46

After the visitors left, Sunday Afternoon Suffocation suddenly descended on me. The bleak, dissatisfied sensation that if something didn’t happen soon, if something didn’t change, I would burst.

I roamed restlessly from the dining-room to the sitting-room to my bedroom and back again, unable to settle anywhere. I felt like a caged animal.

I yearned to be in the outside world where I could kickstart events by getting off my face. Springboard my emotions from the grey, misty depths of depression to the clear blue sky of happiness. But in the Cloisters there was nothing to ejector-seat me.

I consoled myself with the thought that it was my last Sunday afternoon in the kip. That in less than a week I wouldn’t have to feel those feelings anymore.

But, with a throb of undiluted angst, I realized I’d felt such restlessness and emptiness in the past. Often. It usually kicked in at about four o’clock on a Sunday, but had arrived slightly late today, no doubt still on New York time.

Maybe it would follow me, when I left the Cloisters.

Maybe, I agreed. But at least then I’d be able to do something about it.

All the other inmates were getting on my nerves, with their bickering and bantering. Mike was in a right fouler, parading round, pawing the ground, looking more like a bull than ever. He remained tightlipped about the source of his bad humour, but Clarence told me that Mike’s bratty son Willy had greeted his father by saying ‘There’s the alco-pop.’

‘What???’ Mike had demanded.

‘Alco-pop,’ sang Willie. ‘You’re me da, so you’re my pop, and you’re an alco. Put it together and you’re an alco-pop!’

‘He nearly brained the child,’ Clarence intoned, far too close to my ear.

Vincent, on the other hand, was irritating me because he was in such a good mood. In flying form because he’d got his wife to bring in the Babyboomer Trivial Pursuit questions with her. He waved the red box around in Stalin’s face. ‘Now we’ll see who’s so great at getting the pieces of pie, so we will!’ He crowed triumphantly. ‘Now that you’ve had no chance to learn the new answers off.’

Stalin burst into tears. He’d been hoping that Rita would come and visit him and call off the divorce, but there had been no sign of her.

‘Let him alone!’ Neil turned on Vincent. When Neil realized he was an alcoholic, he spent a day or two crying, then took Vincent’s place as Mr Angry. He raged against himself for being an alcoholic, but he also raged against everyone and everything else. Josephine said his anger was to be expected, that no one wants to be an alcoholic, but that he’d come to terms with it soon. We couldn’t wait. In the meantime we were all terrified of him.

‘The poor fecker is in bits about his wife,’ Neil roared into Vincent’s face. ‘So don’t be tormenting him any further.’

‘Sorry.’ Vincent looked mortified. ‘I wasn’t, it was only a joke…’

‘You’re very aggressive, so you are,’ Neil bellowed.

‘I know,’ Vincent mumbled humbly. ‘But I’ve been trying hard…’

‘Not hard enough!’ Neil slammed his fist down on the table.

Everyone started heading for the door at high speed.

‘Sorry,’ Vincent muttered.

Everyone paused and began to return.

Things quietened down briefly until Barry the child raced into the dining-room, all of a dither. Apparently great ructions were in progress upstairs because Celine had found Davy reading the racing pages. As Davy was a compulsive gambler, that was as bad as someone like Neil being found distilling homebrew under his bed.

According to Barry, Davy had gone ballistic. So much so that Finbar the gardener, handy man and all-round, general half-wit had to be called upon to restrain him. With that, there was a surge from the dining-room, Barry the bringer of glad tidings at its head, as everyone ran for ringside seats at the mêlée.

I didn’t go.

I was too narky to be bothered.

But, when the dust had settled, I perked up to discover I was alone in the dining-room with Chris. Even bitch-face Misty had left.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked gently, coming to sit beside me.

I looked into his blue-water eyes and felt tingly from his beauty.

‘No,’ I shifted. ‘I feel… I feel… I don’t know, just fed-up.’

‘Right, I see.’ He thoughtfully ran his big square hand through his wheat-coloured hair, wearing a becomingly worried face while I breathed hopefully at him. Oh, how I savoured being the centre of his attention!

‘What can we do to cheer Rachel up?’ he said, as if he was just talking to himself. I positively squirmed with pleasure.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he suggested brightly.

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘Out there.’ He nodded at the window.

‘But it’s dark,’ I protested. ‘And cold.’

‘Come on,’ he urged, with one of his special wry smiles. ‘It’s the best I can offer you.

‘For the moment,’ he added, tantalizingly.

I ran to get my coat and the two of us went out into the face-numbingly cold night and marched around the dark grounds together.

I didn’t say much. Not by choice. I would have loved to talk to him, but I was nervous and my brain did what it always did when I was nervous. It turned into a lump of concrete; grey and heavy and empty.

He didn’t strike up a conversation either. We walked for a long time in silence, the only sounds our breathing, as we blew out clouds of vapour in front of our faces, and the crunch of the grass under our boots.

It was too dark to see his face. So, when he said ‘Hold it, hold it, stop a second!’ and put his hand on my arm, I didn’t know what he was up to. My down theres leapt with the anticipation of a furtive, sylvan grope. And I regretted wearing six layers of clothes.

But he was only linking arms with me.

‘Give me your arm,’ he said, crooking my elbow into his. ‘OK, off we go again!’

‘Off we go indeed!’ I said, trying to pretend, with my excessive jolliness, that I wasn’t at all bothered by my contact with him. That my breathing hadn’t become shallow and ragged and that a thrill hadn’t shot, like an express train, from my elbow straight through to my loins.

On and on we stamped, side by side, arms and shoulders touching. We’re nearly the same height, I told myself, trying to turn it into a virtue. We’re well matched.