INTERSTICES
A polaroid: a brunette woman, slight, kneeling, his left hand in her hair, her hands behind her back. After he had taken it, he put her in a shower and told her not to touch him. She left in a taxi. He put the polaroid in a drawer.
In another room, he is only sixteen. He knows everything now. He will tell an Irish woman in eight years, and she will suffer because of it. He will unpack it decades later in Kolonaki, in a house made entirely from marble.
‘I’m an organ scholar,’ he says.
‘No, you’re not.’
He frowns. The woman feels a kind of furtive pleasure. His charm is too insincere for him to have any real interests – certainly, for him to have any of hers.
They are in a pub watching a football game she has no interest in. She has been dragged along as an intermediary by someone who fears him.
‘I play cello, too.’ There is a gravity about him when he speaks. It unsettles the movement of everyone around him.
‘No,’ she says, irritated. ‘I play cello.’
Everything that will ever happen to her has already happened. This is what she tells him. This is what she tells him when she tells him that one day, they will never speak to each other again.
A gilt room in a members’ club in London. Gold walls, gold ceiling panels, no windows. The air is still – so tight that she thinks if she says something provocative enough, she might tear right through the stillness and cause the entire place to collapse in on itself.
‘I like the suspenders.’
He narrows his eyes and looks sideways at her. She smiles placidly.
‘I’m a traditionalist,’ he says.
Two hours earlier, she had walked for forty minutes through London in heels to the white building on Pall Mall. A man in a sober suit emerged from the dark-paneled front door. There was an arrogance in the way he jogged down the marble stairs. Sedate movement. He carried himself the way she imagined a Greek sculpture would. She hugged him freely, away from Oxford.
Inside, the bar was dark. Wall lamps cast slivery light across the red carpet. An elderly couple was hunched over a square table in the centre of the room. Two younger men by the bar were speaking over each other. A pasty man in the corner was reading a newspaper with a monocle. It occurred to her that none of these people would say things like ‘grand’, or ‘amn’t’.
They had two drinks in the bar: red for her, white for him. She was aware, as he asked her questions, that she could be anyone else and probably nothing would change. Not so for him. There was too much myth about him, and substance enough to justify it.
‘I want to show you something,’ he said. ‘Take your drink.’
He took her through to the gold room then. A library. Now he is looking at her expectantly, and she can tell he thinks he is the only person who has ever paid attention to her in any meaningful way. She thinks maybe he is right.In an oversized armchair, she explains that time is no longer something external to her. It has crept inside her. She thinks that this will provoke something in him.
‘You’re a fatalist,’ he tells her.
‘Yes and no. Imagine you’re a four-dimensional being.’
He laughs. ‘No, you.’
‘If you were,’ she continues, ‘you wouldn’t move forwards through time. You’d be able to view everything at once.’ She pauses, and then adds, ‘So really, we’re still to get together and we’ve already stopped talking.’
He leans his head back against the armchair. ‘It must be exhausting to be you.’
They are quiet for a while. Then she asks a question about private equity.
April is cold and thin when he tells her he will have three children and Ionic columns outside his future house. He explains that Ionic columns are better than any other kind of columns. Her stomach hurts.
‘Nothing ever goes to plan for people with that level of certainty about things,’ she says.
He makes a kind of frown. ‘That’s pessimistic.’
She shrugs and toes a loose cobblestone on the ground. She doesn’t know how to tell him that no one escapes their lack of integration. How much life has he moved through without casting a single thought to the questions that slip into her body as she sleeps, breathes, eats?
These early days between them, he likes to chide her for talking about men from her past. Somehow, this is qualitatively different to the nights he disappears, the nights she doesn’t ask him about. But something has taken hold of her – something warm and blue and shaped like May.
She is unwritten when he looks right at her and says, ‘Fuck, sorry. I forgot I have to be gentle with you.’
‘Not too gentle,’ she says. This makes him smile. And then she is alive, alive, alive.
After their final exams, she follows him down to the river with four of their friends. They throw their gowns on the bank and jump off the bridge. Light in the dense water. Shaving foam and colour powder wash off, forming small pools of red and orange and purple around their still-unsubstantial bodies. He swims over to her, lifts her up, kisses her. Their friends are quiet. She doesn’t care. There is something bitter in her mouth. She presses her icy hands against his warm, broad face and throws her head back and laughs.
Their first night in Athens, he is talking about war. From their table at the restaurant, she can see the Acropolis. The Parthenon is alive in yellow light and set against the gentlest of blue-dark skies. It stirs a dull ache in her.
‘Would you die for democracy?’ she interrupts suddenly.
‘Yes,’ he says after a pause. ‘Yeah, I would.’
What about for love, she thinks. She doesn’t ask him. She knows what he will say.
She spends a lot of time these days jotting down things she thinks will interest him. She likes to send him New Yorker articles, though she doesn’t know if he reads them. She doesn’t mind. She likes having someone to bear witness to thoughts that mean something to her. She can tell he likes feeling like he’s part of a narrative.
She decides to walk up to the Acropolis without him one warm and muted Thursday. Suit yourself, he says. He is going to meet someone.
They woke up late, and it is early evening by the time she leaves the apartment. The air is warm and thick as the sun sets. Exhaust fumes hang low in the street above the Metro.
She takes the red line to Akropoli station. She has a ticket from the day before. He had stood behind her while she bought it, hand on her waist. She traces it with her finger now. Love is a clumsy excuse to imbue ordinary things with extraordinary meaning. Though maybe, she thinks, this is everything.
It is darker now, but the cobbled street from the station up to the Acropolis is still packed with swarms of tourists, children on bicycles, people gesticulating in the dead centre of the street. The roar of talk spills out onto restaurant terraces.
‘I’d like to see the Parthenon,’ she says to the man at the ticket desk. He narrows his eyes and looks at her, then at his watch.
‘It’s late,’ he tells her. ‘Very late.’
She nods. ‘I know. Sorry.’
The path is gritty and she kicks up dust as she walks. It settles on her shins and ankles. A thin, mottled cat appears from behind a dry tree and peers sideways at her with bulging eyes. It follows her all the way up.
She surfaces to the dregs of indulgent, orange light thrown onto dozens of columns. Doric columns, he had told her. She feels very close to him then, as though she might be able to slip through space and touch him.
The whole of Athens is sinking into a gentle darkness. She stands on a slab of limestone and watches the skyline soften. She wants to cry. She wants to cry, but all she can feel is time. Time, flowing through her.
‘Do you believe in determinism?’ he asks.
He’s good, she thinks. She knows he is less interested in her response than in what the question does to her.
They are in line for a club somewhere on the Athens Riviera. The perfume of the place is warmth and lightness.
‘No,’ she lies, and takes his hand.
Inside, bodies are loose and indigo under an open sky. He hands her something bitter and strong at the bar. She downs it, and orders them two shots each, and does those. He tells her he is impressed. She wonders if his constant underestimations of her hold any significant meaning.
From the bar, they can see the ocean. He draws her close and she wants to tell him that the coasts she grew up around were wild and enormous. She doesn’t. She follows his gaze to a large platform in the centre of the club. A line of dancers in bikinis and bondage chains are held in violent colour.
She feels a sudden and overwhelming urge to dare him to look at her – to look at her stomach, her lungs. She feels like showing him whatever part of herself will stir something in him.
When the sky begins to flush with blue and purple, he hands his phone up to the DJ to take a video of the two of them. She kisses him, and his lips are warm, like the final days of June. He tastes like sea air and chagrin. Sometimes he slips into lucidity and becomes terribly transparent to her. She likes when that happens. She knows he doesn’t.
Later, she imagines he will show the video to his friends to convince them of the gravity of the night. He will hope they pick up on the subtext. He will think about her when she is gone.
A pale pink polaroid camera. They are on a punt back in Oxford, eking out an evening in July.
‘That seems like the most unlikely thing for you to have,’ she says. She laughs gently. These days her poise slips when she challenges him. ‘Too wholesome.’
He smiles in a deliberate way. ‘Look at me.’
She slips the picture into the back of her phone case. Thunder in the distance. A few drops of water splash up from the side of the punt and land cold on her arm.
When he tells her what she already knows, she looks up and sees a huge May sky. A huge May sky.
Iseult de Mallet Burgess, 22, Oxford - UK ✯ IG: @iseultdmb ✯ iseultdmb@gmail.com
“Iseult de Mallet Burgess is a writer based in the UK. She is currently studying Japanese at the University of Oxford and is due to start the MA Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia in 2025. She is interested in the in-between.”