Chapter Six
Lizzie
It’s raining when I wake up in the morning, drops rattling against the window, the howl of wind in the joints. I was aware in the night of Howard padding into the bedroom, but he’s not here now. The clock reads 10.30 a.m. In the early days, I could hardly sleep at all. Even as I longed for obliteration, for anaesthesia, my brain churned and sifted. My guilt-soaked grief became indecipherable from exhaustion. Now I often sleep the sleep of the dead.
The house feels strained, suspended, as if holding its breath to listen. I put on Zach’s dressing gown, which no longer smells of him, and walk from room to room. When my mother was living here, the house was full of plants and knick-knacks. All the walls were papered in different colours – apple green and citrus yellow, flowers and vines. Zach stripped it all out, painted it this cool grey, Borrowed Light, monastically simple. I used to love the starkness of it. But now I’m not so sure. I almost miss how it was before. I wander down into the sitting room and perch on the sofa. I’ve moved it back to the bay window, which Zach wouldn’t like. I bought a rug, too, the other day. Red and blue stripes. Another mistake. It looks ugly, garish; the room has rejected it.
The rug has a tread mark, I notice – the pattern of a large trainer. Jane was wearing stilettos and Peggy was wearing boots. I can’t remember what Hannah was wearing but her feet are smaller than this.
I stare at it for a little bit. Then I kneel down and rub my fingers across it. The nap of the carpet moves, becomes lighter when I do that. When I sit back up, the pattern has gone.
In the kitchen, a chilly blast whips across my legs. The back door is open. The catch is faulty and it must have blown free in the wind. I stand and call for Howard with that familiar rush of panic. The relief when he barrels back in, shaking the rain from his coat, is heavy and unsatisfying. I put some food in his bowl and he eats it hungrily. I am more alert to his appetite since he was so ill last year.
I go back up into the bedroom and open my cupboard door. I put Zach’s laptop in here last night and it stares up at me. The wardrobe is jam-packed and untidy. I haven’t thrown away any of Zach’s things and they are muddled up with mine. The clothes he gave me are in there somewhere – the expensively distressed jeans, the delicate tops. I was always snagging the fabric, or washing them too hot. It was a stressful business, pleasing Zach. Since he left, I have stopped caring. I have worn garments like a shroud. Tracksuit bottoms, a baggy T-shirt, a hoody, and underneath, an old grey bra and pants. The undergarments he picked out – transparent slithers of lace and silk and satin – lie curled at the base of the drawer.
Was it about control, his desire to take me in hand? It didn’t feel that simple. It made me feel desired. He would study my face with an expert’s eye, sometimes touching my cheeks, or my mouth, with his thumbs, an artist working out their proportions. He took me into a department store on one of our first dates and steered me to a stool at the counter. ‘Do with her what you will,’ he said, but his eyes followed every flick and dab of the assistant’s fingers. We kissed afterwards, in the shop doorway, his tongue dabbing at my slick lips, licking the colour away.
I don’t wear make-up any more. My face stays naked. It’s a penance. The last time I saw my mascara, dried up like a chimney brush, it was on my desk in a pot of pens. That red lipstick he bought me then, the one he said made my teeth look like pearls, the one he liked to taste . . . I don’t know where that is.
I loosen a red G-string from the pile of underwear and slide into it. I put on a clingy black dress, with tights. In the bathroom cabinet, I find the remnants of an old grey eyeshadow and I smudge it over my lids. Then I pinch my cheeks and bite my lips to bring some colour into them. If he is watching, I hope he’ll take it as a signal. A white flag.
We leave the house, the dog and I, for a wet, blustery walk, head down into the wind, my vision limited by the hood of my anorak to a few feet of path. The area has changed a lot over the last ten years. The students and actors have moved out and the bankers have moved in. We don’t know our neighbours: they change too often. My mother, who, before she was ill, liked to lend out sugar and water other people’s plants, who noticed when milk bottles stayed out on the porch, hated that.
I cross the main road to the large stretch of Wandsworth Common on the other side – to where expanses of grass are interspersed with trees and paths. It’s less busy than usual, only a few hardy walkers and fitness fiends. It’s stopped raining, but the tennis courts are slick and empty under the writhing limbs of the sycamores. No one outside the café, though on the cricket pitch an exercise class battles on. I turn right when I hit the main track. I used to take in the wilder sweep beyond the bowling green, but I’ve avoided that area ever since a woman was murdered there last year. Instead, I take the ‘trim trail’, sticking to the path to avoid the muddy grass. I cross at the lights and walk up Bellevue Road to the Sainsbury’s Local, where I tie Howard to the railings and go in to buy milk and a newspaper.
Inside, it’s cold and smells of tomato sauce combined with the vanilla whiff of hot supermarket bread. A teenage boy from Wandle Academy, whose name I wish I could remember, is in the bakery aisle trying to pick up a croissant with the awkward tied-up tongs. I smile at him but he goes red, so then I wish I hadn’t. Only one self-checkout is working and a queue has built. By the time I come out, a delivery van has pulled into the loading bay. Two large metal trolleys loaded with cartons of Walkers crisps are blocking my view of Howard. I can’t see him at all. My heart stops for a minute. When I run down the ramp and have passed the final trolley, there he is, sitting quietly, watching the traffic, where I left him.
I read the paper as we walk back along the path. Minutes from a secret governmental meeting have been leaked. Alan Murphy has outraged the Opposition by his pursuit of ‘back-door privatisation’. The article is illustrated with a photo of the MP outside a new, corporately funded library in Manchester, wearing a bright yellow hard hat, thumbs up.
As soon as I put the key in the lock and push, I get an odd feeling, like a through draught. I hear a sound, like the ruffle of a curtain, and there’s a smell a bit like dirty washing, a bit like a neighbour’s cooking seeping through the walls. I put the shopping down at my feet and rest the newspaper on top of it. The edges of the pages rustle slightly. The corners are moving by themselves. I stand still and listen.
Noises from the street seem unusually loud. A motorbike throttling into life sends vibrations up my legs.
The sitting-room door is closed. I don’t remember closing it.
I push open the door, and stare in. I hear myself gasp.
The window is broken and a horrible object is lying on the sofa. It’s a bird, head on one side, the poor wing flared out at an angle. It is dark grey, with a petrol gleam to its splayed feathers, eyes glazed, beak half open. Its feet are pink and horribly curled.
Surrounding the body lie thick splinters of glass. The edges of the broken pane behind are jagged, like teeth.
I don’t want to go too close, but I edge into the room and sit down on the edge of the armchair. The sofa and floor glimmer with tiny shards. I can hear the hum from the fridge and the roar of the traffic. An unsettled loneliness comes over me. Pity merges with self-pity. Poor bird, I think again. Did it see the reflection of the trees behind and fly into the window? It would have had to be flying with force. I lean forward to peer more closely.
A pigeon.
My little London pigeon, he used to call me.
I stand up quickly. I’ve been so stupid. I’ve been looking for the wrong things, thinking about this in the wrong way. Zach isn’t going to leap out at me from the shadows. After all this time, he wouldn’t just appear. It would be too obvious. That’s not what he is like. The back door – wide open this morning. The tread mark in the rug. The broken window. The pigeon. He would toy with me. That’s what he would do.
I walk slowly into the kitchen.
My eyes are drawn to the kitchen table.
The box of Rotring pens that was there this morning is gone. And in its place is a gold blunt object shaped like a bullet. My missing red lipstick.
I pick it up, and feel the weight of it in the palm of my hand. The metal is warm. I unscrew the lid and wipe it across my mouth, dab it on my bottom lip, smear the corners. I can taste it on my tongue, feel its stickiness on the back of my hand.
In the sitting room, I stare at my face in the mirror over the fireplace. My mouth is a gash. My eyes glitter. A flicker of anger, and fear – a fever, a hot thrill.
Zach can read me. He knows what I’m thinking. He’s one step ahead.
Zach
December 2009
Things I now know about Miss Lizzie Carter:
1) She is better with children than adults.
2) She is trustworthy and sees the best in people.
3) She has never watched a reality TV show.
4) She likes to have a book ‘on the go’.
5) She wears M & S bras and pants. White. (Or I think they are supposed to be white.) Her bra is 34C, which isn’t the right size.
6) Her house is shit inside.
7) She lives with her fucking mother.
Three lunches, twenty-two phone conversations, one movie, one visit to the house. To get close to her, I have had to be surprisingly resourceful. I’ve found myself putting in more effort than I am used to. A better man would have given up long ago, but I find myself drawn. The fact is I’ve found it hard to get her out of my mind.
Our lunch dates didn’t flourish. I met her at Marco’s, close to her school. I was going out of my way for her. Conversation didn’t flow. Every time the door to the restaurant opened, she flinched. ‘Are Wandle Academy parents really going to be lunching at Marco’s?’ I asked (35 per cent of students are on free school dinners). But it turned out it wasn’t being seen by teachers or parents that she was worried about. It was leaving the kids. Some bleeding-heart nonsense about lunchtime being when the more vulnerable make their way to the library. Really? Aren’t they too busy having their heads flushed down the loo? Didn’t say that of course. I touched her hand and gazed into her grey eyes and told her she was a saint. Weirdly, while I was forming the words, I meant them. Her love could save me. I felt a stirring inside that was almost sexual.
Our phone calls were more successful. I walked down to the front while Charlotte was cooking my supper and sat on a bench. I watched the sea, all the way to the end of the horizon. Maybe because she couldn’t see me, Lizzie opened up – about the kids at school, the other teachers, her sister, the funny things her tiny nephew has done, her dog, what she’s reading, what she wants the children to read. She asked me quite a few questions along the way. What do I think of this? Have I ever that? It’s peculiar. I’m not used to it. Most of the women I meet tend to talk about themselves. I have to be careful because it lowers my guard.
Charlotte was at a hen do in a spa hotel outside Winchester yesterday so I had the whole day. I had arranged to take Lizzie to the cinema. Jim had ‘lent’ me his bike – well, left it unlocked out the back of the studio – and I had brought it up on the train to Clapham Junction, cycled straight to the Picturehouse from there. Lizzie laughed when she saw me, said she hadn’t imagined me on a bicycle. I had to wear a helmet, she said. ‘Unless you’re planning on killing yourself.’
I shrugged – don’t mind if I do, don’t mind if I don’t.
‘I’ll have to buy you one,’ she said, and blushed.
I was gunning for 2012 (a nice bit of global annihilation for a Saturday afternoon), but she wanted to see some quirky French job, set in the Paris suburbs, in which a truculent jeune fille ‘comes of age’ (i.e. has a lot of sex with older men). Some of her year thirteens had told her it was good. I gave in – which is out of character for me. Afterwards, I treated her to a late lunch at a French restaurant, having spent most of the movie planning how to persuade her against the ‘delicious cheap Moroccan’ she had mentioned. (I can’t eat tagine. I just can’t.) We talked about the film, and about the pressures of growing up. She told me how closeted she was as a young girl, how her sister, her mother’s favourite, had been wilder and had broken free. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘after our father died, Mother assumed one of us would take on his role, and although I wasn’t her first choice, that person became me.’
‘No major love interest?’ I said.
‘There was one man . . .’ she said. ‘In my twenties. An electrician, but he turned out not to be a strong proponent of monogamy. Old-fashioned of me to care, but . . .’
I felt a tug of sympathy. The restaurant was cramped and cosy, the darkness of a damp afternoon closing in outside. The wine warmed my veins and I told her how my childhood sweetheart, Polly, had cheated on me with my best friend. I must have got carried away, because in the course of unravelling that terrible story (though I edited out its ending), I let slip where I grew up. It might not have mattered. People can’t generally locate the Isle of Wight, let alone my specific village. But her eyes widened. Did I know her great friend Fred Laws? I almost choked on my escalope de volaille. That lisping, stuck-up twerp. The last time I saw him must have been – what? 1987 – on the top of Tennyson Down. Mad Paul and I persuaded him to come for a drive one night. He couldn’t believe his popularity. We raced him up to the monument at the top of the cliff and then we left him up there on his own, in the dark, twenty miles from home, for a laugh. God, but if she were to ring him to check up on me, I’d be done for.
I put it out of my mind – steps could be taken, I was sure. I was more concerned with getting back to her house. It had been my plan all along. I had held her hand in the film (when our wrists brushed her upper thigh, I heard her slightly gasp), cajoled her into sharing a carafe of Merlot over lunch. Outside the restaurant, I hugged her, registered the dotted stain of tannin on the inner rim of her lower lip, plum against the rose, felt the narrowness of her ribcage. She pressed against me, breathing in sharply – but then no, she drew away, said she had to go, had ‘things to do’.
The frustration was extreme, but I couldn’t push. It’s a fine line. She was getting the bus home, so I had plenty of time. The route was downhill most of the way, the wind spitting in my face, funnelling across my hatless head. I got there before her, hid the bike behind the bins down the side of the County Arms, leaped over the railings, and crouched in a copse of trees on the small patch of common right by where she lived. I could at least find out her house number. It would be a small bonus.
It gets dark early these days. No one had pulled their curtains. People are weird, the way they don’t care who’s looking in. A young couple watching TV in number 32, pictures flashing across their faces, a baby on the floor, wriggling upside down like a beetle; in number 28, an elderly man playing patience, an overhead lampshade throwing shadows on the walls like the arms of a giant spider. At a top window of a house further down, a girl in a white towel, arms opened wide to close the curtains, in the shape of a crucifix. I studied these images hard. You never know when they might come in useful.
It was chilly crouching there, ears full of noise from the main road. As each car passed, the orange glow of its headlamps raked the underside of the branch nearest to me; what I had thought was moss was a fur of pollution. The ground was too wet, too dirty, to sit down and the muscles in my thighs twitched. None of it bothered me. I was fired by the plan, by the excitement of what might happen, but also by the execution itself. Like that time, most recently, I followed the psychologist home, it was as if my whole being had been subject to an electrical charge. I throbbed with it. What am I trying to say? I just felt alive.
When she turned the corner, she was chewing a nail, her teeth pulling at the cuticle, her brow gently furrowed. Even though I’d been waiting, her actual appearance came as an agreeable surprise. My heart actually stopped for a second. But then the pleasure soured. Here she was, walking down her own street, having made the decision to do it without me. She looked contemplative, too. What was g
oing through her mind? I hate not knowing. If I could have drilled into her head and rummaged in her brains with my hands I would have done so.
She walked a little way down the street and turned into number 30. Neatly trimmed evergreens in the front garden, tatty paintwork, an enormous rubber plant taking up the entire front bay window. She let herself in. The hall light went on – one of those cheap paper balloons – and then she closed the front door behind her.
I stood up. My thighs were about to give out. I hadn’t quite decided what to do – whether to head off back to Brighton or kill an hour or two in a local bar – when the door opened and she re-emerged, this time with the dog tugging at her from the end of a lead. She set off back towards the pub, her chin up now, spare hand thrust in pocket, her expression more cheerful than before. I waited until I heard the beep of the pedestrian crossing and watched her heading down the road that leads to the main part of the common.
Perhaps if she hadn’t looked so optimistic, so unbereft of my company, I might have gone on my way, as planned. But I felt a need, I don’t know, to wrest something back, to possess her in a way I couldn’t put my finger on.
The front door was firm. The window solid, too, jammed with paint. Quick look under the mat. You never know. Some people have shit for brains. Nothing. A jog round the block, though, and interesting possibilities began to open out. Lizzie’s row of houses backed on to a small 1980s estate – all gables, exposed brickwork and twee arches – and I found a high wall that provided indirect access to the fence along the bottom of Lizzie’s garden. With the help of some bins, a little ingenuity and a considerable amount of upper-body strength, it wasn’t long before I was standing in a worn hollow behind some shrubs at the bottom of her garden.
A narrow strip of grass, edged with beds, led to the house about sixty feet away. What I believe estate agents describe as a ‘mature’ plot. Not a bad size for London. South-facing, too. The kitchen light glowed on to a small garden table, two chairs and a raggedy collection of pots – tomatoes or herbs or what the fuck ever.
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