The night I received her email, I slept with V in my arms. It sounds like a strange thing to say because I knew she wasn’t physically there with me, but in all the important ways she was right by my side. It was as if her very essence was in our bed; I smelt her musky scent, felt her hair tickle underneath my chin, fitted my body against hers, held her breasts in my hands.
I woke the next day feeling totally refreshed for the first time in months and when I looked in the mirror after my run my cheeks looked fuller and flushed. Even Kaitlyn commented on how well I looked when I got into work and asked if V and I had made up. Nearly, I told her, with a wink.
Elaine called me during the day and I didn’t have a moment to return her call until I was walking home from the Tube station that evening. I had decided to give V a day to settle back in and then pick her up on Tuesday evening. I had googled restaurants near to her work and decided on a good Lebanese one a short walk from her office.
‘Oh hello, Mike,’ Elaine said when she picked up. ‘Thanks for calling back.’ I imagined her in the hallway, patting her hair as she spoke.
‘How are you?’ I asked, my mood so buoyant I wanted to share it with her.
‘I’m good. I was ringing to see how you are.’
‘I’m great. Everything’s really good.’
‘You certainly sound happy,’ she said, but her voice was tentative. ‘I haven’t spoken to you since Verity’s wedding. How did that go?’
I felt slightly irritated that she should bring that up. I was probably only a few weeks away from announcing our engagement and I didn’t need this reminder. ‘It was fine. A bit over the top, but you know Suzi.’
She hesitated. ‘Actually, Mike, Verity rang last night.’
‘What?’ It felt like a stone had dropped through my stomach.
‘She’s worried about you. So am I, in fact.’
I tried to laugh but it sounded hollow even to myself. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She told me about the emails.’
I stopped on the road and took a breath into my stomach. A man and woman were having an argument in a lighted window, the woman gesticulating wildly at him. ‘They were nothing. We’ve spoken since.’
‘Have you?’ Elaine’s voice rose hopefully.
‘Yes. It was stupid of me. The whole wedding threw me off balance, but Verity explained it all to me and I understand now. I was wrong to be angry with her.’ I started walking again.
‘But Verity said you wrote that you still love her.’
‘It’s all a lot of fuss over nothing.’ I turned up my path and opened my door, balancing the phone between my ear and my shoulder. The house was dark and cool.
‘I don’t want you to get hurt, Mike.’
I leant against the shut door, feeling suddenly weary. ‘Verity would never hurt me.’
‘Not intentionally, no.’ Elaine’s breathing had quickened. ‘Have you thought any more about seeing someone?’
‘No.’
‘I think it would do you good. So does Verity.’
There was a clear line of sight through to the garden from where I was standing and even in the dusk I could see something was wrong, which made my heart quicken. I walked forward purposefully, but then slackened my pace as I remembered that Anna had started that day.
‘I’m fine, really.’ I unlocked the bifold doors, so they could glide away.
‘Yes, but sometimes people don’t realise they need help until they get it.’ Elaine and I had had this conversation a hundred times before when I’d lived with her.
‘That’s my point about Verity.’ I walked into the garden. Anna’s team had begun to hack away at the stone structure of the garden so it resembled a Greek ruin.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know she’s pretty highly strung. I think she might be having one of her episodes.’
‘Really? She sounded fine to me.’
I picked up a bit of the chipped stone. ‘I know her so well, Elaine. I can tell she’s in a bit of a state.’
‘Oh dear. You two have always been so volatile. I just want you both to be happy.’
‘Well, I’m fine, and I plan to help Verity as much as I can.’
‘We all care about you, Mike. You know you can come and stay anytime.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, feeling a sudden surge of love for her. ‘And you and Barry must come here for supper or something.’
‘Well, that would be lovely.’
‘I’d better go now. I’ll call again soon.’
‘Bye, Mike.’ The hope had vanished from her voice and now it was dripping with melancholy.
Others might have been depressed by that call, but V and I are not like others. V would have known Elaine would call and it was just another move in our Crave, which I felt coming closer and closer to its climax. We had played enough times to know that the end moments often seem cruel; that for us to achieve our desires others have to get hurt. If we could have done it another way then no doubt we would have, but there was no other way; cruelty was a necessary part of our game.
They say that hate is the closest emotion to love. And passion certainly exists in two forms. The passion of sex and the passion of arguments. For V and I one would merge into the other all the time. One second shouting, the next fucking. We needed each other in a way that sometimes made me feel it wouldn’t be enough until we’d consumed each other. I read a story once about a Russian man who ate his lovers and I sort of understand why he did it. Imagine your lover actually travelling through your blood, feeding your muscles, informing your brain. Some would see that as the basest level of cruelty, others as an act of love. Ultimately, that is what to Crave means.
I sat in the bar opposite Calthorpe’s the next evening, waiting for V to emerge. The day had been bad and I drank Scotch as a way of eradicating it, although it refused to leave my mind. The chairman and I had had a meeting with the MD of Spectre in which he had cried and told us about the lives of some of the people losing their jobs. The chairman had looked at me and I’d known he wanted me to answer, to spout our well-rehearsed PR spiel. But something about seeing a grown man crying over the curved maple desk in the meeting room had repulsed me.
I heard words come out of my mouth even as I felt the chairman’s stare willing me to stop. The man stopped crying, staring at me open-mouthed. You’re not even an animal, he said, getting up and leaving. We sat in silence for a while after he had gone, my heart thudding in my ears. In the end the chairman stood up and sucked in his breath. I’m going to make an appointment for you with the company doctor, he said, before leaving.
I had forgotten that other people do not necessarily live in a world of bad words.
One of Mum’s boyfriends, I think his name was Logan, used to put his face very close to mine when he shouted. So close I had to screw my mouth shut against his spittle, You useless fucking cunt, he’d scream at me for knocking over his beer, or You fucking pansy twat, for sneezing when the football was on, or You cheeky fucking gobshite, for when I pretended not to hear him. My mother looked out of the window when he spoke, her neat profile blurred by the skyline, as if she couldn’t hear. Naturally he spoke to her in the same way and we both tiptoed round him as if we were visitors in his life and not he in ours. He wasn’t one of the thwackers though; Logan was cleverer than that, his violence more insidious. Logan knew that the threat of his temper hung like a cloud of poisonous fumes over the flat and that it was enough to exterminate the life we knew.