Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  ‘Can I get a drink?’ I asked. ‘Tea or something?’

  ‘No drink,’ she shouted.

  I felt as if I had asked for a cup of meths. I considered whether to go outside for something but couldn’t face it. I took the key and went up two flights of stairs to my room. It wasn’t so bad. There was a wash-basin and a window looking down on a stone yard and across at the back of another house on the other side. I pulled the curtain shut. I was in a hotel room in London on my own with nothing. I stripped down to my underwear and got into bed. I got out of the bed and locked the door, then dived under the covers again. I didn’t cry. I didn’t lie awake all night pondering my life. I went to sleep straight away. But I left the light on.

  I woke up late, dull-headed, but not suicidal. I got up, took my bra and knickers off and washed myself in the basin. Then I put them back on. I brushed my teeth without toothpaste. For breakfast I had a contraceptive pill washed down with a plastic beaker of water. I dressed and went downstairs. There seemed to be nobody around. I looked in at a dining room with a shiny marble-style floor where all the tables had plastic chairs around them. I heard voices from somewhere and I could smell frying bacon. I walked across the room and pushed open a curtain. Around a kitchen table were seated the woman I had met last night, a man of her own age and shape, evidently her husband, and several small fat children. They looked up at me.

  ‘I was leaving,’ I said.

  ‘You want breakfast?’ said the man, smiling. ‘We have eggs, meat, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, cereal.’

  I shook my head weakly.

  ‘You paid already.’

  I accepted some coffee and stood in the door of the kitchen watching as they got the children ready for school. Before I left, the man looked at me with a concerned expression. ‘You all right?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You stay another night?’

  I shook my head again and left. It was cold outside but at least it was dry. I stopped and thought, orienting myself. I could walk from here. On my way down Edgware Road, I bought some lemon-scented wipes and toothpaste, mascara and lipstick from a chemist and then some simple white knickers. In Oxford Street I found a functional clothes shop. I took a black shirt and a simple jacket into the changing room. I put my new knickers on as well, wiped my face and neck with the wipes until my skin stung, then applied some makeup. It was just enough of an improvement. At least I didn’t look as if I was about to be sectioned. At just after ten, I rang Claudia. I had been intending to make up something about going through my papers but once I got her on the line, some odd impulse made me fall back on partial honesty. I told her that I was having a personal crisis that I was having to deal with and that I was in no condition to appear in the office. I could hardly get her off the line.

  ‘I’ll think of something to tell Mike,’ she concluded.

  ‘Just remember to tell me what it is before I see him.’

  From Oxford Street it was only a few minutes’ walk to Adam’s flat. When I reached the street door I realized that I had almost no idea of what I was going to say to him. I stood there for several minutes but nothing occurred. The door was unlocked so I walked up the stairs and knocked on the flat door. It opened. I stepped forward, starting to speak, and then stopped. The person in the doorway was a woman. She was alarmingly attractive. She had dark hair that was probably long but was now fastened up unfussily. She was dressed in jeans and a checked shirt over a black T-shirt. She looked tired and preoccupied.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  I felt a sick lurch in my stomach and a flush of hot embarrassment. I had the feeling that I had fucked up my entire life simply to make a fool of myself.

  ‘Is Adam there?’ I asked numbly.

  ‘No,’ she said briskly. ‘He’s moved on.’

  She was American.

  ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘God, there’s a question now. Come in.’ I followed her inside because I didn’t know what else to do. Just inside the door were a very large battered rucksack and an open suitcase. Clothes were tossed on the floor.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, gesturing at the mess. ‘I got in from Lima this morning. I feel like shit. I got some coffee in the pot.’ She held out her hand. ‘Deborah,’ she said.

  ‘Alice.’

  I looked across at the bed. Deborah pulled out a familiar chair for me to sit on and poured coffee into a familiar mug for me and a familiar mug for herself. She offered me a cigarette. I refused it, and she lit it for herself.

  ‘You’re a friend of Adam’s,’ I ventured.

  She blew out a thick cloud of smoke and shrugged. ‘I’ve climbed with him a couple of times. We’ve been on the same teams. Yeah, I’m a friend.’ She took another deep drag and grimaced. ‘Jesus. I’ve got jet-lag big league. And this air. I haven’t been below five thousand feet for a month and a half.

  ‘And you’re a friend of Adam’s?’ she continued.

  ‘Only for a bit,’ I said. ‘We just met recently. But yes, I am his friend.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, with what I took to be a knowing smile that embarrassed me greatly but I held her gaze until her smile softened into something more friendly and less mocking.

  ‘Were you on Chunga-whatever-it’s-called with him?’ Or: have you had an affair with him? Are you his lover too?

  ‘Chungawat. You mean last year? God, no. I don’t do things like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She laughed. ‘If God had meant us to go above eight thousand metres, he’d have made us differently.’

  ‘I know that Adam was involved in that awful expedition last year.’ I was trying to speak calmly, as if I had come knocking on her door just to have this coffee and friendly chat. Where is he? I was screaming inside my head. I must see him now – before it’s too late, although perhaps it is already too late.

  ‘Involved? Don’t you know what happened?’

  ‘I know that some people were killed.’

  Deborah lit another cigarette. ‘Five people. The expedition’s medical officer who was, uh…’ She looked across at me. ‘A close friend of Adam’s. Four clients.’

  ‘How awful.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’ She took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘You want to hear about it?’ I nodded. Where is he? She leaned back, all the time in the world. ‘When the storm broke, the leader, Greg McLaughlin, one of the top Himalayan guys in the world who thought he’d worked out a foolproof method for getting dorks up a mountain, was out of it. He was acutely hypoxic, whatever. Adam escorted him down and took over. The other professional guide, a French guy called Claude Bresson, a fantastic sport climber, he was fucked, hallucinating.’ Deborah rapped her chest. ‘He had a pulmonary oedema. Adam carried the bastard down to the camp. Then there were eleven clients out in the open. It was dark and over fifty below. Adam went back with oxygen, brought them down in groups. Kept going out. The man is a fucking bull. But one group got lost. He couldn’t find them. They didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘Why do people do that?’

  Deborah rubbed her eyes. She looked terribly tired. She gestured with her cigarette. ‘You mean why does Adam do it? I can tell you why I do it. When I was a med student, I had a boyfriend who was a climber. So I climbed with him. People want a doctor along. So I go every so often. Sometimes I hang around at base camp. Sometimes I go up.’

  ‘With your boyfriend?’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was years ago.’

  There was a silence. I tried to think of something to say. ‘You’re American.’

  ‘Canadian. I’m from Winnipeg. You know Winnipeg?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘They dig the graves for the winter in the autumn.’ I must have looked puzzled. ‘The ground freezes. They guess how many people they think will die during the winter and they dig that many holes. There are disadvantages to growing up in Winnipeg but it teaches you respect for cold.’ She put her cigar
ette in her mouth and held up her hands. ‘Look. What do you see?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ten fingers. Complete and unmutilated.’

  ‘Adam has toes missing,’ I said. Deborah gave an accusing smile and I smiled ruefully back. ‘He might have just told me about them.’

  ‘Yeah, right. That’s different. That was a decision. I’ll tell you, Alice, those people were lucky to have him out there. Have you ever been on a mountain in a storm?’

  ‘I’ve never been on a mountain.’

  ‘You can’t see, you can’t hear, you don’t know which way is up. You need equipment and experience but it’s not enough. I don’t know what it is. Some people stay calm and think rationally. That’s Adam.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and then left a pause so that I wouldn’t appear too eager. ‘Do you know where I can reach him?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘He’s an elusive man. He was going to meet someone in a café over in Notting Hill Gate, I think. What was it called? Wait.’ She walked across the room and returned with a telephone directory. ‘Here.’ She wrote a name and address on a used envelope.

  ‘When will he be there?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Now, I guess.’

  ‘I’d better go.’

  She led me to the door. ‘If he’s not there, I’ve got some people you might try. Let me give you my number.’ Then she grinned. ‘But you’ve got it already, right?’

  All the way along Bayswater Road in the taxi I wondered if he would be there. I constructed different scenarios in my head. He isn’t there and I spend the next few days living in hotels and wandering the streets. He is there, but with a girl and I have to spy on them from a distance to work out what’s going on then follow him until I can get him alone. I guided the taxi just past the café in All Saints Road and walked cautiously back. I saw him straight away,sitting in the window. And he wasn’t with a girl. He was with a black man who had long dreadlocked hair tied back in a pony-tail. In the taxi I had also been considering ways of approaching Adam that wouldn’t make me look like a stalker but nothing had occurred. Possible strategies were rendered irrelevant in any case because, at the moment I caught sight of Adam, Adam caught sight of me and did a double-take like in the movies. Standing there with all my current worldly possessions – old knickers, old shirt, bits of newly acquired makeup – in a Gap bag, I felt like some pathetic Victorian-style waif. I saw him say something to the man with him and then get up and walk out. There was a strange ten seconds or so in which the man turned and looked at me, obviously wondering, Who the fuck is she?

  Then Adam was on me. I had been wondering what we were to say to each other, but he didn’t say a word. He held my face between his large hands and kissed me deeply. I let the bag fall and put my arms round him, as tightly as I could, feeling the old sweater he was wearing, and his strong body underneath it. Finally we moved apart and he looked at me with a speculative expression.

  ‘Deborah told me you’d be here.’ Then I started to cry. I let him go and took a tissue from my pocket and blew my nose. Adam didn’t hold me and say, ‘There, there.’ Instead he looked at me as if I were an exotic animal that fascinated him and he was curious to see what it would do next. I composed myself to say what I had to say. ‘I want to tell you something, Adam. I’m sorry I sent you that card. I wish I’d never sent it.’ Adam didn’t speak. ‘And,’ I paused before leaping, ‘I’ve left Jake. I spent last night in a hotel. I’m just telling you this. This is not to put pressure on you. Just tell me to and I’ll go away and you’ll never have to see me again.’

  My heart was beating painfully fast. Adam’s face was close to mine, so close that I could feel his breath. ‘Do you want me to tell you to go away?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Then you’re all mine.’

  I gulped. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ said Adam, not as if he were surprised, or joyous, but as if the obvious had been acknowledged. Perhaps it had been. He looked round at the window and then back at me. ‘That’s Stanley,’ he said. ‘Turn and give him a wave.’ I gave a nervous wave. Stanley gave me a thumbs-up back. ‘We’re going to be staying in a flat round the corner that belongs to a friend of his.’ We’re. I felt a wave of sexual pleasure inside me at that. Adam nodded at Stanley. ‘Stanley can see that we’re talking but he can’t lip-read. We’ll go back in for a few minutes and then I’ll take you to the flat and I’m going to fuck you. Painfully.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You can do anything you want.’

  He leaned down and kissed me again. He ran his hand round to my back and then beneath my shirt. I felt his fingers under my bra strap, a nail running down my spine. He took a fold of flesh and pinched it hard, agonizingly. I gave a sob. ‘That hurt,’ I said.

  Adam brushed his lips against my ear. ‘You hurt me,’ he whispered.

  Nine

  I was woken by the phone. The light felt painful against my eyes. It was near the bed, wasn’t it? I found it by touch alone.

  ‘Hello?’

  I could hear some noises, traffic maybe, but nobody spoke and the receiver was replaced. I put the phone down. A few seconds later it rang again. I answered. The same nobody. Was there a sound on the line? Some whispering, very quiet. I couldn’t tell. I heard the dialling tone once more.

  I looked down at Adam’s sleepily opening eyes.

  ‘It’s the old story,’ I said. ‘If a woman answers, hang up.’ I tapped out four digits on the phone.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Adam asked, yawning.

  ‘Finding out who called.’ I waited.

  ‘So?’ he asked.

  ‘A call-box,’ I said finally.

  ‘Perhaps they couldn’t get the money in in time,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to wear.’

  ‘Why do you need anything to wear?’ Adam’s face was a few inches away from mine. He tucked some strands of hair behind my ear, then trailed his finger down my neck. ‘You look perfect like that. When I woke this morning, I thought it must be a dream. I lay here, just looking at you asleep.’ He pulled the sheet off my breasts and covered them with his hands instead. He kissed my forehead, my eyelids, then my lips, gently at first, and then hard. I tasted blood metallic inside my mouth. I slid my hands down his knotty back, on to his buttocks and pulled him against me. We both sighed, and shifted our bodies slightly; my heart pounded against his, or was it his heart pounding against mine? The room smelt of sex, and the sheets were still slightly damp.

  ‘For work, Adam,’ I said. ‘I need clothes for work. I can’t just spend the whole day in bed.’

  ‘Why?’ He kissed the side of my neck. ‘Why can’t you? We have to make up for all the time we lost.’

  ‘I can’t just not go to work again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I just can’t. I’m not that kind of person. Don’t you ever have to work?’

  He frowned but didn’t reply. Then he very deliberately sucked his index finger and slid it inside me. ‘Don’t go yet, Alice.’

  ‘Ten minutes. Ah, Christ, Adam…’

  Afterwards I still didn’t have anything to wear. The clothes that I had worn yesterday were in a sweaty heap on the floor, and I had taken nothing else with me.

  ‘Here, put these on,’ said Adam, and chucked a pair of faded jeans on to the bed. ‘We can roll up the legs. And this. That’ll have to do for the morning. I’ll meet you at twelve thirty and take you shopping.’

  ‘But I might as well just get my stuff from the flat…’

  ‘No. Leave that for now. Don’t go back there. I’ll buy you some clothes. You don’t need much.’

  I didn’t bother with underwear. I pulled on the jeans, which were rather loose and long but didn’t look so bad with a belt. Then the black silk shirt, which brushed softly against my jumpy skin and smelt of Adam. I took the leather thong out of my bag and put it round my neck.

  ‘There.’

  ‘Beau
tiful.’

  He picked up a brush and pulled it through my tangled hair. He insisted on watching me pee, brush my teeth and apply mascara to my eyelashes. He didn’t take his eyes off me.

  ‘I’ve gone to pieces,’ I said to him in the mirror, trying to smile.

  ‘Think about me all morning.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Think about you.’

  I did think about him all morning. My body throbbed with the memory of him. But I also thought about Jake and about the whole world that Jake and I had belonged to together. There was a bit of me that couldn’t comprehend how it was that I was still here, in my familiar office, stringing together well-worn sentences about the IUD and female fertility when I had thrown a bomb into my old life and watched it explode. I tried to imagine everything that had happened since I had left. Probably Jake would have told Pauline, at least. And she would have told everyone else. They would all meet up for drinks and talk about it and wonder and be shocked, and try to comfort Jake. And I, who had for so long been an established part of the group, would have become the object of their gossipy, shocked exchanges. Everyone would have an opinion about me; their own emphatic version.

  If I had left that world – and I supposed that I had – had I then joined Adam’s world, full of men who climbed mountains and women who waited for them? As I sat at my desk and waited for the lunch hour, I reflected on how very little I knew about Adam, about his past or his present or his planned future. And the more I realized that he was a stranger to me, the more I longed for him.

  He had already bought me several pairs of bras and knickers. We stood half hidden by a rail of dresses and smiled at each other and brushed each other’s hand. It was our first real date outside the flat.

  ‘These are ridiculously expensive,’ I said.

  ‘Try this on,’ he said.

  He picked out a straight black dress, then a pair of tight-fitting trousers. I tried them on in the changing room, over the top of my new underwear, and stared at myself in the mirror. Expensive clothes made a difference. When I came out, clutching the garments, he thrust a chocolate-brown velvet dress at me, with a low neck, long sleeves and skirt cut on the bias, trailing the floor. It looked medieval and stunning and the price tag told me why. ‘I can’t.’