Leda

This is what she remembers, when she remembers them. A humming gentleness between them. A sly boy's smile on his face. They sleep and eat and fall into bed again. A month of hungry mouths, she falls down shivering and shuddering, her body broken open into a smile, and, looking down, he looks almost stupid, like her, with a smile that is frank and content. He rests his head in her lap, still and quiet. There's an animal stench from their room. Their neighbours hate them. Their flatmates all stay somewhere else, when she's over. Its hard to sleep, with them fucking the bed and the sofa and the dining room table, and the kitchen table and the bath and the shower . At moments during the day, she arches her neck, and sighs, remembering. He's left bite marks all over her. She won't wash for a day after he's seen her, because her body is still dancing a little, or sleepy as a cat, with a wide open grin. She spends the day on the Eveline Road in Tesco's sticking sun dried raisins, oatmeal cookies and tesco striped white and blue value flour on shelves, and delighting in the this and that of him, the licking and kissing of him, from his feet to his neck, and back again. A delight in fingers that are quick and clever, and a hot tongue, and eyes that mist over, the way they look at each other, drunk and grinning, and the way they spill into each other, and the way she sleeps, her head on his shoulder. Sometimes when he is inside her, the air feels very thin. Sometimes she gets vertigo, and forgets which way is up. When they sleep, they curl around each other like vines.
It is the coldest winter, the winter that he leaves her. She stares at the TV and at the cat, and back again. She watches the Antiques Roadshow, and Hollyoaks, she eats plastic cheese on toast. She shivers to think of him. His room, is just as he had left it. The big, always open window. The brown shoes with the backs trodden down, hole in the toe, torn jeans thrown on the floor, a tower of paperbacks, a red jumper, a bottle of Glenfiddich, a bunch of records, socks. Was anything different, anything that you remember, any thing at all? All that's different, she says, for the seventeenth time, looking at the rain outside and the wind scuffing the trees, is the blood and feathers.
. She stands again, as she stood in the morning, strokes her hands along the wall, and looks into his dirty mirror. That's all, she says again, and looks at the inky trickle of blood on the floor, next to the brown shoes by the window and the pile of white feathers on his bed. They sit there, as inpenetrable as calligraphy. She takes one and pokes it quickly into her coat pocket.
That's on the Tuesday. By the following Monday she's only been out for milk, digestives, bread and cutter's choice and that, that is the day. On Tuesday she dozes, doesn't get out of bed. She hears the kids from school next door: break time, then lunch, then home time, a shouting and clattering out of the gates. She throws off the duvet, gets out of bed, knocks over a tea cup, spills cold tea all over the carpet. It sinks in . Bollocks. She goes to pee, goes into the kitchen, puts the kettle on and there he is.
Not Larry of course, he's gone now, gone for good, but Billy. Sitting on the sofa. Fuck me, she says. Not that she called him Billy at first. He's there, in his radiant whiteness, as if he was born to float in the sofa's dark velvety green.