She steps from the taxi, pushing at the metal weight of the door, clutching cigarettes, change and the thorned stems of roses. Sarah says something to her over the taxi roof and she half turns. She’s aware too late of her foot catching on the granite curve of the kerb, and the next moment she is airborne, falling upwards.
Lily sees the world swivel on its axis, her hair, lighter than her, flowing past her face, her fingers shedding roses and spinning discs of coins. She arches through space she sees, walking along the pavement towards her, a man. It seems odd somehow that he should be alone because he strikes her, in that split-second shutter-snap moment, as the kind of person who is rarely without others. He walks with a peculiar emphasis, as if trying to leave an imprint of himself on the air. Then concrete and grit smack against her body, and the skin is flayed from her hands.
At the touch of fingers, tight as ivy on her sleeve, she looks up. His eyes are a surprising, unambiguous blue. The flowers are crushed beneath her, seeping yellow pigment into her clothes. He is helping her upright, speaking to her, asking her are you all right, are you hurt. Her hands feel scalded, raw, and when she looks at them she sees beads of blood springing from the skin in neat rows. Then Sarah has made it round from the other side of the taxi and is holding her arm, pressing tissues to her grazes, thanking the man. When Lily looks round, he’s vanished.
‘My God,’ Sarah says, peering at her. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah,’ she says, laughing now, embarrassed, ‘I’m fine. Don’t know what happened there.’ And they walk through the night air, towards the party. A repetitive, thrumming pulse of music is stretching at the walls of the building.
Inside, the rooms and corridors are crushed with people and hung with heavy nimbuses of smoke. It’s the exhibition launch of a friend of Sarah’s, but no one’s looking at the art - photo-realistic paintings of people and animals being consumed by fire. Lily has the sensation of wanting to stretch up to the ceiling where there might be more air. Her injured hands feel sensitised, peeled like eggs.
She leaves Sarah in the main room, talking to a girl in a turquoise dress. The dress is rimmed with silky, frail fur, strands of which cling to the moistness of the girl’s skin like seaweed. The people all seem to be of a type, or wearing some kind of uniform. The girls are small and gamine with cropped hair and dark-kohled eyes. The men are brash, filling their clothes complacently, gripping cigarettes between meaty fingers. Maybe it’s the fall, or the pain in her hands, but she can’t get over how distant everyone seems, as if she’s looking at them down the wrong end of a telescope.
At the drinks table, she picks up a fragile-feeling plastic cup filled with acidic pale wine. Next to her, a woman is fanning herself vigorously with the exhibition catalogue, her cup-rim stained with a simulacrum of her violent crimson lips. Holding her drink above her head, Lily starts pushing her way through groups of people and cross-currents of conversation, towards the back and shoulders of a man she knows. She hears the rub of her black corduroy trousers as her legs move under her - a sound of secret, velvet friction. She had a lover who’d been obsessed with these trousers. ‘Cor-du-roy,’ he would say as he eased them off her, separating each syllable in a fake French accent, ‘cord of kings.’
A hand darts through the crowd and seizes her arm. It’s brown-skinned, crooked-fingered, with silver nails.