Exposure Page 9

  Even so, his upbringing told him he ought to say something! He knew he ought to halt proceedings because she was a girl, because being a girl meant you felt things in special ways and he really ought to tell her that they needn't rush into anything if she wasn't sure—if she didn't know him well enough, which of course she didn't.

  But he was terrified that this might really stop her taking off her knickers. So he said nothing—except her name a few times—and in due course she threw the knickers over a photograph of his rowing four (who were grinning victoriously after the school championships) saying, 'Lucky boys!' and giggling.

  And then, with a serious expression, she wriggled away from him up the bed and lay back against the pillows. She observed him anxiously as if she was wondering what was meant to happen next and was afraid that he was going to show her. He clambered after her, grabbing her ankle to hold her still, concerned that if she did tell him to stop now, he would actually have a heart-attack from the frustration. But she let him continue and when he was safely inside her he felt dangerous and exceptional. Or was it desperate and ordinary? It was strangely impossible to say which, but it didn't seem to matter very much. In fact, nothing mattered at all, as long as he was able to match the violent movement of her hips and to stop the bed frame collapsing, without for a moment suggesting that he ever, ever wanted her to stop.

  Anticipating him at the vital moment (with what seemed later to have been a supernatural sense of timing), she put her hand over his mouth to prevent him waking the others. He found himself licking her fingers like a grateful dog.

  Chapter 5

  When they woke up the others had already left. Ludo and Jessica had obviously pieced together a simple story and closed the door quietly behind them. It was around eleven on Saturday morning. Luke and Arianne lay staring at each other on the pillows.

  'Don't go back today,' Luke said, not knowing where 'back' was. 'Do you have to?' She smiled and said no, she didn't have to go anywhere. She turned her back to him, and moved in against him wrapping his arm over her, covering his hand with kisses.

  Why did he feel such intense joy? He was smiling into her hair. Grinning into that shiny, white-blonde bob. She was beautiful, of course, but it was far more than that. He had never met anyone before who seemed to hum with that high voltage of personality, that supercharge of stored passions. She made him feel he was on the verge of something incredibly exciting. Life had been a dark plain, barely visible against a black sky and Arianne was the impending flash of lightning.

  Until Sunday evening, they did nothing but sleep and wake and make love again. They were no more than the sum total of their mouths and hands, their lust, hunger, thirst. Lust came before everything else, though. A few times they felt hungry and ordered food. But having thrown coins and notes at the delivery boy and torn open the boxes frantically, they left it almost untouched. It was as if their senses were already promised elsewhere, to a physical desire that left them laughing at its excesses. It left them prey to comical impulses—to biting a wrist as it reached out for a bottle of water; to appetites so sudden that lamps were knocked off tables and upended glasses sent ice skidding across the floor.

  They put on clothes for the first time when Ludo dropped by on the Sunday evening, curious to have heard that Arianne was still there. 'Hello, you,' he said, in his camp, cynical voice, when she opened the door. 'This is an interesting development, isn't it?'

  When the buzzer went Luke had gone into the kitchen to get drinks. A small part of him knew that what he was really doing was hiding. He dreaded seeing his friend laugh at the idea of him and Arianne together. Ludo—everyone, probably—would think he was just old Lulu: reliable, but not bright or sophisticated enough for a girl like her. He needed to collect himself for a performance of virile indifference. He also felt guilty—as if he had hurt Ludo personally—and was not sure why.

  He wondered if he was just vulnerable from physical exhaustion and lack of sleep. As he took out three glasses, he remembered having jet-lag after watching a rugby Test match in Australia a few years back and how difficult it had been to talk to his parents over dinner when he got home. The food had tasted bizarre and alien, somehow. Onions were like plastic, green beans squeaked like rubber against his teeth. He felt just as disoriented now.

  He and Ludo hugged without making eye-contact and Arianne opened the bottle of wine. Luke sipped his, but it was like drinking wine at that strange dinner and he put it down again. He pushed his fingers into the back of Arianne's jeans, letting them sit against the soft skin, which was still hot and flushed from sex, feeling an ache in the palm of his hand to touch more of her. Her body was the only real thing in the room.

  'So I basically wanted to go to Blue Monkey, but they were all, like, "Come to Noise, Bas is DJ-ing, Bas is DJ-ing",' Ludo said, rolling his eyes. 'So there was this huge mission out there—four taxis—and it was really pretty crap. Not crap, but you know—just one of those nothing nights.'

  'Nothing nights,' Arianne repeated. 'Was Bas rude about me?'

  'No. Why? Oh, God, I'd forgotten all about that. No, he was perfectly dignified. Anyway, he was busy. We said hi. He's pretty good, isn't he? But— fuck —it's like you spend so much of the evening deciding where to go you haven't got it in you to enjoy yourself when you get there. Texting, phoning, listening to fucking whiny voicemail from Saskia: "Ludo, man, where are you? Have you got any coke because I'm a silly tart and I can't get anything done without you." You know what she's fucking like. Devastatingly bovine. God, I think I danced, like, twice, maybe. Actually, I think I might still have concussion. I can't believe I let you all talk me out of staying at the hospital for observation. I should probably be on a ward and shit. With, like, monitors on me.'

  While she and Ludo talked, Luke remembered visiting the little gallery his aunt Suzannah had run for a while. He must have been about seven because he had been carrying a cap, which was part of his pre-prep-school uniform. He clearly recalled standing there in his duffel coat, in an agony of frustrated sensuality, beside a marble sculpture he had been told not to touch. The sculpture had been polished to smooth perfection; it was curved and heavy—as if explicitly to please the hand. But his mother had caught his wrist as it reached out.

  What was the point of making things so lovely for touching if you were just going to stop anyone doing it, he had wanted to know. He had wanted to know it very much and right that minute—even if Aunt Suzannah was crying. (She was always crying, after all.) But his mother just shook her head firmly and said there were yummy biscuits in the car if he was good, but otherwise not. Adults had once been full of weird formulas like this.

  Luke smiled privately on the sofa. He felt certain that Arianne was helping him return to lost truths about himself.

  At that moment she laughed buoyantly at some nonsense of Ludo's and wriggled back against Luke's fingers, catching them behind the elastic of her knickers. Her face was perfectly composed and he glanced at his unsuspecting friend and was exhilarated by her dishonesty.

  But this feeling was soon followed by deep apprehension. He was, after all, in the presence of an aspiring actress and, unlike Lucy, she could cover up whatever she was feeling. With Lucy there were tears, there were flushed cheeks in spite of her efforts to appear calm—and if anyone had faked things, it had always been him, pretending he hadn't noticed so they could just get on with it and have dinner, have sex and go to sleep.

  His deceptiveness had always been pragmatic. But for Arianne it seemed to have become a pleasure in itself. She concealed, but then she went further than this, as if for the sheer fun of it, simulating the exact opposite of whatever she was feeling. When he had reason to know this was the case, her talent astonished and frightened Luke. At times he sat beside her and it was as if she had crept out of the room, stifling giggles with her hand, leaving a counterfeit girl in her place.

  Actresses were dangerous. Even Arianne's arms and legs could act: her fingers would tap in turn against her thumb
, to imply consideration of what she had already decided; her legs would stretch out nonchalantly while her heart contracted with rage; she could do 'person daydreaming out of window' when she was breathless with anticipation, or have her shoulders and neck wilt in lily-like despair at some practical concern she knew Luke would soon disregard.

  Much later, Luke came to suspect she could even tell lies in sleep. He listened to her nestle and sigh with soft femininity, and wondered what polemical resolve this obscured.

  When Ludo left, she leant back against the door and pushed it shut with her bottom. Luke pulled her jeans down, laughing at the wonderful ripple of buttons. Inanimate objects were drawn irresistibly into the music of their long afternoons: the mattress thumped under the fall of their joint weight, the bed legs scraped on the wooden floor, the headboard high-fived the wall, and the water splashed joyously out of the bath and giggled all over the tiles.

  Arianne's strong right leg kicked off her jeans and then she leant down, saying, 'Careful, careful of my bad foot, silly,' over Luke's hurrying fingers. She stood there in her T-shirt—the word 'genetic' in faded yellow letters across her breasts—and then he took that off too. All this before they had even heard the outer door bang closed and Ludo walking down the steps!

  Arianne had simply assumed she would move in. Even the assumption was communicated obliquely, by hints too subtle or organic to single out afterwards. Luke just realized he had arrived at a conclusion—and because he adored it, he found no need to ask questions.

  'Living together' had been an issue between himself and Lucy for months now. Her poignantly restrained statements had made him wince: the pink toothbrush she had placed neatly beside his, the bottle of cleanser in the cupboard a discreet but purposeful one inch in front of his razors. Somehow none of her tactics had worked.

  But Arianne's sense of fate was consistently weightier than that of anyone else with whom she came into contact: it heavied outsiders into mystified passivity. To Luke, this passivity was just one more mode of sensual abandonment, closely related to the fall of his eyelids when her fingers undid his belt.

  Quietly, quietly, he removed all the little signs of Lucy from around the flat, storing them all in a plastic bag under the sink, which seemed slightly less appalling than throwing them out. He was relieved to hide them away—it was as if they were loud, or hot, or dazzling. He found a novel called Oh, Serena!, a bottle of pink nail varnish, a rare photo of himself and Lucy with his mother in which, oddly, he was also holding a camera and squinting into the sun. He found a pale blue hairband by the kettle. He read the last lines of the novel:

  'Well, that's lucky, isn't it?' Gus said. 'Because I've got a plane ticket here. You see, I thought you might like to come with me.'

  He wondered if you could actually die from guilt and threw the book into the plastic bag.

  Later that morning he discovered Arianne using Lucy's cleanser and his heart palpitated with fear. He stood in the doorway unable to speak until she smiled at him with cotton wool held over one eye and said, 'Just be a second,' as if it had not occurred to her that this bottle might belong to some other girl.

  But she required no explanations—as if they, too, were superfluous to the requirements of her performance, to her own suspension of disbelief. Arianne consumed without question or conscience in every area of her life. When she was hungry she unwrapped things from the fridge, sniffed or picked at them absent-mindedly, then left them out on the sideboard to go off.

  Luke couldn't help finding this beautiful. Unlike his own culpable wastage, his shamefaced fiddlings with clingfilm, this was high-spirited; this was the decadence of kings. It implied a joyous consciousness of her worth and he was not going to argue with that.

  He found an oozing packet of Cornish butter; a crusted slab of foie gras; a flat bottle of elderflower pressé from which she had only removed the lid, before being seduced by some other treat. And he threw them into the bin as if he was scoring a goal. The fridge had ceased to be a focus for anxiety because even though these 'luxury goods' were the physical evidence of his ambition, his aspirations, it felt good to waste them on her. It felt luxurious to waste them on her. She transfigured the guilt he felt, drawing the waste, the hours spent in bed ignoring his work ethic, into the realm of self-expression.

  Maybe important people really do arrive in your life at crucial moments, he thought. She had come at a point when he was increasingly conscious that he was working for a cause in which he no longer believed. He could not even think, then, what this cause had been, though he could remember how fervently he had believed in it just weeks ago. He remembered early mornings, late nights, weekends spent in prayer. He remembered penitential cereal for supper while the printer ran.

  But in reality this loss of faith in his work was only a tiny scatter of stones and did not account for the dreadful rumbling sound. There were other questions in his mind.

  One evening, a month before, an old lady had got on to the tube and stood beside him. By making a practised Londoner's dive (eyes dead straight, arms tight against the body and go) he had secured a seat. There he was, dishevelled but victorious. Of course, he knew he ought now to stand up, but he didn't seem to be doing it and instinctively he hugged his briefcase to his chest as a shield from mob judgement.

  Quite suddenly, a troubling thought occurred: what if it just didn't matter whether he offered the old lady his seat or not? Would he be shot? Would he go to prison, for God's sake? Gradually, defiantly, he found himself lowering his shield.

  There she stood—

  1. old

  2. a lady

  —holding on to the rail with her arthritis-thickened fingers. He took her in: the grey comfort-sole shoes, the tan tights, the hem of the tartan coat, and all he felt was ... irritation. Why did they all wear that hideous stuff anyway? The train moved off and she grabbed the sleeve of the man beside her, apologizing in her wobbly voice.

  What he would have liked was for everyone to know that he had mustered the energy to work right through for twenty-four hours for the sake of a threatened shampoo brand, and that even his toes were tired, his hair was tired. Did he have no right to the seat himself? Yes, he was young, but he was a tired, tax-paying young person. And, most important of all, his parents DID NOT GIVE HIM MONEY ANY MORE.

  In the bottom right-hand corner of his field of vision, hallucinated email boxes kept levitating with sinister import.

  He glanced around at the downturned faces: girls whose earrings swung as the train moved; men with loosened ties, reading the sports pages; two schoolchildren with orange, skull-shaped ice lollies hunched over a mobile phone. Far from stoning him to death, the mob was entirely self-absorbed.

  And even if one of them should happen to look up and think he was a horrible person who stole seats from old ladies, why exactly did he imagine they would ever give him another thought after that day? It was as if he felt people were keeping score.

  But he didn't keep score himself: he saw angry tracksuited women thwack sticky-faced, anaemic toddlers, he saw schoolkids pocketing Mars bars in pitiful corner shops, he saw teenage boys dive past exasperated ushers at the cinema, and he tutted, perhaps, but that was all. Then he forgot. And in the same way, all memory of him would be wiped out as soon as the tube doors hissed closed behind his back.

  Why did anyone care what total strangers thought, anyway, even for an instant? The fact that his parents did had always maddened his sister—only slightly more so than her own brother's capacity to humour them. He knew he had always scandalized Sophie with his casual shrugs, his ability to put on the little suit at Christmas feeling no obvious loss of personal identity.

  Just then, the Christmas suit concerned him, too. He had simply put it on, hadn't he, because his parents would be more likely to let him stay up or go out or to buy him something? He had simply understood early on that this was how the world worked. But underneath he was his own person. Wasn't he? He made his own rules. Or had there always been more to it t
han this? Perhaps the immaculate family image had appealed to him just as much as it did to his parents. It was possible that he had liked the idea of being the spodess boy at church, pegged by all (he had proudly hoped) to be a fighter pilot and tennis superstar one day.

  It had made a good picture: well-groomed, prematurely muscular young Luke Langford, with the beautiful mummy and the important father on either side. But then there was Sophie, spoiling the view. She dyed her hair blue, tore up her tartan Christmas dress in protest, sat two feet away on the pew beside him unable to speak with rage. Consequently she was sent to bed early. And although he hated to recollect it now, he had once stood in her bedroom and patiently explained (before her hairbrush took a chip out of his left incisor) that he considered his parents more than fair to her in this respect.

  Another phantom email rose up in the corner of his eye.

  He took a newspaper out of his bag and flicked it open. At this point the old woman went so far as to drop her glasses, without which she was probably blind and defenceless, on to the dirty floor. A girl reached down for them, losing her balance as the train lurched, and there ensued an agonizing pantomime of altruism as one kind person helped another kind person to balance until eventually the glasses were put back in the trembly hand. 'Thank you, dear, thank you. So kind,' the old woman said—in her stupid trembly voice.

  Luke was too paralysed with unexamined aggression to read the newspaper on his knee. He surveyed the downturned faces and a question kept running through his mind: What if being good doesn't matter? It had never occurred to him before.