Nicola Barker - Love Your Enemies

To fill the following silence she added, ‘The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that it was just a power thing. There was something explosive about the situation, the confrontation, something strangely … well, strange. Erotic.’

Stephanie looked down at her hands. She had never used the word ‘erotic’ before. Especially in front of someone like Jane. Using the word was almost as much fun as the sex had been. She felt like D. H. Lawrence.

Jane was devastated. She looked at Stephanie and couldn’t understand her, she couldn’t contain what she had done in the relevant compartments of her brain. She wondered whether Stephanie was now a slag. A slut. Finally she said, ‘You behaved like a slut, with some big, ugly skinhead.’

Stephanie shrugged. ‘If you mean “slut” in a good way, then yes, I did. The shop was so quiet. We made love behind some racks of mohair jumpers. Nobody came.’

She smiled at her unintentional pun. Jane missed the joke. Her ideas of Stephanie had now been so radically altered that any coherent discussion about motivation and intent seemed entirely fruitless. But she was like a small, common bird, like a sparrow, a pack creature, something that acts on impulse. She wanted to know the details, but this desire compromised her and she knew it. Eventually she said, ‘How was he?’ She had never been able to ask this question about the sexual relations between Stephanie and Chris, but this was different. Stephanie looked for a moment like she wasn’t going to reply, then she said, ‘Good. Strange. Condensed …’

‘Did he have …?’

Stephanie frowned. ‘Don’t ask. It wasn’t like that.’

Jane felt coarse and embarrassed. She snapped defensively, ‘I’m not particularly interested in what it was like. Don’t flatter yourself.’ She was silent for a second and then added, ‘How can we even discuss it? How can we talk about it? There’s nothing to say.’

Stephanie frowned, trying to understand what Jane meant. She said, ‘I thought I should tell you.’

Jane raised her eyebrows and tried to look ironic. ‘Tell me? Tell me what? I think you should consider telling Chris. I don’t think he’ll be too sympathetic, though.’

Stephanie cupped the bowl of her glass in both hands. She was temporarily confused. She had known that Jane would be disapproving, surprised, maybe even shocked, but the coherence and simplicity of what she had experienced … She repeated the word silently to herself and felt it to be totally appropriate. Simplicity. That expresses it best. It was so simple, unadulterated, natural and yet unnatural.

She tried to articulate her thoughts. ‘It wasn’t sordid, just natural and kind of obvious, that’s why it’s so hard to describe …’

Jane shrugged. ‘Just sex. Are you seeing each other again?’

Stephanie sighed and shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t think so. I hadn’t thought about it like that. It wasn’t like that.’

Jane seemed unimpressed. ‘So you won’t be seeing him again. But will you have sex with other people at work? When it’s quiet, just before closing?’

She was smirking. Stephanie felt at once angry and misunderstood. She spoke instead of thinking, before thinking. ‘Maybe this has changed me. I didn’t feel immediately different, but I think that I might actually be. I knew you wouldn’t approve, but I thought you’d be …’ She tried to collect her thoughts.

Jane turned away from Stephanie and looked over her shoulder and towards the juke box. It was silent. She wondered whether she could be bothered to go over and put some money into it. It then struck her that this might in fact be a good idea, a means to walk away from the conversation, to bring about a hiatus, a gap, a space, so that when she returned they could discuss other things. She took her purse from her bag and stood up. She said, ‘I’m going to put some music on the juke box.’

Stephanie didn’t reply. She nodded. She watched Jane walk over to the juke box and thought, ‘Suddenly we have no common ground. When she comes back to the table she won’t discuss this with me again. It’s as though nothing can be expressed between us which will make sense, which we can both understand. When she comes back to the table she will be assured in her own mind that she is now better than me, that she has something over me, and yet …’

She sighed and pushed a piece of hair that had fallen across her face behind her ear. ‘And yet something so incredible has happened.’ She felt sad, almost bitter, but in her heart she knew that the space that had sprung up between them, the vacuum, had now opened up inside her, and it was a positive space that could be filled with so many things; ideas, possibilities. She thought, ‘Words are like gifts, some people are generous and some frugal.’ She decided to make herself a present by keeping quiet.

Anne Marie baked cakes every week. Usually she baked for a couple of hours every Sunday afternoon. The family had dinner at five on Sunday so she baked from two until four and then began the Meal Proper. Her husband liked her baking, he appreciated the way that she did things from scratch. Even if the results were sometimes inadequate, he still complimented her roundly and fully on effort and commitment. ‘After all,’ he’d say, ‘this is the Take-Away Age. You do well to stand up against it with its additives and its preservatives and its factory-plastic tastes.’

Anne Marie valued his opinion. Often his family visited on a Sunday so she’d make dinner for five; for Steve, his mum, his dad, little Fiona and herself. Now she had another hungry mouth to feed on its way too; a tiny thumb-sized foetus nestled in her stomach somewhere, eating, growing and forming.

Little Fiona was almost three. Anne Marie had decided to have her children later rather than sooner. She had worked as a legal secretary for twelve years before even considering the idea of conception, pregnancy and birth. Fiona had burst into the world when Anne Marie was already in her thirty-fourth year of life, although she and Steve had been married for ever.

She had begun baking just before Fiona was born because she thought that it made the home more homely and she and Steve more of a proper family. She needn’t have worried though because he took to being a father like a duck to water. He leapt in with his eyes closed and a finger and thumb placed firmly over his nostrils. He said that he was happy about the second baby but that he missed her extra wage coming in. He had calculated that her wage would be back in the kitty when Fiona had started at nursery school. It didn’t look that way now. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I’m perfectly happy about the new baby, and at least we don’t have to buy a new pram this time.’

Steve worked in his father’s business, which was a small concern that produced paper cups and plates for children’s parties, featuring popular cartoon characters. The business barely supported two executive wages so Steve had to work extra hard for less than you’d expect. He had his eye on the long term. His dad took a back seat, spending long lunch-hours in the Hammer and Tongs, reading the Financial Times and smoking Lite cigars.

At the factory the workforce consisted mainly of women working part-time for under the minimum wage. They also had a couple of YOP schemes on the go. The kids learned how to stack packets of cups and plates into groups of twelve before putting them into boxes. It was illuminating work.

Anne Marie took an active interest in Steve’s activities and firmly believed that he was more intelligent than her. He often hinted as much with wry smiles and gentle pats on her head whenever she made as if to discuss anything of worth. He was clever enough in his own way though, clever enough to employ attractive young women at work and to touch their hair and brush himself against them when distributing their wage packets on a Friday afternoon. The women came into his office one by one. He was like an enormous prickly hairbrush, stroking and tweaking, smoothing and glossing. At work the women secretly called him ‘The Brush’. He was so obvious.