He took the green velvet jewellery box from his pocket, bundled it into the glove compartment with the dead phone and opened the car door, trying, even alone in the dark, not to grunt as he pulled himself out of the bucket seat. He locked the car carefully, his eyes lingering on the glove compartment, testing it with fresh eyes to see if Helena could have spotted anything through the glass and metal and leather. She'd know the whole story if she found the gaudy present, she'd know about the cheap woman and the why. He couldn't face a showdown. She'd divorce him and take everything. He didn't want her anymore, couldn't take her anywhere. She had too many scars. The best that could happen would be if she just ran back to France and left him alone.
He put his key in the large front door and opened it to a thick, fetid silence. The hall was dark. Following his nightly ritual, Phil put his house keys on the silver calling card plate in the centre of the hall, emptying his pockets of small change and a couple of tenners, giving the impression of openness.
The edge of the large bowl of lilies reflected what was behind him: a brightly lit kitchen door with a shadow moving through it, holding on to the wall to steady herself.
'Well, well, well,' she said, 'if it isn't Jesus H Christ himself.'
She talked in stupid clichés when she was drunk, her French accent coarser and thickening. Phil ignored her and walked across the hall to the bottom of the stairs.
'Where the hell are you going?' He turned. Helena was silhouetted against the light, wearing a long black silk nightgown with lace on the arms and chest. The sort of nightgown an older woman might wear, imagining it to be alluring. Naked and young was alluring, sweet and vulnerable was alluring. Drunk Helena swaying in the doorway, her mouth a bitter button, her eyes blinking slowly, was not.
'I made you dinner,' she said. 'You said you'd be in from work at fucking nine o'clock and I made you a beautiful soufflé.'
Phil stopped on the stairs, holding on to the banister, letting the weight of his body swing him back to face her.
'Supper,' he corrected quietly.
Helena rolled her eyes up in her head, shutting them tightly, and tried to start the argument again.
'I made you fucking dinner–'
'A meal served at that time is commonly called supper. Not dinner.' He swung back to face the stairs, suppressing a smile. 'Supper.'
She was too drunk to think of a comeback. By the time she opened her mouth to start again he was out of sight on the upstairs landing. He heard her draw breath as he felt along the wall. His fingers found the light switch and he flicked it off and left her, flummoxed in the darkness. Silly cow.
He was halfway across the bedroom to their en suite when he heard the first crash from downstairs. She was trashing the kitchen again, smashing up the new set of crockery he had bought her to replace the previous set she had smashed up.
He locked the door to the bathroom, something he hadn't done in weeks. Helena had been up here already, pouring talcum powder on the head of his electric toothbrush, in his aftershave bottles and in his basin. Hers was pristine. The talc was all over the floor, trapped between the biscuit coloured tiles. She'd have to clean it up in the morning or at least arrange for someone else to come in and do it. She never seemed to realize that she was only making work for herself.
Phil went to the cupboard and pulled down a spare head for his toothbrush and a packet of floss. He broke Anya's tooth tonight, knocked part of a premolar right out of her mouth and across the room with a single punch. Anya was beautiful. She had large brown eyes, thick black hair. When he first saw her at the champagne bar it was her legs he noticed. She had a scrawny thinness that made her look like a suspect, a highly strung woman too nervous to eat properly.
Slammo saw him eyeing her up and leaned across the table, dipping his silk tie in a puddle of cheap champagne and cigar ash. 'Is she a drug courier?' he said and Phil laughed.
That was exactly what she looked like. She wore too much make-up, teased her hair in ways it didn't want to go.
The champagne bar was a cheap con serving viscose Cava for twenty quid a glass. The real reason anyone went there was for the striptease and the nearly naked serving women. They were good-looking women though, there was no denying it, but their purpose was to get you to drink more. They got a cut of the tab from their tables. Anya made him buy four bottles, each costing eighty-five quid, before she would sit on his knee. He bought another four for the privilege of kissing her hand.
He had money to spare and he wouldn't be like the other contenders for her affections: he wasn't old or fat. He was a successful broker, not hyper successful and not obsessed with the work. He was never placed on the top table at functions but in her eyes he was a god. He owned a large house outright, he drove a Ferrari, he was generous and handsome and young. Most of the men who went in there were forty or fifty, she said, most of them were fat or sweaty. He was a good catch for her.
They had been together for four months now, long enough to swap sexual histories. He told her about Helena and how they met at a barbecue in Henley, he told her about Helena's drinking but left the rest of it out. Anya had loved a boy at home but he'd died, sadly, when she was out of town on business for the shop (she worked in an aunt's clothes shop at home – top class, designer things like Dior and Chanel and Versace). She had only had one boyfriend since she came to London, Johnny, who wasn't nice to her. Phil wanted to ask her outright, did he hit you? But he didn't want to sound outraged or disapproving. Part of the grooming was never to talk about it in other than positive terms: there are worse things you can do, at least he loved you enough to do that, he didn't mean it. Set up excuses for himself in the future. Johnny had been very rich but she didn't see him anymore. She didn't miss him at all.
Helena was rattling the bathroom door, cursing him for locking it. Phil ignored her, running the warm water into his basin to wash his face. She kicked it, he could hear her grunting as she did.
He could imagine Anya working in a designer shop at home, the most beautiful girl in her small, mud-encrusted town. It was a shame he couldn't tell the boys in the office about her, but a few of their wives knew Helena from Christmas parties. It was a shame. If he groomed her properly, if it worked out right, Anya could turn out to be sustainable, the woman he could come home to every night, want every night and have. It could work. Russian women had different expectations.
He didn't know where she was from or why she had come here. She told him the name of the place several times and he would play act, shrugging, watching her lips, making her say it again. She finished by smirking and saying, 'It near Siberia, Pheel, you don't know Russia's towns.' He didn't have to engage with her personal history. She was twenty-three and living in a flat in Soho and working for her cousin Fat Eugene in a champagne bar. Fat Eugene had the flat in payment for some debt and let her use it exclusively because she was family.
Helena kicked the door. 'Let me in, you fucker.'
Every night they went through this charade now, Helena trying to get attention from him by behaving badly and then he'd come bursting out of the bath-room and leather her, slap and punch. 'Is this what you want?' He'd fall on his knees by her side and take out the pocket knife, nick her skin with the business end of the bottle opener. He sharpened it for her, to make the cuts uniform. Helena lay on the floor and took it, groaning like a whore in ecstasy, climbing slowly into bed after him, sorry for all the mess she'd caused.
She kicked the door again. 'Let me in, you fucker. Let me in and I'll fucking kill you. I'll mark you and then we'll see what your friends at work think about it.'
She stood back, waiting for him to open the door and go for her. Her complicity was pathetic to him now, role play, even hardcore role play, wasn't what he wanted, not after Anya's horror and fright. Poor Anya, so shocked by the change of mood in him. He snapped the lock off the door and let it swing open. Helena stood outside, staggered back a little step, bracing herself for the first blow.
'Do what you like,' sai
d Phil, 'I don't give a shit.'
He brushed past her on the way to bed, and as he passed she gave a little inadvertent cry.
'For fucksake, I didn't touch you.' He turned and saw that her eyes were fixed on the back of his hand. Helena's knees buckled. She slid to the floor, seeming to whither as she did so, still staring. He had fresh cuts on his knuckles. She crumpled to the floor, real tears in her eyes. He had cut the back of his hand on someone else. Phil was embarrassed.
He tutted hard and covered the cut hand with the other, muttering 'for fucksake' and 'just a cut' as he busied himself taking off his rings and his watch. He stripped down to his boxers and hung his clothes up, ignoring Helena. He saw her in the reflection of the window, sitting in the shaft of harsh light from the hall. Her hands were clasped to her chest and, even in a reflection, Phil could see a hundred tiny white scars, each a centimetre long, criss-crossing her face and hands, intersecting her eyebrows and lids, crawling over her lips like a hundred tiny worms.
When he met Helena she was young and pert and game for anything. She said something cheeky to him in front of all the men gathered round the barbecue, something about her needing a good slap. They became inseparable. They travelled when they could take holidays, went to visit her cold parents in Paris and bought the house after the wedding. It began in this house, drunken arm-twisting and small hits, getting bigger and closer to her face until she couldn't go to work for more than a day a week and they sacked her. But now it was no more than a hollow ritual, a reminder of when she'd really had something worth taking away.
'Goodnight, Helena.' He climbed into bed and turned off the light.
She stayed on the floor in the shaft of light, sobbing while her energy lasted, ending up sniffing and lonely on the big white floor.
Phil lay in the bed facing the windows with his eyes shut. He pulled the sheets up to his mouth and felt, for the first time in years, a little guilty. He listened as she cried quietly. He listened as she tried to get up, her feet scrabbling on silk nightie against the woollen carpet, looking for purchase, trying hard to get up but failing, like a spider caught in the bath.
He didn't want to ring too early in the evening. He wanted her to wait and get desperate, to reach the stage where she expected him not to phone but dearly wanted him to. Helena had told him how she'd waited by the phone the day after the first real beating, praying for his call, wishing, wishing. He ordered a steak sandwich at the bar and another pint of Stella. The pub was at Charing Cross, an anonymous theme bar less than half a mile from Anya's flat. He didn't know anyone in there and mingled happily with the other commuters relaxing with the paper on their way home. He flicked through the Evening Standard, skimming the articles, thinking about the bracelet in his pocket.
They had been seeing each other for four months, all of it very nice, out to dinners or staying in, having a good time while he waited. When he saw the charm bracelet dangling from the tree he knew that now was the time. She was attached enough. He would give the bracelet to her afterwards, pretend he had bought it in a flurry of remorse.
It looked like something a Russian girl would like, gold and rich, vulgar and an obvious antique. It had individual charms hanging off it; a tiger, two dice, a little steam train with wheels that spun, all heavy and expensive. Not designer, not pretty, she wouldn't necessarily like the thing but she'd feel the weight of it and know how much it was worth, and that alone would endear him to her. And then, when she had calculated how much it was worth and what he would have spent retail (she knew he didn't have any contacts in wholesale, they'd had that conversation when he bought her the watch), when she was already pliable and forgiving, then he'd give her the smaller box in matching green velvet with the pink egg inside.
The bracelet was dun and stuck with leaves and mould when he found it. It had been left hanging in a branch like a child's lost glove, advertising itself to passers-by. The sun passed overhead and he caught a glint of it. He was sitting on the bench in the overgrown path, phoning her. He told her he was thinking about her and touching himself (he wasn't) and wanted to kiss her all over and look after her (he didn't). On the other end of the phone Anya was saying that she'd got a hundred quid tip from a handsome man the night before.
It was all she talked about, money, all she wanted, poor immigrant. Perhaps the man will come back, perhaps he would give her more money and try to become her lover. Would that make him jealous? Would that make him angry? Phil could hear Fat Eugene laughing in the background.
'You know, Anya,' he said, picking the bracelet off the branch like a fruit, 'all that glisters is not gold.'
She didn't understand of course. She asked him what twice and then brushed over it.
He stopped himself from telling her he had a gift for her.
He had paid to have the bracelet cleaned and polished and bought the best box the jewellers had to present it in. The green box had a yellow coat of arms stamped on it, some spurious connection to an obscure European family of aristos prepared to exploit their family history to make and sell trinkets for tourists. It had a gold satin interior. And then he saw the egg in pink enamel with gold weave around it, a poor man's Fabergé. The elderly jeweller showed him how to open it. 'A special message can be placed inside, you see, for a loved one.' He glanced at Phil's wedding ring. 'For an anniversary. It's a brand new piece, valuable, from a very reputable maker, intricate.' It was yellow gold meshed over menstrual pink enamel. Phil could see it was crap. That's why he bought it.
He finished his sandwich and stepped outside the sticky hub to make the phone call. He found an alley away from the pedestrians and faced the back, hanging his head low, getting the voice right.
'Please don't hang up,' was his anxious opener. He loved her. He needed her. He was sorry. He finished by telling her that she deserved so much more.
She was delighted to hear from him, he could tell by the high tone of her voice. 'Please to come,' she said. 'We can talk please.'
'I'm so sorry.'
'Come to me, Pheel.' She sounded quite turned on, a little breathy even.
He hung up and went back into the pub for another quick half.
It was a cheap room in a pricey area. Soho might have been the centre of the red light district but it was still expensive. Small rooms in overpriced narrow houses. The buzzer system was ramshackle, with biroed names sellotaped on to the buzzers. Some of them weren't even names, some were just descriptions: Young Model, Swedish Girl, Lonely Guy. Anya only had a number on hers. She must have been waiting by the entry phone because the moment his finger came off it she buzzed him up.
The stairs were wooden and narrow and worn in the centre where eager feet had rattled up them and sloped down for a hundred years. Anya was waiting for him on the second landing, dressed in a sheer black silk shirt and jeans, standing in the doorway, watching for his face to appear on the bend. She looked tentative and nervous. He brought his eyebrows together in the middle, whispering her name as he ran up the three final steps.
'Forgive me.' He brought her hand to his lips, looking at her face and noticing a small black crescent on her cheek where the tooth had gone into it. He kissed the mark lightly. She kept his big hand in her small one and pulled him into the flat.
The apartment had been chopped up from a grand whole and there was no hallway. She manoeuvred him to the sofa and sat him down. He stayed on the edge of the seat, acting anxious still.
'I have something for you,' she said and skirted round behind him to a sideboard. 'I bought for you.'
She bent down, presenting him with her tight little arse in denim, and pulled from the cupboard a bottle of Remy Martin XO Special. It was very good cognac and she had the presentation bottle: a flat oval with ornamental ridges all along the side. They had it in the drinks cabinet at work. It was a delicious, cool fit on the well of a palm and cost extra to buy. In the four months they had been together he had never known her spend any money on anything and he knew that this bottle cost closer to a hundre
d quid than fifty.
'You like?'
He nodded dumbly. There was less work for him to do here than he could possibly have supposed. She was already forgiving him, already smiling at him as she unwrapped the lid and poured the glittering caramel liquid into two waiting glasses.
'I bought you a gift too,' he said quietly, looking back at her.
Anya looked him in the eye as she ran her sharp little tongue around the neck of the bottle. 'That's lovely, honey. Put on the table for me to see.'
'It's nothing much.' He took out both of the green boxes and placed them on the cluttered coffee table next to one another, the big one and the matching little one, and for a moment he considered them and thought they looked like him and Anya, a big one and a little one by its side, perfectly matching.
Behind him Anya raised both hands high, using all her slight weight to bring the heavy ornamental glass bottle down on the left side of Phil's head.
Stunned at the blow he slumped to the side and she hit him again, holding the bottle by the neck, smashing the deep heavy ridges across the right of his head this time, hearing a dull crack. Frowning, she looked at the bottle, but the glass was intact. The noise hadn't come from the bottle. Phil was lying on the sofa, staring intently at the legs of the coffee table, a bubble of red at his ear. She hit him once again, on the temple this time, and his head caved in like a smashed egg. He rolled forward, tumbling paralysed on to the floor, unable to bring his hands up to break his fall. His blood began to spill free and the thirsty carpet sucked it up.
As he lay on the ground listening to his own hot blood glug into the nylon shag the last thing he heard was Anya, tiny hitherto compliant Anya, spit words at him. 'Fuck you,' she said. 'You can fucking hit me? Fuck you.'
He couldn't hear her anymore but his vision was suddenly as sharp as it had ever been. The last image ever to register on his retina was Anya, drinking straight from the bottle, clutching the blood-smeared glass with both her bird-like hands.
Like a Charm Page 15