Remember Me This Way (27 page)

Relief makes my legs feel weak. I sit down on my chair. Better to say nothing. It needs to play out, this game. It’s the only way.

Perivale is looking at me. He rubs his cheeks with one hand, thumb and finger splayed. ‘KISS,’ he says suddenly.

‘What?’

‘KISS. K: Keep your bag and mobile close. I: If you suspect you are being followed, cross the road once, then again, and if your suspicions are confirmed, enter a public place. S: Stick to busy, well-lit streets. Final S: Shout “fire” not “help” if accosted. It’s more effective.’

‘Oh. Thank you.’

‘Just in case you’re thinking of wandering around any other dark commons any time soon.’

‘I’ll bear the advice in mind. Thanks.’

Morrow has joined him and they walk together towards the stairs.

Zach

August 2011

What a tosser. Waste of space. All that effort for nothing.

It wasn’t even a gallery so much as a poster shop, tucked down a side street in Bristol, between a shoe shop and a patisserie. John Harvey, Kulon’s friend, had forgotten we’d even made an appointment. He flicked through the canvases slowly, massaging his chin, nodding wisely. Interesting, brave, original, he said. ‘I can see you have a lot to say, but . . .’

There’s always a ‘but’ with people like him. No imagination. Can’t take the leap. Not the sort of thing his customers are looking for, he said. Too much darkness. He’d love to take a punt, ‘but . . .’ If he had the cash himself, ‘but . . .’ But. But. But. But.

I stood in silence, watching him as he wriggled. A spider on a pin. Narrow-hipped, slight build, wispy beard. Jeans and Jesus sandals. I weighed it all up. He couldn’t even afford me. He’d been mucking about from the start, keeping in with Kulon. My fist impacted with his jaw; it had happened before I could do anything about it. He lay on the floor, clutching his mouth, blood spilling through his fingers. I bent down. ‘If,’ I said in his ear. ‘If I ever see your face again, I’ll hit you so hard you’ll know the meaning of “too much darkness”.’

I drove straight back to London. All I wanted was Lizzie, to see her, to hold her, but the house was empty. Just the dog – I kicked him until he whimpered and hid under the table. Then I rang her over and over, ten times in total, until she answered. She was in school, she said, she’d told me, didn’t I remember? She’d gone in to help a group of sixth-formers who wanted to defer their university applications. I drove straight round there. The door to the school was locked and I banged and banged – but no one answered. In the end, I sat on the pavement to wait.

When she finally clipped down the steps in her sensible shoes and saw me, she flushed red to her roots. She covered it well, I’ll give her that. She ran over and put her little arms around me, kissed my bruised hand. (I told her I’d caught it in the car door.) I explained what had happened – the first part anyway – and she said I shouldn’t blame myself, that I was brilliant, ‘exceptionally talented’, the guy was a philistine. She stroked me with words. She wasn’t clever enough to hide what she really thought. I could see it in her eyes.

It’s more than I can stand, the disappointment, the leaching of faith. She was supposed to save me. She’s the one I chose. She’s everything to me. Yet she wasn’t even in the house when I got home. She couldn’t let her students down, but she lets me down over and over again. She needs to learn how much she needs me. It’s the only way forward. I am the one. She’ll know it in the end. I just have to work out how to prove it.

I shouldn’t have given Onnie my address. It was a weak moment. Still, even if I hadn’t, the dirty minx would have tracked me down.

Two things played into her hands. 1) Lizzie was out for the morning – some health crisis with her mother – and 2) I was in when she knocked. I haven’t been able to work this week, not since my trip to Bristol. In fact, I’ve thrown away a load of paintings – dumped most of them in a wheelie bin around the back of the greyhound stadium. I was just hanging around the house, avoiding the dog, and there she was at the door. She was crying, too snotty to speak for a while.

‘Results,’ she managed to sob out eventually. Took a moment to work out what she meant. Her exams. The GCSEs. Three Es, two Ds, a C, and a B. ‘Which one was art?’ I said.

She wiped her nose on my shoulder. By this stage, she had wrapped herself all over me.

‘The C,’ she said. ‘Sorry. The B was for Religious Studies. God knows how I got that.’

I pushed her off. ‘Perhaps you could train to be a vicar.’ Honestly. Fuck, I worked hard for that exam. All that work I put into her sketchbook. All the thought I put into ‘Force’.
C
. What does that say about my talent?

She begged to come in. I was sick to the back teeth of my own company, and God knows when Lizzie would deign to return, so I made a sweeping gesture with my arm. ‘Enter,’ I said.

I made her a coffee in the kitchen. It was clean – I had cleared away Lizzie’s mess. I told Onnie how untidy my wife was – ‘She’s actually quite slutty. It’s the cross I bear.’

‘I hate mess,’ she said.

‘Yeah, me too.’

The dog was sniffing about and I pushed him into the garden and shut the door on him. ‘Filthy animal,’ I said, under my breath.

‘I hate dogs,’ Onnie said.

‘Yeah, me too.’

‘I don’t get what people see in them.’

‘Me neither.’

We both laughed.

My phone rang – Lizzie. She’d taken her mother to hospital. They were still in A & E, waiting for tests. She had no idea what time she’d be back. It’s just one betrayal after another. If she’d picked up on my tone, had the sensitivity to know when I needed her and come straight home, then everything would have been all right. ‘Will you be OK?’ she said. ‘Will you make yourself something to eat?’ All week she has been talking to me as if I were a child. I don’t need her pity.

So – if I succumbed to Onnie, mea culpa. She was gagging for it; girls her age always are. I only had to look at her – that lingering glance, that skew of the lips – and she was peeling off her clothes, opening herself like a present. We did the deed there, on the floor in the sitting room, and later upstairs, in the marital bed. Fresh skin, new breasts. Brazilianed. Up close, she has spots around her nose. Her hair, dyed, feels coarse. Passive, too, on her back, waiting for me to show her what to do: so young of course.

Did it make me feel better? This small victory? I thought about Lizzie the whole time, imagined her face, the soft feel of her limbs. So, no, it didn’t. I felt sickened with myself, with the fear of what she had made me do. That’s the thing about revenge. People get it wrong. It isn’t always sweet.

Chapter Sixteen

Lizzie

I open the front door to silence and the smell of furniture polish. Tiny motes of dust twirl in the hall light. No music, no TV. No click-clack of Howard’s nails.

He raises his head when he sees me enter the kitchen but doesn’t get up.

I crouch on the floor and feel him all over. When I spoke to Onnie at lunchtime she told me he was better. She’d walked him to the vet and they could find nothing wrong – ‘Something he’d eaten probably, you were right.’ But now he’s breathing fast and his eyes look milky. He lifts his front paw, suspends it in the air, so I can rub his stomach. ‘Poor old chap,’ I say. ‘Are you not feeling yourself?’ The whiskers of hair below his mouth are tinged with white. He is what – nine, ten? It’s no age. ‘Is it?’ I say. ‘No age.’ He puts his head down on the edge of the basket. ‘We’ll make you better,’ I say, stroking along the side of his head. ‘Won’t we?’

‘What would you do without your dog?’

Onnie is standing above me. Her voice is flat, and odd.

‘God, you gave me a shock,’ I say.

‘I was in the front room. I dozed off. I heard you talking.’

She’s wearing a jumper above bare legs and she pulls the sleeves down over her hands, rubbing her face with the wool at her shoulder. It’s pale blue, baby soft, and bears the small embroidered symbol of a pheasant.

‘You’re wearing Zach’s jumper,’ I say.

If you hold it to your face, it still smells of Acqua di Parma Intensa. Close your eyes and you can imagine the warmth of his skin. I can smell him now.

‘Do you mind?’ she says, in a little girl’s voice. ‘I hope you don’t. I was cold.’

I want to snatch it off her, wrestle it over her head. ‘Of course, that’s fine,’ I say, hoping to sound bright. ‘I’m sorry. The heating is timed to come on twice a day. It must have been freezing. Poor you.’

‘I turned the heating to constant,’ she says.

‘Oh. You found the timer then?’

‘Yes – in your wardrobe.’

I take a moment to register this – the control panel is concealed at the back of a shelf, behind some clothes. She would have had to search the house to find it. I turn my attention again to Howard. ‘Did the vet really say he was OK? He doesn’t seem it now.’

‘God . . . he’s fine. The vet said it was nothing. We went for a literally massive walk when we got back. I think he’s just tired.’

‘Which vet did you see?’

She shrugs. ‘I didn’t catch their name.’

‘The man or the woman?’

‘The man.’

I study her carefully, and then look down again at Howard. ‘And they really didn’t want my credit card number?’

‘No. I told you. We were in and out in seconds.’

‘OK. Thank you.’ I look at Howard again. He is licking a patch of skin on his side, the same patch, worrying at it. She’s lying, I’m almost sure. I could confront her, but if she
is
telling the truth and I’m over-reacting, then I am the one who will seem unhinged. I have to check first. I’ll ring the vet without her knowing. I stand up and stretch to give myself time.

Onnie doesn’t seem to have noticed that anything is up. She is sitting on the counter, swinging her bare legs. ‘People are funny about pets. I don’t get it,’ she says conversationally. ‘A man died in Cornwall last November. He went into the river to rescue his dog. The dog lived, the man drowned.’

‘It happens a lot. I’d probably do the same. Climb down a cliff, jump into a river. At the time, I don’t expect you give yourself time to think.’

‘Pity you don’t have a baby,’ she says. Zach’s jumper is stretched over her knees. ‘You’d make a good mum. It’s a shame, isn’t it, that you won’t be one?’

I turn away – try to rise above the casual callousness, put my hand out for the kettle. The kettle isn’t where it’s supposed to be. She’s moved it again, back over to the fridge. I click it on.

She leaps to her feet. ‘I’ve done more tidying today,’ she says, throwing open the cutlery drawer with such force the knives and forks jangle. ‘Tra-la!’

I feel a fresh wave of resentment. If she’s done all this and not taken the dog to the vet, she isn’t just hopeless, but insane.

‘And there’s more. Follow me!’

She slips off the counter and heads out into the hallway with a dramatic flourish of her arms. I follow, and she throws open the sitting-room door. ‘I’ve feng shuied,’ she says.

My eyes scan the room. She’s moved the furniture. The sofa is no longer in the window but along the wall facing the fireplace. The table is in the bay again, with the lamp on it.

‘Where’s the rug?’

‘I’m sorry. I spilled a cup of coffee and tried to get it out, but it just spread. I basically just kept making it worse. I’ve rolled it up behind the sofa. The polished boards are so nice, though, aren’t they? Do you like what I’ve done, or have I been presumptuous? I think it’s better this way, don’t you?’

Zach’s jumper has slipped off one of her shoulders. I’m transfixed by the smooth ball of fresh skin, the sinew and the bone beneath it.

I am aware of a strange tingling at the back of my calves.

Onnie calls my name as I reach the landing. ‘Wait!’ she says. ‘It’s a surprise.’

‘Just a minute.’

The bedroom door is shut but I push it open and close it behind me. I lean back against the wood. The old familiar scent is here – Acqua di Parma. Intensa, not Assoluta. It’s not lingering, but strong and astringent, freshly sprayed. Zach hasn’t been in the bedroom today, not necessarily. But Onnie has. She came in to search for the thermostat, and she put on Zach’s jumper, and anointed herself with Zach’s aftershave. I think about her questions, the way she wants to pry me open, her knowledge of Zach’s ways. A jangling has been set off in the deepest unlit depths of my heart, a dark suspicion I don’t want to examine.

I cross the room quickly and open the cupboard. My side is in its usual chaos, but Zach’s portion has been gone through. His shirts are lined on their hangers, in colour order, his jeans separate from his suits. On the shelves his sweaters and T-shirts and underwear are in neat piles, the socks coiled in pairs. The rack underneath has been swept and his shoes – a pair of brown suede lace-ups, washed-out Converse, old trainers, still bearing the imprint of his feet – are lined up, dusted and polished.

Her hands have touched all this, these clothes that have hung on his body. She has sorted and caressed them. I slide a pair of jeans off their hanger and drop them to the floor. I tug at the pearly buttons of a Paul Smith shirt, scrunch the fabric to my face. I think about the things Onnie said about Zach, the knowledge of his character. He kept the tutoring secret from me. Why would he have done that unless there was something to hide?

I sit down on the bed until my head has stopped swimming, and then I go back downstairs into the kitchen. She’s sitting motionless at the table, her knees hunched up to her chin. She turns her face when she sees me. Do I see hope, vulnerability? I don’t know.

‘Thanks for all the tidying,’ I say. ‘Though I’m sorry, I have to say it, but I’d rather you didn’t touch my things, or Zach’s.’

She glances away. ‘I was just trying to be helpful.’

‘It just feels invasive.’

She scratches her palm, head bent. ‘Sorry,’ she says finally, but not as if she means it.

In a minute, I’m going to ask her to leave. Nothing she says will sway me. In a few minutes, she will be out of my house and I’ll be alone. I won’t have to deal with her oddness. I won’t have to feel inadequate any more, or suspicious, or angry. I feel better now I know that, and more bullish.