Her skin is like well-creamed coffee. West Indian, I think.
And before you say anything: no, I am not racist. Believe me, if there’s one thing my little talent has taught me it’s that there are far better things to base your prejudice on than skin colour.
Racist? Me? No. I hate everyone equally.
Her hair is scrappy and tied in an off-centre bun. She taps her head.
‘The first time. Hurts.’
She’s right. Whatever this is, whatever this is the first time of, it hurts. It hurts a lot. I feel as if a blade is permanently wedged between my eyes. She nods at the arm of the sofa, upon which is a cracked glass of water and two pills. I pick them up.
‘Paracetamol,’ she says, sensing my reluctance. She pulls a strip from her pocket and tosses it to me. It lands on the floor but I can see that two are missing. I look at the ones in my hand — don’t take them, I think. But my head feels like it will burst if I don’t. I swallow them and drink all the water, as slowly as I can, trying to think through the pain.
I remember running — the crowd that followed me like a pack of wolves, the dreamlike pulse of diving into every face I saw, of having lost control, hitting the car, seeing this face before me now.
‘You’re safe,’ she says.
I look at her. There is nothing remotely safe about this woman — about her face, or the way she sits, or the way her eyes keep darting over my head, or at the corners of the room. My head starts to suggest words like kidnap, extortion, money. Drugs, suggestion, hypnotism. I inspect her again to see if she is somebody I may have wronged in some way (let’s face it, there’s a fair chance) but come up with nothing.
All the same, I’m not safe. I know that much.
I feel like I am drifting away again. The walls seem to ripple.
‘Who are you?’ I say. The sofa wants to pull me inside it. ‘What have you done to me?’
She cocks her head as I melt backwards.
‘I told you,’ she says. ‘It’s not who we are, but who we used to be.’
When I wake again it is cold and dark, and the sparse room is illuminated by candles in the fireplace. Long, threadbare curtains are drawn across the two windows on either side of the sofa upon which I lie. The pain in my head has dwindled to a dull throb.
‘Better?’ says the woman. She is sitting at the other end of the sofa to me. It is a long piece of furniture — enough that she can sit with her knees against the back cushion and still be far from my feet. She holds a cup of something steaming, and watches me over its rim.
I sit up and stretch my limbs and back, half expecting to find my wrists and ankles bound with cable ties. But I’m free. I check my pockets. No phone, no wallet.
She hands me the cup, but I don’t take it.
‘Tea,’ she says. ‘You need fluids.’
‘No, thanks.’
She raises an eyebrow.
‘You don’t trust me.’
I stand.
‘Err…no, not since you kidnapped me and drugged me.’
‘I didn’t drug you, and you got in the car of your own accord, remember.’
‘Really? Didn’t drug me? I take two of your pills and fall unconscious for…what, four hours? Five?’
I look around, pacing the floorboards. There are two doors. One looks like it leads to a small annex, like a galley kitchen, and the other leads out to a hall. It feels as if we’re on an upper floor.
‘Two days,’ she says. ‘I was out for three. And I told you, they were paracetamol. Tell me your head doesn’t feel better.’
It does, but this doesn’t mean anything. For all I know the sedative killed my pain.
‘Where are the other two?’
‘Sleeping. They’re tired.’ She holds out the cup again. ‘Drink it. I promise you it’s fine.’
I snatch the cup and hurl it at the wall, against which it shatters, leaving a batwing spray.
‘Two days? Where’s my phone? Wallet, keys, where are they?’
She jumps up, holding her hands out. ‘Take it easy.’
I back away from her, but I’m going the wrong way.
‘You didn’t have anything on you.’
Now she’s between me and the exit.
‘Back off!’
I look at the windows, wondering if I could risk a jump.
‘Just calm down.’
I do need calming down, that’s for sure. Very little fazes me; I’ve seen too much for that. And really, in hindsight, this — this whatever it is, this odd room and this stranger and not knowing where I am — it’s not what’s making me panic and want to jump out of a window. It’s what happened before at my flat and out on the street and then at Patti’s. The people — I can still feel their bones, taste their teeth, taste their thoughts.
And there’s something about this woman too. She gives me a feeling I can’t place; a dizzy recognition — no, not recognition, but some distant, forgotten ancestor of it. If recognition is knowing a person’s face, then this is knowing their intestines, or how they see colours, or the shape of their secrets, or their soul.
But I don’t allow myself to think these things right now. As far as I’m concerned, I’m panicking because I’m trapped and compromised and somebody wants something from me.
I’m trembling, sweating, twitching.
‘Calm down,’ she repeats, palms up. She sounds like she’s done this before — calmed someone down, I mean. But her tone isn’t soft; it’s not the manner of a teacher or a parent talking a toddler down from a tantrum. Her voice is as flat as her expression. I think of prison officers, or social workers, and red-faced youths shaking blades from a corner.
There’s something about her. Just like there was something about the boy in the photograph.
You…you…you…
As if on cue, a floorboard creaks out on the landing, and in he walks, the ragged man, lit hideously in the upward light of a gigantic, oozing candle. His face looks worn down to the very skull.
I stagger back. Behind him is a girl — she’s young, still a teenager, with a shock of white hair and pale skin. She risks a smile, then places a hand on his shoulder.
‘Elliot,’ she says, with strange delight. Her voice is soft and crackles like old wool. ‘Elliot, it’s OK.’
‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ I say with a mirthless laugh. ‘You’ve kidnapped one of the most famous people in the United Kingdom. Do you know who I know? There’ll be people looking for me. Right now, there will be people out there looking for me.’
‘We didn’t kidnap you,’ says the pale-skinned girl. ‘You got into our van, and you’re free to go whenever you like. We’re not going to hurt you.’ She places one hand over her heart. ‘I swear it.’
Our eyes fix — hers unwavering, mine still looking madly between them all — and it’s then that I realise something: They are not like the others. I’m not diving into them. I am at least safe from that.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘You’re not going to hurt me. What you most certainly fucking are going to do is sit down and tell me who you are, and what you want, and what’s happening to me.’
WHO YOU USED TO BE
‘TELL ME YOUR NAME.’
‘It’s not who I am, it’s…’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know, who you used to be, I heard you the first time and I’ll get to that. But just for consistency, love, tell me who the fuck you are right now.’
We’re sitting in the galley kitchen. There’s no bulb, so a single candle stands on the table between us. The ragged man is on the sofa in the other room, head cradled by the white-haired girl. I can hear her singing softly to him over the crackle and wheeze of his snores.
‘My name is Zoe Marsh.’
‘How old are you?’
‘What does that…?’
‘Just tell me.’
‘Of all the fucking people’ — she rolls her eyes and sighs — ‘I’m thirty-eight.’
‘Where do you live.’
‘Vario
us places but I told you, none of this matters.’
‘Fine, homeless, so now tell me who you used to be.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Yes it is. Tell me, who were you? What did I do to you?’
She looks up as if I’ve lost it.
‘You don’t get it.’
‘Pretty sure I do, love. I piss people off every day, have done for years. All part of the territory, I’m afraid. I get death threats for breakfast, child maintenance requests with my elevenses and lawsuits with my fucking afternoon tea. So what’s your beef? I don’t want to float your boat, but I’m fairly sure I would remember having slept with you, and you’re too old to be a child. So what then, were you on the show? Did I get you in trouble? Make you lose custody of your child? Worse? Did you go to prison? Do you want money, revenge, fame? What?’
She shakes her head, eyes narrowing.
‘Of all the people,’ she says, ‘it had to be you.’
I slam my hand on the table.
‘What do you want from me?’
The echo deadens in the small room.
‘I need your help.’ She glances at the door. ‘We need your help.’
I sit back and fold my arms. This is possibly worse than I thought.
‘What do you do?’
‘I run shelters in London and the south coast.’
‘What kind of shelters?’
She shrugs.
‘Started off for women escaping domestic violence. Then it was homeless, now asylum seekers…’
Aha.
The penny drops.
‘So, you’re a do-gooder.’
It isn’t the first time someone like this has come knocking at my door, although I will grant you it is the most theatric. The chair topples as I stand.
‘Let me guess, your…organisation or company or whatever it is wants some exposure. People aren’t throwing you enough coins, is that it? Those plastic envelopes you stuff through people’s doors are ending up in the recycling bins, the black-and-white photos of kids on doorsteps aren’t getting through, people have seen too many of them.’
I’m pacing now.
‘They’re desensitised, aren’t they? Twitter and Facebook aren’t cutting it, the press don’t want to know, so you need a stunt, right? A heist to get people’s attention. Something a little on the wrong side of the law, just over the line that it makes you seem edgy and committed, but not enough to get you in trouble with Plod, right?’
‘Just wait…’
‘No, I get it, so you stalk me — oh, yes, I’ve seen him…fucking…Steptoe lurking out there on my street — then you work out some cheap parlour trick with the Milky Way out there, whoever the fuck she is, something to make me lose my shit, then you take me in, feed me some more bollocks, get me on side and then…what? What then? You make an example out of me? Hold me up as some totem representing the big problems of the world? Get me to fund you? Is that it? You, your girlfriend and your shit-stained old hobo out there want my support?’
I throw my head back and laugh, as much out of relief as anything. I can see a way out of this now. Unless they’ve got some heavies downstairs, all I’m facing is a bit of public humiliation when I get back to London, and that’s fine; I could do with a break anyway. And the best thing about public humiliations, if you play them right, is the comeback.
This woman, this Zoe, glares up at me. Her mouth twitches, momentarily baring her teeth.
‘You don’t understand.’
‘Wrong. I do understand; I just don’t care.’
I scoff and stride out, but before I reach the door I stop at the sound of a metallic rattle.
‘It starts with smell,’ she says. ‘That’s the first thing: You can smell what they smell.’
The words freeze me to the spot.
‘Then touch,’ she says, slower this time. ‘Vision, hearing, and taste. Then I’m them, Elliot. I am them. It feels like diving slowly into water. That’s how it is with me, anyway. How about you?’
The words loiter like an unwanted child. Finally I turn.
‘This is a trick.’
‘I wish it was.’
She pulls out some cigarettes and lights one, eyes pincering me with disgust through the first and second furious drags.
‘Let me be absolutely clear,’ she says, on the third. ‘I don’t like you. I don’t like your show, or what you do or what you stand for. Quite frankly, I think you are everything that’s wrong with the world, but right now I don’t care. It just makes this so much —’
She shuts her eyes, shakes her head and tries again.
‘I thought everyone was like me, when I was a child. I thought it was normal that I could sometimes see inside other people’s heads. I just thought that was how the world worked. But it didn’t take me long to realise that wasn’t true at all.’
A memory momentarily sweeps over her face.
‘I was scared at first. I thought I was mad, but once I had learned to control it, everything just’ —she fans her palms — ‘became normal again. And now, this.’
‘Yes, this. What is this?’
She stubs out her cigarette and pulls something from her cardigan pocket. It’s the photograph from the Cherry Tree, which she places on the table before me.
‘You put that on the restaurant wall?’
‘You’re a difficult person to get a picture in front of. We tried the mail, social media...We even tracked down your address, but nothing got through.’
‘For good reason.’
‘In the end we had to put it out in public, places we knew you’d be. You’ve probably walked past it a hundred times. But it was a last resort. Heathcliff had already tried the normal way.’
‘Who the fuck’s Heathcliff, and what do you mean, normal way?’
‘To show himself to you, so you could recognise him like he recognised you. That’s how it worked with us.’
‘That old man? That’s why he was out on my street every day?’
She shakes her head.
‘It didn’t work, every day for two months and nothing, so he said — he let us know — that this picture might work instead.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
She inclines her head to the door behind her.
‘They came to me last winter. It was a cold one, remember?’
‘I was in the Bahamas, so no.’
‘There was a blizzard, a storm, huge waves rolling across the road from the estuary.’
Estuary thinks a corner of my brain concerned with survival. We’re on the Thames Estuary. Zoe nods at the small window by the sink.
‘I saw them out there, huddled beneath a streetlight, looking up at me. So I went down and let them in.’
‘Why?’
She frowns.
‘You do know what shelter means?’
‘Yes, doss house.’
She rolls her eyes and lights another cigarette.
‘Anyway, as soon as I saw them, that was it, I was gone. I lost control. I couldn’t stop getting inside of people. Almost everyone in the shelter — people who I would never in my darkest dreams want to dive into — I did so uncontrollably. I was just like you, running around Piccadilly like a lunatic.’
‘You followed me?’
‘We had to see that it had worked.’
I slam the table with an open palm.
‘That what had fucking worked?’
She takes a drag from her cigarette, unmoved, and stares at me through the shifting smoke.
‘You have to remember.’
There’s something hiding in her eyes, an urgent muted prompt. I lean on the table, facing her down.
‘Remember what?’
‘That’s just it. I can’t tell you, or…’
‘You better had right now, love, or I’m out of that door.’
‘You have to find out for yourself. Morag said — ‘
‘Are you serious? You want me to play a guessing game now?’
&
nbsp; Her finger finds the photograph and taps it.
‘Tell me what you see.’
I stare at it, alien memories rising like bile. The row of faces, the feeling of heat, the music, the boy…
‘I don’t —’
‘Tell me.’
‘A boy.’ I say.
‘On the end, pointing off camera. And you remember everything else about that day too. The weather, the sounds, the smells, how you felt. Just like Morag said you would.’
My silence fills the room. She offers me the pack.
‘Cigarette?’
ONE PARTICULAR LIFE
I HAVE NEVER MUCH been one for smoking cigarettes. Something about the sense of infiltration, of being occupied internally by something so dense and malevolent, always put me off. That and the wretched stench of grey addicts shuffling inside sucking their desperate, pointless mints.
No, not one for the fags, me. But boy, do I smoke this one right down to the filter.
Zoe says nothing as I work my way through drag after drag. She sits there, smoking her own, watching me with the cool regard of a scientist over a well-tested chemical reaction.
Finally, I blow out the last lungful and stub out the butt.
‘Why me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean what made you come after me?’
She shrugs.
‘It wasn’t a decision. We had your show on in the TV room one night.’ I take quiet umbrage at the way she says show. ‘Heathcliff never usually watches telly, but he did that evening, and he saw you.’
‘So?’
‘So, he went crazy, didn’t he? Jabbering, pointing, throwing his arms up, holding up the photograph. We had to clear the room, get everyone back to their beds while Morag calmed him down. And when he was back to normal, she came to me and said that he recognised you.’
‘Of course he recognised me, I’m famous.’
‘Not you now. You before.’
The Other Lives Page 10