Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley

Author:Tessa Hadley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Six

Usually, Zoe didn’t stay the night with Simon. After they’d finished making love he would send her home, always much too soon for Zoe, who would be drifting into a sweet heaviness among the crumpled dragged sheets and the mounds of pillow and kicked-aside duvet. She would have given anything to sink down and down and find her sleep inside the heat of his nearness, inside the smell of him, peppery and astringent. But Simon would never lie stilled and satisfied for long. If she lay with her face pressed against his fine rib cage or his long honey-brown back she felt the change of his mood distinctly, like something chemical altering in his tissues: abandonment and languor transforming into alertness, then restlessness, and then, if she stayed too long, or resisted or protested, into impatience. So she would force herself awake, and find and pull on the clothes she had carelessly torn off, and fish around on the dark floor for her sandals. Her head would be swimming and her legs still trembling. Sometimes she even felt nauseated: this was shock at the sheer effort, she thought, of taking back into rational possession the flesh that had been so opened up and lost.

Simon would get up and put on his jeans and help her find her things. He would come with her to the back door and check that her bike lamp worked. He didn’t like her to kiss him goodbye; he said he “preferred to keep things separate.” She cycled off, doing her best not to wobble for as long as he could see her, making her way confusedly until she woke up properly to the empty night streets: a narrow way between sleeping terraced cottages, then Mitchams Corner roundabout, where in the day the lanes of traffic thundered but now the traffic lights often changed color only for her, although she still obediently waited, one foot on the road, when they were on red. Sometimes, although she never remembered this when she was with Simon, she was afraid as she pedaled home: that someone would leap from the bushes and drag her down as she crossed Jesus Green or that when she had to get into college through the underground bike shed because the gates were locked, someone would be lurking there to rape her and smother her.

It was a cold winter. By the time she climbed the staircase to her room, her jaw would be in spasms of shuddering and her hands even inside her gloves would be frozen into the shape of her grip on the handlebars. Because her room was one of the modern conversions in the attic, it didn’t have a gas fire, only an inadequate electric heater, so when she undressed for the second time she kept her socks and pants and T-shirt on under her nightdress, piled her coat and dressing gown on top of her duvet, and lay shivering in her bed, hugging her knees. She didn’t mind all this.

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