by Mike Ripley
I know I dozed off before the football results came on the TV because I normally tune in. Not that I’m a fan of football, but it sometimes helps to know what everybody else in the pub is talking about.
And when I was rudely awakened by Fenella hammering on the door, it was about half past 6.00.
‘Why was your door bolted?’ she asked as I scratched my head and tried to shake the sleep from my eyes, thinking that she had a point as she normally charges straight in these days.
‘Pass.’
‘What?’
‘Too difficult. Next question.’
‘You went out.’
She said it like I should be on the steps of the guillotine already. ‘Yes, I did.’ I stepped back into the kitchen and waved a hand at my shopping.
‘Ugh! All that meat!’
I took a deep breath.
‘Look, what’s up, Binky?’ Then I had a bad thought. ‘It’s not Lisabeth, is it? Is she okay?’
‘She’s fine. I did what you suggested.’
What I suggested? I had another bad thought.
‘I gave her one of her prezzies,’ Fenella explained, and looked puzzled as I exhaled loudly in relief.
‘So what’s happening?’
‘I didn’t hear you come back.’ And she’d been worried about me. I almost put my arms round her until I remembered Lisabeth and the aerosol and the scissors. And then she went on: ‘And I took a phone call for you.’
I was awake.
‘A girl? A woman? Female?’
‘Yes. She’s coming over here at seven. She’d got your number but she said she’d forgotten your address. So I told her.’ She put her head on one side. ‘Was that all right?’
‘Brill, Binky darling. I could kiss you. Absolutely ace.’
‘Oh good,’ she said in what for her was a sarcastic tone. ‘I’m glad I’ve done something right. She sounded ever so nice.’
I smiled, but to myself at that, knowing both Fenella’s ultra-middle-class upbringing and sexual preferences.
‘Oh, I doubt if you and Zaria would have much in common,’ I said gently.
‘Zaria? No. This one was called Lara. I’m sure of that.’ Oh shit.
I turned the shower on and let it warm up while I stashed the shopping and tidied the flat. Everything that was meat or could have contained meat went straight into the freezer. Surely she wouldn’t look in there. Did I know the sort of woman who checked out refrigerators? Yes. I wondered how she felt about butter, and played safe and threw that in the freezer too. Milk? The hell with it, I’d risk that.
What else?
Within five minutes, the fridge contained an ancient tub of margarine, some mushrooms, a clove of garlic, some celery, some politically dubious grapes and some right-wing Chardonnay (Australian – no sweat), about a gallon of bottled or canned beer and a bottle of tequila.
I checked my bookcases and, apart from the cookbooks, which I took and hid under the bed, I felt there was nothing that actually screamed out that I was a carnivorous crypto-fascist. Aside from the fact that the freezer door bulged at the seams and was in danger of pinging open, it was the best I could do. I dropped clothes as I ran to the bathroom.
When the doorbell rang, I was almost dressed and I had almost zipped up my jeans when I remembered the leather jacket I’d left draped over the Habitat sofa-bed. The doorbell had gone again before I’d thrown that under the bed as well, and if I didn’t move it, Fenella would get there first.
She already had and was saying ‘Ah yes, I spoke to you on the telephone earlier’ as I appeared on the landing.
‘Lara! What a surprise,’ I said loudly, hoping she hadn’t noticed I’d forgotten shoes and socks. ‘I didn’t know you knew where to find me.’
Fenella glared at me, so I turned up the volume on my smile.
‘You were out when I called,’ said Lara, looking at Fenella, which I thought was pretty tactless, ‘so I just thought I’d drop round.’
‘Why not? Come on up.’
No matter how badly dressed or off-guard, you always have the advantage if you are higher than somebody else, and I could see it rankled with Lara to the extent that she forgot about Fenella, who disappeared, unwanted and unthanked, into her lair after giving me the sort of look that could come in useful if we ever decided to strip the paint off the staircase.
‘You’ll have to take me as you find me,’ I said, which, in normal circumstances, is not a bad line.
‘That’s fine,’ she said, walking by me.
She was wearing a blue denim trouser suit, with medium-heel sandals that made her taller than me, and a stretchy white polo-necked shirt, with a single string of huge wooden beads around her neck. I bet myself that every stitch was man-made and that her underwear was all from Marks and Spencer, though no-one would offer odds on that if she was British and female.
‘Come in, make yourself at home.’ I waved her to a chair and I killed the CD set. ‘It seems like only yesterday –’
‘It was yesterday,’ she said deadpan.
‘I know. It was just something to say. You’ve rather taken me by surprise, I’m not … it’s just … I’m not used to women coming calling on me.’
I hoped I wasn’t overdoing it.
‘I can’t believe that,’ she said. But I think she wanted to.
‘Well, what I mean is calling here,’ I said, not really sure where all this was going.
She looked around, her lush red hair swishing like a curtain so that she had to flick strands out of her eyes.
‘Do you have a relationship with someone here?’ she asked, businesslike.
‘You might say I’m escaping from one.’
That was a pretty safe thing to say at any time.
‘Then you won’t mind if I ask you out, will you?’ She forced a smile when she said it, and then screwed up her nose.
‘Tonight?’ I asked innocently, wondering why she looked as if she’d just found a bad smell.
‘Why not? There’s a new restaurant I’ve been meaning to …’
She screwed up her whole face this time and fumbled in her jacket pocket for a balled-up Kleenex. She didn’t sneeze, she just dabbed her nose.
‘I’m sorry. There’s a new restaurant and I wondered if I could buy you dinner and talk you into giving me a lift to ... to ...’
This time she did sneeze, and when she drew breath afterwards it went in with a wheeze.
I stood over her.
‘Are you all right, Lara? What’s the matter.’
‘I’m so sorry, this hasn’t happened in a long time.’ She tried to breathe again, and it was an effort and she was going red in the face. ‘H ... ha ... have you ha ... had a cat in here, or a d ... d ... dog?’
‘What?’
‘I’m all ... allergic ... to fur.’
‘Thank God for that, I thought it was me,’ I said without thinking.
I could tell from the way she gasped that she didn’t think it was funny. Then I thought: an animal libber allergic to fur? Pull the other one. Then I thought: Springsteen!
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘it must be awful for you. I’ve not been here long and I think the people before me had a cat.’
Not bad for thinking on your feet, I reckoned.
‘There are cat hairs on this … this …’
Another sneeze snapped her head forward as she ran a hand over one of the cushions.
‘The place came furnished,’ I said desperately. ‘Let me get you a drink.’
‘Water … just water,’ she wheezed.
I dived into the kitchen, and the first thing I did was hide Springsteen’s dinner bowl and water dish in the cupboard under the sink. Then I opened the freezer door to get some ice, and half a dozen packets of hamburger meat, veal, lamb’s kidneys, you name it, tumbled out on to my bare
feet.
I was cramming them back into the freezer drawers and swearing fluently but softly to myself when something made me look up to the kitchen window, which on clear days gave me panoramic views over the ten-foot-square back yard.
Balanced on three legs, one paw extended like a pointer dog, was Springsteen. He was on the window-frame and must have jumped six feet straight up from the roof of the kitchen extension downstairs. He had landed on a two-inch-wide frame through a half-open window in total silence, but I knew that if he moved down onto the sink, a mere three inches below the window, he would somehow manage to smash all the plates in the drying rack, disturb the washed-up pans and send cutlery flying all over the floor. It would sound like a brass band on crack during an earthquake. Cats are like that.
He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at the packs of meat that still seemed to want to jump out of the freezer as much as I wanted to cram them back in. He showed me a millimetre of pink tongue and hissed through his fangs. From the living-room, Lara went into another round of coughing, which sounded positively terminal.
I straightened up and squared off to Springsteen with my best John Wayne voice, at the same time reaching for a pack of lamb’s kidneys that were still unfrozen.
‘Okay, Springsteen,’ I said quietly. ‘This is serious. Either you leave this kitchen immediately or I’ll see you skinned and stuffed as the prize exhibit in the London Dungeon. Which’ll it be?’
He hunched his shoulders as if to pounce. Reason wasn’t going to work.
‘Then fill your paws, you son of a bitch!’ I said and flipped the kidneys, pack and wrapping, over his head like a frisbee They sailed out of the window and he turned without a sound and launched himself after them.
I bet myself that he took them before they hit the ground.
‘Inhaler,’ gasped Lara, which for a second I took to be some sort of bizarre instruction. Then I twigged.
‘Where? Did you have a handbag?’
She shook her head, and the long fronds of her ginger mane totally hid her face.
‘Didn’t bring it,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s back home.’
‘Then let’s go.’
She looked up at me wildly.
‘But … I …’
Then she coughed violently and clutched herself with both hands under the breasts.
‘No arguments; come on,’ I said. ‘I’ll put some shoes on.’
I dived into the bedroom and found some clean white socks, then hopped around finding my trainers, wallet and keys. I grabbed a black trenchcoat, because it was the first thing I could put my hand on that wasn’t either leather or fur-lined, then I put an arm around her and helped her downstairs.
Even by the bottom of the stairs, her breathing had recovered to something like normal; well, normal for someone who’d just finished a three-minute mile. But the strain was genuine and she was putting most of her weight on me.
As I fumbled with the door catch, she pushed the hair out of her eyes and looked around.
‘I’m sorry about this. It’s unforgivable,’ she panted.
‘Nonsense,’ I said reassuringly.
She looked at the Christmas decorations and then the tree.
‘I know,’ I said, getting the door open. ‘I’ll straighten it later.’
By the time we reached Muswell Hill, she had recovered enough to move to the jump seat behind me, and through the open glass partition was desperately trying to talk me out of taking her home.
‘I’m fine, honestly.’
I’d bundled her across Armstrong’s back seat and locked open the windows in the back so she could get fresh air into her system, and it certainly seemed that the further away from Springsteen we got, the easier she could breathe.
‘Come on, I’ll survive. I want to take you to this restaurant. It’s in the West End. I’ve made reservations.’
Reservations? Confident lady.
‘Look, I’ll be a lot happier if you get your inhaler or something, just in case. I feel responsible, you know. That’s a frightening thing to suffer from. Do you take drugs for it?’
‘I have some that will hold off the symptoms, but you have to take them in advance. Look, it’s okay now.’
I checked her in the rear mirror. There was anxiety in her eyes. Something definitely wasn’t going to her plan.
‘Let’s just pick up your inhaler and then we can go straight up West. No problem; it’s a straight run down through Swiss Cottage and the traffic’s no sweat.’
‘Well, all right,’ she said slowly. ‘Take a left up here, then left again.’
She gave me more instructions until we were in a quiet avenue off Ballards Lane.
‘Pull in here. Will you wait here? It’s my flatmate. She’s not expecting me back so soon and I don’t want to upset her. I’ll just nip in and get my stuff. Won’t be a second.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll turn around.’
She was out of Armstrong and sprinting towards a three-storey block of apartments before I could argue. I whipped the wheel over and Armstrong turned beautifully, as all London cabs do, within the width of the road.
Leaving the engine running, I watched the block of flats until a light came on, then another one, in the top two windows on the left. If she had a flatmate, she liked sitting in the dark.
I put my arm out of my window and opened the back door for her as she skipped across the road. She clutched a small metal canister.
‘All set,’ she laughed. ‘And running upstairs gives you an appetite.’
‘Where to, madame?’
‘Baker Street. Do you know anywhere to park?’
‘With a black cab? Who needs car parks?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ she said.
The restaurant was vegetarian, of course, called No Gravy, which I didn’t think was a bad effort. The menu was imaginative, the food forgettable, and the wine list included kosher wines from Israel. We drank mineral water and talked. We talked about animals, about food, about me. A lot about me.
Lara proved an expert in turning the conversation away from herself, and by the end of the meal I knew little more about her other than that she said her surname was Preston, and that yes, she was a legal secretary and how had I known? (Three types of shorthand, good salary, negotiable working hours and familiarity with a Coroner’s Court, plus a good guess.)
She insisted on paying the bill, and she did it with a roll of ten-pound notes that she produced from her jacket pocket. I’d wondered about that, with her not carrying a bag, and I’d expected a credit card or two, but it seemed she was a cash-on-the-barrelhead type.
I suggested a drink for the road or maybe a club, but she said she’d rather go home, and would I like coffee?
I said sure, thinking that if every time anyone said ‘Come in for coffee’ and they actually got coffee, then coffee futures were the thing to put your investments in.
It was the top-floor flat, a spacious, two-bedroomed affair decorated in pastel blues, immaculately tidy, comfortable and pretty much characterless. There was no sign of a room
mate.
‘Do you really want coffee?’ she asked, slipping off her coat.
‘No. Not really.’
I watched fascinated as she hung her jacket on a metal hanger.
‘The bathroom’s through there.’
She took the jacket to a built-in wardrobe and slotted the hanger in, then she crossed her arms and took her shirt off over her head, leaving the necklace of wooden beads around
her throat.
I stepped up behind her and undid the metal clasp for her, sensing her shoulders tense as I did so.
That’s okay,’ she said softly and relaxing a little against me. ‘I can manage.’
I kissed her lightly on the shoulder and went into the bathroom like I was supposed to, but n
ot really knowing what I was expected to do there. At least I’d been right about the brand label on her bra.
I took off my coat and then the rest of my clothes and left them in as neat a pile as I could on the old fiddle-back chair next to the bath. Then I filled the sink with hot water and washed face and hands and then took a new toothbrush from the inside pocket of my trenchcoat (well, you never know), removed the wrapping and cleaned my teeth.
On the shelf above the sink, in front of the mirror were three carefully arranged contraceptives in their shiny foil packets. Each was a different brand. I couldn’t swear to it, but I was sure they were the three brands I’d last seen in the Reverend Bell’s bathroom cupboard in West Elsworth. I reached for my coat again.
Lara was in bed, the only light coming through the doorway from the hall, her hair splashed over a pillow framing her white face like an aura. She turned down the duvet to her left so I didn’t even get a choice in which side of the bed I had.
‘Did you see what I left for you in the bathroom?’ she said calmly.
I showed her what I had in the palm of my right hand.
‘It’s okay. I roll my own.’
Chapter Twelve
‘And that was it? She just told you to go and you went?’
‘She said she had things to do. Hell’s teeth, it was a one-night stand – and carefully stage-managed at that – not an invitation to share the rent.’
‘Did you get a chance to look around?’
Prentice dunked a chocolate biscuit in his tea. We were in a scruffy, formica-lined café, which during the summer made a fortune selling ice-creams and soft drinks to the tourists struggling between the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace. Across the road, through the bits of the window people had rubbed the condensation from, was a wet and deserted St James’s Park. It was Monday morning and also Christmas Eve, so most of the offices had closed for the holiday. The few that were still working would be deserted by noon, and the staff well ensconced in the nearest pub by five past.