Extract from Say You Love Me
CHAPTER 1
Mark said, ‘I’ve decided to go home.’
In their flat above their florist shop Luke and Tony looked sympathetic. Carefully Tony said, ‘When you say home you mean…?’
‘Thorp.’
‘Because of…?’
Mark bowed his head embarrassed by their concern and the careful way they avoided the relevant words. There was a vase of lilies on the mantelpiece and their intense perfume filled the room and deepened the silence he seemed unable to break. He almost blurted out that he was too strange to be sitting here in their tidy living room, that didn’t they think he was polluting the very air they breathed? He was filthy after all – couldn’t they tell? His flesh crawled. He mumbled, ‘I just thought I’d go home – see Dad. A bit of a holiday, really.’ He thought how northern his voice sounded when he couldn’t be bothered. It was a sign of his depression these slack, Teesside vowels. Luke and Tony exchanged looks and Mark tried to read their expressions, knowing he looked too hopeful. He wanted them to tell him not to go and that it would all be all right to stay and do nothing. But their pity had become exasperation and he looked down at the glass of wine cradled in his hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been much company tonight.’
The two men were quick to deny it. Luke glanced towards the dining table still littered with coffee cups and wine glasses, the plate of ravaged cheeses sweating and weeping amongst grape stalks and biscuit crumbs. All the other guests had left; only he outstayed his welcome. Mark thought of the woman who had sat across the table from him, a dentist with dark, clever eyes, good looking enough. Luke and Tony had high hopes that he and the dentist would hit if off, hopes that were unspoken but demonstrated in the way the two men became more flirtatious around them, as though some of their playfulness would rub off on their awkward guests. The dentist was called Helen. She was the kind of woman he ought to like but didn’t, adding to his sense of hopelessness.
Tony said, ‘Mark, why don’t you come and stay with us for a while?’
Mark thought about staying in Luke and Tony’s spare room, of waiting in bed, listening to the two of them prepare to go downstairs to work. Luke would sing; he sang often, the latest song by Madonna or Kylie, and Tony would nag him to be quick: they had deliveries to attend to, wreaths to assemble. The smell of their coffee would drift into his room like a gentle hint that he should get up and stop moping, although neither of them would use such a word as mope. Luke and Tony believed what he was going through was far too serious for the kind of stiff upper lip, grin-and-bear-it words his father would use. Suddenly he longed to be home, in his bedroom where the bright colours of the Persian rug broke the shadow of the plane tree that grew outside his window, only to remember that it had been days since he’d slept a full night in his bed. Lately he fell into fitful dozes on the couch, afraid of sleeping, of his violent, chaotic dreams.
Tony said, ‘Listen, love, the offer stands. If you go home and find you can’t cope with all that family stuff, come back here and stay with us. Or one of us could stay with you. You’re not alone in this.’
Luke said, ‘Of course you’re not.’
I am alone, Mark wanted to say. Utterly, totally. He looked at the two men sitting opposite him on the china blue silk sofa. Tony’s arm stretched along the sofa’s back, his fingers dangling millimetres away from Luke’s shoulder. Such casual intimacy used to reassure him: here was love and respect and tenderness. Now it just seemed smug and condescending. He got up, surprising himself with the suddenness of his move so that he felt too big and awkward amongst the knick-knacks and artful arrangements of flowers. He downed the last of his wine in one swallow and knew that he must look rude, in too much of a hurry to leave.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I should go.’
They followed him down the narrow flight of stairs that rose from the doorway leading out on to the street. On the pavement they embraced him in turn. Holding him at arms’ length, Tony searched his face. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. It was a statement, as though he’d seen something in his expression that reassured him. Tony had told him once that he was strong, that he could sense his northern grit beneath the soft veneer living in the south had lent him. Mark was tempted to ask him if he truly believed he was a hard man. How ridiculous he would sound.
In his car he sat for a moment before turning on the engine. He pictured his flat, how he had left a lamp on in each room, how the feeble, forty-watt bulbs would leave too much shadow and darkness. He needed one hundred-watt bulbs, the kind of harsh, no-nonsense light that illuminated his father’s house. Simon didn’t go in for the soft ambience of lamps. Simon had to have blinding, white, overhead light as though he was about to examine a patient.
A week ago Mark had been to see his GP. Years since he had visited the practice, he found that the doctor he remembered as being a little like Simon had retired, replaced by a girl a good ten years younger than himself. On her desk she had pictures of a fat toddler clutching a baby, on her wall a poster informing that Breast is Best. He had felt like a trespasser. She had ended up taking his blood pressure, listening to his blood pounding with a professional little frown. He couldn’t bring himself to say what he’d intended to say if the doctor had been the older, old-fashioned man he’d expected. ‘I am so tired,’ he’d wanted to say. And, if he’d felt brave, ‘I think I should be put away.’ And the kindly, twinkle-eyed doctor who wore a tweed suit and smelt faintly of cigars would not be shocked or disgusted as he coaxed out his confession but rather brisk and even dismissive. ‘My dear boy,’ the doctor would cry, ‘I daresay we all think of ourselves as monsters from time to time!’
Mark put on his seatbelt and started the car. He thought of Susan who had told him that if he was a monster he was one of a rare and exotic breed, a line that must be nearing extinction. ‘You’re the last of your kind,’ she said. Straddling his body she’d leaned forward and brushed her mouth against his. She’d whispered, ‘I’m not scared,’ and the smile in her voice had made him laugh in despair.
‘I am,’ he’d said.
She had sat up and frowned at him thoughtfully, her head cocked to one side. At last she’d said, ‘I wish you were a monster, Mark, a larger than life shit – I wouldn’t feel guilty about fucking you then.’
They never mentioned guilt and she had glanced away as she said it, only to look at him again, not quite meeting his eye as she smiled crookedly. A few minutes earlier she had been wrapping her legs around his waist and groaning his name in a climax he only half-believed she faked. Now the guilt she’d conjured made her look sheepish. ‘It’s just sex that’s all,’ she said. ‘I do what I do because you’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.’ She laughed a little and rested her forehead against his. ‘Think of it as a basic urge I have to satisfy, like thirst. I would shrivel up without you.’
He remembered holding her head between his hands and lifting her face away from his. The fresh wounds on his back and buttocks stung and he knew the sheets would be spotted with blood and he would feel ashamed as he stripped the bed and bundled the linen into the washing machine. But for that moment he wanted her to tear at his broken skin with her finger nails, to open him up and make him bleed more. He had almost asked her to stay the night in his bed so that later, later…Instead he had closed his eyes, sickened by his own basic urges. She had kissed him. ‘I should go,’ she’d said. ‘Or he might begin to wonder where I am.’
