I ordered stuff she could eat cold, to keep things simple - turkey breast, bread and rolls, a bag of ready-cut carrot slices, some apples. I added some fun-size cartons of orange juice, and then on an impulse, a bar of Cadbury’s dairy milk.
This time I had to approach her from the opposite direction, since she’d gone through the door to get to the water bucket and was now on the other side of the door. It didn’t matter: from the master board up in the projection booth, I could open up any route I liked and make absolutely sure of where she was before I moved in, did the drop-off, and retreated again to the booth and the CCTV monitors.
At the sound of the lock clicking, she went scooting back through the door like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
She wolfed the food down like she hadn’t seen bread since the Thatcher years. It was a fucking unedifying sight, so I turned off the CCTV and left her to it for a while.
The next time I checked, she was done. The floor was strewn with wrappers, apple cores, a crumpled juice carton. The woman had spotted the camera and was staring at it as though she expected it to start talking to her. Actually, it could do that if I wanted it to: the cameras each came with a speaker as standard. But I didn’t have anything I wanted to say to her: I just wanted her to eat, drink, wash, fix herself up, and fuck off out of there.
Wash. Okay. I ordered some more groceries and added soap and shampoo to the list, not to mention another bucket. The next time I fed her, I left both drinking water and wash water, but she didn’t take the hint, maybe because the water was cold. Too bad. I didn’t have any way of heating it up, and I wasn’t running a fucking guesthouse.
I spent about three days plumping her up. On the second day I left her some bandages and antiseptic for her fingers, which she ignored, just like the wash water. On the third day I made a similarly useless gesture with some clean clothes, ordered online in the same way from the ASDA superstore at Brentwood.
Okay, so my reluctant houseguest wasn’t interested in personal hygiene, even on a theoretical level. I don’t know, maybe the dirt acts like insulation out on the street, and maybe after the first month or so your panties get welded to your privates past the point where you can take them off. Maybe not, though, since she had to be managing to piss somehow. Following that thought through, I realized it was probably a good thing that the cameras had such crappy resolution. I could see the corner she was using as a latrine, now that I looked for it, and I sure as hell didn’t want to see it any clearer.
Well, the bottom line was that she had to go out looking no worse than when she came in: I wasn’t under any obligation to make her look better.
On day four I drew her a map, showing her how to get back to the vent pipe, and left it with the food. Then I threw the lock on the door behind her and all the other locks leading back to the outer wall and her exit point.
She examined the map as she ate her breakfast, which was croissant and apricot jam. She’d shown a real taste for pastries by this time and none at all for fresh fruit or cereal.
But after she’d finished, she didn’t make a move to step over the threshold. She just wiped her mouth on the napkin provided, dropped it into the water bucket - which always drove me crazy because I had to fish the fucking thing out again - and settled back down against the wall.
What was she playing at? She had to realize I was allowing her to leave.
‘Come on!’ I shouted at the monitor. ‘Get out of there. You’re free as a bird. Go!’
She settled into her characteristic, head-bowed huddle.
Impulsively, I flicked the microphone switch on the CCTV board. I’d never used it before, so I had no idea if it even worked, but a light flashed on the board and the woman jerked her head up as though she’d just heard something - a click, maybe, or else a little feedback flutter from the speaker.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Time to go, lady.’
She blinked twice, her face full of comical wonder. She took her time about answering, though, and when she did it was kind of a non sequitur.
‘Who are you?’ she demanded.
‘The owner,’ I said, and then, not to be put off, I repeated, ‘Time for you to get out of here.’
She shook her head.
I blinked. ‘What do you mean, no?’ I asked, too incredulous even to be pissed off. ‘This is my place, sweetheart. Not yours. You’re not wanted here.’
The woman just shrugged. ‘But I like it here.’
The way she said it made me want to go down there and up-end the water bucket on her head. She sounded like a little kid asking if she could stay a bit longer at the beach.
‘How can you like it?’ I demanded, really annoyed now. ‘It’s a fucking corridor. You like sleeping on concrete?’
‘That’s what I was doing outside,’ she said, calmly enough. ‘And at least here I don’t have homeless guys wanting to charge me a blow job for a place by the fire.’
‘Because there is no fire.’
‘But there is food.’
‘Food’s off,’ I said bluntly. ‘That was the last of it.’
She put her head between her folded arms again, as a way of telling me the conversation was over.
‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘Food’s off. You stay here, you starve to death.’
She didn’t answer. Fine, so she wanted to be alone. I turned off the sound and left her to it.
‘Dumb bitch,’ I said to the monitor, even though she couldn’t hear me now.
That was going to be the first item in a varied agenda of invectives, but I realized suddenly what had just happened, what was still happening. I was angry. I’d managed to get angry, somehow, even though on the face of it I didn’t have the necessary equipment any more.
If I could do anger, then presumably I could do other flashy emotional maneuvers too. Quickly I fired up my computers and logged on to my U.S. trading board. I didn’t surface for five hours, and by that time I was three hundred thousand up on the day.
Saint Nicholas was back, with gifts of ass-kickings for all.
After I closed out on the day, I checked in with the woman. She seemed to be asleep, but she stirred when I clicked the mike back on.
‘What’s your name, darling?’ I asked her.
‘Janine,’ she muttered, looking muzzily to camera.
‘I’m Nick.’
‘Hi, Nick.’
‘You can stay here to night,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow we’ll talk.’
But we didn’t. Not much, anyway. I made a food drop at 6:00 A.M., before she was even awake, then came back upstairs and logged on. I had another good day on the markets, and the day went by in a blur. I did order a folding bed, though, and some blankets and pillows to go on it. I picked a local store that could deliver immediately, had them leave it round by the back door, and lugged it in myself after they’d gone. It made my skin prickle just a little to be in the outside air again, even though it wasn’t a warm day or anything. Just psychosomatic, I guess.
Over the next few days, I furnished Janine’s corridor pretty lavishly. She arranged it: all I did was buy the stuff and bring it to the door then let her choose for herself where to put it. I’d started to leave the mike on by this time so she could tell me what she wanted - a chair and a table, a kettle for making tea, a chemical toilet, even a little portable DVD player and a few movies for her to watch while I was busy on the trading boards.
The weirdest thing of all, though, was that I actually started talking to her while I was dealing. It seemed to help me concentrate, in some way I couldn’t quite define. Most of the things she liked to talk about were stupid and irritating - her favorite celebrities, previous seasons of Big Brother, her hatred for supermodels. I just made ‘I’m still listening’ noises whenever they seemed to be called for and channeled the aggravation into some world-class short-selling.
It got so that if she actually shut up for a while, I’d throw in a question or two to get her talking again. Questions about herself she didn’t
like to answer, except to say that she was living on the street because of something that had happened between her and her stepfather back when she turned eighteen. I got the impression that it had been a violent and dramatic kind of something, and that the stepfather had gotten the worst of the deal.
‘He came on to you?’ I asked, genuinely, if slightly, curious.
‘I suppose. He came into the bathroom when I was showering one morning and tried to get in with me.’
‘That’s pretty unequivocal,’ I allowed.
‘Pretty what?’
‘Clear-cut. Hard to misinterpret.’
‘Yeah, right. So I smacked him in the mouth with the showerhead really hard, and then I ran out.’
‘Naked?’
‘No, Nick. Not naked.’
‘Then you were showering in your street clothes?’
A pause. ‘I didn’t run out straightaway. He fell down and hit his head. I had time to grab some stuff.’
This was in Birmingham, Janine told me, as if I could possibly have mistaken her accent. She’d taken a bus down to London the same day, hoping to stay with a friend who was studying hairdressing and beauty at Barnet College. But the friend had acquired a boyfriend and wasn’t keen on that arrangement. She passed Janine off to another girl, whose floor she occupied for a while. Not a very long while, though: there was an argument about the rules for the use of the bathroom, and she was out on her ear again before the end of the week.
I was starting to see why Janine wasn’t big on washing.
‘So what about you, Nick?’ she asked me, when we’d been doing this for maybe a week or so. ‘What do you do for a living?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘when you put it like that, Janine, the answer has to be nothing.’
‘I can hear you typing away up there,’ she said. ‘Are you writing a book?’
‘Yeah,’ I lied. ‘I’m writing a book. But it’s not to earn a living.’
‘How come? You’re already rich?’
‘I’m already dead,’ I said.
That remark led to a very long silence. The next time I checked on her, she was asleep.
In the morning, she asked me if she could see me.
‘The cameras only work one-way,’ I pointed out.
‘I don’t mean on the cameras. I mean, you know, face-to-face. ’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I lied.
But she wouldn’t leave the idea alone: she kept bringing it up last thing at night, when I was logging off and cashing in. I kept being evasive, and she kept going quiet on me, which was fucking annoying. I’d say good night, get nothing back: she went to sleep each night surrounded by a miasma of hurt silence.
In the end, I did it by accident - almost by accident, I should say. When I unlocked the doors one morning so I could drop off a food delivery, I flicked one switch too many. She was waiting for me as I turned the corner, leaning against the open door with her arms folded in a stubborn, take- no-prisoners kind of pose. The crazy thing is, I sort of knew on some level that I’d done it, that I’d opened the final door and removed that last degree of prophylaxis between us. I just didn’t let myself think about it until we were face-to-face and it was too late to back out.
She stared at me for a long time in silence. Then her face wrinkled up in a sort of slo-mo wince. ‘You look horrible,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ I answered inadequately. ‘You say the sweetest fucking things.’
That made her laugh just a little, the sound pulled out of her almost against her will. She took a few steps toward me, then stopped again and sniffed the air cautiously.
‘What’s that smell?’ she wanted to know.
‘Which one? I have a complex bouquet.’
‘It’s like . . . antiseptic or something.’
‘Formaldehyde, probably. I’m pickled inside and out, Janine. It’s why I don’t smell of rotten meat.’
‘You smell of that too.’
I bridled at that, like some living guy accused of having bad body odor. ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I went to a lot of fucking effort to—’
She made a gesture that shut me up, kind of a pantomime of throwing up her hands in surrender, except that she only threw them up about an inch or so. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re right. You don’t smell rotten. You just look like you should smell rotten. Your skin is all waxy and sweaty, and I can see stitches in your neck.’
My carotid was one of the places where I’d inserted a trocar to draw off some of my bodily fluids way back when I was fighting the war on rot. ‘Don’t get me started,’ I advised her.
So she didn’t.
‘Show me where you live,’ she suggested instead.
She stayed upstairs with me for an hour or so, wrapped in three coats against the cold. Then she retired back to her little dead-end corridor, home sweet home, and spent the rest of the day watching movies. Musicals, mostly: I think she was plugging herself back into the world of the living to make sure it was still there.
The next day I bought her a couple of hot-water bottles, and she was able to stay longer. I didn’t mind the bottles, so long as she kept them under the coats so the heat stayed right against her skin. The thermostats were still set at the same level, so the room didn’t warm up at all, and she didn’t come close enough to me for the heat to be a problem.
I think that was the first day I forgot to lock her in, and after I’d forgotten once, it kind of felt like going back to that state of affairs would be a slap in the face to her - a way of saying that I thought I could trust her; but then decided I didn’t, after all.
That thought raised all kinds of other thoughts, because it suggested that I did trust her. There was no reason why I should. Back when I was alive, I’d never felt more for people like her than a kind of queasy contempt, mixed with the unpleasant sensation that usually translates - by some spectacular whitewashing process - as ‘There but for the grace of God . . .’
But God doesn’t have any grace, and I don’t have the time or the temperament for helping lame ducks over stiles. If I meet a lame duck, generally speaking, I make duck à l’orange.
So what the fuck was going on here, anyway?
At first, I justified it to myself by counting up my market winnings. Janine could make me feel things again, as though my endocrine system was pumping away like it did in the old days - and that gave me a lot of my wonted edge back. But plausible as that explanation was, it was ultimately bullshit. After a week or so, I was spending more time talking to her than I was in managing my portfolios. A week after that, I wasn’t even bothering to log on.
At this point I was even making a loss on the deal, because I kept buying her stuff. It wasn’t even stuff she needed to live any more: it was chocolates and beer and doughnuts and even - I swear to God - a fucking hat.
You’re probably thinking that there was some kind of a sexual dynamic going on. Janine certainly thought so. When I presented her with the final little chachka - the straw that broke the camel’s neck, so to speak - she stared at it for a long time without reaching out to take it. She looked unhappy.
‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What’s the matter? It’s just a necklace. See, it’s got a J on it, for Janine. Those are diamonds, you realize. Little ones, but still . . .’
She looked me squarely in the eye - no coyness, no pissing around. ‘Do I have to blow you to sit at the fire?’ she asked.
I thought about that. I wasn’t insulted: it was a fair question, I assumed, given the way she lived outside on the streets. I also wondered for a split second if she might be offended if she realized how far I was from being attracted to her. She was dirty, she was as skinny as a stick, and she had bad skin. Back when I had a pulse, I would have sooner fucked a greased oven glove.
‘There is no fire,’ I reminded her.
She nodded slowly. ‘Okay, then,’ she said, and took the necklace.
But the writing was on the wall, because once I figured out what it wasn’t, I couldn’t hide any
more from what it was.
That shitty old poem: it’s not ‘lame ducks over stiles.’ It’s ‘lame dogs’.
I watched her sleep that night, and I knew. I let myself see it instead of hiding from it. Fuck, it was nice, you know - watching ghost expressions chase themselves across her face. Hearing her breathe.
The next morning I gave her a roll of notes - maybe twenty grand, maybe a little more - and told her to get lost.
She cried and she asked me what she’d done to hurt me. I told her she’d figure it out if she thought about it long enough. When she asked about the money, I said it was a one-time payment: she should use it to get the hell away from here, and not talk about me to anyone she knew on the street, or else I’d have all the homeless schmucks in Walthamstow climbing up my drainpipes.
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Page 30
