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  Without even thinking about what he was doing, he walked over to her, lifted her face in his hands and looked into her eyes.

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry. We can do something like this outside, but we can’t do it here anymore. Do you want to meet me this evening?’

  She hesitated. ‘OK.’

  Chapter 13

  I walked out, livid. Fuck him! I wanted to run, I wanted somewhere to go, somewhere that meant something. Half-running, half-pacing, I reached the Plaza de Mayo and sat on a bench in the square which looked up at the tired face of the Casa Rosada, the president’s pink house, where Madonna had played one of Argentina’s most treasured symbols, Eva Perón. What other president’s balcony had been witness to such turmoil? Military coups, riots, demonstrations, celebrations of war and elections and World Cup finals. The square needed crowds to breathe and the crowd was deeply engrained in the Argentine psyche. It was Thursday and the mothers were here, walking in circles with their white handkerchiefs around their heads, like some forgotten sect from the sixties. I couldn’t tell if Ana was among them. People hurried past, laughing and seeming oblivious. I suddenly felt out of my depth. This was other people’s meaning, not mine.

  Maybe Nick was right. Maybe I should go back, but back to what? Back to who? Time was supposed to be the cure-all. Tell that to my dreams! And now this arsehole of a therapist had gone all soppy on me. What was he playing at? Why had I agreed to meet him? Fuck him!

  Chapter 14

  Jenny was already there when he arrived. She had insisted that they meet at the same restaurant as the first time, which he found strange. It was as if her life was so devoid of meaning that she needed to create tiny rituals around it. He tried to block out the last few days, the last few years of his life. Carolina had been right, of course, about the night they made love. It was Jenny he had been thinking about, it was the English girl he came in. Well, now here she was.

  He wanted her to smile, but she looked straight at him as he sat down and blew smoke in his face.

  ‘OK, Doctor, these are the rules for tonight. You can fuck me if you want to, but that’s where it stops, and whatever has happened to you – I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it do you some good to listen to someone else for a change?’ Ignacio felt like a ventriloquist’s puppet.

  ‘How could you possibly think I would want to know what your problems are? I came to your surgery about me, not about you.’

  He held her gaze through the smoke. ‘Yes, and it was you that wanted to bring this outside, you that tried to persuade me to meet you outside, you that needed something different. Well, like it or not, that’s what you’ve got, so shall we order?’

  They ordered. They ate. They fought like lovers, used each other like punchbags, taking out their frustrations on each other, bruising the anger and resentment out of themselves. She surprised him, again, with the ferocity of her accusations, as if he had plotted, lured her into a trap, waited in ambush until she was ready to embrace her therapy, until she needed him, and then pulled a rug from beneath her feet. Blinded by the disintegration of his personal life, forgetting the ethics of his profession, he smarted at the unfairness. It was she who had lured him outside the safety of the therapist’s walls. It was not his fault if she had intruded into his dreams, into his private life. He had tried to keep her out, but she had kept on and on.

  At a certain point the punches began to subside and the punchbag fell still between them. They looked at each other shyly, aware that their sparring had created a level of intimacy associated with couples, self-conscious suddenly that they had been so vehement in public.

  She laughed then. ‘That’s the first time in my life I have argued like that with a man before sleeping with him!’

  He looked straight at her and for the second time that day lifted her face towards him, desperate to tame her, soften her, hold her in his arms. ‘We could do something about that, you know . . .’

  She looked back at him and he longed to stroke away the aggression that still lay like a cat in her eyes.

  ‘Yes, we could,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want you dumping on me about your private life.’

  For a moment he felt resentment bulge inside him, warning him, reminding him what he knew – or didn’t know – about her. But then she smiled and the smile washed away the harshness in her voice and the red bulge inside him became a bulge elsewhere as he gave in to the vision of her naked underneath him.

  ‘We can’t go to my flat,’ she said bluntly, cutting through his thoughts.

  Ignacio trembled at the idea of going back to his own. Carolina had moved to her sister’s with the kids and was to stay there until they sold the house, but the associations were too raw, still far too raw.

  She sliced into his consciousness again. ‘We could go to a transitorio. There’s a good one near the cemetery at Recoleta.’

  Ignacio wondered how many men she had slept with. ‘How many of these hotels have you been to in Buenos Aires?’ He teased her.

  ‘I’ve got my favourites,’ she laughed.

  ‘OK, I’m in your hands.’

  In the taxi she sat close to him with her legs slightly parted and her thigh against his. They stopped outside what looked like a hotel with its doors closed to the public, given away by the red light above the car park. In the seven years that he and Carolina had been married, Ignacio had never slept with anyone else. He wondered how Carolina would have reacted if he had suggested coming here on a Wednesday night. Many married couples used venues like this to sex up their flagging appetites for each other or to get away from the awareness of children in the next room, but Carolina lacked the naughtiness latent in so many Catholics. She would have taken offence.

  Ignacio was about to ring the buzzer when Jenny pulled him aside. ‘No, not yet, kiss me first,’ and she tugged him with her into the comparative darkness of the overhang of the building next door. He realised that she needed to prepare herself. So he kissed her deeply, pulled her bottom against his groin, felt her breasts pushing softly into him, felt his hardness pushing at her.

  In the lift his hands were already on her, already undoing her dress. They passed another couple in the corridor as they lunged towards their room. Inside, he peeled apart the open dress. Her breasts shone in the red light. Her nipples challenged him through white lace. He fell on her now, greedy, impatient, with only one thought in his head. She pulled his hand down and he felt the wetness of her. Jesus Christ. He struggled out of his jeans, pushed into her . . .

  ‘No!’ she cried out suddenly. ‘No, not here, not here,’ and as she tried to thrust him away from her, he came.

  Chapter 15

  Something in me wanted to surface. I was back in the swimming pool, fighting for air. His penis was pushing me underwater. I didn’t want sex with him, not now, not here. Above all, not here.

  ‘No!’ I cried out suddenly. ‘No, not here, not here.’ I tried to push him away, to find air, and I felt the gush, like blood leaking. Too late. I rolled over and hid my face from him, ignored his confusion, punished him for it.

  ‘Jenny, what’s wrong? What happened? I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘Everything is wrong.’

  An onlooker would have felt sorry for him, would have thought me cruel. What would an onlooker know? Only one person could know. Only one person could understand. Too late.

  ‘I’m going home now.’

  ‘You can’t go like that. Jenny, talk to me. What’s wrong? Talk to me.’

  ‘Welcome to my rules! I’m going home.’

  Chapter 16

  The illusion of friendship. Shared circumstance, shared problems, the impression that someone is listening, someone identifies with you? Or simply the effect of enough wine to make you expansive, a favourite tune in a room full of people. But when does it become friendship? When does loyalty take hold? When does someone become a stakeholder in your feelings and your memories? Shared history, dependence, suffering – are th
ese the trappings of true friendship?

  Someone was playing a guitar, people were singing, sitting outside on a warm night at somebody’s weekend home, beyond the pampas, where, after ten hours’ drive, the hills start to break the monotony at last. Henry had his arms around Sally’s neck as she sat cross-legged in front of him, rosy-cheeked and safe. A woman sang softly to Brazilian chords which purred in the air. The competitive edge of early evening banter had subsided and people were drifting with the music and the knowledge of the night, which scattered stars and space around them. Even Nick was moved, had packed away his cynicism along with the other relics he would take with him after seven years. Tonight he would allow himself to be sentimental, touched by the gesture of a farewell weekend away with the friends who cared to say goodbye.

  Had I left friends behind? There were distant school friends. A girl who had Donny Osmond posters on her bedroom wall. The gorgeous brother of another girlfriend who showed me his willy at the age of eight and then confided in me years later about his impotence. University friends, reunions cemented by old laughter and the same anecdotes played like a favourite tune over and over again. Flatmates and work colleagues, though only one whose words were unguarded.

  And Johnny, friend and lover, the man it hurt me to remember.

  But when it came to the point, friendship didn’t stand the test. Didn’t stand my test. Would I miss Nick? Yes. Did that make him a friend? Would I see him again if I ever went back? Probably not. Did that mean he wasn’t a friend?

  The human glow around us was seductive; like cotton wool clouds viewed from a plane. Part of me longed to jump, to believe, like Henry and Sally seemed to, that the cotton wool would hold, but my thoughts sank through the cotton wool and into the journey below. What would you feel? Which friends would you remember then? Would time become slow and languorous, teasing you with the last soft sensations you would ever have, air goose-bumping against your skin, your stomach circus-riding? Or would it screech inside your head, fighting the knowledge of what was happening and the vicious curiosity about how it would feel when the earth claimed your bones? I knew, with a certainty that lived inside me like a clenched fist, that it would do both.

  * * *

  ‘Hey, Jenny, smile! I’ll give you my address, don’t worry!’

  ‘So, Nick, what are you going to do now that you’re about to grow up?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I hope to find out! Let’s drink to middle age, to new beginnings!’

  The theatre in him could never resist a toast. His life was punctuated by raised glasses, a gesture I was jealous of and would miss, but how much did I really know about Nick? I had lied to him about myself and led him to believe he was my only confidante, but he had not even needed to lie. He managed to be so direct and intimate that everyone assumed he was as frank about himself as they had been about themselves in his company. But what did frankness tell you anyway? I felt a wave of tenderness, which was safe, because he was leaving.

  ‘Nick, you take care of yourself back there.’

  ‘Hey, Jenny, of course I will. You can judge for yourself when you come back.’ He seemed to sense that we would probably never see each other again. ‘I’ll miss you too, you know.’

  ‘Fuck off!’ I elbowed him, pricking through the charm bubble he knew would wind me up.

  ‘I will,’ he said, ducking my fists. ‘I’ll miss your stories.’

  * * *

  After Nick left I felt empty and listless. It was a pleasant sensation, a new emptiness, something to focus on, and I carried it proudly inside myself. For a while I went out of my way to see more of Henry and Sally and the other English people I knew. Sally even asked me once if there had been something between Nick and me, and I basked in the temptation to say ‘yes’; to break down in tears and tell her that it was only now he was gone that I realised I had been in love with him, yet it was pointless to run after him as he would never feel the same about me. Sally would have listened softly, stroked me like a cat and plotted ways of bringing us together. She would have enlisted Henry, whose job it would be to find out – discreetly by letter – what Nick really thought of me.

  Even now I was tempted. Surely Nick would realise this was a game? He would write to Henry about his listless relationships in England and ask casually how everyone was in Argentina, dropping my name sometimes more than once in the same letter. Henry and Sally would read everything into this and then one day there would be a letter which would merit a meal out to talk tactics, a letter in which Nick would pour out the revelation he had had one very drunken evening that the reason his relationships were doomed was me. Sally would invite me out without Henry. She would be flushed, enjoying the matchmaker’s right to be nervous, skirting round me at first, asking throwaway questions about how I felt these days, dropping Nick’s name into the conversation as if it were salt on her food.

  But I resisted, not because I thought it would be unfair on Sally and Henry, but because there was a chance, just a chance, that Nick would not realise I was playing.

  Chapter 17

  The night she walked out of the transitorio, Ignacio had felt an almost Catholic sense of punishment. His loneliness was acute and he punished himself further by imagining that this was what Carolina had felt for years. He longed to reach back into the past, to the days when she would throw her head back, laughing at his revelations about his tortured childhood, his senile grandmother who hid in bathrooms and the paranoid dog who couldn’t bear people hiding in bathrooms. She had laughed at serious revelations, too, and he had felt that she would always make light of their problems. When she stopped laughing and he stopped listening, he punished her for taking things seriously and now this English girl had punished him for taking her seriously.

  He thought about the role of punishment in people’s lives, the way that some of his patients punished themselves with feelings of inadequacy or addictions, or imagined that they were somehow powerless victims of a grand scheme that considered them important enough to make them a scapegoat. It was the power of this sense of punishment and the guilt that underlay it which had both estranged him from his Catholic upbringing and attracted him to psychoanalysis. For weeks he thought incessantly about his life and about the part Carolina had played. He mixed images of her from past and present in a kaleidoscope of shifting emotions, fighting to order them and failing. He realised, guiltily, how little he thought about their son and daughter, and wondered what would become of their relationship now.

  Guilt hung on him like beads of sweat and he laughed hollowly at the grip of childhood. At night he had wet, guilty dreams about Jenny.

  He worked, holding together his own sanity at the expense of others. He talked to his wife through lawyers. He wondered about Jenny, smarting that she didn’t contact him. He would have tried tocontact her, but for the fact that – worse than punished – he felt mocked.

  Jenny’s behaviour had turned him into a panting, premature- ejaculating adolescent. The last image he held of her was the look in her eyes the moment before she opened the door. She had dressed frantically and yet there was a controlled violence in her movements, something very cold about her panic, confirming the feeling he’d already had during their sessions that there was a deep imbalance in her. His pleas seemed to drift past her. Her eyes were hollow, unseeing, and then they seemed to laugh at him, and her cruelty stung him. This gave him an anger that protected him.

  Chapter 18

  I didn’t trust myself to see Ignacio again. It had been momentary, but shocking, the feeling that I wanted him, wanted him not just sexually, but in a deeper, forbidden part of myself. The realisation that he had somehow penetrated my defences, if unknowingly, left me reeling. I tried to stop him, to save the moment for a time and a place when it would be more than just another story, but the bastard came. I knew I was being unfair, but I hated him for ruining it and I hated him still more for not realising how. I understood I was retreating into fiction, but I couldn’t help myself. It was a
fiction that enabled me to live. It was water on the right side of the reef and I had already been on the other side.

  So I avoided everything that might mean seeing him again. Therapy, of course, but also certain bars and restaurants, the tennis club I knew he played at, his favourite cinema. Beyond these details I knew nothing about his private life in any case, so it wasn’t difficult.

  I drifted. My classes at this time grew more and more obscure. I invented untenable plots and relationships, role-plays between inanimate objects. I made two bank managers pretend to be a pair of shoes talking to each other. One was called Adidas, the other was Sol, and in the end it became political, with Sol nationalistic and resentful about the other’s growing popularity in her country. I made a table interview a chair. Not everyone appreciated this methodology. Some loved it and learnt to see English as a plaything. I swear they benefited more from my classes than their therapy. Others dropped me, one by one.

  I got invitations from married bank managers and flirted just enough to keep my income going. I lost interest in sex, smoked for England and received my sixth postcard from Nick. Every time he found himself in a different city, he sent me a card, as if this was a plot to force England into my consciousness. This one was from Liverpool and said, ‘Bonked a Beatle fan here! Love, Nick.’ He never told me what he was doing or how he was, but then I never asked. I never wrote back and yet it was strange: Nick was the only person in England who knew where I was. I imagined him bumping into Johnny and talking about me, but would Johnny have known it was me? Probably not.

  I read The Celestine Prophecy and fantasised about following coincidences round the world. I waited, alert, for one that might set me on my journey. Took the rickety underground trains, which in Buenos Aires are slightly smaller than life, and studied faces for a sign. Got myself followed once as a result, but decided that wasn’t it. Imagined letters misdirected to my flat, but knew they were probably meant for the hairy grandmother who lived across the hall. Closed my eyes and pointed as I walked past travel agencies in an attempt to divine the country I should go to.