Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

At some point, above the rattle of the extractor fan, I thought I heard Graham knocking on the door and calling, 'Are you all right in there?', though I was certain only a few minutes had passed since I'd left him. I checked my watch, but as I couldn't remember what time it had been in the first place, the fact that the hands had now slipped past midnight was less than meaningful.

I stared hard into the mirror, trying to hypnotize myself into feeling like five feet six inches of unalloyed sex-bomb. How could Graham resist me? My eyes stared hack at me sceptical and unblinking, so dark with dilated pupil there was not even a hint of the insipid blue I disliked so much. For a while, I amused myself by transferring my weight from one foot to the other, so that the crack in the mirror dissected my face at a wide variety of different angles. In rapid succession, I was the Elephant Man, someone with a learning disability, the Mona Lisa with toothache, a leering serial killer, Sybil the schizoid woman, and a grinning pirate visage divided by a cutlass slash as deep and oozy as the Mariana Trench, down in the nethermost abysses of the Pacific Ocean, where there was neither a current, nor a ripple to disturb water that had endured, unmoving, for many thousands of years. It was the deepest, darkest, coldest place on earth. And the most silent.

Except for one sound, a repetitive tap tap tap tippety tap which echoed eerily through the darkness.

The sound of typing.

My spectacles fell off the side of the basin and landed on the floor with a clatter, yanking me back into the real world. The sound wasn't typing at all — it was a gentle rapping on the door, barely audible over the extractor fan, which was still rattling away overhead. How had I ever thought myself hemmed in by silence? That bathroom was as noisy as a percussionists' convention.

'Be right out,' I called.

I felt as though I'd dragged myself up from a dream. How long had I been swimming around in the Mariana Trench? I had a guest outside, waiting for what had probably seemed like hours. It would serve me right if he'd given up and gone home.

I put my spectacles back on and glanced at the mirror one last time. Nothing I could do would disguise the way I looked. My eyes were back to their usual shallow blue, nothing like the deep dark ocean. In a burst of bravado, I took the glasses off again and left them on the shelf over the bath. I looked better in soft-focus. A lot better.

Finally, I opened the door, turned off the bathroom light, and stepped back into the living-room.

Jefferson Airplane was on the tape deck. I'd been playing it so often that I recognized it instantly.

The white knight is talking backwards

And the red queen's lost her head

How true , I thought. Sophie could be the red queen; she had certainly lost her head. But who was the white knight?

Graham was standing over by the window with his back to me.

'What are you up to?' I asked, trying to sound jovial, as though he might just overlook my having left him to his own devices for the past ten or twenty or thirty minutes, however long it had been. I had half a mind to sneak up behind him and give him a great big hug. It would have been one way of breaking the ice. If I felt him cringe, I'd still be able to back down with my dignity intact.

But something stopped me. Graham's shoulders were hunched as though he were reading something, hut I couldn't see how or what because he had turned off the lamp and the room was lit only by the light from the street outside.

His shoulders were shaking.

I took a step forward and said 'Graham?', and he turned, and I saw that he wasn't shaking, nor was he reading anything, and it wasn't Graham at all. I'm not sure how I could tell, but perhaps it had something to do with the way his outline rippled, like a person glimpsed through the dimpled window of the Landrace Inn. He was more shadow than solid person, a shape made up of shifting black smoke.

I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound emerged.

I was beginning to think that maybe I should have kept my glasses on after all.

The shadow crept forward until I found myself looking into a half-formed face.

Definitely not Graham.

The shadow spoke, just as the room began to tilt at an impossible angle, and I lost my footing and slid towards the dark lake that waited for me under the house.

From somewhere above, I heard the words, 'What took you so long?'

I missed Dirk and Lemmy like mad. All those evenings in their company no longer seemed like pointless loitering in the waiting-room of life. I couldn't imagine how I'd ever regarded them as no better than second-rate stop-gaps for the kind of social calendar I'd always thought I wanted. Instead, as the weeks passed, I found myself looking back on the times we'd spent together as a long-lost golden age. Dirk and Lemmy hadn't been…

'Hang on a minute,' said Daisy.

'…substitutes. They'd been the real thing. Once or twice I'd glimpsed them from afar, shambling along Portobello Road or…'

'Hell- o ,' said Daisy, cupping her hands into a megaphone. 'Earth calling Clare.'

Clare stopped talking and folded her arms. 'What now?'

'Excuse me," said Daisy. 'Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we just come face to face with the dead guy?'

'Maybe,' said Clare. She smiled to herself. 'Maybe not.'

I tried to stay out of it, but the provocation was too great. 'That's cheating ,' I said. 'You can't just leave it there.'

Once again, Clare seemed to be directing most of her rancour towards me. 'Who says I've left it anywhere?' she demanded testily. 'Look, do you want me to go on with this, or don't you?'

'That's just it,' said Daisy. 'You're not going on with it.'

Clare leaped to her feet, 'Fine. Party's over. Let's go, Miles, we're out of here.'

' No ,' wailed Luke.

'Sit down,' pleaded Daisy, tugging at Clare's skirt. Clare glared down at her contemptuously, as though she couldn't believe one of us had actually sunk to the skirt-tugging level.

'Please sit down,' Daisy begged.

I could tell that Clare was savouring the sensation of being in demand. Then she said, simply, 'No more interruptions then,' and sat down again. She was looking grim, like a girl on a mission.

'No more interruptions,' repeated Daisy. 'And that's a promise.'

Dirk and Lemmy had been the real thing. Once or twice I glimpsed them from afar, shambling along Portobello Road or moseying around the north end of Ladbroke Grove. Once I spotted Dirk staggering along Golborne Road with an enormous Art Deco cocktail cabinet strapped to his back. But neither he nor Lemmy ever gave any sign of having noticed me, and I didn't have the nerve to approach them. Instead I kept my head down. I had to face it: the Boar's Head had been my own personal Garden of Gethsemane. I had publicly disowned two of my closest friends. It would serve me right if they decided to cut me dead in their turn.

But how I needed them now. They might not have listened as I poured out my heart, it's true. Or they might have babbled some of their hippy garbage, but once you dug past the layers of fish-heads and mouldy old cabbage leaves, there was sometimes, wrapped in old newspaper at the centre of all that crap, a gleaming nugget of perspicacity.

I needed someone to confide in. I needed to be convinced that I wasn't going mad, that it was pure coincidence that an unnervingly large number of rational individuals honestly believed they'd seen me in the company of someone who, for want of a better way of putting it, wasn't there.

Walter Cheeseman had acted as a sort of deterrent, but as soon as he departed, my shadow had returned to hover at my shoulder, whisper into my ear — even buy me drinks, or so I was told. You have no idea how frustrating this was. I kept thinking of that line from The Wasteland — 'But who is that on the other side of you?'