by Sarah Dunant
She peered frantically into the semidarkness of an empty room, all shadows and flagstones in the twilight. The place reeked of damp and decay: too much weather coming in around rotting window frames. No wonder there had been no worry about her screams. The house was a ruin.
Behind her the cellar door shook with the weight of his body. She sprinted out into a passageway and then into another smaller room with an old iron range under a chimney and a door giving out onto what must be the outside. It was locked. As she rattled the lock desperately, she heard something behind her. She whirled around in time to see a bulky shadow leap, crouching into the doorway; no face, no body, just a shape with arms thrust out in front of it in a gesture that echoed back through a million movies.
“Don’t sh—” she screamed, but the sound never got out of her mouth as the room exploded into fire all around her.
She was typing so fast the letters were coming out mangled. When she stopped to read it back she realized she was grinning, a silly cracked smile stapled to her face, held on so tight that it made her muscles ache. Stupid. Total crap—all of it, knee-jerk stuff without an ounce of finesse or originality. Except who cares as long as it does the trick? Once you stopped talking there was nowhere to go but action. In the cinema you’d be starting to feel the communal adrenaline now, little ripples of nervous approval and fun. The fact that it wasn’t good enough was somehow the point; its very crudeness was its satisfaction.
She highlighted the new text and printed it out, then pressed the save button. She could always rewrite it later.
She looked at her watch: 2:55 P.M. Almost two hours since she had called. God, she’d like to see his face when he opened the door.
Well, why not? It was Christmas, after all. Everyone deserves at least one present, even if she might have to wait for it.
She decided to treat it like an outing. She pulled a loaf of bread out of one of the shopping bags and hacked off some clumsy slices, making crude sandwiches with a doorstop of cheese and a thick layer of mayonnaise, devouring half of them as she went, realizing only as she tasted the food how hungry she was. She dug out a couple of packets of chips and used the new coffee to make a thermos full. It looked like a builder’s lunch. She grabbed the printed manuscript and shoved it all in a plastic bag, along with a handful of tapes, and headed to the car.
Outside the temperature was dropping rapidly, an icy wind whipping late leaves through the gutter and across the roads. She drove to his street and parked the car facing away from his house on the opposite side, but with the winged mirror positioned so she could see his door and the road in front of it. She turned the engine off, but within half an hour had to switch it back on again to cope with the cold. She sat, eyes on the mirror, roasted air rising up all around her, and watched while a succession of women returned home with last-minute Christmas shopping, trailing children grown grumpy with the cold. The next-door nanny bounced a stroller carefully down the outside steps. The baby, stuffed into a padded one-piece ski suit with gloves and hood, jiggled about, yelling at the top of his lungs.
Fresh air. It could be a killer. But she was beginning to feel the need for it herself. The recycled heat from the engine was making her increasingly drowsy. If she just put her head back and closed her eyes . . . But she couldn’t give in to it now. There would be time enough to sleep later, safe and sound in the knowledge that this time there could be nobody to disturb her. She turned the engine off and let the cold wake her up.
By four-thirty it was dark. She watched as a man and his young son carried an oversized Christmas tree up the stairs to their house. The door opened onto a hall crammed with decorations, then closed again behind them. It looked warm in there.
What would she be doing now if Tom and she had stayed together? If things had been different? Would they be loitering around travel-agency windows checking out the last-minute Christmas bargains, or might it have gone further than that? Might she now be out braving the West End with a little Tom look-alike tucked under her coat, a scrunched-up newborn face squashed up against exploding tits? There had been a while there when it had seemed an almost attractive nightmare: playing house, creating the sense of family that the death of her mother had taken away forever. But it was all fantasy, the feeling that you needed to reclaim Eden even when in your soul you knew you were happy to have been banished from it.
So what did she have instead? Eighty thousand words of English sleaze on a computer and semen stains on her robe from a rapist lover whom she had anonymously turned in to the police. Not exactly the kind of life story to appeal to her mother. Maybe some people die at the right time, to shield themselves from life’s unacceptable outcomes.
She rubbed her hands over her eyes and poured herself a thermos lid full of coffee. The first few sips made her feel better, but as she was pushing the cup onto the dashboard she misjudged the distance and it tipped back over onto her lap and the sheaf of pages she was holding. The liquid was hot enough to make her yelp. She flung open the door and stood in the cold pulling her trousers away from her skin, swearing softly under her breath. An elderly woman walked past, frowning at her language.
She was still standing there when the Ford Fiesta drew up on the other side of the road with two men inside, and she saw the one in the passenger seat duck his head down in the window to check out the numbers of the houses. They both got out.
She scrambled back into the car, but they weren’t looking at her. The driver straightened his jacket, exchanged a quick glance with his companion, and together they climbed up the stairs of 36.
She sat frozen in the front seat, eyes glued to the mirror. She saw one of them push at a doorbell, then stand with his hands in his pockets while the other leaned over the side to check out the windows. Nice action. If you opened the door to them now you wouldn’t have any trouble knowing what they were: too much studied nonchalance to be anything else. They waited. She waited. He rang again. From the middle window she thought she detected the blinds move a fraction. If she had spotted it they must have, too. Her heart gave a little leap of joy. Would he come down? He’d probably be half asleep still, mind gummed up with dreams of dark-alley violence and fun. On the other hand, they weren’t going anywhere without him. She watched him ring again, this time keeping his finger on for a while. Oh, the pleasure of law enforcement.
Two minutes later the door opened a few inches, but all she could see were two suit backs and nothing of what stood in front. One of the suits shifted a little as its owner rummaged inside the jacket for a card. For a heart-stopping second nothing happened, then suddenly the door opened wider and the two of them went in. It closed behind them.
She sat quietly, trying to contain the excitement within her. How long would it take them? Half an hour? An hour? Longer? Would they search the house? No, they wouldn’t have to search. They’d know just from talking to him. They’d hear it in his voice, smell the desire on his breath, see the fantasies crawling like lice through his mind. It was their job. That was what they were paid for.
She sat back in the car. The dashboard clock read 5:13 P.M. She put on the radio, skimming the dial until she found something she could listen to. Not music now. She needed words. BBC news. Radio 4. The final reassurance. These commentators, you felt, would still be there after the apocalypse.
She tried hard to listen, but the words kept slipping down the paintwork of his front door, sliding in through the cracks, disappearing as quickly as they came. The news came and went and five o’clock moved on to six. To be there so long they must have their suspicions: checking dates, talking about women, maybe phoning his details in to the police computer. The chances are a man like him would have some kind of record: a minor assault here, a Peeping Tom conviction there. All safely stored in Big Brother’s brain along with personal bank records and hospital tests. Would they maybe have his HIV status? A shudder passed through her. Don’t spoil the triumph with another kind of fear.
But as she stared into the mirror what she
saw spoiled it anyway. Across the other side of the street, walking quickly in her direction, was a man in a car coat: thin face, wiry hair, hands dug deep in his pockets against the cold. The sight of him curdled her stomach. She dropped her head hurriedly but kept her eyes on the mirror. He came nearer. He passed number 36, and 38, then at number 40 turned and took the steps up to the door two at a time. For someone who had been awake as long as he had, he was looking pretty active.
At the same moment that he put the key in the lock, the door to 36 opened, and the two plainclothes policemen came out alone, tripping briskly down the steps toward their car. One of them said something to the other and his companion made a face and laughed. They beeped the car door open.
From his vantage point by the door he spotted them, too. He stared at them for a second; then his eyes darted quickly up and down the street. When she brought her head up he was gone, the door firmly closed behind him. From its parking place the Ford Fiesta pulled out past her, without its blinker on.
She slammed her fist on the dashboard. How could she have been so stupid? One house. Just one house off and the whole thing evaporated like smoke around her. She adjusted the mirror to center on number 40 and found a middle window like all the others, clean and anonymous. Not even a weasel face to give it away.
On the radio the headlines were recapping on a world going to the dogs. What do you do when there is nothing you can depend on? She was about to find out. Because this time she was going after him.
nineteen
If he could exist on so little sleep then so could she.
She allowed herself four hours, setting an alarm for ten, but when she woke, without the aid of the bell, she was convinced she must have slept through it because the room, though dark, was so deathly quiet. It was more like the early morning, surely. In her mind, day and night were becoming mashed together. Her whole body felt glutted, as if the sleep had been merely a drug that had brought unconsciousness but no peace. She flicked up the light of the digital clock and found to her surprise that it was indeed just before ten. Get up, she thought. Get up and check him out.
It was only as she looked out the window that she understood the reason for the change of atmosphere. Outside, the world had turned white. The air was filled with swirling flakes, and a thick blanket of snow covered everything in its deep silence. What just a few hours ago had been a set of raggedy suburban gardens was already a landscape of ice sculpture: enchanted, remade. It was so dazzling, so completely unexpected, that it made her almost stupid with delight, reading its beauty as some kind of promise of comfort in a comfortless world. Pathetic. So God was nothing but an occasional cold front. Two degrees warmer and this would have been rain: dull, remorseless English rain bringing a chill to your bones and drowning out your optimism. Not so much comfort as a trick of nature, a kind of trompe l’oeil of the spirit.
Across the gardens his was just one of a number of lights that were blazing. She picked up the binoculars and focused. And now, at last, she spotted him. Above the net half-curtain, a figure took shape in the lens. Her hand shook. It disappeared. She steadied herself, and this time an orb of a face came into view, distorted and shimmery at the edges like a 3-D image.
He was standing square on to the window looking out, watching the snow fall. Safe in the darkness of her bedroom she knew he couldn’t possibly see her. Now, for the first time, she became the voyeur.
He stood there for so long that it hurt her hand keeping the glasses up and still. She thought about him in the supermarket, frozen against the shelves of cereal boxes, then sitting at the end of her bed, watching, waiting, with a creepy, endless patience. Yes, he was a man good at withholding himself from the world: being, but not being. But that was his whole problem; while others found it easy to join in, he could only watch, then go out and grab. What was he thinking now? Did it take his breath away, too? Driven snow. Pure as . . . Maybe he wanted only to fuck it. Disfigure it with a splattered arch of urine, watching the steam hiss up from the little track of burned holes. Or did its fabulous sense of transformation make him ache for something similar in himself—the idea that he, too, could wake up one morning and find that sleep had transfigured his psychic landscape, bringing with it peace and a different image of self? She thought again of the way his voice had shaken with the violence of undigested fury. She felt the heavy sweat on his skin and the way his chest grabbed for air as the anger turned to sobs. Maybe the worst thing about evil is that the devil always knows how far from grace he has fallen, and that’s what makes him so desperate and cruel. It also means that however many times he smashes the mirror he will still be looking at his own reflection. Which is why he has to smash it again. And again.
He disappeared out of the lens, and she had to dart around to try to relocate him. For a second she lost him completely, then he turned slap-bang into focus holding something in his hands. A cloth? A dishrag? No, gloves, he was putting on a pair of gloves. He moved away, then back again, this time wrapping a scarf around his neck. My God, he was getting ready to go out.
She watched, caught between fear and excitement, as he rubbed his hands over his face, then up and over through his hair, as if he were tugging at his scalp, trying to see how far he could pull it. She could even make out the grimace on his face. He stayed like that for what seemed like a long time, his head pulled sharply back by the force of his hands. It looked painful, a gesture of self-punishment almost. Or preparation? Then he turned away and the light went off.
She didn’t think about what happened next, just did it. It was easy. Since she had gone to sleep in her clothes it took her less than thirty seconds to pull on a pair of boots and get herself out of the house. She was met by a soft assault of snow: fat, flashy flakes everywhere. The ground crunched under her feet, the fresh fall groaning as it impacted downward. It had to be at least two or three inches deep already. It must have been snowing for hours. Her face was wet and stinging by the time she got to the car.
She drove as fast as she dared on roads where the first tire marks were already starting to freeze. She had her headlights full on, but when she turned onto his street she dimmed them, just in case. Big, splashy flakes tumbled down onto the windshield, forming perfect ice crystals until they were raked away into water by the wipers. There was snow everywhere. It was a world in slow motion. She used it to her advantage. She moved at a cautious ten miles an hour. She had just made the turn, when in front of her his door opened, and she watched as a figure came down the stairs, almost unrecognizable in one of those bulging greatcoats that had kept the Russian army warm during half a century of communism but were now good only for army surplus stores. An army-surplus boy? Uniforms and balaclavas, clothes with a history of violence. Somehow she wasn’t surprised.
If he had looked back now he would certainly have spotted her car; it was the only one on the street. But this wasn’t the weather for sightseeing. There was a wind picking up now, whipping up the snow and driving it horizontally into your face, making it impossible to walk unless you kept your eyes down. At the bottom of the steps he pulled up his collar and turned right, heading in the direction where Montague Crescent met the main High Street.
When she was past him—not too fast, not too slow—she kept him in her mirror. He didn’t look up. The High Street was an arterial road and there was still a fair amount of traffic, so when she reached it she could legitimately wait to make her turn until he had caught up. At which point, he turned left, then immediately crossed the main road by the pedestrian crossing and headed down a side street.
She followed slowly. He was quite a way in front of her by now, and the snow was falling so thickly that visibility was becoming a problem. A car pulled out of a parking place ahead of her and skidded slightly as it took off. She waited for it to right itself, by which time his silhouette was dissolving into the white mist ahead.
The lights of the pub, when they came into view, were an image from a Dickensian thriller: warmth and the promise of a hea
rth and good company rising out of the bleak mid-winter. Except why should he be tempted by such conviviality? This was a man who could only live and work alone.
She was about forty yards behind him when he stopped and swung open the door, stamping his feet to clear them of the snow, or maybe to get some feeling back into them. Forty yards, twenty. Ten. As the door slammed behind him she brought the car to a careful halt and parked on the other side of the road. The tires crunched on fresh snow.
Maybe he had noticed the car and used the pub as a diversion to get away from her? No, surely he hadn’t seen her. He hadn’t been looking. So, what should she do now? If she went in after him she ran the risk of being recognized, but if she stayed where she was she might find herself in premature rigor mortis by the time he came out. The fact that she had already spent too much of the day sitting in the car decided her.
She needn’t have worried about anonymity. Inside, the place was so full you could hardly move, let alone talent-spot. Not only was there no space on the floor but above there were Christmas decorations everywhere—big gaudy bells and twisted loops of fringed tinsel running across the whole room, low enough in places for the taller patrons to reach up and touch them. In one corner they had pulled them down, and the barmaid was wearing the trophy of an oversized tinsel coronet. The whole place was vibrating with what might have been forced bonhomie, the background music so embedded in the voices that it was impossible to tell Bing Crosby from hip-hop. Or to care.