Bastian raises an eyebrow.
“That was my main takeaway point from all the Enid Blyton I read as a child,” Laura explains. “The elaborate picnics. I didn’t really understand the concept of eating tongue, so I guess it stuck in my head.”
“I don’t think I ever ate tongue.”
The lads finish their stretching and begin a dribbling exercise. The coach is in his early fifties with a red face and a gravelly voice. He issues instructions with encouragement, and jokes and laughs with the boys. Though clearly past his prime, he runs around with them and kicks the ball back to the lads when they overrun it. The football pitch is peppered with molehills like small explosions of feral interference. The white lines need repainting, and the nets between the goalposts hang loose.
“So Rebecca kicked you out, and you decided to get on the train and come and see me?”
When Laura phrases it like that, it sounds bad. Bastian tries to think of a way of explaining that he and Rebecca were unhappy together for a long time; that he regretted things ending with Laura almost from the moment it happened. He felt the need to explain to her that his biggest failing was being totally passive; of sleepwalking through his own life. He hadn’t ended things with Rebecca and come to find Laura sooner not because he lacked the desire, but because he lacked the ambition.
Laura waits for Bastian to respond but when he doesn’t, she speaks again. “To be totally honest with you, Bastian, it’s slim pickings up here. I haven’t had good sex since I moved back home and for whatever reason, despite myself, I just well fancy you. So, although I know in this situation I should be outraged and that I should feel, I don’t know, used or disposable or something. Despite that, I am absolutely going to have sex with you as soon as we can get a moment to ourselves. If this makes me weak or a bad feminist or whatever, never mind.”
After that, the atmosphere changes between them. Bastian becomes suddenly and inconveniently aroused, only there’s still another forty-five minutes of football training to watch, and even when they get back to Laura’s house it will be full of children and dogs.
But he’s thinking about her body. Her strength. The way she pushed back against him as they used to kiss. The way she gripped his arms with her hands; the way she stretched out her long legs when he was inside her, and linked them behind his back, and he felt her thighs against his hips. And the way, when she was on top of him, she rested her weight on his chest with a single hand, and rocked back and forth, and how his breathing came to work with and against her rocking. When Laura wanted something from him, she asked. When he wanted something from her, he asked, and he knew that she would give him a straight answer.
She doesn’t think there’s anything special about him. Bastian has been led to believe by any book he’s ever read and any film he’s ever seen that it is good for the person you love to think you’re totally one hundred percent remarkable. All fictional characters seem to very much enjoy being told that they’re wonderful and beautiful and intelligent and brave—the most wonderful and beautiful and intelligent and brave people that have ever existed in the history of the world. But Laura doesn’t seem to think Bastian is any of these things, except perhaps beautiful, and that’s okay. That’s exactly what he wants.
He’s average. He’s mediocre. He doesn’t think these things about himself because he lacks confidence or because he has low self-esteem. He thinks them because they’re true.
At school, Bastian and his friends were told that they would rule the world. That wasn’t even hyperbole. They were told that they would literally rule the world. The world of business; the world of politics; the world of culture; theater, film, television. At the time he just thought: fine. But that was before he realized what ruling the world would mean, before he had a chance to decide upon the kind of world he wanted, and the life he wanted within it.
Bastian’s eyes follow the line of the football as it’s kicked from boot to boot.
“Are you coming?” Laura calls from a few meters away. She’s turned and is walking towards the sports center. “Tuck shop, yeah?”
Bastian hasn’t heard anyone use the phrase “tuck shop” for years. Bastian jogs after Laura. She doesn’t lead him to a tuck shop. They go into an empty changing room at the end of a corridor. Laura pushes Bastian gently against the wall and kisses him, and as she kisses him she lifts her knee so that her foot strokes against his calf and she leans into him with her pelvis and he feels himself go hard, slowly then quickly.
He enjoys the loss of control, of the response his body has to her touch. His mind can just shut down now, and for this he’s grateful. There’s no point in having a mind anyway, or in personhood at all. As she kisses him and reaches down to unbuckle his jeans, he leans back against the wall, dissolves into it. I am nothing, he realizes. I am nobody.
Anastasia
Following their argument at the motorway service station, mother and daughter part company. Anastasia finds Roster waiting by the car. She tells him she’ll be making her own way back to London. He doesn’t object. He has known her for a long time and knows there is no point arguing.
Anastasia makes her way towards the lorry park to find a likely looking driver. She knows what to look out for—how to find a target, and how to work him. She has played this game before.
It doesn’t take long. He looks lonely and eager. He is heading to London and says she can join him. She climbs up into
