Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  I speared a chunk of flan and pushed it into my mouth and chewed determinedly. ‘Fine,’ I said, when I had swallowed it. ‘I’m getting over something.’

  ‘Will you be all right for this evening?’ Jake asked. I looked baffled. ‘You know, stupid, we’re going for a curry with the Crew over in Stoke Newington. Then there’s a party if we feel like it. Some dancing.’

  ‘Great,’ I said.

  I nibbled some garlic bread. Jake’s mother watched me.

  After lunch, we all went for a slow walk in Richmond Park among the docile herds of deer, and then, when it was beginning to get dark, Jake and I drove home. He went to the shops for some milk and bread, and I took out an old Interflora card from my wallet, with Adam’s number on the back. I went to the phone, picked it up and dialled the first three digits. I put it down again and stood over it, breathing heavily. I tore the card up into lots of bits and flushed it down the lavatory. Some of the scraps wouldn’t go down. In a panic, I filled a bucket with water and swilled them away. It didn’t matter anyway, because I could remember the number. Jake came back then, whistling up the stairs with his shopping. It will never get worse than this, I told myself. Every day it will get a little bit better. It’s just a question of waiting.

  When we arrived they were all there in the curry house. A bottle of wine and glasses of beer stood on the table, and everyone’s faces in the candlelight looked merry and soft.

  ‘Jake, Alice!’ Clive shouted, from one end of the table. I sat squeezed against Jake, my thigh against his, at the other end, but Clive waved me over. ‘I called her,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Gail,’ he said, slightly indignantly. ‘She said yes. I’m going to meet her for a drink next week.’

  ‘There you are,’ I said, making myself do an imitation of a person having fun. ‘I’ll become a freelance agony aunt.’

  ‘I thought of suggesting that she come tonight. But then I thought the Crew might be too much for her on a first meeting.’

  I looked around the table. ‘The Crew sometimes seems too much for me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you’re the life and soul of the party.’

  ‘Why does that sound so dreary, I wonder?’

  I was sitting next to Sylvie. Across from me was Julie with a man I didn’t know. On the other side of Sylvie was Jake’s sister, Pauline, who was there with Tom, her fairly new husband. Pauline caught my eye and gave me a smile of greeting. She is probably my closest friend and I had been trying not to think of her for the past couple of days. I smiled back.

  I started to pick at somebody else’s onion bhaji and concentrate on what Sylvie was telling me, which was about a man she’d been seeing, most specifically what they’d been doing in bed, or on the bed, or on the floor. She lit another cigarette and drew deeply from it. ‘What most men don’t seem to understand is that when they arrange your legs over their shoulders so that they can go deeper in, it can really hurt. When Frank did it last night, I thought he was going to pull my coil out. But you’re the coil expert,’ she added, with an earnestly analytical air.

  Sylvie was the only person I knew who satisfied my basic interest in what other people actually do when they have sex. I was generally resistant about replying with confessions of my own. Especially now. ‘Maybe I should introduce you to our designers,’ I said. ‘You could road-test our new IUD for us.’

  ‘Road-test?’ said Sylvie, grinning wolfishly, her teeth white and her lips painted bright red. ‘A night with Frank is like the Monte Carlo rally. I felt so sore today that I could hardly sit down at work. I’d complain to Frank about it but he’d take it as some backhanded compliment, which I don’t mean at all. I’m sure you’re much better than I am at getting what you want. Sexually, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, looking around to see if anybody was listening to what we were saying. Tables, indeed whole restaurants, had a way of falling silent when Sylvie was talking. I preferred her alone in situations where there was absolutely no risk of being overheard. I poured myself another glass of red wine and half emptied it in a gulp. At this rate, and on a practically empty stomach, I’d be drunk soon. Maybe then I would feel less bad. I stared at the menu. ‘I’ll have, urn…’ My voice trailed away. I thought I’d seen someone outside the restaurant window in a black leather jacket. But when I looked again no one was there. Of course not. ‘Maybe just a vegetable dish,’ I said.

  I felt Jake’s hand on my shoulder as he moved across to our end of the table. He wanted to be near me, but just at the moment I could hardly bear it. I had an absurd impulse to tell him everything. I tilted my head on to his shoulder, then drank some more wine and laughed when everyone else laughed and nodded occasionally when the intonation of a sentence seemed to demand a response. If I could see him just one more time, I would be able to bear it, I told myself. There was someone out there. Obviously it wasn’t him, but someone in a dark jacket was outside in the cold. I looked at Jake. He was having an animated conversation with Sylvie about a film they had both seen last week. ‘No, he just pretended to do it,’ he was saying.

  I stood up, my chair scraping loudly. ‘Sorry, just got to go to the bathroom, I’ll be back in a minute.’

  I went to the end of the restaurant, near the stairs that led down to the toilets, then glanced back. No one was watching me: they were all turned to each other, drinking, talking. They looked such a happy group. I slipped through the front door and outside. The cold air hit me so that I gasped as I breathed it. I looked around. He was there, a few yards down the street, beside a telephone box. Waiting.

  I ran to him. ‘How dare you follow me,’ I hissed. ‘How dare you?’ Then I kissed him. I buried my face against his, pushed my lips against his, and wrapped my arms around him and strained my body against him. He pushed his hands through my hair and yanked my head back until I was looking into his eyes, then said, ‘You weren’t going to ring me, were you?’ He rammed me up against the wall and held me there while he kissed me again.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I can’t. Can’t do this.’ Oh, but I can, I can.

  ‘You have to,’ he said. He pulled me into the shadow of the telephone box and undid my coat and felt my breast under my shirt. I moaned and tilted my head back and he kissed my neck. His stubble rasped against my skin.

  ‘I’ve got to go back,’ I said, still straining against him. ‘I’ll come to your flat, I promise.’

  He took his hand from my breast and moved it to my leg and then up my leg and against my knickers and I felt a finger inside me.

  ‘When?’ he asked, looking at me.

  ‘Monday,’ I gasped. ‘I’ll come at nine o’clock on Monday morning.’

  He let me go and raised his hand. Deliberately, so I could see, he put his shiny finger into his mouth and licked it.

  On Sunday, we painted the room that was going to be my study. I tied my hair back in a scarf and wore some of Jake’s old jeans and still managed to drop pea-green paint on my hands and face. We had a late lunch and in the afternoon we watched an old movie on television, arm in arm on the sofa. I went to bed early, after an hour-long bath, saying I still had a bit of a stomach-ache. When Jake climbed in beside me later, I pretended to be asleep, though I lay awake for hours in the dark. I planned what I would wear. I thought about how I would hold him, learn his body, trace his ribs and his vertebrae, touch the full, soft lips with my finger. I was terrified.

  The next morning I got out of bed first, had another bath, and told Jake I would be working quite late, that I might have to go to a meeting in Edgware with clients. At the tube station, I rang Drakon and left a message for Claudia, saying I was ill in bed, and please on no account to disturb me. I flagged down a taxi – it didn’t occur to me to go by underground – and gave Adam’s address. I tried not to think about what I was doing. I tried not to think about Jake, his cheerful bony face, his eagerness. I looked out of the window as the cab crawled slowly through the rush-hour traffic. I brushed my hair
again, and fiddled with the velvet buttons on my coat, which Jake had bought me at Christmas. I tried to remember my old telephone number, and couldn’t. If anyone looked inside the taxi, they would just see a woman in a severe black coat on her way to work. I could still change my mind.

  I rang the doorbell and Adam was there before I had time to arrange my smile, my jokey greeting. We nearly fucked on the stairs, but made it into the flat. We didn’t take off our clothes or lie down. He parted my coat and lifted my skirt above my waist and pushed into me, standing up, and it was over in a minute.

  Then he took off my coat, straightened my shirt and kissed me on my eyes and mouth. Healing me.

  ‘We have to talk,’ I said. ‘We have to think about…’

  ‘I know. Wait.’ He went into the tiny kitchen and I heard him grinding coffee. ‘Here we are.’ Adam put a pot of coffee and a couple of almond croissants on the small table. ‘I bought these downstairs.’

  I discovered I was ravenous. Adam watched me eat as if I were doing something remarkable. Once he leaned forward and took a flake of croissant off my lower lip. He poured me a second cup of coffee.

  ‘We’ve got to talk,’ I said again. He waited. ‘I mean, I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your second name or anything about you at all.’

  He shrugged. ‘My name’s Adam Tallis,’ he said simply, as if that answered all my questions about him.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Do?’ he asked, as if it were all far away and long ago.

  ‘Different things, in different places, to get money. But what I really do is climb, when I can.’

  ‘What? Mountains?’ I sounded about twelve, squeaky and amazed.

  He laughed. ‘Yeah, mountains. I do stuff on my own, and I guide.’

  ‘Guide?’ I was becoming an echo.

  ‘Put up tents, short-rope rich tourists up famous peaks so they can pretend they’ve climbed them. That sort of thing.’

  I remembered his scars, his strong arms. A climber. Well, I had never met any climbers before.

  ‘Sounds…’ I was going to say ‘exciting’, but then I stopped myself from saying something else stupid and instead added, ‘… like something I don’t know anything about.’ I smiled at him, feeling giddy with the utter newness of it all. Vertigo.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘I’m Alice Loudon,’ I said, feeling foolish. A few minutes ago we’d been making love and staring into each other’s faces with a rapt attention. What could I say about myself that made any sense in this little room? ‘I’m a scientist, in a way, though now I work for a company called Drakon. They’re very well known. I’m managing a project there. I come from Worcestershire. I have a boyfriend and I share a flat with him. I shouldn’t be here. This is wrong. That’s about all.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Adam. He took the cup of coffee out of my hands. ‘No, it isn’t all. You’ve got blonde hair and deep grey eyes and a turned-up nose, and when you smile your face crinkles up. I saw you and I couldn’t look away. You’re a witch, you cast a spell on me. You don’t know what you’re doing here. You spent the weekend deciding you must never see me again. But I spent the whole weekend knowing we have to be together. And what you want to do is to take off your clothes in front of me, right now.’

  ‘But my whole life…’ I started. I couldn’t go on because I no longer knew what my whole life was meant to be. Here we were, in a little room in Soho, and the past had been erased and the future too, and it was just me and him and I had no idea of what I should do.

  I spent the whole day there. We made love, and we talked, although later I couldn’t remember what about, just little things, odd memories. At eleven he put on jeans and a sweatshirt and trainers and went to the market. He came back and fed me melon, cold and juicy. At one, he made us omelettes and chopped up tomatoes and opened a bottle of champagne. It was real champagne, not just sparkling white wine. He held the glass while I drank. He drank himself and fed me from his mouth. He laid me down and told me about my body, listing its virtues as if cataloguing them. He listened to every word I said, really listened, as if he were storing it all up to remember later. Sex and talk and food blurred into each other. We ate food as if we were eating each other, and touched each other while we talked. We fucked in the shower and on the bed and on the floor. I wanted the day to go on for ever. I felt so happy I ached with it; so renewed I hardly recognized myself. Whenever he took his hands off me I felt cold, abandoned.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said at last. It was dark outside.

  ‘I want to give you something,’ he said, and untied the leather thong with its silver spiral from his neck.

  ‘But I can’t wear it.’

  ‘Touch it sometimes. Put it in your bra, in your knickers.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Crazy for you.’

  I took the necklace, and promised I would ring him and this time he knew it was true. Then I headed for home. For Jake.

  Five

  The following days were a blur of lunch-times, early evenings, one whole night when Jake was away at a conference, a blur of sex and of food that could be easily bought and easily eaten: bread, fruit, cheese, tomatoes, wine. And I lied and lied and lied, as I had never done before in my life, to Jake and to friends and to people at work. I was forced to fabricate a series of alternative fictional worlds of appointments and meetings and visits behind which I could live my secret life with Adam. The effort of making sure that the lies were consistent, of remembering what I had said to which person, was enormous. Is it a defence that I was drunk with something I barely understood?

  One time Adam had pulled on some clothes to buy something for us to eat. When he had clattered down the stairs, I wrapped the duvet around me, went to the window and watched him head across the road, dodging through the traffic, towards the Berwick Street market. After he had vanished from view, I looked at other people walking along the street, in a hurry to get somewhere, or dawdling, looking in windows. How could they get through their lives without the passion that I was feeling? How could they think it was important to get on at work or to plan their holiday or buy something when what mattered in life was this, the way I was feeling?

  Everything in my life outside that Soho room seemed a matter of indifference. Work was a charade I was putting on for my colleagues. I was impersonating a busy, ambitious manager. I still cared about my friends, I just didn’t want to see them. My home felt like an office or a launderette, somewhere I had to pass through occasionally in order to fulfil an obligation. And Jake. And Jake. That was the bad bit. I felt like somebody on a runaway train. Somewhere ahead, a mile or five thousand miles ahead, were the terminus, buffers and disaster, but for the moment all I could feel was delirious speed. Adam reappeared around the corner. He looked up at the window and saw me. He didn’t smile or wave, but he quickened his pace. I was his magnet; he mine.

  When we had finished eating I licked the tomato pulp off his fingers.

  ‘You know what I love about you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of the things. Everybody else I know has a sort of uniform they wear and things to go with it – keys, wallets, credit cards. You look as if you’ve just dropped naked from another planet and found odd bits of clothes and just put them on.’

  ‘Do you want me to put them on?’

  ‘No, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘When you went outside just now, I watched you as you went. And I mainly thought that this was wonderful.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Adam.

  ‘Yes, but I suppose I was also secretly thinking that one day we’re going to have to go out there, into the world. I mean both of us, together, in some way. Meet people, do things, you know.’ As I spoke the words, they sounded strange as if I were talking about Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. I became alarmed. ‘It depends what you want, of course.’

  Adam frowned. ‘I want you,’ he s
aid.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not knowing what ‘yes’ meant. We were silent for a long time and then I said, ‘You know so little about me, and I know so little about you. We come from different worlds.’ Adam shrugged. He didn’t believe any of this mattered at all – not my circumstances, my job, my friends, my political beliefs, my moral landscape, my past – nothing. There was some essence-of-Alice that he had recognized. In my other life, I would have argued vehemently with him over his mystical sense of absolute love, for I have always thought that love is biological, Darwinian, pragmatic, circumstantial, effortful, fragile. Now, besotted and reckless, I could no longer remember what I believed and it was as if I had returned to my childish sense of love as something that rescued you from the real world. So now I just said, ‘I can’t believe it. I mean, I don’t even know what to ask you.’

  Adam stroked my hair and made me shiver. ‘Why ask me anything?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you want to know about me? Don’t you want to know the details of what my work involves?’

  ‘Tell me the details of what your work involves.’

  ‘You don’t really want to know.’

  ‘I do. If you think what you do is important, then I want to know.’

  ‘I told you already that I work for a large pharmaceutical company. For the last year I’ve been seconded to a group who are developing a new model intrauterine device. There.’

  ‘You haven’t told me about you,’ Adam said. ‘Are you designing it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you doing the scientific research?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you marketing it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, what the fuck are you doing?’

  I laughed. ‘It reminds me of a lesson I had at Sunday School when I was a child. I put up my hand and I said that I knew that the Father was God, and that the Son was Jesus, but what did the Holy Spirit do?’