Wolves Read Free

memory.
    She ran the soles of her feet along my penis. She wanted me to join in. She pressed my foot to her sex. My toes scrunched her hair as though it were a carpet. Her hand kept me from pulling away.
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    I touched her clitoris with my toe. It was wet there. It felt all wrong – wine spilt on a carpet. ‘I can’t do this,’ I said.
    My company aside, Mandy spends much of her time alone. Her father is in a home and can no longer be relied upon to recognise her. Her mother remarried over twenty years ago and lives and works abroad. She has no brothers or sisters.
    Mandy is learning who her real friends are, and it’s been a steep learning curve. One of them sent her flowers and a card that told her to ‘Get better’. There are much kinder women in her life, but they are older than her, and by now they have their own responsibilities: jobs, young children.
    Mandy’s life has been comprehensively locked down since the accident. Until she’s restored enough and confident enough to leave the house, I am all she’s got.
    ‘You should leave the house,’ I tell her. ‘We should go for a walk.’
    She holds up her big white hands: evidence for the prosecution. ‘Go for a walk,’ she says.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Go where you like,’ she says. ‘I’m not keeping you here.’
    In the kitchen I neck a couple of tablets. Spending so much of my time indoors, in Mandy’s overheated rooms, and breathing the recycled air of the hospital, has given me one head-cold after another. ‘I could take you for lunch.’
    Mandy says nothing.
    ‘In town. I could take you for lunch.’
    ‘How am I supposed to eat lunch?’
    ‘The way you usually eat lunch. With your hands. And I can help you. If you get into real difficulties we can ask for a trough.’
    Mandy bursts into tears. ‘Why do you have to be such a cunt?’
    So I take her to lunch, and that’s when I learn that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who still enjoy playing in puddles and those who never did.
    When high water overcomes the Middle, it rises through the pavements everywhere at once. Mandy and I teeter along duckboards down flooded alleys – pausing distracted at this church or that, this bookshop, that stand-up patisserie – and slip, the pair of us, like a couple of drunks, on stone footbridges, their steps edged in marble slick as soap. The water in the city’s culverts is always the same colour, regardless of season, weather, or time of day: the blue-green of plastic garden furniture.
    Again and again I crash against the rocks of her resentment.
    ‘Do you have to keep bumping into me like that?’
    ‘Do you have to keep pawing me?’
    This after she asked me to take her arm. (‘Please. I’m afraid to fall.’)
    The water is gone by lunchtime. From the window of the first-floor restaurant I watch as a clear foot of it drains away through tiny sink-holes between the flagstones. The damage done.
    Mandy is playing her ‘Come here, go away’ game with the staff. She wants the waiter to dry her shoes. She wants the waiter to bring her shoes back. She wants the waiter to bring her some dry shoes.
    In the centre of the square, a man and a woman in smart-casual clothes trot in circles, round and round. Every so often they point at random into the air, as though firing imaginary weapons.
    Mandy wants a drink. Mandy wants the waiter to know, me to know, the world to know, that she cannot be expected to sit down to five courses with wet feet and no drink.
    Out the window, I watch them playing. The couple’s gestures are ungainly and unpractised. I lean back in my chair, and now I see that I have been watching them through a flaw in the glass; that they are smaller and nearer than I thought. That they are children.
    Mandy stands up suddenly. ‘You can have my starter if you want.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘I’m going.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘All your sniffing and snotting,’ she says. ‘I feel sick.’
    It is beginning to dawn on me