Close Your Eyes

by Robotham, Michael

  ‘Sometimes a stutter is just a stutter,’ I say. ‘We all have foibles and tics.’

  ‘Do I have foibles?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘They don’t matter.’

  ‘I want to know.’

  She has turned in her seat, fixing me with her gaze.

  ‘Well, let’s see. You dress quite more modestly than a lot of your friends. You don’t like tight tops or low-cut blouses or short skirts.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘When you’re worried about something the twin frown marks between your eyes get deeper. And you climb the stairs one step at a time instead of two. You’re also impatient with Emma.’

  ‘She’s annoying.’

  ‘She loves you.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘When you drive you always check the mirrors in a certain order and tap your right leg three times before putting the key in the ignition. It’s a small ritual you have – I don’t know why. I also think you quite fancy Nina’s brother Jake.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘You act differently when he’s around. You tease him and twirl your hair. You’re blushing now.’

  She touches her cheek and says, ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nothing much is said on the rest of the journey. Charlie rests her head against the side window, staring at the passing fields.

  Eventually, she speaks. ‘Those people living in that street – some of them were looking out of their windows; they could see what was happening, but nobody came to help me.’

  ‘They were scared.’

  ‘When does someone stop being scared? What if I’d been drowning, or the car was on fire? Would they have done something then?’

  ‘Yes, most likely. Often it’s a split-second decision. If we spend too long thinking about it, we talk ourselves out of it, or reach a kind of paralysis that stops us making a decision. We think someone else will step forward.’

  ‘But you always step forward,’ says Charlie. ‘That’s why Mummy gets angry. She says you try to be a hero, when you’re not meant to be one.’

  ‘I don’t try to be a hero,’ I say.

  ‘You know what I mean. Would you die for a stranger?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about for me or Emma or Mummy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Charlie seems to ponder this. ‘I don’t know if I could do that.’

  ‘You won’t ever have to,’ I say.

  Another thought occurs to her. ‘Mummy can’t know about this. You know what she’s like. She’ll say it’s your fault. She’ll kick you out of the house again. We have to keep it a secret.’

  ‘What do I say about the broken window?’ I ask.

  ‘Tell her someone tried to break into the car.’

  ‘To steal what?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do thieves normally steal? Radios. Mobile phones. I’ll say I left my phone in the car.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have to lie,’ I say, knowing that my daughter is right. Julianne doesn’t need to know about this. She has enough on her plate.

  37

  Watching a woman dress is far sexier than seeing her undress. It’s akin to a dance without music, a silent ballet where every movement is so practised and easy. Julianne lays a skirt on the bed and begins looking for a matching top. She decides and then changes her mind. Looking on, I revel in the familiarity of the scene.

  ‘Sorry it’s taking so long,’ she says, going back to the wardrobe.

  Having decided, she sits on the bed and rolls her tights over her legs, leaning back to pull the opaque black fabric over her thighs and her buttocks. (Less sexy, but still watchable.) Then she stands and shimmies into the dress, letting the fabric fall to just below her knees. Turning left and right, she checks out her reflection in the mirror.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ I say.

  ‘It takes a lot of work.’

  ‘You’ve always been beautiful.’

  She rolls her eyes, dismissing the compliment, but I know that secretly she’s pleased. It’s not pretence or false modesty. A woman such as Julianne favours self-deprecation over self-assertion. It makes her feel more comfortable and less objectified, although sometimes I wish she could simply accept an accolade and say thank you.

  I have booked a window table at her favourite restaurant along with champagne and flowers. Too much, I think, but I’m not very good at this. When I proposed to Julianne I sounded like Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral (and every other film), umming and ahing, stopping and starting, mumbling and apologising.

  She’s ready. I follow her downstairs. Charlie and Emma look over the banister as though they’re watching all their well-laid plans come to fruition.

  When did tonight become such a big ‘thing’?

  We take Julianne’s car. I don’t want her seeing the Volvo. I let her drive. In profile I see an eyelash brush against her cheek and the pink shell of her ear poking through her hair.

  ‘How did Charlie get on?’ she asks.

  ‘Great,’ I say. ‘She picked up something that we’d all missed.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘There are three hours missing from one of the timelines. Charlie found a sketchbook with a date. It might tell us what the girl was doing in the unaccounted hours.’

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘Could be.’

  Twilight has descended on the landscape as the angled sun creates a soft aura of light around the trees. I see a family picking strawberries in a field, stencilled like cardboard cut-outs against the light.

  ‘Do you wish I had chosen to be something else?’ I ask. ‘Not a psychologist, I mean.’

  ‘I would have fallen in love with you regardless.’

  ‘Why did you choose me?’

  ‘You had kind eyes.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘You were clever, but you didn’t show off. You had a nice smile. I had gone out with boys who were handsome, but a lot of them were pretentious, vain or just stupid.’

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘No.’

  I want to ask her if she’s still in love with me, but I’ve learned not to lead with my chin.

  ‘It’s weird to think we have an eighteen-year-old daughter,’ she says.

  ‘You were nineteen when you met me.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Charlie falling in love.’

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘Should we hope that it doesn’t happen too soon?’

  ‘No.’

  We park the car and she slips her arm into mine, leaning against my shoulder as we walk. ‘Do you remember when we met?’ she asks.

  ‘That pub just off Trafalgar Square.’

  She smiles. ‘It was actually before then – at the Student Health Service Clinic.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh, I’m certain. Rowena was with me. She thought she’d caught some terrible STD after a one-night stand with the drummer in a pub band called Chernobyl – which says a lot about Rowena’s taste in men and music. I went with her to the clinic. It was on the ground floor of the Geography building at the Mile End campus. You were a medical student doing a clinical rotation. It was only your second day. You were dressed in a white coat with the stethoscope around your neck and looked absolutely terrified. The doctor in charge asked you to draw blood. You told Rowena, “It’s just a little prick,” and I said, “That’s not what the drummer said,” and Rowena glared at me and said ouch every time you stuck the needle in her.’

  ‘I couldn’t find a vein.’

  ‘I know. You asked Rowena if she drank a lot of coffee and she thought you were asking her out.’

  ‘She was dehydrated.’

  ‘She was hung over.’

  ‘I did manage to find a vein.’

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t notice you.’

  �
�Rowena had bigger tits.’

  ‘I didn’t look at her tits.’

  ‘She said afterwards you were gay.’

  ‘Gay?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Do you remember what she said to you?’

  ‘Something about not specialising.’

  ‘She told you not to become a gynaecologist because no girl would want her boyfriend to spend all day looking at other women’s bits.’

  ‘There wasn’t much mystery about Rowena.’

  ‘True.’

  I can’t believe that Julianne has never told me this story before. I thought all our biographies had been written and rewritten and there were no surprises left; all questions posed, all anecdotes recalled. In my mind we first met at a pub near Trafalgar Square after an anti-apartheid rally in front of the South African Embassy. I’d given a soapbox speech from the back of a truck. Julianne introduced herself. My best mate, Jock, tried to chat her up, telling her he’d grow to be a better man around her. Julianne told him that a hard-on didn’t count as personal growth.

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ she asks now.

  ‘Jock.’

  ‘He was such a rogue.’

  ‘He and Rowena would have made a good pair.’

  We’ve reached the restaurant. It is one of those incredibly trendy places done out in polished concrete and chrome, where you can look through to the kitchen and see eruptions of flame bursting from a wok or frying pan. The menu is almost completely indecipherable. I have never heard of caramelised witlof, katsuobushi, or bagna càuda. Our waiter reminds me of a greyhound and his French accent is so thick that I avoid the ‘specials’.

  We order and eat. The reminiscing hasn’t finished. Julianne talks about our wedding at a little church in Chiswick, our two families separated by a central aisle. My side was full of doctors, surgeons, university buddies and family. Julianne’s side had painters, sculptors, poets, nude models, actors and designers. She was barely twenty-two. Not yet finished her degree. I was a trainee psychologist – having abandoned medicine.

  We danced to Lyle Lovett’s ‘She’s No Lady, She’s My Wife’. We cut the cake. We mingled. We grinned at each other. I made a speech poking fun at myself and she scolded me afterwards.

  ‘You made yourself sound hopeless.’

  ‘I am hopeless around you.’

  I think every couple embellishes how they met, romanticising the moment, polishing the details into a shiny creation myth. I was older, but Julianne was worldlier. She had spent a year in Paris and Florence – a gap-year odyssey that involved lots of red wine, dope-smoking and riding on the back of motorcycles with boys called Marco and Paolo. She had experienced Europe, while I had only observed it on family holidays that corresponded with the medical conferences where my father was speaking.

  I don’t know why Julianne chose me. Perhaps I was reliable and stable – the entry-level requirements – or maybe it was something to do with her losing her father when she was barely in her teens. Perhaps she valued my rational mind after spending so long with an irrational one.

  We keep chatting over coffee and herbal tea. By then we’ve talked about Charlie’s birth and how long we waited for Emma. It’s strange reminiscing like this. When we split up I told Julianne that she was throwing away twenty years and she said, ‘You don’t throw away the past. It will always be there.’

  I still can’t explain exactly why we separated six years ago. It was easy to blame the Parkinson’s. She could see the writing on the wall, growing spidery and small as my tremors grew worse. But it was never the disease, and it wasn’t boredom or the desire for something new. I let my work get too close. I put Julianne and the girls in danger.

  Would we have lasted anyway? Who knows? Even the best of marriages can become like a Pinter play, with long pauses, or characters finishing each other’s sentences or having no dialogue at all.

  When I was thirteen I used to go looking for bodies washed up on the beach. In my imagination I found dozens of them. Not bloated or decomposing – they looked untouched and almost alive, rolling in the shallows, or washed up on the shingle, skin pale, eyes open.

  I don’t look for bodies any more. That was childish. I’m a grown man now with responsibilities, but it still occurs to me whenever I read stories of fishermen going missing at sea or swimmers getting caught in treacherous currents. I wonder where their bodies might show up and who might find them.

  They say that adolescence is when every child becomes an orphan. I was alone long before then, but something did wake in me. It stirred and it roared and it would not be put to sleep. I discovered girls and nothing was ever the same. Some were so beautiful my heart would ache. I would sit behind them in class or at the cinema, memorising every inch of their tanned legs or the soft, almost translucent hair on the nape of their necks, the swell of their breasts, the curve of their eyelashes. I could tell them from the way they walked, or laughed, or tossed their hair.

  A girl called Daniela was the first to steal my heart. I saw her in a cinema queue in Bristol. She was with a girlfriend and gave the smallest of glances in my direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw her clearly and in that instant I appreciated true beauty. I wanted to sit next to her. I wanted to smell her hair and hold her hand and hear her voice.

  When the movie was over I followed her. Not in a creepy way. I wanted to know her name and where she lived and went to school. I caught her bus and sat behind her. She didn’t notice. I didn’t turn her head or lift her chin or raise her pretty plucked eyebrows. I was ordinary, nondescript … invisible.

  A week later I was behind her again in the cinema queue. An older boy made this fphwawwww sound and shook his right hand as though scalded. ‘Get a look at that,’ he said, nudging his mate. ‘She could sit on my face any time.’

  His mate laughed. The boy’s name was Adam Landrey. I knew that because he played league football and had trialled for Manchester United when he was only fourteen. He started chatting to Daniela. She laughed.

  ‘Sit next to me,’ he said. ‘I won’t bite, but I can’t promise I won’t eat you.’ He poked out his tongue and wiggled it up and down.

  I wanted him dead. I wanted him burned or crippled or deformed. I wanted to cut out his wriggling pink tongue.

  Daniela should have slapped him. She should have belittled him or ignored him. Instead she sat next to him and I watched them whispering during the movie. I saw him put his arm around her shoulders and his hand slip down and squeeze her breast. She didn’t push it away. I will never understand that. Why do women rail against sexism and chauvinism, yet they let someone like Adam Landrey paw their tits?

  People say it’s a man’s world, but women let us be that way. They could chase off the cavemen or demand they change, but instead they pander to the jocks and alpha males and brutes. Maybe they imagine they can tame the savage beasts, but instead they perpetuate the cycle of chauvinism and misogny.

  I wonder whether the psychologist would agree. He’s on a date tonight – eating out with someone who might be his wife. She’s not wearing a wedding ring so they might not be married, yet there’s something very practised about their body language, as though they’ve had these conversations before.

  I’m sitting at a bus shelter across the road, looking at them through the front plate-glass window of the restaurant. Buses come and go. I wave them on. A woman watches me from the near corner. A while ago she came and asked me for a light. I thought she might be a prostitute, but she didn’t ask for anything else.

  My stomach is gurgling hungrily. There’s a fish and chip shop up the road and the smell of fried food is sticking to my nostrils. I did contemplate getting cod and chips, but was too anxious about missing my chance.

  Three women, drunk, arms locked together, are staggering towards me, cackling with laughter. They’re in their mid-forties, wearing uniforms from the local supermarket. One of them is quite pretty. Her name is Felicity – I can see her nametag. The others are heftier. One of them is a bleached blonde
with a yellowing front tooth.

  ‘All right, love?’ she says as she passes. ‘Like what you see?’

  The others shriek with laughter. My neck goes hot.

  I look back at the restaurant. The psychologist and his lady are leaving. Arguing. I can’t hear what the fight is about, but she’s in tears. She steps on to the road and waves down a cab. He tries to pull her back. She pushes him away.

  The cab drives off. The psychologist yells something, but she can’t hear him. She’s gone. He’s alone.

  I follow him along Princes Street to the NCP car park. He takes the lift. I take the stairs two at a time. I watch his shadow moving between vehicles. He unlocks his car from twenty paces away. I take one last look around us, checking that we’re alone.

  He opens the door as I slip my arm around his neck and kick hard at the back of his legs so that his own body weight adds pressure to the choke. He is on his knees. I fall with him. We are hidden between vehicles.

  He slumps against me. Unconscious. I lay him on the concrete – shame about that nice shirt, did she wash it for you … do the ironing? I wrap tape around his hands and over his mouth, counting down the seconds. He stirs. Jerks. Disorientated. I am behind him again with my arm around his neck.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  He fights. I tighten my grip.

  ‘Shhhhhhh.’

  He mumbles into the gag. The psychologist wants to talk in his own defence, to plead his case, or beg forgiveness.

  ‘Shhhhhh. Now it’s my turn to speak,’ I say. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘But you keep telling people that you know me. You call me names. You make up stories.’

  He mumbles again, no doubt offering me money; telling me to take his wallet or his car or both.

  ‘Would you like to die?’ I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  My forearm forces his chin back and my other arm provides leverage. I watch the mystery of his limbs twitching and his eyes rolling before he sags like a puppet with cut strings. I rock him in my arms, holding the choke, denying blood to his brain.

  ‘You think you’re so clever, don’t you – you and your fancy education and your big words. Don’t worry. I’m going to hold you just long enough to ruin that big brain of yours. You won’t be so clever then.