Free The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse Page A

enveloping us in a private cloud of light, we had been talking about friends and I’d told him my theory that being with other people is the only insulation against the sharp edges of the world. Part of it, I told him, as he rubbed his foot up my shin under the table, was the feeling that there were people to help you and look after you, of course, but the other part was simple distraction, that being with others and being involved in the business of their lives was padding against the hardness of things.
    ‘That’s what you’re really afraid of, isn’t it?’ he’d said, his foot stopping all of a sudden. ‘It frightens you more than anything else. Being alone.’
    I looked at his face. His eyes were watching me carefully. ‘Yes,’ I said.
     
    That first day I didn’t get out of bed except to stagger to the bathroom where I was very sick. I ate nothing and my stomach was emptier and emptier, the throwing up only exacerbating the aching until I was no longer sure what was hunger and what was the voracious anxiety. I didn’t open the curtains but was aware periodically of the light changing behind them, the dim daylight becoming dusk and then dark again.
    The following day, I had no choice but to get up. I was too hungry; the pain of it was clawing at my stomach. I stood on wobbling legs. The bed was rancid, the sheets soft with sweat. The stairs seemed steeper even than usual and I put my hand flat against the wall to steady myself. In the kitchen there were a few slices of bread left and I ate them straight from the bag, feeling them melt against my teeth. A cold draught blew in over the linoleum tiles, mottling the flesh of my thighs white-blue and making the bones in my feet numb. I went upstairs and got out the spare blanket I’d seen in the wardrobe. It was old and the grey wool was rough against my bare arms; it smelled of dust and the bare pine shelf. The stitching round the edge was done in contrasting red wool and sharp tears came into my eyes. I remembered a blanket that my brother had had in his cot, his in palest blue, the stitching also in red. I remembered my mother’s hands tucking it in around him.
     
    Irregular hours were one of the things that Richard and I had had in common. When he was abroad, he sometimes phoned me very late. The first time, I had been asleep and answered the phone anxiously, wondering why anyone would be ringing at nearly three o’clock in the morning. ‘It’s me,’ he said and I sat down in the wicker chair in front of the window, suddenly wide awake. ‘I know it’s late there but I wanted to talk to you.’ A thrill went through me. This was what I wanted, someone who didn’t follow the rules but called when he needed to, regardless of the time. There was a drama about it, implicit excitement. Why wait until the morning, office hours? We talked until the sky above the roofs opposite began to lighten through shades of blue so stunning I didn’t want to look away. I described them to him. He told me how he thought the estimate he’d been given by one of his contractors was too high. ‘They’re trying to rip me off,’ he said. ‘I’m not having it. They’ll regret it.’
    I laughed. ‘That sounds very serious.’
    ‘I am serious. There’s hundreds of thousands of pounds at stake here, sweetheart; I’m not fucking around. People have to learn that they can’t outsmart me.’
    I reached for the throw that I kept on the arm of the sofa; though it was summer, it was chilly in the flat in the early hours. Richard’s business attitude, the macho posturing of it, made me laugh sometimes, though of course he’d be furious if he knew. On the other hand, there was a part of me that found the sheer self-confidence of it attractive. In him, I saw for real the strength that sometimes I only pretended.
    I came to love the phone calls; there was something so intimate about them. In bed, we were the same as every man and woman, the same bodies, the same positions, even