Page 36 of Pictures of Him

‘And now? Does she still like you too much?’

She does and she doesn’t, is what I think. Sometimes I know that Rachel’s obsession with me – there, I’ve admitted it – is really just another rung of her drug addiction. She thinks she loves me but the truth is it’s the idea of me and perhaps my unavailability that she loves, in the same way she craves hedonism and rule-breaking. Drugs are an empty experience ultimately, and every time she wakes, or rather fails to sleep, through the slicing grittiness of dawn, she knows that. Loving me is an escape, a front, a screento hide behind, and it’s exactly the same with her coke habit. An out-of-control, drug-addicted life is easier to deal with than the harsh issues that lie beneath it: perhaps that she doesn’t feel capable of being a mother, perhaps that she doesn’t like herself enough to warrant the love of someone else. But enough of the cod psychology. Like Catherine says, Rachel has got further to fall.

‘She thinks she still loves me, though believe me, it’s not based on anything real.’ We stare at each other for a long moment, and then I turn Rachel’s portrait to the wall and we kiss.

Fifteen years earlier

We became something of a four, you, me, Jack and Alexa. Most nights she and I would come over, and we ordered a takeaway or occasionally cooked and quite often went out to a party. I drank back then, which was probably just as well, because your lives were awash with booze – Chablis and claret and champagne and expensive brands of Russian vodka I’d never seen before. After the first fortnight spent almost exclusively in bed, I always got up the next day and went to the library or my weekly tutorials while the rest of you slept. I was a slogger, a habit I was unable or unwilling to break, while you had that casual, irritating intelligence that enabled you to read a text at the last minute without doing any background research and come up with an original, incisive commentary that always blew our tutor away.

One Friday I was hard at work in the library when a piece of paper fluttered down onto my books. I looked up and found you leaning over the top of my cubicle, grinning.

‘Hello,’ you said in a voice too loud for the library.

‘Hello,’ I whispered back.

Another drawing, pen and ink again, but this time agrand house with pillars and turrets and three rows of long, thin windows. My heart began to race. I knew instantly that this was your uncle’s house, Shute Park, somewhere I’d secretly been desperate to see. Above the drawing you’d written,Road trip?

‘Really? I said. ‘When?’

‘Now. Jack’s driving, more room in his car.’

Jack’s car was more studenty than yours, a beaten-up bottle-green Golf that smelt of stale tobacco and spilt beer. Alexa was sitting in the front beside Jack, and when we got into the back seat, she popped the cork off a bottle of champagne.

‘Here she is!’ Jack said. ‘Let’s get this weekend started.’

He pressed eject on the CD, lifted out a disc and hurled it into the back. The bright red and yellowScreamadelicaslotted into its place.

‘We wanna get loaded!’ he cried, putting his foot on the accelerator so that we shot past a group of earnest-looking students on their way into the library.

‘It’s Friday, losers!’ Jack yelled out of the window.

The journey seemed to take only minutes, though perhaps the champagne was blurring my sense of time. One moment we were on the outskirts of Bristol; the next we were turning in between two stone pillars and my stomach began to flutter with anxiety.

The drive was long and tree-lined, which I’d sort of expected, but the house – we turned a bend and there it was, quite suddenly, like a mirage – was even more incredible than your drawing.

I gasped, and Alexa laughed.

‘Magical isn’t it?’ she said.

What was I doing in a relationship with someone who lived in a house like this?

‘One day, my child, all this will be yours,’ said Jack, making his voice thin and old and wavering.

It was as if he’d read my mind. I felt like an imposter in the face of all this grandeur, and he knew it.

He slammed the car to a stop in front of the house, punching the horn once to announce our arrival. I was in awe of Jack right then; to me his confidence seemed out of reach and overwhelming.

The front door was opened by a small, dark-haired woman whom you introduced as Mary.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Your uncle’s in the library, waiting for you.’

In the hallway, both you and Jack sniffed the air.

‘Mary!’ Jack said. ‘Don’t tell me. You’ve made the pie, haven’t you, you amazing woman,’ and she laughed.

‘Yes, of course you’re having chicken pie.’

I recognised the music before we got to the library: Bob Dylan,Blood on the Tracks; you played it all the time. There were no books in the library, just a huge fireplace at one end with leather sofas in front of it, and a sideboard stacked with decanters of spirits: liquids of amber, gold and brown, bottles of gin and vodka lined up beside them. Your uncle was stretched out on one sofa with a glass balanced on his stomach, but he stood up the moment he saw us. He was tall and thin and surprisingly handsome; I don’t know why I hadn’t expected that. He wore a blue paisley shirt with jeans and embroidered velvet shoes.

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