Magpie

JAKE: ‘WHAT?’

  KATE: ‘So freaked out.’

  JAKE: ‘Going to call you.’

  Marisa scrolls down until the last messages. She stares at the screen, wondering if those three dots will emerge again, whether one of them will type out a further incriminating message. She thinks of Kate, her narrow hips and her slight figure, the way she looks like a ballerina from certain angles. Kate is all discipline, from the amount of food she eats to the rigorous nature of her exercise routine and the way she insists on going through her diary every Sunday night to run through her meetings and appointments. Marisa doesn’t have a diary on her phone. She has a battered old paper notebook, filled with scribbles and rubbed-out thoughts.

  What is she going to do? In a cheap film – the kind that she watches on cable channels in the afternoons lying on the sofa when she should be working, the kind that are called things like My Lover’s Murder or The Story of Heidi Brown – there would be no doubt. The wronged woman would pack her bags and leave the house in a fit of righteous indignation. But Marisa has nowhere to go. Her rented flat was given up as soon as she moved in with Jake. She hasn’t been paid for weeks because she has neglected her work. She seems to have lost the desire for it. Tracking Kate’s every move has taken up more time than she had anticipated, and what little she has left over she spends napping or staring into space, thinking.

  She doesn’t want to give up her nice house and her nice standard of living. She has got used to it. She has lost touch with Jas, although maybe she could get back in touch and ask to stay. Jas would probably say yes. But the humiliation of having to explain everything that has happened is too much for her. She hasn’t spoken to her father for years.

  And yet, she can’t stay with Jake, can she? She will have to confront him and they will have a screaming row and … then what? What if he calls her bluff and tells her it’s over and that he sees a future with Kate? Marisa will be a single mother, in a shitty little flat, with Jake visiting every other weekend. It’s unconscionable. She and Jake aren’t even married. He pays the rent. She has no legal rights.

  ‘Count to ten,’ she imagines her mother saying, leaning over Marisa in bed so that a strand of her long blonde hair – hair just like Marisa’s is now – falls forwards and tickles her collarbone. ‘Count to ten, my darling, and then see how you feel.’

  That is what she will do, Marisa decides. She will count to ten, over and over again, until she works out what to do next.

  Part Two

  12

  Kate gets back first. The house is dark when she turns her key in the door, its windows blank. The temperature is cool. The central heating hasn’t kicked in yet. She must remember to tell Jake to re-programme it now that winter is approaching. He’s good at that sort of stuff.

  The first thing she does when she gets across the threshold, before she even takes off her coat, is to draw the curtains in the sitting room. She doesn’t like the thought of passersby being able to peer into her home from the street, the inside light spreading out so that the inhabitants are on full display.

  She hangs her parka on one of the hooks lining the hallway. She still hasn’t thought to turn on the lights. It is as she is removing her scarf and ruffling her hair free of her beanie hat that she hears it: a scuffle and then a creak.

  Kate stills, halting her breath, listening intently as the darkness tunes her ears into a higher frequency. A faraway car horn sounds. Outside, someone has turned on a radio and she can just make out its tinny jingle.

  No more noises come. Probably just the clatter of an old house, she thinks. She’s still getting used to it. Before, she had lived in new-build apartment blocks with concierges at the door. She hadn’t liked the sterility of the interiors, but she had felt safe there.

  The Richborne Terrace house, by contrast, has history built into its brickwork. She researched it once, using the online census to discover that in 1901, it was occupied by J. Humphrey, a retired lighterman and his wife and three children and – surprisingly – another family of four, headed by one Patrick Lancton, a postman. It stands opposite a low-rise block of maisonettes, the result of two World War II bombs obliterating the original houses. Kate doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she doesn’t not believe in them either. Sometimes she wonders if she can sense another presence next to her, a shuffling elderly figure, his hands roughened from years on the river, powering barges up and down the murky Thames waters.

  In the hallway, she shivers.

  Outside, the sky has leached itself of colour. The clocks went back last month and the days have become shorter since then. It’s 6 p.m., but it feels like midnight. Even the moon, which she can just make out through the glass above the door, is dulled by grey wisps of cloud.

  She drops her bag on the floor and slips her phone out of her pocket, checking to see if she has any messages. Jake has texted saying he misses her and he’ll be back by half seven. She feels a small, familiar thrill seeing his name there. She unlocks the home screen and starts typing back a response.

  ‘No problem.’ She uses thumbs to text, her shoulders hunched over the phone. She sends the text, slides the phone back into her trouser pocket, and then she turns and feels along the wall for the light switch.

  Her eyes, confused by the bright light of the phone, struggle to adjust to the darkness and the switch isn’t where she thought it would be. She gropes along the plaster, stumbling slightly.

  The phone vibrates against her thigh. She reaches into her pocket, and as she turns back, she sees it: a ball of shadow, tumbling towards her, expanding like an ink blot. She has no time to raise her arms to defend herself. She understands, too late, that the scuffling noise she heard was not just the creak of ancient pipes or the residue of half-formed ghosts, but a thing that wishes her harm.

  Before Kate has a chance to react, a heavy and formless weight is thudding against her skull with such force that her neck cracks and slackens and her head drops forward. Her thoughts atomise then coalesce into a bright, dazzling white. She crumples to the floor. She’s always thought she would scream if she were attacked. But in terror, it turns out Kate is silent. As she passes out, she thinks of brown, gloopy water, rising up over her face. She imagines the dim light of a slow-moving boat receding into the silty darkness and she tries, in vain, to reach for it as the current sucks her to the bottom of the riverbed.

  When she comes round, her right leg is numb and pressed against a hard, cold surface. Her eyelids are sticky and opening them requires effort. Her vision is blurry, and she realises one of her contact lenses has slid around her eye, the edges of it scratchy and dry. She blinks – once, twice, three times – and it slips back into place. A kaleidoscopic pattern comes into focus, brown and white mosaic pieces which jiggle and then solidify into a tiled floor. Her cheek is raw and cold. She is lying on her side, her face against the tiles, her right shoulder twisted uncomfortably underneath her chest. Her left ankle is splayed back at an awkward angle. Her head is throbbing. She has the unpleasant sensation of liquid coagulating at the nape of her neck. The thought of blood makes her feel faint and she blinks her eyes shut for a minute, to rid herself of the image.

  ‘Kate.’

  Her name.

  ‘Kate.’

  There it is again. Her name spoken in a recognisable voice that she can’t yet place.

  ‘Open your eyes, Kate.’

  Her head is still fuzzy. Someone has upended a snow globe and scattered her thoughts like glitter.

  ‘Kate.’

  It is a female voice. It is one she knows, but not intimately. It is someone she has been worried about. And then, suddenly, it comes to her. Marisa. Thank God. Marisa is here. She must have come in after her and disturbed the intruder and found Kate lying here.

  ‘Mrsssa,’ Kate slurs. A tooth has loosened in her mouth. Her tongue is swollen. She tries to say she’s glad Marisa is here but it comes out as ‘Sgld sshh
ear.’

  ‘Don’t speak,’ Marisa says.

  Kate opens her eyes fully. She sees the edges of Marisa’s slippers: fluffy beige booties Kate has always hated. They look so matronly, and Marisa is so young. She doesn’t make the best of herself. But why is she thinking this now? She needs to concentrate. She needs to get up off the floor and get some medical attention. Marisa will have called an ambulance, she is sure. But why is Marisa wearing slippers if she’s just come in from outside?

  Kate tries to untwist her shoulder and to press her hand against the floor so that she can lever herself into a sitting position against the skirting board. Even this sends an electric eel of pain slamming into her ribs and swimming down her spine.

  ‘Arrrghh!’ she cries out. The loose tooth comes away entirely. It floats in her mouth, lodging underneath her tongue. Kate gags. She thinks she’s about to throw up. She spits out the tooth. It lands on a white tile, amid a spatter of blood.

  She rests her cheek back on the coolness of the floor, allowing the nausea to pass. Why is Marisa just sitting there? Why isn’t she trying to help her?

  ‘Sit up, Kate.’

  Marisa’s voice is monotone, almost robotic. Perhaps it’s tough love, Kate thinks. Perhaps she thinks this is the best way to snap her out of her shock.

  ‘Ambulance,’ Kate says. Without the tooth, it is easier to make herself understood.

  ‘You don’t need an ambulance, Kate. You’re perfectly fine. I just want to talk.’

  That is the first odd signal that reaches Kate’s jagged synapses. Oh, she thinks, Marisa is not going to help after all. Marisa is not acting as she thought she would. Oh, she thinks. Oh.

  Then Kate notices that she can’t move her legs. They seem to be fused together, impossibly heavy to lift. She lowers her head. Looking down along the hallway floor, she sees there are coils of rope wound tightly around her thighs. She recognises the rope as one of Jake’s at-home fitness purchases. At weekends, he loops it behind the back-garden gatepost and slams the rope up and down from a squatting position to burn belly fat. Now, the rope is still, the woven weight of it heavy against her legs. Kate follows the rope with her gaze across the hallway floor. In the split-second before she sees, she understands that it will be Marisa holding the end.

  ‘Hello there.’

  Marisa is sitting on a kitchen chair, erect and poised in the half-gloom, the rope twisted several times around her hand and wrist. Her blonde hair is loose around her shoulders. She is wearing a grey cardigan and a grubby T-shirt and no bra. Her pregnant belly sticks out. Her legs are spread apart. There is a strange nonchalance to her stance. It reminds Kate of a portrait of the Virgin and Child she has seen on Jake’s laptop: a late medieval altarpiece fragment, with the mother looking monumental and stolid against a gold-leaf background. The only sign of her relation to the adult-seeming baby standing on her lap is the slightest inclination of her head, swathed in blue-gold cloth. Even her hands, elegantly placed around the child, seem not actually to touch his flesh.

  ‘How long have you and Jake been sleeping together?’

  Marisa asks the question calmly but there is a flush on her cheeks, a dot of red at the centre of each one that suggests a flaming core of anger. Kate is so surprised by the question, so utterly taken aback by the surreal weirdness of the situation that it takes a moment to register what is being asked. For a second, she forgets about being scared.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  Kate laughs. She tries to haul herself upright once again and this time, she manages it. She bends both her arms to the deadweight of her legs, half pushing, half carrying until they lie at an approximate 90-degree angle to the rest of her. She sits with her back slumped against the wall, exhausted by the effort. Sweat drips from the end of her nose. She wipes it away with the back of her hand and when she draws it away, it is smeared with blood.

  ‘What … have you … done to me?’ Kate asks.

  Marisa raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Oh, Kate, Kate, Kate. Whatever I’ve done to you pales in comparison to what you’ve done to me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Kate starts to cry. She hates herself for it.

  ‘Why am I bleeding?’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll live. It’s just a minor blow to the head.’

  She has never seen Marisa like this – cold and distant. Even her language has acquired a medical gloss. Usually Marisa is so chaotic and rumpled and earth-motherly. Kate has always believed her to be a bit hopeless. Strange, yes. Lately, her behaviour has been erratic and worrying. But this – this – is beyond anything she could have imagined.

  She looks directly at Marisa, and then down onto her lap where Marisa appears to be holding something in her hands. The hallway is still gloomy, but light is filtering out from an open door further down the corridor. The light reflects weakly from a tiny glimmer between Marisa’s hands and Kate realises it’s a knife. She’s holding a knife.

  Panic scrabbles in her chest. She swivels her head, trying to make out an escape route, but there is none. No windows. No way of moving with her legs tied. A warmth seeps into her trousers and she realises she has wet herself. She is still crying, sobbing now, her throat raw. She starts to scream, hoping someone will hear. But she knows the walls in this house are thick. They have never heard any noises from their neighbours. Not once.

  The screaming unsettles Marisa.

  ‘Shush, Kate, shush.’

  But Kate carries on because the noise of it reassures her she is still alive. That there is still hope. She screams. No words, just sounds and the more she does it, she realises, the more Marisa becomes agitated.

  ‘Kate, please stop. Shush, shush, shush, now. You’re OK. You’re fine. It’s OK. I’m not going to hurt you. I promise.’

  Marisa shifts forward in her chair, placing the knife carefully onto the floor. Kate registers that it’s a knife from the wooden block in the kitchen, one of the ones that needs sharpening. She used it the other day to slice into a tomato and the knife was so blunt it was difficult to dent the skin. This calms her. Marisa can’t hurt her with this knife. It is for show, nothing more.

  ‘I just want to talk,’ Marisa says. Her voice is different now, less flat and more fevered. ‘I feel like I’m going mad and I just want to talk.’

  You are, Kate wants to say. You are going mad. These are not the actions of a sane person. For months, she’s been worried about Marisa, about the way she barely sleeps or eats, about the way she slinks around the house as if she’s stalking Kate. There was that time, a few weeks ago, that she found Marisa following her in the tube station at Oxford Circus. She was spooked enough to tell Jake about it.

  ‘It’s like she’s obsessed with you,’ he said, stroking her hair out of her eyes. ‘A girl crush or something.’

  But she knew, even then, it wasn’t a harmless crush. It was something darker. It was as if Marisa actually wanted to be Kate, to inhabit her form, to stitch together clothes made of her skin.

  ‘It can’t be good for the baby, all this,’ she said to Jake. ‘I’m really worried about her. And we both know it’s more important than just her. The baby’s my main concern.’

  They had plans, the two of them, for what would happen when the baby arrived. What they would do. How happy they would be once Marisa had left their lives.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to her.’ And Kate had trusted him to do so. She always had.

  13

  They had met six years ago. He always joked that she could never remember specifics. It was Jake who recalled anniversaries and Valentine’s Days with small gifts and thoughtful cards referring to long-held private jokes, but she knows they met six years ago because it happened at her thirtieth birthday party. She had, at the time, been working on the publicity for a low-budget independent film directed by one of
her friends – it was a favour, really, she wasn’t making any money on it, but she believed in the movie, which was interestingly shot and told a story that needed to be told, about a twelve-year-old girl who was taken into care and sexually abused by one of the counsellors. Kate had persuaded a couple of critics from the broadsheets to come to a screening and they had loved it, and given five-star reviews that made them seem edgy and helped the film expand its distribution to more than a handful of cinemas. Kate’s friend, Ajesh, was now being courted by the bigger studio heads, one of whom had shown interest in developing a script about a teenager who discovers she has been born with no sense of morality. The working title was Badolescent.

  Ajesh came to her thirtieth birthday, which was held in the upstairs room of a Wandsworth pub within walking distance of her flat, and he brought with him a couple of men Kate had never met. This was typical Ajesh. He hadn’t asked if he could come with anyone but he was so likeable that you could never begrudge it. It was how he persuaded people to do things for him.

  ‘Katie!’ he bellowed from the other side of the room. Ajesh was also the only person allowed to call her Katie. She was drunk on champagne, wearing a tight blue satin dress bought for the occasion from Topshop, and heels that were higher than usual because it was her party and she was allowed to dress like a slut. She beamed at Ajesh, handsome in a corduroy suit and his familiar tortoiseshell-framed spectacles, and made her way over to him.

  ‘Happy birthday, darling,’ he said, hugging her. ‘Fuck me. You look fiiiiit.’

  They had slept together once, back in university. It had been good, but not good enough to pursue, and it seemed not to have damaged the closeness of their friendship although occasionally she still thought of him, and the thought of him turned her on sometimes, which she had never told him. He smelled of tobacco and Red Bull.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, standing back to do a little curtsey and losing her balance. She was drunker than she’d thought. He put his arm around her waist to steady her.