Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  After all, I thought, it was beginning to get better. I could live without him. Days were going past. Soon it would be a week. Then a month…

  We played poker: Gail won and Clive lost. He clowned around for her benefit and she giggled at him. She was nice, I thought. Better than Clive’s usual girlfriends. He would go off her because she wouldn’t be cruel enough to keep his adoration.

  The next day I left work at the usual time, and by the main entrance. I couldn’t hide from him for the rest of my life. I pushed my way through the doors, feeling dizzy, and looked around. He wasn’t there. I had been sure he would be. Maybe all those times I had sneaked out of the back he hadn’t been there either. A terrible disappointment rose in me, which took me by surprise. After all, I had been going to avoid him if I saw him. Hadn’t I?

  I didn’t want to go home, nor did I want to wander across to the Vine to meet everyone. I suddenly realized how tired I was. It took an effort to put one foot in front of the other. I had a dull thudding ache between my eyes. I drifted along the street, jostled by the rush-hour crowds. I peered into shop windows. It had been ages since I bought any new clothes. I made myself buy an electric-blue shirt that was in a sale, but it felt a bit like force-feeding myself. Then I dawdled along in the dwindling crowd, going nowhere in particular. A shoe shop. A stationer’s. A toy shop, where a giant pink teddy sat in the middle of the display. A wool shop. A book shop, although there were other objects that gleamed in the window, too: a small axe, a coil of thin rope. Warm air gusted from its open door, and I went in.

  It wasn’t really a book shop, though it had books in it. It was a climbing shop. I must have known that all the time. Only a few other people were in there, all men. I gazed around, noting the nylon jackets, gauntlets made from mysterious modern fabrics, the sleeping bags stacked on a large shelf at the back. There were lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and small camping stoves. Tents. Vast, weighty boots, gleaming and hard. Backpacks with lots of side pockets. Sharp-looking knives. Mallets. A shelf full of adhesive bandages, iodine swabs, latex gloves. There were sachets of food, energy bars. It looked like equipment for people venturing into outer space.

  ‘Can I help you?’ A young man with bristly hair and a puggish nose stood by my side. He was probably a climber himself. I felt guilty, as if I were in the shop under false pretences.

  ‘Um, no, not really.’

  I sidled across to the bookshelves and let my eyes slide over the titles: Everest without Oxygen, The Fierce Heights, Roped Together, The Third Pole, The A–Z of Mountaineering, First Aid for Climbers, Head in the Clouds, A Kind of Grace, On Top of the World, The Effects of Altitude, K2: a Tragedy, K2: the Terrible Summer, Climbing for their Lives, On the Edge, The Abyss…

  I pulled out a couple of books at random and looked at their index under the Ts. There he was, in On Top of the World, a coffee-table book about Himalayan climbs. Just the sight of his name in type made me shiver and feel queasy. It was as if I had been able to pretend he didn’t exist outside that room in Soho, didn’t have a life except for the life he spent with me, on me. The fact that he was a climber, something I knew nothing about, had made it easier for me to treat him as some kind of fantasy figure; a pure object of desire, only there when I was there. But he was in this book, in black and white. Tallis, Adam, on pages 12–14, 89–92, 168.

  I turned to the section of colour photographs in the middle of the book and stared at the third one, in which a group of men and a few women in nylon or fleece jackets, snow and rubble at their backs, smiled into the camera. Except he wasn’t smiling, he was gazing. He hadn’t known me then; he had a whole other life. He probably loved someone else then, though we had never talked about other women. He looked younger, less bleak. His hair was shorter and had more of a curl to it. I turned the pages and there he was, on his own and looking away from the camera. He was wearing sunglasses, so it was difficult to make out his expression or what he was looking at. Behind him, in the distance, there was a small green tent, and beyond that a swoop of mountain. He had thick boots on and there was wind in his hair. I thought he looked distressed, and although that was long ago, in another world and before me, I had an intense desire to comfort him. The agony of my renewed desire took my breath away.

  I snapped the book shut and put it back on the shelf. I took out another book and again looked in the index. There were no Tallises there.

  ‘I’m sorry, we’re closing now.’ The young man was back again. ‘Do you want to buy anything?’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize. No, I don’t think so.’

  I made it to the door. But I couldn’t do it. I turned back again, snatched up On Top of the World and took it over to the till. ‘Am I in time to buy this?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I paid and put it in my bag. I wrapped it in my new blue shirt, so that it was quite hidden.

  Seven

  ‘That’s it, pull the left string down a bit, careful not to collide with that other one. There, isn’t that satisfying?’

  In each hand, I held a spool of string that twitched and snagged in the gusts of wind. The kite – Jake’s present to me from Edinburgh – swooped above us. It was a rather swanky red and yellow stunt kite, with a long ribbon that slapped when the wind changed.

  ‘Careful now, Alice, it’s going to crash. Pull.’

  Jake had an absurd bobble hat on his head. His nose was red in the chill. He looked about sixteen, happy as a boy on an outing. I tugged on both strings randomly, and the kite veered and plummeted. The strings went slack and it accelerated into the ground.

  ‘Don’t move. I’ll get it,’ yelled Jake.

  He went running off down the hill, picked up the kite, walked with it until the strings were taut again, then sailed it up into the low white sky once more, where it pulled at its reins. I thought of trying to explain to Jake that the good bits of kite-flying – that is, when it was briefly airborne – didn’t, as far as I was concerned, compensate for the bits where it was lying on the grass with the line having to be untangled by clumsy numb fingers. I decided not to.

  ‘If it snows,’ said Jake, back beside me and panting, ‘let’s go tobogganing.’

  ‘What’s got into you? You’re a bit energetic, aren’t you?’

  He stood behind me and slid his arms around me. I concentrated on steering the kite.

  ‘We could use that big kitchen tray,’ he said, ‘or just some large bin bags. Or maybe we should buy a toboggan. They don’t cost much and it would last us years.’

  ‘In the meantime,’ I said, ‘I’m starving. And I can’t feel my fingers.’

  ‘Here.’ He took the kite from me. ‘There are gloves in my pocket. Put them on. What time is it?’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Nearly three. It’ll be getting dark.’

  ‘Let’s buy some crumpets. I love crumpets.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘There’s lots you don’t know about me.’ He started reeling in the kite. ‘Did you know, for instance, that when I was fifteen I had a crush on a girl called Alice? She was in the year above me at school. I was just a spotty little boy to her, of course. It was agony.’ He laughed. ‘I wouldn’t be young again for anything. All that worry. I couldn’t wait to grow up.’

  He knelt on the ground, carefully folded the kite and put it away in its narrow nylon bag. I didn’t say anything. He looked up and smiled. ‘Of course, being grown-up has its problems too. But at least you don’t feel so awkward and self-conscious all the time.’

  I squatted down beside him. ‘What are your problems now, then, Jake?’

  ‘Now?’ He frowned then looked surprised. ‘Nothing, really.’ He put his arms on my shoulders, nearly unbalancing me. I kissed the tip of his nose. ‘When I was with Ari I felt I was always on trial, and was never quite coming up to scratch. I’ve never felt that with you. You say what you mean. You can be cross, but you’re never manipulative. I know where I am.’ Ari was his previous girlfriend, a tall, big-boned, beautiful woma
n with russet hair, who designed shoes that I had always thought looked like Cornish pasties, and who had left Jake for a man who worked for an oil company and was away for half the year.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What are your grown-up problems?’

  I stood up and pulled him to his feet. ‘Let’s think. A job that’s driving me insane. A phobia about flies and ants and all creepy-crawly things. And bad circulation. Come on, I’m freezing.’

  We really did have crumpets, horrid plasticky things with butter running through the holes making a mess. Then we went to see an early-evening film, and there was a sad bit at the end which allowed me to cry. For once, we didn’t join everybody for drinks at the Vine or a curry, but went to a cheap Italian restaurant near the flat, just the two of us, and ate spaghetti with clams and drank abrasive red wine. Jake was in a nostalgic mood. He talked some more about Ari, and about the women before her, and then we did the whole how-we-first-met routine again – which is every happy couple’s best story. Neither of us could remember when we had first set eyes on the other.

  ‘They say the first few seconds of a relationship are the most important ones,’ he said.

  I remembered Adam, staring at me across a road, blue eyes holding me. ‘Let’s go home.’ I stood up abruptly.

  ‘Don’t you want coffee?’

  ‘We can make some at home.’

  He took it as a sexual invitation, and in a way it was. I wanted to hide somewhere – and where better than in bed, in his arms, in the dark, eyes shut, no questions, no revelations? We knew each other’s bodies so well it almost felt anonymous: naked flesh against naked flesh.

  ‘What on earth is this?’ he said afterwards, as we lay sweatily against each other. He was holding On Top of the World. I’d pushed it under my pillow last night, when he was away in Edinburgh.

  ‘That?’ I tried to sound casual. ‘Someone at work lent it to me. They said it was brilliant.’

  Jake was flicking through the pages. I held my breath. There. The photographs. He was looking at Adam in a photograph. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was your kind of thing.’

  ‘No, well, it’s not really, I probably won’t read it.’

  ‘People must be mad to climb mountains like that,’ said Jake. ‘Do you remember all those people dying in the Himalayas last year?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Just to stand on the top of a mountain and go down again.’

  I didn’t reply.

  The next morning, it had snowed, although not enough to go tobogganing. We turned up the heating, read Sunday newspapers and drank pots of coffee. I learned how to ask for a double room in French, and to say that ‘Janvier est le premier mois de l’année’, or ‘février est le deuxiéme mois’, and then I ploughed through some technical journals that I’d let pile up, and Jake went on with the climbing book. He was about half-way through.

  ‘You ought to read this, you know.’

  ‘I’m going to go to the shops to get something for lunch. Pasta?’

  ‘We had pasta last night. Let’s have a real greasy fry-up. I’ll cook and you wash up.’

  ‘But you never cook,’ I protested.

  ‘I’m changing my ways.’

  Clive and Gail came round after lunch. They had obviously spent the morning in bed. They had a post-coital glow about them, and occasionally they would smile at each other as if they knew something we didn’t. They said they were going tenpin bowling and would we like to come too, and maybe we should ask Pauline and Tom.

  So I spent the afternoon skidding a heavy black ball towards the skittles, and missing them every time. Everyone giggled a lot: Clive and Gail because they knew that as soon as this was over they would go straight back to bed, Pauline because she was planning to have a baby and couldn’t believe how her luck had changed, Tom and Jake because they were nice men, and it’s easier to join in than not. I giggled because everyone expected me to. My chest hurt. My glands ached. The echoey, overlit bowling hall made my head spin. I giggled until my eyes watered.

  ‘Alice,’ said Jake, at the same time as I said, ‘Jake.’

  ‘Sorry, go on,’ I said.

  ‘No, you first.’

  We were sitting on the sofa with mugs of tea, about six inches apart from each other. It was dark outside, and the curtains were closed. Everything was silent, the way it is when snow falls and muffles all sound. He was wearing an old speckled-grey jumper and faded jeans and no shoes. His hair was all rumpled up. He was looking at me very attentively. I liked him so much. I took a deep breath. ‘I can’t keep on with this, Jake.’

  At first, the expression on his face didn’t change. I made myself go on looking into his eyes, nice brown eyes.

  ‘What?’

  I took one of his hands and it rested limply in mine. ‘I have to leave you.’

  How could I say it? Every word was like hurling a brick. Jake looked as if I had slapped him really hard, bemused and in pain. I wanted to take it all back, return to where we had been a minute ago, sitting together on the sofa with our tea. I could no longer remember why I was doing this. He didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’ve met someone else. It’s all so…’ I stopped.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He was staring at me, as if through a thick fog. ‘What do you mean, leave? Do you mean you want to stop being with me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The effort of that word rendered me speechless. I gazed dumbly at him. I was still holding his hand, but it lay nervelessly in mine. I didn’t know how to let it go.

  ‘Who?’ His voice cracked a bit. He cleared his throat. ‘Sorry. Who have you met?’

  ‘Just… no one you know. It just… God, I’m so sorry, Jake.’

  He passed a hand over his face. ‘But it doesn’t make sense. We’ve been so happy recently. This weekend, I mean…’ I nodded at him. This was more awful than I could have imagined. ‘I thought – I – how did you meet him? When?’

  This time I couldn’t meet his gaze. ‘It doesn’t matter, that’s not the point.’

  ‘Is the sex so good? No, sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to say that, Alice. I can’t understand it. You’re leaving everything? Just like that?’ He looked around the room at all our things, the whole weight of the world we had built up together. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s that bad, is it?’

  His whole body was slack on the sofa. I wanted him to shout at me, get angry or something, and instead he smiled across at me. ‘Do you know what I was going to say?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was going to say I thought we should have a baby together.’

  ‘Oh, Jake.’

  ‘I was happy.’ His voice had a muffled quality. ‘And all the time, you were, you were…’

  ‘No, Jake,’ I pleaded. ‘I was happy too. You made me happy.’

  ‘How long has it been going on for?’

  ‘A few weeks.’

  I watched him considering, revisiting the recent past. His face puckered. He stared away from me, towards the curtained window, and said, very formally: ‘Will it make any difference if I ask you to stay, Alice? Give us another chance? Please.’

  He didn’t look at me. We both stared ahead, hand in hand. There was a great boulder in my chest.

  ‘Please, Alice,’ he said again.

  ‘No.’

  He took his hand out of mine. We sat in silence, and I wondered what came next. Should I say anything about sorting out my things later? Tears were rolling down his cheeks, into his mouth, but he sat quite still and made no move to wipe them. I had never seen him cry before. I put up a hand to wipe his tears away but he turned away sharply, angry at last. ‘God, Alice, what do you want? Do you want to comfort me or something? Do you want to see me howl? If you’re going to go, just go.’

  I left everything. I left all my clothes and my CDs and my makeup and my jewellery. My books and magazines. My photographs. My briefcase full of documents
from work. My address book and diary. My alarm clock. My bunch of keys. My French tapes. I took my purse, my toothbrush, my supply of contraceptives and the thick black coat Jake had given me for Christmas and went out into the slush in the wrong shoes.

  Eight

  It’s at a time like this when you’re meant to need your friends. I didn’t want to see anybody. I didn’t want family. I had wild thoughts of sleeping in the street, under arches somewhere, but even self-punishment had its limits. Where could I find somewhere cheap to stay? I had never stayed in a hotel in London before. I remembered a street of hotels that I’d glimpsed out of the window of a taxi the other day. South of Baker Street. It would do. I took a tube and walked past the Planetarium, across the road and a block along. There it was, a long street of white stuccoed houses, all converted into hotels. I chose one at random, the Devonshire, and walked in.

  Sitting at the desk was a very fat woman, who said something urgently to me that I couldn’t understand because of her accent. But I could see plenty of keys on the board behind her. This was not the tourist season. I pointed at the keys. ‘I want a room.’

  She shook her head and carried on talking. I wasn’t even sure if she was talking to me or shouting at somebody in the room behind. I wondered if she thought I was a prostitute, but no prostitute could have been as badly, or at least as dully, dressed as I was. Yet I had no luggage. A little corner of my mind was amused by the thought of what kind of person she took me for. I extracted a credit card from my purse and put it on the desk. She took it and scanned it. I signed a piece of paper without looking at it. She handed me a key.