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OK love, I’m happy for you then
NINETEEN
Ada woke up and it was dark and she became aware of a soft sound off to her left. She rolled and saw the shape of a laptop, open but blank, its battery humming insistently. She didn’t know where she was so she raised herself onto her elbows and saw Stuart’s head at the other end of the bed. It seemed they were sleeping top and tail and before Ada could consider this further, she became alarmingly aware that she needed to pee. She eased herself sideways and stood in the room, trying to orient herself enough to find a door. As she spun slowly, her body told her she was naked and so she got on her hands and knees and crawled until she found her sundress. She pulled it on without a bra or underwear and tiptoed to a wall. She ran her hand along it until she found a door and after a little more exploration she hit the knob, turned and eased herself into the hallway.
The hallway was dark too but as Ada creeped unsteadily down it, she could hear a laugh track issuing from one of the rooms. A vague memory emerged of a housemate popping his head out to say hello when they’d got home – Tom? Was it Tom or did she just think every white British guy was called Tom? – and then disappearing again with an oven pizza and some beers.
Ada reached a door tucked under the stairs and pulled it open, finding a cupboard filled with the miscellany she associated with student living. An iron attached to nothing, upside down. Empty boxes, partially crushed so unusable but also unrecycled. Wrapping paper spotted with damp. Chargers on cables on cords. Ada realised this was the Harry Potter cupboard Stuart had joked about in a message to her weeks ago, saying she could move in there and cast spells on his housemates. She then pretended she’d never read Harry Potter, claiming it never came out in Australia. Stuart had then spent a full day attempting to explain the plot to her before she folded and said there were actually two copies of each book in her parents’ house because she and Gabby wouldn’t share. They lost part of the next day to debating whether they could ever read the books again, what with the issue of the author, before Ada guiltily admitted she and Mel had watched the movies one weekend when they both had throat infections. ‘They mostly hold up,’ she’d said, ‘and did you know Dean Thomas grew up hot?’
Ada closed the door to the cupboard and continued her hallway exploration, taking in the mould creeping down the walls in a foggy sort of spread. She pulled open another door and there was a toilet and sink, grim in the darkness and grimmer still in the buzzing light after she pulled the switch. Ada closed the door behind her, found no lock and lowered herself onto the slick, damp seat, hiking her dress up with her right hand while gripping the door handle with her left. She pissed and grinned.
Ada picked through her memory to figure out how she’d ended up lying at the wrong end of the bed. They had started by the water. Stuart had pulled her up and she’d thought they were walking home but they only made it a few feet. She was pressed against the closed shutter door of a Food and Wine when Stuart had surprised her by very quickly pushing his hand under her dress, urgent like a teenager who didn’t have a private room to go to. He had pulled back, seeming equally surprised at himself, and she had grabbed his hand and put it back, right at the top of the inside of her thigh. He kept it there while he kissed her and she felt his sweat or hers run between his fingers. He groaned every time her body shifted and she responded by angling herself until the tips of his fingers were grazing the damp outside of her cotton underwear. She always wore plain cotton on a first date, a lack of artifice that was all artifice.
Stuart made a fist and his knuckles grazed her as she rocked over him. Within a minute she was gasping into his mouth but she found, as she often did, that this moment disappeared quickly, leaving her desperate to reach it again. But Stuart pulled back and stared at her, in one light looking horrified and in another amazed. He lifted his hand close to his face and asked, ‘Did what … I think happened … I mean,’ and she said yes and pulled him to her, wanting to climb him, to keep climbing, scale him like a cliff face, and he said flatly, ‘Well, wow, I mean good for me.’ Then he stared at her, took her hand and laid it on him and she felt the disconnect again between his body and his disinterested words and he asked if they could actually go home now.
The walk took half an hour and they each finished their bottles of wine, barely touching and only talking when Stuart gave directions. Ada considered his awkwardness, which she knew she could take away with her body, but that he held between them all the same. Her comfort in her body startled partners and she had noticed it sometimes had this effect, of drawing them further into themselves, an equal yet opposite blah blah, whatever the science thing was.
She remembered a man she met when she was temping at a construction company who worked as their in-house lawyer and spent five nights a week at the gym and cringed when Ada stepped on his shirt which had landed on the floor. When they were done – lights off – he put on a full set of pyjamas before going to sleep, and when he woke to find her naked in bed he asked if she’d been that way all night. The only partner she’d had who matched her was a yoga teacher she spent a weekend with in Essex after opening Tinder on the Central line. They revelled in their shared nakedness but Belle didn’t drink and Ada felt certain she’d start smoking just to spite her if they stayed together, so the weekend was enough.
When they reached Stuart’s house – the same kind of house as every other on the street but, Ada thought, kind of romantically worse – he unlocked the door and told her the bathroom was upstairs. It was clean and well stocked with shampoos and shaving caddies and now that Ada was sitting in this downstairs buzzing toilet cell she thought it was considerate of Stuart to have sent her to the other one first. Ada had looked at herself in the mirror, fuzzy at the edges but sharp around the eyes and felt ready.
She’d come back downstairs and found Stuart grabbing glasses from the kitchen, chatting to Tom, who waved his hand at her in a vague sort of way but who she felt watch her as they left the room. They went into Stuart’s bedroom then and he turned on the fairy lights that were strung over his mantlepiece and around his curtain rod and then also the lamp with the greying shade next to his bed. ‘Very seductive lighting set-up,’ she said and he looked uncomfortable and said, ‘The overhead light blew and it has some weird bulb situation so only the landlord can replace it but fucked if we can get him to answer an email.’ Ada was at risk of feeling very silly and said, ‘Oh, I bet you use that landlord line on all the girls,’ and she sat on the bed while Stuart stood, hovering, in the middle of the room before deciding it was OK to sit next to her.
Ada reached for him and he jumped up again, opening his laptop on the other side of the room. ‘Will you pour us a whisky?’ he asked without turning around and Ada picked up the bottle on his bedside table, noted its presence, wondered if it always lived there or was a concession to her visit. She free-poured into their tumblers, took one and waited. Music started to play softly from the laptop and he came back to her, picked up his glass and sat on the bed and looked at nothing in particular. Ada was on the verge of something – screaming, climbing out a window – when she realised the song that was playing.
‘This is that song … this is the song you said I reminded you of,’ and Stuart said, ‘I’ve been listening to it every day,’ and the laptop sang about a woman who can’t stop leaving and Ada swallowed the last of her whisky and laid Stuart down. She hummed the music as she unbuttoned his fly, staring at his face while he looked at her and away and at her again. She took her time to touch him and watched his whole body clench with anticipation. She pulled down his jeans and then his underwear and then she looked at him and he looked at her looking at him and she felt a pass of melancholy because they would never quite have this moment again, these seconds before. The track changed to ‘One Crowded Hour’, another Australian song, and she realised he’d made a playlist for her, had crafted it out of the songs of her teenage years, and she leaned down and put her mouth on him at last.
Ada remembered the end, remembered how he had touched her hair while steadying his breath and not rushed to bring her up to him. She remembered leaning back so she was facing him and then, she didn’t remember this bit, but then she must have gone straight to sleep. And that is how she had come to wake, desperate to pee, with her head in the wrong spot and his feet by her ears. She considered that he must have made the choice to stay that way rather than sleep at the wrong end of the bed with her and wondered if he was compulsive. She wiped and flushed and ran her hands under the water, noted the lack of soap but wasn’t concerned by it.
When she stepped back into the hallway, Ada heard the front door open and two voices coming in and considered whether this was the right time to meet more Toms. The two men rounded the corner and looked briefly so similar to Ada that she wondered if they were twins then she realised they simply had the same short hair and particular northern paleness that often confused her senses. They stopped and were suddenly silent until one stepped forward and said, ‘All right, love, sorry, are we in your way,’ and Ada laughed and said, ‘Yes, please step aside, I have somewhere to be.’ She realised she was still very drunk but said, ‘I’m Ada,’ and the quieter one nudged the first one and said, ‘Stuart’s girl,’ and they introduced themselves and Ada didn’t take in either name. There was an awkward shuffling and some nice to meet yous and she eventually passed them and slipped back into Stuart’s room where he was snoring in a staccato way.
Ada dropped her dress back to the floor and considered Stuart’s back, which had the same kind of paleness as his flatmates’ and the slightly rounded spine of the reluctantly tall. It was beautiful and as she looked Stuart whined a little and scratched his side in his sleep, looking again like a mangy dog, this time dreaming of a rabbit. He looked malnourished, full of need, though he was probably stronger than her. He was so like the exact idea she had of an English artist that it was like she had cast him. She climbed into bed next to her sniffling stray and as she wrapped herself around him, he shook awake. ‘It’s Ada,’ she said, and he shuddered a little then whispered, ‘You’re in my bed,’ and then, ‘Stay.’ They both went back to sleep.
When Ada woke, his pale grey curtain was lit up from the outside and she was in the exact same position, wrapped around a sleeping Stuart, their bodies damply clinging. She ran her hand down Stuart’s chest, feeling the dent in the middle, and he murmured and moved back against her. She tapped out a rhythm lightly, wanting him to wake, and a growl emerged that she could feel under her hand. She didn’t know if he’d meant to make that sound or if something stirred in his ribs but she tapped at him again. All at once he turned to her, and a moment later, he was on top of her and she was surprised to see he hadn’t put his underwear back on last night; she hadn’t figured him for the type.
He reached over her head to the drawer in his bedside table and his armpit dangled above her nose. She breathed him in, knew from experience that this scent would become a stink if they were together long enough, considered the science of partners growing to resist each other’s smell. He sat back, eased himself off her briefly and she saw he was holding a condom. He looked at her, a question, and she answered ‘hurry’ because she was desperate for his weight. He pulled the condom on and climbed back on top of her and without guidance they locked together and even though she had been waiting for it the sensation was a shock. They moved in a frenzy and after seconds or minutes – some time had passed – she took his right hand in hers and pressed it between them so he was rubbing her as he moved. The speed with which she came drove him somewhere else and he bent to her neck and bit down as he came too, digging his way into every part of her at once. He gave her everything. She took it all.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to her throat and she could feel him breaking it, the heavy code of their bodies; he was trying to break it way too soon. He was drifting out of his body again and she stroked his hair and said, ‘Don’t say sorry to someone who you just fucked unless you fucked them wrong,’ and he said, ‘You actually talk like that?’ and she said, ‘I actually do.’ And then he looked up at her and smiled.
‘So you liked the playlist then?’ and Ada said, ‘Yes, the Aussie music knowledge is deep.’ Stuart said, ‘Months of bar work in Brunswick will do that,’ and Ada said, ‘So were you in Melbourne the whole time you were there?’ And Stuart shrugged a little, said ‘mostly’, and it occurred to Ada then that he never wanted to talk about his time in Australia. She wondered if he’d gone with a girlfriend or if he’d had one out there. Maybe she reminded him of her. Maybe that’s all this was. But then he took the end of her hair and chewed it for a moment, the animal in him coming out, and she pitied whatever girl he’d left in his past.
‘Can I show you something?’ he asked and she knew this was the bit where they looked at his art. With musicians it’s better to see them at a gig first because then you avoid the moment where you’re sitting on their bedroom floor and they bring out a guitar – or worse, when they do it at a party. Actors don’t usually subject you to monologues unless they are preparing for an audition, but that does mean you have to go to a play and the secret, Ada had realised, was that a lot of plays, were bad. Poets were the worst because poetry could happen anywhere, anytime. You could be blindsided by a poet. She’d only dated one dancer and she hadn’t seemed interested in making Ada watch her dance, so Ada bought a ticket to Sadler’s Wells and watched her glide and flip across the stage, then waited at the stage door after, and the dancer seemed annoyed that she’d come and didn’t message her again.
So Ada was prepared for this bit and as Stuart eased off her, put on a pale green, stained dressing gown and opened a case on his floor, she sat up and waited. He pulled out a canvas which had been stored carelessly, she thought, and he said, ‘These aren’t … these aren’t my finished things, they live at my parents’ place because this house is a shithole,’ and Ada said, ‘Oh come on, some of this mould is artisanal,’ and he didn’t respond because he was looking at the canvas. He carried it to the bed and lay it before her then said, ‘I’m going to make coffee,’ and walked straight out the door. And on the bed in front of Ada was a painting of Gabby floating in the sea but then she looked again and saw that it was her.
TWENTY
22/09/2017
