“I like this place,” he said. “The kitchen at the other place is so empty. This is homelier. I love your cat.”
Then I realised what was wrong. The reason I really couldn’t kill him. This was my flat. My real flat. Not the fantasy flat that Markus shared with Trent. But my own home. I’d been an absolute idiot. I guessed I must have got completely hammered last night and got us a taxi here on autopilot. Because, obviously, that’s what trained killers do. They get minicabs (which have cameras) from nightclubs (which have cameras) and casually blow up their carefully-constructed false identity.
Because I was an idiot.
“Yeah...” I said slowly. “Do you like it? The other place is Trent’s.”
He nodded, accepting it without question. “Two flats? You guys must have so much money.”
Ah, yes. Money. That’s what it always came back to. “You should rent the other place out—” A tiny, calculating pause. “I mean, you know, if I got a job in London, perhaps you could let it to me. Or... you know, I could stay here. After all, your cat must get lonely. She likes me.” He beamed, happily. “It’s a shame to have a place going to waste. That’s all. How much is this place?” He smiled wider.
I ducked that one off. My aching head was considering his plan, completely forgetting for the moment that I did not, in fact, have two flats. The Shoreditch flat came from the KillFund, and I used almost every penny of my own money to rent this place. This was not good.
Romeo needed distracting, quickly. So I had some sex with him. I was actually getting quite used to it. Enjoying it, almost. I mean, you know, these things aren’t easy to talk about. (Don’t you hate it when your friends start talking about their sex lives? I do consider us friends.) But sex came in handy with Romeo. You know how you can distract a dog by throwing a stick? That, really. And he was very good at it. I guess he had to be. It’s how he worked. It was so easy to forget during it that all the while, simple, stupid, loveable Romeo was calculating away. Working things to his best advantage with his natural dull cunning. I was using sex to distract him, he was using sex to make me think he liked me. Neither of us was having sex because we wanted to.
So it was kind of funny that we were having so much of it.
“I
AM TOTALLY
stealing your cat. She’s gorgeous.” Romeo was just wearing a towel and a pair of Primark socks. And my cat was all over him. For some reason I found this worrying. I know that, on a purely rational level, cats don’t really like you, or have any affection for you. They’re just cats. They see you as a source of food and warmth that has to be slightly protected. I was used to my cat being surly. It suited me.
When I first started chugging, I kind of hoped the cat would come along. We could be the Street Cat Bob of chuggers. But it didn’t happen. The first morning I strapped on my tabard and headed meaningfully to the door, the cat narrowed its eyes and trotted off to the far corner under the bed reserved for imminent vet visits.
But here she was, a purring heap of fur wrapped around Romeo. I definitely couldn’t kill him today. He was, after all, covered in cat hair. Would I really want to be the first killer to be tracked down by cat hair? No one wants that as a first on their LinkedIn profile.
“You’re lucky,” I said to him.
“How?”
“Oh, you just are,” I said. I ruffled his hair, and Romeo purred. “Come on. Enjoy being alive. I’ll take you out for second breakfast.”
Hey @TrentSwish wish you were comic-book shopping with me and markus. WANTS!!!
Here’s the BEST CAT EVER. AND ME!!!
Behold my breakfast. It is MIGHTY.
F
OR SOME REASON,
the fiction was all getting a little complicated to maintain. Part of it was just the grinding certainty of work. I still had a job (of sorts). I still had to pound the streets being totally ignored by everyone so that my boss’s boss’s boss could buy another race car plus cure cancer. I was slogging away at the minimum wage and yet having to pretend very hard to Romeo that I was a successful digital strategy manager. I’d made the job title up, which hadn’t seemed a problem when I’d thought of it, but it was getting more complicated as he started asking me casual questions about work. What the hell did I do all day? I didn’t have a foggy clue.
Could I really justify dipping into the KillFund in order to keep taking him out for meals and buying him comic books? I mean, that was a bit against the spirit of the thing. Also, always having to pay cash for everything and make sure he took no pictures of me.
The easiest thing, I decided, was to not kill him. Just tell him some sort of truth and then get on with it. I mean, there was a way through this. Perhaps I could tell him that I’d invented Trent and a job to... to make him like me? Wait, that was utterly nuts.
But then, if I told him, and he was fine with it, what would that make him?
My boyfriend?
DUSTER: How is the latest assignment going?
ME:
... is typing a response ...
H
E CAME UP
on the Friday night so I could take him clubbing. He assured me it would be a cheap night out for both of us. Which was fine, but it never seemed to be his round and he always wanted expensive doubles and this was nice as it meant my urge to kill him was rising again. Each drink here cost more than an hour of chugging. That helped ease my conscience. But, of course, I couldn’t kill him here. The whole club was soaked in CCTV. I amazed myself that I actually clocked these things now. Like a spy. Or someone really shifty.
That was bad. I was changing. But clearly not that much, in that I was out dancing with my victim. Rather than fitting his body parts into bin liners and popping them in the ‘Food Waste’ recycling bins.
Anyway, Romeo became suddenly excited. He started waving, and then hugged me. I worried he was about to ask me for a cocktail. Instead he pressed himself really close to me in a hug that reeked of Jean Paul Gaultier (I knew this ’cause he never went anywhere without it). “Thank you,” he said. “I’m having such a wonderful time with you.”
Then he took a picture of us together on his phone. In the picture he’s smiling. And I’m looking startled. And there’s someone behind us in the photo. Someone who has no reason to be there. Someone who... someone who is the reason for Romeo grabbing me.
But I don’t know that yet.
“I love you,” whispers Romeo.
“Oh,” I say. I’m not sure which is more troubling—that he’s just taken my photo or said that he loves me. Hmm.
Then he turns around, pantomiming surprise and grabs a complete stranger by the hand.
“Trent!” he says.
Standing there is my completely imaginary boyfriend.
I
WANTED TO
go home. This is pretty much my default setting when I’m out. Age is odd, really. In my twenties, you could stick me in a loud, crowded bar and I’d love it. You could make me queue for an hour in the rain outside a nightclub and then cram me into a corner with other people’s elbows and I’d still dance happily away and tell you I’d had a brilliant time. Not anymore.
I was suddenly all too aware of myself. I was in a large concrete bunker in Vauxhall. Lights were going off all over the place without illuminating anyone’s faces, there was noise everywhere and a smell of amyl nitrate, Lynx and drains.
I was suddenly all at sea. All these people. All these bloody people. And for some reason, some God-alone-knows-why reason, I was trying to tell them how to live their lives when I couldn’t even look them in the eye or talk to them. Because I was lost and alone and broken and... Romeo was standing there on my left. Smiling.
Trent was standing opposite us. Not smiling.
And I wondered what the hell was going on.
Because Trent wasn’t real. I’d made up Trent. But here he was. Or rather, I realised, the man whose pictures I had stolen to make Trent.
He was here, of course he was, because he was real and real people went out and got shitfaced on a Friday night. Small world, funny old world. But completely possible. The thing was, he was here. And he had no idea who I was, who Romeo was, or that his name was even Trent.
Ooh, nightmare.
Not-Trent is being held by Romeo’s hand. Not-Trent looks perplexed. The window until someone says something else is closing. What to do? My first impulse was to brazen it out. “That’s not Trent. It just looks like him.” This seemed easy enough. But there was something else. Nagging away in my head. Something I needed to pay attention to, or I’d miss. Life doesn’t have Sherlock-vision. The best you can hope for is a flash of inspiration on the night bus on the way home.
Instead, I stole a trick from my old team leader, Alison. She used it to terrorise new recruits. Especially ones who weren’t that good at English.
“I beg your pardon?” I said. “Could you repeat that?”
It worked. Not-Trent leant forward, puzzled. “Sorry?”
“I didn’t catch that,” I repeated.
Not-Trent frowned. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Oh, fine,” I replied, dismissively. About three seconds had passed. But it was enough.
Let me tell you what I’d learned. For a start, Not-Trent was off his face. You could tell from the way that he’d not disengaged his arm from Romeo’s grab. And his eyes. And his gentle swaying. His frown was that of a smashed man trying to concentrate very hard on things which demanded his attention. He’d wear it later having a last piss before using it again to try and work out the number of the night bus he’d caught home a hundred times before.
I’d also learned something about Romeo. He’d kissed me in front of Not-Trent, thinking it was Trent. He’d wanted us to be seen by Trent. If he hadn’t engineered the situation, he’d seen it arising and was making the most out of it. But I didn’t have the first clue what he was making. So...
“This is Romeo,” I said to Not-Trent.
Not-Trent, a bit dazed, said, “Yeah. Hi.” Romeo said hello back, and then gave Not-Trent a hug. The hug lingered a bit. I wasn’t surprised by this. Also, mercifully, neither was Not-Trent. He beamed a mooncalf beam. As far as he was concerned, a tiny randy gay had just come on to him in a club. Result.
“Not in Frankfurt, then?” I said, my voice low.
“What?” Not-Trent hadn’t heard, but it was the right reply.
“Thought not! I can’t talk to you now!” I said.
“Oh, Okay...” Not-Trent tried to care. But he was very out of it and Romeo was rubbing his arm.
“I’m going home. Stay if you want, Romeo,” I said, and turned on my heel.
I’d built a rough binary logic-gate flowchart for this with two outcomes. Get me. Using some incoherent phrases, I’d hopefully left Not-Trent mildly baffled and given Romeo the impression we’d had a huge row and I was storming off. What happened next would be interesting.
If Romeo followed me, then it would be fine. I could tell him that Trent and I had split up. I could even use Romeo as a reason. He’d probably like that.
If Romeo didn’t follow me, he’d clearly be going home with Trent. At some point he’d realise that Trent was Not-Trent. Maybe he’d assume it was a case of mistaken identity or something, but it didn’t matter. I would never see him again.
Only... well, I knew it would be a relief, but I didn’t really want him to go home with Trent.
I paused briefly in my storming out and then went.
L
UCKILY IT TAKES
a while to storm out of a nightclub. More of a slowly drifting cloud. Nightclubs really are just long queues with short breaks for dancing. I collected my coat with a rictus smile, and made my way up some stairs, past a crowd of people wanting to get in and a woman with a clipboard who may have been working for a cab firm or may just have been a passing woman with a clipboard. I nodded past and then was out into London, making my way up a pissy alley to the giant desolate roundabout of Vauxhall.
I could, I thought, get a bus and be home in an hour.
I really wasn’t thinking straight. I got on and paid for my ticket with the
wrong
Oyster Card. I keep two, you see. The easiest way to get around London without being clocked is to dig your own tunnel. Walking is possibly the second least traceable. Even Taxis have cameras in them. My main Oyster Card, the one I use when I’m not saving the world, is linked to my bank account. It automatically tops itself up and has a lovely long list of all of my journeys similarly linked to my bank account.
My other Oyster Card does none of these things. I top it up with cash at a machine at a different tube station every time. It’s just a series of anonymous journeys that builds up over a week or so, and then I throw it away and get another one, or ditch it with just enough credit for someone to pick it up and take it on some completely random journeys.
But I’d just used the wrong card. It was turning into a bit of a wrong night, really. It showed that I was off my guard. I’d not even bothered booking ‘Markus and Trent’s flat.’ If Romeo had come back, he’d have come back to mine. I’d even got bacon in for breakfast.
I climbed the how-drunk-are-you stairs to the upper deck of the bus, pulling my hood up over my face and sitting away from the camera through habit. I needed to think. I felt a complete failure and I needed to think my way up from it. It had gone wrong. Somehow, like a pill you swallow the wrong-way round, I’d hunted down Romeo, I’d built a trap for him. And then I’d moved into it myself. And I didn’t know what to do next.
In theory it was all fine. He was, even now, trotting off with Not-Trent to Not-Trent’s real and amazing apartment and having real and amazing sex and that should, in theory, be fine. But, if that was the case, why did I feel so screwed up about it?
My phone bleeped. It was a text from Romeo.
You guys had a row, yeah?
Yeah
Want a hug? :(
I stared at the text. I knew that wherever he was, he’d see the ‘...’ of consideration appear on his iPhone as I started typing my reply. I didn’t know what to say. In the end I went for, ‘Why?’