Free Under My Skin by Alison Jameson Page A

You?
    Matilda said goodbye to Glassman and watched as he leaned down to open the cab door. She stood still and managed to smile when he kissed her cold cheek and when the cab moved away she turned and pressed a small red-gloved hand to the glass. Without noticing people or streets or shop fronts she found her way to her apartment and giving her keys a little shake, she quietly let herself in. Glassman did not understand that after he had told her the news she had felt her own breath slip away. That as her body seemed to curl and then stiffen on the sheets beside him, she felt something real and full of happiness and life just die inside. She had no way to tell him. No means to explain. There were no words big enough to show him that her life, all of it, every day marked out on the calendar, had been for and around him.
    Her cat Godot had not been fed for two days. Any longer and he would start chewing on his own tail. She opened the windows and a light snow shower came in and she sat there on the end of her bed and felt the cold wind on her face.
    When she got up she saw that she had creased the sheets and she was somehow glad of this. It was in her mind a sign of life she didn’t know she had. She had been let down before and she knew the mechanics of it. How she could begin to move on again after losing a love. It had happened only last year too and now she had a cat, knowing that there was an agreed limit on their love. She would feed Godot and in turn he would stay. He would live with her, asking for nothing, just a roof over his head, a handful of Go-Cat and a clean littertray. Without Glassman she would have to go back to love in dry handfuls now.
    She closed the window and seemed to pause and watch her own every move. She had loved this apartment. The curved tongue-and-groove panelling. How the room curled and how her bed, a wide cream expanse with Egyptian cotton sheets and pillowcases covered in blue cornflowers, had kept her safe until now. The bathtub with the shining taps. The goldfish swimming on her shower curtains. The specially chosen walnut doorknobs and the French windows in the kitchen. The previous owner had left a red antique scales and Glassman had helped her to paint the kitchen door to match. Her crockery came from Denmark. In summer she grew sunflowers on her balcony. Until now, when she closed her door behind her, she moved to Europe and said goodbye to New York. But that was before she went swimming and forgot about loving water and instead seemed to fall into him. Her friends said she was crazy and then they saw it too and could only stand by and watch how her life began to turn and turn around his. How nothing mattered. How everything, her work, her home, her family, were all just things to be passed on a road that led to him. He had a way of making her feel
cherished
. That was it. He would lay one hand on her shoulder as he walked from the kitchen to the bathroom and she felt alive. He could look at her and smile over his small silver glasses and make her feel like a three-year-old.
    She was not beautiful in any conventional way. She knew that. But he had wanted to touch her from the start. He made her feel wanted and gave her a real sense of place. And now, without him, her whole life would become an irritation. The phone could not ring now unless it was him. The doorman could not give her any message unless it was from him. Evenher parents who lived in Connecticut were in the way. Her friends, giant obstacles to her thoughts. At least if she could not have him, she could be alone with her thoughts of him. Perhaps she always knew it was all going to end. He did not want her to sublet her apartment. He had baulked at making promises. Told her about his illness. That in ten years he would be sixty, but nothing mattered to her. Matilda was in love with him. There were red hearts being puffed towards him and they kept coming even when he looked away.
    The first item was a piece of glass from his