Strangers

I’m sorry. The words swelled, dancing above her, dinning in her ears. Surely they were loud enough? I’m sorry. She wanted Martin to hear them, somehow. She had failed him, and their children, and she knew how much they needed her. ‘I’m afraid,’ Annie said again. ‘I’m afraid to die.’

Steve lay rigid, thinking, I don’t know what to say. He had been absorbed in trying to imagine it as one more thing to get the better of. He felt it facing him, as tense as an animal ready to spring, but it was he who was cornered. I don’t know what to say to her. I’ve always known what to say. I’ve been so bloody sharp. I’ve cut myself. He heard Nan warning him, back in the kitchen three floors up behind Bow High Street. And now. Now there was this.

‘I’m afraid too,’ Steve whispered.

The confession of their fear drew them close, and the spectre of it moved back and let them breathe a little. Steve and Annie couldn’t huddle together and keep it at bay but they felt one another in their fingertips. Their hands became themselves.

‘Thank God you’re here,’ Annie said. And then, after a minute, ‘Steve? If it comes, will you be here with me?’

If death comes, that’s what she means, Steve thought. Will I be with her through it?

‘Yes,’ he promised her. ‘I’ll be here.’

We’ll wait, together.

Annie took the reassurance, and Steve’s admission of his own fear, and built them into her barricades. The terror receded a little further. She used the respite to look at the pictures that whirled in her head like confetti, examining each one and setting it in its place. It became very important to make a logical sequence of them. Annie frowned, gathering the ragged edges of concentration. So many little pieces of confetti.

There was Martin, on the day that they met. That’s right, that one would come first. She looked at the fragment carefully. He was sitting at the next table, in the coffee bar in Old Compton Street favoured by students from St Martin’s. Annie was in her foundation year, and Martin was two years ahead of her. She had seen him before, in the corridors and once across the room at a party, without noticing him in particular. He had long hair and a leather jacket, artfully ripped, like everyone else’s. Today he was drawing on an artists’ pad, his head bent in concentration. She remembered sitting in the warm, steamy atmosphere listening to the hiss of the coffee machines behind the high counter. The boy at the next table had finished his drawing and looked up, smiling at her.

‘Another coffee?’ he asked.

He brought two cups over to her table, and she tilted her head to look at the drawing under his arm. Obligingly he held it out and she saw an intricately shaded pencil drawing of the coffee bar with the chrome-banded sweep of the counter, the polished levers of the Gaggia machine and the owner’s brilliantined head bent behind it. At her table, close to the counter, he had drawn in her friends but Annie’s chair was empty.

‘Why haven’t you drawn me?’ she demanded and he answered, ‘Well, that would have been rather obvious of me, wouldn’t it?’

He’s nice, Annie thought.

She felt the intriguing mixture of excitement and anticipation that she recalled years afterwards as the dominant flavour of those days. Everything that happened was an adventure, every corner turned presented an enticing new vista.

‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked her. ‘I’ve seen you at the college, haven’t I?’

‘Anne. Annie,’ she corrected herself. Since leaving school she had discarded sixth-form gawky Anne in favour of Annie, free-wheeling art student with her Sassoon bob and cut-out Courrèges boots.

‘I’m Martin.’

And so they had met, and the strands had been picked out and pulled together in the first tentative knot. Martin had taken a crumpled handbill from his pocket. It was the term’s programme from the college film society.

‘Look. Zéro de Conduite. Have you seen it?’ And then when Annie shook her head, ‘You really should. Would you like to come with me?’

For all their protestations of freedom they had still been very conventional, all that time ago. He had invited her to see a film and she had accepted, and he had taken her for supper afterwards at the Sorrento.

But there was no fragment to illustrate what had happened next. She simply couldn’t remember. All she could see was herself, trudging through the rain in the streets beyond Battersea Park, with Martin’s address burning in her pocket. He must have taken her out once or twice and then moved on to someone else. Was that it?

Perhaps. And perhaps she had been smitten by the anguish that was as much part of those days as the enchantment. She had determined that she wouldn’t let him go, and had boldly gone to the registry to find his address. But she could see her nineteen-year-old self so clearly, in her white plastic mac dotted with shilling-sized black spots, splashing through the puddles wearing her tragic sadness like a black cloak. Just as Jeanne Moreau did, or Catherine Deneuve, or whichever French actress was providing her model for that week. She was going to confront him, beg him to listen to her because she was lost without him. There was a bottle of wine in her carrier bag, and when the time came they were going to drink it together, all barriers down at last.

There, that little piece fitted there.

She had reached his door and rung the bell, her face already composed in its beautiful, sad, brave lines. Martin opened the door, brandishing a kitchen ladle. He beamed at her, and her heart lifted like a kite.

‘Oh, Annie, it’s you. Great. Just the person we need. Come in here.’

She followed him into the kitchen and stared around. It wasn’t what she had planned, not at all.

The room was packed with people, mostly ravenous-looking boys. In the middle of the table, amidst a litter of potato peelings and bottles of beer and cider, there was a slab of roast pork, half carved, with blood still oozing from a round pinky-brown patch in the centre.

‘We were going to have a house feast,’ Martin explained. ‘But the meat looks wrong. What d’you think?’

‘I think it needs about four more hours in the oven,’ Annie retorted. It was hard to maintain her Jeanne Moreau expression confronted with a piece of raw pork and a dozen hungry faces.

Martin shrugged cheerfully. ‘Oh well. Let’s stick it back in the oven and go to the pub.’

They went to the pub, and came back again much later. At some stage they ate the pork, or what was left of it. Somebody else drank Annie’s wine, and later still threw it up again. Annie didn’t care about anything except that she was with Martin. He took her upstairs to his room and put his arms round her, and they looked into each other’s eyes as if at a miracle.

‘Why did you come down here, this evening?’ he asked her and she answered, with daring simplicity, ‘Because I can’t live without you.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Martin said.

It was the truth.

After that, for a long time, all the pieces of confetti that she put into the proper sequence belonged to them both. Slowly, by the same stages that many of their friends were passing through at the same time, Martin and Annie became a couple. They explored each other, awkwardly at first, on the mattress in Martin’s room, then with daring, and then with skill that turned quite quickly into tenderness. In the same way, but even more slowly, their life in the world found its pattern, echoing the private one. The discovery of one another’s likes and pleasures was consolidated by sharing them. They launched themselves into the endless, fascinated talks that convinced them they were identical spirits. They went everywhere and did everything together, exchanging the romantic isolation of adolescence for the luxury of mutual dependence. They became, to all their friends, Martin-and-Annie.

For a while in Martin’s last year they lived together, sharing a chaotically disorganized house with three other students. There were lots of little, disjointed pictures of that time, of faces around the kitchen table and skinny legs sprawling in broken-backed armchairs. Where had all those people gone? Perhaps, Annie thought sadly, they had become Martin. Become him because all the memories of that time were crystallized in him, part of the cement that held them together. In those days, at the age of twenty, Annie had proudly acted out the role of housewife. Here was the image of herself heading for the local launderette with two bulging blue plastic carrier bags. She had cooked meals too, and folded Martin’s shirts for him.

Did I ever, she wondered, see my mother in myself? Was I never afraid that it would be the same for me, too?

No, not that. We thought we were different, so busy making new rules. We thought we had turned the world upside down because Martin used to clank about the house with a mop-up bucket. Because he used to take his turn at cooking dinners that were never ready until midnight, and left every saucepan in the house dirty.

They had been happy … There was a lot of laughter printed on those confetti fragments. Lying numbly in her tiny space with Steve’s hand her only warmth, Annie wished that she could breathe life into them again.

At the end of that time Martin had gone to work in Milan. Here, Annie saw herself with him at the airport, her face crushed against the leather shoulder of his coat as he hugged her. For two years they had separated, because they had grown out of play-acting married life.

Annie remembered the flat that she had taken. It was close to here, above the creaking weight that pinned her like a butterfly to a board. She followed the turns of the streets that would take her there, and up the stairs into her rooms. She saw the colour of the walls – had she really painted them aubergine? – and the fringed Biba lampshades. The flicker under the skin of her face might have been a smile.

At the end of two years Martin had come home from Italy. They had found each other’s company all over again, as comfortably fitting as a winter coat left on a peg all through the summer, and then gratefully put on with the coming of cold weather. Within a year they were engaged. Their parents met and approved, exchanging drinks in their similar houses, pleased that their children had found the way at last. And a year after that, with Matthew’s still face watching from inside her head, Annie was married.