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like hers at all. He formed the impression that she had thought this out,
that like him she had thought in advance about the things she would say (but
she, choosing the ground in advance, had the advantage), so that her spoken
words were more like lines, something to be acted out on the tense stage of
her body.
'Yes, I think so,' he said, because she was silent, and it seemed they would
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go no further until her question was answered.
'Good,' she said, and sighed. 'I'm sorry you've been deceived, but there were
reasons. Do you want me to explain them to you?' She looked up again, once
more just for a second or so.
'I don't understand,' Graham said, shaking his head, trying, by the expression
on his face, the tone of his voice, to make it clear that he wasn't taking all
this as seriously as Sara was. 'How do you mean "deceived"? How have you been
deceiving me? I've always known about Stock, I've known about your
relationship, but I haven't... well, I might not have been ecstatically happy
about it, but I didn't -'
'Do you remember that time when it was raining and you rang up from... a
callbox, I think you said?' Sara interrupted.
Graham smiled. 'Of course, you were under the bedclothes with your Walkman
turned up full blast to drown out the thunder.'
Sara shook her head quickly, briefly, so that the movement looked more like
some nervous spasm than a sign. She kept looking down at her hands. 'No. No,
I wasn't. What I was doing underneath the bedclothes was screwing Bob Stock.
When you rang, and rang and rang, he took his... stroke from the pulses of the
bell.' She looked up into his eyes, her face quite serious, even unpitying
(while his aching guts turned inside him). A cold, uneven smile crossed her
face.
'As a third party, you were quite a good screw. Rhythm and staying power.'
He felt he could not speak. It was not the fact of the tawdry revelation
itself so much as the tone of its delivery which hurt; this clinical, deadpan
expression, the flat voice, even if this outer calmness was belied by that
tensioned neck, the jerkiness of her movements and gestures. She went on:
'That time I talked to you from the window, when you were down in the street,
the day we went to Camden Lock... Stock was behind me; he put the window down
on my back. All I had on was that shirt. He took me from behind, you know?'
The corner of her lips jigged nervously twice, then twisted with a tiny dry
hint of a smile. 'He'd always said he might do it, one of the times he was
there when you called. I'd dared him to do it. It was very... exciting. You
know?'
He shook his head. He felt he was going to be sick. This was absurd, insane.
It was like all Slater had ever joked about, like all the most sexist
caricatures of female deception.
Why? Why was she telling him all this? What did she expect from him?
She sat on the far side of the circular black table, her hair severely
gathered back, that thin, nearly translucent face brought to its own point,
decks cleared for action. She was watching him now, he thought, the way
scientists must watch a rat; some animal with its brain exposed, wires into
it, hooked up to a machine with its tiny, electric, animal thoughts bleeped
and phosphoresced, recorded by glowing green lines and the smoothly unrolled
lengths of paper and the thin metallic scribbling of scratching pens. Why,
though? Why? (And thought, does the rat ever know, could it ever comprehend,
the reasons for the cruel uses it was put to?)
'You do remember,' she said, voice purring, 'don't you?'
'I... remember,' he said, feeling broken, unable to look at her, and stared at
the table's surface and one or two small crumbs lying on it. 'But why?' he
said, looking up at her. He could not keep his eyes on hers for very long.
He looked down again.
'... even that first time,' Sara said, ignoring his question, 'when we met at
the party.
In the loo. Would you believe that Stock was in there? We had arranged it
all in advance. He climbed up the drainpipe. I left that room we were in and
went down there to meet him. That's what I was doing in the bathroom; fucking
on the floor with Bob Stock.' She pronounced the words
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carefully.
'Really?' he said. He had forgotten it all, forgotten all he had ever felt
for her. He would feel it again, he knew, and it would hurt, but for now he
was putting it out of his mind.
It didn't matter any more. She had changed all the rules, put the whole
relationship that had existed between them into quite a different category.
He stored the old self, the hurt young man for the moment, concentrated as
best he could, while still reeling inside from the sheer force and extent of
the change, on what was being said now, on this new set of rules, this role he
was being forced into, for reasons he didn't yet understand. 'But why?' he
said, trying not to sound hurt, trying to play it the way she was.
'Decoy,' she said, shrugging. She gazed at her fingers again, spreading them
out on the black paint surface. 'That divorce of mine... my husband was
having me followed. Stock couldn't afford to be involved, but we didn't
want... couldn't stop seeing each other. So we decided to use somebody else
to seem to have an affair with me. You were seen to go upstairs with me at
that party; we figured that whoever my husband had tailing me would be at the
party, gate-crashing;
following me. We thought that he would assume we'd been screwing. I really
had, of course, but that was just a little extra. We've been stringing you
along ever since. Sorry, Graham. Anyway, our man doesn't seem to be
following you. Perhaps he's been called off the case or something.
Maybe my other half just didn't want to spend any more money on me; don't ask
me.'
'So,' Graham said, feeling faint, sitting back in the chair as though nothing
was wrong, trying to stop his lips quivering, one hand on the top of the
seat-back (where, he remembered for no good reason, the fly had been), his
other hand still on the table, like some strange animal in a black and
circular arena, on the far side of it from her pale fingers. His hand,
trembling very slightly, scratched at a fleck of white paint on the black
surface as he said, 'I'm not... of any use any more, is that it?'
'Sounds rather mean, doesn't it?' Sara said. She was still trying to sound
calm, but her words sounded clipped. Graham laughed, shaking his head.
'Oh no; no, not a bit!' He felt tears starting to come to his eyes, and
stopped them, determined not to show her what he was feeling. He shook his
head, went on laughing, still watching his finger scratching at the
white-paint fleck. 'Not at all, no.' He shrugged.
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