Read Online Repeat It Today With Tears by Anne Peile - Free Book Online

shy and awkward. ‘Listen,’ he was moving his fingers down the surface of his glass as if he were sculpting it from clay, ‘I couldn’t help noticing… noticing that you were looking over, and so on, just now. To be honest, I’ve been wondering if you thought I was someone else, somebody you knew… ’
    I smiled at him properly for the first time because I wanted to reassure him, ‘No, I didn’t think you were anyone else.’
    ‘Oh, okay. Well, my name is Jack, by the way.’
    ‘Jack.’ I had repeated it many times over in my head as I tried out his mouth and traced imaginary contacts with his imagined body. Never, until then, had I spoken it out loud.
    ‘Yes, and may I… may I know your name?’
    ‘My name is Susie. Susanna, but people call me Susie.’
    ‘And, do you live around here, Susie?’
    ‘No, I live across the river.’ I did not dare to say Clapham. In my head I conjured Julian’s flat in the red brick mansions facing the park, ‘In Prince of Wales Drive.’
    ‘Ah yes, I know it.’
    He lifted his arm to drink. I saw that the veins on the back of his hands stood out in relief, that there were a few freckles and golden hairs there and on his wrists. The glass of his watch was scratched and he wore it on a fabric strap of navy blue and red. When he looked at me, only an arm’s length from myself, and I saw how nervous he was, I wanted to tell him there and then how much I loved him and to let my head fall like a dead weight on his chest and to be done with all pretending.
    I did not, of course. I sat silent, adjusting myself to the emotion which I felt for my father beside me. It was a physical phenomenon; there was some tide rise in the circulation of my blood. If I could have looked under my clothes I expected that my chest would have been suffused with a flush, like cochineal dripped into white icing.
    Sylvester the barman, sensing the musk on the air, folded a towel and retreated through the archway to the public bar.
    ‘Show me where you live,’ I said, holding my father in my gaze.
    Jack was caught off guard, he enunciated one or two of the phonic forms to which Englishmen resort when they are embarrassed or require a moment to collect their thoughts, then, ‘Are you propositioning me?’
    He gave a half smile but I did not smile at him at all. Instead I continued to stare at him full face with the look akin to insolence that gamblers use to regard their opponents in games ofchance.
    ‘Listen,’ Jack stood up and pushed back his hair; the muscle in his left cheek twitched. ‘Listen, I’m not quite sure what’s going on here… ’
    Sylvester faltered, hesitating like a prompt in the wings lest we should require another round.
    I stood up too. ‘Let us go,’ I said.
    Outside in Phene Street I took his arm in such a way that he could be aware of the softness of my cheek and upper arm and breast against him but he gave no sign of response. He was too intent on walking, stalking almost, straight and stiff and upright. Neither did it occur to him that I seemed to know the way. We stopped outside number 33 Oakley Street.
    ‘I could… I could make you a cup of coffee.’
    ‘That would be very nice.’
    He laughed, ‘God help me, first you pick me up, and now you’re going all demure on me.’ In the hall my father said, ‘Come here, Miss, the timer for the lights goes out and leaves you in the pitch black unless you sprint, I’ll take your hand.’
    Ascending the three dark flights, it was an act of supreme self-denial, now that I had his hand in mine at last, not to take up his long fingers and try them inside my mouth, one by one, to see whether they tasted salty against the pink of cheek flesh.
    ‘Well here it is,’ he pushed open the door, ‘it’s a bit bare, I’m afraid. A bit like a monk’s cell I suppose, but I’m only here during the week, mostly. At weekends I go back to Suffolk.’
    I knew that to mean that he had a wife there. ‘Do you have children?’ My