Another Country by Anjali Joseph Read Free Book Online Page B

her feel despair.
    Across the room she saw Guillaume, ratty and smooth in his good coat. He was talking intently to a young woman who seemed to want to get away. When Leela’s eyes met his, he ignored her.
    She wasn’t sure Greg wanted to talk to her, but he had begun the conversation. She ought to be offering herself up to yet another dialogue with a stammering, forceful student. But she’d done that for nearly two hours.
    â€˜Do you work here?’ Across the room, she saw with envy that Nina and another teacher, an Irish girl called Tessa, were laughing together, again in contravention of the rules, and pouring each other wine.
    â€˜No, I’m living with one of the tutors, I mean I’m sharing his flat.’
    â€˜Oh, who’s that?’ Leela was having a hard time focusing on his face. Why? It was a well-appointed face. His dark hair, pushed back, made a curl then flopped like a waterfall over his brow.
    There’s nothing behind his face, she thought, and realised he had been speaking.
    â€˜Where do you live?’ He said it patiently, as though speaking through glue, probably for the second time. Must concentrate.
    â€˜Oh, on the boulevard Saint-Denis.’
    â€˜Ha ha, really?’
    â€˜The boulevard Saint-Denis,’ Leela repeated. ‘Not the rue Saint-Denis. It’s perpendicular. At the north end of the rue Saint-Denis.’
    â€˜But it’s quite something, isn’t it, that street? God!’
    His face became earnest, his eyebrows wavered; she noticed his black jacket, well cut, and the thin cotton scarf wrapped several times around his throat, mentally clocked the time and energy he must have put into assembling this look. Again she had the strange, unwelcome sense that behind it all, scarf, handsomeness, jacket, there was nothing: shadows in the sunshine day.
    â€˜How do you mean?’
    â€˜Well, all those ads in phone booths, those little doorways – video parlours.’ His eyes bulged at her, and she suspected him. ‘It’s pretty depressing, isn’t it?’
    Leela thought of Baudelaire’s consumptive girlfriend; she was still there, but today she lived up a narrow staircase, and had to fuck businessmen and be videoed while she did it, a piece of paper with ‘virgin, just arrived’ written on it in the doorway below.
    She had an intense urge to get away from Greg.
    â€˜I’ve got to – excuse me.’ She smiled and walked towards Nina and Tessa, who were laughing and drinking across the room in his line of sight.
    â€˜Hm, he’s lovely, who’s that?’ Tessa enquired.
    â€˜Some guy, he’s living with Jim Davis.’
    â€˜He’s cute,’ Nina said. ‘Listen, my brother’s coming here for a visit in a few days. Are you free on Sunday? We were maybe going to go out for lunch.’
    â€˜That sounds great,’ Leela said.
    Nina lowered her voice. ‘Hey, what’s happening with that man you met?’
    â€˜Simon? I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in a bit.’
    Before the end of the evening, Leela, now much drunker, sought out Greg again. His eyes flashed alarm when she approached, but she talked to him for ten minutes, discovered that they had grown up not far away from each other – though he must have had a genteel, quite English set of parents, and, she thought, a minor public school education – and discussed with him his interest in amateur theatre. Like her, he felt he didn’t see enough plays. There was Shakespeare in the twentieth somewhere that week. She gave him her telephone number.
    â€˜I’ll call you,’ he said, his eyes frightened.
    She went home inebriated and truculent, and stayed up too late.

    In the morning, the day was clear and mild, and the flat was filling with water. Her green television bobbed on clean water; sun spilled into the room and refracted from small waves; water rose towards her platform bed. She