Exposure (11 page)

He ran his hands over the shelf of T-shirts and pulled out one that he had worn during his gap-year. It had a picture of a spliff on the front. He remembered standing under the clock at Waterloo, while he waited for his father to collect him, holding his surfboard, vowing never to shave off his beard, never to get stuck in a normal job. Ludo laughed about this lost idealism, but he, like most of his friends, was still embarrassed to have proved so ordinary, and quickly changed the subject if ever it came up.

But he did not really think for a moment that he could have acted differently. How else could you afford to live in London, be a member of a good gym, have a decent car? He wondered why his sister, Sophie, still dreamt of going back to India, to the places she had visited at eighteen. Surely they would not be the same now. Backpacking was dirty, European hotels were nice; these were axioms of adult reasoning.

But he had still not shaken off the belief that Sophie's excellent grades, her grade-eight violin and piano, meant she had a firmer grip on reality than he did. Where he suspected her of sentimentality or nostalgia, he found his judgement encroached on by a sense that he might simply have missed the point. She was always saying that to him, after all: 'You're missing the point, Lulu. You're not hearing what I'm telling you. You hear cliches.'

Normally, having remembered this crushing observation, he would have been tempted to brood, but just then his mind could not stay still: it felt pursued and aggravated. He slapped his hand against his forehead and wondered if he had ever actually felt physical desire before, because this, what he felt now, was close to humiliating. Again and again he thought of going into the sitting room, waking Arianne and offering her his car, his salary,
anything,
if she would let him take off her clothes—just her
jeans,
even — and run his mouth up between her legs. It didn't matter if she did anything to him really—not right away. First he just wanted to kneel down in front of the sofa with the weight of those beautiful legs over his shoulders, those thighs cushioning his cheeks, his lips and tongue lost to her taste and smell—and to watch her face, to watch what
he
could do to her face.

But why on earth would she let him? And why had he never wanted to do this to Lucy?

He looked at the T-shirt in his hands, unsure how long it had been since he had touched it.
Two years? We
don't have time to touch the things we own, he thought. And then he felt close to tears.

'Hey? Is it making you feel funny, too?' Arianne said. She was leaning on the wall by the doorway. 'The painkillers are making me feel funny. Maybe it's because of the champagne. She said not to drink, didn't she—the doctor?'

He imagined she had caught him looking through her clothes, rather than his own, and hurriedly put back the incriminating T-shirt. 'What is it? Do you feel sick?' he said.

'Sick? No—no. Not that kind of funny...' It was never 'that kind of funny' with her. She could profoundly understate herself at the least expected moment. She used words associated with mild physical sensation to describe deep emotional change.

'Does your head hurt?'

'No ... not that kind of funny at all. No, it was just ... I dreamt I saw God.' She walked over to his bed and climbed on to it.

He felt this intimate contact in his own body. 'That—that's pretty full on,' he said.

She pulled a pillow half-way down the mattress and rested her head on it. But almost immediately she sat up again, drawing her legs under her with a jolt. 'I'll tell you about it if you like. Want to know about God?'

'Um—OK.'

'Well, it was the whole "bright light" thing people talk about,' she said. 'You know? On talk-shows or whatever, where people say things like that.'

He nodded.

'But it wasn't a nice "bright light". It was this burning, devouring light like a nuclear explosion and I knew if I looked I'd go blind. It was like my skin would
blister
from the exposure. You'd get cancer instantly if you got near it—your cells would all
die.
It was like being killed with light—only I knew I was already dying or I wouldn't be allowed to see it.' She looked at him, horrified. 'It makes no sense,' she said.

Then she started smiling and shaking her head as if she couldn't believe how silly she was—and then she burst into tears. They were long sobs, painful to listen to. She covered her face and he went over and put his arms round her—instinctively at first, feeling only a desire to stop a girl crying. 'Hey, hey—you're not dying. Nothing's going to kill you,' he said.

'I just get so
scared ...'

'I know, I know...' he said. He knew.

'So incredibly scared.'

'Yes, I know, I know...
Hey,
I know, I know...'

But his words quickly became a meaningless repetition, their delicate sincerity heavied out by lust. Moments later he found himself kissing her salty mouth—or was she kissing his?

Her ribcage jerked with her sharp, convulsive breaths. Again, according to the artist's design, her body was a kind of conundrum. The adult muscular legs were at war with the fragility of her upper body. Physically, Arianne seemed to be rising above herself, leaving the earthly legs behind, becoming less worldly with every inch she grew towards the sky.

A police car passed under the window, its siren going, and Luke wished it would be quiet, just shut up, in case it broke the spell and she told him to get off. At that very moment she pulled away from him and looked him fiercely in the eye.

With a plummeting heart, he began to prepare an apology. But the next thing he knew she was undoing her shirt, pushing his fingers softly into her bra and whispering, 'So, are you going to make me feel better, Luke?'

Perhaps suffering always precedes style, both in its origins within a personality and in each of its subsequent manifestations. Without pain behind it, strength of personality has no depth, no poignant darkness by which it is thrown into luminous relief.

Luke had never known anyone so desolate or so powerful by turns. Nor had he ever been subject to an aesthetic instinct by which, occasionally, even his own dominance seemed somehow to have been requested. Having raised a sceptical eyebrow at him, Arianne suddenly became a feast of softness and pliancy: she let the strap of her bra submit to his fingers in one joyous burst and he remembered nectarines, which Sophie had picked for them all as a surprise in Portugal. She had come running in from the garden in her sundress, giggling, her skirt full of something, and sent three million nectarines bouncing and rolling all over the lunch table.

With amazement he looked down at the pile of clothes and then at the hot expanse of femininity, a full-bodied and slightly terrifying responsibility, in his arms.

Arianne sat up smiling gently and turned him over. Her face lowered towards him until it was all dark and smelt only of her perfume and her sweat and the wine on her breath. She brought about a total eclipse—then she popped his jeans undone with a practised flick. Her hot palms pressed his wrists back into the duvet, and Luke thought quite clearly that this, right now, was all the French girls in Cap d'Antibes that he could possibly ever have wanted.

Even so, his upbringing told him he ought to
say
something! He knew he ought to halt proceedings because she was a girl, because being a girl meant you felt things in special ways and he really ought to tell her that they needn't rush into anything if she wasn't sure—if she didn't know him well enough, which of course she didn't.

But he was terrified that this might really stop her taking off her knickers. So he said nothing—except her name a few times—and in due course she threw the knickers over a photograph of his rowing four (who were grinning victoriously after the school championships) saying, 'Lucky boys!' and giggling.

And then, with a serious expression, she wriggled away from him up the bed and lay back against the pillows. She observed him anxiously as if she was wondering what was meant to happen next and was afraid that he was going to show her. He clambered after her, grabbing her ankle to hold her still, concerned that if she did tell him to stop now, he would actually have a heart-attack from the frustration. But she let him continue and when he was safely inside her he felt dangerous and exceptional. Or was it desperate and ordinary? It was strangely impossible to say which, but it didn't seem to matter very much. In fact, nothing mattered at all, as long as he was able to match the violent movement of her hips and to stop the bed frame collapsing, without for a moment suggesting that he ever, ever wanted her to stop.

Anticipating him at the vital moment (with what seemed later to have been a supernatural sense of timing), she put her hand over his mouth to prevent him waking the others. He found himself licking her fingers like a grateful dog.

When they woke up the others had already left. Ludo and Jessica had obviously pieced together a simple story and closed the door quietly behind them. It was around eleven on Saturday morning. Luke and Arianne lay staring at each other on the pillows.

'Don't go back today,' Luke said, not knowing where 'back' was. 'Do you have to?' She smiled and said no, she didn't have to go anywhere. She turned her back to him, and moved in against him wrapping his arm over her, covering his hand with kisses.

Why did he feel such intense joy? He was smiling into her hair. Grinning into that shiny, white-blonde bob. She was beautiful, of course, but it was far more than that. He had never met anyone before who seemed to hum with that high voltage of personality, that supercharge of stored passions. She made him feel he was on the verge of something incredibly exciting. Life had been a dark plain, barely visible against a black sky and Arianne was the impending flash of lightning.

Until Sunday evening, they did nothing but sleep and wake and make love again. They were no more than the sum total of their mouths and hands, their lust, hunger, thirst. Lust came before everything else, though. A few times they felt hungry and ordered food. But having thrown coins and notes at the delivery boy and torn open the boxes frantically, they left it almost untouched. It was as if their senses were already promised elsewhere, to a physical desire that left them laughing at its excesses. It left them prey to comical impulses—to biting a wrist as it reached out for a bottle of water; to appetites so sudden that lamps were knocked off tables and upended glasses sent ice skidding across the floor.

They put on clothes for the first time when Ludo dropped by on the Sunday evening, curious to have heard that Arianne was still there. 'Hello,
you
,' he said, in his camp, cynical voice, when she opened the door. 'This is an interesting development, isn't it?'

When the buzzer went Luke had gone into the kitchen to get drinks. A small part of him knew that what he was really doing was hiding. He dreaded seeing his friend laugh at the idea of him and Arianne together. Ludo—everyone, probably—would think he was just old Lulu: reliable, but not bright or sophisticated enough for a girl like her. He needed to collect himself for a performance of virile indifference. He also felt guilty—as if he had hurt Ludo personally—and was not sure why.

He wondered if he was just vulnerable from physical exhaustion and lack of sleep. As he took out three glasses, he remembered having jet-lag after watching a rugby Test match in Australia a few years back and how difficult it had been to talk to his parents over dinner when he got home. The food had tasted bizarre and alien, somehow. Onions were like plastic, green beans squeaked like rubber against his teeth. He felt just as disoriented now.

He and Ludo hugged without making eye-contact and Arianne opened the bottle of wine. Luke sipped his, but it was like drinking wine at that strange dinner and he put it down again. He pushed his fingers into the back of Arianne's jeans, letting them sit against the soft skin, which was still hot and flushed from sex, feeling an ache in the palm of his hand to touch more of her. Her body was the only real thing in the room.

'So I basically wanted to go to Blue Monkey, but they were all, like, "Come to Noise, Bas is DJ-ing, Bas is DJ-ing",' Ludo said, rolling his eyes. 'So there was this huge mission out there—four taxis—and it was really pretty crap. Not crap, but you know—just one of those nothing nights.'

'Nothing nights,' Arianne repeated. 'Was Bas rude about me?'

'No. Why? Oh, God, I'd forgotten all about
that.
No, he was perfectly dignified. Anyway, he was busy. We said hi. He's pretty good, isn't he? But—
fuck
—it's like you spend so much of the evening deciding where to go you haven't got it in you to enjoy yourself when you get there. Texting, phoning, listening to fucking whiny voicemail from Saskia: "Ludo, man, where are you? Have you got any coke because I'm a silly tart and I can't get anything done without you." You know what she's fucking like.
Devastatingly bovine.
God, I think I danced, like, twice, maybe. Actually, I think I might still have concussion. I can't believe I let you all talk me out of staying at the hospital for observation. I should probably be on a ward and shit. With, like, monitors on me.'

While she and Ludo talked, Luke remembered visiting the little gallery his aunt Suzannah had run for a while. He must have been about seven because he had been carrying a cap, which was part of his pre-prep-school uniform. He clearly recalled standing there in his duffel coat, in an agony of frustrated sensuality, beside a marble sculpture he had been told not to touch. The sculpture had been polished to smooth perfection; it was curved and heavy—as if explicitly to please the hand. But his mother had caught his wrist as it reached out.

What was the point of making things so lovely for touching if you were just going to stop anyone doing it, he had wanted to know. He had wanted to know it very much and right that minute—even if Aunt Suzannah was crying. (She was
always
crying, after all.) But his mother just shook her head firmly and said there were yummy biscuits in the car if he was good, but otherwise not. Adults had once been full of weird formulas like this.