‘Quite the opposite effect. Your bumps make me go faster, not slower.’
I grin at that, and kiss him back. My lips part and his tongue slips between them, probing delicately. I know what he’s asking and don’t pull away, slipping a hand down between our bodies. I take my time, my eyes shut tight, concentrating on him. It’s the perfect distraction.
He starts to harden against my fingers, and his breathing quickens.
‘Yes,’ he mutters.
We don’t make it to the bedroom. He makes love to me right there on the sofa, from behind, while I’m bent over, gasping. I don’t know where he finds the energy, after his long shift at work. I close my eyes and try to close off from that other world. The one with eyeballs, and parcels from anonymous ill-wishers. Despite his fatigue, he makes love to me with a familiar, almost violent urgency that often accompanies days when he’s witnessed a death at the hospital.
Afterwards, Dominic lies panting beside me.
‘You didn’t come,’ he says.
It’s not a question. All the same, I consider lying. Avoiding all the fuss by pretending he missed it in the rush of his own orgasm. But a greedy little voice in my head won’t let me. Instead, I whisper, ‘It doesn’t matter’, and wait.
‘Of course it matters.’ His hand pushes between my legs, bold and insistent, as I secretly hoped it would.
‘What about the pasta?’
‘Fuck the pasta.’
I stifle my cries against the cushions, my face hot and flushed, my legs shaking as though after some traumatic incident.
Dominic always seems to know what I need, physically. It’s his gift, I tell him in a hoarse voice, but he’s already moving away and doesn’t hear me.
I consider showing him the snow globe.
But then I decide against it. He knows I had a sister who died young. But none of the details. And that’s how I prefer it. I don’t want him to know about my past.
About Rachel.
Chapter Three
After we’ve eaten the chicken pasta, we lie together on the sofa for an hour, limbs tangled in lazy torpor, and watch a late-night news programme where they’re discussing the state of the NHS.
‘Bloody fools,’ Dominic growls, throwing an empty cigarette packet at the screen. ‘What the hell do you know about it?’
He’s a political animal.
I was vaguely apathetic before I met him, not even bothering to vote. But I take a keener interest in politics now, largely down to him and his highly vocal opinions. Dominic seems better informed than the guests we see on news shows, quickly grasps political nuances and complexities that other people miss. He snaps at the television when annoyed, as though the presenters can hear him.
I find his outbursts entertaining, but keep my amusement to myself.
As a nurse practitioner in a casualty department, he sees an even sharper side to social injustice than I do at the food bank, and I know it’s real experiences that drive him, like the old lady’s death today.
Protest marches, campaigning, political activism. Dominic has made no attempt to encourage me to take part in such activities. But I often join him anyway, making slogan banners long into the evening on Friday nights and sometimes carrying them, too, marching beside him and his activist friends at weekends.
The job at the food bank was his idea, initially. Though only after I’d expressed a need to do something worthwhile, rather than continue working in an exclusive Knightsbridge boutique, as I was doing when he met me.
Mum and Dad were astonished when I told them about the food bank. Dad even tried to stop me, saying he would find me ‘something better’ if I didn’t like boutique work anymore. But Mum backed me up for once. ‘Let the girl do what she feels is right, Robert,’ she told him, and smiled at me.
A minor victory. Something to put on my mental shelf, along with other trophies, like my parents’ acceptance of Dominic, and their grudging support when I chose to move out and rent a flat like most other people of my age that I knew. I still need their help with the rent, of course. But I won’t be doing volunteer work forever, and my time at the food bank will help to build up my CV.
‘I’m not a child,’ I told my dad when he complained that our flat was too insecure, the area run-down and dangerous. ‘I’m twenty-three, for God’s sake.’
Dad said nothing. But his disapproval was palpable.
‘You can’t blame your parents, babe,’ Dominic told me later, reassuring me that I was making the right choice. ‘They live in a different world to us. People like that don’t see why food banks are needed, just like they don’t feel the need to protest. They think the answer is as simple as someone getting a job instead of a handout. Their lives are too comfortable for reality to ever intrude. They live in this soft, champagne-coloured bubble of money, and can’t see anyone outside it.’
I couldn’t argue with that.
Dad works at the Foreign Office, and is almost never at home. And Mum is a housewife, the Roedean-educated daughter of a diplomat herself. She doesn’t work; in fact, I don’t think she has ever had a job. Her obsessions include her looks, the large and immaculate London town house where I grew up, and hosting dinner parties for their circle of wealthy, influential friends. I can’t imagine either of my parents having experienced hardship, let alone poverty and starvation. So how can they possibly understand my need to give something back to the society I can see falling apart around me? To do something altruistic with my life?
The news programme finishes just before midnight, and I glance at Dominic, lying curled up against me.
He’s asleep, breathing deeply, his mouth slightly open.
‘Poor tired baby,’ I whisper.
He doesn’t react.
As gently as possible, I extricate myself from his arms. I leave him sleeping on the sofa and creep into the bedroom without putting on the light. I don’t want to wake him. Not yet, anyway. Listening for sounds of movement from the living room, I drag the parcel out from under the bed, then remove the snow globe in the semi-darkness.
It’s cold, round and heavy in my hands. Like a marble head.
Ugh.
I carry it on tiptoe into the bathroom, then shut the door. As an afterthought, I turn the key in the lock.
I turn the globe upside down. The black plinth is easy to remove. Just a few twists and a click.
I hid a screwdriver in the cupboard under the sink earlier while Dominic was preoccupied with the pasta. I take it out now and slip it inside the rubber seal of the snow globe, wiggling it about. It’s harder to dislodge than I thought it would be. After a few minutes of pointless fumbling and swearing, I’m tempted to give up. To throw the bloody thing away and forget it ever arrived.
But I need to be sure. So I persevere, and eventually the rubber cap shifts, water pouring down my arm in a sickly, glittery shower.
‘Shit,’ I say, inadvertently loudly.
Loud enough to wake Dominic? I listen at the door, suddenly tense, but there’s no sound from outside the bathroom.
I don’t want to involve Dominic in this. Can’t involve him. How could I possibly explain a horror like this without sitting down to tell him the whole sorry tale of my sister Rachel? I can’t bear to admit to any of that. After we’re married, perhaps. But not before.
I know it’s a form of dishonesty. But it’s just too scary a thought. Rachel is the skeleton in our family closet. And what if it’s hereditary?
Once I’m convinced Dominic is still asleep, I hold the globe over the sink and slowly let the rest of the water drain out, glitter and white snowflakes clogging up the plughole.
Then nothing is left inside.
Except the eyeball.