Land of the Living (25 page)

Twenty-four

Ben was at work and I was in his shower in the middle of the morning. That was one of the many good bits about Ben’s house. It was modern and technological and things functioned in a way I had hardly even imagined before. The so-called shower at Terry’s was like a dripping tap six feet above the bath. You stood under it and it drip-drip-dripped on to you. Even when the water was hot, the drops got cold on the way down. Ben’s shower, on the other hand, was a real machine, with an apparently inexhaustible supply of hot water and the power and concentration of a fire hose. And it wasn’t in the bath. It had an entire space to itself with a door. I crouched in a corner and I imagined that I was on a planet that was perpetually bombarded with hot rain. Of course, such a planet would have had its disadvantages when you wanted to eat or sleep or read a book, but just then it felt fine. A jet of hot water hitting my head with considerable force was a good way of stopping myself thinking.

I’d like to have stayed in there until spring, or until the man was caught, but I finally switched off the shower and dried myself with the slowness and attention to detail of a woman without a pressing appointment. I wandered through to Ben’s bedroom and dressed myself largely in his clothes: tracksuit bottoms and a floppy blue T-shirt many sizes too big for me. And some huge football socks and a pair of slippers I found in the back of his cupboard. In the kitchen I boiled the kettle and made half a pot of coffee for myself.

One day I was going to have to start thinking about taking my career out of its current state of abeyance, but that could wait. Everything could wait.

I drank my coffee then made some half-hearted attempts at cleaning and tidying. I didn’t know Ben’s house well enough to do much. I didn’t know what implement went into which drawer or on which hook and I wasn’t keen enough to scrub the floor or anything extreme like that so I contented myself with doing the dishes, wiping surfaces, straightening out the duvet and generally putting things in neat piles. Even that took less than an hour and left me with an empty day stretching out until Ben came back. I had a chance to spend time in the way I’d always planned to but never had the time. I could flop on a sofa and drink coffee and listen to music and read and be a woman of leisure.

Women of leisure wouldn’t listen to the jangly pop music that made up the bulk of my own collection. They would want something more sophisticated. I browsed through Ben’s CDs until I found something that looked jazzy and mellow. I put it on. It sounded very grown-up. More like a soundtrack than something you would actually listen to, but that was fine. I was going to be reading and sipping coffee and I just wanted something in the background. The problem with having an entire day of leisure was settling on a particular book to read. I wasn’t in the mood to tackle a proper serious book and there was no point in starting a big fat thriller. In fact, as I took books out of the shelves and inspected them, it quickly became clear that I wasn’t quite in the mood to be an authentic woman of leisure. Despite my long shower and my empty schedule, I was still very agitated. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t stop thinking about the one thing I wanted to avoid.

Ben had a stack of photography books and I sat flicking through them, unable to settle on one in particular. I lasted the longest with a collection of photographs from the nineteenth century. There were exotic landscapes and dramatic events, battles and revolutions and disasters, but what I looked at were the faces. There were men and women and children. Some were distracted, terrified. Others were celebrating at fairs and fiestas. Sometimes a face would look round at the camera with a conspiratorial smile.

That was what struck me most. The strangeness of those faces. I thought, and I couldn’t stop thinking, that all of those people, the beautiful and the ugly, the rich and the poor, the lucky and the benighted, the evil and the virtuous, the religious and the godless, now had one thing in common: they were dead. Each of them, singly, utterly alone, in a street or on a battlefield or in a bed, had died. All of the people in that world were gone. I thought about that but I didn’t just think about it. I felt it like toothache. This was part of what I had to get over. I looked at the higher shelves at the spines of the smaller books, which wouldn’t have any pictures in them. Poetry. That was what I needed. I’ve probably only read about eight poems in the years since I left school but I suddenly felt the need to read a poem. It would also have the extra advantage of being short.

Ben obviously wasn’t much of a poetry reader either but there were a few of the sort of anthologies that grandparents and godparents give you when all inspiration fails. Most of them looked too much like textbooks for me or else they were poems on subjects that didn’t interest me, like the countryside or the sea or nature in general. But then my eye fell on a volume called
Poems of Longing and Loss
, and even though I felt like an alcoholic reaching for a bottle of vodka, I couldn’t resist it. I sat with my coffee and dipped into the book. I was hardly aware of tracing the meaning of individual poems. Instead, there was a blur of grief and regret and absence and grey landscapes. It was like being at a party of depressives, but in a good way. Trying to pretend that I was happy and relaxed had been a mistake. It was much better to find that there were other lost souls who felt the way I did. I was among friends, and after a while I found I was smiling with recognition.

I liked the book and turned to the beginning to see who had compiled this wonderfully bleak anthology and I saw that a message had been scrawled on the title page. I experienced the tiniest flash of an impulse that it was wrong to read the message. I ignored it. It wasn’t as if I had rifled through Ben’s desk and found his diary or some old love letters. An inscription in a book is like a postcard that has been pinned to a wall. Even if it’s addressed to a single person, it’s still a sort of public declaration. At least, that’s what I told myself in that fraction of a second, and when I saw the first three words of the inscription, which were ‘Dearest darling Ben’, I began to suspect that this wasn’t really a public declaration but by that time I was reading it and this is what I read: ‘Dearest darling Ben. Here are some sad words which are better at saying what I feel than I am myself. I am so so sorry about all this and you are probably right but I feel torn apart and terrible in different ways. And this is a hell of a message to write in a book. All of my love, Jo.’ It was dated November 2001.

And there wasn’t even the tiniest bit of me that even tried to believe that this could be some other Jo. I had been living in Jo’s flat for days and her writing was all over the place, on shopping lists, memos, on the covers of videos, and I knew it almost as well as I knew my own. I felt scalding hot all through my body, through my hands and my feet, and then I shivered uncontrollably. Fucking Ben. Fucking fucking Ben. He’d told me all about that bloody Leah. He’d been all sensitive about that relationship and how beautiful she’d been and everything, and he’d just omitted to mention the minor little detail that after he’d split up with her he just happened to have been fucking the woman whose flat I was living in, the woman who just happened to have disappeared. I thought of him casually ringing her doorbell. They were friends, it was no big deal. We had spent huge amounts of time wondering where Jo was. Or, at least, I had been wondering. What had he been thinking? I feverishly went over conversations I had had with him. What had he said about her? He had fucked her in the same bed that he had fucked me. He hadn’t thought to mention it. But, then, he hadn’t mentioned to me that he had already fucked me. What other secrets did he have?

I tried to think of the innocent reasons he might have had for not telling me. He didn’t want to upset me. It might have been awkward. But the other reasons kept intruding. I needed to think about this. I needed to sort it out in my head. But not here. I was starting to tell myself different stories in my head, and all of them definitely required that I get out of Ben’s house as soon as possible. I looked at my watch. The day didn’t seem so long any more. I ran into his bedroom and took my clothes off- his clothes — as if they were contaminated. I started to mutter to myself like a madwoman. I wasn’t sure I could get it to make sense but the one thing that Jo and I had in common was that we had been sexually involved with Ben. There was no doubt about that. Not only that, we had both been sexually involved with him just before we disappeared. I quickly pulled on my own clothes. I just couldn’t get it to make sense. I had to think about it somewhere else, somewhere safe and quiet. Because I wasn’t safe here any more. The quietness of the house closed round me.

Once I was dressed I moved quickly around the flat retrieving what I absolutely needed. Shoes, bag, sweater, purse, my horrible warm red jacket. What was he playing at with me? He’d lied to me, or sort of lied, or omitted to tell the full truth, and I wasn’t going to sit here and wait for him to come home. I tried to remember that voice out of the dark. I’d heard Ben’s voice in the dark as well, next to me in bed, murmuring in my ear, groaning, telling me he adored me. Could it be the same voice?

I ran over to Ben’s desk and started rummaging through the drawers. I pushed files and notebooks aside impatiently until I found what I was after. A strip of passport-sized photographs of Ben. I contemplated it for a moment. Oh, God, he was a handsome man. I had asked whether people had seen Jo. But I had never asked — had never thought to ask — whether they had seen Ben. I had been tracking myself tracking Jo. I might consider tracking Ben. I hesitated, then picked up his mobile phone. I needed it more than he did. I opened his front door and before leaving I turned and looked back, as if to say goodbye to a place where I had been briefly happy.

I couldn’t rely on anyone now. I had to be quick. I was running out of safe places.

Twenty-five

I was running. Running down the road, bitter wind on my cheeks and my feet slipping on the icy pavement. Where was I going? I didn’t know, I just knew I was going, leaving, moving on to somewhere else, something else. I’d closed the door on the warm house that smelt of sawdust and I hadn’t even taken a key. I was on my own again, out here in the winter weather. It occurred to me that I was very visible, in my red jacket, but the thought flitted vaguely through my head like a snowflake then melted. I just kept running, my heart thumping in my chest and my breath coming in gasps, and the houses and trees and cars and the faces of other people were a blur.

At the bottom of the road I forced myself to stop and look around. My heart slowed down. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of me, though you never know. Think, Abbie, I told myself; think now. Think for your life. But I couldn’t think, not at first. I could only feel and see. I saw pictures in my head. Ben and Jo together, holding each other. I closed my eyes and saw darkness, and it felt like the darkness of my lost time, folding around me again. Eyes in the pitch black; eyes watching Jo, watching me. A butterfly on a green leaf, a tree on a hill, a shallow stream, then clear deep water. I opened my eyes and the harsh grey world came back into focus.

I started moving again, walking this time, not really knowing where I was going. I walked past the park and down the hill. I walked towards Jo’s flat, though I knew I mustn’t go there. On the main road, which was full of traffic and lined with shops selling pastries, hats, candles, fish, I saw Jo’s face. I blinked and stared and of course it wasn’t her. It was just a woman, going about her day, with no sense of how blessed she was.

I knew I had traced Jo to within the last couple of hours of her freedom, Wednesday afternoon, and she’d been looking for a kitten. She had disappeared on a Wednesday afternoon, and the next day I too had gone. After all this time of blundering around chasing for clues, that was all I had. A pathetic shred.

I turned on my track and went down the high street and left on to a road that led to Lewin Crescent. I walked up the narrow street until I came to the dingy house with its boarded-up windows and knocked on the door. I listened and I could hear miaows; I even thought I caught a faint whiff of urine. Then I heard shuffling footsteps on the other side of the door. The door opened a chink on its chain and her eyes peered suspiciously out at me. ‘Yes?’

‘Betty?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Abbie. I came to see you — two days ago. I asked you about my friend.’

‘Yes?’ she said again.

‘Can I come in?’

The chain slid and the door opened. I stepped into the hot, stale room, with its moving carpet of cats. The smell caught in my nostrils. Betty was wearing the same blue shift with its missing buttons and covering of cat hairs, and the same ratty slippers and thick brown tights. I thought at least some of the ammonia smell came from her. She was so thin that her arms were like sticks and her fingers twigs. Her skin gathered in pouches on her small face.

‘So it’s you again. Can’t keep away, can you?’

‘There was something I forgot to ask you.’

‘What?’

‘You said you’d seen my friend? Jo?’ She didn’t answer. ‘The one who came about having a kitten and you said she couldn’t have one because…’

‘I know who you mean,’ she said.

‘I didn’t ask about the man I was with. Hang on.’ I fumbled in my bag and took out the strip of passport photos of Ben. ‘Him.’

She glanced briefly down. ‘Well?’

‘Do you recognize him?’

‘I think so.’

‘No, I mean,
did
you recognize him? Before.’

‘You’re a very confused young lady,’ she said. She held out a hand to the ginger cat that was butting against her legs and it leapt up and nuzzled its chin against her fingers, purring like a tractor.

‘What I want to know is, had you seen him before he came here with me?’

‘Before?’

‘Have you seen this man more than the once?’ I asked desperately.

‘When did I see him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘I mean, yes, when did you see him?’ I was starting to feel slightly sick.

‘I said that to you. I said, when did I see him? “Yes” isn’t an answer.’

I rubbed my eyes. ‘I just wanted to know if you’d seen him before two days ago. That’s all.’

‘All sorts of people come here. Is he from the council?’

‘No, he’s —’

‘Because if he’s from the council, I won’t let him into my house.’

‘He’s not from the council.’

‘Cats are naturally clean animals, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said dully.

‘And some people think it’s not nice, the way they hunt. But it’s just their nature.’

‘I know.’

‘I don’t give my kitties to homes where they’re allowed to go outside. That’s what I told your friend. When she said she’d let a cat outside, I told her it wasn’t a fit place. It would just get run over.’

‘Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’ I turned to go.

‘Not like the hippie lot, mind.’

‘The hippie lot?’

‘Yes. They don’t make proper checks.’ She sniffed disapprovingly.

‘These, um, these hippies have lots of cats, like you?’

‘Not like me,’ she said. ‘No.’

‘Did you tell Jo about them?’

‘Maybe,’ she said.

‘Betty, where do they live?’

I don’t know why I felt I was in such a hurry. It was as if I was scared the trail would go cold. I knew where Jo had gone after Betty’s — or, at least, I knew where she might have gone, and that was enough for me. Now I was in the final hour or two of her final day. Everything else had faded and all I could see was her receding shape and I was stumbling along in her footsteps. But who was coming behind me? Who was following me?

Betty had called them hippies, but I guessed from what she’d said about them — their dreadlocked hair and patched clothes — that they were New Age travellers. She had told me that they lived in an abandoned church over in Islington, and I prayed that they hadn’t moved on. I jogged back to the high street and flagged down a taxi. Because I didn’t know the exact address although I knew the general area, I told the woman driver to take me to the Angel. I could walk from there. I kept glancing over my shoulder. I kept looking for a face I’d seen before. I saw nobody, but still the sickening sense remained that I didn’t have much time left. I sat on the edge of my seat, impatient with traffic jams and red lights.

It was starting to get dark by the time we reached the Angel — or, at least, the colour was draining from the day. I had lost all track of time and I couldn’t even think what day it was. It was a weekday, I knew that. Most people were at work, sitting in heated offices, drinking coffee from vending machines, having meetings that they liked to think were important. I paid the driver and got out, side-stepping a half-frozen puddle. Out of the low, dulling sky a few flakes of snow fell. I pulled up the collar of my jacket and started walking.

Some of the church had been painted in primary colours, and there was an asymmetrical rainbow over the large wooden-ribbed door. A rusty pink-sprayed bicycle leant against the wall, beside an old pram full of wood and another full of tin cans. By the side of the church was a van decorated with swirls and flowers, and with blinds drawn down over all of its windows. A large, dun-coloured dog was nosing its tyres.

I lifted the knocker and let it fall with a heavy rap on to the door, which was already open a crack.

‘Just push and come in,’ shouted a female voice.

The interior of the church was dim and hazy with smoke from a fire burning on the floor, in a makeshift fireplace of bricks. Round it a group of people sat or squatted, wrapped in blankets or coiled in sleeping-bags. One was holding a guitar, although he was making no attempt to play it. I saw the shapes of other figures towards the back of the church, where there were still a few pews. There were mattresses and bags over the floor. A great crack ran down the stained-glass window.

‘Hi,’ I said uncertainly. ‘Sorry to butt in.’

‘You’re welcome here,’ said a woman with cropped hair and studs in her eyebrow, nose, lips and chin. She leant forward and thick copper bangles cascaded down her arm.

‘I’m Abbie,’ I said, and shook her mittened hand. ‘I just wanted to ask…’

‘Well, we know you’re Abbie — at least, I do. Some of us haven’t been here for more than a few days. I’m Crystal — remember? You’ve cut your hair, haven’t you? Anyway, sit down,’ said Crystal. ‘Do you want tea? Boby’s just made some. Boby! Another tea — we’ve got a visitor. You don’t take sugar, do you? See, I always remember.’

Boby came over with mud-coloured tea in a pewter mug. He was small and skinny and had a white, nervous face. His combat trousers hung off him and his neck looked thin in the chunky knit of his sweater.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here before, have I?’

‘We’ve got some beans spare. Do you want some?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

The man with the guitar ran his fingers over the neck of the instrument to produce a few broken chords. He grinned at me and I saw that his mouth was full of black, broken teeth. ‘I’m Ramsay,’ he said. ‘Ram for short. I came yesterday from the bypass protest. My first night for weeks on the solid ground. Where’ve you come from?’

I realized I looked like a runaway. I’d become one of them. I didn’t have to struggle to make sense here. I slid down by the fire and took a gulp of my tepid, bitter tea. The smoke from the fire stung my eyes.

‘I don’t know where I’ve come from, really,’ I said. ‘But Betty told me about you lot.’

‘Betty?’

‘The old woman with all the cats,’ said Crystal. ‘You told us about her last time.’

I nodded, feeling oddly peaceful. The fight had gone out of me. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter, being dead. ‘I probably did,’ I said. ‘I probably asked you about my friend Jo.’

‘That’s right. Jo.’

‘I asked if she’d come here.’

‘D’you want a roll-up?’ said Boby.

‘All right,’ I said. I took the thin cigarette that he held out and Ram lit it for me. I inhaled and coughed. Nausea swept over me. I took another drag. ‘Did she come here?’

‘Yup,’ said Crystal. She looked at me. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes.’

‘Here. Have some beans.’ She picked up one of the tins of baked beans that was by the fire, stuck in a plastic spoon and handed it over. I took a mouthful: disgusting. Then another. I sucked on the roll-up and pulled acrid smoke into my lungs.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks. So Jo came here, did she?’

‘Yeah. But I told you.’

‘I can’t remember things,’ I said.

‘I get like that too,’ said Ram, and made another stab at a chord. A man opened the door of the church and came in pushing the pram. He tossed some more wood on the fire then bent over and kissed Crystal. They kissed for a long time.

‘So she came here looking for a kitten?’ I said finally.

‘Because that crazy Betty thinks we keep cats here.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Can you see cats?’

‘No.’

‘I mean, we have had a few strays, because we give them milk and food. And some of us were in a raid that released cats from a laboratory the other month.’

‘I dunno how she heard about us, though.’

‘Nor do I,’ I said. ‘So did she just go away?’

‘Jo?’

‘Yes.’

‘She gave us some money for our projects. A fiver, I think.’

‘And that was it?’

‘Yup.’

‘Oh, well,’ I said. I looked around. Perhaps I could join them and become a traveller and eat baked beans and sleep on stone floors and up trees and make roll-ups until my fingers were stained yellow. That would be different from designing offices.

‘Except I said she could always try Arnold Slater.’

‘Arnold Slater?’

‘He’s the man we gave some of the strays to. When the dogs started chasing them. He’s in a wheelchair but he looks after them anyway.’

‘So did she go there?’

‘She said she might. So did you — last time, I mean. Weird, eh? Like
déjà vu
. Do you believe in
déjà vu
?’

‘Of course. Round and round and round I go,’ I said. I threw the end of the roll-up into the fire and drained my tea. ‘Thanks,’ I said. I turned suddenly to Boby. ‘You have a big tattoo of a spider, don’t you?’

He blushed violently then pulled up his thick jumper and on his flat white stomach was a tattooed web that stretched out of sight round his back. ‘There,’ he said.

‘But where’s the spider gone?’ I asked.

‘That’s what you said before.’

‘Clearly I’m a very consistent person,’ I said.

It was really dark when I left the church, even though it wasn’t evening yet. I could make out the ghost of a moon behind the clouds. Arnold Slater lived two minutes from here and he was old and in a wheelchair and Jo had thought she might go to see him and I had thought I might follow Jo and go to see him… I stepped out into the road, and at that moment the mobile I’d grabbed as I left Ben’s started to ring, making me jump violently. Backing on to the pavement, I put my hand in my pocket and pulled it out. Without thinking, I pressed the ‘call’ button.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Abbie! Where the fuck are you, Abbie? What are you up to? I’ve been out of my mind worrying. I’ve been calling the house all day and you didn’t reply so I came back and you weren’t here…’

‘Ben,’ I said.

‘So I waited and waited. I thought you might have gone to the shops or something, and then I saw my mobile wasn’t on the charger any longer, so I rang it on the off-chance. When are you coming home?’

‘Home?’

‘Abbie, when are you coming back?’

‘I’m not coming back,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You and Jo. I know about Jo. I know you were with her.’

‘Listen to me now, Abbie—’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why, Ben?’

‘I was scared that —’

‘You
were scared,’ I said.
‘You.’

‘Christ, Abbie—’ he said, but I pressed the off-button. I held the phone cradled in my hand and stared down at it as if it could bite. Then I scrolled down the names in its memory bank. I didn’t know any of them until I came to Jo Hooper. I recognized the number, because it belonged to her flat. But then there was another Jo Hooper (mobile). I pressed ‘call’ and heard the sound of ringing and just as I was about to give up, someone said, ‘Hello,’ in a whisper. So quiet I could hardly hear and, anyway, whispers in the dark all sound the same.