by Albert Alla
Still, I wanted to hear her speak, to divulge her thoughts as she’d always done. When, in between two shows, she went to use the bathroom, I looked at her bag, spilling its guts on the coffee table, offering her secrets to me, and I pinched her phone. What mattered was that we understood each other, and if she wasn’t going to speak to me, then reading her messages was perfectly justified.
I heard her open the toilet door and I jumped up. But I needn’t have worried: she walked right past me and slumped on the sofa in exactly the same position as before. Guiltily, I grabbed a textbook and went to the small bedroom, as if I were doing work. There, I flipped the phone open and I parsed through her inbox. A message from me asking her whether she was coming home, another telling her I’d made her some dinner if she was hungry. And then, between two more of my messages, the last of which was dated before our rainy weekend, a message from her friend Jenny, the school friend I’d never met. ‘Love sucks. Chocolate and ice cream tonight?’
I switched to her sent messages. There were very few – she only ever responded to half of mine. At the top of the list, I found the one addressed to Jenny: ‘Cried all day. I think I’m going to do something crazy.’
Something crazy. The words flashed so hard they burned themselves onto my retinas. For the rest of the evening, when I sneaked her phone back into her bag, when I watched her stare blankly at the television, when I stared into space, when I tried to sleep, I saw them, holding court over my mind. Something crazy. Perhaps she’d forgive me, perhaps she’d choose love. Or perhaps she’d stab me, store my body in a freezer, and eat me one limb at a time. But she was merely thinking of doing something crazy. She hadn’t made her mind up, I thought, and I clung to that hope.
***
My nights had changed. I’d shed my Pavlovian 5 a.m. drugged-with-sleep start to the day, and embraced a seven hours’ stretch, oscillating between oblivion and flying dreams, sandwiched between two crusts of gut-rattling brain twists.
When Leona turned the television off and snuck into bed for the first time since she’d disappeared, I noticed how she lay right against the edge of the mattress, how she had her back turned to me, and I briefly emerged from my dark pool to silently torture myself – to ask and stab, to fearfully deduce. Something crazy. The next morning, when I woke up alone in bed, I felt like I’d slept in a hot room after drinking too much the night before and I couldn’t go to the toilet. And then I started listening to myself: if she wanted me to call up the BBC and tell my story, I’d do it for her, and I’d crawl to Santiago, and I’d climb the Himalayas barefoot, and I’d chart the spread of man-eating ants through the Amazon.
My morning guilt ran its course: it was the price for replacing a rotten core for a rotten conscience. A price worth paying. My past and its iguana tongue had slowly but surely drained me into half of myself, and I only realised it now that I could once again sprint up Shotover Hill.
I appreciated my newfound energy when I was in the library later that day, and I tore through a schematic understanding of supply and demand, or when James, the only other student to have worked at sea, started discussing the merits of Obama’s foreign policy, and I attacked his interpretation with nine examples, two of which concerned Indonesia’s role in the Muslim world. As long as I kept myself clear of Leona, my mind added and associated faster than it had in months.
***
That evening, as I was working on the flat’s only table, Leona walked in with lines under her eyes, and three opaque plastic bags in her hands. A shapeless navy blue hoodie, with Oxford written big across her belly, masked her as surely as any disguise – she looked like an American exchange student who’d spent the last five nights exercising her right to buy alcohol. After a curt greeting, she put the bags where I couldn’t see them, and tossed a vampire novel on top of my notes.
‘It’s for you,’ she said, her eyes focused a foot beyond my face.
Puzzled, I studied the sensual blood etched on the black cover. She had to know my tastes better than that.
‘For me?’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ I put it down on the table and pretended to read the back cover. ‘What else did you buy?’
She stood awkwardly, glancing first at me then at her bags.
‘A DVD player?’ I said.
‘No. Read the first chapter,’ she said, and she mimed me reading the book.
I opened it, expecting to find a handwritten note breaking us off, but the pages were crisp and clean. I started the first chapter – an evil vampire posse chasing our presumed male lead. After two pages, I looked up to see whether Leona could give me a clue. She was hunched over in the kitchen so that I could only see the top of her head.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Tidying up,’ she chirped.
I stared at her unusual straight parting splitting her hair right down the middle, and I went back to the man-vampire jumping out of a building. Just as he was backing into a dark alley, Leona appeared next to me. She stood with a hand on the table, as if she needed to steady herself. I looked up. She was so pale that I felt afraid. Something crazy, I remembered. Her eyes had stopped floating: they were now focused on my lips.
‘I want to ask you a question.’ She spoke in a grave voice, her face solemn.
‘Anything,’ I said.
‘When Eric called you to him that day,’ she said, and my back straightened, stiffened, ‘was Jeffrey still alive?’
‘I didn’t—’ I started, but I was back in that room, and I was standing up, and Eric was calling me – Nate, come on, Nate! – and there was Grace and Tom and Mr Johnson all down, and there was a group forcing the door, and another voice, I couldn’t remember who, telling Eric that he didn’t have to do this, and I was moving towards Eric, like a moth to a flame, a step at a time, while he was shooting past me, over me, around me, or perhaps he wasn’t, and there was silence, and I was next to him, inspecting the room, my limbs drained of blood, my mind blank, and he handed me a gun, carefully and everything – So easy, Nate! – and he levelled his gun at Jeffrey, who was standing straight looking at both of us, and I wanted to shout but I couldn’t move, and Eric reloaded his gun, and he shot three more times, crack, crack, crack, I couldn’t look, and he turned to me, for there was nothing but a hoarse silence in the room now, and he looked afraid.
Next to that moment, I was insignificant. Even if I’d wanted to tell her, I wouldn’t have been able to explain it: sometimes, a man does nothing, and it’s the wrong thing to do. That couldn’t be enough of an explanation, even when it was all I had.
‘When Eric gave you a gun,’ she pushed through my silence, ‘was Jeffrey still alive?’
‘He grunted,’ I said.
I saw it for an instant. A great pain in her face – she’d loved her brother, she’d loved me, and I’d done nothing. And then it was gone. She pulled a chair and sat opposite me, her wide-open eyes searching for mine.
‘It’s nos quatre mois next Friday,’ she spoke very carefully.
‘Yes,’ I whimpered. ‘We should do something.’
‘I want to make you a special dinner. A watercress soup. A strawberry risotto. A coconut flan. And then, when the moon is high, we’ll go to the river. There’s a wild spot before Donnington Bridge. That’s where we’ll have our final drink.’
‘Final?’ The word scared me.
‘Champagne,’ she stated. ‘For nos quatre mois.’ My eyes met her stern eyes. She looked directly into me until I turned away.
‘Alright,’ I said.
She nodded slowly, her head rising and falling, and we’d sealed a deal. Only the corner of her mouth, with a simple twitch, betrayed the expression. And I saw it. It wasn’t a hangover on her face, but the calm after a storm – a face that emotions had torn apart and that had finally come back together, tired and decided. I watched her stand, as she laid both hands on the table and pushed up, and I understood that what I’d been waiting for had happened. She’d made her choice. Now I’d get to find out what it was.
‘I’m going home,’ she said, and her voice was suddenly distant, devoid of her earlier gravitas.
‘But you said you were staying tonight.’
She shrugged.
‘I feel like going home.’
She grabbed her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and I spoke again, because I needed to know, and this was my chance:
‘Have you forgiven me?’ and I cringed over the word ‘forgive’.
‘No,’ she said immediately, with none of the anger she’d had the last time I’d asked her that. She laid her cold fingers on my arm and squeezed it affectionately. ‘Why do you keep on thinking about that?’
‘Well.’ I felt stumped. ‘What about Kuraetsokov?’
‘Exactly. Stop thinking,’ she said. ‘Thoughts get in the way.’
When she was almost through the door, she gazed back at me, two creases drawn across her neck, a wild look glistening in her eyes. Her hazy voice, her wild gaze, she didn’t seem all there. And I realised that she’d just done something important for herself too, and she was going to leave without telling me what it was.
‘My mother’s the same. She keeps on asking me strange questions. Why can’t you all see it? Your heads, they just get in the way.’ She pointed at her head, then at her heart, and she smiled harrowingly.
As she left, her smile kept me rooted to my chair. It had none of her usual joy, none of the glee that used to take over her face when her lips were inches from mine – cheeks lifted to her eyes, nothing but teeth and gum – a smile that demanded my lips surrender their control and answer in kind, even if teeth were going to smash into teeth, for all of the joy in the air was making hurts and burns as right as a mother’s caress. No, this smile was tight-lipped. It stopped where tears trailed. It was her pain.
I needed to know what she’d decided. I remembered her bags and went into the kitchen. In the fridge, I found three bunches of herbs. I recognised one: coriander. There had to be something else. She’d been hunched over behind the counter while I’d delved into her vampires. I looked into the three cupboards she could reach from her position but nothing seemed out of the ordinary – just plates, pots and biscuit tins. There was something about coriander, but I couldn’t remember what. I knew that she never used it in her cooking. I went to my computer and, perched on the green exercise ball, in between two of my larger graphite sketches, I searched the internet for herbs. It took three clicks and I’d found the right picture: yellowish green, like a miniature pine tree. One of the herbs was dill. ‘Thyme, coriander and dill,’ she’d said. And I recalled her grandmother’s quiet death.
A surge of adrenaline sent me back to the cupboards. There had to be more than just those three herbs. While she’d had me in that book, she’d been plotting my downfall. I just needed proof. I took out the pots, the tins, and patted the shelves, running my hand over all the surfaces, looking for a bulge. There was nothing. She’d hidden it somewhere and I needed to find it. While the adrenaline ran high, I was all action. She’d repeatedly glanced back at her bags – she’d been so obvious about it all, tossing me the first novel she’d found at the till, like she’d toss a dog a bone while she readied his last needle. I opened the tins. The first one was still full of stale biscuits. The second had two new medicine bottles. My heart started pounding. A pink bottle with the picture of a flat and tanned stomach; a green bottle with Spanish words, and a label pasted over it: ‘Vet Supplies.’
Fear took over. My breath shortening, I went to my computer with the two bottles, and searched for their names. Nembutal and Pepto Bismol. Pepto Bismol, the pastel pink bottle, was an antiemetic. To stop my body from vomiting the other drug. Nembutal was a sleeping pill, banned in the UK. Taken together with an antiemetic, my browser was spurting Dr Death articles, assisted suicide, euthanasia. This was how Leona had helped her grandmother die. And now, this was how she planned on killing me.
A few pills dissolved into a watercress soup, crushed into a strawberry risotto, or even concealed in a flute of champagne, and I was a dead man floating down to London. I wouldn’t go far. With the Iffley Lock three hundred yards past Donnington Bridge, my body would hardly have time to bloat before a man and his dog found it, and the police asked my mother to identify my half-distended deformity, my cheeks gone brown with silt, my lips a bloodless white, and my eyes bulging out of my head with water, only so she could better see how vacant they were.
No, I was letting my fears override my reason. She’d realised I had trouble sleeping and now she wanted to help me. And the antiemetic – well, perhaps she had heartburn. There I was making everything out of nothing, forgetting the times she’d spontaneously asked me whether I wanted a massage, the plethora of dishes she’d cooked after a long day waiting at tables just so I could try to integrate another logarithm, the picnic she’d made me three weeks earlier, and the sandwiches she ran home to make so that two of my friends could invite themselves along. I was forgetting the ease behind her smile, the light tingle of her forefinger running back and forth over my wrist, and the way she kissed my neck, with lips, tongue and hot breath, each ingredient added after another week together, until she had me just right. And three herbs; I was remembering her story wrong. It could have just as well been basil or parsley. The drugs were a mere coincidence.
I needed to wash my hands, to douse them in soap, and to rub until I’d erased the last of my fingerprints. The sink wouldn’t do: I went into the bathroom and had a shower, turning the tap into the red until it burned my skin. I was big enough to stand it. When I became used to the heat, I turned it hotter still, and then I made it as cold as possible.
The contrast made me groan, and the groan became a shout. And I loved the release, the way it started in my gut, the way I clenched my fists and thrust my chest out, the way its echo broke through the sheets of water. I shouted until I ran out of breath. Then I turned the shower off and, naked, I went to sit in the living room. Water pooled in the sofa’s creases.
Someone had to die to make up for her brother’s death. That much was clear. Ever since she’d hit her mother, she’d started to repress the violent side of her grief. That was what Amanda had meant. And now that she’d waited so long, now that I’d drawn a target on my neck, she was preparing to execute me. She had a rope around my throat, and she’d pulled her noose tighter with every hour we’d spent together. I’d started to feel it in Wytham Woods, when it was still loose enough that it rested heavy on my shoulders. But a day watching television, and worst of all, the hours she’d spent away from me, when I was nothing but a faceless prisoner, and she’d pulled the rope tighter, inch after inch, until I could feel the imprint of its grooves on my jugular.
I pictured her sitting across from me, my papers strewn all over the table, her vampire novel split open over my notebook earning its first crease, and I understood the expression on her face as she spoke of our final dinner: its length, its paleness, and the extreme stillness of her eyes. A judge handing out her first death sentence, hiding behind a wig and a grave face. And I remembered her standing up, both hands flat on the table, her single nod like a scythe to my heart, and that singular twitch in the corner of her mouth. I couldn’t argue with that twitch; it was my crowning proof. As damning as if she’d shed a tear. A dash of pain, compassion, doubt to justify the rest.
But it was only a dash. The part that wanted to see my fingers crisp and drop my champagne flute under Donnington Bridge ruled her. I’d been punched on the back of the head. My brain had squeezed through my eyeballs and splattered on the wall. I started to shiver, but I didn’t move. After a long time, I found a blanket, draped it over my shoulders, and lay down on the sofa until night fell and sleep came.
***
I woke up in bed with a vague feeling of guilt and fear, as if I’d set myself an alarm but couldn’t remember what I was getting up for, only that I couldn’t be late. Wading through my schedule, I asked myself whether it was my turn to prepare the Saturday picnic, and I felt a sharp surge of ad
renaline. I swung out of bed, looking for something to do, to act so that I wouldn’t think: correct the wobble of the three kitchen chairs, remove the vinegar stain on the coffee table, see whether I could unwarp my front wheel – the bicycle, resting against the lower flat’s veranda, the wind brushing its spokes, held a message addressed to me. I went into the garden, unclasped the wheel, and laid it flat on the garden’s only patch of grass. When I looked right down the axle, I could see the back of the wheel rise into a crescent. Hammer in hand, I hit it once. The wheel spun, rubber burning my fingers. I turned it back to where it’d been, eyed the flatness of the plane, and hit it harder. The feel of the heavy hammer clanging against the light aluminium frame satisfied me, but I couldn’t see whether it was straightening the wheel. I needed a level. There was one in the kitchen under the sink.
As I walked up the steps, the seams between the stairs’ bricks tried to tell me something, but I couldn’t make out the secret locked in their pattern. The kitchen tiles listened to the bricks and waved too. I stopped in the middle of the kitchen, wondering why I’d gone up in the first place. And then, where I’d left them the night before, I saw the two medicine packs on the counter: the green bottle promising sleepless sleep, and the pastel pink bottle that would quieten my body’s doubts. The last of the adrenaline stored in my glands came up. Without thinking, I reached for my phone and called Leona. It rang and it rang and it went to voicemail. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, I tried again.
‘Good morning, Nathan,’ she said in a sluggish voice.
Surprised, I looked at my watch: it was 8 a.m. She was probably asleep in her room, in Jeffrey’s old room.
‘Are you going to work today?’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ she groaned.
She was still missing work because of me.
‘Only ten days left before your classes start again.’
‘They think I’m sick,’ she said.
‘Oh.’
‘I’m not sick.’
‘I don’t think you are.’