by Rudd, Matt
‘All this proves is that Alex is either gay or obsessive compulsive.’
‘Let’s just confront him with what Saskia said,’ suggests Johnson. ‘We can make him talk.’
‘Yes, let’s use your handcuffs and balaclavas,’ replies Andy. ‘I’ll tell him this is Operation Bend Over Big Boy, you two sing “YMCA” in the background. He’ll cough in seconds.’
‘Oh look, a secret doorway.’
‘Shut up.’
‘No, seriously. Look.’
I hadn’t noticed it before, but in the corner of the kitchen, partly obscured by a pretentious New-York-style kitchen-canteen table, is a hatch. We move the table, we lift the hatch and climb down into the cellar.
Bingo.
In the small, unnaturally lit basement, there is a computer, a scanner, several television screens, a whiteboard full of terrifyingly elaborate plottings, a wall full of photos of Isabel and me, of my ex-girlfriends, of my office, of the flat, the house, all annotated in Alex’s spidery handwriting. Initially, it is alarming, but then I begin to notice the detail and it becomes…very alarming. One screen shows a grainy video image of my bedroom from the perspective of Alex’s horrible strokeable lamp—which explains how he knew my marriage’s innermost workings; there are notes about cheese knives and bunches of flowers and Viagra trials; a whole corner plastered with earlier attempts at the fraudulent photo of Saskia and me mid-coitus; a dog-eared manual entitled How to Win Back Your Ex, next to Time Out’s ‘London Cocktail Bar’ special edition. And, on a separate wall, scrawled in what looks like blood, ‘Keep your friends close, keep William closer.’
‘It’s not blood, it’s just red paint,’ says Johnson, as if that makes everything all right.
‘Wow,’ says Andy. ‘He’s a nutter. Is any girl worth this much effort?’
‘Yes,’ I realise. ‘She is.’
And then our shocking discovery is interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the kitchen above. A trembling voice calls down: ‘If you’re still here, you’d better watch it, I have a black belt in jujitsu.’
‘See, this really is Murder She Wrote,’mutters Andy.
‘They’re not supposed to come back early,’ mutters Johnson, consulting his imaginary book of espionage. ‘We’re going to have to bring forward Mission Two.’
OPERATION PROBE
Stage two: interrogate Alex about all the psycho stuff in his basement
We didn’t even have to use the balaclavas. Faced with the evidence in the basement and everything Saskia had already told me, Alex cracked almost instantly. More annoyingly, my urge to punch him a thousand times evaporated as soon as he began to speak. Because he was crying like a girl. Why is everyone crying at the moment?
Through racking sobs, he confessed to a double life: one as Isabel’s best male friend, one as a lovesick maniac who would stop at nothing to win her heart.
‘She was my childhood sweetheart.’
‘No, she wasn’t. She only let you touch her breasts.’
‘One of them,’ corrects Johnson by way of support.
‘One of them. So you thought you’d destroy her marriage as a thank you.’
‘You aren’t good enough for her.’
‘So she’s better off with a basement-dwelling psycho-stalker? Pretty weird buying a flat, making my ex-girlfriend move into it, sending her underwear to Isabel, faking photos.’
‘Saskia was happy to help. You ruined her life. And you ruined mine. You had Saskia but you stole Isabel too.’
‘I didn’t have Saskia. I didn’t steal Isabel. I wish you’d stop telling people that. You. Never. Went. Out. With. Isabel. Get it?’
I have no real experience dealing with stalkers. It’s not something they teach you at school, although it would be helpful if they did. School really could have been more practical, you know. Less biology and Latin and trigonometry. More How to Deal with Stalkers, How to Spot When a Girl Is in Love with You and Not Simply Having a Fling Like She Says She Is, and, perhaps, at a stretch, the odd lesson on shelving. We only ever made salt-and-pepper shakers at my school. How did that prepare me for real life?
Alex is rambling.
‘I love her,’ he whimpers. ‘You don’t understand.’
This is irritating. I love her. He wouldn’t understand. ‘What
about what she wants?’ I say, still resisting the urge to hurt him, which has now resurfaced. ‘It’s not like I stole her from you. She never wanted to go out with you, even when she was single.’
‘That’s only because I never asked her.’
‘What?!’
‘I never asked her. Never wanted to risk that she might say no. I mean she wouldn’t have. Definitely not. She would have said yes. Definitely. It would have been perfect. Until she met you, that is. I was going to ask her. I was almost ready. And then you came along. You ruined everything.’
This is more irritating.
Without any tuition in stalker-handling, all I can think of as a reference point for how to handle the situation is Fatal Attraction. The similarities are remarkable:
Alex Forrest becomes obsessed with Dan Gallagher after a one-night stand (more than feeling one breast, but it’s the same ballpark).
Forrest plots revenge when Gallagher tells her to clear off (check).
Forrest boils Gallagher’s daughter’s rabbit (check-ish: I think that’s pretty much on the same level as the fake sex photos).
Gallagher drowns Forrest in the bath, she jumps out again, everyone screams, wife shoots her dead. Glenn Close doesn’t get any dates for years to come.
Drowning and shooting it is, then, just as soon as he stops crying.
‘Let’s just kill him with the jemmy,’ offers Johnson. ‘Your black belt in origami won’t help you now, mate.’
‘I don’t care what you do. It’s too late anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Isabel doesn’t love either of us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, you don’t know?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s moving to Snowdonia on Friday. Apparently there’s a drystone wall in dire need of repair on the outskirts of Llanllanlllllandunlan. She’s joined a volunteer programme.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘Nope, jacked in her job and everything. I tried to talk her out of it but you know what she’s like when she gets an idea in her head.’
For the first time ever, I find myself nodding at something Alex has said. And then he ruins our brief moment of accord with a nonchalant shrug. ‘As long as she’s happy, I’m happy.’
I punch him hard in the face. Not in my imagination like I’d done so many times before, but actually, for real, right on the nose. It feels good. Immediately, a year’s worth of irritation at this utter, utter bastard and all his terrible scheming begins to ebb away.
I punch him again to see if the ebbing will increase. It doesn’t. It stops and I feel bad. This is deeply unfair because, frankly, I should be kicking his head in. Instead, I pick him up, put him on his chair and try to think of a suitably crushing line to walk out on.
Nothing. Not even a Clint Eastwood cliché. So I turn to leave in silence.
‘Do me a favour, will you?’ says the last person on earth to deserve a favour from me. ‘Let me tell her what I’ve done. She’s going to hate me forever anyway, so I’d rather I told her myself.’
Wednesday 4 April
After a whole day of total radio silence, during which time I assumed Alex had failed on his promise to make things right, I finally received a call from Isabel.
‘I owe you an apology. Can you come on Friday evening?’
Cue choirs of angels fanfaring and harping and firing Cupid-ish arrows all over the place. My marriage was saved. Alex was no more. Everything would be all right now.
Bit of a pain to have to wait until Friday, though. Would have thought marriage-saving was more important than anything else she had going on in her life.
&
nbsp; Friday 6 April
Anastasia asked me to finish off her piece on ‘Sex Wars: How Women Win in the Bedroom’ because she was running late for dinner with George and Al. George being her new best mate Clooney, Al being Gore.
I told her to get stuffed and walked out of the office, my triumphal return to domestic bliss begun. I was wearing my lucky underpants and the shirt Isabel said made me look a bit like Colin Firth, only thinner. And I had shaved the seven days of what’s-the-point-in-grooming-if-my-life-is-shit? beard growth. I was ready for marital repatriation.
Johnson said that, at the very least, I should get out of cooking duties for a month. And have complete control over the whens and wheres of bedroom athletics for a year. But I was going to ignore him. When a man is proved to be right all along about absolutely everything, he must, under no circumstances whatsoever, rub it in. ‘I told you so’ had no place in this evening’s rapprochement. I would just let her say her piece and then suggest we move on.
The problem was, her piece wasn’t very extensive. She opened the door, we hugged, she opened a bottle of wine. Then she said sorry…sorry for not trusting me, sorry for insisting that Alex was all right when actually he was a maniac who had stalked us for months, undermined me at every stage, recruited ex-girlfriends to help and smuggled a video camera into our bedroom in a lampshade that I hated but had allowed Isabel to keep anyway. Sorry she had allowed a psycho to turn our first year of marriage into a horror story.
But it wasn’t the bended-knees, hands-clasped, please-forgive-me, you-were-right-about-absolutely-everything apology I felt I deserved. The closest I got to confronting this was in the simple question, ‘You weren’t really going to north Wales for six months, were you?’ And all I got back was a long silence followed by a ‘yes’ that told me I should cease this particular line of questioning.
Still, as I’d repeated to myself mantra-like on the way over, this was not the night for I told you so’s. It was the night for gentle smiles, warm small talk and rather excellent sex in a bedroom that no longer contained those lamps.
Saturday 7 April
Eight a.m. I wake for the first time in a month in my own bed. It isn’t the lazy, curl-over-and-drift-off-back-to-sleep-then-wake-up-again-then-have-hug-then-play-paper-scissors-stones-to-see-who’s-getting-the-tea awakening I’d missed so much in my exile because Isabel is not beside me. For the first fifteen minutes, I assume that she has decided to forgo the paper-scissors-stone competition and make the tea anyway. Perhaps part of her more gradual way of saying sorry. For the next fifteen minutes, I assume she is making some elaborate breakfast in bed. But as time passes, and the imagined breakfast becomes more and more elaborate—kippers and muffins and handmade muesli and self-grown oranges and pancakes rolled on a Cuban woman’s thigh—I realise there are no telltale aromas. Eventually, reluctantly, because it’s always hard to accept breakfast in bed isn’t on the cards when you thought it was, I decide to venture downstairs to see what is going on.
There is no breakfast.
There is no Isabel.
Just a note.
William, thank you for last night. It felt almost normal after the horrible time we’ve been having. But things aren’t normal, are they? You see, it never mattered what Alex or Saskia were doing. It was that we were so easily divided by it. We don’t trust each other. Perhaps we never did. I’m sorry it didn’t work out because you were the love of my life. I hope I was yours. It’s a shame we couldn’t keep it that way. Isabel
PS I’ve taken the car. You can have everything else. Even the lamps.
I call Isabel’s mobile but it’s off.
I call her father but he can’t remember where she was going. ‘Something with too many “ll”s in it,’ he offers eventually. ‘You know what those Welsh are like. They love their “ll”s.’
I call Alex and he says, ‘Sorry, I thought she wasn’t going until tomorrow.’ I promise him a slow and unnatural death involving a tile-cutting machine, a litre of nail-polish remover and a thousand unsterilised drawing pins.
And then I decide to get a train to Snowdonia.
‘Welcome to National Rail Enquiries. Please press one to speak to an adviser or hold for our simple and fast automated train-tracker service.’
I press one and get put through to the simple and fast automated train-tracker service. I then waste ten minutes battling with the train-tracker service’s ruthless and unremitting requirements.
‘Which station are you travelling to?’
‘One in Snowdonia.’
‘Did you say Solihull?’
‘No.’
‘Which station are you travelling to?’
‘Anything in northern Wales will do. I just want a rough—’
‘Did you say Andover?’
I throw my mobile in the bin in fury, put some pants in a day sack (the one Isabel bought me when my back hurt, sniff ) in fury, and march out of the house in fury. I take the train to London and a taxi into a traffic jam. Why did I ever think a taxi would be quicker than the Tube? So I take the Tube into a Tube traffic jam (due to an ‘incident’ at South Kensington). I run and stand behind some tourists on an escalator and run and stand behind some more tourists on the escalator and run and…‘Can’t you read? Look—stand to the right! It says it right there.’ And the elderly Japanese couple look terrified and hold out their wallets and I apologise but they don’t understand, and I run again and I arrive at Paddington.
And there’s a man in a blue cap standing behind that standard-issue lucky-for-him bulletproof glass.
‘I need to get to Snowdonia.’
‘Where’s that then?’
‘It’s a national park. In north Wales.’
‘Right, sir. You’ll need Euston.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘’Fraid not. Train to Birmingham, then…dunno. They’ll tell you at Euston.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘’Fraid not.’
So I get the Tube to Euston and I’m feeling a bit light-headed because my stomach had been expecting kippers and eggs Benedict cooked by a loving wife and it got absolutely nothing. As we grind through Edgware Road, Baker Street and so bloody on and so bloody forth, my head starts throbbing and then I notice it isn’t my head, it’s the chap three seats down listening to his i-eff-ing-Pod on standard what-is-the-world-coming-to maximum.
‘Turn that bloody thing down,’ I scream, causing a mother sitting opposite to wrap her arms protectively around her toddler.
The iPod-er looks at me aggressively.
‘NOW!’ Like I’m the Terminator only without any muscles or robot technology or Austrian accent.
‘Sorry.’ I win. I win. I win. I am a man. I have stood up against the hoodies. Isabel will be so proud. Except this hoodie is about eight and Isabel has gone. I am not a man. I am a bully. And I am a divorcé-to-be.
At Euston now. I run and run and smile at tourists and run and fight my way through a surprisingly large number of people, all of whom seem to be standing around looking annoyed.
And there’s a man in a blue cap standing behind that standard-issue bulletproof glass. And I say, ‘A ticket to Snowdonia, please.’
And he says, ‘Snowdonia?’
And I say, ‘Yes, apparently I need to go to Birmingham and change.’
And he says, ‘There’s no trains to Birmingham this morning, mate. Engineering works overran again. You should’ve called National Rail Enquiries.’
Sunday 8 April
Police cells are less comfortable than your own bed but more comfortable than a friend’s sofa. Next time, though, I’ll take one of those aeroplane eye masks and some earplugs to keep out the bright lights and screamed profanities. They are not handed out on check-in.
SEQUENCE OF EVENTS LEADING TO MY SECOND-EVER NIGHT IN A PRISON CELL
Step one: I called the smartarse behind the bulletproof glass a wanker.
Step two: I waited in the railway bar for the afternoon train to Snowdonia.
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Step three: I drank five pints.
Step four: I returned to the bulletproof glass ticket booth.
Step five: ‘I’m sorry, sir, all the trains are now full. You should have made a reservation this morning. I can get you a first-class open return leaving at 5.27 a.m. tomorrow. It will cost £457.’
Step six: I become abusive.
Step seven: I am asked to leave the concourse.
Step eight: I go to a pub around the corner and drink some more pints and a whisky.
Step nine: I decide to sneak onto one of the full trains under cover of darkness.
Steps ten to seventeen: there isn’t much cover of darkness, I am spotted, I run, there are railway security officials, then police, then an overwhelming urge to vomit, which I do, on a policeman, then detention by angry policeman ‘for my own safety’.
Step eighteen: I’m Nelson Mandela. In a sense. Actually, in no sense at all.
Still no mobile reception on Isabel’s stupid phone. Stepping out of the police station into the harsh light of another miserable, stinking morning, I decide to go home and sleep. In my own bed. On my own.
I wake at 6 p.m., then fail to go back to sleep until 5 a.m. The emotional upheaval of the weekend has effectively put my body clock onto Australian time.
Monday 9 April
An alarm bell is ringing. My house is on fire. I am trapped in the upstairs bathroom. Primrose is at the top of the fireman’s ladder, her face pressed against the bathroom window, laughing. But it’s not a fire or an alarm bell. It’s my mobile. It’s Isabel!