Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

not, as he saw it, demean or betray cinema’s true purpose. Hope came to realize fairly swiftly that going to see these films was in a real sense therapeutic for him. They functioned as a kind of drug, and she began to see how his close-up, all-enveloping, dream-fulfilling cinema buoyed him up and kept him floating. Those few weeks of ease she had experienced after his return from the conference began to be eroded once again by the slow drip, drip of worry.
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    Hope looked up at John’s taut, stretched face as he came. She saw his brow crumple, his cheeks concave, and heard a grunting deep in his throat. Then he exhaled and smiled and lowered his head until their noses met. He settled his weight on his elbows as Hope touched his wiry hair. He fitted his head into the angle of her neck and shoulder and exhaled again, his breath warm and moist against her skin. Inside her she felt the small shiftings and slippings as his penis detumesced. She sensed a complementary swelling of love for him in her throat as she dragged her fingers over his head, down across the thick hair that grew on his neck, trailing them lightly across the flaky blur of big freckles on his shoulder blades, making him shiver.
    Catching the thin, sour smell of fresh sweat from his armpits, she slipped her hand into his armpit, feeling the hairs slick and clotted between her fingers. She kissed his neck, pressing her nose into his neck, smelling his own particular scent, his spoor. She remembered thinking once, before she married, what kind of man she wanted to live with, and had run through the various types that seemed most commonly on offer—the caring ones, the bastards, the strong ones, the moneyed, the humorists, the saints—and had decided that what she wanted was not a model or an archetype, but somebody quite different. A man. A person. Different from her.
    Hope held and smelled this real person that she had found. Then she slipped her fingers into her mouth and tasted his salt sweat. She reached down his spine to touch the small, flat button of a mole that grew four inches above the cleft in his buttocks and reveled selfishly in the quiddity of this individual who was hers, whom she possessed…. Intimacy made her melancholy and exhilarated. She turned her head and kissed him on the mouth, forcing his teeth apart with a blunt, strong tongue and then sucking his own tongue into her mouth, tasting his saliva.
    She pushed him over onto his back and felt his flaccid penis slide wetly from her.
    â€œAh. Sheets,” he said.
    â€œI love you, John,” she said. “And don’t you forget it.”
    â€œI won’t. But I’ve forgotten the tissues.”
    â€œThen the deal’s off.”
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    It was a Sunday morning. He brought her a mug of tea and then went out to buy newspapers and bread. She shouted at him to put some music on the record player before he left. He couldn’t have heard her because the door closed and there was only silence.
    She rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed looking down at her lap and thighs, thinking dully that she was putting on weight. She cupped her soft stomach with both hands—she was. She sighed, and then, absentmindedly, with the backs of her fingers, gently stroked her pubic hair—unusually thick, she thought, a brash, dense triangle—and thought about John, and the cinema,their first wedding anniversary, which was approaching, the holiday they were going to take, and how it would be.
    She stood up, walked through to the sitting room and crouched in front of the record player. A thick plank of sun lay across the dining table illuminating the wreckage of their evening meal, the dregs of wine in the opaque, smeary glasses, the congealed scraps on the uncleared plates.
    She put on a record and stood up, humming along. And then, somehow, her mood, a phrase in the music, the sun on the table made the moment magically thicken and hold. For an instant she forgot