Because She Loves Me

by Mark Edwards

‘But you were looking at me like you knew me. I’ve never seen you before, so . . .’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake. You’d better come in.’

  I followed him into the living room. He picked up the remote and turned off the TV. A half-full ashtray and can of beer sat on the coffee table. Apart from the TV and an iPod dock, a few magazines and books stuffed untidily onto a bookcase, the room was bare. No pictures on the wall, nothing to make it look like a proper home.

  ‘Charlie’s stuff is all in her room. Boxed up. Ready for when she moves in with you.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m Fraser. I’m having a beer. Want one?’

  It was only noon. I shook my head.

  ‘Suit yourself. I’m having one.’

  He came back and handed me a dirty glass containing tepid tap water, then gestured for me to sit down.

  ‘So, are you Charlie’s flatmate?’

  He laughed. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’

  I decided to come back to that one. ‘Why have you been following me?’

  He seemed wired, his left leg twitching up and down like it wanted to detach itself and make a run for it. He stared at me, his eyes wide and unblinking, and I wondered if he was on drugs. Was he a smackhead? He was wearing a thick jumper so I couldn’t see his arms, couldn’t tell if they were covered with track marks. He was chewing gum, even while drinking his beer, and his jaw jerked in time with his leg.

  ‘I told you, I wasn’t.’

  ‘Then why were you staring at me?’

  ‘Because I recognised you, didn’t I?’

  ‘You mean . . . Charlie showed you a photo of me?’

  He barked out a laugh. ‘Yeah. Something like that.’

  ‘What are you smirking at?’

  ‘I’ve seen you in the flesh before, too.’ I didn’t like the way he said it. It was hot in the room but I felt cold inside. ‘The first time I saw you was back in December. That night you and Charlie hooked up.’

  So that was where I had originally recognised him from. That night, coming out of the nightclub. He had seen us and crossed the road. I’d hardly thought anything of it at the time.

  He picked up his beer can but fumbled it, knocking it over. Beer gushed onto the carpet between his feet.

  ‘Oh, bollocks!’ he shouted, springing up and running to the kitchen, coming back with a cloth. ‘Charlie will be well pissed—’ He stopped himself. ‘Ha. Force of habit. I don’t need to worry about all that shit anymore, do I? She’s your problem now.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  He impersonated me, using a whiny voice. ‘What do you mean, what do you mean? You ask a lot of questions. I mean, you’ve got her now, haven’t you? You’re the one who has to deal with her issues.’

  I stared at him. ‘Were you and Charlie . . . together?’

  Fraser snorted. ‘Yeah, we were. For nine months. We moved in here together after we’d been with each other for about a month.’ He looked around the empty room. ‘Good times.’

  ‘I had no idea she still lived with her ex.’ At least I knew now why she hadn’t wanted me to visit her place.

  He picked up the almost-empty can, raised it and sucked out the dregs. ‘Likes her secrets, does Charlotte.’

  I almost said What do you mean? but stopped myself.

  ‘When did the two of you split up?’ I asked.

  He frowned. ‘Do you really expect me to just sit here and answer all your stupid fucking questions?’

  He stood up and I shrank back, suddenly fearful of him. He was bigger than me, though he didn’t look particularly strong. His face twisted into a snarl of hatred, then suddenly relaxed, and he flopped back onto the sofa. He put his face in his hands.

  ‘I thought we were going to be together forever,’ he whimpered. I realised, with horror, that he was crying. I shrank back in my seat, wishing it would swallow me up. Eventually, he wiped his face on his sleeve and groped on the table for a cigarette.

  ‘We split up just after Christmas. That was—’ He gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘That was the worst week.’ I could see him picturing it, like he was reliving a nightmare. Just after Christmas. That meant they were still together when Charlie and I had gone out that night.

  He gathered himself. ‘I don’t want to talk about that week. It’s too . . .’ He trailed off.

  That first night, Charlie had told me she was going to stay with a friend. ‘Did she stay here? That first night I saw you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled with one corner of his mouth. ‘She was really turned on that night. Horny as hell. I suppose I should thank you for that.’

  My insides went cold.

  ‘And now you get to fuck her. Amazing, isn’t she? Unbelievable. That girl . . . I’d give anything, everything, to spend another night with her.’ He stared at me as he sucked his cigarette.

  ‘You haven’t . . . slept with her since I was with her?’

  He laughed coldly. ‘No. I’ve hardly seen her. She’s never here. And now she’s moving in with you and I’ll probably never see her again. But that’s good, it’s for the best. I mean, I’ll be able to move on. Get my life back on track.’

  I waited for him to say more but he changed the subject. ‘Why are you here?’

  I trotted out the lie I’d prepared. ‘I want to surprise Charlie by arranging to move her stuff. I wanted to see how much there is.’

  He swept an arm towards the hallway. ‘Feel free. Second door along.’

  I left the room, leaving him curled into a ball on the sofa. I wanted to go, to get the hell out of here, but I had come here looking for information. This could be my only chance. I had already found out why Charlie had taken so long to contact me after that first night. She had been with this loser. I had taken an instant dislike to him, but I wasn’t sure if I believed him about yesterday. Had he already been in the cafe when I went in? I couldn’t remember. On balance, he was probably telling the truth about it being a coincidence.

  Charlie’s bedroom was almost as empty as the living room. Half a dozen boxes were piled up in the corner, along with a few carrier bags stuffed full of clothes. The bed was stripped to the mattress, the walls bare. The room smelled stale, musty.

  Then I spotted half a dozen canvases leaning against the wall, one against the other. I crouched and studied them. A couple were abstract: jagged lines and swirls, blood reds and blacks. They looked angry. Another was a charcoal sketch of a man, but he had no face. Was it supposed to be me? The canvas at the back startled me. It was a collage of photographs arranged in the shape of a female body. The photos had been cut out of a book: my Rankin book, to be precise. Various models, either naked or nearly nude. Charlie had painted sharp, jagged lines in red across their flesh. It was a powerful picture. But why hadn’t she asked if she could take the book if she wanted to cut pictures out of it?

  ‘Not much, is there?’ Fraser said, startling me. He was leaning in the doorway. ‘You could probably take it home on the bus.’

  ‘She never had much stuff,’ he continued, swaying in the doorway, his eyes pink and unfocused. ‘I used to joke that she always acted like she was preparing to go on the run.’

  ‘How did the two of you meet?’ I asked.

  ‘I was working at King’s.’ Kings College Hospital was just up the road from this flat. ‘I’m in IT and she was on a temp contract there, just before she started at Moorfields.’

  ‘And do you know where she lived before that?’

  He stared at me and a sly smile crept on to his face. ‘She’s as secretive with you as she was with me, isn’t she? It used to drive me crazy. Trying to get any info out of her about her past was like trying to get a cat to go walkies. Her line was that it didn’t matter, that it was all about the here and now.’

  He walked into the room, came up close. His breath stank of warm lager and I shrank away as he grabbed m
y arm and leaned in close, his nose inches from mine. ‘Do yourself a favour, mate. Don’t let her move in. Get away while you can.’

  I pulled my arm free. ‘Why are you saying that? A minute ago you were saying you’d do anything to spend another night with her.’

  ‘Yeah. A night. Not a day.’ He pulled up the sleeve of his jumper and I gasped. The skin was criss-crossed with slashes, most of them scars but some fresh, scabbed over, the skin between the knife-marks looking like it was going to peel off.

  ‘See this. This is what Charlie did to me. She fucked me up.’ A noise came out of his mouth that was half laugh, half sob. ‘She really fucked me up.’

  I waited for him to calm down.

  ‘What did she do?’ I asked quietly, dreading the answer.

  He sat down on the edge of the mattress, picked at one of the long scabs on his arm. ‘It’s hard . . . it’s hard for me to talk about. But you know her. You must have seen it. Signs, at least.’

  I didn’t want to give anything away. I had no idea if I could trust him. And with the conflict raging inside me, the internal war between virus and antibodies, I didn’t want to say anything negative about Charlie. I was still hoping that, any minute, the lights would come on and the truth would be illuminated – the truth being that Charlie was innocent of everything but being jealous, that this guy was a liar or a nutter or both, and that my girlfriend and I could get on with our lives. Walk into our bright future together.

  ‘I’m talking about how possessive she is,’ he said. ‘How jealous. Even though I never did anything to make her jealous. Christ, why would I want to look at other women when I had her? It didn’t make sense. I used to tell her, it’s irrational, illogical. Stupid.’

  ‘What was her reply?’ My throat was so dry I could barely get the words out.

  ‘That love isn’t rational or logical. That it’s meant to be like this: like a tropical storm, a hurricane. Exciting and destructive and unpredictable. She said that when two people love each other they have to give themselves completely. It has to be all or nothing. No one else is allowed in.’

  I wondered if this conversation was awaiting me in the future.

  ‘She hated me seeing other women. Being in IT, I mainly work with a load of greasy blokes, but I have female friends, acquaintances. Charlie went mental if I so much as went for a coffee with them.’

  ‘How long had you been together when she started being like that?’ I asked.

  ‘I dunno. Three months? Everything kind of snowballed after that. I mean, it just went crazy. Intense. Her temp contract ended and she persuaded me to quit my job so we could be together all the time. She wouldn’t let me go out. We got all our shopping delivered. I mean, we became hermits. We stayed in all the time. I lost contact with everyone: my mates, my family. My mum would ring me every day, worried sick, and Charlie wouldn’t let me answer it, said that I shouldn’t need anyone else, even my mum. And I was so scared of her leaving me that I gave in. She had a violent temper too. She smashed up loads of my stuff, all my old vinyl, because she said I’d listened to the music with other women so it was tainted.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I had one album, an old Pixies album, with a picture of a topless woman on the cover. When Charlie saw it she went mental. Accused me of fancying this picture more than I fancied her. She burned it, right there in the middle of the living room. I thought she was going to burn the fucking flat down. She was screaming at me. I’m amazed the neighbours didn’t call the police. But afterwards, the sex . . . That’s why I stayed.’ He hung his head.

  I could understand. Not because he was thinking with his penis – though that was probably part of it. I could understand how you could get trapped in a bubble, the intensity and excitement addictive, this twisted version of love providing rush after rush. It was the opposite of boredom. It was being alive.

  I had tasted that with Charlie too. But I wasn’t like Fraser, the poor sap. I was in control now. I had told Charlie she needed to seek help for her jealousy. I wouldn’t let her control me. I understood the draw of the dark side of love, knew how seductive the stormy waves could be, but I was strong enough to resist.

  Wasn’t I?

  ‘I asked her to get help,’ Fraser said. ‘To see a counsellor about her jealousy, and she told me she was going to see one, but she lied.’

  I swallowed. There were barbs in my throat.

  ‘Then,’ he said, ‘it all changed. Suddenly. She went out one day and came back announcing that she had a new job, a contract at Moorfields. She told me I should get one too, get out of my pit, as she said. It was so sudden, like she’d simply got bored and decided she wasn’t interested any more. She stopped wanting to have sex with me. I tried to talk to her and she said that I was being pathetic, that I shouldn’t expect it to last forever. But I couldn’t suddenly change the way I felt about her.’

  I looked at him, at this shell of a man. Chewed up and spat out. Was this my future?

  ‘That’s when she met you,’ he said. ‘I followed her that night, I admit. I watched you both. I saw her kiss you goodbye. I texted her straight away, telling her that I was going to talk to you, tell you what she was really like, put you off, if she didn’t come home with me. We spent the rest of that week here, talking. Fucking. I called you at one point, but chickened out and hung up. I hid Charlie’s phone, which made her go mad. And at the end of that week, I was worn out. I knew I couldn’t cling on anymore, that I had to let her go. We agreed that she would stay here for a little while, and she moved her stuff into the spare room. This room. And that was it – she went. Leaving me like this.’

  It was raining outside now. In the silence that followed his words, I heard it beating against the window.

  ‘What about other people?’ I said. ‘Did anything . . . happen to any of your friends while you were with her?’

  He stared at me like he didn’t understand the words. ‘What?’

  ‘Your friends. Especially female friends. Ex-girlfriends. Did anything weird happen to any of them?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘But as soon as I let Charlie in, I broke contact with everyone, like I told you. I didn’t have any female friends left. And Charlie was my first proper girlfriend.’

  I let this sink in. So there had been no one to threaten the relationship from the outside.

  ‘Do you promise you haven’t been following me or Charlie around?’ I said.

  He nodded, but I wasn’t sure if I believed him. I still didn’t trust him.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said.

  I walked past him into the hallway, my legs unsteady. My injured knee throbbed and there were spots dancing before my eyes. I had an almost irresistible urge to go home and put the duvet over my head, blot the world out. Stay there forever.

  ‘There are probably others,’ Fraser said, as I opened the door.

  I turned back. ‘Others?’

  ‘Like me. Other men, from her past. I bet she’s left a trail of fucked-up blokes and squashed hearts. And you’ll be next.’ He pointed a shaky finger at me. ‘Think of me, when she decides to leave you.’

  ‘I bet you’re hoping she will,’ I said. ‘Because you’d have her back, wouldn’t you? You’d want her back, anyway.’

  He shook his head. But I knew he would. He’d have her back in a heartbeat.

  Thirty-two

  I leaned my head against the window of the bus, welcoming the vibrations into my skull. The man in the seat in front was talking earnestly to his companion about how Jesus had come to him in a dream and told him that the world would end on April 1st. ‘And it won’t be no April Fool’s joke!’

  I had found out nothing to prove that Charlie was either innocent or guilty of murdering Karen. But I had been given a terrifying glimpse into what life with Charlie might be like. Did I still want to prove her innocence? Maybe I should go to the pol
ice now, tell them my suspicions. Explode everything. Go back to being alone.

  But even as I thought this, a text arrived on my phone.

  Hi handsome. What are up to? Feeling REALLY rough this morning. Can’t concentrate. Why the hell do they have to do training at the weekend? Call me later – maybe we can Skype? Finish what we started yesterday. Love and miss you. xxx PS Can’t wait to live with you :) Exciting! xxx

  I sighed. How could any of it be true? How did I know Fraser wasn’t lying or exaggerating? He didn’t seem like the most stable person on earth, and the more I thought about it the more convinced I was that he was lying about following me. Even if a lot of what he’d said was true, that had been his relationship with Charlie, not mine. He was weak. He had caved in to all her demands, pathetically grateful that she was his girlfriend. The dynamics in their relationship were all wrong; they created bad weather. I would never allow anything like that to happen. Knowing that Charlie was prone to jealousy, possessiveness, even obsessive behaviour, didn’t put me off her. I didn’t want a boring girlfriend and as long as it didn’t get out of control, it would be worth it. I suppose there was also part of me that relished the challenge, that wanted to be the one who rescued her, an atavistic urge that lay deep within my psyche, the need that we men feel to be the gallant prince, the hero, the only man able to tame the wild woman. I wasn’t proud of this. It was just the way it was.

  I wanted to rewind time, just a few days, back before I had started to wonder about Charlie. Back when everything was straightforward.

  Instead, I still needed to prove her innocence to myself.

  I texted her back, still pretending everything was normal.

  Hi gorgeous. Not up to much. Miss you too. Def Skype later. I’ll wait up. xxx

  I sat back and tuned out the doom-mongering warnings of the guy in front. Being on the bus prompted thoughts of the bag Charlie claimed to have left on one just like this. I was now certain that she had been lying. I could picture her rifling through it, spying on my past, feeling sick as she discovered the old photos and letters from ex-girlfriends. Then, in a jealous rage, she had decided to destroy the bag. Dump it in a bin somewhere. She wouldn’t have been able to come up with a story to explain removing just the items relating to my exes; she’d needed to get rid of the whole thing. Then she made up the tale about losing it on a bus, pretended that she had been calling London Transport every day in a desperate bid to find it.