“I can’t,” she protested. Didn’t he understand what he was asking?
He made a face, sighed, and crossed to his jacket, which was where he’d dropped it on the floor. He rummaged around in the pocket until he found the heroin. It was a pitifully small packet, and if he knew Flynn, the stuff was cut. But that was her business, not his. She stared, transfixed, at the packet.
“It’s all yours,” he said, and threw it over to her. It landed on the bed beside her. “You’re welcome to it.”
She still stared; now at his empty hand. He broke her look to pick up his stale shirt, and slip it back on.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve seen you high on that crap. I’ve heard the garbage you talk. I don’t want to remember you like that.”
“I have to have it.”
She hated him; she looked at him standing in a patch of late-afternoon sun, with his bare belly and his bare chest, and she hated every fiber of him. The blackmail she could understand. It was crude, but functional. This desertion was a worse kind of trick altogether.
“Even if I was to do as you say . . .” she began; the thought seemed to shrink her. “. . . I won’t find out anything.”
He shrugged. “Look, the smack’s yours,” he said. “You’ve got what you wanted.”
“And what about you? What do you want?”
“I want to live. And I think this is our only chance.”
Even then it was such a slim chance; the slimmest crack in the wall through which they might, if fate loved them, slip.
She weighed up the options; why she even contemplated his idea she wasn’t certain. On another day she might have said: for love’s sake. Finally she said: “You win.”
He sat down and watched her prepare for the journey ahead. First, she washed. Not just her face, her whole body, standing on a spread towel-at the little sink in the corner of the room, with the gas-fired water heater roaring as it spat water into the bowl. Watching her, he got an erection, and he felt ashamed that he should be thinking of sex when so much was at issue. But that was just the puritan talking; he should feel whatever felt right. She’d taught him that.
When she’d finished she put her underwear back on, and a T-shirt. It was what she’d been wearing when he’d arrived at Caliban Street, he noted: simple unconfining clothes. She sat on a chair. Her skin rippled with gooseflesh. He wanted to be forgiven by her; to be told that his manipulation was justified and-whatever happened from now on-she understood that he’d acted for the best. She offered no such disclaimer. She just said:
“I think I’m ready.”
“What can I do?”
“Very little,” she replied. “But be here, Marty.”
“And if . . . you know . . . if anything seems to be wrong? Can I help you?”
“No,” she answered.
“When will I know that you’re there?” he asked.
She looked at him as though his question was an idiot’s, and said: “You’ll know.”
62
It wasn’t difficult to find the European: her mind went to him with almost distressing readiness, as if into the arms of a long-lost compatriot. She could distinctly feel the pull of him, though not, she thought, a conscious magnetism. When her thoughts arrived at Caliban Street and entered the room at the top of the stairs, her suspicions about his passivity were verified. He was lying on the bare boards of the room in a posture of utter exhaustion. Perhaps, she thought, I can do this after all. Like a teasing mistress, she crept to his side, and slipped into him.
She murmured.
Marty flinched. There were movements in her throat, which were so thin he felt he could almost see the words shaping in it. Speak to me, he willed her. Say it’s all right. Her body had become rigid. He touched her. Her muscle was stone, as though she’d exchanged glances with the basilisk.
“Carys?”
She murmured again, her throat palpitating, but no words came; there was barely breath.