by Simon Lelic
I had been, until the landlord Bart had been chasing had finally deigned to return one of his calls. To be honest, I’d been glad of the interruption. I’d started the story about the attic without knowing whether I really planned to finish it. Not because I didn’t trust my friend or value his opinion. I just . . . I guess I was still struggling to work out what I’d seen up there—and how to put it into words.
“It was just . . . a cat,” I said. “A dead cat.”
“That was making the smell?”
I shrugged, nodded.
When I’d swung the torch beam from my spot by the hatch, the attic had shown itself to be surprisingly empty. Not empty empty. There were boxes, a roll of carpet, an old water tank—all your typical loft-level artifacts. Mostly, though, it was cobwebs and dusty space. It explained why the rest of the house was so chock-full. The things most people would consign to the garret, the previous owner had been either too lazy or too infirm to carry up a ladder. I didn’t know which. At that point we still knew next to nothing about him, other than the story about his emigrating. And it was that as much as anything that had been bothering me. The cat was one thing: the smell of it, the sight of it, the difficulty I had getting it past Syd. But it wasn’t just the cat that I’d discovered.
“It was in the corner,” I said to Bart. “I couldn’t tell what killed it. Maybe, I don’t know . . . I figured maybe it got trapped up there.”
“How? Was there a window or something?”
“I didn’t see one. But you know what cats are like. They can get in anywhere there’s air.”
“Maybe it got injured in a fight or something, then crawled away somewhere to die.”
“Right,” I said. “I guess.” Although the cat had looked as though it had got involved in something more serious than a fight. Two of its legs were bent at odd angles, and its fur in places appeared almost to be singed. “But the point is, there was something else as well,” I went on. “The cat, it was right at the back. The attic was only boarded around the hatch, so I had to walk over the rafters to get to it.” And through a million of those cobwebs, I didn’t add. “But once I was there I could see into this little alcove. Like, this space tucked away behind the water tank? And there was a shoebox. A big one, all by itself. Sort of . . . hidden there.”
Bart was watching me with a curious little frown. He was dark-haired, dark-skinned and, much as I hate to admit it, hideously handsome. Even when he frowned—especially when he frowned—he could have passed for a model. One of those earnest types advertising something life-changing—like chewing gum, say, or underwear.
“What was in it?”
I could tell from Bart’s tone that he was genuinely curious, and I was sure as well that I was about to disappoint him.
“Kids’ stuff,” I said.
“Kids’ stuff? What do you mean, kids’ stuff?”
I twitched a shoulder. “Like, a box full of stuff a kid would keep. A little girl, I’m guessing. You know, like a treasure box. But treasure that’s not really treasure.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Like . . . there were some shells in there. Like ones collected from a beach. And a bookmark, the head of some doll, some dried flowers. A Care Bear. Lots of postcards, all blank, but like a collection. Just, you know, treasure.”
Bart was looking at me like I was talking in tongues.
“You never had a treasure box?” I asked him. “When you were a kid?”
“No, Jack,” Bart said. “I never had a treasure box. I had a money box, but it was always empty. My parents, they—”
“I know, I know. Your parents fled their homeland with nothing. You’ve told me before, Bart. A thousand times, probably.”
I was pissed off at him all of a sudden and I wasn’t sure why. I’d been expecting more of a reaction, I suppose. Or a reaction more like mine.
“OK, Jack, so you found a treasure box. What happened next?”
And that just irritated me even more. “What do you mean, what happened next? Nothing happened next. That’s it. That’s the end of the story. It just . . . it freaked me out, that’s all. Finding a little girl’s stuff hidden away like that.” Although that wasn’t quite true. There had been something else: one final detail I hadn’t mentioned yet.
“What was it that freaked you out exactly? I mean, the doll’s head I can probably get on board with. The Care Bear, too. They’re creepy little fuckers, the lot of them.”
Ordinarily I might have smiled at that. Probably Bart was expecting me to.
“Did you show Syd?” he asked when I didn’t, pretending too late that he was taking me seriously. “What did she say?”
I didn’t like that either, that Bart should mention Syd. In part, frankly, because I’d always been a little suspicious of how well the two of them got on whenever we were all together. Not jealous, exactly, just suspicious. Don’t get me wrong. Me and Syd, it’s the most secure in a relationship I’ve ever felt. But that in itself tends to make me worry, even if most of the time it might seem like there’s nothing to worry about.
Plus, the other thing was, I hadn’t told her. Syd, I mean. I hadn’t even told her about the cat. I’d told her it was a pigeon. I don’t know why, but I thought a pigeon would upset her less than a cat would. Syd’s got this aversion to mortality. Which, to be fair, I suppose we all do, but what I mean is it’s her own personal take on my fear of spiders. Those stuffed birds she’d just about coped with, but a rotting cat, on the other side of the ceiling of the room in which she sleeps? It would have set her back months.
“I didn’t want to worry her,” I said to Bart. “And I didn’t want her taking the piss.” I glared at him meaningfully.
“I’m not taking the piss! Christ, Jack, when did you get so sensitive? I’m just . . . I’m trying to work out what the big deal is. So you found a box of stuff. So what?”
“Not just stuff. A little girl’s stuff, in a house where there’s no other sign of any children and hidden in a spot where no one would ever find it. Plus, the bloke who lived there before us, he’d owned the place for thirty-odd years. There’s no way the things in the box were that old.”
“But it doesn’t mean anything. Does it? Unless I’m missing something.”
“How do you know? There’s hardly going to be an innocent explanation for it, is there?”
Bart was watching me, and I expected him to roll his eyes and turn away. Instead, all of a sudden he started laughing. A big, booming, Eddie Murphy–style laugh that for an instant made me want to punch him.
“I’ll tell you what it means,” he said. “It means you’ve obviously got that novel in you after all. Maybe I’d work on some of the details, maybe put some human bones in that box instead of a bunch of dried flowers. But that imagination of yours is clearly working overtime.”
I tried to stay angry. It was hard, though, in the face of Bart’s grin. And actually I felt a measure of relief. Because I’d never wanted my friend to agree with me, I realized. I’d wanted him to laugh, to mock me in exactly the way he was doing now.
I didn’t smile exactly, but I came as close as I could manage. I even allowed myself to believe that Bart was probably right. Probably I’d only been irritated in the first place because I recognized I was spooked over nothing. Even the bit I hadn’t mentioned yet, probably I was overreacting to that part, too. There was a name, you see, handwritten on the inside of the box. On the underside of the lid, to be precise, in felt-tip that had long ago faded.
But it was just a name. A fairly common name at that. There’d been nothing in the contents of the box to suggest its presence was anything but a coincidence. I mean, even if Syd had seen it . . . if I’d let Syd see it . . . there was every chance she would have said the same thing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SYDNEY
I GREW UP thinking love was just a lie. Not just a lie.
A deception. Like Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny or God. Fibs that change how we feel, that trick us into believing the world is a better place than it really is. That distract us, in fact. Blind us, purposefully, to cold reality, so that we don’t fight the way we should and instead submit.
It was Jack who changed that for me. Who showed me that love was really real.
That time we met? At the conference? I’d woken up that morning and inhaled three lines of coke. In fact, once registration was over, I had it in mind to make another visit to the Ladies’. Jack was the last delegate to arrive and I was sitting in the hotel lobby, tapping his unclaimed badge against the table, when finally he blustered in through the set of double doors.
“Bloody trains” were his first words to me. “Has it started already? I’m so sorry I’m late.” He looked like he’d set out that morning all neatly packaged but, like a parcel that gets waylaid en route to its destination, had somehow come unraveled on the journey. His suit was wet and his tie was crooked and his hair was a hybrid of contrasting styles—neither one of which, I later discovered, was the one he spent ten minutes every morning trying to summon from the bathroom mirror.
“Mr. Walsh?”
Mr. Jack Walsh, I’d imagined, was older, tireder and pastier. He wasn’t my age, like the man before me (the boy, rather, because I still hadn’t learned to think of myself as anything more evolved than a girl), and certainly he wasn’t as good-looking. I’m not talking jutting-chin and gleaming-smile good-looking: Jack was a little rougher around the edges. His ears were slightly too big, his nose a fraction too small. His eyes, though, were a deep tobacco-colored brown. They were kind eyes. Curious too. They didn’t look cruel, or dulled, the way mine did.
“Ow. Bugger.”
He’d pricked himself on the pin on the back of his name badge. Then, when he noticed me trying not to smile, he flushed.
“Sorry,” he said again. “This is seriously not my morning. Should I . . .” He pendulummed his finger between the two closed doors on the wall behind me.
“Actually,” I said, “they’re kind of halfway through the first session. Maybe you want to hang on and get a coffee?”
We weren’t supposed to admit latecomers. I always did but today—on a whim—I enforced the rules. He looked so crestfallen, I immediately wished I’d smuggled him inside.
I checked my watch. “They’ll be breaking up in fifteen minutes,” I said. “And you’re not missing anything, I promise. The opening session, it’s really just an introduction.”
I smiled and he smiled back. He went to get that coffee and even fetched one for me. A cappuccino, he’d guessed, with three packs of sugar balanced on the lid. I accepted it gratefully. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I drink my coffee black.
I watched him after that through the morning sessions. Most people at these events we run, they’re only there to scam a day out of the office. Jack was actually paying attention. It’s stupid I know but even then—even before I really knew him—he made me feel that I was doing something worthwhile. I’d never felt that way before. I’d only taken the job because it paid well, and I’d only been offered it in the first place because the man who’d hired me had clearly valued my cleavage over what was missing from my CV. But seeing Mr. Jack Walsh, social worker, sitting there scribbling earnestly in his notebook, I felt . . . valued, I suppose the word is. Validated. For the first time in my whole life.
—
I’D NEVER HAD a boyfriend before.
If you’d asked me, I would have claimed I’d had relationships, but none had lasted more than four dates. Four dates, I’ve found, is about as much time as you can spend with a bloke before he expects you to part company with your knickers. And it’s not that I have a problem with sex. I mean, I do. Clearly I have a problem with sex but not in the sense that I don’t like doing it. I’ve fucked plenty of men. Thirteen, in fact, not counting Jack. But fucking isn’t the same as having sex (OK, OK, making luuurve). It’s when sex becomes meaningful that I pull up the drawbridge: that moment you really let someone close. So once we’ve moved from coffee to the cinema to drinks and then maybe dinner, that’s when I invariably shut down. I become a bitch, is usually the easiest way. I’ll snipe, snigger, turn up late or, once or twice, not turn up at all. I’ll ingest a mound of coke and start babbling, not bothering to disguise the signs of my cistern-top habit—my not-so-little white lie—or I won’t take anything, not even a drink, and I’ll sit there saying nothing at all. It takes surprisingly little to scare men off, I’ve found. Sometimes all that’s required is a well-placed burp.
I tried to play the same game with Jack. I’d allowed our run of dates to stretch to five, mainly because he managed to make me laugh so much and also because for our fifth date he’d suggested we visit London Zoo. Which is basically my favorite thing to do in the whole city. It feels innocent somehow and I craved innocence. Some people, I know, would take objection to that. There’s nothing innocent, they’d say, about keeping animals locked up in cages. But even if they’re in cages, at least they’re cared for. And what’s so fucking fabulous about the big wide world anyway? Out there it’s all about survival. Freedom: it’s just another term for living in fear.
Plus the thing with zoos is, I like monkeys.
And that’s where it started, as it happened. Beside the monkey cages. That’s where I almost let Jack slip away.
“You know, there’s a Monkey World near where my parents live,” Jack said. “We should go there sometime. Take a trip.”
“To Monkey World?” I answered, already starting to feel light-headed. “Or to your parents’ place?”
“Either,” Jack said. “Both. And maybe afterward you can tell me if you noticed any difference.”
He was looking at the gibbons, tapping a finger against the enclosure, so he couldn’t have noticed the expression on my face.
I turned away.
“Syd?”
We’d been sharing a stick of candy floss and I dropped the whole lot in the nearest bin.
“Syd? Where are you—”
I’d started walking. Jack hurried to catch up.
“My parents aren’t that bad,” he said, buzzing around me like a wasp with a wounded wing. “I mean, they are, but what I mean is you don’t have to meet them. Ever, if you like.”
Ever. As in forever.
I stopped.
“I’ve given you the wrong impression and I’m sorry,” I said, which to be fair was about the most up front in that type of situation I’d ever been.
Jack frowned as he tried to process what was happening. For a second I thought he was going to react the same way all the others had. Stage one was confusion. After that, sometimes, was denial but all roads eventually led to anger.
“It’s fine,” Jack said.
I thought it was a tactic. A prelude to an onslaught of abuse. “What?”
“I said, it’s fine. I mean, I don’t want to meet your parents either.”
I just stared then. He wasn’t following his lines.
“I’d like to hear about them,” he went on. “At some point. But I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t ever want to meet them.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You think you know me? Is that it?”
Jack was already shaking his head. “I barely know myself,” he answered. “But I know I like you. And I know I’m not in any hurry.”
I laughed then, I think. I may even have put my hand on my hip. “Well, that’s a relief. I’d hate to think I’ve been holding you up.”
Jack shrugged, shook his head. “Just the opposite,” he said. “I feel like I’ve achieved more in the three weeks since I met you than I have in the past twenty-four years.”
Which left me speechless. And—trust me—rarely am I ever speechless.
“But as I say,” Jack went on, “I’m not in any hurry. You know how
to reach me if you change your mind.”
He turned then and started back toward the gibbons.
“Hey. Hey!”
Jack moved to face me. “That was quick,” he said, daring to grin.
“Fuck you,” I replied. Not exactly original, I realize. “What do you think? That time is like some magic eraser? That all you need to do is sit back and wait for a couple of weeks? You don’t know me, Jack. Even the bits you think you’ve guessed. I guarantee you haven’t got a clue.”
He seemed to recognize that grinning at me had been the wrong thing to do. “Look, I . . . I didn’t mean to imply that I did know you. But maybe you don’t know me the way you think you do either. That’s all I’m saying.”
I didn’t answer that. Mainly because I suspected he had a point.
“I’m not after anything, Syd. I just . . . I like spending time with you, that’s all. Really, that’s it.”
It was like I’d attempted to slam the door but Jack had surreptitiously stuck out a foot.
“Look, Jack. I’m sorry. I really am. But this is as far as I can go. I’m a mess. OK? My life, it’s a fucking mess, and I should never have implied you might become part of it.”
“I’m used to mess,” Jack answered brightly. “I am. I mean, come round to the flat one day and take a look at my bedroom.”
It took him half a second or so to register what he’d said.
“Shit, Syd. I didn’t mean . . . I just meant . . .”
“I know what you meant, dummy.” I kept frowning but the corners of my mouth twitched involuntarily upward.
“Look, how about we go and get a coffee or something?” Jack tested. “A cappuccino, right? Three sugars?”
It had become our first private joke. Even today if Jack’s going up somewhere to order and I tell him that’s what I want, he knows to bring me black with none.
“And then what?” I answered. I wasn’t smiling yet but I wasn’t frowning anymore either.
