“It’s not really that so much,” I say, turning my head toward the window so she can’t follow the expression on my face. The rain has picked up. “I never minded sharing the space. That felt like the whole point of living together.”
Later on, walking home, I stop at the petrol station and buy another cherry Coke to replace the one Leah wasted earlier in the day. I stand in the car park and watch the sky growing dark beyond the tower blocks, the buildings like faces buried in unclean pillows. We have always lived here—met in a pale electric summer, moved quickly from our respective basement studios to the second-floor flat we have shared for seven years. Before she transferred to the Centre, Leah used to take the train each morning, an hour at least to run her out through brown uncertain marshlands to the research facility, minutes from the sea. An hour back in again at night, her clothes salt-glazed, her skin scoured smooth by coastal weather. Strange, to live in such proximity to an ocean that I almost never see.
The city is veined with inland tributaries and close-dispersed canals, waterlogged about its edges. Bridged across its belly, a river running down its throat. August in the city is always strange, wet, scuttled through with insects freshly burst from shells. I scratch my calf with the toe of my left shoe and think about Leah—about her bright pale eyes and the shape of her mouth and the feeling when we spoke for the first time that there were vast places in the world that I had never yet thought to go.
* * *
A thousand years ago, Leah held a hand over my mouth in the bathroom at the wedding of a mutual friend. We’d gone into the stall together because I needed help with the buttons up the back of my jumpsuit and had ended up trapped when one of the bridesmaids came in and started sobbing to someone on the phone.
It was roughly five o’clock, fireworks planned for seven thirty and rain forecast for six. I just don’t think, the bridesmaid wailed into her mobile, that it’s such a big deal when I’ve been carrying her fucking spare shoes around with me all day. I just don’t think that it’s so much to ask, to be understanding, when I handmade those fucking centerpieces myself.
In the stall, I pictured the bridesmaids: six of them, goosefleshed in summer dresses. During the ceremony, they had stood in line as if in preparation for a hanging, the sense of a barely under control Salem implicit in their fixed expressions, in the mess of arms that later reached toward the bride at the behest of the wedding photographer: We’re doing a funny one now—act like you all want to choke her!
Leah gave me a warning look that tumbled off into a smile, pressing her hand down harder to stop me from laughing. I’m just so tired, the bridesmaid sighed—the plink of earrings removed and dropped into the sink—I just can’t believe she’s so angry at me because I—oh—right, yes of course, I’m sorry. Absolutely, go if you have to go. She dissolved into fresh sobs and I watched Leah’s face change a little, her typical reaction to gen uine suffering always being to cease laughing before I did and then look at me until I stopped. I rolled my eyes at her and she pulled her hand away from my mouth, murmured come on before easing the bathroom door open. The bridesmaid by the sink had apparently suffered a catastrophically unexpected period, the lavender silk of her dress streaked red all up the back. Hey, Leah said, and the bridesmaid jumped and turned and then carried on crying, and Leah told her not to worry and then listened to her sob for twenty minutes while I sat beside the sink and handed over a pound for the tampon machine.
Later on, fireworks called off because of rain, Leah went out to the covered porch and I went with her. Across the courtyard, a view of the rest of the venue—wide white outbuildings arranged in a semicircle. Georgian by design, it had apparently been used as the primary setting for a recent Austen adaptation on a midbudget cable channel—cardboard cutouts of the hero and heroine standing life-size in the reception area, sun-faded toward the end of the tourist season. For all its photogenic lines, the house retained little of its original features beyond a tottering cupola and a widow’s walk made semilethal with age. A folly, so the receptionist had explained unprompted when we first arrived: Widow’s walks are typically a feature of coastal dwellings. Wives would watch for their husbands’ ships, mothers for their sons—fishing boats, whalers, smugglers. And there was always the possibility of pirates. Things to look out for. Not so helpful sixty miles inland.
Back inside, the previously distraught bridesmaid was now dancing, having tied her boyfriend’s suit jacket around her waist to cover the stain. That’s sweet, Leah had said when she saw the boyfriend offering the jacket and I had grinned at her without really knowing why. I’ll do that for you, she had added, next time you have a terrible period and I’m wearing a suit.