by Anne Billson
'As far as I know. Why do you ask?'
She paused, and had the grace to look embarrassed. 'Lu said she thought there was another woman.'
The blood rushed to my head, but then I realized she couldn't have been talking about me. News didn't travel that fast. 'She hasn't mentioned anything to me.'
'I can't believe Duncan would be so stupid,' said Jack, so smugly that I wanted to hit him. 'Lulu's a corker.'
There was another uncomfortable silence. 'There's some problem with tax, I think,' I said, damaged brain working overtime. 'He's been having a lot of meetings with his accountant. Maybe that's it.'
'Maybe,' said Alicia, but she didn't look convinced. I thought I saw her raise an eyebrow in my direction, but I may have been mistaken.
Five minutes after getting home, I had yet another call from Duncan. It was the same old stuff - no Lu, no fun, no future. By the time I'd summoned sufficient resolution to terminate the one-sided conversation, my mood, which had been jiffed up by the gin, had plummeted back into the pits. There was only one thing to do in the circumstances. It was a foolproof method of cheering myself up. I dialled Patricia Rice's number.
At the twenty-fifth ring - just as I was about to give up and go to bed - she answered. I heard a little gasp, as though she were anticipating some fresh new hell, then realized it had not been a gasp but a yawn. I had probably got her out of bed. She was just the sort of person who would be turning in before eleven o'clock.
'Hi there,' I said in what I hoped was a Californian accent. 'Am I talking to Patty? Patty Rice?' I'd decided to give her some more of the weird hippy subcult.
Immediately she was on her guard. 'Who is that?'
'You don't know us,' I said, 'but we sure as hell know you. We were kind of wondering if you'd gotten our latest letter.'
I should have known something was wrong as soon as I heard Patricia laugh. She usually swore, or hung up, or both things at once, but she never laughed, not ever. 'Yes,' she said. 'I got it this morning. And you know what?' She laughed again. 'This time you really screwed up.'
The sensible thing at this point would have been to hang up. But my brain was still feeling like something battered against a rock by a Greek fisherman, so I didn't. I kept on babbling, my accent veering from California to Brooklyn and back again, taking in the Deep South en route. I had never been terribly good at accents. I gave her some poetry: 'Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak-and weary, de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum forgotten lore...' I stopped. Something she had said finally sank in. 'What do you mean, I screwed up?'
Patricia's voice quavered with righteous triumph. 'I don't know why you've been doing this, and I don't care, but at last I can put a stop to it. You've finally given yourself away.'
I racked my brains, but I didn't know what she was talking about. 'Hey, what did I do? Use headed notepaper?'
'Not quite.' I could see her smiling in that mean, thin-lipped way she had. 'But almost. You sent me something you didn't mean to send.'
I was impatient, but uneasy. 'And what's that?'
'Oh yes, it must be nice, living in Notting Hill,' she said. 'Shame about all the rubbish on the streets, though. And the noisy neighbours. And the Alsatians. I know you're not really Gunter Krankzeit, are you, it's just another of your poison pen-names, but this time I've got your address and I'm giving it to the police. You're sick. You should be locked up, and I'm going to make sure you -'
I slammed the receiver down on her. Or she slammed it down on me, I'm not sure which.
What had I done to deserve this shit? My stomach lurched as I realized what had happened. I wondered how Kensington and Chelsea's Environmental Health Department was coping with the threatening letter from the weird hippy subcult.
I sat completely still, trying to control my breathing by slowly counting to ten. It was all the Krankzeits' fault. If they hadn't kept me awake, I would never have written that letter, and I certainly would never have been dozy enough to put it in the wrong envelope. I blamed Duncan, as well. I couldn't think why, exactly, but I did.
My first instinct was to march straight round to Patricia's and threaten her with GBH until she returned the evidence. Then I decided this wasn't such a sensible course of action. She might have known, approximately, where I lived, but she still didn't know who I was, and there was no point in showing my face. Besides, she was bigger than me. But I couldn't let it rest. There were fingerprints, handwriting, and, for all I knew, traces of saliva on the gummed flap of the envelope.
I smoked three cigarettes, thinking hard all the while, then plumped for emergency action. Somewhere in the top drawer of my desk, amongst all the spare boxes of staples, hotel stationery, novelty erasers and rubber stamps, there were various old keys I had never had the heart to discard.
I rooted around and found what I was looking for - the Yale to Patricia Rice's flat. I hadn't kept it on purpose; I just hadn't got round to returning it. And the estate agents, embarrassed by the gazumping, had never asked for it back.
Chapter 8
It was raining hard. I wrapped myself in a large mackintosh and set out for the offices of Flirt. It was far too early for the Notting Hill flotsam to be up and crawling, but there were plenty of reminders of the previous night's rumba session: rubbish all over the streets, dog shit and broken bottles and ripped-up garments with revolting stains all over them, a paddy field of old newspapers and sodden cigarette packets. The usual stuff, only it seemed to be getting worse each day. In my head, I composed yet another why-oh-why letter to the local council. I thought grimly that while I was at it I could send a copy to Patricia Rice as well.
Two out of the three down escalators at Notting Hill station were out of order, the platform was covered with litter, and the train was running late due to a signal failure at Edgware Road. It arrived a couple of centuries later, and another couple of centuries after that, after I'd read my newspaper (including the financial, sports, and small-ad pages) and completed all but two of the cryptic crossword clues, we rolled into Embankment station. I headed up Villiers Street, past the entrance to the Foxhole, and plunged into Covent Garden. Since it was not yet ten thirty, the Flirt office was deserted except for a lone receptionist. I deposited my fun package on the appropriate desk and took the opportunity to dial Patricia Rice's number, just in case she'd stayed home sick. No answer, just as I'd expected. She was a creature of dreary routine.
The coast was clear, but the sky wasn't. The rain was pelting down as I crossed Hungerford Bridge. The drainage was so bad it was like walking on the beach when the tide wasn't fully out; water darkened the leather of my shoes until they made squelching noises at every step. Before I'd got halfway across I was so wet it didn't matter any more. I paused and leant against the railing, facing east to where the sky was darkest. Squinting against the rain, I could just make out some brightly lit buildings in the City. I couldn't see as far as Molasses Wharf, but in my mind's eye was a picture of Multiglom Tower, even darker than the sky, a long way beyond Lloyd's, but big and very sinister, surrounded by black flapping things which might have been seagulls but were probably not.
I shook myself out of this reverie and moved on, past the Festival Hall, feeling wetter and colder all the time. There weren't many people around, only a few figures scurrying towards the nearest shelter, huddled beneath umbrellas or shielding their heads with newspapers. The streets around Waterloo were busier, though not by much. I stopped off at the station to warm my bones with a cup of coffee before striking out through the downpour for Lambeth North.
Patricia's flat was a conversion job, but one of the things I had liked was its position on the end of a terrace, which meant it had its own separate entrance on the side street around the corner. Lucky Patricia; no awkward neighbourly encounters in the hallway, no having to sift through other people's fishy-looking mail, no Krankzeits to thunder up and down.
I pressed her doorbell. Of course there was no reply. I hadn't expected one. I looked around; t
he building site across the road, like the Flirt office, was deserted. I went on to check out Patricia's back yard, which backed on to a tiny corner of scrubby public land. There was a bench right under her back wall. I clambered up to peer through the tangle of barbed wire. Before the gazumping, I'd planned to fill the yard with shrubs and creepers; Patricia had filled it with dirty milk bottles and an old kitchen cabinet. It was clear she had failed to exploit the property's full potential on the outside; now, letter or no letter, I wanted to see what she'd done to the inside. I climbed down and strolled back to the front door. There was no one around, but even if there had been they wouldn't have noticed me. I was an old hand at looking casual. I inserted my key, turned it, and stepped inside.
What little light there was came through the small panel of amber glass in the front door. I didn't much care for the way Patty had decorated the hall. The wallpaper was turquoise, and reminded me of the decor in a Tandoori restaurant. There was a framed reproduction of Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy on the wall.
I stood for a while, ears straining, but apart from my own breathing the only sound was that of water dripping slowly off the bottom of my raincoat. I took it off and left it draped over the Rousseau. The first door led to the kitchen, where there were little jars of dried herbs and some recipe books on a shelf above the fridge. Hanging from some red plastic hooks were an apron with Supercook emblazoned across the front, an oven-glove shaped like a penguin, and a tea-towel decorated with characters from Mabel Lucie Atwell. It was all preternaturally tidy, except for a single unwashed mug - not at all like my kitchen, which was rarely without a sinkful of dirty crockery.
The bathroom smelt of fake pine, and the predominant shade was lilac. There were no interesting prescription drugs in the wall-cabinet; just aspirin, and Listerine, and tampons manufactured in Havant. I retraced my steps along the hallway. The bedroom had been decked out in lemon yellow, in that bland style witless folk called 'feminine' - floral-patterned quilt, brass bedstead, and fluffy toys. The bed hadn't been made; apart from the mug, it was the only evidence I had seen of sloppiness. On the dressing-table were a couple of pinkish-beige lipsticks, a bottle of Dior perfume, and some blemish concealer. I sneered and went into the last room. This was the room which faced on to the street, and it was darker than the rest of the flat because the blinds were closed. I could just about make out the outlines of furniture, and that was all, so I went over to the window and yanked on the cord to let in some light.
I should have realized something was up as soon as I felt the scrunching beneath my feet, like the sensation you get from walking on a crisp layer of snow. As I let the light in, I turned away from the window and saw a lot of things. Not all of them registered immediately. But I saw enough to make me snap the blinds shut, quickly, before the smell of burning could get any worse.
The first thing I saw was the mirror over the mantelpiece, or what was left of it. There was hardly any glass left in the frame - most of it lay in pieces on the carpet; I'd stepped on some and shivered it even further. It was impossible to tell precisely what had happened, because the floor was covered in debris; as well as glass, there were pieces of broken china, scraps of fabric, and feathers. I remember thinking how odd it was this room should be so untidy when the rest of the flat had been so neat. Patty had slipped up there.
Then I saw exactly where she had slipped up. One of her slippers had fallen off, and I saw her bare foot before I saw the rest of her. She was lying alongside the sofa, one cheek pressed into the carpet, hair spread out like a fan. There was blood on her dressing-gown, but not much.
And that was it. That was all I saw of her as she was then, because the exposed part of her face was already turning a shiny plum colour, even as I looked. The light came in through the window from the north. What with the clouds and rain it was fairly feeble, but it was still enough to make her skin blister and pop. Patricia Rice was fortunate it was not a sunny day.
Her limbs twitched. There was movement beneath the dressing-gown, but I knew it was involuntary. There were sounds, but they were involuntary too, like the bubbling and hissing when milk boils over and splashes on to the hot-plate. And there was a smell like lamb chops cooking beneath the grill; it was a smell which under normal circumstances I would have liked, which made it worse. It took me a split second to see all this and then I fumbled for the cord and pulled the blinds shut.
I was thinking practical thoughts, and lots of them. My brain was a different creature from the battered cephalopod of the day before; now it was whirring through the options like a well-oiled fruit machine. Carefully, I trod back across the room and switched on the lamp by the telephone. I was quite calm. I was calm because I knew what was going on. I'd seen this sort of thing before: open wounds on the neck, glassy-eyed stare.
Definitely Violet.
Violet had been here.
And Violet would be back, this night or the next, to complete what she had begun. It was this certainty, more than anything else, that stopped me from leaving the blinds open, though I couldn't for the life of me imagine why anyone should bother to preserve someone as boring as Patricia. I craved nicotine, but I didn't dare light up. I wanted to leave things as near as possible to how I'd found them. As it was, I knew that Violet, as soon as she came back, would smell that someone else had been present. I wondered whether she would be able to identify the source of the scent; I wondered whether her olfactory recall went back that far.
But I had other unfinished business. I crossed the room again and rifled the bureau. Patricia's papers were not as organized as the rest of her life. I found a mass of unpaid bills: gas and electricity and television rental. There was an uncompleted insurance form, and a half-finished letter to someone called Moira, and a small red address-book notable only for the number of blank pages. I thought of my own personal organizer crammed with names and addresses and telephone numbers, and for a few seconds I almost felt sorry for Patricia. Then I decided it served her right. Nice girls don't gazump.
But there was no sign of my letter. I scanned the rest of the room, reluctant to touch any more than was necessary. I especially didn't want to touch what was left of Patricia. There was a sudden hiss of tyres on wet tarmac as a car went past the window. I checked my watch, thinking I'd been there ten minutes, but more than half an hour had passed since I'd inserted the key. It was time to beat a retreat and devise a plan of action. As I pulled my raincoat back on, I heard the muffled thud of a pneumatic drill starting up across the street. The building-site boys had finally turned up for work. They didn't see me letting myself out. No one did. No one had seen me go in. And no one saw me leave.
SUCKERS
Part Two
Chapter 1
I was an only child, brought up in a semi-detached, three-bedroomed house on the outskirts of Havant. This is a place which rings bells with people who like to read the small print on packaging; Havant is best known for its tampon factory.
I never gave my parents any trouble, at least not to begin with. I never stayed out late with unsuitable friends, because I didn't have any friends, unsuitable or otherwise. I didn't really fit in at school, but I managed not to make too many enemies, and I worked hard. I was seventeen, studying for A-levels in French and Art, when my mother suddenly got it into her head to search my bedroom. She found all sorts of interesting things: a sheep's skull I'd found in a ditch, a collection of adult magazines shoplifted for research purposes, a diary which was more fantasy than fact, and some of the drawings I'd done to illustrate my favourite French set book, Les Fleurs du Mal.
I came home from school that afternoon to find a bonfire blazing in the garden, my mother stoking the flames hysterically as my most valued possessions turned to ash. It was the diary that had set her off. She burst into tears, called me an unnatural child, and told me I was no longer welcome in her home. She wept even more when she saw I was only too eager to leave. There were streaks of grime on her face, and her hair, usually so neatly permed, frizzed arou
nd her head like a tangle of live wire. She appeared to be having some sort of nervous breakdown. I was hugely embarrassed, and disowned her on the spot.
I spent the night in a neighbour's garage, curled up in a nest of oily rags and yellow newspapers. I was in a state of shock - this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. In the morning, my father rather sheepishly gave me some money and I caught the next train to London. For the next five nights I slept on the sofa in a flat belonging to a friend of his secretary, who had also supplied me with some of her old clothes. In the daytime, I roamed the streets, living off coffee and sandwiches, and loitered in the British Museum, sketching and making notes. On the fifth day I strayed into University College and jotted down some phone numbers from the students' notice board. Two days later I moved into a small room in Camden Town.
The following weekend, my father drove up to deliver all my unburnt earthly goods: clothes, record-player, records, and boxes of books and papers. My mother had sent bedlinen, a towel, and a tear-stained letter in which she begged me to come home. I told my father this was out of the question, and he agreed to send me a small allowance each month, at least until I found my feet. It wasn't much, but it took care of the rent.
I found a part-time job in a West End shoe store. Every evening at closing time the manager would search his employees' bags to make sure we weren't walking off with items of stock, though the shoes were so awful (patent plastic, buckles, platform soles) no one in their right mind would have wanted to steal them. Besides, the store practised its own type of aversion therapy. We assistants had to wear turquoise nylon smocks; the carpet was nylon too, and the display units were metal, and every time we touched a shoe, it would give us a small, sharp electric shock.
On days when I wasn't trying to squeeze misshapen feet into plastic shoes, I was busy doing all the things my mother had never let me do at home - like staying up half the night, or staying in bed till noon. I assembled intricate collages out of pictures cut from magazines. Other than a weekly trip to the cinema, I didn't go out much. I played records at maximum volume, until the student in the next room tapped timidly on my door and asked if I could turn it down because she was trying to sleep. Sometimes I laid traps for the mice which would come out to play every night, squeaking excitedly as they abseiled down the back of the wardrobe on my loudspeaker wires.