Eating Crow by Jay Rayner Page B

over in that building, actually.”
    “You live in a government ministry?”
    “In one of the tied apartments. A perk of the job. I’m moving out soon. What I’d like to do is …” She stopped as if trying to calm herself. “I know this might sound a bit weird, but I’d like to get you down on camera. A small digital thing I’ve got for recording meetings and stuff. Would you mind? Would you? It would be very helpful to me.”
    “What about your package?”
    She looked down at the manila envelope as if she had forgotten it was there.
    “It can wait,” she said.
    I had no reason to refuse. If she wanted my apology recorded then that was her right.
    She took me to a single-room apartment high up inside one of the Treasury buildings, a grand echoing space of dark parquet floors and long windows that flooded the vault with light. There was a neatly made double bed and, by it, a clothes rail hung with black pantsuits and white blouses. In one corner was a starkly modernist kitchen and, above the work surface, a shelf heavy with thick-spined cookbooks. She asked me to sit down on a pale cream sofa in the seating area while she went to retrieve something from a cupboard in the wall by the bed, which I hadn’t even known was there until she thumped the panel and it sprang open.
    “Here we are,” she said. She came back carrying a tripod and a camera so small it seemed unlikely it would be able to fit all of me into its narrow frame. She fumbled around trying to get the two pieces of equipment connected to each other and a minidisk into its drive and the whole kit pointed in the right direction. Finally she seemed satisfied that everything was in place. She pulled up a chair so she could sit next to the tripod and reached up to press the controls.
    “Can you see a little red light on the front, just below the lens?”
    I looked away from her to the camera. “Er, yeah. Yes. I can see it.”
    “Great. It’s recording.” She looked back from the control panel to me. “So, in your own time.”
    I pointed at the camera. “Do you want me to do it to the lens or to you or …”
    She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her head on her hands as if bracing herself. She said, “Doesn’t matter. Whatever feels comfortable. Talk to the camera or to me. Really. Whatever works for you.”
    “Okay,” I said. And then: “From the beginning?”
    “Absolutely. From the beginning.” She smiled encouragingly at me.
    “Right. Here goes.” I closed my eyes for a second, then opened them and looked past the camera at Jennie. She had presented me with the perfect opportunity, a way to move the apology on from being simply a momentary rush of self-serving emotion toward something much more profound, a performance piece that would have a life above and beyond the set piece. I was apologizing for posterity. The arguments with Lynne, the tense exchanges with my brother, the intensity of the previous days faded away. I was focused on the event.
    “I treated you badly and for that I am terribly, terribly sorry. Some people might say it’s such old history that it doesn’t matter now. That we were practically kids. I don’t see it that way. I wasn’t a child. I was an adult who behaved as a child. And the irony is that it was you who helped me into the adulthood I then failed to grasp.”
    Jennie tipped her head to one side and smiled at me.
    “We don’t need to pretend, do we? I am, I hope, mature enough to be able to say it without embarrassment. You took my virginity, which was a gracious and lovely thing to do, and I should have been only grateful to you. But instead I violated the trust you placed in me.
    “I am also, I hope, enough of an adult to understand why I did it. I wanted to belong. That was all. There was this club from which I had been excluded for so long, a ludicrous club, the boys’ club. But I still needed to feel a part of it and you gave me the perfect opportunity.”
    I hesitated for a