Richard felt his anger falter for a moment. The man was absolutely in the wrong, however he'd got hold of the letters. Richard had every right to have them back. And yet … the idea of confronting the man was more unappealing than most things he could think of. He reached for the ashtray, feeling unsure.
Then he stopped, staring at the table. On it, by the side of the ashtray, there was a small pile of ash and a warped brown filter. The remains of a cigarette were lying on an intensely black burn about an inch long and a centimetre wide. The position of the debris left no doubt as to what had happened. When he'd gone out he'd left a cigarette burning. It had fallen out and burned the table.
Whimpering quietly, he pointlessly dashed to get a wet cloth. A little of the black smear came off, but not much. The table was scarred for life. It wasn't his table, but worse, what if the butt had rolled onto the carpet, or against the curtain?
Hadn't he checked?
Richard flung the cloth back towards the sink and stood, hands on hips, glaring unhappily at the ashtray. Somehow, and in some way he couldn't closely define, this made things worse. Suddenly he knew with absolute certainty that he'd put the letters in the wrong envelopes. Not because he remembered doing so, but because he'd left a cigarette burning, and the two were the same thing. His mind had been elsewhere, and the robot in charge of envelope filling had made a mistake.
Richard spent the next two hours drinking coffee, sitting on the sofa, leaning forward on his knees and staring out of the window. If the man passed by again, he didn't want to miss him, wanted to be out of the door as soon as he was in sight. He didn't know what he could say to him. He just knew that he had to get the letters back.
He also knew something else. If he didn't get them back, he was going to have to tell Susan and Isobel. The emotional balls he'd been able to keep juggling for five months had fallen out of sequence and landed heavily in his hands. Now they were there he knew, with a terrified relief, that he was going to have to tell. He tried to dislodge the thought, but it felt as if his centre of gravity had irrevocably shifted, as if the whole thing had shocked him out of his previous equilibrium. It was no longer a case of whether he was going to do it, but simply when, and how.
At six, he shook himself out of a kind of awful reverie in which he'd mulled over different ways of breaking the news to Susan. He had a shower and picked through a joyless meal, and then left the house. He couldn't work, and couldn't face spending the whole evening staring pointlessly out of the window. Instead, he grabbed a book and walked down the road to the Porcupine, the nearest pub where the clientele weren't actively frightening. Not all the time, anyway.
The pub was busy, but Richard was able to get his favoured seat, in the raised area next to the window which looked out onto the main road. He sat with his pint and tried to get into the book, but the increasingly strident levels of noise outside and inside his head made it difficult to concentrate.
He ought to tell them both, as soon as possible. He'd been a bastard to them for too long, and he owed them the truth.
Maybe if he just explained everything, and said he was sorry, he'd get away with it. He hadn't set out to hurt them, after all. It was an accident. It wasn't his fault. Maybe they would see that.
If he was lucky enough to be able to choose, which would he go with? With a changed, sourer Isobel, who rightfully wouldn't trust him an inch, or back to Susan as so many times before, with a new debit in the complex scoring system they tended?
He didn't deserve either of them, and should be left alone, hated by both of them, the bad man in both their pasts whose legacy future boyfriends would have to deal with.
Everything he thought seemed to vacillate, to lurch from one viewpoint to another. It wasn't as if he kept changing his mind, but rather as if he had three or four consistent sets of opinions in his head, and kept ricocheting between them.
At nine there was a new influx of locals into the pub, and the noise leaped in volume. It was crowded now, the ceiling almost invisible above a pall of cigarette smoke. It was hot too, and the dangerous-looking lads on the big table next to Richard's kept banging into him on the way to the bar. He shook his head to try to stop the constant cycle of thought, and attempted manfully to get into his book.
The noise kept coming, and the room got more and more sweltering until he found himself wiping his hand across his forehead to dry it. The lads next to him got increasingly raucous until they were shouting almost constantly. He felt a self-righteously liberal thread of distaste as their tales of sexual derring-do got more and more frank and degrading, and then realized he wasn't in a position to get self-righteous about anything at all.
‘Whaa fuck s'matter with you?’
Startled, Richard looked up. One of the men on the next table, about his own age, had twisted round in his seat and was staring at him with deeply alarming aggression.
‘I'm sorry?’ Richard replied, before he had time to loosen his accent.
‘I said, what the fuck is the matter with you, wanker?’
The pub was now delirious with noise, and the other lads on the table were still merrily shouting at each other. The man stared at him and Richard felt his head run clear with fear.
‘I'm sorry,’ he stammered, ‘I don't understand…’
The man twisted further round, until the full force of his apparent hatred was directed firmly at Richard. Still the pub raged, and still the man's companions seemed oblivious to what was going on. Richard gripped his book with hands that were now slick, and tried not to look as terrified as he felt.
‘I fucking hate you wankers,’ the man continued, slowly and deliberately, ‘bunch of fucking arseholes. Put you in charge, then one little problem and you lose it.’
‘I'm sor-’
‘Course you fucking are. That's your whole fucking problem.’ Suddenly and viciously the man mimicked Richard's voice. ‘“Oh dear, I've fucked up, what shall I do.” What a wanker.’
Richard felt the back of his scalp crawl and he stared at the man. It was probably the smoke in the pub, and probably fear, but it was almost as if he was looking at the man down a tunnel of clearness.
‘Fuck ’em. They give you any lip, just tell them to fuck off. Better still, just lie your fucking head off. So you shagged them both. So fucking what – that's what they're fucking there for. Tell you what mate, you want to try and get the two of them together.’
The man broke off to guffaw. Richard felt around him for his cigarettes, swallowing compulsively. This was bad. He had to get out.
‘My advice to you,’ the man concluded, winking with a kind of horrific intimacy, ‘is to stop being such a cunt.’
Richard stood up and walked quickly across the raised area. He slipped going down the couple of steps and almost fell, but survived to shoulder his way through the crowds to the door. Just before he stepped out he glanced hurriedly back at the table. The man was still staring at him, a crooked grin on his face. He winked, and then turned his back on Richard, melting back into his group as if he'd never turned round. Richard fell out of the door into the cooler air outside.
He walked home as quickly as he could, pausing only to rest with his hands on his knees, sucking in great lungfuls of air. Occasionally, his mind was able to come up with a concrete thought, but most of the time it just whirled and flinched, balking against what had just happened.
The man had known what was going on. He had known.
As he fumbled with his keys outside the house Richard thought he heard a sound behind him and spun round, but there was no one there. He hurried up the stairs to his flat and let himself in.
The flat was hot, stifling. Richard wrenched open the fridge and grabbed the bottle of Diet Coke. Most of what he poured went into a glass. Then the phone rang in the silence and he dropped the glass.
The phone rang again. He should answer it. Carefully, Richard stepped over the broken glass. It rang again.
Then there was a clicking sound, and Richard remembered the
answering machine was on. He listened to his voice saying he wasn't there, and waited with his hand over the handset for it to finish. He wouldn't be able to hear himself speak with it on.
‘Well,’ said a voice from the speaker when the answering message was finished. Richard pulled his hand back. ‘What a lot of bother over nothing.’
Eyes wide, Richard straightened. He didn't recognize the voice. It was suave but oily, the voice of a plump, self-satisfied man.
‘We're all adults here, we know these things happen.’ There was a chortle, and Richard felt his flesh crawl as he stared. ‘It's not ideal, I'll grant you. But what's done is done.’
Teeth clenched, Richard reached his hand out towards the phone.
‘After all, you were what they both wanted, and what they didn't know didn't hurt them. So why should it now?’
Richard lightly put his hand on the handset.
‘Really, they've been lucky to both be able to have you. I'm sure that if you point that out, calmly but firml-’ Richard yanked the phone up to his ear.
‘Who the hell …’ he shouted, but too late. All he could hear was a dial tone. Blinking, he shook the phone, but the tone remained. Then Richard noticed that the answer button was flashing on the machine. Of course: the machine would have been running. He hit the play button to hear the man's voice again.
After assorted beeping sounds a voice came over the speaker, but it wasn't the one he was expecting. It was Susan. She'd finished work early and was coming down this evening instead of tomorrow lunchtime. She expected to be at Kentish Town tube at 10.30 p.m. Would he meet her?
Shocked, Richard glanced at his watch. It was ten o'clock. What on earth was she playing at? He could have been out with Isobel this evening. Worse still, they could have been spending the evening in. What was she doing, suddenly coming early? His heart stopped as he thought of one possible reason for the change in plan, but then he discounted it: she couldn't have received the wrong letter, because some bastard was running round London with them. So why? What was going on?
The machine beeped again, and noise poured suddenly out of it, the sound of lots of people talking and shouting at once. Richard stared at it as a low, guttural voice spoke.
‘She's my favourite. The one with the tits. Good mouth on the other one, but give me the tits any time.’
There was a laugh that distorted the speaker, and the message ended. Richard found he was breathing very heavily, heart juddering. That was him. That was the man from the pub. The machine beeped again, and after a pause, rewound. Richard jabbed the button again, bewildered. Where was the message from the oily man? Why wasn't it there?
He listened carefully to Susan's message again, trying to hear some expression in her voice. It was casual, conversational. There was no way of telling what she might be thinking. Maybe it was all right. Maybe she was just coming early because she wanted to see him. Maybe not.
The machine beeped and Richard clapped his hands over his ears when he heard the noise of the pub again. He sang loudly for ten seconds, eyes tightly shut. He didn't want to hear the man's voice again. There was still no other message.
Richard walked to the sofa on legs that felt very shaky and sat down. His chest was still hitching unevenly, his forehead beaded with sweat and his eyes were taking in next to nothing. While part of his mind ran calmly over the change in plan, trying to see if it would cause any problems, the rest of him tried to flee. The oily man, he was sure, was not the man who'd stood outside his window. His voice would have been dry and quiet with firm authority. He wouldn't have delivered that smug homily with its fatuous arrogance. He would have calmly told him he was a shit.
Was that fair? Was he simply a bastard? He hadn't meant to do it, had only wanted to be with both of them. Surely he hadn't acted as badly as all that? These things happened, after all.
Suddenly Richard realized that he was a shit, that he was simply unlucky to have been caught, and that he did want to sleep with both of them, and keep doing so. Whoever the fuck they were, and however they'd found out about him, the three men were each right. They didn't understand the whole story, but they had bits of it. The oily man could have been a friend of the stern man, or an accomplice, together with the yob in the pub. The first man could have shown them the letters. In fact, he must have done. Why? Why were they doing this? He wished he could talk to them, tell them that it wasn't the way it looked, that he did care about both of them. But what business was it of theirs?
Shaking his head violently, he stood up, and then realized he had nowhere to go. Not yet, anyway; in a little while he had to walk down to the station and face the music. Face the fucking Ring Cycle, in fact.
Then, puzzled, he came to a mental halt. He'd got it wrong again. He wasn't going to have to face anything. Susan couldn't have received a letter, unless the stern man had hopped on a train and delivered it personally. Why did he keep forgetting that?
He turned and looked round for his cigarettes. He had to do something to fill up the minutes, and smoking seemed as good a bet as anything. He also grabbed the copy of Time Out that he'd dropped by the armchair, to see if anything worth seeing was on. Without noticing he was hunched over slightly, as if flinching against the phone ringing again, he searched through the cinema listing. Lots of foreign shite: Susan wouldn't fancy that. No point looking in the theatre listings either: after rehearsing all week the last thing she'd want to do was watch other people standing on a stage. Drawing heavily on his cigarette Richard switched to the clubs section to see what was happening at the Dome. Then he stopped.
What the hell was he thinking of?
Aghast at his own stupidity, Richard threw his cigarette butt out of the window, moving slowly as if under water. What on earth was he doing? Foreign films were exactly Susan's thing, and he knew there were at least two plays she wanted to see. She wouldn't, of course, have been anywhere near a bloody stage, and wild horses couldn't have dragged her into the Dome. He'd been thinking of the wrong one. He'd been thinking of Isobel.
But he hadn't, not really. All he'd been doing was reacting, behaving normally. The only problem was that it had been Isobel's Richard who'd been doing the thinking, not Susan's.
Then, very late, he snapped his head up and stared at the window. It was open. He hadn't opened it since he got back. When he came in he went straight to the fridge, then the phone. He hadn't opened the window. So it had been open all the time. He had left the window open when he went out. Part of him had known that, and had unthinkingly aimed the butt out of the window.
Suddenly feeling sick, Richard hurled the magazine at the bookcase, and leapt up and slammed the window shut. He also left the window open and put the magazine back near the armchair, and then looked at his watch. It was time to go.
He marched quickly along the crescent towards Leighton Road. He didn't look up at the window. It didn't matter whether he'd shut it or not. He wasn't going to be gone long.
Leighton Road was deserted, eerily wide beneath sallow streetlights. Head down, he walked as quickly as he could. Halfway down, as he passed a side road, he heard a sound and turned to look. He couldn't see anything, and took a couple of steps into the dark turning. The sound got louder until he recognized it. It was someone crying.
About five yards up the road stood a little boy. He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and his hands were pressed into his eyes. Richard took a careful step towards him. The boy's chest was heaving spasmodically, and he was oblivious to the world around him, trapped in some private grief alone by himself in a side road in Kentish Town.
‘Are you all right?’ Richard asked. He knew it was a stupid question, but it seemed to be the only one available. The boy didn't answer. Richard tried again, hating himself for being conscious of the fact that he ought to be hurrying to the station. ‘Are you hurt?’
The boy didn't even look up, and Richard realized with a chill how alone he looked, as if he'd been wandering the earth for ever, with no home to go to and no on
e to care for him. His chest hitched again and Richard took another step towards him.
Suddenly the boy looked up, a flash of tears and cheeks that were swollen red. He stared directly at Richard for a second, and then screamed at him.
‘I hate you,’ he shouted, and then turned and ran into the darkness. Stunned, Richard stared after him.
‘What?’ he shouted, ‘Why? Who are you?’ But the boy was gone.
Richard turned slowly and went back the way he had come, continually casting glances behind him. There was no sign of the boy, and no sound of footsteps. Head down, feeling like crying, Richard walked onto the main road.
‘Richard?’
Startled, he looked up. Susan was standing in front of him, overnight bag in hand.
‘Suz?’ He stared at her stupidly.
‘Was that you shouting?’
‘Er, yes. What are you doing here?’
‘I rang…’
‘I know, I mean, here?’ His heart beating more slowly, Richard began to feel slightly more normal.
‘Train was early.’ She smiled. ‘I got bored with hanging about. Thought I'd brave the streets alone for once.’
Richard nodded, and smiled tentatively back. Then he consciously broadened his smile. Susan was very good at noticing when something was wrong.
‘Why were you shouting?’ Susan asked as they turned and headed for Torriano Crescent.
‘Oh, just some kid. He seemed upset.’ At me, Richard could have added, but didn't. Susan took his arm.
‘You are good,’ she said. ‘Most people wouldn't have given a toss.’ Richard smiled painfully at the compliment. With a lurch he remembered his earlier vow to talk to her this evening, to tell her what was going on. Then suddenly he heard footsteps, and turned to look behind them. There was nobody there.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Thought I heard someone.’ Susan turned to look. ‘There's nobody there,’ he added quickly.
What You Make It: A Book of Short Stories Page 16