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“Hobnob and Gingernut,” says Arthur. “The guinea pigs. Look.”
He lifts the lid of the cage and leans into it, emerges with a handful of red fluff. “This one’s Gingernut,” he says, passing it to her.
She takes it from his hand and coos at it. “Nice,” she says. “Cute.”
But she’s not here to look at guinea pigs and interiors, she’s here to work out who these people really are.
She follows Arthur up the steep staircase to the next floor, a tiny landing, two small bedrooms, a carpeted bathroom that makes her stomach churn. She goes to push open the door to one of the bedrooms and Arthur stops her.
“No,” he says. “Don’t go in there.”
“Why not?”
“It’s my parents’ room. It’s private.”
“Okay,” she says, pressing her hand to her chest. “I hear you.” Behind his back she rolls her eyes, then pushes open the door to the other room.
Arthur clears his throat. “It’s very small,” he says, apologetically. “I mean, it’s fine, but you know…”
A single bed made up with a burgundy striped duvet and navy- blue pillows, posters of various super heroes and action figures pinned to the walls and displayed on shelves, a large computer screen on a desk, a scruffy gaming chair in bright red and black. The bedroom of a sixteen-year-old boy, not a twenty-two-year-old man.
She hears him clear his throat again. “Anyway…let’s go down. I’ll open the champagne.”
“Okay,” she says, stroking his waist absentmindedly. “I’ll be right down. I’ll just use your bathroom first.”
She sees uncertainty pass across his face, a flash of distrust. “I’ll wait here.”
“No, no,” she says, shooing him away. “It’s rude to wait outside a bathroom when there’s a lady in it. Go down. I’ll see you in a minute.”
His face softens with surrender. She squeezes his waist again, feels him melt at her touch. He turns to head downstairs.
She stands in the bathroom for a count of twenty, her breath held against the damp smell of the old carpet, at the thought of thirty years of misdirected pee, then she turns the tap on and off again and very quietly tiptoes across the landing to the main bedroom.
She feels it the moment she opens the door, a raw energy that she cannot define. It rocks through her: something dark, yet something at the same time tender. And there is a smell, dense and metallic, like stale pennies. She scans the room, quickly. She opens jars and pots and sniffs the contents. They have that same old-penny smell that pervades the room. She rubs some cream into the freckles on the back of her hand and watches them for a moment. Nothing happens.
There’s a dull drone in the room, a deep rumble, and she traces it to the built-in wardrobes that run down the back wall of the room. Inside one wardrobe is a small, padlocked fridge.
Polly recoils, sucking her breath in dryly. She reaches out to touch the padlock, weighing it with her outstretched hand.
“Polly?”
She hears Arthur calling her from downstairs and lets the padlock drop.
“Polly? Are you okay?”
Her heart is racing. “Yes!” she says, stepping quickly onto the landing. “Just coming.”
She closes the door quietly behind her and heads back down, to Arthur, to his fizzy stuff, to closing her eyes tight while he kisses her with his amateurish lips and his amateurish tongue, to his boy’s hands over her woman’s body.
She will close her eyes and pretend that he is someone else entirely.
She glances at her hand on the banister as she readies herself to step down the stairs.
Where she spread Ophelia’s skin cream, her freckles have faded to nothing.
FIFTEEN
WHEN JESSICA GETS back to her hotel room two and a half hours later, she is absentmindedly humming yacht rock classics under her breath and feeling strangely happy. She liked Mike Miller and his band of long-haired old men with cheeky faces, including the little skinny one with dyed black hair who kept winking at her. She liked all the people she met tonight in the pub. Jessica thinks of the lonely echo in her Hell’s Kitchen apartment, the empty bed, the long days and longer nights. Maybe, she thinks, as she strips off her clothes and turns the dial on the shower, maybe she should move out of the city, find a little place on the coast, a cutesy village with a cozy bar and a pharmacy and a local history society. She could open a pizzeria. Or maybe even write that damn novel.
