Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

I wasn't naive. I knew that when a man looked as square as this, the odds were that he would turn out to be incredibly avant-garde. I handed him his drink, and watched as he slurped at it inelegantly.

'Wine OK?' I asked.

'Lovely,' he said, wiping his mouth, and added, 'I don't normally drink wine.'

'Oh? And what do you normally drink?'

'Light ale, or stout.'

'I can get you some lager.'

'No, the wine is lovely,' he assured me.

Not exactly the world's most accomplished conversationalist, I thought, and decided he wasn't my type at all. I couldn't possibly go out with someone who described his wine as 'lovely'. But I persevered, trying to make small talk while scanning the room for traces of Sophie or Miles.

'Do you know many of the people here?' I asked him.

'Not a soul.'

I looked at him again. He was gulping his drink as though it were Horlicks, like an overgrown schoolboy with no social graces at all. He didn't even have the nous to pretend he was at ease. I felt a mixed sort of triumph; I'd actually stumbled across someone even more gauche than I was. I sipped at my drink, trying to think of something else to say.

'How many people do you know?' he asked boldly.

'Not many,' I admitted.

'I just moved here.'

'I've only been here a couple of months myself.'

'Are you Sophie?'

'No,' I said, 'I'm Clare.'

He shook my hand energetically. I'd been right about his palms. 'Clare, he repeated. 'Yes, I've heard about you.' He looked at me with what seemed to be new respect.

I asked if he was a friend of Marsha's. He shook his head so violently that the wine slopped against the side of his glass, almost spilling over. I realized he was a good deal more than just half-cut. Not that I was feeling particularly sober myself.

'I don't know Marsha,' he said.

The desultory conversation dried up, so I decided it was now permissible to hit him with the Big One, the question I'd been dying to ask all along but had held back, out of propriety. I asked him what he did.

His face brightened. I'd been expecting him to say he was a writer or performance artist, or perhaps a sous-chef or waiter, but instead he said, 'I just found a job, starting next week. But it'll mean moving to Balham.'

I felt a prickling sensation in my scalp.

'Don't tell me,' I said.

He looked straight at me, and I studied his face more carefully. It was a very sincere, slightly puzzled face. The signs were all there, laid out in front of me. I couldn't understand how I'd missed them.

'You're a butcher, aren't you,' I said.

He nodded, pathetically excited. 'One day I'll have a shop of my own.'

I'd noticed his skin was pale, but only now did I notice how thoroughly pale it was — a ghastly, shiny sort of pale. Almost translucent. He squirmed uncomfortably beneath my appalled gaze.

'What?' he demanded. 'What are you staring at?'

'You're not in fancy dress at all,' I said. 'And you're not wearing make-up, are you?'

His lips compressed into a prim line. 'Leave it out,' he said, not so friendly now. 'What do you think I am?'

'Oh, I know what you are,' I said. 'But what I'd like to know is — what do you think you are?'

'Leave it out,' he said again, struggling to stop his voice turning high-pitched. 'I don't like that funny stuff.'

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry… Arthur, isn't it?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Arthur. How did you know?'

'It's my party,' I said. 'It's my business to know. Tell me, Arthur, do you know someone called Ann-Marie?'

He blushed and cast his eyes down. 'She wouldn't have nothing to do with me,' he said. 'None of them like me. They all say I'm useless.'

He looked up, and there was a weird light in his eyes. 'But I'll show them,' he said. 'I'll show them I'm good for something.'

The light in his eyes frightened me so much that I quickly asked if he wanted another drink. He looked down at the empty glass he was holding as if wondering where the contents had gone. 'Don't mind if I do.'

'More of the same?'

'Yes, please. It's lovely, that wine is.'

I had no intention of providing Arthur with another drink. I just needed to put as much distance as I could between me and that corpselike complexion. I knocked back what remained of my own drink, and forced my way to the door, looking back only once. I'd half expected Arthur Mowbray to be gone, but he was still standing there, staring after me with his strange, yearning expression.

Sophie, I thought. I had to find Sophie. If Arthur Mowbray was here, who knew what other gatecrashers might be lying in wait for us? I checked her bedroom, but though there were several couples heavily engaged in necking manoeuvres, Sophie wasn't among them. I could feel one of my headaches coming on, but held it at bay long enough to fight my way back down to the first floor landing.

Maybe that last glass of wine hadn't been such a good idea after all. I found myself squashed against the banisters, gasping for air, and it was even stuffier here than it had been upstairs. Ogres and hunchbacks pressed in all around me. I needed to find another breathing space soon, or I was going to keel over. The down staircase was choked with laughing, chattering freaks, the noise of them sounding distant to my ears, like the echo in an indoor swimming-pool. I was about to plunge in and do the crawl when I caught sight of Carolyn and Charlotte and Grenville halfway down, their faces twisted in fury, all yelling at one another. The last thing I needed right now was to get caught up in a domestic brawl, so I turned and headed up to the second floor.

Maybe Sophie had come up here, I thought to myself. That would explain why I hadn't been able to find her. Maybe Miles had come up after her.

Maybe I would catch them at it.

The thought made me break out in goose-pimples. I no longer knew whether I was looking for Sophie to warn her, or to stop her from getting back with Miles. The two concerns had somehow merged in my head.

As I climbed the stairs, the crowd thinned out like oxygen on the upper slopes of a mountain. There were three stray guests in my kitchen, heads bent in earnest conspiracy. They glanced up guiltily as I passed and I wondered if they were taking drugs, but the smell coming out of there wasn't one of dope. It was more like food. More like tomato sauce.

But I kept going, leaving the last of the pleasure-seekers below me. My living-room turned out to be every bit as deserted as when I'd been up here with Graham. The cassette I'd left playing had long since come to an end; the only sounds were a low hum from the stalled tape deck, and the thump of the bass leaking up from Sophie's.

The chicken claws gave the room a rather forlorn aspect, as though a fox had slunk into a coop of hens and left their remains dangling from the ceiling as arrogant proof of his cunning. The sheets Dirk had draped so artistically over the furniture and which I had once considered so dramatic — so very Interiors — now made it look as though someone were in the middle of decorating and had left everything half-finished to go and make a cup of tea.

I began to feel sorry for myself. Half of Notting Hill was whooping it up down below, and not a single visitor could be bothered to climb a measly few stairs to see how I might be doing. I dug out my emergency stash of Silk Cut and sulkily lit one up. The air was so thick you could have sliced it with a knife; it couldn't possibly have been made any thicker by a few wisps of cigarette smoke, but I went across to open the windows anyway.

It was only when I got there that I found they were already open.

As I turned back into the room, my ears picked up a familiar rattle, like the sound of a throat being cleared.

And I saw one of the sheets ripple, not because someone was hiding underneath it but because the air had shifted as someone, somewhere, had opened and closed a door.