LITMIR.BIZ

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her; she doesn’t want anyone to be friendly.

      At least once each day, she goes down to the beach and stomps along it for a while, tipping forward as she forges against the wind, clenched and braced, enjoying the crunch and sink of the stones beneath her feet, until she is pleasantly exhausted and takes refuge in a café where she sips hot tea from a polystyrene cup and does some more staring. Staring is my job now, she thinks. I’m getting really good at it. This will work, she thinks. Walk all day. Watch telly in my compact cube in the evenings. Go to bed early.

      Just before she goes to sleep each night, she picks up her phone from the bedside table and looks at it without turning it on, feeling the shape of it in her hand, the weight of all the messages accumulating inside. She puts it inside the drawer, next to the Gideon Bible, and closes the drawer very gently, as if the phone is a small, sleeping animal and she doesn’t want to risk disturbing it.

      On the third morning, as she is crossing the foyer on her way to the breakfast room, the pale young man calls her over, ‘Miss Crossley,’ he says.

      She greets him with a smile. They are almost old friends now. She struck up a proper conversation with him the day before, after she lost her key card on one of the beach walks. He ended up confiding in her that his wife is expecting twins, that she is from Romania, and they met over karaoke, that he is excited but nervous about becoming a father. She has worked out that his supercilious air is borne out of a touching if misplaced belief that the hotel he works for is quite posh. ‘Morning,’ she says, cheerily.

      He hands over a hotel envelope. ‘Your brother left this for you.’

      She takes it with an automatic hand and turns away, scarcely registering the young man’s brief look of disappointment that she doesn’t say thank you, when they got on so well the day before. She grips the letter in her hand as she crosses the foyer, and her knees are weak as she stands waiting for a table at the entrance to the breakfast room. Later, she will query her actions at that point, how swiftly she defaulted to automatic pilot, how normal that felt.

      She doesn’t speak to the young woman who leads her to her table, hardly hears her as she puts the menu in front of her and reminds her to help herself to the continental buffet if she’d like fruit or cereal before her cooked option. She opens the envelope with shaking fingers and sees that inside it is a hotel compliment slip, folded in two. She unfolds it as the young woman pours her coffee, and doesn’t even acknowledge her with a look.

      The compliment slip has four words on it, in blue biro.

       I am you, remember?

      Maria thinks, then, of how when her train arrived in Brighton three days ago, she felt such pleasure at the fact that the station was a terminus – she had come to the end of the line, the edge of the country, and from now on it was the open sea. And it is with a solid and unsurprised kind of feeling, a cold feeling, quite devoid of emotion or panic, that she looks out of the breakfast-room window and sees, standing on the steps of the hotel and looking right at her, a compact young man in a dark-grey coat, staring at her with a smile. He isn’t her brother.

      The world closes down, as if a lid is being brought down on a coffin. She can almost hear the thump of the nails being hammered in. In the tiny, box-like room, with the view of the brick wall, Matthew guides her by her elbow to the bed and sits her down. She has the irrational thought that this would not be happening if she was still in the room with the view – as if, somehow, that would have enabled her to fly out to sea. He sits next to her and strokes the side of her face with the backs of his fingers while she looks straight ahead. He talks to her very gently, explains how disappointed he is, how sad he was when he came home to her note, how his first thought was to go down to the canal and sit by the side of it and slash his wrists and throw himself into the water with stones in his pockets to weigh him down. Was that what she wanted? Was it? He has missed her so much. He has been crazy with worry.

      Afterwards, they lie together under the shiny eiderdown. He has pulled her close, and his skin feels clammy against hers – the room is stuffy. ‘The thing is,’ he says. ‘I am you. And you are me. We can never be separated Maria, because we are the same person. Don’t you remember? I told you. You were only half a person when we met. And then we met, and we joined, and we became a whole thing, and that’s the way it will always be. We can’t exist without each other.’

      She lies next to him, breathing steadily. It has not been too bad so far. There will be more to come later, in two weeks or six weeks or six months. It will come, then. This is only postponement.

      She props her head up on one elbow and turns to him, managing a smile. ‘How did you find me?’ she says, still smiling, as if it has all been an enormous game, and that is when his hand comes at her from nowhere, to grab the underside of her chin and force her head back against the headboard with a bang.

      The pale young man who works behind reception is still on duty when Matthew comes to check Maria out of her room. Maria and Matthew have come down from the room together, but Maria sits and waits in the armchair on the far side of the lobby, her beanie hat pulled down low.

      Matthew stands at the reception desk tapping the edge of his credit card on it while the pale young man looks at his computer.

      ‘No, it’s all paid for,’ the pale young man says, ‘your sister paid in advance when she checked in, didn’t she mention that?’ He glances past Matthew’s shoulder, across the lobby to where Maria sits, looking at the door.

      ‘Oh,’ says Matthew, giving a final brisk tap and slipping the card back into a pocket, ‘No, she didn’t, she must have forgotten.’ He slides the key card across the table. ‘We’re all done then.’

      ‘Was everything OK for your sister?’ the pale young man asks, looking down at Matthew and tipping his head very slightly to one side.

      Matthew stretches a smile without parting his lips. ‘Lovely,’ he says, ‘she’s had a lovely break.’

      Matthew crosses the lobby and takes Maria by her arm and guides her out of the main entrance, holding her backpack in the other hand. His car is parked in the small car park right in front of the entrance to the hotel.

      As they reach the car, he stops and turns her to him, then moves his hand up to the back of her head. He laces his fingers in her hair and pulls her face towards his and kisses her with all the passion of a drowning man. Maria hears a passer-by, an elderly voice say, fondly, as Matthew’s teeth clash against hers, ‘Oh, look …’

      After the kiss, Matthew releases her and turns to unlock the car door, and at that moment, Maria looks around and sees the young woman from reception in her navy jacket, standing in the hotel entrance, behind the glass-panelled door, looking out at them both. Maria is close enough to see her own reflection layered against the young woman’s face and to know that the young woman is, in that moment, seeing her for who she is. It would take no more than a couple of steps.

      Matthew turns, puts his hand on her arm again and pushes her gently into the car. By the time Maria has put her seatbelt on and looked back at the hotel entrance, the young woman has gone – or maybe she is still there, and it is simply that Maria herself has moved away and is no longer reflected in the glass panel of the door. Perhaps it is just that the light is different.

      Maria thinks, She will have forgotten me before she has crossed the hotel lobby, lifted the wooden hatch on the reception desk, and gone to join the pale young man who will talk about his twins.

      On the long drive back up to the Midlands, Matthew chats away about what he has been doing, about how the cat threw up on the bedspread yesterday, but he was in such a panic about finding her, he left it. It’s going to be her job when they get back, sorry, but she can hardly blame him.

      Maria sits with her head resting against the side window, staring at the flash and rush of the passing countryside as they speed up the motorway, and when she doesn’t respond, he makes a snort of disgust – she knows he will bring her surliness up later – and turns on the radio. He turns it up so loud that the signal is distorted and the music wavers and blares. He sings along, loudly, tapping

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