Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

“Famous?”

Amy shook her head. “Just two people having an affair. Soho’s full of them.”

“That what happened to you?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” said Amy. “But I was the one who climbed into the wrong bed. Also goes with the job, apparently. So Steve told me.”

Steve must be the ex-husband, unless he was the ex-lover.

“You want anything else to drink?”

Amy glanced from the empty Soave bottle to her almost-empty wineglass. “I think we’ve had enough,” she said. “Well, I have.” A margherita pizza flopped virtually untouched on the table in front of her. “Should have eaten some more if I was going to drink that much.”

Kit shrugged. “It’s not every day I meet an old friend.”

“Is that what I was?”

Something about Amy’s voice demanded an answer, so Kit provided one. “I think so,” he said. “But things move on.”

“Which is what we should do,” said Amy. “Or they’re going to shut this place around us.”

Alcohol reduces inhibitions. Other drugs do it better, but alcohol works when these are unavailable. The man who walked up Charlotte Street, turned left opposite the print shop, and cut through a narrow alley behind a pub, knew all about drugs and inhibitions, having shared his life with both.

The woman who walked beside him also knew, though Kit was coming to realise her knowledge of both was mostly hypothetical. A dozen snatches of conversation came and went, signifying nothing but thinly shared memories. It was hard to say exactly when lust crept into Kit’s mind, but creep in it did, arriving somewhere between a child’s cry and the sight of two men scuffling outside the doorway of a 1980s concrete block building.

“I should find you a taxi,” said Kit. It was late, Neku was at home, he’d already missed supper, and Kate O’Mally was bound to phone before breakfast.

“Yeah,” said Amy, nodding. And somehow her nod invited a kiss, the kiss turned into something more serious, and Kit found himself with one hand on her breast and Amy’s fingers holding him through his jeans.

“You know,” said Amy, “we could always go back to Mary’s flat.”

“No.” Kit shook his head.

Amy took a step back. “I thought you’d want…”

“The kid’s there.”

She stared at him, eyes uncertain. “I didn’t know you had a kid.”

I don’t. Well, thought Kit, maybe I do. Only not in the way you think. “It’s complicated,” he said.

Hotel3 was what you got if a London property company bought the gap between two Georgian town houses on the eastern edge of Fitzrovia, then in-filled with a thin cage of ferro-cement clad in smoked glass. The glass was mostly gone, replaced with panels of reconstituted limestone chosen to match the walls on either side, something the hotel’s original façade had failed to do.

In fifteen years Hotel3 had gone from uber chic to has been, and was now half way back, thus occupying a far more enviable place, as a comfort zone for those who’d originally made it fashionable.

“I’m not so sure that…”

“This is a good idea?” Amy smiled. “Of course it’s not. You should be at home, I’m meant to be writing a report on you, and we’re both drunk. But since when did Kit Nouveau worry about things like that?”

Since always.

“Come on,” she said.

Their room was tiny. A chocolate-coloured box, with burlap walls that were either a retro joke or the cutting edge of new design. The bed was a hand-made cherry wood futon, while the kidney-shaped basin came from Syracuse in Italy and was cut from the same horsehair marble as the bath. A sign by the door told them so.

What the sign didn’t mention was that their room looked out onto a fire escape, where kitchen staff gathered to smoke dope and swear loudly about the chef, the sous chef, and the unbelievably shitty pay on which the rest of them were expected to live. When the litany of complaints began for a second time, Amy shut the window with a bang.

“You want a shower or something?”

Kit shook his head. “You?”

“Not really,” said Amy, “unless you think I should…”

Her hair stank of cigarettes, anchovies and garlic from a shared bruschetta, and grease from not having been washed in a while. Without even realising he’d made the comparison, Yoshi floated ghost-like and squeaky clean into Kit’s mind.

“What?” Amy demanded.

“Nothing,” said Kit.

“Good,” she said. “You might want to kill the lights.”

Amy stayed standing while he undid her blouse, finding each pearl button by touch before moving to the next. After the blouse he unzipped her skirt and discovered through touch that she wore a thong. Her bra was pale in the half dark, underwired and unhooked at the front, because some things in life never changed.

Feeling one nipple harden, Kit cupped his fingers under a full breast, until she hooked her hand behind his head and pulled him close. Their kiss was deep and lasted for as long as it took him to slide his hand towards her panties.

Amy groaned. A second later, she said, “Don’t smile.”

“Why not?” asked Kit.

They kissed again, his fingers trapped between her thighs and her hand still wrapped in his hair. And then, as Amy broke for air, Kit edged aside the silk of her thong and slid two fingers into her.

“Fuck,” said Amy.

He grinned. “In a minute,” Kit said.

The kitchen staff came back sometime after midnight, to stand on the metal grid outside the closed window, insult each other and bitch about the chef. Although, after thirty seconds of listening to Amy, their bitching was reduced to the occasional whispered comment and stunned silence.

It was an impressive performance.

Having wrapped both arms around Kit’s neck and hooked her ankles over his, Amy clung so tight that every time Kit tried to pull back, he simply lifted her off the mattress. Yelping turned to something more urgent, as Amy grabbed his hips, jammed her nails through Kit’s skin, and began to ram him into her.

Spitting on his fingers, Kit reached under to spread Amy’s buttocks and eased one finger inside. So far as Kit could tell Amy’s orgasm was real. Her scream certainly was.

“Shit,” she said, when she got her breath back. “So that’s what closure feels like. I always wondered.” And before Kit had time to think that one through, she rolled him onto his back and dropped her head to his lap.

The dirt tracks and dunes of his original dreams had gone. Where once trucks had been driven by skeletons, a ragged matrix of dimly visible silver threads patterned the bowl of a silver sky.

Kit didn’t believe in souls or eternity, but was still blinded by both as they pulled tears from his sleeping eyes. His own soul had been lost in the sands, a voice told him. The last life taken in the cross-hairs had been his own, each shot splintering a little of what made him alive, until finally there was nothing left to splinter at all.

He had blown through Middle Morton that summer like a ghost, hungry for forgiveness and angry at the weakness this signified. The voice told him nothing that was new. He’d heard it all before. The voice was his.

Trapped in a half world between waking and sleep where everything was possible only because common sense refused to object, Kit opened his eyes to a tiny hotel room in Fitzrovia and tried to remember how he got there. And then he remembered.

The same way he usually did.

Amy lay across him, naked and snoring. A crumpled sheet was thrown back to reveal heavy breasts, a soft belly, and a butterfly tattoo on her hip. She still stank of unwashed hair and cigarettes, only now sex and sweat had added themselves to the mix.