The House Swap(13)

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say softly, and I mean it, no matter how pathetic it sounds.

‘Nor do I,’ he replies. His voice is low and gentle, almost sad, and it strikes me that this may be difficult for him, too. Whenever I have tried to talk myself out of my thoughts in recent weeks, I’ve told myself that he’s nothing but a youthful sexual predator, wanting to carve another notch on his bedpost, but right here and now, nothing seems further from the truth. He cares about me, I think – he likes me. The thought is simple and incredibly powerful. Heat flushes up inside me, making me flushed and dizzy. The music emanating from behind the bar seems to swell and rise, vibrating through the walls.

‘I can’t hear myself think,’ I say. ‘Let’s get out.’

We walk to the Tube station together side by side. I fold my arms across my chest, shivering in the night air. From time to time, we chat about Grant and his band, laugh about something that happened at work last week. It is as if the conversation in the pub has not happened, and the thought strikes me fiercely that this is not what I want. I want those moments back. I want that intimacy, the meaning that buzzed between us in the silence with his hand in mine. I can’t see past it, can’t get round it. My head is so full of it I can barely think.

We stop outside the Tube and, for a moment, we look at each other in silence. ‘Are you coming?’ he asks at last.

I shake my head. ‘I’ll walk on to the next one, get on the Northern line.’ We face each other in the cold, the wind blowing between us. Desire is making me faint, and the whole world blurs before my eyes. He says something I don’t quite catch, but I know it’s a question and I am nodding, moving forward into his arms and tilting my face up to his. My fingers are running through his hair as he holds me against him. His lips are cold. We kiss for maybe twenty seconds. A bunch of teenagers lurch past, whooping drunkenly and appreciatively as they do so.

He releases me, and I let my eyes slide up to meet his for an instant. ‘Don’t feel too guilty,’ he says quietly.

‘I’ll try.’ I can hardly form the words in my head, let alone talk. I mumble a goodbye and twist away from him, walking fast down the street. I am still shivering with adrenaline. I turn those few seconds over and over in my head, trying to understand what I am feeling. A strange sense of anticlimax is trickling through me. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. And it’s already gone.



When I find it, it’s in a place so obvious that I hadn’t even bothered to look at first: a dark red notebook with nothing printed on the spine pushed in between two novels on the bedroom bookcase. Hiding in plain sight – it’s her all over. I should have made more effort to think the way she does, but it doesn’t come easily.

I sit down on her bed and flick backwards through it, watching the dates at the top cycle back in time until I reach January, and then I read every page she has written for the next six months. The words are crammed in, crowded almost on top of one another, as if she has had difficulty squeezing her thoughts into the narrow lines. She writes from the heart, holding nothing back. And yet the first thing I feel when I come to the end is a crushing sense of disappointment. It’s so pedestrian, all of it. She’s an intelligent woman, and she can talk a good game, but when it comes to emotions Caroline clearly paints by numbers. Some of the phrases she uses are so worn and universal that it makes me wonder if she even realizes that this diary could have been written by pretty much any woman in the country. I think about him all the time. I want to be with him, even when he’s only just gone. I can’t think about anything else, can’t even step back to understand what I’m doing or why. I can’t get enough of him and it scares me. Things like that. Put slightly differently, twisted an alternative way, over and over again, for six months.

As I expected, the last entry comes on 8 July, and then there’s nothing. Just blank space. I read through the whole thing one more time, and then I do what she should have done long ago and light a match to the pages one by one by the open bedroom window, watching the charred black fragments drifting down to the pavement below the tower block and disappearing into nothing. It takes a long time. Halfway through, I feel a little pang of guilt, because it doesn’t sit well with me to destroy something that someone else cares about, even if that someone is her. I get over it, though.

When it’s done, I sit there for a while, thinking again about the words I have just burned and their prosaic simplicity, how far they fall from anything that really matters. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me. When it comes down to it, what she’s writing about isn’t important. It isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s just love.



Away


Caroline, May 2015


I SEE HER coming from the top of the street; a tall, slim figure strolling in jeans and a bright blue vest top, her hands pushed casually into her pockets. I’m on the way back from my trip to the newsagent’s to pick up the paper. It’s obvious that we’re on a trajectory towards each other, that our paths can’t avoid crossing.

I’ll just keep my head down and pass by quickly, I decide. The carrier bag feels slippery in my hand and I can feel my cheeks burning. It’s ridiculous – I don’t even know the woman. It doesn’t matter if she thinks I’m the rudest person she’s ever met, or sends a bulletin to all her neighbours saying that they should batten down their hatches and ignore me on sight. I’m only here for a week.