We went to the pub by the train station. I didn’t know what I would tell him if he asked about my life before the hardware store. Luckily he didn’t. He didn’t seem interested in any part of my life, but he still asked if I wanted to go back to his apartment. I said, “Okay.”
I was wearing my work polo shirt: blue, with the Penton Supplies logo on the chest. He pulled it over my head without undoing the buttons, left my ears ringing. He wore a crucifix on a silver chain around his neck, and while it was happening I counted how many times the pendant bumped against my face. When I lost track I turned my head to the side and read the titles of the videos stacked next to his telly. I felt I was being pushed against very hard, as if he was trying to break through a solid wall inside me. I thought how frightening it was to be crushed underneath someone bigger and stronger than you, their body blocking the light, squeezing out your air. It was horrid, feeling frightened. I wished it hurt more.
“Are you okay?” he asked from above me, again and again.
“Okay,” I said from below him, again and again. I was flat on the floor, his weight drilling into me, my body cracking and seeping like a stretched scab. I was a lot of things. “Okay” wasn’t one of them.
“Oh,” I said when the pain changed from an ache to a stab. He made a grunting noise at the back of his throat. “Oh,” I said again. He grunted again. It was a happy sort of grunt. It made me think he liked me. I wondered how anyone ever knew this thing was over, whether it would go on indefinitely, whether he would know when to stop, whether he would tell me it had finished. After a long time he went still, gasped, and slid out, and I was relieved that the ending, at least, was clear: a stinging emptiness. We rolled away from each other. I pulled up my jeans and curled my knees into my chest. I felt open and sticky, like a wound.
“Right,” I thought. “So that’s that.”
We did it five more times over the next three weeks. It didn’t hurt after the first time, just felt like stretching, like being a glove full of hot oil. He liked it, and I liked the feeling of him liking it. It felt almost the same as him liking me. I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not—the act itself, the smells and sounds and heavy closeness—but there was a peace to it, an occupied feeling, and I liked that. I didn’t feel much about him, and he gave me no reason to think he felt much about me. We never talked about what we were doing. We looked in opposite directions while it happened. I sometimes felt it was a secret we were trying to keep from each other.
A month after the first time, I was putting paint tins on shelves when the checkout girl tapped my back.
“Can you cover my till for five minutes?” she asked. “I’ve got to run to the chemist.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said, and leaned in. “Morning-after pill.”
“Okay,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot less than okay, suddenly hot and sick. I bought a test instead of dinner, and sat in the fourth-floor toilet that no one used because the window didn’t close and the cold tap was broken. There was a poster advertising halogen lightbulbs on the back of the door, and I read it from start to finish while I waited, trousers and underpants wrinkled at my ankles. I learned a lot. The two lines came up like swearing fingers.
“Right,” I thought. “So that’s that.”
• • •
I held Molly’s sleeve as we crossed the road in front of the shop. Inside, Arun was filling the pickled egg jar. Eyeball globes in murky brown vinegar. I could smell them from the pavement, and I felt the sickness as a spider, inching hairy legs onto the back of my tongue. As I looked for the key to the apartment, Molly dawdled in the strip-lit doorway, looking for attention.
“Hi, Arun,” she called when he didn’t immediately oblige.
“Hello, Miss Molly,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron and drinking from a can of Coke. “How are you this afternoon? How is the poor arm?”
“Okay,” she said. “How many chips have you cooked today?”
“Oh, today is slow day,” he said. “We only cook fifteen thousand today.”
“Yesterday it was twenty.”
“I know. And the day before it is twenty-five. What can I do?”
“Don’t know.”
“Today we do not even sell all the chips we cook. Is nightmare. So many left over. I am thinking—do I know any hungry little girls? But then I am thinking, no, I can’t think of anyone . . . not anyone at all . . . .”
“She’s not hungry,” I muttered. I found the key and crunched it into the lock, but Molly was already in the shop. I heard the scrape of metal on tile as she pushed past the stools by the mirror.
“You know me, Arun,” she said.
“Molly, can you come inside please?” I called. When she didn’t appear I leaned round to look through the shop doorway. She was at the counter, her face pressed to the heated display, watching Arun rustle chips onto a sheet of white paper.
“No, Arun, really,” I said. “We’ve got food. She doesn’t need those.”
“Is nothing, is nothing, Julie,” he said. He wrapped the chips in a parcel that he handed to Molly, which she clutched like a newborn. Upstairs, she deposited it on the table and peeled away the layers of paper. I breathed through my mouth. In the shop the smell of oil bounced off the tiles, but the apartment was made of carpet and curtains,
