by Unknown
Everything was happening at a remove; everything was unreal. Not long ago Hayden had been leaning over me, hand around my throat and an ugly snarl transforming his face into a stranger’s, and now here I was, making conversation with people who were behaving as if they knew me.
I drank a cup of coffee, strong and bitter and without milk, then another. My hands were shaking. I wanted to be alone in a cool, shaded wood in autumn. I felt dirty and ashamed.
Neal and Guy arrived together. Guy was wearing a suit and when he took off the grey jacket his shirt was dark with sweat at the armpits and down the back. He rolled up his sleeves and mopped his forehead with a white handkerchief. I opened the windows in every room but it still felt claustrophobically hot.
‘There’s not really room for us all here,’ I said.
‘And Hayden hasn’t arrived yet.’
‘No,’ I said. My voice was like dry leaves scraping against each other, and I could feel a flush prickling across my face, under the camouflage. ‘Perhaps we should start without him. You know what he’s like.’ Did that sound natural? Didn’t anyone see? Couldn’t anyone tell?
‘Who the hell does he think he is?’ grumbled Amos, and Joakim gave him a dirty look.
‘Let’s assume he won’t be here,’ said Neal, in a quiet voice that sent a small shudder of dread through me. He was looking at me appraisingly. I felt his eyes on my face, my throat, and all at once I was sure he could see right through me – through the makeup and the scarf and the stupid, stupid frilly shirt, through all my futile pretence and all my transparent lies.
‘Shall we start by clearing the living room a bit?’ said Sonia. ‘We can pull everything back against the walls.’
Everyone started picking up chairs, moving boxes. I saw Sonia shifting pieces of china that seemed to have made their way in here from the kitchen. I was starting to feel sick, but if I could just get through the next couple of hours, it would be all right. Guy was talking about some terrible accident there had been in the early hours of the morning on the M6, a whole family killed. Sonia was issuing instructions to everyone and miraculously giving the room a kind of order. Amos kept bumping his shins and cursing. I thought of the note from Hayden, now lying in my underwear drawer. What was it he needed to say to me and why was I even thinking of going round to hear him out? If I went, I could tell him that I never wanted to see or hear from him again and he had to pull out of the group. But if I did, I’d see his face, ravaged with guilt, and he would speak words of passion and torment and I might – No, no, I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t. Never again. Not ever. I hated him. A man who hit women, a man who left women without a backward glance. I hated him. I did.
‘Bonnie?’ It was Sonia. She put a hand on the small of my back, a light but comforting touch. ‘You look miles away.’
‘Sorry. I haven’t been much help.’
‘Shall I get you something for your throat before we start?’
‘My throat?’ Unwittingly, I put a hand to my neck, which felt sore to the touch. Was it showing? I imagined the colours staining through the makeup I had plastered over it, my mark of shame.
‘Milk and honey to soothe it or something?’
‘That’s nice of you, but I’m fine. It sounds worse than it is. Anyway, I don’t think I’ve got honey and I’ve just used up the last of the milk.’
‘Shall we start, then?’
We began with ‘Leaving On Your Mind’. My fingers knew what to do even though my mind was a jumble of thoughts and feelings. Sonia sang and sounded so powerfully sad that everyone in the room seemed taken over by the emotion, even Amos in his bright summer clothes. I saw him gazing at Sonia, her arms at her sides, palms facing forward, and head tipped slightly back.
‘We can’t,’ I said, as the last note faded. ‘We can’t play this at a wedding. It’s a lament.’
‘We’ve been through this before,’ said Amos.
‘But Sonia’s never sung it like that. It’s going to make everyone cry.’
‘That’s good,’ said Joakim.
‘What? Everyone crying at a wedding?’
‘People always cry at weddings, in films anyway. It’s not a proper success unless everyone’s bawling their eyes out.’
‘They don’t cry because they’re thinking of it coming to an end,’ said Guy. ‘They cry because they’re happy.’
‘No, they cry because they’re filled with strong emotion,’ Neal said. ‘You can’t call it happiness or sadness.’
‘It’s too late,’ said Sonia, with her usual practicality. ‘It’s virtually the only one we all know properly.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what Danielle’s going to think, though.’
‘Who cares what she thinks?’ said Joakim, who had never met Danielle, of course, but seemed to have taken a dislike to her on principle.
‘It is her wedding,’ said Sonia, mildly. ‘What’s next?’
At that moment, the phone rang. Everyone looked at me.
‘Are you going to get it?’ Guy said eventually.
‘They’ll give up in a moment.’
It stopped and for a brief moment there was silence. Then my mobile, which was on the window-sill, started ringing instead. I went over and turned it off without looking to see who was calling, because I knew. ‘You decide what to play,’ I said to Sonia. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’
I went into the bathroom and closed the door, locking it. Then I turned to face myself in the mirror. If you looked carefully, it was possible to make out the bruise above the shirt. The makeup had rubbed off slightly, so that the collar had a grubby, orange-brown stain on it. But, more than anything, I just looked odd. If I had met myself walking down the street I would have thought there was something wrong with me, askew. I blinked and a single small tear ran down my cheek, leaving a snail trail behind it of half-cleared skin. With a forefinger, I gently rubbed my face back to a uniform colour. I wanted to splash myself with ice-cold water, but I couldn’t do that, so I just stood there and gazed at myself hopelessly.
I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. I could hear them all talking next door and knew I should join them, but I couldn’t bring myself to go back in and pretend to be me. Neal came looking for me. He walked over to where I stood, took the glass out of my hand and put it on the table.
‘This can’t go on.’
‘I don’t understand.’
We both spoke in hushed voices, scared of being overheard.
He lifted off the scarf. ‘This.’
‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t. I’ll leave that to your precious Hayden.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I don’t get it, Bonnie. You’re a strong woman. Tough, even. Until this happened, I’d have said you wouldn’t let anyone mess with you.’
‘I didn’t let him.’
‘Look at yourself.’
‘Don’t look at me, please don’t.’
‘You look dreadful. Your neck is one great bruise and you can hardly move your face.’
‘Only because it’s caked in makeup.’
‘Don’t make a joke of it. You’re a victim of abuse.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Why is that your business?’
‘I’m not going to stand by and let him do this to you.’
‘He’ll never do it again.’
‘So you’re going to leave him?’
I turned away. ‘This is for me to sort out, not you.’
‘I’m not doing it out of concern or kindness,’ he hissed. He leaned towards me and I shrank back. ‘And I’m not going to stand by. I’m going to go and tell him to lay off. You hear?’
‘Hear what?’ Amos stood in the doorway. He looked amused.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Nothing at all,’ Neal echoed.
‘Well, whatever this great nothing is, t
ake a break from it and come and rehearse. Everyone’s waiting for you. You look as though you’ve caught the sun, Bonnie,’ he added, as I passed him. ‘You should be careful, with a pale skin like yours.’
After
When I got off the train at King’s Cross it was late evening and the sky was a glaring purple; the air was heavy. It looked as though the weather was going to break in a great downfall. I didn’t go straight home. I needed to think and clear my head, so I walked past all the new flats and offices of curved glass, the swathes of land that were being cleared for redevelopment, and down to the canal. London seemed to drop away. The water was a dark, murky brown, the colour of stewed tea, and ripples blew across it. I felt the first drops of rain on my face and shivered, suddenly cold in my thin clothes. I was tired, jittery with too much caffeine and hollow from lack of food. But my mind was agitated.
I walked along the towpath. There was a barge with tubs of flowers on the deck and, in the cabin, I could see a middle-aged woman in spectacles reading a newspaper. A runner jogged past me, puffing. Bits of rubbish bobbed in the water. A gust of wind shook more raindrops onto my arms and cheeks and the sky darkened. A storm was coming.
Before
I made it through the rehearsal, nodding when people spoke, twisting my mouth into an approximation of a smile, uttering words that no one else seemed to find strange. And then at last people were leaving, pushing guitars into cases, gathering up sheet music, talking about the next time. Sonia was the first to go, Neal the last. I steered him out of the door, ignoring his baleful and beseeching glances, and shut it behind him with a sigh of relief. Then I went and stood under my third shower of the day, cold, of course, but that was welcome because I was clammy from head to foot and felt as grimy as if I had stood in the hot stew of traffic all day. I tipped my head back and let the jets of water hit my face, run over my shoulders, stream over my belly. I could hear the phone ringing. I very carefully massaged my neck, rubbing away all the orange paste there. I washed my hair again, then sat on the floor of the shower, shaved my legs and clipped my finger- and toenails.
I felt better, and when I stood in front of the mirror, I didn’t look too bad. The bruise was swollen and it was visible, but it wasn’t the dramatic blue-black flowering I had been expecting, rather a dirty yellow. My ribs hurt sharply but I could carry myself straight. I looked depleted but not worryingly so. I pulled on an oversized shirt, made myself a cup of herbal tea and put on a Joni Mitchell CD. I sat on the sofa, still pushed to the edge of the room, and closed my eyes. The phone rang once more but I ignored it. I let the music fill my head.
All my life I had prided myself on being strong and independent. Tough, that was the word Neal had used today, bitterly, and that was the word Hayden had used, admiringly, as if it aroused him, in the past. I had grown up in a household in which my father tyrannized my mother and I had made a pledge to myself that it would never happen to me. Sometimes being strong meant being cool; being independent meant holding myself back from involvement. Amos used to complain that there was always something withholding about me, and perhaps he was right; perhaps that was why in the end we had gone our separate ways. I didn’t know; it didn’t matter any more because that was over and Amos loved Sonia, and our relationship faded even as I thought about it. I could barely remember what we had been like together, and now when I saw Amos I felt faintly surprised that once we had felt passionate desire for each other. How was that possible?
But Hayden had outmanoeuvred me. Where I was independent, he was detached; where I was anxious about intimacy, he was phobic. I wanted to be free, but he wanted to be freer – and for him freedom meant losing all anchors and rudders and being carried off by whatever wind took him. An ill wind had blown him into my life and an ill wind was blowing him out of it. And I saw, lying on my sofa and listening to Joni Mitchell singing about love and disillusion, that with him I had taken on the unfamiliar role of the more committed and more loving one, the one who got hurt, the one who was left.
He had hit me, twice. What I wanted, what I was waiting to feel, was anger, the welcome fire of it, to burn away every other emotion, leaving no room for pity or for regret. I remembered his face twisted in a vicious snarl and his fists falling towards me, and then I remembered his face wiped clean by love for me.
Joni Mitchell came to an end. I stood up and went into the bedroom, retrieved his note to read again, although I knew what it said: ‘There are some things I would like to tell you that I should have told you before. Please let me see you. Please. Sorry. So very very sorry. H’. I stared at it, as if there was a secret code to be deciphered. The sun was low in the sky and its light rippled like water on the ceiling. The day was drifting into evening. The phone rang once more, and after it had stopped, the flat was full of ominous silence.
At last I stood up. I put on clothes – pale blue jeans torn at the knees, a T-shirt, a thin grey jacket. I left the house, feeling the warm evening air on my face, high summer in its breath.
After
Lightning cracked the sky ahead of me and I counted to eleven before the thunder rumbled. Eleven miles – did that mean eleven miles out or eleven miles up? As I left the canal basin and walked up Camden Road, fat drops were falling, bursting on the pavement like small bombs, and people were running for shelter. I didn’t bother trying to keep dry. I walked steadily up the road, feeling the rain splash on my head. Soon the separate drops seemed to have merged and the water was coming down like a sheet. I might as well have jumped into a river. Or a reservoir, I thought, and shivered violently, remembering again what I knew I would never forget. My shoes squelched and my hair dripped. My heart pounded with rage.
I didn’t have any battery left on my mobile, so I went back to the flat, peeled off my wet clothes, towelled myself dry, pulled on jeans and a shirt. Then I rang from the landline.
‘I need to see you. Yes, now. Are you at home? Alone? Good. Stay there. I’m coming round now.’
Sonia opened the door before I even had time to ring the bell. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a ponytail and there were dark shadows under her eyes, a stretched quality to her skin. She stepped aside and I entered. I didn’t usually meet Sonia at her flat; instead she came to mine or we saw each other in pubs and cafés and other people’s houses. And nowadays, of course, she seemed to spend most of her time at Amos’s. It wasn’t surprising – she rented a depressing basement flat a few minutes’ walk from mine, which felt damp and underground. It had always puzzled me that Sonia, who was so in control of her life, so practical and careful with money, thrifty even in the old-fashioned sense, shouldn’t by now have moved up the property ladder.
‘Something to drink?’
‘No.’
I sat at her kitchen table and folded my hands tightly together. Sonia sat opposite me.
‘Horrible weather. I couldn’t bring myself to go out in it. I’ve been getting ready for the new term. Just a few days left.’
For once I didn’t gabble. I didn’t even speak. Not yet.
‘I don’t know what to say, Bonnie. There’s nothing I can do to make it better. It was an accident. You know that. Nevertheless, I killed Hayden. And I misled you. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else for me to say except I’m very sorry. Sorry for what I did and sorry for your loss.’
I looked at her, waited. I felt the silence grow dense around us. When at last I spoke, it was slowly. I could almost taste each separate word. ‘Things have been going round and round in my head,’ I said. ‘I keep seeing his face, his dead, beautiful face. I remember how it felt to touch him. I guess it’s the same for you, the images that won’t fade. That’s not what I was thinking about this time, though. When I finally knew it wasn’t Neal, and he knew it wasn’t me – before we knew it was you, though – we all compared crime scenes. There was the one he found and disrupted, and then the disordered one that I found, disordered by him, as I later discovered.’
‘Your point being?’
‘My poi
nt being that the one you left was the one he found. But he found an ordered scene – nothing out of place, just Hayden dead on the floor. He messed it up so that it looked like a struggle or an accident, a robbery gone wrong or something. He probably didn’t know exactly what he was trying to do, he just wanted to make it look like something it wasn’t.’
‘Bonnie,’ said Sonia, softly, ‘dear Bonnie, you’ll go mad, turning it all over and over in your head. Let it go.’
‘No. Listen. Nothing was thrown around or broken at that stage. But you said it was. You did, Sonia. I can hear your words in my head. I’ve been going over and over them. You said you went to tell him to lay off me and it all turned ugly, and he lashed out and things got broken and you picked up the nearest object to hand. That’s what you said.’
‘And that’s what happened. He came on to me and I panicked and – well, that’s how it all went wrong.’
‘Yet everything was in place when Neal arrived a few minutes later. He arrived at an orderly scene – a scene where no struggle had taken place.’
‘Perhaps he got it wrong, perhaps I did. For God’s sake, Bonnie, I was in a state of shock. A man was dead. Maybe I didn’t remember everything clearly.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you, Sonia.’
‘I’m sorry if I didn’t behave with total calm and logic. I don’t think any of us did.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You left the flat in good order. You killed him, certainly you did, but not the way you described.’
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say.’
‘That was the other funny thing,’ I said. ‘Once you realized I’d done it to protect Neal, and Neal had done it to protect me, you knew we’d protect you. Why didn’t you tell us? You’re a logical person, Sonia. It was the logical thing to do.’
‘I wasn’t thinking logically,’ Sonia said.
‘You always think logically,’ I said. ‘That set me wondering. I tried to work out whether there was any connection between you and Hayden apart from me and that crap about going to see him because he’d knocked me around.’
