The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  The thought nagged at Bryant: the old lady hardly ever went outside, so why had she been dressed for an expedition? And if she had voluntarily ingested some foreign matter, how would Benjamin react to being told that his closest surviving relative had committed suicide?

  The front doors were tightly closed on Balaklava Street. His job would be to prise them open.

  5

  * * *

  OPPORTUNITY

  Their third fight in three days.

  She knew why it was happening, but was powerless to prevent it. Kallie Owen pulled another plastic carrier bag from the tines of the checkout bay and piled in the last of the groceries, carefully placing the eggs on top. In the doorway of Somerfield, Paul fumed and paced, cigarette smoke curling from beneath the raised hood of his parka. He was a placid man, but the situation was getting them both down.

  After living together in the cramped Swiss Cottage flat for eight months, they had fallen out with the landlord over rising rent and his inability to carry out essential repairs. Exercising their rights as tenants, they had asked the council to mediate, and the situation had been resolved in their favour. As a consequence, the landlord, an otherwise affable Greek Cypriot with a string of properties in Green Lanes, wanted them out, and had given them notice to quit within a month, citing his decision to subdivide and renovate the building. Paul was refusing to pay rent, claiming a breach of the tenants’ agreement. Kallie just wanted to leave. The latest argument was about where they would go, and if they would even go together.

  Paul flicked his cigarette into the road and came in to help her with the bags. He became claustrophobic and sulky in busy supermarkets, and had returned only to make a point. ‘You know if we move any nearer, she’ll come around every five minutes to check on you,’ he warned. ‘It’s bad enough at the moment, all that business about “I was just passing.” She doesn’t know anyone who lives near us.’

  Kallie’s mother lived in a small flat behind the Holloway Road. She didn’t approve of her daughter living with a man like Paul, who kept odd hours and had a job she didn’t understand. She visited Kallie less to check on her welfare than to assuage her own loneliness.

  ‘I’m not getting drawn into this again, Paul. We need to buy a place and put down some roots. I’m fed up with moving around. Three flats in four years, it’s got to the point where I hardly bother to unpack the boxes. And the King’s Cross idea—’

  ‘King’s Cross would have gone up in value.’

  ‘Meanwhile we’d have been stepping over crackheads to get to our front door.’

  ‘Come on, Kallie, buying somewhere decent around here would take more money than we’ve got. You know we’d have to move further out.’

  This is the point where you don’t mention his lack of commitment, she told herself. This is where you change the subject to looking for a bus.

  ‘You hate the idea of settling down,’ she heard herself say. ‘You think you’ll never have a chance to do all the things you planned to do when you were eighteen.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. We’re going to have a baby, that’s commitment, isn’t it?’

  The baby thing. Kallie coloured and ducked her head. She knew that at some point she would have to own up to the truth. Why had she told him she was pregnant? What part of that particular overstatement could have turned in her favour? True, her period had been late, they had been out for a rare dinner, she’d drunk too much wine, and Paul had talked about his father with such admiration in his voice that she had taken it as a coded message about parenthood. In the euphoria of the moment, she had told him that her home test was positive. She was ready to have a baby, they would make one a few days later and she really would be pregnant. The desire was there on both sides, all she had needed to do was make it happen. Sensing that he was ready, even if he hadn’t said as much, she stopped her contraception and calculated the right time. She planned the best sexual position for maximum fertilization, and their lovemaking had taken on an intriguing edge of urgency.

  But nothing had happened. Now she was stuck with a lie, and time was passing fast. She had never expected to welcome his insensitivity to gynaecological matters. Luckily, he couldn’t tell the difference between a uterus and a U-bend. It was all just plumbing. He already had her pegged as a dreamer, a fantasist. Now he would be able to call her a liar.

  ‘Great, that’s all we need.’ Paul set down the bags and tipped up the hood of his jacket as it began to rain hard. ‘Look at the bus queue. I hate this bloody country—the rain, the roadworks, the sheer bloody incompetence, everyone looking so miserable all the time, rattling between the shops and the pub as if they were on rails, and now the summer’s gone, there’s just months of bloody rain to look forward to.’

  She nearly said then you should have travelled when you had the chance, but this time she caught the words before they could escape her lips. She knew he regretted working through his gap year, not going around the world as his brother had, and now the baby story was backfiring on her, trapping him, pushing them further away from each other.

  When they arrived back at their third-floor flat, they found that the front-door lock had been changed. Paul went downstairs to see the landlord and lost his temper, while Kallie sat on the gloomy landing surrounded by her shopping bags, trying to stay calm. As the shouting continued, the police were called.

  She didn’t understand how it could have all gone wrong so quickly. She had been modelling and making a decent living, but after her twenty-fifth birthday the work was harder to come by, and she found herself being downgraded from style magazines to catalogue jobs as the unsubtle ageism of her career made itself felt. Paul worked in the A&R department of a record company that was going through a rough patch. The era of superclubs and celebrity DJs was over, and there was a possibility that he would be made redundant. Nothing was quite as easy as it had been when they first met, and she hated the effect it was having on them, a gentle but persistent dragging at the edges of their life that robbed them of small pleasures, making laughter less easy to come by. Paul was two years younger, and had developed the annoying habit of treating her like an older woman, expecting her to sort out his problems.

  On the evening of the Sunday they were locked out of their flat, they went to stay with Paul’s brother in Edgware, and after two weeks of sleeping on his expensive and uncomfortable designer leather couch, with Paul sinking into a kind of stupefied silence, Kallie decided to take matters into her own hands before something irreparable occurred between them. She went to see her former schoolfriend for advice. Heather Allen was nuts, everyone knew that, but she was ambitious and decisive and always had answers. She owned a nice house and had made a successful marriage; there were worse people to ask.

  ‘Who died?’ Kallie asked as Heather ushered her into the hall of number 6, Balaklava Street.

  ‘Oh, the funeral car. Not many flowers, are there?’ Heather peered out of the front door. ‘Shame. I wondered what the noise was. The old lady next door passed away. We hardly ever saw her, to be honest. She couldn’t go out. Her brother always came around with her groceries, and he’s no spring chicken. Come into the kitchen. I’ve been baking.’

  Kallie found it hard to imagine her former classmate tackling anything domestic, but followed her.

  ‘Well, I was attempting to bake because of all these bloody cookery programmes you see on telly, but I couldn’t keep up with the recipe. Some cockney superchef was rushing all over the kitchen tipping things into measuring jugs, and I didn’t have half the ingredients I was supposed to have, so I started making substitutions, then he was going “Lovely jubbly” and waving saucepans over high flames and I totally lost track. God, he’s annoying. Nice arse, though. You can try a piece, but I wouldn’t.’ She shoved the tray of flattened, blackened chocolate sponge to one side and tore open a Waitrose cheesecake. ‘Don’t sit there, use the stool, otherwise you’ll get cat hairs all over you. Cleo somehow manages to get white hairs on dark items and vice versa,
it’s the only talent she has. A legacy from George. My God, you’re so thin. Is that a diet or bulimia? I take it you’re still modelling.’

  ‘I was supposed to be working today, but I threw a sickie,’ Kallie admitted. ‘I don’t do it very often, God knows we need the money, but things were getting on top of me, and I wasn’t in the mood to stand around in thermal underwear smiling like an idiot for five hours. They said I could pick up again on Monday. We’ve been kicked out of Swiss Cottage.’

  ‘That awful little flat? A blessing, surely?’ Heather never appeared to think before she spoke. She reboiled the kettle, grabbed milk and, more oddly, sugar from the fridge, and started rinsing cups. Whenever Kallie thought of her friend, she imagined her doing three or four things at once. The kitchen was so immaculately tidy that it looked like a studio set. Heather possessed the kind of nervous energy that made everyone else feel tired. There was too much unused power inside her. She was competitive in a way that only women who were never taken seriously could be. Consequently, her enthusiasm was ferocious and slightly unnerving.

  ‘I only agreed to rent the place with Paul because it was near his office. Unfortunately the landlord had other ideas. We’re sleeping in Neil’s lounge, and I think I’m really starting to bug his girlfriend. She comes in first thing in the morning and slams about in the kitchen, sighing a lot. Plus I don’t like the way Neil looks at me when I’m in my pants.’

  ‘Well, Paul.’ Heather tapped crimson nails on the breakfast counter while she waited for the kettle. ‘It’s admirable that you’ve stuck by him, of course. He’s never really been able to hold down a job very long, has he? Not much of an attention span. Funny how women always see the long term, while men struggle to concentrate on the next twenty-four hours.’ Heather and Paul had a history of antipathy toward one another. It was the main reason why Kallie hadn’t seen anything of her in the last two years.

  ‘If you’re determined to make it work with him, I don’t know why you don’t buy somewhere and have done with it.’ Heather poured tea, dispensed biscuits, laid out coasters, cleaned the sink. ‘It was the best thing George and I ever did, getting this place.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Oh,’ she waved the thought away, ‘working all the hours God sends, making an absolute fortune, but still travelling too much to enjoy it, and it’s no fun for me, pottering about with female pals. You get too well known at Harvey Nicks and the staff start to look at you with pity. I suppose it could be worse, I could be a golf widow.’

  ‘Where is George now?’

  ‘In Vancouver for a week. He asked if I wanted him to bring anything back. I said Vancouver, don’t bother. We mostly communicate by email these days. Listen, you’ll get another place together and things will calm down between you. Moving is stressful, particularly when you do it as often—’

  ‘I told him I was pregnant.’

  If Heather was surprised, she didn’t show it. ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘No, we’d talked about it, and then we went out to the Italian place in Kentish Town—’

  ‘Pane e Vino? The lovely one with all the garlic?’

  ‘And I had a bottle of Soave and got a bit carried away. I thought we really might go for it later, but he ate too much and just wanted to sleep. I left it too long to tell him the truth and now he’s expecting me to start traipsing to the doctor. He doesn’t really want a baby—he says he does but now I can see it in his eyes. He thinks it’ll tie him down and he’ll never go travelling like Neil did, and he’ll have to be a grown-up for ever, and I don’t know, it’s all getting screwed up.’

  ‘You can’t work out your life when you’re sleeping on someone’s couch,’ said Heather. ‘That’s the first thing you have to change.’

  ‘You were so lucky, getting this house. A cobbled street, it’s like something out of a fifties black and white film.’

  ‘I know. It’s all a bit faux-shabby, but we really do have a milkman, a paperboy, a knife-grinder, a rag-and-bone man, ice-cream vans in the summer. Men take their shirts off and mend their cars in the street, as if they’re reliving their childhoods. The woman opposite still washes her front step. Some mornings you half expect Norman Wisdom to walk past with a ladder. We even have our own tramp, a proper old rambly one with a limp and a beard, not a Lithuanian with a sleeping bag. And you’d be surprised how cheap it still is around here. Urban chic, you see, much more bang for your buck than any pied-à-terre in Kensington, and we still have the cottage in Norfolk—not that I’ll go there alone, because who wants to be surrounded by nothing but scenery? There’s only so many times you can go for a walk. Here, we’re sandwiched between two dreadful council estates, and of course there are no decent schools, not that I’ll ever have children. But it’s quiet and we all have gardens. Not quite Eden, given the number of stabbings you get near the Tube.’

  Heather lowered her mug. ‘You know, you should go after the old lady’s place. You’ve always wanted a garden. I suppose it will be put on the market now, and some developer will snap it up. She’s been there for years, so it would probably need a lot of work, which is good because the asking price will be lower.’

  ‘Won’t her brother want to live there now?’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’d be happy about climbing the stairs. These houses are quite small, but they’re arranged on three floors.’

  Kallie refused to allow herself the indulgence of such a fantasy. ‘There’s no point in dreaming, I wouldn’t be able to afford it.’

  ‘You’ll never know if you don’t ask.’ Heather had that determined and slightly crazy look in her eyes that Kallie remembered from their school days. It always used to envelop her whenever she decided to adopt someone else’s problem as a challenge. ‘Tell you what, I’ll ask for you. I do know the brother, after all. Let’s see if he’s there right now.’

  ‘Heather, he’s burying his sister. You can’t badger someone on a day like this.’

  ‘Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor, ever hear that? If we don’t ask, someone else will. Come on, don’t be such a wuss.’

  ‘I can’t, it’s her funeral. It’s wrong.’

  ‘Look, I’ll just pay my condolences and ask if he’s going to move in—stay here until I get back.’

  As usual, Heather led the way. She always had, since they were eleven and nine. Heather, in trouble for stealing from the art-supplies cupboard, Kallie, the shy one who took the blame and never told. Heather, charging across roads and walking along the railway lines, Kallie stranded imploringly at the kerb or beside the track, waiting with clenched lips and downcast eyes. Heather with the lies of a demon, playing terrible games with older boys, Kallie with the heart of an angel, being terribly earnest. Men and money had driven them apart, but perhaps it was time to be friends again.

  She sat in the kitchen and waited. The house was extraordinarily quiet. Walking to the window, she saw that the street was deserted but for a man and a woman from the funeral parlour, standing rigid and dormant beside the car, dressed in neat black suits and ribboned top hats, like a pair of chess-pieces. Having witnessed a thousand moments of sadness, their studied melancholia, so at odds with the urban world, appeared unfashionably graceful.

  It was so very calm and still. Even the dingy clouds above the rooftops appeared to have stopped moving. They were, what, less than three miles from Piccadilly Circus? She could see the Telecom Tower through rain-spackled glass, although the top was hidden within low cloud. You forgot that there were still postwar pockets like this. Dark little houses. Cool still rooms. Ticking clocks. Settling dust. Polished wood. Time stretched back to the boredom of childhood. The houses were charming but slightly bothersome, as though they were waiting to dust down some half-buried memory and expose it to the light. Something here was comforting, yet best forgotten, a temporal paradox only serving to prove that you couldn’t go back.

  Kallie let the curtain fall. The front door opened and quickly closed. Heather came in with a smug smile on her face. />
  ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get.’ She grabbed Kallie’s arm. ‘His name’s Ben Singh. Sounds like a character from Treasure Island, doesn’t it? But he’s her only surviving relative and he’s going to let the place go. He’s not doing it up to make money—he wants a very fast sale, even if it means going below the market price.’ She gave a muted scream of excitement. ‘I’m sure you could get in there, Kallie. The house could be yours. You’d finally have independence. You’d have somewhere you could call home.’

  Kallie thought of the dark windows and doors behind which a woman had died, and smiled back uncertainly.

  6

  * * *

  TAKING THE PLUNGE

  ‘I don’t understand how you got my mobile number.’

  Paul Farrow set his beer back on the bar and studied the two men perched on stools before him. They had announced themselves as Garrett and Moss, sounding like an old music-hall act, but were involved in property. They represented a matched pair, a modern-day version of Victorian Toby jugs, with their grey suits, sclerotic cheeks and thinning fair hair, pink ties knotted loosely, stomachs forcing gaps between the buttons of identical blue-striped shirts. The heavier jug, Garrett, wore rings made from gold coins. As a plea for credibility, the look was singularly unsuccessful. Paul wore torn Diesel jeans and a black sweater, the regalia of the media man, regarded with disdain by men in cufflinks. They were doomed to be enemies before anyone had opened their mouth.

  ‘I’ve been in touch with Mr Singh on a number of previous occasions,’ said Garrett. ‘Obviously, properties like the house belonging to Mr Singh’s sister are highly prized in this area because of their proximity to the new King’s Cross rail link. We have a lot of European interest.’

  ‘So Mr Singh came to you for a sale.’ Paul fingered the beaded sandalwood strap on his wrist as he studied the two men, taking a fantastic dislike to them.