Exposure (12 page)

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 than 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.

It was certainly not that Arianne provided an answer to this; but she did provide an alternative anxiety. A compelling, all-consuming anxiety. She sat with the ash dangling off her cigarette, occasionally seasoning the carpet, looking distracted or bored or depressed, and Luke watched her, ransacking his heart and soul and body for ways to amuse her.

He had still not returned Lucy's calls. Sex with Arianne conquered his guilt every time. Sex with her conquered guilt and fear and ambition and inadequacy. He lost them all with his hands on her hips, his head pressed back into the pillow.

'Look, I'll have to get my stuff from Dan's place,' she said, at around three a.m. that Monday morning. 'You can drive me over tomorrow. OK?' She laid her head on his chest and sighed. 'And then the day after won't belong to anyone else at all.'

He stared out of the window, at the bare branches against the sky, and he smiled. The day after wouldn't belong to anyone else at all...

How could he disappoint her romanticism? He saw he would need to take the week off work. He had taken no holidays that year. He hadn't dared to, because, unlike the creatives, his job at the agency was secured by physical dependability rather than ethereal talent. Unflattering as it was, he knew he simply had to
be there.

But life seemed so unbearably short! Twenty-eight years wasted already. He rolled towards Arianne with his eyes closed. She wrapped her legs round him and, after an astonishingly deft movement of her bottom and hips, she had swallowed him up.

Every time—literally every time—he felt as though he had burst garden doors open on to glorious summer. And she was so long-limbed and so—elastic! She dragged her nails up the back of his thighs, her tongue licked the inside of his elbows, his earlobes, his armpits, the palms of his hands, his nipples, his lips. She was a searchlight of eroticism and his senses were caught in it like boys after lights-out.

At first he was stricken with fear and nervous hilarity. These responses were all that held him back from a hot, golden, long-legged, jasmine-scented future. They belonged to his past, to Lucy whispering, 'Is that not very nice, darling? Oh, sorry, why didn't you say? I'll do it a bit harder then, shall I?' He cast them off. This proved to be a mutually gratifying decision.

Invariably, having wrung the last out of both of them, Arianne would drop down hot and shivering against him, her face turned away, her hair covering her eyes. For a short time, his existence was irrelevant to her and he blinked behind the lovely blonde haze and enjoyed the feel of her heart thudding against his. She was everywhere and she contained everything—at least all that was of any interest in the world to him. Arianne was her own weather system with a million volatile seasons and the world outside it was just so ... slow and so quiet.