The Pleasure Quartet Read Online Free PDF Page A

lost, or forgotten. Her will was sparse. She left Iris and me no money – not that
either of us had even thought of it – but an envelope that contained two one-way tickets and a note of white paper, folded twice, that contained one line of writing in black ink: Go to
London, and find the ghost of me there .
    And so we went.
    Iris’s parents were sad to see us off but did not fight the move. Our entire country was made up of immigrants. The urge to roam was strong in our genes and a desire to travel overseas,
therefore, unremarkable. We promised to write, but knew that we probably wouldn’t do so often enough.
    When we arrived in London the city seemed to me a thrumming, caterwauling mess, a hotchpotch of traffic roaring and grime that clung to walls like cement and people who stared right through you
as though you weren’t there at all. I fell in love with her immediately. Living in London was like living at the centre of a beating heart. I thought of her as a woman, alive and full of
contradictions, of light and dark corners waiting to be explored, straight rows of red-bricked houses standing in perfect uniformity alongside crumbling squats and derelict warehouses, parks filled
with neat hedgerows and populated by swans or with murky shadows and things unknown lurking in them and best left alone, depending on your postcode.
    We had saved enough money between us to put down a bond and the first six week’s rent to secure a ground-floor, semi-furnished bedsit. One room that contained a small double bed we planned
to share, a kitchenette and bathroom. An old sofa that might have once been white ran along one wall. A too-small window above the sink, with a sill that wouldn’t come clean no matter what we
scrubbed it with, overlooking a lemon tree. We pooled the last of our cash to buy a dining table, a stamp-sized, square of a thing that was barely large enough for us both to sit and eat at, a
green glass jug to fill with flowers, a set of new sheets and a bed cover, all in white.
    At night we made love. Even though I knew that we were alone and the door was locked, I always waited until we were under the cover of darkness before I reached beneath the sheet and curved my
palm over the silk of Iris’s ankle, or cupped the slight hillock of her breasts. Her nipples jutted out, but I never pinched them, only brushed them lightly with the very tips of my fingers,
or blew on them softly until she shuddered and they turned even harder. Almost invariably, I took the lead role, beginning by her side and arranging her limbs as the mood took me, letting her
chorus of soft sighs and moans be my guide. Sometimes I rode her, grinding my mound against hers and even, once, pressing the C-shape of my thumb and forefinger against her throat until she
gasped.
    Yet, I was possessed by the idea that something would go wrong, that by living with Iris I was trying to keep a handful of quicksilver from vanishing between my fingers.
    She found a job quickly, temping as a secretary in a law firm in the West End. I knocked on the doors of every theatre that I passed and was rejected from most until finally the Princess Empire
Theatre offered me a week’s trial as an usher, leaving me under no uncertainty that if I was clumsy, slow or loud I would be out of the door as quick as I’d come through it.
    The bus pulled into my stop and I leapt off my seat and down the stairs in the nick of time, thankful that another passenger had pulled the cord. There was still a ten-minute
walk to the bedsit, along dimly lit streets, and I huddled into my jacket, seeking protection from the dark as well as the cold. It had rained earlier and my shoes slid along the slippery street. I
concentrated on navigating my way around the puddles that filled the uneven footpath, trying not to notice the similarities between the scene around me and the one that I had witnessed earlier that
night unfolding on the stage. A cloud had covered the moon and what