All the Rage by A. L Kennedy

of a cheap fawn coverlet and dull white sheets, her bared feet towards me, plump. She was sleeping it off. She was sleeping me off.
    â€˜Night-night, sweetheart.’ When I’d kissed her forehead and each closed eye, she’d tasted only pure.
    This couple had walked along the corridor at my back and I’d been so absorbed that I hadn’t noticed.
    And then I did.
    And the three of us stood and I knew we were each one of us studying Emily.
    I kept the door open – not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant – but I did give that much of her away. And it made me glad. I wanted them to understand that I could touch this angel and she’d got me.
    She never knew and it didn’t harm her, and then I locked her up safe and the couple moved on.
    She was mine, proved mine.
    Emily.
    He would drive Pauline about – short trips – dance with her or face her at unamusing parties, nod while she talked in supermarket queues, lean near her at the kitchen sink while she washed the dishes and he dried – he did his best to be compliantly domestic when he could – and he would be tight in a fury of needing Emily.
    Mine.
    Unlike his previous lovers, Emily made him have increasingly emotional sex with his wife. He would weep against Pauline’s neatly measured breathing and then have to agree to let her comfort him. His wife as a relief from the truth of fidelity – it was absurd.
    Like staying in a railway station with no trains that we can catch.
    Am I displaying hope or idiocy?
    Are we? Or are we pretending this is acceptable, because we’re in company?
    In it together.
    A problem shared is not a problem, it’s a community.
    And so forth.
    We can’t claim it wasn’t more than possible to foresee – our likely future.
    The fate of our nation.
    And so forth.
    I saw it. I stared at it, sort of, not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant.
    Although I suspect my real focus was elsewhere. That’s likely.
    I wasn’t alone in ignoring multiple warnings.
    Even about trains.
    As a student, he had decided he should seem to take an interest in the wider life. It enriched his social circle.
    More girls.
    His drive to be committedly well informed meant he’d attended a lecture by some playwright.
    Face like a punched scatter cushion and a scholarship boy’s accent.
    A laughably earnest audience had squeezed into the studio theatre at the Barbican Centre and been subjected to the usual liberal/left stuff – here we are in 1984 and it’s ever so much worse than the novel. Smug. The playwright cared. No one could match his extravagant caring, that was plain, and no one else had noticed and resisted the loss of their country’s virtue with quite his intellectual elan.
    His thesis was okay, though – quite elegant, if repetitive. Probably rehashed it for
The Guardian.
That’s the way to make money: get paid for saying the same thing, over and over again
.
    Sorrysorrysorrysorry.
    But I’m the one who pays for that.
    The playwright had made frequent and self-consciously lyrical returns to the break-up and sale of the nationalised railways.
Passengers
were no longer
passengers
, they were being redefined as
customers
.
Customers
were happy when they bought something, in this case a ticket.
Passengers
wanted to travel, have politically and economically significant mobility, but instead would have to settle for pieces of thin card and lots of waiting. Dissatisfaction was being rendered inarticulate by a maliciously transformed vocabulary.
    Mark had appropriated the idea and used it in arguments whenever he could.
    More girls meant I had to find more ways to impress them. Until I could attempt the obvious.
    Probably why the playwright was pimping himself onstage.
    Both of us aiming to sound insightful and socially engaged.
    Which I also aspired to for real.
    I was going to be that kind of journalist.
    I can’t dismiss all my ambitions as