Another Country (7 page)

Chapter 11

‘Can we take it a bit shorter?'

The stylist put down the hand mirror. She looked annoyed. ‘Shorter than that?'

‘Yeah, a bit, yeah.'

‘If I take it shorter it won't look
feminine
.' She seemed exasperated. This was the last appointment; Thursday nights there was a special offer.

‘I want it shorter,' Leela said.

‘I'll have to use clippers.'

‘Fine.'

No one else was left in the salon. Its chrome fittings glinted in the night. The steam that lingered smelled vanilla, like hairspray, or teen perfume. Leela went into the cold, defiant but suspecting once again she'd done herself a bad turn.

She stood outside Amy's door ringing the bell and ignoring the waiters who came out of the Indian restaurant downstairs to smoke.

‘Not there, ah?' said the waiter on the doorstep of the Bombay Tandoori.

‘She is there,' Leela mumbled. ‘We arranged. She – I –'

There was a heavy flurry down the stairs. The door shot open.

‘Sorry! Come up. I just – aw!' Amy hugged Leela.

The waiter looked on with interest. The rain carried on falling, cold and sharp, just enough to make Leela's neck glow.

‘Come in, come in, sorry, I was just on the phone to Mum.'

Leela followed as she ran up the stairs. At her door, Amy turned. ‘Oh my god, your hair! Come inside. I'll get the kettle on.'

Leela sat on the broken futon and the rain rained. What if there were floods, and she had to stay here forever? She had a sudden urge to text Richard. She typed, ‘Hi sweetie', then dropped the phone when Amy came back in.

‘Do you hate it?'

‘Well, gosh! It's short, isn't it? But it's cool! Very cool!' ‘Cool' was a word Amy used to denote things that were foreign to her. She now used another. ‘It looks really trendy.' She peered at Leela. ‘It's very short, isn't it?'

Leela knelt on the futon so she could see herself in the mirror. She pushed her hair around. ‘Do I look like a 1980s footballer?'

‘No! Don't be silly. You look lovely. It's just –' Amy's eyes narrowed, and she darted back into the tiny kitchen to hasten out the tea bags, slop the tea, put in skimmed milk, and bring out the mugs.

‘Can I have sugar?' Leela asked accusingly.

‘Oh shit, sorry.' Amy went back into the kitchen and returned with an aged packet of caster sugar and a spoon. ‘Here.' She plonked it next to Leela and turned up the music. She sang along, then turned it down, lit some candles, and sat next to Leela.

‘It's just –?'

‘It's just probably a good idea to, to, definitely wear make-up. And, you know, more skirts and stuff. Which you're doing anyway! You dress so much better than you did. What made you do it?'

Leela pushed bits of hair around to see if there were ways of looking more mysterious, less startled. ‘I don't know. I'd been thinking about it. I thought it might feel lighter, it'd be fresh. Why not?'

‘Do you think Richard'll like it?'

Leela sat down. ‘Yeah,' she said. She caressed the near-shaven back of her head, and felt uneasy.

At some point in the night, Richard joined her in his bed; his cold hands and feet crept towards her legs. She flinched and withdrew. He chuckled and persisted.

‘What time is it? Stop it, your hands are freezing.'

‘I don't know, about two. We had to work late. The presentation's done though.'

He fell asleep soon. Leela lay watching a parallelogram of light, ugly, indifferent, from the road. Slowly it moved across the ceiling. She felt helpless against the threat of loneliness, and replayed part of her conversation with Amy.

The morning was both more and less frightening. Grey light came under the blinds; she made out the comforting shape of the large duvet, but the day was about to begin. She woke with Richard's hard-on tucked between her legs from behind. He sighed, and rocked closer as though to jog her memory. Leela tried to edge away. She craned her neck to look at the clock on the bedside table, but couldn't see it for his head.

‘What time is it?'

‘Come here.'

‘I don't know if I –' The duvet, the room depressed her, but she would have liked to stay in bed for a long time, and get up after he'd left, as on days when the agency had no work for her and she sat in the flat, using the internet, reading, or writing things on pieces of printer paper. By mid-morning, all traces of him gone, she could wash up, tidy, then enjoy a sullen complicity with the furniture, and the blush-coloured carpet.

His fingers rooted about between her legs.

‘Your nails –'

‘Sorry sweetie, I'll trim them today.'

She tried not to think of the infection she'd had, which never showed up in tests, but reappeared to make her sore. She'd begun to simulate orgasms a while ago, she'd forgotten why; now she worried she couldn't remember how to come normally.

‘I'm really turned on,' he said.

‘Do you want me to go down on you?'

‘Do you want to?'

‘I can.'

‘Not if you don't want to.'

‘I want to.' She wanted to pretend the morning hadn't yet happened. She snaked under the duvet towards his crotch, and he began to masturbate and to palpate one of her breasts, eyes closed, while she stuck out her tongue. His fist accelerated; she moved back so it wouldn't hit her nose. Underneath the duvet, the air was warm and humid, a strange alternative world. When he came it was salty and viscous.

She resurfaced. He put an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. ‘That was lovely.'

‘Did you smoke yesterday?'

‘Only half a sneaky fag outside the office. Could you smell it?'

‘You taste different.'

She lay against the pillow, the padding of her sleep gone.

‘I've got to have a shower, sweetie.' He got up, mock-groaning, and peeked through the blinds. ‘Ugh, still raining.'

She watched him walk, tall, hairy, thin, out of the bedroom. Suddenly his head reappeared. ‘Jesus. What have you done to your hair?'

Leela watched his expression. ‘I cut it.'

‘Yesterday?' He came closer.

She turned to show him the nape. ‘I like the back.'

‘The back's nice.' He stood, irresolute and naked, a towel in his hand.

‘It's my hair.'

‘It makes your shoulders look nice,' he said. ‘I've got to get ready.'

Leela, unbreakfasted, opened her bag. Yes. Lurking at the bottom, with a couple of wrapped tampons and one glove, was a slim dark chocolate wrapped in cellophane. ‘Merci,' said the label in faux-cute serif font. Richard's ex-girlfriend had left them for him on a visit. Leela had mocked the name; she ate the chocolates with cannibalistic satisfaction when she was hungry, which was often. Richard ate irregularly, though he ate well, and his fridge was full of things Leela didn't consider food, like smoked cheese and salami.

The phone call came when she was returning from the park at the end of her lunch hour.

‘Hi sweetie!'

‘Hi sweetie,' he responded. ‘Listen, I've had an email from Dad.'

She took the news well, stopped in the doorway of a shop, and had to move aside when young men came out with cigarettes and bottles of Lucozade. Friday, the end of the week.

‘When's he here? How many days?'

Richard's father lived in Germany. He owned the flat where his son and, unofficially, Leela lived. He would be coming to London on work the following afternoon, and staying for a few days. Leela would have to gather her things and take them back to her house.

She didn't say, ‘Are you going to tell him about me?'

Richard had a strange relationship with his father. Typically, when he and Leela fought about his not having disclosed Leela's existence, he would say, ‘I'm not even that close to him. There are a lot of things I don't tell him.'

But Leela suspected he enjoyed the time away from her and with his father, out to nice dinners and strolling around exhibitions. She had more or less moved in with him, and abandoned the daily carrying of a change of clothes, toothbrush, hairbrush etc with her to work, then out, then back to his house. She wanted to be settled; she didn't want to have to think so often about the small objects that supported her life.

In the afternoon, while the rest of the office grew skittish after a Friday lunch in the pub and sent round droll email forwards, she brooded on those objects. Her hairdryer. Her underwear. Socks, tights, clothes, superannuated make-up, shoes, trainers, a disposable camera that wasn't yet ready to be disposed of. She dreamed of having few possessions. But it would be the usual degrading scramble of things stuffed in supermarket plastic bags, and Richard, probably, left holding out to her a pair of knickers that had fallen from one of them.

‘Come home and I'll cook you a nice dinner tonight,' he said at the end of the call.

‘It's not my fucking home, is it.'

She left work, disregarding the injunctions from her temporary colleagues to have a good weekend. Was a weekend not merely an opportunity to have long, unfurling arguments and dilatory sex; to spend a long time apologising for things one had said, and a shorter time in the warmth of apparent forgiveness?

On the tube, she was distracted by the profusion of stuff. She tried to read the magazine she'd bought, and scanned the pictures of things with alluring, slightly threatening legends: Pointy-toed boots, Dune, £49.99. Should she wear different nail polish? Change her eye make-up?

She surfed, too, the body parts around her. One day, in bed, Richard had said that when he looked at women it wasn't in the way she had feared. Or rather, that her fears weren't sufficiently comprehensive. ‘It's not necessarily just someone who looks really beautiful,' he said. ‘Half the time, I'm looking at their clothes, or how they've put together a look.'

‘But not all the time.'

He'd giggled, perhaps at his own audacity. ‘When you look in a more sexual way, I suppose there's an element of looking at individual body parts. Sometimes you see a great arse, or a nice pair of breasts. You're not really looking at the person as a whole.'