by Denise Mina
She was delighted to hear from him, he could tell by the high tone of her voice. 'Please to come,' she said. 'We can talk please.'
'I'm so sorry.'
'Come to me, Pheel.' She sounded quite turned on, a little breathy even.
He hung up and went back into the pub for another quick half.
It was a cheap room in a pricey area. Soho might have been the centre of the red light district but it was still expensive. Small rooms in overpriced narrow houses. The buzzer system was ramshackle, with biroed names sellotaped on to the buzzers. Some of them weren't even names, some were just descriptions: Young Model, Swedish Girl, Lonely Guy. Anya only had a number on hers. She must have been waiting by the entry phone because the moment his finger came off it she buzzed him up.
The stairs were wooden and narrow and worn in the centre where eager feet had rattled up them and sloped down for a hundred years. Anya was waiting for him on the second landing, dressed in a sheer black silk shirt and jeans, standing in the doorway, watching for his face to appear on the bend. She looked tentative and nervous. He brought his eyebrows together in the middle, whispering her name as he ran up the three final steps.
'Forgive me.' He brought her hand to his lips, looking at her face and noticing a small black crescent on her cheek where the tooth had gone into it. He kissed the mark lightly. She kept his big hand in her small one and pulled him into the flat.
The apartment had been chopped up from a grand whole and there was no hallway. She manoeuvred him to the sofa and sat him down. He stayed on the edge of the seat, acting anxious still.
'I have something for you,' she said and skirted round behind him to a sideboard. 'I bought for you.'
She bent down, presenting him with her tight little arse in denim, and pulled from the cupboard a bottle of Remy Martin XO Special. It was very good cognac and she had the presentation bottle: a flat oval with ornamental ridges all along the side. They had it in the drinks cabinet at work. It was a delicious, cool fit on the well of a palm and cost extra to buy. In the four months they had been together he had never known her spend any money on anything and he knew that this bottle cost closer to a hundred quid than fifty.
'You like?'
He nodded dumbly. There was less work for him to do here than he could possibly have supposed. She was already forgiving him, already smiling at him as she unwrapped the lid and poured the glittering caramel liquid into two waiting glasses.
'I bought you a gift too,' he said quietly, looking back at her.
Anya looked him in the eye as she ran her sharp little tongue around the neck of the bottle. 'That's lovely, honey. Put on the table for me to see.'
'It's nothing much.' He took out both of the green boxes and placed them on the cluttered coffee table next to one another, the big one and the matching little one, and for a moment he considered them and thought they looked like him and Anya, a big one and a little one by its side, perfectly matching.
Behind him Anya raised both hands high, using all her slight weight to bring the heavy ornamental glass bottle down on the left side of Phil's head.
Stunned at the blow he slumped to the side and she hit him again, holding the bottle by the neck, smashing the deep heavy ridges across the right of his head this time, hearing a dull crack. Frowning, she looked at the bottle, but the glass was intact. The noise hadn't come from the bottle. Phil was lying on the sofa, staring intently at the legs of the coffee table, a bubble of red at his ear. She hit him once again, on the temple this time, and his head caved in like a smashed egg. He rolled forward, tumbling paralysed on to the floor, unable to bring his hands up to break his fall. His blood began to spill free and the thirsty carpet sucked it up.
As he lay on the ground listening to his own hot blood glug into the nylon shag the last thing he heard was Anya, tiny hitherto compliant Anya, spit words at him. 'Fuck you,' she said. 'You can fucking hit me? Fuck you.'
He couldn't hear her anymore but his vision was suddenly as sharp as it had ever been. The last image ever to register on his retina was Anya, drinking straight from the bottle, clutching the blood-smeared glass with both her bird-like hands.
She sat alone and still for a long time, drinking brandy, whispering to Phil's cooling body, telling him what a cunt he was. She opened the boxes and saw the bracelet and put it on. It looked ridiculous on her slim wrist.
'Fucking rubbish.'
And then the egg. She opened it in the middle and found a note in Phil's handwriting: I love you. She screwed it up and threw it to the floor. It sucked the blood up from the ground, smothering itself in gore until it was as bloated as a happy tick. Anya clipped the egg to the bracelet and sat back, poking the body with her toe.
'Go fuck yourself.'
The fury ebbed away as the drink warmed her. She would have cried but she wasn't sorry or afraid. Phil had stopped bleeding and the edges of the blood had started to dry by the time she picked up the phone and called the club.
It was nine o'clock and the punters were few and far between. The music blared insistently on the other end and she could hear the girls talking to each other. Eugene? Please to put Eugene. Thanks you, Sally.
She shook a cigarette out of the packet and lit up, inhaling deeply, tipping her head back, closing her eyes and stroking her slim throat with her fingertips. Eugene picked up the phone and grunted hello and Anya lapsed into her own language. 'Eugene,' she whispered, 'I've done it again.'
Suddenly he was attentive. 'By "it" do you mean what happened at home, the Johnny situation?'
He sounded annoyed. She jackknifed slowly forwards over her knees, contracting every muscle in her face until she looked like a small, grieving child.
'He hit me, Euge,' she keened. 'I can't… Euge, I can't take that. My face, it's my face.'
Eugene turned from the bar, cupping his hand over the receiver. 'What's wrong with you? Why do you keep doing that?'
'I got angry. He hit me. Please help.'
He sighed, a breathy exasperated fluster in her ear. 'Anya, I can't help you.'
'Please, Euge, please help me.'
Eugene was a gangster born of gangsters and he had seen some hair-raising sights in his life, but those were accidents of birth and cast. Deep in his heart he was a gentleman. He used violence as a tool, for a reason, but disposing of needless bodies depressed him. It made him question the purpose and point of life.
'No,' he said. 'You'll have to run.'
Contemplating difficulties for herself made Anya howl with grief.
'But Eugene, I'm your family, how can you leave me unprotected? How can you abandon me?'
Eugene waited until she had calmed down and said, 'After Johnny, never again.'
She heard the finality in his voice, remembered wearing the blood-soaked kimono as she sat curled up on the sofa, watching Eugene and his two friends, who knew about those things, coming out of the kitchen for smoking breaks, covered in blood and bits, avoiding her eye. She had liked that kimono. It was yellow and she suited yellow. It looked well with her black hair.
'Anya, wherever you go, remember to call your mother. Goodbye.'
'But Eugene-'
But Eugene was gone.
The International Departures lounge was chic and modern, but one small escalator ride up took Anya into Waterloo train station itself, a grey, cavernous building filled with a yellow light filtering slowly down through the dirty glass above. Disease-ridden pigeons and pedestrians intermingled, all feeding and waiting. It was nine thirty a.m. and the commuter traffic was slowing down.
Anya perched on the coffee bar stool for a long time, watching the women come and go from the toilets across the concourse, looking for someone of her build with luggage. She had seen a couple of hopefuls, but one woman only had a briefcase with her and the other was too fat. The train was leaving in thirty minutes when she finally saw her, a perfect match; the woman was petite, had a suitcase, a red coat and matching wide-brimmed hat. She was well dressed, which pricked at Anya's
vanity. The hat would be the perfect way to hide her face.
She slipped off the stool and walked across the busy concourse, ducking past and around people. She dropped a twenty pence piece into the turnstile and followed her into the ladies toilet. The tail of the red coat swished the bottom of a cubicle door. She was hanging it up. Anya waited silently, watching for an attendant, although there didn't seem to be one, listening for other customers. The place was empty. Everyone was gathering down by the platform, waiting to get through customs before the train embarked. The toilet flushed behind the door and the end of the red coat was lifted up.
Anya slipped into a cubicle opposite the sinks, pulling the door to. The woman walked across to the basin and turned on the water, rolling first one hand and then the other under the tap, watching her hands as she did so. Anya had her hands around her neck before she even realized she was not alone.
The woman struggled, but not for long and not too hard. She can't have had a lot of breath in her to begin with because she was unconscious in thirty seconds and dead in two minutes. As she slumped into Anya's arms her hat fell to the side. The woman's face was covered in small scars, like healed paper cuts. They were all over her neck, rioting up her chin and cheeks, swarming into her mouth.
Anya dragged the body backwards to the cubicle and sat it on the toilet, peeling the coat off her, taking her money and papers, shutting the door on it firmly. She stood in front of the mirror and fixed the hat on her own head. It was a little bit big but it would do. She tipped it to the side at a jaunty angle and noticed the heavy charm bracelet that she still wore. It was all wrong, too vulgar for the cashmere coat and matching luggage. As she left the toilet she let the bracelet slide out of her hand into the mop bucket, the splash barely audible, a flash of gold swallowed by the black water.
She was waiting at passport control when it occurred to her: she did not have scars all over her face. They would know it wasn't her. Suddenly alive, she looked left and right for an escape. They were in a corridor.
Surgery. Could she say she had had surgery and got rid of them, a skin graft, a peel? They might send her back and tell her to get another passport then. The fat man in front shuffled off and she was motioned forward. The woman found the photo and looked at her. She looked closer and handed the book back.
'Merci, Madame.'
She waited until she was in the departure lounge to look through her papers. She was called Helena and when she had applied for her passport five years ago, her skin was as soft and perfect as Anya's.
Denise Mina
***
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