‘When I was young.’
They look out at the rink – at the laughing skaters on faster dates.
‘So you’re a poet,’ she says.
He nods.
‘Where do you write?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘Is it lonely?’
‘Not really.’
‘Least you don’t have to do the office Secret Santa. Thank God for Huntingdon’s pound stores, is all I can say!’
He nods again. The relaxedness of his nodding says, ‘This silence is your failing. You should fill it.’ She notices she wants to dig her heels in: I won’t put you at your ease, she thinks.
He looks out at the rink as if he’s alone.
‘Do they rhyme?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your poems – do they rhyme?’
‘Do you like poetry that rhymes?’ he asks.
A full sentence. There is a God.
‘I’m not a big poetry fan,’ she says, which is an out-and-out lie. She has inhaled everyone from T. S. Eliot to Wendy Cope.
You take up yoga, walk and swim.
And nothing works. The outlook’s grim.
‘Really?’ he says, his interest only vaguely pricked. Even jabbing him with a stick doesn’t work. ‘What do you read?’ he asks.
‘Thrillers. Love them. The bigger the gold lettering, the better. So how do you make a living? I mean, poetry doesn’t pay, does it? Are you a poet who also serves pizza?’
‘I couldn’t do that. I prefer to keep my living costs down. I don’t pay any rent … and I sign on.’ He takes a sip of hot chocolate. ‘I live with my ex-girlfriend – at least, I sleep on her sofa. She doesn’t mind. We stopped sleeping together and, well, I never moved out.’
‘Christ, isn’t that a bit awkward?’
‘We’re really good friends. We were always really good friends. More friends than …’ The rest is a mumble.
Manon cups her ear. ‘Sorry, can you say that last bit again?’
‘I said it’s a bit more awkward now she’s got a boyfriend.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘She likes it if I stay out – you know, in the evenings, give them some space.’
Manon looks at him. Smiles. Wonders if she can make him want her. ‘You could always come back to mine,’ she says.
He looks into his hot chocolate, making her wait.
‘We could,’ he says, as if she should do more to persuade him. Another silence which she feels the pressure to fill.
‘I’ve got wine – a nice bottle of red,’ she says.
Her hand feels warm around the paper cup containing her hot chocolate but her heart is darkening. She pictures herself writhing above him, the sex just like the skating – stilted and awkward. He will expect her to put him at his ease, then lay the failure of the exercise firmly at her door. Her life seems as if it’s on a loop, round and round, nothing ever changing.
‘Actually,’ she says, surprising herself, ‘forget that. It’s probably not a good idea.’
‘But you just said—’
‘Yes, I know. I don’t know why I said that.’
‘We could just talk,’ he says. He has reddened.
‘Talk?’ she says. ‘I think there’d be only one person talking and it wouldn’t be you.’
He swallows, watches as she shuffles out between the nailed-down table and the nailed-down stool.
‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I like petite women.’
‘Right, of course. I should have expected that,’ says Manon.
The night air drips with moisture, dank and lonely. Up the broad pedestrian thoroughfare, yellow-smeared from the street lamps, deserted now, past the soldier on the war memorial, deep black stone receding into the night, only the shine on his elbows and knees and helmet are points of light. Aimed at him on all sides, and now shuttered up behind locked grilles, are the pound shops, one after another, which in the day give out a tinny cacophony of jangling and kerchinging, tink tonk, rat-a-tat-tat, dancing Santas, and teddies with drums.