What Happens Now

Suddenly, Max pulled out and, reaching underneath my back with one of his muscly arms, flipped me on to my stomach. I tried to look over my shoulder at him in what I hoped was a smouldering way, although I knew my eye make-up had probably smudged again so I looked like Noel Fielding. Max was on his knees behind me, but lowered his head to kiss my left shoulder, then my right shoulder, then, slowly, he kissed his way down my spine. His beard gently tickled my back and I sighed into my pillow. Then the kissing stopped and I was pulled backwards by my legs, Max’s hands underneath my thighs. My bottom was now on the end of the bed, my knees on the carpet.

‘Give me your hands,’ he said, so I lifted my arms from under my head and moved them behind me.

‘Here, put them here,’ he said, putting one hand on each of my butt cheeks and spreading them apart slightly. There I was, lying on my chest, with my hands on my bottom as if I was about to do a naked version of the Macarena.

Max then buried his head in my crease, starting to flick up and down with his tongue again, harder this time. It felt so good that I didn’t even worry about what my bottom looked like at that angle. I just wanted him to carry on, harder, faster, harder, faster, harder, faster, until that hot feeling of being on the cusp of exploding again and I came, moaning into the pillow.

‘That was amazing,’ I whispered, looking over my shoulder.

‘Good,’ he replied, and then, within seconds, he was lying on top of me, having pushed his cock into me again. His forearms were on the bed and he moved back and forth, breathing loudly and more urgently until he too made a sort of roar and flopped down on my back.

I silently congratulated myself for the performance then wondered how long I had to lie there underneath him before trying to move. I needed a wee.

He kissed my neck and rolled off a few moments later.

‘I’m just going to nip to the bathroom,’ I said, sitting up on the edge of the bed.

‘That one,’ said Max, inclining his head towards a doorway besides his wardrobe.

‘Thanks,’ I said. Strange how you could suddenly go into polite mode when moments ago someone was licking your bottom.

I sat down on the loo in his bathroom – grey marble and black and white photos of mountains on the walls – and tried to wee. It took ages. Come on, Lil, he’ll think you’re doing something revolting in here if you don’t hurry up. Finally, I weed. Then I wiped, stood up and looked at my face in the mirror. My cheeks were flushed, my lips pink. I reached for the Colgate, lying beside the basin, and dabbed it on my forefinger. Then I ran the finger over my teeth and gums, turned on the tap, palmed a pool of water into my mouth and swilled it around.

I tiptoed back towards his bed and got into it, glancing across at him as I lay down. He was lying on his back, one arm bent above his head on his pillow, but rolled on to his side as soon as I was lying down.

‘Head up,’ he instructed, so I lifted it and he put one arm underneath it and wrapped the other over me. Spooning someone you’d met only hours earlier seemed weirdly intimate. Even more intimate than them licking your bottom. But it was the perfect end to this most perfect night, and I fell asleep without even a second of neurosis that I shouldn’t have gone home with him on the first date.

The only thing was, when I woke up in the morning, Max wasn’t there. I lifted my head to survey his room, listening for clues. Ouuuuuuuuchhhhhh, my head. It felt as if my brain had grown too big for my skull overnight. Throb, throb, throb. I tried to ignore the pain and listen for any noise in the flat. But the place was silent. What time was it? I looked on the floor for my bag. No bag. I must have left it in the sitting room. Then I spotted a clock on his bedside table: 8.23 a.m. Early for a Sunday. I sat up in bed.

The floor of Max’s room looked like a battlefield, various items of discarded clothing lying on the carpet like wounded soldiers. My knickers, my bra, my shirt, my jeans, all at different spots. I swung my legs out and reached for my knickers, pulled them on and then tiptoed to listen at his bathroom door. Nope. Nothing. I retrieved my clothes from their various locations, put everything on and opened his bedroom door a fraction to the hall to see if I could hear a kettle or a radio out there. Still nothing. I found my way back to the living room but he wasn’t there either. Then I saw a note on the kitchen counter.

L, SORRY TO ABANDON YOU, JUST GOT A FEW WORK THINGS TO DO. BUT MAKE YOURSELF A CUP OF TEA AND GREAT TO MEET. M.

I stood at the kitchen counter analysing it. Analysing every word. Analysing every letter. No kiss after the M, was my first thought. And did ‘great to meet!’ feel a bit corporate? I don’t want to harp on about the bottom thing, but ‘great to meet!’ felt like something you said after meeting someone at a middle-management awayday, not what you said after putting your tongue in – I quickly counted in my head – three of their orifices. And who had work this early on a Sunday morning? But he’d also called me ‘L’, which seemed sweet. A bit intimate. L&M, we’d be, if we were a couple. As in ‘Shall we have L&M round for dinner?’ or ‘I wonder if L&M are free this weekend?’

I ordered myself to stop. What was I doing, standing barefoot in a stranger’s kitchen, wondering about what we’d be called if we were a couple? That was nuts. I needed a cup of tea and thirty-seven glasses of water, plus toast. And some Nurofen. And some more water. Lots more water. My mouth felt like something had died in it. But I didn’t want a cup of tea in Max’s flat. I wanted to get out of there and into my own space where I could go over the evening in my head, or at least the bits I could remember.

I folded the note up and slid it into my pocket, grabbed my bag off the sofa and went back to the bedroom. I resisted the urge to poke around his room too much – what if he was watching, somehow? – so made the bed and then took my bag into his bathroom to sort out my face. It was predictably terrible. Dry flaky skin. Faintly bloodshot eyes. Probably a good thing Max wasn’t there. I’d seen better-looking animals when I took my class to London Zoo.

A few minutes later I let myself out, praying silently that I didn’t bump into a neighbour. I made it to the front door of his building when I realized I didn’t know how to get home. What line was Hampstead on? I felt for my phone in my bag and retrieved it. Uh-ohhhhh. Eight missed calls from Jess and a mad number of WhatsApps. I scrolled through them. The gist, basically, was had I been murdered.

Are you dead? Please don’t be dead read her penultimate message.

Then the last one, sent at midnight: If you’re just shagging and not dead, then I might kill you myself when you surface. LET ME KNOW YOU’RE ALL RIGHT xxxxx.

I was about to open Citymapper and work out how long it would take me to get home when my phone started buzzing in my hand. It was Jess.

‘Hi,’ I croaked into the phone.

‘Oh thank God, you’re not dead,’ she said, deadpan.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Not quite. But I feel like I might die soon.’

‘Did you stay with him?’

Christ. I wasn’t up to this before a cup of tea. It was like being on the phone to MI5.

‘Yup.’

Jess whooped down the phone. ‘String up the bunting, let the bells ring out. I need to see you immediately.’

I sighed on the pavement. Had anyone in history ever needed a sugary tea more than I did at that very moment? ‘I’m about to go home, love, think I need a bath and piece of toast. What are you doing later?’

‘No, forget later. Where are you? Why don’t you come over now and I’ll cook us breakfast while you have a bath here. I can hear Clem clanking downstairs in the kitchen.’

She was in one of her determined moods. No point in arguing. I didn’t have the energy. And maybe it would be better to go debrief with Jess. To be fed and watered by someone else and go home afterwards. Grace and Riley were probably making the flat walls shake this morning anyway.

‘OK,’ I replied. ‘I’m… in Hampstead… somewhere. Fuck knows how I get down to you. But give me, say, forty-five minutes?’

‘Amazing,’ said Jess. ‘I’ll go to Nisa and get some juice.’

It took me an hour to cross London. Jess and Clem lived in a tall, thin house on the north side of the river near Chiswick. Theirs was one of those red-brick houses that overlook the Thames, with big windows surrounded by climbing ivy; a road ran in front of the house and beyond that there was a little private garden which sloped down to the river. Most of the houses along this stretch were immaculate, the sort of homes lived in by rich hedge-funders or app millionaires. They had wisteria climbing up their walls, roses twisting over the railings and painted signs on their gates with grand names like Heron House and River View. Dog walkers strolled up and down the road, peering nosily into the bay windows, trying to gawp at the owners.

Jess and Clem’s house was different. Chaotic was the word I’d use, but I mean it affectionately. It was just as big as all the others – three storeys, plus an attic room in the roof which Jess – a portrait artist – had turned into her studio when she and Clem moved in. But if you were a dog walker wandering past their place, you might have assumed it had been taken over by squatters. The paint was peeling off the window frames, the path to their front door was uneven because several bricks had mysteriously disappeared and moss had long since covered the others. There was no painted sign on their railings – which were rusting – just a number: 19. Although the ‘9’ had swung upside down so it looked a bit like it was number 16 Chiswick Mall.

Clem and Jess couldn’t afford to patch it up. They couldn’t have afforded to live there at all, but they’d inherited their house from their grandmother, Blanche. She’s dead now but she was a famous concert pianist, who had a daughter with an Italian conductor in the 1960s. The daughter was Jess and Clem’s mum, Nicoletta, who’d inherited the conductor’s fiery tendencies and just about managed to get her two children safely to adulthood before abandoning London a decade or so ago for an apartment in Rome.

By the time I knocked on their door that morning, I was practically hallucinating about tea.

‘Here she is,’ said Jess, as she opened the door in her dressing gown. She stood back and squinted at me. ‘I can tell you’ve had sex.’

‘What?’ I rasped, standing on the step but leaning on the door frame. ‘You can’t possibly tell that.’

‘I can,’ she said, standing aside as I went in. ‘You look shattered. And you have sex hair.’ She waggled a finger in small circles at my head and then closed the door behind me. ‘Plus I can smell it.’

‘You’re a bloodhound, are you?’ I said, heading towards the kitchen. ‘That’s gross, by the way.’

‘I have a very sensitive nose. Tea?’

I nodded and pulled out a seat at the kitchen table, then sat down and put my arms on the table in front of me, laying my face on top of them. ‘Where’s Clem gone?’

‘Out walking.’

Clem was a terrible musician who had to supplement his creative endeavours by dog-walking. He’d gone through various musical stages since leaving uni. The guitar phase. The drumming phase. Even, at one particularly bad moment, an accordion phase. Now he was into his electronic phase and was working on his ‘first single’. He’d been working on his ‘first single’ a while and, lately, this seemed to mean a lot of sitting in his bedroom, enormous headphones on, tapping away at his laptop. Whenever he felt an artistic block, which was frequently, he sought refuge in the kitchen, hacking about with knives and experimenting with strange bits of meat the butcher on Chiswick High Road had persuaded him to buy. Offal, if you were unlucky. I remembered a vile liver tagliatelle; he was roughly as good at cooking as he was at music.

On the upside, he was the most popular dog-walker in the area, not only because he was so charming, but also because he had a boyish face that appealed to women of a certain age. He was tall and blond but had soft, pink cheeks that looked like they’d never needed to be shaved and he was always dishevelled. Mismatched socks, shirts fastened with the wrong buttons, tufty hair poking up like straw from the head of a scarecrow. But he came off as endearing, rather than useless, and so he had successfully, if unintentionally, cornered the local bored wives market. They scrabbled to sign their dogs up with him and then appeared in very pink lipstick and tight lycra at the house each morning to drop off their pugs and French bulldogs.

Jess busied herself with mugs and milk while I remained with my head on the kitchen table, gazing at the TV in the corner where a politician whose name I should know was droning on about some scandal in the Sunday papers.

‘Walt was upstairs,’ Jess went on, ‘but I’ve sent him home.’

Walt was an art dealer – full name Walter de Winter – who Jess had been dating for the past couple of months. Very English and very posh, he always wore corduroys and was ‘too fumbly’ in bed, Jess had told me a few weeks ago. But he took her to exhibitions and discussed painters with her.

‘Oh sorry,’ I said, sitting up. ‘I didn’t mean to crash your Sunday morning.’

Jess shrugged in her dressing gown. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I want to know everything.’ Then she lowered her voice. ‘And I can’t spend all day with him again. Yesterday afternoon was too much but I’ll tell you about that in a minute. You first.’

I wondered where to start. ‘OK, so we met at the pub, and it was total agony to begin with.’

‘Why?’

‘Just sticky. Couldn’t think of anything to say so made small talk about where we lived until a couple of drinks in.’

‘What happened then? Do you want sugar?’

‘Two please. And then it just got a bit easier. Talking, I mean. Then our respective relationship history came up.’

She spun around from the kettle on the sideboard and raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Did it now?’

‘I didn’t bang on about it. Promise. And he mentioned his ex as well so we were equal.’

‘OK, go on.’

I sat up from the table and leant back against my chair. ‘And then… we just stayed there getting more and more pissed, basically.’

‘Aaaaaaand?’

‘Then he suggested going back to his place.’

‘Aaaaaaaaand?’

‘And then, well, we had sex.’

Jess put a mug down in front of me so hard that tea spilled over the edges on to the table. ‘I’m not cooking you breakfast for that pathetic recap. Come on, more details.’

I heard the front door close in the hall and Clem appeared in the kitchen in his dog-walking kit: ancient green Barbour with plastic bags bursting from one pocket and a whistle hanging around his neck. ‘Lil, top of the morning.’ He bent down and kissed my head. ‘Bit early for you, isn’t it?’

‘Shhhh, Clem, she’s telling me about her date and she’s just got to the sex,’ said Jess.

‘Excellent,’ said Clem. ‘Can I join in? Is the kettle on?’

‘It’s just boiled,’ said Jess. ‘And I’m making bacon. Want some?’

‘Yes please.’

‘It was sort of… athletic,’ I started. ‘Because he’s a climber.’

‘A climber?’ said Clem. ‘What does he climb?’

‘Be quiet, Clem. He’s climbing Lil right now,’ said Jess, peeling rashers of bacon from a packet and laying them in a frying pan.

‘He sort of threw me around. Was quite… dominant. One minute I was underneath him, the next he was behind me.’ I stopped and thought. ‘It was like having sex with the Jolly Green Giant.’

Jess threw her head back and laughed. ‘Ha, I’m so jealous. Did he have a jolly green penis?’

Clem sat down heavily at the table. ‘Girls, it is the Sabbath, you know.’

‘Never mind Jesus, Clem,’ said Jess, then she looked back at me. ‘How have you left it?’

‘OK, this is the thing,’ I said. ‘When I woke up this morning, he was gone.’

‘Gone?’ they chorused.

‘Mmm. As in, gone from bed. His bed. Vanished. And I found a note in his kitchen that said he had “work”.’

‘Have you got the note?’ said Jess.

‘Yes, Miss Marple,’ I said, leaning forward in my chair and sliding it from my jeans pocket. ‘Here you go.’

She smoothed it on the table and read it silently.

‘But yeah, I would like to see him again,’ I said, while Jess read. ‘It was the ideal date, after the first bit. We chatted for hours in the pub. And I did vaguely wonder whether I should play hard to get and not go to his place, but it just felt so natural, that I thought, why not?’

Jess nodded while still looking at the note. ‘I’m not sure rules like that matter any more.’

‘I’m always thrilled if a girl comes home with me on a first date,’ added Clem.

‘Well that’s the other thing,’ I said. ‘I know it was just a first date, but it felt like there was more to it than that. That there was something, you know?’

Jess looked up at me from the note. ‘Well it’s not Shakespeare. But it’s sweet. Polite. Good manners. Have you texted him?’

‘No, obviously not. I can hardly form proper sentences this morning, let alone compose a message.’

‘OK, let’s have breakfast and then think about it. You need to be casual yet sexy. Clem, you’re on toast duty. And can you get the ketchup out? And put the kettle on again. We all need more tea.’

‘Some people call Sunday the day of rest,’ he said. But he stood up anyway, winking at me as he did.

An hour or so later, plates smeared with egg yolk and baked bean juice, Jess held her hand out and asked for my phone.

‘OK, but can you not send anything without checking first?’ I said, passing it over the table.

‘Obviously I won’t. But I’m very good at this.’

I narrowed my eyes at her.

‘I am!’ she insisted. ‘Aren’t I, Clem? Didn’t I help you with whatshecalled last week? Milly? Philly? Jilly?’

‘Tilly,’ corrected Clem, who always had someone on the go. Mostly petite blonde girls who he wooed intently with Spotify playlists and by taking them for romantic walks along the river. They often disappeared shortly after he cooked for them, but Clem remained stoically unaffected and simply moved on, as if he were a Labrador looking ahead to its next breakfast.

‘Yes, Tilly, exactly,’ went on Jess. ‘How long is she going to last, by the way? I had to help her with the front door because she couldn’t work out how to open it.’

‘She’s very sweet and the door was probably double-locked,’ said Clem, ‘and anyway, at least she’s not boring. I had to hide in my bedroom last week because Walt was loitering downstairs and I couldn’t face another conversation about his latest artist. And he leaves terrible skid marks in the loo, if you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Clem!’ said Jess. The house echoed with cries of ‘Clem!’ several times a day. ‘At least he’s got a brain.’

‘Enough!’ I said, interrupting them before they really got going. ‘Can we write this message?’ I nodded at my phone in Jess’s hands. ‘What about “Thanks for last night, had a lovely time. Hope the head’s feeling all right this morning.” With one kiss?’

Jess looked disgusted. ‘You can’t say “had a lovely time”. That’s what you’d say to a great-aunt who’d taken you out for tea and scones. And not the head thing either.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s feeble, that’s why.’

I sat back in my seat and thought. Funny how much energy we can all expend on a few words in messages like these. Hours, potentially, to write a message that was designed to sound as if it had been composed casually in a few seconds.

And that was when I saw him, while I was gazing blankly at the news again. I didn’t take it in for a few moments. I just stared at the screen, thinking the dark hair looked familiar. Then I realized. It was him. It was Max.

But WHAT? What the hell was Max doing on television? Why was he sitting in the news studio talking to the news presenter? I looked at the time. Just after midday. I’d left his apartment basically three hours ago and he was now in front of me on the screen. I felt like I was dreaming. Maybe I was dreaming? Maybe I was still asleep and this was all made up. But it didn’t seem like a dream. I wiggled my fingers in front of me. They were definitely my real fingers. And a fresh bout of bickering between Jess and Clem over the washing up was also quite loud and real, which is why I couldn’t hear what Max was saying.

‘It’s your turn,’ Jess said, reaching for our plates.

‘Guys…’ I tried to interrupt, eyes remaining on the TV.

‘Absolutely not,’ said Clem. ‘I did it last night.’

‘Shhhhh, don’t fight in front of guests,’ said Jess.

‘Calm down, it’s just Lil,’ he replied.

‘Guys, stop it,’ I said, louder, so they both looked at me.

‘What?’ said Jess.

‘It’s Max, it’s the guy, he’s… he’s there… he’s on TV.’ I nodded my head at the television and they both turned to it. ‘Can you turn it up a bit, Clem?’

‘British explorer Max Rushbrooke aims to be the first man to scale…’ Jess started reading from the screen but stopped at a complicated name.

‘Muchu Chhish,’ said Clem. ‘In Pakistan, I think.’ Then he swivelled round in his seat to look at me. ‘But, Lil, that’s Max Rushbrooke, the explorer. You went on a date last night with Max Rushbrooke?’ He sounded offensively surprised.

‘Technically she didn’t just go on a date with him. She shagged him,’ said Jess, who’d stopped gathering plates and was also staring at the screen. ‘But who is he? How do you know about him, Clem?’

‘Shhhhh, guys, seriously, can we just watch for a second?’ I nodded at the television again and gestured at Clem to turn the volume up.

‘It’s a daunting expedition. My most ambitious challenge to date,’ said Max, ‘but I’ve dreamt about this mountain my whole life. Ever since I was a small boy.’

‘How confident are you about succeeding?’ said the presenter, a blonde woman who was wearing quite a tight, red dress and straining towards Max.

Max looked seriously at her, his eyebrows knitting together. ‘Pretty confident. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. We just have to keep our fingers crossed for a weather window.’

‘And when do you leave?’

‘We fly from London next week, and then it’s about a week to base camp where we’ll be acclimatizing for a few weeks. Then hopefully starting the climb shortly after that, hopefully mid-October,’ Max replied.

‘Well we’ll be rooting for you, and thank you very much for coming in,’ said the presenter, still gurning at him.

‘Not at all,’ said Max. ‘Thank you for having me.’

They smiled at one another again before the presenter swung back to face the camera. ‘That was Max Rushbrooke talking about his upcoming expedition to climb Muchu Chhish, one of the highest unconquered mountains in the world. So best of luck to him, and next we’re going to Adam for the weather.’

I put my hands to my cheeks and shook my head in disbelief. ‘I mean,’ I started saying, ‘I had no idea. He just said he was a climber.’ And then I thought about his flat. ‘But it makes more sense now. He had photos of himself in climbing kit and pictures of mountains everywhere.’

‘I’m confused,’ said Jess. ‘Clem, how do you know about him?’

‘Guys, come on, he’s pretty well-known,’ said Clem, frowning as if exasperated by our lack of expertise about explorers, remote control still in his hand.

‘No?’ he said, to our blank faces. ‘He’s a sort of Bear Grylls. I think they’ve climbed together, actually. And I’ve read about his expeditions before. Max’s, I mean. Can’t remember what the last one was…’ He stopped and frowned. ‘Somewhere in Tibet. And I think he comes from quite a posh family. His dad’s a cousin of the Queen or something.’