“Your friend’s family…? The girl’s family…?” He spoke unsteadily. “Have you seen them?”
She lowered her glance, hair falling across her face in oily ribbons. “I saw them. I couldn’t speak. What do you say? I couldn’t say I was sorry, or…” She hauled in a shuddering breath and retched drily. Mark rose to fetch a basin but she waved him feebly down. “We’ve both been sick tonight, eh?” Sam gave a feeble, conspiratorial grin. “But they didn’t expect me to talk at all, it turns out. I saw them in the station…and they said, the mother said, that I’d been through a terrible ordeal myself, that they understood if I…I was the lucky one! Her father said that! He held my hand and said how I’d been luckier than their Trisha. I should be glad, he said, and he squeezed my hand. Dead hard.”
She looked narrowly at Mark. He flinched and she saw that his eyelids too were coloured in.
“They said he had a skinhead in the back of his taxi. Covered in tattoos. I saw you. I knew your face.”
Mark made as if to go. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why did you?” Sam’s voice was hard, her body rigid, feet pushing her away from him like someone clutching in a dream. She was thinking furiously: he was a passenger in the taxi when it happened, when it knocked down Trish. What did he see then? What has he seen?
“I came to say sorry.” He was standing up. His words barely registered. “I’m sorry. It was my fault.”
Sam was standing on the kerb. She was clutching a bottle loosely around its neck. Trisha, a little ahead, was screaming at her. Her ugly pink gash of a mouth glinted threads of spittle. “Fucking cow, Sam! That’s fucking it this time! How can you do it to your best mate, you fucking—”
Trisha’s eyes were glazed over, as if in shock, widened obscenely. She leaped at Sam with wet, red palms in an embrace as sure as sex. Sam wielded her bottle with a shriek, clonked Trish once across the neck, pushed her backwards onto the rain-sticky road.
Sam reeled onto the path, cracking the base of her spin as she hit a puddle and the taxi’s headlights bore down on them both, sluicing around the corner, sweeping over, swallowing up Trisha’s lazy body.
“It was all my fault.”
Mark felt awful saying that. It sounded inane.
“I distracted Tony, the driver. I was ill in the back of his cab. I know him, he was giving me a lift, he can’t get the cab dirty, you see, it’s his job, he was distracted, and I…it was my fault.”
Sam closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. It was all Mark’s fault. She felt the thickly padded springs of her mother’s old settee rubbing painfully, a dull, throbbing pain in her coccyx. She tasted the wine, sitting in the gutter, shoving her tongue into the bottleneck for the last drops, staring at the street, people from the pub, ambulance, taxi, police, all at dangerous, crazy angles; the mess in the dark. It was all Mark’s fault. He had laid his blame before her.
Sam opened her eyes again and spread her palms. “I forgive you,” she said.
“What?”
“I forgive you.”
His face tightened to a complex mesh.
“She was my best friend. I won’t say a thing. She was my best friend. Don’t torture yourself, Mark. It’s all over now. I won’t say a thing.”
“You forgive me?”
She took his hand; she was suddenly, frighteningly lucid. “Never tell anyone what you’ve just told me,” she said. “Never. Hold me.”
Clumsily he gripped her as she bent forward, burying her nose in the front of his shirt, squeezing out tears and mucus into his throat’s hollow. Never tell, he thought. Tony won’t tell. Tony will take it.
Sam shivered against him. Instinctively he wrapped himself about her, responding with an animal warmth, without thought. He made himself pliable.
“Mam won’t be back to listen,” she was saying. “I’ve no one else to talk to. Trisha always listened to me. She was my best friend.”
He swallowed an impulse to vomit again and was surprised by Sam reaching up to kiss him. She bore down and burrowed into him, her fingers clattered and jabbed at undressing him. He was stunned; the erection she procured for him was sluggish, merely warmth, but it was the response she wanted.
Sam made urgent, sickly love to him and his head rocked against the lampstand. He nudged it too far as he came with a confused moan; the lampshade swung and collapsed, smashing, pitching the room into purple. Sam sank to sleep on his stomach, clutching at the whirling patterns of his skin, the vortex etched on his torso. Mark allowed his head to fall back across the armrest. They slept till mid-morning, dehydrating steadily through the night, their headaches knocking uneasily against one another’s skin.
FOUR
I’VE A FEELING THAT MY LAST LETTER WAS STRANGE. A LITTLE BITTER, perhaps. Was it? I’m sorry, Mark. I only send the better ones. That one sort of slipped through. A waste. I suppose we’re lucky to have this contact at all.
I’m content, though. At least on paper I have your undivided attention. These words, for your ears only, can’t fail to be taken in. On paper we value each other all the more. If I was there, with you, you would start to fade away. You would have switched off by now. You always did. Does Sam get annoyed with you for that? Your self-absorption. Staring at the back of your hands, following the tracery of lines up your wrists. I’d trail away speaking eventually, you’d not even notice, and then we’d both be looking at your tattoos.
The most eloquent part of you. Well, maybe not.
I remember your look when you were being tattooed. Impassive; you were brave. It seemed so painful. All that fine shovelling into skin, the deft glutting and smear of crimson and
