Shortly after the viewing we crowded around a phone box at the docks and made our offer. When the agent got back with a ‘yes’ we shouted so loudly I’m pretty sure a whole flock of seagulls took off.
***
Naturally things didn’t go smoothly. The survey revealed the full extent of the damp and timber work that had to be fixed before the mortgage lender would release the money and we had to fight off a developer, which meant securing an even higher sum.
It was Zak’s idea to go to the company for the loan to cover the shortfall. We dressed in suits and approached the fifth floor with some trepidation as the chairman Mr Renton was a bit of a legend in the industry and seldom made himself available to humble employees. The company had a first-names policy, but he was always Mr Renton.
We let Imogen do the talking. She did a pretty good pitch about how we all believed our future in the company was worth investing in and that we were a sound investment for them. Even so, we expected to get a bollocking or at least be laughed out of the room. But we must have caught Mr Renton in a good mood because he sat back with a smile, threw up his hands and said, “Why not?”
We managed to retain a professional calm until we got into the lift and then started dancing and jumping around until we fell over in a heap. The doors opened, and the Finance Director stood there staring at us quizzically. We muttered apologies, picked ourselves up and walked out.
“Wrong floor,” said Stuart.
But by then the lift was shooting back up to the top floor so we had to run down the rest of the steps.
I suppose by agreeing to the loan the management must have thought it was a good way of keeping us in the company. Too many graduates before us had left the scheme halfway through for more glamorous titles and better pay or faster life in London.
We cast our eyes over the letter stipulating that the repayments would be deducted from our salary and if we left the company before the date given we’d have to pay the outstanding sum in full. It all sounded reasonable.
My parents swooped down at the weekend to see the house before committing themselves to helping with my deposit. They accosted us with a series of observations as we went round. Had we spotted the mould in the basement? Did we realise the window frames were rotten? Were we aware the broken pane in the kitchen door was a security risk?
My mum lowered her voice, although it was still loud enough to be overheard, to ask how well did I really know these people I was buying with? What if one of them didn’t pay their way? What if, heaven forbid, one of them turned out to be a criminal?
But one thing you could say about my parents was that they were never predictable. Just as they were leaving Dad asked how much I wanted to borrow again. On hearing the sum, he grimaced, clutched his chest, and folded onto the floor. The estate agent blanched and looked as though he were about to shout for an ambulance but Dad, who used to go through the same routine whenever he was presented with a bill in a restaurant, produced his cheque book.
“It’s a loan,” he said thrusting the cheque at me. “Don’t even think of getting engaged before you pay it back because it’s the money we’ve saved up for your wedding. And your sister’s.”
Hugging him, I promised him I was highly unlikely to get married within the next two years as I’d have to find someone to marry me first. I’d left my student boyfriend on a train platform in Zagreb a few months before after three stressful weeks of Interrailing. For all I knew, he was still there.
I didn’t mention that it was even less likely my sister would be getting married unless same-sex marriages were to become legal, which in those days seemed a long way off.
“I know they’re a bit eccentric but they’re good people,” I said to the others after my parents had left and we were sitting in the pub that we hoped would soon become our local. It was one thing for me to laugh at them, but I was damned if anyone else was going to.
“Don’t worry,” said Zak with a grin, “when it comes to embarrassing parents, I think you’ll find I win that one.”
“Really? How’s that?”
He gave the name of a sex therapist who’d made a name for herself on morning television with her eye-wateringly frank advice and piercing questions and her less than subtle revelations about past lovers in the tabloid press. “My mum.”
Xanthe spurted her beer all over the floor.
***
For the first few weeks in our jointly-owned home we were all on our best behaviour, trying to conceal our flaws and not be the one who upset everyone else. We were polite about each other’s taste in books and videos, didn’t impose our choice of music on everyone else, and trod carefully around political issues.
Xanthe made an effort to clear up after she’d used the kitchen, I restrained myself from experimenting with other people’s bathroom products. Stuart offered us lifts to work and didn’t blow his top if you forgot to leave the car seats tidy. Imogen didn’t spend too long in the bath; and Zak didn’t bring home a succession of waifs and strays he’d just met.
We were united against the slippery estate agent, the incompetent surveyor, the grasping building society and the curtain-twitching elderly couple next door who for all our efforts to be friendly seemed determined to find fault. Nosy Mrs Parker was regularly to be found stationed at her window watching us. She complained whenever we played music and yet her television reverberated through our living room to the extent that we often found ourselves watching one programme while listening to another.
We received a few sour remarks about the state of the garden but when we spent a weekend tidying it up she started moaning about the broken fence although our solicitor had made it clear the boundary belonged to the neighbours.
Stuart mended the fence anyway, but this seemed to raise more suspicion and Mrs Parker stood watching us from an upstairs window as though she suspected we were burying a body or something.
“Shame to disappoint her when you think about it,” said Zak noting that she hadn’t moved from her watch post for at least half an hour.
So, he and Stuart staggered out into the garden with a rolled-up rug while Xanthe and I dug a hole in the vegetable plot with exaggerated gestures, folding over the spade in laughter. We’d have loved it if she’d rung the police.
But bit by bit of course this honeymoon period unravelled. It didn’t take long for us to start falling out, usually over the silliest things. Imogen’s boyfriend Rick who she’d been seeing since uni rubbed the rest of us up the wrong way. From the occasional visit he was starting to spend more and more time at the house and behaved as though he owned the place, helping himself to beer from the fridge, taking charge of the TV remote and poking around inside Imogen’s clothes or whispering lewd suggestions in her ear that were just loud enough for you to catch while you were trying to hold a conversation with her.
He also took it upon himself to go through our cupboards and chuck out anything that was nearing its sell-by date, which sometimes left us with nothing to eat over the weekend. I got the feeling he hoped we’d all move out one day, so he and Imogen could take over the house and have it the way they wanted.
It soon became clear Imogen viewed the house in a different way from the rest of us – less as a base, more of an investment. I think it’s also fair to say, too, that we lacked her sense of style and thought the place would look all right with a lick of paint, so we pointedly ignored the brochures she left lying around.
Although during the first weeks we’d pussy-footed around political differences, you can only bite your tongue for so long. Zak was outraged when Stuart said, “the miners really should embrace change” and the IRA soldiers in Gibraltar had been “asking for trouble in the first place” and Stuart was infuriated when Zak called the salmonella egg scandal “a Tory trick.”
But it was the personal questions that caused the most damage. Being journalists, we all suffered from an inability to know when to stop asking questions.
During one of those idle evenings in front of Blind Date Za
k playfully asked Imogen if he was her type. When she said no he could have left it at that – but he had to ask why. There were so many reasons she could have given that would have been acceptable – he was too short, too stubbly, too much of an eco-warrior or she only had eyes for Rick.
But instead she turned her ice blue eyes on him, drew on a cigarette and said with that lovely smile, “Sorry but you’re too much of a slag for me.”
Zak choked on his beer. He smiled too, just about maintaining the light-hearted air of the conversation but said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shrugged. “Just that you’ve had a lot of sexual partners if we’re to believe all your stories.”
He laughed. “I should be so lucky. Most of the stories are about the same few people. Anyway, this is outrageous. How would you like it if I said that about you?”
Imogen blew a coil of smoke up to the ceiling. “People say things like that about women all the time – if a man sleeps around he’s a lad, if a woman does she’s a slapper.”
“All right but I don’t.”
“The point is, you can’t be too careful these days.”
His brows lifted. “Oh, now you’re saying I’m an AIDS risk?”
The AIDS thing was always there at the back of our minds in those days. You’d have to have been in a coma for the past few years to have missed the advertisements with the falling tombstone, the leaflets that came through the door and the signs everywhere.
“You’d be more of a risk to me than the other way round,” said Zak. “I got tested a couple of weeks ago after that heroin addict bit me down at the soup kitchen so I know I’m negative.”
Imogen smiled apologetically. “I’m still not interested I’m afraid.”
He looked appalled. “I wasn’t asking. You’re the last person on Earth I’d sleep with.”
Stuart moved the conversation on but Zak couldn’t leave it alone.
“How do you know you haven’t got it?”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t need a test. I make sure I know a person’s sexual history before I sleep with them. Rick was a virgin before I met him. And before him I went out with Jake for four years and I was his first girlfriend.”
Zak laughed at that. “And you believed them?”
Imogen looked seriously pissed off but Xanthe jumped in with another question.
“Would you cover up a crime to protect a friend?”
At the time I was more concerned about those two needling each other to death. We had no idea how Xanthe’s question would come back to haunt us.
***
After their first row the tension between Imogen and Zak built up. Zak had a thing about Imogen being a secret slob. She took such care over her skin and hair and yet her room was a bomb site. She had a drawer full of mugs sprouting mould that looked as though an alien invasion was taking place. She’d hide full ashtrays under cushions and kick old knickers under the bed. She wasn’t even great at remembering to flush the toilet. And Zak of course delighted in pointing these things out.
But perhaps if we hadn’t been so short of money things wouldn’t have fallen apart as quickly as they did. We could have distracted ourselves more easily. The bills that came in after the first quarter were a shock and it didn’t help that the mortgage rate had gone up twice by November. Doubts started to creep in about whether we’d be able to keep up with the repayments if they went any higher. The housing market had already started to slow. At first that seemed to be no bad thing but then people started saying prices would never recover. We started to wonder if we’d bought a very expensive white elephant.
Stuart got twitchy about wasting energy. If you popped upstairs for something he’d come bustling out and turn the hall lights off, plunging you into darkness, and turn off the television while you were out of the room. When he discovered Imogen had a portable electric heater in her room he reacted as if he’d found out his wife was having an affair.
But the biggest row was when four of us came back after a weekend and discovered Xanthe curled up on the sofa with a huge red dog.
“Is this a joke?” Zak asked.
She smiled sleepily. “No. He followed me home from the shops.”
“Well he can’t stay here.”
She ruffled the dog’s fur. It reminded me of the bad perm I’d had when I was sixteen.
“No collar, look. He’s a stray.”
“I’ll ring the dogs’ home,” said Stuart.
“No!” Her scream made us all jump back. “If they can’t rehouse them in three days they put them down. Do you want to be responsible for that?”
We looked at each other. As if he knew we were talking about him the dog pawed Stuart who crouched down and ruffled big, wiry head and the dog nuzzled his hand.
“He is rather delightful.”
“No way,” said Zak. “I’m allergic to dogs.”
To be fair, I thought he was making it up – allergies weren’t so common back then.We eventually agreed to let Xanthe keep the dog on the condition he’d be re-homed as soon as possible. Imogen and I cycled all over town putting up posters, but a month went by and still no one had claimed him. Xanthe insisted it was no problem because one of the secretaries at work had said she’d take him but every night when we got back home Rufus was still there and he’d caused a whole new level of havoc.
Cute as he looked, the dog chewed through electric cables, sofa covers, socks and a market report that Stuart was analysing for an article. Xanthe tried to get home at lunchtime to walk him but she sometimes didn’t make it on time – and neither did he. It turned out when we talked to the secretary she’d only said she’d like to take him. If she didn’t already have a staffie who hated other dogs.
After six weeks Rufus was driving us mad. Stuart got agitated when the dog’s barking drowned out the TV and fretted constantly about the damage Rufus caused and the mounting cost of repairs. The Parkers next door complained about the noise and accused us of “neglecting the poor animal” for long hours while we were at work.
Zak was having regular asthma attacks which he blamed on Rufus. He banned the dog from coming upstairs but Xanthe used to sneak him up to her room anyway. But by eight weeks we’d pretty much resigned ourselves to having a sixth housemate and to tell the truth I was becoming attached to Rufus.
So, it was such a shock when Imogen, Zak and I got in from work one evening and found him wild eyed, careering round the house. At first we thought he was just having one of his exuberant romps, but it became obvious it was more than that.
“There’s something wrong with him,” said Imogen. “His heart’s pounding.”
She tried to hold him still, but he scrabbled and sank his teeth into her arm. She screamed, and he leapt out of her grip and took off around the house again.
“Thank God for that,” said Zak when he finally stopped.
But when Imogen went up to her room much later she found the dog slumped halfway up the stairs, all stiff and lumpy next to a patch of vomit on the carpet.
“He’s dead.”
I couldn’t believe it. I bent down and stroked Rufus’s head fighting back tears, but he didn’t respond. I thought of all the times I’d been angry with him. We hadn’t given him a chance. But I couldn’t understand it. He’d been fine only that morning, his usual crazy self. I noticed the froth around his mouth.
“It looks like he’s been poisoned.”
“He can’t have been. He’s been here all day,” said Imogen. She shot a look at Zak, comprehension dawning. “Unless…”
Zak was clutching his hair. He murmured. “Shit. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I suppose he must have been attracted to the shiny wrapper.”
“Sorry?” I said. “Is that all you can say? Look what you’ve done. Xanthe’s going to be heartbroken. Why did you have to leave pills lying around?”
“He wasn’t allowed to come upstairs.”
“But you know he did anyway.”
Zak dragged his hands down his
face. “She’ll think I did it deliberately. She knows I didn’t like him. This is bad. I wouldn’t, you know, I’d never do that.”
Gently, he scooped the body up. I thought he was taking him outside to bury him.
“Shouldn’t you wait until Xanthe gets back?”
“Damage limitation,” he muttered. “I can’t bring him back to life, can I? But there’s no point making things worse than they are. He might just as easily have been run over.”
Despite our protests he took the dead dog outside and laid him down on the road. An hour later we heard Xanthe’s scream. She hammered at the door and when we opened it she dragged us outside to look. The poor dog looked a lot worse than when we last saw him, but she flung herself down on him. Stuart had to prise her off or she’d have ended up getting run over too.
“How did he get out?” she kept asking. “I can’t believe none of you noticed.”
We did our best to make it up to her over the next few weeks, cooking her dinner and bringing her gifts, but nothing worked. None of these events sound much, I know, but they were all tiny parts of a whole. While we were dealing with the cracks in the house, the fissures in our relationships were starting to deepen and sprawl.
But it was the party on New Year’s Eve that changed everything.
Chapter Four
I don’t remember much about the housewarming party we had the first weekend or the ones that followed at the end of most weeks until the one at New Year. With the state the house was in it was the ideal venue and with us all having such different circles of friends it soon became a gathering point for a large number of people.
The impression I have of the New Year’s Eve party is like an old video with some moments of clarity but lots of scenes that hop and get stuck and keep replaying, of voices that fade out or are drowned by buzzing and crackling and faces that merge and morph.
I remember the air being thick with smoke and all kinds of stuff being passed around, the music so loud you could feel it slam through your body and someone falling or getting pushed against the wall when carrying a pizza up the stairs, plastering its face like a clown with a custard pie and defensively saying the place couldn’t look any worse than it already did anyway.
The Suspects Page 3