LITMIR.BIZ

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be able to stand one more night alone in the house. Even though they are finally gone, even though the coldness and the silence, the sneaky feet and surreptitious fists that never left a mark, even though the dead eyes and the lovelessness are all gone, it’s still horribly creepy. And now it’s deserted as well.

      The Black Hat looked jolly and warm enough. Even though it’s not Halloween till tomorrow, they’d lit candles and lanterns and draped the beams and light fittings with lacy cobwebs, propped-up broomsticks, carved out grinning pumpkins. One of Jake’s many gripes is that I’m buggering off just when the party season is starting. He still doesn’t get that I’m done with partying. I’m done with him, with everyone, and certainly with spending any more of my precious time and money in a medieval pub in a dead-end village at the far end of the country.

      I have a life to start living.

      But I went along for that one last drink, didn’t I, persuaded our rag-tag bunch of mates to come along. Hence this hangover. Jake was behind the bar all evening, serving a bubbling punch from a cauldron which was deceptively orange-flavoured and totally lethal. He was ladling out brimming pint glasses for free, and by the time our mates had drifted away, slightly too obviously I thought, I was pissed and careless, and what happened next is that all that coolness, sortedness, strength, it all evaporated. At least physically. Nothing in my mind had changed. My bags were still packed.

      I was still the heroine of all those country and western blues you’ve ever sung along to, about lovers leaving on jet planes.

      So there we were, Jake and I, somehow back inside the little tin can that he lives in, and it was midnight. I can only conclude, if there is a jury out there, that it was laziness and familiarity and the remnants of randiness that bore us from the village up the road, along the pitted track, into the muddy field to where the caravan sits, protected from the sheer drop to the fierce sea by massive boulders that look like nightclub bouncers, and purple moss and hard sheep droppings and a broken fence.

      That caravan with its moth-eaten pull-down bed and garish seventies orange-flowered curtains, its kettle and booze and stash of chocolate and overflowing ashtrays, it used to be my haven. Once we’d pulled the rickety door closed and bolted it with elastic bands and other flimsy barriers against the world, Jake and I were like babes in the wood in there. We used to cling and whisper together, getting stoned, learning everything together. And I mean everything.

      Childhood sweethearts sounds so innocent, doesn’t it? But we weren’t children. And we were on a mission to shed our innocence.

      We both tried to deny we were virgins when we finally found ourselves under that faded duvet. But who else could possibly have got there first? When he passed his driving test and bought the caravan we christened Jake’s new toy by deflowering each other.

      It’s meant to be awful, and painful, the first time, isn’t it, but when the fumbling, the probing and the giggling stopped and we became deadly silent and serious, only the sea foam trying to reach up the cliff, only Adele crooning in the background, when we realised that our mouths were made for this different, deep, penetrating kissing, that our bodies were built to fold round and in and out, to become hot and yielding under each other’s hands, when I held him balanced in my fingers, long and hard and ready, and he touched me, so soft and wet, and waiting, it was amazing.

      Sorry, but it was brilliant. Two fit teenagers hiding away from home, exploring each other in the dark. How could we fail?

      I didn’t come that first time, or even the second, but boy did he, and my triumph was as explosive as his orgasm. By the third attempt we still weren’t always doing it right, or very imaginatively, or with any kind of adult finesse. But we were hooked.

      My stomach lurches as the train shoots through a tunnel. Is that a kind of useless death throe of desire kicking me deep inside, or is it excitement about what’s ahead? Desire used to be a sharp tugging between my legs or a coiling in my stomach whenever I thought of Jake’s angry blue eyes, his hungry mouth, his eager hands, his quiet, rocking caravan. But when the longing slides northwards to the heart, then the brain, by then it’s diluted completely and that’s when it’s platonic. I’m not sure it’s even that, now. It can’t be. It’s over. I keep telling him. I’m gone.

      Did I owe it to him, to give him one last night? Payment for keeping me safe when I had nowhere else to go? Did he hope that bringing out all his tricks, all the old words and moves, the guitar strumming that secretly shreds my nerves, did he think that getting me drunkenly naked by the light of his old hurricane lamp would make me chuck all my dreams out of the window and make me stay?

      He knows me so well, so how could he not guess last night, once he was on top of me, the usual position, how could he not tell through the limpness of my limbs around him, the tightness of my body resisting him, the difficulty he had pushing in, the way I turned my head away from his desperate kisses so that they missed and slithered instead across my cheek, my half-hearted moaning, how could he not know that I was faking it?

      The easiest way for me to explain why I let it happen is that it was sympathy sex. Cruel, I know. But that’s how removed I felt from it. From him. I am a bitch, no question, just as he said. How else to excuse the way our fledgling love burned brightly for a while and then just died? Why have I changed so drastically in the space of a couple of years? Almost as if my teens were shackles I was waiting to throw off as soon as I hit twenty. I can’t explain it myself. Suggesting that I grew out of my adolescence somehow doesn’t cut it.

      Just now he slouched out of the shadows as I was heaving my cases and photographic gear into the carriage. And there’s the rub. He slouches. I march.

      Thank God the train was already there, striking its metal hooves to be off. The guard was waddling along the platform, probably wishing he could slam the doors and wave a flag like in the old days but having to content himself with jabbing at the hissing buttons.

      The guard’s whistle blew, and there was nothing more to do. I don’t even know if Jake saw me. Anyone noticing him standing there, mean and moody and uncomprehending, would think he was a hunk alright. What idiot would kick that out of bed? Some lucky girl, one of the girls in the pub, in the newspaper office, one of the walkers along the cliff, will have him, if they haven’t already.

      Jake walked to the far end of the platform as the doors folded shut, the end where it slopes down into the nothingness of grass and weeds and rubbish, so that it wouldn’t look as if he was going to miss me. His iPod was plugged into his ears, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his leather jacket. His fingers would have been fiddling and twisting all the items I know he keeps in there. Phone, keys, wine gums, pens, cash, miniature tape recorder. Ripping up the snapshot of me to show that he’s over it.

      Well, that goes for the two of us. I’m off men now. For good.

      The train gathers speed, breathes its huge rumbling sigh of relief as it accelerates out of the station. It rushes with glee through the scruffy outskirts of town, then turns away from the sea, ploughs through the bare, wintry countryside overhung with a heavy blanket of sky, and hurtles towards London.

      TWO

      I have them in my sights. A ragged crocodile of little witches, snaking their way across the quiet garden square. They seem to know exactly where they are and where they’re going, but I am several tube stops away from my flat south of the river and I’m not quite sure where I am. I tell myself that’s all part of the fun of being in this city. A mist has descended over London like a ragged curtain and temporarily cowed the commuters who would normally be scurrying home by now.

      The leading witch holds a lantern aloft, presumably to guide her gang to some Halloween party round the corner, and it emits a weak glow of eerie orange.

      In the middle of the square there’s a statue of a man who looks like Robin Hood or someone, maybe Dick Turpin, or Cupid with clothes on. Someone important and athletic, anyway, and yet there is something melancholy in the statue’s posture. It even seems, in this dim light, to be turning its head to watch the mini witches pass by beneath it. I count seven in all, maybe six

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