I’m just making mischief, he thought as his giggles subsided. But I don’t really care right now. I deserve some fun.
It was his first recent glimpse of Sam and he was reassured by the fact that she behaved, meeting him, as if she were in a horror film. It made her seem less of a threat.
TWENTY FOUR
EARLY, VERY EARLY, RICHARD DECIDED HE SHOULD WAKE. HE KNEW SAM, Bob and Sally were there. Things would have to be discussed.
When Simmonds came in to go about his daily business, Richard would have to make the introductions and decide who was related to whom and how. That seemed like a moment of daylight clarity and one to be put off. Richard wanted to stretch the deft ambiguity of the night into the day. He knew that everyone else would sleep in till late, but he wanted Mark conscious and around him, with him until the last moment.
He woke him, almost brusquely, and urged him to dress.
“I want to take you to that bookshop. It’s not far.”
“What for?”
“Because it might be fun.” Richard didn’t know why, but he wanted them to do something. He wanted a peg to hang this morning on. He stripped the sheet off the dozing, still complaining Mark.
Whose body was bright blue in the morning. Mark was oblivious to his own spectacle and Richard was half-ashamed by the shock of it. The alarm clock on his chest. An eagle flying between a unicorn’s belly and a stretch of Icelandic coast.
Richard could see no connection between the skin and its cautious oils, the taste of it, and this incredible jigsaw. He felt hoodwinked, as if he had eaten a Mars bar with the wrapper still on. And yet…He thought about food dyes and how once, for a joke which backfired, he’d done a blue curry for Tony and old man Simmonds. It was meant to be tasteless, that odd midnight blue, but dinner was bitter that night and the old man gloomily suggested that Richard was trying to poison his mentors.
Mark stretched and yawned, eyes squeezed shut with those fake eyes squinting unseeing at the ceiling. His William Morris prick stirred feebly and Richard wondered why he hadn’t at any point tasted the design. Those violet anemones and blue arum lilies. Oughtn’t pollen have come away on his tongue from Mark’s stomach? Shouldn’t his morning breath be complex with the juice of crushed fruit? Yet all Richard could taste still was whisky.
He watched the silent Mark haul himself from the bed and tuck this ensemble, piece by piece, back inside his clothes. It seemed touching that he exposed all this to Richard. Richard watched him dress with fascination.
Why was the sight of roman numerals on the clock a man had painted on his chest more intimate than taking his cock into your own mouth?
They crept down the corridor on their way out for the morning. Everyone will sleep in, Richard consoled himself.
But behind them, in her circular room, Sally was sitting up in bed, turning page after page of the book she had been forced to leave unfinished. On either side of them in that thinly carpeted corridor, Iris and Peggy and Sam and Bob were awake also, and yet engaged, buying time of their own.
Something about snow and being snowed in, perhaps.
But early, very early that morning, Tony’s house creaked in its icy coat with the secretive and relieved sounds of its visitors loving each other.
IT WAS THE MORNING YOU WERE TOLD NOT TO LEAVE YOUR HOUSE.
Unless absolutely necessary, you were warned to stay indoors. Outside it was risky and you ventured into its deep and even crispness at your own peril. This morning was strident and blue, offering the slightest respite in terms of snowfall, but you were told more was gathering. The sky was, as it were, drawing in the deepest of breaths, making temperatures drop, preparing to unleash itself once more. The already fallen snow developed a gleaming crust and declared its intention to remain.
If anyone in Tony’s house had been watching TV this morning, they would have heard these warnings. In the grim dawn they might have watched the concerned, puckered faces of presenters on plush sofas urging their viewers to go back to bed.
Why don’t you just give the day a miss? It is too hazardous out. Go back to bed, pull the covers up to your chin, and enjoy the rest of the show? You can spend all day, should you wish, entirely passively, taking in the odd magazine article and quiz show and perhaps, occasionally, apprehensively, spare a glance at the windows. The dropping snow casts moving shadows on your curtains.
On the TV news, images remind you how wise you are to avoid snow chaos. Images of a country knocked into a standstill.
A postman being discouraged on a long, long, slippery street. The wind snatches letters from his hand and valiantly he attempts to retrieve them…gives up.
Eager lambs totter, slump, sink and are never seen again.
A train has derailed itself. The black swathes of churned earth make the snow look wounded.
Cars shunting slowly, filmed in infrared, still not getting home, batteries ticking down. The frazzled AA men get soup at motorway services.
As it happens, nobody in Tony’s house watches the TV. There isn’t one, anyway.
If Sam knew, she wouldn’t be surprised. She couldn’t imagine the inhabitants of this house sitting round to enjoy Blind Date. It was another reason to despise them. Sam would quite enjoy spending this morning in bed with the telly on and Richard Madely and Judy Finnegan at her feet. It’s one of the things you miss when you work in a shop. The newsreaders and presenters—our current Lords of Misrule—would demand that she embrace the novelty of this solstitial decadence.
As it was, she is relishing quite another morning novelty: waking up with
