by Joe Heap
Kate keeps touching her neck. She can still feel the rope. The skin feels raw. It’s like her whole body was hung up. They go and sit around the kitchen table.
Paul writes a few more things down, reads over what he has written, then looks into her eyes. ‘Kate, maybe this is going to seem like a stupid question, but who do you think did this?’
She doesn’t say anything.
‘Kate? I might be wrong, but I feel like there’s a story here that I’m not getting.’
The other officer, Sandra, returns from comforting their neighbour, and sits next to him. Kate looks at Nova, who is leaning on the work surface. Her expression wills her on.
‘I don’t know. I never thought he could do something like this. But …’ She trails off, hopelessly. She can’t understand her own life any more. Everything seems like a bad dream, in the way that dreams have no logic. Anything can happen in a dream.
‘Kate?’
‘My husband, Tony. We had a fight a few months ago, and he left. I, uh … I’ve been getting blank letters since then. I think they might have been from him.’
Kate tries to ignore Nova’s face, turning upwards in shock.
‘Okay, Kate. Can you give me Tony’s full name?’
Kate swallows. ‘Anthony John O’Neill. He – he’s a DI in the Met …’
Later, she will wonder if she imagined it – the slight incline of each officer’s head towards the other, as she says Tony’s full name. It isn’t that they look at each other. But it seems to her that a sign has passed between them. She tells the rest of her story, and they take down the details, but they do not smile as they leave and offer few words of sympathy.
Kate cannot not ask what they think they know, but it seems clear to her in the moment. She is the wife of DI Tony O’Neill, and she is not to be trusted.
Nova doesn’t know what to say to Kate, doesn’t know what to do. There doesn’t seem to be anything. She doesn’t want to confront her about the letters. Not now. She goes and makes cups of tea in the kitchen. Finally, the police are gone, and they are left alone. Kate fastens all the locks then stands there, frozen.
The cups of tea that they left a couple of hours before are sitting on the table, and Kate stands there with her coat still on, staring at them. Nova takes her hand.
‘Come on, love. Come to bed.’
‘Don’t.’ Kate pulls her hand away.
‘Don’t what?’
Kate takes a shaky breath. ‘Just don’t, okay? I can’t do this right now.’
‘Can’t do what?’ Nova feels like the air is being squeezed out of her.
Kate holds her hands out in frustration.
‘This. Whatever this is. I … I can’t.’
She grabs a single duvet and a pillow from the fort, which still stands in the front room, takes them back to her empty bedroom, and shuts the door. Nova stands there, eyes closed, listening to the blood rushing in her ears. Then she goes to the fort. She could try to dismantle it, take the double duvet to the pull-out bed in the study. But she doesn’t want to accidentally knock everything over.
She crawls onto the bed with her clothes still on, pulls the covers over her and cries into a pillow that smells of Kate.
Twenty-Eight
May
NOVA BREATHES IN AND out a couple of times, readying herself for the return leg of the tightrope walk. She grips tight to the bag of dry-cleaning and starts to walk home.
Today the light is being especially difficult, coming at her from funny angles, bright one moment and dark the next. She supposes it’s something to do with the clouds, but it’s like listening to a song while someone keeps turning the volume up and down. Her eyes ache, and Nova wonders if she might go blind again from the strain.
When she gets home, Kate is at the kitchen table, quiet and still. She has put the radio on, not loud, but enough to cover her own silence. Nova stands in the doorway with the dry-cleaning, trying to find the courage to ask the only important question.
It has been a month since they came back from the restaurant. A month since Kate left the house. A month since they slept together. The police have no news for them. They are on their own.
Nova walks to the table and puts the dry-cleaning down.
‘There you go.’
Kate doesn’t reply, just grunts in recognition, and Nova’s irritation finally allows her to ask the question she’s been wanting to ask for the last week.
‘Do you want me to go?’
Kate’s head jerks up. She stares at Nova. There are dark circles under her eyes. Nova wonders whether she’s sleeping at all, or just lies there in the dark in her bedroom. The thought makes her jaw ache. There’s an agonising gap before she says,
‘You mean leave? For good?’
Nova sighs.
‘Yeah, that’s what I mean, Kate. It doesn’t seem like you want me here.’
‘No … of course not. No, no, no.’ Kate takes a deep breath, but when she speaks again, her voice is cracked. ‘But I … I understand if you want to go.’
She looks away.
‘I don’t want to go anywhere.’ Nova says, carefully.
‘Oh.’ Kate exhales shakily. ‘Well, if you change your mind …’ she trails off, and is silent again for a long time.
Days pass without natural light, bleeding together.
Nova tries to bring Kate back to how she was before. Slowly, she talks more and seems more like herself, but in that time she never leaves the flat. Nova goes to work when she has to, and often returns to find Kate where she left her, on the sofa or in bed. She wonders if Kate has told work that she’s sick, or if she’s just falling further and further behind on her assignments.
They dismantle the fort and Nova continues sleeping on the sofa. Whenever she reaches out to touch Kate on the arm or brush her cheek, her touch isn’t returned.
Nova is scared. She was ready for their relationship to be difficult. She knew that Kate was going through a bad time. But this doesn’t feel like something she can fix, and Kate refuses to get help. Suddenly, Kate’s problems seem bigger than ever, and Nova wonders, not for the first time, if she doesn’t have enough problems of her own.
Their supplies of loo roll and toothpaste dwindle, and Kate forgets to do an online shop. Nova mentions this, and Kate goes quiet for a moment.
‘Would you mind …?’
Nova understands what is being asked of her. She puts her shoes on and goes to the shop on the corner. She buys loo roll, milk and not-very-fresh bread. Even on such a small scale, shopping is one of the most challenging things she can attempt. It’s difficult enough to distinguish one object from another, similar object – say a pack of loo roll from a pack of kitchen roll. But then, even in the corner shop, there are several types of loo roll, all boasting different qualities. With that, the gamble is small, but with other things she ends up buying something quite wrong – the clove toothpaste they both find disgusting. Or there’s the butter that turned out to be cream cheese.
RULE OF SEEING NO.324
Some plastic bottles are transparent, so you can see what’s inside. For example, it is easy to tell the difference between lemonade and cola. But some plastic bottles are opaque, and their colour is misleading. For example, when looking for a pint of milk, avoid detergent in white bottles.
Nova can decipher words slowly, but the packaging is crammed with so many words, in so many colours, fonts, shapes and sizes, integrated into images or swirling around smiling faces, that she can often only get fragments of information. A few items have Braille on them, but not many. She asks the boy on the checkout a few times if she has bought the right thing, but he’s sullen, and Nova gives up asking.
She gets back to the flat, exhausted, and hands over her haul to Kate. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, and just mutters ‘Thanks’ when Nova sets the bag down in front of her. Nova takes a deep breath, and makes a spur of the moment decision.
She goes and puts her few things in a rucksack. She doesn’t
pack her toothbrush for fear of being too obvious. If she feels guilt, she packs it away to deal with later. When she is ready, Kate is still sitting in the kitchen.
‘I think I’m going to go back to my flat, to check everything’s okay.’ She watches Kate’s face for clues.
‘Sure, sounds good.’ Kate doesn’t even look up. ‘See you later.’
Getting to the station is easy. She remembers what it used to be like – the negotiations with other travellers, the search for Braille signs, the long moments standing on crowded platforms or echoing concourses. It impresses her, this ease, but saddens her too – is this what she made her compromise for? She had expected something deeper, an appreciation of reality – her hopes had verged on the mystical. All that she has gained is convenience, and vision just seems like another gizmo for getting her from place to place.
She phones work from the train, and tells them she won’t be coming back. The call takes longer than she hoped, with her being passed from one person to another, none of whom seems to know what to do in the absence of a letter of resignation. But the job has always been a flexible one. She’s on shifts that can be covered until a replacement is found. In twenty minutes or so, Nova no longer has a job in London.
RULE OF SEEING NO.349
If you look out of a train window, facing backwards, it looks like the world is shrinking down to a point, as though everything is being sucked into the event horizon of a black hole, and the train is the only thing escaping destruction.
She thinks of phoning ahead to Oxford. She could phone John, or Rebecca. But she would rather wait. She doesn’t have much to be excited about at the moment, and the thought of surprising them gives her something to focus on.
She feels like she’s suffocating.
The person she should call, of course, is Kate. She has brought the number up on her phone several times now, and hovered her finger (so precisely) over the call button. But every time she held back and put the phone away.
Kate hadn’t called her at first, when she didn’t return to the flat. Nova started to think she never would – that her disappearance was welcome.
By the evening, the messages started, and the calls. Nova ignored them to begin with, because she didn’t know what she was doing. She sat in a café, not drinking the tea in front of her. She didn’t want to talk to Kate until she had made her decision. But with each call she ignored, her decision hardened.
It’s been an hour since Kate last called her, and she doesn’t feel as if she could pick up if she tried. With effort, she takes out her phone and writes a message.
Kate – I’m going away.
She stops, stares at the message for a long time, but she can’t make it seem true. She deletes ‘away’ then continues.
Kate – I’m going to Oxford, to stay with a friend. I’m sorry. You should get some help.
She thinks about writing more, but can’t stand thinking about her words any more. She presses Send, turns her phone off and looks out of the train window as it starts to pull out of the station.
Twenty-Nine
July
‘YOU SHOULD EAT YOUR cake; I made it specially.’
Kate stares down at the piece of syrupy lemon cake on her plate and feels sick. There is another half of this cake in her bag already, to eat later. She knows her mum just wanted to do something to make her feel better. Something tangible, because she’s not good at talking. It’s always been like this – cakes baked, presents bought, sentimental objects pulled out of the attic for her to take home. But Kate doesn’t want cake – she wants her mother.
‘Please, Mum; I’m trying to talk to you.’
Mrs Tomassi shifts as though trying to get comfortable, though her armchair is fatly upholstered.
‘I don’t see what there is to talk about, Katerina.’ She sounds genuinely baffled.
‘We can just talk, Mum. Talk about what’s on our minds. It’s not …’ Her hands form shapes in the air for a moment. ‘Not everything has to be essential information.’
‘You’re talking in riddles again.’ Her mother stiffens, sips her tea. China cups and saucers – Mrs Tomassi has an idea of Britishness that is firmly rooted in the 1950s.
‘Not riddles, Mum. I’m your daughter, who has recently escaped an abusive relationship after discovering her husband was selling drugs that he had stolen from—’
Her mother winces. ‘Do we have to talk about that, Katie? You’re only making yourself worse by raking over it.’
‘I’m not raking over it. I’ve not spoken to anyone else! Just you, and you won’t listen.’
She slams the plate of cake down on the coffee table. Her mother’s lips purse into a thin line.
‘I’m listening, aren’t I? I just think you should try to forget.’
‘Well, I can’t forget. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. And I’m also trying to tell you …’
Kate doesn’t mean to keep talking, but she’s angry now, and can’t seem to stop.
‘I’m trying to tell you that I was in a relationship. The first relationship that had made me really happy in … in forever.’
Her face heats up. Why does she feel like a child every time she comes here?
‘You met another man? You’re not divorced yet, Katerina.’
‘No, Mum. I didn’t meet another man.’
Circling around the drain now, she can see the drop that she’s about to make.
‘What are you talking about? If you didn’t meet another man …’
Kate sticks her jaw out, to keep the tears from coming. She can’t say the words for a long moment, but her mother hasn’t understood.
‘I met a woman. I met another woman …’ She looks down at the cake, bleeding sweetness onto the plate. Anything but look into her mother’s eyes. ‘I met a woman, and she was wonderful. And now she’s gone and—’
She’s about to say, ‘I was in love’, but her mother cuts her off.
‘Get out.’
Kate looks up, in shock.
‘What?’
‘Get out of my house.’
She stands, and Kate finds herself mirroring her mother. She feels like she’s standing in front of a mirror, now. She sees her mother’s wrinkles, her sad, defeated face, and Kate feels old. When did she get so old? It just happened.
Wordlessly, her mother walks out of the room, into the hall, and Kate follows her. Kate hadn’t known how her mother would react to this news – like so many other aspects of her inner life, her mother had artfully concealed anything that might be distasteful. But she did not think of her mother as a bigot. She did not know what she expected, but she did not expect this.
Her mother hands Kate her bag, and she takes it. She’s too shocked to say anything else.
‘Mum—’
Mrs Tomassi opens the front door, and stands out of her way. Kate walks through the open door, then turns.
‘Mum—’
‘Goodbye.’ Her mother looks right at her. ‘Don’t come back.’
The door does not slam, which feels wrong, somehow. It closes gently, and Kate listens to the lock turning. It’s like a dream, she thinks. She hasn’t had a key to the house for years now. She looks up and down the street to see if anyone is watching, but she is alone.
Slowly, Kate walks away.
Nova expected the funeral to be a small one, but half of Oxford seems to be here. It has rained while they were in church, and the earth is sweating in the heat with a musk-like body odour. The air is hard to breathe. She had imagined standing by the grave as the coffin was lowered, but she is at the back of a crowd. Faintly, she can hear the Methodist minister (another surprise to Nova) incanting the words.
She is wearing black. Before, she would have needed someone else to pick the outfit for her, but today she did it herself. Okay, the T-shirt has JURASSIC PARK on the front, but it’s the best she could do. She doesn’t have many clothes with her.
John Katzner didn’t have much family, but it seems that Nova wasn�
��t the only student he had befriended. The service, organized by the faculty, featured readings and remembrances. Words in translation and words in their original language. Nova hadn’t been asked to say anything, but she doesn’t mind. Nobody from the faculty knows her now, and she’s not sure what she would have said.
Trying not to seem distracted, Nova scans the assembled faces for Rebecca. Not that she really expects her to be here, but she did promise. Perhaps, after turning up late, she’s got lost somewhere in the crowd. But there is no sign. She can hear people are crying, though cannot see the tears on their faces unless their makeup has run.
The minister makes some closing remarks, as though drawing a debate to a close, rather than a life. The crowd starts to thin as, one by one, they make their way to the grave, get whatever they were looking for there, and move away.
Nova waits, for a long time, until most of them are gone and a small queue has formed of the remaining mourners. She is getting the hang of queues, slowly, though working out where they start and end still gives her trouble. People don’t always line up properly, standing in all directions. She joins what she takes to be the back of the queue and shuffles forward every minute or so. A girl in front of her is sobbing heartily.
Finally, Nova reaches the graveside. A small wooden cross has been staked into the earth, with a brass plaque bearing an inscription she can’t read. The smell of earth is thick here, and she feels sick. She seems to be the last person here, though she is aware of someone lurking a way off, presumably the gravedigger waiting to fill in the hole. Nova reaches into her pocket and pulls out a couple of Earl Grey tea bags, which she tosses down onto the pale coffin, already half obscured by earth and flowers.
RULE OF SEEING NO.355
There are no objects (see Rule No.92), but there are boundaries – contrast boundaries, colour boundaries, texture boundaries. Like the border between land and sea, these are not absolute, but they are helpful in distinguishing the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead.