Fallout by Sadie Jones Page A

averted his eyes as if Leigh were doing something lewd, and looked at her bookshelf instead: Simone de Beauvoir, Jung, Anaïs Nin, Marx, Greer. Oh God , he thought. He noticed Luke was smiling; he didn’t seem embarrassed at all. He was smiling at Leigh as if she were doing a special trick all for him.
    Leigh was invisible behind the bed now, on the ground. Both men stared at the gap and, after a while, with just the sounds of her breathing, she emerged, red faced, but not giggling any more. She wiped her eyes.
    ‘I could have died,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘I promise you, I’m not like this normally.’
    ‘You’ve got Karl Marx,’ said Luke, easily, who must have been looking at her books too. ‘I haven’t read it. Can I borrow it?’
    And the evening began again. A new night. A fresh thing. All the books came out. Records were played on Leigh’s record player on the pine table next to the two-bar. The Maxwell House was finished. None of them were hungry. It was one o’clock. It was two o’clock. The three of them, cross-legged on the bed, and the record sleeves scattered around them.
    At about half past two Paul fell asleep, with his face on his arm, and Luke and Leigh, whose voices had been easy, overlapping until then, noticed him sleeping, and fell silent.
    The song carried on. It was ‘Homeward Bound’. They had been talking about their visions of America, where neither had ever been, and if England’s cramped spaces could ever offer such romantic loneliness as the railway stations and Greyhounds and endless roads of there; of New York and Greenwich Village, if those places really were what they seemed, or just constructs in the minds of the artists, the troubadours, the vagabonds.
    Leigh changed the record. ‘Corrina Corrina’ . . .
    She got back onto the bed and glanced at Paul, then her and Luke’s eyes met, frighteningly alone but at the same time in thrilling danger of being witnessed. They had been talking quickly before, finishing one another’s thoughts; meeting in recognition and play, forgetting – a little – how closely they were sitting and that they were on a bed. Now, with no conversation, and the record playing on, there was only the awareness that they were not touching, and that they wanted to touch. Now, the wanting one another was in the room so quickly it was like vertigo.
    Leigh did not look directly at Luke but she put her hand, slowly, into the charged territory of the space between them. She hadn’t known she was going to do it.
    Luke’s hand was resting on his knee – and, under his leg, Bob Dylan, young, his arm linked with the woman in the suede coat as they walked towards the camera in the New York winter, parked cars and fire escapes.
    Leigh glanced up at him, fearful, and smiled. He looked at her quietly, his eyes were serious, the unselfconscious looking at her that she could not hide from. Their fingertips touched and then their hands, moving over each other, light and deliberate, finding the spaces in between, the sides of their fingers. It was as if hands never did ordinary things, they felt so new. Then Luke closed his fingers around hers and reached his other hand to the back of her neck, warm under her hair – she looked quickly at Paul, and Luke took his hand away.
    They both laughed – almost – quietly. There was nowhere to go with it.
    They sat and looked at each other. Paul gave a small snore. Leigh bit her lip, felt giggling rising again in her chest, but then Luke took hold of both her wrists in his hands. His fingertips pressing against her pulse stopped her. It steadied her, but lost her, too. She hadn’t felt this before – she had known it on her own, with her own imaginings, but this was so fast, getting away from her. She thought, I always knew I’d see you again .
    ‘When we met the first time I thought I knew you already,’ he said. It was the truth. ‘Do you ever get that?’
    She was embarrassed, and looked away, just as he got