If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse couldn’t help but kick back in to life. Her hip bones, her red knuckles, the soft skin of her thighs, her fine crackle of hair. (That long red hair. The shock of it spread out on the floor.) I loved her boredom, her glazed look, her dark laugh, her eyes. The way she moved around things, gliding, very near. The warmth that emanated from her skin. Everybody gives up warmth but with Ann it had a special quality, as though she was heat seeking heat, threatening to touch you in the spirit of danger, on a dare. She’d stand in the gutter, off the kerb, while she was waiting to cross the road. Buses skimmed past. She didn’t flinch.
She wasn’t one of those women who hate their feet, who hate their bodies, the kind who turn the sight of their ass in broad daylight into a state secret. (God, you just find yourself dying for a glimpse, you’ll do anything to get it, hover outside the bathroom door, hide under a table, pull back the sheets when she’s sleeping.) Ann didn’t care. Her body was open for viewing. It was one of the ways she distracted you from what was inside her head.
And her feet weren’t perfect: they were long and dry, with knobbly toes and a verucca on one heel which never went away because she refused to do anything but laugh about it. She liked pedicures, massage, that slightly sickening world of female self-obsession, and went in for toenail polish in dark, back-off shades. The lightning bolt scar on her right arm was a bubble-edged disaster, a memento of youth that she kept covered up. What you couldn’t take your eyes off were her legs. She had a sexy stance and walk, sort of hollow around the waist and jutty at the hips, shoulders slumped forwards. Now that I see it written down it makes her sound like a gorilla, but was more sort of slutty flapper. Bear with me.
She was a mould-maker; that was her job, to take casts of people’s bodies, the parts of their bodies that were ill and needed radiating to kill cancer cells or shrink tumours. This wasn’t what she’d had in mind during her sculpture major at the Slade but it brought its own satisfactions. A little plaster-dusted room at St Bartholomew’s Hospital very like a studio, the Hogarth diorama she could visit there each day, the walk to work under St John’s Gate. She loved the historical location, the feeling it gave her of being part of something, of belonging. It was a raggle-taggle version of the past that Ann had, she picked up scraps about the Knights Templar or pilgrims, eighteenth-century pleasure gardens, I don’t know, there was no grand scheme in her mind, no connecting dots. She said she needed the feeling of stone at her back, even if it was in ruins.
I can’t look at Ann in terms of the bare bones. She was this kind of person, she was that. Her parents were whatever, the house she grew up in was blah – it isn’t going to work. Partly because there’s so much I don’t know. It was Ann’s mystery I fell for, her genuine mystery, not the cultivated kind so many of the English girls had. Those girls, I can give you their bare bones: mummy and daddy still together, decent schools, hopes of working in television, a pesky brush with the law over shoplifting, an affair with a drug dealer, a lost night waking into a frightened morning (where am I, what is that mark on the floor, I don’t have the tube fare, where the fuck are my jeans) that is better left unexcavated and so she puts the bad-girl days behind her. She flounders for a bit. Drops the media dream and retrains, funded by the parents, in something useful to society (can’t think what that might be), in which instance she is out of my orbit and we’ll never cross paths again. Or she pursues the dream with renewed vigour, pulls contacts to get a job on the women’s section of a broadsheet supplement, acquires a new edge, drops the milliners and jewellery designers that she went to school with and goes out to bands at night. Then she meets me, or someone like me, at the launch for a new short film and bang. A few movies, a Malaysian meal or two, the introduce-to-friends dinner party, three months of electric fucking, one mid-week trip to a foreign city and then the writing on the wall. They’re paper, those girls, and Ann was flesh.
I’d like to be inside her somehow, to strap her ribcage on over my own and see the world from behind her skin like the serial killer in a lurid film. Breathe with her breath, hear and smell with her senses, taste the inside of her mouth, speak with her voice. A clear Perspex mask of her head, big holes gaping for eyes and mouth, sits in the corner of my office. She had a radiotherapy trainee do it, lay the cling film over her face, cover her with the cold gypsoma strips, piece by tightening piece – so she would understand how her brain tumour patients feel. Plaster has plastic memory. Ann found it magical. These aren’t death masks, she’d say, they are the opposite. I borrowed her glassy head for one of my creatures, back when I was trying to please Alan Tranter, trying to go commercial. Now I want more than this transparent mould from Ann; want to make her so real that I can hold her. Tshh– quiet. Shut off the radio. Close the window on the neighbours, muffle those clangouring workmen in the street below. I’m trying to hear her speak. It isn’t going to be easy, for a man more used to writing about vampires than about spirit, flesh and blood. But I’d like to know what the hell else I’m meant to do.
A long time after the accident, as though she was experiencing déjà vu, Ann swore that she had dreamed about it – being on the derailed train – before it happened. I couldn’t tell if this was true or whether she was trying, after the event, to turn what was really a disturbing memory into a premonition of some kind – into something with meaning. Why she would do that was unclear, but by that stage I didn’t know why she would do or say a lot of things. Kate was listening too; perhaps it was the day of the exorcism.
‘It was dark,’ she said, as though seeing a warning film playing in her head, ‘but emergency fluorescents flickered, lighting the passengers in odd blues and yellows. There was the toasty smell of smoke or burning hair. Most people stayed calm. We followed the instructions that came over the tannoy system.’ When she spoke she still sounded like herself. She’d kept her careful, covered-over accent.
‘All of us walking forwards over the rails towards the next stop felt, some people said at the hospital later, a weird sort of achievement, camaraderie, the pleasure of an ordeal survived. You knew that it was better to be down there, in the hot dark mess of it all, than one of the thousands of passengers whose journey was delayed. All above your head were men and women with nothing to show for it. You could imagine them, limp-armed and impotent at the grilled-shut tube entrances, late now for meetings and lunch dates, travellers bound for Stansted making frantic useless mobile phone calls to airline check-in voicemail, no money for taxis, losing their holidays, no way now of catching their aeroplanes out.’ Ann’s eyes were glassy. She was on holiday from herself; she didn’t need an aeroplane.
When she was thrown from her seat to the other side of the underground train, hitting her head on the yellow metal pole, Ann’s first thought was for the baby. The lights went out and a sharp object jabbed her in the temple (it was the corner of another woman’s briefcase) and she realised she wasn’t being attacked but that something had gone wrong. ‘This is it! This is it!’ shouted a female voice and she thought, don’t be so stupid, of course it’s not. Then through the darkness she smelled smoke and quickly felt it stinging her eyes, robbing her, for the moment, of her remaining vision, and she wondered if perhaps the hysterical woman was right. Ann was three months pregnant with our baby, that astonishing baby, and I assumed she had left work early so as to miss rush hour: she’d been feeling sick, headachy and exhausted, but because she didn’t yet show nobody knew to give up a seat for her on a crowded train. Londoners do give up seats on trains, despite what other people think of us. I made a habit of it after the morning when Ann phoned me from work, her voice bumpy like she was saying the words aloud for the first time, which she was. She had been pregnant before, but not to me; not to anybody she would tell.
And there she was in her carriage, sitting on the worn tartan cover of the bench seat, where a billion tired, impatient, resigned people had sat before, coming home early, so I thought, because she was in need of comfort, in need of rest. Earlier at Farringdon station, waiting for the train to arrive, she had watched two immigration officers approach a couple of men who were speaking to each other in what sounded like Arabic. One of the men started to walk away and an officer followed him, stepping around and into his path so he couldn’t go forwards. For a few seconds they performed a ludicrous dance, until the man took a wallet from his jacket and shoved it into the immigration officer’s face. ‘I really resent this,’ he said in a loud, accented voice, gesturing so that everyone near him on the platform turned to look. ‘Papers, he wants, here they are.’ The officer made a point of looking methodically through the wallet, his face expressionless. ‘All in order?’ the foreigner asked as he shoved the wallet back inside his suit jacket. ‘Good. I’m so pleased.’ His friend came towards him and took his elbow. They walked off down the platform arm in arm, the questioned man shaking his head in silence.
While this was happening a train had pulled up, and passengers had got on and off, and it had driven off again. Ann had not moved. The other immigration officer tried to stare her down, and she knew it was rude to stop and gawp, but she also felt it was her duty. It shouldn’t be normal, she said to me later, shaking her head just as she had demonstrated the questioned man’s gesture. It isn’t right. The officials left the platform. More travellers arrived and waited. It was too crowded to see what had happened to the other two men. Ann got on to the next train. This was the one that, deep underground in a lightless tunnel, bucked its tracks and derailed.
There was screaming at first, panicking and total darkness, the ‘This is it’ woman and others like her. A man flicked his lighter – a sudden, oddly Christmassy glow, the tips of his fingers translucent pink, the O of his face in orange. ‘Put it out!’ shouted a half-carriageful of voices. It was nearly twenty minutes before the passengers were allowed to move. People made indescribable noises, Ann said, words of outrage and fear, banging on immobile windows, worrying that the air was running out or whether there were chemicals in it. But what were you doing, I asked her, while all of this was going on?
‘I started by not wanting to breathe too much, because of the baby, so I didn’t want to talk or join in.’ As she described the scene she sat with her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands, flicking quick glances at me through her fingers, and I understood that this was how she had been on the train. ‘By the time I did want to join in it was too late, we were moving.’
Of the two hundred and ninety-six passengers that clambered through the darkness towards the light of Liverpool Street station, twenty-eight suffered serious cuts and bruises and seven were later admitted to hospital. (She had made it to the Evening Standard late edition, along with an archive photograph of a derailed train, on-the-street interviews with dazed survivors, and the politics of outrage: ‘2.39 P.M. – THE WAKING NIGHTMARE’.) Ann had been sitting at the back of the train, and had to make her way forwards through all of the carriages and out the emergency doors at the side of the driver’s cabin. She could hear nothing behind her yet had the feeling that someone was there, in the darkness, just waiting for her to move on. The dark space at her back had a presence, she told me, an occupied quality. It was the darkness that stopped her from turning and looking to see. When she finally left the train she inhaled deeply with relief, but dust quickly entered her mouth and throat, thrust in like a cobweb mitten. Decades of it had been thrown up by the impact, soft felt-like layers of human hair and skin cells, so thick that all around her people choked on it. A man just ahead wheezed asthmatically. Ann fumbled in her handbag for her inhaler, which for once she had with her, and passed it up to him. This, she thought later, must have been when she lost her phone. She didn’t hear it fall: the tunnel was full of the echoing voice of the driver, issuing instructions through a loudhailer, and the smaller human sounds of muttering and griping, complaints about the state of the railways, the state of the country, the state of the world. Somebody mentioned Al-Qaeda and somebody else snapped at him to shut up. There were the sounds of pushing and skidding feet – two men were actually fighting down there, Ann laughed, swearing at each other, fuck you, no fuck you, scuffling over whether or not they were victims of a terrorist attack. A third man boomed at them to break it up, in the voice of schoolyard authority, and the tussle subsided.
It was hot and dizzying in the tunnel. Some people cried out that they could see sparks and flames; others shouted at them to just keep moving. Somehow Ann was now in the middle of the shuffling crowd, being jostled and pushed into the slower, cautious people in front of her. Although she wanted to be out, to push through, climb over people towards the open air, Ann thought she might faint or be sick, so she stepped aside and bent over for a minute, by the hot dark wall, to try and get oxygen into her head. People bumped her as they passed. It seemed to go on a long time, this moment – doubled over in the dark, covered with soot and dust, preventing herself from clutching at passing arms. Then a man’s voice came towards her, trying to stay low and calm, comforting his crying child.
‘Can I help?’ Ann asked, pulled out of herself.
‘He’s done something to his wrist,’ the man said. ‘Can you carry anything?’
Ann took his bags and the man lifted his boy into his arms.
Later in the grot of the Royal London Ann waited with the man while his son’s wrist was put in a splint. He lent her his mobile phone and she called me. There had been fire engines, she told me when I arrived, when I finally found her waiting for an ultrasound scan in the obstetrics department. She still had soot smeared on her face and hands, and blood – somebody else’s – in small brown spots on her blouse. People had sat around at the station and later the hospital A & E centre dazed, bleeding, getting bandaged. The man with the boy had gone home. She still had his mobile phone. She was going to wait for him to ring, if he remembered that she’d borrowed it. ‘Let’s turn it off now,’ I said, looking at the picture by the sonographer’s door: a mobile phone with a red diagonal line through it.
We could see the baby’s heartbeat. Ann and I laughed at the same time – I had the huge ballooning sensation of being given something undeserved – blood rushed to my face in a hot sweet tingle. The baby was a transparent pulsing bean in a sea of grey whorls. I squeezed Ann’s hand. There were tears in her eyes; she looked suddenly much younger. When I kissed the side of her face I could smell the sweat and dust, and I had to resist an uncharacteristic urge to wrap my arms tightly round her, to cling to her in gratitude and relief.
‘Hang on,’ the sonographer said. ‘What’s that? You’ve got something there.’
‘What is it?’ Ann gripped my hand hard.
The woman pushed the monitor deeper into Ann’s belly. Now we could see it, a thick mass of tissue, enormous next to the embryo, ten or fifteen times its size.
‘Don’t cry,’ the sonographer said to Ann, as though she were a silly little girl. ‘It’s just a fibroid. Baby’s fine.’
‘But that thing’s so big,’ Ann said, her voice off-balance. ‘Look at it.’ Her smudged face was tight and worried. It was hard to comprehend that the murky image on the screen was showing us the inside of Ann.
‘It’s nothing,’ the woman said, wiping the transparent jelly from Ann’s stomach with a paper towel. ‘It can’t hurt you.’
Together Ann and I drove round to return the mobile phone to the father from the train. He lived in Hampstead, a part of London I pretended was too fuddy-duddy for me but secretly aspired to. I tried to take a clever short cut, and we got lost on the way and narrowly avoided a navigation fight. Our laughter, as we turned into street after street of bigger and bigger houses, was thin with envy. Ann brushed invisible creases out of her sleeves and reapplied her lipstick in the glove box mirror. Outside the tall wide house – the wrought iron gate, the polished railings, the sheeny windows bouncing light – we sat silently, bracing ourselves for strangers. On their doorstep Ann squeezed my arm and nodded at the pile of champagne bottles in the recycling bin. When Simon, this man who’d shared the intense hours of the derailment with Ann, came to the door I smiled tersely and gripped his hand, which was, I noted gratefully, neither clammy nor vice-like. We stepped into his house.
There are few situations more uncomfortable than entering a stranger’s house; beyond university you really shouldn’t be expected to meet new people. I found myself checking out the woman standing behind him in the hallway and comparing her to Ann. She had that insane Birkenstock look, tanned skin, no make-up and lots of single white streaks through her straight long black hair giving her an unnerving Medusa-like quality. Her eyes, a wild sort of orangey-brown, stared in eager greeting as she wiped her hands on her denim apron and stepped forwards to say hello. An invisible hand pushed at my chest. I found myself looking for an exit. Her name was Kate; she introduced her husband, Ann’s crash cohort, as ‘my partner Simon’, and their children, preposterously, as Titus and Ruby-Lou. ‘After circus performers, do you think, or porn stars?’ Ann snorted and rolled her eyes on the drive home. It was a break in the frosty silence between us. ‘You’re cross with me aren’t you,’ she asked, once I was safely laughing about the children of these people we didn’t know. If there was one habit of Ann’s I didn’t like, it was her persistent need to smoke out bad feeling and dispel it with this little-girl routine. I was more than cross with her; I was outraged, and didn’t want to be cajoled out of it.
We’d been sitting in Kate and Simon’s kitchen, Ann having accepted, despite my significant no-no-no eye contact, their offer of a drink. Now press-ganged into it, I’d gone for tea, figuring it was quicker to make, but Ann wanted coffee and we had to wait while Simon faffed around with some fancy espresso machine that he’d brought back from Italy. He actually told us that: ‘I brought this back from Italy.’ ‘Congratulations,’ I managed not to say. We’d been introduced to Titus, his bandaged wrist and Ruby-Lou who were now off cruising the Internet or watching Looney Tunes while pretending to practise the clarinet or whatever eight-year-olds did.
‘Two cappucini coming up,’ said Simon, which confirmed my hatred of him – it’s ridiculous to fuss about the niceties of another language when you’re not even on foreign soil. And then Kate asked whether Ann was going to seek counselling about the accident. I laughed, but Ann seemed to take her seriously.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I hadn’t thought about it. What about you?’ she asked Simon. ‘What about Titus?’
Simon had his back to us, frothing milk, but you could hear the pride in his voice. ‘Kate’s a therapist. She’s helping us through it.’
‘Oh. Wow. That’s great.’
‘Are you allowed to treat your own family?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, I treat them all the time,’ Kate said, in what I had hopefully thought was a stoner’s voice but now took to be a very irritating, all-seeing tone of wisdom.
‘What kind of thing do you talk about? If you don’t mind my asking.’ Ann was clearly fascinated.
Kate looked perplexed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Sorry, it’s presumptuous, sorry.’ Ann laughed, shaking her head in that charming way she had as though amused by her own stupidity. We were all silent for a few seconds. She could handle it.
While Simon spoke he dabbed a finger around in his cappuccino froth. A flashing vision of him aged three sitting on a sandy beach, tentative and curious. Perhaps he wasn’t so hateful. ‘We were going to Bethnal Green, to the Museum of Childhood.’ Of course they were. ‘They’ve got a brilliant collection of old—’ He must have sensed something in the air, my rising urge to laugh, perhaps, as he cleared his throat and said, ‘I did wonder if the tube is safe these days, we’d not taken the children on it for months after the bombings.’
‘But that’s crazy,’ said Ann. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘Were you on your way home from work?’ Kate asked.
‘Well,’ said Ann, sipping her coffee, ‘I’m pregnant.’
I stared at her. We hadn’t even told my parents. Kate and Simon cooed congratulations and delight. What were we doing here around this unknown kitchen table? I stood, patting my pockets for cigarettes, and was about to excuse myself into the back garden, when Ann said, ‘But I left work early…because of…’ She examined her hands. ‘This guy who’s been following me.’
I sat back down.
‘Really?’ said Kate, unable to disguise her curiosity. ‘Do you know him?’
Ann looked at me, guilty. This was the first I’d ever heard of him. ‘No. But I recognise him.’
‘Who is he?’ I asked, not caring that the question made it obvious to Kate and Simon I knew nothing at all about this situation. ‘When’s he been following you?’
‘Black or white?’ asked Simon.
She hesitated. ‘He’s a black.’
The racist-sounding use of the article alarmed me. Would she phrase the sentence in quite such a way if she were telling Tonia? Tonia would not have asked Simon’s question. And he would never have asked it if she’d been in the room. I hated him all over again, turning the four of us into a bunch of middle-class anxious white people with that simple ‘Black or white?’ (All right, that’s exactly what we were, but how rude of him to point it out.)
‘I’ve seen him in the playground across the road from our house. Just sitting on his own. Do you know the guy? He’s disturbed, you know, not right. He wears, like, a hood and a really heavy coat, he’s skinny but all,’ her fingers were gesturing claws, ‘shaggy somehow.’
‘Are you sure it’s always the same guy?’
‘Oh it’s him.’ She was certain. ‘It’s always the same guy. Hunched over. But like he’s watching.’
This spooky touch was unlike Ann. I laughed. ‘There are one or two hood-wearing creeps in London.’ I often stared out at the so-called playground, an oval stretch of tarry rubber on which was planted one broken seesaw and a pair of swings. Older children came out like imps in the night and pushed the swings over and over the bars that held them so that they hung way out of reach on shortened, looped chains. They left broken bottles, takeaway fried chicken boxes, plastic bags and dead lighters, but I’d never seen them do it, and I’d never seen this man.
‘Once I thought he was following me to the tube, but then I decided I was paranoid.’
There were bright spots of red in Ann’s cheeks. Simon and Kate were staring at her. We ignored the muffled thuds and shrieks of Titus and Ruby-Lou fighting upstairs.
‘And then on the day of the crash, I saw him at my work.’
Kate asked where she worked.
‘At the radiotherapy department at Barts. I see lots of people who don’t look well, and you know, homeless people get cancer too, I mean I’m used to a range. But he wasn’t there for treatment, I’m sure of it.’
‘Did he actually come in?’
‘He just stood outside with the smokers, where the ambulances pull in. He watched me when I arrived and he was still there when I went for lunch. In the afternoons I work upstairs so I went in the back way, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he was still there or not.’
I envisaged Ann’s upstairs room – the pressing machine where she made the latex moulds of people’s heads and arms and hips and torsos from her plaster casts. The white shelves, laden with these rubber parts, and the sinister, transparent (sinister because they were transparent?) masks of individual faces that all looked exactly the same. Ann went into a kind of zone in the afternoons, I knew from trying to call her and getting a distracted version of her voice on the end of the line, disembodied and somehow floating. Now, in this house of people we didn’t know, she looked the way that voice sounded.
‘How did he look at you?’ This was Simon.
‘Not directly. He keeps his head ducked down. So I asked one of the nurses to check for me and she said he was there, this was about two o’clock. And I really started freaking out, so I cleaned up and left early, out the back. And got stuck on the train.’
‘He keeps his head ducked? Have you seen him since?’
Ann nodded silently. A tear rolled down her face.
‘For Christ’s sake Ann, why didn’t you say anything?’ I asked. ‘We should call the police.’
She shook her head. ‘He hasn’t done anything. He’s sort of forlorn.’
I couldn’t understand her. For a cavernous second I had the feeling she was making it all up. I said, ‘If you see him again you’ve got to tell me. He can’t just follow you around, he’s probably a psychopath.’ I glared at Kate. Wasn’t she the nutcase professional?
‘Oh, before I forget.’ Ann passed Simon his mobile phone.
‘I’ll take your number,’ Kate said. ‘We’re very grateful you weren’t opportunist phone-thieving teenagers.’
Ann laughed. ‘There were all sorts on that train.’
After Kate punched our phone number into Simon’s mobile, Simon handed Ann a small rectangle. ‘Here. Have my card. I hardly ever get to hand it out.’
She looked at it. ‘Oh, how completely weird! You’re a writer too.’
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
‘You’re cross with me,’ she said in the car, and I pulled over and unbuckled my seat belt and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What if anything happened to you? What if he – I just – don’t understand why you wouldn’t tell me.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Because you’d want to do something, call the cops, or move house, or confront him – I guess – I don’t know.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Don’t say that!’ She laughed, surprising me, my Ann again. ‘That’s your job. You have to understand.’
I started the car and pulled out into the traffic.
‘Do you know him?’ By this she meant Simon, did I know his work? Yes I did know his fucking work. Oh, get a grip, Tom, I told myself, you are too old for envy to be in the slightest bit wolfishly attractive on you. And what did I envy? His solid career on Holby City, Casualty and East-Enders? He was television. There’d been that usual awkwardness as we paid each other our respects, him feigning surprise that I’d heard of him, me genuinely relieved he didn’t draw a blank when my one decent credit was mentioned by Ann. The wives were our mouthpieces, Kate reporting that Simon was the new story editor on Casualty and Ann responding with the name of my film. Resumes delivered, at last each of us spoke for ourselves.
‘Yes I read somewhere you’d gone back to run the show, I hear it’s doing very well, you’re up in the ratings, congratulations.’ I ‘read somewhere’, I ‘hear’, was I going out of my way to be clear I’d never actually watched the show?
His turn: ‘The class-divide romance, I remember. Whirlwind produced it. You doing anything else for them?’ Clever. No indication as to whether he’d seen it or, if he had, what he thought. I’d had enough wrong-footing for one morning.
‘And,’ he went on, ‘weren’t you doing something with Hallie?’
John Halliburton. Wide-boy Australian producer of attempted blockbusters. Simon must have heard of the meltdown in Fiji, the humiliating way I’d got the flick. ‘Do you know Hallie?’ I asked, glacially. I shot a quick glance in Ann’s direction. She had stood, and was asking Kate about their garden.
‘Well not really – seen him round the traps, you know – out in LA last month, met him at a party, he’s …’ He had the grace to drop the end of his sentence into his coffee cup. Faker, calling Hallie by his nickname when they were only on canapé terms.
This time, Ann responded to my stare. ‘We really must leave you in peace.’
Just as my first film was coming out, I’d briefly – briefly! – had a fair bit of currency as a ‘hot new screenwriter’. Then it opened to reviews that revealed it to be the kind of ‘right on’ British feature everybody thought they should go to but nobody did. (I actually stood in a queue at Steve Hatt and heard this exchange: ‘Have you seen that new film, the council estate love story one?’ Shrugging of shoulders, sucking in of air over teeth: ‘No … I know I should, but…’ ‘I know what you mean.’ ‘If I’m going to pay for a babysitter I’d honestly rather do something fun.’) Anyway, in that window of hotness I’d signed a contract to write a script for John Halliburton. The story was set at a luxury resort in Fiji, which was taken over by machete-wielding locals during one of that country’s many recent military coups. It was in danger of being one of those stories where the plea ‘but this really happened doesn’t make the outlandishness of the situation any more believable. I was drawn to it for a number of reasons, not least the research trip to the resort that Hallie was spunking for. Ann had just moved in to my Camden flat, and if I switched the business class flight for two economies I could take her too.
Driving down the tree-lined Hampstead street I poked again at my jealousy, like checking a new cavity in your mouth with your tongue, and was pleased to discover that yes, indeed, there was no longer anything there. I thought myself a master at side-stepping such emotion, the king of rationalisation: so-and-so was older than me and therefore more experienced, or was more commercial, or more alternative, or was a woman and so didn’t count as direct competition, or was a different bloody star sign. Probably I could have talked myself out of any grinding competitive urges with anyone other than an identical twin brother, and as he didn’t exist I was home free. Ann approved of this absence in me of what she termed ‘alpha bullshit’, as long as it didn’t interfere with my drive, my will to succeed in general. Since the pregnancy there had been a few treacherously light exchanges about money-earning capacity and the mortgage. We both lay awake some nights, listening to the other’s breathing, trying to discover sleep through the electric field of tension in the air. I was running out of tricks to play on my insomnia.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard of him. Casualty. Fuck.’ I had taken a wrong turning and was faced with one of those idiotic bollarded streets without warning.
‘She was interesting.’
‘Can you just look at the A–Z for me? I hate Hampstead.’
Her head was bent over the map, but I could see she was suppressing laughter.
‘I do! It’s a stupid maze where wildly successful television writers and their freaky all-seeing wives live with circus midgets they pass off as their own children.’ It was a pleasure to make Ann laugh. She really gave in to it, enough to make me laugh too, even while negotiating a ten-point U-turn between smugly clean German cars. ‘If you see that man following you again you’ve to tell me Ann, you promise.’
‘I will. I promise. I’m sure it’s just coincidence.’ She looked happy.
Some facts are known. We met. Fell in love. Went to Fiji. Were married. We lived together in the house in Daley Street and we had our baby. Ann died. Now I live alone with Arlo, who is four, and I can barely remember the last three and a half years. A rented flat. The move to Muswell Hill. A series of nannies: the Romanian, the Canadian, the Russian, the droopy-haired Danish girl crying as she fled the house. One of them saying, ‘You cannot speak to me like that.’ The Romanian’s boyfriend coming with aftershaved pals to collect her things, his gaze at me through rheumy eyes, don’t start, as if I could. Somewhere, in all that, Arlo learning to walk, feed himself, use the lavatory. Arlo talking. Arlo singing in his birdy voice, perched on a stool in the back garden while I cut his coppery-red hair. It has felt, lately, since Arlo started school, as though the haze is lifting – as though Ann is coming back to me. So that is why I’m writing this. There are the known knowns, as a politician might say. Other things I can only take a stab at. What Ann thought. What Ann felt. What happened to her when I was not around. For this I need fiction, the grrrt of the paper rolling into the old typewriter I’ve hung on to since my student days. I like this arrangement, the computer for what I know, the typewriter for everything I’m not so sure of. Fiji.
N.A.M.W. 01.07
They arrive, after travelling for a day and a half, so much sea they all but hang motionless above it, and it is the middle of the night. The passengers limp off the plane on to a covered, raised walkway without walls. Ann feels the heat like a hand pressing a warm damp cloth over her nose and mouth. Dense, rubbery air envelops them. Against the fading white noise from the plane engines, a bird makes the creak of a screen door. Frangipani, even with all this asphalt, all these big machines. In a room floored in linoleum fans whirr; the overhead lights are dim, economies are being made.
A band of men wearing traditional skirts plays the guitar. Ann and Tom walk towards the blackness of night at the end of the hall. Dark carved wooden masks, shop windows of raffia bags and coconut soap, car-hire logos in flat primary colours. A man loops a shell necklace over Ann’s head. He leads them to a car with windows of tinted glass.
‘It looks like a politician’s car,’ says Ann.
‘You can see out, ‘ the driver tells her, ‘but no one can see in. ‘
They can’t see out. The roads are marked by Cat’s-eyes. ‘On our left are some sugar cane fields. Sugar cane is Fiji’s secondary industry.’ After what, Ann nearly asks, then realises — tourism, them. ‘Sugar cane crops are still harvested by hand. It is hard, rough work. I am Fijian Indian. We have a slave history, brought here by your people’ (a light, wry emphasis on the your)‘as indentured labour, and we still cannot buy land. ‘ It makes Ann feel better, this all being said out loud.
‘Nadi,’ the driver says, ‘your first stop.’ Ann makes out colonial buildings lining the road under the small icy glow of the streetlights. He says something about the dry side of the island and the average rainfall and she has a vision of the wet side of the island being the underneath of it, as though it were a floating disc, and there was a mirror world on this underwater side with buildings and upside-down people and sugar cane growing down into the sea.
Work, the day after Ann’s revelation about her stalker, went sluggishly, like walking forwards in a nightmare, weights attached to your feet. My sleep had been disturbed by visions of Ann’s drowning body, her arms outstretched, cross-like, a meaty red hand holding her face under the water until the air bubbles stopped coming. She lay next to me in the bed, deeply asleep with the swallowed-up exhaustion of early pregnancy. At five a.m. I began to think of my tax self-assessment. I didn’t sleep again.
The very early morning is supposed to be the best time to write but I looked at my screenplay in despair. The who-gives-a-fuck element was at an all-time high. I was working on a script, strictly a money job that had started as a romantic comedy but now needed to become a horror ‘for reasons of zeitgeist’, as the producer, who wore his blond hair in spiky dreadlocks, described it. Who were these people and why was I doing it? How had I come so far from what had made me want to write film scripts in the first place? I sat in my office on the middle floor of the house, rocking in the hideous ergonomic chair, periodically banging my head lightly on the desk. The idea was to get enough girls, twists and sudden flashes of knives in to please a bloodthirsty audience of young misogynists; naturally I wanted to do better, only lately, even achieving that small goal seemed beyond me. I wasted at least two hours inserting religious imagery, knowing that without the story in place it was an indulgent exercise. After a period scanning the Internet for film industry gossip I heard Ann walking around downstairs, and gratefully went to make her breakfast.
She was trying to leave the house, unable to find her wallet, tired smudges under her eyes, skirt crumpled, hair awry, when the phone rang.
‘Alan, hi.’ The man who was paying me to write.
Ann looked at me questioningly and brought the sofa cushion that was in her hand to her chest. I turned away from her as I accepted Alan’s invitation to coffee. He suggested a café in Islington that was always full of young people writing manuscripts and talking about technology I had never heard of.
‘What did he want?’ Ann asked, panting lightly, which she often did now with the oxygen uptake difficulties of pregnancy, having resumed her search for the wallet.
‘I don’t know. To meet up.’ He wants to fire me! I was screaming inside, but for fear of making it true by saying it aloud, kept my mouth shut. I fished in the pocket of Ann’s raincoat hanging from a peg in the hall. ‘Here.’ Her wallet. She took it, and the tiny beginnings of tears welled up in her eyes.
‘I’m losing my mind,’ she said, and tried to laugh.
‘Don’t be stupid. You’re hormonal.’
We embraced. I pulled her long slim back towards me, feeling the small invisible hardness of the pregnancy against my middle. Then suddenly I found myself on my knees in front of Ann, my arms around what was still only just her waist, kissing through the fine wool layers of Ann’s clothes. Our baby. Ann’s long, fine-boned hand rested softly on my head.
I’m the kind of man who is attractive to a certain type of woman. This is not bragging: she’s not damaged exactly, but borderline fucked; needs reassurance but resents this lack in herself and constantly plays against it. Self-deprecating, but when she lacerates others you see the tentacles and double-row teeth of her inner self. Her sexual centre is in her eyes. She’s easy to fuck. Responsive, a bit perverse, sometimes lazy. But I’m not complaining. Despite having been married to Ann for four years, I can still see them coming, red-dotting me at parties, thinking I don’t know what’s in their minds, feverish and bright with drink, ready to provoke. Ann entered my life like this, only she somehow stayed a step ahead.
The usual rule for a man like me is that your primary relationship is not enough, that you get bored of the mysterious wide-eyed not-quite-beauty who started off aloof and self-possessed and turned out to want to know your whereabouts all the time. Such a cheat, and in my last relationship I’d often allowed my feelings of aggrieved betrayal to justify inviting another ambitious young brunette out for a drink. They went a long way on the promise of nothing, these girls, though I got a nasty shock when a particularly neurotic one, Rebecca the journalist, began writing to me at home. Mobile phones and email count for nothing when you’re dealing with a woman who imagines herself a nineteenth-century literary heroine, and a wronged one at that.
I was living with Bridget then; she was older than me and I’d once worshipped her. She frightened me, which is always compelling. In her omnipotent way she got wind of the girl’s obsession just as I was about to tell Rebecca to stop writing. It’s true I had let it go on. Who wouldn’t, once they’d been described as ‘saturnine’? (OK, it was within the mildly over-the-top phrase ‘my saturnine lord’, but still. It isn’t every day.) I had to plead ignorance and beg forgiveness at the same time, and was not convincing on either count, and although Bridget let me stay it was the true beginning of the end. Not long after that I met Ann.
Ann was tall, rangy, with thick red hair she wore tied back. She was Australian and though I’d never been to that country I understood from a mutual friend that Ann had ‘the Sydney look’. This observation wasn’t passed back to her; she had done her best to shake her roots. She never talked about home and sometimes I wondered what she did bloody well remember: it was as though she’d been hit with the amnesia stick on landing at Heathrow. The description referred to Ann’s penchant for skinny jeans and skirts in varying shades of black, big boots and eyeliner that winged over her top lids in the style of a fifties film star. The whole effect was don’t fuck with me, and stopped crucially short of gothic. Our sex life had ground to a halt the moment her pregnancy hormones kicked in (when, by the way, her wardrobe underwent a dramatic change too and she seemed constantly swathed in layers of gauzy, floating natural fibres). Our ‘sex life’ – how can that bloodless phrase encompass something so wrist-bitingly, bruisingly tender, the cold press of steel, the light scrape of a knife edge, the warming security of bonds, the long, long gazes between us? It took me by surprise, I admit it, but I didn’t pass judgement on how Ann wanted to be fucked. She was tough.
I got to the café first and was able to spend a good paranoid couple of minutes checking out the fashions of those younger than myself and wondering what Alan wanted to meet up for. The third coffee of the day is always a mistake, but it was that or one of those chai abominations that taste like liquidised baby food. I was not afraid of Alan but I was very, very afraid of the sack. I’d take anything to avoid it; he could switch genres as many times as he liked, he could ask me to dramatise the phone directory, he could demand a part for his wife, I didn’t care: I was his writing bitch and would hang on to that prestigious position till my fingernails bled.
A woman sat on her own in the booth across from me. She had the look a little of neurasthenic Rebecca: huge eyes, an oddly small rosy mouth, something about her pale arms that looked squishy to the touch as though she had other people to do the tiresome stuff like handle her money and cut up her food. She was reading an old paperback, exactly the kind of thing Rebecca would have pulled out in public: Under the Volcano perhaps, or Wide Sargasso Sea. I tried to see the front cover without her noticing.
‘Hi.’ Alan had changed his look. The matted peroxide tufts were gone, and in their place was a surprisingly corporate hairdo. Had he finally understood he was too posh and too white to pull off the dreads? Had he given up hope of ever being cool? Had his wife put her foot down? Alan was talking about her, about his wife, but I couldn’t concentrate. First there was the hair, then a fat woman joined Rebecca’s doppelgänger at the other table. Fat women always keep their friends waiting, I have noticed, it is a symptom of their anger. The Rebecca lookalike’s novel was The Yellow Wallpaper. I pitied her boyfriend; undoubtedly she had one, a skinny bespectacled fellow who cooked Thai food. She caught me staring at her.
Alan said, ‘So that’s made a huge difference, obviously.’
‘Sorry?’ I came to rudely. ‘This music, I couldn’t hear what you just said.’
‘The pregnancy. Everything’s been so insecure with the company and now with the baby, it’s too precarious. I need something more reliable. The advertising gig is perfect. Tom, I’m going to take it.’
‘A job in advertising?’
‘A creative at Clock. Yes. I’m nearly thirty, I’m bloody lucky they’ll have me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Because Ann’s having a baby?’ I was outraged, discriminated against. ‘That doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to my writing, I’ll still come up with the goods.’ All the time I spoke my mind was spiralling down the tube of no Alan, no producer, no backer for the script, Ann, the baby, no money, no money, no money.
‘My baby. Sally’s pregnant, didn’t you hear me?’ He blew steam off his coffee. It might have been the vapour from dry ice, so cold was the air that slowly swept over me.
‘Alan, that’s great.’ I knew their story: miscarriage after miscarriage, an empty round of IVF, the specialists, the hormone injections, the slow dropping away from friends who had children, the desolation of it all. Ann and I had felt guilty and awkward about our easy, almost accidental pregnancy. More than ten years older, we were meant to be the dried-up, wizened ones unable to conceive. This was wonderful news for them. And of course he wanted to take a more secure job. But oh my God. ‘The script, Alan, it’s so close. This draft is it, I can feel it.’ Bullshit. I was trying to save my life.
‘We’ll pay you for this draft of course.’
‘But after that?’
Alan shrugged. ‘Sorry Tom. I wanted to tell you in person.’ The betrayer’s plea for lenience, the calling card of finer feeling.
‘And what if it is – you know, what if this is a great script, can you just walk away from it?’
‘I’m not producing any more. It’s a mug’s game. You wouldn’t do it.’ A pathetic attempt at consolation. ‘Nearly thirty’, he had said, ‘bloody lucky they’ll have me’. ‘Even without the baby, I … Well. That’s it.’
Alan had a business partner, an older woman, canny, with an ex-drinker’s inability to be fazed by anything. ‘What about Rosemary? And Cheryl?’ The company assistant, she of the roll-your-own voice and poky hips. ‘How are things going, Cheryl?’ you’d ask, and she’d say briskly, ‘Tits-up, the film industry is tits-up as per usual,’ which always (as it was meant to do) made you think of Cheryl’s tits, small and high but remarkably present in her skinny high street T-shirts. The last Christmas party she’d sat on her desk, queen of all she surveyed, one springy leg swung over the other. The look she sent out under her half-closed lids, equal parts come-on and disdain, pierced me like a wire. I remember actually squeezing my fingernails into my palms to survive the moment. The Rebecca lookalike was staring at me staring at her. I felt sick, as though I had been unfaithful to Ann and this was the ever-dreaded tap on the shoulder from the fidelity police.
‘Cheryl’s staying on.’
‘With Rosemary?’
‘Yes. Before you ask, Rose has looked over the projects I’ve got in development. She’s only taking over one.’ I willed his mouth to form the word, ‘Yours.’ He said, ‘Joe Baxter’s.’ Joe Baxter was twenty-six. He had once written a lovely script that was slightly reminiscent of my first screenplay, the council estate thing that I now regarded with some embarrassment. Other people must have seen the similarities too because Alan couldn’t get Joe’s script off the ground. He gave it to me, at Joe’s request, to see if I could suggest any improvements. There was nothing to say: the writing was tight, the characters surprising and real, the jokes true. It made me laugh out loud and want to cry in all the right places and when I put it down I knew it would never get made. This sort of thing had already been done. There wasn’t enough of either the blue flame of originality or the satisfying clicking into place of a perfectly executed genre piece. A small voice inside asked whether my film, its commercial failure, hadn’t scuppered Joe’s chances. A successful movie spawns imitators. But Joe’s script was no homage; it was probably, the voice whispered, better than mine. I wrote Joe a letter praising his work in some detail, and suggesting he use the script as a sample piece to generate commissions. He would have, I told him, a good career in film, and I believed it. I didn’t say what else I believed, which was that he had sent me the script not to garner my critical notes but this very praise, and to let me know he was most definitely on the block. Part of me was flattered he thought me important enough to receive his smoke signals. Now he was the sole survivor of Tranter’s defection to the dark side.
‘What is it, the council estate project?’
‘A new one.’
‘That was quick.’
‘It’s early days.’
‘Can I take the project anywhere else? The rights are mine?’
‘Yes of course.’ Magnanimous now. ‘The rights revert to you.’
Through pursed lips I blew out slowly, deflating the paper bag of self. Without knowing it was coming I began, helplessly, to laugh.
‘Tom, Tom. Take it easy.’
‘Oh, God!’ Trying to finish and polish this draft and then hock a hybrid script that had been misguided from its inception, that only Alan had faith in and I had taken on in the cynical hope of a proper pay day at the end. Selling the house we’d only been in six months, incurring all over again the legal fees, the estate agent’s fees. Losing space, losing time. Where would we go? Not Andy and Tonia’s, no. My parents’, never. A smaller place, a flat? Where would we get a mortgage now? Ann resuming work as soon as she’d had the baby? Telling Ann? Again. It had happened again. I was that guy. Laughter keened from my throat. Though I was shaking my head, covering my stretched face with both hands, I couldn’t stop. The Rebecca woman brushed past me on her way out the door, clutching her coat tightly as though whatever I had might be contagious. At last the laughter tipped into a light fearful sob, and this humiliation enabled me to lasso the emotion, squash it with a couple of shuddering breaths. Sit still. I shrunk down in the booth, wiped my face with the flat of my hand. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘All right.’
Ann lay downstairs on the sofa, her long legs over the end, her eyes closed, an effigy from a fairy tale. I poured a beer and sat and watched her, the faint purply lines on her eyelids, the smudged eyeliner, the saliva glistening in the corner of her slightly open mouth. She’d been off sex since she got pregnant. I didn’t know whether or not this was normal and couldn’t think of anyone to ask. The one time we tried it she said she didn’t like the alcohol on my breath. She was dry. We persevered but it didn’t seem worth going through again. I was hoping for a second trimester transformation.
She woke suddenly, with a deep intake of breath. I put down my drink. Her head jerked towards me and she clutched a pillow to her at the same time. For some reason neither of us spoke. She sat up and flicked her gaze around the room, her head darting like a bird’s, as though sure somebody else was there.
‘What?’ I said, and coughed to clear my throat. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’ She stood, then sat down again. ‘I thought there was someone in the room.’
‘Only me.’
Ann told me her dream. It is not my usual practice to listen to other people’s dreams. I can’t bear the female penchant for analysing these sleep-time ramblings as though they contain messages of meaning. Horoscope bullshit, palm reader lies. This time I paid attention. She was still in the dream’s grip, speaking almost in a monotone, holding my arm as though afraid.
When she first woke her voice often sounded more Australian than usual. Ann assimilated successfully when she came to this country over twenty years ago. It was a survival move, she told me, defence against being treated like a colonial bozo by arrogant parochial shit-heads like me. Shit-head, wanker, prick (prek, she said it) – these endearments were common to her, she swore like a posh girl. I have met self-appointed upper-class Australians, with their landed gentry airs and Aryan physiques; they wear linen in varying degrees of beige, their shirt collars up, have suntans and streaked blond hair and speak with pretentious rounded twangs, shushing ‘s’s. They maintain the same old right school, right surname nonsense essential to any strain of society that considers itself superior. In their case it is an especial curse, coming as most of them do from looters, killers and thieves, and that’s just what they did once they got there, never mind what got them sent in the first place. Ann wasn’t one of those.
Some facts are known. She was born in Australia in the mid-1960s. At the point in time that I’m describing, this was all I knew about her life before she landed on these shores, aged seventeen, full of fury and adventure, in the heyday of New Romanticism. Like everyone of her generation she was enraged with the world as it was. She enjoyed the anger; it powered her forwards through her reinvention. Scrupulously she avoided other Australians, the squatted flats of Earl’s Court, the lair-ups and random homesick sex. She was no longer ‘En Weals’ but Ann Wells, who with her drawled vowels and fishnet gloves, tilted chin and smoky eyes, defied anyone who challenged her right to be here.
I was at university at this time, getting sat on by fat lesbians who were in love with Hélène Cixous but couldn’t find anyone to fuck them. If Ann and I had met then, we speculated later, we would probably have gone to bed together and then behaved inhumanly towards each other as quickly as possible. It was my emaciated phase, when cheekbones were at a higher social premium than having a friend who knew Simple Minds (I could tick this box too), and perfecting your angst-ridden bastard routine was guaranteed to get you laid. This was where the puddle-eyed screwy girls entered my life and where I learned that the tougher they acted, the more you could get away with because they couldn’t be seen to care. When I fell in love with Ann I fell way out of my depth. Too late, I discovered that in her the toughness was all true and all a lie, both at the same time.
It is surprisingly, disappointingly hard for me not to ramble on about myself, when my (self-assigned; perhaps this is the problem) task is to figure out how Ann got us both here. I’d have thought years of reading other people’s thinly veiled autobiography in screenplay form for a hundred-odd quid a pop would have put me off the personal. The wandering down lonely streets, the unattainable beauty, the mother fixation and, worst of all, the obligatory masturbation scene. So often have I had to put down my tea in disgust at other people’s compulsion to tell the world their dirty little secrets. But here I am just like everybody else, wanting all the detail, picking over the laundry, not content with what is in front of me now, sniffing hard with my face right up against the past.
Ann became a waitress in one of the champagne-spilling, Camembert-frying restaurants of the day. Before long she was managing the place, greeting people at the door with the unsmiling facial rigor mortis that we all suffered from back then. She was, briefly, at the centre of things, where all the right music was played and drugs were taken and styles were worn; she was someone you had to know. The lifestyle, playing at dressing up, suited her. It was as far from Pokesville Australia as she could imagine. By the time the summer of love hit, she like everyone was bored with looking bored and she leapt on the new drugs, the ones that made her look happy. There were always boyfriends, often older, attached, but nothing serious, and then one day she realised that she wanted to go to Paris but that her UK visa had expired, and so she got married. In the Marylebone Registry Office, upstairs amongst the faux marble columns and oak-panelled walls, at eleven o’clock in the morning she became Mrs Lincoln. It surprised me, this, that she would change her name. Some facts are known.
Ann didn’t live with her husband. She never had sex with him. The deal was that he and his boyfriend could set up in Australia in a couple of years’ time, and she’d go out and act as his wife until the authorities put the right stamp in his passport. Knowing now what I do about Ann’s attitude to her country of birth, I wonder if she ever really planned to follow through, or if the crossed fingers she held behind her back during the ceremony were more about the emigration promise than the wedding vows.
Tonia told me about the crossed fingers. She had met Ann when both were working as artists’ models at a Slade life drawing class. In my limited experience, a certain type of woman becomes a life model. She has a history with class-A drugs and finds it hard to understand why the students don’t lovingly render her tattoos. Ann and Tonia were still young; they had serious nightlife habits to support; Tonia supplied the drugs and Ann had the scars. Over the weeks, in the five-minute interval between classes, as one dressed and the other stripped (look I know it’s not supposed to be sexual, but it just is), they exchanged first covert glances, then nods, then began to speak. They must have been gorgeous then, rake-thin laughing girls, Ann with that tumble of hair and the faint slice marks on her long blue-white thighs, Tonia’s dark brown limbs arranged at angles over the white-sheeted podium, shadows in the cleft of her collarbone as she leaned forwards … Oh, it’s so wrong to think about your wife’s best friend in this way, but as the young say nowadays, it’s so right … Tonia lived near the campus, in a filthy enormous Peckham squat with an indefinite number of people: before too long Ann started sleeping with one of them, Useless Bill, who pretended to be a film-maker but was more a professional ashtray; he smoked roll-ups incessantly and rubbed the leavings on his rank-smelling grey jeans. I like to think the sheer pointlessness of Useless Bill’s existence was the catalyst for Ann’s next move, which was to surprise herself, and everyone she knew, by enrolling in a foundation course at Camberwell College of Arts.
Several years later Ann went, reluctantly, to her husband’s funeral. He had never got to Australia: hepatitis caught from needle sharing kept him at home and eventually a fungal infection killed him. He and Ann had lost touch but his partner called and gave her the news. ‘Dress like a widow,’ Sam told her. ‘Martin would like that.’ So when I first laid eyes on Ann her face was obscured under a black net veil, her tall slim figure encased in a 1940s suit, black high heels sinking into the cold graveside mud. Martin was buried in Bournemouth, where he had been living and then half-living, and afterwards we – those who had been his friends, his family – congregated at the draughty beach hut he had shared with Sam, grey winter waves crashing just outside. It was there that Ann took her hat off and I saw all of her red hair, gathered into a heavy pile at the nape of her neck. She was thirty then and at her most striking, her face solemn and white, a properly sombre note against the multicoloured fairy lights and glowing tulips Sam had draped around the place as decoration.
I was there with Bridget: we no longer lived together but through her I vaguely knew Sam, and paying respects to his dead boyfriend seemed like the right thing to do. But really the wake was intolerable, pervaded as it was with a sullen sort of tragedy despite the Santa’s grotto feel: another good man gone too soon, why Lord why, sort of thing. Martin had belonged to a tight little community of university friends, of whom Bridget was one. Perhaps I envied them their ease with one another, as though they all belonged to the same special race, but since they walked around glum because the race had dwindled, it was not what I would call a fun send-off. Through the fug of cigarette smoke and sea damp I made my way to Sam and asked who was the woman with red hair and he said, ‘Martin’s wife.’ We weren’t introduced but when I overheard her making her excuses, explaining that she had to take the train, I offered her a lift back to London and left Bridget hugging Sam, promising she wouldn’t leave until after the weekend. As I left, my hand hovering near the small of Ann’s back, Bridget gave me the most disgusted of her extensive array of disgusted looks. She knew me.
Who was Ann then? Mostly what I remember is that getting together with her plunged me into a bout of deep insecurity. Who was she? Who cared? Who was I, who dared to think she might want to be with me? Every morning after we slept together I would wake amazed that I’d escaped being transformed into a lion or placed under some other kind of curse. In fact getting her into bed – or across the kitchen table – was the easy part. It was getting into her mind that required a technique I apparently lacked. For the longest time she seemed not to give a shit about me, while I lost every shred of dignity phoning her several times a day, booking tickets to plays that I thought would impress her, cooking extravagant and frankly homosexual fish dinners because she was a part-time vegetarian, and generally haunting her life like a sad old ghost who doesn’t know when to stop.
For a year and a half we took turns visiting each other at night. At that time she had a cheap lease on a place in Clerkenwell, near the hospital where she would later work, just before the area became fashionable. I used to walk down from Camden on sooty summer evenings, find her in her tiny studio flat surrounded by small piles of moulded wax and human hair, slip her sandals on to her long bare feet and gently push her out the door. We’d drink everywhere, in the new gastropubs and the Fleet Street holes and the tapas bars behind Tottenham Court Road, making ourselves wavy, smudged, emerging into tepid air as though into warm water, leaping recklessly on to the number 19 home just as it was pulling away. Ann pulled away, she tried it, she was so totally convincing I was on the verge of giving up, and then – she must have sensed my withdrawal, felt the silence of the phone as the nights went by while I didn’t call her, now a week, now a month – she appeared in the doorway of my flat, ears red, hands thrust into her trench coat pockets, and told me in a quick, angry voice that she loved me. Behind her, across the road, wind shook the tree blossoms. She scowled. Was I so fucking rude that I wasn’t going to invite her in? My mouth filled with a new taste. The beginnings of tears shuddered on her lower lids. Every part of my body was pent with the weeks of restraining myself from contacting Ann but still I drew the moment out, not wanting her to have it so easy. Hate, love.
‘Good,’ I finally said. ‘Because I don’t ever want to go a day without seeing you again.’
‘I’ve got the sack.’ I blurted it, taking a perverse pleasure in the phrase. There was a tense moment when we both waited for me to say, ‘Again,’ but I wasn’t going to blame Ann and once she realised that, perhaps, she laughed. Not in desperation as I had at the café with Alan, but lightly. Where was her panic, the fizzing anxiety of three a.m.?
‘Your face!’ she said, and laughed again. She told me I would get another contract, we had had gaps before, she wasn’t finishing work for another five or six months and something was guaranteed to turn up by then.
I squeezed her arms. ‘You’re amazing.’ It was true, she could make anything better. She edged out of the embrace and went to phone Tonia from the back step. The cool autumn night flowed into the kitchen. I closed the back door.
This was what we had become, after the first symbiotic year of our living together: a couple who needed another couple to be around. Tonia and Andy, the man she had got together with back in the life model days, had no children either. We all behaved, the four of us, as though we had a tacit agreement not to do it, that childlessness was our lifestyle choice. No ties, no banal obsession with schools and jabs and bodily functions, no ugly great family car. We all hated kiddie bores, we socialised with them sometimes but would never stoop to asking after their offspring or remembering their preposterous names (poor little Savannah, showing every sign of growing up to be more lumpen blob than Southern belle; pity snaggle-toothed Indigo and speccy white Sylvester!) Our holidays together were filled with novel reading and explorations, mountain walks and tennis games and one couple clearing off into whatever neighbouring town while the other enjoyed a do-not-disturb afternoon in bed. We stopped short of nicknames, but only just. Considering all this Tonia and Andy took the news of Ann’s pregnancy well. There was just one shaky fortnight when we didn’t hear from them and I did think, here we go. I was amazed by how upset that made me. Not, of course, to the degree where I lay awake at night thinking we’d made a mistake, or wishing we had the friendship back instead of the child ahead. Then Andy called and said they’d still be our friends if we promised never to buy an SUV or use the sentence, ‘We’re pregnant.’ The great surprise for me, when we first met, was that I liked him: it’s difficult to get on with men in that everyday, intimate kind of a way. Andy refused to play most of the games, no posturing or point-scoring: he never engaged in (Ann again) that alpha shit and seemed hardly to notice it when a couple of silverbacks were grunting and wrestling on the floor in front of him. It’s a curse to be a man with an ego these days, you’ve got to fight the war on so many fronts, and I’ve often been tempted to loosen my waistband and begin the slump into passive, feminised middle-age. But I am haunted by an essay of Orwell’s in which he writes something like, most people feel like they are riding their own lives until they’re about thirty, and then they give up, and succumb to the same predictable patterns of all the flabby no-hopers they’re previously scorned. He puts it better than me, of course. But I’d managed to hit forty doing what I want or at least having the illusion that I did, and Orwell’s theory has been the challenge that kept my courage to the sticking-place even when sweating over the lurid murder of another bloody co-ed virgin. Fuck him, I’m still hanging on.
Since Ann had confided in Tonia about my being given the flick I could legitimately see Andy for some sympathy beers without having to tell him myself. We met up in Hackney the next afternoon. Some kids hollered potential gay-bashing abuse as we crossed the road towards the Lauriston, but Andy, a teacher, was used to brutal youth. I always felt safer around him. The pub was fairly empty; paranoid (unemployment will make you jumpy), I wondered whether the boys would follow us in. Without the usual drinkers you were able to see the big walls and the doorway, wide and ominous, but the place had a dress code – no baseball caps, no tracksuit tops – which was a comforting piece of paper. A beer calmed me down. After a brief exchange about the crappiness of the film world (tits-up, I told him) we didn’t touch on my situation again. Andy likes to talk about the movies but only the ones he’s seen. He is a Billy Wilder fan; he’d like life to be arranged like a Wilder film, tough and complicated but with the pure of heart winning through. It’s one of his favourite words, heart, and things either have it or they don’t. Tottenham are all heart; Chelsea have no heart. Channel 4 News, heart. Newsnight, heartless. Tennis, fishing, walking, all activities of the heart, in contrast to card playing, which is so devoid of heart it is an activity fit only for the dead. This caused the odd problem on our holidays, with me usually suggesting some four-handed 500 around evening two. Ann always cleaned up no matter who she was partnered with and that was OK because Ann had heart, she played with it, and Tonia too. On me the jury was – is – out.
He was tired, he said, and had a whiskey tic in one eye to prove it. A kid had come to school with a gun. A knife the year before had been bad enough; the gun was horrifying. The police were always there, people were keeping their kids home. Andy hated what he felt himself turning into: somebody who wanted to run away. He’d been like this before, his first couple of years in, gone to work shaking some days, waiting for the challenge he’d not be able to meet. But he had met them, all the different ways the kids had of fucking with your head, the silent treatment, the outright refusals, the laughter, the lies, he’d worked his way through and survived by staying the same. Consistency’s the most important part of parenting, those infuriating, life-saving books say, though show me a parent who claims to be consistent and I’ll show you a liar. Andy is, more than many people, ineffably himself, with his freckled beakiness and his heart. He should have gone into tertiary education but without ever saying so he felt drawn to teaching in crap schools. A Samaritan perhaps, or a masochist. There was one guy, he said, one fat fucker who was making life tough for him. Not a student, another teacher. Chippy as hell, convinced Andy talked down to him, always interfering, taking sides with the kids. He had nicknames for the nicely spoken teachers. Andy’s was Lady Bountiful, so wrong it was brilliantly right. He’s tall, with the unruly red cowlicks of a Norman Rockwell child, and massive hands and feet. If he were a woman he would have to be one of the incredibly posh and ugly sort. I, on the other hand, am bony and femme to start with, and it wouldn’t take much to turn me into a purring minx straight out of Anaïs Nin. Sorry, not sure how I ended up here.
Andy seemed troubled by something more than the school complaints, but he wouldn’t be drawn. Tonia was fine, his parents were fine, he was just tired. The beers felt good for us both. It wasn’t long before we were on music and then Andy was rabbiting away to the soundtrack of obscure American college bands, those with heart and those who were nearly there but needed to evolve (I loved that phrase). He quoted lyrics, impersonated band members, delivered what seemed, since I didn’t know the music, pithy and perfect analyses of song after song. It was a pleasure to bask in the glory of Andy’s obsession, to be let off the hook of my life for a couple of hours.
When I got home the lights were on. I was a bit drunk, and knocked on the door instead of fumbling with my key. For what seemed a full minute I stood swaying slightly, staring at the chipped green paint, the brass knocker in the shape of a wolf’s head, which we were meaning to replace; I knocked again, loudly. Footsteps sounded and Ann opened the door, hair wet, a towel clutched around her.
She looked at me – past me – and then an odd thing happened. She shut the door. I was still outside. It took my fuggy brain a few seconds to register that she had slammed the door in my face. The wolf stared at me. I slowly blinked and like a cartoon character tried to shake the woolly feeling from my temples. I shoved around in my pockets for my key and jabbed it into the lock.
The house was warm after the cool autumn night. I called out for her. The unfinished, unpainted hallway was empty. There was a blur of motion as suddenly she rushed at me, pushing my shoulder.
‘Bolt the door, bolt the door!’
‘Why?’
Her fingers jabbed my shoulders, the towel slipping, her whole body white and shaking. ‘It’s him – didn’t you see? Right behind you on the path.’
‘Him? That guy?’ I turned to open the door again to check.
She pulled me away, grabbing for the bolt chain. ‘Don’t do that!’
‘Wasn’t anyone behind me.’ The path had been slippy with damp and leaves, the street yellowy dark in that London half-light way. There might have been someone behind me. I wasn’t at all sure.
‘I just saw him.’ She was slightly calmer now the door was bolted.
I followed her into the front room, where she drew back the shutter, hiding behind it while she peeped out.
‘Is anyone there?’
‘No.’ The shutter swung back into place. ‘He’s gone.’
Drinking during the day is never a good idea. I had drifted off on the bus back from the pub and now this hot panic from Ann made the ground drop away from under my feet. It was entirely possible I had been followed from the bus stop or the playground, I now thought, just as it was possible that Ann had seen nothing but a shadow and flipped out. Neither explained why she had shut the door in my face and left me out in the night, alone with the man.
After I’d gone round checking the locks on the windows I found Ann in her dressing gown, chopping onions at the bench in the kitchen. The room looked different. What had she done?
‘Sorry about shutting the door,’ she said before I could ask. ‘That was stupid. I just freaked out.’
I hugged her. ‘It’s OK.’
‘I feel so vulnerable,’ she said, ‘I think it’s being pregnant. Fuck I want a cigarette.’
I coughed. ‘You should have one.’
‘No.’
We had agonised, when doing the place up, over what sort of kitchen to get. The cheapest was made by a company that had a long-running dispute with its workers – men had been on strike for years, families had cracked and fallen – and here we were with our food stored in their fitted cabinets, all in the name of a tight renovation budget and my inability to wield a hammer. Every time I put an expensive brand of pasta or extravagant bottle of wine in one of the cupboards I felt bad karma emanate from the shelves. Ann saw me looking around.
‘I cleaned,’ she said.
‘I see.’
The doors were off the cupboards. Everything inside them was rearranged – glasses where flour and baking powder used to be, spices on the glasses shelf, stacks of tins in the wine rack and plates underneath the sink.
‘It’s better, don’t you think?’
‘Well – no, I don’t get it.’
She slid the onions into a pan and stirred them around briskly. ‘It’s more practical.’
Ann thought she had left Australia long behind but she had that ruthless pragmatic streak and often managed to imply that we English were useless and effete, stuck blindly in pointless traditions such as doors on the kitchen cabinets and keeping pots and pans beneath the sink. The dismantled doors, apparently, were under the stairs, which seemed an appropriate place to keep my guilt. I went to look at them – I don’t know why, to make sure they were there perhaps, still in harmless rectangle form, and hadn’t arranged themselves into the shape of a pointing finger. Ann’s hand had been on the cupboard here too: her toolkit was tidied, the coats hanging by colour, boxes of crap we had never unpacked stacked according to size. Something about all this order gave me a constricted feeling. I’d thought we were the types of people who didn’t care about the neat edges of things, who understood mess and were not afraid of it.
‘Are you sure you saw him?’ I had to ask over dinner, a legitimate glass of wine in my hand. ‘Are you really sure he was there?’
Ann sipped water. ‘Yes.’ Her expression was emphatic. ‘Why would you doubt me? I don’t understand why you would doubt me.’
‘Sorry. You’re right.’ I felt terrible. Only some facts are known.
N.A.M.W. 03.07
They crash on to the large dark-wood bed, faces pale with travel against the crimson hibiscus-pattern cover. Ann feels weightless.
‘I’m so tired,’ she says.
‘I want to fuck you,’ says Tom. ‘ Take these off, ‘ he says, tugging at her hot jeans, lifting the sticky shirt away from her stomach, his hand brushing her breasts. She peels off her jeans, her underwear, unbuttons the shirt, the creamy lei hanging over her naked body, and lies back down beside him, watching. He unbuttons his belt.
Her mind closes in on itself like a swarm of bees, warm, alive only to the humming friction, the heat, the thick grain of the linen underneath her bare legs, the smell of Tom. He pulls her up towards him, kissing her face before turning her over to fuck her from behind. ‘Horny little bitch,’ he says. She registers surprise at the pillow, as though it were a camera: the pornographic anonymity of the hotel room.
His eyes are closed; he pushes at her, lost, listening to the table fan, reaching to clutch at the thick auburn hair lying damp on the nape of her neck. A knock on the bure door. He pushes on in this foreign bedroom, eyes closed as he does it, one audible grunt escaping his throat before he rolls off her, rolls away, pads to the door. ‘Yes?’
She lies watching him, her naked back exposed to the room, and stretches her arms above her head with satisfaction. Tom pulls a towel around his middle, opens the door and a porter stands there with their suitcase on a trolley beside him. The gesture of her nakedness feels like luxury. The door has not closed properly; a sliver of light. She loves Tom for bringing her with him.
Or not. Or, perhaps, this.
She lies watching him, her naked back exposed to the room. Wondering if he really didn’t notice that she didn’t come, wondering if it matters. Tom pulls a towel around his middle, opens the door and a porter stands there with their suitcase on a trolley beside him. In the shadow of the door it is hard to know whether the man has seen her. Tom scrapes the suitcase along the floor. Surely he will want to fuck her again, she is still here, smelling of crushed frangipani and sweat. The door has not closed properly; a sliver of light.
‘It’s the wrong kind of jack point,’ he says, crouching down, looking at a skirting board, his voice tense. ‘I’ve got to get an Internet link. Fuck!’ he explodes, closing the bathroom door behind him. ‘Always something.’
After a moment or two she exhales, gets up off the bed and walks slowly to the unshut door, pushing at it until the snib slides over, then locks, into the door frame socket with a rattly click.
We decided there was no need to worry, we promised each other in fact not to worry, unless the man appeared to follow one of us again. Ann agreed to phone me from work if she was frightened and I would come and pick her up. He was probably harmless, we thought, just a care in the community case who’d been out in the weather too long.
With the second trimester hormones Ann’s mood soared. We fell into a honeymoon dream, alive to our great luck, cherishing the time together before the interloping child was due. Although the meetings my agent had set me up with had so far come to nothing, Ann felt confident that a lucrative script-doctoring job was just around the corner, and quite happily ploughed through her wages to front me. In the evenings I’d meet her at the hospital after work and we’d take the bus into town, go to a movie or to dinner, a late night showing at the Tate, sometimes walking home or taking gratuitous taxi rides along the river. London that autumn was all red-and-yellow neon signs in Chinatown, lacy rain, swirling skies over the Thames, the pearl strings of Embankment lights glowing through the night.
And sex, lots of sex. Not the dirty, fucked-up half-porn we were used to, I don’t think either of us could have managed that while Ann was pregnant. We were self-conscious enough at the start. It had been over three months, the longest break we had taken, and I know she’d discussed it with Tonia. For days, anyway, that was the last time either of us thought about the man or anyone else. At least I didn’t; I can’t speak for Ann obviously, only about her.
She looked more beautiful than ever in those weeks – wore her hair long and loose, instead of the usual falling-down knot at the back of her head. Her body lost its elbowy, gaunt aspect: even her lips took on a Pre-Raphaelite fullness, her eyes shone clear from drinking less alcohol, her skin was appley and sweet. But it wasn’t as though she was morphing into a body-bound corn goddess with chaff in her head – her mind was sharp, quick – she could keep me up all night talking about sculpture, Jeff Koons or the Hepworth Museum or some other subject I had honestly no interest in whatsoever. Her fierce, almost feral, energy was too much to ignore. I’d wake in the morning to find another room reorganised, furniture shifted, Ann on her knees behind the washing machine or scraping out the oven. The windows sparkled, the tiles in the fireplace shone. She was manic. She was fucking manic. I don’t know why that word never occurred to me at the time.
And even as she became more vivid, more present, more her essential self (as I thought), she retreated from me too, the mystery of her core magnetically pulling everything into its dark unknowable space. How to describe it? She was, on the outside, larger than life – but inside she was shrinking.
Don’t think I was analysing Ann’s interior telescoping in any way as it happened. Why would I? We had our own house, we were in love, we were expecting a baby and this intoxicating surge of energy made us feel young. It was a golden time. Like all such times it didn’t last. I’m a moron, OK? I didn’t see it coming.
* * *
We had been to a play in Islington, something we would normally have run a mile from, a devised piece of physical drama with a lot of dry ice. I sat riveted, ideas for my otherwise stalled screenplay rushing towards me with arms outstretched. In the morning these would appear as ridiculous as the black-leotard performers we had thought so entrancing the night before, but we were still in the night before. Afterwards we found a Turkish place and sat at a low lamp-lit table eating mezze, a bottle of red wine between us. Ann was animated, one moment laughing about the earnest theatre buffs we had overheard during the interval, the next crying as she recalled a particular sequence from the play.
Just as suddenly, we were fighting. I had made a joke or a comment or something that was only meant as light teasing about her compatriots – look, we were in a café called Gallipoli, there were some backpacker types at the next table, I mean, come on. It was not a big deal. And she suddenly went nuts. She hissed in my face, called me a fucking English cunt, and stormed out. The connection line for the Switch payment broke down on the maître’d’s first three attempts. Certain my card was about to be declined, I stormed back and forth between the cash desk and the street to look for Ann, inviting huffs about cold air from people sitting by the door I kept opening. By the time I had paid the bill and knocked back my wine and got into the street there was no sign of her. Some fat drunk bloke bellied into me and it was all I could do not to cuff his head. Instead I stood there twisting in the wind (come to think of it, exactly like a fucking English cunt), too embarrassed to call Ann’s name. I walked a little way towards Highbury corner, then back towards Angel, increasingly annoyed. I rang her mobile phone before I remembered she still hadn’t got it replaced after the derailment. And then – it still makes me shiver to remember it – just as I was thinking about the derailment, for the first time since it had happened, the man from the accident – Simon, the television writer – and his wife, the staring-eyed voodoo woman, crossed the street towards me. Perhaps it was the cast of the streetlights in the night but they looked unnaturally tall, lean and angled, like alien visitors alighting from a spacecraft. The first thing I felt, on seeing them, was dread.
They looked at me as though I was familiar but unknown. Stepping forwards I reminded them who I was, pretending to be shakier on their names than was the case. He found himself then and said, Of course, Tom Stone, of course, hi. How’s the writing going?’ I had to explain about having lost Ann, though didn’t say we’d fought, stammering instead through some doubtless transparent story about money machines and different directions and neither of us having listened to the other. There was a moment when they both just stared in silence and I was glad of the darkness because I could feel myself blush. I never blush.
‘Shall we wait with you?’ Kate asked.
‘No, God no. Please don’t. Where are you off to?’
She nodded towards the tube station. Simon’s phone trilled the theme tune from EastEnders.
‘Sorry,’ he said, looking at the caller ID then up to us both, no betrayal of smugness, master of his delight, ‘LA.’ He turned his back and wandered into the shelter of a doorway that I hoped might smell of wee, laughing Britishly and sounding conspiratorial, winning.
‘How’s all that going?’ I asked, ‘with your son? Is he all right, on the underground?’
She looked surprised. ‘Oh yes. He never had any problems.’
I felt let down. ‘Oh.’
‘And Ann? How is she?’
‘She’s fine too. It wasn’t that big a deal, I suppose.’
In the pause while I glanced again up and down the street for Ann, Simon began the ritual noises of signing off … did he really say ‘old bean?’ I looked sharply at Kate but her eyes were fixed on the ground. Her husband swaggered back to join us. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘I’d better get on,’ I said, refusing him the pleasure of asking who that had been … Harvey? Ron? Steve?
‘Jerry’s people want me there for Monday,’ he said in a low, serious voice to Kate that indicated the incredible fucking top-secretness, the cancer-curing aspects of his mission. ‘I’m going to go pack. Maybe we should hail a taxi.’ There he was, the jerk – super-English-guy for the Yanks, Mr America for us.
‘But we’ve got our travelcards,’ said Kate. She touched my arm, which had the entirely unexpected effect of making me want to touch hers. I restrained myself.
‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘I hope you find her.’
‘Nice to see you.’
They walked out of sight, arguing no doubt about her irrational need to save money. I looked back into the road for the black cab that miraculously appeared; Simon’s black cab, I thought triumphantly as I threw myself right into the corner of the back seat, the pulse hard and fast in my throat. Lucky escape.
The sky got light after seven o’clock. I woke on the sofa, cold and sore. Around me the house felt dry and empty. In this place, so much bigger than our old flat, it was possible for someone to appear in a room without being heard. For the first time we had space, and solid walls. Out the door from the kitchen extension was a weed-covered garden, not deep but wide by London standards, like the house. Neither of us liked having anything to do with plants but we wanted the garden to look good; every evening Ann swore she would get out there, but so far she had not. We had only been here a few months. I loved the house on Daley Street with a passion that frightened me, an intensity I thought it was impossible to have for material things. It stood broad and square, rescued by us from dereliction, in a Hackney street of other houses similarly saved, or about to be saved. We were part of the generation that had decided not to care about crack dealers and gun crime in our neighbourhoods; it always seemed to happen to somebody else. Anything was worth putting up with for the sake of a piece of London, a postage stamp of earth, which was owned of course by the bank.
‘Ann?’ Nothing in the room had changed. I felt certain she was home. I walked up the stairs in my T-shirt and underpants and paused on the landing to rub pins and needles from my leg. I had no idea what I was going to say to her. Past the bathroom, my office, its closed door chiding me, unproductive, up the next flight to our bedroom at the top of the house. A chill draught blew over my skin – there was just time to register how cold it was up here – as I entered the room and saw that the four sash windows were wide open.
Ann lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. In that second I remembered a comic book I’d been obsessed with as a boy. A devil spirit sucked out people’s souls and left them lying in seedy Mexican pen-and-ink rooms, wearing not much and staring like this with their unblinking eyes straight ahead. The story went on in sinister fashion, involving a priest past his time and lots of long hair and crucifixes. I walked towards Ann. A shiny streak of tear ran down towards her hair. What on earth had we fought over? Where had she been?
A quick flash in my peripheral vision made me jump: my own reflection in the bedroom mirror. I crawled on to the bed and clutched her like a baby.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
‘Me too,’ I said.
We both fell back to sleep.
Downstairs later we made coffee and toast and talked too loudly and too laughingly in our relief. I told her about seeing Kate and Ann confessed that she had spotted us, from the other side of the road, but been too ashamed to cross over. She’d felt sure I’d told them everything and couldn’t face making up with me in their presence. ‘There’s something about that woman,’ she said, ‘that gives me the creeps.’ I agreed. The peculiar amber of her eyes hadn’t been as noticeable under the streetlights, but the taut skin of her face, almost like a mask surrounded by all that straight hair, left an uneasy impression. She seemed not like a real person but a carved icon. Perhaps this was how I had seen Ann at first, before I made her flesh and blood. No, Ann I had always been drawn to, had always wanted to touch – this other woman, Kate, frightened me, as though she were a primitive figure made of polished wood, hanging on the back of a door in a darkened room.
Ann had stood watching us from across the road and then lost sight of me – at the moment, I suppose, when I disappeared into a taxi. She thought she’d go to Tonia’s in Borough, stay the night even, I could go fuck myself. So she walked down to the harsh fluorescent lights of Angel station and took a used travelcard from a guy wearing a filthy trench coat and with matted hair.
‘Ann, Jesus.’
And on her way walking down the long, long escalator somebody touched her shoulder and it was Simon.
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘So you talked to them too?’
She nodded. ‘I assumed they knew we’d fought so I said how embarrassed I was. They were confused. Then I realised you hadn’t said anything, it was all a bit weird.’
‘Great.’ Exposed as a liar.
‘They were going to King’s Cross.’
So then they had stood in the halfway place between Ann’s platform and theirs while Friday night types lurched past them to wait for trains. They’d talked about children in that way that people had started to do to us now. Simon, apparently, was very funny about childbirth and babies, and Kate was – as you could tell she would be just by looking at her – an enthusiastic advocate of natural birth. ‘And I was still so awake, I felt like there was no sleep left in me ever. So when their train came first we were still talking about babies and childbirth and things, and we just kept talking.’
The milk had pooled in the centre of the coffee cup, a shrunken circle on the top. I swilled it out in the sink.
‘It was odd, being underground with them, seeing as that’s how Simon and I met. And oh, I realised then that their train had gone, I don’t know how I let that happen, and I was mortified, so embarrassed, the next one wasn’t for, like, fifteen minutes, and then mine came and he was in the middle of a sentence and I couldn’t suddenly go right then, sorry you’re talking now, bye!’
‘You missed it.’
Ann giggled. ‘Oh, Christ. Then I’m standing there, he’s pausing like, are you going to? And I’m like, no, no, it’s very interesting what you’re saying … Oh. I’ve just remembered.’
‘What?’
What they had been talking about. She had told Simon what had happened with Tranter. That I was looking for work.
‘Ann, no.’
‘He was lovely about it, he said you must call him, he gave me his card again …’ She left the kitchen while she was talking and stood in the hallway by the door, fishing in her shoulder bag … I let my head drop to the cool hard kitchen table, the thunk of which only slightly eased my humiliation … she was back in the room waggling his cards. ‘Look, two! Really, darling, it was fine. Do you mind?’
‘No. I’m just a loser.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
One of the cards slid across the table into my frame of view. ‘Simon Wright’. A phone number. Nothing else, as though he hardly needed to outline his achievements, which naturally you would already know. He was shedding description and soon perhaps would reach the ranks of those known to the world only by a first name. Simon. Simon. His face on the cover of GQ ‘Simon says.’ Ann interrupted my – what, obsessive thoughts?
‘A train suddenly appeared, so I decided to take it with them to King’s Cross, then get a cab from the rank.’
‘OK …’ What did these people want? What was Ann doing?
They had had to stand – it was the last train of the night, packed and smelling nauseatingly of gin, tonic and fried food. It pulled into King’s Cross station and Ann stood poised to get out, but the doors didn’t open. There was a general groan. Through the scratched, greasy window Ann saw movement on the platform, figures pushing back and forwards. ‘They’re fighting,’ she said.
Everyone within earshot craned to look. A loud crack as a man was pushed hard up against the carriage doors, facing the passengers inside. His attacker kept him pressed up there, holding his head to the door while he punched him in the kidneys from behind. Dull thuds came, sickeningly, through his body, through the door. Kate and Simon looked the other way, refusing to rubberneck. But Ann ducked her head beneath the crowded shoulders around her and watched.
She lowered her face to the kitchen table and said something muffled that I couldn’t make out. When she came up for air she was laughing, like you do sometimes at bad news.
‘It was him,’ she said.
‘Him?’
‘The man, it was the man.’
‘The guy from the playground?’
She nodded.
‘But what did this guy look like?’
‘I couldn’t see clearly, the glass was so dirty, scratched.’
‘Then how do you know? Ann, come on. A skinny guy in a hood? Identify him in a line-up?’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘I mean, I can understand it wasn’t a nice thing to see. But there is no way.’
She had stopped laughing. She nodded, and went to rinse her cup out at the sink. ‘I know.’
The fighting men were dragged away out of sight and the carriage doors finally opened. Ann made hurried goodbyes to Simon and Kate and pushed her way through the oncoming passengers. Outside the station the queue for taxis was at least an hour long. She began the dark foul walk up Pentonville Road, steeling herself from street lamp to street lamp, trying hard not to keep looking behind. The mini-cab office smelled of stale cigarettes and musty carpet; she sat underneath the stark yellow light with nothing to read and wondered whether the man was the one who had been watching her or someone else.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
Ann shook her head. She covered her eyes with her long pale fingers. In the loud, Saturday morning silence that followed, something smelled rank, sweet, like old fruit. A couple of softish apples sat in Ann’s special blue and white earthenware bowl on the table. I tipped them into the bin at the end of the kitchen bench but even with the lid down, the smell stayed in the room.
Ann insisted she didn’t mind doing blood tests alone, but I came along to the hospital for the diversion from my lack of a job. The nuchal fold test a few weeks earlier had been negative, or positive, or whatever it is when your baby has a decreased chance of Down’s syndrome. This made us temporarily confident but she was still edgy because of being older, thirty-nine by the time the baby was due, even though she wasn’t, pregnant at this age in these times, a circus freak. It was odd, she remarked, going to another hospital, the Homerton, all new brick oxblood and cream walls that gave an acidic feeling, so different from the rabbit warren dead-end lanes and grand stone of Barts. For the first few months in the radiation job she’d found it strange, voluntarily going to a hospital to work every day. It must have been how prison workers felt. Tonia had taken a job doing art therapy at Holloway, which she said was fulfilling though some of the women were so damaged it was like watching badly glued broken toys pull themselves around the place. Prison was murder but it was just as hard trying to imagine their survival on the outside. Nearly all of them, even the really hostile ones, came up at some point and asked her to help them. Help them with probation, help them once they were out. One girl was leaving soon and she was terrified, had nowhere to go, no place to sleep and they were trying to put her in a halfway house but she knew that would be the end of her. It was all Tonia could do not to invite her home. We wondered how she had managed it, to draw the line and stay on her side of it. Perhaps when you were doing something good it was easier to live with the stuff you didn’t do as well. Christ, she walked into that place twice a week of her own volition.
‘This is the thing,’ Tonia emphasised. ‘They’ve got stories to tell. Most of them pretty unbearable. You see the results. Personality disorders, self-harm, fire-setting. In there, for fuck’s sake. Most of them shouldn’t be.’
‘Do you believe in prison?’ Ann wondered.
‘I don’t know,’ said Tonia. ‘Maybe not.’
The hospital was a reminder of what women are expected to put up with once they’re expectant mothers – like the pregnancy books that we scoffed at in bed, every sign, every brochure was geared for the retarded, accompanied by photographs of young women breastfeeding, imbecilic smiles plastered to their bovine faces. In the queue for reception we were eighth. The receptionist, tight blonde curls like wood shavings glued to her head, seemed slow on purpose. She disappeared behind a hessian screen. One heavy minute ticked by on the wall clock. Another. The woman at the front of the queue said loudly, ‘I’ve been waiting an hour and three-quarters. I’m not used to being treated like this.’ ‘Go to the Portland then,’ someone behind us muttered. Already there were three people behind us, no, four, we couldn’t leave now, escape to the cafeteria, come back at a less busy time. There would never be a less busy time. In her hands Ann had the manila folder with her antenatal notes. She had read them in the car hoping for some revelation, an outsider’s insight into herself, but they just contained a half page of ticks in boxes, meaningless groups of initials, ‘FHH’, ‘no FMF’, and the sentence, ‘Mother in good health. Possible low blood pressure. Check again.’ Mother? Was she a mother already? This was an exciting, legitimising thought. But she’d been pregnant before … she wasn’t a mother then. Five people ahead in the queue. Some of them enormous. Kids running up and down. Hospitals always felt dirty with the invisible spread of bacteria over handrails and doorknobs, the water-splattered toilets where they kept the bottles for urine samples, pale-blue paper hand-towels mulching away on the grimy floor. In this room, the antenatal waiting area, the carpet was striated with tidal marks of trodden-in street dirt. Where Ann had grown up it was scungy but not dirty. There was a distinction.
What did this scrawl mean? Ann looked at her file again. Yes. A note of past pregnancies. The shorthand couldn’t encapsulate the accident at fifteen, one week into her sex life, with a part-time boyfriend and a broken condom. Getting through the psychological questionnaire that would allow the abortion, worse than the hormone sickness, the anxiety about her father and step-mother finding out. The thudding loudness of her brothers playing basketball against the wall of the next-door room. Her part-time boyfriend scarpering and finally, after waiting five fearful and unhappy weeks from when she’d first figured it out, the procedure. Termination, procedure, operation – these were the words Ann chose, and who could blame her.
Three of them, she went through, in her free fall. And the third and final time she sat so alone with her troubles in that suburban Sydney room and there was I, at the same date down to the year and month, riding a train to my grandfather’s deathbed and thinking I was seeing it all, becoming a man at last. What would I have done, had a magic mirror showed Ann lying on her candlewick bedspread, staring at the ceiling like the possessed woman in the comic strip, large tears sliding from the edges of her eyes down into the hair at her temples? I’d have flung open the door to her father’s house, wouldn’t have knocked, there he goes, there goes Tom, pushing through the open plan living room, television tuned to daytime soap, past the step-mother with a cup of instant coffee in her hand, her mouth a ridiculous O, into the room with the posters of American teen idols Blu-Tacked to the walls. Then what? Tom?
The woman taking her blood didn’t look at Ann once, not at her face, just at the labels on the sample bottles and at her proffered arm. Maybe she looked at the raised zigzag that was Ann’s lightning bolt scar, half visible under her pushed-up sleeve, the end of it lumpy and blurred as though a knife or whatever made the scar had slipped. The tourniquet went round Ann’s bicep; she clenched her fist without being asked. The clinician ran a gentle finger over another, finer scar mark that ran up towards Ann’s elbow.
‘Hmn?’ she said, not really requiring an answer.
‘Yeah, I don’t know what that’s from,’ said Ann. One, two, three tubes, the colour so rich and surprising, almost black, and back in the queue to make the next appointment, a white neat plaster in the crook of her elbow.
Next Ann arranged herself on the examination bed and the student midwife squeezed clear jelly on to the baby bump, then pushed some kind of microphone device around on it. The pop and crackle of a sound system firing up, then a pulse, thick and underwater-heavy, like listening to one of those whale sounds tapes, only good.
‘Wow.’ I gripped Ann’s hand: she’d craned her neck forwards to see what the student was doing, and beamed at me over her double chin.
‘No,’ said the midwife in charge, ‘that’s your blood.’ The student looked at her, uncertain. ‘Keep going.’
My upper lip had gone cold at the word ‘no’. Round and round Ann’s belly swept the sensor device, pushing in at the sides, under the bump until she grunted with discomfort, collecting and transmitting no sound other than the swooshing, regular wave-break of Ann’s own blood. Nothing else.
‘How many weeks are you?’ asked the senior midwife.
‘Seventeen,’ Ann whispered. The midwife hummed. The student’s jaw was set with fear and her eyes were pebbly, rigid as she concentrated. One of those fair women whose skin blotches under stress. A large patch of red welled upwards from the collar of her shirt. Fiercely I hated this airless place, its potential for bad news. The older midwife was asking Ann when she had last felt the baby moving.
‘I don’t know.’ Ann still could not speak above a whisper. She was trying, I knew, to keep her voice from breaking.
‘Don’t worry, baby’s just hiding. Sorry, when did you last feel it move?’
Was she not listening? Ann’s head rolled from side to side. ‘I don’t know, I don’t remember.’
I fixed my eyes on the microphone, willing it to pick up the baby’s heartbeat. Instead it stopped moving. The trainee looked at her superior and shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
As soon as the more experienced midwife took control of the thing we heard it: a fast little tick-a-tock sound, much lighter and quicker than the other. Ann laughed. ‘There he is!’ The midwife smiled expansively, as though she herself had conjured our baby into life. Afterwards, as Ann was queuing to make her next appointment, I pretended to have left some papers in the examination room and found that midwife in the small corridor, talking to an Asian man in a suit whom I presumed was a doctor. Waiting for them to finish I pretended to read the incomprehensible codes on a whiteboard, and skimmed the posters exhorting grown women to breastfeed, stop smoking, eat their greens, et cetera. The previous week I had been climbing the stairs at home when a paperback sailed out of our bedroom doorway and thwocked me in the side of the head. It was a best-seller on pregnancy and motherhood, and Ann had got to the reminder about the importance of washing hands before she’d had, in her words, just about fucking well enough. The midwife came free, and I stopped her as she began to walk away. Her face was so busy it had gone way beyond curiosity; perhaps news of a terrorist plane heading for the hospital would have mildly piqued her interest; anything less, including my gnat-like presence, was simply to be endured. In a way I rather fancied this manner – it reminded me of Bridget. Or my mother. Help.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, apologising for being about to lay into her, ‘but was that really necessary, before?’
‘Was what necessary?’
‘Letting it go on so long, that palaver with the student midwife. I know they have to learn but couldn’t you see we were very upset? That it seemed as if there was no heartbeat?’
She came into focus and looked at me, not without sympathy, and said, ‘But we weren’t waiting very long at all.’
I was nonplussed. ‘We weren’t?’
‘It was a matter of seconds. I’m sorry if it felt too long. Even with an experienced midwife it can take some time, if the baby’s in the wrong position.’
‘Wrong?’
‘Not wrong, just – lying quite far back, hard to get to.’
‘Oh I see.’
‘Was there anything else?’ Now she gave the appearance of really studying me, as though there might be something else, something I wasn’t aware of.
‘No.’
My Switch card was finally declined at Tesco. We’d already booked and paid for a weekend break in Whitstable. That was how things were.
The Kent coast was rough, dark grey, and the Whitstable harbour creaked with salt and rust. The car had made the hour-long trip without dying, for which we were grateful. I was always surprised to see the car in one piece; it wouldn’t be long before it sat battered in the street one morning in a glittering of windscreen, East End hail around the tyres. If it survived the Whitstable public car park I would give it a medal.
We walked and walked that day, round the coast path, along the sea wall, past fishing boats and gravel tractors and beach huts. The wind was too cold and loud for talking. This was a relief. Ann grew tired and we returned to the town for mugs of tea; I ate brown bread and oyster after oyster while she picked at cod and chips. Her energy levels, which had been so buoyant and vital of late, were back to normal again, or less than normal. She seemed reduced.
In the bed and breakfast that night we lay down, our hair thick and greased with salt, our lips chafed, on the soft patchwork bed. I reached for Ann but she rolled on to her side and said she was exhausted. ‘Sorry,’ she said, which I remember hating. ‘Fuck sorry,’ the old me would have answered, but I had already begun treating her with kid gloves. I lay listening to the insistent clank of a fishing boat’s winch and to the sounds of Saturday diners having their night out downstairs, waves of laughter, occasional raised voices. The sea wind looped and groaned outside the building like the villain in a horror movie. Ann would never leave me, I thought. A simple unfinished sentence like that.
The first holiday we ever went on together was to Italy. London had laid on a particularly biting winter, and come late March the days of sleet and little money were wearing Ann down. Sculptures usually littered the floor of her Clerkenwell flat, cloth rabbits and whittled sticks, small creatures with blind eyes that multiplied until a swag of them were given away or exhibited in one of the thrown-together group shows Ann and her art school friends subsisted on. Now she had ceased production. The talismans dwindled in number until only a favoured few were left. It was because she was in love, she told me half jokingly, half angry, she had no spare time any more, no sexual frustration to work through in muslin and kapok and infuriatingly small black buttons. We lay in bed all weekend long until that tipped over from indulgent to depressing. Ann went silent. I took the money my parents had given me at Christmas time and booked us flights to Rome, where neither of us had been before.
It was difficult to believe that this balmy, happy world was only a couple of hours away from home. Dazed, we wandered under cartoon-like umbrella pines, sun loosening our shoulders, golden dust in the dirt paths that wound around the park towards the next gelato. All food, all drink tasted as though it had been spiked. This perhaps was heroin (Ann would know; I was embarrassed to ask her), colours washed to a vibrating brightness, wave after wave of perfumed air, each scent, coffee or garlic or car exhaust swooningly rich. The scale of Rome’s buildings, the aggression of the scooters at your heels, the gobbledegook of the language which I had made no attempt to learn: all of these things floored me. Our room in the Campo dei Fiori overlooked the flower sellers by day and provided front-row seats to the bacchanalia of the local youth by night.
The first night we drank three bottles of red wine at dinner, the house Chianti because it was too hard to order anything else. I asked for what I thought was lamb and was served fish, or perhaps fishy lamb; my head was swimming, it was hard to be sure. The hotel, which we had found in a guide allegedly published for the cash-strapped but fearfully chic, was a pit with an orange candlewick bedspread, rough sheets and things sinister in the fuzzy bathroom grouting. There was no hook for the shower nozzle; you had to hold it with one hand while you washed, presumably to save on the hotel’s water. Remembering Bridget’s disdain for unthinking design (‘it’s greed, sheer greed’) and the way it could taint an entire week abroad I braced myself (‘Yes I want you to go down to reception and ask for another room’), but Ann was enchanted by the ivy outside the window that opened on to the Campo and effusive, even before the red wine, about everything she saw. How easy, how relaxed she was! I revelled in the comparison. (‘Well don’t suggest it if you don’t want to do it. Oh, for God’s sake I’ll go.’) After the fish-lamb dinner we passed out on to the cheap mattress, I don’t remember even walking up the stairs. Then one of those jangly sleeps with too much tannin and sugar in my bloodstream, a running commentary of the day’s new images flickering behind my eyes. My heart clenched, as with panic. In the morning Ann wanted to make love, but I was too ill. The next night she wanted to make love, but I was too tired. And the next night, and the next. By day we wandered like children in history and by night we lay in bed not touching each other, but not innocent; I was mortified and after a few days Ann, thank God, stopped being understanding. Perhaps I wasn’t the first Englishman to be castrated by that city, but it was hard not to hate Rome. Ann looked exquisite, her hair shining auburn in the sunlight, her breasts beneath a fitted white blouse drawing frank stares of admiration from the local garçons or whatever they were called. What am I saying, of course I hated Rome, it was fucking my woman every time we stepped out the door and there was nothing I could do apart from shepherd her into another churchyard, tucking a cardigan modestly across her shoulders, making sure the hem of her skirt was demure. My jealousy rendered me impotent. Ann plied me with alcohol and walked round the small hotel room in nothing but her knickers, lounging in the brown speckled armchair swirling wine in bored come-on circles in her glass. I looked out the window. Paced. Cut myself shaving. Despaired, in the tawny light of another perfect Roman day, that I was so hidebound by my British fuckwittedness that I was going to lose Ann. That’s right, I imagined her saying in years to come, that guy Tom Stone … fine till you get him on to foreign soil … Finally, on the last night of our holiday, we found a little bistro in Trastevere, a place with no concession to romance under the strip lights or on the menu. The old dwarfess who ran the place seemed instantly to glean that we were lovers in trouble. The menu offered only two dishes. Once we had chosen, the wizened Señora handed Ann the carafe of wine and indicated that she should pour me a glass. She was led up two steps into the small kitchen where she was handed a plate and given to understand that it was for me. She filled it from the high saucepan on the stove. The woman nodded again in my direction and Ann carried it carefully down the stairs. At the table she placed the dish gently in front of me and smiled. I smiled back, and felt an unexpected softening inside, a breath out, a surrender. The woman was at Ann’s arm. She tugged her sleeve: and now you serve yourself. But I stood, despite protesting croaks in Italian that we didn’t understand. I pulled Ann’s chair out for her to sit in, took her plate to the kitchen and served her, and wish I was serving her now, still, bringing food for her, and drink, brushing out her long, long hair as I did that night in Rome, finally, the soft streams of it on our hotel room bed. The noise of boys and girls out in the dark square with their cigarettes, their night-time sunglasses, their crazy traditions and their youth was the background to our hot slow kissing, to the hum between my fingers and Ann’s skin.
Ann’s skin, Ann in Rome, in London, in Whitstable that last winter … Ann beside me in the bed and breakfast, sleeping. The lavender smell of her hand cream, the way her red hair looked dark in the darkness, the ripe curve of her hips, that yowling wind, so loud above the sound of her breathing. And I didn’t know anything there, didn’t know fuck, didn’t even know just to stop and take it all in. My mind got busy on the problems with my script, the final, contract-ending draft of which I was meant to deliver to Rosemary the abortionist, as I had come to think of her, at the end of the week. ‘We’ll pay you for this draft,’ Tranter had said, before letting me down, and it was the wretched hope that Rose could still be won over, decide to keep this fledgeling project, that made me determined to deliver her a knock-out. From these thoughts ballooned the money nightmare we were returning to in London, and the slow eliminations of possible sources of income. There were two people left I could beg for a job. Simon Wright was one of them, and I would rather have eaten off my hand before picking up the phone to make that call. The other one was Hallie. The Thames would have to be on fire before I would consider that.
Ann and I drove back from Whitstable in silence. We listened to music but didn’t speak. I started a lot of conversations in my head but abandoned them one by one for being too confrontational in tone, and suspected Ann was doing the same thing. Without knowing how, we’d arrived somewhere that was impossible to talk about. And, as the garish reindeer and holly lights strung around the shopping streets of East London reminded me, Christmas loomed. The combination – my empty bank account, Christmas and lengthy silences – sent me into a quiet panic.
My parents had invited us to join them in Wiltshire, where they retired to die several years ago. My father has long practice at filling holiday silences with his particular stream of consciousness. ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea, who’d like a cup of tea, no don’t get up, look there’s a robin in the garden I said look Stella there’s a robin in the garden, you wouldn’t believe the bird-life we’ve had this year, global warming, monkeys and banana palms soon, now I’m just putting the kettle on and – oh – where were my – there they are – Ann would you like a biscuit there’s nothing to you, are you sure?’ The ease with which I embody him alarms me. My mother less so: she brings to mind the word imperious. If she had pince-nez she would peer over them. As she has aged, her body, her hair, even her features have thickened and settled, become emphatic. There is never a whisper of self-doubt. She suffers more than my father from being buried in the countryside. Where once he had been, if not a Londoner, at least a suburbanite (I grew up in Barnes), he has now become an Englishman. He has his birds, and a hitherto un-guessed-at talent for the rustic that bobbed up on his retirement: genuine pleasure in the changing weather, the mud and skies that instil in me nothing but agoraphobia. (Although I have, since that Christmas, had cause to be grateful for their isolation, and for the breadth of those skies, and the solitary places in the blessedly deaf woods.)
Some weeks earlier we had taken a deep breath and told them our baby news. They were delighted at getting any return on their measly investment of one child. Dad came over all quivery on the speakerphone. Then he made the mistake of asking Ann whether she was going to leave her job. ‘I don’t think so,’ she’d laughed, and we could hear my mother in the background saying, ‘John, you really are ridiculous,’ in the same voice she uses to comment on him beyond his earshot, watching him, say, as he grunted with the effort of extracting their suitcases from the car boot that Christmas: ‘Look at his bandy little legs. He walks extra fast to make them appear longer, but it doesn’t make any difference.’ She took the phone from him. ‘Ann. Now listen. You too, Tom. You’re not going to go in for one of these ludicrous home births. They’re terribly dangerous.’
I began to back out of the room. I wanted the birth to be a sterile, white-sheeted affair if at all possible.
‘No, Mum, I’m going to hospital.’
To me my mother was Stella, had been ever since I went to school, but Ann, in her colonial over-familiarity, called her Mum. We saw them maybe three times a year at most.
That winter I did not relish the thought of being snowbound in the middle of nowhere with Ann and her hormonal mood swings and my parents and my unemployment. If we went to Wiltshire would she begin shifting their furniture at midnight too? I had a vision of my parents’ living room put together like an anagram of itself, dark rectangles on the wall where the watercolours had hung, the rugs pulled up, sofas pushed against the wall as though a space was cleared for dancing. Ann in the middle of the room alone, moving intently, rhythmically to silent music, to music only she could hear.
* * *
We stood on the down escalators, undergoing the long descent at Angel. Christmas shopping weighted our plastic carrier bags like platinum bricks, and it felt like I was carrying my flayed credit card just behind my eyes. Our free hands were clasped together in wordless acknowledgement of that last, stupid fight we’d had near here at the Turkish place, making our peace with it. A matted busker sat cross-legged at the foot of the escalator playing on one of those long pipe things, a didgeridoo or, to give it its correct name, a didgeridon’t. The space filled with that objectionable low brewing sound, something rolling pointlessly round and round the bottom of a large bowl. A never-ending grumble from the bottom of the earth, maybe all right in the desert but not played by some smelly white boy here, it served the same purpose to my ears as the moan of bagpipes. I told Ann this theory – the revenge of the colonies, inflicting their music of complaint on the blameless English commuter. Her fingers grew stiff and tight in my hand and she began talking very loudly; I don’t remember now what she was saying, only that it was from nowhere, irrelevant thoughts, punched out brightly like brass notes against the hot insistence of the Aboriginal pipe. She was trying to block the other sound out – I knew it then – she wanted to hear that menacing noise even less than I.
The question of Christmas had been solved, if you could call it a solution, by inviting my parents to stay with us. They were driving up on the twenty-fourth and had strict instructions to leave after Boxing Day. Perhaps it was because she was pregnant that Christmas suddenly meant more to Ann than usual. Traditionally we both merely tolerated the festive season; now she embraced it with a fever. The lassitude of only days before had left, her mood had spun right round, she was everywhere in the house at once, her voice piping higher than usual, dabbing away at things, busy. Fruit had been soaked, cakes baked, mince pies assembled. Decorations littered every conceivable surface, the house smelled of cloves and oranges, we were living in the window of a Dickensian department store. It wasn’t until my mother arrived on Christmas Eve, bearing box-loads of presents for the unborn child, that I realised Ann’s fervour even had a theme: ‘A Victorian Christmas!’ Stella exclaimed, eyes glowing with approval. ‘Ann, how lovely.’
That night Ann and I sat up long after my parents had gone to bed. She had lit the fire and kneeled by it now, her long white hands smudged with soot, the velvet of her skirt spreading thick and crimson on the dark floorboards beneath her. It was the calmest moment we had shared in days. From where I sat on the sofa her pregnancy wasn’t visible. She could have been the ghost of Janey Morris in a timeless London room. And then I saw Ann as she must once have been: sunburned, freckled, her hair starched with sea-salt, bare knees raw and chapped.
‘Yeah?’ she said, grinning. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘Did I say that out loud?’ I was startled.
‘Say what out loud?’
‘What I was just thinking. You’re fucking with me.’
‘What were you just thinking?’
‘Ah, nothing.’ She was giving me a look, I knew what it was getting at, but the wine, the hour, the quite honestly castrating presence of my parents a floor away in the spare room, I don’t know. I wanted to go to bed, but not in that way.
We were halfway through Christmas morning before anything went wrong. We’d all, under Stella’s instructions, listened reverently to the latest adolescent opera sensation singing a few of the cheesier Anglican hymns: ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Abide with Me’ (’Feel like I’m at the FA cup final,’ I whispered to Dad, who shouted, ‘What?’) and rounding off with ‘Amazing Grace’. ‘Once blind, but now I see …’ Ann closed her eyes … was she nodding off? No, she was weeping, tears sliding out from her closed lids. Such sentimentality! I thought. But the hormones were doing that to her – these days she could cry at a television advertisement for loo roll. ‘OK that’s great,’ I announced once the CD was finished, ‘now I’ve got to make dinner.’ Stella lounged on the sofa in the front room reading the novel I had given her; her short barking laugh of approval punctuated the air from time to time. My father and I were on KP duty, nubbling the ends off sprouts and peeling potatoes. Ann said she was tired and needed a rest, she hadn’t been sleeping. Was there an accusation somewhere in this, I wondered, she had been kept awake not by sex but by frustration? She disappeared upstairs for some while; eventually I called to her, ‘When do you want me to check the turkey?’ which was English for, ‘Get the fuck down here, I am drowning of boredom hearing about Dad’s runner beans.’ No response came. While I waited for one I checked the turkey anyway. Juice ran from its thigh, still pink with blood.
‘What shall I start on now?’ said Dad.
‘Go and put your feet up, read a book.’ Stella’s ‘hah!’ came from the living room. ‘If you can concentrate.’
The bandy-legged comment had predisposed me towards my father. We share a physique. My legs, doubtless, will go the same way.
He left, I sharpened the carving knife, and suddenly she was in the doorway. It felt like there had been a jump in time. I shivered.
She said, in her bright high voice of that Christmas, ‘We don’t need to set an extra place. He isn’t coming down.’
‘Who?’
‘Him, I’ve asked him but he isn’t coming down.’ She spoke speedily, impatiently, as though I were an idiot.
A horrible streak of adrenalin shot through me. ‘There’s no one upstairs.’
‘He’s busy.’ She met my eye. ‘He’s busy writing down everything we do and say.’
‘Ann, you’re freaking me out.’ I reached behind her to shut the kitchen door. It seems terrible to admit but I was more worried about what my parents might think, in that vertiginous minute, than what was happening. Stella was likely to send us to the hospital. Accident and Emergency on Christmas Day. Was this an accident? An emergency? These were the thoughts that fired through me, badly aimed arrows, as Ann and I stood frozen. ‘There’s no one upstairs,’ I said again. ‘Have you been asleep?’ Was she sleepwalking now?
Her eyes flickered. ‘There’s no one upstairs.’
I shook my head no. But was there? We slept with the bedroom window open, even in winter – had the man …? Oh, for fuck’s sake we were throwing madness back and forth between each other like a hot roast potato. Ann looked unconvinced. ‘Let’s go,’ I said firmly, ‘and see.’ It was very important to break the spell, to confront Ann with the empty reality of upstairs; I steered her out of the kitchen by the elbow.
I pushed her up the stairs. No room here for creeping horror movie dread. She stumbled as I stomped and huffed behind her, overtaking her on the last flight of stairs to fling open the door to our bedroom. ‘You see? Nothing there.’ But she was not behind me. I found her back on the middle floor, staring at the closed door of my office, arms limply by her side.
‘He was in there,’ she said.
‘Here?’ The door swung halfway open, then hit something and juddered, stuck. I peered round it. ‘There’s no room.’ Papers, computer, teetering, dust-stroked piles of books, the Perspex model of Ann’s head, filing cabinet drawers stuffed open, boxes of film magazines – there was barely space to sit down.
‘He was in the corner,’ Ann said. ‘With his back to the room. Taking notes.’
‘In real life, or in your dream?’
She considered this, helpless. ‘In my dream?’ The upward inflection of Australian accents, everything an uncertainty, a question. We would not talk about this any more. It was ridiculous. I drew her back on to the landing and closed my study door.
‘Now. Do you think this is a good enough excuse to send my parents packing?’
A note of relief sounded when she laughed. ‘Don’t say anything to them.’ And quickly, ‘I wish it was just us.’ She clonked her head down on to my chest and gave a sort of self-directed growl. ‘I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘You got the short straw on the in-laws.’
We kissed. The bump was pushing me further away every day. ‘Should we make an appointment with the doctor? Get you a little electroshock therapy?’
She laughed and made a ‘lunatic’ face by sticking her bottom lip out with her tongue. ‘I should get more sleep.’
We were better together after that, my parents the tangible common enemy. The sight of Ann across the Christmas table, the pink paper crown skew-whiff on her red hair, sent a swell of admiration rising in me. So what if she had acid flashbacks or low blood pressure or whatever might have caused this waking dream? She had chosen me, who for all my attempts at urbanity – here I went, collapsing time myself – was the child of this stolid respectable English couple, passing pickled walnuts around the table, so un-doubting, so certain of the parameters of their universe, where normality began and ended. Anyone who lived outside of that zone was a freak, not that they would use that word. ‘Different’ was enough to imply distrust, contingency and doubt. I was different. Ann’s love for me proved it.
The little episode was not mentioned again. We waved goodbye to the Citroen on Boxing Day afternoon with relief, leaning into a kiss as soon as the car disappeared, staying close, loving the comforting smell of each other, the emptiness of the street around us.
N.A.M.W. 04.07
She walks up the dusty street following the sound of a choir singing ‘Amazing Grace’. Past a peacock-tiled mosque she comes to a white wooden church, small, its peaked roof unusual here. Ann stands outside the door in the sunlight, her hat in her hands, eyes straining to see inside the dark body of the church. Women stand in rows beneath its ribs, singing. In front of them a man waves his arms. There are maybe a dozen women in there but it sounds like a cathedral-full.
Tom has spent the two days in Nadi doing research interviews. Everyone he speaks to — shopkeepers, hoteliers, policemen — has different opinions about the coup but it has made all of them poorer. Ann slept off her jet lag in the room with lizards on the ceiling. She swims in the hotel pool and walks the ramshackle shopping streets picking up souvenirs and putting them back again. Long-bodied dogs, some with only three legs or broken tails, trot down the middle of the street. On the edges of town chickens roam free.
‘Hallie thinks there isn’t any point,’ Tom tells her, ‘in getting into the human reaction. He wants goodies and baddies. Pow pow.’ Tomorrow’s resort is where, during the 2000 coup, some locals landed on the beach wielding machetes and took the guests and owner hostage for twenty-four hours. Everyone was rescued by a passing cruise ship; no blood was spilled on the sand.
But Hallie wants blood. He wants a visiting American hero trying to save his marriage with one last holiday, taking out the evil Fijian Indian businessmen (who are behind it all, in cahoots with evil British businessmen, masterminding the unknowing native pawns from their evil corporate headquarters) with the help of a trusty Fijian guide who is to be DBTA. Ann has been with Tom for long enough now to know that that means Dead By the Third Act. It all seemed so hilariously pop and fun, this idea, in London. Now that they’re here it is different. She shuts her eyes, her dress sticking under her arms in the humidity, listens to the women sing and wishes she and Tom had come alone, that they’re not meeting up with this person Hallie on the island, that they had paid for this themselves.
The misty feeling of being in a fairy tale was palpable the night I called Simon Wright. In the limbo season between Christmas and New Year anything seems possible. It was certainly possible for the utility companies to keep billing us. Red letters from BT, Thames Water and EDF were magneted to the fridge. Although a constant stream of money out was required, money in was a dry spring. I’d delivered to Rosemary as promised and the final payment from Whirlwind had cleared my credit card. Ann was finishing work in April, when she would go on half-pay for six months. They’d hold the job open for another six. We were awed by our ignorance as we prepared to become parents. There was no way of knowing how Ann would feel about returning to work. Where would we want the baby to sleep? How long would she breastfeed for? Would we be groovy laid-back positively reinforcing parents, or nervous wrecks who lined our house with cotton wool? Who knew? That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don’t know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it’s just the horizon – and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it’s suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you’ve had the right shots. Nothing was certain. Life was tight enough on Ann’s income alone. Interest rates had been raised a quarter per cent, Happy Christmas from the Bank of England, and the mortgage had jumped. In December I had been to six meetings, delivered six pitches for each of my three ideas, toughed out as many humiliating Christmas parties as I could (no heart, office parties, Andy always said, but all right if you want to get laid), worked on plotting out the most commercial of the pitches. Surely someone would bite.
The stairs creaked as Ann descended. They were still unpainted. The hallway was mottled where we had torn down the wallpaper without replacing it. Here in the kitchen the cupboards bore marks of Ann’s latest efforts, the doors refitted because she was sick of seeing the contents. Outside darkness gently concealed the cracked, weedy mess that was the tiny back garden.
‘The cistern’s leaking again.’
‘That guy hasn’t called me back.’ A cheapo plumber, botched job, an unanswered mobile phone. London. In the window Ann was reflected on to the night, a white towel around her body and another towering on her head in a turban. Since the twenty-week scan she’d begun to look really pregnant, as though the magical visions of the ultrasound wand had drawn her belly forwards, changing its shape.
‘What did you say to him?’
‘Left a message for him to call me.’
‘Did you say the cistern is leaking all over the floor?’
‘I told him to call me.’
‘Right.’
‘Ann, what?’ I twisted my neck to look at her in the flesh, not in reflection. A pillar of white. ‘What do you want me to do?’
She exhaled and looked away. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Simon’s card was also on the fridge, half hidden beneath the final demand from BT. I steeled myself.
Kate answered the phone. Her voice was warm, woody, evoking that otherworldliness of hers, carved deep into the prosaic clog-wearing uprightness. If she was surprised to hear from me she didn’t let on; she knew who I was immediately. Even as we mouthed clichés about Christmas I was tempted to abort the call. What did she think of me, this man phoning in the darkness at the loneliest time of the year?
‘Do you have any plans for New Year’s Eve?’ The words came out of my mouth all wrong – it was meant to be a light time-passing question, greasing the wheels, keeping them spinning until the natural pause when I could ask to speak to Simon. It sounded desperate.
‘Actually we’re having a party.’ The worst possible response. Silently I begged her not to invite us, to allow me the dignity of having plans.
‘I just wondered if Simon was there,’ I said.
‘He’s got some people here.’
‘You’ve got people, I’m sorry.’ My body kept tipping forwards, one of those nodding wooden birds, in my need to hang up. ‘I’ll call another time.’
‘Well, what about New Year? Would you like to come?’ Not, ‘Are you free?’ or, ‘We’d love it if you and Ann could make it.’ We’re busy, I should have said, we’ve got people, we’ve got plans. Instead I fumbled churlishly through a series of ums and ahs, I don’t knows and I’ll have to checks. She cut across me. ‘You could talk to Simon then.’
‘No I don’t think so, it’s a work thing, look, yes thanks, we’d love to come to your party. If you’re sure.’
Her laughter was light, relieved. This psycho conversation was coming to an end. ‘Of course. I’ll get Simon to call you before then.’
How sad were we, to see in the New Year with a bunch of people we didn’t know. Andy and Tonia could not understand us and offered to break their rule of spending New Year alone together. But Ann liked the idea of revisiting Kate and Simon’s house. Or maybe she just wanted to reinforce how pleased she was with me for having phoned Simon.
Their house was larger than I remembered, even with a hundred people in it. Kate and Simon were popular. Some of the guests were familiar to me – a director or two, a handful of television actors – a social coup, getting this lot on one of the biggest nights of the year. The rest had the feverish look of parents who hadn’t been out of the house for months. The cumulative babysitting fees from the kitchen alone probably ran to a thousand pounds. Simon had greeted us at the door. He hadn’t phoned me back, and was all mein Host effusion and apologies. He’d call me tomorrow, he definitely would. No hurry, I said, looking him square in the eye. Whenever you’re back at work. He took the proffered bottle of fizz and led us through the crowded hall and to that room the four of us had sat in nearly three months earlier when he made us coffee. Crushed in close behind him, I realised that the smell enmeshed with his hair and clothes, dull on the previous times we’d met, was cigarettes, chemicals and ash. Now it had a sharp, recent edge, as though the secret smoker had been dragging down a chain of final addicted puffs before the year turned. The urge for a cigarette stabbed me. He quickly palmed us off on a pale, sickly looking couple who were clearly at a loose end, grabbed a bottle of wine in each hand and topped up people’s glasses as he moved towards the living room.
We were stuck with the boring couple for a good fifteen minutes and I began to worry that the stain of their inadequacy would rub off on us if enough people saw us with them. Ann abandoned ship first – she was adept at that – by claiming, pregnantly, that she needed to find the bathroom. We limped through another ninety seconds about the neighbourhood (the duration reported accurately here because I was studying the clock on the kitchen wall). Of course they were Kate’s neighbours, these were not the sorts of people anyone had as friends. Blond wispy gluten-and-lactose intolerant angry non-voters. I asked about schools in the neighbourhood and wanted to slash my throat open with a cheese-knife. ‘We’re home-schoolers.’ The boring man drained his glass and said as though he’d noticed a rare and fascinating insect on his shirt front that he was going to get more wine and his boring wife hastily said she would go too and I was left stranded, as if it was I who was the kiss of social death. The situation was all the more hopeless because I had just finished my drink and was gasping for a fresh one but couldn’t run the risk of appearing to follow them to the bar and being shaken off again.
Which is how I ended up in Simon’s study. I went looking for Ann. The loo under the stairs had a small queue and I waited until a man came out. No sign of her. A teenager who must have been hired for the purpose, with spotted cheeks and shaking hands, was pouring drinks in the doorway to the front room. I inserted myself in front of somebody’s outstretched glass and got the refill I so badly needed, without making any new friends. Another aproned teen came towards me with a full bottle and I prised it from him, saying, ‘Let me do that for you,’ splashed meagre amounts into the glasses of two people sitting on the stairs and climbed over them towards sanctuary and Ann.
Only Ann was not about. There was a room off the landing that played host to a sewing machine and dressmaker’s dummy. Of course Kate would make her own clothes, no matter how much wealth her husband accrued, and probably her children’s too. I felt a rush of sympathy for Titus and Ruby-Lou, with their brown bread packed lunches and mental institution haircuts. The dummy was sinister (though armless, I weakly joked to myself) in the same way Ann’s Perspex radiotherapy mask could be: the shell of a person waiting inside a room, always in the house, alive when you were out, helping itself to toast and making long distance calls. I continued. An enormous white-tiled bathroom at the top of this flight, nobody in it. Drinking all the while, almost wilfully because Ann was driving, I took the stairs three at a time to the next flight, peered into a dark spare bedroom, walked past another closed door – the mental patients, no doubt – and ended at the top floor front of the house, in the doorway to Kate and Simon’s bedroom. So this is what television money buys you in Hampstead, I thought, and turned to go back downstairs to do something about Simon’s terrible taste in music. I could not see in the New Year to the Best of the Rolling Stones.
There was a narrow stairway behind me going up. Another floor? An attic, surely. I ventured up, one hand shooting out to the wall to keep myself upright. The office opened to reveal itself the size of the bedroom below it. Light came in from the stairs I had just climbed and from the street outside, falling around two shadowy sofas and a bulky desk. Books lined the walls; at least a dozen more were stacked like a crooked man’s chimney on the desk. The first one I picked up was a medical textbook, the next a guide to basic forensics. They were meaty numbers, on the way to rivalling one part of the Shorter Oxford for heft. He wouldn’t fit these in his luggage on his trips to America. Perhaps he had another office there. He was a transatlantic asshole. And what was this? A copy of Swann’s Way lying casually on a sofa cushion as though just put down at the sound of the doorbell? And above the sofa – oh ho ho – photographs. I switched on the wall lamp and the blurry blacks and whites of Simon’s life pulled into focus. There he stood, on the steps of an anonymously grand neoclassical building, fluted columns behind and his arm around – could that be – Bono? Or just a random berk in dark glasses? Sweet pictures of the kids, one not very flattering one of Kate post-childbirth with a blob in her arms, and another of Simon and Kate all togged up in black tie, Simon holding a piece of sculpture about the size of a wine bottle in his hand. I raised my wine bottle to him in salute. There was the sculpture on the windowsill, clustered with more snapshots of the kids, the deprecating family man. It was of course a trophy of some kind, an award for Best All-Round Pronouncer of Foreign Words or Most Close-Together Eyes, a twisted piece of bronze that looked as though C-3PO had shat it. I peered at the wooden plaque the award was glued to: Best Drama Script from some backwater Central European festival in a country where the viewers were probably still gripped by Poldark. My head green and monstrous, I turned again to the wall … there was another photo, in the tawny colours of twenty or so years ago, of a girl standing in a doorway. White sunlight spilled on her shoulders, across her chest. She was wearing a blue cotton dress that gaped slightly at the neck. Her face was beautiful and not quite formed, the nose a little too big, the cheeks soft and boneless — she can’t have been more than fifteen. Her expression was as undefined as her features, soft, unreadable, that age when all you can do is absorb experience, walk through life as through a rain shower, unable yet to interpret what is happening to you. I had the slight impression of a time-rush, that this was Ruby-Lou six years from now, that I had grown older standing still in this room while the world swirled about me. Of course, the girl in the photo was not Ruby-Lou. It was Kate.
My God, our women change when we marry them. They thicken up, on the inside if not out. Become pragmatists, wide-footed creatures with capable hips. The girl you fell for has a halo of frizz all over her hair now, she gives a grunt of resignation as she takes out the rubbish. In a cream silk camisole and with too much wisdom she handles you in bed. She knows secrets about life but you will never let her quite know yours. It’s her sense of humour that shrivels you, the survivalist’s wryness with which she copes. I’m only teasing. You never thought you’d miss the plate-smashing and weeping of women in their twenties but you do. Now she has the dread power of the life-giver: she has no end of puff, her love and occasionally her rage filling the bellows over and over again.
The light dimmed. I turned. Kate was there, silhouetted in the doorway. In that instant her strange impervious quality physically jolted me. Below her the stairwell light shone upwards, illuminating the grey in her bolt of black hair as though it was electric. She had been looking for me.
‘Hi,’ I said too loudly. ‘Have you seen Ann?’ It sounded like a cover. It was a cover. Really I had been searching for Kate’s dirty underwear. ‘I look like I’m snooping,’ I said, and hiccuped. Hot wine regurgitated quickly in the back of my throat; I swallowed.
‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I held up one of the books, pivoting my body to keep facing her as she walked past me into the room. ‘Has he ever written a character that reminds you of you? A shrink decoding some nutbar patient?’
‘Am I the shrink or the nutbar?’
‘Good question.’
‘I’m not a shrink.’ She frowned at me. ‘You know I’m not a shrink.’
‘I thought …’ This was embarrassing. ‘Aren’t you a therapist?’
‘Yes, I’m a naturopath.’
‘Oh.’ Ann had said therapist. Hadn’t she? You never listen, Tom. The image I had of her in an expensive chair, surrounded by medical textbooks, rich kilims and shelves of symbolic arcana from her travels, melted away. In its place appeared a shabby quack’s office, cheap overhead lighting, everyone in the room egg-shaped, defeated.
She slid open a drawer. ‘Ah.’ A small velvet pouch on a tasselled rope dangled from her fingers. ‘The wishes.’
‘What are they?’ I leaned too close into her. I could sense her holding her breath, so backed up to the doorway.
‘For the New Year. It’s a little ritual we have.’
‘Like a witch.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A wish. For the New Year.’
You understand I had a sort of distant awareness of my idiocy. My reflection sloped in the angled mirror Simon had on a side table (a mirror in a study? Those eyes!) It was like catching a glimpse of myself on a film set monitor; I was horribly conscious of being a short drunk little fucker.
She peeled out from the bag a small rectangle of paper, the same size as for rolling cigarettes. I sniffed deeply, as though I could smell smoke, that longing again.
‘These are wishes. Everyone writes down what they want for the year. Then we burn them. They float, like amaretti papers, you know what I mean?’
It was easier to look at the floor than at her. For a frightening second I felt stirred by dread. Was it dread? Something spiked. I wanted to kiss her. No – much worse – I wanted to bite her neck, suck on her, leave a mark. Looking up unbalanced me and I swayed on my feet.
‘Are you all right? Let’s go down.’
I didn’t want to explain it. I wanted her to know. (Know what? I was on a Mobius strip of repulsion and lust.) She lightly touched my elbow to indicate I should follow her downstairs. I waved her off, hiccuping grossly, it sounded like a sob. On the next level down the landing light had been switched off. The hallway was shadowy and I was grateful for the cool dark length of it in which to recover from my embarrassment. Just as I passed the children’s bedroom a primitive cry came from within. Kate spun round and we performed a terrible little mutual shimmy as she tried to get past me to the bedroom door. ‘Jazz hands!’ I said, and demonstrated. She humphed in annoyance and disappeared through the door. I scuttled away as though it was I, Nosferatu, who had caused the nightmare.
Ann was deep in the back of the living room, talking to a man who was flirting with her. Since her pregnancy had become visible a particular sort of man found her even more attractive. Yuck, my inner eight-year-old said to that, but my inner thirty-year-old was flattered and smug about fathering a child and my forty-year-old self felt proprietorial in a way that Ann, had I ever mentioned it, would have objected to. The partygoers formed a dense crowd to side-shuffle through, but I felt more sober now. Between dancing bodies and laughing heads I had glimpses of her laughing, nodding, flicking her gaze around the room. A few feet away she became aware of my approach. We watched each other as I made my way closer. If Ann had not been my wife, if I had never met her before, the way she looked that night – sleepy, half-bored, amused by some private joke – would have devastated me all over again.
We were going to leave the party before midnight. I didn’t want to run into Kate again and the house was big, but not that big. Drunken conversations, I remember, not the content but the diabetic rush off the wine, the sense of being fucking hilarious, of colluding with another couple in laughter over the orange skins of the TV actors amongst us. Ann pulled me away. Together we filed through the busy rooms. Ann complained her shoes were pinching. I held my hand in the small of her back, supporting her. Two men deep in conversation blocked the way ahead. We paused in our path and Ann shifted her ass with almost imperceptible pressure back into my hand. I moved my mouth towards the curve where her neck met her shoulder and said in a low voice that I wanted to take her home. Her spine elongated as she arched her neck around to slide me a look that meant ‘yes’. We were just in our coats when Simon appeared at the bottom of the stairs bearing a tray with the wishes, Kate’s special little strips of paper on one side and a pyramid of sharpened red-and-black-striped pencils on the other. The two teenage staff followed with identical trays. One wrong move and those pencils would be everywhere.
‘Surely you’re not leaving?’
We pleaded pregnancy (I was beginning to see how useful a social tool this could be) and made our thank-yous and goodbyes to Simon. Ann supported me now as we walked up the black-and-white-chequered path to the street. We were in the car, buckling up, when Ann said, ‘Oh, look.’ I leaned over her from the passenger seat, tempted just to rest my head on her lovely pillowy breasts and fall asleep. Which house was I meant to be looking at? The lights in the wide double bay windows had gone out and the ground floor of Kate’s house was in darkness. Ann breathed in audibly, her chest rising and falling as at first one – then more, then dozens – a hundred tiny orange flames lifted slowly in the air.
‘We should have stayed,’ she said. The moment was held, suspended briefly like the floating, glowing wishes. Then she started the car, shunted into reverse and forward, reverse and forward, to wriggle out of the parallel park, and quickly pulled away. Neither of us wanted to be there to see it when the electric lights came on again.
All over London car horns and firecrackers sounded in the New Year. Back in our neighbourhood after midnight, invisible boys threw bangers from dark doorways and low-rider cars doofed bass as they crawled along the streets. The house was warm; we’d left the heating on, but on the little two-stair drop close to the kitchen Ann paused to sniff the air.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Something stinks.’ She backtracked, and opened the front door again to inhale the outside air, then came back into the hall.
‘No wait.’ She opened the kitchen door. Her hand flew to cover her mouth and nose, and her body convulsed with a dry retch. ‘Oh my God. Something’s died in here.’ All I wanted was sleep, but she gave me one of those marital looks, so I followed as she pressed on through the room to open the windows above the sink and the frustratingly stiff dead-bolt on the back door. It wouldn’t budge, not even when she nearly tore the skin off her fingers with her grip. She sucked at her hand and hopped on the spot.
‘I’ll do it,’ I offered unconvincingly, slumped on the top of the steps down into the kitchen. I couldn’t smell anything. She waved her hands at me in an air traffic controller motion, holding her breath, then yanked open the cupboard under the sink, pulled on the yellow rubber gloves and tried the bolt again. This time it opened.
She exhaled with relief. ‘Can you really not smell that?’
The outside light cast little visibility; it was like the lights in A & E toilets, tinged blue to prevent junkies finding their veins. There stood the wrought iron bulk of the garden table, a housewarming present from my parents and a piece of furniture that always looked as though it yearned for Wiltshire, where it belonged. We kept it covered with pots of herbs, tile samples for the bathroom we would one day decorate, and old silver Ann liked to pick up from Portobello and leave out there to tarnish. (She was convinced that Silvo would harm the baby, and I wasn’t about to polish several dinner sets’ worth of cutlery that we didn’t need.) Beside the table were two plastic orange chairs I had rescued from the skip outside Tranter’s office, hoping he would see me from the window and realise he ought to pay me more. Other than that, the back yard was empty.
It was freezing out there. I sniffed around but smelled nothing but my own boozy breath, which came in satisfying puffs from my mouth. Our Christian neighbours were up, and yellow light from their kitchen slatted through the fence on to the clutter in the passage down the side of our house. Ann picked up a long piece of dowelling and poked at the canvas, the paint cans, the skeleton of her bike. The only smell out there was the chill aftermath of rain on asphalt. I don’t know what exactly is the hormonal trick that gives pregnant women a heightened sense of smell, but from the minute Ann conceived she hadn’t entered the fishmonger’s, or taken out the rubbish, or been able to ‘gas up the car’, as she put it, without wanting to gag.
‘I can’t smell anything.’
‘I think it’s inside.’
The back door creaked in a gust of wind and we both ran to catch it as it was about to slam shut. Ann tripped on the concrete step and hit the ground on the palms of her hands, hard enough to make her cry out loudly. I held her.
‘Are you all right? We should go to bed.’
She shrugged me off. ‘It’s only going to be worse in the morning.’
So much for the promising way we left the party.
Nursing her left wrist, Ann poked around the kitchen for a minute or two, giving me a running commentary — first the smell was strongest in the corner by the oven, then high in the pantry, now under the sink. She was getting agitated, her voice was rising. I didn’t like it.
‘It’s because you smoke, you’ve wrecked your nostrils.’
‘Even if there is a dead rat there that only you can smell, what can we do about it?’
‘There’s no such thing as a rat.’
‘OK. But you know what? There might be dozens of undead rats in the walls,’ I gave quite a good zombie rat impersonation, ‘all arms outstretched and whiskery snouts, but the council are not going to pick up the phone for at least another five days. I’m going to bed.’
Three hours later I was still comatose in our bed from wine and fatigue, and Ann had removed every packet of dried spaghetti, jar of capers, can of flageolet beans, tuna, or crushed Italian tomatoes and stacked them up on the sink bench and kitchen table. She wiped down the surfaces as she went but there were no telltale rodent droppings, no gnawed corners on the paper bags of pumpkin seeds, linseed, Brazil nuts, all the various forms of trail mix she was taking for the baby. The stench wavered, now magnified, now receding; she crushed the ends of some lavender from the garden and left them lying around the room, where I found them, and the evidence of Ann’s cleaning jag, in the morning.
I also found the hole she had smashed in the skirting boards.
The rat catcher, from the only private firm open at that time of year, looked pretty much like his prey. He clacked his teeth when he saw Ann’s botch job on the skirting board and said, ‘You’ll be wanting a builder, love, not me.’ He didn’t do a lot more than Ann had in the way of looking, though he had a little torch that he shone under the stairs and into the bathroom cupboards. I felt self-conscious following him around, so joined Ann downstairs where she made tea. Once the rumbling of the kettle stopped we stood in silence and listened to his heavy footsteps, the joists creaking through the house. It was comforting to think that this man was here shining his light into all of the dim corners. Ann was pouring just-boiling water into the pot when the man gave a muffled yelp. Water splashed the sink and burned her fingers. I grabbed her hand. ‘Quick, run them under the cold tap.’ She shook me off and ran up the stairs. I followed close behind.
The rat man was on the landing, breathing hard. ‘Jesus that gave me a fright.’ He pointed towards my office: ‘That head in there. I thought it was a person.’
Ann laughed. ‘Skinny person,’ she said.
‘Creepy,’ he said.
‘Not as creepy as rats,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well, I can’t see anything. That smell you mentioned, was it upstairs too?’
‘No,’ she told him, ‘just down.’
‘I’ll be honest with you, love, I can’t smell a thing.’
I watched Ann closely. She didn’t flinch. ‘Oh, no it’s gone today. It comes and goes.’
‘If it was rats, I don’t know if it would come and go like that. Specially this time of year. They like to bed down. And I can’t see anything but I’ll leave some bait around anyway. Under the sink in the kitchen, in that gap beneath your bath and I’ll put a bit out the back too. So mind fingers.’
The next day we went to Travis Perkins in Kingsland Road and bought a new plank for the skirting board. We walked through the timber yard, fingers intertwined, the picture of late capitalist home improvement bliss. The vast tracts of planks were covered with green tarpaulins against the weather, and loomed above us like sadly caped, elongated beggars. I gave the man the measurements and he came back with a strip of wood about twice the length of our kitchen. It occurred to me that I might have mixed up inches and centimetres, but I kept that quiet. We guessed how long a piece of wood we would need and returned home. It didn’t quite reach across the splintered mess around the hole. We banged it in anyway, and after a few days became blind to the way it stuck out unpainted, like bad panel-beating, and the dark little gap on one side.
I told Kate and Simon the rat story, with embellishments, when they came for lunch with Tonia and Andy at the end of that week. In schoolboyish fashion my intention was to shock them; much the same motivation kept me going to the window to check the safety of their car. They owned a pale silver people mover. Despite her hippie appearance, she drove it. Simon looked the type of chap to have had his licence revoked. The children stomped up and down the stairs. We hadn’t expected them but Kate had brought their lunch, brown paper bags filled with, I don’t know, miso sandwiches. I settled them upstairs, left them transfixed by Japanese animation and ran back down towards our guests, afraid of what they might interpret from our living room ephemera when I wasn’t there to monitor the scene.
A whole family of rats had decomposed here, I told them, after we heard them scrabbling in their death throes for days. Ann laughed, told me to shut up and come away from the window.
‘Yes, why do you keep checking the window?’ Simon asked. ‘I feel as though I’m in a farce by Feydeau. Oh, open this,’ he leaped up and pressed on me the bottle they had brought round, ‘Don’t cellar it, it’s bloody good.’
‘So is this,’ I said smoothly, continuing to unplug the cork from my own bottle.
‘Where were we, Kat,’ Simon asked his wife using a nickname that disturbingly brought their bedroom into our living room, ‘when we saw that something-or-other je me’n fous? Exquisitely constructed. The play I mean, the theatre was a bit run down.’
‘The Comédie-Française,’ she said, ‘and now you’re being insufferable,’ her emphasis implying that previously it had been me behaving badly.
‘I’m making sure your car doesn’t get set on fire by the local youth. It’s a bit flasher than the ones usually parked around here.’
‘They don’t burn cars,’ said Ann.
‘Those two look dodgy,’ said Simon, who had taken over window duty.
‘That’s Tonia and Andy.’
Momentarily we left Kate and Simon alone in the living room and greeted our friends. ‘How are you?’ Tonia looked good. Women in London are thinner than women anywhere else and she was sometimes too thin, which didn’t suit her now she was forty, even with that enviable West Indian skin (‘Black don’t crack,’ she liked to tease Ann when they were moaning together about getting old). This day there was a warm glow in her face and an air of wellbeing clung to her. She was wearing her usual shabby effort. Most of the time she got around in jeans and some kind of boy’s shirt. She shrugged off her French sailor’s jacket and crumpled it over the banisters.
Simon stood with me in the kitchen while I cooked, and we managed to keep from an embarrassing work exchange or too sticky a silence by letting the conversation float around the property market, which was where my self-loathing really kicked in for the day. Gaily whistling up some risotto for a man I was all but on my knees before made the knife I was using for the onions quiver in my hand. Our phone conversation hung thick and silent in the room. I had let it be known, before Ann invited them to lunch, that I was on the hunt for any kind of writing work, that in fact, some long-running medical soap experience would be intensely artistically satisfying. If there weren’t any openings I quite understood, but given that he’d mentioned, that time at his place … Oh, definitely, absolutely, in fact there might well be something coming up soon … he would be in touch. After this conversation I wanted to have a shower. Humiliation. No real likelihood of a paying job. Any money that might come in would be slow, a trickle. The mortgage fell due at the end of the week and that would clean us out until Ann was paid again next month. I’d paid the last lot of bills on my credit card. And still we hosted lunches! I was forty. Was this failure? Did it feel like this, like the need to stand under hot running water until the cylinder was drained?
Andy hovered in the doorway, offering drinks. I was sweating. On the bench next to the element the kitchen timer dinged, but too late, the risotto was gluggy and fucked, and I had forgotten to make the salad. When Simon offered to ‘give me some space’ I thanked him and topped up my wine. In the empty room I stamped on the bin pedal so hard that the metal spring popped out. The bin lid fell on my chopping board mid-scrape and vegetable debris scattered over the floor. A few liberal sloshes of Noilly Prat are very good for risotto and even better for chefs.
At the table my mind drifted up the stairs to my office and the parking fine that had already hit the double penalty date, the car insurance bill, the council tax bill, the Thames Water bill, the go-nowhere draft of the vampire script, Rosemary’s lack of response, my decision to keep tinkering regardless and try to sell it somewhere else. It was shitty but it was over a year of work and I couldn’t give up on it. Now I was the guy writing a cheesy genre film on spec, the sort of loser they make indie documentaries about, documentaries that are watched by people like my former, successful self in crowded screenings at film festivals. Ann served coffee. The others slowed down on the wine but I topped up my glass with mechanical regularity. Time to dive in.
‘So how’s work going, Simon?’ Beneath the table Ann’s foot pressed slowly but quite seriously down on mine.
‘Great, yeah. Not here, bit of a dry hole here, isn’t it?’
‘Mn.’
‘Had this American thing come up when we spoke on the phone?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ My voice almost wobbled with the effort of keeping it casual, it was like trying to look cool on a skateboard. Hadn’t he been on the phone to America when we met in Islington that time?
‘Yeah, I’m going to be out there for a while.’
I checked Kate. She was talking to Tonia, invisible blinkers keeping her eyes focused solely on her face, the stiffness of her neck betraying that she was listening to every word Simon said.
‘What are you working on?’ asked Ann.
‘A new crime series. Filming out the back of a Disney lot. They call it Mauschwitz.’
Everyone laughed. Kate and Tonia escaped their false bubble of conversation and turned to face the rest of us.
‘What about your work here?’ Ann again.
‘Handing over to my second writer for a while. Be back and forth for a few months, it’s going to be a busy time, but if it works out … ’
‘Your children will have American accents,’ Tonia said to Kate, who looked stricken at the thought.
‘Any stars?’ Andy asked, which I loved him for.
Simon nodded. ‘Some girl off a vampire show.’ I HATE THIS MAN. ‘Remember when vampires were the hot thing?’ he laughed. HATE AND RAGE.
‘The great thing about the undead,’ I said before Ann could say, ‘Oh, Tom’s writing a vampire movie right now, and everyone could think, isn’t he behind the times! ‘What I love about them, vampires, zombies, whatever, is that they know what they want.’
My wife made a scoffing sound and nodded between Simon and the almond friands, indicating he should help himself. He was busy performing an expert inspection of his cappuccino, which I happened to know had been frothed with an Aerolatte from Argos and not the high-end steamer he was used to. After he hummed approvingly I tried to catch Ann’s eye, but she wasn’t interested in that game so I continued with my pet theory: ‘All the undead want is to make more undead – they want to expand the group, they function like cancer cells or Jehovah’s Witnesses.’
‘Or pro-democracy hawks,’ said Andy.
‘Also undead.’ This was Tonia.
‘Exactly. Most sensible living people don’t really want everyone to be the same as them. Except my mother. Most people don’t even know if they want to be as they are or if they’d be better off being different. So we are far more equivocal than the undead, who at least have a simple, easily met want, and are therefore, in our terms, happy.’
Kate laughed. ‘You equate simplicity with happiness.’
‘Of course. We all want a log cabin.’