Girl A(63)

And then there was JP, and I prepared my self-respect, and served it to him, delicate, on a plate.

I spent most of the summer after university in London. Dad dropped me at the station on Friday afternoons, and I sat on the train in the same seat – one hour and seventeen minutes – with butterflies battering around my belly. They had claws; they had teeth. The hot, rattling carriage, and then the shade of the platform. JP waited behind the barriers at London Bridge, past the initial crowd, and I liked to see him just before he saw me, his eyes sweeping the different faces for mine. Each time we met, it was as if we started again: for twenty minutes we were shy together, one talking over the other, both of us with too much and too little to say. We took the tube to his flat in De Beauvoir, walking from Angel and holding hands, and as he talked about his week and his friends and his ideas for the weekend, the butterflies became drowsy, and slumbered. His flat had long windows facing west, so that the evening light fell in neat stripes across the floorboards, the bookshelves, the bed. He resisted all decoration. There was never anything on the floor.

I tried to remember to urinate on the train, right before it reached London, so that as soon as we were inside he could set me where he wanted to: on the sofa or on the desk, or through and into the bedroom. This sex was always inelegant, half-dressed and hurried, and never lasted long. ‘I need to be inside you,’ he would say, and I enjoyed the needing, as if it was something he would have to do, whether I liked it or not. As soon as he came, we removed the dregs of our clothes – a stray sock, or my bra pushed above my breasts – and lay naked together on the bed or on the rug. He propped himself up on one elbow and reached for me, his eyes creased in a smile and barely open.

‘Tell me,’ he said, during one of the first weekends, starting to touch me. ‘Tell me what you want.’

I rolled onto my stomach and rested my head on my arms.

‘I want you to hurt me,’ I said.

‘Say that again.’

I did so, obedient. A smile rose across his face, sun-slow. ‘How fortunate,’ he said.

When I had met JP in my final weeks of university, I had assumed that his family would be comfortable, and as tidy as he was. There would be a mother and a father, and a house in the home counties. He would be able to ski, and play a musical instrument. He spoke with a soft, placeless accent, and he was endlessly generous; he would insist on paying for extra rounds and dinners and my train fare home. When I refused, I would find the exact sum hidden in my shoes, or fluttering from a book when I unpacked.

After several months, I realized that I had been wrong, although I knew that JP appreciated the assumption. It was, after all, a testament to his life’s work. His mother lived in Leeds, and he visited her three times a year, returning sullen and withdrawn. Her house was cluttered with kitsch ornaments and kitchen paraphernalia, and he couldn’t stand it. He had been made to watch whatever came onto TV next. He had lost brain matter. But he was simple to appease. I waited for him on the sofa or at his desk, sometimes in the position which he requested and sometimes intending to surprise him, and when he walked into his flat he smiled, dropped his bag definitively upon the floor, and unbuckled his belt. ‘There’s no place like home,’ he said.

When I found JP looking at me – returning to our table from the bar of the local pub, or grinning over his shoulder from his desk – I wondered about his own misapprehensions. I had told him everything about Mum and Dad. He knew the layout of their cottage, the best of Dad’s stories, my teenage grudges against them. To somebody else, it might have seemed strange that my memories started at fifteen, but JP’s reluctance to discuss his own childhood made my omissions much easier. We had his cases, and Olivia’s on-off relationship with his senior colleague, and the impending start of my job, and which books we should take with us to Croatia, in order that we would both be happy to read any one of them, and Christopher’s new boyfriend, who was earnest, which we both agreed was one of the worst things you could be. The past was one of the few foreign countries which neither of us wished to visit. There was always so much else to talk about.

My lies ran out when I realized that he would have to meet my parents. It had been over a year, and we planned to leave our separate flats and to move together, to somewhere new. I was pretty sure that Mum and Dad would lie for me, if I asked, but when I pictured them in the garden in Sussex, nudging one another to remember the facade, I didn’t want them to have to.

‘If you’re going to do it,’ said Olivia, ‘then just do it, before you drive yourself crazy.’

‘But doesn’t it have to be the right moment?’

‘Come on, Lex. There isn’t a right moment for something like this.’

Now that the decision had been made, the thought of it loomed over my desk at work, and sat beside me in the taxi on the way home. It stood beside our bed at night, glancing at its watch.

I waited until a summer Bank Holiday. A Friday-night train to the Lake District, with cans of gin and tonic. We reached the bed and breakfast after midnight, and by the morning, the landscape had emerged, bright and textured from black silhouettes, as if it had been finished overnight.

I waited a mile into the first walk, when we were off the road and beginning the ascent. I recalled Dr K’s old adage, about the difficult things being easier to say when you don’t have to look at somebody, and I waited until a narrow path between bracken, single-file only.