by Jane Rogers
‘I didn’t say you were smelly.’
‘I probably am. I haven’t had a shower for a while.’
‘For God’s sake.’
‘For God’s sake indeed. Sauve qui peut.’
‘I don’t want —’
‘But why?’ he says insistently. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. Why? The children? You think you’re going to turn Dan around by staying in the same house as his smelly father?’
‘Dan doesn’t need turning around. Dan is perfectly self-sufficient.’
‘Right. By which you mean, Cara isn’t.’
‘Are we going to go through every old argument you can rake up?’
‘You think I indulge her.’
She strains for a conciliatory tone. ‘Each of our children is different. They are fine. Paul is fine. Megan is fine. Cara is fine. Dan is fine.’
‘Don’t patronise me. And Dan is not fine. He hasn’t got a friend in the world.’
Like you, she thinks. ‘We both know what’s wrong with Dan. For God’s sake, shut up!’ Why doesn’t she leave him? It is true her heart sinks every time she opens the front door.
‘It is possible to talk in the night, you know. Don’t you talk to Louis?’
Cradling her mug, she moves away from the sink. ‘Dan still needs to be able to come home. The others are in and out. We still have a life here —’
But he rises to his feet, heavily. Like an ox. He is standing in the doorway.
And now El allows the memory to blur, to waver into dreaming, to imagining whatever it is that Paul may imagine. So Conrad does not step aside to let her pass, as he did in reality.
‘Let me go to bed, please,’ she says.
‘No, we don’t have a life. I’m here. On my own. Night after night…’
‘If you saw your friends, joined something, did something, for God’s sake – it’s a vicious circle, can’t you see?’
‘You have a life,’ he says in the same heavy, bewildered voice, ‘but it isn’t here.’
‘Please move. I’m going to bed.’
‘No.’
‘Con, move!’ She makes a grab for the door handle but he bats her arm away and the cocoa spills down her new wool trousers, scalding her leg.
‘No!’ she shouts. ‘Bastard!’ Hopping about in pain she flings the mug at him and it hits him smack on the side of the head and he dodges heavily, too late, and bumps the other side of his head against the corner of the bookshelf behind the door, the corner she has told him about a dozen times. He crashes to the floor.
El rips off her boots and trousers and holds a tea towel under the cold tap then wraps it round her scalded thigh. Pressing her legs together to hold it in place, she runs a bowl of tepid water and puts the pale grey trousers in to soak. They are probably ruined.
When she turns back to Con he is lying blocking the doorway. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ She picks her barefoot way across the shards of mug and crouches beside his head. He’s bleeding where the mug hit him but it isn’t deep. He’s out cold, though. She staunches the wound with her tea towel and scrapes away the broken china so she can pull him out to full length. His head lolls to the other side. Now she can see. The injury to the other temple is serious. It’s deep and white and livid. The tissue around it is already swollen. How has he —?
She looks up in panic. The old iron shoe-scraper which they use as a doorstop when the kitchen door needs holding open – the old iron doorstop lies, toppled on its side underneath the bookshelf. It has an edge like a cleaver. She snatches a clean tea towel, runs more cold water, presses it to the swelling. His body twitches convulsively and his bowels open. His eyes roll up in his head.
‘Con! Con! Conrad, listen to me.’ She leans into his face, searching for breath – grabs his wrist and fumbles the stupid multi-coloured sleeve out of the way. She can’t feel a pulse.
Is this what Paul imagines? Or worse, that she attacked him with intent to kill him, with a knife or a brick? What is she supposed to have done with the body? Con is six foot four. Does Paul imagine her sawing his father into chunks on the kitchen floor, then secreting them round the garden? Or dragging his weight into the boot of the car (she wouldn’t have the strength, though, so again she’d have to dissect him first) and unloading him at some conveniently isolated landfill site, or popping him in a sack with stones and dropping him in a river?
Eleanor is sweating. She opens her eyes. It seems entirely plausible; if she were Paul she would probably think it too. But I didn’t do that, she reminds herself. I didn’t do it. It could have happened but it didn’t.
There is not much comfort in the thought. She wonders if Conrad too has imagined such a scene. No wonder he has left her. No wonder.
Chapter 2
Conrad has not been murdered by Eleanor. He has gone to the conference in Munich. Where he has been greeted with friendliness by colleagues from universities around the world, and where he has slipped into his work persona as easily and comfortably as a man sliding his feet into a well-worn pair of slippers.
It is a short walk from the conference centre in Munich to Conrad’s hotel. His Korean colleague, Park, is staying with friends a tram ride away. After the Sunday night dinner, Con walks with him to the tram stop then turns the corner towards his own hotel, away from the brightly lit main thoroughfare.
This is a quiet residential street; on the corner there’s a building site enclosed by hoardings, then well-to-do houses, with brass nameplates of dentists and lawyers, shuttered windows, small coiffured shrubs in planters. The streetlamps are heritage, resembling gas lamps and giving as little light. As he moves towards the end of the empty street Conrad hears a lighter step behind him. He glances back. There’s a squat tree between him and the nearest streetlamp, and the shadows of the branches reach across the street. A woman is coming towards him through the shadows. Her.
He’s running before he knows it. Running for the corner, running past the dark shopfronts, running up the steps, through the open door, into the lobby of his hotel. He slows to a walk, and nods to the receptionist while moving quickly towards the stairs. Once out of the receptionist’s view he’s running again. Up the stairs, round and round to the third floor. Along the quiet corridor, fumbling his key card, and into his room. Where he manages to not-quite slam his door, and leans against it, breathing hard.
How did she know he was here?
Leaving the lights off he moves to the window and looks down. A few cars pass, but no pedestrians. What is she doing? Why is she waiting in the street, what is she planning? Something moves at the pavement edge and he cranes to see. A cat.
Eventually he turns from the window and moves to sit on the bed. It is neatly made; his washbag on the bedside table has been tidied and straightened. Anyone could have been in here. He runs his fingers over his face, as if the softness of his eyelids, the slight friction of the day’s growth of stubble, are new; his face, his head, his whole body feels fragile as an egg. He will have to go to bed. But his bowels have turned to water.
He can’t bring himself to switch on the bathroom light. The fan comes on automatically; he won’t be able to hear someone at the door. There’s nothing he can do if someone does come to the door, beyond not answering it. But he needs to know. He lifts the lid and lowers himself gingerly onto the toilet in the dark. When the hot liquid has shot out of him he wipes himself, pulls up his trousers, and moves towards the door so he’s grasping the handle with one outstretched hand, and reaching for the toilet flush with the other. He has to force himself to press the flush and get out of the bathroom on the roar of sound, pulling the door closed behind him. Outside the bathroom door he waits, listens: nothing.
She knows where he is. He can’t go back to the conference tomorrow. He undresses in the dark, keeping his underwear on, and crawls into bed. He can listen better when he is lying flat. He can see the shape of the windows, he can see the
crack of corridor light under the door. He is keeping an eye on the entrances and exits. Maybe he’ll get some sleep.
It is two hours later, after he has lain quietly breathing, staring at the passing illumination of headlights across his ceiling, marking the sounds of the hotel and its inhabitants, including two sets of feet moving along the corridor to a door beyond his own, which duly opens and closes; it is after this that he realises what she is doing. Keeping him dangling. It is her intention that he will lie awake, jumping at every shadow; that the drip drip drip of what she might do will slowly unhinge him.
He has already given himself up to it. So why didn’t he simply turn and face her in the street? The answer is a spasm of nausea; fear and self-disgust conjoined. The idea of facing her cannot, itself, be faced.
He thinks about going home. He thinks about Eleanor. She sometimes accuses him of playing the victim. She has accused him of that when she has done something which makes him unhappy. ‘Don’t play the victim, please.’ There is no reply, because he is the victim, or has been, of what El has done, and she knows it. He understands her to mean, ‘Don’t ask me for sympathy’ or ‘You are as bad to me as I am to you’, or simply, ‘Don’t feel sorry for yourself.’ He understands her to mean that his response to her behaviour is tiresome.
He is playing the victim now. He is the victim. He should go to the police. But he is embarrassed by his own naivety. Also he doesn’t speak German. And he doesn’t believe they would protect him anyway. ‘Don’t play the victim,’ he tells himself. Don’t go back to the conference. Don’t go home. Don’t lie here in the hotel where she knows you are. Go somewhere else, give her the slip.
He imagines leaving the hotel, dragging his wheelie case, crossing the road to the tram stop. No. He imagines asking the receptionist to call a taxi. Skulking in the lobby till the driver calls him. Hurling himself into the passenger street and shouting, ‘The station, quick!’ The bahnhof. All he needs to do is get on a train before she can get on. That’s all he needs to do, leave on the soonest train.
He sees himself vanishing down the line, diminishing to a dot. He sees himself gone. He can’t make himself be in that dot, to know where he is. But he sees himself gone. It might work; it would at least be active rather than passive. Ever since the evening in Malmaison, she has been in control. At least if he vanishes, it is not playing the victim.
The sludge of his responsibilities stirs and clouds up around him, muddying the view. If he disappears, how will it affect the children? Cara especially, on the point of splitting up with her pig of a boyfriend – who can she turn to? If he disappears, what will happen at work? If he disappears, who will take the car for its MOT next Tuesday, who will be there to let the plumber in? Who will know where he has put the key to the shed? If he disappears…
If he disappears, where will he be? There is a click outside his door. He holds his breath. No further sound. He exhales. He remembers how he felt on the plane coming here; the lightening, the relief. Escape.
He gets up at 6 and moves silently round his room, gathering his things into the case. When he looks out the street is still. She can’t have waited outside all night, it was freezing. But if she has, he will handle it. A kind of calmness has seeped into him. Something has been set in motion and now he can follow it. Or maybe it’s just the animal lifting of the spirits at the passing of the night. He splashes water on his face and cleans his teeth, though he still doesn’t turn on the light. He opens his door carefully and steps out, case in hand, into the silent corridor.
His taxi takes him past the conference centre. Its front doors are closed, its interior dark. She will be expecting him to be there today. Maybe whatever she is planning will happen there today. The speed of the taxi through near-empty streets is like flying, winging his way above trouble. He has his case, his phone, his laptop, he is self-contained, extricating himself from the scene. What can she do when he’s gone?
He knows, of course. She can target El and the children, and blackmail him with the threat of that. He should close his email account. Then her emails would bounce back, wouldn’t they? Close his phone and email contracts, render himself incommunicado. It would be part of vanishing. He cannot put himself out of the reach of the children, he thinks, but simultaneously knows that he can and will. They are adults, all they need of parents now is cash and Eleanor has plenty. They don’t need him. It’s over, he tells himself. It’s over. So what are the choices? To huddle in the shell of his own life, playing the victim, or to strike out into the distance. His fear, his concern for his own safety, is nothing. There are many other things which are more important and which should now direct his movements. The monkeys, the animal house – despite all this sound and fury he has done nothing yet, nothing has changed. His work, El, the children, the house, all still wrong, all unresolved, all in need of – in need of — a figure outside the station snags his attention, as the taxi slows and pulls in. The up-and-down gait, the forward angle of her head… but then the movement of the taxi allows him a glimpse of profile; of course it is not her, it’s a young girl. And how will he ever resolve El, the children, the house, work? This ludicrous crowd of impossible things, this unending list of his failures, of his ‘playing the victim’, of his being at the receiving end of undeserved random events which buffet him from one buffoon-like position of imbalance to the next, which knock him down like the wobbly man the children used to play with, bobbing back up idiotically ready for the next blow. Of course he must disappear. Or the painted smile will be battered right off his face and he will be nothing but a scarred plug of wood tottering into and out of balance, taking longer each time to regain the upright, a kicking stool, a whipping boy, a victim.
This as he pays the driver with the note ready folded in his clasped palm, as he hefts his case and runs into the cavernous noise of the station, as he scans for her, for the destinations board, for the ticket office, for the exits, as he gauges the 08.04 departure for Paris against the time, 7.59, against the size of the queue at the ticket office, against the next departure, 08.07 to Rome, and the next, 08.09 to Berlin. He won’t make the Paris train, and anyway Paris is too close to home. He scuttles to the ticket hatch, waits with his head sunk between his shoulders, pays cash for a ticket to Rome, forces himself not to run to Bahnsteig 12, validates his ticket, moves swiftly down the platform. All the time he’s on the platform he is visible. He should get on immediately. But he hurries past carriage after carriage, hunting for an empty one. As he mounts the steps he permits himself one quick glance back. On the other side of the rails which lie between this platform and the next there is a woman facing his train. As he looks she starts to run, up towards the ticket barrier. He dodges into the carriage and peers through the window, holding his body sideways out of sight, but a train is pulling in on the neighbouring rails, she is already obscured. He’s lost her. If it’s her. If it’s her and she’s running for this train – he checks his watch. 8.06. If it’s her she has time, if she has a ticket. But why would she have a ticket? She was on the wrong platform. She thought he was getting a different train. Or was she just there on spec? It wasn’t her. It’s nothing, he tells himself furiously, moving down the carriage, aware of other passengers’ glances. It’s nothing. Even if it is her, even if she gets on this train – what? What is the worst she can do? And why wouldn’t he welcome the worst? If he is tired of playing the victim, if he is vanishing into a dot, then what? Why not embrace the consummation of these two? Allow her to vanish him, her victim.
This is not the point. This is white noise, nonsense, gabbling, all he needs to do is find a seat and conceal himself in it. But there are no empty doubles. He can’t sit beside someone, he can’t sit exposed in the aisle seat, he needs a corner, the end corner of a carriage. People stand in his way, rifling through their open bags for tickets, books, spectacles, shoving luggage into overhead racks, stowing and settling, blocking up the aisles. There are people at his back, he can’
t move. The train will stop, he thinks. He can get off anywhere, suddenly, just before it pulls out. If she’s on the train, she can’t know where he will get off. She can’t, she’s not superhuman, she can’t know.
He is in the last carriage: the last carriage is bad, nowhere to run, but finally there is an empty double, he ducks into it and heaves his suitcase onto the seat beside him, blocking himself in. He lowers the tray table, buries his head in his arms on the table and feigns sleep. Which is of course idiotic because he has to know who it is now coming down the aisle in his direction, who it is now hesitating beside his seats, shuffling tickets and seat reservations – he opens his eyes, he raises his head. A querulous elderly man holds out his seat reservation, obliging Con to move. The train pulls out at the same time. He staggers on down the carriage with his bag, finally stowing it in the end-of-carriage luggage rack and slumping beside a skinny youth with headphones, who appears not to notice him. He has a clear view down the aisle, at least. He can see anyone approaching. And everyone is seated now. The train gathers speed; he lays his head back against the seat and allows his burning eyes to close.
He is in the monkey house. He recognises the nightmare before it even materialises, recognises the lurch in consciousness, the fall. He knows what’s coming; it should be possible to turn, to wake, but he is powerless, limbs weak as trailing underwater weeds. The first cage swims up at him, the small grey inert body, the yellow vomit. He is holding his breath against the stench of the place, the filthy oranges, he can feel the air sticky on his skin, penetrating every orifice and pore, inhabiting him, staining him. With a gasping cough he is awake and sucking in a breath – the comforting recycled still slightly chilly air of the carriage, with its smell of carpets and burnt dust, its decent anonymity. The youth beside him stares ahead, jerking his feet to the sounds in his ears.
So, to Rome. Conrad has once been to Rome. He has a memory of El with Paul and Megan, laughing beside some towering ancient column, then realises he is remembering a photo. The real Rome is unimaginable. He will be nothing. A wraith, a ghost, a negative. With no reason to be there, no work, no children, no family, no friends, no holiday. Why should he be there? Why should he be anywhere?