The only thing that keeps me sane, cooped up in this vacuum, is the thought of sealing the envelope, and somehow finding a stamp and a postbox in a wasteland of snow and barbed wire. Of course it won’t really be like that. The town will be pretty much the same as any other – a grid of office blocks between the mountains and the harbour, the last trace of snow just a passing reminder. In the Chukotka Suite, I’ll pause to take off my watch for rewinding, just as I always do at the start of presentations. ‘Yes,’ I’ll say, if there’s any reaction, ‘it’s hand made, an anniversary present, as a matter of fact. My wife knows I like old-fashioned things.’ Ah, wives – a small murmur of laughter. By then this letter will be on its way. One day I’ll come back from work to read your name on the envelope, and I’ll keep it with all the others in case you decide to come home.
But in the end there’s no alternative. That’s what he tells Linda. The van’s fucked. So some one’s going to have to come and get them. Just too bad. But at least they’re nearly there, and she can see the baby tomorrow. A few more miles, that’s all. He hates the sound of his own cheery voice. Everything he’s saying sounds like a lie, even the things that are true. But she seems no worse. She’s even taking a mouthful of soup from the flask. ‘Do you remember,’ she keeps saying. ‘Do you remember when we . . .?’ He can’t make out what she’s saying and there’s no time to ask before he hears the sound of the ambulance screeching like an owl.
Unfinished Business
Christopher Priest
He was standing at an open window and he was naked. He was pressing binoculars to his eyes and he was pointing them at me.
It was a shock reversal of voyeurism. I was the woman being watched, peered at through binoculars, privacy invaded, possibly at risk. But he was naked, exposed, vulnerable. I turned away in embarrassment, but as soon as I did I realized how irrational it was, so I looked again.
I was on my morning commute, an ordinary weekday in early summer, the train slowing down as always – there is a junction of three main lines outside London Bridge Station and during the rush hour it is always congested. The train was full but because I live close to the beginning of the line I could always get a seat. The same one every day, by the window. Most days I read or listened to music, but that morning I was staring out of the window instead, watching the London suburbs go by.
He was still there when I looked back but now he was leaning forward to follow me with his glasses, angling out as the train bore me on past and around a shallow bend. He was soon lost to sight.
I knew I was blushing and I felt the palms of my hands sweating. I glanced around at the other passengers, feeling irrationally guilty, but they were commuters busy with their newspapers, magazines, smart phones, e-readers and books. I was unnoticed.
I leaned back against the hard head-rest, closing my eyes, trying to calm myself. The man had been in one of the houses in a street where the terraces backed on to the track. Surely it was only a weird accident that he should seem to be looking at me? I could just about comprehend why a certain kind of man would expose himself as a train went by, but why should he pick me out, stare so intently?
The train continued its slow journey through the complex points and signals, halted briefly at London Bridge Station, then rattled on, eventually crossing the steel bridge above the Thames and into Charing Cross Station on the northern side.
I left the train and went through the crowded concourse. Collecting a large cup of coffee I took the familiar walk to my office. I was shaken up by what I had seen but I needed to collect my wits for the day ahead. My first appointment was with the people who represent Yuri Maximov, an arms trader and holder of Siberian oil shale rights and our most important Russian client. I had been working on this presentation for two months. After that I had to see my line manager Kersey and report on the meeting. I always dreaded being in his office, because Kersey liked to mix business with pleasure. An ongoing problem, but I had it under control. Then a lunch with one of the agency heads. In the afternoon, more of the same.
I put the incident of the naked man out of my mind. On the way home that evening the train trundled past the same row of houses, but my thoughts were running through the events of the day and I was catching up with incoming text messages. I forgot to look.
That time.
The next day was Friday. I tried to act as if it was just another day. I gulped my organically sound breakfast, hurried to the station. The train arrived on time and I took my window seat. I nonchalantly read my copy of The Times, solved a few crossword clues. I listened to the BBC news on my mobile radio, then afterwards I sat back to watch the London suburbs go by.
As the train slowed on the approach to London Bridge I was craning my neck to see ahead. It was a sunny day – I saw reflected light glinting from binocular lenses.
He was already pointing them at the train, at my carriage, at my seat by the window. Again I felt the impact of that cold, unexplained regard, the sense that he had picked me out.
But there was nothing he could do but look! So I stared back frankly, feeling brazen, daring. At first it was just the same as the day before: the blatant, intrusive stare, the disguising blackness of the binoculars across his eyes. Then he slowly raised his free hand and waved.
The train was moving more slowly than the day before. I thought, I will have to report this! I must try to remember details!
As the train carried me on past I tried to see objectively, so if necessary I could give a clear description. He was of medium height, had a paunch. He was white-skinned. Bald, or his head was shaved. He had some kind of beard or moustache about his mouth, but because his arm threw a shadow it was difficult to see exactly. And he was hairy – his chest was matted and everywhere else I could see was smudged with hair.
Soon the moving train dragged us away from each other. Again, the man leaned out to keep me in view for as long as possible.
Other than his behaviour there was nothing about his appearance that was in any way unusual. There must be a million men in London like him: roughly middle-aged, bald or shaven, stocky of build. A million, but only one of them was doing what he did. And was doing it to me.
I worked through the day and when I caught the train home in the evening I made sure I was sitting in a different carriage, further forward, a seat where I hoped to get a good view of the house. The train went along, accelerating away from the junction, and as it went past the houses I leaned forward to look. All the windows were dark, though, and because it was early evening the sky was bright behind the houses. There was nothing to see.
Kersey was coming to dinner over the weekend, with four other non-work friends to help keep him off me. It meant going to the supermarket and preparing and cooking, but I still had time to think. I had to be logical.
Who was the binoculars man and why was he naked? The answer: I did not know. I did not want to know and most of all I did not care. Big cities are full of perverts and wackos and the discovery of one more was not my problem.
But harder questions remained. Starting with this: why did I imagine he was looking at me? Couldn’t it just be chance? Maybe he stood at the window all day looking at women on trains.
It had happened twice. Once might have been chance, but twice? Coincidence? No, not chance on two consecutive days. He was looking at me, and it was deliberate.
So why me? Had he picked me at random? Perhaps he had spotted me on the same train, every day, always in the same seat, felt curious . . .
No, that did not make sense either. When a train goes by you can barely see the people on board, let alone pick any one of them out, and never mind noticing them again and again. Trains in London are not reliable: they are often late, sometimes early, occasionally cancelled, and the operators change the rolling stock unpredictably. From the track-side it’s difficult to identify any individual train.
So not random. Then had he chosen me
for some reason? Had he followed me home? Was he a stalker?
Again, no, not possible. How could he know where I lived? He was in an inner London suburb, while I lived in a middle-class dormitory town more than forty miles from the centre of the city. There was no way he could have found my house or located me in some other way, figured out which train I would be on, in which seat . . . No way in a sane or comprehensible universe.
It left only one possibility. He was someone I knew, or had once known.
Oh no.
A thought to spoil a weekend. Not long after, Kersey arrived at the house with a bottle of champagne, a wet kiss and greedy hands, and the weekend went from spoiled to difficult.
I am a woman of what is sometimes called, out of courtesy, a certain age. I am in general well and contented. I look after my health, I work out once a week, I eat sensibly and walk as often as possible. I believe I have kept most of my youthful good looks, but there is no denying the calendar and I do not try.
My name is Janine, a conventional name and my friends call me Jan. I am an independent woman, a successful businesswoman, junior executive in a graphics imaging firm that specializes in conceptual drawings for large engineering or mining companies. I enjoy my work. I pay my bills and taxes, obey the law, vote in elections, have an African child I support through a charity, clean my house, care for my friends, and much more besides. I am in short an honest, decent, kind, hard-working citizen.
Twenty years ago, though, things were different.
Yes, different. The world was different. I was different.
For a period of five or six years, from when I was about nineteen, I lived more or less entirely for the promiscuous pleasures of the flesh and the chemical distractions of the mind. I was young, single, living alone in London, free to do whatever I wanted and with whomever I wished. There were many places I could go, and many friends from which to choose. I observed no boundaries. Recklessly, I drank a great deal of alcohol, I experimented with many substances, I tried out a range of positions.
I slept with an awful lot of men – I suspect I also slept with a lot of awful men.
Now, today, do I regret that period? Do I look back on it as a kind of golden age? Do I miss that lifestyle and secretly yearn to go back to it? Was I damaged by it all? Would I recommend it to others?
Yes, No, Yes, Maybe and No.
Or then again: No, Maybe, No, Yes and Yes.
Or yet again: well, you understand.
The point is that I survived, that eventually I matured a little and cleaned up my life and found new friends and took a proper job and bought an apartment I love to live in. And became someone who pays her taxes, gives to charity, is kind to others . . .
There is no denying that past, though. Once I had eliminated other options about the man, I began to wonder if I did after all know him, and what I knew of him and, worryingly, what I might have forgotten about him.
All through that weekend, and while my guests sat around the dinner table, I thought back and back: old boyfriends, former lovers, brief encounters, all the emotional and sexual detritus left around by a paid-up member of the permissive society. When I thought about those men I remembered them, some with fond or happy or unhappy or indifferent memories. Others I recalled more vaguely, all feelings dimmed by time. I still remembered them, though.
But I did not remember every man. Somewhere in the deeper recesses of the past there was a succession of befuddled or blanked-out or forgotten one-night stands, casual pick-ups in pubs or nightclubs, chance encounters at raves or parties. There were likely to be some good memories there, but many more dark ones, some guilty, some irrelevant. Who was to know now? Everything was in the past, over and gone. I cast the forgotten to the night.
I survived, I survived, I did no harm, I hurt no one, I survived.
If I had ever been afraid that something or someone from this past would return to haunt me, that was long gone. I felt immunized by the passage of time.
It was only later, after the dinner guests had left, that my thoughts returned to my naked phantom. What if there really was someone out there who held a grudge against me? For a moment, a memory flickered at the edge of my consciousness, the ghost of a face, something I had tried to bury. I realized my heart was racing, but before I could identify the source of my fear the image had vanished.
Vanished too was Kersey, cast homeward into the night with the others, but only after a silent but determined struggle. Perhaps I should not have let his hand rest so long on my knee beneath the table, but my mind had been on other things.
The man was at the window again on Monday morning but I afforded him barely a glance. This time I wanted to identify the road in which the house was situated and I was clutching a detailed street-map of London for that purpose. Before the train had rolled slowly around the bend I had positively identified the street: Ennert Road, London SE16.
The day after that, while the man watched me I ignored him and counted the houses. He was in the fifth along.
Wednesday he was there again and I went on to work. The day after that I called in sick but I went to the station and caught my usual train. Took the window seat. Waited, read for a while, then watched the London suburbs go by. He was at his window again. After a quick glance to be sure he was there I looked away.
The train slowed down and entered London Bridge Station. No one lives in London Bridge – they just change trains there. On normal days I would sit tight as what felt like half the population of London climbed off my train and the other half piled back in, but that Thursday I joined the crowd who left the train. I walked down to street level and consulted my map.
Distances can be deceptive when you clatter by on a train – it turned out to be a long way back to Ennert Road. I had rarely walked through this part of London before. After the metropolitan bustle and noise around London Bridge, within a few streets I was passing through a less populous commercial area where former warehouses had been turned into office spaces. Beyond these was a warren of narrow residential streets, some lined with the sort of old terraced houses I had seen from the train, but in many places post-war apartment blocks rose on both sides. Cars were parked everywhere. Street signs were hard to see and even with the map I made a couple of wrong turns.
I took a break at a café. There was a taxi driver at the next table, and using my street map he gave me exact directions to Ennert Road.
Twenty minutes later I found it. Ennert Road was fairly long, but the part of the street running parallel to the rail tracks was a short section. As I arrived I heard trains going by noisily beyond the houses. I walked the length of that stretch to gain some sort of idea about the neighbourhood – many of the houses had racks of multiple bell pushes, indicating they had been partitioned into apartments. Most of them were in poor condition: the curtains looked shabby, the windows needed cleaning and the paintwork on the doors was dulled by exposure to the weather.
The fifth house along was different.
Without being conspicuously so, it was cleaner than the others, more recently attended to, the windows had ornaments and there were small potted plants on the sills. There was a single bell push by the door.
I stepped back, counted the houses again to be sure. Then I pressed the bell.
The door opened almost at once. The man who stood there was fully dressed, in baggy denim shorts and a T-shirt. He looked clean as if he had recently stepped out of a shower. He was wearing round spectacles that glittered in the daylight. For a moment I thought I was in the wrong place, but then I realized it must be him. He was staring steadily, appraisingly at me. I suppressed an impulse to stammer out an excuse, back off, run away to safety down the street.
Then he said, in a level tone, ‘You took longer to find me than I expected. Come in, Jan.’
I followed him up a short flight of carpeted stairs. Behind him wafted the scent of bath oil or sh
ower gel, but underlying that was something stronger, more animal, more of the body. For a couple of seconds, as I watched his sandalled feet climbing the steps in front of me, I was disoriented by the smell, taken back by an associative memory. I said nothing, but something deep stirred inside me: connection to him, identification of him, memory of him? I had prepared myself for anything when I called at the house, but these recollections took me by surprise.
He led me into a room with a large, uncurtained window. Sunshine flooded in. Cushions were scattered across the floor, a stack of books lined one wall, rows of music and video discs another. The pages of a newspaper were spread across the carpet. The screen of an iPad glowed mutely from beside one of the cushions.
I went to the window where there was a close view of the railway line. He stood somewhere close behind me as I glanced across the tracks. My heart was racing, my fists were clenched. There was a pair of binoculars on the sill.
Then he said, ‘Do you remember me, Jan?’
‘I think so. I can’t remember your –’
‘It’s Theo. I wasn’t using that name, back then.’
I turned to face him, and he was close to me. Too close. Again, the faint odour wafted across the space between us. Theo? Theo?
‘OK, Theo – what is it you want?’
‘You took my money. I want it back.’
‘Money?’ I was astonished. This was about money?
‘Fifteen thousand pounds. You took it and I want it now. I’ll have it in cash, and you can have a week to bring it to me.’
I wasn’t thinking about money. Associations with the man’s body smell were spreading around me, almost shocking in their unexpected clarity. I remembered a closed van in the dark of a freezing cold night, some stolen goods and money stuffed into a bag, an ancient stinking mattress laid across the compartment at the back. The vehicle was parked somewhere close to the side of a busy highway, a stream of traffic roaring by, the trucks shaking us with the violence of their close passage, brilliant beams of headlights shafting in, and this man, Theo, and me, lying on the dirty mattress, naked from the waist down, greedily going for it in that sordid dark, thinking of nothing but a carnal need for each other.
The Best British Short Stories 2014 Page 15