Exposure Read online

  He had been left a whole box of cufflinks by his maternal grandfather and one day, to please his mother whom he was meeting for lunch, he had worn a pair to work. With an uncharacteristic sense of self-parody, Luke had noticed that, along with his public-school accent and floppy hair, the cufflinks conveyed to his colleagues a note of patrician authority, which did him no harm at all.

  When he walked out for his sandwich at lunchtime he looked up at the icy blue sky over Hoxton. The wind pulled his trouser legs taut round his ankles and tugged his hair back straight. The weather was abrasive, at odds with his reflective frame of mind. Movements around him seemed staged, menacingly interconnected. A can of the drink he was about to buy bounced in the gutter beside him. A woman rushed out into the road and a hairbrush fell out of her handbag; as she bent down to get it a motorbike passed, whipping up her long hair, which caught the eye of a window-cleaner, who dropped his sponge. Behind the soapy glass, a row of blowup sex dolls mouthed their obscene 'O' and just as Luke wondered what on earth this had to do with selling neat racks of footwear, someone threw a cigarette butt on to the pavement—at the exact moment he lowered his new shoe. He crushed it out.

  When had life started feeling like this, like a steady-cam shot with him as the walking figure?

  He sat down under a tree in a nearby square with his can of Lilt and his smoked-duck wrap. He was not hungry: he had bought his lunch out of habit, standing numbly in the line at the deli, distantly reassured by the familiar rows of sandwiches and cartons of juice, by the bright signs asserting the magic words 'healthy' and 'fresh' to some half-dormant part of his consciousness. A crisps packet skimmed across the grass and was caught against the railings. He put the lunch in his shoulder-bag and lit a cigarette.

  What had begun as an odd game had become a preoccupation with how easily he might have altered the story of his life. His mind ticked over the endless range of improbabilities, the minute coincidences, that had brought his current existence into being. He had found out about the company he worked for from an ad in a newspaper that someone had left on the tube. Who? And hadn't he been on the wrong tube, drunk, on his way from one party to another? He had folded the page into his pocket. Hadn't he met a girl that night and slept with her? What was her name? He had left his jacket at her flat—and had to go back for it because of the ad, pretending he had also forgotten to ask for her phone number.

  She didn't believe him about the number, he remembered. He had done a big, broad smile at her and asked her for it and she had pulled her dressing-gown round her very tightly and blushed. She handed the jacket to him on the doorstep and scribbled the number in tiny handwriting on a piece of notepaper with 'THINGS TO DO TODAY!!' printed at the top. He remembered the smell of toast behind her, the traffic rushing by behind his back as she wrote.

  What was her name? He could recall oddly pendulous breasts ... but not her name.

  And into this void went the missed opportunity of meeting Arianne.

  Was it TV that made you think the world was smaller than it was? He had worked in advertising for six years now and he was sure he ought to know better. He would never see Arianne again, no matter how similar their bio-active yoghurt purchases or their taste in music, no matter how inclusive 'youth culture' seemed to be in magazines or cable documentaries about twenty-somethings.

  His mobile phone was going in his pocket and he knew it would be Lucy. Everything about his relationship with her had been consciously planned. It was formulaic, designed to challenge the terrible sensation he was scarcely allowing himself to feel, even now. What was the sensation, exactly? It came between heartbeats; it was like clicking on the wrong link, being launched involuntarily towards web addresses you hadn't typed in, pop-ups bursting on to the screen advertising humiliating products that must yet appeal to someone (but who? Where?), telltale cookies accumulating faster than you could press 'Escape', 'Escape', 'Escape'...

  He and Lucy had been introduced at a dinner party as two nice-looking single people, aged twenty-six. They were a good match. He diverted her call.

  Luke felt breathless. He looked around at the offices and the people he could see through the lit windows, all doing their jobs. Mothers, fathers, boyfriends, wives. Betrayals, longings, grief, pride, heartbreak, ambition. Two girls passed by eating chips from the same bag. The smell of vinegar made him salivate.

  'What—like Buddhism, you mean?' one of them said.

  He felt crushed by detail, by the equal importance of other people's lives and the contingency of all his accomplishments. His heart went fast as he tried to think of an aspect of his life that existed independently of his blind faith in it.

  It occurred to him that he could just not go back to work—ever. And would it matter to the stars in his gap-year shots of Tanzania? Would it disturb for one minute the thick-set horses in his book on the Mongolian planes?

  Worse than the content of all these thoughts, though, was the suspicion that, as ever, he was the last person to have them. He had a desire to cover his ears—as if people were laughing at him for his slowness—but he lowered his arms in time and lit another cigarette.

  It was just three weeks later that he got into his friend Ludo's car and discovered Arianne on the back seat. Ludo had said he was going for a drink with a few friends and that his 'mad cousin' would be there.

  Ludo's family was a sophisticated mess, spread out in the most picturesque-sounding cities in Europe. Luke had imagined a Eurotrashy cousin called Philippe or Sasha, who smoked Gauloises Légères; someone with a manicure, a ski-tan, a cashmere jumper. But instead there was Arianne.

  She had bleached her hair blonde. She slouched sulkily in a cloud of honey and jasmine scent, her worn-denim-clad knees resting on the back of the driver's seat. She moved them over a little to give Luke room.

  'Cheers,' he said.

  'Cheers'? He never said 'cheers'. It was a depressing, flat beer and stale smoke word. Darts competitions and rain. Cheers? That was not him. It was not even anyone he knew.

  They set off and he thought about introducing himself. What was called for was an ordinary exchange. He must simply tell her his name and ask her what hers was. This was what people did—ordinarily. But how could it be an ordinary exchange when he already knew her name?

  Arianne ... Just the name filled him with dreams, with adolescent nostalgia. There in his mind were all the unattainable French girls of his early teens. Unchanged in his imagination, they sprawled out like kittens on the white beaches of Cap d'Antibes; they wriggled off their bikini straps and flipped expertly on to their fronts. He remembered the agony of watching them flip-flopping at high speed through the beach bar where he languished podgily with his bottle of Coke. They had an edible smell of coconut oil and you wanted to lick it off, but you knew they would smack or scratch you if you tried. They cried out in delectable fury, ' Oui, j'arrive! J'arrive!' to friends, who waved by the pedaloes a little way off.

  Arianne was a holiday name, which made his mouth water for the taste of pear juice and croissants, for the flavour of every breakfast he had ever sleepily consumed on sand-dusted hotel terraces while his parents consulted maps. His memory had preserved a deep blue sea just beyond the edge of a terrace, blinding white tables chequering a lawn, a sense of complete faith in the world.

  He watched Arianne's face out of the corner of his right eye. She was busy sending a text message and paid him no attention. Again, he felt condemned to invisibility as he had in the bar. And again he let himself enjoy it, like a peeping Tom—or a plump boy at the beach club. It was so odd to return to this adolescent role! Particularly given that now, of course, he could get any girl he wanted.

  Arianne had milky-coffee-coloured skin, and the new blonde hair looked almost metallic against it. It had been cut in a 1920s-style bob and it swung into her face as they turned a corner. She pushed a supernaturally gleaming strand behind her ear. In profile her mouth protruded, forming a sharp little curve at the top of her lips; her upturned nose seemed
gently to echo the shape. But then, as if to save her face from bland, girlish prettiness, the jaw was strong—almost masculine. She had long, muscular legs; to Luke they suggested sport, tennis matches in the sunshine on red clay courts in southern Italy. He saw lemon trees, he heard cicadas. He could imagine her devastating serve.

  His mind was full of faraway pictures as he sat there beside her in the car.

  It was not a precise, photographable beauty. In fact, it was brought together by strength of personality. Later it would seem to Luke that her face was a manifestation of her mind, or rather that an artist had wanted to depict the polarities at war within it and had set the strong jaw and the little girl's nose against each other. She gave over her whole physiognomy to whatever emotion she was feeling. At that moment it was to abject exasperation, which increased with each text message she received. Luke decided her impatience had a distinctly sexual quality—and then wondered guiltily if he might be imagining it.

  He decided to wait until she was free to introduce himself. He looked out of the window and saw his friend Jessica waving outside South Kensington tube station. Ludo pulled up and she got into the front beside him.

  Jessica was a friend of theirs from university and Luke was always glad to see her. She had been a sort of big-sister figure when the three of them lived together in their second and third years, even though she was actually the same age. She had prepared meals for them, since Luke had always been cooked for and Ludo had always eaten out or ordered in, neither was much use in the kitchen, and they consumed her miraculous shepherd's pies and pasta bakes like starving children. They had also left her in charge of all the bills, merely scrawling cheques absentmindedly when she asked for them. Both he and Ludo felt embarrassed and confused by all this when they remembered it. Luke had found out recently that Jessica had been working secretly at a Pizza Hut in a nearby town to supplement her student grant and pay the bills. Her two flatmates, on the other hand, had idled away their three years in hangovers and come-downs, leaving on lights and hot water and blow-heaters, carelessly squandering their parents' money.

  Jessica leant right back between the seats and kissed Arianne, whom she had obviously met before, then gave Luke a big hug. She was one of those people who always insisted on proper hugs and kisses, even if it meant climbing over a restaurant table. Her hair smelt cold and Christmassy; it felt icy against Luke's face. She smiled at him. 'Are you well, sweetheart?' He nodded and smiled back, and she began to adjust the car stereo, looking for a song she liked while she waited for the lighter to pop out. She glanced at Arianne in the vanity mirror. 'Are you still texting? She was texting all last night. Have you had a break?'

  'Done it,' Arianne said. 'Finished. I shall never send another text message ever, ever, ever again.' She dropped the phone casually into her handbag. Arianne was fond of absolute statements.

  They set off again and Luke felt increasingly awkward. They turned corners fast and three times his leg almost touched hers as he slid around on the seat. Why did Ludo not say anything? Suddenly he felt exasperated by his friend, who was just sitting there, steering with his knees, singing along to David Bowie with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It was absurd. It was Ludo's job to introduce them.

  Luke clenched his fist and turned towards Arianne, wearing his best smile. Unfortunately, though, before he could say anything, a gun-metal blue jeep came out of a side street on to the King's Road and slammed into the passenger side of the car.

  The road was icy and they spun a hundred and eighty degrees through the bright, cold air and smashed into a tree.

  The first hit had taken them all by surprise, but the second came with a calm inevitability. The tree trunk loomed larger and larger in the side window until it filled the view. It felt like dancing, as if London itself had swung them out, out, out—and then snatched them back in again from the other side.

  The side windows cracked on impact. And then came the gentle shower of glass on the pavement, the standstill, the car creaking in its new shape, and the two girls crying quietly. There was a strange, starlit quiet as the scene took shape around them. A few passers-by came up and stared, dumb and curious as cattle.

  If it hadn't been for that tree, they would have gone right through the window of the Indian restaurant. The winter sun bounced off the huge pane of glass in front of all the tables. It remained intact; a sparkling miracle. They were all alive.

  And that was how, twenty minutes later, the incredible girl came to be crying in Luke's arms in the back of an ambulance—before he had even told her his name.

  Arianne didn't have a French accent any more. Luke discovered later that it came and went according to her mood. Her mother was French, but Arianne had only ever been to France on holiday herself. She wanted to be an actress and she expected acceptance of this and other small insincerities as part of her vibrant performance. In fact, acceptance was not enough: she found it hard to forgive the sin of literal-mindedness in any of her friends.

  Thankfully, none of them was seriously injured. The other driver was unhurt and had given Ludo his details, looking guilty and afraid. A gaudy blonde girlfriend came to collect him. She eyed the dishevelled opposition, tightening her fuchsia lips, anticipating litigation.

  Ludo and Luke had mild whiplash and Jessica, whose whole weight had been caught by her seatbelt as they spun towards the tree, had bruised her hip badly. Arianne had broken two bones in her foot. It struck Luke that she barely complained about the pain. She merely referred to the shock of what had happened as if it had been full of sinister import—like a terrible noise in an empty house at night.

  Arianne had a deep-rooted pessimism to which her imagination gave lurid expression. It was not uncommon to see her wince—while she brushed her hair or put on her clothes—at the potential injuries and betrayals that ran through her mind. She sensed a forest fire of disaster raging just over the horizon, and if she came too close to it her reaction was always to fall asleep, as if she had been drugged by the smoke.

  They spent the whole afternoon in the hospital, having X-rays and waiting for the promised doctor to come and see them after the initial examination and filling in of forms. After a while they were asked to wait in a cubicle. They felt demoted, ushered offstage on their big day, but there was no protest in them. They had waited so long that nurses had ceased to be a source of information and passed them by holding peculiar objects, entirely without significance. Arianne slept peacefully on the trolley while the others sat on plastic chairs. They were too tired to relive the accident any more so they stopped talking and listened to the comings and goings of other patients. It was with an increasing sense of contamination that they realized this was a world of bad luck that usually they had no cause to acknowledge.

  Stories could be pieced together around them. The woman in the cubicle next to theirs had somehow spilt a kettle of boiling water over her neck and chest. Her husband refused to leave her alone with the nurse. 'We'd just like to ask her a few questions, Mr McPherson,' the nurse repeated. 'That's all.'

  'What questions? There are no questions which I can't answer,' Mr McPherson said.

  Opposite them an old woman lay on a trolley and a young man held her hand. She slept placidly, her small head sunk deep in the pillows. Every so often, he would say, 'Mum? Mum?' with a note of panic in his voice. The old woman would smile and raise her free hand as if she was too tired to answer him in words. And the man would rub his eyes under his glasses as if he was trying to wake up. Up and down the hallway, two children wearing surgical masks ran back and forth squeaking, 'Peow! Peow!' at each other, their fingers pointed like guns.

  The doctor was only a year or so older than they were. Her name was Dr Bandari. She gave them prescriptions for painkillers and told them to go to the hospital dispensary. She said, 'Look, you really shouldn't drink with these,' and smiled. She wore the Muslim hijab and they were glad to escape from her purity, from the correct assumptions she seemed to be making about their lives. />
  When they got out on to the street, the traffic looked fast and dangerous. The darkness had gathered itself without their knowledge while they sat in the windowless hospital, and the headlights and glaring shop windows were threatening. They felt a need to stay together. They were connected by an important experience and were not yet ready to allow others in.

  'Lets go back to my place,' Luke suggested.

  'Cool. Perfect, actually,' Ludo said. 'You've got DVDs and shit. We can chill out there.'

  'Yeah, we'll hide out.'

  'Exactly. We won't even answer our phones,' Jessica said.

  This made sense to all of them. They hailed a cab.

  Luke was glad he had suggested they go to his place. He wanted Arianne to see his flat. He wanted her to take in the way it looked, what it said about him. His father had given him and Sophie a hundred thousand pounds each to start themselves off and he had bought his first place at twenty-two. He had sold it for a good profit in the London housing boom and put everything into this new one. It was in Notting Hill. It was open-plan. You had a power-shower then walked serenely, barefoot, across the polished wood floor. Your guests drank martinis on the suede sofa. That was the look. He had recently had a thirty-two-inch plasma-screen TV delivered—one of the white ones, which were a limited edition, if she cared about that kind of thing. Irritatingly, most girls didn't and he knew Lucy faked it, saying obvious things, like, 'Oooh. Is it surround sound?' which of course it bloody was.

  In the taxi on the way there, they drove past Ludo's car. It was more wrecked than they had realized. The bonnet was crushed and the passenger side was buckled in just between the front and the back seat; it had missed Jessica and Luke by inches. They both squinted, picturing their body shapes on either side of the dent, experiencing a completely abstracted form of pain, the idea of pain. Someone had put a bunch of flowers on the roof, assuming everyone had been killed.