The Howling Girl: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff

Jamie was waiting on the threshold. His hair doing that thing. His face doing that thing. Casual trousers low on his hips, and a cup of tea in one hand as he took her coat and gave her ‘the tour’.

‘The tour’ took quite a while. The house was old, old enough for a lot of people to have lived and died in it, refurbished with that soft, warm lighting everywhere, calm and quiet, like an upscale restaurant before the punters come in.

‘The tour’ was an excuse for Jamie to show off, which he did graciously, and also for them to talk, for the first time in a long time, about a lot of things that didn’t matter, like how it made sense that you weren’t allowed to just knock out a wall of a four-century-old cottage, no matter how much you wanted a kitchen island, or how much it cost to have original hardwood floors stripped, re-sanded, and painted – a lot, but you should have seen the carpets. The previous owners had been vandals, truly, people who put paisley on floors ought to be shot, and he was only ninety-nine per cent joking, he’d do it himself, he was ethical like that.

The cottage was warm – almost stuffy, all the windows were shut and locked, and Grace supposed it made sense. The wind stampeded over the moors outside, bitter, and the windows were all single-glazed, old-style, just thin glass between you and the terrible dark. Still, she remembered how much Jamie used to long for fresh air, when they’d lived together.

In the terrible one-room studio in Turnpike Lane – you couldn’t call it a bedsit these days, but that’s what it was, no turning-around room between the end of the bed and the oven – he used to creep up onto the windowsill, perch among the ashtrays, and sip down the dirty traffic-stinking air from the crack in the skylight. Sometimes he’d do it in the middle of the night, after they had fucked, before they fucked again, the streetlight making his skin luminous and alien, his flat white bum and the signature-line of his spine, as he turned to look at her like a drowning kid looks at a life raft.

She really had loved him.

It was important, Jamie was explaining now, to have simplicity, comfort, minimalism, if you were doing real creative work. Grace was waiting, just waiting, for him to use that Danish word that had been in all the lifestyle magazines, but of course he would never be that obvious. He simply led her into the living room, with its low, squashy sofa covered with sheepskins, its low-burning fire, the delicious rich scent of pine and cinnamon from some hidden, noiseless diffuser.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ she said, meaning it. ‘It feels so—’

‘—so safe, doesn’t it?’ Jamie liked to finish people’s sentences.

It was only after you really knew him that you discovered how special this ability really was: Jamie could finish your sentences without listening to a word you’d been saying. He had a natural ear for the rhythms of speech – it was part of what made him so good at what he did – he could predict people’s words. Most people are tragically predictable, she remembered him saying, more than once, wafting a spliff between slim fingers, conducting the conversation.

Jamie had what songwriters called a lean and hungry look – a boy who wanted so much from life. You wanted him, and more than that, you wanted to be the thing he wanted, even as he stared over your shoulder at the curve of his own future strutting by.

In the downstairs toilet, which Jamie referred to bizarrely as the half-bath – as if she were intending to buy the house – Grace checked herself in the mirror and decided she would do. People told her, approvingly, that she looked young for her age, and she worked out to videos, and she kept herself just a little bit hungry all the time, not being silly about it, not like she used to, but still, the regular empty noises inside were a growl of approval: tomorrow you will take up no more space than you do today.