Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

'I'm beginning to think it was just a nightmare,' Sophie said.

'It was no nightmare,' he said, locking on to her gaze. 'I've seen it too.'

Sophie fought to stop her mouth falling open. 'You did? '

'Not tonight,' he said. 'Not recently. But I have seen it. I've seen other things, as well.'

'Other things?' Sophie sat up straight in her armchair. 'What other things?'

Robert seemed to find this amusing. 'Put it this way,' he said with a bit of a snigger, 'I won't be looking in my bathroom mirror again in a hurry.'

Sophie couldn't believe he was laughing, but he sobered up instantly, and did the best possible thing in the circumstances: he leant over and kissed her. His lips were dry and tasted of stale tobacco, like his breath, but his technique was a marked improvement on Graham's sluglike intrusions. To Sophie's surprise, she found herself responding with some enthusiasm.

Just as she was getting into it, he pulled back.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I shouldn't have done that.'

'It's all right,' she said. 'Really.'

'I'm taking advantage.'

'No you're not.'

But he stood up, and said, 'Will you be all right now?'

'Don't know,' Sophie said, trying to make her face register apprehension in the hope that he would kiss it away.

'You won't be disturbed again tonight,' he said. 'I know this place. I know what it's capable of.'

'Well, ' I said.

You had to hand it to Sophie. She would have turned Armageddon to her advantage. I couldn't help wondering how much she'd made up. An attractive unattached male in the flat upstairs; it sounded like wishful thinking to me.

'What happened then?'

'I went back to bed.'

'On your own?' I teased.

'He saw me downstairs. But that was it.' Sophie laughed her dirty laugh. 'Not on a first date, Clare.'

'Weren't you scared?'

'Not after that. He said that if anything else happened, I should yell, and he would come running. When I went back to bed, I could hear him moving about upstairs, and it was comforting. And I didn't really mind the idea of something else happening, not if it gave me an excuse to see him again. I even thought about screaming anyway, just to get him to come down.'

But the rest of the night passed without disturbance. For the first time since she'd moved in, Sophie found herself drifting off to sleep without thinking about Miles.

She was thinking about Robert Jamieson instead.

'Clare, he's fabulous.'

'But only five minutes ago you were saying it might not be over with Miles,' I pointed out. 'Don't you think you should wait? You've spent your entire adult life hopping from one man to another: from Hamish, to all those guys at college, to that Raymond bloke, to Miles. You've never been on your own. You don't even know what it's like.'

'Awful, isn't it?' Sophie admitted cheerfully. 'I really should try to be more independent. But I can't bear the idea of not having a man in my life, Clare. I don't feel like a complete person without one.'

I heard myself shouting. 'Of course you don't feel like a complete person! You've never given yourself the chance to be a complete person! You've never had an opportunity to find out who you really are!'

'Does anyone ever know that?' asked Sophie. 'Do you know who you really are, Clare?'

'Of course I do,' I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt a cold finger of doubt. Who was I? Who was I really?

'You saw him again, didn't you,' I said, feeling the cold spreading through my body. I was getting left behind again.

'Next morning he slipped a note under my door,' said Sophie, looking quite blissed out. 'Asking me to lunch.'

Now I understood why my own lunch dates with Sophie had gone down the drain. She took it for granted I would understand. I was expendable. Men came first. Men always came first.

'It wasn't exactly a date,' she said. 'More of a briefing. He said there were things I should know. And he said I should hear them while it was daylight.'

The door was open. The air was thick with the overripe smell of spaghetti sauce. She called 'Robert?' as loudly as she dared, and poked her head into the kitchen. It was nothing like her own gleaming workplace, but a vast cave which trickled with the fat of a thousand deep-fried breakfasts. Two aluminium pans sat quivering on the electric hotplates. She peeped into them to see what was cooking: one held a glutinous red liquid which bubbled and popped like molten lava, the other was three-quarters full of ferociously boiling water. Sophie wondered if Robert was aware that aluminium pans gave you Alzheimer's. She turned both hotplates down to a simmer and went on up to the living-room.

He was standing with his back to her, dressed in the same jeans and T-shirt as the night before, and struggling with something she couldn't see. She thought she heard him say, 'White women have eggs,' but immediately doubted her ears because it made no sense. He turned, and she saw he was tugging at a corkscrew wedged in the top of a wine bottle.

He seemed surprised to see her.

'The door was open,' she said by way of explanation.

'Frascati,' he said, indicating the bottle. 'I thought we'd go with an Italian theme.'

At long last, he managed to remove the cork and pour the wine. The glass he handed to Sophie was smeared, but she put her fastidiousness on hold and took a sip. The Frascati was warm, sweet, and not very pleasant.

'Something tells me you're more of a whisky drinker,' she said.

'Don't,' he groaned as though she'd hit a nerve. 'Not so much nowadays. Not nearly as much as I used to.'

Sophie set up a mental marker in her brain. Next time they had lunch — if there was a next time — she would be the one to choose the wine. There were certain areas in which Robert Jamieson needed educating. For example, he was lighting a cigarette now, and without even asking if she minded.

Robert caught her looking at him. 'You don't like the wine,' he said.

'Yes I do,' she lied.

'I'm skint,' he said, 'otherwise I would have taken you to a restaurant. I'm expecting a cheque right now. Payment for some poems I just had published.'

Sophie thought she could detect a slight puffing out of the chest as he said this, but the news didn't exactly fill her with enthusiasm. Poets, in her experience, were generally poor, pretentious and prospect-free.

He started down to the kitchen. Sophie followed. 'You do journalism as well?'

'Here and there,' he said. 'I've written a novel too, but I'm still waiting to hear from my publisher.'

'Perhaps you'll let me read it,' she said.

'Maybe when I know you better,' he said. They entered the kitchen and he turned the heat up under the saucepans. 'I'm not sure it's your sort of thing. It's rather unconventional — the language, and so forth.'

Sophie was mildly offended by the suggestion that she had conventional tastes. 'Do you have an agent?' she asked. 'I could introduce you to Grenville Hodge, if you like.'

Robert suddenly looked very haughty. 'I make it a rule never to associate with the offspring of famous parents.'

Sophie began to protest, but changed her mind. 'Have you got a title?'

'Ways of Killing Women.'

'Ways of…?'

'I might change it,' he said. 'It lacks cadence.'

Sophie nodded, though she thought lack of cadence was the least of its problems.

Robert jammed a fistful of dried spaghetti into the boiling water and stuck a wooden spoon into the glutinous red sauce, which responded with an eruption of sucking noises and renewed bursts of that overripe smell. Sophie watched in amazement as he cleared a small space on the edge of one of the work surfaces by sweeping everything — pieces of kitchen towel, onion skins, a flattened tube of tomato puree — on to the floor.