And he obeys her, eyes red against his pale face.
‘If she asks why we look this way,’ says Becky, ‘it’s because an old friend of ours died today and we just found out. Someone from school. No one she knows. I left the room because I didn’t want to spoil her birthday while she was happy opening her presents. If she asks, his name was Ben. We haven’t seen him for a long time. It was just a shock.’
‘Will you let me explain? Please?’
The face she had touched with her fingertips only hours before, communicating something warm like love, is nothing more in that moment than a flesh and skin arrangement. The mask that once convinced.
‘I want you out of our lives,’ she says blankly.
‘Would you please just let me tell you what happened?’
Becky sees it so clearly then – this pattern of men calling themselves good men, sitting her down to explain how all the things that she might have seen, or even things that she has had done to her, were in fact nothing. Trivial matters that are easily dismissed, if only she can agree to let their explanations blossom until they fill all the spaces left by her questions. Let me tell you. Allow me to explain. This is the way things are.
Adam begins whimpering then, like a dog or a child. ‘Please, just hear me out.’
Even as her curiosity gets the better of her, even as she tells him, ‘Fine, explain,’ she doesn’t believe that she’ll be given the truth. Not if the truth costs him more than the price he’s prepared to pay for it.
‘I was in love with you—’
‘So you lied to me for sixteen years.’
‘No!’ he says. ‘That’s not what it was. Please. It’s important you know I loved you. I’ve always loved you.’
She stands up then, to make herself bigger, wanting to cower over him in his crouched position, to make him feel as small as she had once felt. But she does not walk towards him, she is not ready to be an inch closer to his body. Instead she lowers and loudens her voice.
‘If you say the word love again,’ she says, ‘I will kick you out and I’ll tell Maisie the whole truth, as soon as she’s back. And your parents. What you did was not love. Don’t you dare use that word.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Get on with it,’ she spits. ‘Tell me what you did.’
‘I came back. I came back to the party in Hampstead because I wanted to see you. I thought … I just … I won’t use the word, but I just wanted to be with you. And I thought – or at least I hoped – that you maybe liked me too. The way we talked to each other, I was in love with—’
Becky flings the nearest object – a mug left by the bedside – hard, at his head. It smashes on the wardrobe door less than a foot from his head. She wants him out, he is as repulsive to her as a murderer. She wants him damaged and impotent, like she has been for half her life.
‘I came back to the party to see you,’ he says, holding himself still, upright yet foetal, legs held to his chest. Glassy eyed. ‘And when I got there it was late. I think it was about two in the morning. I had to be back at home the next day for my dad’s family but I was really high and … I don’t know. I thought I’d come and see you and maybe we’d … Anyway. I looked for you and you weren’t downstairs where most people were, and Mary had apparently taken off with that guy she was seeing, so I checked around the house and then I found you.’
‘Like Sleeping Beauty.’ Her voice wavers as she tries in vain to sharpen her words so they will slice him, but she finds only a withering, disappointing sarcasm to express her sadness for the girl in the bed, asleep and unaware that she is about to be invaded. ‘Waiting for my prince.’
‘You weren’t asleep. You were in bed but you were awake.’
‘I don’t remember a single moment that I was awake with you.’ But even as she says it, she finds she cannot trust that she is right. Maybe he is right. Perhaps she woke briefly. ‘I was never awake,’ she says again, holding her own hands to stop them from shaking.
‘You were really out of it. Like … I’d done a pill and I’d had some beers and a joint as well downstairs. And you were in bed in the dark and I put a lamp on and sat down, and I swear it was just to ask if you were OK, and you said to get in and so I did.’
The world tilts. He is going to make it her fault.
‘I didn’t say that,’ says Becky. ‘I didn’t ask you to get into my bed.’ Becky puts her hand to her mouth, then wonders if the movement has betrayed her.
‘I got in with you and you sort of snuggled up to me and I thought, or at least I think I thought: oh my God, she likes me that way as well. And then I kissed you and … you were obviously really wasted, but so was I and, I don’t know, I really honestly thought …’
‘Get to the good stuff, Adam.’ She cannot take much more of this scene setting, this underpinning and drapery. She just wants him to say it now.
‘I don’t remember if we said much. I just remember really, really wanting to be with you and thinking you wanted that too. And so we took off our clothes.’
‘We?’ She presses her fingers firmly together, imagining Adam’s skin caught in her
