Chapter 139: Nobody Either Side II

She put her hands over her face and stood like that for a while.

"I don’t understand one word of what you’ve just said," she said through them. "And I believe all of it. And I hate that."

Then she took her hands down.

"Did they see you? The brother’s lot, the wife?"

"The wife saw me. Through a car window and then in the hall. She’ll know my face."

"And she’ll be going who was that man to anybody who’ll listen."

"Probably."

"And you went back in anyway."

"I’d already been paid. Going back in didn’t cost me anything I could count."

"It cost you her knowing your face, you daft sod," Jodie said. "For a man who’s hiding, that’s the dearest thing you’ve got."

"I know."

"No, you don’t." She took her hands down. "You don’t know what it’s like believing somebody when none of it makes sense. I’ve had 3 days of it."

"Then I’ll go and stand in the lift and you can have the flat for an hour on your own. Look at all of it. I’ll come back when you want."

"You’ll stay where you are." She pulled her coat off and dropped it over a stool. "That’s still Thursday. This doesn’t fix Thursday, and I want you to know I know that."

"I didn’t bring you here to fix it. I brought you so you’d stop picturing a stairwell."

"Where’s the bathroom?"

"There’s 4."

"Course there’s 4. Which is the big one?"

She found it herself. The room was marble floor to ceiling and warm under her socks, and the bath was sunk down into the floor, long enough to lie flat in, with nothing round it but a ledge and the window.

Jodie stood at the edge in her socks.

"My shower does 4 minutes. 4 minutes and then it’s cold, and I’ve stood in it in January with my coat on the hook waiting for the boiler to come round. How long does that do?"

"I don’t know. I’ve not run it once."

"Why on earth not?"

"It’s a bath for 4 people. It felt daft on my own."

"Who’s either side of you up here?"

"Nobody. It’s the top. There is no either side."

"And underneath?"

Mara.

Saturday afternoon. She told me once, I’m out most of the day. She’s always out at weekends.

And it’s concrete.

"Underneath’s a lot of concrete," he said.

Jodie bent down and put the plug in, and turned both taps on full, and the water came out hard and hot and loud.

"I’m having this," she said. "That’s a different decision. That’s got nothing to do with Thursday either."

It took 25 minutes to fill. She sat on the ledge with her arms round her knees and watched it come up.

"Does your mum know? About up here."

"Since October. She had a bad night and I brought her here and put her in a spare room."

"So your mum knew before me."

"My mum knew because I needed somewhere to put her."

"That’s not better, Danny."

"It’s worse. I put my mum in a spare room up here and I let you keep sending me stuff about a stairwell."

She put her hand in the water to test it and took it out again.

"What do you even do up here on your own at night?"

"Stand at that window. Make tea in a £10 kettle on £10,000 of stone."

"That’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said to me," Jodie said, and turned the cold tap down.

When it was full she stood up off the ledge.

I watched her pull the jumper off over her head and I could not have looked at anything else in that room if I had tried.

She is freckled down to where her bra strap has sat her whole life and pale under it, and the bra was the black one with a hook she has mended in white cotton. She undid it and dropped it on the warm marble, and stepped out of her jeans and her knickers together, and went down the 3 steps into hot water up to her ribs.

"Oh."

She put her head back on the ledge and shut her eyes, with her tits just under the waterline and both nipples going dark and tight in the heat.

"I hate you," Jodie said, with her eyes still shut. "I hate you so much. Get in."

I got in behind her. She lay back on me without looking round, the whole warm length of her, and took my wrists and moved them, one flat on her stomach under the water and one round her tit, and held them there with her own hands over them.

We stayed like that till the steam was halfway up the window.

"Does it stay hot?"

"I think it stays hot till you get out."

"You don’t know."

"I’ve told you, I’ve never run it."

She laughed, the real one that starts at one corner of her mouth. Then she went quiet and slid my hand off her stomach and down between her legs, and left it there.

She was wet in a way the bath had nothing to do with.

I went slow. There was nothing on God’s earth to rush for. Two fingers along the lips of her pussy, up and back, never quite where she wanted, and under the water her hips started following my hand.

"You’re doing it on purpose."

"There’s no hurry for once."

"Don’t stop, then."

Her head was back on my shoulder and her mouth was open. A noise started low in her throat and I felt her catch it, out of 11 years of habit and her mum through a wall, and then I felt her think about it.

"There’s nobody," she said.

"Not for 40 floors."

"No Sarah. No tap upstairs. Nobody."

"Then let it go."

She let it go.

It went up off the marble and the glass and came back off the ceiling, and she did nothing at all to stop it. I had 2 fingers in her cunt and my thumb on her clit and her nails in the back of my wrist, and she came with the water slopping over the edge onto the heated floor and my name going up into all that empty room.

She lay back on me after, breathing.

"I can hear myself," she said. "I can hear me coming off your ceiling."

"I’ve been listening."

"That’s mortifying."

"Best thing I’ve heard since I moved in."

She turned round in the water and knelt up between my legs with her hair stuck dark to her neck and her chest gone blotchy pink, and reached under the water and took hold of my cock.

And stopped, with her fist round the bottom of it and her head tipped, and looked.

Thursday she had not looked.

"Don’t start," I said.

"I’m not saying anything." Her thumb went over the top of me, slow, and she watched what it did to my face. "There. I missed that face. I was too cross on Thursday to bother with it."

Her other hand went down and cupped my balls in the water, gentle, and she watched my face again.

"Bed," she said. "I want to see the bed a man buys with 8 million quid and 2 mugs."

The bed was enormous and there were no curtains, and it was gone half 4 with the sun down and the lights coming on all over the city. She went across the floor wet and laughing and dropped face down in the middle of it, and stopped laughing.

"Oh, it’s stupid. I could lose you in this."

"Come here, then."

"No. You come here." She looked at me over her shoulder with wet hair down her back and her arse up in the window light, and her thighs, the solid stockroom thighs, a little apart on the duvet. "Like this. I’ve been careful for 3 days and I’m sick of it."

I knelt up behind her and she lifted her hips to me, and I pushed my cock into her slow, and she pushed back onto me till I was all the way in, and said God into a mattress the size of a room.

"Nobody either side," she said.

"Make as much noise as you want."

"Then do it properly."

I had my hands on her hips and her thighs flexing against mine on every stroke, and she was pushing back hard into all of it.

"Harder. Yes. God, Danny, harder."

She has said those words before. She has never said them at that volume, into a room with nobody else in it, and the bed under us did not make one sound.

She came again with her face in the duvet and both fists in it. I came maybe 10 seconds behind her, all the way in, with my hands round her hips and all the lights of the city in the glass.

After, Jodie lay on her back across the middle of the bed like a starfish and looked at the ceiling. Danny lay on his side next to her and looked at her, and for a while neither of them said anything.

"Jodie."

"Mm."

"I opened one of my dad’s letters last night."

Her head came round on the duvet.

"Your dad wrote to you?"

"3 times. 2015 and 2018. My mum’s had them in her wardrobe all this time."

"What did it say?"

"Nothing. It was a Christmas card with a beach on it. Thought of you, Dad. And a twenty in it."

"And the others?"

"Not opening them. They’re going to my solicitor, shut."

She was quiet for a bit.

"That’s the most you’ve told me about him in 11 years," she said. "You’ve never said he wrote."

"I didn’t know he had."

Jodie looked back at the ceiling.

"That’s still not where the money’s from."

"No."

"And it’s still Thursday."

"I know."

"But I’m having that bath again." She put an arm over her eyes. "Next week. I’ll bring my own towel."

On the 39th floor, under the bed, Mara Doyle was sat cross-legged on Camilla’s sofa in a cardigan and bed socks with her laptop open on an email to Rupert in Marylebone. She had rewritten the first line 6 times since lunch.

She had heard the lift go up at 20 past 3. It carries along her corridor. She had looked at the ceiling for a second and then made herself look back at Rupert.

For 7 weeks the only thing she had ever heard through that ceiling was a floorboard going at 2 in the morning. One man who could not sleep.

This was not a floorboard.

It started faint, and then it was not faint. A woman, at the top of her voice, with nothing in the way of it at all. And then his name.

Mara shut the laptop.

She sat with her eyes on the patch of white plaster above the lamp until it stopped. Then she put her feet flat on Camilla’s carpet, and went and found her shoes in the heap by the door, and her coat, and her keys, and went out of her own flat without turning the lamp off.