On the Floor (22 page)

The porter's smile followed us across the lobby. He said have a nice evening which felt like a smack in the teeth. ‘Right, let's go for a drink,' said Stephen. Like there was something else we might do instead.

Four or five drinks later on San Marco, every other table occupied by well-dressed couples who seemed to be mind-staggeringly in love, we were sitting silently side by side facing the piazza. We were both being over-friendly to the waiter, me smoking a cigarette about every six minutes, according to Stephen's watch, which I could monitor by narrowing my eyes and pretending to study the scene beyond his head. The waiter changed the ashtray, which was very small and of the cheapest glass. I was thinking why do they have such cheap ashtrays in a city where glass is an art form and in a cafe where the drinks average six quid a shot? And what about economies of scale and how many ashtrays get knocked off tables by careless drunkards. I was trying to remember a book I'd read about an Englishman of some artistic or literary merit, who came to Venice for a holiday or maybe it was to live with a boyfriend or his father, who might have gone to the opera while he was here or maybe it was the theatre, but all I could really remember was that I'd read about somebody in a book walking across the Bridge of Sighs, and then out of nowhere I was blinded by a threatening well of sudden tears, teetering on the brink of a weeping that might never
stop. Holding my breath, I forced myself though a rush of numbers: last year's peak on the Nikkei Index 35,000, Dow Jones 2750, FTSE 2400, Rex's next date for vaccination 22/3/92, but I figured I was only picking questions I knew the answer to, so I did a few quick currency conversions to sharpen up.

‘Are you hungry?' said Stephen and I thought about saying no, but appetite is a weapon wielded by sulking women.

‘Sort of.'

‘Pasta or something?'

‘This
is
Italy,' I said, but it came out more acidly than I meant.

We started walking, managing not to brush against each other despite the rush of crowds. In the restaurant, I curled the top left corner of the menu and decided on fish, which both of us knew I don't like, but maybe a little unpredictability was just what the situation required. So I ordered the skate and looked to the right at the yellow lights moving across the dark water. Stephen chose the wine and I drank most of it. I considered the two days left and the vague possibility of making an effort. Perhaps the potential for change lay somewhere out there on the glittering horizon and we could make a dash for it, if only there was a lifeboat of energy and conviction.

I said, ‘Sorry about the deal.'

‘Not now,' he said, fingering the label on the wine bottle.

And although I was staring regret in the face, there was a roadblock between the thought and the feeling. Stephen was floating away and I could not find the words to haul him back in.

Stephen ordered another bottle of wine. The waiter commiserated with my uneaten skate and I explained that I had a very small appetite. Then Stephen said on cue, ‘Why did you order it anyway?'

And I said, ‘I just did,' examining the tablecloth. There was a faint red wine stain, just barely visible and I wondered if it was Irish linen because it felt very good quality but I didn't know enough to tell and then Stephen said, ‘Well, I guess this is it.'

I remember I looked up and directly across the table to his profile
staring out at the navy sea. I followed the straight line of his nose, toying with the idea of pretending to misunderstand, asking what did he mean, wondering if he was more courageous than me, if I would regret the missed opportunity of being the first to throw in the towel. Then he turned his face towards me, looking serious and vaguely irritated, like when he's stuck in traffic or when I've said something that he disapproves of. He didn't look angry, he wasn't frowning.

He said, ‘Well,' and I was uncomfortable with his eyes, so I studied the tablecloth again for a while before I said, ‘How d'you mean?'

‘I think you know.'

‘Yes, I know what you mean.'

‘Then we might as well… knock it on the head.' His voice was low and even.

‘If that's the way you want to put it.'

‘Geri, I'm only saying what we both know.'

In the silence that fell upon us I explored the absence of sensation while imagining him coming round to pack up the clothes he had at my flat. Would he gather up the disorder of my stray possessions at his place and bring them over, or would I have to collect them myself and end up saying goodbye twice? I thought about the confusion of CD ownership, knowing that we would both say, ‘You take them, it doesn't matter, I'm sure they're yours anyway.' We wouldn't look each other in the eye anymore. And a whole baguette would never get eaten up now. And I wouldn't have to make sure there was always champagne in the fridge.

And what would we do about sleeping arrangements tonight? Would Stephen offer to sleep in the armchair, like men do in the movies and would I say, ‘Don't be silly, we don't hate each other, do we,' and would we actually end up having sex just so we could remember the last time we did it?

And when would the hurt be? Would it be tonight or tomorrow or in a few months' time?

‘I'm going to try and get a flight back tomorrow,' said Stephen. ‘It would be easier.'

‘OK.'

‘A couple of days on your own might be nice,' he suggests in a tone that encompassed just about everything.

‘Sure. OK by me.'

‘After all, you're the one with the guidebook and I've been here before.'

I realised this was his closing witticism when he raised his hand to call for the bill. He was wearing the cufflinks I had had made for his twenty-ninth birthday and I thought what a boring fucking present to give someone after three and a half years even if they were expensive. I reached for my handbag and he said, ‘I'll get this,' and then we walked quietly back through the narrow streets, past the outdoor orchestra still playing light jazz at 1 a.m.

In the hotel room, I poured myself a large vodka and stood by the open window doing an emotional minesweep over the black water. I counted eleven distant moving boat lights. When I turned back into the room, I thought Stephen had sawn the bed in half until I realised that the double was a twin.

A silver light slipped through the window. In sleep Stephen always took up the whole bed, lying diagonally like there wasn't room for another person. On his back, one arm behind his head. Relaxed. Apparently that's not how I do it, not still and peaceful but writhing annoyingly around the bed. This makes me difficult to sleep with according to Stephen who is, of course, qualified to judge this issue after more than four years of experience.

Two bodies in a bed, the sum of collected facts and shared experiences, years of familiarity binding you together, the desire to tell and to hear all, the need to be known and explored, to shed your lonely individuality. In the beginning it wore us out: I couldn't get enough of the gift of his skin, the sensation of touching, like pink-lidded puppies nuzzling into each other's warmth. For the first few months, it only got better, clothes scattered on the floor, the bed always unmade, me thinking this is like the adverts where the couple doesn't care that it's
lashing rain and they've got no umbrella. Maybe you take too much in the beginning and use it all up, or maybe beginnings are all there is, the rest a slow slide on gravel, lower and lower until you no longer see the top: why it started, how it began.

One hundred and eighty-one days ago, at 7:48 a.m., in room 303 in the Hotel Cipriani, Venice, I woke up face down in the pillow, and I knew without looking that Stephen was already gone.

After a half hour shuttling back and forth between Central and Kowloon, watching the orderly draining and refilling of passengers, I am flatly damp. I disembark, make my way past the busy shops with their the doll-like mannequins, hips and waists so slender, feet like babies'.

My step is slow in the thick air as I reach Mandarin and the doorman bows, his gaze lingering just a second too long as I lurch a little to the right and into the lobby chill. And there, walking quickly towards me and checking his watch, is Stephen. I stop dead as if I could be camouflaged by remaining still. The bell chimes faintly, the lift doors slide open behind him and he looks up to catch me with my mouth hanging open. A waiter's airborne tray glides between us and then Stephen draws level. His eyes as brown as ever, head tilted in the interrogative, the faint chin cleft is unfilled: he has been preserved intact, immaculate and exactly as I remember him.

‘I might have known.' His smile is hesitant but it is warm, the slight dimple appears as he closes the gap between us and I catch the air rush of a familiar scent.

‘So you're after my clients now?'

He grins. ‘I should have guessed Felix would tell you I'd called.'

‘You
do
know he only agreed to meet you out of curiosity?' And he frowns, his Stephen puzzle-furrow. ‘Felix just wanted to check out the guy who dumped me.'

‘Nothing could surprise me after all you told me about him.' Stephen smiles – kindly, unruffled, unshakeable as ever. He is looking right at
me, so I look away. Please let me not be churlish now. Let me rise to the occasion and show how much I have grown.

‘So how's Rex?'

‘He's fine.'
Like you care
. ‘Great, happy as a lab.'

‘Lisa looking after him?'

‘No, she's away.'
Like it's any of your business
.‘He's with a guy from work,' and for a fleeting moment I am tempted to invent a new boyfriend who is not only gorgeous and rich but babysitting Rex as we speak. ‘Actually, it's Pie Man, the quant guy.'

‘The fat guy?'
Why am I admitting to hanging round with fatboy?
‘A last minute thing for this trip. Rex sort of knows him.'
I don't have to explain. You left us, remember?

‘So you just got in today?'

‘I'm not even supposed to be here. I was here last week, got back Saturday and then got sent out again.' And suddenly I want Stephen to know that I am travelling up the food chain, not just selling water to ducks these days. ‘On a Special Mission.'

‘Really.'

‘For one of your heroes, in fact.'

‘Oh yeah?'

‘Kapoor, actually.'
Go on, look surprised
. And Stephen does in fact seem to miss a beat, I know him well enough to notice the slightest double take before he inclines his head in graceful acknowledgement.

‘Well, well.'

‘She must be going up in the world, is what you're thinking.'

‘You were always destined for stardom, Geri.'

But that wasn't enough to stop you from dumping me, was it?

‘So are you here for a few days?'

‘I'm done. Flying back tonight.'

Me too
, but I don't say this.

‘You busy now?' He gestures with his hands, looks around and it seems like a genuine enquiry rather than a protocol line.

‘I'm due in the office. To report on my Special Mission.'

‘Oh, right.'

‘Why?'

‘I thought perhaps we could – that I could take you out for a drink. If you had time to kill and if you would – like to?' And I am struck by the awkwardness in a rare rephrasing from the man who so fluently despatched me in Venice. There is a steady drift down the lobby into the Captain's Bar and the promise of an afternoon buzz, the red hide is snug and softly animal and invitingly kitsch. But it pulses with the reminiscence of other warmer times and since this chance encounter is an opportunity to rewrite my own ending, I do not trust myself to navigate safely out of reach of the past.

‘Yes, I'd like to. But not here.'

Out in Repulse Bay the clifftop air at the American Club feels lighter but isn't. Executive wives in tennis skirts thrash around on the pink courts, gathering in G&T clusters in the terraced heat to discuss the relative merits of birthing in Hong Kong or Tokyo, trying to pretend that dim sum is really nice once you get used to it and that all the slender young Asian girls don't bother them. A couple of years in expatriate nirvana before rock fever sets in. The island is a playground, a watering hole.

‘You remember we came here that time with Tom Castigliano?' Stephen gestures with his wine glass. A rare collision of travel schedules three years ago had us overlap for twenty-four hours in Hong Kong and I watched from the viewing gallery while Stephen and Tom played squash, thinking which of the two is the most fuckable, legs slamming across the wooden floor, shouts bounding off the glass, Stephen doing a Borg kneel when it was over and both waving up to me before they disappeared to the showers. And while I lay back in the shaded heat, I could feel the soft sweep of Stephen's hand under the fold of my skirt, trace the smooth slide of his fingers along the inside of my thigh, taste the heat of his tongue as my lips parted and I pressed into the surge of him swelling deep inside me until the light blackened behind my closed
lids. My eyes opened onto their double silhouette against the sudden sunset and Stephen said,
Time to wake up
.

I run my finger around the steaming ice bucket.

‘You want to go inside?'

‘I'm fine.' The terrace is sticky. Drips trickle down the neck of our second bottle into a small, damp pool on the stone.

‘Felix is insisting I move out here.'

‘Well, I guess that was always on the cards.' Stephen nods over the rim of his glass. ‘But?'

‘Who said there was a but?'

‘So you
are
keen on the move?'

‘There are worse places.'

‘You don't sound too enthusiastic.'

‘Obviously there's Rex to think about.' And even as I say this I know how pathetic it sounds. This vision of me home alone clinging to a fucking Labrador. A surrogate child, like Zanna says. But Stephen just smiles, a slight twist of the mouth – this is what happens when someone knows you so well they can write your script; in fact they
do
write it. And then they stop listening. Arrested development, a relationship on autopilot. You no longer grow.