‘I used to lie in bed and think she must’ve died and then who would take care of me? And then I’d hear the door slam and her laughing and some bloke laughing, both of them pissed, and she didn’t even come in and see if I was all right.’ Natalie had finished her cigarettes. She took one from his packet. ‘I saw things no child should see. I saw things and I heard things. And we moved from place to place so I didn’t have any friends, and sometimes the blokes would come and live with us and once, one of them . . .’ She poured more wine into their glasses; it spilt on to the table. ‘Maybe you should blame her, for making me what I was. But then she’d had a tough time when she was little, so maybe you should blame them, her parents – oh I give up.’ She pushed back the hair from her face.
‘But you’re alive,’ David said.
It was chilly. The central heating must have switched itself off. Natalie sat, hunched in her sweater, and stared at the floor.
‘When she left,’ said David, ‘I just said Got your keys? I didn’t even say goodbye.’
She looked up. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’
The table had burn-marks along the edge, from some past tenant’s cigarettes. He said: ‘After it happened, I used to drive round, in the night. I used to drive along the streets she must have walked on her way home. I wanted to be near where she was. I tried to make it all all right, that she wasn’t frightened, that she was happy because she’d enjoyed herself at the party . . .’
‘She probably had.’
‘Some nights I’d park the car where she was found—’
‘Where was she found?’ Natalie looked at him eagerly. After all, this was a murder story, like in the papers. ‘I don’t remember where it was.’
‘Whitworth Street.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Just near the station. Piccadilly Station. There’s a patch of waste ground there.’ He stopped. There was a slope, behind a hoarding saying FOR SALE: DEVELOPMENT LAND. People tipped rubbish down it. There was a row of old buildings: Follies Disco, Yellow Cabs, a health club. A few feet away, traffic thundered past. He said: ‘Some people had put flowers there, bunches of them with cards.’
‘Did you?’
He shook his head. ‘I sat there and willed myself to feel something but I couldn’t connect it to her . . . that place.’ The slope was steep; at the bottom lay a broken pushchair and a filing cabinet. ‘They had taken her away by then. I couldn’t believe she had been there. People coming and going at the station, everything going on around her as if nothing had happened. It didn’t hit me at the right moment, see. It happened just when I wasn’t prepared for it.’ He paused. ‘I like to be prepared.’
They drank in silence for a while.
He said: ‘I wasn’t prepared for the pain. The physical pain of it.’
Natalie asked: ‘Why didn’t you talk to your wife? Why are you here, for Christ’s sake? You don’t even know me.’
Gazing down at his feet, he noticed how scuffed his shoes were. It was all that walking. He used to take care of his clothes, he used to keep himself in trim. He thought of the landlord in the pub across the road; how he had stood rigidly in his smart jacket, with his face like a skull. ‘I keep thinking of all the things she’s missed, since then, and some of them I’m glad about.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m glad about them, for her sake. Like that shooting in that American school. I think – at least she’s been spared that. It came and went without her worrying about it – if she would have worried about it, and then I realize I didn’t know her well enough to know if she would’ve been that upset.’ He found he was crying. It was such an unfamiliar sensation that it took him by surprise. ‘I never got to know her, see, once she’d grown up. Somehow there wasn’t the time.’ He looked up. ‘Can you put on the bloody heating?’
Natalie got up and went into the hall. He watched her fiddling with the thermostat.
‘I’m glad she missed it,’ he said, ‘and all the stuff about the dying planet, things like that, because now I don’t have to worry about it either, things like surveillance cameras everywhere and old dears being mugged. I mean, what sort of world is it? What’s the point of it all? But I don’t have to worry about it for her, that she’s got to grow up and find that out.’
Natalie came back into the room and sat, splay-legged, at his feet.
David said: ‘She was alone. I wasn’t there to help her.’
Natalie’s eyes filled with tears. She took his hand.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
He pulled her head to his chest. It was a clumsy gesture; she had to shift forward and he felt he was hurting her neck. But she was all he had.
‘She wasn’t even robbed,’ he said. ‘There was still eight pounds in her wallet. The minicab fare.’
Outside, a car alarm started wailing.
‘I haven’t told anybody this,’ he said.
She muttered into his jacket: ‘What can I do?’
‘Do what I came here for.’
Her head jerked back. She stared up at him, her freckles vivid against her white skin. ‘What did you come here for?’
‘Come back with me.’
‘What?’
‘Come back to Leeds and give yourself up. Nothing will get my daughter back but – don’t you see? Justice will be done.’
‘Come back with you?’ Her mouth hung open.
He laughed a thin laugh. ‘Call it my final demand. Otherwise, nothing makes any sense.’ She had shifted away from him; they both found it embarrassing, clasped together like that. ‘We’ve got nothing to lose, either of us. Please, Natalie.’
There was a faint gurgling sound. It was the water in the radiator, heating up.
‘They’ll find you sooner or later,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she replied.
‘It’s only a matter of time.’
She sighed, and wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘It hasn’t been so much fun, this time around.’
‘Do this for me,’ he said urgently. ‘For Chloe. Please!’
She got to her feet gracefully, in one movement, like a ballet dancer. He thought of his daughter’s fat thighs. She waddles. Did he say it aloud, to Sheila?
‘All right,’ said Natalie. ‘Give me five minutes. I’ll go and pack.’ She went into the bedroom and closed the door.
He sat there, on the hard dining chair. She had agreed! For a moment he could hardly believe it.
There was still some wine left, in the second bottle, but he thought: I’ve got to drive. Even in his state, he thought that.
He spoke aloud to the closed bedroom door: ‘It was me, really, who was to blame.’
There, he had said it.
His back ached. Sitting on the hard chair, he felt that he was sitting in judgement. But who was he to judge? That was why he had been unable to speak to Sheila. On the long drive north, through the night, he would tell Natalie this. He was as guilty as she; they were in it together. Now the words had been loosed there was a flood of them, they would gush out, all the things he would tell this girl who until tonight had been unknown to him.
He would tell her about his youth, those heady years when anything had been possible. How he’d had a talent, a true talent like his daughter did, but that life had extinguished it. How all his hopes had been pinned on his daughter, to do what he had failed to do and to redeem him.
He felt sanity returning, warmth filling him like the heat in the radiator. He would go back and deliver Natalie up to the police. He would give up smoking; he would go on the wagon and sort out the rest of his life. A small shift would restore some balance to the world; some kind of justice would be achieved.
He looked at his watch; it was three in the morning. What a long, strange night it had been . . . It seemed to have lasted weeks. Peace flooded through him. With surprise, he realized that his rage was gone. He had lived with it so long that it took him a moment to identify the sensation. It was like the silence when you discover
that, some time ago, the rain has stopped. The stillness and then the first, tentative birdsong, ringing through the air.
He gazed at the bedroom door. There were pricks in the paintwork. Some past occupant had pinned up pictures, like Chloe used to do: a party polaroid, a photo of a baby tiger. Behind the door his surrogate daughter was packing. Such was his gratitude to her, now that she had surrendered, that he did indeed think of Natalie warmly, like an alternative child – prettier and more adventurous than Chloe had ever been. The sort of girl he had tried to bully Chloe into becoming. Who knows? They might even stay friends, he might even visit her if she went to prison.
Later he realized how odd it was, to think this way – proof, if proof were needed, that he hadn’t yet regained his sanity. But that was how he felt. He was drunk, after all.
Half an hour had passed. David got up and tapped on the door.
‘Natalie? We should get moving.’
There was no reply.
Perhaps she was having second thoughts. She was sitting on the bed, her face grim. Push off and leave me alone.
He tapped again. Silence.
Finally he opened the door and went in.
Natalie lay on the bed, unconscious. Beside her, on the floor, was an empty bottle of pills.
David stood there, frozen.
‘Natalie!’
He lunged towards the bed and shook her.
‘Natalie, wake up!’
She was so frail. He could feel her thin shoulder blades beneath her sweater. Gripping her in both hands, he lowered his face to hers. She was still alive; he could feel her breath, soft against his lips. He cupped his hand under her breast; her heart was beating.
‘Natalie, don’t do this.’ A stupid thing to say, but still.
There was no phone beside the bed. David got to his feet and stumbled into the living room. On the shelf was a volume of the Yellow Pages but he could see no phone there either.
A mobile. She must have a mobile. He went back into the bedroom. Natalie looked smaller somehow, diminished already. Her blonde hair, spread out on the pillow, showed its dark roots. Transfixed, he stood there. He could almost see the life in her ebbing away.
She was still breathing. He could see the mauve mohair of her chest gently rising and falling. ‘Please don’t die,’ he said, his voice oddly conversational. ‘I’m going to call for help. You’ve got a mobile, haven’t you? Everyone’s got a mobile. Chloe’s got one though she’s always losing it.’
Natalie’s bag sat on the floor. He turned it upside down and shook the contents on to the carpet.
‘Or else the batteries would be flat,’ he said. ‘I’d hear her voice breaking up, fainter and fainter, and then she’d be gone.’
He spotted the mobile. It was right there on the bedside table, in front of his eyes. He was too flustered to think straight.
‘Stupid me,’ he said. You had to keep talking to coma victims. In fact, it came naturally. It kept him calm, too. ‘Now, I’m going to dial 999. You’ll be fine . . . they’ll look after you, might need a stomach pump or whatever but don’t worry, nobody’ll know what’s happened, you needn’t come back to Leeds, I promise . . .’ His hand was trembling; he could hardly hold the phone. Squinting at the buttons – he was getting shortsighted – he said: ‘Now how do I work this thing, eh? Chloe’s is different.’ He pressed the red button. Nothing happened. ‘Shit.’ He peered closer. Yes, that was the On button. He pressed it again. The tiny screen stayed dark.
‘Oh help me, please,’ he said. The battery must be flat. But even if it was flat, surely the light would come on?
Frantically he pressed the buttons but the phone was dead.
He climbed to his feet. ‘I’m going to get help. Wait here.’ This was a daft thing to say – was she going anywhere? ‘Bloody phones, never work when you need them.’ He touched her foot, in its thick stripy sock. ‘Please don’t die, Natalie, it wasn’t that bad, what you did. I didn’t mean it – it was all my fault, you were right, I just needed someone to blame.’ He gazed at her closed eyes, the fringed lashes against her skin. ‘It only makes it worse. Don’t you see?’ He urged her, with all his heart, to wake up. ‘Don’t you see? It makes my daughter a murderer too.’
He looked at her one last time. Then he hurried out of the flat, leaving the door ajar, and thundered down the stairs. He left the front door on the latch, stepped backwards into the street and looked up. The other windows of her building were still dark.
Up the road, in the distance, he saw a call-box. He ran there, fumbling in his pocket for change. Did you need coins for 999?
It makes my daughter a murderer. What did he mean? Surely what he meant was It makes me a murderer.
The booth had been vandalized. Somebody had wrenched out the phone; loose wires dangled down.
David stared at it. Not again, he thought. Please God, don’t let it happen a second time.
Wherever you are, whatever the time . . . just phone.
The tube station. There must be a phone there. He turned right and ran up the street. It had started to rain. It seemed to take an age before he reached the main road. A taxi approached, its sign illuminated.
‘Taxi!’ Waving his arms, David stepped into the street. ‘Hey, stop!’
The taxi drove on. Just another drunk, the driver was thinking.
Finsbury Park station was closed but there were two phone booths beside the entrance. David went into one, lifted the phone and dialled 999.
A voice answered. What service did he require?
‘Ambulance,’ he gasped, and gave the address.
And then he was pounding back down the street, past rows of rubbish bags left out for the morning, back to Natalie’s flat.
He pushed open the door and rushed upstairs, to the first floor. Natalie’s door was still ajar.
‘It’s all right, I’m back,’ he called, like a husband returning from a day’s work. ‘They’re coming.’
He went into the bedroom.
The bed was empty. She had gone.
Chapter Six
‘DON’T MESS WITH me, baby . . .’
Damon’s voice blasted out. Natalie drove fast, through the empty streets. The windscreen wipers sluiced to and fro.
The boldness of what she had done – look, she had got away with it, yet again, she was a cat with nine lives! – the sheer boldness set her heart hammering.
It wasn’t that bad, what you did, he had said.
The poor bloke. She was sorry for him, truly she was. The way he’d talked to her, pouring out his heart, it touched her. And his distress, when she lay on the bed . . . she’d had a strong desire to sit up and say, Just kidding.
It must be terrible to have a daughter die. Raped and strangled, too. She remembered shivering when she’d heard it on the news. It must be the worst thing that could happen. Poor David. But she couldn’t help him; nobody could. Nobody could bring his daughter back; the pain was something he had to work through, by himself.
What a weird night it had been . . . one of the weirdest of her life. Who would have guessed the long chain of events that had resulted from one little cheque. There had been two others, she remembered them now – it was the day the computers were down. She hadn’t thought of that; what had happened to the other people?
It was over now, over and done with. Soon it would be a new day. She must pick herself up, dust herself down and start again. A girl had to survive. Did he really think she would give herself up to the police? Was she mad?
She was driving through Hackney. BLACKWALL TUNNEL. The sign loomed up through the rain. She had a plan, of sorts. Her Aunt Judy lived in Folkestone. Judy had a history of mental problems and wouldn’t be overly curious about Natalie’s appearance on her doorstep. They had kept vaguely in touch over the years – the odd Christmas card – but she hadn’t turned up at Natalie’s wedding and she would know nothing about her arrest. Natalie would lie low in Judy’s bungalow for a few days while she decided what to do next. Fran
ce was a possibility; her friend Melinda worked in a sports shop in Rouen. Natalie had plenty of ready cash – eight thousand pounds at the last count – and it was high time she disappeared from T.B. Computer Services. She was surprised they hadn’t yet twigged that something was going on.
‘Got that lovin’ feeling, all over again,’ sang Damon. It was O-Zone’s latest single; Natalie sang along, loudly. It was reassuring to hear her own voice, keeping herself company.
In one respect she had spoken the truth. These past months had been miserable, she could admit it now. She had never been so lonely in all her life. She had even missed Colin, that was how desperate she had been.
Never mind. ‘Hold me tight, baby!’ she sang as she drove under a flyover.
BLACKWALL TUNNEL. M20 FOLKESTONE said the sign. Too late.
‘Shit!’ She had missed the slip road that led up to the motorway. In a moment she emerged from the underpass, the rain battering again at her windscreen.
That was OK; she would just have to find her way back. Slewing the car to a halt, Natalie reversed on to the pavement and turned round. All she had to do was return the way she had come, drive under the flyover, do a U-turn and get on to the slip-road.
Except that she seemed to be swept up into a one-way system. It swung her round to the left and suddenly she found herself in an industrial wasteland. Large buildings loomed up on either side. An illuminated sign blazed: ACORN STORAGE.
Damon’s voice seemed to be getting fainter. She turned up the volume, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. She looked at the dashboard. Was it her imagination, or were the lights dimmer?
‘Gimme love, gimme love!’ she sang, urging Damon to stay with her, but he was fading. She could hardly hear him now.
It was then that she realized the car was slowing down. She pressed her foot on the pedal but there was no answering surge. She slammed it on the floor but nothing happened.
Natalie peered through the windscreen. The headlights were getting fainter. She kept singing but soon she realized that she was singing alone. Damon had gone. She stopped; silence filled the car.
And then the lights on the dashboard went out completely. The engine cut out and the car drifted to a standstill.
Final Demand Page 21