Signs of Life by Anna Raverat Page B

with rolled-up fifties, smoking joints. The next day
I forged a receipt for the amount he had spent on the drugs. After this, we often shared a joint while driving back from meetings in work vehicles, and sometimes we stopped the car somewhere quiet.
I would like to say I felt guilty, making such use of company resources, but I was excited by our bad behaviour, and at the prospect of getting away with it.
    Once, before the first kiss, Carl wore a green shirt to work that I admired. It was a new shirt and he was pleased when I noticed. A couple of days later, he presented it to
me, washed and pressed, and after some protest I took it home and showed Johnny, who barely raised his eyes from the paper.
    As teenagers, my sister and I made up a game called ‘Am I prettier than?’ There were two answers: ‘Yes’ or ‘Same As’. (There were only a
handful of exceptions, where the answer ‘No’ was allowed. I suppose we had to have some ‘No’s to give the game gravitas, to make us feel it was serious, and it was serious.
Even when played lightly.) We started with girls at school, going from average to the prettiest and most popular, and branched out to girls we didn’t know (Am I prettier than Victoria?
Nicola? Natasha? Yes, Yes and Yes. Am I prettier than the girl who works in the bakery? Yes) and then to famous people and icons (Am I prettier than that newsreader? Yes. That actress? Same As. Am
I prettier than Princess Diana?). As I remember, we would play for hours, but that can’t be right because it’s quick to get through even twenty other women. Maybe it was an ongoing
conversation that we kept picking up over a number of years, which is why it feels like we played it for so long. The only taboo, never broken, was to ask: Am I prettier than . . . you?
    Since they struck gold here once, the builders have developed more of an interest in my window. This past week, there has been a lot of looking (but no waving, from either
side). I can see them clearly; they are only about twenty metres away – if I threw something, they could catch it; if I shouted, they would hear me. I have to admit I am tempted to walk naked
in front of my window as my sister did, just to see if I get the same reaction. Right now, there are four builders looking at me, one from each of the four windows. One of them is leaning out of
the window, smoking. One of them is holding a mug, empty, I think, by the way he is tilting it. One, with a fat face, has a phone to his head but he is not talking, maybe he is listening or maybe
he is on hold or maybe he is waiting for someone to answer his call. One of them is just standing, doing nothing except look at me. He is the youngest and the one I like best. I would choose him,
if I had to. Each of the four men is unaware that the other three are also looking at me. The fat-faced builder holding the phone begins to speak. He turns away from the window. The spell is
broken.
    Maybe because Carl was older, maybe because he was new to me, I felt he knew something I didn’t, a secret that I wanted to know too. Now I don’t think it was as
defined or as sealed as a secret, it was more open-ended, to do with how he approached life as an experience where finding yourself and losing yourself is the same thing.
    I said ‘spell’ but it was not magical nor even particularly charged, this moment with the four builders; no intent at all, or not that I could feel – and I
think you can feel these things. It was absent-minded, idling. They were on a break and I was something, a woman, to look at, or on, or through. Or was I four women?
    I returned from the Forest of Maibie to the city by train and Johnny was there to meet me in our car. I let him fasten his seat belt but before he could start the ignition I
started telling him about Carl. Small dark words flew out of my mouth like bats. As soon as they hit daylight they darted away for cover, but I knew he heard them because his whole stature