“Why are you so late? I thought you were coming hours ago.”
“Traffic.”
She sizes me up in the doorway, as if not quite sure whether to let me inside. Then she turns and I follow her down the hall, watching her hips slide beneath her robe.
Elisa lives in a converted printing factory in Ladbroke Grove, not far from the Grand Union Canal. Unpainted beams and timber joists crisscross each other in a sort of bonsai version of a Tudor cottage.
The place is full of old rugs and antique furniture that she had sent down from Yorkshire when her mother died. Her pride and joy is an Elizabethan love seat with elaborately carved arms and legs. A dozen china dolls, with delicately painted faces, sit demurely on the seat as if waiting for someone to ask them to dance.
She pours me a drink and settles onto the sofa, patting a spot beside her. She notices me pause and pulls a face.
“I thought something was wrong. Usually I get a kiss on the cheek.”
“I’m sorry.”
She laughs and crosses her legs. I feel something shred inside me.
“Christ, you look tense. What you need is a massage.”
She pulls me down and slides behind me, driving her fingers into the knotted muscles between my shoulder blades. Her legs are stretched out around me and I can feel the soft crinkle of her public hair against the small of my back.
“I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why did you?”
“I wanted to apologize. It was my fault. I started something that I shouldn’t have started.”
“OK.”
“You don’t mind?”
“You were a good fuck.”
“I don’t want you to see it like that.”
“What was it then?”
I contemplate this for a moment. “We had a brief encounter.”
She laughs. “It wasn’t that
My toes curl in embarrassment.
“So what happened?” she asks.
“I don’t think it was fair on you.”
“Or your wife?”
“Yes.”
“You never told me why you were so upset that night.”
I shrug. “I was just thinking about life and things.”
“Life?”
“And death.”
“Jesus, not another one.”
“What do you mean?”
“A married guy who reaches his forties and suddenly starts pondering what it all means? I used to get them all the time. Talkers! I should have charged them double. I’d be a rich woman.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Well what is it?”
“What if I told you I had an incurable disease?”
She stops massaging my neck and turns me to face her. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Suddenly I change my mind. “No. I’m being stupid.”
Elisa is annoyed now. She thinks she’s being manipulated. “You know what your problem is?”
“What’s that?”
“All your life you’ve been a protected species. Somebody has always looked after you. First it was your mother, then boarding school, then university and then you got married.”
“And your point is?”
“It’s been too easy. Nothing bad has ever happened to you. Bad stuff happens to other people and you pick up the pieces, but
Now I’m struggling. I think it was in Holloway Prison. Elisa was twenty-three and had graduated to working for an up-market escort agency. One night she was lured to a hotel in Knightsbridge and raped by six teenage boys celebrating an eighteenth birthday.
After the first rape she stopped fighting. Instead, she concentrated on reaching her coat, which lay beneath her on the bed. Her fingers closed around a small knife in the pocket. She stabbed one boy in the buttocks and another in his thigh. The blade was only two inches long so none of the wounds were deep.
Elisa phoned the police from the hotel lobby. Then she went through the motions of making a complaint. The boys each had a lawyer present as they were interviewed. Their stories were identical.
The police charged Elisa with malicious wounding while the youths were given a stern talking to by the station sergeant. Six young men— with money, privilege and a walk-up start in life— had raped her with absolute impunity.
While on remand in Holloway Prison she asked for me by name. She sat on a plastic chair with her head cocked to one side and her hair falling over one eye. Her chipped tooth had been fixed.
“Do you think that we determine how things turn out in our lives?” she had asked me.
“Up to a point.”
“And when does that point end?”
“When something happens that we have no control over: a drunk driver runs a stop sign, or the lotto balls drop in the right order, or rogue cancer cells begin dividing inside us.”
“So we only have a say over the
“If we’re lucky. You take the Greek playwright Aeschylus. He died when an eagle mistook his bald head for a rock and dropped a tortoise on it. I don’t think he saw that coming.”
She laughed. A month later she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in jail. She worked in the prison laundry. Whenever she became angry or bitter about what had happened, she opened a dryer door, put her head inside and screamed into the big warm silver drum letting the sound explode into her head.
Is that what Elisa wants me to remember— my own pithy homily on why shit happens? She slips off the sofa and pads across the room, looking for her cigarettes.
“So you came here to tell me that we’re not going to fuck anymore.”
“Yes.”
“Did you want to tell me before or after we go to bed?”
“I’m being serious.”
“I know you are. I’m sorry.”
She lets the cigarette hang from her lips as she reties the sash of her robe. For a brief moment I glimpse a small taut nipple. I can’t tell if she’s angry, or disappointed. Maybe she doesn’t care.
“Will you read my Home Office submission when I’m finished?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“And if I need you to give another talk?”
“I’ll be there.”
She kisses my cheek as I leave. I don’t want to go. I like this house with its faded rugs, porcelain dolls, tiny fireplace and four-poster bed. Yet already I seem to be disappearing.
My home is in darkness, except for a light downstairs leaking through the curtains of the sitting room. Inside the air is warm. The fire has been burning in the front room. I can smell the smokeless coal.
The last of the red embers are glowing in the grate. As I reach for the lamp switch my left hand trembles. I see the silhouette of a head and shoulders in the armchair by the window. Forearms are braced along the wide arms of the chair. Black shoes are flat on the polished wooden floor.
