Intention: a compelling psychological thriller

by C. S. Barnes

I had no idea whether that was true or not but it seemed a feasible argument, and when my mother nodded and disappeared back into the living room I assumed that it must have been an acceptable one too. She was right, of course; I was going out more. Chiefly to escape my mother who these days needed more interactions than I was capable of providing, but also to see these so-called normal people – the ones who I thought might be out there. I had tried libraries, coffee shops, parks – although the latter was too closely associated with my less-normal activities – and on that evening my destination of choice was a restaurant.

  It turned out to be one of those cliché places, solely lit by candles and occupied by couples. The walls were decorated with chalkboards, cheap artistic prints, and odd-angled shelves that displayed empty wine bottles. There were six couples already in the room by the time I arrived, all seated a safe distance from each other.

  ‘Table for one, lady?’

  Without waiting for confirmation the short, plump man grabbed a menu and marched away from the couples, leading me to a table for two tucked away in a corner. A large part of me was tempted to turn for the exit, but it wasn’t often that I was given the opportunity to observe this style of interaction in real life. Much of my romance schema had been fed by romantic comedies, and I was aware of their likely artifice. And so I followed him.

  The man deposited my menu on the table and nodded towards one of the chairs.

  ‘You sit here, lady, we take order soon.’

  I wondered whether the Italian accent and poor English were authentic. Before I had time to make a decision, another interruption arrived – a new voice, speaking in loud and unaccented English:

  ‘Of all the corners, in all the restaurants, in all the towns, she walks into mine.’ Casablanca. 1942. Humphrey Bogart. But it wasn’t quite right.

  In my initial scan of the room I had missed someone. Two tables away from where I was sitting, there sat another solitary diner at a table for two, in the lonely corner of the restaurant.

  ‘I’m not sure you’ve got the quote right,’ I replied, raising my voice to travel across the furniture partition between us.

  ‘I’m sure I haven’t,’ he admitted, not seeming to mind. ‘I just needed an opener.’

  He smiled and so I smiled in return, feeling I should. He was a conventionally attractive young man of average build and height, from what I could gather, although his sitting position made it challenging to properly judge. But he was pleasing enough to the eye, with a neat albeit lopsided smile and hair tucked up into something that nearly resembled a quiff. He didn’t wear glasses, although he appraised the room with a squint that suggested he needed them. His clothing created the illusion of someone slightly older, but his face belonged to someone in the same age bracket as myself.

  ‘Sometimes the movies can say things better than I can.’ He shrugged.

  My smile that followed this was much more authentic than my first. There was something all too familiar in his sentiment.

  On the table in front of him there sat a half-empty bottle of Corona. There was one menu and one place setting, also directly in front of him, and one set of cutlery. There was no coat draped over the back of the chair opposite, nor a handbag hidden beneath it. When I looked back to the young man I saw that while I had surveyed his surroundings, he had surveyed me. He smiled before speaking again.

  ‘Do you mind if I scooch over a little towards you? There’s a fair bit of distance with all

  these tables here in the way.’

  My cheeks began to burn with what felt like frustration – although I couldn’t say whether it was directed at the young man or at myself. I had walked into this situation.

  He tucked a well-worn corduroy blazer beneath his arm before picking up his menu and his bottle and migrating over to the empty seat opposite me. A grating sound caused me to wince as he pulled his chair closer to the table, dragging the legs along the floor. When he felt close enough to the table to be comfortable, he took a second to smooth down the front of his shirt – it was a strange off-white with a brown stripe, presumably picked to match his brown blazer. He appeared to think he had just sat down to a job interview rather than to dinner with a stranger. I wondered whether his schemas were the same for both.

  As he settled himself into the chair, it occurred to me that I had probably missed my opportunity to halt his plans. Or had I? I could have still stopped him, I suppose. But when would an incident like this occur again? A one-to-one conversation with a stranger for a prolonged period of time would be a challenge, but it may also be a worthwhile undertaking.

  ‘I’m Daniel.’

  ‘Gillian.’

  ‘That’s a pretty name, Gillian.’

  ‘Thank you, Daniel. Yours is…’ I stumbled over the compliment. ‘Also nice.’

  Following the formula for a conventional introduction, Daniel promptly stuck his arm out across the table; at the end of his arm there was a flat and expectant palm. I took a quick glance at his face to search for signs of humour or irony. Blue eyes looked back at me; the shade was so bright that you seldom find it in adults. His mouth was pulled up at one side in a lazy-looking smile that caused an indent in his cheek.

  ‘Sometimes, when people are meeting for the first time, they shake hands.’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s singularly associated with the first meeting.’

  ‘Ah, so you are familiar with the gesture.’

  I took his hand and delivered an abrupt shake; his palm was sweaty.

  ‘You have a good handshake, Gillian.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you could classify handshakes.’

  ‘Absolutely! There’s too firm, where you fear for the safety of your fingers; too limp, where your hand comes away feeling a little insulted. And there are unfathomable types in between those. Yours is certainly one of the better ones.’ He pressed his palm against his chest before he continued: ‘And I really do mean that.’

  The whole situation felt highly irregular, increasingly so, as the minutes rolled by.

  Fargo. 2014. Billy Bob Thornton. ‘No, highly irregular is the time I found a human foot in a toaster oven. This is just odd.’

  Trying to regain some perspective, I asked: ‘Daniel, do you often eat dinner with strangers?’

  I was certain this behaviour wasn’t actually normal practice, but Daniel had taken to it with such ease that I had to check. He relaxed against the back of his chair, as if the question would take some serious thought, then said: ‘Well, it’s better than eating alone, isn’t it?’

  We perused our menus after that, with Daniel occasionally interrupting the quiet:

  ‘Do you think you’ll have a starter?’

  ‘Are you more of a pudding person?’

  ‘How do you feel about salmon?’

  ‘And what about people who eat salmon?’

  ‘Should I have some sort of grievance with people who eat salmon?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s hard to say. I’m sure you could if you tried; you seem the type.’

  We ordered a bottle of red wine and two steaks. Daniel wanted his well done, I wanted mine as close to rare as they were comfortable serving it.

  ‘How can you eat your steak like that?’ Daniel quizzed.

  ‘It’s better when it’s bloody.’

  ‘Well, there’s a life motto that I can live without.’ He laughed, but I was unsure why his remark had been amusing to him. Part of me – the desperate-to-conform part – wanted to laugh with him; the observational part just wanted to know what this Daniel character might do next. ‘So, Gillian,’ he started again. ‘What is the wildest thing you’ve ever done in your entire life?’

  The steaks were set on the table just as Daniel completed his question. He tucked in immediately, pouring himself half a glass of wine before grabbing at his cutlery. He clearly expected me to hold the conversation. It was tempting to squash the naiveté of his question with a truly honest answer and, although I barely knew the boy in front of me, I believed that
my not knowing him was part of his appeal. I could have been entirely honest with him, and then just walked away. Would we walk away, though? Was that actually how this would end? In the thirteen seconds it took me to consider this, Daniel began to speak again, apparently noting the unexpected difficulty of his question.

  ‘That was probably a little unfair, actually. Shall I go first?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Okay, when I was seven, maybe eight – although, I don’t suppose my age has much to do with the story, so we’ll just say seven slash eight – I took a book out of the library using my mum’s library card, and, well, to this day I still haven’t taken it back.’ At that he theatrically dropped his cutlery onto his plate and leaned back in his chair, releasing a deep sigh as he did so. ‘You have no idea how good it feels to finally get that off my chest.’

  Despite my best efforts to remain unmoved, I smiled.

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Are you silently judging me for being a juvenile thief?’

  ‘No, I’m judging you for being so boring.’

  ‘Interesting. So you’re not opposed to theft, then? Now, is that generally or is it specifically a book thing?’

  ‘What book was it?’

  ‘Do you know something, Gillian, of all the people in the world to hear that sordid tale, you are the first person to ask that question.’

  ‘I’m wondering whether it was worth stealing.’

  ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.’

  It seemed a peculiar book for anyone to steal, but it said a lot about him.

  As the evening progressed I found that I was beginning to like Daniel. Over the course of four and three-quarter hours, two steaks, several more glasses of wine – Daniel was more of a drinker than me – and one and a half desserts, we established that Daniel had recently moved to this area, to care for an aunt who was now battling cancer. It was just Daniel – he had no siblings

  – and his two healthy but self-centred parents had relocated to Nice to live the great cliché – Daniel’s words – leaving him responsible for the remainder of their affairs in the United Kingdom. Prior to the business with his aunt, Daniel’s profession had officially been ‘financial assistant’, which he assured me was as boring as it sounded. He believed comedies to be the superior genre of film; he liked music mostly taken from the charts, but he preferred to tell women that he listened to jazz because he believed that it added something charming to his persona; and when he didn’t sleep through his weekend alarm, he always made the effort to attend church on a Sunday.

  ‘I’m just saying, if God wanted us all to get up at the crack of dawn every Sunday morning then he wouldn’t have gone and called it the day of rest. Am I right, or am I right?’

  I couldn’t decide whether the question was rhetorical.

  Daniel was making eyes at the half-eaten chunk of brownie on the plate in front of me when he spoke again. ‘If I remember my law studies correctly, it’s actually a little bit illegal to leave something that looks that good,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome to finish it.’

  ‘No judgement?’

  I shook my head. He pulled the plate towards him and, turning the fork on its side to score a line along the brownie, he then pulled away a decent-sized chunk which he slipped into his mouth. He let out a series of exaggerated ‘Mmms’ and ‘Ahhs’ as he chewed his way through the generously sized piece. When he had finished his performance he set his fork down and grabbed a napkin. He dabbed at the corners of his mouth, catching one or two stray flecks of chocolate.

  ‘Now you know everything about me, including my dark history of fraudulent behaviour, and my penchant for anything made of chocolate, and I don’t even know so much as your favourite colour.’

  ‘Yellow.’

  He grimaced.

  ‘What’s wrong with yellow?’ I asked.

  ‘Isn’t it something to do with death? You always see it, don’t you, on funeral cars and headstones and, well, just where death is I suppose.’ He drained the remains of his wine glass and glanced at his watch. ‘Christ, I think I have stolen far too much of your time, and my own, come to think of it. So, Gillian of Yellow, I shall pack up, pay up, and go home with little to no knowledge of the woman with whom I have just spent an entire evening.’ He wiped away a faux tear.

  As I turned to search for my purse in my coat pocket he continued: ‘Please?’ He gestured with his wallet as he spoke, as if it were a part of the question. ‘I’m sure you weren’t too fussed about having my company and you were just too polite to tell me; the least I can do is pay for your dinner.’

  Not for the first time that evening, I felt unsure of what was happening. But then I felt equally unsure of how, or even if, I could decline Daniel’s offer. The evening had, after all, adopted the conventional structure of a date – much as the term and indeed the conduct perturbed me. Also, as modern society would have you believe, the male, whether by pride or as a throwback to hunter-gatherer ancestry, is somehow inherently inclined to pay for the pleasure of feeding his female companion. I smiled and nodded then.

  ‘It has been–’ I paused and wondered how to complete the sentence.

  ‘Irritating? Demanding? Blood-boiling?’

  ‘Pleasant. I think it’s been pleasant.’

  Daniel clenched his fist in mock anguish. ‘Damn it! Pleasant would have been my next guess. Although, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with pleasant, is there, Gillian of Yellow?’

  ‘Thompson.’

  ‘Oh, at last, Gillian Thompson tells me something. And now, if you’re feeling generous, tell me something else, Miss Thompson: What is the wildest thing you’ve ever done in your life?’

  ‘At the beginning of the summer, I killed someone.’ I remained neutral as I spoke, as if this were the most natural answer in the world for someone to give to such a question.

  ‘Pretty wild, Gillian Thompson.’ He paused deliberately, as if considering how he could move the conversation on from this. ‘Doesn’t really compare to the whole library book thief thing. Does it?’

  Chapter 7

  The outside world seemed brighter than it had a few hours ago. Not in a metaphorical sense. The sky was a light charcoal with intermittent smudges of clouds and the stars were spread out erratically, as if a child had gained control of a glitter shaker. And it was good to be alone. I hadn’t realised how disruptive Daniel had been over the course of the evening but as I walked home I greatly appreciated the quiet that accompanied me.

  I avoided the bench on the way. It made the journey longer but it felt necessary, although I struggled to decipher why. At three minutes past midnight I arrived outside my mostly dark house, though there was a glow emanating from the living room. It was clear that behind those closed curtains there was a low-watt bulb still wide awake, and although I listened carefully on my approach I couldn’t hear a noise to go with it. No television; no late-night phone call to the Samaritans.

  Reluctant to ruin the serenity of the moment, I placed my key into the front door with great care. I had a vision of my mother’s head snapping towards the sound and so I slowed to complete the manoeuvre as quietly as I could. I pressed against the inside lock until I heard the second click. I pulled the larger lock across (for our safety, although the monsters had always lived inside the house), and I waited.

  After a minute I took three steps forward, bringing me level with the living room door. My mother was sitting upright in my father’s old armchair, her body angled towards the television screen that showed nothing but static. The combination of the lazy table lamp and the crackling glow from the television lit the room in an uncomfortable way. Her head allowed for a quick twitch to the side as my footsteps became more pronounced. After an evening laden with human interaction, it was tempting to back away and to leave my mother alone to contend with any breakdown that she might be having. But her expression concerned me. She was, after all, my mother.

  ‘I think that’s quite bad for your
eyes, Mum.’

  There came another head twitch. This one steadily evolved into a shake. I turned the television off and the room became notably darker, yet enough light remained for me to garner a good view of my mother’s expression. The bags beneath her eyes had swollen into small cushions; the cheeks beneath them were overrun with red blotches competing for space. Train tracks of mascara had run down each cheek in a way that I recognised from the funeral.

  ‘Have you been crying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Where have you been tonight?’

  Conversational exchanges have never been my strong point, but even I could tell that there was something misshapen about this interaction.

  ‘I went for a walk to begin with but then it rained–’

  ‘Where did you walk?’

  ‘Out to the public park, just outside–’

  ‘Why did you go there?’

  ‘Why do you keep interrupting me?’

  It was the first time she had looked at me since I had entered the room. There was a hardness to her eyes that I didn’t recognise. I wondered whether she’d been drinking but a quick scan of the room showed no empty bottles, cans, or glasses.

  ‘You’ve been out all evening. That’s a long time.’

  ‘I wanted some air and so I started walking. I didn’t think much about it until I stopped.’

  ‘That sounds like a little lie, Gillian.’

  I didn’t know what response she was expecting. Stumped, I continued with my itinerary.

  ‘It started raining while I was out so I found somewhere to have dinner as well, and now

  I’m home. That’s my whole evening.’

  She narrowed her eyes as though she were physically inspecting the words. Her mouth was tucked up at one side in a sort of smirk, implying a level of self-assurance that seemed inappropriate for my mother’s general character. I couldn’t help but return to the idea that an alcoholic stimulant might be involved here. No, there was no evidence, but my mother had spent enough time clearing up after my father to know how to clear up after herself.