Our Kind of Cruelty(3)

For a few days I felt simply numb, as if an explosion had gone off next to me and shattered my body. But I quickly realised how pedestrian this reaction was. Apart from all the love she clearly still had for me, V seemed to be under the impression that I had wanted the relationship to end. Her breezy tone was so far removed from the V I knew, I wondered for a moment if she had been kidnapped and someone else was writing her emails. The much more plausible explanations were that V was not herself, or she was using her tone to send me a covert message. There were two options at play: either she had lost her mind with the distress I had caused her at Christmas and jumped into the arms of the nearest fool, or she needed me to pay for what I’d done. The latter seemed by far the most likely; this was V after all and she would need me to witness my own remorse. It was as if the lines of her email dissolved and behind them were her true words. This was a game, our favourite game. It was obvious that we were beginning a new, more intricate Crave.

I left it a few days before replying to V’s email and then I chose my words carefully. I adopted her upbeat tone and told her I was very happy for her and of course we would still be friends. I also told her I would be in touch with my address when I got back to London, but after the invitation landed on my mat I knew I needn’t bother. It meant she had called Elaine and that in itself meant something. It also meant that she probably wasn’t as angry as she had been any more. I quickly came to see the invitation for what it was: the first hand in an elaborate apology, a dance only V and I could ever master. I even felt sorry for Angus Metcalf, as the ridiculous invitation revealed him to be.

MR AND MRS COLIN WALTON





REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF


YOUR COMPANY AT THE MARRIAGE


OF THEIR DAUGHTER


VERITY





TO


MR ANGUS METCALF

AT STEEPLE CHAPEL, SUSSEX

ON SATURDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER

AT 3 O’CLOCK





AND AFTERWARDS AT


STEEPLE HOUSE



I woke sometimes with the invitation lying next to me in bed, not that I ever remembered taking it up with me. Once, it was under my cheek and when I peeled it from me I felt the indentations it had left. In the mirror I could see the words, branded on to my skin.

I left it a few days and then sent a short note to V’s mother saying I would be delighted to attend. Not, I knew, that she would share my delight.

I have spent a lot of time with Colin and Suzi over the years and there was a time when I imagined them coming to see me as a sort of son. Sometimes at Christmas it was hard to shake the feeling that V and I were siblings sitting with our parents over a turkey carcass. ‘We make a funny pair,’ she said to me once, ‘you with no parents, me with no siblings. There’s so little of us to go around. We have to keep a tight hold of each other to stop the other from floating away.’ Which was fine by me. I loved nothing more than encircling V’s tiny waist and pulling her towards me in bed, feeling her buttocks slip like a jigsaw into my groin, as our legs mirrored each other in a perfect outline, her head resting neatly under my chin.

Sometimes I think I liked V best when she slept. When I felt her go heavy in my arms and her breath would thicken and slow. I would open my mouth so that my jaw was able to run along the top of her head and I could feel all the ridges and markings on her skull. It didn’t feel like it would be hard to go further than the bone, to delve into the pulpy mixture protecting the grey mass of twisted ropes which formed her brain. To feel the electric currents surging, which kept her alive and alert. Often I would feel jealous of those currents and all the information they held. I would want to wrap them around myself so she would only dream of me, so that I filled her as much as she filled me.

I wonder if V had to argue with her mother to invite me, or if Suzi thought it would serve me right to see her daughter happily married to someone else. I wonder if she planned to look at me during the ceremony and smile.

But in retrospect Suzi was always a stupid woman, always pretending she wanted to be different when really she wanted to be exactly like the people who had surrounded her all her life. I should have realised this sooner, as soon really as I heard her name.

‘I’m Susan,’ she said to me on our first meeting, ‘but call me Suzi,’ which wasn’t too bad until I discovered she spelt it with an ‘i’. A ‘y’ would have been too cosy for Suzi, too normal, too close to who she actually is. And you should never trust people who yearn to be something other than who they are.



It wasn’t even vaguely hard to get a job in the City when I arrived back in London. I had glowing references from the American bank and my performance there spoke for itself. My new salary was large and my bonus promised even more. I didn’t mind the journey to the office each day and I even liked the tall, glinting building I worked in, high in the clouds. I spent my days shouting about numbers and watching them ping and jump on the screens on my desk. It was so easy I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t do it.

V had always said we should aim for retirement at forty-five and it was a target which looked easily within my grasp. I presumed she hadn’t completely changed her life since February and was still at the Calthorpe Centre, working in her sterile basement on her computer programmes which, she said, would render humans useless one day. She claimed not to know why she did it, why she persevered so steadily to make machines cleverer than we are, but I think she loved the idea of inventing something artificial that was better than the real thing. I think she loved the idea of seeing if she could outsmart human emotion.