Over the days and weeks that followed, the houses filled with couples and families, and the darkness was pushed from the houses and streets, forced further and further back into the fields and hills behind the estate. He watched the vans filled with possessions unload as the streams of people’s lives ran to identical doors. Furniture was tilted and squeezed through doorways, appliances were flipped on, boxes opened and unpacked.
Martin watched all of this from the upstairs window. Neighbours did not come out and help or greet the newcomers. No-one called next door to say hello and introduce themselves. They unpacked their cars and emptied the removal vans, then went inside and closed the door. At night, no-one walked outside. The furthest anyone would walk was to the door of their car. All of the lives on the New Acre Estate were being lived behind closed doors, tucked safely into the new houses on the hillside.
Martin continued to write the story of Gregor Alskev. Every day Alison caught the train into the city and he filled the computer screen with words. He didn’t have to clear away his notes or shut down his computer when Alison came home, he just moved downstairs and spent the evening with her. Gregor Alskev stayed up in the writing room.
***
Chapter Six
Gregor and Lucy drive away from the heart of the city, with the great broad river to their left. Old spreading trees shelter the road and the houses hide behind ornate walls. Above the branches Lucy sees thin clouds passing over the stars like smoke from a distant fire. She imagines that it comes from Archie’s filthy flat, that everything in that place is now ash. She closes her eyes and imagines flames curling up the side of the wall-sized plasma TV, melting the image of the woman. She imagines the blood on the floor heating up, the thick red pool bubbling.
Gregor turns the car suddenly right. She opens her eyes and sees a long shadowed driveway, with dense hedges on either side. In front is just blackness.
“Where are we going?”
Gregor doesn’t answer.
* * *
Martin stopped writing. Through the window behind him the sky had darkened to a deep charcoal blue and the glow of the computer screen in front of him was the only light in the room. He turned off the computer and went downstairs.
He was still watching the car pass through the city as he kissed Alison’s cheek and asked her how her day was. As Alison put their plates on the table and sat opposite him he was on the bonnet of the car, looking at Gregor and Lucy through the windscreen, rocking and bumping with the rolls of the road, the warmth of the engine beneath him, feeling the city wind in his face.
As Alison told him about where she had been thinking of going on holiday this year, Martin heard the rattling drone of the engine, the wheels on the street, the buzz of the city. He saw the pale drawn skin of Lucy, watched the changing reflections of the passing shop windows in her eyes, studied her wide mouth and angular cheekbones, her thin nose and the dark long lashes. He leaned in through the windscreen to see the colour of her eyes, green with flecks of silver, like sunlight shining on a shallow coral reef. He followed the line of her profile as she looked out the side window, so defined, her sharp chin and elegant neck. He saw her turn to Gregor and he heard her voice as she said slowly, “I want to go to Mexico.” Alison was filling his wine glass and saying, “It’s expensive, but wouldn’t it be something?” Lucy turned away to look at the passing city and said quietly, “Mexico looks so good.”
* * *
The headlights show a set of tall gates which open as they approach. An old Georgian style house is revealed, with an arch over the front door. Gregor pulls up and walks around to her side of the car, opening the car door. Cold air hits her and she pulls the jacket closer around her, bringing her knees up to her chest.
“Come on,” he says, “it’s warm inside.” He takes her by the arm and they walk across the gravel to the front door. He switches the light on and the hallway appears. It is big enough to hold Archie’s apartment, with warm amber walls and a wooden floor. A gloriously patterned rug with swirling patterns of shimmering gold on deep violet runs all the way to the foot of the stairs. As they walk across it Lucy looks at her dirty bare feet on the thick weave and finds herself squeezing Gregor’s arm. She stops. He glances at her, then walks ahead.
“We’ll get you some clothes upstairs.”
As she follows him through the grand hallway she sees a door ajar, opening to a parlour room. The stairs are elegant with a carved banister, which is smooth and warm to touch, like recently bathed skin. There is a little landing area and the stairs turn back toward the front of the house. Lucy follows Gregor as he goes up another flight, turning lights on as he goes. At the top, the walls are a yellow cream from the ceiling down to a dado rail and beneath the wooden rail is wallpaper, textured ridges of swirling paisley patterns encrusted with purple and silver.
“Do you live here alone?”
“Not anymore.”
There are four doors and Gregor leads her to the furthest one on the right. He opens it and gestures inside. Lucy walks into a bedroom. A mound of pillows and cushions cover the double bed. On the wall is a painted portrait of a little girl, her blond hair tied into pretty plaits. Her painted face is on the verge of tears. Lucy touches the canvas.
“Who is that?”
Gregor is still standing in the doorway. “Who does it look like? It looks like you maybe?”
A large window is sunk into the deep outer wall, with a cushioned sill. Lucy can see the driveway and the black four-by-four, the gate and beyond. The lights of the city pulse in the distance, from the high rises and the houses, like every building has a fire inside, hollowing it out. She turns and Gregor is standing in the doorway with a blue tracksuit in his hands. He hands it to her.
“Here, try this,” he says, “we’ll get you fixed up in the morning. I’m going to get some food. Make yourself at home.”
Then he is gone, padding away down the hall. The front door shuts.
Next to the bedroom door Lucy sees a circular mirror, the ring frame of which looks like it is spun from golden strands of silk. Half-closed eyes squint out from dark pits and her cheekbones protrude above hollow cheeks. Gregor’s car rumbles down the rattling gravel, past the iron gates, which then whir slowly closed. She is alone. A grey ghoul stares at her from the golden frame. Is this what Archie has done to her? She turns away from the mirror.
She puts the bottom half of the tracksuit on and pulls Gregor’s jacket tighter around her; she is getting used to its smell. She goes back out to the landing and opens one of the doors to a pristine bathroom, white tiled with a large corner bath with steps into it. Towels are folded neatly over a rail on the wall, matching the pale blue colour of the sink and toilet. Through another door is a large room with a running machine and a weights bench, a blue mat on the floor and a TV screen that fills the wall. She tries the other two doors but they are locked.
She kneels and runs her fingers over the swirling silver and purple on the bottom half of the walls. Then she stands and goes back down the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase she turns right through to the TV room. There are two large sofas, a big screen television, and a wall of books. As far as she can make out they are all biographies: Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Ted Bundy, Dennis Nilsen. Heroes, statesmen, and killers side by side.
Lucy walks through double glass doors into the kitchen. She flicks the light switch and a smooth light grows from the bulbs embedded in the ceiling revealing a mesh of the old and the new: a stone sink with a hand basin that looks like it has been carved from an ancient mountainside, and a sleek coffee machine with a green digital display. The cupboards are muted green and stretch from floor to ceiling and match the colour of the pots and pans hanging from hooks on the opposite wall. In the centre of the room a stone plinth like a derelict Greek column rises and is topped with green marble, smooth, glossy, and embedded with the crisscross of fine white threads.
Lucy touches the smooth surface. She sees it as a piece of a distant
planet, the reflections from the bulb above like the glow of a sun, the web of white lines scars on the rock surface and dry river beds, a landscape she will never experience.
Every surface in the kitchen is clean. There are no crumbs, no coffee cup rings on the worktops. The fridge, tall and silver, stands in the corner. Lucy sees her distorted reflection. Her head looks tiny and squeezed, the jacket she is wearing bulges and grows, and her blue track-suited legs look short and fat. As she moves, her reflection elongates and slides, her body follows her head, squashed and stretched, and she walks to the back of the kitchen through an archway and into the dining room. There is a long table of thick old wood and sturdy wooden chairs sit heavily on the stone floor. Off to the left another archway shows the first steps of a staircase curving out of sight.
On the other side of the table are glass sliding doors, and Lucy sees herself again, skinny and grotesque. She walks toward herself before cupping her hands around her eyes and peering through the glass. She sees grass and overgrown flower beds, old trees, and a statue of two lovers in an embrace, their two bodies joining at the hips and melding into one, curving gracefully into the earth. Lucy pulls at the doors but they are locked.
She walks back through the kitchen and out into the hallway where she came in and she sees the door of the parlour again, half-open. Inside is a room painted white and a large sleek table, dark polished wood with office-style chairs around it. On the wall hangs a painting, luscious but elusive, a web of blues, greys and reds, with streaks of light and shapes appearing and disappearing behind each other. The more she looks at it, the more the colours move and shapes slide across the canvas. Lucy is overcome, and a dizziness sways her.
She backs out of the room to the hallway until she feels the thick rug beneath her feet. Then she lies down. There is not a sound. It is a silence inside a beautiful ornate box, sealed tight. With her cheek on the violet weave with golden spirals, she closes her eyes. She sees again the flames rise in Archie’s little flat, burning, burning.
***
Chapter Seven
Now that he had his own writing space, Martin could let Alison go to bed and work. If she wanted to watch something on TV that he didn’t like, whereas before he would have stayed on the sofa with her telling her what a waste of time the programme was, now he could go up to his writing room and close the door.
In the six months that had passed since they moved in, Alison noticed that he was talking less. To her anyway. Sometimes she would come to his door before saying goodnight and hear him muttering. She would open the door a bit and he would jump up to kiss her goodnight.
“You not coming to bed then?” she would say.
“In a bit, babe,” was his usual reply. At the threshold they would hug and then he would close the door again and she would turn and go to the bedroom.
There on the bedside table were the magazines and catalogues of things to make their new home more comfortable, more beautiful, more individual. She would browse through them until she felt tired enough to turn the light off. In the hallway a thin strip of light escaped from beneath Martin’s door, and Alison could hear the tap-tapping on the keyboard.
This was how it went on, Martin in his room with the door closed and Alison on the outside hearing the tap-tap-tapping. Martin wrote and wrote until he had completed a first draft. He sent it through to Noire.
Alison stood in the doorway. “Does this mean I’ll get you back? You need a break anyway, it can’t be good for you to be locked away in that room all day and night. When will you know?”
“When they’ve had time to read it, I guess.”
“Well they can take their time, so I’ve got you all to myself.”
* * *
The first time Alison had ever heard Martin mention Lucy it was a Friday night and Alison had still not changed out of her suit. When she got through the door from work she was ready to just get changed and go out for some food and some drinks. She had texted Martin to tell him not to bother with dinner, that they would go out, so she was expecting him to be changed, for the place to be clean, for her evening to be ready to begin. Instead Martin was still in his slacks and his dressing gown. He was sitting at the kitchen table with the laptop open in front of him. She knew there was something wrong. He showed her the email from Noire.
Gregor Alskev is great, it said, but what has happened to the detective? Henry Bloomburg is the one we fell in love with through your stories in Noire. We were expecting a story about him.
“But that’s okay,” she said, “that’s positive. Look, they fell in love with the detective. In love. Sweetheart, that’s great.” She really wanted to get out of her shoes and her suit. “You just have to figure it out. Let’s go out and talk about it at Giorgio’s or the Mexican place. Come on, get your things on.”
“But it’s Lucy’s story,” he said. She stopped with her foot on the stairs.
“Who’s Lucy?”
He didn’t answer.
* * *
They went out to Giorgio’s. There was a wait for a table, so as they sat at the bar, Alison asked again.
“Who’s Lucy?”
Martin rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. “She’s involved with Gregor.”
“And it’s her story?”
“Yeah, it’s her story.”
“Well, everybody’s got different ideas about stories, don’t they? You can’t expect them to think exactly the same way as you. Do you have to do a new one? Can’t you just change it? Can you do it that way?”
A smiling barmaid slid a small plate of black olives in front of them, each one speared on a cocktail stick. Her hair was brown and tied back in a ponytail. Her complexion was tanned and her teeth seemed almost to glow white in the low light of the restaurant. Alison smiled back. Martin shifted on his bar stool.
“Your parents are still together,” he said.
Alison nodded. He knew they were. He had met them both at their house. Well, their house-boat. They had spent two days there, on the lake. Alison had felt so happy, finally bringing a man she could say she loved to meet her parents, and she knew Martin would love it. He did.
It was a two storey wooden house set on a floating platform. For the first twenty minutes or so, Martin just stood in front of the wall of glass that looked out on to the lake and the mountains beyond. The water came right up to the base of the wall and swans and ducks floated past, just a few feet away. The sunlight hitting the water bounced through the window and around the room, throwing intensities of light like a diamond turned in the hand of a jeweller.
Her mother said to her as they prepared dinner, “He’s very sensitive, isn’t he? Quiet. Just lovely.”
Martin and her father didn’t have much to say to each other at the start. By the end of the second day they were playing chess and drinking brandy while discussing the politics of the impending energy crisis.
“Your parents are still together because their story stayed the same. Mine broke up because I changed their stories. For my mother, after I was born, the story was now about me, do you see? Everything was now in relation to that. But for my dad the growth of a child was too slow, too predictable a plot.”
Martin had never gone into much detail about his family. Like Alison he was an only child, but his upbringing was very different. His father had left and come back several times, and each time his mother had accepted him back. Alison got the impression that he was a womaniser who probably had more than one family on the go, but Martin still held an obvious affection for him. His mother had several relationships with different men, and Alison knew that Martin resented that. But each relationship ended as soon as his father came back, and then within months he would be gone again.
In all the time Alison had known Martin he had never talked of contacting either of his parents. She thought it odd that he was talking about them now. She was chewing on the olives and placing the sticks neatly in a row at the side of the plate.
“Hmm, it seems like they chang
ed their own stories. I mean, you didn’t consciously do anything to make them act the way they did.”
“No, but the very fact that I was there changed everything for them.”
“I don’t see what you’re driving at. What has this got to do with the story you are writing?”
“If Bloomburg comes into it, just the fact that he is there will change everything. Everyone’s story will change.” The smiling bar lady was back and asked them did they want to top up their glasses. They did, and while she poured the wine she apologised for the wait. She was pretty sure that a table was coming free any minute now. It is usually very busy on a Friday. She spoke with a thick Australian accent.
Alison said, “Thanks. We usually book, but tonight we just came out.”
“I know,” said the waitress, “it’s not like you can plan everything is it? I mean, look at me. I was only going to stay here two weeks. That was two years ago.” They laughed.
“Something must have caught your interest then,” Martin said.
“Well, something or someone,” she replied, raising her eyebrows and smiling her neon smile. “I will let you know soon as that table is free, guys,” and she walked away.
“But Martin, you are in control. It’s up to you what happens,” said Alison.
“Ah, that’s it, that’s not the point. The point is, the point is—” Martin ate another olive and placed his little stick down across the neat line Alison had created on the side of the plate, like a bar in a fence, “—the story is about Lucy. If Bloomburg comes along, everyone’s story will change.” He pushed the plate away and turned around in his bar stool, scanning the restaurant.
Couples and small clusters of people ate and talked and poured each other’s wine and water. How many stories were changing right now, in this room? How many people would rise after this meal, wipe their mouths with their napkin and pay the bill, with their lives altered? None, Martin thought. Because even when people made decisions it was not until the action was carried through that change actually occurred. And actions can be deferred. How many life-changing moments are there in a lifetime? He saw a waiter place a fresh tablecloth and wine glasses on a table for two near the door. He turned back to the bar.
The Fly Guy Page 5