by Anne Billson
'I could never catch her off-guard. She always moved, every bloody time. She always knew - even with a wide-angle lens, even at 1/125th of a second. She never, ever let me take her picture.'
I felt a sharp pang in my chest, like the bite of a scalpel. He had taken photos of all of them, of Lulu and Alicia and all the ex-girlfriends whose names I didn't know, Jesus, he had even tried to take photos of Violet. But he had never taken photos of me. In his files, I didn't exist.
'Oh boy,' I said. 'You really want me to say she's come back for you, don't you? You're not going to rest until you've got me to say it.'
'I just want you to confirm it's not all in my head.'
I'd had enough. 'OK, she's back. She's definitely back, Duncan. No question about it, she's back. And she's going to rip your head off. Happy now?'
He smiled and nodded courteously. 'Thank you.' He pulled the darkroom door open and slipped into the shadows on the far side, and I could hear him throwing up in the sink. I wondered if there were any prints in the wash there. If so, he would have to rewash them.
I didn't feel too good myself. Into my head floated a picture I'd been trying to suppress for so long - small, fetid packages wrapped in leaking black plastic. I tried to distract myself by going through Dino's photos again. I hadn't recognized Andreas Grauman at first. He looked strange in a tuxedo, with his hair tied back, but the sight of him still gave me the creeps. In fact, it was making me feel ill. My skin went hot, then cold, then hot again, and there was a roaring like motorbikes in my ears, and a faint chirruping noise as well. I put my head down between my knees, until the chirruping noise had died away and been replaced by the sound of a tinkling mountain stream. After a while, I realized the water wasn't some New Vague soundtrack in my head, but was coming from the dark-room next door. I sat up as Duncan came back, blowing his nose on a paper towel.
I made small talk, trying to hide my discomfort. 'Rotten photographer, Dino. Did you find out when these were taken?'
'Six weeks ago.' He was explaining about the filing code scratched into the emulsion when the chirruping started up again. Duncan tensed and swore and hurled himself through the door. Belatedly, I recognized the sound of the telephone, and followed. He was too late; the answering machine had already clicked on, and the caller hung up without leaving a message.
'Shit,' he said, looking devastated. Both of us had the same thought - that it could have been Lulu. 'Shit, shit, shit.'
'Maybe it was her who rang before. While you were throwing up.'
Duncan pressed the replay button. There was a whirring, and a pause, then the familiar little-girl voice. 'Duncan, are you there? Dunc? I guess not... Well, I'm having a great time earning pots of money. And don't worry, I'm not doing anything you wouldn't want me to do. I'll call you tomorrow. Take care. Bye now.'
'What the fuck does she mean by that?' asked Duncan.
We listened to the tape again. I was disappointed and relieved at the same time. 'You heard her,' I said to him. 'She's not doing anything you wouldn't want her to do.' It was an odd thing for her to say, but I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it, especially since she had given no indication of wanting to come home.
We inspected the photographs again and then, over another drink, discussed what to do. I thought we should take them to the Sunday Times or the Observer. Duncan thought we should give them to Jack, whose magazine was small but ideologically sound. We eventually decided that Duncan should print up as many as he could, and we would send them to all the publications we could think of. I wasn't sure what good it would do, but people needed to be made aware of what was going on. There was bound to be an outcry. Someone, somewhere, would settle Murasaki's hash.
Duncan went back into the darkroom to churn out some more prints while he still had the chemicals mixed. While he did that, I went through the Yellow Pages and made lists. Then, just to be on the safe side, I went round the flat leaving cloves of garlic on window-ledges and around door-frames, in the bed and on the dressing-table. After all this and a nightcap, I was too tired to walk home. Duncan offered to call me a cab, but I said I preferred not to go out in the dark at all, and not after the photographs. I told him I was too scared to sleep on my own, so we ended up in the same bed. He was drunk, but not as drunk as he'd been after our night on the town. It wasn't a very good erection, but it was better than nothing and I exploited it to the hilt.
Chapter 2
I woke with the smell of bacon fat in my nostrils. Duncan was already up and beavering away in the kitchen. I stumbled in, searching for Paracetamol, and before I knew what was happening he'd got me sitting in front of a plate of fried food. He'd already polished off one of his own. Lulu would have hit the roof; she kept a close watch on his cholesterol intake. Breakfast, for Lulu, was muesli or nothing. He was really living it up behind her back.
'I can't.' I stared at the egg, and it stared back, unblinking.
'Nonsense,' he said briskly, shovelling a dripping slice of fried bread on to the plate. 'Eat up. We have a busy day ahead of us.'
'We have?'
He sat down next to me and poured a generous slug of brandy into his mug of tea. 'Want a pick-me-up?'
I shook my head and pushed the food around my plate with my fork, leaving a trail of coagulating grease and dark speckled bits. It reminded me of the places I used to go to with Grauman.
Duncan explained he still had some printing to do if we were to have enough copies of the photographs to hand around. In the meantime, I should set out some of our suspicions in a letter. He frowned. 'I don't know. Vampires sound a bit far-fetched, don't you think?'
'We can play down the paranormal side and pump up the conspiracy angle. Maybe we can tie it in with AIDS. Blood sucking spreads diseases.'
'Don't give too much away. Let them phone for the juicy details.'
'Hang on a bit,' I said slowly. 'Let me get this straight. You think we should give them your telephone number? You think we should give them our names and addresses?' I was thinking of Patricia Rice.
'Why not?'
He took a lot of persuading, but eventually I convinced him we should preserve our anonymity. 'Even with Jack's mag?' he asked. I hadn't made up my mind about that, but since Jack's magazine was a weekly and we'd missed the deadline, the decision could be postponed for another few days.
There was one other factor we hadn't considered. We considered it now. Once all this stuff about Violet came out, someone was bound to start digging around in her past. They might find more than they bargained for. They might find... us. It may not have been murder, but some people were going to have trouble understanding that.'
'If only she hadn't moved when Dino pressed the shutter,' Duncan said. 'Then we would have had proof that Violet Westron is alive and well and living in... where is it? Molasses Wharf?'
I struggled through breakfast and half a dozen cups of tea and eventually felt human enough to sit down at a typewriter and compose the letter. It went like this:
Dear Sir or Madam,
We feel you may be interested in the enclosed photographs showing a gathering of executives from the well-known Multiglom corporation. As you can see, these people hold orgies in which the participants wear plastic fangs. We have stumbled across important data which suggests these activities are not quite as harmless as they appear.
Some of these people are involved in sadomasochistic pursuits which include biting and the shedding of blood - blood which is not necessarily that of consenting adults but frequently extracted from the veins of innocent children and teenage runaways who have been lured into a career of vice and licentiousness. In these days of viruses communicable via exchange of body fluids, we would suggest that such behaviour is at best irresponsible, at worst a danger to public health.
We also have reason to believe there are bogus social workers involved, as well as at least one prominent Tory MP. Perhaps you might care to investigate further, starting with Rose Murasaki, editor of Bellini magazine, which is based
in Multiglom Tower at Molasses Wharf. This is not, repeat not, a crank letter.
Yours sincerely,
Concerned of Kensington.
PS. The man who took these photographs has since gone mad and set fire to a building.
I was pleased with this, but especially proud of the bogus social worker angle. I popped out to the local newsagents to make Xerox copies. It was raining again, so Duncan lent me one of Lulu's raincoats. It was see-through pink plastic and I felt a bit like a walking condom, but there weren't enough people around to point at me and laugh. The wind picked up sheets of wet newsprint and whirled them through the air, but I didn't mind the rubbish any more. I felt pretty good. After all these years, Duncan and I were together again. He had cooked me breakfast. We were working towards a common goal. And it was fun. I was hoping like mad that Lulu wouldn't suddenly come back and spoil the party.
As Duncan had predicted, the rest of that day was hard work. We had decided to address our hot little envelopes to the respective news desks, but Fleet Street was a thing of the past; now all the newspaper offices were scattered around, everywhere from Battersea to Wapping, and though we split the workload into two it took the best part of an afternoon to deliver them by hand. I parted with my last envelope just as darkness was falling. Night-time made me nervous, especially in the vicinity of the East End, so I caught a cab and headed straight back to Duncan's. He made fettucini with mushroom sauce, and we ate it in front of the television. We drank two bottles of white wine and half a bottle of brandy and then we went to bed. For the first time in my life, I felt like half of a couple. It was a comfortable feeling, and I liked it. I had waited long enough.
Next day, Duncan had to set off early for a fashion shoot. He pecked me on the cheek, just like a husband going off to the office. Alone in the flat, I took the opportunity to poke around, but didn't find much I hadn't uncovered a couple of months earlier, when he and Lulu had gone off to Barbados and left me with a set of keys so I could water the plants.
Around lunchtime I strolled home, stopping off at the newsagents to buy a load of papers and magazines. There was no sign of Dino's photographs in any of them, but it was early days. Give them time, I thought. They would undoubtedly want to do some investigating of their own. Then it would be a case of sit back and watch the fireworks.
I settled down to a spot of work - a completely spurious account of what teenagers thought about violence on TV - when the Krankzeits came in from one of their shopping expeditions and slammed the front door so hard that my unfinished Visible Woman leapt from her shelf on to the floor, where her detachable foetus detached itself, and her liver and kidneys fell out through the gap. My neighbours thundered up the stairs in what I took to be hob-nailed boots, then there was a double-barrelled crash as they flung open the door to their flat and let it slam behind them.
Much later, at about seven o'clock, they had a major argument. I could hear him calling her a 'fucking stupid cow' and her calling him a 'fucking stupid Nazi'. This was unusual; normally they yelled terms of endearment at each other. The crash-bang-wallop went on for so long I wondered if he were knocking her around. I hoped so, though I also hoped she would be giving as good as she got. In the best of all possible worlds, they would be beating each other to a pulp.
Unfortunately, Christine Krankzeit stormed out of the flat before it got that far. She pounded down the stairs so heavily that my crucifixes were still vibrating five minutes later. I thought I could hear her sobbing, so I peeped through my curtains, hoping to see Gunter storm down after her and start some sort of ruckus in the street. But he didn't. A little later on I peeped out again and saw her standing perfectly still on the pavement outside, her face tilted upward and her gaze fixed on the floor above. Her skin had taken on a greenish cast in the lamplight, which was strange, because the street lighting was orange. I blinked, and saw that it wasn't Christine at all, it was Patricia Rice.
I blinked again. How could I have been so stupid? Of course it was Christine. Who else could it have been? But she was staring up at the front of the building with an otherworldly expression on her face. I shuddered and drew the curtains tightly to shut out the sight. Half an hour later, when I forced myself to look again, she was gone. But I made sure my front door was double-locked.
That glimpse of Christine had shaken me up more than it should have done. I tried to blot out the memory with lamebrained television, and then, somewhere between the end of a documentary about drug abuse on council estates in South London and the beginning of a new sitcom about Vietnam veterans trying to fit back into small-town American society, I noticed someone showing lots of cleavage. I didn't twig at first; I just saw this figure, dressed in black, stalking down a neon-lit street in ridiculously high heels. The other pedestrians, all male, were going ape-shit. The first gulped down a lethal dose of strychnine - you knew it was strychnine because it said so on the bottle. The second threw himself under the wheels of a Ferrari. The third plunged a knife into his belly, and the fourth was so traumatized that his head exploded. Then Lulu (for it was she) turned to the camera, an enigmatic smile playing on and around her lips, and a disembodied voice whispered, 'Kuroi. They'll die for the woman who's wearing it.' Then Lulu's face faded into an elegant orchid-shaped chunk of black glass, and the voice whispered, 'Kuroi. By Murasaki.'
It was a grand excuse to phone Duncan. 'Lu's on telly,' I said. He wanted to know which channel. I heard him switch his set on, but it was too late; all he got were bursts of canned laughter and the gatta-gatta of automatic gunfire. 'Maybe it'll come up in the next break,' he said. 'What was it for? Bellini?'
'Perfume. By Murasaki. Multiglom strikes again. They didn't waste any time, did they?'
'Who?'
'The admen. When do you reckon they filmed it? Two days ago?'
I could sense him considering this at the other end of the line. 'Less than a week, you're right. They must know something we don't know.' He paused, then asked if I wanted to go round and see him that evening. He offered to drive over and pick me up, which suited me fine, because it wasn't just Violet I had to worry about now - it was Grauman, Patricia Rice, and the rest of the crew as well.
Duncan did the cooking again, but I could tell the novelty of it was already wearing off for him. He served linguini with a ready-made tomato and basil sauce from the delicatessen down the road, and then he fried up some bread to boost the meal's cholesterol-packing potential. We ate in silence, trying and failing to stick to mineral water and staring at the television in case Lulu's ad should come on again. It didn't. The news was full of the takeover of three British companies by a single foreign consortium which already owned four national newspapers and a satellite channel. Questions had been raised in the Commons by Her Majesty's Opposition, and the Monopolies Commission was preparing a report, but the consensus was that there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it. It was all very dull.
Shortly after we'd finished eating the phone rang. Duncan snatched the receiver up excitedly, but I could see, by the disappointment on his face that it wasn't Lulu. He listened uninterestedly for a while, saying 'yes' and 'no' and 'OK, yeah', but then he heard something which made him sit up straight. He talked a bit more animatedly after that, said 'cheerio' and hung up.
'Weinstein,' he said. 'She's having a party tomorrow.'
Ruth's party had completely slipped my mind. 'Just what the world needs right now,' I said. 'One of Ruthie's shindigs.'
Duncan said, 'I'm going.'
'You are?' I was taken aback. Duncan disliked Ruth, everyone knew that. He despised her dilettantism and the way she always protested she had no money, even though she was probably the wealthiest person we knew. Her father had bought her the house where she and Charlie now lived, and then he had also bought her an art gallery in Westbourne Park under the pretext of it being a birthday present, though it was more likely some sort of tax dodge. I usually tried to avoid walking past it in case Ruth was there and spotted me, even though she treated t
he business like a hobby and left most of the day-to-day running of the place to badly paid underlings.
Duncan said, 'Lulu's going to be there.'
'Lulu?' Impossible, I thought. 'You don't know that.'
'Ruth saw her the other day, at Gnashers.'
Ruth had such a bloody big nose. For the love of Jesus, why couldn't she keep it out of other people's business? I wanted to ask Duncan why he wanted to see Lulu so badly, since she obviously wasn't in a tearing rush to come back and see him, but I didn't. Instead, I said, 'Maybe I will come along after all.'
'OK.' And with that, he wrapped himself in his own thoughts and hardly said another word to me. We had a few more drinks, and pretended to watch a late-night film, but all the sparkle had gone out of the evening. He stared at the screen and didn't seem to hear when I asked him questions. A barrier had gone up between us. I felt like an idiot, perched on the sofa in my jingling silver trinkets while Duncan acted as though I was invisible. I felt my recent joie de vivre giving way to gloom. The prospect of seeing Lulu again had brought home to me how much, how very much, I'd been enjoying her absence.
Chapter 3
Saturday morning got off to a bad start when I suggested to Duncan that we meet up somewhere before going on to Ruth's party together. He started making excuses. He had to work all afternoon. He had no idea what time he'd be finished. I cottoned on fast. 'You don't want Lulu to see us together, is that it? Hell, you don't want anyone to see us together.'
'I thought you realized, Dora. Our affair could never be anything other than clandestine.'
'Clandestine? Clandestine? What's that supposed to mean?'
'We must keep it secret. No one must know.'
'I know what it means,' I snarled. 'It means I've served my purpose and now you're going to put me back in the cupboard.'