by Nicci French
I closed my eyes once more and heard him leave. I’d had a couple of hours of fragmented sleep, and now I had about three minutes before I had to become a person again among all the other people pretending to be people. I pulled the duvet over my head and made myself consider the events of the previous evening. It wasn’t really like thinking. I felt I was being punched by someone who was skilled in such things, the blows aimed at the soft areas of my body where they would leave no mark. I found it difficult to breathe. I gasped and coughed, as if I had been washed ashore by a large wave. I thought of that woman last night – me – laughing and flirting and being so reckless and yielding to every temptation. No, not ‘yielding’, courting every temptation. The life and soul of the party. Now she just seemed like a ghastly, trashy bore. I thought of myself in that room, that other bed, with that man – whoever he was.
That’s the thing, with love and sex: people write songs and poems and make movies and we swoon and fantasize about it and we all want it or we want it to be better. But in the end when it happens, when you’ve left the club, when the clothes are off, it’s just a spotty back and a stained sheet and an awful flat somewhere in a nasty bit of London you’ve never been before and a slimy, crinkled-up condom on the carpet, which makes you want to throw up. I thought about going downstairs to the kitchen, sitting down opposite Charlie, telling him what I’d done last night while he’d been peacefully sleeping in our bed. The sheer stupid, squalid, ugly, nasty pointlessness of it. I imagined the way the expression would change on his face as I told him, and I squirmed further into my duvet and groaned out loud in the muffled darkness, sickened by what I’d done. If I could turn back the clock, leave the bar when Meg had done, leave the noise and lights and laughter, and come home to my husband, go to sleep innocently curled up at his side between clean sheets, wake this morning with a clear conscience… If only, if only…
Part of me knew quite well that I’d changed my life. There was a little voice in my head saying, ‘You’ve committed adultery.’ I remembered religious education lessons in school, fragments from the Bible about how you could commit adultery in your heart just by looking at someone with lust. But I hadn’t committed adultery in my heart, or even in my head. I’d committed it with my body, the body I’d scrubbed so ferociously in the shower, as if I could wash it all out of me. I couldn’t tell Charlie about it. It would be cruel and, like a great stain, it would pollute everything in our life.
I’m good at lying. I always have been. Since that autumn day eleven months ago, so blustery and bright and full of promise, when I tugged him into the register office, followed by the two bewildered, shy witnesses we’d grabbed from the street, I’ve lied lots of times, lied and pretended and faked, but never like last night. That was a first.
I heard Charlie downstairs, the clink of china, a clatter of mail falling through the letterbox on to the bare boards of the hallway, and I pulled the duvet off my face and squinted out into the room. My legs ached and my eyes ached and there were swollen glands in my neck. Perhaps I was getting flu, I thought hopefully. Then I’d have a reason to hide from the world just a little bit longer. But I knew I didn’t have flu, just a hangover and a guilty conscience.
‘Out of bed, Holly,’ I ordered myself and, like an automaton obeying its master’s command, I sat up, headache clanging round my skull, and put my feet on the floor. I waited for the room to steady, then shuffled into the bathroom where I washed my face in cold water. I stared at myself in the mirror: the darkish blonde hair that Charlie used to say looked like a lion’s mane, the grey eyes that gazed back at me candidly from under thick brows, the wide mouth that smiled out at me so brightly. How was it possible that my mind should be covered with a layer of sooty grime while my face looked so fresh and happy?
‘You can’t fool me,’ I hissed at myself, wrinkling my skin in a hideous grin. ‘I know you, Holly Krauss. You can’t fool me.’
‘Are you going in to work at the usual time?’ Charlie pulled a letter out of its envelope, glanced at it, then crumpled it into a ball.
‘I’ve got to. I’m seeing Meg at nine. And there’s someone I need to deal with first.’
Charlie looked round. ‘That sounds ominous,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘And then we’re going to be frantic, preparing for next weekend. It’s going to be a nightmare. Who was that letter from?’
‘Next weekend? I didn’t know about next weekend. What’s happening?’
‘I told you. Twelve executives crossing a pond on a raft. To help them bond. What are you doing today?’
‘Stuff, you know. You want breakfast?’
‘Maybe,’ I said dubiously.
I had woken up thinking I would never need to consume anything more than coffee as long as I lived, but suddenly I felt the sort of ravenous shaky hunger that makes you think you’ll faint. Had I eaten anything last night? I went through the evening as if I were fast-forwarding a video. There was lots of talk and drinking and cigarettes. Occasionally I’d catch sight of some food on my internal video but although I’d pushed it around on my plate I hadn’t eaten much. I looked further back in the day. I’d forgotten about lunch and, in all probability, about breakfast as well, although I’d got up at five thirty. Had I become some new sort of human being who didn’t require sleep or food?
I rummaged in the fridge, and found myself nibbling a slice of pork pie, and then I drank a liquid yoghurt. It all tasted like chalk, and the combination of the different foods made it even worse, different kinds of chalk coating my tongue and the roof of my mouth. What a strange thing, I thought, to take things from the outside world, mash them up in your mouth and push them down into your body so that some of it becomes part of you. It was enough to put anybody off their food, except that I had an unassuageable craving in my stomach. It wasn’t so much appetite as the sort of signal a robot might send out when it required charging up.
Charlie was scrutinizing me. ‘Here, have some more coffee. I could make you something proper, if you want.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Bacon and eggs, an omelette, sausages, except we haven’t got any sausages. Or bacon, actually. And I’m not sure about eggs. We’ve got bread, though.’
‘No, no,’ I said, laughing – trying to laugh, needles of pain in my head. I was in the audience and on stage, all at the same time, watching myself impersonate a normal woman. ‘What are your plans last night?’
Charlie looked puzzled. ‘Did you say last night?’ he asked.
‘Did I?’
‘Last night I was here. Tonight I don’t know. Do you know?’
‘We could do something. Or nothing. That would be good.’ I went and stood beside him, putting my hands in his thick, clean hair, bending forward to smell his warm morning cleanliness, to place a kiss on his warm cheek. ‘Charlie?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
I reached across for my mug of coffee, but fumbled it and it smashed to the floor, the coffee spreading in a puddle at my feet.
‘It’s all right,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll clear it up.’ He squatted on the floor, picking up the pieces, mopping at the spillage with kitchen roll.
‘It was the one we bought together at that pottery near Brighton.’ I felt near to tears.
‘I can fix it.’
‘No, you can’t. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s just the handle, Holly. Look. I’ll glue it and you won’t even know where it was broken. Leave it to me.’
I stared at him, and thought: Now. Tell him now. Don’t rush off to work. Instead, take his hand and look into his face. Talk to him honestly, for once in your stupid life. But then there was a sharp knock at the door.
‘I’ll get it,’ I said.
It was Naomi from next door. She had moved in at the beginning of the year and she was our only friend in the street. She looked as unkempt as I felt. Her hair was standing up in wild, dark curls and she was wearing slippers. ‘I’m on the scrounge,�
�� she said, stepping into the hallway. ‘I’m all out of coffee.’
‘We’ve got plenty, and there’s some in the pot. Have a cup.’
She looked nervously from me to Charlie. ‘If you’re sure…’
‘I’m on the way out, but Charlie’s here.’
I left them together in the kitchen and stepped out gratefully into the street, where no one knew my face or name.
I quite like it when we have projects that are impossible because then people are grateful when you manage anything at all. That was how Meg and I first met, nearly five years ago now, although sometimes it feels we’ve known each other for ever and it’s almost a shock to realize that she wasn’t around in my childhood and adolescent years. We were both in our first jobs and we were the dogsbodies in a company that was a total shambles. One day a woman arrived to check the arrangements for the following day and Derek, our boss, had forgotten all about it. As if that wasn’t enough, he shut himself away in his office. After about an hour, I went in without knocking and he was crying. Even now I can remember his wretched, crumpled face and his red eyes. He looked desperate, so I told him it would be all right. We’d make sure of it. He held my hand in both of his and told me his wife had run off with her decorator.
We had nothing to lose. We were only twenty-two, and everything seemed possible. We phoned the woman, got some details about the company, then found a hotel and cobbled together some exercises from talking to people around the office. We stayed up the entire night preparing cards and little speeches. The next day, well, it wasn’t the greatest office away-day of all time, but Meg and I worked like dogs getting people to cross a carpet with only a plank, a rope, a bucket and a couple of other stupid things, and we flirted and sparkled until our faces hurt – or mine did, at least. Meg is the straight man in our double-act. She doesn’t flirt – when she likes a man, she gets clumsy and abrupt, laughs in the wrong places, blushes to the roots of her hair. And she never shows off. I do, and when I do she looks at me with an expression that’s a mixture of indulgence and faint anxiety. She has a faint crease between her eyebrows from when she frowns. It makes her look as if she’s about to burst into tears.
We did it all day and we did it in the bar all evening. Just after midnight the woman from the company came up and hugged us and said, thank you, thank you, thank you, that we had saved her job, and then Derek the next day, he was so emotional he started crying again. I sat there again and said reassuring things and looked at him. I remember shivering. We were both on a high wire, making it look easy. All it took was a glance down, the realization that there was no safety-net, and you slip and fall.
And yet at the same time it was the biggest high of my life bar nothing. I’ve heard people say they have a recurring nightmare that they are on a stage and a play is going on and they don’t know their lines. That day showed me that it wasn’t my ultimate nightmare at all. Quite the opposite: it was something I sought out. My nightmare begins when the show is over.
It wasn’t many months later that Meg and I decided to go it alone. I had never met anyone I liked as much as her. I think she was almost the first person in the whole of my adult life I didn’t feel the need to put on an act with, didn’t need to try to charm or impress. I always knew she was kind-hearted, and in a peculiar way I felt that I was a better, or less bad, person when I was around her. Perhaps, in my twenties, I had at last found my first real friend.
We could have called our company something New Age like Swish or Enthrall or Aspire but we stuck with KS Associates, which is brilliantly derived from Krauss, my surname, and Summers, which is Meg’s. We paid an old art-school boyfriend of Meg’s five thousand quid to design a logo for us. Imagine the K and then imagine that the sideways V is the top half of the S, which continues below, then curves back and almost touches the bottom of the straight bit of the K. It’s rather hard to picture unless you see it. We thought it looked quite classy, but when we had the party in our office to celebrate the launch of the company, someone pointed out, late at night when we were all quite drunk, that it looked like the wheelchair sign you see on disabled toilets. But it was too late to change and, anyway, Meg and I decided it was probably only an effect noticed by the very drunk.
I like the impossible, but there are limits even to impossibility. The previous week one of our staff had gone off on maternity leave and another woman had resigned and we had two away-days coming at us, like something very big and very heavy. As I stood on the Underground platform, for the second time that morning, with my aching head and sore throat and a sense of disaster hanging around me like a toxic miasma, I started to reassign the two absent women’s duties in my head and work out a rough timetable and think of what lay ahead in the next seventy-two hours. The train burst out of the tunnel and I suddenly thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to let myself tip over like a tree in front of it? I would never have to work out anything ever again. After all, in a hundred years I’d be dead anyway. Everybody on this jam-packed platform would be dead, most of them probably after years of loneliness and illness. I’d just be arriving early. And there are no spreadsheets in the grave. And no greyness. Just blackness, or nothing. Or maybe even as a surprise bonus there would be heaven and I would meet my old budgies and hamsters and my rabbit and my cat from when I was a little girl. And I would see my father again.
But then I saw the face of the driver, homely, jowly, unshaven, shockingly close, and I saw us, the crowd on the platform, from his point of view, all teetering on the edge over the rails. Did he have nightmares that one day someone would jump?
Our office doesn’t look like what my father would have called a normal office. Not that he ever worked in a normal office. At least, it’s not what normal fathers would call a normal office. We found it on the edge of Soho and took over the lease from a dot com company that had gone bust. It has no walls, no partitions, no doors. There’s just a series of parallel tables like a modernist monk’s refectory. There’s a poky so-called conference room, but usually when we have a meeting with clients, we hold it at another long table on a dais at the end, where the abbot would sit. It has industrial-looking lights hanging from the ceiling and people have lockers but no set desks or terminals – except me, because apparently wherever I sit I make such a mess that no one wants to take my place. We inherited the design from the dot com company and have never got round to changing it. Meg and I have promised each other that one day we’ll have it converted into real offices with walls so we won’t have to stare at each other all day, but I doubt we’ll bother.
I walked through the door at five minutes past eight, which, considering everything, I thought deserved an entry of its own in the Guinness Book of Records. The office was empty and silent. Good. I had about half an hour. I made myself a cup of coffee and got to work. I heard a noise and looked round sharply. It was probably something out in the street. I couldn’t help smiling nervously at my situation. I was like a burglar in my own office. It took only a moment to locate Deborah’s files. It was an easy task because for the most part I knew what I was looking for. Like any skilled thief, I had cased the joint well in advance and I knew where the plunder was to be found. I felt a brief glow of satisfaction at being proved right, but this was quickly replaced by a sour feeling about what had been done. I photocopied some of the papers, then replaced the files in the locker just as I heard footsteps on the stairs.
4
I knew it was Meg, always first in the office. Except today. She was wearing a white cotton shirt and her hair was pulled back from her face. There were little silver studs in her ears but no makeup on her face. I thought how fresh she looked, like an unblemished piece of fruit, an apple or a peach. She started with surprise when she saw me, then came and sat beside me. ‘I thought you’d be late,’ she said, ‘after last night. What did you get up to?’
I gave a sort of shrug that meant: Later. We’ll talk about it later.
She stared at me. ‘You’ve done something stupid, haven’t you?’
It’s important not to underestimate Meg. She sees right through me. She can even see through my shrugs.
‘This isn’t the time,’ I said. ‘I came in early because I wanted to check through this. Look.’
I laid out the photocopies in front of her.
She looked at them with a frown of concentration. ‘You’re going to have to talk me through them,’ she said.
‘These are Deborah’s so-called documents,’ I said. ‘Invoices, reports, expenses forms, plans, you know. The sort of stuff we do.’
‘Yes, I can see that.’
‘It’s all rubbish,’ I said. ‘Look at this expenses claim. She wasn’t even there for the Sussex job.’
‘Yes, but–’
‘And the assessment for the weekend after next. The one she’s been writing all week, the one she said was finished. This is it.’
Meg picked up an almost blank sheet of paper. ‘How do you know?’ she said. ‘She may have the rest of it at home.’
‘I’ve been through it all. The only question in my mind is whether she’s dishonest or a fantasist who believes her chronic lies. By the way, that train she missed last week, back from her friend’s funeral. There is no such train. I checked.’
Meg was clearly shocked. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘We need to talk to her.’
‘We need to fire her.’
‘Holly, we can’t. There are procedures.’
‘We’re a tiny company, Meg. Someone like Deborah could drag us down. We can deal with it in a decent way. We’ll talk to her, explain the situation, say she has to leave. We could even suggest she sees a doctor. We’ll do it today. As soon as she walks through the door.’
‘She’s away today and tomorrow, remember, at that conference.’
‘When she comes back, then. No putting it off.’