With my face between his hands he gasped, ‘Sure?’
‘Nah,’ I gasped back. ‘Changed my mind. Let’s go back to the movie.’ I tugged at his belt. ‘Got a condom?’
‘Uh-huh-uhhh.’
‘Good-oh,’ I said, and wrigged our tangled bodies under the duvet, where we could strip off one another’s remaining clothes, away from the ghostly watching eyes.
Twenty-five
Foley wasn’t quite looking at me any more. He was looking at my right shoulder, and stroking it over and over again with one finger. I curled my toes into his, and they tightened round mine. I took a strand of his hair and pushed it behind his ear, and it fell forward again. Which gave me an excuse to touch his ear again. He gave a tiny shiver.
‘I feel a bit bad leaving you alone,’ he said.
A bit bad? That wasn’t bad enough, not by a long way.
‘Cold outside,’ I said.
‘I know, but I’ve got to go.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘On your own? Sure?’
Why did people feel the need to rub that in? The truth was that I was being haunted by Jinn, but that would be fine if people didn’t go on and on about not being scared. It wasn’t like I was afraid of Jinn. That would just be stupid.
‘It’s just, I’ve got to take Mallory to school in the morning.’
‘Yeah, that’s fine.’
‘Mum and Dad, they’re going to a show. Early, like. Mallory won’t even be up when they leave. I’ve got to be there.’
‘Do shut up,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’
He disengaged from me and the duvet, rolled off the bed, hunted for his clothes. My toes flexed and curled, empty and cool. I’d been alone for ages in this house. This wasn’t any different, it wasn’t. Jinn hadn’t been dead before, that was all. I wriggled under the duvet and somehow found my top and pants and squirmed into them. Nothing to do with modesty. I felt less vulnerable, that was all.
‘Are you really OK?’
I pulled the duvet off my face and opened my eyes. He stood there, awkward again.
Was I? Yes, I was OK. The dislocated grief had seeped down to my chest and stomach, but it was a diffuse pain, nothing I could cut open and cry over.
Sighing, I clambered out of bed and kissed Foley brusquely. That changed my mind. Reeling him back in, I kissed him slowly.
‘I’ve really got to go.’ He sounded as if he was in an agony of guilt. Good-oh.
‘Piss off out of here.’ I shoved him gently doorwards. ‘Bye.’
Opening the door let in a wall of cold night. Foley hesitated, turning to watch me while I leaned on the door to heave it shut. I smiled at his remorseful face the whole time. It wasn’t me leaving, it was him, and may he suffer for it, I thought cheerfully.
When the door finally slammed shut, I was shocked once more by emptiness and silence. The ache in my body had coalesced, in an instant, and at the same time it had filled every bit of me. My skin felt electric and I couldn’t shut my eyes. I felt as if I should cry, as if I very much wanted to cry, but it was still impossible. Something inside me clawed to get out but there was nothing I could do to release it; it would just have to dig. And despite that I was inside out, raw and exposed to the night. Cry? Sleep? You’re joking.
The house was a vacuum. Of course Jinn wasn’t here: there was no spirit in it at all, barely even my own. That was an even scarier thought, as if I might evaporate without her ghost to hold me here, so I went in search of her.
I hadn’t disturbed her room at all since she died. I’d disturbed it plenty before then, despite my promise, borrowing her stuff and occasionally stuffing mine into her unoccupied space. But I’d left it pretty much as it was, seeing as she’d be coming back and all.
Now I felt the need to open her wardrobe doors and plunge my hands into her clothes, to bury my face in her old gardening shirt, which had sparkly bits – what shirt of Jinn’s didn’t? She’d been gone a long time and gone from that shirt longest of all, but it still smelt of her: of Jinn and earth and weeds and Miracle-Gro. I pulled open her drawers, rummaged in lipsticks and combs and broken hairclips, half-empty bottles of yellowed perfume the colour of pee, and twists of sweet wrappers around leftover Love Hearts or Chewits. There were some bits of underwear, too: scrumpled tights, sports socks, a few pairs of pants. I felt like a grave robber.
Blushing, I slammed the drawer shut, then rubbed at my fingerprints on the melamine as if the police were going to be checking it later. Talk about a guilty conscience.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave her room; my skin felt less raw in here. Stuff on the surface was fair game, wasn’t it? Her jewellery box, her old hairbrush with gleaming strands still in it. The shoebox on the windowsill that she’d covered in an old cut-up shirt. How did she ever have time to do that stuff? I recognised the fabric: a satiny red shirt of Lara’s. I’d never looked in the box before but now the curiosity was intolerable.
I picked it up, sat down on Jinn’s bed cross-legged, the box in my lap. On one side, the window side, the red satin had faded to pink in the sunlight. Easing off the ribboned and sequinned lid, I half expected the plagues and pestilences of all mankind. But they were loose already and running free, and Hope had left with them.
Bloody hell, I was hallucinating again.
I reminded myself there was no life to intrude on, it was dead and gone. All the same, my fingers trembled as I touched the things in the box.
Shells and pebbles. I swear I could remember her picking them up, and I thought I remembered that they’d meant as much to me at the time as they had to Jinn. Now I didn’t recognise their shapes or mottled patterns; nothing sparked a flare of nostalgia. The traces of sand that stuck to them were bone dry, and they didn’t smell of the sea any more.
I picked them out one by one, set them out on the bed beside me in a neat row, then dug further down into the box. More scraps of fabric. Bits cut off a scarf of Lara’s. An old hair tie I used to wear, when my hair was mousy and long and I wore it in bunches. I rubbed my itchy nose with my fist. There was a fold of silver-blue ribbon, river-coloured, neatly wrapped, but inside it was something hard: another beach stone maybe. When I unwound it, the pebble of amber fell into my hand, and the thick silver chain trickled through my fingers.
Oh.
I remembered Jinn coming home that day. The awkward silence as she rummaged in her room, the offer of tea refused. I’m just going to pick up a few things. Have you been messing with my stuff, Ruby? Good. So don’t.
She left it here that day, because she was less likely to sell it if she couldn’t lay her hands on it. I rubbed the amber with my thumb, feeling the warm texture. She hadn’t sold it. She’d left it here. In my unknowing care. Shutting the door of her room with a warning glare at me.
Don’t mess with my stuff.
I stared down at the amber in my lap. I wondered if it would have been harder to strangle her with this chain, if she’d have had more of a chance had she not chosen that leather thong.
Probably not.
The last thing in the corner of the box was a square of folded tissue. I nearly didn’t look inside, thinking it was only there to cushion the amber, but when I unfolded it I drew out a thin cheap chain, carefully wound in a circle so it wouldn’t get knotted. On the end of it dangled a tiny cat, winking at me with its one ruby-red eye.
Nestling it in my palm, I touched it with a fingertip. I couldn’t breathe. Guilt and remorse washed over me like a big wave. Marley had returned it, and Jinn hadn’t told me because she was angry about how I behaved. Or maybe Jinn had asked for it back. Maybe she’d been waiting for the right moment to give it back to me, waiting for things to be all right between us, or waiting till she wasn’t so mad at me. Things hadn’t been right enough that day. Blinking, I let the chain trickle off my palm and fall with a tinny click on to the shells and pebbles.
I thought of the old lady waiting in her locked tower for my return visit, gazing out of the window over Gla
ssford. Sighing, deciding I wasn’t coming back, hauling herself on to her Zimmer to make another cup of tea. Violently I shoved the image away.
I put the amber pebble back in the bottom of the box, coiling its chain round and round it. The mosquito no longer looked unhappy. It was just fixed. Just dead. I laid the blue ribbon over it and piled on the other rubbish, and finally I put the little cat pendant on top. Changing my mind, I hooked it round my finger and lifted it out again.
The clasp was a bitch, cheap and awkward and stiff, but I finally closed it at the back of my neck. The Cyclops cat hung with Foley’s silver cat, a little lower because the cheap chain was just a bit longer. They kind of matched.
I shut the door on Jinn’s room and the box, and began to pace. I walked from room to room of the little house, staring out of each window in turn. I went back to the bed I’d shared with Foley, but I couldn’t sleep. My blood was still electric. I got up again, paced the house again. I tried lying on the sofa, staring at the television’s standby light, at the DVD timer that still read 01:20:16.
And then I must have slept. Not well. I kept half-waking, seeing that number and the little red standby light. I heard cars go by outside, distant shouting revellers coming from the pub. I heard knocking, urgent and getting sharper, and I thought, Foley. And it was for that reason, drugged on half-sleep and confusion and remorse and longing, that I rolled off the sofa, blundered to the door and opened it.
I think Nathan Baird was as shocked as I was. That was how I got my chance. Against the frosty wall of night, and in the half-glow of next door’s security light, I saw the haggard bones of a face. Pale skin, caramel eyes set in shadow. I smelt sweat, and alcohol, and crack and, unexpectedly, fear.
I didn’t scream. I tried to slam the door that wouldn’t slam. His foot was in the gap, his fingers holding the edge of the door, and he was shouting something. I leaned and heaved, and he must have been weakened by his lifestyle because I was winning, and his fight was oddly pathetic. I shoved, I stamped on his foot, I head-butted his fingers and cracked my own temple on the edge of the door. He yelped, protested. This time I bit his fingers, and he snatched them back, and I stamped on his foot again, hard as I could, till it shot back and at last, at last, the door slammed shut and the lock clicked.
I shot the bolt.
I stepped back.
His fist battered the door again. ‘Ruby!’
One more step back.
‘Ruby!’
‘What?’ Why was I talking to him?
‘Please, Ruby. Please. Open the door.’
‘No.’
‘Ruby!’
I pressed my lips together to stop my heart escaping. My throat being blocked, it tried to hammer through my ribcage.
His breathing was rapid and desperate and far too loud. Or maybe that was mine.
‘Ruby. I just want to get something. Please.’
I didn’t answer.
‘Something of hers. That – that necklace, remember? I want it back. Please.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it was hers and I want it, Ruby. I really want it.’
To sell it? To keep for a souvenir? ‘Go away.’
‘Ruby, let me in.’
Little pig, little pig. ‘No.’
The door shuddered under his fist. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I wanted to turn my back on it but then his fist might come through. Like in The Shining.
The thudding stopped at last. Silence, except for my breathing. And his. I slumped down with my back against the wall, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that door.
‘Ruby, I’m sorry. I just –’
‘No.’
‘Please open the door. Please.’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I just want the – I just miss her. Ruby.’
‘Go away.’
‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’
Too frigging late, mate. What was I doing? Why was I just sitting here? My phone. My phone. I was sitting here in my underpants and a T-shirt and I didn’t have my phone.
I glanced at the living room but just that instant of looking away from the door struck me rigid with terror. My phone was stuck between the sofa cushions.
I could get up. I could run and get it in a matter of seconds.
I wasn’t getting up.
It wouldn’t kill me. He wouldn’t get through the door in the time it took to fetch my phone.
It might kill me.
I could take my eyes off that door for five seconds, goddamit.
No. Couldn’t.
I pressed my body harder against the wall, wanting to weep at my own cowardice. I couldn’t turn my back on the door. What if the phone had got lost? Fallen right down the back? What if I had to pull all the cushions off the sofa? How long would that take?
‘Ruby, I need a place to stay. Please.’
Oh, as if.
‘It’s cold. Just one night. I’ll pick up her necklace and I’ll go in the morning. Please. I’m sorry, Ruby. I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry I didn’t look after her. I loved her and you know it. Please, Ruby. I’m sorry but let me in.’
He had to be kidding. Right?
‘Ruby! Ruby!’ His cries were turning to angry sobs.
I didn’t want his voice to get quieter. I wanted the Grumpy Old Bugger next door to hear him, to come and see what all the fuss was about. Call the council. Call the cops.
No chance. A huge shudder went through my guts.
Please, I thought. Please make it morning. My skin, my heart, my guts were so cold.
I looked at my watch. Three o’clock? It wouldn’t be morning for five hours. G.O.B. might be up in four. Nathan could be through the door. I could be dead in four hours.
‘Ruby, it’s so cold out here. Please. I just need a place.’
I put my hands over my ears.
‘Ruby? I’m cold.’
Her too.
His voice was a lot quieter now. He must have been sitting down, curled up, pressed right against the door hinge, because I could feel his voice almost in my ear.
‘Ruby. Why won’t you let me in?’
I’ll huff and I’ll puff.
‘Ruby. It’s cold. I’m so cold.’
Very, very tentatively, I laid my head against the door. Our skulls must have been almost touching. If he banged on the door again I might die of fright, but he didn’t. He was whimpering. I stared and stared at the painted plywood, wishing I could see through it, glad I couldn’t.
‘I’m sorry, Ruby.’
I angled my head. His voice was a pitiful mumble.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t look after her. Just let me in. I haven’t got anywhere else to go. I’m so cold. Please.’
‘No,’ I said, quite softly this time. My lips were almost at his ear, after all. And I decided I wasn’t going to speak to him again.
‘Cold, Ruby.’
‘Please, Ruby.’
‘Let me in. Ruby?’
The demands were growing less frequent, but I still heard them. I heard them like in a dream, and maybe they were, because exhaustion was overwhelming me now, stifling even the fear. I drifted in and out of sleep, there in the hallway, pressed to the door, close enough for Nathan to murder me.
Except for the door.
‘Oh, Ruby. Open the door, Ruby.’
I think that was the last one. I didn’t hear any more, unless I heard them in my sleep. When I next woke I was curled on the floor, the crown of my head pressed against the door, and I was chilled to the bone.
Violent shivers racked me straight away. I forgot about Nathan long enough to crawl through to my bedroom and drag on jeans and a thin jumper and a thick jumper, and woolly socks. Even when I’d done that and let myself remember him, I wasn’t afraid because I knew he must be gone. The door hadn’t been opened. And filtering through the thin curtains was a gauzy winter light. Death didn’t stalk in the daylight. He was gone.
Just as I thoug
ht it, I heard the storage heating click on. I curled into my bed, hugging my knees under the duvet, waiting for the house to warm up fast as it always did. Eventually I stopped shivering, and after an eternity, I was hot enough to throw off the duvet and sit up.
I fetched my phone. It was half-sticking out of the space between the seat cushions; last night I could have snatched it up and called the police in a few seconds. Idiot.
Anyway. It was fine. Nothing had happened. I was fine.
I turned the phone in my hands. I should call the police now anyway. Nathan Baird had come back. He’d reappeared and now they would find him quickly.
I stared at the door. After last night it looked as menacing as a tombstone.
My hand trembled as I reached out, gently unsliding the bolt. Just as carefully, I turned the Yale lock, reached for the handle and turned that too. I wasn’t breathing as I pulled it silently open.
Nothing. Not even a dent on the frayed rope matting, not even a smell of sweat and crack. Maybe I’d dreamed him. The air on my lips and nostrils was bitterly cold but I drew in a huge breath and stepped outside. Through my socks, the doorstep and the paving slabs chilled the soles of my feet, but I went on taking steps, one foot in front of the other. My phone was in my freezing fingers but I’d almost forgotten it. I reached the corner of the house, where the stone gargoyle gazed reproachfully up at me. I almost raised a finger to my lips. One hand on the grey roughcast wall, I stepped round.
Nothing to see, at first. Nothing but a pile of tyres and an old blanket. Not weighted down with bricks any more, it was wrapped tight round something. Wondering why I wasn’t afraid, I stepped close, touched the blanket. It was stiff with frost as heavy as snow, and whitest and iciest where I lifted a corner of it. Nathan looked back at me, eyes half-closed, lips blue. His lank hair was stardusty with ice.
I folded back the cardboard-crisp blanket, tucked it round his neck and throat as best I could. Then I sat down on the plastic bench and watched him.
Was I expecting him to move? Like a bad horror movie? He looked asleep, all tucked up in his blanket, except that his breath didn’t cloud the cold air, and his ribs didn’t rise and fall, and his skin was so very waxy, so very blue. And he didn’t blink those half-closed eyes, and those amber pupils went on gazing into the middle distance.
The Opposite of Amber Page 18