The floorboards groan. Clara’s heavy boots make their way down the hallway. Ren rolls on to her side and watches the crack of light beneath her doorway, split now by Clara’s legs. Then, someone else’s. Two bodies coalesce in the sparse light, before the shadows disappear. Ren closes her eyes. She thinks of the shared bathroom in their old uni halls, Ren cutting her fringe with kitchen scissors and Clara bleaching her hair in the shower. She thinks of their movie nights in the house after that, sacred occasions when Clara would spend hours setting up the bedsheet and the projector and picking the film, before talking all the way through it about which shots she loved and why. They’d met on the second day of the first year, had bonded over the fact that they were both ostracised at school and ignored at home. Ren lives life with the volume down low. When she talks on the phone, to her old friends or her brother, she does so quietly. When she does what Clara is about to do, it’s a pantomime of bitten lips and clamped mouths, things whispered in ears rather than screamed at the top of lungs. She barely spoke up at uni, ever the odd one out at CSM as the daughter of a cabbie, heroverdraft a shameful secret. Fashion didn’t work out for Ren, but uni had its upsides. When she and Clara had kissed on that night out in Freshers’ Week, it had meant nothing to Clara and everything to Ren. Ren, who has never been able to put herself into words. Ren, who has no idea who she’s supposed to be.
A murmur. A giggle. Ren rolls on to her back again, arches her neck as if she might be able to see right through the wall and into the bedroom behind her. It’s been six months since Clara broke it off with Jacob. A record amount of time, but he always creeps back in. If Ren has a prevailing image of Jacob, it’s him after the lights came up on the first short film he and Clara made together. When all the RADA gang told Clara, with varying degrees of surprise, how talented she was, only Ren noticed Jacob’s face. He was livid. Not because he disliked the film, but because no one was talking about him. She hears Clara’s door clicking shut, now, and she imagines Jacob’s ironing-board torso, anAmerican Psychosmirk directed at the mirror on Clara’s wardrobe. Her stomach roils. Two voices mumble in the dark. Her brow furrows. The voice is deep. Too deep. The stride in the hallway should have been enough to give it away. Jacob is touchy about his height. But if this isn’t Jacob, then who is on the other side of this wall?
A thump. A back against that wall, planted firmly enough to rattle the picture frame above Ren’s head. Ren imagines muscular shoulders on the other side of it, a beast of a man looming over Clara, Clara standing on tiptoes to meet his open mouth. Her mouth on a wide chest, his lips on her long neck. Ren and Clara’s headboards are pressed up against the same wall. From above, it might look like they shared one long bed,Clara’s face resting on a pillow only ever a few inches away from Ren’s. Tonight, Ren on one side, on her back in her boxer shorts. And Clara on the other, falling backwards now, pulling someone down on top of her. A giggling whisper that is unmistakably Clara’s. A low reply that belongs to someone new. Ren imagines a man’s head behind her own. She can’t picture a face. But she can picture Clara’s face, travelling down a man’s torso, and the thought is enough to make her own face hot. She tries to identify the sounds on the other side of the wall. The jingle of metal on metal is a belt buckle being unclasped. The two dull thuds of Clara’s heavy boots, kicked off carelessly to reveal small feet in fishnet tights.
A groan, long and deep. Then, another, high and breathy, almost surprised. A zipper, a wrapper. The night is so hot that it feels like a fever. Close, you might say, and Ren can hear how close they are together, can imagine the sweat dripping from his chest on to Clara’s. Pooling in places she cannot see. Ren indulges herself. She imagines drawing a line from the balls of Clara’s feet over the delicate arches to her raised heels, from Clara’s straightened calves and all the way up. Clara is pale and clumsy. When she wears her pyjama shorts in the kitchen, her white legs are covered in bruises. What is Clara wearing now? And is she taking it off?
Ren realises that she’s been holding her breath. Now she exhales, knocks her knees together. She can hear bed springs straining, voices gasping for air. She imagines elbows, torsos, the soft skin on the inside of a pale thigh. His fingers. Her tongue. On the other side of the wall, Clara moans. With her free hand, Ren covers her mouth.
the woman in seat 13C
The average city-dweller passes a thousand different people every day. By that measure, one must pass the same strangers time and time again, sharing the same pavement, the same café, the same train carriage, never once realising, never once stopping to see. Why would you recognise one face, and not the other nine hundred and ninety-nine? Passers-by, by their very nature, pass you by.
Things are different when you’re travelling. In a foreign country, you’re bound together by your otherness, more likely to recognise a fellow traveller. You might see a couple on your plane, then spot the same couple in a museum. Don’t I know you from somewhere? You might glimpse that couple in your hotel lift, or glistening on a sunbed by the pool, or clinking glasses on your last night at the same restaurant. It’s freaky, you might think. You might nudge your husband, say it out loud. Isn’t it uncanny?
She looks up from her plane ticket, on which is stamped the seat number 13C. Her face obviously can’t hide its disappointment, because the man in seat 13B has long legs and broad shoulders and is already apologising for both. She says,don’t be silly, though she sees that the man’s girlfriend has considerably slighter shoulders which would have been better suited to the middle seat. The girlfriend likes looking out of the window, it turns out, and the boyfriend is more inclined to put on his big black headphones and fall asleep. At first she’d assumed that he was Italian, on account of their destination, the tanned thighs and the Roman nose, which, in profile, looks like it should be on an ancient coin. Once he speaks, though, the illusion is shattered. He’s just as English as they all are. Her own husband is sitting in 13D. They’d booked two aisle seats in order to maximise leg room. He’s reading a newspaper, guffawing at an interview with the floppy-haired contender for Mayor of London.
The man in 13B holds his girlfriend’s hand, his thumb tracing circles on her pale skin. He murmurs something in her ear, and she giggles, turns to kiss him. They share a look, eyes barely an inch apart from each other. They kiss again, and again. Thank god they’re separated by an armrest.
She looks up from her train ticket, and there they are again. On the concourse at Roma Termini, 13B rests one long arm over his girlfriend’s shoulder. He’s wearing black denim shorts and a MetallicaRide the LightningT-shirt with the arms cut off. She’s in a linen shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. She’s talking animatedly about Fellini, aboutRoma. The heat is relentless.
‘Let’s go to Cinecittà,’ the girlfriend is saying, eyes bright. ‘Let’s frolic in the Trevi Fountain.’
Her boyfriend, black leather bag hoisted over one muscularshoulder, checks a black Casio watch. ‘Let’s check in first,’ he says. He hails a taxi. ‘We can frolic at the hotel.’
His girlfriend looks up at him, and he looks down at her, and it occurs to the woman watching that it’s been a long time since someone looked at her like this. Like something to be pulled apart and licked clean. At some point, she’d reached an age when people stopped looking. Her husband is already ten paces ahead of her, so she ambles, watching the girlfriend haul up her own heavy bag and attempt to hit her boyfriend with it. The action topples her over, but he catches her before she falls.
‘Did you cut the arms off this yourself?’ the girlfriend asks, nodding at his top, her small hands on his long, brown arms.
Behind his Wayfarers, he’s as inscrutable as a poker player. He tilts her chin upwards with one finger, kisses her lightly on the lips. ‘No comment.’
At the hotel, the husband of the woman from seat 13C spends fifteen minutes failing to work the safety-deposit box. The wife shares a look with the handsome bellhop. Is she surprised when he looks right through her?
She’ll put such things out of her mind until that evening, when she’ll realise that the young couple are staying at the same hotel. From there, she’ll see them everywhere. In the Forum, two distant figures in the dust, embracing under crumbling columns like doomed lovers painted on an ancient vase. In the Pantheon, a welcome escape from the stifling day outside. The girlfriend is scratching impressions in a sketchbook, while he is staring silently and solemnly upwards at the oculus, which shoots a single beam of sunlight like a pinhole camera into thevast and echoing chamber. Again, at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, he pulling out her chair in a dim and candlelit corner, where they’ll eat fried artichokes and sheets of pasta coated in melted pecorino, hand-shaved slices of black truffle quivering on top. Each of them leaning over, to stroke a hand or to steal a kiss or to tuck away a strand of hair. He’ll run a fingertip across his plate and lick the residue. She’ll order a second fiasco of Chianti, half of which they’ll take back to their hotel room.
It’s a special kind of intoxication, to be so dizzy on someone else that everything around you falls away. The couple can’t keep their hands off one another. They can’t keep it down. In the morning, at the breakfast buffet, everyone watches them, sharing wry smiles, rolling jealous eyes. They all want what the couple have. They all want to be voracious. The couple sit on the same side of a small table, he picking wafer-thin slices of prosciutto off his plate and sucking his fingers, she burying her face in his neck and baring her teeth.
The woman from seat 13C finds herself in the Villa Borghese. Her husband is not one for culture, and his nose is so sunburnt it’s blistered, so she’d left him behind. Here, it is just her, and her thoughts, and the couple. The girlfriend is crouching with that sketchbook balanced on top of her bare legs, drawing furtively, scribbling things out and starting again. There is a dewy pink sheen over the tops of the girl’s freckled shoulders, a lasting blush on the arches of her high cheekbones. Her boyfriend is sitting beside her with a sketchbook of his own, concentrating on a bust he’s trying to replicate in charcoal.
The woman moves from statue to statue, tries to findsomething in each slab of marble. Then, a light touch on her elbow, and she finds herself standing face to face with the girl from the couple. The girl rubs one of her reddened shoulders, speaks self-consciously.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she says. ‘But I drew you.’
When the woman from seat 13C finally looks up from the drawing, its artist has already returned to her boyfriend. He’s holding his own drawing to his broad chest, asking her to promise not to laugh. He turns the terrible sketch around, and his girlfriend does as promised. Instead, she strokes his hair, leans forward on her knees on the cold marble, kisses him right there on the gallery floor.
The woman looks back down at the drawing she’s been given. She searches the black lines, the shadows of her figure. She would never see herself like this.
She sees the couple just once more. She leaves her husband sleeping in bed, finding herself a table for one on the cobbles of Trastevere. It is late. She doesn’t do things like this. It is not surprising, to find them here. It is comforting, in a way.
‘Let’s move here,’ the girlfriend is saying. ‘You could actually learn Italian.’
She is drinking a negroni. The boyfriend is holding a cigarette in one and a bottle of beer in the other.
‘I don’t need to,’ he says. ‘IamItalian.’
A man holding a bunch of roses arrives at their table. ‘Prego?’ he says.
The boyfriend freezes, just long enough to send his girlfriend into peals of laughter.
