In the next hour there’s a general loosening. Giles begins tearing through the pile of board games stacked near the fire. He unearths a box of Twister with a cry of triumph.
‘Oh fuck off!’ Julien shouts, but he does so with a grin. It’s a long time since I’ve seen him smile, properly. It’s probably just the pill, but it makes a bubble of something like happiness expand inside me. Maybe it’s time to let him out of the doghouse, after all. It’s been a year, now. And it’s exhausting: him acting so guilty all the time, me feeling disappointed in him.
It takes several attempts and lots of giggling for us to even get the plastic mat laid out. Everyone is suddenly pretty high.
‘I’ll be caller,’ Katie says, quickly. She didn’t have a pill – neither did Samira, but she at least has a good reason: the baby monitor clipped to her chest like a policewoman with a radio. In this moment Katie’s face – the expression she wears, of adult exasperation in the face of childish silliness – almost pierces through the bubble of joy inside me. I want to say something, call her out on it, but I can’t find the words to do it. Before I can, Mark has grabbed my arm and launched me forward to land: left hand, red. Julien goes next: right foot, green. Then Emma, Giles, Mark. Bo, then Nick: even Nick isn’t above Twister, for God’s sake. Soon Julien is half straddling me, and through the fuzz in my head I think how curiously intimate it feels. Probably the most intimate we have been for a while, that’s for certain. We’ll have sex tonight, I think, in that big, draped four-poster bed. Not baby-making sex. Just for the sheer fun of it.
Emma topples and puts herself out of the game. She staggers to her feet, laughing.
A few more moves. Nick staggers a foot outside the mat and goes out, then Giles collapses trying to cross his left leg over his right. It’s just Bo, Mark, Julien and me in the game now.
I become aware of a hand on the side of my torso, just below my right breast, and moving upwards. It’s on the side that’s out of sight of the others. I smile and look around, expecting to see Julien. Instead I find myself following the hand to Mark’s arm. We are faced away from Emma, and because Julien is above me I’m fairly certain no one else can see. There is a moment while Mark and I look at each other. His eyes are glazed like a sleepwalker’s. My head suddenly feels the sharpest it has since I took the pill, since even before I started drinking. Wrong, is all I can think. This is wrong.
It’s like he has forgotten the rules. We flirt, yes, and he fancies me, and I quite enjoy it, and he does things for me, and his reward is looking. But he can’t touch. That’s different.
I shrug myself out of his grip. As I do I must unbalance him – he sways and crashes to the mat.
‘Mark’s out!’ Emma cries, in glee.
I feel a bit sick, all that rich food and the booze and then the pill. I roll out of my position, amid catcalls of ‘spoilsport!’ and summons back to the mat, and stumble down the corridor to the bathroom. I want to wash my face – this is the mantra in my head – I want to wash my face with cold water.
I look at myself for a while in the mirror. In the bright light, despite all my efforts, I look older than thirty-three. It’s not lines – I’ve made sure there are as few of those as possible – it’s something intangible, something strained and tired about my face. I feel a strange sense of disconnection between the person looking back at me and my internal self. This isn’t me, is it? This woman in the mirror? What was I thinking, getting that stuff? I forgot how after the hilarity and the ease it can quickly make me feel so off. But then who am I kidding? I’ve been feeling like this more and more recently, pills or not.
It used to be enough. Just to be me. To look the way I do, and to be a bloody Oxbridge graduate, and to be able to talk with fluency about current affairs or the state of the economy and the new trend for body con or slip dresses.
But I woke up one morning and realised I was supposed to have something more: to be something more. To have, specifically, ‘A Career’. ‘What do you do?’: that’s the first question at any drinks gathering or wedding or supper. It used to sound so pretentious when someone asked this – in our early twenties, when we were all just playing at being adults. But suddenly it wasn’t enough to be Miranda Adams. People expected you to be ‘Miranda Adams: insert space for something high powered’. An editor, say, or a lawyer, or a banker or an app designer. I tried for a while to say casually that I was writing a novel. But that only led to the inevitable questions: ‘Have you got an agent? A publisher? A book deal?’ Then, ‘Oh.’ (Silently) So, you’re not really a writer, are you?
I stopped bothering.
Sometimes, for shock-value, I’ll say, ‘Oh, you know, I’m a housewife. I just like to keep things nice at home for Julien, and look after him, make sure he’s comfortable.’ And I’ll pretend to myself that I am very amused by the appalled silence that follows.
That was why you flirted with Mark. To prove you’ve still got it. To prove you’re not a … whisper it … has-been.
It was stupid. I mean, I flirt with pretty much everyone: something Katie pointed out when we were first at university. But I know it’s different with Mark – that I shouldn’t lead him on.
I hear footsteps in the corridor. Perhaps it’s Julien, come to check I’m all right. Or Katie, like in the olden days. But when the door opens, slowly, it is the last person I want to see.
He’s so tall; I always forget this. He’s blocking the doorway with his frame.
‘What the fuck, Mark?’ I hiss. ‘What was that? You groping me out there?’
I wait for him to plead with me not to tell Emma, claim he was too out of it to realise what he was doing.
Instead, he says, ‘He doesn’t deserve you, Manda.’
‘What?’ I glare at him. ‘And you do, I suppose?’ I feel filled with righteous anger and shove out at him. ‘Let me past.’
He moves aside. But as he does he reaches out, quick as a flash, to grab my upper arm. I try to twist away from him, but his fingers only tighten, gripping me so hard it stings like a Chinese burn. I feel a shot of adrenaline and pure fear. He wouldn’t try anything, would he? Not here, with the others only in the next room?
‘Get the fuck off me, Mark,’ I say, my voice low and dangerous. He’s never been like this before – not with me, anyway. I try to tug my arm away, but his grip is vice-like. I think of all those useless body combat sessions I’ve done in the gym: I am so weak compared to him.
He bends down to my ear. ‘All this time, I’ve been there for him. Since Oxford. Looking out for him, covering for him if necessary. And does he look out for me? Does he help me out when I ask him to? To have something of my own, for once? No. I’m sick of it. I’m not lying for him any longer.’
He sounds completely sober, his words clear-cut. It’s as if the pill hasn’t affected him at all. In comparison I feel fuggy and confused. Except for the pain in my arm, anchoring me.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask him. I feel as if I’m several minutes behind.
‘I know about him. I know his little secret. Shall I tell you what he’s been up to?’
I’m shaking, with a mixture of fear and anger. It’s important, here, to pretend I don’t know anything – don’t want to know anything.
‘Whatever it is,’ I say, ‘I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want anything to do with it.’
He looks momentarily taken aback. His grip slackens, and I wrench my arm away. ‘I …’ he fumbles, ‘you mean – you really don’t want to know?’
Does he really imagine that my own husband wouldn’t have let me in on his shameful little secret? Still, definitely best to play dumb. Just in case there comes a time when I need to distance myself from it all, to insist on my own innocence.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to know.’