Yes Yes More More Read online

  “It feels like someone’s going to come and tell us that we can’t really stay here,” said Karen. “It’s too nice.”

  This thought had half-occurred to Claire, too – that they were not the sort of people to stay in a place like this. Once Karen had said it out loud though she decided it was silly.

  The bedroom had a bath in it, freestanding and with those claw feet, of course, in the middle of the room like a mythical metal pet. The bed was almost waist-height. Claire stood at the bedroom door and could see straight underneath it to the other side.

  “Come on, we’ve left the bags outside,” Karen said.

  “Who’s going to steal them?” Claire asked, still giddy and high-pitched. “A yeti?” She climbed onto the bed. It was big enough for Claire and Karen and a yeti, and a couple of spare yetis. From up there she felt like she might need to row, or steer, or order supplies in.

  “The kitchen is full of food!” Karen screeched, and Claire sauntered through to have a look, giving it the laa-di-dah. There was an Aga, with a heavy pot full of carrots and potatoes and borlotti beans and tarragon and butter on top, keeping warm. A bowl of russet apples sat on the side next to a bottle of merlot, nice and warm-enough too, and a box of All Gold. Terry’s All Gold! It was a small kitchen, compared to the cathedral-dimensioned sitting room, with two chairs at a wooden table, a jug with pink and purple anemones and a ridiculous silver candelabra.

  “They said they’d leave some groceries and supper ready for us,” said Karen, a lazy grin on her face as she adapted to this hifalutin life.

  “Supper?”

  “Tea, alright. Tea.”

  “I want to explore.”

  “There’s a bathroom too.”

  “No, outside. Before it’s dark.”

  They pulled the bags just inside the door and headed to the water, a few paces from the cabin. Claire looked down and the phrase ‘crystal clear’ stopped being a cliche, became a perfectly good description. Then she struggled for another.

  “This water is like thick air,” she said. “Thick, cold, soft air made for paddling in.”

  “Let’s have a swim,” said Karen.

  She went to get towels from the cabin-castle and Claire stripped down to her knickers. Karen came back naked. “Not a soul around, not for miles,” she grinned. “That’s what the website said.” She shook her belly and tits at the mountains.

  The pebbles were cold and wet under their toes but the air was not cold, just fresh and soft, with no wind and a blanket of low sunlight covering them. Claire tugged her knickers to her ankles and stepped free of them. The full moon was already out – above the trees, yellowish and splodgy against the blue-white sky.

  Karen ran straight in, making hurgh-hurgh noises, gasping and splashing, clumsy on the pebbles. Claire padded carefully down the rattling incline to the edge of the water.

  “So cold!” Karen said, a loud bleat, with the water up to her chest. “My labia are retreating!” She was full of glee, fizzing with the chilly blast of it.

  Claire stood there a bit longer. The trees came right down to the lake, along to her right, so many of them, tall and familial, a quiet gang watching. She stretched herself up, imagined as she lifted her arms that she might tickle the pale sky. Then she ran unsteady and eager into the water. She wanted to get in before Karen got too cold and came out. She got knee-deep and then lay right back, held herself up with her hands, spun herself round and round, a rolypoly-ing water-baby.

  “It’s fine once you’re in!” she said, which was sort-of true. Her skin was shrieking. Karen had swum out a few more metres and was floating on her back. “Look, Claire – the moon!” she shouted, and pointed to it, kicking her legs and wriggling to keep herself steady. Then she flipped over and swam a little more, a confident front crawl.

  “It’s colder the further out you come,” Claire said, swimming towards Karen. She was wondering if she was out of her depth, aimed a pointed toe straight downwards like a ballerina and touched nothing.

  They headed back up the pebbles and sat by the lake wrapped in the big towels. Claire fetched the wine and they swigged it. The cold of the water and then the clement air (“balmy,” Karen said, “it’s balmy!”) had left their internal thermometers baffled, their skin neither hot nor cold but pink and alive.

  Karen sighed.

  “Do you miss Lucas?” Claire asked.

  “Not right now I don’t.” Karen was holding the neck of the wine bottle, twizzling the concave base on her big toe. She looked like a child wrapped up out of the bath, playing, nearly ready for bed. “I miss Davey McLaverty from year five.”

  “From year five in school?” Claire thought she’d misunderstood.

  “He was the nicest boy I ever went out with.”

  “In the fifth year?”

  “He was fifth year, I was third year. I peaked early in love.” She sighed again, and her bottom lip popped forward. “I finished with him because I wanted to get off with Si Twist. Si Twist said he wouldn’t get off with me if I didn’t finish with Davey first.

  “Davey McLaverty wrote me poems and told me funny stories and brought me sweet presents,” Karen was saying. “He was so kind. I thought they’d all be like that.”

  Karen and Claire had only really started hanging out together again in the last two months. Karen’s boyfriend Lucas broke up with her on the same morning that Claire got turned down for a shitty promotion that she didn’t even want and realised that she was going to leave her job. And so that lunchtime they both happened to be wandering, sulking, in the massive Topshop at Oxford Circus, looking at cheap bright gewgaws, like gamblers in a casino, about to be okay, any minute now. They’d recognised each other from college and compared petty miseries over neon lace vests. Then at lunchtime the next day they had a glass of wine in an actual winebar, and after that they made a habit, two or three days a week, of mooching around together at lunchtimes consoling one another.

  Maybe if they weren’t such recent friends, Claire would have said something when Karen started mooning over a school boyfriend from twenty years ago. She might have told her she sounded like a sappy character in a teen drama, not even Joey in Dawson’s Creek, not even Tai in Clueless. Or she might have said, teasing, “Oh shit, can we rewind a couple of decades? Or shall we just go and pull an emotionally literate, sexually precocious fourteen year old, see how that works?” Instead she lifted the wine from Karen’s limp hands and took a gulp. They sat and finished the bottle, it didn’t take them long, looking out over the water snuggled in their towels.

  Then they spent an hour trying to get the wood-burning stove to burn wood. They ate the stew with huge silver spoons, they drank another bottle of wine, they deliberated over the chocolates with tiptoeing fingers, like ladies in an advert. Cappuccino intrigue, vanilla flourish, midnight praline. They didn’t mention that there wasn’t a television in the cabin and they didn’t turn the radio on. They opened a bottle of peaty whisky from the kitchen, slurped it from thick-bottomed tumblers, no ice and no water. Huge measures.

  “Another one?” Karen would say.

  “This stuff is beautiful,” Claire would say, and offer up her glass. They took it in turns to pour, and the more they drank the more delicious it got.

  Claire read the first few pages of The Secret Adversary, very slowly. Karen took the polish off her toenails. It was not quite nine o’clock. Claire went over to the bookshelves, looking for that hidden door.

  From this groggy silence, they heard noises outside, something moving. Just in front of the cabin, perhaps. They looked each to the other, with did-you-hear-that-too eyes. There was no wind, so it wasn’t the trees groaning or the water lapping on the pebbles. Then there was a great croaking howl, from the woods perhaps, and they both shrieked. They took a moment to feel silly, then they were just scared. A creak in the corner of the room and another more uncertain howl from the woods. Claire was on high alert, her ears trying to flap, to scan for sounds, her eyes wide, fingers splayed out str
aight like antennae switched on. Karen was on the floor by the stove, knees up, holding onto her toes, head thrown back, jaw frozen half open, blank and waiting. Claire was still at the shelves, no escape door to be found.

  Then Karen grabbed the tongs, the massive pincers by the stove, and ran to the door, shoved her feet into her big boots. Claire started laughing, not a happy laugh. Tongs, she was thinking, not even a poker, as if there might be a barbecue out there in the dark rather than a wild animal or an axe murderer. She thought of how Karen played in their after-work football games at Regent’s Park, steaming towards the goal, shouting “Attack! Attack!”, laughing like a maniac, roaring at the opposition.

  She was outside now, had left the door agape. Claire looked at the almost-empty whisky bottle and it occurred to her that she could close the door, lock it, stay inside by the stove with the chocolates and that paperback. Still, here she was, grabbing her coat, pulling on her boots, heading out after Karen.

  A vertigo took hold of Claire when she stepped outside, her sense of scale toppled over. Their grand posh cabin became a stupid box and this was stars and moon and space, the surface of the lake a not-there barrier to another world beneath, the trees all various but all the same and pulling you in for adventures.

  She saw Karen disappear into the woods, hunting, and headed after her, propelled by admiration and a desire to witness the main event. But her stride slowed to a syrupy stumble once she reached the trees, and each step became a new discovery – a log, was that?, a stone, something spongy, something cracking under her boot. There was a sound just behind that may have been her own footsteps, or may have been something else. She noticed that she didn’t care about Karen anymore or what the howling had come from. She wasn’t worried now, she just felt cosseted. The woods held her. The trees were so straight, so straight up, that the moon created pale blue stripes and long triangles. The dim, oozing light made everything seem flat so she couldn’t entirely tell if a tree, a rock, a branch was inches or yards away. The woods smelled clean, alive. She would like to have spent months, years, decades exploring the rough scabby bark on those trees, the mosses firm and soft like a just-baked cake, the pine needles under her feet, countless tiny spines, soft in their millions, the beetles pacing their territories, the spiders spawning spiders.

  She fell over, ker-bomp, and zoomed her face right in next to a root that was knuckling out of the ground, slipped her hand around and took hold of it like you would a doorhandle. Her eyes struggled to focus, up so close to the bark ravines and the gristly lumps. It smelled good. Things were alive in there and busy. Her smile pulled up the corners of the earth like a rug. A darkness has consumed my soul, she remembered, and that felt good.

  There was another howl, but she noticed it some while after it had happened, as if she’d been asleep and was trying to recall the noise that woke her up. She looked straight up to the moon then closed her eyes to enjoy the soft round memory it left on her lids. She lay back and waited with her eyes wide to see what might pour in. But nothing else appeared and there were no more howls. She relaxed back into the ground, closed her eyes, felt safe. Limply, she wondered where Karen might have got to, how long they’d been outside. Was it getting cold? Damp?

  So she pushed and pulled herself up and took a few steps, into a treeless patch of ground and then just beyond that, where she saw something hanging in the trees. It was a branch, snapped off and dangling there, except actually it looked like Karen. It was the right size, that cluster of leaves could be her hair and profile, lit by the moon, that smaller branch her floppy feet. She stared at it, trying to see a branch instead of a dead friend. She held down a tickling panic, felt her brain teetering.

  And Claire was tired so she sat back on the soft ground. Something was rising, singing inside her. Then there was heavy breath a few yards to the right and then there was Karen, real alive Karen, leaning up against a tree, rolling herself around it. She had dropped the tongs at her feet, and she sank her face and chest into the tree’s bark, one cheek pushed up like a pillow for her eye. Her face was puffy and streaked with snot and tears for Davey McLaverty or Lucas or whatever, but she was not crying now. She was on pause, held there by the tree, not asleep or awake, like a big stupid baby. I could pick up one of these hefty branches, thought Claire, and I could walk over and smash her fucking head right in.

  And then Claire noticed the stag. How ridiculous. A stag tottered right into the clearing and stopped in the moonlight. He stopped and looked at Claire. He was too far away to touch but near enough that she could see his pulsing neck. His breath was fast and quiet, he was square and still, bones and skinny legs, improbable antlers and a round solid softness. She watched, listened, kept quiet, tried to breathe shallow and silent. The stag blinked, slowly, and his head shifted a little. He was real. Claire didn’t move, felt her skin like stone. The stag kept her still, and it felt calm, exciting.

  And then he went, haughty and magnificent, breezy and powerful, away into the woods. Gone. Usual life came slumping back in, all blah-blah-blah. For a while Claire watched the space where the stag had been, the trees still glowing with the memory of him.

  Karen whimpered. Her eyes were closed, she hadn’t seen the stag. Claire was up and walking over to her, grabbed her, loving and rough like a matinee idol. Karen grinned, was happy to be found. She gave a snorting little giggle, like a drunken, too-old starlet who thinks she’s still cute.

  “Let’s get back to the cabin,” Claire said, one arm around her friend now. “I’ll put the kettle on, get you safe to bed.”

  ‌When Can You Start?

  I was going to a job interview, I was supposed to be getting a new job, but I knew if I concentrated hard enough I’d make it here, to a sunny dusty avenue in the Pyrenees with a cold glass of wine and tiny French birds chirruping in the trees. Les moineaux. They are singing. Ils chantent.

  I’m wearing a fitted skirt, just below the knee, and I’m wearing heels but the heels are lace-ups so they feel secure on my feet. And a long-sleeved T-shirt, but quite a posh one (linen blend), tucked in, with what my mum might have called a ‘snazzy’ belt.

  The interview – the job – is at Vogue House. Condé Nast, posh magazines. This place has class, I say to myself as I walk in: class, pizazz and gravitas. They should use that as a slogan, except they’re too classy and gravitassy to do that. It’s on Berkeley Square, on the corner. You push through the revolving doors and the air conditioning begins to suck the hot dampness from you. The foyer is marble and glass, high ceilings. The floor is a bit slippy but my heels have rubbery tips so I am fine, thanks. I’m very nearly strutting. Piece of string from the crown of my head. There’s flowers and seats and magazines.

  I am friendly to the receptionist, a young man who looks like he’s doing summer-holiday work experience. I’m friendly and professional, bright and serious. There’s no one here but us two. I announce myself and wonder how many other people they’re interviewing today. There’s no signing-in book, nowhere to have a quick peek and see who else has been here. The boy picks up a phone, seems to know what he’s doing, speaks to someone upstairs, looks back to me.

  “Fifth floor, please, Ms Marshall,” he grins. “Debra will meet you outside the lift.”

  Who’s Debra? He doesn’t say. Maybe I’m supposed to know.

  “Thanks so much,” I say. Thanks so much? How much?

  Everything, everything, everything, everything

  The lift arrives and it’s full-length mirrors in there so I get a chance to look at my professional, creative self. Check my make-up is intact. No food stuck in the teeth. A bit of sand is still clinging to the bottom of my legs, just a few grains, soft and salty round my ankles. It’s rather attractive, kind of sexy. I look capable, I look stylish, you’d trust me to edit your celebrity interviews, check your page furniture, you could invite me down the pub, maybe share some sushi at lunchtimes. I stand and face the doors, all set for that fifth floor. I’m glad there’s no one else in the lift. I t
ry to relax my face, get my expression Debra-ready.

  It’s so hot today, I wish my tits were smaller so I didn’t have to wear a bra. Who wants nylon and wire clamped onto you in this weather? Nobody. Little tits and I could let the breeze to my nipples, but with these I need a bit of lift and containment, else they get in the way. Even on holiday.

  “Hi, Annie!”

  Debra seems nice.

  “Thanks for coming in. We’re just down here on the left.”

  She leads me past banks of desks, bookshelves filled with cardboard boxes and piles of folders. Big windows and a few pot plants, a warm breeze and sea air. Glass partitions. Then she opens a door and nods me inside. I recognise Elise, the editor, from her photo in the front of the magazine. She’s sitting there with another woman who’s looking at an A4 sheet on the table in front of her, crossing things off a list. Or maybe doing a wordsearch, or a sudoku, like you do on holiday.

  Everything, everything, everything, everything

  “Hi, Annie!” says Elise. Everyone is really delighted that I’m here. “Take a seat. This is Maddy.”

  Maddy looks up and smiles too. “I’m the associate editor,” she tells me. Pretty fancy.

  Debra’s still at the door. “Would you like anything to drink?” she asks. “Tea? Coffee?”

  “I’d love a gin and tonic.”

  “Ice and lemon?”

  “Lovely, yes. Well, actually lime if you have it, otherwise lemon is fine.” I think lime is a bit more exciting. Just a little bit, obviously I’m not actually excited by lime.

  “I’ll see what we have,” says Debra. She doesn’t look hopeful about the limes.

  I’m invisible, I’m invisible, I’m invisible, I’m invisible

  “We’re really impressed with your CV,” Elise tells me. She’s wearing the same sort of outfit as me, except more expensive. Her belt isn’t snazzy though. “Can you tell us a bit about why you’ve applied for this role?”