Mark nodded. “I can imagine.”
“It’s weird, the relationship I have with him. It’s like most of the time he takes my personality, everything I am, then raises it to the nth power. He elevates me. Other times, he blasts straight through it and I’m a body, a thing for whatever he feels like doing. I just assume that’s how it is with older men.”
“It’s how it is with Tony. It was that way with me, and we were together at the same age. I’ve never had an older man, I must admit.”
“Well, you’ve been on the straight and narrow for a while now, haven’t you? In fact—” Richard’s eyes were mischievous—”you’re now in the position to be an older man yourself.”
Mark choked. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
SALLY SLEPT DEEPLY IN A CYLINDRICAL DRESSING ROOM WHOSE SINGLE wall bore a spiralling shelf. Sally slept surrounded by an interminable coil of books, and she dreamed of a Möbius strip. She dreamed of climbing a friendly gradient, stopping here and there to browse through other people’s stories. She dreamed and dreamed so completely, so far from the rest of her life, that images from this night would recur at scattered moments throughout the rest of her formative years. But she would never put them in any kind of order.
That night in the converted dressing room, however, the world was hermetically sealed, complete and replete with each answer she would ever need.
“MUSIC!”
In the half-dismantled dining room, Richard found a wind-up record player. They danced together for a while, until it was about four in the morning.
SEVENTEEN
DRUNK THIS TIME, MARK WASN’T ABOUT TO MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE. He hadn’t meant to get like this again. At one point, dancing in the dining room with Richard, feet scraping on hollow wood, he thought, I can’t handle it if this is another epiphany.
Getting drunk could bring on disaster. You widened out and out and embraced everything; you said anything you liked, did anything you felt, and hoped the world would relieve you of responsibility. This night, too, he could feel his sympathies widening and knew at the back of his mind that he couldn’t afford to let them. He was still here on a mission.
Richard was by turns diffident and keen. This night could go any way they fancied, really, with little lost either way.
But Mark knew that upstairs Sally slept in the circular room, and when they reached four o’clock all he wanted to do was fall asleep outside her door. He wanted to guard her room tightly with the full weight of his body, until morning came and they could leave. It was time to shut down and wait until sensible action was called for and could resume. Tonight was not the time nor place for giving anything away.
Richard shrugged as Mark reeled away from him, tangling his feet in the dirty canvas sheet where the assorted objets were laid out. Mark explained that he needed to sleep. His ‘goodnight’ was one of those very polite ones, resolute yet fond, and could be taken by the younger man as a final word on, and even a betrayal of, the atmosphere they had summoned up between them. Richard showed him up and Mark was so intent upon the thought of being a dead weight of protection for Sally, listening in his stupor all night for her breathing through the door, that he was now no longer conscious of Richard as anything but a guide to that resting place.
“In here,” Richard reminded him, patting his shoulder as Mark slid past into the warm room. Richard switched on the bedside lamp and then was gone, the door clicking behind him.
Once in bed, Mark screwed himself up tight in the bedclothes and listened. Nothing; but her room was lined in books, he recalled, and insulated. With his night vision tilting side to side and his breath rattling in his chest, stertorous as though he were already asleep, he went to her door, opened it a crack and checked she was there. She was: a half-moon of pillow-reddened face showed under mussed-up hair, the fat fingers clutching an opened book over the covers.
Mark slumped back into bed and wound himself up secure, making his presence as stolid as he could. When he closed his eyes he felt everything tip slowly into the mattress; nothing would stop the inexorable slide other than keeping his eyes open and lying quite still, in a vigil. He didn’t know how far the dark slide would take him but he was sure it wouldn’t be into a contented sleep. So he lay still on his side with heart palpitations, able to make out the room’s single round window, high upon the wall across from him.
“Let’s see what’s through the round window today.”
Sally was too young ever to have watched Playschool. That seemed a shame. She hadn’t seen The Clangers, either, Hector’s House or Tales of the Riverbank. She didn’t have much patience with what there was on kids’ TV these days. Either it was way above her head or way below it. Mark watched with her sometimes to get her interested, but it all seemed to be teenage boys in dance bands parading about with opened shirts and only their underpants on. Sally grew bored and wandered off to do something else. She’d be absorbed in a drawing when Sam came in from work, and Mark would still be watching Take That in action. Sam would tut.
When he heard the patter of tiny feet on the room’s bare boards, he thought he was merely inventing it. Then he thought Sally was up and about. But she was heavier than that. Having woken up, she, like
