Chapter One



It started with paint, thick oily stuff, cold to the touch and it ended in blood, warm and buttery, gushing, spurting through paint-stained fingers… And yet, in spite of the excess and betrayals, I remain grateful for this enduring, gentler image that still remains uppermost in my mind—Mari and I, naked on Mari’s mattress on the floor of her room, my head on her chest, my fingers moving in circles over her breast as if raking over the pebbles of a Japanese garden.

Her large Manga eyes were still pink from crying, but her lips kept smiling, like a cheeky, nervous angel with a clipped wing. It was as if, after the tears had gone, we’d stepped into sunshine and rainbows. Bertrand was gone but we had each other and, for a few hours, that felt bigger than the loss we’d been crying over.

When you weep for someone close to you who has died, as we had done, you realise you are crying for all those other hurts you’ve clocked up in your life, and you realise, too, how few of them have been lubricated by tears till now.

If I hadn’t been there to witness Mari break down in tears, I doubt I would ever have found a way to cry myself—I tend to bottle it in, forever. When I somehow found a way to let go, I felt as if I was relearning how to cry, and I had to pass though barriers of painfully embarrassing emotions before I could believe that perhaps I wasn’t actually faking it.

As a grown woman, I had never cried in the arms of another woman before. Tears ran down my shirt and hers, soaking us. We peeled off our tops, suddenly hot, suddenly needing to feel each other’s tears on our skin, like a healing rain. Skin to skin we knew we were still alive, protected, loved. But even as we consoled one another, as only lovers can, I wondered if we weren’t already losing each other, if maybe events wouldn’t soon tear us apart. To think of that happening made me angry, and out of the anger rose a fresh and desperate desire for her body and whatever guilt rushed up to meet us, we rode on through it, like swimmers who had turned their backs on the treacherous safety of land and swum out to meet an inescapable, bubbling tsunami. And how rich is your lover’s body, salty and more richly scented, when she emerges from tears wanting you like a gulp of rarefied air.

Mari was my first woman, possibly my last, and I miss her terribly.

As we lay on her bed under her thin duvet, our breasts pressed against one another, her heart beating faster than mine. We kissed one another as if picking at delicious seedless grapes, unable to stop ourselves coming back for more. I felt like a shipwreck victim, amazed to find myself still breathing and clinging to land.

We were less like lovers after the sex than children afraid to leave one another’s side and return to the adult world.

“What is it, sweetheart?” she would say, caressing my hair... my pelvis, my breast, as if she were now the older of us both.

I wasn’t used to being the child in a relationship. To begin with, I was thirty-eight and she was twenty-six and, thanks to my childhood, I’ve had a poor time trusting people my entire life.

My body felt as fragile as china in her hands, even though—or perhaps because—she was so delicate herself. She’d coaxed a tenderness from me I always knew I possessed but hadn’t been able to express with men, save warily and fleetingly.

We had been three people—the eternal love triangle—and now we were two. Now even his name, Bertrand, tasted like ashes in my mouth.

Would the police descend on us again? With new evidence that implicated me in the crime? An unbearable waiting game had begun.

When one terrible event tears a hole in the fabric of your life, you can’t help feeling that maybe all that need happen now is for someone to pull at the dangling threads and all of you will unravel till nothing is left.