Don’t Trust Me

by Joss Stirling

  ‘OK. Moment.’ He goes back into his flat and closes the door.

  Hanging on to the promise in that ‘Moment’, I wait for him to emerge, which he duly does a minute later, wearing lycra that looks like it’s been slapped on with a roller brush. Soho’s answer to Chris Froome, he hefts the bike out of my way and follows me downstairs. I hold up my keys, and point to the lock. Then magically, he produces a brand-new Yale key on a ring with a fob in the shape of a little bicycle-wheel.

  Thank God, some sanity is being restored to my morning. Jacob must have had the locks changed and had the idea of leaving the spare with the guy upstairs. He could’ve told me. My headache begins to ease.

  My Polish white knight opens the door and stands back.

  ‘Thanks.’ I hold out my hand for the key, but he shakes his head.

  ‘I keep. For boss.’

  I don’t really hear this explanation because the room I enter is just not right. Ten days ago, my messy desk with laptop sat in front of the sash window, a grey filing cabinet in the corner, a pinboard of all the cases we were working on next to that. Jacob’s desk had taken up the majority of the room across from me, a chair for clients and a coffee table pushed against the wall. The decor had been gunmetal grey with water-stain accents. The door opposite the entry had led into a depressing little kitchen and bathroom in the cheap extension, which I guess had been put on in the 1930s when it was decided indoor plumbing was here to stay.

  Now I feel like I am walking into the same room but in a parallel universe. The place is bigger. Someone has knocked through to the kitchen, laid a wooden floor and painted the walls white, refitted the kitchen. All in the space of ten days. A treatment table, still wrapped in plastic, has replaced Jacob’s desk, and all the paraphernalia for an aromatherapy-cum-massage is neatly laid out on a pale-wood counter that takes up one wall. A feng shui kind of arrangement of ominous forked twig and stones – I mean, where are they planning to shove that? – stands on a low table where my desk had been. It smells new – new paint, new people, new business. There wasn’t even a nail mark in the wall to show where the pinboard once hung.

  I resist the temptation to slap my cheek to check I’m not dreaming. ‘What happened to all the stuff that was in here?’ I ask, pointless though it is.

  My Polish helper just smiles that bemused ‘seen enough, lady?’ smile.

  ‘Where is Jacob Wrath? Who’s renting this place?’ Finally I think of a relevant question with which the key holder might be able to help. ‘Do you have a number for the landlord? Landlord? Yes?’ Meeting incomprehension, I type the word into Google translate and let him squint through the spiderwebbed screen.

  He nods and pulls a phone out from God knows where in his close-fitting outfit. Also in dumb show, he selects a contact and turns the screen to me. I jot down the number with a biro on a receipt dug out of the bottom of my shoulder bag.

  ‘Thanks.’

  My guide stands back. He’s not going to leave me here, clearly, in case I steal a box of patchouli essential oil. I walk back down the stairs and on to the street. A few moments later, my new friend is outside with the bike slung over his shoulder. He dumps the bike on the road, gives me a wave, and mounts in one smooth move.

  ‘Jen-Coo-Yan. Thanks!’ I call after him in my one remembered coffee-powered phrase.

  And then it starts to rain. Of course it does. But not glamorously, not like that scene at the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral, where the girl stands looking damp but still adorable. This is thunderous downpour where no one escapes with any shred of dignity. Deciding to take my phone call to a drier spot, I scurry to the coffee shop I like on Soho Square.

  Buying an Americano to cut down the wait produced by the arcane art of working an espresso machine, I slide into a table near the back. Chasing a couple of paracetamol with a shot of black coffee, I tap in the number I got from the Two-wheeled Pole.

  The phone is answered with an aggressive ‘Yes? What the fuck is it?’

  God, I wish I was the least bit assertive but that was missed out of the baby shower of cradle blessings thrown by my good fairies. Instead I got impulsiveness, disorganisation and an inability to swear in public. I can swear perfectly well in private – fuck it – see what I mean? But whereas other people seem to regard the f-word as an ordinary intensifier, I can’t use it. Not at all. Not even when it is literally what I’m doing. Especially not then.

  ‘Um, hello, is that the landlord of 5a Dean Street?’

  ‘What’s it to you? You’re not that fucking woman from Number 7? Don’t waste my time telling me Marek is playing his music too loud. Fucking racist bitch. Take it up with him.’

  I guess Marek is the bicycle messenger. ‘It’s nothing to do with him or his music. I’m not from Number 7. I work in the office below his flat – or at least I did. I was wondering if you know what’s happened to the previous tenant, Jacob Wrath?’

  There’s silence at his end. I can hear birdsong and the crunch of gravel. Is he on a golf course? I immediately imagine an Essex gangster type, thick gold jewellery and a blonde younger wife. My mind loves these leaps.

  ‘You know that fucker Wrath?’

  This doesn’t sound good. ‘Um, yes. I mean, I work for him. Do you have a forwarding address for correspondence?’

  ‘Ha! Stay right where you are… What did you say your name was?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Suddenly, it doesn’t seem a very good idea to admit who I am, so I say the first thing that comes to mind. ‘Holly Golightly.’ It must be the whole adrift-on-the-streets-of-a-big-city-in-the-rain thing that’s getting to me if I’ve gone from Four Weddings to channelling Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  ‘I’m sending my man round to talk to you. Where are you? Coffee shop?’

  He can hear the hiss of the milk being steamed into submission and the Italian being bandied about behind the counter. I calculate what could happen. To lie or not to lie? He needs time to send someone over. ‘Yes, I’m in Carlo’s, Soho Square. Do you know it?’

  ‘No, but my man will find you.’

  ‘Why? What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  That doesn’t ring true. He didn’t know I existed until he took the call. ‘Right then. I’ll wait for him here. I’m in the seat by the window.’ I mentally picture Audrey Hepburn sitting there over a solitary coffee to make it more real for us both.

  ‘You fucking be there, all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Sending a mental two-fingers, I end the call and then power off the mobile. I have to hope that no unsuspecting girl on her own takes a seat by the window but so far I’m good: there are two Asian boys with laptops who look like they’ve settled in for the morning.

  This is getting ridiculous. I’ve just talked to a man who sounds like the cliché of the mobster boss. I don’t do that. My life doesn’t include that kind of conversation. Gathering my things, I leave the cafe, having already plotted my next move into the garden square. I stand in the shelter of the half-timbered hut in the centre, a child-sized Tudor fortress, and keep watch on Carlo’s. A damp ten minutes pass and then a man arrives on a motorbike. He gets off, locks his helmet in the seat compartment, revealing he is the spitting image of Idris Elba, and heads into the cafe. Is that him, the landlord’s man? Two women follow him in with their pushchairs, children under plastic wrap. Then an older man with a briefcase.

  I should’ve got a description, but I never got the knack of thinking things through.

  Motorcycle man comes back out with a sandwich in a to-go box and roars off. OK, not Idris. Through the window, I see the mothers edge out the Asian students with an interesting piece of psychological warfare. They let their two-year-olds occupy the low window seat normally devoted to flyers for local businesses and West End shows. The kids, two boys, lounge on their bellies and wave their heels in the air as they bash toy cars into each other. The Asian students exchange a look, close their laptops and scram. The mothers settle in the still-war
m chairs like a couple of self-satisfied generals. The man with the briefcase comes out but with no sign he’s bought anything.

  Him? He doesn’t look dangerous but he looks legal. I don’t want to take charge of any papers or writs that the landlord might be trying to serve. I’ve worked out by now that Jacob must owe him money – just as, come to think of it, he owes me my pay.

  The older man, paunchy, grey receding hair, navy suit, makes a call. I would bet that if I had my phone switched on, it would be ringing right now. Then more bad news: he is joined by two serious-looking blokes who have just got out of an SUV, the muscle to the brains. The knee cappers. Spine crackers. My fertile brain comes up with lots of words for them but no hint of how to handle them.

  Self-preservation instinct kicks in. I really shouldn’t still be here.

  Something tips him off. Mr Lawyer raises his eyes and meets mine across the square. He knows. I break into a run and risk taking the shortest route to Tottenham Court Station. Good idea? Bad idea? How do I know? All I can be sure of is that they’ll be in pursuit. If I get into the Underground their car won’t help. I reach Oxford Street and feel too exposed on the pavement. I dive into the first shop with open doors, a saucy lingerie store where a woman blends in and three guys stand out like priests in a bordello. I weave expertly through the aisles of satin and lace panties and barely-there bras and take the far exit that brings me out closest to the entrance to the station. Once at the bottom of the stairs, I fly through the barriers with a wave of my Oyster card and vanish down the escalator to the Central Line.

  With heart pounding, I get on the first service going anywhere. I’m not even sure if I’m going east or west. I’ll work out the route home later. I duck down as I think I catch sight of one of the big guys arriving on the platform just as the doors close. The woman opposite gives me a funny look, but this is London and the trains are full of weird people you really don’t want to challenge. She turns her gaze back to her paperback.

  That’s right, sister. Nothing to see here.

  The train goes into a tunnel and I sit up.

  Well, hell. It appears that my boss and my job have gone. Time I was too.

  Chapter 3

  I reach home with only a cracked phone to show for my attempt to fulfil my part of the gainful employment deal. On the doorstep of our Victorian semi-detached house, stone worn into a dip by the passage of so many feet, so many bags of shopping, I have a moment of doubt as I slide my key into the lock, but there are no surprises. It turns. Wouldn’t that be the cherry on top of the crap if Michael had taken it into his head to edit me out of his life today too? If he’d given the order for the locks to be changed while I was at work and he was guten tag-ing the frauleins? I’m like that paragraph in one of his articles, the one around which the copy editor has put a square bracket. Do you really need this part?

  Stet. For now. I have my uses.

  I go inside, disarm the alarm, and walk through to the kitchen conservatory at the back to dump my shoulder bag on the table. Something prompts me to check so I go past the tiny utility room and peer nervously out of the glass in the back door but I’m not sure what I’m expecting to see. An abandoned Scream-face mask? Footprints in the flowerbeds? I still can’t shake that feeling of not being alone, the flight from Soho not having helped my rational processes.

  I check the door to the basement is securely bolted – it features in another of my nightmares where I imagine the undead breaking through the London clay beneath, climbing up the wooden stairs and invading the house. It’s actually not that scary with the light on as it’s full of Michael’s snow sports gear and boxes of his wife’s things that he has never wanted to throw out. He goes down there from time to time just to bury his face in her ski-suit – he thinks I don’t know. It’s kind of sad really, this wanting to catch the scent of someone who’s gone forever. He won’t do that with anything of mine if I go.

  I return to the kitchen. Here I’m surrounded by the hobbies I have adopted and failed to finish during my recovery: the bulky quilt project stuffed in a bag like a dead Elmer the elephant, the jewellery maker’s starter kit, and the half-finished oil painting of the Serengeti – I’d had big plans for that. Beginning to feel a little desperate and a whole lot suspicious, I boot up the old desktop and check my last two months’ statements. I had one payment in June, a cheque that I’d cashed myself, but the promised standing order has still not arrived. I can see Jacob now, fingers hovering over his laptop keyboard, handsome ‘trust me’ dark eyes meeting mine as he asks me what day of the month I’d like to receive my pay. He’s a good-looking man, an outdoors type with tanned skin and work-roughened hands. He habitually wears a string of wooden beads around his throat like a dog’s collar that he said he carved himself, and I believe him. In that game of ‘Which person would you take with you to a desert island?’, he’d be a good choice as he’d whittle, build and farm his way to survival.

  ‘I’d like to be paid on the first,’ I said, just so thankful that someone would pay me after all that had happened. When my salary hadn’t come through in July, I’d raised it with him and Jacob had laughed it off as a mistake, saying he’d missed the deadline to set something up for the previous month but I should get twice the amount come 1st August. I hadn’t wanted to push or suggest another cheque. I knew that his finances were tight and my position was tenuous. If he’d asked more questions he would’ve found out about the Eastfields disaster and then I’d be out the door. The single payment had persuaded me to trust him.

  I log off from my account, all too aware my balance is in desperate straits. That is two months’ part-time work for which I haven’t been paid and I don’t need a crystal ball to tell me that I’m unlikely to see the money. I’m thirty and on skid row. Again. Why can’t I negotiate my adult life better than this? If I told you what had happened to me recently it would appear to be one crisis after another. I sometimes feel that some cosmic soap scriptwriter has got hold of me and keeps orchestrating season finales. I just want a quiet run of modest happiness with no thrills or spills.

  I need to talk to someone about this. I need to vent. But who is there? My half-sister has forbidden me from troubling my mother. She’s delicate, vulnerable, says Miriam, it’s time you relied on yourself. That always brings to mind Mum as a dandelion clock, a perfect sphere, tremulous, seemingly fixed until a puff of wind starts to unravel it. She only ever seemed competent when with me, never with her capable older child, which is probably why Miriam doesn’t understand our relationship. But big sister is right about one thing: I sense Mum is retiring from a world which she finds too much for her, pottering around the edges of Miriam’s life on the farm, looking after grandchildren, getting involved in her village community where what happens on Strictly is about the most distressing topic of conversation. Her whole aim is to try to keep from being underfoot. Her existence is cast as a form of apology, her epitaph ‘I’m sorry I took up so much room’. No, Mum isn’t the right person to help me with this.

  Depressingly, I find myself reverting to habit and sending Michael a text. Can we talk? I don’t want to do this by messaging. A minute passes in which I put on the kettle. I can see he’s read it, and he knows I know he’s read it, so I get a response.

  Is it important?

  It’s important to me.

  I mean can it wait until tomorrow? I’m about to go into a presentation.

  What would be the point of a conversation, I wonder, dragging him away from his oh-so-vital conference on something or another? Please hold, your call is important to us. Michael doesn’t even pretend to give me the pseudo-sincerity of the automated switchboard. I try one last time. My boss has gone. So has the office.

  The elusive Jacob Wrath. Or is that illusive?

  Damn you, Michael, with your clever word play. Couldn’t you for once try to care? We had been friends before, even if we’re not now. I close the message thread. His comment reminds me that the couple of times I arranged for a social meet-
up after work for the three of us, me, Michael and my employer – ‘come on, guys, it’ll be fun’ – Jacob cried off, claiming new lead, head cold, threatened train strike. It was all the more galling as I had called in a lot of home-life favours to get Michael to agree to traipse up to Soho (his characterisation of a simple tube journey). He began to make barbed jokes that Jacob didn’t exist, that he was a figment of my imagination. Now I think that Michael just didn’t want to discuss me with my boss, or look responsible for my day-to-day welfare, and Jacob was just avoiding making himself real to anyone but me. So much easier to slip away when you’ve few connections to sever.

  How far has Jacob taken it? Paranoia is getting a hold. I search for our website, the one I’d helped create and administer. Wrath Investigations, Specialists in Missing Persons Cases. (Yes, I am aware of the irony that the expert has gone AWOL himself.) Instead of the picture I’d posted of a lost girl in profile against the background of a London station, I get a broken link. I do a more general search and find only one relevant record: my cheery announcement on a business networking site that I’d started work as a profiler at Wrath, the implication being that it was far better than teaching Psychology A level. I’d meant it as a ‘look, see: I’m bouncing back’ to old colleagues but now I’m ashamed. It seems like I’m trying far too hard. I delete my profile. I don’t want the landlord to find me that way now I’ve not stayed to meet his man.

  My phone starts doing an Irish jig on the table. I check the number. I’d noticed three missed calls in my log from the same phone since I turned it back on, which suggests the landlord isn’t going to let this go. I decline the call but wait for the person to leave a message.

  ‘Miss Golightly, if that’s your name, this is Max Tudor of the law firm Tudor Associates.’ The lawyer is more of a film buff than his employer and has recognised the borrowed name. ‘I believe we almost met today. My client, Harry Khan, wishes urgently to speak to you. Mr Wrath owes him three months’ rent. The only payment he ever received was the first instalment plus deposit, which has naturally been forfeited. We are eager to find a Miss Jessica Bridges, whose name and signature appears as co-guarantor on the lease.’