A reference to our days in the office together, and India specifically, brought a memory out of the file in my head marked Days At Work You Wish You’d Forgotten. One of those recollections where everything is razor sharp and you don’t know why – probably it’s due to your brain having a day when it’s been miraculously spared of caffeine or E numbers and it feels pretty healthy, showing off – but here it was muscling out of the mud of my back brain like some barely vertebrate creature eager to evolve…
Apparently, according to Greg, this is a pretty incestuous office, or rather, it used to be: all the permutations have been exhausted, except for those including me – I don’t know whether that excites me or scares me to death. Greg used to see Claire, who was going with Shaun and having an intense affair with him, or so the rumour went, after having a brief fling with Elliot during an office party. Elliot’s now married to Jane in telesales but rumour has it he slept with India on more than one occasion. I fancied India – you could see it in my eyes – but she had the hots for Harry, the editor, and he was kind of interested but then she slept with Rachel.
Anyway, not really important beyond establishing that these people knew each other well.
I remember India carrying a tray of coffees so the first I see of her is her slim, heart-shaped bottom backing through the swing doors, the zip of her skirt like a silver tear beneath a triangle of white where it’s not quite fastened properly. She pours, as always, left to right: Elspeth, Greg, Shaun, Elliot, Claire, Me. When India serves, I get the bitter tail of whatever’s in the pot, which is so strong you could surface roads with it. ‘Can I have a spoon to eat this?’ goes the joke. An office favourite that raises not a snigger. My stash of biscuits are locked in the bottom drawer of my desk. Anyone for a Coconut Cream? Is there buggery. Nobody likes them. Which is why I buy them. Another Sad Office Triumph. I don’t like them either.
It’s quiet. Our deadline has gone. In a minute, someone is going to suggest we pile down the pub for a swift one, precursor to the predictable all-nighter. There’ll be murmurs of demurral from most but we’ll all go along, even Elspeth, who, after a gin and orange, will slope off back to whichever room she sulked in when she wasn’t doing so professionally.
I’m happy to saunter along after everyone, even though I’m still trying to get past that initial new boy stage, a limbo between occasionally feeling involved and skating around on the edge of things. Part of the downer about being a freelance (or ‘temp’ as some irritants are wont to call us) is the feeling that your time is owned, that you come into work and get your head down from ten to six or your number gets struck off the list. It gradually got to the stage where I felt relaxed enough to lift my head from the screen for three minutes and chat to someone in the kitchen while the tea brewed. I fell in love with India for making the effort to talk to me, when I was too shy to start a conversation. She had a big mane of wheat blonde hair that reached down almost to the point where those dimples on a woman’s back sit, either side of her coccyx. The sacrum. Great name for it. Her hair was so thick and heavy, it would barely move when she walked, but for a deep undertow of shift, like currents tugging at the surface of a river. She’d leaned back against the work surface and fold her arms under her breasts, assess me levelly with her striking blue eyes and ask me about my home town or my friends in London; how I knew Greg, where I went in the evenings. Tame stuff, but it helped me, made me feel like I had an ally; someone I could say good morning to without them looking at me as if I was some scuzzball drifted in from the street.
So it was that I latched on to her as we walked down to Quinn’s on Kentish Town Road, just up from the tower block where the magazine was based. She’d been going on about her favourite baked potato fillings and had said the word ‘cottage’ as in cottage cheese. Something in that thick, glottal word, the way she said it, didn’t half give me the horn.
‘How did you get your name?’ I asked her, a propos of nothing more than the need to hear her voice again, and a desperation that she’d turn her attention to someone else if I didn’t keep breaking up the silences.
‘A mistake. My mum wanted to name me after Indira Ghandi but my dad fucked it up when he went to register it. Dad wanted to call me Hecate. For Christ’s sake. Only reason he didn’t was because he was pissed – probably didn’t remember. Probably too pissed to realise what he was doing anyway.’ She laughed. I was smitten. Say fucked again, I was thinking to myself.
As soon as we entered the pub, I felt on edge and knew something unpleasant was going to happen. I’d externalised this hunch, saw threats in everyone else at the bar without realising that the danger was radiating from our party and that I’d just felt that bristling, spreading as we moved among the crowded drinkers. If anyone else felt similarly, they didn’t let on, although I saw Greg look at me twice in quick succession, a trace of unease on his face.
He went to the bar and bought a round of drinks. Elspeth had decided to hold court in that imperious, slightly withering way of hers. She was talking about how her neighbour’s garden had gone to seed since the death of the wife.
‘She used to go at that garden like a monkey having a wank,’ she said, taking her gin and orange from Greg with a curt nod. ‘When she shot her bolt, he couldn’t care less. He just used to go out with his hands in his pockets of an evening and stare at the clematis. Grass was up to his knees in no time. It’s a jungle. I’m telling you, it wouldn’t surprise me if they found a live dinosaur in that mess. Or a Japanese soldier who doesn’t realise the war’s over.’
‘I like it that he doesn’t touch the lawn,’ I said, instantly regretting my words. All heads turned to me; Greg was grinning. I took a restorative sip of my lager and shrugged. ‘Maybe he doesn’t mow the lawn because he likes the idea that she was the last person to touch it. It gives him some natural measure of how long she’s been away.’
‘Maybe he’s just a lazy old giffer,’ Elspeth said, ‘who can’t be arsed. I bet his bathroom looks like something that’s overwhelmed an agar dish.’ As soon as she’d said it, her eyes darted around, eager to feed off any appreciative laughter, but whether her joke was too sophisticated or, as I suspected, too cruel, nobody reacted. The familiar, slightly puckered manner of her face returned. She drained her glass and stood up. ‘Got to be off,’ she said, ‘it’s my turn to cook.’
I could tell I’d made a few allies by what I’d said; India, especially, was favouring me with a warm smile. But I felt a bit guilty that my gainsaying of the office crone was the reason I’d been accepted. I was about to make amends, say something conciliatory and dumb like: ‘What are you cooking?’ when the contents of a glass sprayed across her front, followed by the glass itself, which shattered against her cheekbone. Her hands jerked to the pain: a surge of blood fled her face, drizzling between her fingers. She remained shockingly quiet.
‘Shit, Shaun, what are you fucking doing?’ Greg got up, then sat down again when he saw the wildness on Shaun’s face.
‘I am just so sick to fucking hell, man,’ he said, though his voice was calm as a priest giving benediction. ‘Sick of all this fucking so-called social inter-fucking-course. Everyone’s watching what they fucking say to each other. Nobody wants to step on anybody’s toes and everyone’s toeing the line. Yessir, nossir, three bags fucking – stop bleating you fucking whingebag or I’ll give you something to fucking moan about!’
I heard sirens. The bar staff must have called the police. Since Elspeth had started keening, I could hear everything, every last drip from the beer taps, every anxious susurration of breath from the punters watching this unfold.
‘You’d best scarper,’ I said to Shaun, I don’t know why. He looked at me for a long time before heading out through the front doors, pushing past Elspeth who was being comforted by Greg, India and Claire as red slowly crept through the cotton of her blouse. Claire’s mouth flapped open and shut like that of a beached fish. Her right hand moved to her breast and pressed there as tears silvered her eyes. Then
the police burst in and introduced some welcome monotony.
Chapter 7
Blue
I received an invitation handwritten on expensive, watermarked paper. Saskia had signed it, and marked it with a lipstick print of what looked like a pair of nipples, her nipples.
Adventure.
Find the blue car on Holloway Road.
First four to arrive get to go.
I rang Yoyo.
‘Have you seen this madness?’ I asked her.
She had, and she was just about to leave her flat to be a part of it. ‘I need a break,’ she said.
‘Come here instead, then,’ I said. ‘We’ll stay in and watch horror films. I’ll make hot chocolate. We’ll order a pizza.’
‘No, Ads. I need to get out.’
‘Well meet me outside the Nag’s Head shopping centre,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with you.’
It was the last thing I wanted to do. But I hadn’t seen Yoyo for a while and I was worried about her. No. That wasn’t quite right. I was worried about her, but my reasons for needing to see her ran to more than that. I needed her, she was my barometer. She was my measure of how far from reality I was falling. I caught a cab outside and a couple of minutes later I was paying the driver outside the Odeon. I looked back the way we had come, along the straight thoroughfare that is Tufnell Park Road, and felt a strange tugging in my gut, as if being able to see, in the distance, the junction that I lived off from an area of uncertainty was one mismatch or imbalance too many.
I trotted across the road and waited by the entrance to the shopping centre while dozens of people wove around me, ducking into or coming out of the entrance, weighed down with plastic carrier bags. Kids implored parents for rides on a grubby motorised elephant as if their future happiness depended on it. A young woman who looked too thin to be able to withstand the spank of freezing wind was rocking on her haunches, copying a picture of Reggie Kray on to the pavement from a post card. The white chalk went down grey, instantly fouled by the grime. Next to her, a dog licked at itself half-heartedly. Somewhere, someone was playing very loud music, but I couldn’t begin to guess where it was coming from; the sound was picked up by the wind and looped and fragmented even as it teased you with its identity.
Suddenly Yoyo was standing there, a still point around which everything was moving hard. Something seemed wrong with her, as if the colour of the clouds, or the pavement she was standing on, had infected her skin. But the shadows passed when she smiled, and I kissed her on her cheek, which was cold, but a nice cold, a fresh cold, and her skin smelled of apricots.
We walked in the direction of Islington, checking side streets for this blue car Saskia had been on about. It was lunchtime, and people were going about their lunch hour business: sinking fast pints at The Litten Tree, sitting on walls with their overloaded subs and baps from sandwich shops that didn’t sell anything that didn’t have mayonnaise in it. People were walking along the street, eating, sitting in cars, eating, clustered around café tables on the pavement, eating. I wanted to do anything but, and if Yoyo was hungry, she wasn’t doing anything about it.
There were a few false alarms, and no doubt Saskia knew that would happen. I could imagine her relishing being told about my approaching a metallic blue Ford Sierra and tapping on the window to find the driver trying to wipe blood off his hands on to his jeans.
‘What the fuck was that about?’ I said, breathily, as we hurried on. The guy had climbed out of his car and was looking after us intently, as if committing our retreating shapes to memory, so that next time he would be ready.
‘Forget him,’ Yoyo said. ‘It was probably just a nose bleed, or he was wanking too hard.’
I started laughing at that, and at Yoyo’s serious face. ‘I wouldn’t like to have a look at what’s lying in his boot,’ I said.
We approached another car, a pale blue Mercedes parked on Hornsey Street, but the middle-aged man with mirror shades in the passenger seat shook his head and mouthed No.
‘What is it with blue cars, today?’ Yoyo said.
‘We’ve probably missed out,’ I said. ‘Four people have found a blue car and they’re now enjoying an adventure that involves trying to rescue Saskia from choking to death on her own vomit on a cracked toilet swarming with flies. Meanwhile, we’re going to spend the next five hours tapping on car windows until we find someone willing to shoot us through the brains.’
‘That’s not funny, Ads.’
‘Where’ve you been, lately?’ I asked her, carefully. ‘What have you been up to?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘You okay? I mean, you look a little peaky. Have you been ill?’
She sniffed. ‘I’m always ill.’
‘What are you reading?’ I asked, nodding at the top third of a slim volume poking out of the top of her coat.
‘The Rapture.’
‘The Rupture?’
She laughed. Yoyo had a great laugh. It was giggly, infectious. I realised that I hadn’t been hearing it too much, lately. ‘The Rapture,’ she said.
There was something in the day that didn’t feel right. Maybe it was because the sun didn’t seem to get above a height that was rooftop level, or burn with a colour that was any fiercer than a kind of blood orange. Maybe it was the incipient mist, which never quite grew as dense as it was promising, or it could have been the spate of narcoleptic attacks I had been having: day swapping with night at the speed of a blink to the extent that I was never sure of the where and when. In all likelihood, it was my own nervousness, and in such cases, when you expect it, bad things tend to happen.
We found the blue car.
It was a dark blue Mark II Escort, parked up on the kerb on Chillingworth Road. It was battered almost to the point of submission. A hole in the rear windscreen the size of a fist drew the eye, mainly because it was the only solid colour that didn’t gleam or glint. There was nobody in the car. Nobody hanging around it, waiting to go on their adventure. A note was tucked behind the windscreen wiper, along with a couple of parking tickets.
Hi Yoyo and Adam.
Nice to have you along.
Now we are four.
The beep of a horn behind me. I sauntered over, thinking, Here’s weird for you.
The guy in the driver’s seat of the Renault Clio wound down his window. He didn’t look at me. He was chewing some kind of red gum with a strong, spicy smell. I caught wafts of it as he said: ‘Adam Buckley? Get in. And your girlfriend. I’ll take you to Saskia.’
‘Where is she?’ I asked. He’d switched off. Staring straight ahead, chewing, waiting. I asked him again. He responded by turning up the Snoop Dogg on his stereo.
Yoyo pushed by me and climbed into the back as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I followed suit. I asked the driver his name, but nobody was talking. It all seemed scripted. I played dumb.
The quiet driver dropped us off on Wattisfield Road, a busy little rat-run off the A104 at Lea Bridge. South Millfields Recreation Ground, which separated the road from Chatsworth Road, was host to a game of football which included over three dozen players, a guy in a wheelchair and two dogs. Before he drove off, the quiet driver tossed me a door key.
‘What’s this for?’ I asked. I should have saved my breath.
Yoyo took the key off me and was trying to guess which of the houses it would let us into. ‘It can’t be those because there are toys in the garden,’ she was saying.
‘Yoyo,’ I said. ‘Let’s fuck off. Pubs were invented for days like this. This is madness.’
I must have donned my cloak of invisibility – nobody was listening to me any more. I shook my head and followed her into the driveway of a semi that had the stripped down skeleton of a Kawasaki motorbike sitting in a puddle of old oil. She tried the key and the door swung open. The door would have swung open had she breathed on it, it was so feeble. We passed into a sour fug of burnt fat and nicotine.
She swept up the stairs and I trotted after her, thinking of how much I had hated treasure hunts when I was a child. Maps that weren’t as good as the ones in my copy of Treasure Island drawn by dads who had had too much to drink at whoever’s birthday party it was. X marks the spot. And the spot was the fridge. And the treasure was some shit with gold wrapping: a Crunchie bar. A Twix. For fuck’s sake.
We found Saskia sitting in a bath with a razor blade in her right hand. Her left forearm was opened, a huge mass of sopping red toilet paper wadded into it, as if she had changed her mind when it was too late, or was trying to keep the mess to a minimum for the poor fuck who would have to clear up. She had scratched a pattern on her swollen stomach: a series of cross hatchings that looked like diamond link fencing. Keep out. Stay in. Some adventure. Some treasure.
Yoyo was staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, a three-quarter length affair that was foxed and warped, its edges permanently misted.
She said: ‘There’s a little… gap… in the river. You can walk to it. You can walk to it over the water. There’s this hard seam, like glass, you just walk along it and there’s this gap.’
I was looking at the blood. Such a lot of blood. I wondered how all of that could be contained inside someone so small. I thought, crazily, unforgivably: She’s bleeding for two…
There was something in the day that didn’t feel right.
And hindsight is a wonderful thing. But I had felt that at the time. I had felt the streaks of threat in the air, like the odd sensation of slow pain that reaches out in soft, arbitrary directions from a bruise when it is pressed. I opened my eyes in a bed that smelled too strongly of me and nobody else. I felt the shadow of a second hand slide slowly over my body and tick off another moment from my time. I never knew what I could be. What I had the capacity for. I still don’t. London was meant to be my map, something that would reflect me, give me more of a clue as to who I was and what I could do with myself. But all of its streets were being dug up, or barricaded, or designated No Entry. Trying to better myself was turning into battering myself flat. I felt a tear, one of those that creeps out of the corner of your eye if you keep it open for too long, slide into my ear. I watched a brick of sunlight edge its way from one side of the wardrobe to the other. I was still here. Saskia wasn’t. Saskia’s unborn child wasn’t. So close to a first breath, to a sizing up of a world there to be conquered, or at least got along with. So close. One terrible moment found me thinking that it was better off as it was, where it was. For ever on the cusp of being, having known nothing but senseless nourishment. I cried for the baby, and for Saskia. I mean, I tried to cry, but no tears would come. I was dry as sand. I cried that uncry, that nothing cry, until the brick of light dissolved into the wall.
London Revenant Page 8
