sermon he had delivered too many times: The average life expectancy of those below the poverty line was forty; two paupers died on the London streets every day; the homeless could stand three weeks of sleeping rough before long-term problems set in; a simple state of divorce was enough to force you into the open air. Perhaps a speech was required before the doling out of food, she thought, like a Victorian lecture.
Helen remembered a mauve cotton sweater, a purchase on her last spree. It had been carefully folded into white tissue with its arms crossed like a mummy carapace, then placed into a stout blue box with a diagonal purple ribbon knotted at one corner. It had cost nearly seven hundred pounds. She watched Nathan serving free day-old cheese sandwiches, donated to make the difference between getting by and going hungry.
A young man in a fur hood leaned against the wall of the arch, noisily pissing. When he realized she was standing nearby he braked in mid-flow.
“Don’t let me stop you,” she said, raising a hand and averting her eyes.
“You’re in my bathroom, lady.” The young man buttoned his fly and spat at her legs.
She waited in the cold as Nathan handed out sandwiches to a line that showed no sign of diminishing. A little after midnight, he closed the van and drove her to the edge of the Thames. They walked across a litter-strewn concourse as bare as a disused runway, to a yellow metal ship’s container butted up against a beech tree. Nathan slipped into a diagonal shadow. Helen hesitated.
Nathan beckoned. “Not everyone is out to hurt you.”
He opened a padlock on a dented steel panel and shoved the door back with a ferrous scrape. “Wait.” He disappeared inside.
A match flared, and gradually the interior of the oblong box was illuminated. The container was constructed of flat steel panels without windows, but it had been decorated like the Bosphorus
“It’s all stuff people have chucked away. Have a glass of wine. I doubt it’s what you’re used to. Your skin’s so pale. Is it as soft as it looks?” He teased out the words with his hands.
“You live here when you’re not at the sandwich van?”
“I spend most of my time on building sites. I’m working on the electrics at the mall.” He pulled up his T-shirt to reveal a belt lined with different drill bits, like gun cartridges. His stomach was flat and brown.
“But you have a platinum credit card.”
“It belongs to a dead guy. I found his body in one of the offices this morning. It’ll run out soon.”
“And the car?”
“That belongs to my mother. What do you do?”
“I spend.”
“Is that all?”
“Pretty much.”
“Where did you get the gun?”
“I bought it. I had a fantasy of using it for target practice in Selfridges homewares department. Not on people, on soft furnishings.”
“I thought you loved all that shit.”
“It’s complicated. The things I own usually end up owning me. My signature scent has its own Web site, for God’s sake.”
Nathan smiled. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. This is just what happens when the world collapses. It’s a perfectly natural thing. Gounod said, ‘Our houses are not in the street any more; the street is in our houses.’”
“What happens after that?”
“Oh, both the streets and the houses disappear and we start all over again. I think you’re helping to speed up the process.” He filled two scratched blue tumblers with wine from a box. They touched glasses and drank. Nathan watched her with amusement.
“You say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ve been afraid all my life. You don’t seem afraid.”
“Do you know about the legend of the Green Man? It’s a pagan myth that exists in almost every history of England, but you can find him in many churches. There are sixty depictions of the Green Man in Exeter Cathedral alone. He goes back far beyond Christian legends.”
“Who is he?”
“A forest creature that destroys dying cities and returns them to nature. The result of mixing sex and soil. He’s benign and terrifying. He has a leafy face and tendrils sprouting from his mouth and nose. His hair is made from grass; his body is made from roots and flowers and branches. He is both cruel and gentle. He’s coming back to turn the cities into forests.”
“How do you know he’s coming back?”
“He lives inside everyone.”
“Including you?”
“Including me. And you.”
“I think I should go.”
Nathan suddenly leaned forward and kissed her, pushing hard. His right hand slipped across her stomach and up to her breasts. The left supported her in the small of her back. It seemed a good idea to lie down on the velvet divan, especially as his mouth was still glued to hers and was gently forcing her in that direction. He weighed almost nothing; she could hardly feel him straddled across her. Instead, she felt the warmth of his thighs where they touched her hips, his forearms against the sides of her chest, a wide tongue reaching into the back of her mouth for what seemed like days.
At some point later—she could not remember when—his shirt came off, and she heard buttons bouncing on the floor. His dark, soft skin smelled of sandalwood and underarm sweat that lingered on her fingers. The base of his erection pressed a denim-clad post against her crotch as he unpinned her arms and guided her hands around his hard buttocks. His chest hair formed a perfect black trapezoid, a ladder of tiny curls tracing to his navel and into the low waistband of his loosened jeans. The wide dry palm of his hand covered her pubic bone as he slipped his fingers inside her pants. The shock of a young man’s cool bare hand over her sex was extraordinary; she could not recall the last time someone had cupped her so gently, opening her lightly with the tips of his fingers.
Helen sank deep into the cushions, her chocolate skirt sliding from her legs. For so long she had been constricted by the curse of propriety, strapped into a sensible brassiere and expected to behave as if she were shocked and disapproving all the time, but what was all the respectability for? What had the city given her back, apart from a wider choice of fabric patterns?
She knew she wanted him inside her, and allowed him to push her deeper into musky warm darkness, the muscles in his slim brown arms lifting and widening as he raised his body over hers, each firmly guided stroke burying a hot dark beam farther and farther into her flesh, until she could feel his stomach tense and their raised pelvic bones grate hard against each other, a cauterizing molten center to their joined bodies that could light up the little cabin and provide enough electrical power for most of the shops in Oxford Street.
It was a seduction conducted backward, starting with the fierce, hard culmination, his eyes never leaving hers, his body pulling back and pushing in with decreasing connection, penetrate and withdraw, gentler and gentler, resolving to a faint and tender kiss.
Some minutes later, she realized he was sitting beside her, smoking. She dressed slowly and carelessly.
“Come back if you like,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll be here.” She could not see his smile, but knew it was wide and white and dangerous. She didn’t care how much he had practiced it on other women; she liked the idea of being one of the other women. It made her feel normal somehow, involved, part of something powerful.
Rising carefully to her feet and testing the ground to stop it from swaying, she tried not to lose her balance. She smoothed her hair back behind her ears in an attempt to look vaguely sensible and in control, and pulled the container door open a crack as Nathan refastened his jeans and took a slug of wine.
Outside, she drew a deep breath of dank river air, trying to work out exactly what had just happened. Although it was still night, a warm gray nimbus of never-darkness profiled the skyline of the embankment. In contrast, Nathan’s cabin was a black silhouette. In the center of one of the most overcrowded cities in the world, it could have been a chateau in rural France, beset by cawing crows and claw-branched trees, shunned by villagers,
