What became of us
he was inside her and they were both gasping with the glory of what they were doing together. She put her hand over his mouth to quieten him as she moved on top, staring into his eyes, and as they came together, she fell down onto his chest shuddering. It was the only time in her life that she had felt as if her body and soul were the same entity.
They lay together on the floor as the air in the room grew chilly and grey.
‘Have you got any 50ps?’ she whispered, breaking the uncanny silence.
He had used all his money buying rounds that evening.
‘Oh well, it is my last day,’ she said, showing him how she had learned to open the padlock on the meter. Then she struck a match and lit the hideous gas fire. ‘Don’t tell the others!’ she told him, blowing out the match, then looking over her bare shoulder with a little wicked smile as the blue flames whooshed in the greyness of dawn.
It was that sentence and that image of her perfect back in the flickering blue light that had stayed with him for many years after.
He had fallen asleep, and when he awoke she was no longer in the room. The fire was off. At first he assumed that she was in the bathroom, then he imagined her in the kitchen making coffee. As he dozed, he even convinced himself that he could smell the coffee. Every creak of the house was the sound of her footfall tiptoeing up the stairs. He moved from the floor onto the narrow single bed, shifting as far as he could to one side to leave room for her, kicking the counterpane off, then pulling it back up as he remembered that she liked to be warm. He lay there, with the cover pulled right up to his chin, smiling at the door, expecting it to open any second. But she had not come back.
After a while, he had begun to invent new reasons for her absence. The revised scenario was that she had gone for an early morning walk. He was crestfallen that she had not asked him to go with her, then suddenly scared as he heard the sound of movement coming from the other rooms. He realized that if he didn’t want to be caught in her room, he would have to make his way downstairs very rapidly. As he pulled on his clothes, he noticed that her black vest and frayed cutoff Levis were no longer on the floor, but thought it only logical that she would have dressed before going out.
In the darkness of the night before, he hadn’t seen that there had been a rucksack packed and standing by the door which had now disappeared too.
As he closed the door carefully, it occurred to him that the room looked very clear and very empty. Then he heard Annie getting up and was only saved from being discovered because she had found a cigarette in her room and had collapsed back on her bed to smoke it. The acrid fumes wafted onto the landing as he tiptoed past her door.
He remembered the joy in his step as he went downstairs, the blue sky visible through the pane of glass above the front door, the sensation of being in love. He was longing to be outside with Manon, in the open where when he told her that he loved her, no-one would be able to hear. He wanted to shout ‘I love you’ so much that it was almost physically painful to keep the words in. He had murmured it silently again and again into her hair and her skin during the night, but he had not yet said it out loud. But she knew. And she loved him. He knew it. He sat down at the kitchen table to hide his growing erection. And only then had he seen the note.
Enjoy your lives! love Manon.
He was still staring at it when his sister emerged bleary-eyed from her bedroom.
‘Oh hi! Where did you sleep?’
‘In there.’ Thinking quickly, he pointed at the small back room that had a battered old sofa and a television in it.
She did not notice his lie because she was peering at the piece of paper in his hand.
‘What’s that?’
He handed it over.
‘Oh, she’s gone then. Typical of her not to say goodbye, but I suppose we weren’t really in a fit state...’
‘Gone?’
‘She couldn’t wait to get out of here,’ Ursula said with a sniff.
He noticed for the first time that whenever his sister talked about Manon she adopted a disparaging tone.
‘You don’t like her much, do you?’ he asked.
‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘You never know what she’s thinking.’
* * *
It had felt as if a piece of his soul had been amputated.
After a couple more days in Oxford he eventually accepted that she was not going to come back and he returned to Nottingham where
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