The First Law of Thermodynamics by Michael Logan

Our balcony is, I suppose, a sparse place to the casual observer. An unruly lemon verbena plant with browning leaves, a fold-down wooden table, and four chairs with cushions mismatched in size and colour are all that sit on the cracked blue tiles. Wound through the railings is a string of solar-powered fairy lights that turn on at dusk to keep the night at bay. It is certainly nothing compared to other balconies and terraces in Rome, with their lemon trees, drooping green beards of vines and wrought iron dining sets. But there is more here than the eye can see. In these few square metres, fifteen years of memories crackle in the air.

Here is where Alexis and I sat for the first time in our new home in a new city, squirting mouthfuls of Prosecco at each other through rolled-up tongues and goggling at the small square of Roman ruins below our apartment block.

Here is where our swelling group of friends jostled for space on balmy summer evenings, all swirling around Alexis, the light at the centre, voices raised in English, Italian and French until the old man upstairs screamed Basta! and we scampered inside, snorting. 

Here is where she and I squeezed onto one chair, even when there was nobody else around, and whispered and giggled and fought and forgave until the early hours of too many mornings to count. 

Here is where she plucked out my first grey hair, and we dreamed of retiring to a ramshackle farm in Umbria to make vinegary wine that only our most bacchanalian friends would choke down. 

Here is where I first felt the hard, alien lump when my hand cupped her breast.

Tonight, Reid, Valentina and I are at the scratched table, minding our elbows amid the clutter of wine bottles, glasses and mobile phones. I have already drunk too much, the glass clanking against my teeth with every snatched gulp. We have been waiting over an hour for Alexis to join us. I promised I wouldn’t rush her. She needs the time to prepare herself. Anyway, we have already made Reid and Valentina wait so long that a few more hours or minutes won’t matter. It has been three months since we ast saw them: a neglect they probably think they understand, but don’t. 

They are friends from two circles that rarely overlap. Reid is a humanitarian like Alexis, both dedicated to helping the poor and disadvantaged, as long as you pay them the going rate plus benefits. Valentina is a former Olympic fencer, always seeking an outlet for her physical energy now she is restricted to sparring in the boardroom. They have met twice before that I can remember: in Rosti al Pigneto, where elbow-bruised kidneys from the scrum around the buffet are a price worth paying for a mouth-watering Sunday brunch, and Terrazza Borromini, where the view of the setting sun dousing the dome of St. Peter’s in blood red light blinds you to the eyewatering prices. 

I never considered them a possible couple. Valentina is an Italian racehorse – svelte, muscular and beautifully groomed. Reid is a British seaside donkey – sad-eyed, chunky and covered in bristly hair. But where I saw surface differences, Alexis saw deeper commonalities. She saw two high-achievers in their late thirties, both cute in their own way, both aware that while their careers were on the rise, their dating potential was on the slide. She also insisted she had spotted them slinging sneaky glances at each other in Borromini. Even though I held out little hope of setting them up, I agreed to her proposal of bringing them over for drinks. She knew she couldn’t put off seeing them any longer; I wanted to shift the focus of the evening, even slightly, away from her.

So far, it seems that she may be on to something. She always was the matchmaking champion. In her credit column she has two marriages and three long-term relationships. The best I managed to arrange was a drunken tussle between two casual acquaintances that bordered on mutual sexual assault.

Valentina is sitting upright, one tanned hand resting on the fence, the other twirling the stem of her wine glass. She has weaponised her hair and body with curling tongs and a low-cut black top. Reid is hunched in the corner beneath a crown of twigs, one eye squeezed shut against the smoke curling from his Camel Blue. He is still wearing his crumpled work suit, and his beard needs a trim. He swipes at a branch, as if to make room for the words flying from his lips, and rips off some leaves. The fresh tang of sap mingles with the smell of cigarettes in the autumn air. 

It is too early to be sure what kind of explosion the spark between Reid and Valentina will ignite. Within a few minutes of arriving, when it became clear I didn’t want to talk about Alexis until she made an appearance, they started arguing. About everything. In the first half an hour, they jumped from Rome’s dilapidated streets (Reid said the neglect was romantic; Valentina contended it was grubby) to politics (Reid believed leaders should stick to their principles; Valentina thought they should listen to the people) to how to order a coffee (Reid advocated British politeness; Valentina considered anything other than bluntness a waste of breath). Now both of their cheeks are flushed, which could be alcohol, irritation or desire. Valentina has, at least once to my knowledge, stroked Reid’s meaty calf with her toes. He didn’t pull his leg away. This points to the last option, but she could be playing footsy as a tactic to put her opponent off his stride, and he could have written off the contact as accidental.  

By now, I am only pretending to listen to what Reid is saying, my nods inserting the punctuation his chaotic train of thought generally neglects. My gaze keeps flitting to the balcony door. It is becoming increasingly difficult to remain in my seat. It is only when the background drone of their conversation halts, and I feel them both looking at me, that I figure out somebody has asked me a question.

‘Sorry, I zoned our for a second,’ I say. ‘Blame the wine.’

‘I asked what you thought,’ Reid says.

Even if I had been following their latest spat in detail, I probably wouldn’t have had anything insightful to add. I have slept so little recently, and tonight’s alcohol has taken such rapid effect, that my brain feels like it has been soaked in liquid Valium. I go for the response that serves as my Get Out of Jail Free card when I lose the thread in work meetings. ‘You make some valid points.’

‘See!’ Reid says, jabbing a finger in the air.

Valentina rolls her eyes. ‘You think that means you’re correct? Eli is only being his usual agreeable self.’

They dismiss me and start to reprise their points simultaneously, leaning in towards each other as their raised voices contend for supremacy. The warbling siren of a passing ambulance, which makes me wince, adds to the clamour. Amid the din, they don’t hear Alexis’s footsteps. I do. I have become attuned to the new cadence, the hiss-slap of feet that never fully leave the ground. The sound makes me want to punch holes in the walls. I try to breathe deeply, but I can’t force the air down into my diaphragm. Alexis pauses in the living room. Seconds pass. Then the door slides open.

Valentina and Reid both fall silent. Reid throws his cigarette into the plant pot like a guilty schoolboy. 

Alexis has done her best. She has chosen a sunflower yellow bandana that sets off her pale blue eyes. She has layered on the foundation and garnished it with blusher. She is wearing a long-sleeved, ankle-length floral print dress that draws the gaze to the surface rather than the frame beneath. But the bandana can’t hide the shape of her skull, from which blond ringlets once flowed. The makeup can’t fill the hollows in her cheeks. The colourful pattern of the dress can’t disguise how it billows in places where it once clung.

I look at Reid and Valentina. Seconds ago, they were absorbed in each other, Alexis not even an afterthought. Now the shame at their own blithe flirting is rising off them like steam. I want to tell them that it is okay: that we hid the truth by telling everyone that Alexis just needed space to recover and get her head straight after the surgery; that they can have their beginning, as we had ours; that they should hold the world upside down and shake the fucker until every last coin has fallen from its pockets while they still can.

I say nothing. 

Even though Alexis must have seen her rapid decline in the dilated pupils of our friends, as I have, she does what she always does. She tries to shine.

‘Christ on a bike,’ she says, stepping onto the balcony, no hiss-slap to be heard. ‘This cancer’s getting on my tits, never mind in them. You lot were gabbing away non-stop while I was prettifying, but the moment I walk out here even the piano stops playing.’

Reid’s eyes shimmer, but he remains frozen in his chair. Valentina lunges up and squeezes her friend, as though by doing so she can stop the flesh falling from her bones. 

‘Why didn’t you tell us it was so bad?’ she says, her voice muffled from within the curtain of hair her bent head cascades over Alexis’s shoulder. 

‘Way to make a girl feel attractive,’ Alexis says.

I see her stiffen and feel the simmering heat in her voice, but I know she will keep herself in check. Only I ever get my eyebrows singed in the full force of her flare ups. 

‘Sorry,’ Valentina says. ‘I didn’t mean to … I just …’

Valentina tightens her hold. Alexis lets her stay in the clinch a little longer, then pushes her back. When she speaks again, one hand cupping Valentina’s cheek, the heat has gone. ‘You’re right. It wasn’t fair to hide it from you. Consider this my coming out party. As you can see, I’m proper cancer girl. Ta da! Probably not the best superhero persona, but there you go.’

Valentina hiccoughs, half laugh, half sob. Alexis presses her back down into her eat. Then she comes to me. She doesn’t have to say anything. I budge over, and she slides onto the cushion beside me. Her hip bone, once sunk deep in a pool of flesh, jabs my thigh, but we fit in the small space easily. Too easily. I remember the many nights we sat together on that chair, one fat, good-life buttock apiece all that anchored us. Something dark and slippery rises in me, and I wonder if it is my turn to curl over the toilet bowl and vomit. 

Reid claws for Alexis’s hand. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Now that’s a first,’ Alexis says. ‘Normally we can’t shut you up with a roll of gaffer tape and a ping-pong ball. I’ll tell you what you can say: “Have a fag, my love.”’

Reid hesitates, and looks to me as though for approval – like Alexis has ever needed my go-ahead to do precisely what she wants. I shrug.

‘Believe me,’ Alexis says. ‘One little smoke isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference. It’s all genetics, darling. Now cough up, pun fully intended.’

Reid’s resistance melts and he lights a cigarette for her. She takes a long drag and staccato-coughs out puffs of smoke.  

‘Ground rules,’ she says, when she has her breath back. ‘I’m sorry, you’re sorry, we’re all sorry. Let’s take that as read. We’ll talk about it later, I promise. But not tonight. Tonight, we’re going to get off our tits – why, for fuck’s sake, are there so many breast idioms? And we’re going to talk bollocks.’

Of course Reid and Valentina want to talk about it. I am not sure even Alexis can charm her way out of this one. But she has another trick up her sleeve. Literally. She clamps the cigarette between her lips and lets a blister pack slide down her wrist. She pops out four round, white pills.

‘A little gift from the cancer Gods,’ she says. ‘Tramadol. Serious pain killers. The bee’s knees, as they’re known in the biz, especially when washed down with booze. Don’t worry, there’s plenty more where that came from. I’ve got a tab at the pharmacy.’

She presses the medication into three slack palms.

‘Salute!’ she says, and taps her pill against mine.

We parrot her, clinking painkillers. Alexis flips hers into her mouth and swallows it dry. Again we follow, chasing the Tramadol down with a slug of wine. 

‘Now who wants to start the bollocks?’ she says.

We teeter on the edge of a silence that could go either way until Reid wipes his cheek, smearing wine and tears onto the back of his hand.  

‘Well,’ he says, ‘Since I seem to have the reputation for being a chatterbox...’

He starts talking again, slowly, his gaze flicking to Alexis. I can see he is trying not to look at anything other than her eyes. Alexis prompts and cajoles until his voice accelerates and gains volume. Before too long, his hands are flying again. Meanwhile, Alexis is giving Valentina the reassurance she needs, stroking the light brown skin of her friend’s arm. Deftly, Alexis leads our friends back out of the darkness. 

Our friends. I say that, but it isn’t strictly true. Really, they are hers. She met Reid on a security training course, where aid workers ran around a muddy field administering fake first aid, and Italian soldiers hammed it up in their roles as terrorists and militiamen. She emerged with the phone numbers of half the course. She met Valentina at an open-air Capoeira class beneath the stone pines of Villa Celimontana, their friendship sprouting from the bloody nose Valentina dealt Alexis with an over-exuberant air kick.

This is Alexis’s gift. When we first came to Rome, she blazed through dozens of established social circles, dragging everyone she encountered out of their pre-defined orbits until they all revolved around her. I sat at home, writing advertising copy for clients in other countries, and let her bring them to me. When I finally got a real job with real people in a real office, running the communications for an artisanal brewer looking to break into the English-speaking market, I started to bring peopl into our lives. They too looped in to the Alexis system.

So close to the centre, I could have pretended that all of these people were spinning around me as well. But I couldn’t remember half their names, never mind the names of their partners and children and pets the way Alexis could. I have always known I am a secondary body – on a tighter orbit than everybody else, but on an orbit, nonetheless. Even when Alexis entered her self-imposed quarantine, nothing changed. Her phone buzzed and chirped all day long, at least until I asked her to mute all notifications, while mine stayed largely silent. When people bumped into me in the street, often as I was returning from the pharmacy next to her office, they asked how she was before they asked how I was – if they asked at all. Reid did exactly this tonight when he walked through our front door. I have become adept at keeping my face still. 

I know that they would all rather I had cancer than Alexis. I would take it from her if I could. Maybe then I would be the one at the centre, even if just for a little while.

I look down at the ruins outside, the voices around me distant now. There are many such smaller relics around Rome, uncovered during the laying of cables or metro line expansions. These particular remnants of the city’s ancient civilisation, hidden up a side street, aren’t grand enough to draw the crowds of tourists that clog the pavements in the historical centre. When we first arrived, Alexis decided they were once a brothel, where portly Roman senators cavorted with oiled slave girls and boys between dashes to the vomitorium. It is really an old local government building, possibly used by tax collectors. I read the plaque. When I tried to tell Alexis the building’s real function, she put her fingers in her ears.

Tonight, the top half of the crumbling Doric column at the heart of the rubble is glowing orange, as though it were alive. But I know it is an illusion. The stone has borrowed its sheen from the sun, sucking up the heat and light and passing it off as its own. As I watch, the sun drops lower and the rest of the column begins to darken. Before long, with no light to illuminate it, the column will sit cold and unseen in the depths of the night, a relic from a lost life, fenced off and forgotten.

A breeze snaps me out of my reverie. I blink and see Alexis, her lips pursed as she blows air at me from close range. I realise I am shivering.

‘You’re there aren’t you?’ she whispers.

‘Where?’ I ask.

‘After me.’

I shake my head, not to deny the insight – she knows me too well – but to clear my mind. Reid is now addressing Valentina, looking fixedly ahead. His voice is too loud, clipped with tension. 

‘There is no after you,’ I say.

‘Of course there is. If one Pope dies, we elect another, right?’ 

‘You’re not the Pope.’

‘True. But I do rock a white gown far better than he does.’

I search for the laugh she is trying to prompt. It is frozen in my throat. She kisses me. Her lips and tongue taste sour, inhuman. It is both nicotine and a side-effect of the Halaven, which dries out the mouth, but it feels like I am inhaling the cancer metastasising throughout her body.

‘Don’t be there,’ she says. ‘Be here, where I need you.’

I look at her. By bringing me back, she has taken herself forward, to a world in which she is no more. Her face looks paler. The light in her eyes is flickering. She gathered all of her reserves for tonight, still trying to shine for me and for her friends. But she has shone all she can. Her fuel exhausted, she is collapsing in on herself, and I don’t know what to do.

Lights go on along the fence, accompanied by the click of the automatic switch. The sensor on the fairy lights has decided that it is dusk, or thereabouts. They always come on early. The little five-pointed stars are still faint; they will brighten as the sky darkens, or at least seem to. Alexis is staring at me, waiting for something, anything. But I can’t look away from the lights. This ten-euro knickknack has sat there for two years, snatching slivers of the sun’s immense power from the air. But it does not keep what it has stolen. It gives it back, in the form of light, when darkness comes. Even the column returns what the sun has given. By day, it stores heat and expands, as though trying to get closer to its benefactor. By night, it shrinks back into itself and offers up its heat to the cooling air. Both, in some way, return or pass on what they have taken. 

‘I’m here,’ I say.

She rests her forehead against mine, her skin cool, and lets me bear her weight. The hairs on my arms prickle as I understand. All of the energy Alexis has poured into me down the years is stored in the battery of my heart, fizzing in its cells and chambers. I too can give back. 

I wrap my arms around her thin waist and place my palms on her back, trying to send blue bolts of electricity streaming into her body like some wild-eyed dust plains preacher. There is no Hallelujah moment, no sudden healing blast of energy. Of course there isn’t. We give and take our energy through the mundane, not the miraculous. 

I draw her closer, hoping to at least transfer some of my body heat. I have forgotten that we are sharing one chair that has seen too much rust and friction down the years. Our combined weight, as slight as Alexis now is, snaps a bolt. I hear it skitter across the floor just before the legs give way. I fall to the left, still holding onto Alexis. We land in the corner, my back taking the brunt of the blow. Alexis sprawls on top of me, my soft gut cushioning her fall. Her flailing leg clatters the table leg. Valentina shrieks as a glass tips and glugs red wine over her tight white leggings. Reid whips a hanky from his pocket and starts dabbing her knee. Valentina grabs his wrist and moves it up her thigh.

Some strange force grabs me, stealing my breath and twisting my cheeks into a forgotten shape. It takes me a few seconds to understand that I am laughing. 

‘How wasted are you?’ Alexis says, slapping my chest.

I am, of course, very wasted. But sometimes it is only by setting the mind loose from its moorings and letting it drift that we can find a better place to dock.

‘I finally get it,’ I say, once I have gotten myself under control. ‘I’m the fairy lights.’

The ridiculousness of my great insight spoken aloud sets me off again. 

‘No more pills for you, space cadet,’ Alexis says.

She laughs herself, tentative yet, and the foam of her padded bra shifts against my chest. There is still pain here, and much more to come. But it doesn’t matter, not right now. The light is back in her eyes, faint but steady. 

I will return everything she has given me. But I am not enough. For the first time, that is okay. Tonight, when she is wrapped in the thin blankets of her morphine sleep, I will borrow her mobile and copy her contact list. I will message everyone she has been avoiding. I will gather them on this balcony in the time that remains. They too will return what she has given them. Together, we will keep the light alive as long as we can.

I start with Reid and Valentina, who have turned the rubbing into something that looks suspiciously like it will end up making them both dirtier rather than cleaner. 

‘Looks like you were right, smartarse,’ I whisper into Alexis’s ear, nudging her head around so she can see the fruits of her matchmaking.

‘I knew they were a pair of dirty bastards,’ she says.

‘Reid, Valentina,’ I say, louder now. ‘A little help, please.’

Reid looks up from his labours and, after a brief pause, reaches out a hand. 

‘Pile-on!’ I shout, grabbing his wrist and yanking him down on top of us.

I realise too late that Alexis may not be able to bear his weight in her frail condition, but there is no need to worry. Reid braces himself on the tiles with hands and knees as he lands. Even though he has held back most of his bulk, Alexis squeals as he presses against her back. 

‘Fucking hell, Reid!’ she shouts. ‘Is that a hard-on?’

‘It’s not for you,’ he has time to say before Valentina belly flops onto him. 

In a pile of tangled limbs on the balcony floor, teeth and clothes stained purple-black by cheap Primitivo, veins and sinews singing like high-tension cables, our laughter spews great sizzling clouds of energy into the air.

………………..

Michal Logan is a former journalist and author of four novels, the first of which won the Terry Pratchett First Novel Prize. His short fiction has appeared in many journals, and he won Fish Publishing’s 2008 international One-Page Fiction Prize. Originally from Scotland, he now lives in Rome, Italy.

michaelloganbooks.com

Twitter: @MichaelLogan