Virtue (20 page)

‘Never mind.’ I dig in my bag, find a couple of coins, drop them into his hand.

‘Thanks, love,’ he says. ‘Much obliged.’

I put my hand out for my magazine. The grin comes again. ‘You don’t mind,’ he asks sweetly, ‘if I keep the
Big Issue
, do you?’

You can’t refuse a good scam. Not if it’s offered with chutzpah. ‘’Course.’ We grin at each other. He smells of old vodka and loose boxes. At least I know there are people in a worse state than me.

‘Have a good night, love,’ he says. I thank him for his wishes, jump over a spilled bin bag, skirt a puddle, cross the road to avoid a group of Leeds fans besieging a kebab shop, slip off my coat and push open the door at the top of the stairs to the Steam Room.

A blast of jungle, a wave of heat so ferocious you think that something must be seriously wrong. By the time I’m halfway down the stairs I’m coated in sweat and the neat alcohol I’ve already consumed has just got a couple of pints neater. Lovely. Save money. Dehydrate yourself and cut out the middle man. At the bottom of the stairs, a corridor leads to a door behind whose glass all you can see is a cloud of damp heat and the occasional glimpse of a body part. I drop the coat in with a girl who sits by a permanently working fan, a pint glass of iced water by her elbow, and go inside.

If there is a hell, the Steam Room must be the closest approximation on earth. I think people only go there because it’s such bliss to come out again. In a typical forty by forty Soho basement, sixty-odd twentysomethings bathed in ninety-degree heat pumped out by two giant fan heaters, slip and slide in the pool of perspiration on the floor, flimsy clothes clinging to pain-wracked bodies. I fight my way to the bar, order a triple vodka and soda, rummage around for cash in my bra. I am actually losing weight as I stand here, I can feel it.

A tap on my shoulder, and Mel is there. ‘Hi, kiddo,’ she yells into my ear. ‘I’d forgotten how vile this place was. You got a drink?’

I nod, wave my vodka and souse my thirst. Dom gives me a big kiss on the cheek while she hangs over the bar and orders. ‘Heard you were in a state!’ he shouts. ‘What’s been going on? Where’s Harriet?’

‘Dunno,’ I reply. ‘I’m fine, really. Just had dinner with the old girl.’

He grimaces.

I think for a moment, and start, ‘Actually, something really—’ but he’s helping Mel with her purchases and not looking in my direction. By the time he’s turned back, I’ve changed my mind.

We go and sit on the sauna-style wood-slat benches that line the walls and Dom shouts, ‘Remind me why we come here again?’

‘I think,’ I tell him, ‘it’s because no one can ever think of the name of a bar when they’re talking on a mobile phone. The only places they can think of are places they
don’t
want to go to.’

‘Ah, right,’ he says.

I take a large slurp of my drink. A very large trainer lands on my lovely new shoe and, soaked as it is with other people’s sweat, it splits open like a swatted mushroom. ‘Fuck,’ I mutter. Suddenly things get a bit blacker. Suddenly, I really don’t want to be out. I should never have believed my first urge. I want to be at home with the duvet over my head and Henry curled up with me.

Dom has fallen to jiggling in time with the music pounding from the eight four-foot speakers ranged around the room. He’s a restless presence, slapping his thigh with his open palm, nodding and tapping his foot to produce a constant, irritating chafe against my leg. I gaze around and see that everyone in here is doing the same; the benches are stacked with bobbing heads, jaws slackened, eyes vacant, having fun. I think I’m getting too old for the cutting edge of leisure. I find myself longing for somewhere where I can simply get my elbows on a table, my bag between my feet and hear what more than one person is saying at a time. I want nice light lounge music to soothe my harassed mind with a BPM that doesn’t raise my heartbeat above its already elevated rate. Everyone is having a good time but me. I wasn’t meant to have a good time. What on earth made me think I was?

I burst into tears. Not showily or loudly, but my nose fills with snot, my lower lip trembles and my cheeks are soaked. I didn’t cry in front of Grace – you never really cry when you get the shock; it’s only afterwards – and now the misery surges up and takes over my whole world. My shoulders are shaking. I bow my head and let the tears drop onto my thigh. Oh, God, I wish I were dead. Why didn’t you just kill me at birth? Why didn’t you give her a dog, a monkey, a dolphin, a computer to play her games with? What the hell did I do to deserve a life like this? Where the hell is Harriet?

Nobody notices. Dom jiggles on and Mel is conducting a conversation in sign language with a boy who I vaguely recognise by his haircut. I hunt through the zip pocket of my handbag and find a wad of old loo roll, which I squash into a ball in my hand and surreptitiously use to wipe either side of my nose and catch the drips coming from its end. But they just keep coming. I try to take a deep breath to clear my head, but halfway through it turns into a sob.

Even Mel hears it. Turns to look, and her face drops. ‘What is, it, Annie?’

I open my mouth to tell her, but another sob comes out instead and cuts off my words. I shake my head, clutch my snotrag tighter and start to bawl.

Mel glances over my shoulder at Dom, puts her arm round me. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Come with me.’ Pulls me to my feet, puts her other arm round the front of me so I’m buried in her T-shirt and pushes a path for the two of us through the crowd to the ladies’ toilet. By now I can barely walk, certainly can’t see in a straight line; all I can do is give myself up to Mel’s guiding arms. She drags me past the queue, pushes the door open and props me up against the sinks, where I tip forward and shudder while she holds me up by the shoulder with one hand.

‘What is it, Annie? What’s happened?’ Mel is terrified, I can hear it in her voice. ‘Talk to me. What happened?’

And all I can manage to articulate in return is, ‘She hates me. She h-h-
haaates
me.’

‘Who?’ Mel reaches round me, wets a couple of paper towels and presses them against my face as though cleaning away the mess will make me stop. ‘Who hates you? Oh, Annie, what’s happened? Please tell me. I don’t understand. Who hates you?’

But I can’t say anything more, just let the sobs rip their way up my throat, tumble out of my hanging mouth. I’m a mass of slobbery, slippery misery, mascara all the way down to my smile marks, red eyes, salt in my hair. Mel gives up, just puts her arms round me and lets me slobber on her bosom, another drunk chick crying in a nightclub lavatory.

Then a sound of running feet from the corridor outside and a bang as the door is pushed open. And Harriet’s voice, going, ‘Where is she? Annie? Where are you? Annie?’ and Mel lets go with one arm to beckon her over. Then she’s there, holding me up, cheek pressed against my own, and she’s going, ‘Annie? Oh, Annie darling, what happened? It’s okay now, sweetheart, I’m here. What happened, Annie? Oh, darling, what did she do?’

I stand on the chair and take a final look around. Scuffed cream walls, heavy thirties carved mahogany wardrobe containing a selection of knee-length skirts, cardigans, coats, blouses, washed and pressed and hung carefully on hangers to prevent creasing, three pairs of dowdy brogues. Divan bed, single pillow, candlewick bedspread, regulation wavy pattern, pale pink. Sixties ‘Look, no handles!’ chest of drawers, veneered in wood-effect melamine, containing socks, white knickers, bras in white and natural, sleepwear, jumpers, cardigans. Orange, black and purple half-length curtains whose pattern declares that they originated in the seventies, just like me. The desk, wood-look melamine to match the drawers, is under the window to make use of the sill as extra shelf space; like the rest of the room, it is scrupulously tidy, books lined up with their edges flush both with each other and the edge of the desk, computer cleaned each day with antistatic wipes, drawers containing drawer dividers containing pens, pencils, rulers, set squares, compasses, protractors, A4 printer paper, lined notepads. Carpet in wear-well red. Imitation tweed armchair. Kettle. Tea, Nescafé, milk. Three chocolate-coloured earthenware mugs, three teaspoons, three plates, three knives, three forks, three dessertspoons. By the desk, an umbrella plant, four feet high, bought by my mother as a gift to add a personal touch to my college accommodation.

I look, and I think: the five months you’ve lived here, you’ve left no mark of yourself on this room at all. All they’ll have to do is take the books back to the library and straighten the bedspread, and no one will ever know that you were here in the first place.

And then I kick the chair out from underneath me, and drop into space.

The moment I begin to drop, a voice inside me goes:
Stupid, stupid, stupid
, and I realise that I don’t want to die. Then the rope reaches its end, and I realise that I
really
don’t want to die like this.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
: seventeen years of intensive education, and I can’t even tie an effective hangman’s knot. Instead of the quick snap of the neck and oblivion, I’ve tied a slow and vicious garotte.

I’m making noises; scrunching, gurgling noises from the throat where I try to force my windpipe open and only spittle emerges. Try to force a hand in under the rope, can’t do it, scratch skin until blood flows. Sound of breakers crashing on a distant beach, red pain as larynx bends and tries to snap. White lights. I feel my tongue swell and force its way between slack lips, eyes begin to force way out between stretched lids.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
. I’m going to die and I don’t want it to be this way.

My legs dangle and flail and drum against the wall, the chair, on its side, is just one inch beyond the reach of my stretching arch. Suck at air, get phlegm, can’t choke, nowhere for it to go. Got to do something. Stupid. Air hisses out like a cat throwing up, but nothing goes in.

Reach up above my head and grab the rope. Haul. Shoulders, upper arms, wrists, scream in pain; this is not an angle arms are supposed to lift body weights at. But, God, the rope loosens slightly, or stops tightening, and by wriggling I am able to inhale, tiny gulp by tiny gulp. I can’t see above my head, don’t know how far I am from the hook from which I’m dangling. Try to pull myself up towards it, but the rope is behind my head and it’s like doing body lifts backwards.

This isn’t going to work; I’m getting enough air to slow down the onset of unconsciousness, but it won’t stop it. I dangle like a kosher chicken, slowly kick the life from my limbs. So now I’m going to die by crucifixion. People died on the cross of strangulation; pain and blood loss and strained and broken limbs would push them into coma, and, slumping forward, they would cut off their own windpipes. I can’t keep holding myself up like this. Thirty seconds more, maybe, until a muscle gives or something pops in my brain and I drop back into endspace.

White light intensifies, but black encroaches around the outside of the picture. And through the roar of the breakers, a new sound: thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump. Not rhythmic like the whoosh of my blood, but angry and off-beat and – coming from outside my head. Someone is banging at the door. I kick hard against the wall, try to shout, but no sound comes. Don’t go away. Please, don’t go away.

‘Open the fucking door!’ she shouts. ‘I know you’re in there! I can hear you! Open it!’ and she thumps again.

I drum against the wall. My arms have reached the end of their strength. Strain. Beg myself for more power, but nothing’s going to work. Against all my will, my hands drop open and I fall once again to the end of the line.

Three thumps, louder than the last, and the door bursts open. Harriet Moresby crashes through, face purple and constricted with anger. She’s shouting, ‘Don’t you ever, ever—’ and then she gapes. Eyes almost as big as my own bullfrog bulgers, blonde hair fixed on the top of her head with a biro.

‘Oh, shit,’ she says.

Then she turns round and leaves the room.

She left me. She left me. I don’t believe it.
Of course she left you. You think you deserve to have her stay?

And then she’s back, and she has something in her hand. Something long and black, like a pole. I can’t see anything, really, now; white light and darkness are turning red. I know what this is. The veins in my eyes are popping. I’m dying.

The krish of metal on metal, then she leaps upward in front of me, brings her hand across above my head. Hits the rope, makes me jump and jiggle, closes the last little gap in my windpipe. I start to struggle, fight, beat at her with my hands.

‘Stop it!’ Harriet stuns me with a single, sharp but deadly, punch to the face, leaps once more and slashes, and I tumble to the ground.

She drops on me in an instant, slapping away my scrabbling hands, getting her fingers under the knot, pulling. It won’t come. ‘Don’t move,’ she snarls. Takes the Belhaven sword, one of the many
objets de la guerre
I saw coming through her door at the beginning of the first term and with which she’s cut me down, pushes the tip into the centre of the knot and strains.

The sword, sharp as the day it was used on the eighth Countess, lurches forward, slices the skin of my shoulder and embeds itself in the floor, and the knot, cut at the bottom, unravels. Nothing happens. I’m still choking. Harriet pulls me upright, bangs on my back with such violence I think my heart will jump from my chest. And with a ghastly squeal, my windpipe comes open and I breathe. Collapse and lie there, heaving and shrieking, while my deliverer kicks the door closed and starts to pummel me about the face and shoulders with her fists, to shout in my face.

‘Don’t you ever, ever do that again!’ she screams, slaps my cheek, hauls me up by the collar of my shirt and shakes me. ‘If you ever try something like that again, I’ll fucking kill you myself!’ Slap. ‘You stupid, stupid, stupid bitch! What the fuck do you think you were playing at?’

And then she does something I don’t expect: she hauls me into her arms and bursts into tears.