Exposure (37 page)

Luke put his head into his hands and then he put his head in his hands on his knees, and then he drew his knees and his head and his hands up into his chest. It was as if being smaller might shrink the pain.

'Oh, babe,' Jessica said, 'they
might
just be friends, honey. I really don't know.'

'They're not,' Luke said. 'She's sleeping with him.'

'Luke, you don't know that.'

'Yes, I do.'

Jessica sighed and looked away. They sat in silence for a moment and the wind stirred the bushes and blew a few rose petals out across the lawn. Eventually she said, 'So have you just ditched your amazing flat?'

'I'm just staying here for a bit, OK? Basically I'm not going back there without her, Jess.'

'What?'

'I mean it. I'm not doing anything without her. Life, I mean. None of it.'

'Luke, this is
crazy,'
she said.
'Luke?
How do I make you listen to the voice of your friend who loves you?'

'I always listen to you.'

'OK, then. What if she
is
going out with this Jamie whatever-his-name-is?'

'Turnbull,' he said, remembering Arianne mentioning she had met him. How insignificantly the name had trickled into his life! He recalled her saying, 'Yeah, I met some new people this evening—a few models, an actor. Mostly twats—except this swanky actor called Jamie Turnbull. Want a bubble bath? I'll go and run it.'

Unable to drink, Luke put down his beer bottle. 'I know who he is. He's the one from that hospital thing,' he said.

'Yes,
that's
him. He's like the "lovable rogue" who's secretly a genius but has-a-drinking-problem-and-is-wasting-his-incredible-potential-to-be-a-brain-surgeon-like-his-highly-respected-brain-surgeon-father.
God,
those shows are crap—psychiatrists must
wince
if they see them. Anyway,' she said softly, seeing she had lost him he was staring out across the garden,'
anyway
, what if she
is
going out with him, sweetheart?'

'No,' he said.

'Because you probably should just try and be ready for that. I suppose that would be sensible.'

'No, it's OK. She can't be, Jess. She isn't. She
couldn't
after what we had. Not so soon. The reason I know is because it wouldn't be humanly possible.'

'"Frailty, thy name is woman,"' Jessica said. She hated the glibness with which she was avoiding her friend's unhappiness, but she had not been prepared for it. It occurred to her that, oddly, she sounded rather like Luke's emotionally paralysed father, who was a mine of apposite quotations if ever warmth was required. It was unlike her, but she felt thrown. Of course, she had seen other friends heartbroken before, but to see Luke in this state somehow constituted an end of innocence. If her broad-shouldered, privileged, sports-playing, handsome friend Luke wasn't immune to this depth of pain, no one was safe. Here was the rose garden of his childhood—and here was Luke, pale and slouched before it.

He looked at her as if she had been trying deliberately to confuse and scare him.

She said, 'Oh, sweetheart, I'm sorry. All I'm saying is, you know what Arianne's like. I mean, I don't know her that well, but wasn't she seeing some guy when you met her? Didn't she leave him in exactly the—'

'No,'
Luke said. 'It's not the
same.
Oh, my God.'

She saw tears in his eyes and went on, rather desperately, 'But, Luke, think about it calmly. Please try. She wasn't the easiest of girls, was she? Let's face it, she was a total nightmare. Don't you remember that evening at Ludo's—the dinner party? She went completely mental because you stopped checking on her for five minutes so you and I could have a litde gossip and catch up. Do you remember? She didn't like you
having friends,
Luke. She didn't like you having a
job.
These are commonly thought to be bad signs in a girlfriend.'

'It was just she didn't know many people that night. She thought I was ignoring her.'

'Oh, right.
OK—because she's so
shy.
Yes, I can see why that would have been a problem.'

'She
is
shy. Underneath it, I mean. You don't know her. It's all very complicated. There's basically been a
huge
confusion.'

'What confusion, Luke? OK—no, I don't
know her.
But I do know love isn't meant to be
complicated,
there aren't meant to be huge
confusions.
To me, you either love someone or you don't. And, Luke, if you do love someone, you
respect
them.'

'But I
do
respect her.'

'Fuck! I'm talking about
her,
Luke, not
you.
Wake up! She practically kissed your friends in front of you. Remember Joe and that whole tequila-shot incident? Everyone fucking gossiped about it, babe. They were all, like, "Luke should have more self-respect." Is that what you want?'

'Well, I know why she didn't respect me. And I just need a chance to show her who I really am and then she will.'

'Who you really are? Who were you then?'

'I don't know. I was just—I was
scared
all the time. All I could think about was her leaving me. I was not myself. I wasn't a real man.'

'Yes, you were. What's a real man? That was you. Luke, you were what she made you into—you were both what you made each other into. And you
still would be now.
That's the Arianne-Luke, just as much as this is an aspect of the Jessica-Luke.'

He shook his head slowly. 'God, you really think that's how people are?
Chaotic
like that?
Changing, changing, changing?'

He sounded slightly manic, but Jessica did not notice this. She enjoyed theorizing and could forget her context in the rush of mathematical excitement.
'Definitely,'
she said. 'We're like colours. You put one shade of blue next to another shade of blue and it can look green, but put it next to green and it's blue as the sky, put it next to red and it looks purple. No one's fixed. And, Luke, Arianne made you invisible. You disappeared on us.'

'Not at the beginning. It wasn't like that at the beginning.'

She sighed. 'No, it can't have been. I know. But maybe it wasn't ever meant to be a long-term thing. Maybe it was always just a litde bit of the journey.'

This was almost exactly what Arianne had said to him. He remembered her standing there with her weird assortment of possessions, sinister in their disparateness as ingredients for a spell. She had said, 'This was always a temporary thing, Luke. Life's a journey, right? Who wants to
settle down
and all that?'

Luke turned to Jessica. 'A journey?' he said desperately.'
Where?'

'Well, I mean I don't know, exactly. Why would I know? But this is what people say is the interesting—'

'Don't tell me that.
And I don't see why you're so sure you're on
a journey,
anyway. You only call it a journey if you know you're going
somewhere,
right? If you were just going round and round you'd call it—' He broke off in wordless frustration.

'Just going round and round,' she said.

'So how can you tell that isn't what we're doing?'

'I ... You can't.'

'Well, then.'

'Well, what? I don't see how this relates to you and Arianne.'

'No,' Luke said, 'neither do I. I think I've forgotten.'

But even though the idea could lose its logical formation, he could not really forget. Although he could not explain it, he knew that his belief in God and heaven and in human progression altogether was inextricably connected to the salvage of all that wasted love. That it should simply be lost and forgotten implied facts about the world too terrible to contemplate.

'Sweetheart, if you want my honest opinion—and I'm well aware you've given me no reason to believe you do—I think you should move on.
Mend
yourself and
move on!

'Oh, you make it sound so ... How would you know? I'm sorry, Jess, but
how would you fucking know?'

They sat quietly while he cried, and then Jessica said, 'Luke, haven't you ever wondered why I don't have a boyfriend?'

It took a moment for her words to reach him. 'I suppose,' he said. 'You're pretty secretive about things. Private, I mean.'

She laughed. 'No, secretive was the right word. But you're so unsuspicious, Luke, aren't you? You just accept things—the way they look on the surface.'

'Oh, I'm
thick,
you mean?' he said, remembering how frequently his sister had made this poisonous observation. 'You mean I'm
thick
and
conventional.'

'No!' she said, although if you stripped away the fond indulgence that was what was left. 'No,' she said more quietly, ashamed of herself. 'Anyway, I'm trying to tell you I'm gay.'

Luke flinched as if he had been punched in the stomach, and she couldn't help giggling at the artless honesty of his reaction. 'So, what do you think?' she said. And then, unable to stop herself before it came out, 'Are we still friends?'

'Of
course
we're still friends,' he said. He put his hand on her arm and then, as if in response to a new understanding of her, he shook it and thumped her on the back.

She smiled lovingly at him. 'Good. I'm sorry I didn't say before.'

'I—well, you
should
have. How long have you known? I mean—oh, God. Does Ludo know?'

'Yes. I told him a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I introduced him to my new girlfriend the other night.'

'Your—'

'Cally,' she said. 'I'd like you to meet her. She's doing a doctorate in philosophy at Cambridge.'

'Wow.'

Jessica blushed with pleasure and excitement. 'I know. She's
gorgeous,
too. I have no idea what she's doing with me, which is a completely great sensation.'

Luke felt a stab of jealousy. 'That's really fantastic, Jess.'

She put an arm round him and kissed his cheek. 'Thanks, babe,' she said, again reminding herself not to sound so grateful in future. Cally was always telling her off for this—and she was right. You had to start on the right footing—no defensiveness—particularly, as Cally said, if you'd been crazy enough to pretend for as long as Jessica had.

'So, you see, I do know what it feels like, Luke. I know what love feels like. I understand how overwhelming it can be and how you can't tell left from right from wrong.'

He looked at her seriously and it occurred to him that he had probably been this obtuse in his own happiness. Perhaps everyone was. Hadn't he almost wanted to tell his ex-girlfriend Lucy not to be sad about them splitting up because so much
happiness
had come out of it? He had wanted to draw her attention to the
sum total
of happiness because, for a moment back there, he had felt sure good old Lucy would understand and be pleased, if only she thought about it.

Happiness was an ugly condition to be in, really, he thought. A picture came back: himself, overexcited by a new red bike on his eighth birthday, running round the house shouting his joy like a Red Indian, accidentally stamping on Sophie's hamster. 'No,' he said bitterly. 'Now you'd have to feel it all turning into
hate.'

Jessica looked at him and nodded. Then she put her arms out and he let go of himself into them and cried into her long hair.

When she had gone, he went into his father's study and typed Arianne's name into the search engine: 20,024 hits in 0.45 seconds.

'Jamie dating again! But who is the mystery girl?'
he read. He clicked on the link:

 

www.starsandcelebs.co.uk

Jamie Turnbull, who split just recently from sexy co-star Elaine Dance has been spotted in the arms of a new babe. At the 1st birthday bash for trendy restaurant 'kink', Jamie's date for the evening was the mystery-girl who recently replaced Cindy Tayler in
Ho—

 

He clicked back and tried another site, for something—
any thing
—better. Surely the world could do better than this.

 

www.hotaosmaaazine.co.uk

Bad luck girls I It looks like our Jamie has found love. With her sultry looks and sexy French accent, Arianne is going to be tough comp—

 

He turned the computer off at the mains.

 

It was an hour or so before he returned to himself. Gradually, he noticed his face in the polished surface of his father's desk. Then he wiped his eyes and looked out of the window at the annexe. He must take them their sheets and pillows because his mother would be back soon. It was getting dark.

He went to the linen cupboard and took the sheets for the bed in the first-floor spare room, then he went downstairs and gathered some of the cushions from the cupboard in the conservatory. He took the picnic blankets from the chest of drawers in the hall. On the way through the kitchen, he went into the storecupboard and took a packet of biscuits and a bottle of lemonade because they—or, rather, Goran—had eaten everything but the apples and the Go-Go bar at the Easy Dine Cafeteria.

Luke was rather astonished by his efficiency. He was learning things about himself. He put the biscuits and lemonade under his arm, balanced the huge pile of bedding on his outstretched wrists, steadying it with his chin, and walked down the garden steps, past the empty beer bottles that he and Jessica had left there in a time of relative innocence.

At first there was no answer to his knock. He said, 'Hello? It's OK, it's me, Luke.'

Then Goran came to the door. He was swollen-faced with sleep. Luke gave him the bedding and explained he would have to go straight away as his mother would be back at any moment. He promised to come and wake them in the morning and tell them when it was safe to go out.

Goran took the bedding and put it on the table by the door.