by Jane Hill
But tonight had been different. Tonight it had been a real person. I had run away from a real person, a harmless guy, a nice thoughtful bloke drinking coffee at Leicester Forest East services. The whole thing had become completely irrational. It had gone too far. It had to stop.
By the time I had spent several minutes driving around the area near my flat in King's Cross looking for a parking space, the next day was already dawning, catching up on me before I was ready for it. Even on a warm day, dawn can chill you to the bone. It panicked me sometimes, and it did that morning. The light was never sharper or colder – sharp and cold and hollow like hunger – and the streets around King's Cross were never emptier than they were at three and four o'clock in the morning. I felt exposed by the weird light. The shadows were in the wrong places. It was disconcerting, disorientating. My head ached from the metallic clash of caffeine and exhaustion. I was pretty sure I was about to have a migraine. I felt sick and empty.
I walked back to my flat with my keyring clutched in my fist, keys sticking out between my fingers: a do-it-yourself knuckle-duster. I made myself put my shoulders back and walk with a confidence that I didn't feel. I walked past the shuttered pub, past the internet cafe with its tables and chairs folded and leaning, padlocked, against the cafe windows, past the shadowy entrance to the neighbouring block of flats. I counted my steps, as if that would ward off the fear I felt. Of course, it was perfectly logical for a woman – for anyone – to feel scared walking in King's Cross in the early hours of the morning. But my fear had a different tone, a different flavour. It was my own personal, irrational fear. I knew it well. I knew the shakes it gave me. They were familiar – not quite old friends, not exactly old enemies either, but like someone I'd known for years and didn't much like but had learned to live with. I had learned how to control those shakes.
Counting was good; counting kept everything under control. Every sixteen steps I stopped, stood still for a moment, held my breath and listened hard – my normal routine, but that morning my heart was thumping harder and louder than usual.
At the end of the street the turrets of St Pancras twisted Gothickly out of a façade of boards and scaffolding, like Sleeping Beauty's castle emerging from the thicket of thorns. I reached my block of flats: Edwardian red brick, solid white stonework; charitably built for low-income workers in the early part of the last century, now colonised by those of us who wanted to live relatively cheaply in central London. I pushed open the big wooden door, turned on the light and stood for a while in the cool, echoey white entrance hall. I looked upwards at the six flights of stone stairs stretching dizzyingly to the top of the building. All seemed empty. My footsteps echoed on the white stone floor as I walked towards the lift and pressed the button to summon it to take me to my flat on the fifth floor. I stepped in, stood in the corner and waited for the doors to close. I was nearly home.
I walked along the stone walkway, looking down at the inner courtyard far below me: a few beds planted with despondent trees and dreary shrubs, casting weird shadows on the grey concrete. Finally I reached my front door. My hand shook as I put the key in the lock. Inside, I locked, double-locked and bolted the door. I checked the rooms (force of habit). A glance to my left: the bathroom, empty. T o my right: no one in the kitchen. The bedroom: clear. And at last I made it to my sitting room, with its huge window overlooking the London skyline, the Post Office Tower a sharp grey outline against the increasingly bright sky. There was a cheap Ikea sofa, a stereo, a few CDs, a desk, a laptop. A small pile of books on the floor by the settee. White walls, no pictures, no photos. A place of safety. I put the kettle on, made a mug of tea, swallowed a couple of extra-strength ibuprofen and sat on the sofa, shaking.
It was ridiculous. Most women I knew who got frightened travelling home alone at night were scared of rapists and muggers. I was scared of the ghost of a man called Rivers Carillo. And I didn't even believe in ghosts. I sat there early on that Sunday morning and thought about the state my life was in. I thought about the man I had run away from, the man who wasn't a ghost. I thought about my sister, and how I had walked away from a happy, warm, family weekend. I thought about my life, and about how much fear and how little joy was in it. And I told myself this: I can't live my life like this any more. This has got to stop. It's time to let go.
Two
The sound of a package being pushed through my letter box and dropping onto the doormat woke me up with a start. I looked at my alarm clock. Ten o'clock. I panicked for a moment, worried that I had overslept, and then I remembered that it was Sunday. I sat up in bed and moved my head slightly from side to side to test my headache. It felt okay, not much worse than a mild hangover. Not too bad. It would pass. I pulled on my dressing gown and padded down the hallway in bare feet. There, on the doormat, was a small white box.
It was a cardboard package, flat and square, about the same size as a CD. It lay on the doormat, passive yet threatening. I stood and looked at it for a while, and then I picked it up gingerly, weighing it in my hand. It was quite light and it didn't rattle. There was no stamp, no address. I turned it over and what I saw on the other side made me go cold. I had to put one hand against the wall to steady myself. I was expecting an address label, or maybe a handwritten address. But instead there were words and letters torn out from newspapers and magazines, stuck onto the cardboard. They looked jagged and dangerous against the white of the package. It was Sunday. It must have been hand-delivered. Someone had just pushed this through my letter box. Someone had been at my door, just a few feet away from me, to deliver this. I felt sick. I made myself read the words: ' T o the mysterious brunette in Flat 519. Belated Happy Birthday.'
I could feel my heart beating hard. There were goose pimples forming on my forearms and the backs of my hands. Holding the small container by one corner, I took it into the living room. I sat on the settee and looked at it, as if it was an unexploded bomb and I had to work out how to defuse it. And then, all of a sudden, I realised. It wasn't just a CD-sized box, it actually was a C D . I opened the box, fingers shaking, and sure enough that was what it was: a C D , a home-recorded compilation with a white inlay card full of words, no pictures. A compilation CD: a mix tape, as we used to call them in the days before digital technology. Nothing but a harmless CD. Therefore it could only be from Danny, my musical neighbour. He did this a lot. He was forever making me CDs and giving them to me, and then waiting eagerly for feedback. There was already a small pile of them next to my stereo. There was nothing odd or unusual about Danny making me a mix tape, except for the fact that he normally just handed them to me. He'd never pushed one through my door before. He'd never sent me one anonymously. And there was one other thing that didn't make sense.
'How did you know about my birthday?'
I was standing at Danny's front door with my hands on my hips, wearing yesterday's clothes that I had just pulled on. Danny leaned against his door-frame, dressed in a scraggy T-shirt and jeans. 'Oh my God,' he said, a look of mock horror on his face. 'Have I inadvertently breached the protocol of your witness protection scheme?'
I blushed and stammered an apology. The witness protection scheme was Danny's little joke, his way of explaining my oddities. 'I don't do relationships,' I had told him soon after we'd first met, when he'd kissed me goodnight after an evening in the pub with slightly too much enthusiasm, not to mention tongue. And another time, when he had looked around my flat, one of the few times I had ever let him in, and he'd mentioned how spare and empty it was, I'd said, 'I don't really do possessions.'
'Blimey,' Danny had said then (and I thought, 'Blimey – I love that word'). 'No relationships, no possessions. What are you, on the run from the police? The mob? In some kind of witness protection scheme?'
I'd blushed then, too; deeply. And then I had laughed loudly, as if it had been the funniest thing I had ever heard.
Danny Fairburn was an intense, clever, socially awkward guy with the makings of good looks, almost handsomeness. He was about my
age. He was tall and quite slim, a bit gangly. He had dark brown eyes and thinning dark hair that he wore shaved close to his skull. He had good bone structure and a very gentle way of talking. And in spite of myself, I had become very fond of him. Not in a relationship way, of course. But he was a good neighbour and a good friend. I didn't want to upset him. Now he looked at me with those dark eyes, and said, 'So, did you like your present?'
'Yes. Thank you. I did. I haven't listened to it yet, but thank you. It was very kind of you. Sorry, that sounded rude earlier. I was just confused. Not many people know when my birthday is.'
'The postman knows.'
'What do you mean?'
'I saw the postman at your door on Thursday. He was giving you parcels. And at least one card in a pink envelope. Ergo, I guessed it was your birthday. Sorry. I didn't mean to creep you out or anything.'
Birthdays had never been a big deal in my family. The parcels and card that Danny was referring to consisted of a cheque for thirty-five pounds from my parents, tucked inside a card in the pink envelope, a couple of chick-fic paperbacks with pink covers from Sarah (she always liked to send me something to arrive on the day itself, even if she was going to see me the next day) and a D VD of some Japanese animated film from my kid sister. I hated cartoons, but at twenty-eight Jem was still the baby of the family and we cut her a lot of slack. If she asked about her present I would humour her and tell her how much I had enjoyed it. It hadn't been a bad set of birthday presents, all things considered. And now there was Danny's CD.
'Okay. Sorry. Thank you. It was really thoughtful of you. I shall enjoy listening to it.'
I started to walk back to my flat and Danny was still standing there, looking at me, when I opened my front door. 'Beth,' he called.
'Yes?'
'This whole paranoia thing is getting a bit annoying, you know? You should learn to trust people. Like me. I like you. I like spending time with you. You're my friend. And friends are a good thing, okay?'
'Okay,' I said doubtfully.
'Beth,' he said again, and this time he was looking down at the ground, stubbing the toe of his trainer into the edge of his doormat. 'Would you like to come to a gig with me some time?'
'As friends, yeah?'
'I don't know. We could see what happens.' He looked at me again, a hopeful look on his face.
'Oh God, Danny, I don't know.' I pushed the door open and stepped back into my flat. He called after me, a jokily pleading tone to his voice. 'Oh, go on, Beth. What are you scared of? What's the worst that could happen?'
I didn't answer that.
I put Danny's CD on the stereo and went into the kitchen to make coffee. The first song hit me with its perky, percussive guitars. I could identify a steel guitar, and I thought there was at least one slide guitar in there too, and a distinctive female voice, slightly nasal and twangy; hard as nails but vulnerable with it. Lucinda Williams, of course. A song called 'Can't Let Go'. I couldn't help smiling to myself.
Danny worked for a local authority in some no doubt terribly important and worthwhile capacity to do with housing. But when he wasn't doing that, he reviewed albums and gigs for a music website. Earlier that year he'd been to Austin, Texas, for a music festival called South by South-West, and he had learned to do a dance known as the Texas Two-step. The thought of serious, buttoned-up, thoroughly English Danny dancing was so surprising that I kept asking him about it. So one evening he had tried to teach me. He played this Lucinda Williams song as we tried to dance around his tiny living room, as he called out instructions: 'Step. Step. Step, hold. Step, hold.'
'Danny, it's the wrong rhythm. You can't dance that to this. Are you sure you've got it right? Maybe you've got the wrong number of steps. That dance sounds like it needs three beats. Or six-eight? This song is four-four.'
He stood still for a moment and I could tell that he was mentally counting out the steps. He pulled a face. 'Oh, what the hell. Let's dance anyway. It's a great song.'
So we bobbed around the room awkwardly and unrhythmically, laughing like idiots, as Lucinda sang her song of jaunty pain: a song about a relationship that was over, a man whom she couldn't forget, couldn't let go.
I had my left arm around Danny. His right hand was pressed reassuringly into the small of my back. Our other hands were clasped together. Our hips started swaying together. There was an instrumental break in the middle of the song, as two or more guitars duelled with each other, and Danny took the opportunity to swing me around and dip me over his knee. Back together again, tighter clinch as the song ended, and he picked up his remote with one hand and clicked it to replay the song.
And I found myself remembering another clinch, another dance: slow-dancing with Rivers Carillo in the cabin of that tiny cramped houseboat in Sausalito as the afternoon sun poured in through the big windows. Round and round we danced to Bob Dylan, or whatever it was that was playing on the stereo, repeatedly knocking our shins on the low bed. He nuzzled his stubbly chin against my cheek and held me close. How easy it was to let yourself go, to fall into the warmth of a man's arms when you were dancing with him.
'Can't let go,' Lucinda Williams sang. But that night with Danny, as we clumsily two-stepped around his living room, I was thinking that those words could mean something entirely different. I said to myself: I can't let go; I can't let myself let go. I can't succumb. It would be so easy to fall in love with Danny, so lovely and warm and comforting, but I couldn't let myself go. I couldn't let myself fall in love. Not again. Not after what had happened last time. Bad things happened to people I loved. If you made sure you had no one in your life then there was no one who could hurt you. And no one you could hurt.
But it got so lonely. Maybe now was the time to risk it.
Maybe now was the time to change.
Three
'What are you scared of?'
Danny had meant his question as a sort of joke, a cliché. It was what you said to people in those circumstances. 'Come on, what are you scared of?'
And the usual answer, the expected answer, the answer most people would give was, of course, 'Nothing.' But not me. What was I scared of? I could have given him a list. I had a list, an actual written list.
I knew all about fear. I lived with fear the whole time, and it was manageable, mostly. It wasn't much fun, but that was okay. I killed someone: I couldn't expect my life to be a bed of roses. But I could cope with the fear, most of the time. I could live with it. I had it down to a fine art.
The best way to manage fear was to analyse it; to divide it into categories and to deal with each little bit of it separately. I did this quite often. I would sit down and I would make a list – a physical list, pen and paper. I wrote down what I was afraid of, and I wrote down reasons why I should or shouldn't be afraid, and what I could do about it. I would keep the list. I would fold it up small and carry it about me somewhere: in the back pocket of my jeans, in the zipped compartment of my handbag; in the inside pocket of my jacket. Sometimes when I needed reassurance I'd pull it out and read it. I would usually keep it until the paper was falling apart, and then I would write a new one.
The list usually fell under three major headings. The first thing I was afraid of was Rivers Carillo; or, more correctly, his ghost – his apparition. That one was easy to deal with, to neutralise. I knew he was dead because I had killed him. The dead didn't walk again except in my imagination. I could usually make the apparition disappear. Sure, it was off-putting. Sometimes it was downright frightening when he would suddenly spring up in front of me. Sometimes, like I've said, he would presage a migraine, but that was okay; that was just something I had to live through. But no actual harm would come to me from seeing Rivers Carillo. It was just a reminder of what I once did.
The second heading, the second thing I was afraid of, was that someone knew what I had done and would come and find me. That was a tougher fear to deal with, because it was both more realistic and more amorphous. It had been seventeen years and no one had yet track
ed me down. That didn't mean that they wouldn't at some point in the future. On my list I had three subsections under that heading; three ways of controlling that particular fear. The first was information, the second was disguise, and the third was the ability to run away.
I had gathered as much information as I could about Rivers Carillo. I had made a sub-list of anyone and everyone who might have known about Rivers Carillo and me; who might have known that we were seeing each other and therefore might, somehow, for some reason, unlikely as it seemed, associate me with his death. I had all the newspaper clippings that I had ever been able to gather on the subject. I had every single thing that I'd been able to find anywhere on the internet that related in any way to the subject: tidal patterns through and around the Golden Gate, for example; the names of second-hand bookstores in San Francisco's North Beach; a list of universities in the state of Indiana. I kept all this information in a manila file, stored between The Times Atlas of the World and the Collins Complete DIY Manual on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. I knew that having the file in my possession constituted a risk in itself, but I didn't think that anyone would be able to put the information together to make any sense of it. And besides, I hardly ever invited anyone into my flat.
The next tactic was disguise. The woman – the girl – who killed Rivers Carillo had been a pretty, vivacious, annoying whirligig called Lizzie Stephens. On the plane back from San Francisco I killed her too. I supposed I should have changed my whole identity. I should have found a graveyard and a child who had died young, born the same year as me. I had a vague idea that it was possible: I'd seen it in a film or read it in a book. But I was eighteen years old and very, very scared. I wanted to go home to see my mother and father. I needed them. I wanted to be at home. So I compromised. I killed Lizzie. 'I've decided I'd like to be called Beth from now on,' I told my parents as they met me at the airport.