Our Kind of Cruelty(25)

‘A what?’

‘Didn’t you ever play that game when you were young? You know, making shapes out of the clouds.’

‘No. We didn’t play any games.’

She leant up on her elbow so she was looking down on me and her hair brushed against my cheek. ‘Sorry, Mikey. I didn’t think.’

‘It’s OK.’ I reached up and wound a piece of her hair round my finger. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘Was it very terrible?’

I tried to think of something to say about my childhood, but all that came to mind was the colour grey and the feeling of cold concrete. It had only been three years since I had last seen my mother by then but she had already blurred and morphed into more of a feeling than a person and I found I couldn’t grab hold of a memory which felt real. ‘It wasn’t all bad,’ I tried, but that sounded wrong. ‘Elaine and Barry were great.’

‘Of course,’ V said. ‘But what was your mother like?’

V and I had only known each other for about six months at that point and I had never spoken to anyone before about my mother. But with V I always had the feeling that nothing was ever enough, that we could never do or say or know enough about each other. If I could have turned myself inside out to show her how I worked I would have done.

‘She was very sad,’ I said finally, which sounded true as I said it.

‘In what way?’

‘In every way.’ I tightened my twist on V’s hair and realised how easy it would be to rip it from its roots. ‘I think she drank as a way of blocking life out.’ The conversation was starting to make me feel funny, as if there was something I was forgetting.

‘What about your dad?’

‘I don’t have a dad.’

‘Everyone has a dad,’ V said, her eyes locked on me.

‘No, the space is blank on my birth certificate. My mother said it could have been one of a few men, none of whom she was still in contact with.’ The words sounded unreal outside of myself, where they had lived for so long. I almost wanted to catch them like butterflies and put them back. I couldn’t meet V’s eyes in case I had made her hate me.

But she leant down and kissed me very softly on the side of my mouth. ‘Oh, poor baby,’ she said, so gently I could have cried. Then she laid her head back on my chest and we breathed together for a few minutes. ‘The swan is still there,’ she said.

I looked back into the sky, but all I saw were wispy clouds against the peacock blue. ‘I still can’t see it.’

She laughed. ‘You’re not very good at interpreting things, are you?’

I pulled her closer to me. ‘I love you,’ I said, needing to say it so much at that moment I thought it might burst out of me if I didn’t.

She was quiet for a moment, but then, ‘I love you too,’ she said.

I can’t tell you why V loved me as much as she did. I spent the first year of our relationship terrified that she would wake up and realise she had made a stupid mistake, or identify me as the faulty goods I had always presumed myself to be. But it didn’t happen and I came to realise that she loved me in spite of who I was, which was not something I had ever imagined happening. At times I even let myself believe that she loved me because of who I was, although that thought never seemed quite real to me.

I thought it was a joke when she came up to me at a party I hadn’t wanted to go to in our second year at university. I thought once she had her light she would walk off, but she leant against the wall and asked me my name and what I was reading and where I was from and all those normal questions. And I was so stunned I didn’t ask her any in return, which I only remembered after I got back to my room hours later. I sat at my desk then and wrote out a list of things I wanted to know about her, all the things I would ask her next time, if the phone number she had given me proved to be real. And I also marvelled at the fact that I had even been at the party, via a series of odd coincidences, which was the first time I considered the possibility that fate had wanted us to meet.

There’s a French film called something like The Red Bicycle, I can’t remember the exact title. I saw it years ago late at night on BBC2 and I was so mesmerised by it I forgot to wonder at the name until weeks later, by which time I couldn’t find any reference to it, to the extent that I sometimes wonder if I dreamt it or if I really watched it.

In the film there is a boy who works in a shop and a girl who cycles past the shop every day on her red bicycle. They nearly meet a hundred times, their paths crossing, but never merging. As the film goes on you get the feeling that they need to meet, that it’s imperative to humanity, that when they do something magical will happen. But still they never do. Then they both board a ferry on an ordinary day. They sit near each other, but still fail to notice each other. Even when the storm rolls in and catastrophe strikes, even when it is obvious the boat is sinking rapidly, even when people are losing hope, still they fail to notice each other. The boat sinks and people are dying, perishing, leaving, but still they are flailing on their own. Then the camera pans out and we are watching the event as news footage. The newscaster is telling us it is the worst maritime disaster in French waters since the war, that it is feared only two people have survived. There is a shaky shot of two people being helped off the upturned hull into a lifeboat. They are the only two people left, and they look at each other, and you know immediately that all it was ever going to take for them was one glance.