The door slams and they’re gone. I prod my feelings, a sharp stick digging into the mud of the riverbank. Loneliness. Relief. Two sides of the same coin. I hate to be alone and yet it feels natural, inevitable. Two days. I check the pill packets stuffed down the side of the sofa and take a few. I start to count what’s left, but I can’t keep the numbers in my head. Better be on the safe side. It’s not like they do anything any more – I remember the hit they used to give, the swooping high that has eluded me for months, like the sweet memory of an old lover – but all the same, they’re necessary. They punctuate my breathing. Make it possible.
I send a text to one of my sources and ask him to set something aside. Can’t afford it, but it makes little difference now. Something tells me I won’t be around to sort this mess out. The last time I checked my bank balance it seemed crazily high, until I saw the little minus sign. When I’m lying here, sometimes I see the figures rising in negative, cycling and whirring like silent-spun wheels. A whole parallel world, growing while reality recedes.
I get up and go to the window, breathe in sweet, warm air. I have a session today. Young teenage girl who’s been coming for months. I was helping her, at first. Could cancel. I mostly do, these days. But all of a sudden there’s a strange little burst of energy and the thought of getting on the train and going to the clinic feels doable. Kind of fun. Maybe I was lying when I said there was no hit. There’s still something, even if it’s hard to predict or define. Might as well ride the wave.
By the time I’m at the clinic, the window that opened up inside my head for a few minutes has closed again and the shutters are dark. Cold in here; yellowing carpets and musty walls, faded lampshades. I shouldn’t be here. The walls are rearing up at me like sentinels, slanting grimly inwards and blocking out the light and space in my head. This place doesn’t want me in it.
But it’s too late now, and I’m walking into the counselling room and seeing everything laid out neatly, just the way it should be. Box of tissues on the little low table. Jug of water with two small glasses. Lamp glowing in the corner. And she’s pattering in after me, the girl. Can’t remember her name. I glance at the pink crib sheet poking out of the top of my folder. Melody. Not really a name. Means something else, though right now I can’t quite think what. Doesn’t matter.
‘So,’ I’m saying, ‘how are you?’ My voice sounds different and strange in my own head. Kind of muffled, filtered through several layers of sound. The girl cocks her head and I have to repeat it.
‘Oh,’ she says blankly, like she thought I’d said something else, something better. ‘I’m OK, I guess. Not so great this week overall, though. Some stuff happened with my mum again.’ She’s off, drawing me through the marshlands of her memory, raking up the mud. I try to listen. Something about a fight, some raised and unkind words. Digging up old wounds, making her wonder if the relationship can be saved. The words are going in, but my mind is throwing them out again, because my heart is thudding fast and my palms are wet with sweat and I know that this stuff used to matter but it doesn’t now because no one matters but me.
She’s still talking, but her eyes tell another story. They’re raking over me, as if she’s wondering who the hell this man is that she’s trusting with her secrets. I haven’t shaved in weeks and I can’t remember the last time I had a shower, and there’s a stain the size of a handprint halfway down my shirt.
My fingers are rattling against the edge of the tabletop. Stop. Looks like I’m impatient, like she’s boring me. ‘Say that again,’ I say, because she’s paused and it seems like I should be giving her something in return, but I have no idea what she’s just said.
‘I said,’ she repeats, and just as Caroline did, she slows her words down and leaves a lot of space around them. ‘I said, it feels like I’ve been born into the wrong family.’
‘Interesting,’ I say, and actually this is interesting, and my mind is suddenly speeding up and thoughts are rushing around it at a hundred miles an hour, brightly coloured lottery balls falling into the slot at random, without thought or design. ‘Because, you know,’ I say, ‘your mother might well be thinking the same thing. That you’ve been born into the wrong family. That she’s given birth to alien spawn. Some kind of incubus.’ I’m warming to my theme, but the girl draws back as if I’ve hit her and her eyes fill with tears, and before I know it she’s leapt up from her seat and flounced out.
I stay sitting in my chair. That’s never happened before. A lot of firsts, today. Outside in the corridor, I can hear the distant echo of her voice, raised and tearful, and a soothing murmur coming back. It carries on for a few minutes. Then the girl sweeps back past my door again, not bothering to look in, and bangs her way down the stairs and out on to the street.
‘Francis.’ It’s Sara, with her hooked, horn-rimmed glasses and her wispy hair, her floaty dresses. She’s like a hippie without any of the free love or the fun. The thought amuses me and I wonder if I should share it. But before I get the chance she’s talking again, her voice relentless and smooth, arms folded across her chest. ‘I can’t quite get to the heart of what you just said to Melody, but she’s very upset.’
‘Upset?’ I think back, struggle to understand. What I said was interesting, thought-provoking. Nothing personal. I’m an incubus myself. I don’t belong anywhere. Not in the smug, gentrified space my family inhabits, not in the would-be-perfect nuclear little bubble with my wife and child. Maybe I should have said that.
‘Yes,’ Sara says firmly. ‘And I have to tell you this isn’t the first complaint that’s come in about you in recent weeks. Not to mention all the cancellations. It’s a very difficult situation, as I’m sure you understand. We all care about your well-being, but you’re in a position of trust here. We need to be sure that you’re capable of upholding that position. There is support available, if you need it. You, of all people, should know that there’s no shame in …’
And that’s the point I switch off, because it’s obvious where this is going. Her mouth is still moving and the sounds are coming out. Sharp eyes, soft words. She’s wrong to think she can reason with me. Give me a loaded gun and I’ll pull the trigger.
‘Fuck this,’ I say, standing up. ‘I’m out.’ Push past her. Barely touched her, but her mouth is rounded in a shocked little ‘o’ of surprise and she’s clutching at her side like I’ve stabbed her in the ribs. It’s only her pride I’ve hurt, and people so easily hurt shouldn’t be allowed to live.
Out on the street, back on to the train, the walk down the road towards home. Noise is pounding in my head and my limbs are sore and tight. Bursts of colour lurching out of the air, people sliding past like they’re on ice. That’s that done with. No more putting on a mask, no more pretending I’m someone who can listen to your problems and pull you out a solution, or even that I’ve got the means to listen at all. Dust my hands off and on to the next thing. Whatever that is.
At home, I switch on the television and stick a pizza in the oven. I eat the whole thing in five minutes flat, oil clinging to my fingers and the cheap, artificial taste flooding my mouth. There’s a programme on about the Grand Canyon and, as I watch it, the sweeping panoramic views and the knowledge that there’s a whole world out there to which I don’t have access sends me hurtling down into my own canyon, a place I know so well now that it feels more like home than these four walls. I send Caroline a text: Remind me to tell you about the black canyon. A few months ago, this kind of cryptic non sequitur used to throw her into instant fearful meltdown. What’s up, Francis? Are you OK? Cutting her nights out short sometimes, to hurry back to my side. I kind of liked it. Showed me she cared. But this time the phone stays silent and it just sits there like a brick next to me, and there’s no one else to call.
I sit on the sofa for a few more hours and I run my fingernail up and down the new packet of pills, and pop them out and swallow them one by one, and when I think I should stop I take some more until the world blurs in front of my eyes and I lose my grip.
But all that happens is I wake up fourteen hours later with a splitting headache, feeling like my bones are painfully sharpened points, digging into me like knives from the inside out. Because anything else would be too easy. And it seems that even now I can’t take the easy option.
I shouldn’t have sent the photograph. It was a snap decision. I suppose that, with the number of emails she was sending, something was bound to hit home and goad me eventually. A monkey rattling away on a keyboard might produce Macbeth after a few hours or a few million years, and in the grand scheme of things it didn’t take her long to find a weak spot. It was the challenge of inactivity that did it. The casual assumption that I was hanging around, impotent and passive, waiting for something to happen. And of course, like all the best insults, it hurt because I was afraid it might be true.
It took me a while to understand why the tone of her messages had changed – terse queries; veiled, confused threats – but when I looked again at the photograph I saw my tell-tale shadow in the corner of the shot. In the end, all it took to break her romantic fairy-tale was an intangible blur of reflected light. It’s rocked her equilibrium, shone an unpleasantly harsh spotlight on her own assumptions. While I was Carl, she could kid herself that the only reason anyone would infiltrate her life in this way was because they couldn’t bear to be without her. Now, she can’t. And she still doesn’t understand. This is how completely she’s overwritten the past. She still can’t accept that so much more was lost back then than the thing that she’s made everything.
Still, I can’t sit stewing over it now. I’ve got visitors to prepare for. I have to get the flat looking perfect, at least the parts they might see. I’ve polished the surfaces, tidied away the detritus. Taken down all the photographs in the hall that featured her, which, admittedly, doesn’t leave many, but I’m hoping they won’t notice. And now I’m doing the dishes, cleaning and scrubbing and all the while thinking about the instant when they step over the threshold and we’re here in the flat together. It’s become a perfect moment in my mind: a flawless little tableau, in a suspended bubble of time. I don’t know what to do with it yet. But the closer it gets, the more I think that the way will be shown to me; that some kind of divine inspiration will descend and I’ll understand how to make everything right and wipe out the past two years and start again.
Away
Caroline, May 2015
I’M IN THE last place I want to be. A neon-strip-lit madhouse buried in the bowels of a concrete shopping centre, with the air suffused by the smell of frying chips and the sound of thudding bass and children screaming. Francis has decided that we should take a trip down memory lane and visit the bowling alley we used to go to together occasionally years ago, when we were living in London, before Eddie. When he came into the bedroom to make the suggestion, I was still staring at the emailed photograph, trying to focus, blood rushing in my head. I was in no state to say no. For a crazy moment, I almost thought it might be good for me – to take a break, clear my thoughts and unpick this complex mixture of disappointment, relief, confusion and fear. But there’s no chance of that in this chaos, and every thump and screech jars on my nerves.
‘Right!’ Francis is briskly weighing balls, finding ones of the right size. ‘I’ll start. Prepare to get whipped.’ He strides up to the alley and throws one of the balls with more force than precision, sending it skittering into the gutter with a rattle that sets my teeth on edge. ‘Yeah, well …’ he says, shrugging and casting a rueful glance over his shoulder, ‘it’s been a while. Just need to get back into the habit of it.’
I try to smile, but my mouth feels tight and frozen. Despite the number of bodies packed into this space, it’s cold in here, the air conditioning pumping brutally through the room and bristling the hairs on my arms. I take a ball, walk up to the mark and force my arm to swing and release. I watch it rolling, a bright orange sphere heading for a bullseye, but at the last moment it swerves and veers, knocking two or three pins as it drops out of view.
‘Unlucky,’ Francis crows, giving my arm a pat of mock-sympathy as I return.
‘Luckier than you, anyway,’ I say automatically, and a kind of desperation overtakes me as I listen to our banter and I know that I should be enjoying this, that I should be able to relax and have fun with my husband without these shadows crowding the air and these horrible, ugly thoughts forcing their way between us. I reach for his hand where it still rests on my sleeve and curl my fingers between the warm flesh of his. This is what is real, and yet I can’t rid myself of the knowledge that it could all crumble into dust if I said the word, even now. It would take only one revelation, one decision, for everything we’ve carefully rebuilt to pop and vanish. Whatever you do, all it takes to make it worthless is for one person to turn their back and walk away.
We carry on with the game and, all the while, thoughts are pounding relentlessly through me. You and this woman in the photograph you emailed me are linked somehow; you must be. Have you cooked this up together between the two of you? Is she in love with you, willing to do your dirty work? But that doesn’t make sense – if you wanted to be in my home, understand where I lived, then there would be no point in sending someone else in your place. Unless you’re there together. But those pictures in the hallway … it doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing you would ever do, or even approve of. It’s too subtle for you, too threatening. Even if you wanted to hurt me, the bottom line is I can’t believe you would do it like this. You wouldn’t cloak it in this kind of deception and trickery. Which can only mean … that you aren’t the one behind this at all.
But that doesn’t add up, either. I can’t believe it can be a coincidence that you are living across the street from where I am staying. No matter how I look at it, I’m driven round in circles, brought back again and again to the same point of incomprehension. Who the hell is this woman? Why is she in my flat, and what does she want?
Something is rising darkly in the back of my mind, and I push it down, clenching my fists with the effort. The room shimmers around me, the faded psychedelic pattern of the carpet suddenly rising up and rolling beneath my feet like waves.
‘Strike!’ Francis is standing with his arms aloft in triumph at the end of the alley. ‘What a way to end it.’ He jogs back to my side, gives me a commiserating kiss. ‘Never mind, eh. You didn’t do too badly …’
I look up at the score card, realizing I have absolutely no idea how the game has gone. I seem to have racked up sixty-eight points, though when I cast my mind back I can’t remember a single ball I’ve thrown since that first one. I’ve lost the time again, stepped outside my life. Like any addiction, it seems this appetite for self-destruction has been gnawing at my defences with steady, unwavering determination, finally breaking through.
Making my voice light, I congratulate Francis and give him a hug, breathing in the familiar smell of his aftershave and clinging to his reassuring solidity. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks. I nod, even though I can’t imagine eating and the smell of oil and grease in the air is making me feel sick. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘I’ll go and get us a couple of burgers. Maybe see if you can nab a table?’
He heads off down the neon-lit corridor towards the cafeteria, and I follow at a distance, blankly scanning the rows of yellow tables. I see a spare one in the centre and make my way towards it, slipping into one of the hard plastic chairs. Next to me, a family of five is wrestling over the last portion of chips, children complaining and squealing at each other across the ketchup-spattered table and the baby in the highchair drumming its fists and screaming. The sound scrapes at the edges of my already frayed nerves and I look around for another spot, but the tables are all jam-packed and I give up, letting my shoulders slump.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I feel the familiar clench of apprehension. For an instant, I think it might be Amber, telling me that you have returned – perhaps that she’s told you everything, that you’re appalled by the idea I might have followed you here. But the name that flashes u
p on the screen is Jess’s. I stare at it, jolted. It’s a signal, a white flag in the wilderness, reminding me that there’s more to me than all this.
I open the message. Hey there! Having a good week? How are things with you and F? Saw your FB profile pic – bit weird?! Am I not getting the joke? LOL. Anyway, speak to you soon I hope. Xx
I frown, trying to remember. My profile picture on Facebook is a shot from last summer – on the beach with Eddie, when we took a day trip to Margate. I haven’t changed it for ages. I barely even use the site now, except to lurk and satisfy an occasional curiosity about former acquaintances.
A tiny premonitory trickle of instinct is travelling over me, making me shiver. Quickly, I load the Facebook app on my phone, then click through to my profile. At first, I can barely make out the picture. It’s a jumble of lines and shapes, blotches of darkness and colour. I enlarge it, peer closer. And then I see. It’s a car, mangled and misshapen, thrown at the roadside like a crumpled toy. The windows are shattered, shards of glass littering the lay-by, and through the dark hole of the front windscreen, the seats are darkly streaked with blood.
This time, the shiver that racks me is powerful and intense, sending the breath hissing through my parted lips. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Francis, weaving his way towards the table, carrying a tray heaped with burgers and fries. I should put the phone down, but my hand is clasped rigidly around it, unable to let go. Because I can’t hide from it any more. It’s staring me in the face and, as I stare back, I realize that, on some level, I’ve always been aware of it – that it isn’t surprise but guilt that’s paralysing me. I may not know exactly who has done this yet, who is in my home. But I know why she’s there.
The House Swap Page 19