by Sarah Rayne
Stacey has a strange expression on her face, as if she can’t decide whether to be appalled or overjoyed.
‘Look, are you sure about this?’
‘I’ve never been so sure about anything. As they say in the movies.’
‘You do realize that if you tell me anything I can use, I will have to use it. I won’t be able to resist it. And there’ll be no taking it back, you know, once it’s out there. And you never know what the consequences will be, who it might affect.’
‘That’s the whole point. Once I’ve told you this stuff, everything is going to go nuts. People will hate me,’ Maggie hoots, amused. ‘And I will be out of here! I won’t give two fucks!’
‘It’s not as simple as that, Maggie. People will bear grudges. For a shrink to reveal a client’s secrets . . . I mean, it doesn’t happen. Nobody does it.’
‘Nobody does it because they’re scared for their careers. It’s not out of respect for the clients. OK, so maybe it is in some cases. But mostly it’s fear. And I don’t have that fear. Because I don’t want to do this any more. More than that: I’m not doing it any more. It’s over.’
‘You must have some clients you . . . you know, you genuinely care about, or—’
‘Sure. But I’m not going to tell you any of their secrets. I’m only going to tell you stuff about the arseholes. The ones who, if they didn’t have a psychotherapist to help legitimize it—’ She breaks off, momentarily surprised by her eloquence, given the drink. ‘If they didn’t have me saying it’s OK, you have this problem, you have that problem, they would just have to admit they are bastards, cheating on their wives, lying to people, hurting people. So don’t worry about the moral high ground, Stace. You’re a journalist.’
‘I know that. It’s not the moral high ground I’m worried about, it’s you. Do you see that?’
‘Yes. But you don’t need to be.’
Stacey lets out a long breath and shrugs, resigned.
‘OK. Just tell me again, when did you come to the decision that you were going to sabotage your entire career?’
‘Literally while I was taking a dump.’
Maggie laughs. The two of them cackle, with the abandon of drunks, till a couple of people look round.
A blonde woman in a shapeless raincoat walks past the bar and makes frosty eye contact with Maggie and Stacey for a moment. Her disapproving expression sets them off giggling again. It’s Pippa, on her way to do waitress work at a gay magazine’s awards ceremony on Charlotte Street. As she frowns at Maggie and Stacey through the window she is not – as they imagine – looking at them at all, but catching sight of her own tired reflection and wondering whether she ought to get in touch with Xavier. The thought of it, the risk of more unhappiness, all the emotional hassle, redoubles her feeling of exhaustion, and she lets the idea go.
‘OK. Come on, then.’
‘OK.’ Maggie rests her chin on her hands, a pose that for so long served as her paying-full-attention face for ungrateful jerks. ‘Would you like to start with the politician who’s fucking a married TV star, the model who does twenty grand of coke a week, or the very well-known sports star who is gay and bribing rent boys for their silence?’
‘Wow.’ Stacey is hooked, however reluctantly. ‘Right. The politician and TV star, I think.’
Maggie leans in close and says a name, which prises Stacey’s mouth open by a fingernail’s length.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Am I sure? He’s told me enough about the fucking thing! Every week for two years!’
‘And the TV star, who is it?’
This time, Maggie presses her boozy lips to Stacey’s ear to whisper, and this time, Stacey’s mouth drops open so wide that she could almost fit her fist inside it.
Xavier sits in the kitchen with a glass of wine, exactly a week after he opened a bottle with Pippa, remembering his departure from Australia.
Almost as soon as he was committed to the decision, things began to ease, if only marginally. His mother seemed relieved; not, as she might have been in other circumstances, upset that he was leaving. Realizing this only shamed him into going through with it. He saw Matilda briefly for coffee; afterwards, they held one another tightly for a while. She told him Bec and Russell were doing all right. Russell himself called to say goodbye. He also said that Bec was all right, and that Michael was too. It was the first time Chris had heard the name directly for months. He couldn’t speak for a few seconds. Russell said, ‘God bless you, mate,’ at the end of the call. It was not the sort of thing he used to say.
A few days before he left, Chris was wandering down Brunswick Street when he saw the eighty-year-old man at the tram stop. As before, the old guy was wearing an aged baseball cap and clutching a lager can which had probably been empty for some time. Chris was surprised that the man recognized him.
‘Long time, no see!’ he croaked at Chris. ‘How’s life?’ He flashed his oddly well-preserved teeth.
‘Er, yeah, good,’ Chris muttered. ‘Ups and downs.’
‘Ups and downs!’ The octogenarian cackled at this. ‘Ups and downs is right, I reckon. You know, just remember this.’ He wiped his mouth and coughed. ‘Whatever’s meant to happen, happens. Right?’
‘I . . .’ Chris began, but his new friend wasn’t looking for corroboration.
‘Whatever’s meant to happen, happens. Do whatever you want. Some stuff’ll happen. Bunch of other stuff won’t. Right? We can’t do anything!’ The man gestured broadly around. ‘We think we can, but we can’t! We’re just a bunch of . . . of bloody idiots, mate!’
He asked Chris for a cigarette. Chris gave him ten dollars and, to the slight surprise of them both, the two men shook hands. Chris continued on his way, past the turning he no longer took towards Bec and Russell’s, knowing there was no chance he would ever see the man again.
At the stopover in Dubai Airport, two-thirds of the way to England, Chris stood for a minute at the top of a great staircase, looking down at the swarms of people traversing the shiny floor below, weaving between the shops. It was soothing to think that he didn’t know a single one of their names, and they didn’t know his. Outside, by the side of a runway, were piles of crates stencilled with words: CHINA SHIPPING, MAERSK SEALAND. He couldn’t begin to guess what was inside any of these dozens of crates, what they were for, anything about them. Again, the ignorance was comforting.
Chris Cotswold became Xavier Ireland two weeks after landing at Heathrow. He had a new name, a new home, and – already, unexpectedly – a job: it added up to a new identity. It was never a specific condition of this identity to let life pass him by as far as possible and to stay out of others’ lives as well, but it has been his unspoken pact with the world, he now realizes, ever since he set foot in England. As Saturday night turns into Sunday morning – the dark draining from the sky, as if reluctantly – he’s only very dimly aware that the past few weeks have begun to break the pact.
VIII
Edith Thorne, a well-known TV presenter, thirty-eight years old, and in an adulterous relationship with a notable MP, wakes in her Notting Hill house at seven o’clock, three streets away from where Maggie Reiss is about to enjoy her first Monday morning lie-in as a lady of leisure. Edith’s husband Phil has already had a shower and is mentally halfway to work. She kisses him briskly at the top of the stairs. After he’s gone, she sits in the open-plan kitchen, wearing a towelling robe and eating porridge with blackberries. She watches the breakfast news. Later, Edith plans to do an hour of yoga and visit the gym and then have lunch and go to film her show at four o’clock. A car will come and pick her up at two fifteen as usual.
Edith used to worry, right up to the age of perhaps thirty, that all her advantages – good looks, good health, smooth professional progress, money, popularity – would have to be paid for in the end, written on one side of a balance sheet, the other side of which would bear details of a huge setback still to come. As her confidence grew, she realized that this was mere superstition.
Some people, she learned, are simply marked out for success, some for failure. And then, of those marked for success, some work hard to live up to that marking, others don’t bother. Edith realized that she’d got to where she was by a combination of good fortune and industry. It was much more reasonable to think she would continue to succeed by the same methods than it was to fret that some arbitrary realignment of fate’s continental plates might throw her from this perch.
Her confidence had always been justified but, when Xavier failed to save Frankie in the snow that day, things began to change.
Edith’s phone pulses on the table. Her agent, Maxine, is calling. Edith picks it up.
‘Jesus, bit early in the morning for this, isn’t it?’
The brightness in Maxine’s voice this morning is noticeably synthetic.
‘Edith, nothing to worry about, but I need to talk to you about something.’
At the ‘nothing to worry about’ Edith’s spine stiffens with a premonitory fear.
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve had a call this morning from a journalist. She also sent me an email.’
Edith’s body is still a few seconds ahead of her brain. Invisible hands creep over it, applying little prods of pressure here and here. She feels her throat constrict.
‘And . . .?’
‘She’s got some . . . allegations about you, about you . . .’ Maxine coughs. ‘Having an affair.’
As if a large object had been knocked over in the hall, Edith fancies for a moment she can hear the toppling of the precarious tower she has built.
‘Edith?’
Maxine’s voice sounds very far away.
Edith swallows.
‘How did she, how did she . . .?’
‘I don’t know, Edith.’
Maxine’s normally smooth voice contains a high, unprecedented note which Edith recognizes after a few moments as fear. This is the first situation, in their nine years of working together, in which Maxine’s repertoire of tricks and blandishments, her coaxing and haranguing skills, are not going to be enough.
‘She’s going to publish something tomorrow.’
Edith breathes in and out twice, and only on the second out-breath do words emerge.
‘Can we do anything?’
‘That depends, Edith. Is it true?’
If Edith Thorne’s week begins with the most violent shock of her life, Xavier’s begins much as expected. There is an atmosphere of deflation which the flat seems to absorb from Xavier and reflect back at him; and, even in this short time without Pippa, it is also in physical decline again. The sink is full of cups, the bathroom worn-looking, layers of dust are massing on the top of a bookcase here, a window ledge there; all things he would never have noticed before she first visited. Any attempts Xavier makes to tidy or clean feel pathetically inadequate given the standard that has been set, and trigger additional pangs for the woman whom, he’s increasingly aware, he has no way of contacting.
Around eleven, Xavier goes to collect the mail and deliver it to his two neighbours. He hovers for a shifty second outside Tamara’s door, but of course there is no sound from within; she left early for work as always, the high heels pattering across the floor above, just beyond the edge of Xavier’s consciousness. Her post includes a brown package marked with the words STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL. Outside his own flat, he is stopped by a piercing wail from Jamie, followed by an unusually feeble, ‘Please, Jamie, stop it,’ from Mel. She breaks into an escalating series of barking coughs that are painful to listen to. Jamie yells and hits something. ‘Because Mummy is not very well,’ Mel answers. Jamie advances a counter-argument. Mel erupts in coughs again.
Xavier, after a second’s hesitation, pads down the stairs and knocks on the door. It opens almost straight away. Mel’s hair hangs like washed-out curtains around her face. There are deep creases under her eyes.
She smiles wanly at Xavier.
‘Hello. I’m sorry, it’s all chaos in here.’
‘I was just . . . I just thought you might be ill. Do you need anything?’
Jamie appears alongside his mother, tugging fiercely at the folds of her jumper.
Mel’s dulled eyes flicker in gratitude.
‘That’s really . . . thank you. What have you got?’
‘I’ve got cough medicine and, er, headache things.’
‘Paracetamol?’
Xavier grins.
‘Yeah. “Headache things” is the medical name for them.’
She laughs and sniffs.
‘Is it all right for me to . . .?’
‘Well, yes. You’re obviously ill. I’m not too bad. I think you should have them.’
It’s easy to find what he needs in the bathroom cabinet, which Pippa effortlessly reorganized. Xavier scoops up a packet of paracetamol, two rolls of throat sweets, a bottle of cough mixture and an assortment of other helpful-looking items into a carrier bag and takes it back downstairs. Mel, still propping the door open with her elbow, looks at him appreciatively, her watery eyes moistening further. When she’s ill she becomes rather embarrassingly emotional; she cried at a song in an advert earlier. Jamie darts out from under her armpit and makes a charge for the main front door, smashing at it several times with his little fists.
‘Come back, Jamie. COME HERE, JAMIE.’
But at the shout, her voice curls up, succumbing to more coughs.
Xavier, suddenly bold, squats down to make eye contact with the boy, who’s wearing a red-and-yellow jumper, fresh on this morning but already grubby.
‘Hey, Jamie. Come over here.’
After a few moments’ consideration Jamie toddles back towards the adults and takes a fistful of Xavier’s shirt in his hand.
Mel grabs her son and eases him back over the threshold of the flat. Jamie, wrong-footed by Xavier’s intervention, makes no protest.
‘Thank you. He’s getting worse and worse at running off. I mean, he’s getting better. You know what I mean. He got onto the road twice last week.’
‘If there’s anything more I can do,’ says Xavier. ‘While you’re ill. Or, well, you don’t have to be ill.’
They smile at each other and Mel shuts the door gently. Xavier, invigorated, goes upstairs to his study to work on his emails. Halfway through the task, to refresh his brain, he wanders into the lounge, which still feels cold and unwelcoming, pregnant with the memory of Pippa. He wishes she’d seen what just happened.
It seems pathetic to pine for someone who was barely even here in the first place, and absurd that – as is becoming increasingly apparent – he might never be able to get back in touch with her. London is so small in some ways: the smallest of big cities, he’s heard someone say. And yet, thinks Xavier despondently, it’s easily big enough for somebody to be lost to you for ever. Especially if they like it that way.
He glances out of the window and is suddenly reminded of the boy with the scar he saw, through those surprise tears, the other day. God, Xavier thinks, registering it properly for the first time, it was the kid I saw getting beaten up in the snow. He got that scar then. I could have stopped that.
With this thought in and out of his brain, Xavier turns back to his emails. He advises an economics student to relax and be himself rather than continue to send the object of his unrequited love a present every day. He recommends hypnosis to a man scared of the dark, assuring him that it is a common fear. He doesn’t, however, open the latest email from Clive Donald, who at this moment is midway through a double-maths lesson with 11.2, his worst class, and is watching calmly as they catcall and clatter about, thinking that very soon there will be no more double-maths with this class, or with 13.1, Julius’s class; very soon there will be no more Mondays.
By Thursday night Edith Thorne’s unfaithfulness is a matter of general knowledge, keeping North Korea’s experimentation with nuclear weapons off the front pages of three national newspapers. So well established is the topic that Murray adds it to his ‘Musings’ that night, with Xavier conscrip
ted into the role of the politician. They read a little skit which Murray scrawled across some of his yellowy lined paper.
‘And if anyone else out there is sleeping with Edith Thorne, we may as well know now,’ says Xavier drily, to chuckling from Murray. ‘Do call in.’
The £1.2 million house, which, a few days ago, Edith considered a refuge from the outside world, has now been crudely invaded; a photographer camps across the street, sleeping in his car. The biggest reception room hosts what the papers call crisis talks between the star and her bewildered husband. Equally bewildered is Alessandro Romano, the Italian barman on the other side of town with whom she had been conducting a parallel affair, and who thought she was in love with him, believed she was on the verge of leaving her husband for him. He pulls pints without looking the customers in the eye, and waits in vain for a text. The politician Edith was sleeping with has already made a full apology to the leader of his party, and to his constituents, as if they were the real victims of the situation.
At two o’clock on Friday morning most of London’s night-regulars are at their posts. Julius Brown still dreams about being caught for the mugging, but he’s come to understand that the dreams themselves are his punishment. He’s still not certain how he’ll get another £67 for the next month’s gym membership, but – ironically, perhaps – the stress of the past few months has seen his weight dip slightly. Clive Donald, who taught Julius’s trigonometry class earlier, lies awake with the radio on, imagining the announcement of his suicide in assembly. ‘I have to give you some very sad news, some terrible news.’ For once, silence in the room.
The road-safety officer at Haringey Council, Tamara Weir, tosses and turns, wishing she had somebody other than her boyfriend to talk to. There’s a lot on her mind; it’s so hard to get people interested in the speed-bumps campaign without more support, maybe if she could get a celebrity to speak up, but it’s finding the energy . . . nothing’s been right since her dad died. She can’t believe she wasn’t there. Outside Xavier’s studios, above the car park, clouds rush across the moon.