by Laura Marney
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
Sanj responded to this by swirling the weapon in front of my face before putting it back on my neck.
‘Go ahead,’ Chloe said, waving her arm to signify that if Sanj wished to sink it into my windpipe he should go for it.
‘Chloe, don’t wind him up. He’s losing it, he could stab me, he’s come close already, don’t try to bluff him.’
‘I’m not.’
There were a few issues I wanted to raise with Chloe, but right at that moment what was most pressing was that she didn’t encourage Sanj to slit my throat.
‘Chloe, please, talk to him in Spanish, calm him down. And for God’s sake give him back his coke.’
Sanj was pushing me forward towards Chloe and screaming a torrent of Spanish, his voice a high-pitched hysterical scream.
‘Okay, okay. I’ll give him it,’ said Chloe, holding her hands up.
‘Tell him! In Spanish!’ I yelled.
‘Vale, vale! Venga, yo la tengo! Mira.’
This calmed him and Chloe turned and walked out the bedroom. Sanj pushed me forward and we shuffled out into the hall, where Chloe was waiting.
She lunged at him, punching his already well-pummelled face and catching him under the chin. This winded him momentarily but not long enough for him to let go of me. She grabbed his knife arm and did manage to pull it back six or seven inches away from my neck, but as he shook her off his arm sprung back and the knife sliced through my skin. Suddenly I was watching my blood pour on to the floor and trying to catch my breath. The fighting ceased.
Nothing made sense. I was covered in blood but when I tried to staunch the flow my neck felt intact.
‘It’s your ear, he’s cut your ear,’ Chloe said, pointing to a piece of pink flesh on the floor.
As we all looked down Sanj released his grip on me and grabbed Chloe in a headlock.
‘Donde esta my coca?’ he screamed.
‘Okay, okay, I’m getting it!’
I picked up my piece of ear. They’d be able to sew it back on at the hospital but I’d have to freeze it or something. Lucky the dogs were still in the kitchen or one of them might have gobbled it up by now. Sanj and Chloe were shouting at each other. Maybe if I put it in milk. I had to do that right now.
They were screaming at each other and Sanj was shouting my name as he dragged Chloe through the living room, out the patio doors, on to the terrace. He was shouting and gesturing and I had to go out there too. Reluctantly I followed.
Once we go out there Sanj kept shouting at me but I didn’t understand what he wanted.
‘The coke’s in the chimney. He wants you to get it out.’
‘Or what?’ I asked.
‘Or he’ll cut my throat.’
I caught Sanj’s eye and waved my arm magnanimously. ‘Go ahead, Sanj, be my guest.’
‘He won’t do it. I’ve already invited him to kill me, he’s chicken,’ Chloe said sadly.
Chloe was full of surprises. In a fast manoeuvre she grabbed Sanj’s arm with both of hers. But she didn’t push it away. Instead she lunged at it, trying to impale herself on the knife. I realised then what a mad bitch she truly was. I’d always known she was crazy but I never thought she’d commit suicide just to get her own way. And she would have, if Sanj hadn’t been stronger.
They tussled over the knife until eventually he managed to pull it out of her hands. He sprang away from her as if she was diseased.
Sanj rushed up the ladders to the chimney. Chloe screamed as one by one he wrenched her four ceramic crowns off and threw them on the terrace floor where they smashed into sharp pieces. She shrieked and sunk her teeth into her own hand.
‘You filthy fucking bastard fucker!’ she screamed.
Sanj had torn off a poly bag that had been taped to the inside of the chimney. Still ten feet off the ground up the ladders, he checked the contents of the bag. At the same moment Chloe and I rushed to the bottom of the ladders, Chloe in an attempt to topple him, and me to stop her.
While I tried to pull her away Chloe heaved and kicked. I weighed more, I should have been stronger, but I wasn’t a foam-mouthed lunatic like she was. We struggled and Chloe managed to break loose from me. She rushed at the ladders and gave them a fierce push. I ran after her but it was too late. The ladders rocked from foot to foot and then shifted, sliding down the wall. We watched as Sanj plummeted through the air. As he fell he brought lots of mosaic pieces, a windfall of yellows and blues and greens all around us. His face hit the ground first, bursting his nose like a peach while his hips and ribs smashed into the terrace.
I ran to him and crouched down beside him. Maybe I was going to face a murder rap after all, but he moved and then lay twisted and groaning. Chloe walked across the terrace to her tool bag and came back with her hammer. Standing over Sanj and me, she lifted it high. She was planning to bring it down on his head. I pushed my hands against her hips and threw her off balance. She ran forward a few steps and once she regained her balance, she turned to come back. I was ready to run, to leave Sanj to his fate if she turned on me, but it was as if she didn’t even see me. She was only interested in battering Sanj.
Sanj was dragging himself along the terrace on his knees but he wasn’t moving nearly fast enough. He wouldn’t be able to get away from her. Screaming in pain he rolled on to his side and pulled himself on to his feet. To give him a chance of escape I stood in Chloe’s path. I noticed that, miraculously, one of her precious ceramic crowns was still intact and so to distract her I lifted it and handed it to her. Meanwhile Sanj hobbled out the flat with his bag of cocaine as quickly as his beat up bones would carry him.
As we heard the door bang closed Chloe dropped the indestructible crown, which rolled away harmlessly, and crumpled. She sat with her legs splayed out in front of her like a rag doll, staring at the rubble. Without its fancy crowns the chimney looked like a ruined fairy tale castle.
‘He destroyed my chimney!’ she wailed.
I waited until she’d stopped crying, which was quite a few minutes, before I spoke. I wanted her full attention.
‘You’re seriously bonkers, Chloe,’ I said, ‘you need locking up.’
‘No I don’t,’ she smiled.
‘I’m deadly serious, you’re mentally ill, you need help. You would have killed him.’
‘I knew you’d stop me,’ she shrugged.
‘Why is it my responsibility? I wasn’t there to stop you when you murdered Bashed Head Boy!’
Chloe giggled, ‘You think I killed the boy in Raval?’
‘I know you did. And not only did you murder him but you tried to set me up for it!’
‘You’re crazy,’ she laughed.
‘No, you’re crazy, but you think you’re very clever. You dragged me away from the scene and cleaned me up trying to make me look guilty. You told me not to go to the police. Now I understand why: me covered in blood in front of all those witnesses and then running away. The police were bound to think it was me.’
Chloe held her hands up, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, first off I didn’t murder anybody. And second: if I’d murdered him and framed you, why would I have you move in here with me?’
‘I don’t know. Guilty conscience?’
‘But if I was a murderer I’d be kinda stupid to get involved with the chief suspect, wouldn’t I? That might lead the police straight to me. Think about it Alison, it doesn’t make sense.’
‘But nothing makes sense with you, Chloe. You let me think we’d murdered Sanj!’
‘Did I say we’d murdered Sanj?’
‘No, but you let me think it. I was going out of my mind. Did you think that was funny?’
‘Come on, it was a little bit funny.’
‘No Chloe, it wasn’t. It was really fucked up.’
‘You knew I did stuff like that. You knew from the start.’
‘I knew you were cruel to Lisa and Lauren but why me?’
Chloe di
dn’t answer; instead she asked me a question.
‘How did you get the dogs back from Josep?’
‘What? Ewan picked them up.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘See? I told you not to pick up the dogs. I knew Mahmood’s people would be looking for us. That must be how Sanj found us, Esmeralda.’
She said the word Esmeralda in a teasing, playful tone.
‘And you hid my phone! You told me you lost it, you lied and I can prove it!’
‘Honey, we’ve all lied. You stole my underwear, you even stole my money. Did I give you a hard time?’
‘Chloe, this isn’t a game. I can’t take this any more. It’s dangerous for me.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s right. Your heart attack,’ she sneered.
‘What about my heart attack?’
She smirked.
‘Are you saying you made that up? I saw the report from the hospital. It said a heart attack.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Chloe, please. Stop fucking with me. This is important. Please just tell me the truth now. I won’t mind if you lied, but it’s really important that I know the truth. Did I have a heart attack?’
‘And you won’t be mad with me?’
‘No,’ I said, tasting the bile in my throat, ‘I won’t be mad with you.’
‘You didn’t have a heart attack. It seemed like you wanted to have a heart attack. I made ‘em do all the tests, but no, you didn’t.’
I kept my voice calm.
‘And college? We were going to go to Berkeley, weren’t we?’
‘That was why you stayed with me, isn’t it? That was what you wanted.’
‘Just tell the truth, Chloe.’
‘No, you tell the truth! That was why you stayed with me, isn’t it?’
Without hesitation I replied.
‘Yes.’
She didn’t answer my question immediately. She didn’t have to. I knew now that going to college in the States was never going to happen. It had just been another hook in my mouth.
‘Probably not,’ she said wistfully. ‘Maybe sometime, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know if I could trust you.’
‘So you were testing me.’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
‘Telling me I’d had a heart attack and letting me think I’d murdered Sanj; that was your way of testing our friendship?’
‘Hey, it’s not my bad if you’re paranoid. You’re free to think whatever you want. We have fun, don’t we?’
‘No, Chloe, we don’t,’ I said.
‘Now who’s not telling the truth?’
‘You call this fun? You’re dangerous, Chloe! You’ve used me; you’ve made me fucking miserable. Can you not see what you’ve done?’
‘But it’s fine now, isn’t it? Your heart’s a-pumping. Sanj is alive and well and, thanks to you, he’s got his coke back. Juegita and the pups are home. No harm, no foul, huh?’
She was right. Everything was back to normal but when she mentioned my heart a-pumping it began to pump faster and faster.
‘You don’t even care what you’ve done to me, what you’ve put me through. The only thing you care about is that fucking chimney.’
Adrenaline flooded my system and tingled in my spine. With every breath I took I felt my body fill up with rage. I was a balloon filled to bursting point.
‘Give me that,’ said Chloe, taking the piece of my ear from me. ‘I’ll put it in the freezer. We’ll need to put antiseptic on the wound.’
When she came back she stood with the TCP in her hand, open-mouthed at what I’d done.
‘Now do you get it, Chloe?’ I yelled. ‘Now d’you see how much you’ve hurt me? This is the only way to get through to you!’
I bashed the hammer again into the crack I’d made in the chimney. The tiles had come off and I was through the plaster to the bare bricks.
Chloe ran at me and delivered a flying kick. She missed completely and fell back. I hit into the chimney again, the force of the thud of the hammer making the muscles in my arm quiver with the effort.
‘See? It’s not funny now, is it?’ I screamed as she scrambled to her feet.
She jumped on my back and put her arm around my neck, trying to choke me. She couldn’t stop my arm without releasing her chokehold and I managed to land another two blows to her precious chimney before she pulled me over and threw me to the ground. My arm was weak with hitting the chimney and it was easy for her to take it from me. She lifted the hammer out of my hand and lifted it above me.
Everything went dark. The event I had spent my life waiting for, the sensation I had anticipated so many times was here. I was dying. It was dark and there was pain, but inside the pain, at the very root, there was bliss. In the dark, the pain and the bliss were so intense they merged and made a euphoric, excruciating high-pitched buzz. A flat line. A flat line that stretched on and on without end.
It didn’t last.
The bliss was the first to go.
My head hurt, my arms and legs too. I couldn’t move. I was weighed down by something soft and something hard. The soft thing was Chloe’s body, which lay motionless on top of me. The hard thing, that held us both down, was the crushing weight of the collapsed chimney.
Epilogue
It’s not that I’m scared of going to hospital. It’s pain and sickness and knives slicing through my skin that worry me. You of all people must be able to understand that.
It’s not just the surgery, it’s the shape I’m going to be in afterwards: swelling, scarring, bits popping out or dropping off. Okay, maybe not dropping off exactly but you know what I mean. It’s gonna do ugly things to my body, that’s for damn sure. My legs are already getting criss-crossed with blue veins. I look like one of those three-dimensional road maps of California they sell in truck stops.
Of course, Aged P is delighted, you know what he’s like. This is exactly where he’d like to have me: flat on my back, under his control. D’you know he even had the gynaecologists gang up on me? They told me I’m ‘elderly prima gravida’. Elderly! How can thirty-four be elderly?
I’m still a kid. I’m more of a kid than you are. Sure, I have botox but think about it: I get a lot more exercise than you do and my diet is way healthier. But even though I’m fresh and lovely on the outside, my insides are officially elderly. It’s not fair.
P wants to hire a team of nannies to look after ‘the little man’ as he’s calling it. I said knock yourself out. The fewer diapers I have to deal with the better. Oh, and wait till you hear this: he asked when the baby comes if I could please stop calling him Aged P. He doesn’t want the kid to grow up hearing it. Okay, he’s kept in shape, must be all the golf he plays, he still looks pretty good naked and, sorry, I know this is a bit gross but it has to be said, he’s no slouch in the sack either, but he’s sixty-six with a serious heart condition, I mean, that seems pretty damn aged to me. If I’m elderly, he’s gotta be aged. But it gets worse: he started on again about me giving up work. I told him no deal. I didn’t spend four shitty years at college to give up everything because a kid comes along.
Remember how excited we used to get talking about college? What a letdown that was. I wasn’t cut out for medicine. One sick person in my life is plenty for me. If P hadn’t got me switched to corporate accountancy I would’ve dropped out. And we never did do that frat party stuff, did we? The other students didn’t get my Scottish accent and they were just so cliquey. The social life was juvenile anyway, sad little cheese and wine parties hosted by the phrenology society or the Klingon Language Institute. Duh, no thanks. That was when I first got a therapist, d’you remember? She still goes on about my trust issues. It’s probably true; I think I do have trust issues but I’ve got you to thank for that. Actually having trust issues hasn’t done me any harm. It was probably due to not making friends that I graduated top of my year. So thanks for that, Chloe.
If I hadn’t done so well at college, P might not have taken me into the company and I wouldn’t be on the board rig
ht now. I know he said that he just needed someone on the board he could actually trust but don’t you think I’m the best person for the job? Believe me, I work hard, you know I do, but I don’t think the other board members will ever accept me. Of course it’s awkward but I love my job so fuck them.
Oh, I knew there was something else I had to tell you! This morning I had a meeting with a private detective. When I say private detective, you think ‘gumshoe’ don’t you? But she was nothing like that. This detective is a woman, Mrs Colette Sam. Apparently she’s the best in the business. If it’s done nothing else, accountancy has helped me appreciate attention to detail and Mrs Sam left no stone unturned. Honestly, you’d have been impressed. Oh yeah, her report was very interesting. Very interesteeng, Meester Bond.
There was a copy of a twelve-year-old newspaper article, with a translation from Catalan to English. It was an account of an incident in an apartment block at Fifteen Calle Hierba, Raval, in Barcelona. Ring any bells, Chloe? Fifteen Calle Hierba was the apartment block I’d just run out of when you first met me, remember?
A young man, William Fenton, aged nineteen, a US citizen, fell to his death over a banister. William Fenton, was he the one you were going to Vietnam with? Was he your boyfriend, Chloe? He was, wasn’t he? The report said William Fenton was a student visiting Europe for the summer before returning to California to continue his studies. Everything was in the file: the police report, medical records, the autopsy. It was very detailed.
There was a pretty gory account of the location and severity of William Fenton’s wounds, an analysis of the alcohol and drug levels in his blood, and a list of the contents of his stomach. There was a lot of boring technical data I didn’t understand so I skimmed through to the summary and conclusions, which I’m sure you’re as keen as I was to know.
Well, apparently William Fenton’s wounds were consistent with a fall of twenty metres. There was no evidence in the form of contusions or otherwise to suggest that he had been coerced or pushed. He had drugs in his bloodstream but these were found to be prescribed medication. On further investigation his medical records showed that he’d been diagnosed with labyrinthitis, a condition of the inner ear affecting balance, the chief symptom of which is dizziness. The autopsy report concluded that William Fenton had most probably suffered a dizzy spell and fallen over the banister.