By the third hit I had started to crack it. I’d never smoked cigarettes at school because our cycle sheds backed onto the playing field and I hadn’t wanted to get mud on my shoes. I told myself that a joint would help me to forget what I saw. Rough sleepers knew all about blotting out the night. I had a place to sleep, but there was a lunatic in the building. The thought made me giggle, then laugh out loud.
‘I saw someone die tonight,’ I explained. ‘It was funny.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘I’m not sure I do either. Forget it. OK. I have to go. I can handle it now.’ I took another hit, then handed the joint back as it whacked me.
‘Where will you go?’
‘Back to the apartment.’
‘Why don’t you stay here with me, that is if you want?’
‘Thank you, Stefan, but I’m not in control right now, and I think I should go back. I have to deal with a few things.’ I took his hand. ‘Perhaps another time.’ I thought he was going to help me up, but instead he kissed me, really pushing hard.
They’re funny things, lips. Gordon’s were thin and dry. Stefan’s were full and moist. For a brief moment I sensed what I had been missing all this time. Perhaps it was how Gordon felt when he kissed Hilary, although with the amount of foundation she wore I imagined he would have to sprinkle sand on her face to get a good grip.
At some point – later, I couldn’t remember when – Stefan’s shirt came off, and I heard buttons bouncing on the floor. His dark, soft skin smelled of sandalwood and underarm sweat that lingered on my fingers. The base of his erection pressed a denim-clad post against my crotch as he unpinned my arms and guided my hands around his hard buttocks. His chest hair formed a perfect black trapezoid, a ladder of tiny curls tracing to his navel and into the low waistband of his loosened jeans. The wide, dry palm of his hand covered my pubic bone as he slipped his fingers inside my pants. The shock of a young man’s cool bare hand over my sex was extraordinary; I couldn’t recall the last time someone had cupped me so gently, opening me so carefully, as if he was unwrapping a tissue-wrapped buttonhole.
I sank deep into the cushions, my chocolate skirt sliding from my legs. For years I had been constricted by the curse of propriety, strapped into a sensible brassiere and expected to behave as if I was shocked and disapproving all the time, but what was all the respectability for? What had the city given me back, apart from a wider choice of fabric patterns?
I knew I wanted him inside me, and allowed him to push me deeper into musky warm darkness, the muscles in his slim brown arms lifting and widening as he raised his body over mine until I could feel his stomach tense and our raised pelvic bones grate against each other, a cauterising molten centre to our bodies that could light up the little cabin and provide enough electrical power for most of the shops in Oxford Street, plus a few going down toward Marble Arch.
Stefan’s right hand slipped smoothly across my stomach and up to my breast, tapping my nipple as if nudging a fruit machine. The left supported me in the small of my back. It seemed a good idea to move further down the divan, especially as his mouth was still glued to mine and was gently forcing me in that direction. He was so light that I could hardly feel him straddled on top of me. Instead, there was the heated V of his thighs where they touched my hips, his forearms against the sides of my ribcage, and that wide outrageous tongue, coming to rest in the back of my mouth. I felt an unfamiliar warmth settling across my pelvic floor. He was everywhere at once, rolling up fabric, unsnapping elastic, and I was drowning in the divan. My rucked skirt was a suburban absurdity against the elegance of silken Arabic cloth. I was enveloped in perfumed heat, pinned through the lower, hotter heart between my legs, burning with the secret smiles of the night. Dark, flickering flames held me in place. I was somewhere I had never been, but had always desired to be.
It was a seduction conducted backwards, starting with the fierce, hard culmination, his eyes never leaving mine, his body pulling back and pushing in with decreasing connection, penetrate and withdraw, gentler and gentler, resolving to a faint and tender kiss.
Some minutes later, I realised he was sitting beside me smoking. ‘You know where I am,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Come and visit. I will be here.’
Rising carefully to my feet and testing the ground to stop it from rolling, I tried not to lose my balance. I clawed my hair back in an attempt to look sensible and in control, and pulled the container door open a crack as Stefan refastened his jeans and took a slug of wine. I drew in dank river air, trying to work out exactly what had just happened. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You are welcome, Juin.’ That smile, so wide and neon-white and dangerous. I didn’t care how much he had practised it on other women, I liked the idea of being one of the other women. It made me feel normal somehow, part of something. Strangely, I felt more in control than I ever had with Gordon.
It was still the heart of night, but a soft yellow light profiled the skyline of the Thames. Only the Ziggurat stood in sinister blackout. As I made my way across the churned-up quadrangle, the cool night air cut through the light-headed power of the joint. I pushed open the lobby door and tiptoed across the marble space, my pulse lifting as I reached the stairs. It was necessary to feel for the edges of the steps with my bare feet.
With a sobering sense of unease I climbed toward the apartment, scared to think about what I might find, but a little more prepared.
The stairs were laced with ladders of shadow. In darkness the building was a Caligari’s cabinet of disorienting angles. As I paced steadily along the corridor, a fear threshold gently nudged at my stomach wall. The joint had left me hungry and agitated. Winds fluted and scraped across the acute edges of the building, rain tapping like showers of gravel against the far windows.
Armed with the battery light, I examined the corded corridor floor once more. No blood, no marks, no sign of an anguished victim collapsing against the parchment walls.
I tore the events down into minutes and seconds. I had stepped onto the balcony and watched as the bare-breasted girl raised her arms to the sky. I had seen her in the hallway with Stitch-Head. I had entered the bedroom and found her within the strangling collar. She was less a figure of flesh and blood now than a missing frame from a film, an opaque, silvery tableau from a forgotten Victorian ghost story. If there was no body and no-one to come looking for her, how long would it be before she ceased to exist at all?
She would survive so long as I did, which was why her attacker had come looking for me. He’d been watching the building for most of the night, but had given up before I returned. All I had to do now was leave and never come back.
The remaining candles in the apartment had burned out. Propping the battery lamp against the wall, I searched among the jars, packets and tins in the warm refrigerator. There was nothing to eat at the stripped house in Hamingwell, and I couldn’t go begging to Gordon, who was on his way to Amsterdam with his pumpkin-coloured mistress. Saffron had been right, I decided. The door had a lock. All I had to do was stay the night and go the next morning.
The flat was silent, only the whispering of rain against the glass, the bluster outside tearing like rip-tides at the corners of the building. I tried to sit calmly with my eyes shut, but my heart was too noisy. In the bathroom I found cabinets stocked with pain-killers and – Lord be praised – Temazepam, good for at least four hours of slumber. Taking one of the small white pills and making my way to the bedroom, I doused the light to conserve its power and sank into the softest gooseneck-down duvet I had ever felt against my skin. I thought about Stefan, slender and tanned, lying in his casbah container, and my limbs grew heavy.
I was no longer someone’s wife but a woman, sinking into sleep, to be reborn in a giant storybook bed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
City Life
DREAMLESS DARK WAS lapped by light and the sound of distant morning traffic. Drifting yellow blooms swam across my vision, shrinking to pinholes of dust as
I opened my eyes. The rain had stopped, the sun so bright that I was forced to shade my face. The curtains had been left open. The pitiless brown paintings refused love even in sunshine.
I rose and checked my watch – nearly eight. No more pills from now on. I was glad I’d forgotten to empty the contents of the bathroom cabinet into my handbag before leaving Hamingwell. The bathroom water was still scalding hot, powered by the basement gas boilers. I scrubbed out the fuddle of sleep and felt the cool of the morning on my skin. I could no longer smell Stefan on my body.
My first instinct was to cook a breakfast of fried bread, bacon and eggs, but the cupboards had been cleared of perishable food. After years of guilt about my eating habits I wondered if it was possible to change, even though there was something pleasurably obscene about eating a fry-up in such smart surroundings. Searching the shelves I found vacuum-packed fruit, mangoes and peaches.
I slivered soft ripe flesh apart and ate, sad at the thought of leaving all this behind. My case was filled with expensive flower-print clothes that now looked naïve in such a stripped-back setting, so I settled for a grey sweatshirt and jeans before taking a final look around the apartment. I binned the items with bloodstains. I would pack and be gone within the half-hour.
It was almost possible to dismiss the previous night, but for the shears and the man with the stitched head. The world was sharp and bright, strangeness dispelled, rationality returned to its rightful position at the head of my mind’s army. Standing on the balcony nursing a ceramic tub of milky coffee, my unknotted brown hair drifting around my face, I felt a sense of sophistication for the first time in my life, not the bogus sophistication of gold-card credit but something placid inside. Apart from anything else, I had been propositioned by a very attractive young man several years my junior. The thought filled me with new confidence.
Below, matchbox traffic shunted and braked at road junctions. River launches were puttering up the Thames like battered bathtoys. A distant haze presented the London Eye in low resonance, its glinting glass pods imperceptably rotating. The futuristic ferris wheel gave London the air of a half-constructed funfair. I tried to recall Phillip Larkin’s comment about London in the sun – something about ‘its postal districts packed like squares of wheat’. I’d been wasted on the residents of Hamingwell.
A few minutes later, packed and ready, I stood in the hall and took a last look around the apartment. Everything had been returned to its rightful place. I would lose the money I so badly needed, but at least I’d be safe. I ventured back out into the top floor hall with my case and nearly had a heart attack.
‘Jesus, you made me jump!’ The young West Indian woman had a white plastic toilet brush raised in her right hand like a club. ‘I didn’t think there was anyone else here today.’
‘Neither did I.’
The young woman lowered her lavatorial mace. ‘Sorry, I’m cleaning the flat next door. I’m Fragrance.’ She snapped off a glove and shook hands with stiff-armed formality, a member of staff meeting an employer. I noticed we were dressed in almost identical clothes.
‘There’s no-one staying in there at the moment, is there?’
‘No, I don’t think anyone lives here full-time. It’s a contract job. I’ve only been doing the place a month. There’s not much to do, ash-trays, dusting, some washing up, and they’ve got their own linen service. I was told it’s for corporate hospitality.’
‘There’s not a girl staying there, very attractive, slim, about eighteen?’
‘I don’t see anyone, I’m always gone before they return. I’m supposed to do the place on Fridays but I had to take my little boy to St. Thomas’s for his ears. Did Mr. Ashe find you?’
‘Who?’
‘The man from the gas company. I told him I thought someone else was up here. You’re supposed to be out tomorrow night some time.’
‘It’s okay, I’m not going to be here anyway.’
‘It’s just for a couple of hours. He’s shutting down the system, but he’s not allowed to let anyone remain in the building while he’s doing it. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to explain. It took me ages to get away from him. He’s in the basement, a big bald man in a red hat. You must have heard that weird clanking sound.’
‘No, I’m afraid I’ve been dead to the world.’
‘I told him if I saw anyone I’d tell them. Save him coming up. I’ve got to go back to the hospital, so I’ll finish here tomorrow. Don’t worry if you hear someone moving around, it’ll just be me.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ Perhaps it was better for someone to think I was still in the building. Fragrance’s description of the gas-fitter in the basement sounded close to that of Stitch-Head. The best thing, I decided, would be to take a look from a distance. I slipped my case back into the apartment and went downstairs.
I found Ashe up an aluminium ladder hammering on a steel cylinder with the end of a spanner. Ashe was bigger. The fat at the base of his neck formed a crease beneath his shaved head, and his stomach stretched a vast oily vest over the belt of his jeans. On top of his toolbox were six pairs of pliers with different coloured handles. Gordon used to lay out his drill-bits like that. Men are genetically programmed to display tools in obscure groupings. Then they draw lines around them on peg boards. Go figure.
‘You’re not supposed to be down here,’ he called, attacking the pipe more violently. ‘You the lady in one of the penthouses?’
‘I’m just staying for the weekend,’ I lied.
‘Can’t be here tomorrow night between ten and eleven. We’re shutting the system down to install new valves, and we can only do it while the electricity is turned off otherwise it’ll trigger automatic ignition while the pipes are full of gas, and you don’t want that. Look at this.’ He pulled out a yard of paperwork covered in spidery diagrams. ‘There’s lads out there with degrees who can’t tell you what this lot means, and I’ve only got an hour to sort it out.’ I was already losing interest. ‘The power’s back on at midnight, and I don’t want to leave unignited gas building up. Health and Safety.’
‘Does that mean it’s dangerous?’
‘No, love, this electronic stuff’s state-of-the-art, which means I can’t thrash it with my spanner to get it working. I’ve never seen a place like this, everything’s arse-backwards. The workmanship’s slick but it’s all too complicated. I tell you, I wouldn’t want to live here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Microchips. Nothing’s built to a standard gauge, so you can’t fix anything yourself. Couldn’t have kids here, either, because of the low balconies, the unsupervised pool and gym, the easy-access garbage chutes to the incinerator. Doesn’t conform to Health and Safety if you ask me, but there’s ways of getting round these things. They don’t want families here, just rich singles who’ll pay the service charges and be happy to live alone with a lot of high-tech gadgets. I tried to talk to that mad French woman about it but she didn’t seem to understand, just screamed her head off at me.’ He shrugged and returned to hammering his pipe.
I was going to leave, but the day outside looked so inviting that I decided to take a walk around the neighbourhood first. I didn’t want to have to carry my case with me, so I slipped it behind a table in the foyer. As I left the Ziggurat and walked from Lambeth towards Waterloo, the morning felt freer, lighter, a gold mirror-image to those rare days before pleasure relied on spending. The city looked different at pedestrian height. You saw another London when you walked it. The atmosphere changed from one road to the next. In the most derelict areas of London perfectly preserved terraces were tucked from the view of cars and buses, so that there was hardly a part of the metropolis that didn’t hide secret streets, parks, tunnels or gardens.
I watched and listened. And I talked to a cab driver as he leaned against his cab, drinking tea on his break.
‘Oh yeah, College Place N1, Fournier Street E1, Markham Street SW3, Kelly Street NW5, parts of Commercial Road, the backstreets of Whitechapel, behind
St. Bart’s, off Hatton Garden, bits of New Cross, Southwark, Tooting, there’s what I call nice roads all over, but I’ll tell you what.’ He stuck a Kit-Kat into his tea and noisily sucked the chocolate off. ‘The posher the area gets, the more crap it becomes. Chelsea, Barnsbury, Hampstead, Highgate, they all full of bankers pretending they’re living in little villages with their organic fucking bakeries and craft fairs, and it’s bollocks. They scream blue murder if McDonalds opens in their high street, but drive through a shit part of town and you’ll see KFC bunging up takeaways that look like clown’s houses. Go to any rough area and have a look around, you soon find canals and alleys, parks, footbridges, tunnels, all kinds of hidden stuff.’ He drained his tea and smacked his lips, chucking the cup into the gutter. ‘This was a right trouble area, and now all of a sudden it’s professional. There’s people paying six million quid for a luxury flat, and they find themselves living next door to a hostel full of alkies. I’m not sure who it’s worse for. Then there’s your immigrants scratching about to make a living, just like the old lurks and sewer-hunters. We don’t have any cats-meat men no more, but we got every other bugger. Right, I’m back on duty. But I’ll tell you, anyone who says London is like everywhere else now has never done The Knowledge.’
I thought about what he’d said as I passed a bow-windowed Victorian house with a stucco façade and an overgrown front garden, standing in melancholy isolation behind lanes of stalled traffic.
I started to notice other people, and watched where they were going. A group of Asian women were heading for the gates of a small factory, their grey raincoats, headscarves and jumpers pulled on the top of bright embroidered sarees, British clothes smothering rich colours with dull common sense. They stepped into the road to pass around some teenaged girls in short-sleeved T-shirts and microskirts on their way home. A night shelter was discharging a line of homeless men wrapped in identical tartan travel blankets. A private development had two new silver-blue Ferraris on a chained-off forecourt.
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