‘Look at those clones lined up at the bar,’ I said, unwisely pointing. ‘They look like a rack of toothbrushes.’
She tried to smile. ‘I still see them, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Those imaginary cows. From the acid trip in Michael’s home town. They come to haunt me, Paul, mooing and stamping their feet about my eating meat and walking out on Michael.’
‘He threw you out!’
‘I know, but—'‘He threw you out on a Sunday morning and made you hitch back to Leeds.’
‘But betrayal is betrayal, whatever—’
‘Oh, fuck betrayal! Look.’
On the dance floor Esmé had her tongue down some woman’s throat. Jackey smiled bitterly. ‘She’s like Alien fucking Three. What does he see in her?’
I walked back with Esmé and Jackey on either arm. We went past a couple of nightclubs—Thursdays is Ladies' Night! Free Nurses on Saturdays!—past single men walking home alone, baffled by the sight of my two attendant handmaids. They weren’t speaking; Esmé was being upset and disturbed by Jackey’s silence, while Jackey was too drunk to care any more.
The bells gonged twice as we crossed the canal car park. Jackey extricated herself. ‘I’ll leave you before you go up that hill,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my key for Helen’s house.’ Tactfully she had elected to stay at the house of a different old friend. ‘I’m off tomorrow. I’ll be back to see you soon. Give me a hug.’ We embraced with our usual vigour, the bizarre sexual chemistry blunted by alcohol.
Esmé made a big show of giving Jackey a no-hard-feelings-we-are-sisters hug. Jackey complied, although she might as well have been holding a lamppost. We watched her stagger off down a side road.
‘All my friends make beautiful, filmic exits,’ I said as we set off up the hill. ‘It’s one of my few demands; that when they leave, they do it beautifully.’
Esmé remained ominously quiet. Usually she would jump after a snippet like that like a kitten on a sock. Almost home she said, ‘Jackey deserves to be happy. She’s had it hard, too, hasn’t she?’
I nodded. Esmé gave me a sickeningly consoling squeeze.
‘It was such a shame it never worked out for her and Michael. But it wasn’t right for them. Me and Michael are the right thing. He’ll come to America in the end. But I hope Jackey finds someone soon. She needs to. You both do. You both deserve better. I just wish everyone was happy.’
By now we had reached our back door. I unlocked it and she inserted herself, exhausted, into the dark kitchen before I could. The air was heavy with the reek of stale spices.
I am dreaming, I think, about scarlet cows in bomber jackets. They crowd about me in moral indignation and I am dancing to ward them off, like Glenda Jackson in Women in Love.
Just past four in the morning I wake to the sound of screaming. A keening, babyish shriek. She’s slashed her wrists, I think, propelling myself out of bed. On the landing there is Jack from upstairs, panic all over his face and belly hanging over his boxer shorts.
‘She’s screaming—go and see—Michael’s just shot past me—on the stairs—He’s run out of the house—’
As I race up the stairs the others are coming out of their rooms, dazed and frightened. How many people live here? Which room is Michael’s?
The room that is smashed up; the light glaring on. The room is lifeless apart from Esmé sitting up in bed. She is rigid-backed, screaming, eyes like hardboiled eggs. Her wrists are held out; mercifully clean, harmless.
I grab her and she holds me hard, full of a sexless, destructive passion. She screams down my ear, a sound I have never heard so close in real life.
The rest of the house is congregating downstairs. Someone shouts that they are calling an ambulance. They imagine blood dripping from attic walls, sliding down the Schiele prints. Or the empty pill bottles, the slimy syringe. Her body is hard and yellow, naked and bony. Her jaw judders at my neck. Her screaming slows, is torn into ragged sobs. She heaves breath with difficulty.
‘It’s all right,’ I intone, voice stunningly deep and clear. ‘Esmé, Esmé, it’s all right.’
She subsides; her nails loosen their grip on my T-shirt. She is calming down, slipping back into a lucid wakefulness.
‘It was just a bad dream,’ I tell her.
‘Where’s Michael?’ She works at her breathing.
‘Easy, easy.’
I see everything clearly. She is pasty white. Her pupils are still rolled back. I look down and see my balls hanging negligently out of my shorts. We are complicit in an absurd intimacy. The drama is perfect.
Someone pops their head around the door, afraid. ‘Michael’s gone. He’s ran away. The cunt!’
‘Is the ambulance coming?’
‘Jack went out to ring for one. What was it?’
I smoothed her back, urging her to breathe as I would do to a baby. ‘I don’t know if it was drugs or not. She can’t talk. If it was, and the ambulance comes…’
He vanishes. I hear his steps thudding downstairs.
She gags on every word. ‘I was drowning. I couldn’t get up. Michael got frightened.’
‘Calm down. Just calm down.’
She sucks up air in long gulps.
‘Slower.’
‘It’s so sad, so sad,’ she heaves. ‘So sad.’
‘Slower.’
‘So sad!’
And she begins to pant again, faster and faster, and her eyes flip back like a doll’s in their immaculate make-up. She stiffens in my arms. Something cracks and she stops breathing entirely.
‘Esmé!’
For the first time I hear my own panic.
She starts to curl away from me, into a foetal shape. Something is ebbing out of her, or is it just the folding of her limbs away from me, her dull heaviness sinking back on the shabby duvet? She is silent.
And it was then I had to punch her, hard, to bring her back to life.
BARGAINS FOR CHARLOTTE
Each street on our estate of yellow box houses has a smaller box somewhere in it and these are
