Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

She moved forward and picked up her tea. She found, to her horror, that her hands were shaking. She didn't want to put the mug back down and draw attention to the tremor; she lifted it higher, and tried to meet it with her mouth. But the tremor grew worse. Tea spilled; she saw it stain one of Mickey's cushions. Abruptly, she set the mug down again and tried to mop up the worst of it with her handkerchief.

She caught Mickey's eye as she was doing it; and her shoulders sank. She leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands.

'Look at me, Mickey!' she said. 'Look at the creature I've become! Did we really do those things we did?-you and I, when the war was on? Sometimes I can't bring myself to get out of bed in the mornings. We carried stretchers, for God's sake! I remember lifting-' She spread her hands. 'I remember lifting the torso of a child… What the hell happened to me, Mickey?'

'You know what happened,' Mickey said softly.

Kay sat back and turned away, in disgust at herself. 'It's no more than happened to thousands of us. Who didn't lose someone, or something? I could walk on any street in London, stretch out my arm, touch a woman or a man who lost a lover, a child, a friend… But I- I can't get over it, Mickey. I can't get over it.' She laughed, unhappily. ' Get over it . What a funny phrase that is! As if one's grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one's way over the rubble to the ground on the other side… I've got lost in my rubble, Mickey. I can't seem to find my way across it. I don't think I want to cross it, that's the thing. The rubble has all my life in it still-'

For a second she couldn't go on. She looked around the cabin of the boat; then spoke more quietly.

'Do you remember that night, when we all sat here? That night just before-? Sometimes I think about times like that. I bloody torture myself with thinking about times like that! Do you remember it?'

Mickey nodded. 'I remember it.'

'I'd been to that place in Bethnal Green. You made gin slings.'

'Gin gimlets.'

Kay looked up. 'Gin gimlets? Are you sure?' Mickey nodded. 'Weren't there lemons?'

'Lemons? Where the hell would we have got lemons? We had lime juice, remember, in a bottle of Binkie's?'

Kay did remember it, now. The fact that she'd misremembered before-misremembered to the extent that she'd been able to picture Mickey actually cutting up the lemons, squeezing out the juice-made her uneasy.

'Lime juice,' she said, frowning, 'in a bottle. Why should I have forgotten that?'

'Don't think about it, Kay.'

'I don't want to think about it! But I don't want to forget it, either. Sometimes I can think of nothing else but things like that. My mind has hooks in it. Little hooks-'

But now she sounded almost crazy. She turned her head again, and looked out of the window. The sunlight made patterns on the water. A slick of oil had colours in, silver and blue… She turned back into the cabin, and found Mickey checking her watch.

'Kay,' said Mickey, embarassed. 'I'm sorry, mate. I've got to get back to Sandy 's.'

'Of course you have.'

'Why don't you stay here till I get home?'

'Don't be silly. I'm all right, really. It's a bore, that's all.'

She finished her tea. Her hand was quite steady now. She brushed crumbs from her lap, got to her feet, and helped clear away the plates.

'What'll you do now?' Mickey asked her, as they made their way down the Harrow Road.

Kay became a debutante again. She made a flighty gesture. 'Oh, I've heaps of things.'

'Have you, really?'

'Yes, of course.'

'I don't believe you. Have a think about what I said-about coming to live with me. Will you? Or come out, some time! We could go for a drink. We could go to Chelsea. There's no-one there these days, the crowd's all changed-'

'All right,' said Kay.

She got out her cigarettes again, took one for herself, gave one to Mickey; and tucked another behind one of Mickey's boyish little ears. Mickey caught hold of her hand when she had done it, and gave it a squeeze; they stood for a second, smiling into each other's eyes.

They had kissed once, Kay remembered-years ago, and without success. They'd both been drunk. They'd ended up laughing. That's what happened, of course, when you were both, as it were, on the same side…

Mickey moved away. 'Ta-ta, Kay,' she said. Kay watched her running back to the garage. She saw her turn, once, to wave. Kay raised her hand, then started to walk, back in the direction of Bayswater.

She walked briskly, for as long as she thought that Mickey might be watching; but as soon as she'd turned a corner, she slowed her step. And when she got to Westbourne Grove and the street grew busy, she found a doorstep in the shadow of a broken wall, and sat down. She thought of what she'd said to Mickey, about standing in a crowd, stretching out her hand… And she studied the faces of the people as they passed, thinking, What did you lose? How about you? How do you bear it? What do you do?

'I knew that girl from Enfield was trouble the second she walked in,' Viv was saying, as she sprinkled Vim on the cloth. 'They always are, that brassy type.'

She and Helen had just been about to take their lunches out to the fire-escape when they'd spotted pencil-marks on the lavatory wall.

A long and thin goes right in

But a short and thick does the trick!

somebody had written, on the paint above the roller-towel. Helen had not, for a second, known where to look. Viv seemed hardly less embarassed. 'This is what comes,' she said now, rubbing madly, 'of advertising in those local magazines.'

She stepped back, flushed and blinking. The wall was pale where she had cleaned it, but the words thick and does the trick! still showed, scored faintly into the paint. She rubbed again, then she and Helen moved about, narrowing their eyes, holding their heads at different angles to the light… They became aware, all at once, of what they were doing. They looked at each other and started to laugh.

'Dear me,' said Helen, biting her lip.

Viv rinsed out the cloth and put away the Vim, her shoulders shaking. She dried her hands, then lifted her knuckles to her eyes, afraid for her mascara. 'Don't!' she said.

Still laughing, they opened the window and clambered out. They sat and unwrapped their sandwiches, sipped their tea and grew calmer at last; then caught one another's gaze and started laughing all over again.

Viv set down her spilling cup. 'Oh, what would the clients think?'

Her mascara had run after all. She got out a handkerchief, made a twist of it, put the twist to the tip of her tongue, then held up a mirror and widened her eyes, rubbing beneath them almost as savagely, Helen thought, as she'd rubbed at the marks on the lavatory wall. The blood, in rushing into her face, had made her seem youthful. Her hair was disarranged by laughter; she looked tousled, full of life.

But she tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve and picked up her sandwich; and her laughter faded into sighs. She put back a corner of the bread, and the sight of the vivid meat inside it-and the taste of it, when she'd bitten-seemed for some reason to subdue her. Her face lost its flush. Her eyes dried. She chewed very slowly, and finally put the sandwich down. She was wearing a cardigan over her dress, and began fastening up its buttons.

It was almost two weeks since that warm Saturday, when Helen had lain with Julia in Regent's Park. That had been the last warm day of the summer, though they hadn't known it then. The season had turned. The sun was moving in and out of clouds. Viv put back her head to look at the sky.

'Not quite so warm today,' she said.

'No, not quite,' said Helen.

'I suppose we'll all be complaining, soon, about the cold.'