Free Exposure by Talitha Stevenson Page B

back and forth squeaking,
'Peow! Peow
!' at each other, their fingers pointed like guns.
    The doctor was only a year or so older than they were. Her name was Dr Bandari. She gave them prescriptions for painkillers and told them to go to the hospital dispensary. She said, 'Look, you really shouldn't drink with these,' and smiled. She wore the Muslim
hijab
and they were glad to escape from her purity, from the correct assumptions she seemed to be making about their lives.
    When they got out on to the street, the traffic looked fast and dangerous. The darkness had gathered itself without their knowledge while they sat in the windowless hospital, and the headlights and glaring shop windows were threatening. They felt a need to stay together. They were connected by an important experience and were not yet ready to allow others in.
    'Lets go back to my place,' Luke suggested.
    'Cool. Perfect, actually,' Ludo said. 'You've got DVDs and shit. We can chill out there.'
    'Yeah, we'll hide out.'
    'Exactly. We won't even answer our phones,' Jessica said.
    This made sense to all of them. They hailed a cab.
    Luke was glad he had suggested they go to his place. He wanted Arianne to see his flat. He wanted her to take in the way it looked, what it said about him. His father had given him and Sophie a hundred thousand pounds each to start themselves off and he had bought his first place at twenty-two. He had sold it for a good profit in the London housing boom and put everything into this new one. It was in Notting Hill. It was open-plan. You had a power-shower then walked serenely, barefoot, across the polished wood floor. Your guests drank martinis on the suede sofa. That was the look. He had recently had a thirty-two-inch plasma-screen TV delivered—one of the white ones, which were a limited edition, if she cared about that kind of thing. Irritatingly, most girls didn't and he knew Lucy faked it, saying obvious things, like, 'Oooh. Is it surround sound?' which of course it bloody was.
    In the taxi on the way there, they drove past Ludo's car. It was more wrecked than they had realized. The bonnet was crushed and the passenger side was buckled in just between the front and the back seat; it had missed Jessica and Luke by inches. They both squinted, picturing their body shapes on either side of the dent, experiencing a completely abstracted form of pain, the idea of pain. Someone had put a bunch of flowers on the roof, assuming everyone had been killed.
    'It's like being at the scene of your own death,' Arianne said. They were all quiet for a moment.
    'We should drink champagne or something,' said Luke. 'We're fucking lucky to be alive. Let's stop and buy a couple of bottles of champagne and celebrate.'
    Arianne rested her head on his shoulder. He had said something that pleased her. It was an immediately addictive sensation. He found himself looking out of the window as if to find space for the deluge of pride. She could move him from despair to elation by the slightest sign of her approval. Just a few weeks later he would have bankrupted himself for her, left his job, sold all his possessions. Her personality destroyed all sense of proportion, the way the height and velocity of an aeroplane can make the whole canopy of a forest look like moss held close to the face. Luke felt his mind's eye spiral back into his imagination in search of a scale by which to measure the importance of her remarks. Her head tattooed its shape on his shoulder.
    What accounted for this effect she had? He was not the first man to feel it.
    In fact the explanation, when accompanied by her unquestionable physical beauty, was surprisingly simple. There are few examples of unqualified achievement in a lifetime. Success is generally tainted by all the failures that came before it, or diminished by a prologue of endurance and compromise. Naturally, people are driven to seek out the indubitable. Some climb mountains—after all, who can argue with a boot on a rock