Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

Well, who was it? More to the point, what was it?

And who could I talk to? And who would understand?

It was ironic, I thought, that since I'd moved to the hub of the social universe, my circle of friends had not gone supernova, as I'd confidently anticipated, but had dwindled into something of a black hole. I hadn't seen Larry and Berenice since their dinner party. Rufus and Nadia and the others had fallen by the wayside, and I didn't feel up to phoning them now, out of the blue, to dump this all over them. I could still hear the sympathetic noises people had made about Sophie. I didn't want them making those same noises about me.

Walter Cheeseman, with his interest in local history, might have lent an ear without sniggering, but he had deserted me as pitilessly as any lover. As for Graham, just because we were now having regular sex didn't mean I was ready to empty all my innermost secrets into his ear. It would have sent the wrong sort of message entirely. He might have started thinking our relationship was meaningful .

'But what did he look like?' I asked Carolyn, after she had once again started talking about the person everyone referred to as simply 'my friend'.

'What I meant was,' I said, 'Did you think he was good-looking?' By now I knew better than to say, 'What friend?'

Carolyn wrinkled her brow, but delicately, so as to lessen the risk of permanent frown lines. 'Kind of,' she said. 'Rather fond of black, though, isn't he? You should coax him out of that post-apocalyptic get-up and into something a bit more cheerful. I remember when Grenville went through his all-black phase. Everyone started calling him The Undertaker , and it really pissed him off.'

I wasn't one hundred per cent happy about the idea of any undertaker — phantom or otherwise — loitering at my elbow, but how could I possibly feel menaced in the middle of a packed bar or crowded street? How could I be afraid of something I couldn't see or hear or fed? It wasn't as though the flat was haunted — that might really have worried me. It wasn't even as though I was hearing things going bump in the night any more; even the typing noises had turned out to have a logical explanation.

But if Marsha and Carolyn and Toby and the others thought I had a good-looking, attentive, trendily attired companion in tow, then why should I need to set them straight? At least it stopped me feeling like a gooseberry.

Of course, I had also to face the possibility that if there was an unseen presence hovering over me in public, it might also mean he was hovering there in private as well, the only difference being there was no third party to tell me about it. If I didn't know when he was there, then neither did I know when he wasn't.

So it was better safe than sorry. Whatever this presence was, I didn't want it thinking I was a slob. I started to take more trouble over my appearance. I endeavoured to hold my face in an alert, lively expression at times. I stopped recycling smelly T-shirts from the laundry bag. Even on the days when I didn't go out — and they were getting more frequent now that summer was over — I made sure my hair was gleaming, mouth carefully lipsticked, clothes fresh and neatly pressed. I began to feel almost as well-groomed as Sophie.

It wasn't hard to work out what was going on. Robert Jamieson had taken a fancy to me. Sophie and the others had wilted beneath the scorching heat of his passion, but I hadn't even flinched — actually I hadn't even noticed him, though he wasn't to know that — and now he was regarding me as an intellectual equal rather than as a mere plaything. First-class fuck-up indeed. The Walters of this world just didn't get it. People like Robert were artists and prophets, men ahead of their time. History was peppered with them; in their lives, they were rejected, neglected, ridiculed. Even after death, their heads were heaped with scorn. Only another outsider could understand.

Only I could appreciate what he'd been going through.

Graham and Robert had nothing in common, neither physically nor mentally. Robert had been tall, I imagined, whereas Graham was a runt. Robert would have been saturnine, whereas Graham was washed-out and sandy. Robert had usually worn black, whereas Graham wore hand-knitted tank-tops. Robert in his lifetime had been masterful and charismatic, whereas Graham was, let's face it, a bit of a saddie.

So I couldn't understand how I'd thought I'd seen Robert Jamieson when it had been Graham all along. Afterwards, he told me I'd spent so long in the bathroom that he'd started to worry. When I'd finally emerged, he said, I'd taken only a couple of steps into the room and passed out. He'd put me to bed before crashing out himself on the living-room cushions. That was his story, and he was sticking to it.

What I remembered was having sex. Wild drunken sex, with lots of squelching noises.

Graham denied it, of course. I knew he didn't want me thinking he'd abused my semi-comatose body; he was keen to repair the damage done to his New Man reputation by the incident with Sophie. All right, so he'd removed my clothes, he admitted when pushed, but he hadn't taken advantage of me at all. If anything, he said, it had been I who had taken advantage of him.

But we must have really gone at it, because in the morning I woke to find myself cocooned in soggy bedclothes. Graham had already departed, but had left a mug of tea by my pillow. I'd reached out for it thirstily, but it had turned out to be stone cold, with a skin on top.

For those precious few seconds, Graham Gilmore had shimmered with borrowed allure, and afterwards, I found myself not averse to spending more time with him, though obviously there was no question of our being seen together in public, and I knew there'd be one hell of a scene if Sophie ever spotted him on the premises. Fortunately, he didn't seem to mind being smuggled in and out, and he told me he had no desire to see Sophie again — he thought she was excessively bourgeois, and that even though she was pretty, it was a conventional, uninteresting sort of prettiness. Needless to say, I wasn't about to discourage such opinions.

And so we kept each other company, and we had sex, though it usually took three or four drinks before I began to find Graham remotely attractive. I had yet to sleep with him while sober; I wasn't sure I was capable of going that far.

Even when I was inebriated, the earth didn't always move, but on less than satisfactory occasions I would close my eyes and think about Miles. Sometimes I would think about Robert too, although for obvious reasons that required a little more effort.

I sorted through the heap of mail on the mat. There were a couple of letters for Sophie, several airmail envelopes and a bill for Marsha, an oddly shaped package for Walter Cheeseman, a small brown envelope addressed to Robert Jamieson, and nothing for me, not even a bill.

I stared at the small brown envelope for a very long time. If I'd had a letter of my own to open, things might have turned out very differently. Had Marsha emerged from her flat at that point, I would have been happy for her to have scooped up Robert's envelope along with her own mail and whisked it away to that mysterious forwarding-office where it would never trouble me again.

But the silence from Marsha's flat was deafening. So I carried on looking at the envelope, turning it this way and that, studying the handwriting (small, neat, round) and holding it up to the light, trying to catch an outline of whatever was inside.

What had started off as harmless fun was now turning into an addiction. With each new envelope, I vowed to hit it on the head and never again open anything that didn't have my name on the front. But curiosity always got the upper hand.