Michael, I reflected, certainly wouldn’t say anything about me. Esmé was reaching for my cigarettes with a customary inverse hospitality which enabled her to grab what she required qualm-free.
So. Anal intercourse sucked. I wondered if she knew yet—I presumed she didn’t—that Michael did too.
Then came the revelation meant to bond us in complicity. ‘I can tell you this, since I know you’ll understand.’
I nodded grimly and thought about how much more attractive she had been upon first arriving, when she was all Louise Brooks hair and public-theatre workshops. In one of those workshop sessions she had met Michael. She shaved her head to be like him and nowadays they meditated and Wrestled together in the formation of a performance aesthetic °f their own. I wouldn’t have minded so much if they didn’t Work on it in the room above mine.
She said, ‘I’m a bisexual butterfly.’
I was more surprised at the second bit.
Esmé went to the corner shop for some wine and we christened our complicity and superiority well into the early hours of that night. By the time I stumbled into my room and threw up purple on the carpet, I had told her the ins and outs of everything.
She had dragged on thirteen of my fags; eyes alive and magnified in her granny glasses at each salacious gem of conversation, starting in genuine interest only once, when I told her that I had fucked Michael too.
‘It was over a year ago. I doubt he remembers it.’
‘But he does,’ she asserted. ‘He told me about it.’
‘What were you on about before, then? You were talking as if Michael was the straightest thing on earth.’
‘He is straight,’ she told me, very seriously. ‘But you are a very, very special person.’
I went to my room and, as I said, threw up on the floor.
This night, though, in the dark at the cast-iron garden table, with the drizzle diluting our wine and running down our faces, Esmé was showing none of that easy, carefree glamour of our earlier friendship. She was miserable as sin. Our pre-empted intimacy had lost its atmosphere of sophomore slumber party and gained a kind of extravagant despair. Esmé was given to theatricals.
‘You must tell me,’ she burst out, ‘how much he still thinks of her.’
‘How should I know how much? She’ll still be on his mind—she’s bound to be…’
‘She’ was Michael’s last girlfriend, Jackey, another friend of mine. That was a friendship a long time in the making, through much mutual suspicion, circumspection and the added complications of mine and Michael’s goings-on at the time. I wasn’t about to commit myself on anything to do with Jackey for Esmé’s benefit. In this case, I realised, Esmé was expendable. Whatever she showered me with—genuine or not—I didn’t owe her anything.
She pulled her face into a leering frown. She was very pale and even-featured. There was a calm blankness about her that could, at times, make her seem beautiful. But I had begun to suffer the first symptoms of a falling-out. Esmé was looking more hideous, to my eyes at least, with each passing crisis.
‘They had a real Bronte thing going for them,’ I said. ‘It was all passion and tears and banging on windows.’
‘Do you think he wants to go back with her?’
‘She’s living right across the country now.’
‘Catherine Earnshaw was dead. She can catch the train at any time!’
‘Jackey has other things to do now. I don’t suppose she would ever want to get wrapped back up in a poisonous affair with Michael. She’s grown out of him.’
Esmé looked stung and for a moment I was pleased. Then I wondered, how much had I grown up?
The following teatime I watched Michael cooking. Staring gloomily at the filthy work surfaces, I downed a bottle of Bulgarian red and we talked. His newly sprouting head was nodding deliberately over the chopping board. He hacked his thick-fingered way through yellow peppers, courgettes, onions. Vegetarian cookery depresses me after a while. There are only so many nights a week you can relish your virtuousness; frying up the same old pulpy faces, rearranging your spices for maximum interest.
Esmé had already arrived home. Today she was moving in, with her luggage in extraordinary hatboxes, her extraordinary hats squashed in a repulsive pile on her head. Michael was serving up a special meal in celebration, but they had argued as soon as her Doc Martens hit our tea-stained lino. Esmé wanted to commemorate Thanksgiving with us by cooking a special Mexican meal. She had a bagful of ingredients, but Michael had got there first.
Thanksgiving for what?’ he grunted, square-shouldered, unsure, deep-set eyes wriggling backwards like twin conga eels.
At first she refused to argue. ‘It’s my culture,’ she said primly, fluffing up the peacock feathers stuck out of her Saks carrier bag. ‘If I’m going to live here, you ought to respect my culture.’
Michael was making jasmine tea. He turned back savagely to the mugs. ‘Respect the slaughter of an indigenous population?’ His voice was stammering and thick, as if he had eaten four Mars bars on the trot. The tea leaves were in a tiny stainless-steel house on the end of a chain. He swirled this in the mugs, passed me mine. It looked diseased.
After a significant pause he told Esmé, ‘You can cook what you fucking well like—but I’m not eating it if it means giving thanks to America.’
She seized her luggage to her. ‘I miss my family!’ she cried brokenly. ‘I’ll miss our turkey this year!’
We watched her turn, march smartly out of the kitchen, across the dark-brown living room—where the others were watching Countdown—and up the wooden stairs to, presumably, Michael’s bedroom.
He went back to his cooking. In the end I said, ‘Couldn’t you put some Mexican spices in it, to make her feel better?’
‘She isn’t even from Mexico.’
‘I know, but it might cheer her up.’
He deliberated. ‘She’d only say it was too weak.’
I had already heard about Esmé’s early years in Mexico. Her
