Land of the Living (14 page)

‘So can I just take it?’ I asked.

‘Hang on, not so fast. You have to pay, you know.’

‘Oh, yes, of course, sorry. How much?’ I felt anxiously in my pocket for the dwindling wad of notes.

‘That’s what I’m working out. There’s the fine for parking illegally, then there’s the cost of towing it away, then you have to add on the time it’s been here.’

‘Oh. That sounds like rather a lot.’

‘It is, yes. A hundred and thirty pounds.’

‘Sorry?’

‘A hundred and thirty pounds,’ he repeated.

‘I don’t have that much money.’

‘We take cheques.’

‘I don’t have a cheque book.’

‘Cards.’

I shook my head.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. He didn’t sound too sad.

‘What shall I do?’

‘I couldn’t tell you.’

‘Can I take the car, drive to a friend’s to get money, then come back here?’

‘No.’

There was nothing for it but go away again. I slogged back to Bow and sat in a little café with another cup of bitter, tepid coffee. Then I went to a payphone, called Sam and asked him, begged him, really, to send sixty pounds — no, make that eighty, ninety even — by courier to the police pound, where I’d be waiting. ‘Please, please, please,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry but this is an emergency.’ I knew about the courier service because once he’d got his jacket collected from a club we’d been to because he couldn’t be bothered to go back for it. Perk of the job, he’d said.

I finally got my car. At just after twelve thirty, I paid over the £130 and he gave me a printout of where it had been towed away from and a breakdown of the charges. Then he pointed out where it was parked, and unlocked the double gates. I had nineteen pounds left.

I climbed in and turned the key in the ignition. It started at once. I turned up the heating and rubbed my hands together to get rid of their cold stiffness. There was a Maltesers packet lying on the passenger seat. I pushed the tape that was in the machine and didn’t recognize the music that came on. Something jazzy and cheerful. I turned up the volume and drove through the gates. Then I pulled over and looked at the official receipt. The car had been towed away from outside 103 Tilbury Road, EI on 28 January — which I worked out was my last day in hospital. The road must be near here, surely.

The road map was in the glove compartment. I found Tilbury Road and drove there, through an area of London that was quite unfamiliar to me. It was a long, dismal street of boarded-up houses, dimly lit newsagents and twenty-four-hour shops selling grapefruit and okra and dented tins of tomatoes. I parked outside number 103 and sat in my car for a few minutes. I put my head on the steering-wheel and tried to remember. Nothing happened, no glimmer in the darkness. I put the map back in the glove compartment, and felt a rustle of papers. There were three receipts pushed in there too. One was for petrol: £26, on Monday 14 January. The second was for £15o-worth of Italian lire on Tuesday 15 January. The third was for an Indian takeaway delivery for that same day: £16.80 for two pilau rice, one vegetable biryani, one king prawn tikka, one spinach, one aubergine, one garlic naan. To be delivered to ub Maynard Street, London NWI. I’d never heard of Maynard Street and I couldn’t remember when I’d last been in that corner of north London.

I stuffed the receipts back into the glove compartment and something fell on the floor. I leant down and picked up a pair of sunglasses and a key on a loop of string. Not my key. A key I had never seen before.

It was not quite four. I drove off again, through the drawn-out London outskirts, in the growing dusk. Everything seemed more frightening in the dark. I felt ragged with tiredness, but I still had things to do before going back to Sheila and Guy’s.

Seven

‘You know what you need, don’t you?’

‘No, Laurence, what do I need?’

‘A rest.’

Laurence didn’t know what I needed. I was standing in the office of Jay and Joiner’s looking at the spot where my desk used to be. That was the funny thing. The office looked just as it had always looked. It’s not a place that is anything special, which is pretty ironic for a company that designs offices. The only real attraction is that it is in a back alley, which is right in the middle of Soho, a couple of minutes’ walk from the delicatessens and the market. When I say that the office looked the same, I mean the same except that all traces of me had vanished. It wasn’t even as if someone else had just been sitting at my desk. The rest of the office seemed to have been repositioned very subtly so that the space I had once occupied wasn’t there any more.

Carol had led me through. That was strange as well, being led through my own office. I didn’t get the casual nods and greetings I was used to. There were double-takes, stares, and one new woman who looked at me curiously, assuming I was a customer, until Andy leant over and whispered something to her, and she looked at me even more curiously. Carol was breathlessly apologetic about the lack of all my stuff. She explained that people were falling over it and it had been put in boxes and stowed away in the storeroom, wherever that was. My mail was being opened and either redistributed around the office to relevant people or sent on to me at Terry’s. But, then, I’d arranged all that, hadn’t I? When I’d left. I nodded vaguely.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

That was a big question. I didn’t know whether she just meant my appearance. She had certainly flinched when I had walked into Reception in my civilian clothes. Very civilian clothes. Then there was my hair. Also I had lost over a stone since she had last seen me. Plus, my face was still a bit yellow from the bruising.

‘I’ve had a bit of a difficult time,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Carol, not catching my eye.

‘Did the police come here? Asking about me?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She was looking at me now. Warily. ‘We were worried about you.’

‘What did they ask?’

‘They wanted to know about your work here. And why you’d left.’

‘What did you say?’

‘They didn’t ask me. They talked to Laurence about it.’

‘What do
you
think?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘About why I left.’

I didn’t tell her that I had no idea myself about why I’d left, no memory of leaving. I was hoping that there might be at least one person to whom I could avoid telling my story. I felt I couldn’t bear looking at another face showing those signs of growing puzzlement. Should they pity me? Should they believe me?

Carol looked thoughtful. ‘I think you were right,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t go on the way you were going. You were burning yourself out.’

‘So you think I did the right thing?’

‘I envy you your six months off. I think it’s very brave.’

Another shock. Six months. And I noticed her use of the word ‘brave’: ‘brave’ as a euphemism for ‘dumb’.

‘But you’re looking forward to me coming back?’ I said jokingly. She looked wary again and that really did alarm me. What the fuck had I been up to?

‘Obviously things got a bit frazzled at the end,’ she said. ‘And people said things they shouldn’t have.’

‘I always had a big mouth,’ I said, when what I really wanted to say was, ‘What is all this about?’

‘I think you were mainly right,’ Carol said. ‘It’s always a matter of tone, isn’t it? And timing. I think it’s good you’ve come in to talk things over.’ We were at the door of Laurence’s office now. ‘By the way,’ she said, too casually, ‘that stuff with the police. What was it about?’

‘It’s complicated,’ I said. ‘Wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘Were you… you know… ?’

Oh, so that was it. The gossip was that I might have been raped. Or not really raped.

‘No, nothing like that.’

So I found myself being told by Laurence Joiner what I needed. It was all very awkward. On the spur of the moment I decided not to launch into a detailed account of my recent medical and psychiatric history. It was obvious that my last days at Jay and Joiner’s hadn’t been brilliant, and if there was going to be any prospect of my coming back, I ought to try not to make things worse.

‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m trying to get as much rest as I possibly can.’

‘I don’t need to tell you, Abbie, how important you are to us.’

‘You do,’ I said. ‘It’s always good to hear that.’

Laurence Joiner had forty-two suits. There had once been a party at his house and one of the girls in the office had wandered into his bedroom and counted them. They had taken up three cupboards. And that had been a year earlier so there were probably more by now. And they were beautiful. As he talked, he stroked the knee of the lovely dark green one he was wearing today, as if it were a pet lying in his lap.

‘We’ve all been worried about you,’ he said.

‘I’ve been a bit worried about myself.’

‘First, we have… well, I needn’t go over it again.’

Oh, please, go over it again, I said silently. If the apple wouldn’t fall, I’d have to give the tree a little shake.

‘One of the things I wanted to make sure,’ I said desperately, ‘was that everything was still all right from your point of view.’

‘We’re all on the same side,’ Laurence said.

It was all so polite.

‘Yes, but I want to know, explicitly, how you saw it. I mean my taking time off. I want to hear your view of it.’

Laurence frowned. ‘I’m not sure if it’s healthy to rake over it again. I’m not angry any more, I promise. It’s clear to me now that you had been overworking for some time. It’s my fault. You were so productive, and so effective, I just overloaded you. I think if we hadn’t had the row over the Avalanche job we would have had it over something else.’

‘Is that all?’

‘If you mean, have I forgiven you for badmouthing the company to clients
after
you had taken time off, for going round London encouraging them to complain, the answer is yes. Just about. Now look, Abbie, I don’t want to sound like someone out of
The Godfather
but I really don’t think you ought to take sides with clients against the company. If you feel they’ve been badly advised or overcharged, you take it up with me, rather than informing them behind my back and in your own time. But I think we’re all agreed on that.’

‘When, um — just for my own records, I mean — when did I make these complaints?’ I didn’t need to ask what the complaints had been: I had a clear enough memory of the Avalanche project to know that.

‘You’re not going to start raking over everything again, are you, just when we’ve smoothed it all out?’

‘No, no. But I’m a bit unclear about chronology, that’s all. My diary’s here and…’ I stopped because I couldn’t think how to finish the sentence.

‘Shall we just draw a veil over the sorry affair?’ said Laurence.

‘I left on Friday, didn’t I? Friday the eleventh.’

‘Right.’

‘And I complained to people, um…’ I waited for him to fill in the gap.

‘After the weekend. I don’t know the dates myself. I just heard gradually, on two occasions by solicitors’ letters. You can imagine how let down I felt.’

‘Quite,’ I said. ‘Could I have a look through the Avalanche file?’

‘What on earth for? That’s all behind us. Let sleeping dogs lie.’

‘Laurence, I absolutely promise I’m not going to make any trouble for you. But I want to talk to a couple of the people involved with it.’

‘You must have the numbers.’

‘I’m in a bit of chaos, I’m afraid. I’ve moved.’

‘Do you mean moved out?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. You can get any information you need from Carol.’ Now he looked even more concerned. ‘I don’t want to butt in. But as I said, we’ve been worried. I mean, your problems here, you’ve split up with Terry, and then there were the police coming round. Can we do anything? Would you like us to arrange for you to go somewhere?’

I was puzzled for a moment then couldn’t help laughing.

‘You think it’s drink or drugs?’ I said. ‘I wish.’ I leant over and kissed Laurence’s forehead. ‘Thank you. Laurence, I’ve got one or two things to sort out and I’ll be in touch.’

I opened the door of his office.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if there’s anything at all we can do…’

I shook my head. ‘Just listening to you has made me think of how much you’ve already done. I hope I haven’t been too much of a handful.’ A thought came to me. ‘I’d say that I was a different person then, but that might sound as if I wasn’t taking proper responsibility.’

Laurence looked deeply puzzled, and no wonder.

On the way out I asked Carol for the Avalanche file.

‘Are you serious?’ she said.

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

She looked doubtful. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

‘The job’s done with.’

‘Yes, but —’

‘It’ll just be a few days,’ I said. ‘I’ll be very careful.’

She started to yield. Maybe the idea that I would go away if she gave it to me was just too tempting.

‘Do you want the drawings as well?’

‘Just the correspondence will be fine.’

She fetched a bulky file and gave me a Marks & Spencer plastic carrier bag to put it in.

‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘Has anybody called me here in the last couple of days?’

Carol rummaged around on her desk and gave me two sheets of paper covered with names and numbers. ‘Only fifty or sixty people. Mostly the usual suspects. Do you want to give me a number I can give them?’

‘No. This is important. Don’t give anyone my numbers. Nobody.’

‘Fine,’ she said, looking rather startled by my urgent tone.

‘I’ll just take these numbers with me, I think. You don’t need them, do you?’ I folded up the sheets of paper and put them into my back pocket. ‘I’ll call you every so often. And one last thing.’

‘What?’

‘What do you think of my hairstyle?’

‘Amazing,’ she said. ‘A bit extreme maybe, but amazing.’

‘Does it make me look different?’ I said.

‘I didn’t recognize you. Well, not at first.’

‘Great,’ I said, and she looked worried all over again.

I sat in the car and tried to clarify my thoughts. Avalanche. I felt like I’d been dropped on to a new planet. A foggy new planet. What did I actually know? The people at Jay and Joiner’s saw me as a traumatized crazy. I’d left my job — temporarily, at least — after a row. And I’d left my boyfriend. At some point in the next few days I’d gone around visiting people who’d been involved in the project, apparently encouraging them to make complaints about the way our company had dealt with them. And I had met someone mad and murderous. Or could it possibly have been someone I already knew? It couldn’t, could it?

An image came into my mind of an animal out in the open. I wanted to run for cover, but I didn’t know which direction to run in. There were people who didn’t know what had happened to me and there were other people who didn’t believe what had happened to me. But there was one person who knew I was telling the truth. Where was he? I looked around reflexively and shuddered. Maybe I could escape somewhere very far away and never come back. Australia. The North Pole. No, it was hopeless. What was I going to do, initiate the process of emigration? What did that involve? Or should I just go on holiday to Australia and refuse to leave? It didn’t sound very feasible.

I took the takeaway receipt from the glove compartment: ub Maynard Street, NWI. It meant nothing to me. At one end of the spectrum, it might have been left there by someone else and have nothing important to do with me at all. Or it might be where he lived. But as soon as the thought came to me I knew I had to go there.

This was turning into the longest day of my life. I looked in the
A–Z.
It wasn’t so far away. And I look completely different. I could pretend I had the wrong place. It would probably amount to nothing.

The flat was on the first floor of a smart stuccoed house just off Camden high street. I found a parking meter and crammed change into it to give me thirty-six minutes. It had its own entrance down the side. I stood in front of it and took a deep breath. I reached into the glove compartment and found the sunglasses. The cold winter evening was now as dark as the grave but it would complete my disguise. If a woman answered, I would have a proper conversation. If a man answered, I would play it safe. I would just say, ‘Sorry, I must have the wrong address,’ and start walking decisively away. There were enough people in the street for me to be safe.

But nobody answered. I pressed the bell again. And again. I could hear the bell ring, far inside. Somehow you can tell when a doorbell is ringing inside somewhere empty. I took my car keys out of my pocket and juggled them in my hand. I could go to one of the other flats in the building. But what would I ask? I walked back to the car. The meter showed that I had thirty-one minutes left. What a waste. I opened the glove compartment to replace the takeaway bill. There among the other stuff, the log book, a brochure, an RAC membership card, was that key, the key that wasn’t the key to my old flat.

Feeling ridiculous, I took the key and walked back to the flat. With a sense of utter unreality, I pushed it gently into the lock and opened the door. As I pushed it wider, I saw a pile of mail. I picked up a letter. Josephine Hooper. I’d never heard of her. She was obviously away. There were stairs and I climbed them slowly. It could hardly have felt stranger if I had walked through the wall. I looked inside. I saw stripped pine, pictures, photographs pinned to the wall in the entrance hall, photographs I didn’t recognize. Rich colours. I pushed the door shut. Yes, I could smell the mustiness of absence. Something had gone off somewhere.

I had no memory of the house, the street. I had barely even been to the area before. But I had had the key to the door in my car, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when I walked into the living room and turned on the lights and there, along with Josephine Hooper’s pictures, table, rug, sofa, was my stereo, my television, my books. I felt as if I was going to faint. I sank back into a chair. My chair.