by Lisa Jewell
‘Yeah,’ said Phil, effusively, ‘yeah. Of course, man. Get yourself a drink and I’ll see you in there. We can have a chat—I want to find out what you’ve been up to. Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ said Dig, straining to hear him over the thump of the music.
As he approached the kitchen, Dig noticed that someone had spilt a bottle of red wine on to the green carpet, leaving a large brown stain roughly the same shape as South America seeping into the pile. The bottle was still on its side, next to the stain. Dig leaned down to pick it up and tutted again. He couldn’t believe that Nadine was letting her flat get trashed like this. There were about ten people in the kitchen. Most of them were sitting around her table, making spliffs and flicking mindlessly through yet more of her beloved magazines. Some of the glossy publications were being used as table mats and had buckled with spilt liquid. A copy of Wallpaper lay on the floor and had been walked all over a few times by the look of it. It was smeared with muddy brown footprints, and pages from it had been dislodged and dragged across what Dig could now see was a sodden, booze-soaked linoleum.
There was a page at his feet. ‘Pouffes, ’ ran the now-grubby headline, ‘the last bastion of bad taste.’
A girl with scarlet hair was in the middle of telling the rest of the room what was, she seemed to think, a very interesting story about her mother’s new boyfriend. ‘He’s a fuck-in’ wanker,’ she said in a soft Cardiff accent. ‘He calls me Tania—I keep tellin’ him it’s pronounced Tar-nia, but ’e’s so thick. It’s always Tan-ia. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was a fuck-in’ paed ophile, you know? The way he looks at my little sister…’ She shuddered and a few people mumbled in response. It was quite obvious from the reaction that nobody was very interested in what Tarn-ia thought of anything.
A couple of people looked up as Dig walked in and then looked down again. He walked towards the fridge and nearly gasped out loud when he saw the state of the kitchen work surfaces. There was a veritable Withnail and I- style arrangement of festering washing-up piled up in the sink, which made no sense, as Nadine had a dishwasher. There were empty soup cans just left, their lids only semi-removed and sticking up like snapping jaws, and there was some kind of multicoloured, unidentifiable goo slavered all down the white plastic sides of the swing bin. The pools of liquid all over the oak surfaces had attracted particulated detritus—ash, sugar, crumbs and tobacco clung to the work surfaces, hardened and dried. Packets of cereal sat around, open-mouthed, and a crumb-embedded tub of Olivio had developed a rancid yellow coating.
Jesus, thought Dig, this is disgusting. And look—how the hell had that happened?—one of the panes in the window that looked out over Nadine’s neighbour’s garden had been smashed, and there was a Dorothy Perkins carrier bag taped over it.
This was all wrong. The image confronting him was at complete odds with everything he knew about Nadine’s kitchen, with every memory of it. Nadine’s kitchen was one of the best places in the world. He lost count of the hours he’d spent sitting at her faux-gingham, Formica-topped table (donated by the Italian owner of their previously favourite greasy spoon when it had closed down three years ago) watching her knocking together a quick pasta or a moussaka or—it made him drool just thinking about it—one of her home-made pizzas with chorizo and chilli. She always had some kind of music playing, it had been Belle and Sebastian last time, he recalled.
Her smart little CD-player was festooned now with destitute CDs, the neat pile that usually rested against it up-ended, disordered and pilfered.
On summer evenings, the sun set directly into Nadine’s kitchen, it sometimes seemed. She’d have the windows wide open, and as the sun sank the walls of the room would turn a warm, toasty peach, and the birds outside would turn up the volume and Nadine would twitch her floral-clad bottom from side to side in time to the music, and the smell of garlic would hit the air, and at moments like that Dig would feel a happiness that emanated almost entirely from his belly, a happiness that had a short shelf-life but was unspeakably wonderful nonetheless.
How was he supposed to reconcile that with this, with this dark, stinking, dirty, soulless room full of strangers and their mess? Finding no wine, he plucked a beer from the fridge and strode towards the living room. He was now thoroughly unsettled. He had to see Nadine. This couldn’t be right, it just couldn’t. The vibe was all wrong, totally negative. Nadine’s flat felt like it was being squatted. There was no one, he decided, in this room, who he could even vaguely imagine liking, even if they all tried their hardest.
He pulled his cigarettes from his coat pocket and lit one from a dripping red candle before picking his way back over the shredded magazine pages stuck to the floor. He was now so unsure of his place in this once-familiar environment that he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find Nadine stripped naked and cross-legged in the middle of the floor having rashers of raw bacon stapled to her body by a team of gimps in head-to-toe leather.
The living room was almost pitch black and, at first, appeared to be empty, but as Dig’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark he could see that it was, in fact, heaving. The beat pulsated gently through the floorboards, fizzing into the soles of his feet and making him want to dance, despite himself. The Homemaker curtains at the other side of the room had been left open and the window on to the road let in wafts of cool, fresh air which did nothing to alleviate the intense, syrupy body heat that suffused the room.
There was, he could now see, a proper DJ set up at the far side of the room, and as he walked towards the centre of the room the bpm. tripled and the room exploded into dazzling strobe lighting. At least thirty people seemed to jump in the air at the same time, their eyes wide and staring.
Jesus, thought Dig, Nadine’s having a bloody rave in her flat.
He scanned the room nervously for Nadine, his brain throbbing in time with the flashing lights. All her furniture had been cleared out of the room—her leather deco sofa, her mirrored cocktail cabinet, her bookshelves and bucket chairs, her fluffy leopardskin cushions and purple suede pouffe. Every picture and mirror on the wall had been knocked to a dishevelled angle and—oh no—her favourite mirror of all, the oval bevelled one with the chrome frame, had been smashed cleanly in half.
There were fag-ends on the carpet.
Unable to spy Nadine anywhere, Dig began walking towards Phil, who was sitting on the window-ledge with his bad leg resting on an upturned plastic crate in front of him. The tip of his tongue was just protruding from his lips as he licked the corner of a Rizla, and his face broke open into another gummy smile when he saw Dig approach.
‘Dig. Mate. Sit down.’ He slid along the window-seat and patted the space.
Dig didn’t want to sit next to Phil. ‘Erm—actually—I wouldn’t mind just going to say hello to Nadine first. I haven’t seen her yet. D’you know where she is? Is she in here?’
Phil burst into uproarious laughter. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘sit down. Sit down.’ He patted the seat next to him again. He stuck a roach into the end of the spliff he was constructing, adjusted it, lit it and passed it to Dig. ‘Yeah,’ he said, immediately starting to make another one, ‘Nadine told me you two had fallen out. Over a girl, yeah?’ He was pinching pale-green grass from the most enormous bag of grass that Dig had ever seen.
‘Yeah,’ Dig said, inhaling, ‘sort of. It’s all really complicated.’
‘Isn’t it always, mate, isn’t it always?’
‘Look—I really need to speak to her. Where is she?’
Phil exploded into another peal of blood-curdling laughter. ‘I couldn’t say, precisely, Digby. No—not precisely. You’d have a long search on your hands, let’s put it that way.’ He guffawed happily to himself and then looked up at a young man with a mop of peroxide hair who’d just whispered something in his ear. He whispered something back to him and patted his arm. ‘’Scuse me a minute, Dig. I’ll be back in a tick.’ He heaved his bad leg off the crate and hobbled towards the corner of the room with the young m
an.
Dig frowned. What was that supposed to mean, ‘I couldn’t say, precisely’? That sounded…ominous. Deeply, deeply ominous. Dig began to feel the slightly nauseous sensation of butterflies in his stomach.
What had Phil done to her? He stood up abruptly and strode from the room. He checked the kitchen again. Tarn-ia was still talking. He stepped over the Red-reading bloke in the hallway and threw open Nadine’s bedroom door. He backed out immediately when he saw the haphazard piles of Nadine’s furniture, thrown, seemingly, from a distance into the room. The sofa was sitting on her bed, on top of her Bollywood duvet cover, and everything else was just lying where it had landed. There was certainly no one in the room.
The bathroom door was locked. He banged on it hard with his fists.
‘Busy, ’ came a gruff, male voice.
‘Is Nadine in there?’ Dig shouted.
‘Who?’
‘Nadine. I’m looking for Nadine.’
‘Come back later. We’re busy.’
Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Dig ran his fingers through his hair despairingly. He was half-tempted to kick the bathroom door down. Oh Jesus. Nadine. What the hell had happened to Nadine?
He strode back to the living room and towards Phil, who was just tucking a banknote of some description into his jeans pocket.
‘What the fuck have you done with her?’ he demanded, his face inches from Phil’s.
‘Whoa,’ grinned Phil, ‘calm down, man. Calm down.’ He rested one hand gently on Dig’s arm. Dig shrugged it off.
‘Where is she? Where the fuck is Nadine?’
‘What are you trying to say, Digby?’ Phil was frowning, confused.
‘I’m saying, what’s happened to Nadine? Where is Nadine?’
‘I told you, man. I don’t know for sure…’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? This is her flat, for fuck’s sake. Now where is she?’ A fleck of spit flew off the end of Dig’s tongue and landed on Phil’s cheek. He didn’t notice.
‘Shit. I dunno,’ he shrugged, ‘Spain, somewhere. Take it easy, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Eh?’ Dig grimaced. Spain? That was the last thing he’d been expecting Phil to say.
‘Yeah. Spain. She’s on a business trip, taking pictures of tits and arses.’ He laughed again and lowered himself back on to the window-seat.
Dig’s head began to swim. Spain? Actually, that did sound kind of familiar now he came to think about it. She might have mentioned something about a Spanish trip a while back. But that explained nothing. It didn’t explain her desperate visit to his flat last night. It didn’t explain the messages on his answerphone and it certainly didn’t even begin to explain this nightmare of a party currently taking place in her lovely flat. Dig rubbed his face with the palms of his hands and sat down heavily next to Phil on the window-seat.
‘When did she go?’ he sighed.
‘This morning. Really fucking early this morning. Woke me up and all,’ he laughed, ‘expected me to get up, cheeky bint!’
‘You were here this morning?’
Phil nodded.
Dig digested this unsavoury little fact with a dry gulp. Phil was here, this morning. Which meant, of course, that Phil had been here last night. Dig shuddered.
‘So,’ he managed to squeak, ‘what’s the story, then?’ He attempted to imbue his voice with a blokish camaraderie but couldn’t quite veil the creeping nausea rising in his gut. Surely not. Surely not.
‘The story, man? What story?’
‘You. And Nadine. What’s happening?’
He could hardly bear to hear Phil’s answer.
‘Not too sure myself, mate,’ he grinned. ‘Nadine just phoned me, out of the blue. We went out for a drink, went back to mine, and suddenly she was all over me, like nothing had ever changed, you know. That girl is something else, isn’t she? That girl is—hot.’ He nudged Dig and Dig had to stop himself punching him in the face.
‘So, it’s all on again. Me and Nadine. I’ve got the front-door key, mate.’ He winked and Dig felt sick.
‘So,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘where are you living now, Phil?’
Phil shrugged and indicated the room with his eyes. ‘Wherever I lay my hat, Digby, wherever I lay my hat.’
‘And have you—have you laid your hat here?’
‘It certainly looks that way. I could do much worse than Nadine, couldn’t I? She’s an angel, that girl, a true angel. She’s got a lovely little place here and a nice bit of money coming in. You seen her motor?’ He made on ‘O’ of his mouth.
‘So Nadine’s asked you to move in?’ Dig’s eyes were starting to bulge with the improbability of it all.
‘That’s right, mate. That’s right. Bit of a result, non?’
‘But—but—but—’
‘That’s taken you a bit by surprise, hasn’t it?’
Dig nodded.
‘Look,’ said Phil, draping one arm around Dig’s shoulders, ‘you’ve got to understand a woman like Nadine. She’s got everything, right. She’s got the looks and the job and the flat and the car. But she hasn’t got a man. Not a real man. So she’s flailing around for ten years, making do, compromising, and then she turns thirty—the old biological clock clicks in and it gets her thinking—about the old days—about what we had together. She phones me—her lost love. Who can blame her? I was a bit surprised, to be honest, by how fast everything happened, especially the sex—you know—on the first night. But it was blinding, Digby, blinding. Some of the best sex I’ve ever had.’
Dig felt bile rising in the back of his throat. He swallowed it.
‘So I give her a load of what I know she wants—sweet talk, messages on the answerphone, declarations of undying love—and the next night, I’m in. Foot in the door, hat on the old metaphorical bed. In—like—Flynn.’ He nodded smugly and inhaled deeply on a spliff. ‘It’s a shame she had to go away, really. She would have loved this.’ He indicated the party.
‘Does she know?’ muttered Dig. ‘Does she know about this party? Does she know you’re having a party?’
‘Nah. Nah. But she won’t mind. You know what she’s like. Sweet. Laid back. Make yourself at home, she said, help yourself to anything, this is your flat now, treat it like your own.’
Two small girls with spiky pony-tails wandered towards Phil. ‘Yes, sweethearts,’ he smiled. One of them leaned down to his ear. He nodded and leaned into hers and then the three of them disappeared into the corner of the room, Phil turning to wink at Dig before he went.
Dig’s eyes were wide open and his mouth was shut tight. This was all surreal. He must be dreaming all of this. Nadine was in Spain. Phil was in Nadine’s flat. Nadine had had sex with this mop-haired skeleton. She’d invited him to live with her. All this at the same time as phoning him and leaving bizarre messages on his answerphone about his willy. No no no. The entire universe had gone stark staring raving mad.
He felt suddenly and horribly claustrophobic. There were too many people in here, not enough air, too much noise, and this terrible strobing light was sending him just about over the edge. He had to get out of here, absolutely had to get out, fresh air, clear his head…
As he left the room he saw the two girls walking away from Phil and examining something in their hands. Phil tucked yet another banknote into his jeans pocket and started chatting to a bald bloke who was dancing.
Right, thought Dig, OK. Phil’s a dealer. Phil’s a dealer.
He put the realization into a mental To-Do list for digesting later, when he was out of here, away from here, gone.
As he passed the bathroom, the door opened and in the brief second before it snapped closed again, Dig had a fleeting vignette. Toilet bowl: broken. Bath: full of people. Sink: full of sick. Cistern: busy heads bowed down over it. Floor: covered in wet toilet paper. He backed away. He couldn’t bear it. Not for another second. He found the front door handle and forced it open, stumbling into the relative tranquillity of the tiled hallway. He stood statue-still for a sp
lit second. His head was spinning. He pushed open the main door and felt a sense of release when he heard it slam loudly behind him.
His feet sounded like giant’s feet as he clambered clumsily down the front steps. A fat tabby cat perched on the bottom step eyed him up. Where had he parked his car? Where? Shit. Yes. Over there. That’s right. He ran down the pavement, unlocked the front door, slipped into the driver’s seat, locked the door, leaned into the beige upholstery, breathed out—big, long, deep, out. Jesus—Jesus. Pulled on his seatbelt, switched on his ignition, reverse, forward, reverse, out of here, gone.
The world seemed to get brighter as Dig left Gordon House Road. Brighter and lighter. His racing heart slowed down, his strobe-blinded eyes regained clarity, the tape playing in his car stereo was melodic and clean. A group of fresh-faced, friendly-looking people were gathered on the corner of Chetwynd Road, waiting for a cab. They looked like nice people. It was only eleven thirty.
Slowly, yard by yard, Dig’s head cleared. He turned left into Highgate Road and tried to focus his thoughts. He should be doing something, that was what he was aware of above all—he should definitely be doing something. What? What should he be doing? Nadine had invited that man into her flat. She’d slept with him. She’d given him a front-door key. She had no one to blame but herself. But parties—drugs, students, broken toilets and trashed carpets—she hadn’t asked for any of that.
Dig pulled up at the traffic lights at the top of Highgate Road and rested his head on his steering-wheel. This had been the weirdest fucking twenty-four hours of his life.
As he lifted his head to check the lights, another light caught his eye. A light on Kentish Town Road to his right. A deep-blue, trapezium-shaped light. It said ‘Police’. Of course, he thought, of course. Absolve himself. Let someone else deal with it. Clean it up. Sort it out. That’s what they were there for, after all. That’s what we paid them for. Let them take the strain.
The car behind him hooted as he dithered in front of the now-green light. He slipped into first, flicked his indicator to the right and pulled up in front of the police station.