The Suspects

by Katharine Johnson

  Zak started to move towards the car. I went to grab hold of him and pull him back but just as I did so the car went up with an enormous whump. The air filled with acrid smoke, the smell of burnt paint and the crackle of flames. I could feel the heat even from where I was standing. What was he thinking? For God’s sake, it was hardly a subtle way to dispose of a car.

  “Let’s go,” he shouted, propelling me round.

  Our feet pounded through the wood at the edge of the wasteland. We had no idea where we were running but kept going as long as we could. We passed a blocked-up stream and an abandoned children’s playground and the backs of a row of houses.

  Frenzied barking broke out from one of them. Zak froze. I grabbed his arm and pulled him along. Each of his breaths was followed by a high-pitched whine. He stopped, folded over, gasping, took a long puff of his inhaler and stumbled on.

  We reached a wide road with lights heading back into the town centre. From there we followed signs to the station but a look at the timetable told us it was still a couple of hours before the first train. We slumped on the floor against the closed waiting room and watched the clock inch forward. Zak’s face was grey, his whole body shuddering with the effort to breathe.

  When at last the station office opened we bought two tickets to London. From there we could travel back to Bristol as though we’d spent the weekend in the Capital, miles and miles away from where the body had been left. The adrenalin was now starting to recede and tiredness taking over. I felt stiff, grubby and exposed, as though I was wearing a t-shirt proclaiming my guilt.

  “We should spend the day in London,” said Zak when we were sitting on the train but moments later he was asleep.

  I thought I was dropping off too but the heat rising from under the seats scorched the backs of my legs after being so cold and I began to feel nauseous. A numbness crept up my stomach, the sort of feeling you get when you’re on a fairground ride. I had a strong sense I’d been there before, sitting on that same seat on that same train thinking that same thought. I was getting an oddly familiar metallic taste in my mouth although it was ages since I’d eaten anything. Realisation struck before I could do anything about it.

  “Emily, are you all right? Fuck. Em!”

  Zak’s anxious face hovered just above mine. He had tears in his eyes. I tried to make sense of what was happening. What was he doing up there and why did my head hurt like it had been split with an axe? I imagined a series of tiny people climbing out of it like an old legend I’d read about a god giving birth.

  I was gradually aware of shapes and colour. Sound. Legs. And, higher up, faces, concerned and then relieved. Swaying. I was lying on the floor of the train. I covered my face with my hand. Could I have picked a worse time to have a seizure?

  “It’s okay, don’t worry, you’re fine,” Zak was saying. He seemed to be choking back tears. He’d tried to get me into the recovery position but there wasn’t much room for manoeuvre in the aisle and I was now twisted at an uncomfortable angle.

  Turning my head, I found myself looking into a dark space. I could just see a sticky trail of liquid. In a panic I shifted position, feeling the floor beneath me, but it was reassuringly dry. An empty coffee cup rolled towards me and relief swept through me.

  I felt as if I’d just landed back from outer space. My face prickled round the edges and my brain felt full of lead. From a long way off I heard someone ask if they should call an ambulance.

  “No. Think she’s all right now, thanks.” He sounded scared. He was clutching his hair, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

  “Sorry,” I kept saying, trying to sit up. “The thing is — the thing is you see —”

  “Please shut up,” he whispered.

  “But I’d just like to say —”

  He planted a hard kiss on my mouth so I couldn’t talk any more. His unshaved face was rough against mine and I felt my skin burn. My lips were numb. Oh God what else had I said? As I opened my eyes people shifted their gaze. Zak hauled me up onto the seat and spread his coat over me. Someone offered to get me some water but I thanked them and told him I’d be okay.

  I felt incredibly tired as I always did after a fit. He put his arm round me. I could feel his body trembling against mine. All the time the question was going through my mind, were the seizures going to become a regular occurrence again? Even yesterday I’d have jumped at the chance of being on a train with Zak’s arm around me and yet I could never have imagined this. Nothing in my life would ever be the same.

  “Sure you’re all right?” he asked in a low voice.

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “I think you had some sort of fit.”

  “Hmm.”

  He pulled back. “Has it happened before?”

  “No.” I sat up. “Well, yes. But not for a long time. I thought they’d stopped.” I screwed up my face. “Sorry, I should have warned you.”

  He looked relieved. “No. Yes. I just wish I’d known what to do - I felt so useless.”

  My head still felt heavy and I slept until he woke me at St Pancras.

  “Do you need anything?” he asked as we got off the train.

  “Food.”

  He nodded. “Sandwich?”

  “More.”

  We stumbled through the mass of bodies and sat in a burger bar and I made short work of a meal deal with a milkshake while he sat watching. I still felt woozy and in another place. Zak tried to get me to describe what it had felt like, but I could never remember the fit itself.

  “I sometimes get lightheaded just before so I know it’s going to happen. Afterwards it just feels like my brain’s been switched off and then back on again. As if a tiny bit of my life’s been erased. The kiss was a bit of a surprise.”

  He coloured, dipped his head and looked up with an apologetic smile. “I wasn’t taking advantage. I had to stop you rabbiting. You sounded like you were about to launch into a speech.”

  I winced. “Yes, I do that.”

  He sunk his face into his hands and looked up at me. “Really? Always? Fuck, this is serious. I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.”

  “Sorry.”

  He exhaled, cupped my face in his hands and said, “I thought I was going to lose you.”

  I managed a smile. “You don’t get rid of me that easily.”

  I could tell he’d obviously gone through the whole scenario of being left alone in all this, just as I had earlier. In view of the fit we decided against spending the day in London, but we bought two tickets for an exhibition and a film and picked up a Time Out to look at the reviews. I slept for most of the journey back. Engineering works meant we had to get a bus for part of the way, which took ages. From the station we got a cab back to the house. I couldn’t wait to collapse into my bed, draw the covers over my head and pretend the worst night of my life hadn’t happened.

  But as I stuck my key in the lock I got a warning feeling. I opened the door and found myself staring at a police officer.

  Chapter Seven

  My first instinct was to turn and run but I knew I wouldn’t get far. My legs felt hollow. Xanthe and Stuart’s white faces stared at us from the hall. It was horribly like the scene I’d imagined. Was this a setup? Had they called the police while we were away and dumped us in it? Or had the policeman who stopped to see why we’d parked on the hard shoulder passed on his suspicions to the Bristol police? Had the body been found? Could they have made a connection that quickly?

  “My car’s been stolen,” said Stuart.

  Zak was the first to recover. “Stolen? When?”

  “Some time over the weekend. I haven’t used it since Friday.”

  The policeman seemed to be studying us, following the conversation and watching our responses. Zak did a pretty good job of acting shocked. I thought it best to stay quiet except to make sympathetic noises.

  He asked us when we last remembered seeing the car and went over our activities during the weekend, times we’d been in and out of the house. �
��Did you see it yesterday when you left for London?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I can’t remember. I wasn’t really looking.”

  He wanted to know who else lived in the house. Was there any chance Imogen might have borrowed the car? What time would she be back? I’d felt jagged tiredness as we arrived. Now I had to swing into the cheery housemate role as Stuart asked casually about our weekend in front of the officer.

  “Yeh it was good,” said Zak. “So much to do in London.”

  “Do you normally lock your vehicle?” the officer asked Stuart.

  “Always.”

  He closed his notebook. “We’ve had a few car thefts recently. Most often it’s just kids joy riding and the car turns up eventually although it’s usually a write-off, I’m afraid.”

  The officer paused inches away from the door to the basement. I was trying to regulate my breathing. Did the police usually make the effort to come round when a car theft was reported? Or did they already suspect something? I felt my eyes travel over to the basement door and forced them away to look at the ceiling, the floor, the jumble of shoes and bags, Stuart’s golf clubs, a couple of umbrellas with company logos and a potato. But whatever I tried to focus on, it didn’t feel natural.

  When the police officer finally left we slumped to the ground.

  “What the fuck was all that about?” breathed Zak looking up at the ceiling.

  “Sorry. There was no way I could have warned you,” said Stuart. He looked done-in too, bags under his eyes and a scarlet patch over his throat. “I wasn’t expecting them to come over. Looks like they don’t have enough to do at the moment.”

  “If they only knew,” said Xanthe with a wry smile.

  “What if they do?” I asked. “It’s not normal, is it, to come round in person over a stolen car?”

  She shrugged. “What’s normal anyway? I don’t know any more.”

  She threw her arms around us both and clung so tightly I nearly choked. I became horribly conscious of my sorry state.

  Stuart’s face was tight and anxious. “What happened? Where the hell have you been? Tell me everything.”

  I wanted nothing more than to retreat into my bed, but we gave them an account of our night. We left out the encounter with the police and didn’t mention my fit on the train. No point in alarming them with stuff we could do nothing about.

  “What about you two?” Zak asked.

  “Take a look.” Stuart led us to the basement. I shrank back but I realised I couldn’t live the rest of my life in that house afraid to go in or even walk past the basement. I gripped the handle and pushed the door open. The first thing that hit me was the choking smell of chlorine. Now I thought about it perhaps I’d been aware of it all along when we were standing outside with the policeman. Perhaps he’d noticed it too.

  Stuart’s arm snaked around me and snapped on the light. Tadah — a new fitting. The walls had been scraped and painted, the giant mushrooms removed, but the biggest change was the floor. He and Xanthe had made a couple of trips to Texas Homecare in the 2CV and bought a job lot of laminate flooring. It gleamed innocently under the bright light.

  “Wow,” I said, reining in my thoughts. Was it just me or did the revamped space look glaringly suspicious? I doubted the planks would have fitted across the little car without having to stick out of the window, where they’d have been seen by countless people.

  Zak stood in the middle of the space, looked around him and nodded. He inspected the joins. “You must have been working non-stop.”

  “We were. Still got that corner to finish. We need some more planks. I wasted a few getting the cuts right.”

  “I’ll give you a hand with the rest,” Zak said. “Have you been listening to the news?”

  Stuart nodded. “Nothing so far. We’ve had the radio on constantly while we’ve been working.”

  But when the phone rang he was jumpy as hell. I began to see that being left behind in the house hadn’t been an entirely easy option. He seemed grateful when I answered the phone but looked ready to seize it from me if I slipped up.

  “Em.” It was a shock to hear Imogen’s voice. So normal, oblivious. “How was your weekend? And don’t say crap because I can guarantee mine was worse.”

  I smiled weakly at the unlikeliness of this.

  “I’m waiting for a bus. Sodding engineering works. Won’t get in to Temple Meads station until nine-thirty. I was wondering if there was any chance Stuart might pick me up?”

  Because of course in her world everything was different. Stuart’s car was sitting on the driveway. It hadn’t been used to transport a corpse and wasn’t now a smouldering heap in a wasteland in a place we’d never heard of.

  “Um – not sure,” I said. “We don’t know where Stuart’s car is at the moment. Xanthe’s here though.”

  There was a pause. “Has she been drinking?”

  “No.”

  “On the whacky backy?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Hmm, beggars can’t be choosers I suppose.”

  Xanthe looked relieved at the chance to get out of the house. I had a fleeting vision of her just keeping on driving, windows down, long hair flying, jumping aboard a ferry and never being heard of again. But just as she was about to open the door Stuart grabbed hold of her.

  “Wait. We need to think first. Do we tell Imogen about this?”

  We looked at each other.

  “We have to, don’t we?” I said at last. “I don’t see how we can keep it from her when we’re all living here. She’s bound to notice something’s up.”

  “But think. What if she tells Rick?”

  “She will,” said Xanthe after a pause. “She tells him everything. And I don’t trust him. He’s a lawyer for God’s sake.”

  “And if we tell Imogen we may as well tell her dad while we’re at it because she tells him everything too,” said Zak. “And I definitely don’t trust him.”

  “We can’t have her tell anyone,” said Stuart. “It’s not worth the risk. The fewer people that know about this the better. That means not telling anyone ever.”

  I leant back against the wall and closed my eyes. Already it was getting worse. Keeping secrets from each other in the house. It would get more and more complicated as time went on and different people moved in and out of our lives.

  How long can you keep a secret? Would you keep it from your husband or wife and your children? What if you tell just one special person and you split up in twenty years and they tell just one other person? Who tells just one other? The only solution was to keep it from every single living person outside the four of us but that meant spending as much time with each other as possible and hoping that didn’t drive us insane. We needed each other in order to survive but I couldn’t help the creeping thought that one of us wasn’t being honest.

  As I passed the bathroom ten minutes later on my way up to my room I heard a noise. The shower was full on, but the water couldn’t completely drown out Zak’s crying. Even with my bedroom door closed I could still hear those shuddering, heaving sobs and I imagined him cowering on the floor under the deluge, face turned up, water as hot as he could stand. It went on a long time.

  I thought about calling to him but decided he probably wouldn’t hear me and if he did he’d pretend not to. So I went into my room and lay on my bed, stuck in a Eurythmics CD and turned it up loud in the hope it might transport me back a few years to my much simpler previous life.

  But it was impossible to ignore the snapshots that flickered through my head of the body on the floor, the body in the car, the body falling and Zak kicking it to hell. Or the smell of the burning car, or the fear that my seizures had returned.

  A quiet knock at the door shook me back into the moment.

  Zak stood there, head down, black hair flat and dripping. He glanced up at me and I knew his look mirrored my own. It was so many things – shared knowledge, revulsion, regret. No sense wishing things had been different.

 
“Can I sleep here tonight?” he whispered.

  The difference a day made. “Not sure it’s a good idea.”

  “I don’t mean with you, I mean next to you. Please? I don’t want to be alone.”

  He looked so desperate and I didn’t have the energy to argue about it, so I stepped back to let him in.

  We lay together in the bed, curled into each other, clinging like children and cried some more; more than I ever thought was possible. I was worried the violence of that crying might shatter a rib or do some permanent damage to my body. Perhaps I wanted it to. Zak fell asleep before I did. I lay listening to him breathing, envying him that oblivion but resisting sleep myself for as long as I could because I was terrified of what I’d see in my dreams.

  But at some point during the night we must have reached out for each other because somehow we ended up making love. Looking back, it’s a hard thing to justify in the circumstances but I can only say love and lust were the furthest things from my mind at that moment. I think we did it to prove to ourselves we were still alive, that we could still breathe and feel. To annihilate images of that grey, emaciated, vomit-encrusted body, to shut out everything and exist purely in that moment.

  Afterwards, I lay with my head on his chest, his arm draped around me, my hair damp and stuck to my face which was caked in dried tears, the familiar but unfamiliar smell of his skin and sweat in my nostrils.

  Every rise and fall of his chest assured me we were still living, and every breath felt like a small triumph over death and for a few moments before I fell asleep I felt like everything was going to be okay after all.

  Sometime before dawn I heard Zak shuffling about, picking his clothes up off the floor.

  “Where are you going?”

  The only reply was a softly closing door. I lay waiting for him to come back but heard the front door click shut and his feet on the gravel outside. Looking out of the window, I saw him go over to his bike. I wondered if he’d look up and see me, but he started up the bike and rode away.

  When I went downstairs I found Imogen and Xanthe drinking coffee in the kitchen. Xanthe looked remarkably serene as though she’d forgotten the incident already.