Free Corpsing by Toby Litt

on to the earth that lay above her, but my embarrassment held me back. I’d watched that sinking too many times: my natural reaction had been taken away from me. My mourning had been disallowed by soap opera, by TV movies, by Hollywood. I felt myself too English ever to get over my grief: someone needed to tell me that I could allow myself the vulgarity of tears, the kitsch of distraction, the camp of complete prostration.
    But no-one was around to do that.

23
    In the taxi on the way back to Mortlake I tried to work things out in my head. There were, it seemed, certain immediate facts I could begin with. In her phonecall to me, Lily had said she’d been blown out by someone else for the Le Corbusier dinner date.
    Certain other details of the evening recurred to confirm this: Lily’s dress – she wouldn’t have worn a new ghost frock just to meet me. I had never seen it before, and so it must have been a recent purchase, post-split. It screamed special occasion. It strongly hinted at romance – Lily wanting to look her absolute gorgeous best.
    This was for the person she had hoped to be meeting.
    She’d phoned me from her mobile. She’d probably been doing something up in town. Something to do with the new play. No time to go home and get a less special dress.
    So who was it she had been intending to meet? Who had cancelled?
    The main suspect was Cyril. He was always sniffing around. If Lily had been looking for something instant, he’d probably have been it. Then there was the possibility of someone new – someone I’d never heard of. If that were the case, then it was most likely someone from the new play she was about to start rehearsing: the producer, the director, or even the writer.
    I would have to think some more about that.
    The hitman had known who Lily was – probably having seen her on television. The fact that he shot her first suggested thatshe was the main target – the emotional focus of the crime. But the fact that I had been shot as well suggested that someone was jealous of whoever it was Lily would have been with, even if it hadn’t been me.
    There was another line of thought to pursue as well – less comfortably.
    Lily and I had not been one of those couples who, when they are falling apart, stop having sex. In fact, we seemed – during those final months – to be having sex a lot more, and a lot more spontaneously, in odder places: lifts, alleys, toilets, cupboards. We had gone
al fresco
for the first time (on Hampstead Heath) only a month before the end. The last time we had sex before we split was conventional enough – at home, in bed, with candlelight and cocaine. That was ten days before she dumped me.
    Lily was on the pill, but was often forgetful about taking it. We had agreed that, if one of us were to have unprotected sex with someone else, we would confess to it – and use condoms until we’d both had AIDS tests. During the split-up conversation (sofa, tears, bad pop songs), I asked Lily if she’d been sleeping with someone else. Her reply was devastating: ‘That isn’t the point.’
    It was for me. If she had that kind of flippant attitude about it, I wasn’t going to stick around.
    And so, while it was quite possible that I was the baby’s father, it was also quite possible that it was someone else.
    As far as I could work out, Lily had decided to have the abortion about five weeks after we split up. The last time we had sex (ten days before we split) had been just after her period. If I were the father, she would have skipped about three weeks after we broke up. But it wasn’t like Lily to be bothered with pregnancy tests. She’d have waited to see if she skipped another month – and only
then
started to worry.
    So, the father was almost certainly me or someone she had been fucking whilst still going out with me. There simply hadn’tbeen time for her to get pregnant and then get worried about being pregnant in the six weeks after we split.
    Clearly, I had to find