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Stuart Parkes
20:37
I’m going to say something
SEVEN
Sadie moved in gradually and all at once. That first night Ada and Mel made a show of setting up the living room. They laid clean sheets and towels next to the sofa, pushed their coffee table aside to make room for the fold-out. Mel asked Ada if Sadie would use it, weren’t she and Ada kind of a thing? And Ada said, ‘Nah it was just a one-off. She’s going back to Australia in October, it’s not like we could date.’ And Mel said, ‘Maybe she thinks you’re going back too?’ and Ada said no, she didn’t think so, and anyway Sadie lived in Perth which was ‘basically another country from Sydney. Like literally three time zones away.’ Mel said, ‘OK but do you want it to be something? Even like a short-term thing?’ and Ada said, ‘God I don’t know, I bled on her, like this is weird territory.’ And Mel said, ‘She clearly didn’t mind … Hey, it’ll be OK either way.’
When Sadie arrived dragging her bag behind her, the three of them sat together on the floor, awkwardly at first. But after a bottle of red and some free-poured bourbons – as always, Mel made a point of saying that bourbon is for children, Ada really needed to learn to like Scottish whisky, but then drank it anyway – it was easy. Sadie told them that she had gone to stay with a former lover who she’d thought might be a new lover again but the other girl, she didn’t use her name, the other girl was in a long-distance relationship with someone in America now and only wanted Sadie as a friend.
‘When we hooked up last year, we didn’t even talk about a relationship. London to Perth … it just didn’t even come up. I thought it wasn’t on the table but now she’s doing it with someone else,’ and Mel nodded sympathetically and said, ‘I bet it’s just because America is in the northern hemisphere, so it’s closer and easier, you know?’ and this made no sense to Ada who could tell Mel was drunk but Sadie smiled at her. ‘That’s probably it.’
After five nights in the spare room (a spare room? In Camberwell? Ada noted it and decided the other girl was probably rich and therefore easy to hate), the proximity became too awkward and Sadie messaged Ada.
‘I’m sorry, I have other friends in London, it’s just … you’d said … you know, you’d said we could hang out,’ and Ada said, ‘Oh don’t be stupid, I mean I’m so glad you messaged, you know, we’re friends!’ and no one mentioned the fact that they’d only met that one time.
After an hour, Mel realised she’d seen the play Sadie wrote for the festival, the one with all the posters that had got funding from the Australian Arts Council, and she was overwhelmed. ‘It was … I mean, it shook me to my core. I can’t relate to the immigrant experience of course, I’m so embarrassingly white, but I felt like that mother was my mother. I hope that’s not insensitive, ugh, I’m not expressing myself right. I loved it. You got reviewed by the Guardian, didn’t you?’ and Ada interrupted, ‘I didn’t see it, sorry,’ and Sadie said, ‘That’s OK,’ and Mel started asking her about the process of touring with actors of such different ages. Ada watched Sadie rubbing the back of her neck and trying not to enjoy the attention and she wondered what it would be like to be wanted by Sadie and not to want her back. This girl in Camberwell was as unknowable to Ada as an ancestor.
Watching Mel and Sadie stirred uncommon anxiety in Ada. Mel was polite to everyone Ada brought home and usually even laughed at their jokes if she had the time. But this admiration was new and Ada wasn’t sure she wanted Mel thinking so highly of someone who had shared her bed. Mel thought Ada was too good for her partners but maybe not this partner and Ada felt a dangerous urge to tap dance for the grown-ups’ approval. As Mel said ‘dramaturgy’ to Sadie, Ada felt the situation ricochet out of her control but then Sadie turned towards her and said, ‘Well, Ada’s an actor, I’m sure she knows all about this.’ Ada said, ‘I’m untrained—’ and Mel jumped in protectively to say, ‘Only by rigid standards, she’s actually so good,’ and Sadie said, ‘Training often undoes natural talent, I find,’ and Ada felt all cuddled up.
When Mel mentioned a show they’d seen together at the Almeida a few months back, Sadie turned to Ada and asked what she thought of the direction and Ada remembered it was a cool director, one of the young hot ones, and so she almost deflected. But instead she said what she actually thought, which was that the actors seemed like they weren’t having a good time, like they were being moved around the stage rather than acting. And Sadie laughed and said, ‘Right? God he’s so full of shit,’ and Mel said, ‘See, she’s so smart about this stuff, I can never tell what’s directing and what’s just bad acting,’ and the conversation moved on but Ada felt a part of it now.
After eleven, Mel took herself to bed, apologising for keeping normal-people hours and Sadie said, ‘Staying up past eleven is rockstar hours in your thirties, don’t worry,’ and Ada knew a little more about her. After Mel had gone, taking their taco plates with her, Ada resettled her legs so that they were a fraction closer to Sadie and when Sadie looked down at them she felt her stomach burn. Silence, and then, ‘Do you need help setting up the couch? Sorry we don’t have a spare room, that’s kind of a luxury in London,’ and Sadie smiled and said, ‘It’s a luxury anywhere.’ This embarrassed Ada, whose socialism was still emerging and mostly Twitter-based. Sadie stood up and looked at the sofa and Ada said to her back, ‘It’s pretty straightforward and comfy. Or … you can also sleep in my bed … with me, I mean. As friends or, I mean, in whatever way you wanted. But no pressure either way. Obviously!’ The silence stretched and Ada pushed her shoulders back and wondered why she was pretending to be skittish. ‘I would like you to, to be clear. But if you say no, I won’t bring it up again.’
Sadie didn’t turn around and Ada poured herself another glass of wine and drank it to stop her mouth from moving. Sadie said quietly, ‘I would like to share your bed,’ and Ada burned just a little bit more. Sadie finally turned back to her and leaned down to help her off the floor. She pulled her to standing and kept her hand on Ada’s wrist. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t really respond to your messages after Edinburgh. I thought I was moving in with Bill and that she and I would start something so I didn’t want to give you the wrong idea and then when that didn’t happen … like I guess I still thought it might for a couple of days. And then I needed a couple more days to just feel like total shit and then—’ Ada interrupted, ‘—and then you messaged me. That’s OK, I love picking off women at their lowest. You’re like a wounded gazelle,’ and Sadie squeezed her wrist, hard, and said matter-of-factly, ‘I actually feel OK right now.’ And she led Ada to her own room and just like that they lived together.
The sun hitting Ada’s face early let her know that she hadn’t closed the curtains before they got into bed, and she glanced at Sadie then put her head under her pillow to drift away. She knew Sadie would be there when she woke up again. She had nowhere else to go.
When Mel’s alarm woke her through the wall, Ada eased out of bed, leaving Sadie lying completely still, unbothered by the sound. Ada raced to the kitchen to plug in her phone – she’d moved all her chargers to the kitchen as a way of forcing herself out of bed in the morning, which she called a lifehack and Mel called a sign of a very sick person. As she boiled the kettle for Mel’s tea, she watched her phone come to life and saw Stuart’s name cascade down its screen. She hadn’t forgotten him. When Mel and Sadie were talking about whether opera could be redeemed as an art form, she’d wanted desperately to take out her phone and ask him what he thought because asking what he thought had become a habit of hers. But she’d looked down and seen that it had died and she didn’t want him enough to leave the circle.
Now she scrolled his messages, the last one sent at 1:43 a.m., saying he assumed she was asleep and hoped she was OK. They had said good night to each other every night for a week and Ada knew she didn’t owe him this but she also knew if he had failed to do so she would have spent the night in Mel’s room asking her what it could mean. She didn’t think he had a Mel, though he lived with four other men. Ada had fed his fascination with her and then, without meaning to, withdrawn and she knew he wouldn’t believe it was accidental.
The kettle boiled and she sent Stuart a quick message saying her phone had died and she’d had a friend over and she was sorry, so sorry, and he replied immediately saying of course it was fine, he wasn’t upset about it, but she looked at the clock and saw that less than six hours had passed since his last message. She felt a thrill which she pushed aside to apologise again. She left her phone charging and carried Mel’s tea up to her door then climbed back into bed where Sadie was naked, awake and checking her own phone.
‘Anything from Bill?’ Ada asked and Sadie said, ‘Yeah,’ and then put the phone down and smiled right at Ada, who took this as an invitation to cuddle but, it turned out, it wasn’t.
Ada was unmoored, as a rule, a floating vessel who bumped up against others and then drifted steadily on and as she lay on the bed that no longer felt like hers she considered that Sadie might be the same. She felt a sudden urgent need to pin her down, physically, and question her for hours and she wondered if that meant that she was obsessed or just insecure. Sadie was allowed to not want her, she conceded, but was she allowed to not want her when she was sitting up on her pillows, rubbing her eyes? Ada said she was going to shower and Sadie nodded and then Ada left her there, comfortable in their space, the space that now contained them both.
Ada grabbed her phone from the kitchen and took it into their pale grey bathroom that never quite dried. She turned on the shower and then sat in the bath letting the water run over her feet, her arm hanging out of the tub as she read through Stuart’s texts again. His most recent message was an attempt at normalcy as he asked her whether she’d finished her New Girl rewatch. His favourite character was Winston and he included a gif of him in the message and that was just a little too pathetic for Ada’s tastes. She told him she still had a few episodes to go and asked what his plans were that day and he was job-hunting again and it was the same really as the conversation they had yesterday morning except that the cracks in her life she’d been filling with him were shrinking.
Ada put her phone on the side of the bath and lay down, bending her knees slightly so her back could press full length against the base of the tub. She shifted her thighs so they covered the drain and let the shower run up her body and slowly fill the space around her until the water covered her ears and she could listen to the thundering. When it started to spill onto her mouth she sat up, letting everything rush away from her and down the drain. She considered shaving her legs but Sadie didn’t, so. Her hair was wet and matted but not clean so she spun around in the tub and washed it, still seated, putting her head in and out of the stream of water and gasping when it hit her face at the wrong angle. When the water started to cool, she stood up and rinsed for a moment before climbing out and standing dripping on the floor.
Ada usually dried herself by laying flat out and naked on her towel on her bed but she sensed Sadie might consider that a waste of time which, of course, it was, which, of course, was why she did it. She had time to fill and she worried that her normal empty day would look like idleness to Sadie. Stuart liked her flexibility and her refusal to, as he put it, ‘chain yourself to work culture which is so toxic’ and he never asked how she could afford to do it. The answer really was that she couldn’t, but only Mel knew that and Mel wasn’t inclined to judge her for it. Ada was good at evading judgement by being exactly the version of herself most permissible to her company at any time. She was never someone else but there were enough hers to carry her through most interactions. But Sadie was living in her room now and it was hard to know what to be all day. What would be the least exhausting Ada for them both.
Sadie knocked on the bathroom door. ‘Ada, will you be out soon? I have a lunch meeting in Soho,’ and Ada felt desperately relieved that they wouldn’t be forced to bump up against each other for the entire day because she had no idea if they’d have anything to say to each other over a sober afternoon. She opened the bathroom door and stood naked before Sadie, who smiled at her then leaned over and cupped her breast affectionately. Ada didn’t know how to take this lightness in Sadie which seemed to appear only when she was nude, a state which usually made people nervous or overly appreciative or deliberately cold. She leaned in to kiss Sadie who lightly responded then stepped back and around her and turned on the taps.
