Fallout (8 page)

The stairs went up ahead of them in darkness. She could hear voices.

‘We met once, I think.’

They didn’t say anything else, but started to go up. She could smell lamp-oil. The stairs were narrow, the walls close on each side of them. Her candle shrank and sputtered in the draught. Then she felt him put his hand onto her wrist where her coat met the back of her hand. He put her hand onto the rail and withdrew his.

On the landing at the top of the stairs were three doors and Luke opened one. Leigh was dazzled momentarily, even though, as she adjusted, the glare was only lanterns, haloing in the gloom of the black paint and curtains all around.

‘You remember Paul Driscoll?’

Three faces looked up at her; Paul, who she remembered – the same but different – and two others, both bearded; one the director, Jack, and one older.

‘I’m Leigh,’ she said.

‘Are you an actress?’ asked the older one.

Before she could answer Luke said, ‘No.’ And he laughed, inexplicably. Leigh ignored him.

Paul stood up and came towards her. His handshake was a welcome harbour, like an old friend.

‘I remember you – Leigh . . . ?’

‘Radley.’

‘Right!’ He continued to shake her hand for a moment before releasing her. ‘This is Jack, our director, this is Mike, the writer.’

‘We’ve met,’ said Leigh to Jack, who gave her a noncommittal nod.

‘I don’t know how much Patrick told you,’ Paul said. ‘I’m sorry about all this.’ He gestured around but it was too dark to see anything, only the pale faces and suggested clothes of the five of them and the presence of Luke, in black, just behind her shoulder. ‘We get light tomorrow,’ said Paul. ‘Then out again on Friday.’

‘Bloody miners,’ said Mike, who had a strong Yorkshire accent, and all three laughed, very loudly, at a mutual joke. Leigh smiled, to be polite, and Luke said, ‘Mike used to work the mines. The play is about all of this. All of that.’

‘The play is about too bloody much, as it turns out,’ said Mike and sat down again.

Paul began to say something, but then a muffled knocking came from below.

‘Bugger it, Patrick,’ said Luke and went, suddenly.

She heard him running down the stairs, bumping off the walls, and the bang of the door at the bottom. She felt tremendous relief he had gone, breathing again.

‘You’ll have to catch me up,’ she said, briskly, taking off her coat. ‘Patrick said you’re casting today?’

Downstairs, hurrying to let Patrick in, Luke thought of Tanya Cook and how he mustn’t make passes at the stage management. He realised that already he couldn’t remember what Tanya looked like.

All afternoon, Leigh read in the other parts for the actresses; a parade of femininity in winding scarves, layers, shoulder-bags; some confident, perky, others quiet or businesslike, all attempting to occupy the space with their presence. There were fifteen of them, chosen from
Spotlight
, met at parties, friends or strangers. There was some cursory chat then Paul, Patrick, Mike, Jack and Luke sat on the big stepped seating, with Leigh reading in as Antonio, the young man seduced. When the actress was reading badly the men just looked at Leigh.

‘Principal boy,’ whispered Mike, ‘dead sexy.’

Once, when a girl trying out for the Duchess made a mistake – twisting up the words – and she and Leigh laughed, Luke glanced across at Paul and saw that he was watching her closely. He wondered what had been between them, if anything, the night four years ago when the three of them met. He saw the way Paul met her eye; how he seemed to grow a little when they spoke.

‘No Newcastle Brown for you then, Leigh?’ said Paul downstairs, as Luke stood ready to get the drinks in and they went over their notes.

Leigh smiled. ‘I gave it up.’

‘Sherry then, is it?’

‘Not sherry. Gin and tonic please.’ Leigh smiled again.

She had a dimple, Luke saw, enjoying the little sign of fragility, that she could be sweet. Paul obviously liked it too.

‘Off you go, Luke,’ he said, ‘you heard.’

Luke went.

They talked about the actresses they had seen. The drink went straight to their empty stomachs and exhaustion made them all slow, sleepy.

‘Joanna Harris, Rebecca Rose, Amanda Larch . . .’ said Jack, scribbling biro onto his list.

It was after ten. Ron the landlord’s counter-wiping was resentful.

‘They were the best,’ said Paul. ‘Let’s sleep on it. In at nine.’

‘Still driving that Mini, Leigh?’ said Paul, out on the pavement.

It was just the three of them. The others had gone – Jack Payne giving a lift to Mike and ignoring everyone else.

‘It died a noble death,’ said Leigh. ‘Did your Ford Anglia make a recovery?’

‘Full. It’s doddery though. It’s round the corner – can we give you a lift anywhere?’

We
. Leigh looked from Luke to Paul.

‘I’m in Camden,’ she said.

‘We’re in Fulham. Not much of a detour,’ said Paul, and they laughed, because of course it was.

They were revived. They had a late-night wakefulness, like morning. They could stay out. They didn’t have to sleep.

‘Camden it is, then,’ said Paul. ‘On my way.’

The streets were totally empty and dark as a mine.

‘Remember when we met?’ said Luke, from the back of the car. ‘It was just like this.’

Just as he said it the power came back, windows appearing in the dark, revealing the buildings above them; ambient light where there had been none.

Paul laughed. ‘Just like magic,’ he said, trying for dryness but expressing only wonder.

Leigh’s bedsit was tiny. The bed took up most of the floor and there was a lino vestibule for a kitchen on one side of the door and a single sash window hard up against the corner. She shared a bathroom on the landing.

The two men came up with her and the three of them stood squashed all together by the front door, Luke and Paul not presuming to go into the bedroom part of the room. Leigh went in, by the bed, and spread her arms out.

‘Well. This is me,’ she said.

Luke and Paul nodded and Leigh kicked some clothes under the bed. She had painted the walls white, green and brown, in geometric patterns, hand-drawn, and the lampshade was hooped paper. A plant sagged by the window. She made coffee, and then all three sat on the bed – there was nowhere else – but still bundled in their coats, partly because it was cold and partly because they didn’t want it to look as if they were undressing at all.

‘I’ve got a two-bar,’ she said.

‘Crank it up,’ said Paul.

Leigh put the electric heater onto the pine table because if it went on the ground it singed the sheets. She got into a tangle with the flex tying around her legs and then knocked over some leaflets from a museum onto the floor, and she began to laugh. They all three laughed for a second but Leigh had a giggling fit coming on; a rising hysterical surge of gasping laughter, for no reason but that there were two men in their dark coats sitting on her lonely bed and staring at her fighting with the two-bar heater. She couldn’t stop.

‘Sorry,’ she managed, horrified, unable to control herself. She was crying with laughter. ‘Someone slap me,’ she said.

Paul and Luke exchanged a look.

‘It’s probably hysterical hysteria,’ wept Leigh, ‘like Freud said, it’s a sort of mad sex thing, you know – repressed virgin needs or – God, I have to stop – I’m a woman . . .’

And she slithered onto the floor between the bed and the wall, laughing more, the giggling bumping up against sorrow, threatening to release something from her, weak sadness or abandon. Her legs were feeble. She could not breathe for laughing.

Paul found that he was blushing. His cheeks were burning. It wasn’t the two-bar, that had begun to glow furiously; it was the words
sex
,
Freud
and, mostly,
virgin
. He averted his eyes as if Leigh were doing something lewd, and looked at her bookshelf instead: Simone de Beauvoir, Jung, Anaïs Nin, Marx, Greer.
Oh God
, he thought. He noticed Luke was smiling; he didn’t seem embarrassed at all. He was smiling at Leigh as if she were doing a special trick all for him.

Leigh was invisible behind the bed now, on the ground. Both men stared at the gap and, after a while, with just the sounds of her breathing, she emerged, red faced, but not giggling any more. She wiped her eyes.

‘I could have died,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘I promise you, I’m not like this normally.’

‘You’ve got Karl Marx,’ said Luke, easily, who must have been looking at her books too. ‘I haven’t read it. Can I borrow it?’

And the evening began again. A new night. A fresh thing. All the books came out. Records were played on Leigh’s record player on the pine table next to the two-bar. The Maxwell House was finished. None of them were hungry. It was one o’clock. It was two o’clock. The three of them, cross-legged on the bed, and the record sleeves scattered around them.

At about half past two Paul fell asleep, with his face on his arm, and Luke and Leigh, whose voices had been easy, overlapping until then, noticed him sleeping, and fell silent.

The song carried on. It was ‘Homeward Bound’. They had been talking about their visions of America, where neither had ever been, and if England’s cramped spaces could ever offer such romantic loneliness as the railway stations and Greyhounds and endless roads of there; of New York and Greenwich Village, if those places really were what they seemed, or just constructs in the minds of the artists, the troubadours, the vagabonds.

Leigh changed the record. ‘Corrina Corrina’ . . .

She got back onto the bed and glanced at Paul, then her and Luke’s eyes met, frighteningly alone but at the same time in thrilling danger of being witnessed. They had been talking quickly before, finishing one another’s thoughts; meeting in recognition and play, forgetting – a little – how closely they were sitting and that they were on a bed. Now, with no conversation, and the record playing on, there was only the awareness that they were not touching, and that they wanted to touch. Now, the wanting one another was in the room so quickly it was like vertigo.

Leigh did not look directly at Luke but she put her hand, slowly, into the charged territory of the space between them. She hadn’t known she was going to do it.

Luke’s hand was resting on his knee – and, under his leg, Bob Dylan, young, his arm linked with the woman in the suede coat as they walked towards the camera in the New York winter, parked cars and fire escapes.

Leigh glanced up at him, fearful, and smiled. He looked at her quietly, his eyes were serious, the unselfconscious looking at her that she could not hide from. Their fingertips touched and then their hands, moving over each other, light and deliberate, finding the spaces in between, the sides of their fingers. It was as if hands never did ordinary things, they felt so new. Then Luke closed his fingers around hers and reached his other hand to the back of her neck, warm under her hair – she looked quickly at Paul, and Luke took his hand away.

They both laughed – almost – quietly. There was nowhere to go with it.

They sat and looked at each other. Paul gave a small snore. Leigh bit her lip, felt giggling rising again in her chest, but then Luke took hold of both her wrists in his hands. His fingertips pressing against her pulse stopped her. It steadied her, but lost her, too. She hadn’t felt this before – she had known it on her own, with her own imaginings, but this was so fast, getting away from her. She thought,
I always knew I’d see you again
.

‘When we met the first time I thought I knew you already,’ he said. It was the truth. ‘Do you ever get that?’

She was embarrassed, and looked away, just as he got up – shocking her.

‘Here,’ he said and held out his hand.

Leigh glanced back at Paul.

‘He’s asleep,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’

He had none of the movement he normally did, no nerves, just quiet and focused, knowing what he wanted. She got up. She’d have followed him anywhere. He took her hand and they went around the corner, just out of sight, the only place to go, where the wall went to the front door. He put his hands onto her shoulders, her collarbones, and pressed her back, gently, against the wall, and he kissed her. His hands moved up her neck, until he held her face between both of them, the fingers pressing into her neck, and the cold hard wall behind her back. They kissed. Revealed and encircled. Her arms were around him, across his back, pulling him into her as they kissed. Breathless.

He was still in his coat, she had taken hers off hours before and had a dress underneath, short over her jeans, with thin corduroy and tiny buttons that didn’t open. She wanted him to try to open them so that she could tell him they didn’t open and he could find some other way into her.

‘I’m not really a virgin,’ she said.

This gave him pause; he backed off a little – his face coming into focus – and frowned at her.

‘Are you?’ he said.

‘No, I said I’m not.’

‘Why would you say you’re not?’

‘Because I said I was before.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, when I was laughing. It was a figure of speech.’

‘It was a – being a virgin was a figure of speech?’

‘I think I said “virginal”, not virgin.’

He laughed – a great sort of guffaw, suddenly and very loud.

‘
Shh!
’

They both looked around the corner – Paul was sleeping peacefully.

Luke kissed her again, sweet, but then stopped, putting his mouth to her ear.

‘What’s the difference?’ he whispered, very close, keeping quiet for her. ‘What’s the difference between virgin and virginal when virgin is a figure of speech?’

She smiled but thought she might cry. The talking and then kissing – the reality of him, too close, too human, too honest for her to bear. She didn’t know why it should hurt so much, being so perfect.

‘Just – I feel as if I’m untouched, but I’m not. I’ve had boyfriends – I just – you’re . . . I feel untouched,’ she said again.

Luke saw that she had tears in her eyes. It was awful. He took both her hands and held them up between their faces, double fists, like a promise. Blinkered, they were safe in the tiny space of their hands, their eyes the biggest thing in the world, so close up. And there, in the very briefest of moments, there was love.