Our Kind of Cruelty(4)

It occurs to me now that if V hadn’t got her job we might have gone to America together. We might still be there. But I don’t like to think this way; it leads you down too many dangerous paths, into worlds of temptation which can never be yours. And I indulged too much in that sort of thinking as a child: that woman kissing her child in the park could be your mother, your key could let you into the house down the road with roses round the door, the smell of frying onions could be someone preparing your dinner.

And anyway, that is what happened. I got the job in America and she got the job in London. We were both riding the crest of a wave, me offered a salary so high I couldn’t take it seriously and V the youngest person ever to have been taken on as a director at the Calthorpe Centre, only six years out of university.

‘How clever of them to make it sound so innocent, like a medical foundation or something,’ she said after she took the call.

I wrapped her in my arms and whispered my congratulations. ‘But I’m going to New York in three months,’ I said.

She pulled away from me and her face tightened round her words. ‘I can’t turn this down, Mikey.’

Something rose through me which I thought might tip me off balance. ‘I won’t go then. I can get another job here.’

‘No. You’ve got to go. It’s an amazing opportunity for you. You can do a couple of years and earn lots of money and then we can start our proper life when you get back.’

‘You make it sound so easy.’

‘That’s because it is. We’ll talk every day and it’s not that far. We can fly over for weekends. It will be romantic.’ She laughed. ‘You’ll be even more like my eagle, flying across the Atlantic in your silver bullet.’

But that thought jolted me. I reached out and took her by the shoulders. ‘You have to promise that you won’t ever Crave without me, V.’

She shook herself free and rubbed where my hands had held her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Her tone cut at me and I turned away, trying to hide my hurt. But she followed me, twisting her body round mine. ‘Mike, I would never do that, you must know that.’

She stood on tiptoes so that her mouth was against my ear. ‘I love seeing how scared they are of you,’ she whispered. I held myself still, until she said, ‘Let’s Crave.’

I think we both knew it would be our last time. We went to a bar just off Leicester Square. We’d been there before, but not for at least six months. It was always filled with foreign students and tourists and gangs of boys up from the provinces. And the odd prostitute or escort. No one there looked as if they were having a good time and the music was a hard, steady thump which reverberated through your body and felt like you were giving yourself CPR. The lights strobed, making everyone’s skin take on a sickly, alien pallor. And something fluorescent in the air made the whites of everyone’s eyes glint and lint show up on everyone’s clothes.

V was wearing a grey silk dress which revealed the milky whiteness of her shoulders and her long, thin neck which curled into the base of her skull. She had piled her dark hair on top of her head, but tendrils had escaped to caress her neck, in a promise of what your lips could do. Black liner flicked over her eyes, stretching and elongating them, and she licked at her full lips which had never needed any lipstick. There was a blush high on her cheekbones, but I didn’t know if it was real or false. She smiled as the barman handed her a tall, brown drink and I saw her nails were painted black.

My own drink was too sweet and it coated my throat so it felt tight and sore. My head was filled with the knowledge of the time we were going to have to spend apart, which was causing an ache to build in my temples. A drunk man swayed into me, his girlfriend giggling on his arm. We were right next to the bar and it would have been very easy to take his head in my hands and bash it against the hard wood. The blood would have come quickly, his head contorted and broken, before anyone could have stopped me.

I looked back at V and she was still alone, still leaning against the bar, her drink making frequent trips to her mouth. It was possible she looked too perfect for this place and I thought about telling her we should leave. It was like putting an exotic butterfly in a roomful of flies, all buzzing round their own shit. I pushed myself off the bar to go to her, but as I did so a man approached her. He wasn’t much taller than she was; stocky, his large muscles bulging like Popeye’s from a pristine white T-shirt. His skin was swarthy and even from where I stood I could see it was covered in a film of sweat. A heavy silver chain with some sort of round coin encircled his neck and his black hair was slicked off his face. He wasn’t ugly, but something about him was grotesque, almost as though his features were too large for his face.

I stopped myself from moving, my eyes locked on to the encounter. I imagined, as I always did at this moment, what it was like to be that close to V, to feel the heat from her body and to imagine your hands at work there; to look at her lips as she spoke, to catch glimpses of her tongue as she laughed and wonder what that mouth was capable of. He leant forward as he spoke, craning close to her ear, his hand poised in the air just by her arm, as if summoning up the courage to touch her. She laughed. He dropped his hand to her hip, where it finally connected with her body through the silk. She was still leaning against the bar, but she tilted her hips forwards slightly so he could slide his hand behind her, against her buttocks. He closed the gap between them, extinguishing all the air, his groin pushing against her hips, no doubt already advertising whatever it was he had. I kept my eyes on V’s hands, but they stayed on her drink and the eagle hung uselessly round her neck.