Then she said, “Everything all right?”
“Yup. Fine. Calmer, thanks.”
“It’s just Rachel Curtis, who was walking her dog, saw you going off in a police car on Tuesday.” She made a police car sound as extraordinary a proposition as a pimped-up double-stretch candy-pink limo.
“Oh,” I said. “Blimey. Yeah. That was a thing.”
“So what’s going on?”
I should have told her. I’d promised not to lie. And if I wanted her to be my new friend, this was an opportunity. Yet the thought of any more information slipping out, of the production company hearing, of it being blown up into more than it was . . . “It’s all so horribly stressful,” I said vaguely.
“I’m sure . . . if there is anything I can do.”
“I’ll spill the beans over a bottle of wine, when things are a bit calmer.” Could I get away with that for now?
“Of course. Poor you. I’ll speak to you soon.” Apparently I could.
• • •
Lunch is butternut squash and ginger soup with homemade rye sourdough in a homey health food shop at the top of North Laine. Our table, honey-colored varnished pine, is sticky to the touch. The saltshaker and pepper shaker, one black, one white, are halves of a naked body that slot together to make a whole.
“Is that erotic?” I ask Philip.
He screws up his nose. His eyes are red-rimmed. Hay fever season is beginning. “Bit hermaphrodite-y.”
Despite everything, I still love him. I think this in a detached way, as if from a great height. There’s a clenching deep in my stomach as my muscles contract. It was the wrinkling of the nose and the “y” at the end of hermaphrodite, a verbal tick, that did it. They say, don’t they, that in a good relationship the partners meld, become one? What was it Plato said? “Love is the pursuit of the whole.” There have been times, years, when I stopped noticing that I loved him. If only reciprocated love could feel as intense as love that isn’t, how blissful I would have known myself to be. Now that he has pulled away, I can see him more clearly, am reminded, with a sweet pain, of everything—his face, his skin, his mind—that I fell for in the first place. What is agony is that it should be mine and it’s not.
Last night, I wore the Myla underwear, the “boudoir lingerie” he bought for my birthday last June. I would say it hasn’t seen much daylight since, but it hasn’t seen much darkness either. I wish I hadn’t put it on. A Marlene half-padded demi-bra and matching thong in “LA Rose” only adds to the humiliation when things go wrong. We were both exhausted, or that’s what I told him. He turned away. For a moment, I thought he was crying. He was soon asleep, or pretending. I lay there yearning. I felt quite tragic in my longing, like Sylvia Plath. One touch and I’d have died. His naked body—I hadn’t packed his pajamas—thrilled me. Revellers caroused drunkenly below our window. Silently, unmoving, he slept on. The room was hot.
“So, the Easter hols,” I say chirpily, putting the salt and pepper cadavers back together. “I vaguely invited Clara and Pete to come to Suffolk with us.”
He raises an enquiring eyebrow. “Sorry?”
He’s not even listening to me. “Clara and her family—invited them to Suffolk for Easter?”
“Oh, did you.” His tone is not encouraging.
I can see thoughts flickering in his eyes, like figures on the NASDAQ. He could be remembering what a stressful week I have had, or how bad he feels for me. He could be feeling guilty, or sheepish, about last night.
“Philip—”
“No. Yes. No. I can see that that might be a good idea.” He has lost interest. I remember a fight we had with a packet of Maltesers the first time we came to Brighton, trying to throw them into each other’s mouths, Philip howling with laughter. It’s unnerving how the warmth of that memory makes him seem colder now.
“Great. I’ll see if Robin and Ian and baby Charlie can join us for Easter lunch, though Ian might be busy with lambing. Perhaps an Easter egg hunt in the garden, if Clara’s lot aren’t too old for it.”
Philip keeps adding salt to his soup, leaving the white hermaphrodite alone on the table after he’s done. I keep slipping it back. The bottom of the pepper is chipped, so they won’t fit together properly, and they never will. The café owners—the woman behind the counter with the blond dreadlocks—should throw them away and buy a new set.
With sudden certainty, I think he is about to leave me. It is over. It’s too late. There is nothing I can do.
He sighs; his whole body shakes. “Hon,” he says, “I’ve got to go away again this week, to Singapore. Only a few days with any luck. Less than a week, or maybe . . . a week. Back-to-back meetings, important ones. Will you be all right in the house on your own?”
My body feels as if it belongs to somebody else. “I won’t be on my own. I’ll have Millie. And Marta.”
“You will make sure you lock the doors properly at night—put the chain on, won’t you?” He knows I always forget.
I’m biting the inside of my cheek. “We’ll be fine. Safe as houses.” He hates complainers, “whiners.” He fired his last PA, a fearsomely efficient Harvard grad, because she was always moaning about the office air-con.
He pushes his soup bowl away. “Don’t make light of it. There’s some maniac out there.”
“I know. God, Philip, you don’t have to tell me.”
Something passes between us. In his face is a desperate vulnerability. With a stab at spirit he says, “Shame you have to work or you could come with me, like in the old days.”
The old days. The woman with the blond dreadlocks clears our bowls. She asks if we enjoyed our soup, and Philip, who has hidden most of it under (or in) his bread, says it was delicious. You can get by on pretending.
My stomach settles. He’s not leaving me, not quite yet. I have a sense of possibilities, of things cranking up, starting again. For the first time in ages, sitting with Philip in a café in Brighton, I try to imagine an ordinary life.
WEDNESDAY
They come for me soon after dawn. It is as if they were waiting for Philip’s taxi to tick, tick, tick up the road and stutter off round the corner before they knocked.
I’m half dressed. I have come to the door holding my tights. The light out here is pinky, as if the sun had risen early for once and was thinking of poking through. “I thought you were my husband,” I say. “I thought he’d forgotten his passport.”
“Gaby Mortimer?”
“Y-es,” I say, confused. Perivale knows full well I am Gaby Mortimer. He isn’t looking at me. He is gazing at the wisteria, at the twisted wooded stems, the hopeful lime green new fronds, as if inspecting them for buds.
“I’m arresting you,” he says, “on suspicion of murdering Ania Dudek on the night of the fifteenth of March. You do not have to say anything, but I should warn you that it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned anything which you may later rely upon as evidence in court.”
Is that the right sentence? It sounds wrong, mangled into a hideous pattern. Random, ugly words. Or is it the roaring of neurons, synapses, electricity fizzing through my nervous system. I try to speak but my mouth is full of teeth and tongue. My knees buckle. My limbs turn acid and dissolve. My body, thick, flesh, bones, seems to belong to somebody else. I can still see Perivale in the center of my vision, but the rest of the world has gone black.
PC Morrow comes out from behind him and takes my arm and steers me into the house. She is talking to me quietly, as if I am a confused old lady who thinks her care home’s a hotel. Am I a confused old lady who thinks my care home’s a hotel? She is guiding me up the stairs, still propping me up. “Here. We go. Up the stairs,” she says. “We’ll get you properly dressed and then we’ll pop down the station and we’ll have a nice cup of tea there.” Or did she say hospital? Or day center? I don’t know what she said. It’s like a migraine without the headache, when you can’t trust yourself to know what’s real and what isn’t.
I sit on the edge of t
he bed, aged 110, and she tries to put my tights on me, struggling to get a purchase. Suddenly, the black clears. “I can do it,” I say, almost kicking her. “I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you? I’m sorry. I mean, why on earth? What is happening? Why? This is just absurd, it’s completely mad.”
Now I’ve got over the shock, I am outraged. Out the window, I can see Perivale and the knuckleheaded man from the Golf through the open slats. The police car is parked in the middle of the road, with its lights flashing, its engine running, its Day-Glo stripes throbbing. It will wake the entire street. If Rachel Curtis is walking her dog, she’ll have a field day.
“I know,” PC Morrow says, wrinkling her friendly, freckled nose. “I’m sure it’ll all be cleared up and you’ll be home for lunch.”
“I’ve got work,” I almost shout. “I don’t have lunch.”
“God, I do. I’m a real stickler for meals, starting with a good breakfast. Today, I had porridge with milk and golden syrup, which has less calories than you think. It’s only one point on Weight Watchers. I try not to snack in between.” She gives the concave swell of her stomach, encased in its unfashionably high-waisted policeman’s trousers, a little rub. “That’s the problem—the machine in the canteen. A Kit Kat here, a Bounty there . . . maybe a two-finger pack of McVities All Butter Shortbread . . .”
I stare at her, lost for words.
After a few seconds, in which I am not sure I might not scream, I say, “I think you’ve got a lovely figure.”
Perivale has left the front door wide open. Why? So I don’t make a run for it? Or maybe he just doesn’t care, concern for normal door-closing etiquette not being part of his remit. A change in acoustic—the vibrating hum of the police car, the rising snarl of the first planes out of Heathrow—has woken Millie. She is sitting on the stairs, clutching her pink rabbit when I come out of my room. “What’s happening?” she says.
I take my daughter’s sleepy face in my hands and kiss it carefully all over. PC Morrow steps past us. “Nothing, Mills. Nothing to worry about,” I say. “I’ll knock on Marta’s room and ask her to get up. I’ve got to go out for work. Just work.”
“Really? Has Daddy gone?”
“Yes. Marta will give you breakfast.”
“Time to go,” PC Morrow says.
“I love you, Millie,” I call, trying not to sound desperate.
• • •
“You have got to be kidding,” I say to the man from the Golf when he puts his hand on my head. I twist away from him and he clamps it back down and steers me into the back of the car. I am shaking, but I’m aware of it being funny, the sort of thing I could tell Philip. “I can’t believe you did that! Put your hand on my head! Do they teach that at Hendon? I thought they only did it on The Bill.” Apparently not. Apparently they do it in real life, too.
PC Morrow and Perivale are both in the front, Perivale this time in the driver’s seat. “I’ve got to be on air in four hours,” I say. “I’m coming willingly because I didn’t want to upset my daughter any more than she already was. I am a good, helpful citizen. You have everything wrong; you must have. I haven’t done anything. It’s madness. And, come on, guys, you woke up my daughter, and she’s got school. Oh God, what would have happened if I had had no one to look after her?”
“Arrangements would have been made,” says Knucklehead, who is sitting next to me, slightly too close.
“Another thing, my driver will be here in less than an hour.” I rummage for my phone. “I’ll just ring him and tell him to pick me up from the station. We’ll clear this up quickly, won’t we? It must be a misunderstanding. You won’t need me for long, will you? Actually, can I ring my husband? He’s about to get on a plane.”
Knucklehead takes the phone out of my hand and puts it in his pocket.
Morrow twists round in her seat. “We’ll sort it all out for you. Don’t worry. You won’t have to do a thing. We’ll take care of everything.”
I’ve heard those words before. It’s the mantra of the travel agent Philip is so keen on, the one specializing in “handpicked, tailor-made luxury.”
Funny how the same combination of syllables, in a different context, can sound so chilling.
• • •
Who ever thinks they’re going to see the inside of a cell? I’ve got a bench to sit on. A tiny square window up high. That little tent of blue. Except it’s white. The sky is white. Distant drilling. No bucket. Apparently, I can knock on the door if I need to go. I’m so tense I don’t think I’ll ever go again. I’ve got nothing with me. No phone. No pen. No book. You’d think there would be graffiti: “Dan woz here”; “Fuck off.” Not even that to read. Nothing to do, except look at the four blank walls and worry about what is happening to me.
I ask myself out loud if the police have gone mad. I’m Alice down the rabbit hole. I try and think of more cheering precedents, but I can’t. In the last hour, I have been cautioned, informed of my rights, had my photograph taken—click: full frontal; click: turn to the side. I tried, as it was happening, not to think of the reprints. This picture will be shown, like Hugh Grant’s after his dalliance with the LA prozzy, in every piece about me ad infinitum. I tried to come up with something funny to tell Philip. I’ll tell him, I decided, that I kept turning my head, flashing that over-the-shoulder smile that any pro knows is the most flattering of profiles. I didn’t, of course. I looked as glumly petrified as I felt. I couldn’t have raised a smile if you’d paid me. Not a mug shot, a snapshot into my soul.
I have given my fingerprints—and made a thumb of ink on the hem of my skirt by mistake. One of us is never coming out, I thought to myself. There you go: a joke! I could tell Philip that. PC Morrow asked if I wanted to see a copy of The Codes of Practice and Procedures.
“Nobody ever does,” she said. “Or I did have one bloke, pissed to the tits, mouthing off all over the place, thick as shit, mind my French. I said, ‘Certainly, sir. Do you want help with the big words?’ ” She giggled. I told her I was all right, thanks.
I’ve turned down legal representation, too. Philip has his own firm of solicitors, posh ones like his travel agent: a sparky solicitor on the third floor for wills, another on the sixth for conveyancing, and presumably another equally sparky on the eighth in the event of murder charges. Only the best for the golden couple. But I don’t want a sparky solicitor. It would be a statement of guilt. I don’t even want to see the duty lawyer. I don’t need to.
“But the duty lawyer’s free!” PC Morrow said, as if they were a sample of a new type of yogurt being handed out in a shopping centre.
I close my eyes. The cell is too small, so I pace in my head. Up and down. Up and down. It doesn’t soothe. I am back in the exam room; the paper’s turned over, but I haven’t revised. When Millie was first born, I kept having this nightmare that I was in the middle of Bombay, thronging with people, traffic, noise, and Philip was trying to make me jump on to one of those teeming top-heavy buses they go in for in there, but I couldn’t because I was holding a cat, a stray I used to feed in our shed when I was a child, and it was struggling to get free, and I knew if I dropped it, I would lose it. It would be sucked up by the heaving city. I would never find it again.
It was a stupid dream because of the cat—Philip accused me of “moggish sentimentality”—and yet that giddy feeling of standing on the edge of something terrible and inevitable, of a loss waiting to happen, is what I have now. I’m out of control. All that I have—money, house, job, connections—none of it means anything.
Calming thoughts, calming thoughts.
I was allowed one phone call. I tried Philip first, but it went to voicemail. There was a time he would have rung me from the station and the train and the airport, when going away would have made him homesick. That doesn’t happen anymore. He doesn’t have room for that sort of emotion. He didn’t even say good-bye this morning. When he went downstairs, I was expecting him to come back up. I prepared a loving speech about how space would do
us good. I was going to hug him hard, just in case it was the last time I saw him. He knows I’m pathetic like that. But this morning he didn’t come back into the bedroom. I heard the taxi outside the window and the front door close.
So I didn’t leave a message. And anyway, what good would it have done? If he had gone through security, they probably wouldn’t have let him back out, and that would have been unbelieveably stressful. And even if they had, perhaps it would end up being for nothing. He would have given up his trip, gone through all the inconvenience and annoyance of that, and I might be home before he got here. I might be having lunch.
I hung up.
“Not leaving a message?” PC Morrow asked.
“Didn’t want to use up my go,” I said. I smiled at her.
“You kill me,” she said. “Go on, then. Try someone else.”
Marta answered the home phone on the first ring. Millie was dressed and eating Cheerios. Yes, she had calmed down. “I said to her, ‘Silly girl! Your mother back later. She out all the time anyway.’ ”
I didn’t have the energy to take umbrage, so I laughed and told her I didn’t know how long the police would need me—they had a few questions, that was all—but could she “hold the fort” until I got back? This delayed things a little while, idioms, along with collective nouns, not having yet been covered at the Tooting School of English.
PC Morrow took the phone out of my hand, quite abruptly then, as if I had taken advantage of her benevolence. She said if I wanted she would inform my work that . . .
“Will I be late in today?”
“. . . you won’t be coming in at all.”
We were on the station side of the front desk at this point. She was sitting on a high stool, raised up higher than me, even though I was standing. “Thank you,” I said. I thought about Terri’s panic and Stan’s glee, and Alison Brett, that efficient woman in publicity, and what she would say about all this. Leaning my elbow on the counter, I thumped the palm of my hand on my forehead and rested it there for a moment.
Under Your Skin: A Novel Page 9