‘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.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said feebly. I wanted to tell her that she hadn’t been wrong, that it had been beautiful, but I knew I was already in damage-limitation territory.
‘I’m sorry too.’ She bent down to angrily lace a silver shoe. ‘I don’t like being taken for a . . . I don’t know, what did you take me for? Actually, I’d rather you didn’t answer that. Thanks for ruining my festival.’
She had her clothes on and the tent unzipped while I was still barefoot in jeans. I followed her into the silvered field. Freezing grass spiked between my toes. I begged her for a mercy I didn’t deserve. ‘Beth!’ I shouted. ‘Please don’t leave it like this!’
But she was gone. The woods that she found so sinister had swallowed her whole. In the sky, clouds raked the ashes of dawn, reminding me why I was here. The coming eclipse seemed diminished by what I had done.
The loose tent flap slapped slowly against the wall in sarcastic applause. Back inside, I put my boots on and gave my clothes a forensic examination, extracting a single curly black hair from the fibres of my sweater. The red sleeping bag bore a faint wet silvery trail where we had been sleeping, the fever of last night reduced to a tawdry little stain. I couldn’t leave it there. I rolled it up again, ready to throw it in the back of the van. I felt like I was clearing up after someone else, someone I didn’t want to know. I felt like I was laundering a crime scene. I tucked the festering sleeping bag under my arm and walked back to our little camp. A few fires smouldered here and there and I thought about throwing the stained bedding on, but I knew it’d go up with a woof and a flare, attracting attention I couldn’t handle. Instead, I threw it into the back of the van, where I couldn’t see or smell it.
There were no sounds coming from the red tent. I unzipped the green one. Our sleeping bags were there, fastened together. The pillow I’d brought down for Laura smelled of her hair, clear as if she were sleeping there, and it seemed to conjure her face for me, but instead of picturing her smile I saw twisted hate. With a judder I understood what it would be like if the things everyone admired about Laura – her cleverness, her principles – were turned on me. She would know in one look what I was. She would leave me in a heartbeat.