Jonas is a seminarian—in four or five years’ time he’s going to be a priest. I’ve never been inside his seminary, only glimpsed the grounds. A silence in the centre of London. The main entrance is a glass door set between grey pillars, and when I wait for Jonas on a Friday afternoon, sexy, soberly dressed men of every nationality pour out onto the street. Sexy because they belong to God and will never more be caressed by human hand. A strange thing, because I remember when we used to French-kiss, Jonas and I. We’d French-kissed all over the house while his parents went to concerts and galas and dinner parties. It was my idea. He said he’d never kissed a girl, and I felt sorry for him. So I showed him and showed him and showed him. “This isn’t right,” he stammered. “We’re related by blood.” But he liked it, and he was good at it. Very good at it, actually. Gentle but subtly demanding, too, the way he’d pass his hand through my hair, his lips moving over my mine, slow, savouring. He was talented, at an age when other boys were horrible kissers, just horrible and sloppy. I was fourteen then, and he was sixteen. When Jonas came to the phone I asked him if he remembered that we used to kiss. “I remember,” he said tersely. “Is that why you called?”
I meant to tell him about the letter from my father, and to ask what to do. But I could already hear him telling me that I’d have to go to the prison hospice, that place of marvel my father promised me. So I ended up telling Jonas that someone had died on the plane, and that her name was Yelena. He didn’t ask me if I was all right. He listened. He let me tell him what happened again and again, in more detail as the details came to mind.
“Why are you laughing?” he asked abruptly. It was true, I was—and not quietly, either. I managed to say that I had to go, and hung up. So he was dying! My laughter rose in pitch to equal a scream.
Maybe the letter was a trick, like my father hiding in the house, waiting for my mother to come home without fear. I’d know tomorrow, when the lawyers phoned me back.
Dinner was vodka, such a lot of vodka. And Swing Time was on TV, so I watched that.
“Listen,” Ginger Rogers said to Fred Astaire, “no one could teach you to dance in a million years!”
That dried my laughter up immediately. I turned the TV off and went to bed, to the sleep that I loved.
In the morning I Googled S. J. Fox and found a sad story—a eulogy he’d written for his wife four years ago. It was tender. Very tender, and I stopped halfway through—I had no right to be reading it. There was no mention of the word “suicide,” but it was clear to me that that was what he was getting at. Someone from his wife’s family had posted the full order of the funeral service, including the hymns sung and the psalms and Bible passages read, and they, too, pointed to suicide. Oh, you broken, broken soul, they seemed to say. There is a balm in Gilead, etc. I studied the photograph of her. Daphne Fox. She was sitting on a mossy boulder with sunshine all around her, wearing a picture hat and holding on to it at the crown so it didn’t blow away. She’d been a PE teacher at the local comprehensive school, and had given it up when she’d married him. Like someone from another age. She was a bit plump, and she smiled shyly. Not at all the type I would have expected to see with someone like S.J. She seemed to like butterflies. She was wearing a pair of butterfly earrings and a butterfly pendant. I also made out a butterfly bracelet; the wings closed around her wrist. The life of a butterfly is very short. The German word for butterfly is Schmetterling. These were thoughts I had while avoiding the fact that Daphne Fox looked familiar to me. She was a redhead, like me, but that wasn’t it. I must have just looked at her for too long.
Having ascertained the facts, the lawyers returned my calls. Their voices were serious and low. The letter wasn’t a trick. My father was very ill.
Jonas said, Go to him.
Aunt Molly said, Go to him. So did Uncle Tom.
Aunt Jane said, Go to him, Mary.
There was something morbid about their insistence. He was going to die soon, so now his words were important and had special meaning. That’s what they wanted me to believe. It was disgusting. . . .
I pretended my mother spoke to me. I pretended she said, Don’t go to him, he’s evil. Don’t forget, she said, that he had that folder full of newspaper clippings. Don’t forget how he made you look through them. Don’t forget that some nights he kept you up until you had read through all the clippings again. He’d test you. He’d watch you wilt.
Why was Fatema Yilmaz buried alive under a chicken pen?
As punishment for talking to boys. She wasn’t allowed to.
Who punished her?
Her father and her grandfather.
How deep was the hole they dug?
Three metres.
Three metres? Are you sure?
No—no. Two metres.
Correct. Why was Medine Ganis drowned in a bathtub?
Because she wouldn’t do as she was told.
Elaborate, Miel. Elaborate.
Her father chose a man for her to marry and she said she wouldn’t do it.
Who was there when she drowned?
Her father was there, and her two brothers were there, holding her down. Her mother was there, but she took no part in it.
Where in the article does it say her mother took no part in it? Don’t embroider. Silence is consent.
But it doesn’t say her mother was silent—
Enough. Why was Charlotte Romm shot to death in her bed?
Because her husband didn’t want her to know that he’d spent her parents’ life savings. But Dad—
Yes, Miel?
He shot their children, too. And her parents.
I know. But I didn’t ask you about them. Don’t answer questions you haven’t been asked.
My mother would tell him to stop it—I passed these stories on, with gruesome embellishments, to other kids at school, and their parents complained—but he said that the world was sick and that I should know I wasn’t safe in it. My mother told me not to listen to him, but it was impossible not to. I kicked open cubicle doors in public toilets, so expectant of discovering an abandoned corpse that for an instant I’d see one, slumped over the toilet bowl, her long hair falling into the water. I saw them in the dark, the girls, the women yet to be found. I counted their faces, gave them names and said the names, as if calling a class register. Here’s what I learnt from the clippings: that there is a pattern. These women had requested assistance. They’d told people: Someone is watching me, has been following me, has beaten me up before, has promised me he will kill me. They’d pointed their murderers out, and they had been told “It won’t happen,” or that nothing could be done, because of this and that, etc. I was jumpy in those days, expecting something terrible to happen to me at any moment, without knowing where it would happen to me, or why, or who would do it.
My father sent press clippings to me at school, from prison. As if to say, Your mother wasn’t the first and won’t be the last. Maybe I could have shown all the clippings to someone and somebody would have looked at his sanity again, tried to get him treatment. But that might have reduced his sentence, or they might have hospitalised him. My father, out in the world again—a thought I couldn’t think. Not ever.
A box arrived in the post, forwarded from the agency. I signed for it, and sat down on the sofa with it, afraid that it was something my father had sent to me. Then I reminded myself that his letter had come directly to me—he knew my address. Still, my hands shook as I unwrapped a brasshandled magnifying glass and a tiny book about half the size of my thumb. I turned the pages—there were only three, and each had a word written on it in a fine, light hand. Trying to breathe, I held the glass over each page and read:
You
didn’t
call. . . .
He’d included another card inside the box, allowing me the excuse of having lost the first one. He answered on the third ring, as if he’d been waiting.
“It’s me,” I said stupidly.
I thought he couldn’t hear me clearly, and wa
s about to add, “It’s Mary Foxe,” but he spoke just a heartbeat before I did. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“No.”
“Will you see me?”
His voice in my ear. It did interesting things to me. It curved my back and parted my lips. I felt lazy and feline, and he wasn’t even in the room. “Yes. When?”
“I’m in town next week—I do a couple of days a week at a private practise.”
“Call me next week, then.”
“I will.” He paused. I paused.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said, at the same time as I said, “I’m sorry about your wife.”
I recovered first. “Thank you for saying that,” I said, without emphasis. He must have found one of those stupid and unnecessary “she isn’t doing too bad for a girl whose mother was murdered” articles. He’d have had to dig deep, though. It was such a long time ago.
“Likewise,” he said.
“I’m sorry I snooped.”
He made no reply. He’d already ended the call.
“Soon, then,” I told the dial tone.
I stopped talking to Jonas and Aunt Molly and Uncle Tom and Aunt Jane. It wasn’t easy. I missed them. Especially Jonas. I attended foam parties and tube parties and hedge and highway parties. I took every job my agent could get for me. People looked at my contact sheets and told me I was doing my best work yet. I couldn’t see what they meant—the pictures looked the same as always.
It was at another charity fund-raiser that I remembered where I had seen Daphne Fox. Light hummed in crystal chandeliers. Jonas, decadent Catholic that he was, would have loved the party. Men in dinner jackets and starched white collars, throats pulsing with laughter. Yards of oystercoloured silk, and diamonds, diamonds, garnets, rubies. One old man had a walking stick topped with an emerald the size of an egg. I holed myself up in a corner with a couple of girls I knew from jobs I’d done, and we listened to the speeches and stood there drinking and looking at everything through our sunglasses, waiting for something to happen. The room was in half-darkness, raked by a roving spotlight. Every now and again someone who had been only a silhouette suddenly transformed into a pillar of flashing jewels. I hadn’t thought to wear any jewellery, and when the spotlight finally fell on our group, I stepped out of it. It didn’t take much to make my head spin just then—the sudden change from blinding light to dusk made my hands clammy. That and the cough syrup and the cocktails and the wine. I excused myself and weaved out of the ballroom, towards the toilets; a crowd of women emerged and momentarily surrounded me. “Come back,” I wanted to tell them. “Don’t leave me alone in here.”
But they had, and I walked up the row of cubicles, kicking doors and watching the mirror while a tap dripped bleakly and Muzak floated in through the speakers. I kicked the last door open and clenched my jaw against a scream—the image of a dead woman flashed fiercely, just as it used to when I was eleven; exactly like that.
It was the same woman I conjured up each time, sprawled in the cubicle with wet, dangling hair, and that bashful, almost apologetic expression—Sorry about this. The face was Daphne Fox’s. That was my last clear impression for a while.
Some time went by. A night, a very late night, I think; streetlamps spiked the dark, and no one was out. Whatever I was doing, wherever I was, I was most aware of the grinding of my teeth—the sound and the feeling. The supple clicking was a comfort.
At first I was alone, then I was with S. J. Fox, at a restaurant—potted plants as tall as trees, fancy bread rolls, tapenade, and out of a window I saw Cleopatra’s Needle dividing the sky. I was very nervous. Close up his skin was weathered and held frown fractures so fine and deep that he seemed made of them. I still couldn’t guess how old he was. I didn’t listen too closely to what he was saying. His expressions changed suddenly and completely—a frown would chase a boyish grin midway through a sentence; not even my father had switched masks so quickly. And that was what all the expressions felt like—masks. I didn’t believe them. They were too thorough, too nuanced; they were never at odds with his subject matter. He probably had to be like this because of work—he had to show people what normal, balanced emotions looked like. But that’s just not how it happens. People move from comic to tragic with the remnants of a smile left on their lips. Natural expressions linger. There was someone behind all S.J.’s masks, someone who stared mockingly and dared me to say that I knew he was there. And that was the one I wanted to meet. The unprofessional.
It took a lot of concentration not to mention his wife. I’ve never met Daphne, but I’ve seen her in my head. . . .
We walked out of the restaurant and down the street, to the hotel he was staying in. His arm was around my waist. I moved deeper into the curve of his arm as he collected his messages at reception. In the lift he gently pushed me away and made me stand on my own, facing him. “You have a gap in your teeth,” he whispered, and he filled it with the tip of his tongue. He looked at me as he did it, and I looked at him. This was no silver-screen kiss, we were in each other’s wide-open eyes, and I dared not flinch. It was a long way up—the lift kept stopping, and other people entered it and left—I couldn’t see them, only felt them, like clouds drifting around us.
His hotel room was cream and burgundy. He drew the blinds and sat down on the chair by the dressing table. I sat on the bed.
“I loved Daphne,” he said. He studied my reaction—I had opened my mouth, but I said nothing. He went on: “I did. But in the last few months she was worse than a child. She lit fires on the carpets and she threw coffee tables through locked windows. She always had to be watched.”
I couldn’t look at his face anymore, so I looked at his long-fingered hands, the way his knuckles jerked as he opened and closed his hand around the room key.
“I see. She was too much trouble—”
“That’s not what I was saying—”
“So you killed her?”
There, it was out.
“Do you always talk like this?” he asked calmly.
“Did you kill her?”
He answered with a smile. The darkest and most malignant I had ever seen, too strong to be voluntary. The door, I thought. The door. But I didn’t dare turn to it, in case it wasn’t there. His smile stayed. It stayed and stayed, until it became meaningless. It calmed me. So light-headed I stopped trying to sit straight. I dropped onto the floor, and he watched me approach, on my knees. I didn’t stop until I was looking directly into his eyes, deep in their hollows. His face tightened—he was barely breathing.
“Oh, you,” I said. “You are a man I’ve been waiting to meet.”
I took his hands. I arranged them around my throat, closed my own hands over them, tight, like a choker. “Did you kill her and get away with it? How did you get away with it?”
“She killed herself.”
I moved so that they pressed together, the two pairs of hands. I let go, then pressed them together again, made my breathing fold like bellows. It felt good. It felt like forgetting.
“Stop it,” he said. But he didn’t move his hands.
“Did you kill her? Did you kill her?”
“I said ‘Stop it.’”
“And me? Do you want to kill me? Is that why you look at me the way you do?”
“What do you want, Mary?”
I offered my lips to be kissed. He didn’t move his head, though he stayed close.
“Kiss me,” I said.
He took a deep, rattling breath. “You’re . . . a strange girl.”
“Kiss me.”
He did. My hands worked at the buttons of his shirt, carefully, slowly. He peeled my dress away from my shoulders. Then we were on the floor together. I was pinned beneath him at first. Our open mouths. Our heat. I hooked my legs around his, drank his skin, strange salt that ran like water; my hair swept across his bare chest; I was astride him by then, and I took him an inch at a time (“Wait,” I said, “wait,” pulling away every time he tried to take too much), an aching dela
y between each movement that brought him deeper. Such pleasure when he finally steadied me above him, his hands where my waist softens into my hips, such pleasure when he filled me.
“I’m sorry I said those things,” I said when we lay together afterwards. His lips brushed my forehead.
“It’s understandable,” he said. “I understand. The lightning . . .”
I hated the kindness in his voice—where did it come from? It wasn’t why I wanted him. I wanted the look in his eyes when I’d asked, “Did you kill her?” The moment in which he had hated me.
“You shouldn’t work after-hours,” I said.
He laughed softly. “Then don’t make me.”
He left me sleeping—when I woke I held out my arms to him and there was nothing, not even a note.
Another day passed, and another night, I think. Without him. Then there were a lot of people, and I didn’t know who any of them were. There were so many of them. Why so many? I realised that I was in public. I had to stay there, in public, because I didn’t know how to get home. Every direction looked exactly the same to me.
Someone took my mobile phone. Someone else took my purse. It wasn’t robbery, exactly—I must have just been sitting there, on a park bench after dark, holding out my purse and my phone, my hands like weighing scales, and then they were empty. I didn’t worry about it. I thought it was summer. “It’s summer,” I said to myself. And I saw ants troop past my feet in single file. I wondered about ants. I wondered whether within each ant there is another and another and another until finally you reached a cold small chip of the universe, immovable and displeased.
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