Roberta Mill’s good opinion in exactly the same way she used to feel about teachers at school. She wanted them to admire her, to praise her cleverness, but also to think she was special: able to pick things up quickly and apply her intelligence well. The unintended consequence of this was that Charlotte was never fully honest in her therapy sessions. The need to remain in control, to prove that she was getting better, was paramount. She never told her exactly what happened with Charles because, bizarrely, she didn’t want Roberta Mill to think badly of her father.

After twelve weeks, Roberta Mill said confidently that she thought Charlotte had ‘worked very hard’ and was, effectively, cured.

Yet there was one exchange that stuck in Charlotte’s mind. They had been talking about the usual things – family, work, repressed emotion – and for some reason, Charlotte had mentioned that her eczema was particularly bad at the moment.

‘Why do you think that is?’ asked Roberta Mill, head slanted to one side, her green-grey eyes searching Charlotte’s face for reaction.

‘I suppose it’s stress-related.’

There was a long silence. Finally, when it was clear Charlotte was not going to say anything more, Roberta Mill asked, ‘When did you first get eczema?’

‘When I was about eleven or twelve, I think.’

‘And what was happening in your life around that time?’

Charlotte thought back, and suddenly, her mind was crowded with memories of the car, her father, the tick-tick-tick of the indicator, the Lego-brick houses, the science test she was going to be late for, the sight of her mother through the windscreen, the clothes scattered across the road, and then the running, running, running without knowing where she was going. She gulped and felt the wet tingle of tears push against the back of her eyes. She had never before made the obvious connection between her eczema and everything that had been going on. Something about this made her incredibly sad.