An Irresponsible Age. Lavinia Greenlaw

for his cigarettes.

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Cooking.’

      ‘You mean greaseproof paper?’

      ‘No, parchment.’

      ‘Oh, for god’s sake go and talk to him properly!’ One of Jacob’s other voices – vicious and shrill. The fire in Juliet’s belly leapt through her skin and she had a sense of herself drawing back, as if violently recovering her edges. She buttoned her shirt and went downstairs with Fred, where she spent a long time looking through drawers until she found an old manila envelope which she opened and flattened, assuring Fred that it would do perfectly well as parchment.

      When Juliet came back up, Jacob was standing naked by her shelves. He was confident, imperfect, and made nothing of his beauty. He flicked through one book after another. ‘Who is G. Clough?’ he asked, holding up an annotated edition of Hamlet.

      ‘I am.’

      ‘G.?’

      ‘I was christened Giulietta. No one could spell or pronounce it.’

      Jacob had remembered something and was reaching for another book: ‘Oh yes, I found this.’ He brandished the title page of a broken-backed copy of The Catcher in the Rye. ‘Another incarnation?’

      ‘Don’t …’

      In curlicued script, ‘Juliette C.’ The dot over the ‘i’ was a circle.

      ‘Your French period? Left Bank?’

      Juliet grabbed the book. ‘Just think yourself lucky that I didn’t draw smiley faces.’ She pushed him towards the bed. ‘Or hearts.’

      He snatched the book back as she unbuttoned her shirt once more. ‘And somewhere you will have written “irony” in the margin. Oh yes, page sixty-five …’

      

      In the kitchen, Fred balanced a small saucepan containing a broken-up bar of dark chocolate inside a nest of chopsticks and skewers suspended over a larger pan of boiling water. Every time the teaspoon he was stirring it with got too hot to hold, he chucked it onto the floor and reached for another. Six teaspoons later, the chocolate had melted. He moved the pan onto the table and rushed off to the bathroom to fetch Juliet’s tweezers.

      He held up a petal with the tweezers and dipped it into the chocolate. It disappeared. He tried again and the second petal stayed in his grip but wilted to a stringy blob. It wouldn’t work. He went and got his back-up rose out of the sink and shoved it in, head first, stirring it round in the chocolate as if loading a brush. This he laid on the parchment and put in the fridge without looking too closely.

      Jacob was running a finger up and down Juliet’s spine. ‘Giulietta! Juliette! Juliet!’ he recited, the first in theatrical Italian, the second in pouting French and the third as dully as he could. Then in an imitation of Fred’s plaintiveness, ‘Jules! Jules! What an ugly diminutive.’ He was a poor mimic and sounded like a boy trying to amuse and impress other boys.

      ‘You can be really quite unpleasant,’ she said and meant it, but did not feel it.

      She lay on her front and Jacob pressed himself down onto her back and then was inside her. The shock of pleasure was so strong that she lifted herself up to encourage him to push deeper. Jacob tilted his body to one side and as he pushed again – once, slow – he touched the centre of her pain so exactly that she cried out. She waited for Jacob to move, but he didn’t. He took his weight off her but stayed where he was, a containing pressure. He laid his head next to hers, one hand on her shoulder.

      When the pain passed, Juliet shifted onto one side and began to speak. No one could have listened to her more carefully than Jacob did then, his head against hers. Juliet told him about the glass and stones and fire, and then, when he showed no sign of distaste, the blood and vomit and brown water. With these details he began to stroke her breasts, belly and thighs so lightly that her body, used to retreating at the first sign of pain, had to travel back towards him in order to make sense of his touch.