He Said/She Said(95)

‘Me too,’ I said, and meant it. Talking to Beth was effortless. She got all my jokes, I got all hers. We swapped travel stories. I told her everything about myself except for the important thing. Tell her, urged the angel. Tell her about Laura. Let her know you’ve got a girlfriend. The devil simply leaned against his pitchfork and grinned. I looked up; still no stars.

‘It doesn’t look good for tomorrow, does it?’ Beth said.

‘Cloud cover right across the West Country,’ I said. ‘Still, we could get a break. Strong winds, you never know.’

‘Speaking of which, it’s really bloody cold now,’ she said. ‘Does this thing have an indoors? I want to keep talking but I’m turning blue.’

‘Sure.’ My voice, I noticed, had regressed by years; I was a squeaking adolescent trying to chat up girls on a beach. ‘I might shut the tent up now anyway.’ Beth watched me turn the sign to closed and zip the tent behind me.

That was when I learned my lesson about the relationship between contemplation and action. I was thinking about the logistics: the warm pocket of air in the tent; where the clean bedding was; her underwear, the buckle on my belt. The moment you think about an act in terms of how, you are already halfway to doing it.

The chill-out area, with its twinkling lights and Persian carpets, was a grubby harem. With Laura it had always been about love, but desire when laced with transgression has twice its usual pull. I thought to myself, with the unimpeachable logic of the insanely horny, that I would do this once, and then I would go back to Laura. I even reasoned – in as much as reason came into it – that I had simply deferred the women, the new bodies, the one-night stands, that were every young man’s due.

A red sleeping bag in one corner was held together by a belt.

‘This is clean,’ I said, and unclipped it. It rolled out like a red carpet. Beth sat at one end of it; I at the other.

‘So,’ she said, and smiled in slow motion.

If I’d known what I was starting, would I still have done it? I crawled across the floor to her and kissed her. She tasted of spiced tea and faintly of woodsmoke. ‘You’re lovely,’ she said. We undressed each other, occasionally yelping as freezing fingers brushed against warm skin. Her body was covered in gold paint, dancing suns that I smeared across her breastbone. I smoothed the angel wings on her back, as if to stop her taking flight. Beth was a yielding softness that threatened to go on forever until suddenly I was locked inside her. She moved slowly, her eyes and mouth fixed on mine. If she hadn’t been a stranger I would have used a phrase Laura hated and said we were making love. When I was getting close, she held me still and looked into my eyes. ‘You’re lovely,’ she repeated, but she wasn’t smiling this time. I buried my face in her hair as I came, and even the devil on my shoulder turned his back in disgust.





Chapter 51





KIT

10 August 1999

I woke at dawn after a couple of hours’ sleep, still naked, my muscles cramping in the cold. Guilt immediately closed over my head, shutting out everything else. I pictured Laura’s face if she found out; I thought how I would feel if she did this to me, and my guts twisted. How did Mac do this time after time? Why hadn’t he told me that there were consequences, immediate and visceral? Why hadn’t he warned me about the fear? Probably because he’d never had what I had to lose.

Beth was asleep, buried under my clothes and hers, breasts pressed together between milky arms, a rasp of stubble rash across her neck, the last of the gold paint a shimmer on her skin. Tattooed feathers tickled her shoulders. Freeze-frame images of her face in delight came back to me; beneath the guilt was a dark undercurrent of validation: I squeezed my fists to force it away. Without my warmth, Beth began to shiver, and I watched her eyes flicker open. A grain of sleep clogged her left tear-duct. I beat the urge to wipe it away.

‘Hey,’ she said, propping herself up on her elbows. ‘I’m in the right place for a cup of tea.’

I could feel myself tighten. Once more, said my devil. Once more before the sun comes up. It’s still last night. But I overrode it, and pulled on my jeans with what I hoped was an air of finality.

‘Beth,’ I said. She picked up on the weight I gave her name, and pulled the sleeping bag tight around her, narrowing her eyes.

‘This doesn’t sound good.’

‘There’s no good way to say this. I’ve got a girlfriend.’

There was a second’s delay, then, where I might have expected recoil, Beth leaned in close. ‘Fuck. You,’ she said. She went through an awkward performance of trying to get dressed, but the clothes had lost their easy fluidity of the night before, and she struggled awkwardly into a bra that cut her wings in half, and then forced goosefleshed arms into the sleeves of her top.

‘This,’ she turned to face me and waved a hand over the sleeping bag, over me, ‘is not my style. You’ve made me into that woman. Who sleeps with someone else’s boyfriend. You utter shit.’ She gave me a little shove in the chest that I deserved. ‘Actually, no, it’s more than that. There was something there. A connection. I’m not wrong, am I?’

She looked as though she was about to cry.

I was honestly stunned. I had assumed, since everyone else seemed to have been bed-hopping without consequence since their mid-teens, that the need for a deeper connection was a weakness peculiar to me. It hadn’t occurred to me that Beth would have taken it seriously.