It was eight weeks since Lauren saw the builder working on the roof outside her bedroom. She hadn’t sat down with a friend or been touched by anyone for all of that time and in the nights she had started to shake with a feeling that seemed separate to her, her mind watching her body process all the events she had postponed thinking about when there was life to at least observe in offices and galleries and cinemas and pubs.
This feeling seemed then to belong to another character, a heroine, she imagined, in a French film. But it was hers. She was on this floor, observing herself on this floor. The sense that she was more witnessing this feeling than experiencing it must have been her way of managing its madness, of repurposing it as though it might be useful, though she worried it was harming her in ways that were permanent, just as permanent pain might begin to feel normal, manageable, seen through a screen of drugs or reduced expectations of pleasure. In the days the sun blazed down on the no fun anyone was having. The mind rebelled. The body–
The builder had dark hair and tanned arms and a dirty white T-shirt. Outside her bedroom window there was a roof you could climb out on to, with a wooden table and two chairs where she had used to eat dinner with Jack when they were still speaking. When she first saw the builder she was lying on her bed, on a new white bedspread with embroidered flowers, reading a novel, appearing like a vision of an angel, or rather a princess, locked in a tower, waiting to be rescued. That’s how she saw him see her. Which wasn’t not a hot thought. He waved. She waved back. She took a picture when he wasn’t looking and sent it to Reema.
Hot builder alert.
He just waved at me.
He looked up again and smiled at her. He had a dark complexion, with a black beard and thick hair swept back from his face. He looked Mediterranean, or maybe Argentine, a Latin hipster builder – there was enough there to imagine the start of a romantic or at least erotic story.
Hot, wrote back Reema. How are you looking?
Hotter.
