Oh. So this is the ending. After all that’s happened we kiss because, contrary to everything I believed, this is just about: sex, or maybe this is love even. Perhaps it’s just a story of two people talking a long and complicated route to getting it on. It’s not what I was expecting, though. It felt good on my lips, but I was disappointed. A kissing end seemed almost cheap and lacking in imagination. This surely wasn’t the point. Part of me wanted to push away, fight for something more intricate, something richer. But perhaps I was wrong. Maybe it was kissing that would save everything.
I kissed her back and our fingers touched again, delicately dancing round each other, and my heart thumped and my body ached. She led me through one of the doorways, left and then right, and I dragged my feet in the dark so as not to trip. I couldn’t see. Nothing, just fingers touching my fingers, and a kind of sad joy that I’d found my friend and that she was alive. I wanted her to be alive. The acoustics changed and we were in another room now. She led my hands to a wall, cold, and turned me round, pushing me backwards, and her hand reached for my face and her tongue kissed my mouth again.
‘Wait,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll be back in one second,’ and she stepped away from me.
Excitement. Sex. Brain. Wait a minute . . . I held my breath; I could feel her backing away. Adrenaline. What’s happening? Panic. Shit, shit, shit. Wait. Think clearly. No. Don’t wait. Move. No noise. Move. Move now. I reached out my hand to the left. Holding my breath, trying to keep my thoughts quiet. OK, a few small breaths. Small, don’t move the air. I bent my knees slightly, shifted my weight. I stepped, one tiny step, and another. No noise. I could hear her still moving away from me. My arms relaxed, they could move fast. My fingers felt the air, my body listened. Balance. No noise. I heard her hand brush on something, feeling the shape of something, lining up, preparing a movement. Bend knees, no breathing, another step, diagonal towards her, to the side. Feel the air—don’t forget she is small; I am lightning. Let her move, she will tell you where she is. Sudden movement (Sorry, Butterfly; I fight), loud noise, metal screech, metal hitting metal, I flinched to protect my eyes, a click, I knew that sound, it was a padlock. I was standing still—great fighting, Ben. All that had happened was she had closed a gate and locked a lock.
‘Butterfly?’ She jumped; I wasn’t where she thought I should be.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered. She was on the other side of the gate.
‘That’s OK,’ I said, and it was. I was alive. She walked away and I wonder whether those were the most exciting four seconds of my life.
* * *
I felt my way around the room. It was about three metres by three metres and entirely empty. I could touch the ceiling with the palms of my hands if I stood on tiptoe. There was one doorway with a padlocked jailor’s gate. The top hinge had been fitted upside down so the gate couldn’t be lifted off its fixings. There was nothing in my pockets. Anything of interest I may have had was in my bag in the other room, plus my cigarettes and lighter, which were on the table. I paced round and tried to prepare my brain for being patient, but after two minutes I was bored.
‘Butterfly!’ I called out (not angry, not shouting). There was nothing. ‘Butterfly, can I have my cigarettes?’
Suddenly I wanted to smoke so badly I could have cried. Nothing. How long was I going to be here? I did the thing which you should never do when you have to wait and started counting. One, two, three, four . . . conscious of every second passing, pretending to be calm. Just wait, I said to myself. She’ll come in a bit. A thousand is sixteen minutes and forty seconds.
‘Butterfly, I don’t want you to forget about me. I’m hungry and thirsty, and a bit cold, and I want to smoke and I can’t see anything, and I could do with going to the toilet, I mean I could hold that for a while, but not forever, and I think you don’t want me to die here, and I wish you’d come and talk to me some more. I’m sorry I was being difficult and trying to make you say stuff you didn’t want to talk about. We could talk about other stuff if you want.’
One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three, one thousand and four . . . I needed some temporary strategy for not going mental and I feared that I was going to go mental very quickly. I hadn’t even been here for half an hour and I couldn’t trust my brain anymore. I lay down and stopped myself counting. Then I heard the door that we had come through. I heard it bang closed through the stone tunnels and the dark. Tomomi Ishikawa had gone.
* * *
At four thousand six hundred and twenty-two I heard her bump the lock. She came in clumsily, carrying things. I waited. She was moving around. And then she spoke, not close by, but calling to me from another room.
‘I had to go out and get some stuff. I wasn’t really prepared for visitors.’
I didn’t reply and she carried on pottering about. Then a couple of minutes later a torch beam shone past the gate, illuminating my cell.
‘Ben?’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered.
‘Look, you won’t like this, but I don’t really know how else to do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Come up to the gate and look. I’ve got a gun.’
I put my face up to the bars and there she was, smiling and waving a pistol at me. Where the hell had she got a pistol from?
‘You need to move back from the gate and stand in the corner with your face to the wall and your hands in the air.’
‘Jesus, Butterfly!’
‘I just want to open the gate for a moment and you’re bigger and stronger than me. I don’t want you to overpower me, and I don’t want to shoot you, so you have to do what I say. OK?’
I walked to the corner and put my hands in the air. I heard a key and her cosh before the lock clicked open. She put something in the room. The gate closed and the lock clicked. ‘OK, you can move now.’
On the floor by the gate was a bucket with a lid, inside was a roll of toilet paper, a blanket and my bag. Tomomi Ishikawa backed away from the gate and leaned against the wall opposite. ‘Your cigarettes are in the bag,’ she said.
I don’t know where the calm comes from at times like these (not that this sort of thing happens to me often), but there’s a kind of resignation to not being in control that makes everything all right, once you let go of the idea that you could make a difference. It was nice having the light and it was nice having Butterfly there.
‘You know you’ve gone mental, don’t you, Butterfly?’ I said. ‘You can’t take people prisoner. It’s the first sign of being utterly and dangerously deluded.’
‘I’m buying time. I need to work out how to get us both out of this.’
‘That’s easy. You put the gun down, open the gate, and then we walk out into the sunshine and find a nice terrace and drink a coffee. None of this will have happened. It’ll be a story, just like your other stories, except in this one nobody dies.’
‘You think that everything can be explained away, don’t you? That eventually everything will all become clear and then we will be able to laugh and it’ll all be better.’
‘I’d like to understand what the hell is going on, but I’ve suspected for quite a while that nothing you could say would satisfy me. And when I really think about it I know that we don’t need to understand stuff to move on. We can be whatever we want. We don’t need answers.’
‘Hey, that would be beautiful if it was true that you were so cool. But you’re making judgements all the time, trying to decide what’s true and what’s not true. When I tell you lies you believe them, when I tell you things that happened you assume they’re lies. All your behaviour towards me is based on the presumption that everything I wrote in my notebooks was made up. Right?’
‘I . . .’ My speech stumbled, as my ready-made answer didn’t work anymore.
‘Is that what you believe?’ she asked.
I was certain that everything she had written was fiction. I’d had moments of doubt, but I knew it was made up. But when she shut me in this room I was ready to fight for my life. This was a major inconsistency—a smart lawyer would take me apart in seconds. What did I actually believe?
‘I don’t know what I believe, Butterfly. I don’t think what you wrote is word for word true and that leaves the possibility that it was all fiction. I can’t imagine you really killing those people. I think they’re fantasies, where you put yourself in positions of power, where the boss is the small girl and she has the power to decide who will die and when. I like the idea of you taking back control in a life that was laid out for you. But I don’t think you really did those things and I don’t understand why you locked me in this dungeon.’
‘You ask me questions like “why?” but you don’t listen to the answers. To understand why you’re in this room, you have to imagine that I did do all those things: suffocate, slash, stab, burn, poison . . . Imagine now that somebody knew it was me—that I’d killed six people—and that I’d successfully gone into hiding, but that person had come and found me and now wanted me to come out of hiding and lead a normal, happy life. I think even in your determinedly blind innocence, you can see that this simply cannot happen. For the first time in my life, I’m actually interested in living and you are inconveniently in my way.’
‘But you told me everything was lies.’
‘What?’
‘One time when you were drunk you told me everything you said was lies.’
‘Well, I don’t remember that, but I would have thought it was perfectly obvious that it’s not the case. There have been lies and there have been truths.’
There was nothing I could say to this. I had thought she might attack me. I had moved to defend myself. I must think it possible that she killed those people and if she had, and I knew about it, I could see that I actually was a very real inconvenience. I rummaged in my bag and found my cigarettes.
‘Do you want one?’ I held out the packet and Tomomi Ishikawa jumped back and pointed the gun at my face. ‘Shhh, it’s a cigarette,’ I said.
‘Stay back from the gate.’
‘OK. Would you like a cigarette?’
‘No, thank you. I don’t really smoke anymore. Do you have any chewing gum?’
‘No. All I’ve got is your bitter toffee almonds.’
‘I don’t think that’s what I feel like right now. Maybe later.’
She stood up straight.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Carry on improvising until a plan comes.’ Then she walked off.
* * *
While I slept she put a yoghurt inside the gate for me, and a jug of water and a glass. I didn’t know what time it was or what day. I found my phone in my bag. There was still some battery left but no signal, of course. It was three twenty on Saturday afternoon. I should save the battery, just in case. I turned it off. There was nothing left to count. I was hungry and bored. I needed some substantial food; a big meal. I needed to get clever and find a way out of this situation. I smoked my last cigarette. My brain swam in circles like a goldfish and I felt miserable and stuck. The torchlight shone down the corridor. Tomomi Ishikawa waved the pistol at me and told me to get back from the gate and I did. She came and squatted on the floor in front of the doorway. She didn’t speak.
‘I feel stupid,’ I said.
‘You’re lots of things, Ben Constable, but stupid isn’t one of them.’
‘I feel stupid for believing you when you said you were dead, and for thinking that maybe if I had done things differently, I might have been able to save you. I thought that if I had called or sent you a text that you might not have committed suicide. I felt as though it was my fault. And I feel stupid for mourning you, and for being in shock. I was so shocked, I couldn’t control it. It was like being mad. And I feel stupid for believing Beatrice when she said she didn’t know you. She even wanted me to not believe her, but I just carried on thinking stuff that fit neatly into my idea of how things should be. And for missing you so bloody much when I hardly even know you. Who the hell’s Tomomi Ishikawa? I think I just made up an imaginary friend who happened to have your name. That makes me feel stupid. This whole story is just one long string of idiocy on my part, and now I’m locked up underground waiting for my psychotic friend to kill me.’
‘I’m sorry you’re here,’ she said. ‘This really isn’t what I wish for you. I’ll find a way to sort it out. I promise.’
‘Funny when the person working round the clock for your freedom is your captor.’ She did a half shrug and a half smile. ‘And do you know what’s even funnier?’ I asked.
‘It was kissing that got me into this room.’
‘Ha-ha-ha!’ She laughed loudly. ‘God, I’m so sorry about that, and really quite embarrassed. I was desperate.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No, not desperate like that.’
And now I laughed.
‘No, no, no,’ she protested.
I looked at her and she grinned at the floor. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find you lost in the tunnels. I couldn’t let you go. I had this padlock that I’d stolen, and this strange scary room with a steel gate. I put the padlock in my pocket and did the kissing trick and the rest, well . . . sorry.’
‘There are so many endings I could have imagined for this story. And this isn’t any of them. This can’t be how it ends.’
‘Why? How did you want it to finish?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Would it be completely unreasonable to ask for a happy ending?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like we go out from here and you get help from some genius psychologist and realise that you’ve got your whole life ahead of you and it’s beautiful and exciting and perhaps you even get it on with the psychologist because he is dashingly handsome and intelligent and in love with you.’
‘And what would happen to you, Ben Constable?’
‘Well, I’d go home a little wiser but just as innocent. And I would write a book and would feel very pleased with myself. And you and I might meet for coffee now and then and talk about stuff and laugh.’
‘Excellent. It sounds completely boring. How about if there was something that nobody had anticipated? Another person who had organised the whole thing.’
‘It actually crossed my mind that there was some kind of grander conspiracy. I never wanted to admit it, but I kept thinking that people were following me, or looking at me in strange ways.’
‘I followed you a couple of times.’
‘Really?’
‘I wanted to know if you were finding the treasure.’
‘Bloody hell, Butterfly; that’s disturbingly no good.’
‘Hey, only a couple of times. Any more than that and it’s your paranoia playing up again.’
‘My paranoia?’
‘People looking at you in strange ways? A conspiracy?’ She stroked an imaginary beard and laughed at me.
‘I thought maybe you were being held prisoner and had left me clues to help you.’
‘No, sorry,’ she said. ‘But look, how about this for a grim twist? You spend the whole book hoping that everything you’ve read is fiction, but in fact I really am a murderer and I kill you . . .’
‘But who writes the book if I’m dead?’
‘This is the twist: you die here underground and I leave and go back to your apartment and I sit down and write the book from beginning to end, but in your voice. I write it under the name Ben Constable and at the end he witnesses Tomomi Ishikawa dying and so nobody ever comes looking for her—me—and I would live happily ever after. In fact, it might even be the beginning of a writing career with my new nom de plume. Who would have imagined that Ben Constable was in fact a woman?’
I laughed. ‘That’s the most disturbing ending imaginable. It’s wrong in every way.’
‘Sorry. That’s the way my mind works.’
We were silent for a moment and then I remembered something. ‘Hey, there was somebody else, though.’
‘Who?’ she asked.
‘Charles Streetny.’
‘Oh, yes. The executor of my posthumous wishes. How funny that you thought it was his name.’
‘How did he know I was in New York? Did you trace the IP address from my email?’
‘What’s an IP address?’
‘It’s a network address that all computers connected to the Internet have. It’s encoded in the emails you send.’
‘I don’t know about that. I knew you were in New York because I’d given you clues telling you to go there, then you disappeared, and finally you sent me an email telling me you’d arrived. It was pretty easy.’
‘Oh, yes.’ I remembered the email that I’d sent. ‘I thought maybe Streetny had specialist computer knowledge.’
‘Would that he did. Sadly he was my better-organised alter ego. I needed somebody who would be more compliant than the awkward Beatrice.’
‘Was Beatrice awkward? I thought you got her to do pretty much everything you wanted.’
‘No, not really. She was a bit unimaginative.’
‘I liked her. She’s coming to Paris next week. She might already be here.’
‘Are you going to see her?’
‘That kind of depends on you.’
Tomomi Ishikawa looked at stuff, but not at me. ‘We’ll have to see. I don’t have a plan yet.’ Then she waved the pistol. ‘Can you get away from the gate, please?’
I wasn’t even near it, but I stood up and walked to the corner. She reached her hand through the bars and picked up the water jug and the empty pot of yoghurt. ‘I’ll get you more,’ she said.
* * *
After a few hours alone in the dark, my brain felt completely mad. I had no more cigarettes and all I’d had to eat in (how many?) days was a few pots of yoghurt. Tomomi Ishikawa had been twice to empty my bucket and a couple of times to bring me water or just to stare at me. Each time she would shine her torch, wave her gun around and tell me to get away from the gate and I obeyed because I didn’t fancy getting shot. She would have to let me go, though. I knew this and she knew it too. I was bored of being alone.
I found the stainless steel pen in my bag and tried to scrape a hole to escape through. I spent hours. Hours and hours. The pen started to wear down, and I scratched a furrow about two inches long and half an inch deep. I don’t know where exactly I was planning to scratch my way to. It was looking unlikely that the pen was going to save me.
‘Butterfly!’ I shouted. Maybe she wasn’t here anymore. I couldn’t remember whether I’d heard the door. ‘Butterfly! I know why you’re mad.’ I waited, but she didn’t answer. ‘It’s because you only eat yoghurt. You can’t live on just yoghurt and water; it makes you go mad.’ There was no noise.
* * *
Dreams weren’t made for remembering. We have no special equipment or capacity to keep hold of them and nature doesn’t care whether they are documented or not. Like all thoughts in the dark, they just come and then they are forgotten.
‘Of course, it nearly turned out very differently.’
I opened my eyes and she was sitting by the gate with a torch and a gun clamped together like something from a cop show. She was pointing the gun at my head, lining me up in the sights.
‘Don’t point that at me,’ I said.
‘Sorry. I’m trying to get used to the idea. I don’t know what else to do other than kill you. I can’t keep you here.’
‘Butterfly, why can’t you envisage a happy life for yourself? It’s never even been your ambition, has it?’
‘Life isn’t like that,’ she said.
‘It could be. You could choose to aim for good things. I’m not saying it would be easy, but that could be your goal.’
‘It’s too late. They should have taught me that when I was a child. I can’t go back aboveground and just change my past. I’m a danger to myself and others. But I can’t keep you here either, you’re right about that. But it was so nearly different.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You came back to my apartment. You were supposed to come and get the computer, which you did, but you came back again. Why would you do a thing like that?’
‘Sorry. I’d forgotten the power supply,’ I said. ‘For your computer. It wouldn’t turn on. I had to come back to it.’
‘OHHHH! Fucking fuck. Now I understand. It so nearly changed everything.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I was there.’
‘No you weren’t.’
‘I was. I’d come back to pack my things and I’d had a shower and had filled a bag with stuff and was in some state of seminakedness when I heard your voice outside the door. I don’t know who you were talking to. I panicked and grabbed the bag and climbed into the wardrobe and you came in. You nearly found me. You were inches away and you were talking to somebody.’
‘You were, I could hear you both talking.’
‘You couldn’t hear them talking because they can’t talk.’
‘You just said you weren’t with anybody.’
‘I wasn’t. I was with a cat.’
‘What were you doing with a cat?’
‘Look, there’s something about me that you don’t know.’
‘What?’ Butterfly barked with excitement.
‘I’ve got an imaginary cat.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘If only I was.’
‘Have you always had it?’
‘No. Since, I don’t know, maybe eight or ten years ago?’
‘How did you get an imaginary cat?’
‘It’s a long story, but basically anyone can have one.’
‘How?’
‘You just think of a cat.’
‘I’m thinking of a cat now.’
‘That’s a bit like what Cat is like.’
‘It’s called Cat?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are a fucking freak, Ben Constable! I love you.’
‘Thanks. Talking of freaks, what about you? You’ve kept me here for days. I want to go home and have a shower and cook some real food and sleep in my bed. You have to let me go, Butterfly. You can’t keep people prisoner, and you can’t kill people.’
‘I’m stuck, Ben Constable,’ she said. ‘And talking to you doesn’t really help me.’ She shone the torch in my face for a moment, then turned it out and left.
My stubble was itching against my neck and I wasn’t hungry anymore. I was thirsty, though. I dreamed of water in my mouth. When I was awake I spoke with Cat. He was good company and an attentive listener. I tried to explain Butterfly’s situation to him and he acknowledged the complexity of it but had no answers. We reminisced on places we had visited and I told him about places I would like to see. We travelled a lot. I told him that even though I didn’t know what day it was, I thought Beatrice had come to Paris and gone. She must have thought me rude not to answer her calls or emails, as though I was ignoring her. I wondered whether she would stay in contact with me. And then wondering seemed futile. Some things happen; some things don’t. I took Cat’s silence as agreement. I considered doing exercise, but seeing as I didn’t know when I would eat or drink again, I thought I should conserve my energy. Maybe she was just going to leave me to dehydrate. How long can you go without water? It’s not long. Two days maybe? Sometimes I was mad, and other times I was more sane than I would have thought possible. I remembered being four.
When I was four I got lost in the supermarket. The illusory bubble burst and the mundanely comprehensible world of food shopping was clearly endless aisles stacked with mind-boggling repetition, strip lighting and grey vinyl floor tiles to eternity. Adrenaline coursed through my veins and all direction ceased to exist. Another time I shut myself in a cupboard with the handle solely on the outside. I was surprised by the total dark. The door wouldn’t open and the joy of adventure flipped to panic. I let out an inhuman cry of self-pity. I had foreseen my own death.