The Twisted Heart by Rebecca Gowers Page B

about?’
    â€˜I do, but I think it qualifies as left field, all the same.’
    Kit felt inconsequentially miffed. She hadn’t listened to Diamanda Galás for well over a year.
    â€˜You have these beauty treatments often?’ Joe asked.
    â€˜Sadly, no. But if I were rich, ta-da, I’d spend all my time conked out in a beauty parlour, just lounging around.’ Kit smiled again to show she didn’t mean it, though she could have wished she did; that it would be just fine to surrender herself to a life of indulgence and extreme mental neglect.
    â€˜Who needs sleep anyway?’ said Joe, with friendly absurdity.
    â€˜Have you ever heard of Gurdjieff?’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜It’s nothing, don’t worry. I thought I’d ask. He helped kill Katherine Mansfield because he didn’t believe in sleep and she had TB. It’s not important. He was a famous Russian charlatan—Russian, I think. I can’t remember. He had this colony where people had to mow the lawn and no one was allowed any sleep. What do you do?’
    â€˜I work for the university.’
    That was all he said, but he said it in a tone to cast a pall over them both. Kit felt diminished by the picture of him in some mid-ranking, central admin post, and wondered now whether he mightn’t automatically be looking down on her as a lackadaisical student, if his job happened to be dedicated, in some tedious way, to keeping her sort going.
    â€˜Not by any chance mowing lawns?’ she said, in the hopes he might find this funny.
    His eyes did crinkle. It made him look kind. The end ofone of his eyebrows was missing, she noticed. ‘Now that you seem a bit better,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t like to come back to my place and let me make you something decent to eat? I live off the Woodstock Road, up near Summertown?’
    â€˜Oh,’ she said, ‘I go that direction too.’
    Â Â Â 
    They barely spoke. They took a bus as far as the High Street, then walked through the city darkness. The rain that had threatened didn’t fall. In time, the shaky feeling faded out of Kit’s legs. As they went along, she was half-saying, in her head, the entire way, no ; but half a ‘no’ was tacitly much like a ‘yes’.
    Â Â Â 
    Joe ushered her into a large brick house, up the neglected communal staircase, up to the top, where they stepped through his front door into an extraordinarily sleek flat, all chrome and dulled colours and expensive fittings, surely not the abode of a person in a mid-grade admin job. He turned the heating on. Kit was startled by the money implicit in everything she saw. It was also all disconcertingly tidy. She tried to guess whether his spells of maximum boredom took place here, when he was at home, or whether they happened elsewhere, away from home.
    â€˜Glass of wine?’ he said.
    He’s making this easier for me, she thought. What am I doing here? Do I have to do this?—to both of which questions the answers were straightforward. It had been about a year, more than a year, since a man she found catchingly attractive had tried to sleep with her. That was what she was doing there, edged into his cold, glittery kitchen, feeling, on the one hand, hollow, and on the other, almostexcited. I find him attractive? she enquired of herself; but it was a silly question. Going to his flat was admitting it by default.
    And did she have to do this? Of course not.
    She didn’t expect him to ask, exactly. They both drank a little, still standing up. He was staring at her hands but didn’t appear to see them. ‘I’m sorry I upset you,’ he said.
    She wondered why he hadn’t said it before; glanced sideways at herself in a large, ornate, antique mirror that hung on the kitchen wall. ‘I know what they were all—’ she said. ‘Just because I was the boy, because I had control of you, it didn’t mean—and I