London
Corinne
‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right?’ Dominic calls from the kitchen. He is standing at the sink, eating a plum for breakfast. The juice drips down his fingers, yellow rivulets running into the silver basin. I reach for my hand cream, rub it into the crevices of my palms, inhale the soft sweet smell of it.
‘Yes. Yes, Dom, of course.’
‘And you’re going to the gallery today? D’you feel up to it?’
‘Of course. Dominic, I’m not ill.’
He turns on the tap, rinses his fingers and shakes them dry. ‘OK. Sorry. So we’ll meet after work at the clinic, yes?’
I nod, he reaches for me and I lean forward to kiss him. He’s dressed for work and he smells lovely; clean and fresh.
‘Yes, sounds good. What are you working on at the paper today?’
He sighs. ‘Alison’s really on my case at the moment. She’s insisting I get on with the Carlington House piece, says she’s being hassled a lot by the owner. Cool place though, didn’t you think?’
I stare at him. ‘I thought it was kind of scary.’
Dominic smiles. ‘Maybe a bit creepy. Weird to think of it abandoned for so long. I’m hoping there’ll be time to start writing it up today. I’ve got a bit of a backlog at the moment, what with . . .’ He tails off.
I feel a flash of guilt. ‘I know, time off. I’m sorry, I’m OK today. Promise!’
He shakes his head, folds his arms around me again, even though the clock is now showing nearly a quarter to eight and he’s going to be late.
‘Don’t ever apologise to me, Corinne,’ he says, the words urgent in my ear, his breath warm on my cheek.
We straighten up. There is a loud banging sound upstairs, the familiar noise of an electric drill gearing up. The people above us are extending their flat, I don’t know what they’re doing up there, they’ve been messing around for weeks.
‘The fun continues,’ Dominic says, rolling his eyes at me. ‘I wonder whether they’ll ever actually complete?’
‘Go, go!’ I say, and I adjust his blue tie, touch his chest. I don’t really want him to, I don’t want him to leave me on my own. He picks up a cooling cup of coffee from the counter, drains it and leaves the flat; the door bounces noisily on the hinges behind him as it always does, far too loud. The neighbours have complained several times, we ought to fix it.
After he’s gone, I go back into our bedroom. I’ve got to get better at being by myself. My dad used to say being able to be alone is a skill; he told me his alone time was precious to him, something he cultivated in spite of all the parties and the attention, the people who wanted to know his name, where he got his ideas from, what project he was working on next. We used to have a photo of him propped up on the windowsill in the dining room – in it he’s surrounded by people, his dark eyes flashing. He looks like he’s in his element, but one night when I was a teenager he told me that all he’d wanted to do that night was be alone, away from the frenzy. I never would have guessed.
I take a deep breath. Perhaps I can find my element too, perhaps being alone is something I can learn to enjoy. The bedroom feels so quiet and still. The bed is made; Dom is good at things like that. He says we have to try to keep the flat tidy with it being so small. It is tiny, nestled in the tangle of streets between Finsbury Park and Crouch End, a two-room affair with a little bathroom leading off the kitchen. I love it; it’s minuscule, miniature, fit for a pair of dolls.
I go to my drawers, the insides pretty with the embroidered linings that Ashley made for me. In the bottom drawer, a clump of black tights lies in wait, flecked with tiny specks of white tissue. The nylon feels dry and rubbery. I think about untangling the blackness and drawing the material over my legs, getting on the Tube and going to work, and all of a sudden the idea seems overwhelming.
I sit down, hugging my knees to my chest. The flat always feels even smaller when I am on my own, I don’t know why. The absence of a child seems worse. I stare at the painting above the clock, the first picture I ever commissioned for the gallery. I brought it home three years ago, hung it proudly in the flat. The blue waves of the ocean, the bright red of a ship. It’s beautiful. I used to love it, the way the thick paint glistened on the canvas, the hint of sunlight dappling the left corner. Aurora yellow, cadmium red. I know all the paint names, or I did. I used to recite them to Dominic when I got my first gallery job, spent hours hunched over the colour chart, making sure I didn’t forget. That was a long time ago now.
My gaze shifts from the painting to the clock below and, as I watch, the crimson figures (geranium lake, paint number 405) flicker, rearrange themselves into new numbers, and that’s when I realise that I have been sitting by the pile of black nylon for almost forty-five minutes.
It’s too late to go to work now. I don’t know where the time has gone. The hormones I am taking make me feel dopey, a wasp in a honey-jar. When I call the gallery, Marjorie sounds irritated and I feel bad. I’ll go tomorrow, definitely.
I get back into bed, lie still for a while, listening to the sound of rain beginning outside, the steady drip drip drip of the pipe on the roof. The builders upstairs seem to have stopped for a bit, the quiet is nice. When I was little I used to go up to Dad’s office and listen to the way the rain spattered on the skylight, hammered down hard so that it bounced off the glass. It used to make me feel safe, because the rain was outside and I was inside. It couldn’t get to me.
There is a sudden sound, a little thud that makes me jump, and I feel my body stiffen, the muscles in my legs tense slightly under the sheets. You’re too jumpy, Corinne, Dominic always says. You exhaust yourself with nerves. He’s right about the exhaustion. I’m not sure I can help the nerves.
Eventually, I start to need the bathroom, so I ease myself out of bed, go out into the hallway. I’ve got to pull myself together, I know I have. I take a deep breath, peer at my reflection in the mirror. I need to keep hoping, I can’t give up.
The tiles are freezing on my bare feet. The hallway is draughty; the front door has sprung slightly ajar. Occasionally it refuses to close properly; I’ve told Dom to fix it time and time again. I frown, step over a pile of yellowing newspapers, push my shoulder against it to make it jam shut, but it won’t. I open the door again and try harder, but something is bouncing it back. I crouch down. Something is stopping the door from closing; something small jammed in the frame. I stare at it for a few seconds and then it comes to me; I know exactly what this looks like.
I bend down, pick up the small object, hold it carefully between my cold hands. Flecks of auburn paint flake off onto my skin, lying on my hands like specks of blood. How strange. It’s a little chimney pot. It looks like the chimneys we had on our doll house when we were little, on the big pink house Dad built for us.
I stand there at the doorway, clutching the little chimney, and a small smile comes to my lips as I remember.
It was no ordinary doll house. Nothing Dad did was ordinary – I remember one of his clients telling him that over lunch, him regaling us with the story that evening, his eyes glowing with pride. ‘Nothing by halves,’ he always said, and he was always true to his word. Our doll house was almost a metre high, with pink walls and a blue painted door, a red-slated roof and four big brown chimney pots made of real terracotta. Each of the rooms was tiny, compact, perfectly formed. Dad was obsessed with buildings, and he’d spent months working on this one, a little replica of our real home that Ashley and I could play with. Whenever Mum would tell him to come to bed, rest his eyes for a bit, he’d shake his head. ‘It’s a challenge,’ he used to say, ‘and there’s nothing better for you than that. I’ve got to get it right.’
He knelt on the floor with us on Christmas Day and showed us how it worked; the intricacies of the rooms and the stairways and the