The cool night air is chilled inside my lungs. I thought I would feel calmer, after a few minutes, than I did in our hot flat, but I don’t. Nothing helps. My stomach churns, and I can feel a weight across my shoulders. Everything seems scary on the walk—out, by myself. The distant sound of sirens. The streetlights that seem too bright. It is the beginning, I suppose. The beginning of living in fear. I’m not happy out. I’m not happy in—holed up, inside.
When I let myself back into the flat, Reuben is playing the piano in the box room at the back. He only ever does it when I am out. I stand for a second, then shut the door behind me. As expected, the playing stops. He sits uneasily with that talent, does Reuben. It is too extravagant for him.
He appears in the doorway. I have always loved the proximity our flat affords. I like being able to call Reuben from anywhere, to make casual conversation with him when I am in the bath, when he is cooking.
“Number two thousand five hundred and eighty-nine,” he says, still standing in the doorway, “how cute your cheeks look when they’re red. When you’ve just come home from a crazy walk.”
I never even have to think about the list of things I love about him. It is endless. I love how shy he is about his brilliant, artistic, instinctive piano playing. How he is forever crossing boundaries with his clients, bringing them home, taking them on trips, when he shouldn’t; how much he loves those messed-up kids. How he once told my brother, Wilf, that he was being condescending to me.
I should respond. I should offer up something I love about him. Or cross the room and say thank you. A full hug. The length of our bodies pressed together. I should tell him how happy the sound of his piano playing makes me feel when I get in.
But I can’t.
Because if I do that, then I’ll tell him. I know I will. Or, worse: He’ll know. He’ll see the blackness at my center. He’ll guess. And he’ll hand me over.
He’s still looking at me, almost expectantly. I avoid his eyes, looking down.
What he’s not expecting is my rejection. And so it makes it worse when it comes. When he realizes I’m not going to answer, I sense his gaze shifting. He’s embarrassed for me to see how hurt he is, and so he turns away from me, messes uselessly with the plants on the windowsill. He starts watering them, not looking at me.
The water trickles, the only sound in all of London, it seems to me.
* * *
—
We take it in turns to make coffee in the evenings. It was his turn this evening, but I followed him, not wanting to be alone, my body fizzing with acid.
I promised myself a day, but now’s the time. We are alone in the kitchen. This is the moment.
“I didn’t even tell you about my Brixton boy,” Reuben says, looking up at me as he packs ground coffee carefully into our stove-top espresso maker.
“No?”
“You know the one—the boy who got out of the gang stuff last Christmas? Behaved himself?”
“Yes,” I say woodenly.
“Well, he’s been out with other lads . . . torching cars.” He leans against the counter. “I can’t work him out—it was all fine.”
Reuben is often bewildered by things like this. I suppose it is a symptom of having a steady mind. If you remove the boy’s problems, the boy will behave. Very logical, but untrue.
“But don’t you remember being a teenager?” I say, with a tiny laugh, turning to look at him, grateful for the distraction, for the chance to emerge out of my own head, even if I have to fight while doing it, like climbing a rope with no support, burns on my hands.
“I was just . . . I was very boring,” he says, flashing me a small smile.
I wish for a moment that other people could see this Reuben. That he would let them.
“But you of all people had reason to be—to be angry,” I say.
“My adoption was hardly personal.”
I can’t hide a smile. “You are very blessed to have a sound mind,” I say, reaching to touch his hand.
He pulls me to him, immediately, and I step back. He leans his weight against the kitchen counter, looking thoughtful. The coffeemaker is on the hob, and the second it starts to bubble he turns off the gas. “Don’t want burned coffee,” he says, looking pointedly at me.
“He’s not happy, then,” I say. “Even if he’s out of the gang and with functional people . . . he’s not happy.”
“Why not?”
I shrug. “Some of us are screwed up. We sabotage our lives. We don’t know why.”
He gets the milk out of the fridge. “You’re my people person,” he says, reaching out a hand to me tentatively. It brushes my stomach, and I move away from him.
He’s always called me that. His “people person.” One of his many nicknames for me.
He turns his eyes to mine. There’s a question in them. “You all right?” he says. “You sound sad. You’re not a screwup.”
“I am,” I say hoarsely.
He looks at me. “You’re holding your arm weirdly,” he says.
This is surely the moment. I have put it off and put it off. But now I have run out of excuses. My deadline is upon me, and I have yet to begin. It is the story of my life.
He sits down at the kitchen counter, at the breakfast bar that divides our kitchen from the living room, but turns toward the television, sipping his coffee. He has the BBC News Channel on. He always does, even though it irritates him.
I open my mouth. In some ways, it would be so easy. They’re just words.
My mouth stays open, like I am waiting for something. Waiting to feel ready. Waiting to be sure. I am never sure about anything. It is easier to do nothing. I glance at the window, out onto Edith’s yard, and then back at Reuben. My gaze slides away from his and toward the television. Focusing in on it like a camera lens, I see the news bulletins. They flash up, narrated, and interspersed with music:
SURREY MP IN EXPENSES SCANDAL
A PASSING DOCTOR HAS DELIVERED A BABY BORN IN CENTRAL LONDON’S FLAGSHIP TOPSHOP STORE
HOW LONDON IS DEALING WITH THE GROWING MIGRANT CRISIS
I turn toward Reuben as I hear the final headline. It’s almost like I’m waiting for it. A bong, and then:
LONDON CANAL-SIDE ATTACK
I know before I know. I know before they’ve said it. I know because of that bong, as though it is meant only for me. Unthinkingly, I grip the counter, scratching it with my nails.
The news has gone back to the first story. Some politician fiddling his expenses. I don’t care about that, I don’t care about that.
London canal-side attack. I repeat it, over and over, to myself.
My body contracts as though I’m in labor. I feel it right in my heart, moving down my arms and legs. I don’t respond to Reuben about my hand.
“We’re ruled by the corrupt, and nobody even gives a shit,” he says, gesturing to the screen. “How am I supposed to teach young kids to stop lying and cheating when the people who run the country do it? How hard is it to think, ‘I’m not going to fiddle my expenses now I’m an MP’?”
It is one of the only topics he is verbal about; he is often sounding off at parties while people stare awkwardly into their glasses. The day Laura met him, she looked knowingly at me and said, “There is nothing as sexy as a socialist.”
I usually sit there and think: I am glad my husband is the moral one, the uppity one, the one who actually does practice what he preaches, and not the one who finds it awkward. Like the time he said he thought women never lied about having been raped, and the room went silent. But now I don’t think anything. I can’t. I am hot and panicky, feeling as though Friday night’s act is written across my forehead, that my thoughts have materialized right there in the living room in front of us. I have turned around and am staring at the television, waiting.
“Lying,” he continues. “They call it th
ese stupid names. Bespoke offenses. No one calls it what it really is. It’s not an expenses scandal. It’s lying.”
I raise my eyes to the ceiling. What is the universe telling me? Should I keep quiet because I have already told lies, or fess up to stop myself from telling even more?
I sit numbly on the sofa.
I try to control the wild anxiety. It might not be about him. It might be somebody else. Yes. A stabbing. A shooting. It’s London. So what if it’s by a canal? How many canals are there in London—miles, isn’t it? More than Venice—or is that Birmingham? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Oh God. How am I supposed to get away with a crime?
Attack. It’s so presumptuous. They don’t know. They don’t know how it was. He threatened a woman. She was frightened. She fled.
“I mean,” Reuben says, gesturing with his coffee. It sloshes onto the wooden floor, fawn-colored liquid seeping between the cracks. “Shit,” he says. He immediately puts the cup on the table and goes to find a cloth. “I always thought power corrupts,” he says as he’s wiping up the stain.
The presenter cuts to the baby news story, interviewing people who saw the woman’s water break in Topshop. “Not sure why she was shopping,” one of them says with a laugh.
I’m half-aware that Reuben is wiping up beneath my feet, but my whole mind is turned toward the television, and that last news story.
“Don’t know why we put up with this shite for news,” he says, standing and reaching for the remote. “So what if she was shopping?”
I go to stop him, then admonish myself. I can’t do that. No—I can. I’ve got to tell him. “Leave it on,” I say, my voice casual. I’ll tell him when it comes on. I’ve got two minutes, max.
“Can’t deal with this drivel.” He ignores me and flicks to a cooking channel.
Reuben does this every day. Puts the news on. Gets annoyed. Turns it off. He’s not very good at listening to my preferences.
A man’s preparing to skin a rabbit.
“Jesus,” I say involuntarily. I inch my fingers toward the remote control, wanting to switch back. It gives me the perfect excuse to put the news back on. But, as I flick the news back on, a thought chills me.
They know.
It’s on the news not because they don’t know, but because they do. Soon, a grainy image of me—on CCTV, maybe, or a composite photo—is going to appear. I really have only got two minutes left. Two minutes here with this man, in Before.
I curse that I’ve spent my entire adult life scrolling in front of laptops and telephones and not paying attention to anything. Daydreaming. Thinking of career swaps I could do. Making up backstories for people. Not looking and listening and learning. Does it being on the television mean they know it’s me? Or does it mean they definitely don’t?
They’re talking about the Calais migrant crisis. It goes on and on. I sit, rigid, like I am on a bench outside in the cold, not in my warm living room with my husband.
And then. And then. It is my headline’s time. No, not mine. Not mine.
“A man was discovered by the side of a canal in Little Venice in the early hours of Saturday morning.”
It’s as though I have been plunged into a vat of hot acid. My whole body fizzes. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. That this is happening. That this is my life. What have I done?
“Caroline Harris, our correspondent, is at the scene.”
They cut to her, right close up to her face.
“I am standing at the scene of a strange attack,” Caroline says, her voice clipped.
The camera pans out slightly, and I feel the contraction again. Just don’t think about it, Joanna. Just ignore it.
But I can’t ignore it. It’s right there in front of me.
“A seventeen-year-old man was discovered at the edge of the canal at six o’clock this morning by a dog walker.”
I sigh with relief. It can’t be me. Seventeen? Sadiq was not seventeen. There’s no way.
And then the camera pans out farther. And she’s right where I was, just eighteen hours previously. There are the steps. They’re no longer wet. They’ve dried out. The weather’s clear, the sky a navy blue. The reporter’s breath blooms in front of her, just like mine did. Police tape flickers in the breeze. It’s blue and white. A yellow-and-white tent sits inside the cordoned-off area. What on earth is that? I think, looking curiously at the television.
“God,” Reuben says. “Reckon it was that nutter?” He has a fantastic memory for details, and I silently curse it.
“What nutter?” I say, hoping to throw him off the track. To pretend me and my nutter were somewhere else.
“The one who followed you!”
Reuben is looking at me, an expression of disbelief, almost derision, on his face. “You look mad,” he says in his blunt way.
I nod quickly, looking at the television. I can’t speak. It’s like I’ve only got so much brainpower, and it’s all focused on one thing.
The woman is still speaking, the yellow-and-white tent—tent?—quivering in the wind.
I frown. Why was he only found at six o’clock? Was he drunker than I thought? He must have been freezing.
And then I replay the sentence in my mind. Discovered.
Goose bumps appear all over the back of my neck and on my shoulders. No. Please, no.
“It’s always a dog walker,” Reuben says. “Some scumbag’s left them traumatized.”
Some scumbag. That’s me.
He stands and goes into the kitchen, his empty coffee cup in his hand, and swills it out before putting it in the dishwasher.
“The man was taken to hospital at six o’clock, where he was unable to be resuscitated. The police are treating his death as a murder inquiry.”
Before I know what I’m doing, I am sliding off the sofa and am facedown on our rug. My left hand protests at the bent angle, but I don’t care. I’m not crying. I’m doing something else. Something a wild animal might do. Keening. Rocking forward. My mouth open, but no sound coming out. The regret washes over me. I don’t care. I don’t care that Reuben is just over there, his back to me, pushing the dishwasher drawers into place—I’ll have to tell him now anyway. The dishwasher must be full, because he puts it on: he is so good, and so good to me.
Died.
Died shortly after.
Killed.
Murder inquiry.
Just like that. A life snuffed out. A few moments before, he was alive, a mesh of thoughts and hopes and views on music and books and the housing market. And now. Nothing. The machine off.
Reuben is living with a murderer. If I tell him, he will march me straight to the police station. Asking him not to would be like asking him to write with the other hand. Like telling him to vote Tory. To rob a bank. To smack a child.
And that bloody MP work he’s doing. How could he do that? Help out his local MP, while living with a known criminal? There’s no answer, I think, getting up off the rug and sitting down on the sofa.
It’s not even that. No, it’s something else. It’s because he would—privately, alone, so as not to upset me—quietly wonder at me. He loves me—in all my fecklessness, my messiness, my disorganization, my crap job—and this would give him pause. He’d never let on, but I know it would happen, like coming back into a hotel room and seeing it’s been cleaned, the towels restacked, the toilet paper folded into a point. You wouldn’t know unless you were looking for it. But I would know.
Reuben’s standing in the kitchen, his back to me. He turns, looking thoughtful. “There but for the . . .” he says. “Imagine if you’d been a few hours later?”
I start to feel the same panic I felt in Little Venice. A pounding heart. My hands involuntarily making fists. A cold sweat over my back and shoulders. I wouldn’t be surprised if, when cut open, I saw that my blood was black, congealing, or that I was
full of cockroaches, or had an anvil nestled weightily in among my organs.
How can I tell him now? Now that it’s murder? It will ruin him. I will be the worst person he knows. An enemy.
And, in the back of my mind, right in the recesses, among the archives and the distant, half-formed memories, is something else. Seventeen. There is no way Sadiq was seventeen. And so . . . perhaps it was not Sadiq.
I can’t let myself think it. It was him. I was being pursued.
And that is why I killed.
That has to be true. Anything else would ruin me.
* * *
—
I fall asleep on the sofa in the early evening. My mind must be exhausted, but napping isn’t exactly unfamiliar to me: I spent my entire time at university taking illicit naps. My natural reaction is to switch off. To ignore. I sleep deeply, but dream of Sadiq.
Reuben wakes me with another coffee—he drinks so much of it, although it never seems to affect him—and walks out of the living room, probably going to his piano room to write up case notes. As he leaves, he says over his shoulder, “I don’t think I’ve ever known you to sleep talk.”
“What?” I say.
He laughs under his breath as he walks down the hall and says, “You were talking absolute rubbish.”
I can’t ask him. I can’t press him. But what if it was something damning? I draw my knees up to my chest and hope that it wasn’t.
I stare at the news, even though they’ve moved on from my story. I hear two sirens rush past, and I jump both times, a layer of sweat materializing between my skin and my clothes. There are so many sirens in London.
I have never done anything alone in my life. I’ve led it by committee. Asking everybody’s opinions on how to have my hair cut and where to rent in London. Facebook and Twitter were devices where I outsourced my decisions to others. And now: I’m alone.
I have almost finished the coffee when Reuben walks back in. “You were apologizing, in your sleep,” he says, as if no time has passed at all.
“What for?” I say.
The Choice Page 6