Tony wants to leave, but she wouldn’t like to do that without seeing West. He might think she’d refused his invitation, had failed to come; he might think she was being snobby. Also she wants to be soothed and reassured: with him there she will not be so out of place. She goes in search of him, down a hallway that leads off to the left. This terminates in a bathroom. A door opens, there’s a flushing sound, and a large, hair-covered man comes out. He gives Tony an unfocused look. “Shit, the Girl Guides,” he says.
Tony feels about two inches tall. She flees into the bathroom, which will at least be a refuge. It too has been painted black, even the bathtub, even the sink, even the mirror. She locks the door and sits down on the black toilet, touching it first to make sure the paint is dry.
She’s not sure she’s in the right place. Perhaps West doesn’t live here at all. Perhaps she has the wrong address; perhaps this is some other bash. But she checked the scrap of paper before coming up the stairs. Perhaps, then, it’s the time that’s wrong—perhaps she’s too early for West, or too late. There’s no way of knowing, since his comings and goings have always been so unpredictable.
She could go out of the bathroom and ask someone—one of the enormous, furry men, one of the tall supercilious women—where he might be, but she dreads doing this. What if nobody knows who he is? It would be safer to stay in here, replaying the Battle of Culloden to herself, calculating the odds. She arranges the terrain—the hill that slopes downwards, the fine of the stone wall with the tidy British soldiers and their tidy guns in a row behind it. The raggedy clans charging, plunging down the hill yelling, with nothing but their heavy outdated swords and their round bucklers. Falling in picturesque, noble heaps. An abattoir. Courage is of use only when technologies are evenly matched. Bonnie Prince Charlie was an idiot.
Unwinnable, she thinks, as a battle. The only hope would have been to avoid a battle altogether. To reject the terms of the argument, refuse the conventions. Strike at night, then melt away into the hills. Disguise yourself as a peasant. Not a fair fight, but then, what is a fair fight? Nothing she’s learned abouC’ yet.
Someone’s knocking at the door. Tony gets up, flushes the black toilet, rinses her hands at the black sink. There’s no towel so she wipes her hands on her corduroy jumper. She unlocks the door: it’s one of the ballerina women.
“Sorry,” Tony says to her. The woman stares coldly.
Tony goes back into the main room, intending to leave. Without West, there’s no point. But there, in the centre of the room, is Zenia.
Tony doesn’t know Zenia’s name yet, but Zenia doesn’t seem to need a name: She isn’t wearing black like most of the others. Instead she’s in white, a sort of shepherd’s smock that comes down to mid-thigh on the long legs of her tight jeans. The smock isn’t thin but it suggests lingerie, perhaps because the front buttons are open to a point level with her nipples. In the V of cloth, a small firm half-breast curves away to either side, like back-to-back parentheses.
All the others, in their black, sink into the black background of the walls. Zenia stands out: her face and hands and torso swim against the darkness, among the white chrysanthemums, as if disembodied and legless. She must have thought it all out beforehand, Tony realizes—how she would glow in the dark like an all-night gas station, or—to be honest—like the moon.
‘Tony feels herself being sucked back, pushed back into the black enamel of the wall. Very beautiful people have that effect, she thinks: they obliterate you. In the presence of Zenia she feels more than small and absurd: she feels non-existent.
She ducks into the kitchen. It’s black too, even the stove, even the refrigerator. The paint glistens moistly in the candlelight.
West is leaning against the refrigerator. He is quite drunk. Tony can see it at once, she’s had enough practice. Something turns over inside her, turns over and sinks.
“Hi, Tony,” he says. “How’s my little pal?”
West has never called Tony his little pal before. He’s never called her little. It seems a violation.
“Actually I have to go,” she says.
“Night’s young,” he says. “Have a beer.” He opens the black refrigerator, which is still white inside, and digs out two Molson’s Ex. “Where’d I put the fucker?” he asks, patting parts of his body.
Tony doesn’t know what he’s talking about or what he’s doing, or even who he is, exactly. Not who she thought he was, that’s for sure. He doesn’t usually swear. She starts backing away.
“It’s in your pocket,” says a voice behind her. Tony looks: it’s the girl in the white smock. She smiles at West, points her index finger at him. “Hands up.”
Grinning, West puts his hands in the air. The girl kneels and fumbles in his pockets, leaning her head against his thighs, and after a very long moment—during which Tony feels as if she’s being forced to peep through a keyhole at a scene far too intimate to be borne—brings out a bottle-opener. She opens both beers with it, flipping the tops off expertly, hands one to Tony, tilts the other one back and drinks from it. Tony watches her throat undulate as she swallows. She has a long neck.
“What about me?” says West, and the girl hands him the bottle.
“So, how do you like our flowers?” she says to Tony. “We stole them from the Mount Hope Cemetery. Some big cheese croaked. They’re sort of wilted, though: we had to wait until everyone had buggered off” Tony notes the words—stole, croaked, buggered—and feels timid and lacking in style.
“This is Zenia,” says West. There’s a proprietary reverence in his voice, and a huskiness, that Tony doesn’t like at all. Mine, is what he means. Handfuls of mine.
Tony can see now that she was wrong about we. We hadnothing to do with male roommates. We meant Zenia. Zenia is now leaning back against West as if he’s a lamppost. He has his arms around her waist, under her smock; his face is half hidden in her smoky hair.
“They’re great,” Tony says. She tries to sound enthusiastic. She takes an awkward swallow from the bottle Zenia has given her, and concentrates to avoid spluttering. Her eyes are stinging, her face reddening, her nose is full of prickles.
“And this is Tony,” says West’s voice. His mouth is behind Zenia’s hair, so it looks like the hair talking. Tony thinks about running: out the kitchen door, between the denim-covered legs in the main room, down the stairs. A stampeding mouse. “Oh, this is Tony,” says Zenia. She sounds amused. “Hi there, Tony. Do you like our black walls? Please get your cold hands off my stomach,” she adds, to West.
“Cold hands, warm heart,” West mutters.
“Heart,” says Zenia. “Who cares about your heart? It’s not your most useful body part:” She lifts up the bottom of her smock, finds his two big hands, extracts them, and holds them in hers, caressing them, all the time smiling at Tony. “It’s revenge,” she says. Her eyes aren’t black, as Tony thought at first: they’re navy blue: “This is a revenge parry. The landlord’s kicking us out, so we thought we’d give the old fucker something to remember us by. It’ll take him more than two coats to cover this up. The lease said we had the right to paint, but it didn’t say what colour. Did you see the toilet?”
“Yes,” says Tony. “It’s very slippery.” She doesn’t mean this to be funny, but Zenia laughs.
“You’re right,” she says to West. “Tony’s a scream:”
Tony hates being talked about in the third person. She’s always hated it; her mother used to do the same thing. West has been discussing her with Zenia, the two of them, analyzing her behind her back, sticking adjectives onto her as if she’s a child, as if she’s anyone at all, as if she’s a topic. It occurs to her also that the only reason West asked her to their party is that Zenia told him to. She sets the beer bottle down on the black stove, noticing that it’s half empty. She must have drunk the other half How did she do that? “I should be going,” she says, with what she hopes is dignity.