Perfect Day

weightless.
    She wonders if it’s the same for him. Is his heart now beating in his dick like hers is beating in her crotch? Have his nipples gone all hard? Is he imagining what it would be like to be inside her? The muscles in her pelvic floor contract involuntarily. She sits up quickly, pressing her thighs together. A wave slops up to the top of the bath and back over her chest.
    ‘Kate?’ her sister calls from the door.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What are you doing in the bath with your clothes on?’
    ‘I felt like it.’
    Marie puts down her handbag and flops onto the bed.
    ‘I’ve had it,’ she says. ‘They want me back at seven in the morning. Seven!’
    ‘Who’s in at seven?’ Kate asks, not really interested.
    ‘Men who go to work,’ Marie says, ‘that’s who. Men with money to pay to see my bits in the morning.’
    ‘It’s disgusting,’ says Kate, sinking back under the water.
    ‘You sound like Mam .’
    ‘ Mam would die,’ says Kate.
    Marie leans forward and gets a cigarette from her bag.
    ‘Is it more disgusting, d’you think?’ she asks, matter-of-factly, ‘table dancing? I feel terrible about getting them all worked up and then sending them away, you know...’
    She still talks as if she’s a teenage cock-tease deciding how far to let a bloke’s hand slip down her jeans. They used to have whispered conversations in their room at night about how far they would go. Marie was always prepared to go further, and she is two years younger.
    ‘At seven in the morning they won’t go home and bother their wives,’ Kate says.
    ‘That’s a point,’ says Marie, pulling on her cigarette. ‘Their secretaries’ll get it instead.’ She shrieks with laughter.
    ‘I’m making as much money’ — she empties notes out of her handbag, then unzips her jeans and nonchalantly pulls out a roll of new twenties she’s stuffed down the front of her thong — ‘and you don’t have to talk to them. You soon get a sense of what they like. You should try it.’
    ‘No, thanks.’
    ‘You’d be out of here sooner if you did,’ Marie argues, zipping up again.
    ‘I’ll find somewhere else if you don’t want me.’
    ‘It’s not that,’ says Marie, with the little offended look that comes readily to her face. ‘I’m saving to go to college,’ she says , as if to defend her work.
    ‘To do what?’ Kate asks. It’s the first she’s heard of it.
    ‘Interior design.’
    ‘What happened to opening a bar in Ibiza ?’
    ‘Yeah. What have you done to your knee?’ Marie suddenly shrieks.
    ‘I fell over.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Outside Tate Modern.’
    ‘Tate Modern?’ Marie thinks she’s unbelievably pretentious. ‘What were you doing there?’
    ‘Mind your own business.’
    Kate sees that she’s given herself away by trying to hide something of no importance, and then makes it worse by saying, ‘I didn’t think you were coming back tonight.’
    ‘Got other plans?’ Marie’s on to her immediately.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Liar!’
    Kate stands up in the bath and peels off her knickers and T-shirt. Marie hands her a towel. One of the few rules of the house is that you dry yourself before you get out of the bath. Otherwise the carpet starts to smell like an old flannel.
    ‘I met this bloke,’ Kate says. She might as well tell Marie because she’s bound to wheedle it out of her if they’re going to spend the evening together, which it looks like they are.
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Not like that,’ says Kate.
    Marie’s only half listening as she takes a small mirror off the wall and puts it on the bed beside her. She extracts a little plastic bag from her handbag then chops three lines of coke on the silver surface, rolls one of the crisp £20 tips she has earned today, and snorts up a line.
    Kate thinks it’s the paraphernalia of the process that Marie likes. As she sniffs and brushes her nose with her finger, she has exactly the same satisfied look on her face that she used to have after giving herself a manicure as a teenager. Marie loved all the emery boards and buffers, orange sticks and cuticle cream. Her half of the dressing table in their room at home was covered with her beauty equipment lined up in rows. Eye shadows, lipsticks, brushes of every size. Kate’s had a pile of library books all open at different places.
    ‘Want some?’ Marie asks, dipping her head down for the second line.
    ‘No, thanks.’
    She always asks, as if it’s something that Kate does too, and Kate always says no,