Infidelities by Kirsty Gunn Read Free Book Online Page B

door.
    ‘Are you a musician?’ the boy said.
    Elisabeth smiled, ‘I was.’
    She detached herself from him – his hand was on her forearm – and made her way outside.
    There was a group of people standing in a clutch, four or five girls in black boots and skinny coats, young men with big jackets and parkas. She took a place beside them, on the corner. From here she could see her flat; she’d switched the lights on before she came out and the windows of the sitting room were yellow squares against the dark air, and light showed too from the bedroom above. The euphoria from before, from inside, was still with her, in her heart, in her head, but suddenly the body felt weak again. She needed to sit down. There was an upturned drinks crate by the wall, a few of them had been put out there as impromptu seating and a number of people were gathered around them, smoking. There was movement beside her, the girl from the bar; Elisabeth took her arm and they sat down together.
    ‘So’ the girl said, and there again, Elisabeth could hear, was the sun in her voice and all the blue water. It came from a long, long way away. ‘Here we are …’
    She shook two cigarettes from the packet she was carrying, passed one to Elisabeth and flicked open her lighter.
    ‘You live around here?’
    ‘I used to.’
    The tiredness was everywhere, in the bones around her eyes, in her fingertips, in the weight of the paper cigarette she held. She could lay herself down right here, right now, in the street.
    ‘Used to, eh?’ the girl said. ‘But not any more. Great place to “used to” live,’ she said, ‘I reckon.’ She shook her head, took a drag of her cigarette. ‘Yeah, I know that feeling of “used to …”’
    A great cheer sounded then, the band finishing their set, and clapping and whistling.
    ‘You know …’ Elisabeth started to say – but couldn’t finish. There were the windows of her flat, lit up against the dark.
    ‘I do know, darling,’ the girl said. ‘I know. The same for all of us, right? The same fucking lovely thing.’ She put her head back, her face upturned to the sky, to the moon as though it were the sun and she was letting it warm her and Elisabeth did the same, put her face up that the moon might shine upon her in the same way. Only she couldn’t see the moon here, it was London. She’d been alive for a very long time.
    ‘Let’s stay here for a bit,’ she said, and the girl nodded. ‘I’m okay with that. I’m good for ten minutes.’
    Ten minutes is all I need
, Elisabeth thinks now. And she pointed to her flat, the house, the beautiful tree outside. ‘I used to live right there,’ she said to the girl, pointing to the lit-up windows, to the white tree, and the elation rushed through her again like a beautiful drug. The rest of it could wait. Everything that was coming. The hospital.The music. The telephone and the calls and the things she needed to do. Telling Edward that there would be no more tests, that part was over, that she had decided to do this last bit on her own.
Ten minutes
. The flowers were there in the tree, she could see them, each one flocked home for her return. Time yet before they would be fulfilled with the promise of their own blossoming, would fall to the ground and be finished for another year.
Time now
, Elisabeth says to herself, in the bedroom, to the open sky. For now it was as though the same blossoms one by one would detach themselves from the branches and in a great flock would simply fly away.
    *

The Scenario
    At a dinner party a few weeks ago I saw my old friend Clare Revell and we immediately fell into a conversation about words and feelings. The night before I had watched the film
Melancholia
by Lars Von Trier and I told Clare that I had been irritated by its ‘lack of rigour’ – is the expression I used, that old line, meaning, in this case, I said to her, the way the film seemed pulled together, affecting as it may have been but pulled together out of