Exposure (7 page)

She made it sound as though this unforgivable act would not go unrecorded. And then she looked around for her handbag and left—with the perpetrator.

This was not so much a sense of justice as one of composition.

Luke walked back to the bar and picked up his drink. He felt as though he had been dancing right by the speakers for hours but, of course, he was not deafened and it was not sound that had affected him. His mind was reverberating with longing, as if it was a bell, struck by lust. Behind a vacant stare, his imagination laboured shamelessly. James was speaking about something, but all Luke could picture was the girl stopping, as she just might have done, half-way up the stairs to the exit. The boyfriend went on up to wait for her outside while she ran back down to the loo. Before she got to the doorway on to the corridor, she caught Luke's eye. A nod: yes, you.

He was not used to playing this submissive role, because he could get any girl he wanted, you could ask any of his friends, but he found it strangely sexy—in thought, anyway, where it was secret.

By the time he got out into the corridor, where it was cool and dark and muffled, the very long girl was hitching up her very short skirt. There was a store cupboard with a lock and she slammed the door behind them and the light burned round the edges in a dazzling line. He got his fingers all deliciously confused in her suspender belt and she tore them away impatiently, kicking and wriggling, her heel spiking her knickers into the carpet. He had never met a girl more desperate to give him a blow-job. She couldn't wait: she licked her lips and pulled down his boxer shorts with her teeth. But, on the other hand, Luke thought, was this wise? Maybe, he decided, he just pushed her away and she looked slightly disappointed for a second until he thudded her up and back against the wall and she was forced to sink her teeth into his neck to stop herself screaming.

'Luke?' said James. 'Am I interrupting something? I can come back if this is a bad time for you.
Luke
?'

'Sorry. What?'

Just then the bouncer came running down the stairs, looking angry. He had been up the road buying some cigarettes. One of the bar-girls had texted him to come back right away. He went over to the bar and Luke heard the bar-girl tell him they wanted to see him upstairs in the office immediately. 'Babe, you might have really fucked it this time,' she said.

'Why? What the fuck? Was there an incident?' The bouncer peered around the room frantically—as though he might still catch the last moments of it. 'I
knew
there was an incident. I'm gone for two fucking minutes and there's an incident.'

An incident. It was the right way to describe a story without a beginning or an end. Just the middle was there, the comical climax—the girl on the table, holding up her boot as if she was going to take out that big man's eye with the heel of it. Luke wondered what had made her so angry. He was surprised by how exciting he found the thought of her anger—and by how reluctant he was to acknowledge the false note in the scene. The truth was that when he watched her walk away up the stairs, hand in hand with her enormous boyfriend, it occurred to him that it might all have been an exciting game before bed. The jealousy this inspired was unbearable, directly proportionate to his lust.

Arianne had long, muscular legs and he watched them climb the stairs, imagining the feel of her skin, picturing her standing above him in killer heels, letting him do whatever he wanted to her inner thighs.

When he lay in his bed that night, blushing and exhausted after he had done full and appropriate justice to their time in the store cupboard, he thought about Arianne kicking the glass off the table. He smiled to himself. Smash. He loved these sassy, violent women. You envisioned their gratifying orgasms—you
heard
their gratifying orgasms; you conjured up the gorgeous shame of passing the neighbours on the stairs the next day. His girlfriend Lucy favoured pastel colours; she reminded him about dry-cleaning; she said, 'Oh, that was so lovely, darling,' after sex.

And he was
very lucky
to have her, given the long hours he worked. He mustn't forget that, he told himself. No, Lucy was great. She was very pretty and she loved him and these qualities brought a lot of satisfaction—even if the subject of marriage had become more and more of an unspoken issue since her best friend had got engaged. How many times had he heard about the darling Tiffany diamond ring? But at least she was forgiving—even when she cooked for him and he fell asleep, too tired to eat at eleven thirty when he got home from work.

Would he prefer to be
alone
? This was a rhetorical question he asked himself from time to time. He considered the idea of being alone with horror, with the sensation of free-falling through darkness. Like many English boys, he had, at great expense, been expelled from the home at an early age and sent to a boarding-school. 'Alone' was a sensation never more perfectly represented than by sitting in his school bedroom on the first day of term, the last traces of his glossy, silk-scarfed mother on the air, knowing he must just
get on with it
and unpack his trunk.

All that week at the ad agency where he worked, he had played a recently invented game. It involved a vastly complex set of rules, which were just confusing enough to mean he could almost always win without being absolutely certain he was cheating. For the third time in a row, he got the balled-up chocolate wrapper into the ten-point zone between the computer monitor and the phone. That, added to the work-experience boy's four trips to the photocopier before the clock read a quarter to, and to his colleague Hamish's three sniffs in three minutes, meant the score was now high enough to allow Luke to alter history.

What had actually happened now was that he had walked over to the table and said hi to Andy Jones. And Andy, of course, had remembered him perfectly because Luke had been a big figure at school—captain of rugby and cricket and tennis. (He had actually been the first person in school history—other than a vast-jawed, bovine-looking boy named Dorian Anderson who featured in ancient crackly photos from the 1960s—to be captain of three sports at once.)

Andy said: 'Shit, how
amazing
to bump into you like this!'

Luke lit a cigarette distractedly. 'Yeah, it's good to see you again, too, Andy.'

'Fuck.
I mean—
Luke Langford!'
Andy slapped his forehead and laughed. At this point Luke raised his hand at a girl he happened to know. (This girl was beautiful and fashionably dressed in maybe a miniskirt or hot pants. She looked as though she would like to come over but was afraid to interrupt—she assumed he was talking business, perhaps.)

Andy was still staring at him. 'Sorry, I'm really blown away,' he said. 'It's been, what—ten years? Listen, let me introduce you to everyone. I mean, d'you want to meet my friends?'

'Well ... sure—OK. But, listen, I can't stay long, Andy.'

'No, of course. Of
course.
Just quickly.' He put his arm round Luke's shoulder. 'Everyone? This is Luke Langford. This is the school fucking hero!'

And it was then that Arianne had looked down from her pedestal and smiled at him, with a kind of recognition in her eyes.

It was really hard to concentrate on the Calmaderm shampoo account. He knew he would have to do better that afternoon because, in an ad agency full of neurotic creatives, he was the one who held it all together. Everybody relied on him. Just the day before there had been a scene between Adrian Sand, one of the creatives, and the head of marketing at Calmaderm. Adrian had presented an idea that had been deemed, with a sarcastic smile, 'Just a bit too way out,' and he had thrown up his hands and said what the hell was he supposed to do, this shampoo was just like every other fucking shampoo and he might as well shoot himself in the heart. There had been a stunned silence.

It was only a shampoo, for Christ's sake, Luke thought. But it was his job as account executive to liaise between the warring factions and—as his boss, Sebastian, said, with a hand on Luke's shoulder—to help get the fucking money in. Luke was renowned as a 'people person'. He knew perfectly well that he had been so successful by the age of twenty-eight because of his sportsman's calm in a crisis, because of his placid, unifying smile and because of his cufflinks.

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.