Tonight there’s no choice.
Dora and Max’s two heads rest on my starched pillowcases, Max the doctor’s nearest to me. I shake his shoulder. He moves a couple of centimetres, looks up, his eyes blinking open, confused. I put my mouth to his ear, whisper that Charles is ill, needs a doctor.
Max doesn’t hesitate. He’s up and coming through the door grabbing a dressing-gown but without even bothering to pull his trousers on over his boxer shorts.
Down in the basement I stand in Charles’s bedroom doorway while Max listens to the old man’s chest, feels his forehead, checks his pulse.
He turns to me.
‘Upstairs, does Dora have a medical kit? A first-aid box, something like that?’
I run back up the steps to fetch Leo’s zip-up case, the one he showed me in his room, the one he often raids when he thinks he’s got something that needs treatment.
I find the case. Pause, wonder if there’s time to check my Facebook page. But the computer’s switched off. I take the medical case down, and stand at the end of the bed while Max asks Charles questions.
‘Can you tell me your name, your date of birth?’ He looks into Charles’s eyes. Takes his pulse. He puts his ear to the man’s pale concave chest and listens.
I stand, shivering. It’s that pit of night long before dawn. A dreadful silent time, when even the traffic in London is still, when no bird sings – the time, they say, when people are most likely to die.
‘Oh please, Allah, let him be OK,’ I pray. ‘Do not take him from us yet.’
And I realise that I want Charles to live not only because I’m afraid of what Dora will do to me if he dies, but also because he is my friend and I have grown, in a certain way, to love him.
‘It’s nothing serious,’ Max says at last, straightening up, coming over to me. ‘I think he’s woken suddenly with a panic attack – most probably. And he may have caught a cold. I’m giving him something to soothe him. But you must go back to bed, Mona.’
I move over to my heap of cushions and quilt on the floor.
‘Hey,’ says Max. ‘You have a room to go to, don’t you? It’s cold. You can’t sleep there.’
He nods at the rough bed I’ve made.
‘But Dora. She says—’
‘I’ll tell Dora. I’ll look after her, you need to sleep. In fact, go to the room next to ours. There’s a nice bed made up there.’
‘But Charles, what if he’s sick again . . .’
‘You use this, don’t you?’ he says, picking up the monitor.
I nod.
‘I’ll take it tonight, up to our room so I will hear if he wakens again.’
I look at this man. He is kind and gentle, I can see that in his eyes. And what’s more, he’s a doctor – like Ali! I remember the text I saw on Dora’s phone from him, from America, and I see my one last chance flit before me.
I fish in my tracksuit pocket, bring out my photo of Ali and I say, ‘Please, Doctor Max, I’m looking for this man. Ali. Ali Chokran. It’s possible he’s working in a hospital, or has been looking for work. It’s possible he’s in an immigration centre. But I know he’s in this country.’
I hand him a slip of paper. ‘If you find him, you tell me?’
Doctor Max takes the photo, looks at it, nods and gives it back to me.
‘Doctor,’ I say, and I open my eyes wide. I know how to make a plea to a good man like this. ‘I told Dora he’s dead. It was to get work. I thought, They’ll employ me if they think I’m a widow. I couldn’t change my story.’
He smiles. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see what I can do. Now you go back to bed.’
I start to go. And he calls me back.
‘Mona. Listen, you told me a secret. Can you keep one for me? Just until the morning?’
I nod. ‘Of course.’
He pulls something out of his pocket. A small box – the kind they sell expensive jewelry in. I’ve seen them in Madame’s house, and on Dora’s dressing-table before she locked everything away.
He opens it. Whatever it is gleams in Charles’s lamplight. It’s something precious. More precious, I can see, than the chain she wears. Worth hundreds, if he were to sell it on the High Street . . .
‘It’s a locket – for Dora,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow, I want to ask her if she’ll let me come and try living over here. With her. If she’ll have me. And Leo, of course, and you too, I suppose! So, in the morning, I want you to make a good breakfast of coffee and can you get croissants?’
I nod.
‘Croissants and maybe some flowers. Here.’ He gives me a twenty-pound note. ‘Keep the change for yourself.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
I smile at him, happy for him, happy that he will make Dora happy.
As I go back up the steps to the front door, I feel a lightness of heart, the kind that comes after you’ve been lost in the labyrinth of a strange medina and suddenly you see a landmark and know you’ll get home again. The American doctor is going to help me.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
It comes to me like an eruption of all the fears and doubts I have felt since Mona came breezing into my home.
She’s taken my daddy’s affections from me, and Leo’s, and now she’s taking Max.
Things I’ve suspected come back to me. What she told me about Madame Sherif and her husband. All the time, Mona has been building up to this. I’ve let her off, when my instincts told me otherwise, when she deceived me over the roses and the soup spoons, duping me with her ‘goodness’ and with her concern for Daddy and Leo.
Stories from my ex-pat friends echo in my ears. That you have to keep domestic workers from your husband. That they lack moral awareness and see anything of yours as theirs as well. That they’re uneducated and lack sophistication. Why else would they choose this sort of work?
I think of the way Mona flaunted her golden thighs at me – was that a deliberate attempt to undermine the confidence I’ve always had in my own body? Her lies about being widowed – were they to gain my sympathy, and make me believe she’s still mowning her husband so is no threat?
Mona’s strange defiance earlier, in the kitchen when she was making the bread, gave away what she was really thinking. It was a way of communicating to Max that she was not happy with me.
That she wanted him?
I’m out of bed and down the first flight of stairs, nausea rising with each piece of evidence. The bathroom light is off, it’s empty. The house is silent.
Down the next flight, hoping that maybe, just maybe, I’ll find Max making a cup of tea in the kitchen, that he’ll simply say he couldn’t sleep, his body clock is all skewed after his flight.
But he is neither in the bathroom nor in the kitchen. In a panic, half-hoping to find him in there, perhaps reading, perhaps needing somewhere to deal with his insomnia, I push open the door to the back room, my study, where Mona usually sleeps.
Empty.
He’s not here at all. He’s gone to Mona down in the basement!
The irony hits me – that I told her to stay down there tonight, expressly to ensure she was out of our way!
I turn to face the hallway. And then I know.
The front door is on the latch, someone has gone out.
Max.
I try to stop the images marching into my head. Max biting her thighs, telling her how much he desires her, for she is softly rounded and bronzed. For the skin on her thighs is still smooth and not uneven as mine has become. For she is hard-working and clever while I am ageing, and no longer visible, and unable to command power over anything, or anyone.
A ghastly image comes to me, the stone faces outside my door jeering, as they witness Max passing beneath them on his way to her.
Your lover and your maid, they whisper.
I brought him here! I led him to her! Of all the people he might choose to be unfaithful with, he has chosen Mona. My housemaid. My subordinate.
I pull my faux fur coat over my satin nightie, chosen for my lover’s f
irst visit to my home. A pair of boots over bare feet. Through the front door, round to the back of the house. Over the frosted grass to the top of the stairs.
The door is open at the bottom, a pale lozenge of yellow light thrown onto the first two steps. My heart pounds at the realisation of my worst fears. Max has gone in, left the door ajar in his haste. I stand at the top and listen.
Sure enough, I can hear voices, soft voices – Max’s breathy lovemaker’s voice, the voice that makes me think of Tom Waits and smoky late-night blues bars. He’s using it on her! In Daddy’s flat while he sleeps!
The rage, the hurt makes me tremble so much I’m afraid I’m going to collapse.
Between them, Max and Mona have made the ultimate fool of me.
The shadow of a figure in a skirt looms out of the basement doorway. I move to the side, into the dark.
My hand strokes the top of Mummy’s stone head. If only she had never died! If only you’d never left me, Mummy. If only it wasn’t for Anita and Simon and Terence’s selfish behaviour. If only Daddy hadn’t duped me into believing I was his favourite!
I wouldn’t have needed a maid again. I should have learned the first time round that they are nothing but trouble.
I was right that night of the funeral, when I predicted that my siblings were all changing for the worse now Mummy was dead. I have a sudden overwhelming desire to hear our mother’s calm, rational voice. Compromising. Helping us all to see right from wrong. None of them knows what’s good and right since she died. They’ve all lost their moral compasses.
If only I hadn’t had to be the Selfless One, taking care of everything, sorting everything out. You do your best and everyone takes advantage; they take and take and belittle you until you are invisible to your own lover.
The shadow creeps up the steps ahead of its owner.
My body acts as if it is quite separate from me, gripping Mummy’s stone head, giving it an almighty shove, putting all my rage and hurt into the motion. The bust rocks for a second, then crashes down.
It lands hard on the head that is appearing at my feet.
I don’t know if there was much noise while this was happening, whether there was a cry, whether the body made a scrunching sound as it collapsed at the bottom of the steps, where its head is now bent up against the doorjamb at an odd angle. Where, I can’t help noticing, a bare thigh lies uppermost, a slice of light falling across it highlighting the hamstring, just there, the sinewy area of flesh Max was so obsessed with, that it drove him to cheat on me with my domestic worker.
But suddenly the world falls silent, with the kind of silence one only notices once an incessant background noise stops.
And whittling through this silence comes the thin, sweet sound of a blackbird’s song.
CHAPTER FIFTY
I stare at the body. It’s so still. Why doesn’t it move?
I run down the steps. This is all wrong. It was Mona coming out of the flat. I saw the shadow of her overall. Impossible! To my horror I realise the shadow must have been made by the dressing-gown that Max is wearing.
‘Max!’ I cry. I kneel down next to him. Kiss his neck, his chest, his thigh.
‘Max!’
I sit down on the icy ground next to him and cradle his head in my lap.
But where is Mona?
There’s no sound from the flat. She must be hiding in there, afraid I’m about to discover her. As well she might be. I will let her cower, let her suffer, knowing what’s to come. For now I need to give my full attention to Max.
He’s gone a funny colour in the yellow lamplight spilling from Daddy’s flat. Is it just the cold? I take off my coat and lay it over him, to warm him.
And I stay there with him for I don’t know how long.
It’s still dark, but a less weighty dark when a voice stirs me out of my stupor.
‘What happened?’
I turn, confused. Above me, at the top of the steps, silhouetted against the moon, is Mona, her headscarf lit by the streetlamp in the alley, turning both it and her face an amber colour, the way the angels along the street turn orange at night. For a second I feel as if I’m looking at one of the statues Max and I met beneath early on – the beautiful girl who stands demurely on the top of the Palace Theatre wearing only a headscarf. Benign, innocent. But alluring.
I stare at her for a few minutes, hardly believing she’s real. The real Mona is hiding somewhere in Daddy’s flat where she’s just had sex on Daddy’s sitting-room carpet with my lover.
‘What is it? What happened?’ she asks again.
‘What are you doing there? You were meant to be in with Daddy.’
Her face is crumpled, she is frightened. She moves down the steps, one at a time, holding the wall at the side, her eyes deep, dark sockets. As she gets to the bottom she begins to whimper.
‘Stop that – that’s not going to help!’ I tell her. ‘Where were you? Why was Max down here?’
‘He went to Charles,’ she says. ‘Charles was ill. Not breathing. Coughing. I came up to find Doctor Max. He told me to go to bed. He said he would stay with Charles, check he was OK.’
In spite of the cold night, I have broken out in an unpleasant sweat. It veils my forehead and is dribbling down behind my ears. My thighs, too, feel sticky and unpleasant.
‘You were upstairs, in the house?’
‘Yes. Max came down to help Charles. He told me to go to bed in the house.’
I look back down at the man whose head lies in my lap.
Max, you fool. You bloody fool, I think. Mona was sleeping in Daddy’s flat so she could take care of him. It was her job to look after him. So that she wouldn’t interfere with our night together. It was so we could be alone.
And you tell her to go upstairs!
You think you’re the one who has to look after Daddy? It’s what I’ve employed the woman for. You should have left her to it. You shouldn’t spoil these people, Max.
It doesn’t do to be too kind. Too trusting. They’ll take advantage if you’re friendly.
‘Max must have fallen,’ I tell Mona. ‘He must have come up the steps, they are slippery – look, you see? There’s a frost. He obviously lost his balance. He was near the top, put out his hand, grabbed the statue, but the statue came with him as he fell. Backwards . . .’
‘So we must call a doctor? Or an ambulance?’
Yes, I think. This is what we should do. Call a doctor, call an ambulance. Let them take him. There may still be something they can do.
I’m trembling. It’s with the cold, I think. My arms and legs twitch as I try to make sense of the situation. I must instruct my body in what to do. I tell it to move, up the steps, back to the house, to the kitchen, to the phone, where I must pick up and dial. Dial who? The ambulance? The police? A doctor?
Then what?
Max isn’t moving. I shake him gently, but he doesn’t respond. I press my thumb against his wrist. I can’t feel a pulse. Does this mean he’s dead? Can’t they resuscitate people these days? Can’t they do something with their chests, bring them back to life?
I need to ask Max.
But this is Max.
And that’s when I begin to wail.
‘I’ll call an ambulance,’ Mona says. ‘What’s the number? The doctor’s number I called for Charles is too slow.’
She steps over Max. She steps over Mummy’s head, lying on its side, staring sadly into Daddy’s flat.
Mona makes for the phone. She is thinking more clearly than I am, though she is still whimpering, crying, as if this were her problem, not mine.
Then I do begin to think – with a terrible clarity.
As if a light has gone on in my brain.
‘Wait, Mona!’
She turns.
When they find he’s unconscious, in a coma, or God forbid, if he’s dead – they will want to inform his wife, his kids that he’s here, in a basement in south-east London. That he was spending the night with me, a woman they’ve never heard of. And if
he is dead . . . I look again at him, feel his wrist, try to find a pulse, try and try again. Come back to life, Max. Come on, pulse, let me feel you. I put my ear to his chest . . . he can’t be. It isn’t possible.
‘Max!’ I cry. ‘Max!’
No response. If he’s dead they’ll do a post-mortem to check how he died, and they will ask why, if he fell, is there this blow to the skull, just here, where this terrible dark stain is spreading down from Max’s hairline to his eye. It cannot have been caused by a fall, it is too acute; it’s obviously the result of assault.
This thought is so vibrant in my head, I am startled to find another equally bright one move in.
If I am found guilty of assault, manslaughter, whatever charge this kind of accident brings with it – what will become of the new programme Mona said they’d phoned about earlier? I was to be reinstated, after all, as Theodora Gentleman, running a new cookery programme. On air again, with the following I’ve always enjoyed, maybe more so.
Max never told his wife about me. No one will know where he’s gone.
He will be an unsolved disappearance.
No one knows he came here.
Except Mona.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
‘Mona,’ Dora says.
She holds out her hand, she tugs me down. We sit side by side on the bottom step. She turns my face towards hers.
‘Max never came. Do you understand? No one must know.’
I nod, and she lets go of my chin. ‘I understand,’ I say. There’s something wrong here. Something I should object to. But Dora can do what she likes. She has my passport. My lifeline. I’m not in a position to argue.
‘And so, Mona, I need you to help me move him. You are my maid, and you must do as I tell you. And I’m telling you to help me. We need to take Max away in my car somewhere. We need to get rid of him.’
I know not to ask questions. I must do exactly as she says. I shut off all thought. Do as I am told.
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