Chapter Thirty Three

The bed was huge, with pristine white cotton sheets gleaming under little halogen spotlights. It was the kind of bed that Sorcha had only seen before in a certain kind of American hotel: wider than it was long, and about the size of a generous parking space. It looked too big for two people, but no sooner had the thought crossed her mind than she started to wonder whether she ought to be relieved, disappointed, or just plain terrified.

Ironic didn’t feel like quite the right word to describe it. It needed a much bigger, chewier, more complicated word than that; one which properly captured the sensation of being churned around in the messy, merciless cement mixer of fate, aware of what was happening and unable to do much about it. She was going to be sleeping in Jake McDonald’s bed, with Jake McDonald, for the simple reason that they were each so appalled at the idea of having sex with the other that they for most practical purposes turned to stone if anyone else so much as mentioned the idea. They had frozen when Duncan had first suggested it, and frozen again when he had announced his intention to pass out in the spare room. That time, Sorcha had almost felt Duncan’s incredulity physically taking flight, taking his one fully-functioning eyebrow with it. She was only thankful that he didn’t know about the nice, safe, empty hotel room a couple of miles away which she was paying for but couldn’t bring herself to mention.

She pulled on a pair of pyjamas which her mother had given her for Christmas a couple of years earlier: they had seemed like a good idea when she was packing, but when she put them on they were too big in all directions. A brief glimpse in the mirror which was tucked away in the alcove of the room told her that she looked like a child dressing up as Andy Pandy: she took the bottoms off again and stuffed them back into her bag, before sitting down on the edge of the bed to start to do the stretches which the physio had shown her. When Jake came into the room he was pulling her head towards her right shoulder with her right hand, which suddenly felt very silly indeed.

He stood just inside the door.

“Don’t stop.”

Sorcha was about to tell him that by a particularly enormous coincidence she had just finished, but then she registered what he was wearing. She had expected him to be getting ready for bed, but instead he had changed into peculiarly mismatched gym kit.

“Where are you going?”

Jake looked even more unsure than he had done before she asked the question.

“Nowhere. Why?”

“You look as if you’re about to go out for a run.” She looked at him again, “Apart from the shoes: I’m guessing you’d normally wear some if you were actually going out for a run.”

It wasn’t the first time that Sorcha had seen Jake looking embarrassed or uncomfortable, but it was the first time that she had watched him flush a deep raspberry colour, right through to his earlobes. It made his eyelashes look longer and darker, but also seemed to deprive him of the power of speech. She found herself peering at him to make sure that she hadn’t missed something: he still seemed to be wearing white socks, bottle green jogger bottoms, and a big baggy old grey hoodie with a BackBeat tour logo on it.

“You don’t actually sleep in all that, do you?”

He seemed to peer forlornly at her through his eyelashes, as if he was begging her. It felt hugely unfair.

“I don’t normally sleep in anything at all.”

Sorcha didn’t quite know what to say, and ended up bursting out laughing and then immediately trying to smother the sound by putting her hands to her mouth. She wound up with her hands in front of her face, peering at Jake between her fingers. Jake laughed too, but she wasn’t sure that he meant it. It took them a few minutes to recover themselves.

“You do realise that I’m now going to spend the whole night terrified that you’re going to suffocate in your hood, don’t you?”

He seemed to take a couple of seconds to prepare himself, before slowly unzipping the top and slipping it off. Sorcha was still staring from between her fingers. He wasn’t as emaciated as he had been when they had first met, and his arms and abs were toned to the point where they looked sculpted, but you could still clearly see his ribs. He looked delicate, but not fragile. She let her hands drop. Their eyes met, and stayed there.

“You should finish your stretches.”

There was a tacit acceptance that he could bare flesh in her presence without putting himself physically at risk: the mood shifted. They were no longer teetering on the brink of hysteria, and Sorcha couldn’t decide if that was an improvement or not: she still felt self-conscious, but tried to pick up where she had left off. Jake went over to her, and started to try to correct what she was doing, at first by suggesting changes to her posture, but he soon started poking and prodding and pushing as well. It made the whole process a lot more painful than it would have been had she done it on her own, but he didn’t pull back or apologize when he hurt her, and didn’t seem to derive any satisfaction from it either. It was as if he was supervising a flawed mechanical process. To Sorcha, who mostly thought of her body as another one of the things which were intermittently out to get her, it seemed a very odd way of behaving.

“You’re as bad as the bloody physio, you are.”

Jake had been gently massaging the right side of the back of her neck with long, even strokes as she had stretched it sideways: with each lingering stroke he had been inflicting ever so slightly more pain. When she stopped, he had started massaging her shoulders, almost absent-mindedly.

“Just trying to make sure that you behave yourself.” It sounded as if he was smiling, but he then started poking around at her shoulders with his thumbs which made her squirm. “Can I massage your back? You can ask Duncs: I’m actually not bad at that kind of stuff.”

Sorcha wasn’t sure if the last statement had been added out of fear of being misconstrued, or whether there was something altogether stranger going on. Looking at Jake, it didn’t appear to be a joke.

“Can you imagine what would happen if I went out there and asked your furry friend for references on your ability as a masseuse?”

He knew that it wasn’t really a question, although the thought of a furry Duncan made it hard to keep a straight face.

“Do you want me to?”

Sorcha found herself laying naked except for her knickers near the edge of the bed, with the bed clothes over her legs and bottom, wondering if this was really a good idea. Jake found some massage oil out of the cabinet on the other side of the bed, and started working on her shoulders, mixing sets of effleurissage strokes with more direct attacks on the knotty bits. She wasn’t sure whether to try to relax and let herself melt down into the mattress, or to experience it at a wholly different level: because she was thinking too much about it she ended up not doing either. Instead, she felt his hands and forearms playing over her in one long, abstract pattern: it was fluid, but still mechanical. At one point, it felt as if he was sticking his elbow into her, and she told him so.

“That’s probably because I am. The pressure’s much more even than if I used my thumbs.”

The response was absolutely matter-of-fact: it was of a piece with his almost clinical approach to checking Duncan over. Sorcha tried to think her way backwards into Jake, starting with his hands.

“Where did you learn all this? Is it part of what you learned as a dancer?”

He had moved on to making long strokes up her spine and then back down across her shoulders: when she asked the question he laughed gently but didn’t stop.

“The only training I ever had was as a mechanic. That was a long time ago and I really wasn’t very good at it.” Sorcha moved, as if to turn round and look at him, but he didn’t let her, “I’m interested in how bodies work, how they mend, because it’s part of what I do and I’m always getting injured, anyway. But it isn’t something you can escape from either. I mean, you can’t live outside your body.”

Sorcha could feel the rhythm of the massage beginning to eat away at the tension which had taken hold in the course of the evening. This wasn’t the time to start trying to explain how unembodied she typically felt, especially as the only way she could speak was with a mouthful of pillow. But she still wasn’t sure what he meant.

“You learn from what people do to you?”

Jake wasn’t entirely sure that he had heard her right, but he’d got the general gist.

“I watch, I ask people who are working on us heaps of questions until they’re just sick of me. And I read loads.” He realised belatedly that the conversation was a bit odd, “Kind of the normal ways of learning stuff, really.”

“You’ve read books about massage?”

Sorcha moved her head to the side so that she could speak properly, which interrupted his rhythm. This time he seemed happy to stop.

“I read books about just about everything. The others take the piss out of me about it, you know, but at one point I’d spent so long wandering round hotel rooms in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, that I knew bits of those bibles they leave in the bedside tables by heart. That was when I realised I should read other stuff, too.”

Sorcha was about to sit up to face him, but remembered just in time that she was naked and pulled the covers across from the rest of the bed.

“What kind of stuff?”

He looked slightly embarrassed, and she wondered if it would have been better not to have asked.

“All sorts. I mean, absolutely all sorts. I don’t sleep much, and I spent nearly ten years not doing much, so I’ve had plenty of time to do it.”

Sorcha had the impression that he was sure that she didn’t understand what he meant, which was probably true: she was too used to dealing with Oxbridge legal types. She at least needed to try.

“What were the last three things you read?”

“I read an old Raymond Carver book one night last week. And something on Buddhism. I’m reading Kant at the moment, but it’s taking forever.”

Jake was sitting on the edge of the bed looking sheepish. Sorcha was looking at him, holding the bedclothes to her chest, wondering if there was another Kant she didn’t know about. She was tempted to start looking for hidden cameras, although she was at a loss to know who on earth would find this funny. Unhelpfully, an image of Einstein with his hair sticking out swam into her head, presumably because she had no idea what Kant looked like and one intellectually intimidating German was a ready substitute for another.

“Kant?”

Rather than reply, Jake got up and retrieved a book from the rucksack which he’d had with him in the car, which he had tidied away into one of the wardrobes. He handed it to Sorcha, unsure of her reaction. It was a paperback copy of the Critique of Pure Reason, with a plain shiny white cover which was still implausibly white but lightly bashed about at the edges. It fell open to a page about a third of the way in, where the stub of a boarding pass was being used as a bookmark. Sorcha was fighting a losing battle against a growing conviction that this was a very erudite kind of trick: only Jake’s absolute seriousness held her in check. She looked back from him to the book, and leafed through it, trying to think: there were a few pencil notes in the margins of the early pages in tiny, regular handwriting. Jake was still waiting and watching her.

“You’re actually reading this, aren’t you?” That was a stunningly stupid thing to say: she was going to have to do better than that, however badly she was floundering in the tidal wave of her own shattering preconceptions, “I mean, I don’t think I actually know anybody who has read all of this. Not even the guys I know who did philosophy at Oxford.”

Jake grinned, albeit more to himself than at her, and took the book back.

“It’s kind of hard going, but interesting. Have you ever read any of it?”“

No, Pet. I doubt I’d be able to make head or tail of it. All I seem to read these days is work stuff: I can recommend some legal texts for you to try if you are having trouble sleeping.”

“I read a legal textbook once, in Thailand. I found it in this weird old junk shop in Bangkok, and took it with me when we were going round the temples and stuff. I was reading heaps of stuff about legal history by torchlight, in a tent.” He was looking sheepish again, “I don’t remember much about it, but that was kind of interesting too. I mean, it didn’t really send me to sleep.”

Sorcha was now confronted with a mental image of Jake, in hippy backpacker mode, wandering around Thailand with an ancient copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries. She had no idea what to do with it. She was only saved from having to say anything by a loud hammering on the bedroom door, followed by Duncan bursting into the room without waiting for a reply.

“Can I borrow some sunglasses?”

Jake was determined not to rise to the challenge.

“It’s dark, you bastard. And you went to bed an hour ago.”

“I meant for the morning, in case you weren’t up.” Duncan was both defiant and cheerful as he said it, “By the way, mate, don’t know if you’ve noticed but looks like you’ve got a naked woman in your bed. Wouldn’t waste time on a bedtime story if I were you.”

Jake leapt up and wrestled Duncan back out the room: he couldn’t manage to be properly angry. Sorcha was left sitting in the bed, still hugging the covers and staring at the copy of Kant which had been dropped on the floor in the scuffle. Jake took a while to return, as he had decided that digging out sunglasses was probably going to be the least painful way of getting Duncan to shut up for a bit: Sorcha scrambled back into her pyjama top and tidied up the pillows before laying back on them and tried to get her head straight. The day had been a succession of moments in which she had felt that she was beginning to get to know Jake, followed by other moments in which she had been forced into the sudden realisation that she knew about as much about him as she did about the inner workings of dishwashers, or nuclear reactors. None of it was making much sense, and it made her feel guilty and lost, in equal proportions.

It still didn’t make sense when Jake returned a few minutes later, and climbed into the other side of the bed. He was doing a reasonable, if not impeccable, job of managing his frustration on a number of different levels, as he lined up his pillows with more force than was strictly necessary.

“Duncan’s a lovely bloke, but he can be a right bastard sometimes. I’ve threatened to break his kneecaps if he comes in here again, but I’m not really sure he believed me.” He settled back, calmer, “Even though I did tell him that he could come in if the building was burning down or something, you know.”

Sorcha looked across at Jake, who seemed a very long way away.

“Something about beds like this always makes me want to sleep sideways or use them as a trampoline.”

Jake looked back across at her and smiled.

“I’d rather you waited until I’ve got up.”

“I’m sure I could manage to trampoline far enough away from you that you’d hardly notice I was doing it.” Sorcha did rather half-heated snow-angel arms and legs, which fell well short of Jake, “I feel like I need distress flares: do you promise you’ll come and rescue me if I get lost in the middle of the night?”

Jake hesitated, before picking up his pillows, and moving them next to hers. He settled back on his side, looking straight at her, in such a way that she had no choice but to stare slightly fiercely.

“Why the frown?”

“I’m trying to figure you out, and it’s not working.” Sorcha hesitated, no longer sure that she was going to get away with it, “I hear such conflicting accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly.”

His face was close to hers, but still he gave little away. There were faint worry lines on his forehead, and a deep ridge between his eyebrows which seemed to continue into the groove under his nose. Tiny flecks of silver in his stubble caught the light, and his lips were ever so slightly parted. He raised his hand, and pushed back a lock of hair which had fallen across Sorcha’s face. She just about managed to stop herself gasping.

“Perhaps you should stop listening to them, then.”

Jake looked at her, barely blinking, for what seemed like an age, before kissing her gently on the forehead and retreating back across the bed and turning out the lights.

Sorcha lay cocooned in the dark, struggling to remember to breathe. It felt as if her heart was beating at least six inches outside her skin.