‘You’re not from the Island, are you?’ he said suddenly, as I turned to go.
‘No. I’m just staying in Yarmouth for the winter.’
He nodded. ‘Good. Well, enjoy the reading.’
Out on the street again my happiness at finding the books, the moment’s connection, quickly dissipated. Of course he knew I wasn’t from round here, though: my jacket, my shoes, even my bag made me conspicuous. And then there was the black eye.
By the time I got back to the cottage, it was dark. The cold had reddened my cheeks and my fingers were stiff where they had held the parcel of books across my chest. I made a cup of tea and went upstairs to my makeshift study to check my email. It was Saturday so I didn’t expect much, if any, but there was a message. It was from Richard and the whole of it was written in the subject line: If you want to be alone, then be alone.
At the beginning, I had always slept better on the nights he was with me. Sometimes if I was on my own and I’d stayed up working so late that the street below the flat had finally gone quiet, I put off going to bed. I knew that as soon as the lamp went out, my ears would become hypersensitive and the near-silence inside the building would grow into a sound like the fizzing when a record ends. Then every small noise within it, in the flat and on the floors below, would become significant, evidence of the intruder who had broken in through the old back door on the ground floor and was now slowly working his way upstairs. My bedroom shared a wall with the top landing and though I told myself that the creaking I sometimes heard out there was just the sound of the wooden staircase settling as the temperature through the building dropped, there were nights when I had to turn the light back on, get out of bed and nerve myself up to look through the glass spy-hole in my front door to check that no one was there. Often on those evenings I would go to the kitchen afterwards and pour a glass of wine or brandy to take back to bed.
With Richard I didn’t even notice the quiet. Sometimes I tried to stay awake longer than him so that I could enjoy the feeling of security and listen to the sound of him breathing but by the time we turned off the light, it was always very late, often near morning, and I fell asleep immediately.
It was unusual for him to sleep longer than me. In fact, I was surprised by how little rest he seemed to need. Given the hours he worked, I thought that he would spend a significant amount of the spare time he did have catching up on missed sleep, but in fact it seemed as though his lack of opportunity for rest had lessened his body’s need for it.
Near the beginning, though, when we’d been seeing each other for a couple of months, he’d been in Spain for a week. His flight had arrived into Heathrow late on Friday evening and he’d come straight to my flat. He’d looked exhausted when I opened the door and though normally he was up before me, the next morning I’d been first awake. I’d lain quietly for a minute or two looking at the rise and fall of his chest and the muscle in the arm which he’d flung across the bed towards me and then, filled with a sudden enthusiasm, I got up, made some coffee and went to my desk in the sitting room. I liked the idea of working while he was asleep, knowing that he was there, and I also liked the thought of him seeing me working when he woke. His work ethic was inspiring; I was pushing myself harder than I had for some time. The energy I felt now reminded me of the state of strange exultation that I’d had at university and in my early twenties when, strung out on coffee and nicotine and lack of sleep, I’d felt that the world was so full of excitement and possibility that I could go free-running over the rooftops of London without thinking of falling, vaulting from building to building with fearless ease. This, I suspected, was how he was all the time.
The sun, which rose behind my building and moved slowly round during the day to set behind the block across the street, spilled its light further and further down the red-brick façade of the flats opposite. Their blinds were still drawn. As sometimes happened when I knew I would be interrupted, I immediately found a deep concentration and worked well for the hour or so that passed before I heard Richard’s feet padding softly over the carpet. I carried on working, my head bent over the manuscript, and he came up behind me. My hair was loose, hanging down my back over my new silk nightie, and he took hold of it near the end, gathered it into a ponytail and wrapped it carefully around his fist until his hand was tight on the nape of my neck. Then he’d pulled my head back against his lower stomach. On my shoulders I felt the heat of his skin, still warm from the bed, and in the semi-mirror of the window, I could see us, his bare torso, my face against it. His musky scent was in my nostrils and I wanted to turn around and run my tongue over his skin, kiss his stomach, but my head was held firmly in place. He’d caught the delicate new hair at the base of my scalp and it was pulling, a little painful but not unpleasurable.
‘Why do you work so hard?’ he said.
I tugged my head so that I could turn and answer him but he either didn’t notice or chose to ignore me. ‘I don’t work nearly as hard as you do,’ I said.
He laughed, tipped my chair on to its back legs and turned it round so that I was facing him. I kissed him, the tip of my nose fitting into the indent of his navel. Then he’d lifted me up and carried me through to the bedroom again. A block of sunlight was falling through the narrow window on to the bed now and I watched it play on his skin as he moved over me. ‘You didn’t tell me,’ he said afterwards.
‘What?’
‘Why you work so hard.’
Because I don’t have anything else. The words came into my head straight away and though I’d never thought it before, I recognised the truth of it at once. Richard was watching my face and raised his eyebrows in the manner which was already so familiar to me. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to do something . . .’
‘And that’s one of the things I like about you, Katie,’ he dipped his head to kiss my breast again. ‘Why we’re so similar. No half measures.’
Chapter Seven
Two days after I walked to Totland, I woke to find that I’d been taken over by a dreadful, wrenching anxiety. The night before, lying in bed in the dark, I’d felt an emptiness just beyond the horizon, exponentially gathering momentum like a breaker waiting to crest. It pressed at the edge of my thoughts and I’d closed my eyes and pulled the pillow tight around my head, praying that sleep would ward it off and deliver me safely into the next morning.
But now the feeling was in my stomach, a spasming, nauseating anxiety that left no room for any positive thought or even volition. Panic was all there was. I turned on my side and curled into a foetal position but it only spilled further into my body, a viscous liquid slowly finding its level again. Getting out of bed was impossible. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t see any reason to: a paralysis had taken hold of me, as if my brain had lost the ability to send instructions to my limbs. A familiar sense of agoraphobic limitlessness stretched and stretched until I became the centre of a world that I could fall through for ever without coming to anything solid.
One afternoon when I was twelve, Dad and Matt had gone to look at a neighbour’s new telescope and I had been left alone in the house for the first time. As soon as the front door closed behind them, a strange quiet had settled. I wandered from room to room, enjoying the peace and the subtle air of difference that seemed to have come over the familiar things. I had a vision of myself as an adult, the house and the furniture and objects in it mine to do with as I wanted. I was the owner, independent, and my roles as daughter and sister fell away.
Then the feeling had changed. The silence became oppressive, a great weight that threatened to crush me. There was nothing in it, no distractions, nothing but more of the same: silent time rolling on into an empty future. It had been a mild day, still only April, but sweat broke out on my forehead. There was no structure to anything, I suddenly understood, nothing apart from what you could make. I’d recently learned about agoraphobia and I hadn’t been able to imagine it. Then, though, I could: it was panic at the sheer limitlessness of everything. There wa
s nothing to keep you rooted down.
That was the first time I’d had the feeling but I had come to recognise it since then, to sense it rolling towards me, gathering pace and momentum like an avalanche. The only way to deal with it, experience had taught me, was to throw things in its way, create barriers of distractions – work, going out with Helen, talking to my brother, the flings with the men whom I saw for a week or two and then pushed away before they got close, trips to galleries and concerts and films: anything that could ward it off, even for an hour. Now, though, here on the Island, I was cut off from my old life and the little structure it had offered me. I was on my own.
If you want to be alone, then be alone. Richard’s last message ran through my mind, finding its mark over and over again. He knew exactly how to get to me, of course; he had learned me inside out, storing information about me with an avidity I had loved. He had asked me question after question about my life, as if he had been swotting for a cool metropolitan version of Mr and Mrs in which prizes depended on him providing the correct answers. He was so different to my previous boyfriend, David, a teacher and a sweet man whose avuncular warmth had reminded me a little of my father. I’d tried with David, I’d really tried, but I’d begun to feel first stultified, then smothered by his mildness and his references to ‘settling down’, an expression and idea which I’d loathed. It had been three years since we’d split up and in the months before I’d met Richard I’d started to wonder whether I’d been stupid to throw it away. The excitement I felt with Richard, however, the intensity of his focus, was confirmation that I’d been right: stability wasn’t enough.
One evening at our table in the corner of the French restaurant in Kensington – it had become our regular haunt – the candle enveloping us in a private cloud of light, we had been talking about friends and I’d told him my theory that being with other people is the only insulation against the sharp edges of the world. Part of it, I told him, as he rubbed his foot up my shin under the table, was the feeling that there were people to help you and look after you, of course, but the other part was simple distraction, that being with others and being involved in the business of their lives was padding against the hardness of things.
‘That’s what you’re really afraid of, isn’t it?’ he’d said, his foot stopping all of a sudden. ‘It frightens you more than anything else. Being alone.’
I looked at his face. His eyes were watching me carefully. ‘Yes,’ I said.
That first day I didn’t get out of bed except to stagger to the bathroom where I was very sick. I ate nothing and my stomach was emptier and emptier, the throwing up only exacerbating the aching until I was no longer sure what was hunger and what was the voracious anxiety. I didn’t open the curtains but was aware periodically of the light changing behind them, the dim daylight becoming dusk and then dark again.
The following day, I had no choice but to get up. I was too hungry; the pain of it was clawing at my stomach. I stood on wobbling legs. The bed was rancid, the sheets soft with sweat. The stairs seemed steeper even than usual and I put my hand flat against the wall to steady myself. In the kitchen there were a few slices of bread left and I ate them straight from the bag, feeling them melt against my teeth. A cold draught blew in over the linoleum tiles, mottling the flesh of my thighs white-blue and making the bones in my feet numb. I went upstairs and got out the spare blanket I’d seen in the wardrobe. It was old and the grey wool was rough against my bare arms; it smelled of dust and the bare pine shelf. The stitching round the edge was done in contrasting red wool and sharp tears came into my eyes. I remembered a blanket that my brother had had in his cot, his in palest blue, the stitching also in red. I remembered my mother’s hands tucking it in around him.
Irregular hours were one of the things that Richard and I had had in common. When he was abroad, he sometimes phoned me very late. The first time, I had been asleep and answered the phone anxiously, wondering why anyone would be ringing at nearly three o’clock in the morning. ‘It’s me,’ he said and I sat down in the wicker chair in front of the window, suddenly wide awake. ‘I know it’s late there but I wanted to talk to you.’ A thrill went through me. This was what I wanted, someone who didn’t follow the rules but called when he needed to, regardless of the time. There was a drama about it, implicit excitement. Why wait until the morning, office hours? We talked until the sky above the roofs opposite began to lighten through shades of blue so stunning I didn’t want to look away. I described them to him. He told me how he thought the estimate he’d been given by one of his contractors was too high. ‘They’re trying to rip me off,’ he said. ‘I’m not having it. They’ll regret it.’
I laughed. ‘That sounds very serious.’
‘I am serious. There’s hundreds of thousands of pounds at stake here, sweetheart; I’m not fucking around. People have to learn that they can’t outsmart me.’
I reached for the throw that I kept on the arm of the sofa; though it was summer, it was chilly in the flat in the early hours. Richard’s business attitude, the macho posturing of it, made me laugh sometimes, though of course he’d be furious if he knew. On the other hand, there was a part of me that found the sheer self-confidence of it attractive. In him, I saw for real the strength that sometimes I only pretended.
I came to love the phone calls; there was something so intimate about them. In bed, we were the same as every man and woman, the same bodies, the same positions, even if they did feel better with him than anyone else. Our telephone calls, though, were unique; no one else could have had the exact same conversations. When he called me late at night, I had the sense that our voices were cocooned in the darkness, our two spots on the earth’s crust illuminated by the connection between us. But the calls did nothing to stave off my physical longing for him – the opposite, in fact. I craved him. Sometimes when he was away, I imagined him so vividly that I thought I could smell him, the traces of rosemary soap on his skin, the human warmth underneath. I ached to kiss him, unbutton his shirt, put my hands on him.
About three months after we met, he rang from Spain. It was two o’clock in the morning and though I was in bed, I was awake, reading. I’d hoped that he might call and had the phone on the bedside table. I said hello, hearing myself smile.
‘Hello, Katie.’
‘Is everything all right? You sound . . .’
‘I’m a bit drunk. OK – I’m missing you, I admit it. I hold up my hands. Tell me, that game you were talking about – do I stand a chance of winning?’
I felt my heart lift. ‘Well, I don’t know. It sounds to me like I’m winning,’ I said, with the bravado that was getting harder to fake the stronger my feelings for him became. ‘You’d better watch out in case it’s you that ends up giving yourself to me.’
I heard him take a sip of a drink, the ice cubes chinking against his glass, and then a laugh full of pleasure. ‘Oh, I miss you,’ he groaned. ‘Why aren’t you here? I want to fuck you so badly.’
In the bath the following day I lay motionless and let the water settle so the only movement was a trembling across its surface as I breathed. I thought about what would happen if I died. How long would my body be here before anyone came looking for me? It could be weeks. The ends of my hair floated on the surface. Had Alice Frewin thought like this? Had she imagined the boats out looking for her, finding her body? Had she hesitated at the last minute, trod water trying to keep her face above the freezing waves, spitting out mouthfuls of salt water, or had she dived in, dug her way deeper and deeper down into the darkness until the weight above her started to crush the air from her lungs?
I stayed in the bath until the water was cold. The phone hadn’t rung since Richard’s email, I realised, three days before. I had cut myself off from him, run from him in horror, but somehow he had reversed the situation so that now I felt as though it were him who had severed contact. True to his word, he’d gone. He’d left me alone.
The day after that, I had to go out. There was nothing left to ea
t. I wasn’t sure how many days it had been since I’d left the house – three? four? – but it seemed an incredible idea: inside, there was structure; outside, anything might happen. I had no choice, though. Talking myself through the actions, I put my long coat on over my T-shirt and found my ankle boots. My purse and the key were still on the counter from the last time. I took a deep breath and opened the door.
A strong wind was blowing, funnelling down the passage and biting at my bare legs. I put my hands on my thighs to stop my coat flying up. In the Square, against the cloudless petrol blue of the evening sky, everything seemed supernaturally bright, as if I had been wearing a blindfold which had now been removed. It all seemed so definite and beautiful but distant, too: alien.
At the checkout at the corner shop I waited with mounting impatience while the assistant, a woman with salt-and-pepper hair and round eyes that almost closed when she smiled, slowly scanned and packed the food. My hands were shaking with hunger as I took the notes out of my purse and when at last she gave me the change I dropped it and the coins rolled off in different directions, fleeing under the racks and spinning merrily away from me. I got down and scrabbled for them. The floor was cold on my bare legs but the coins now meant much more to me than their monetary value: they seemed to symbolise everything. Suddenly I was blinking fiercely against hot tears. The assistant came out from behind the counter and helped me, retrieving three coins and putting them gently into my hand. As she curled my fingers over to make sure I had them this time, she smiled at me again and in her face I saw the unmistakable softening of pity.
The following afternoon I got properly dressed for the first time since it had started. I needed more books. They had some at the newsagent’s, I had seen them tucked away in a corner at the back, but it was the Totland shop I wanted. There was something more than the books there; though the owner had identified me as an outsider, it had felt familiar to me, a like-minded place.
The Bed I Made Page 6