Page 79 of Pictures of Him

I’m not very well, I think. I’m spending too much time in my head, lost in my dream world, and it’s beginning to get harder to tell dreams and reality apart. If I’m not dreaming and fantasising then I’m remembering and reinventing, always trying to get the perfect ending. To make everything right, you have to turn the clock back, the hands spinning through the years fifteen times until we are young again, nineteen and twenty, everything ahead. Our beginning is just right, no changes needed. There you are standing next to your pale blue car, stubbled, unshowered, with hair that stands on end: the boy who is about to take a stick to my world and spin it round and round until it veers right off its axis. There’s a beautiful drawing that appears like magic on my desk while I’m working. There’s lunch in an old wooden hut with peeling blue paint, and if I try hard enough I can hear the manic cry of the gulls, I can taste salt in the air.

Now there’s a long gilt-edged mirror and a girl standing in front of it, watching, watching as you stand behind her, slowly unbuttoning her shirt, one button, then the next, with hands that do not shake. Your confidence is myundoing, your solemn eyes holding mine in the glass as my shirt falls away, your palms circling my breasts, your almost-smile as you watch me beginning to writhe and squirm, pressing my nakedness back into fully clothed you. Soon you’ll carry me over to your bed, you’ll run your tongue all the way down my body, starting at my neck, you’ll stroke and touch every part of me, you’ll somehow take off all of your own clothes without me even knowing how you’re doing it, and then you’ll be inside me, finally, and it will hurt but I will want you to carry on, and so you do, slowly, so slowly, and now it’s the opposite of pain and we’re grabbing at each other and perhaps I’m laughing, because all I know is that I want this feeling, this incredible, intense, pleasurable feeling to carry on.

There will be dark nights, months and months of them, when we lie wound around each other flesh against flesh, my hand in yours, palm against palm, lifeline, heart line. You will tell me you love me and I’ll say it right back, I’ll whisper the words into your ear. There will be light-filled days, there will be coffee and tiny little cakes and an old woman who calls me by the wrong name. There will be Paris, a painting of a dark-eyed woman at the theatre, slim white candles burning at an altar. There will be a drawing of a girl kneeling up on a bed dressed in nothing but a loose white shirt that ends just above her knees. How long did it take you to do the drawing – ten minutes, maybe fifteen? Yet you managed to capture perfectly the sweep of my hair, almost reaching my waist, the longest it has ever been. My neck was perhaps a little more swan-like than it really is, a Photoshopped neck though we didn’t have the words for that back then. But it is the eyes you notice, mylook of euphoria as I gaze off the page. You know looking at my eyes that I am buoyed by the delirium of new love. I am happy, I am confident, I am invincible. Let’s stop the clock right here.

Four months before: Lucian

Rachel is in rehab. Only this one is in Arizona, some hardcore treatment centre in the middle of the desert, no chance to escape even if she wanted to. She calls one Sunday about a fortnight after her disappearance, the first time she’s been allowed access to her phone.

‘Sorry I didn’t tell you,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it; even when I got off the plane I was considering flying straight back home again.’

‘So how’s it going?’

‘Good, I think.’

Her voice is cautious, restrained, unlike the old Rachel, who was always ebullient or catatonic depending on her intake.

‘It might actually work this time. I want it to.’

She tells me about her days, a 5.30 start followed by an hour’s meditation and yoga, then breakfast, then a hike, then a group therapy session before a break for lunch. There’s relaxation time at this point, reading books on your bed or going for a walk, and then one-to-one sessions with an addiction counsellor.

‘And what does the head doctor make of you?’ I ask,expecting her to laugh, but she doesn’t. Instead she pauses, and a cool breeze blows from across the Atlantic as I realise she is trying to choose her words.

‘Already I’ve learned a lot about myself. What’s good for me, what isn’t.’

‘Let me guess, I’m bad for you?’

‘It’s more that the way I am when I’m around you is bad for me. Does that make sense?’

‘Not really. Surely you’re not trying to say that being with me would push you into drinking? Rach, if you’re clean, I’m going to respect that. You know how much I wanted you to go to rehab. I’d empty my cupboards of booze and fill them with elderflower or lime fucking cordial, you know I would.’

‘Don’t be upset with me. It’s just that if I want this to work then I have to avoid the feelings that make me drink. I think we both know that I’ve always loved you without any hope of you loving me back. And that feeling of hopelessness I used to get, well it didn’t help. Please don’t think I’m blaming you. I’m just trying to give myself the best chance I can.’

‘So what are you saying, Rach?’

‘Hugo has promised me I can start to see Max again if I can just stay clean for two months. I need to give it my best shot. Lucian, you’re my best friend. I hope you know that. I just can’t see you for a while.’

I mainlined an entire bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin after that phone call. I drank it rampaging through my house, clutching the bottle by its neck. In the library I wrenched down Alexa’s purple lights from around the old nail, a flashing symbol of inappropriate levity; I took out threebottles from my tequila collection with a sweep of my hand. Dustpan and brush, mop and bucket, shards of glass swept up into newspaper. The undoing of my wreckage took a good half-hour and left me stinking of tequila, a sweet yet acrid smell that finally enabled me to weep.

But in some ways it’s probably good for me to have this break from my friends, for it gives me the space and time to dismantle my relationship with Jack, piece by piece, slowly and with caution. I want to know all there is to know about this betrayal of my oldest friend and the girl I’ve always loved, but I’ll find it out my way. Did she start it? With a striptease, perhaps, like she once did for me, the slow unbuttoning, the sliding-down of her jeans, those dark eyes holding mine, the smile she could not suppress?

I force myself into the memory of that night long ago and I remember her dancing; even the exact song, ‘Wild Horses’. I haven’t been able to hear it since without thinking of Catherine. She was so beautiful at nineteen, happy, uninhibited. I’d never seen her drunk like that before, but it was funny, it was great. Jack sat next to me on the sofa, watching her too, and I am wondering now if Catherine liked it, being watched by him as well as me. I think, did she always like him a little bit too? Jack with his blatant good looks, all brightness, hair, eyes, teeth. Was she flattered; was there a tension between them, a flirtation I’d failed to pick up on?

It didn’t take much for Catherine to be wildly drunk, I remember. At one point she was laughing so much she lay down on the floor.

‘Need a stretcher,’ she said, lying there until I hauled her up and she started dancing again, all rhythm gone now,just lurching with her arms held limply in the air. That was when my uncle rang, depressed after a row with his lover. His voice had sounded strange and I’d felt the fear instantly. Was he crazy enough to do the same thing as his brother?

Catherine tried to stop me from going. She wound her arms around my neck.

‘You’re too drunk to drive,’ she said. ‘Stay here with me.’

‘Look who’s talking. You’ll be asleep in five minutes.’

She carried on dancing, if you could call it that, weaving, tilting, so lost in the music I’m not sure she even saw me go.

When I got back the next afternoon, Jack was alone in the house. It occurs to me now that he must have known what I was walking into: that cataclysmic note scrawled on my sketch pad, waiting for me on the bed they’d probably made love in. But you wouldn’t have known it from his casual hello, barely flicking his eyes up from the TV screen. He lied brilliantly.

‘She went to bed when you left,’ he said. ‘And she’d gone by the time I got up.’

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