Art Pact 40

Milk-chocolate nail varnish - tap, tap, tap, tap-tap, her fingers drum on the table-top. She is watching the man on the stage, and I am watching her. Perhaps he is looking at me, a never-ending loop. The drumbeat of her finger-tips causes a ripple on the surface of her wine, and lesser ripples in my own glass, so far from the epicentre of the quake.

"He's definitely the one on the poster," she says into her phone. The screen lights up the right side of her face, splashing blue and red across her nose, green on her cheek. If the light were better, or her cheek shinier, perhaps I could see the reflection of the other caller. But I know that she is speaking to Ayesha. The nodding is the same, the arch of her shoulder, the curl in her lip, as though her friend were right next to her, and she turning in to hide some confidence from me.

"Uh-huh. Uh-huh. No, the red one definitely. Yes, the red one. No, I know that," she continues. All of her fingertips click onto the table at once, a heavy seventh wave flicks from the center of her wine, bounces off the glass, interferes with itself, waves doubling and cancelling until everything is still again. I realise that she has not spoken for a few seconds. Her face, lit from the phone, is a mask of shock. I am about to ask her whether she has seen a ghost when my eyes flick involuntarily to the stage and I see that she has.

Behind the man in the floodlights a small troupe of other dancers have trooped on, a little gathering of the underdressed, and in the middle of them, in tight cut-off jeans and a lumberjack shirt now bereft arms and collar, is Him. He looks younger than I remember him, but I know that He is younger than I remember Him, younger than me in fact. In the past He'd just seemed so together than it was obvious that He was my superior in age. An old soul, Ayesha would say, looking at Him and clucking her tongue. She did not approve, would never surely have sent us here if she knew that it would lead to this. I picture her at the other end of the line, staring impatiently at the grimy wall-clock in her kitchen, waiting for the conversation to resume so that it could end and she return to her unknowable tasks. The clock is from the age of Him, a thing Ayesha's boyfriend of the time stole from a food warehouse on the Slough industrial estate and hung directly on the wall. No doubt it is still covered in its patina of insect dung, bacteria, and meat residue, never having been cleaned since it arrived.

"I'll call you back," she says, cutting off Ayesha from my thoughts and from her phone. "Jesus. Jesus Christ on a fucking stick. Tell me I'm not going mad," she says to me, poking me in the wrist with one dagger nail.

"Not going," I say, rolling my eyes. The nail presses harder. "Ow!"

"Less lip. Did you know he was going to be here?"

"How would I kn-"

"You didn't know," she says. "How could you know? Look at you," she says, as if my appearance were any clue as to my powers cerebral or psychic. I tug at the collar of my jacket, pulling it across to hide the flesh revealed by the low neck of the grey dress beneath. I look back at the stage, but He hasn't noticed us yet. He will, though - there's no amount of time long enough to erase the memories. I would kill for the chance to reset time so that we would be strangers. No, not kill - I'd bring someone back to life. Roll back the clock to that earlier time, before Ayesha got her hooks into my mother and confused everything again, before I was a bitter thirty-something woman living at home - even if I was a terrified twenty-something living at home and trying desperately to escape it.

The performers roll through their roster. One strips down to nugatory underwear then steps back to make way for the next - a policeman, a fireman, a soldier, all transforming tediously into almost naked men. Finally He steps into the light at the front of the stage. He is beautiful, something about the angle of His jaw that I can't define, and the flood glistens off the full muscles of His upper arms. My breath catches in my throat. He sees us.

There He is. My mother's ex-boyfriend. My dream lover. My father's killer.