by Jane Hill
The MC, the skinny hyperactive guy, took to the stage first and it was awful. Not him; he was funny. But hardly anyone was listening, and those who were were heckling him, stupid heckles like, 'Wanker!' and 'Get off!' and 'You're crap, mate.'
He cut his material short and introduced Zoey. She looked pale, but managed to wink at me before climbing to the stage. She looked like she was climbing up to the scaffold to be beheaded. She tried her best but it was no good. No one was there to listen to comedy. Most were busy drinking. A few blokes took an interest in the fact that it was a woman on stage – one showed his appreciation by stroking his crotch and leering at her, a couple of others shouted, 'Get your tits out!' When it became clear that she was an American, there were a few shouts of 'Go home!' and 'Piss off back to America!'
After about ten minutes on stage, desperately going through her usual routine and getting barely a single laugh, Zoey shrugged and said, 'Well, Southampton, thank you very much for your support. You've been a great audience,' and she walked off stage with a grim smile plastered on her face.
She was even whiter than she'd been before. Steve bought her a drink and said, 'Fucking hell. That was tough. My turn next. Any tips?'
I put my arm round Zoey and told her she'd done well. What else could you say to someone who had just – figuratively – died on stage in a rowdy pub?
There was a ten-minute interval and a lot more gallows humour from the comics, still gathered in their little huddle. And then Steve went on stage to try his hand. I had to admire him. He had balls. He went out fighting. He slagged off Southampton and the pub, and told the drinkers they were a bunch of 'ignorant fuckers'. He shouted and ranted with exceptional, foul-mouthed eloquence. He told the bitterest, filthiest jokes I'd ever heard, almost poetic in their scatological nature. He told a joke about anal sex that was so outrageous that I had to catch my breath, and some of the crowd actually began to laugh. But then the atmosphere turned. Steve talked to one of the guys in the crowd, just asked him his name, nothing more, and suddenly there was a smashing sound and a broken bottle being brandished just inches from Steve's face. The landlady rushed over and stood between Steve and the broken-bottle guy, arms outstretched, cool as anything, as if it happened every night in her pub. Steve walked off stage looking shaken, and then the landlady came across and started apologising, and bunches of ten-pound notes were being handed to the comics.
We couldn't stop laughing as we made our way outside. It was a kind of release of tension. We – Zoey, Steve, Jim the MC and I – leaned against the wall outside and laughed till there were tears in our eyes. Zoey and Steve were both very 'jingly', the word Zoey always used to describe her post-gig mood. They were repeating lines to each other, analysing the performances they'd just done and congratulating each other on surviving it. I chatted to Jim, a sweet, quiet lad who said he was heading home to Portsmouth now, just down the road, because his girlfriend had just had a baby, and he was glad to be getting home earlier than he'd expected. And then Zoey said, 'Can we give Steve a lift back? He lives just round the corner from my place.'
I agreed. It wasn't out of my way, and it seemed as if Zoey had already made him a firm offer. The three of us walked across the car park. Steve stopped to light a cigarette. He and Zoey tagged behind me, still in full debriefing mode, while I strode ahead towards the car. Everything seemed okay. I'd forgotten my fear, my dread, from earlier. Or maybe the sheer comic awfulness of the experience had lifted it. It had been good to have a night out of London, however terrible the gig. We'd survived. Zoey and Steve were pleased with how they'd coped. They'd been paid and they'd got a great story to tell. Everything was fine. And then it wasn't.
There was something white under the windscreen wiper. I froze, but for a split second I let myself believe it was a flyer or a leaflet, for another comedy night or a carwash business or a second-hand record fair, or for anything else you would get a flyer for. And then I got to the car and I couldn't pretend any more. I knew it was an envelope. A white envelope, tucked under the wiper blade. The kind of envelope I'd seen before. The same kind of envelope that I'd found pushed into my pigeonhole in the school staff room.
I needed to act quickly. Zoey and Steve were still some way away; they'd stopped to talk in the middle of the car park while Steve finished his cigarette. They weren't looking in my direction. I leaned over and pulled the envelope out from under the wiper, hoping they wouldn't notice. Last time the envelope had been blank. This time it wasn't. ' T o the murdering bitch,' it said, in that same neat handwriting that I'd earlier tried to convince myself belonged to one of my pupils.
I don't know how I managed to drive back to London as if nothing had happened. I guess it was a good thing that Steve was with us. I didn't have to talk to Zoey. I didn't have to try to make conversation. They sat in the back seat together and talked about comedy all the way back. They talked about people I didn't know and had never heard of. They were using comedian-speak, talking about other comics and other venues and using phrases like 'great room' and 'neat reversal', and 'I think he's finally found a way to make his material work' and 'she's really not connecting with audiences at the moment.' They were talking about Edinburgh, too; about the Fringe, and the venues they were going to be playing.
I tried to tune out. I tried to concentrate on the road. I tried counting cars. I told myself that if I saw five, ten, twenty silver cars before the next motorway junction then everything would be all right. I tried to tell myself that if I kept counting cars all the way back, then the envelope that I had quickly crumpled into the back pocket of my jeans would have disappeared by the time I got back to my flat. But it didn't help. That was all I could think about – that white envelope in the back pocket of my jeans. It felt like it was burning a hole in my skin. I wanted to scream at Zoey and Steve, to open the doors and push them out of the car so that I could read the note. The murdering bitch wanted to know what he had to say about her this time.
Zoey told me to drop Steve off with her at her flat in Clapham. They were laughing as they fell out of the car. I think they were about to sleep together. Maybe they were already a couple. I didn't know. I didn't care. I drove home through Kennington and Lambeth, over Waterloo Bridge and on to the Strand, and through the strange leery atmosphere of late Saturday night in central London; past grey university buildings and Georgian terraces full of cheap hotels, towards King's Cross and home. I found somewhere to park. I pulled the letter out of my jeans pocket, rolled it up and held it firmly in my hand. I got back to my flat, locked and bolted the door behind me. I unrolled the envelope from my now-sweaty hand. I pulled out the piece of paper and straightened it. My hands were trembling. It was the same type of paper as before, the same weight, the same lack of grain or watermark; the same small, neat handwriting, the same black ink. This was what it said:
Remember, I'm watching you. Does your new lover know how evil you are?
Twenty-four
This is real. This is really happening. That was all I could think. That was what I kept repeating to myself. I think I even said it out loud. This was really happening. Someone was out there watching me, stalking me, watching where I worked, where I went at night and who I was sleeping with. They had followed me to work; they were even following my car. Someone was working hard to scare me, to threaten me, to squeeze all the joy out of my life. Someone had followed me all the way to Southampton just to leave that note on my windscreen. This was dedication, this was vengeance; this was serious hatred.
And it had been going on for weeks. That thought suddenly struck me, stopped me dead in my tracks as I paced around my tiny flat that Saturday night, that Sunday morning. Dawn was already pinking the sky and I was exhausted but I knew there was no point in going to bed. There was no chance of sleeping. It had been going on for weeks; of course it had. I had been so stupid, so quick to believe that the first note was from one of my pupils. Or had I believed it? Really, deep down in my heart of hearts, had I known it was for real? Had I jus
t tried to fool myself? Had I just pretended that everything was all right? And I'd blundered on, despite that earlier warning. I'd carried on, enjoying myself, making friends, dragging people I loved – and yes, I did love them, both of them, Danny and Zoey – into my own personal nightmare, getting more and more involved; doing everything I'd always told myself I wouldn't do.
He'd been watching me for weeks, the avenger, the letter-writer: all those times in the last few weeks when I'd sensed myself being watched, when I'd sensed someone out there watching me. Maybe he'd been there at that comedy club, watching me as I stood behind the microphone ready to perform. Maybe that had been him, sitting there and grinning at my discomfiture, that figure I'd mistaken for the ghost of Rivers Carillo.
Who? Who was it? Who on earth was doing this to me? I got out my list, my list of things that I was scared of. I pulled my manila file from its place on the bookshelf. I sat down and read both the list and the file right through. Who the hell was it?
It wasn't Rivers Carillo. I knew for certain that it couldn't be him. He was dead, I knew he was. I'd seen his head split open. I'd watched him as he died. I'd seen the life leave his eyes. They found his body. They identified it as him. So this couldn't be him. He was definitely dead. All those times when I thought I saw him, I knew really that it was just my guilty conscience playing games with my mind. It wasn't him I should be scared of. It was someone else, someone who knew I'd killed him. Rivers Carillo was just a ghost. I could chase him away any time I wanted to. This was something much scarier. This was a real person doing this to me. Someone I didn't know; someone who knew me intimately.
Rivers Carillo had had a wife, a wife who lived somewhere in the Midwest, somewhere in Indiana. A university town somewhere in Indiana; I didn't know which one. His wife never met me. She never saw me, she probably never knew about me. I was almost certain of that. But maybe she suspected. Maybe she suspected that her husband had lovers, that he'd been seeing someone in San Francisco that summer. Maybe she'd found out who.
Who would have told her? Who knew for sure about Rivers Carillo and me? Joanna, my sister's godmother: she knew. She was one of Rivers's lovers, I was sure of it. She knew about us, or she guessed about us. I was pretty sure of that, too. That was why she'd sent me those newspaper clippings about Rivers's body being found. But why would she have told Rivers's wife about me? What would she have had to gain? No, it couldn't have been Joanna. And besides, she was long dead. She'd died of cancer about ten years ago. There was no way she could have had any connection with this.
I had a list of people who'd seen me that day, the day I killed him. There was a bus driver who'd driven me back to the city. There was the woman at the art gallery, the museum, who'd let me use the toilet. There was the guy at the coffee shop in the Marina District, who may or may not have seen me tearing up that book of Rivers's poetry. Maybe they'd suspected something when they'd heard about the missing man, or when they'd heard about his body being found. One of them might have remembered the teenage girl they saw that day. But there was no way they would have known my name, no way they could have found it out. It couldn't be one of them.
Rivers Carillo had friends in San Francisco. One of them owned a bookstore in North Beach. I met Rivers there a couple of times. Maybe his friend had seen us together, seen us exchange a few brief words. Maybe Rivers had told him all about me. And then there was the friend who lent us his houseboat in Sausalito – the houseboat where we made love that first time. Rivers must have told him about me. He must have told him about this cute English girl he was trying to seduce. Maybe that friend had seen me. Maybe Rivers had pointed me out to him. Maybe he knew my name. Maybe the friend knew that Rivers and I were together on that last day, the day he disappeared. And maybe he'd been looking for me all this time and he had just found me. Found me somehow; I didn't know how.
I thought back and tried to remember Vicky Barron's description of the man who'd handed her the note: about my age, nondescript; tall, probably. Dark, maybe.
American? She didn't know, didn't think so, wasn't sure. She never answered that question properly. About my age. Rivers Carillo might have had children. I didn't know for sure.
I made myself a cup of tea. I washed my face, combed my hair and pulled it back. I stood and looked out of the window for a while, watching Sunday dawn across the London rooftops.
I tried the puzzle from a different direction. The night before – who'd known I was going to be there, at that pub? Could someone really have followed my car all the way through London and down the M3 without me noticing? Or did they somehow know I was going to be there? Zoey knew, of course. Could she, would she have had the time to dash out at some point during the evening and put the letter under the windscreen-wiper blade? Had there been a moment when I'd lost sight of her last night? Had she gone to the loo at any point? Could it be her? Could she be Rivers Carillo's daughter? I did some sums in my head. It was a calculation I'd done before, but I wanted to check. Yes, Zoey could be his daughter, just, if he'd fathered her at nineteen or maybe lied about his age. There was a slight resemblance – something pugnacious about the face and jaw line. But Vicky Barron had said it was a man who gave her the note, that first note. So maybe Zoey had an accomplice? Who? Steve? He was tall and dark, about my age. But Vicky had struggled to describe the man. Surely even an unobservant fifteen-year-old would have mentioned the beard and the long hair. And besides, Zoey had passed my test – my casual mention of Rivers Carillo, just dropped into the conversation. Her response had seemed innocent and unknowing.
Tall, dark, about my age, not distinctive; no American accent. A name kept coming to mind, a name I didn't want to say. Danny Fairburn. Danny. No, no. It couldn't be. Not Danny. I'd tested him. He'd passed the test. I'd mentioned San Francisco, looked for a reaction and had got none. It couldn't be Danny. But he was the right age. Danny was, I knew, thirty-two. We'd joked about him being my toyboy. He could be Rivers Carillo's son. His colouring was right, although he didn't look much like him otherwise. What about his non-reaction when I'd tested him? But he'd have to be a good actor, wouldn't he, to gain my trust, to feign a relationship with me? And if he was that good an actor, he would have trained himself not to react to questions like that. Maybe he was a sleeper, deep cover; a sleeper pretending to be a mild-mannered English music buff and local authority housing officer when he was in fact an American avenging angel. No, no. I shook my head with relief. It couldn't be Danny. Of course it couldn't. He had already been living in his flat when I'd moved here. He'd lived here for months, before I'd even decided to move, before my last flat had even started to feel unsafe. He hadn't known I was coming to live here; he couldn't have planned it. It couldn't be Danny, thank God.
And also, of course it wasn't him. The note, the second note, had mentioned my new lover. There seemed to be some threat to tell him what I'd done. Thank God. It wasn't Danny. I was more relieved at this conclusion than I could say.
Tall, dark, about my age; someone who wished me harm. An ex-boyfriend? One of the grand total of three semi-serious boyfriends, not counting Danny, that I'd had in my adult life so far? But no, that was stupid, a complete dead end. How would they have known about Rivers Carillo? Why would they call me 'murdering bitch'? I thought again, back to San Francisco. I remembered the young guys that Joanna kept introducing me to; those young guys around my age, those guys she made me go out with, the ones who were supposed to take me off her hands. Elliot, Jonas, Jason: I could vaguely remember their names, some of them. One of them might have met Rivers Carillo at some point. Most of them had been to at least one of those late dinners in Joanna's basement kitchen, those dinners where guests sat around talking about poetry and music and art, and I was supposed to chat to my escort for the night. And sometimes Rivers Carillo was there. Had one of them, one of my young escorts, seen something – a touch, a smile, a wink – something that told them that Rivers and I were involved? Had one of them seen us together elsewhere: in the basement food
court at Macy's, the cable-car turnaround on Market Street, the bus out to Golden Gate Park on that fateful day?
It was a stretch, a huge stretch, but nothing else seemed to make sense to me. But why would they do this to me? Why would they want to take vengeance? The new note, the second note, had mentioned my 'new lover'. Did the implied threat mean it was from someone who considered themselves to be an old lover of mine? Again, I was stretching, trying to make the pieces fit. And then I remembered something. One of them – Elliot, was it? – had liked me more than I'd liked him. He'd wanted to see me again and I'd said no. I'd turned him down, and I'd done it in my thoughtless eighteen-year-old way. I'd turned him down in an offhand manner. I might even have laughed at him. I remember thinking, Why would I want to go out with you when I have Rivers Carillo? Was that it? Was this some kind of long-delayed vengeance for a thoughtless, callous laugh?
But if so – and I knew I was clutching at straws here; I knew it only made a tiny bit more sense than any other explanation I'd come up with – why now? And how had he found me?
When the first note had arrived, I'd Googled Rivers Carillo's name, trying to see what had changed, what could possibly have sparked that letter. But it suddenly struck me that I'd been doing precisely the wrong thing. If someone was trying to hunt me down, then I was the one they'd be Googling. Maybe there was something new about me out there. Maybe I'd done something to make myself more visible. Maybe they had only just found Lizzie Stephens.
I had always tried to keep my internet presence to the bare minimum. The kids at school were all using MySpace and Facebook and something called Bebo, and they kept nagging me to get involved, as if I might have a desire to spread my name and picture all over the World Wide Web. There was, as far as I knew, just one picture of me on-line. It was on my school's website. I'd tried to avoid having my picture taken for the site but I ran out of excuses, so instead I put on the glasses that I was supposed to use for reading, and I combed my hair forward over my face so I was as unrecognisable as possible. It said 'Miss B. Stephens' under the picture, and even my mother wouldn't have recognised me.