Another Country by Anjali Joseph

things Leela didn’t consider food, like smoked cheese and salami.

    The phone call came when she was returning from the park at the end of her lunch hour.
    â€˜Hi sweetie!’
    â€˜Hi sweetie,’ he responded. ‘Listen, I’ve had an email from Dad.’
    She took the news well, stopped in the doorway of a shop, and had to move aside when young men came out with cigarettes and bottles of Lucozade. Friday, the end of the week.
    â€˜When’s he here? How many days?’
    Richard’s father lived in Germany. He owned the flat where his son and, unofficially, Leela lived. He would be coming to London on work the following afternoon, and staying for a few days. Leela would have to gather her things and take them back to her house.
    She didn’t say, ‘Are you going to tell him about me?’
    Richard had a strange relationship with his father. Typically, when he and Leela fought about his not having disclosed Leela’s existence, he would say, ‘I’m not even that close to him. There are a lot of things I don’t tell him.’
    But Leela suspected he enjoyed the time away from her and with his father, out to nice dinners and strolling around exhibitions. She had more or less moved in with him, and abandoned the daily carrying of a change of clothes, toothbrush, hairbrush etc with her to work, then out, then back to his house. She wanted to be settled; she didn’t want to have to think so often about the small objects that supported her life.
    In the afternoon, while the rest of the office grew skittish after a Friday lunch in the pub and sent round droll email forwards, she brooded on those objects. Her hairdryer. Her underwear. Socks, tights, clothes, superannuated make-up, shoes, trainers, a disposable camera that wasn’t yet ready to be disposed of. She dreamed of having few possessions. But it would be the usual degrading scramble of things stuffed in supermarket plastic bags, and Richard, probably, left holding out to her a pair of knickers that had fallen from one of them.
    â€˜Come home and I’ll cook you a nice dinner tonight,’ he said at the end of the call.
    â€˜It’s not my fucking home, is it.’
    She left work, disregarding the injunctions from her temporary colleagues to have a good weekend. Was a weekend not merely an opportunity to have long, unfurling arguments and dilatory sex; to spend a long time apologising for things one had said, and a shorter time in the warmth of apparent forgiveness?
    On the tube, she was distracted by the profusion of stuff. She tried to read the magazine she’d bought, and scanned the pictures of things with alluring, slightly threatening legends: Pointy-toed boots, Dune, £49.99. Should she wear different nail polish? Change her eye make-up?
    She surfed, too, the body parts around her. One day, in bed, Richard had said that when he looked at women it wasn’t in the way she had feared. Or rather, that her fears weren’t sufficiently comprehensive. ‘It’s not necessarily just someone who looks really beautiful,’ he said. ‘Half the time, I’m looking at their clothes, or how they’ve put together a look.’
    â€˜But not all the time.’
    He’d giggled, perhaps at his own audacity. ‘When you look in a more sexual way, I suppose there’s an element of looking at individual body parts. Sometimes you see a great arse, or a nice pair of breasts. You’re not really looking at the person as a whole.’
    One cold afternoon, when she was in between jobs, Leela had gone to her house and surfed porn on her flatmate Jon’s computer. The images of women with exaggerated breasts, tans, and open orifices presented to the viewer had aroused her, but in a way she found embarrassing, as though she’d protested a lack of hunger, then, pressed to eat junk food, overeaten anyway. There was no elegance to this desire.
    Still, since that conversation,