How I Left the National Grid (16 page)

He could picture her clearly. Lost in a distant town. Trapped inside the porous boundaries of a book or record.

‘Did you like Paris?’

She looked down at the floor. He wondered what mental riffs made her reflective expression so natural. He could imagine her as a teenager, spending whole summers inside the sleek interiors of Savage Garden albums. Wishing her life was more like that.

‘Not towards the end,’ she said. ‘I’m still waiting for the London I’d heard about.’

‘That doesn’t matter. You can still find traces of it.’

She smiled. ‘You know, that is true.’

‘Course. It’s impossible to prove how shaped we are by art we love. You have to live off the traces.’ There was a knot in his stomach, born of a need to lift her mood.

She laughed. ‘They are there, aren’t they?’ she said.

‘I could take you to clubs in Manchester. Although most of them have been bulldozed over to make branches of Wetherspoons. But in some of them, just in certain corners, you can sense the musicians who danced there in their early days. It sounds mad, but sometimes I think I can almost experience the thoughts behind the songs I love.’

‘I’d love to experience that. The teenage part of me is still looking for those things.’

‘Then we will,’ he said, putting his hand on the compressed leather of her arm. She didn’t move it, and she smiled again. Slowly this time. He wanted to move his hands through the precise abandon of her hair. He thought of Elsa, and stopped himself. He felt painfully alone, but knew it would be extinguished with a kiss. Don’t, he thought. Be genuine to Elsa. Without that clarity, nothing makes sense.

‘I hope I’m still around when you finish this book,’ she said.

She seemed to be considering whether to place her head on his shoulder, or snake her hand through his hair and kiss him. At that sensual moment any delicate trap felt courageous and right. Her perfume clouded round him, a seductive haze in which Sam felt anything could happen.

As she leant forward the harsh light of the balcony lit her hair. He felt her proximity, the fragile nourishment he knew he could glean from a kiss. Holding back felt cowardly, despite the memory of Elsa. But he reminded himself that he was not a character in a book, who would indulge for the whims of a reader.

She looked slowly away, as if amused at her predicament. ‘That might be the last of it,’ she said.

‘Are you going to offer me some of that cigarette or what?’

She nodded. The plastic sensation was returning. He wanted to express something to her so directly that it would cut through all the confusion around them.

She coughed. The music inside grew louder. She licked her lips slowly.

‘We should go back in,’ he said.

It was almost four a.m. when the two of them found a seat in the McDonalds. Theo had proven elusive, escaping with two burlesque dancers in black corsets at three a.m.. They recognised the person who offered Camille a lift home from the balcony. One of the few fans who’d made it to the after-party. While the tendrils of the pill still soothed them it felt natural for Sam to join Camille for the ride. But the lift only took them as far as the outskirts of the city, leaving them at an all-night McDonalds near the motorway. As the euphoria of the night faded the two of them realized they would have to wait until the six a.m. bus to get to Camille’s. Even as the buzz had retreated, it had left behind a fragile shell that they’d lingered in together. As the new morning had pressed through the lights from the car park, Sam realized how exposed his comedown would be. Soon the adrenalin would go, and the payback would begin.

He dreaded the moment this would occur, on a strange pop-up site spinning off the M25. Yet given his company something told him it would be painfully, synthetically beautiful.

He looked at the margin of their reflection in the window, and for a moment wondered if he could slip inside that silvery realm, be irretrievable. Permanently wrapped in the unique Lucite of the morning.

There were only a few people in the McDonalds. Half an hour ago a stag do had pounded on the Drive-Thru window, finding
it closed before carving inside the restaurant. Their muscular bodies teemed with togas and testosterone. They had gathered on the table behind Sam as they sat down. Sam had tried to catch the sharp motifs of their in-jokes, punch lines spinning aimlessly as the discarded burger wrappers in the car park. Now they were gone they had permitted a cherished silence. With her hair ruffled, and lipstick dried to a narrow shade of decadence, Camille had gone into another realm. She looked as if she not only had all the answers, but as if she was tired of their aggregate weight.

Camille looked out at the strip-lit car park, the vehicles now like mini spaceships. She smiled. The smile seemed to acknowledge how painful the morning light would be. As he sucked at his Pepsi, Sam wondered if the wind had shifted outside. He felt as if his soul had been shrink-wrapped, prevented from familiar lunges of emotion, instead left to cower and wait. He succumbed to the hard edge of chemical coldness that sat inside him. Camille met his eyes and shivered.

When their meals came they could only poke at them.

The rush of the evening had awoken a sense of entitlement that felt so modern it was almost satisfying. At the counter they had both ordered swathes of cheeseburgers and fries but now they sat on the table, as if behind a plastic screen. The pill had, at one point, rendered everything delicious. But it had only taken a slight shift to show what a confidence trick that all was.

‘I’ve never felt this cold before,’ Camille said. ‘I feel as if I’ve shrunk inside.’

‘I know,’ Sam replied. They looked out at the car park, beyond it the temporary lights of the city.

‘Are you sad you didn’t get to talk to Theo?’ she asked, taking a sip with her bloodless lips.

Sam felt an urge to trace the side of her face with one finger, place a stray black lock into the rest of her hair. She recognised the impulse, indulging Sam with her eyes.

‘I’m realizing that it doesn’t ever seem to work like that. Perhaps I can’t expect people to be so attainable.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking the Pepsi. ‘Perhaps we need more enigmatic figures. People who give us the room to work ourselves out while we go after them.’

‘So in that case, finding Wardner would have a cost?’

She looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know. Are you not going to touch your food?’

‘Not just now.’

‘Don’t blame you. This place isn’t going to win any Michelin stars. I can’t see Martin taking his wife here for an aperitif any time soon.’

As she looked out of the window Camille seemed to be looking through the car park, through the lights. Behind them. ‘You alright?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

She inhaled, and held the breath. ‘You see those dots on the horizon, Sam? I think all of them are like little universes, aren’t they? Homes, cafes, nightclubs, cars. They move and switch on and off. From here they seem insignificant, temporary. It is barely worth following them because soon they will pop, pssh, and be gone.’

‘So what if that’s true?’

‘Well, perhaps we are just like them?’

‘Barely worth following?’

‘Exactly. All this, the book. Trying to make sense of people’s histories, what it all means. Everyone is looking to the past for answers, as if the blueprint was left there. But it’s all just distant dots. Soon they will wink off too.’

Sam put down the Pepsi. ‘I sometimes think about how we’re all looking back. We should be trying to change the present, but people have become so reductive. Nowadays they seem only interested in money, sex and attention. In getting cheap laughs. When I was younger, I genuinely believed the future would be
made in the margins.’

‘The margins? The fringes of society?’

‘The people who still believe in music.’ He leant forward. ‘I mean the margins where it’s uncertain. That bit of room we have, where we decide how to behave. Those margins where interpretation and sensuality are. I used to believe we could use them to invent new lifestyles.’

‘But how could we make that happen?’ Her eyes narrowed, the long lashes trembling.

‘By changing the script. By not acting as we’re expected. At gigs, at parties, places like that. When I was young I thought people went with an open mind. I thought if one person there suggested using the furniture for a strange act of make-believe then everyone just joined in. I watched David Bowie on
Top Of The Pops
and thought, ‘That is the spark.’ I thought, ‘From now on, people will relate to one another through personas. There’ll be a sexual revolution.’ But everyone just looks for the normal way to behave. Tries to find the agreed script, even if it doesn’t really exist.’

‘Not online though.’

‘Online isn’t real life. Not yet.’

‘You’re right. Wouldn’t it be fun to stay in a hotel and just try out a new identity? See whether you prefer that one instead?’

‘Exactly. Perhaps we should do that.’

She nodded, and looked out at those lights.

12

Elsa knew Malcolm was the sort of man who took pride in never appearing ruffled. But as he hurriedly threw shirts into a leather suitcase, a blaze of frustration flushed onto his face.

‘You don’t need to leave,’ Elsa said.

He looked up, and she noticed he was panting a little. ‘I set this up carefully,’ he said. ‘Some of the richest and most discerning art buyers in the world are, as we speak, milling around in the downstairs lobby. I wanted to introduce them to you this weekend. Yet for some bizarre reason you insist upon throwing all that back in my face.’

‘Malcolm,’ she said, ‘I’m not saying I don’t want that. It is wonderful, what you’ve set up here. Come on, look at how wonderful this setting is.’

He cast his eye, moodily, around the expansive hotel room. The suite large enough to have its own self-enclosed living room, complete with chandelier, glass tables and silk curtains. A fountain, that bubbled languorously though the bay windows. The child in him, she could see, was reluctant to leave. When had Sam ever offered this, she thought? This is a new world for me. She stepped closer to him.

‘All I’m saying is that it’s too soon for us to share a room together, as a couple. I’ve only just bought a house with Sam, and I can’t blow all that away overnight. You have to give me time!’

‘Right,’ he said, smoothing his hair distractedly. ‘So you’re okay with the amenities, but don’t want me to go near you while you enjoy them?’

‘It’s not that.’

He clenched his hands. ‘When are you going to see, Elsa? Sam is an utterly pathetic loser.’ He threw down the lid of the suitcase. ‘Just take one look at him. He’s never succeeded at anything in his life yet you’ve already wasted your best years on
him. And yet still you spurn all this!’

‘My best years? Malcolm, please.’

‘No,’ he said, seizing the case as sleeves flapped around the edges. ‘You know, I intended for us to become business partners someday, Elsa. But you instead want to loaf around with that retarded adolescent.’

‘Malcolm, stop it now.’

‘I will see you at work on Monday morning.’ He grasped the suitcase against him, and then turned and slammed the door.

She went to the lobby. Elsa saw through the window that Malcolm had left, the space where his BMW had sat now replaced by a silver Jaguar. At the reception, a sheikh received instructions from a concierge, who steered him into The Maple Suite. If Malcolm had stayed, Elsa thought, tonight I would have been in there too. Mingling with rich and influential buyers, and becoming a part of something enterprising.

I should not have come here in the first place, she decided. Last night was a mistake. Now I’m stuck in a hotel that only the spoilt can understand, with no way of getting home, and a phone with only a fleeting signal.

She stayed in the lobby, resending a carefully worded text to Sam until satisfied it would have reached him.

The concierge craned over her, and asked if he could help. As Elsa looked past him she recognised one or two faces from the Gavin Holding launch around her. They nodded in her direction, and Elsa wondered what they would make of her presence here. How do they remember me, she thought? For a moment she wondered if Bonny would soon appear amongst them.

‘The pool is now open again madam, if you’re interested?’

It was almost midnight by the time Elsa made her way down to the pool. The darkened room was empty, the low lights on the walls somehow disconsolate. She felt dirty, lost and desperate. I’ll stay in here, she thought, until the water has cleansed every inch
of Malcolm from me.

At the edge of the pool, Elsa dropped her gown. She caught a glimpse of her long, taut frame, clad only a bikini, in the sauna window opposite. Just before it was obscured by steam. But as she kept looking at her reflection she could not make out any of her features. The heat removed the image from that distant screen. It was as if Elsa had just vanished.

The water passed sleekly around her body and after a few long strokes she lay there, just under the surface of the water, her hair splayed in a white, ghostly swirl. She hung for as long as she could hold her breath. As she bobbed she felt glad to have shed her own movements, her own mannerisms, for a few moments. Breaking to the surface Elsa exhaled, placing her hands gently behind her head as she closed her eyes. She imagined the heat opening her pores. Cleansing her of her guilt.