the house reeling helplessly, the garden heaving like water. I realized that I wasn’t sober after all, in fact I was spectacularly drunk. I sat down on the bench and put my head between my knees till things stayed still.
I must have gone to sleep, or passed out, I don’t know. I heard shouting, somewhere, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me and I let it go by.
A crick in my neck woke me. It took me a long time to work out where I was: curled on the stone seat, with my head tilted back against the wall at an undignified angle. My clothes were clammy and cold and I was shivering.
I unfurled myself, in stages, and stood up. Bad move: my head went into a sickening spin, I had to grab at the ivy to stay vertical. Outside the alcove the garden had turned gray, a still, ghostly, predawn gray, not a leaf moving. For a second I was afraid to step out into it; it looked like a place that shouldn’t be disturbed.
Abby was gone from the lawn. The grass was heavy with dew, soaking my feet and the hems of my jeans. Someone’s socks, possibly mine, were tangled on the patio, but I didn’t have the energy to pick them up. The French doors were swinging open and Rafe was asleep on the sofa, snoring, in a puddle of full ashtrays and empty glasses and scattered cushions and the smell of stale booze. The piano was speckled with shards of broken glass, curving and wicked on the glossy wood and the yellowing keys, and there was a deep fresh gouge on the wall above it: someone had thrown something, a glass or an ashtray, and meant it. I tiptoed upstairs and crawled into bed without bothering to take off my clothes. It was a long time before I could stop shivering and fall asleep.
19
Unsurprisingly, we all woke up late, with hangovers from hell and a collective foul mood. My head was killing me, even my hair hurt, and my mouth had that walk-of-shame feel, swollen and tender. I pulled a sweater over yesterday’s clothes, checked the mirror for stubble burn-nothing-and dragged myself downstairs.
Abby was in the kitchen, smacking ice cubes into a glass. “Sorry,” I said, in the doorway. “Did I miss breakfast?”
She threw the ice tray back into the freezer and slammed the door. “Nobody’s hungry. I’m having a Bloody Mary. Daniel made coffee; if you want anything else, you can get it yourself.” She brushed past me and went into the sitting room.
I figured if I tried to work out why she was pissed off at me, my head might explode. I poured myself a lot of coffee, buttered a slice of bread-toast felt way too complicated-and took them into the sitting room. Rafe was still unconscious on the sofa, with a cushion pulled over his head. Daniel was sitting on the windowsill, staring out at the garden, with a mug in one hand and a cigarette burning away forgotten in the other. He didn’t look around.
“Can he breathe?” I asked, pointing at Rafe with my chin.
“Who cares?” said Abby. She was slumped in an armchair, with her eyes closed and her glass pressed to her forehead. The air smelled musty and overripe, cigarette butts and sweat and spilled booze. Someone had cleaned the shards of glass off the piano; they were in a corner of the floor, in a small, threatening pile. I sat down, carefully, and tried to eat without moving my head.
The afternoon oozed on, slow and sticky as treacle. Abby played halfhearted solitaire, giving up and starting over every few minutes; I dozed, off and on, curled in the armchair. Justin finally appeared, wrapped in his dressing gown, eyelids fluttering with pain at the light coming through the windows-it was sort of a nice day, if you were in the mood for that kind of thing. “Oh, God,” he said faintly, shielding his eyes. “My head. I think I’m getting the flu; I ache everywhere.”
“Night air,” said Abby, dealing another hand. “Cold, damp, whatever. Not to mention enough punch to float a cruise ship.”
“It is not the punch. My legs hurt; a hangover doesn’t make your legs hurt. Can’t we close the curtains?”
“No,” said Daniel, without turning around. “Have some coffee.”
“Maybe I’m having a brain hemorrhage. Don’t they do things to your eyes?”
“You have a hangover,” Rafe said, from the depths of the sofa. “And if you don’t stop whining, I’m going to come over there and throttle you, even if it kills me too.”
“Oh, great,” Abby said, massaging the bridge of her nose. “It’s alive.” Justin ignored him, with an icy lift of his chin that said last night’s fight wasn’t over, and sank into a chair.
“Maybe we should think about going out, at some point,” Daniel said, finally coming out of his reverie and looking around. “It might help to clear our heads.”
“I can’t go anywhere,” Justin said, reaching for Abby’s Bloody Mary. “I have the flu. If I go out I’ll get pneumonia.”
Abby slapped his hand away. “I’m drinking that. Make your own.”
“The ancients would have said,” Daniel told him, “that you were suffering from an imbalance of the humors: an excess of black bile, causing melancholy. Black bile is cold and dry, so to counter it, you need something warm and moist. I don’t remember which foods are associated with sanguinity, but it seems logical that red meat, for example-”
“Sartre was right,” Rafe said, through his cushion. “Hell is other people.”
I felt the same way. All I wanted was for it to be evening so I could go for my walk, get out of this house and away from these people and try to wrap my head around the night before. I had never, in all my life, spent so much of my time surrounded by people. Up until that day it hadn’t even registered, but all of a sudden everything they did-Justin’s dying-swan act, the snap of Abby’s cards-felt like a full-on assault. I pulled my sweater over my head, burrowed into the corner of the armchair and went to sleep.
When I woke up the room was empty. It looked like it had been abandoned fast, in some sudden emergency- lamps on, shades tilted at odd angles; chairs pushed back, half-empty mugs and sticky rings on the table. “Hi,” I called, but my voice soaked away into the shadows and no one answered.
The house felt huge and unwelcoming, the way a house sometimes does when you come back downstairs after you’ve closed up for the night: alien, withdrawn, focused on its own private business. No note anywhere; the others had probably gone for a walk after all, to blow the hangovers away.
I poured myself a mug of cold coffee and drank it leaning against the kitchen sink, looking out the window. The light was just starting to turn gold and syrupy, and swallows were diving and chittering across the lawn. I left my mug in the sink and went up to my room, involuntarily walking quietly and skipping the creaky stair.
As I put my hand on the door handle I felt the house gather itself and tense around me. Even before I opened the door, before I smelt the faint wisp of tobacco smoke on the air and saw his silhouette sitting broad-shouldered and motionless on the bed, I knew Daniel was home.
The light through the curtains glinted blue on his glasses as he turned his head to me. “Who are you?” he asked.
I thought as fast as even Frank could ever want from me, I already had one finger on my mouth to shut him up while my other hand smacked the light switch, and then I called, “Hey, it’s me, I’m out here,” and thanked God Daniel was weird enough that we might just possibly get away with that Who are you? His eyes were intent on my face, and he was between me and my case. “Where is everyone?” I asked him, and ripped open the buttons of my top so he could see the tiny mike clipped to my bra, the wire running down into the white pad of bandage.
Daniel’s eyebrows lifted, just a touch. “They went to see a film in town,” he said calmly. “I had a few things I needed to do here. We decided not to wake you.”
I nodded, gave him the thumbs-up and knelt down slowly to pull my case out from under the bed, not taking my eyes off him. The music box on the bedside table, solid and sharp-cornered and within reach: that should slow him down long enough to get me out of there if I needed it. But Daniel didn’t move. I dialed the combination, opened the case, found my ID and threw it to him.
He inspected it closely. “Did you sleep well?” he asked formally.
He had his head bent over the ID, apparently absorbed in it, and my hand was on the bedside table, inches
