‘Mark! What are you doing here?’ I gaze around the sitting room as if an explanation might be found, wrapped in newspaper, amongst the half-empty packing cases.
‘Claire,’ he says, and he is whispering, ‘I can explain, if you could just…’
At that moment there is a rap of knuckles on the front door. I jump again. Mark takes hold of my arm.
‘Don’t answer it.’ His hand closes around my wrist.
‘What do you mean?’ I say. ‘Who is it?’ I am whispering too. There is more knocking, which turns quickly to pounding. I can hear voices outside: angry, foreign voices.
Someone opens the letterbox and shouts, ‘Open the door, or we break window.’
I stare at Mark; his face is rigid. I glance down and see that my wrist is turning white. ‘We must call the police,’ I say. I reach into my bag with my free hand, scrabbling for my phone.
‘No!’ Mark shakes his head and jerks my shoulder. It hurts. A second later there is a grating sound, a raking of something sharp between the glass and the window frame.
‘We have to open the door,’ I hiss. ‘The glass will smash.’
‘If you open the door,’ he says, looking straight into my eyes, ‘I’m not here.’
‘Why don’t you go out the back?’
His fingers tighten. ‘Somebody will be watching the back.’ He smiles, and I realise he is asking me to take his side. ‘Remember Claire. Not here.’
I nod, and then he lets go of my arm. My mouth is dry and my stomach is pitching like a theme-park roller coaster. As I walk forwards Mark slips back into the kitchen.
I open the door keeping one hand firmly on the handle and the other braced against the wall. There are two men. One is tall, bald and bulky, although his weight appears to consist of more fat than muscle. The other is shorter and quite wiry. His long white hair is held in a ponytail and he has pale, almost colourless, eyes. Both are wearing poor-imitation leather jackets, grubby jeans and trainers.
‘What the fuck are you doing to my house?’
They are surprised at my initiative, but recover quickly.
‘Where is Mark Tyler?’ It is the white-haired man who speaks. His accent is from Eastern Europe – Russia or the Ukraine, perhaps.
‘Mark Tyler?’ I repeat. ‘He moved a fortnight ago. I live here now, with my fiancé.’
‘We think he is here,’ the bald one says, simply.
I glare at them. ‘No, I told you. He left. We moved in.’ I open the door just wide enough to show them a few of the packing crates.
‘We think we see him here.’ The disconcerting eyes of the man with white hair are watching me intently. He is not interested in the packing crates.
‘You think he forgot to move out?’
The bald one flicks his head towards the window. ‘Why are curtains shut?’
‘Because I have a headache. A bad headache. The light hurts my eyes.’ I realise with a sense of wonder that this part is actually true. I do indeed have a headache. ‘I had to come home from work. And now you are making it worse.’ I speak with the righteous force of someone wronged and when they flinch I take the opportunity to slam the door and the noise of it reverberates around my skull like cymbals clashing. I sink onto the carpet against the wall, tuck my arms around my knees and close my eyes. I can hear a thudding in my ears and from outside agitated, incomprehensible conversation and shuffling feet. Suddenly there is stillness, and then a louder voice punctuated by silence; one of them is talking on a mobile. An eternity later, the sweet sound of retreating footsteps.
I become aware of Mark beside me. He is sitting so near that his upper arm and thigh are pressed against mine.
‘You were marvellous, Claire.’ He is still whispering. I open my eyes and see that he is buoyant now; all his poise returned.
I rub my forehead. ‘Who are they?’ I ask. ‘What did they want?’
‘Oh, money. They just wanted money.’ He sounds nonchalant, as if the whole thing has been a bit of a laugh.
‘How much money? What do they want it for?’
‘Doesn’t everybody owe someone money?’ Though his tone is light his lips purse in a ‘don’t be naive’ sort of a way. But I don’t owe anyone money, not unless you count our newly acquired mortgage; the mortgage that has occupied several of our evenings with long, sober discussions and ten-year projections of income and interest rates. I am a girl with only one credit card, paid off each month without fail, who was taught to avoid debt by my angst-ridden, penny-counting mother with the same intensity children are taught to avoid sweet-bearing strangers.
Mark gives a little shake of his head as though closing the subject and jumps to his feet. Immediately I miss his body heat. I am trembling a little and feel sick, perhaps it is shock, now the adrenaline has subsided, or perhaps it is the almost-migraine. Mark leans over the top of me and puts his left eye to a tiny, unobtrusive peephole that I’ve never spotted beneath the letter flap. Is it normal, I wonder vaguely, to be able to spy out of your own front door? From my foetal position I glimpse his chest under the gaping shirt – black whorls of hair on a tough, functional torso – before he straightens and turns his attention to me.
‘Come on, Claire, up you get!’ He holds out his right hand and I notice the neatly clipped nails, the signet ring on his little finger. I let him pull me to my feet and we stand facing each other, as if waiting for a waltz to strike up. My eyes are fixed on the space between the starched white of his collar and the dip of his neck, and I can smell his sweat beneath the spiced scent of cologne. Outside, I know, the pavements are full of mothers pushing buggies, dog-walkers and pensioners buying milk; all the ordinary business of the early afternoon, but in the sepia light of this shuttered room they seem as distant as palm trees in a travel brochure. I wonder if the highly skilled migrants meeting is still going on, whether Nigel is proposing a revision to the final paragraph on page 30; Maggie, stoical, reaching for her pen again.
Mark hasn’t let go of my hand. Now he begins to knead my knuckles and rub his thumb into the flesh my palm. I freeze, and he lowers his head, closes the wet warmth of his mouth over my forefinger and slowly begins to suck, swirling his tongue the length of the bone and over the joints, all the way to the tip of the nail. He pauses to breathe, studying my face, waiting, and when I say nothing, when I fail to retract my hand, or tell him to stop, he does the very same thing to my middle finger and, after that, the finger so lovingly adorned with diamonds, and finally my poor, ravenous, little finger. I shut my eyes and Daniel is there, naked in bed. It’s a Sunday morning, chapel bells. Daniel: who loved me once but won’t ever love me again. The pain and nausea tiptoe away and I tilt increasingly forwards until Mark slides his hand under my skirt and presses me into him.
* * *
Later, as I wait for Angus to come home, I try to make myself face up to the awfulness of what I’ve done, but I can’t seem to concentrate. My brain is like a hacked computer and my attempt at accountability keeps swerving onto a different track entirely. Although, of course, I’m perfectly aware that Angus and I are engaged, it feels like a fact I know about somebody else – a cousin, for example. Someone to whom I might send a card, say, ‘how nice, I do hope you’ll be happy’ and never give them another thought. Instead of Angus, my fiancé, my head is full of Mark; full of the Daniel-like bronze of his irises, the Daniel-like curve of his lower lip. Instead of worrying how easily I went astray I spend the whole time before the front door opens reliving the seconds Mark took to unbutton my blouse, recalling the arc of his shoulders over my own, hearing his voice, soft and persistent, ‘How is your headache, Claire…? What about now, Claire…? Is it better now?’
Chapter Six
Five years earlier
I am lying with my head on Daniel’s stomach. The air is sweet with the smell of June, of plants in flower, of trees in bloom, of sun-touched skin. And alcohol, of course. This afternoon the leitmotif is Pimm’s and lemonade; if I open my eyes I can see my glass lurched sidew
ays in the grass, the last dregs of amber aglow with the same lengthening summer light that is soaking into our coupled bodies. Above, the sky is the lavish green of a chestnut. Around us the soporific soundtrack of murmured conversations, of giggles and kisses, the end of a party when the ending has no consequence because another will begin as soon the first one stops, a blurry pageant of carefree, careless hedonism.
Our exams finished twelve days ago. During the weeks beforehand the dial swung steadily from warm to hot, and from there to scorching hot, the library windows wedged open to the drone of normality from the street below, testing my endurance as I fought to memorise the particulars of contract law and tort, of international treaties and human rights. My head ached with list upon list of cases, each like a miniature painting, a bite-sized story framed by man-made rules and judge-made precedent. Slowly I learned how they slotted together as precisely as Lego, the big foundation stones of principle dividing into smaller rooms of category and subcategory, and then upwards into chimney pots and roof tiles of nuance and clarification, all combining to make one titanic structure, an entire architecture of rights and wrongs. Soon the days bled into night, the world reduced to plastic boxes of revision cards crammed with bullet points in coloured inks. When I closed my eyes I could see only the blue and the black, the magenta and the green, my handwriting a diaphanous, unrelenting beacon leading towards the final twelve hours of my degree.
We thought the weather would never last, my fellow students and I. Day after day when we chanced upon another pale sufferer taking the same five-minute cigarette break we would curse the luck that corralled us inside while the rest of the country was busy acquiring suntans. Yet when exam week arrived the temperatures remained sky-high. As I wrote and wrote under the unremitting gaze of the clock I had to pause every so often to wipe my hands on my skirt, vaguely aware of the dark half-moons under my armpits, the glue-like burn that was holding me to the chair as my hand scurried back and forth, back and forth, across the page.
And still the weather holds. While Facebook and Twitter are full of moaners who have had their fill of heat and are now complaining about their inability to sleep, or the threatened hosepipe ban, we students – we ex-students – can’t believe our luck. Tripping from one party to the next, none of us are bothered about sleeping or hosepipes. Released from our desks like animals from a zoo, we are wild with the novelty of a freedom that feels earned, and the heatwave is our friend, making a midnight playground of the parks and riverbanks.
Daniel’s fingers find my hair and embed themselves within its strands. ‘I don’t want to move, do you?’
I merely shake my head against the warmth of his belly.
‘We’re supposed to be going to Mike and Lucy’s party.’
I pretend I haven’t heard. I roll onto my stomach, but rotate on the same spot of lawn so that my face, my cheek, is lying on his stomach. Somewhere close there is a bee, flower-filled and industrious. My limbs are molten and too heavy to move; I can’t feel any boundary between me and Daniel and the ground. Everybody else – our friends, our families – is superfluous. This, I think, this is the second I would still the sand in the hourglass and halt the orbit of the earth.
‘Daniel?’ I murmur, but before he can answer, his phone starts to buzz and my head is so close to the noise that it seems like an act of aggression. Daniel’s hand reaches into the pocket of his shorts as the phone falls silent. He sighs and we settle back to how we were, although I’m aware now that the lawn is hard from lack of rain and that the edge of Daniel’s right hip is jabbing into my shoulder. Almost immediately the mobile trills again. This time Daniel is quicker, but still it dies before he can quite raise it to his ear.
‘Fuck! What’s going on?’ He shifts on to his elbows, cupping a hand over the casing to shield it from the sun as he tries to make out the number.
‘Who is it?’
‘I can’t see…’
We settle again, close our eyes, but we are tense now, poised, as if perching on a ledge.
Waiting for Her to call again.
I knew Daniel before we started going out together. He studied law like me and I’d seen him from afar, not so much in terms of distance, but as if he was untouchable, an expensive item in a shop window I might gaze on with desire but never dream of purchasing myself. He was always with a girl. She was pretty, sometimes in quite a spectacular way, so when he turned up to a lecture on his own it seemed at first surprising, newsworthy even, then very quickly not surprising at all. After that it was only natural to wonder who of us would be the next.
The first time we spoke he appeared behind me as I was getting a brackish-coloured coffee from the vending machine in the library, shortly after the countdown to exams had begun in earnest. ‘So you’re finally taking a break,’ was all he murmured, but the way he spoke made it an observation, not a question, and revealed both that he’d been watching me and that the encounter was a deliberate one. After that it – we – moved so quickly it felt like stepping off a cliff, mistaking the path in the dark or fog and falling before I had a chance to get my bearings or catch my breath.
Now we are an item, a couple, already careless invitations get issued to the pair of us, and yet even while I revel in the intoxicating status of Daniel’s girlfriend, I’m aware that it will never last. I remember his solitary arrival that day in the lecture hall, how everyone pretended not to notice and I worry, constantly, how long my turn on the carousel will last. Unable to stop myself I chase him for words of commitment, searching them out as if they are pledges, promises I can enforce; anything to quiet the little voice that whispers that I too will soon be old news. I know the tighter I cling the more certain he is to slip from my grasp, but it makes no difference. He has the power and I have none, and the only way to pretend otherwise is to lay his declarations of love over the chasm at my feet like branches concealing an elephant trap.
Last night we weaved our way across town after an evening at a pub where we had lingered late and long. The moon was thick and white, spilling like paint on to the surface of the Cam and gilding the vista of rooftops and church towers. As we crossed one of the bridges, our arms wrapped around each other’s waists, I made him stop. There was nobody about, only the perfection of the silvered light and the water. A clock chimed three, slowly, lazily; each strike sounding like it might be the last. For some reason – maybe I sensed, in the way you might sense a ghost, what was to come – a trickle of dread made me suddenly shudder.
I nudged Daniel so that his back was against the stonework and I was in front of him. Our gaze locked. ‘Do you love me?’ I whispered. ‘Do you really love me?’
‘Of course I love you, babe.’ He touched my cheek, his thumb stroking it gently.
I stared into his eyes. ‘If you could stop everything right now and freeze this moment – us – here – forever – would you do it?’
‘What?’ His brow furrowed. Then he laughed, uncertainly, and drew his hand an inch from my cheek. ‘What do you mean? Why would I do that?’
‘If you love me, then how could it get better than this?’ I waved my arm loosely in the direction of the river, but kept my eyes fixed on his face. ‘If time were to stop right now, we wouldn’t ever have to get ill or old. We wouldn’t ever argue or take each other for granted. We would never love each other less than we love each other this very second.’ I was trying to sound romantic, poetic even, but my voice came out breathy and intense.
He shook his head and laughed again. ‘I think you must be drunk!’ He kissed me. ‘Don’t be so serious. You’re talking nonsense!’
I pulled my head back, dramatically. ‘I am serious,’ I said. ‘I want to know. Maybe you don’t love me at all. Maybe you think you could do better?’
‘Oh, is this what it’s about?’ His features relaxed but the force of his gaze deepened with exaggerated showiness. ‘Then here’s my answer. If time had stopped just now’ – he held up his left forearm so we could both see his wristwatch and the s
econd hand crawl a quarter way around the dial – ‘then this would never have happened.’ He kissed me again, but hard and long, my mouth melting so deep into his that I could taste, beyond the wine and the whisky, the uniqueness of him, and our hands began to reach for the skin beneath each other’s clothes.
His phone rings again.
‘Jesus!’ We both sit up and Daniel stabs the screen. ‘Hello?’
There is silence. At least I think there is silence, but I must be wrong because Daniel is listening, and as he listens his expression solidifies. After a moment he twists around so I can’t see his face at all and then he says quietly, ‘Don’t, please don’t cry. Not again.’
And I know for certain exactly who it is.
I touch his arm, but he still won’t look at me, and a second later he gets up and moves completely out of earshot.
When he finally returns he squats beside where I am sitting with my arms wrapped around my knees.
‘I thought you said it was all over now?’ It’s my turn not to look at him.
‘I hadn’t heard from her in a while. I just assumed she was better, but she’s still very upset. She’s moved out of her college accommodation and is renting a room in the north of the town.’
‘And I’m supposed to care?’ I begin to rip the grass into an angry little pile.
‘She didn’t manage to do her exams…’
‘… I know.’
‘She may not even get her degree.’
‘I know.’ This is old news, but Daniel always brings it up. I guess he feels guilty.
Daniel’s hand closes over mine. ‘Don’t be like that, babe. It’s not easy for her to see us together.’
The Couple: An unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist Page 5