Most people were pleased to see the back of 1988. We were all still reeling from the Lockerbie air crash so there was a lot of talk about that. I worried about Xanthe and the memories the disaster must be dredging up for her, as well as the poor people of Lockerbie which wasn’t a million miles from where I’d grown up.
I remember the police coming round twice after our neighbours had complained about the noise and “suspicious smells” from the garden. They’d visited our parties so many times by then we were almost on first name terms.
I was drunk but not to the point of idiocy because experience had taught me how far I could go without bringing on a fit and I hadn’t yet told the others about my epilepsy. The last thing I wanted was the humiliation of them finding out in such a public way.
I didn’t take the pills at the party either. On the one occasion I’d experimented as a student I’d been fine at the time but had a seizure the next morning during the comedown, which freaked me out a bit.
A small, skinny man with hunched shoulders and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down, reminding me of a gecko, wearing a grey hoody and jeans that looked like they’d been sprayed onto his legs, kept appearing at odd moments asking for Fitz.
“Sorry,” I said. “Don’t know anyone called Fitz,”
“You must do,” he yelled in my face. “He said he’d be here.”
I took a step away and wiped spit off my ear. “Well we don’t know him.”
That seemed to satisfy him for a while but every now and then he’d pop up again with the same question and asking other people who didn’t seem to be able to help him either.
Xanthe’s eyes were drooping and she was throwing her arms around everyone. I even saw her kissing The Man Who Was Looking For Fitz, but she must have changed her mind because they seemed to be having a disagreement. She shoved him backwards and he stumbled into me, knocking my drink onto the floor with his backpack. I helped him pick up the bits of broken glass, cutting my hand in the process. From the blood on his lip I guessed Xanthe had bitten him.
“Can you take this stupid thing off?” asked Stuart getting hold of the straps. He tried to pull it off the man but was very nearly punched in the face for his trouble.
Zak said to Backpack Man, “Looks like you’re at the wrong party. Try number thirteen – the one with all the bikes outside.”
I saw Stuart accompany Backpack Man out of the room, but more bodies spilled through the door, sliding across my vision and I don’t remember seeing him again. But I do remember Stuart telling a group of girls that the basement was out of bounds because the stairs weren’t safe, and I remember Imogen and her boyfriend Rick dancing and thinking how cool they looked. And I remember being struck by how beautiful Zak was – the way his hair refused to be tamed, the contrast between his bright eyes and dark olive skin, the plumpness around his mouth and his expressive arched brows.
How had I not seen it before? I think I must have done during those long days in the Training Room but not allowed myself to think about it – partly because I knew there was no way a relationship with him would work. Now we lived together a fling would make life awkward for everyone afterwards. Besides, Stuart had decreed it was against the rules which was probably just as well. I knew Zak liked me, but I also knew I’d turn out to be a disappointment to him.
I hadn’t, like Xanthe, lived in a squat or, like Imogen, trekked across Peru on my own and been stabbed by robbers. Hadn’t thrown myself in front of a truck carrying live animal exports or been arrested for hurling missiles at a speaker from South Africa when they came to my university – or in fact done any of the principled things people he usually hung out with had done.
So, I’d convinced myself that it was better to have his friendship, which would last much longer than a relationship. He remarked once that we knew each other better than a lot of married couples did. We certainly saw more of each other, living in the same house and travelling into work together on the bus. To which I replied that I had no intention of ironing his pants. He agreed and said he didn’t want to know about my morning breath.
Even now we’d been given our placements on different magazines we still phoned each other several times during the day to meet up at the coffee machine even though neither of us could stand the drinks that came out of it and we timed our lunchtimes so we could be together. We’d take a walk around the docks, share a bag of chips, look around the art gallery making irreverent observations and falling about laughing at the avant-garde exhibits or sit on a bench in front of the boats unpicking each other’s life stories.
But there was something about Zak that night at the party – his eyes so full of light and laughter, his brows so expressive and that infectious laugh… I couldn’t stop noticing him. He seemed, despite the people that were hanging round him, to be comfortable with me – at least he kept gravitating back to me to point out someone making a fool of themselves or to take up some half-finished thread of conversation.
Someone put on a track by the Fine Young Cannibals and he said with his heart-stopping smile as he appeared by my side, “My song to you, Em. You Drive Me Crazy.”
“Er – thanks. Not sure which way to take that.”
“Anyway you like.”
He leaned in and said, “Stuart’s little rule about not dating among housemates – rules are there to be broken, right?”
But the next thing I knew Stuart had flumped down on the floor on the other side of me.
“Have they got any idea what they look like?” he demanded, glaring at Imogen and Rick. “Have you ever seen such a plonker? Of all the people she could have chosen…” He was waving a half full whisky bottle as he spoke. “Not interrupting anything am I?”
“Yes,” replied Zak but Stuart carried on. After a few moments Zak shrugged and melted away and I felt a stab of hatred for Stuart but I hoped he might keel over and go to sleep if he kept swigging from that bottle so I sat back against the wall while I waited, watching bodies twisting and sliding in and out of focus, trying to make out shapes in the dark. I gradually became aware Stuart was still talking.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he was saying.
“Um, sorry?”
“Sometimes you remind me of her. I had to tell someone. It’s been killing me.”
“Right,” I said, trying to catch up.
“I’ve never talked about this before. Never thought I’d be able to.”
I’ve often replayed that scene in my head because I know now that if I’d made more of an effort to listen everything might have turned out differently but as it was all I got was, “I should never have…” – “She kept saying …” – “Dear God, I didn’t mean it to end up like that” – “Of course if I could go back I’d do anything…”
Now when I think about it, it’s obvious I should have suggested we go out into the garden or up on the roof where I could have heard what he was saying but at the time I was so worried about giving him the wrong signal and I was also fixated on Zak.
Every now and then I’d hear Zak’s laughter rise up or see him stumble past and we’d share a look but as Stuart talked on, I saw a girl running her hand up and down Zak’s arm. He was carrying on talking, not taking it off. He placed one hand on her hip and lifted her hair with the other while saying something into her ear, making my own hair lift up at the roots.
I didn’t have the heart to keep asking Stuart to repeat himself, but the music was very loud, and my hearing had never been all it should be. Luckily, I’d mastered the art of raising my eyebrows or knitting them, smiling and nodding at these occasions, mimicking the expression on the talker’s face. I hoped to God I wasn’t getting it wrong because he was obviously telling me something important and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
“You hate me now, don’t you?” he said at last. “You think I’m scum.”
“No, of course not.”
I was running out of ways to answer. The next thing I knew he was crying. His head slumped against my sh
oulder and I could feel his tears tickling my neck and his body was heavy and unbearably hot. I thought there was a real chance I might suffocate or have a fit.
Zak shot me a quizzical look. I wanted to shout, “Not what it looks like!” but tried to convey it all in a glance. He shrugged and turned away. The next thing I knew he was stumbling off towards his room with a German girl from the language school down the road.
“But what do you think I should have done?” asked Stuart.
“Well,” I said helplessly, “it’s hard to think what else you could have done.”
“Really? You’re not appalled? You don’t hate me?” He waved the now empty bottle and smacked his head back against the wall but didn’t seem to notice. “You’re the only person who’d react so calmly.”
Doubt crept up through me, but I managed to say, “We’ve all done things we regret, haven’t we?”
I thought perhaps he’d be satisfied now he’d got whatever it was off his chest and shuffle off to his room but then it all started up again. I’d initially assumed he was confessing to illicit sex with another boy at school or possibly a master, knowing the school he’d gone to. But I began to think I’d been wide of the mark.
I had an uneasy feeling that this was more serious than just drunken rambling and started to question what I’d just sanctioned. As he shook against me, saying “You have no idea how much it means to me to hear you say that” I realised I couldn’t possibly ask him to repeat the story now.
Eventually he fell asleep on me. I was getting a searing cramp in my legs but there didn’t seem any way to get him off me except for waking him and I couldn’t face him going through it all again.
I looked across at Xanthe who was lying in the lap of a man I’d never seen before on the window seat, having a deep and barely coherent “Is any of us really here?” conversation and decided it was pointless trying to get her attention.
At around four o’clock, just as I thought I was about to pass out from cramp, Imogen and another girl from The Photographer came over, took one of my arms each and pulled me out from under him, laughing.
But as I stumbled over dark shapes of bodies to the sanctuary of my own room my mother’s warning question swam through my head – how much did I actually know about the people I’d moved in with?
***
The German girl stayed for brunch the next day. She sat sideways on her chair in the kitchen wearing one of Zak’s campaign T-shirts, her slim, golden knees lodged between his legs, feeding him bits of croissant.
“Drink this,” said Imogen. She passed me a concoction made with raw egg – the one food I’m slightly phobic about – and I had to fight against retching, which she seemed to take personally.
A man I didn’t know had his head in the fridge, and the bathroom had been busy all morning. At odd intervals someone would stick their head round the door and say they were off. Xanthe bumbled in wearing her pyjamas and made herself something to eat. Stuart went around closing the doors and drawers she’d left open, switching off the light in the hall every few minutes in between crunching his bowl of cornflakes. I could feel his eyes on me but refused to look at him. I had a sense he was waiting for the others to leave. A chill crept over me as fragments of that conversation from last night swam back:
“It was as if it wasn’t really me, as if I was watching someone else do it.”
Zak and the German girl got up to leave. I scrambled up at the same time.
“When they came to arrest me, it was actually a relief.”
“Arrest me” – he’d actually said that, hadn’t he? I started to mumble something about getting in the bathroom while I had the chance.
“That thing I told you last night…” Stuart’s face was pink, his eyes tauter than ever.
I froze, forcing a bright smile and zipping my lips. “Forgotten.”
He wasn’t having it. “Have you told anyone?”
I felt a frisson of fear. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re friends,” I said, picking up my empty mug and slinging it in the sink.
He looked at me wonderingly, full of relief and gratitude that made me feel wretched. “You’re not normal.”
I managed a laugh. “Now you’re not the first person to tell me that.”
When I eventually got the chance to leave, I bumped into Zak in the hall. “You okay?” he asked.
“Of course, why wouldn’t I be?” I must have said it a bit more sharply than I intended because he held up his palms in a sorry-I-asked way.
I pushed past him to the bathroom and sat on the floor with my head in my knees, thoughts whirling through my head. Stuart’s unheard confession played on me over the next few days. We behaved like normal people, going to work and coming home but I kept stealing glances at him and wondering what it was he could have done that had got him sent to prison and that could make him so certain I’d be appalled. He’d made it clear that he was deeply ashamed and whatever it was he wouldn’t be doing it again but so many criminals say that and yet can’t help themselves.
I was tempted to tell Imogen, to gauge her reaction. With her cool head she’d know what to do but if Stuart suspected I’d told anyone, I had no idea how he might respond. He might, I thought, studying him, be a psychopath. A paedophile. A serial killer. And whatever he’d done, I’d told him it was okay.
The elderly couple next door accosted us outside the house about the noise at the party and asked innocently if that was the police they’d seen. Imogen went round with a box of chocolates to apologise but came back fuming. Mrs Nosey Parker had grabbed the chocolates off her, given her another lecture and shut the door in her face.
It wasn’t until a week later that we made the gruesome discovery.
***
The boiler packed in on the Monday. We woke up shivering and found all the radiators were off and there was no hot water. In the kitchen Imogen gave the boiler a beating but it refused to come to life. The breakdown was compounded by arctic outside temperatures, a scarcity of heating engineers, prohibitive call-out charges and our total lack of funds.
The house with its high ceilings and rattly windows was so cold ice formed inside the windows. We were forced to make do with boiling kettles of water for washing and wearing coats and gloves inside the house. We stayed out as much as possible, impressing our editors with the extra hours we put in and went to the local swimming pool to linger under their hot showers.
The only room that offered any warmth was the living room which had an open fire, so we went on a wood gathering mission in the woods after work although we couldn’t fit much wood in Xanthe’s 2CV and Stuart refused to let us muck up his Capri. Stuart and Zak nearly came to blows over fire-building tactics but Imogen calmly built a pyramid and got it going.
Zak brought his duvet down and we huddled under it on the sofa telling ghost stories and playing Scruples until late in the night. There was a trace of perfume on the duvet and a stain I tried not to notice. I couldn’t help thinking about the German girl in his bed and what she must have done to him and what he’d done to her. But then I reminded myself it wasn’t my business, and in any case why should I care?
Our first hint of Stuart’s explosive temper was when Zak laughed at an old school photo which he’d dropped while carrying a box upstairs and asked if he’d felt a prat dressed in the cloak and stockings that had been his uniform. “Or do you still dress like that when we’re not looking?”
Stuart sprang at him. “You know nothing about me. Nothing!”
Zak looked shocked but tried to laugh it off. “All right, sorry.”
But Stuart wasn’t letting go. “You think it’s all right to make assumptions about me purely because of where I went to school?”
“Again, sorry.” Zak turned his head and murmured as an aside, “I seem to have touched a nerve.”
Stuart grabbed him by the throat. “My stepfather sent me to school so he could beat up my family in peace. Are you happy now?�
�
He stormed out, slamming the door with such force the glass panel exploded into shards. Moments later he was back, glass crunching under his feet.
“And just so you know, people don’t have a monopoly on poverty just because they come from oop north,” he shouted as though they’d been having a completely different conversation. “Are you so bloody ignorant you don’t know that there’s been as much poverty here in Bristol? In High Wycombe? In London? And plenty of fat cat lords of the manor in Yorkshire and Manchester and…”
“Right. Got it,” said Zak. When Stuart released his grip, Zak pulled a face. A moment later we heard a crack. Zak’s nose steamed blood from a Glaswegian kiss.
“What’s his fucking problem?” he breathed when Stuart had gone. He was obviously having to try quite hard not to cry.
“I guess school days are a sensitive subject,” said Imogen handing him a tissue. “It might help if you didn’t deliberately wind people up.”
***
On the Wednesday we got the letters from the building society.
“How can we be in arrears?” Stuart was shouting, waving a letter around the kitchen like a dispatch paper.
“Two missed payments,” said Zak, taking the letter off him and reading it.
We looked at each other, all hotly denying any knowledge of it.
“Ah,” said Xanthe looking into her mug of tea.
“Send them a cheque,” said Imogen. “Today.”
“I can’t. We don’t get paid until Friday. It will bounce right back where it came from.”
“Then borrow. Beg. Steal. Or we’ll get repossessed.”
“They don’t really do that, do they?”
“Of course they do. They’re not a charity.”
Xanthe didn’t eat for three days, which we tried to ignore until Stuart caved and lent her the money. He must have known he wouldn’t get it back.
Zak insisted he cook a meal for all of us, which was the only way he could get her to accept food and produced an amazing Lebanese feast he’d picked up from his travels. Imogen and I made a very unsuccessful banoffee pie for dessert. I think we got a vital ingredient wrong so it didn’t set and looked like sick but it tasted fine.
The Suspects Page 4