by Holly Seddon
I look through the kitchen drawers, through the occasional piles of paperwork and behind the last few paintings left. Finally I go back to the bedroom and start to go through his chest of drawers. Boring clothes, well folded. There is some dust on every surface – clearly Dr Derbyshire could do with a real cleaner.
I’m just opening the wardrobe door as I hear the front door to the apartment open.
I freeze, standing prone in front of the open wardrobe. Is it the concierge? If not, has the concierge told the apartment owner that I’m in here?
I hear a man sigh and dump something down on the floor. A bag or a briefcase, it makes a quick leathery slap on the wood. I stay stock still, not trusting that I can do anything without drawing attention to myself. I hear a gush of water and then what sounds like a coffee machine. Still I stand frozen. Next comes the squawk of a chair being pulled out. It must be Dr Derbyshire, and he doesn’t seem to know I’m here.
I step lightly into the wardrobe and close the sliding doors after me, so slowly I can barely stand it. At first it’s pitch black, but my eyes adjust. Fumbling in the gloom, I open Whispa on my phone and send an urgent message.
‘He’s come home!!! I’m trapped in the wardrobe!!!’
Stay calm. He has a reservation for dinner soon, he will leave again.
‘And what if he doesn’t?’
You know what you need to do. Unless you want to get caught?
It gets later and later. I don’t dare relax, don’t scrunch into the corner on top of his pile of shoe boxes or make myself a little nest in his clothes. The blood pools in my feet, I have to wriggle my toes to relieve them but I remain ready to move.
I switch my SIM and see that both Steve and Joe have called and texted me. Steve is wondering where I am, wanting to know if I’ll be much later as he’s cooking. Joe is asking about the whereabouts of a specific sweater. Then asking if I’m OK, asking when I’ll be back, then telling me, ‘Dad’s worried.’
I reply to Joe, then Steve, telling them I went shopping at Westfield and left my phone in the car. I say that I’ve just got it now and that I’ll get dinner out. It’s unlike me, and they know it. But what else can I do?
I switch the SIMs back and wait. I hear the kitchen door close, pray that I’ll hear the front door next. That the doctor is no longer in the house. Instead, the bedroom door opens and he comes into the room. I hold my breath. I hear the slow slide of a drawer, followed by the sharp clatter of it closing again. He steps closer, my eyes cloud with panic and then, as he starts to open the wardrobe door, calm floods me. The same active numbness I experienced decades ago when faced with a similar yet wildly different situation.
I am standing to the side of the door and I have two main advantages over him. Advantage one, he’s shorter and slighter than me. Advantage two, he doesn’t know I’m here so he hasn’t had a chance to plan his defence, whereas I have already planned my attack.
I close my eyes and breathe slowly. In, out, in, out. I raise my arms slowly over my head, fists ready to thump down on his skull. He’s reaching inside the wardrobe now. When his head follows his hand inside, I’ll have to strike.
His manicured fingers grapple to pull a chunky cardigan from a hanger and then, in a split second, it’s over. The arm, the head, the man, gone. The wardrobe door slides shut. Then the bedroom door. Then the front door.
I rub my hands over my face and try to forget what I was about to do, closing my eyes and counting slowly until my heart rate slows again. As I start to climb back out, I spot an old-style jewellery box in the corner of the wardrobe. I tease it open. It’s the kind of little box mothers leave their children when they die. The kind I didn’t get to inherit; the few things my mother possessed were ransacked along with everything else.
This box is almost empty, but propped in one of the slots designed for a ring is an identical SIM card to the one I have. I snatch it up, slide it into the front pocket of my rucksack and walk out quietly, past a different concierge.
*
The adrenaline is still surging when I reach the tube station. It’s been a long time since I felt like this, and I find it hard to square how pumped up and alive I feel, with the depths I just sank to. Depths I’ve not visited in Samantha Redfern’s lifetime.
I’m about to rush through the turnstile when I hear my name just over my shoulder.
‘Samantha?’
I spin around involuntarily, my coat flapping open and my ‘uniform’ exposed. Jonathan stares back at me, taking in my outfit, the wild look on my face, and clearly not understanding any of it.
‘I …’ What can I say? I had forgotten his office wasn’t far from here. I’ve never visited it. I have no legitimate reason to be here, and I’ve told outright lies to my family about where I am. The last time I saw my brother-in-law, I asked him to cover for me. I kissed him. Now this. And I’m supposed to be meeting his wife tomorrow.
‘What are you doing here?’ he says finally, as people elbow past us to barge through the metal gates.
I have no answer. Instead I stare back at him. Jonathan is slim and boyish. You’d guess he was in his early forties rather than fifty-four. There’s an energy to him that sucks everything into it, like a black hole. His smile suggests the promise of something you shouldn’t want, but ache for nonetheless.
Still saying nothing, I gesture for us to walk back out into the dark street, the cold stealing my breath and turning it into steam. I put my hand on his arm and lead him away, down Derry Street and on towards Kensington Square Gardens. He’s stopped asking where we’re going. Now he’s following in silence as I open the metal gate and tug him inside.
There are no lamps in here, just the glow from the nearby buildings. I walk to a thick tree with a bench running around it in a ring, which I tuck my rucksack under. ‘Sit down,’ I say. The same calm as before settles in my stomach. I smile at his bemused expression. ‘I came to find you,’ I say.
Afterwards, we sit wrapped in each other for warmth. Neither of us asks what will happen next, we both know nothing else can happen.
‘It’s a very long time since I’ve done that,’ I say.
‘You and Steve don’t …?’
It’s bad enough to betray our partners but to give up their secrets too is acid on the wound. ‘I meant, take a big risk,’ I say.
He doesn’t reply, but rests his head on mine so I can feel the contours of his skull pressing against me when he speaks.
‘Can I ask something I’ve always wondered?’ he says.
‘OK.’
He lifts his head from mine and looks at me. ‘Where’s your accent actually from?’
I climb down from the bench and rearrange my ridiculous clothes. ‘What accent?’
‘It’s so faint but …’ He smiles awkwardly and stands up, rearranging his belt. ‘It’s still there. I mean, I know vaguely, but Steve is so tight-lipped. I’ve always been curious about you. In lots of ways.’
I tell him. A country in the Balkans he will have seen on the news and never visited.
He mistakes my reticence for embarrassment and reassures me: ‘You shouldn’t hide it, it’s really sexy.’
*
My accent was stronger when I first arrived. I’d hoped to refine it by talking to the locals but most of my conversations were with other people with all sorts of different accents, so it wasn’t easy. Cristina from Romania, two girls from Russia in the room next to us, the men who controlled the house, the passing ‘guests’ that stayed a handful of nights. Instead, I tried to soften the edges of my accent by listening to Radio 4 on the sticky little radio someone had left in the house.
And I was put to work cleaning offices at night, speaking to almost no one, no English practice there.
It was back-breaking work, starting at 3 a.m. and going on until 8 a.m. when the first worker bees arrived. I then slept patchily during the day, Cristina and I curled up like a basket of kittens in our shared bed, ready to get up in the afternoon. We’d eat a hasty meal i
n the communal kitchen, and then I’d be back out to clean schools after the children went home. Cristina was sent out to sleep with men for money. Neither of us was spending time exploring the city and chatting with the locals.
After the border agency raided the cleaning company, we were all redeployed. Some of us joined Cristina, getting into men’s cars, but I was lucky. Because my English was good, I was sent out to Steve’s Surrey home to work as an au pair, armed with fake papers and written references. One of the men in the knotty little network I’d been ‘rescued’ into ran an au pair agency.
As with the cleaning job, all the money earned was handed over to cover the rent and food that I was somehow always in debt for, and had been since I arrived.
But soon, I was completely and irreparably in love. With Joe. The light of my life, I looked forward to getting to work, picking him up and squidging him, making sticky potato prints with him, cleaning his little clothes, more than I’d looked forward to anything in my life. ‘You’re not like other girls,’ my father had always told me, proudly. ‘You’re tough, you’re a fighter, you’ve never wanted to play with dolls.’ I’d believed him. He was right but he was absolutely wrong.
I didn’t meet Jonathan and Paula until I’d been working for Steve for several months. By then I’d anglicised my name from Samanta to Samantha and worked hard to lose the last traces of an accent that stood out like a splinter in moneyed Surrey. Yet still it was noticed. I wonder what else people saw.
I pull a little tree bark from my hair and reach for Jonathan’s hand as we walk towards the station.
*
I shouldn’t admit this, I shouldn’t feel this, but I’m drunk on adrenaline. The lust and the aggression both lying dormant, now awake.
At High Street Kensington tube, Jonathan and I head to different platforms, agreeing in a flurry of soft kisses that this can never happen again. I struggle to see how I can ever hold his gaze in company, or say his name without flushing. How will I meet Paula for brunch?
I change into my clothes and dump my uniform in the toilets at London Victoria. Then I message ‘them’ to say that I have everything they wanted. ‘But what if he reports the theft?’ I ask. ‘They have me on CCTV, and a witness who spoke to me.’
He won’t report it.
‘How can you be so sure?’
How much have you reported?
Touché.
They send back instructions of where to leave it – yet another luggage storage place somewhere near Gatwick – and I spend the rest of the journey home with my eyes closed, reliving the events of the day in shock. A strange swirl of pride in the mix too, and the standard underpinning of rage at being shoved onto this ridiculous rollercoaster.
Before I set off, I check my normal SIM for messages. Paula has confirmed our date for tomorrow, Le Pain Quotidien at eleven o’clock. Any remaining adrenaline and excitement pools cold and damp in my stomach as she adds, ‘I could really do with a friendly face. I think Jonathan is cheating on me.’
‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry,’ I write back. ‘Hopefully there’s an innocent explanation! X.’
I can’t remember the drive home from the station, my brain running through all the possible scenarios with Paula, not to mention how close I came to getting caught in that flat in Kensington.
It’s only as I pull my car onto the drive that I realise I should have shopping bags with me. I don’t even have a handbag, instead I have a rucksack full of cleaning stuff plus a stolen laptop and SIM card. I’m about to reverse back out and nip to the high street to try to find something, anything, still open for business when the front door opens.
Steve is silhouetted by the hallway light, his stumpy feet hanging from the step in their slippers, his eyes as sad as I’ve ever seen them. He’s aged in the last few years, as if a thread got snagged when he hit fifty and the rest of him unravelled. I get out and go closer, leaving the bag in the car. Any last trace of adrenaline has turned to water, sloshing in my guts.
In his hands, Steve holds a letter with a Surrey Police logo at the top. He hands it to me silently and turns away. I read it as I follow him inside.
A speeding ticket from my journey on the night of Jonathan’s birthday. My car number plate but registered to Steve, the only one of us with a valid UK licence. The offence took place at a time when I claimed to be in bed, ill. When I had lied, so easily, so blatantly, to his face.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, but he’s already walked away.
Greg
Friday, 25 October 2019
Greg leans against the flock wallpaper. The door behind him is locked, sealing him into the pseudo operating theatre. ‘Where’s the other doctor?’
‘He quit,’ Rosie says without looking up, fussing with stirrups and swabs.
Since when was quitting an option?
Talia, the girl on the bed, offers her hands and feet with mute resignation. She’d agreed immediately to Greg’s offer, barely a flicker of willingness or reticence, like it was just another in a long line of events outside of her control.
‘I need to prepare the patient next door,’ Rosie says quietly, as she unlocks the door with the big brass key and hands it to Greg. To settle the acid in his gut, he tries to imagine Talia’s face when she receives the money, smiling through the discomfort. He imagines another group of women being led out into the fresh air, getting checked over by a doctor, getting help from his charity.
Is this enough? To negate everything wrong that he has done? Not even close. He can feel sweat seeping through his T-shirt, his heart thundering under the cotton. He’s never been so aware of it before, but for months he’s had constant butterflies in his gut and flurries of heartbeats. Marianne has noticed too, asking him if he’s OK so many times that last night he snapped at her to get off his back. She’d slunk away, hurt. He apologised this morning, cobbled together some excuse about work. She said it was OK but her eyes were sad and she left without kissing him.
He locks the door again and tries to think of something comforting to say to Talia; then he notices the man at the sink is waiting to talk.
‘I’m Pavel.’ The very young man dressed in scrubs offers Greg his hand. ‘The surgeon,’ he adds crisply, through a strong accent. He looks about nineteen, thin dark hair hanging pointed like a beak, pale face pocked with faded acne.
‘Hi, I’m Greg.’
‘I hope that is not your real name,’ Pavel laughs, nervously. Greg shrugs. He wants to add something. He should ask if Pavel – or whatever he’s really called – has actually completed his medical degree. Or when he first performed surgery. If he’s ever performed surgery. He should ask if he’s going to wash his hands again before touching the precious insides of a human being. Where are the gloves? Where is his cap?
Ask something.
Greg opens his mouth.
And what will happen if the answers are wrong? What will Greg do – stop this? Then what? He looks out across the fields. Thinning clumps of grass dot the bald soil, framed by the heavy curtains.
‘Good luck,’ Greg says to Talia. She blinks but says nothing back.
*
He waits in the same room as last time, this time with a phone charger, newspaper and packed lunch. He sits on the bed, sinking into the cushions that don’t seem to have been moved since he was here last month.
He plays Tetris, tears a recipe from the paper that he’ll cook for Marianne some time and starts the crossword, before giving up.
Hours later, while both patients sleep under Pavel’s watch, Rosie eats her sandwiches in the spare bedroom with Greg. Like colleagues. Which, in a way, they are. ‘He gambles,’ she tells him of David. ‘Fucked this place up ’cos of it, apparently.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He told me. And he’s got a big mouth, I now know.’
‘You told him about the drugs yourself?’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ she says. ‘That man is a leaky sieve.’
Greg laughs despite himself. Despi
te the surreal surroundings, the dusty bedspread, the unwashed coffee cups and single-serving sugars lying around.
‘So was it closed down, then?’ he asks.
She shrugs and yawns. ‘Sorry,’ she says, putting a hand to her mouth. ‘So fucking tired, I’m still on shifts at the hospital around this. Yeah, apparently it was sold on for development a couple of months ago and no one knows we’re here. Though he probably lost the deeds in a card game, let’s face it.’ She bites the final mouthful of cheese and pickle. ‘Best get back to it.’
Talia lives. The client lives. There’s nothing more to stick around for and Greg allows David Ross to rally drive him back to the station again. As the car emerges into civilisation, David’s phone starts to ring from its cockpit dock. He ignores it.
This time, there’s no banter, no blethering on. David works his jaw and clicks his tongue as if thousands of angry words are stuck in his throat.
‘See you next time,’ Greg says, but David just drives away.
*
On the cycle ride back from the station, he picks up the ingredients for the shakshuka with feta that he saw in the paper; he’ll make it for brunch tomorrow. Another feeble apology for his crappy behaviour. Tucks it all in his rucksack and hurries home to Marianne, narrowly avoiding a woman with a buggy who crosses the road in front of him without noticing him.
‘Shit!’ he cries and swerves around her.
‘Wanker!’ she shouts. Greg realises he forgot to put his lights on. It’s a miracle he wasn’t hit by a car.
When he gets in, he finds that two of the eggs have cracked. He cleans out his bag and waits for his wife.
When she comes in, he won’t ask her about her day. Not because he doesn’t care – although he’s not really interested in the machinations of secondary school kids – but because he can’t bear the question being returned. To lie by omission is one thing, but to make up a whole workday that never happened is in another league. Sure, Greg, that’s what she’d be upset about if she knew the truth. That you didn’t go into the office.
If he were to answer truthfully, to just bluntly reply, would she even believe him?
