‘I’ll make you warm soon. Wait.’
Once again, the camera flashed.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Why?’ He put down the camera and sat beside me. The two images were tossed beside me on the bed. I watched myself take shape. The pictures looked cruel to me, my skin looking flushed, pallid, spotty. I thought of police photographers in films at the scene of the crime,then tried not to. He picked up my hand, which was still flung obediently above my head, and pressed it against his cheek. ‘Because I want to.’ He turned his mouth into my palm.
The phone rang and we looked at each other. ‘Don’t pick it up,’ I said. ‘It’ll be him again.’
‘Him?’
‘Or her.’
We waited until the phone stopped ringing.
‘What if it’s Jake?’ I said. ‘Making those calls.’
‘Jake?’
‘Who else would it be? You hadn’t been getting them before, you say, and they started as soon as I moved in.’ I looked at him. ‘Or maybe it’s a friend.’
Adam shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said, and picked up the camera again, but I struggled into a sitting position.
‘I must get up, Adam. Can you put the bar fire on for me?’
The flat, the top floor of a tall Victorian house, was Spartan. It had no central heating and little furniture. My clothes took up one corner of the large, dark cupboard, and Adam’s possessions were neatly stacked in the corner of the bedroom, still packed. The carpets were worn, the curtains flimsy, and in the kitchen a bare bulb hung above the small stove. We rarely cooked, but ate in small, dimly lit restaurants each evening before coming back to the high bed and hot touch. I felt half blinded by passion. Everything was blurred and unreal except me and Adam. All my life until now I had been a free agent, in control of my life and sure of where I was going. None of my relationships had really diverted me from that. Now I felt rudderless, lost. I would give up anything for the feel of his hands on my body. Sometimes, in the dark early hours of morning when I woke first and was lying unheld in a stranger’s bed and he was still in a secret world of dreams, or perhaps when leaving work, before I saw Adam and felt his continuing rapture, I felt scared. The loss of myself in another.
This morning I hurt. In the bathroom mirror, I saw that there was a livid scratch running down my neck and my lips were puffy. Adam came in and stood behind me. Our eyes met in the mirror. He licked a finger, then ran it down the scratch. I pulled on my clothes and turned towards him.
‘Who was before me, Adam? No, don’t just shrug. I’m serious.’
He paused for a moment, as if weighing up possibilities.
‘Let’s make a deal,’ he said. It sounded horribly formal but, then, I suppose it had to be. Usually details of one’s past love life leak out in late-night confessions, post-coital exchanges, little snippets of information offered as signs of intimacy or trust. We had done none of that. Adam held out my jacket for me. ‘We’ll have a late breakfast down the road, then I’ve got to go and pick up some stuff. And then,’ he opened the door, ‘we’ll meet up back here and you can tell me who you’ve had, and I will tell you.’
‘Everyone?’
‘Everyone.’
‘… and before him, there was Rob. Rob was a graphic designer, he thought he was an artist. He was quite a lot older than me, and he had a daughter of ten by his first wife. He was rather a quiet man, but…’
‘What did you do?’
‘What?’
‘What did you do together?’
‘You know, films, pubs, walks –’
‘You know what I mean.’
I knew what he meant, of course I did. ‘God, Adam. Different things, you know. It was years ago. I can’t remember specifics.’ A lie, of course.
‘Were you in love with him?’
I thought wistfully of Rob’s nice face, some good times. I’d adored him, for a time at least. ‘No.’
‘Go on.’
This was unsettling. Adam was seated opposite me, the table between us. His hands were steepled together; his eyes were boring into me. Talking about sex was difficult enough for me anyway, let alone under this interrogation.
‘There was Laurence, but that didn’t last long,’ I mumbled. Laurence had been funny, hopeless.
‘Yes?’
‘And Joe, who I used to work with.’
‘You were in the same office as him?’
‘Sort of. And no, Adam, we didn’t do it behind the photocopier.’
I ploughed grimly on. I’d been expecting this to be an erotic mutual confession, ending in bed. It was turning out to be a cold, dry tale of the men who had been both irrelevant and important to me in a way I didn’t want to explain to Adam, here at this table. ‘Then before that, it was school and university, and, well, you know…’ I tailed off. The thought of going through the rather short list of boyfriends and drunken one-night stands defeated me. I took a deep breath. ‘Well, if this is what you want. Michael. Then Gareth. And then Simon, who I went out with for a year and a half, and a man called Christopher, once.’ He looked at me. ‘And a man whose name I never knew, at a party I didn’t want to go to. There.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So who did you have sex with first? How old were you?’
‘I was old compared to my friends. Michael, when I was seventeen.’
‘What was it like?’
Somehow the question seemed unembarrassing. Perhaps because it seemed so long ago, and the girl I had been was such a stranger to the woman I was now. It had been captivating. Strange. Fascinating.
‘Awful,’ I said. ‘Painful. Pleasureless.’
He leaned across the table but still didn’t touch me.
‘Have you always liked sex?’
‘Uh, not always.’
‘Have you ever pretended?’
‘Every woman has.’
‘With me?’
‘Never. God, no.’
‘Can we fuck now?’ He was still sitting quite apart from me, straight-backed on the uncomfortable kitchen chair.
I managed a laugh. ‘No way, Adam. It’s your turn.’
He sighed and sat back and held up his fingers, counting off affairs as if he were an accountant. ‘Before you, there was Lily, who I met last summer. Before her there was Francoise for a couple of years. Before her there was… er…’
‘Is it difficult to remember?’ I asked sarcastically, but with a tremor in my voice. I hoped he wouldn’t notice.
‘It’s not hard,’ he said. ‘Lisa. And before Lisa there was a girl called Penny.’ There was a pause. ‘Good climber.’
‘How long did Penny last?’ I had expected a catalogue of conquests, not this efficient list of serious relationships. I felt an acid rush of panic in my stomach.
‘Eighteen months, something like that.’
‘Oh.’ We sat in silence. ‘Were you faithful?’ I forced myself to ask. I really wanted to ask if they were all beautiful, all more beautiful than me.
