‘But what about your mother?’ he asks. ‘Really, Collette. You’re going to leave now?’
A tear forces itself from the corner of her eye and runs down the side of her nose. She dashes it away, impatiently. ‘She doesn’t even know me.’
And now she’s crying and she can’t stop. Puts her hand across her mouth and looks away from him, and is grateful that he has the sense not to touch her. She doesn’t want sympathy. She wants gone.
‘I think about it, sometimes,’ he says. ‘Dying by myself. It’s the sort of thing you do think about, in a foreign country.’
‘I know,’ says Collette. ‘But most people do, you know, in the end. All the widows and the people by themselves, all the people who have accidents or end up in hospital before anyone can get to them.’
‘I was married, you know.’
She throws him a look over her shoulder. ‘No. No, I didn’t.’
‘Roshana.’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I think she died. I assume she died. She went out one day and never came back. That’s what happens. One day she was with me, and the next she was gone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘The awful thing is, I hope she was alone. Wherever she was. Because if she wasn’t, it’s probably worse.’
Now he looks away, and toys with the fringing on the edge of the bedspread, his mouth turned down and his eyes unfocused. That’s the thing, she thinks. I know we feel so close, so loved-up right now, but we don’t know each other. We know nothing about each other. Not really.
‘But I wish every day I had been with her,’ he says, eventually. ‘She was – for a long time I felt like the lights had been turned out.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.
‘And that’s not your fault,’ he says. ‘But what I’m saying – I don’t know what I’m saying, Collette. Just that it’s a terrible thing, to die alone.’
‘I’d rather die alone later than die now.’
He puts an olive between his beautiful lips and chews contemplatively. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘It’s not like I haven’t been there myself. Where do you think you’ll go?’
She shakes her head. ‘I hear Norway’s nice at this time of year.’
‘Bloody dark in the winter, though.’
She laughs. He finally reaches out and caresses the back of her neck. ‘Last night was…’ he says.
‘Oh, don’t,’ she says. ‘Oh, God, it’s not like I want to go.’
‘I know,’ he says, and puts his face close to hers. ‘And in another world, you know? I get it. Me too. I understand.’
His skin smells of cleanness and sandalwood. She looks down at his lips, half open, ready to kiss her, looks up at the golden eyes and the careworn lines beginning to settle around them. I think this is a good man, she thinks. I think the universe is having a laugh with me, showing me that there is such a thing.
‘But not today,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow I’ll help you, if you really mean to leave. And not tonight.’
‘No,’ she says, and takes his face in her hands. Kneels in front of him like Mary Magdalene. Kisses his mouth, breathes in the wonder of him.
Chapter Forty-Four
His disappointment is almost painful. He’s taken her clothes off – the shapeless skirt, the lace-edge shirt, the modest undergarments – and found that it’s hopeless. The God Girl has clearly lost half her bodyweight at some point, and lost it fast. If he were to delve into her viscera, he suspects he’d find a gastric band, or one of those balloons they inflate inside the stomach. There’s very little fat on her, it’s true, but her skin looks like a church candle that’s been left burning all through Lent. Like an altar cloth thrown down in the vestry, waiting for the laundry bag.
She’s hopeless. Useless. Nothing he can do, no ministrations, will ever make her right. She’s just an ugly white sack of blubber, an insult to his dreams.
It’s not even worth preserving her, if all he’ll want to do at the end is throw her away. He stands over the bath and glares at her reproachfully. She’s going off, rapidly, her buttocks and the backs of her thighs black with congealed blood, her pupils gone white. And she’s really starting to smell. He’s emptied the supermarket of Febreze and scent blocks, and stuck duck tape over the airbricks to stop the smell circulating, but he knows it’s only a matter of time before the people downstairs start to wonder where it’s coming from. He has to do something with her, this much he knows, but he’s not wasting his skills and time on preserving an object so uncomely. Why on earth did you attract my attention, he thinks, if you were going to let me down like this? I’m glad I don’t know your name. I don’t want to remember you.