I felt awkward with this synchronicity of our circumstances, as if I’d deliberately sought it out. ‘I was two,’ I hurried on. ‘I don’t really remember him. He was called Odell, but without the “e”. When he died, my mother changed my name.’
‘She what? What were you known as before that?’
‘I don’t even know.’
This fact about myself sounded absurd and funny – at least, in that moment it did – maybe it was the clouds of pot billowing around – and we both started laughing. In fact, we laughed straight for about a minute, that pain in your stomach when you laugh and laugh – how one mother can rename you, how mad it is another’s suddenly dead, and you in a kitchen round the corner from the British Museum wearing yellow rubber gloves.
Lawrie turned fully towards me, the milk bottle lolling in his hand. Sobering up, I eyed it, worried that the liquid would start dripping through the lid at such a terrible angle.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Delly.’
‘Odelle.’
‘Do you want to get out?’
‘From where?’
‘From here, you crazy girl.’
‘Who’s crazy?’
‘We could go to Soho. I’ve got a friend who can get us in to the Flamingo. But you’ll have to take off those rubber gloves. It’s not that sort of club.’
I didn’t know what to make of Lawrie at this point. I could describe him as grief-stricken, but arguably the grief hadn’t truly set in. Perhaps he was in shock – it had only been a fortnight. That he was angry with someone, and a bit lost, both certain of himself and yet avoiding himself – these things could be said about Lawrie. He spoke well, and he talked of Gerry and the house and his divorced, dead mother with a practised world-weariness that I wasn’t sure he was trying to escape or keep alive.
‘I – I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I can’t leave the party.’ I pulled the plug from the sink. As the water drained noisily, I wondered how his mother had died.
‘The Flamingo, Odelle.’
I’d never heard of it, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘I can’t leave Cynth.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think she needs you tonight.’ I blushed, looking into the disappearing bubbles. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘my car’s outside. How about we drop the painting off at my friend’s flat and then let’s go dancing. It doesn’t have to be the Flamingo. Do you like to dance?’
‘You have the painting with you?’ I said.
‘I see.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘More of an art girl than a nightclub girl?’
‘I don’t think I’m either of those girls. But I do work at an art gallery,’ I added. I wanted him to be impressed, to show him I wasn’t just some innocent prig who chose to wash up crockery rather than fall around on the carpet.
A light came into Lawrie’s eyes. ‘Do you want to see it?’ he said. ‘It’s in the boot of my car.’
Lawrie didn’t try and touch me in that kitchen. He didn’t let his hand drift anywhere near. The relief that he didn’t, and the desire that he might – I think they are the reasons I agreed to see his painting. I followed him, leaving the dishes stranded in the sink.
*
I think he wanted me to be impressed by the fact he was driving an MG, but that meant nothing to me, once I’d laid eyes on the painting in the boot. It was not large, and it had no frame. As an image, it was simple and at the same time not easily decipherable – a girl, holding another girl’s severed head in her hands on one side of the painting, and on the other, a lion, sitting on his haunches, not yet springing for the kill. It had the air of a fable.
Despite the slight distortion from the orange street lamp above us, the colours of the lower background reminded me of a Renaissance court portrait – that piled-up patchwork of fields all kinds of yellow and green, and what looked like a small white castle. The sky above was darker and less decorous; there was something nightmarish about its bruised indigoes. The painting gave me an immediate feeling of opposites – the girls against the lion, together in the face of its adversity. But there was a rewarding delicacy beyond its beautiful palette of colours – an elusive element that made it so alluring.
‘What do you think?’ asked Lawrie. His face seemed softer