‘You’re wrong.’
‘What is it about Verity? Why do all the boys go potty over her?’
‘Because she’s perfect.’ I couldn’t believe anyone needed to ask that question.
Louise stepped a little closer to me. ‘You know, I always fancied the pants off you, Mike. Not that you’d have ever noticed. You were like a puppy around Verity, only ever had eyes for her.’ She closed the gap between us and put her hand against my dick, on the outside of my trousers. ‘I hate James,’ she said. ‘He fucks like a rabbit.’
‘This is Verity’s wedding.’
‘So?’ she said, her hand still on my limp dick.
I pulled back, raising my hands as I did so to remove hers from my body, but she was so drunk she lost her balance and toppled backwards, her high heels skidding from under her. She fell in an undignified heap, landing by the side of the marquee.
She looked up at me. ‘What the fuck.’
I knew I should help her up and apologise, but something about her crumpled figure on the grass disgusted me. The flickering of the candles was adding to my headache and I found all I could do was turn and walk away across the grass.
‘You pushed me, you fucking maniac,’ she shouted ridiculously after me.
I walked back down into the village but the last train had long gone, so I went into the pub and ordered another pint and asked if they knew of a taxi which would drive me back to London. My headache was so bad by then my vision had become jarred and jagged. I couldn’t answer the barman when he asked if it had been a good wedding and he shrugged and moved on to the next customer. I feigned sleep in the back of the cab to avoid talking, but something about the movement must have lulled me because I woke up as we were pulling up outside my house. I paid the ￡250 requested and let myself in, where I went to the kitchen and opened a bottle of red which I didn’t even really want.
There was just so much I didn’t understand. People said things they didn’t mean the whole time. Or maybe they didn’t know what they meant? Or, most terrifying of all, maybe nothing in the world made sense? What would have happened, for example, if I had fucked Louise behind the marquee? What would she have said to James? Did she really hate him? How do rabbits fuck?
And was it possible that V had known Angus for a year? That they’d had their first date a month before I came home for Christmas? Did they really have it just right like Louise said or was he nothing more than a part in our Crave? If I hadn’t been such a massive idiot and fucked everything up by screwing Carly, perhaps V had planned to tell me all about Angus?
I banged my fist against the marble of the counter top, the pain spreading comfortingly up my arm. ‘V,’ I shouted into the air, ‘I just want to understand. I just need to know what you want me to do.’ But the silence kept its counsel and all I could do was sit down at my long kitchen table and drink the bloody wine.
II
The week following the wedding wasn’t good.
I had terrible trouble sleeping and I felt sick and woozy during the day. At work the chairman put me on to the new deal; we were taking over a large company called Spectre and it was pretty straightforward. Most of it had to be stripped away and lots of people were going to lose their jobs, but I have never felt the queasiness others talk about surrounding situations like this. The way I see it is if everyone in a company is good at their jobs, then the company survives and if, as a boss, you’re too stupid to get rid of any dead wood, then what do you expect?
The chairman laughed when I said this to him as we sat in his sumptuous office. ‘Between you and me,’ he said, ‘that’s why women generally never rise to the top in business, they’re too damned sentimental.’ Which is obviously a load of horseshit, but I smiled and nodded my head as I knew I was supposed to. Except the simplicity of the operation didn’t seem to help matters. I took all the files and folders back to my desk and logged into the secure sites which held all the figures and found I couldn’t make anything stick. It felt like the numbers were dancing across the screen, disappearing behind algorithms and vanishing into graphs. I was able to conceive of a route, but then lose it halfway through, allowing predictions to tumble around me as if they had never actually existed.
The problem was that my head felt occupied by V, as if she was a burrowing animal who had taken up residence in my skull. It seemed absurd to be attempting anything normal when at any given moment she could be experiencing things for the first time which I would never be able to share with her. I kicked myself for not asking her more specifics about their trip, so I could get a clearer handle on what she was doing at any given time. We had talked about going to South Africa ourselves and I felt sure she would be drawn to some of the places we’d discussed.
I googled the country incessantly, refining and extending my searches around the words tourism, high-class, unusual, exotic. There was a dazzling array of things to do and most of them looked like the sort of things V would enjoy. And of course Angus had the money to make it spectacular, which he would be bound to be doing. I took virtual tours around the top hotels, booked helicopter flights in his name, arranged tastings in vineyards, looked into the best spas, read the menus of the best restaurants. But nothing ever felt like enough; I wanted to break the computer screens and jump in, I wanted to peel away all the PR, I wanted to install cameras everywhere. I wanted to know exactly what they were doing.
I continued the process at home every evening with a bottle of wine and dinner eaten out of cartons next to my laptop. V would never stand for such sloppiness, but as the week stumbled on I became more and more angry with her. What she was doing began to feel out of all proportion to my crime. I knew I had massively fucked up sleeping with Carly, but I regretted it and I had apologised and prostrated myself. She must have known that it meant nothing, she must have known she was always and forever the only one for me.
What I don’t understand is how some men get away with the things they do, whilst others, like me, are made to crawl over hot coals for moments of madness which we would take back in a heartbeat.
I can still hear the thwack of connecting flesh which accompanied so much of my childhood. V has never known what it feels like to be lying in your bedroom and to hear your mother’s body slump against a piece of furniture. To crawl on your hands and knees into the hall and to watch from the door as a man hauls her up by her hair and slams her face into the wall. To feel the desire to move and yet the overpowering fear which turns your knees to jelly. I always crawled back to my sheetless mattress and pulled my threadbare duvet over my head, hoping for sleep which never came immediately, instead ambushing me at some time in the night so I would wake in the morning with a shot of dread, convinced I would find my mother dead in a pool of blood.
V has no idea what the body looks like after it has been beaten. How it swells and protrudes, how it colours into sickly shades of crimson and black before fading to yellow and grey. She doesn’t know what it feels like to run your hand over that skin when the person’s body has gone limp from drink, how it feels hard and unnatural and how you can’t imagine it ever looking normal again. She doesn’t know how easy it is to leave scars, how sometimes just a tiny brown oval will remain, but whenever you look at it you know why it’s there.
On the week anniversary of her wedding, I wrote V the following email: