His head is in her neck as they rock together, sleepily aroused, their faces still closed up, their cells thick with half-remembered dreams.
Over and over, all day in bed, wrapped in his grey linen sheets, her on top, bare-breasted, his face burrowed there; Manon trying to ignore the stoic glances from Nana, who has wandered in like a confused pensioner in a strip joint. In the shower, him insistent behind her, the water pouring down her neck and over the hard stones of her nipples and over his hand between her legs. They cannot stop, or when they stop they seem to start all over again, and each time it is new, each time they are remembering the last time and reinventing it too.
‘I’m going to give up my job and just have sex for a living,’ says Manon, in a shirt and knickers, her bare feet freezing on the kitchen floor.
‘Me too,’ he says, leaning against the counter eating toast. How is it that not touching, him being a few feet away, is erotic, a kind of come-on? ‘Our earnings might take a bit of a hit.’
‘Don’t care,’ she says, sidling up to him, putting a hand down his shorts. And she leads him back to bed.
My heart has made its mind up,
And I’m afraid it’s you.
She doesn’t want to leave this bubble, the two of them back at her flat now, exploring each other. She doesn’t want the abrasive world to shock them awake with its cold obligations. She looks at the two mobile phones, like black beetles on the side table – the work BlackBerry and the Samsung Android, which is for personal use – both switched off because when did she last have a life? When was the last time work took a back seat to the rich turbulence of her heart? She has earned this hiatus. She has earned the right to devote herself to Alan Prendergasp without disturbance, though the phones seem to drag her eyes to their black heft, and thoughts of whether she should check in with the office, and in particular with Helena Reed.
No, she will not. Her body is her antenna now and it chooses him, again and again. And she wonders, surprised, whether this will be her undoing. How much appetite is a woman allowed these days? She towers above him on all fours, feeling like an Alice who’s eaten the cake labelled Eat Me and now she is bigger than the room.
‘Come on, how many?’
‘Not many,’ he says, moving her roving fingers, which have traced the line of hairs around his nipples until he’s laughed and shouted, ‘Geroff!’, then entwined them in his, a lock-down, but playful.
‘C’mon, tell me,’ she nudges him.
‘Um.’ He has closed his eyes, lying on his back. ‘Only one serious one.’
‘How long was that for?’
‘Six months.’
She doesn’t comment on how slight this is for a man of forty-two. She wants him to ask about her previous lovers, the boy from university she nearly married. How much she’d loved him for seven long years, how sad she was to lose him when it petered out.
But he doesn’t ask. All is new, she supposes; all is in the now. This is the new regime! Oh hallowed bed. Who’d have thought that Alan, in all his Alan-ness, would make a right out of all those wrongs – the years alone, the terrible dates. When you meet The One, it all makes sense, it makes the cock-ups seem … intentional. And just in fucking time, too.
Hello, you.
Saturday
Davy
Even making the macaroni che ese last night, he hadn’t felt right.
Davy thought it would be nice to feed his mother after all she did for him and Chloe on Christmas Day. It’d been a lot of work, his mother had said (quite a few times), especially with no one to help her. He thought a macaroni cheese would be homely and filling for a January Saturday dinner, just him, Mum, and Chloe, who said it was her duty to come along – though he’d begun to have the sense that she was guarding him from his mother, didn’t want them to spend time alone together, because there might pass between them a moment to which she was not privy. And then he’d caught himself having a mean thought like that. These were happening to him more and more.
He’d spooned the macaroni cheese into a square white dish and covered it so tightly with cling film that the plastic was an invisible plane. He’d straightened it so the dish was parallel with the splashback, and squared up nicely beside the hob, but it didn’t give him any satisfaction.
He’s all out of sync with himself, he thinks now, as he peels off the cling film and pops the dish into the oven to warm and crisp up on top. He picks up his work phone and dials Helena Reed’s number, because she’s been preying on his mind – the way she’d slammed into him, her face full of fear. Who was she visiting, all the way in Newnham – and why had she seemed furtive about it? What ‘friend’ had prompted such a tearful state?