‘Are you sure she wanted to kill you?’
‘Come on, Nuala. She was carrying a fucking weapon. She was there at eight thirty as specified on the note. She came after me. Swinging a chain. Look at my face.’ I pointed out a thin red weal and some tiny black specks, which must have been caused by the sparks when the metal impacted against the stone. I showed her my shoulder, which sported an ugly red track of small ovals, already turning black.
‘Who was it?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see her face. God, I’m not even convinced she had one.’
Her expression didn’t change. She was obviously still sceptical, despite my wounds. I drained my glass and went back to the bar without asking her if she wanted another.
The barman did a good job this time. I was mildly concerned by the urge I had to pan his face in though. I grappled with my frustration on my way back to the table. Nuala had lit up a menthol cigarette. I could see the spine of a book peeking out from the lips of her bag. …ing The Commotion of an Inner Traveller I read. She fiddled with a friendship ring on her finger. Yin and Yang glittered in her earlobes. God, did I want to fuck her so badly.
‘Believe me,’ I said. ‘This happened. This is real. Somebody wants me dead.’
‘Come on Adam. Don’t get down on this. It was an isolated event. She was a mugger, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Think yourself lucky.’ She shook her head and blew out some air to illustrate just how lucky I’d been.
‘Naked? She was fucking half-naked.’
‘She was on drugs. She’s insane. I don’t know.’
‘So you’re saying I’m imagining things?’
‘I’m not saying anything,’ she said.
‘For someone who isn’t saying anything, you’re flapping your lips quite a bit.’
Silence. Silence. Silence.
I wanted to apologise. Instead I said, ‘But she wanted me there. The note – ’
She gestured: let’s have a look at it then.
I fished the crumpled fragment of paper from my pocket and smoothed it out on the table for her to read.
‘Who gave you this?’
‘Initially, I thought it was you. I thought you’d slipped it into my pocket after we fell out yesterday.’
‘We didn’t fall out. You might have fallen out with me but I certainly didn’t fall out with you.’
‘Whatever, Nuala. Look, that isn’t important…’
‘Oh, it isn’t impor – ’
‘Well of course it’s important, but we aren’t talking about that at the moment, are we? The truth is, I don’t know who gave me that note. I just found it in my pocket and thought it was you put it there.’
‘Somebody gave it to you, the night you walked out on me. Wherever it was you went.’
I stared at her blankly. That night was still a dead spot in my memory. A cold ripple moved through me.
‘Maybe,’ she said gently, ‘you went to Laura’s house – I know you deny that – and just blocked it out of your mind. Too painful.’
Laura. Laura. The name made about as much impact upon me as an ash bullet. Laura. I forced memories of her through my head. Playing chess in the nude as slivered summer sunshine flashed through the blinds; getting stoned out of our heads and nipping out for a curry that took us about three minutes to eat; wrapped in a duvet sharing the same heavy cold and the same Patrick McGrath novel throughout a weekend of rain.
‘I don’t care about Laura. Well, I do, but not in that way. Not any more. She means absolutely nothing to me any more.’ I meant it. I couldn’t understand why, remembering the dread I felt every time I re-enacted her dismissal of me.
‘Oh Adam, that’s an absolute lie.’
‘It isn’t. Honestly. I think of her and it’s just… I could be thinking of a plate of cold porridge.’
‘You’re in denial. It’s okay. It’s natural.’
‘I’m not in denial. Look, I’ve got narcolepsy. There, I said it. It’s out. I’ve got narcolepsy and I don’t know what the fuck is happening to me at the moment. I’ve got black spots. Dead gaps in my memory. Great chunks of time go by when I don’t know where I am, what I’m doing, or who I’m with.’
More silence. I felt as if we were collecting it.
‘I can’t go home tonight,’ I said. ‘It’s too dangerous. She might know… Jesus, she must know where I live. She could be there now –’
‘Enough. We’ll go to mine.’ Her voice had softened. It didn’t calm me.
‘But that’s my place too, practically.’
She reached out and held my hand, stroked the skin on my wrist. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’
I wanted to hug her. And then I was, hugging her tightly, like I used to hug my mother when I’d hurt myself, or hurt her.
We went outside and she hailed a cab.
‘Nice uniform, by the way,’ she said. ‘You look like a piece of shit on its way to an interview.’
I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed even as she bundled me into the taxi and headed south. Before long, Nuala was laughing too. And the driver. We laughed so much.
Chapter 13
Oubliette
‘What do you hate?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Hate.’ H. said the word as if it had only recently been introduced into his vocabulary. His voice rushed out of the receiver and into my ear like a torrent of clicking beetles. I looked over at Nuala and she shrugged, smiled, mouthed: humour him.
We were sitting on a thick blue rug in the centre of Nuala’s living room. Nuala had put on a Harold Budd record and gone to make a pot of jasmine tea when the telephone had rung. Light see-sawed languidly upon the walls, reflected off the turning vinyl. Old orange Penguin paperbacks were spread across a coffee table, along with a clutch of CDs: Four Tet, John Parish, Stina Nordenstam, Bill Laswell.
I tried to imagine what H. looked like, just from the sound of his voice. I saw sleepily intelligent eyes, a large mouth, plump lips, Jack Palance cheekbones. His soft voice was mesmerising. A cat shifted from beneath the droop of a yucca leaf. Arching, it considered me imperiously before slouching towards the kitchen.
‘Manchester United,’ I said. ‘People who use the phrase mea culpa. People who put those bull bars on the front of their 4x4s. People who drive 4x4s. Coriander. Call waiting. Public transport. England in a penalty shoot-out. People who smoke when I’m eating. The Americanisation of this country. Old people paying for groceries at the supermarket till with small change. Nearly Nude nail varnish. Ewoks. Having to pay to use a toilet…’
‘Okay,’ he said, and his voice sounded suddenly clear, free of static, as if he was sitting at my shoulder. I actually looked behind me. Nuala was standing there with a teapot. She had undressed and was wearing a large white T-shirt and lots of leg. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘What do you love?’
‘My parents,’ I said, coming right back at him. And then I halted, my mind blank. In my mind I studied his face again, the narrow nose with the flared nostrils, the wolfish mouth, the Slavic sweeps of bone and soft, feminine eyes. Lots of white. Lots of eyelash.
‘See?’ said H.
I couldn’t see I didn’t know what he was getting at. I was surprised he was so animated at four-forty in the morning.
‘I’m just proving how negative everyone is,’ he said. ‘It’s easy for us to reel off what we hate, what gets our backs up. Not so easy to list what we care about. Mainly because there ain’t so much love going around.’
He sounded like a DJ, nothing but soundbites and tenuous links. I kept expecting him to say: Okay, it’s twenty before the hour, let’s have three in a row from Sting! I was too tired to argue, but I didn’t need to; Nuala protested on my behalf, taking the phone off me and replacing it with a white china cup the size of a chamber pot. I sipped my tea and signalled to the cat, but its face was planted in a bowl. Nuala was saying no repeatedly, her face becoming more and more drawn. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not now. Not yet.’
Emba
rrassed by what appeared to be an intimate conversation, I found myself drawn to the fireplace, even though it wasn’t lit and there was nothing of interest there, beyond a porcelain phrenology head. I think it was the dark; its sooty promise of warmth and camouflage. I sprawled against the rug, straining towards the clinging nests of dust and grime on the intricate scrolls of ironwork. They gleamed like clustered spiders’ eyes. I slept there, haunted by flashing images of windows backlit by white and stained by trapped figures, burning, trying to escape the thin barriers of glass. Tubes and tunnels and caves vanished away beneath me to similar ink-spots of infinity, all of them vying to suck my dangling shape into their eternity. The perfect meld of steel wheels on track spat blue ghosts into my eyes. At once, this was the most alien place of my three-decade span and the most comforting. I heard the chunter of carriages and couldn’t tell if it was echoing the sound of my heart or vice versa. Looking down, I found that the skin of my arms was peeled back to reveal a juicy knit of veins and muscles. From the core meat of both, an artery snaked, plugged into the scorched cables that fled along the Tubeways. We sustained and weakened each other with each beat. I belched and farted clouds of black oilsmoke. Sparks wept from my eyes. I came a torrent of marbled electricity. The walls and wires grew slick with mucus and blood. When the trains arrived, powering towards me from all sides, we impacted to nothing: a universe folding in on itself. I came out of sleep mewling like a newborn, my wrists married, thrust forward as if I were imploring someone unseen to drive needles into them.
The living room was empty. A stiletto of morning sunlight impaled the floorboards by my feet. I could hear Nuala’s voice in her bedroom, murmurs streaked with the same urgency she had displayed the previous night. I knocked lightly on the door and wiped the sweat from my face. Nuala was sitting cross-legged on the bed, stroking the cat. They both looked up at me when I entered, indulgent expressions on their faces as if I was a little boy they'd allowed to stay up late. Nuala killed the link and tossed the phone on to the pillow.
‘I’ll be off then,’ I said. ‘Thanks for letting me stay.’
‘Where will you go?’ Nuala asked. ‘Do you think you might go to the police?’
I didn’t know where I was going to go. I shrugged, wanting to ask if she’d come out for breakfast with me. Wanting to get on to the bed and remind myself just how long her legs were. She leaned back and the T-shirt rode up her belly. She was wearing a plain white thong. Through the sheer fabric I could see she had trimmed her pubic fuzz: no topiary; just a neat little short, back and sides. She smiled at me. Turned over. The white string split her plump, smooth bottom into two perfect halves. ‘I could do with a massage,’ she said.
‘Who am I to argue with that?’ I said, shrugging off my jacket.
On the way to the flower stall I went out of my way to walk past Laura’s house. Her car was parked on the street but my heart didn’t lurch at the thought of her sitting topless behind those blinds, maybe drinking a glass of orange juice and eating toast, reading a magazine on the floor. I considered knocking on the door and saying hello but it was all still a little too close; she might have thought I was coming to beg that we get back together. But I was healing. I was coming back from the brink.
The flower stall was as I’d left it: shuttered up, a sign on the front saying CLOSED. Cherry had left me a message: ‘We sold our entire load of geraniums despite you and your Geraniums to wow your cranium. And the fact that they are all, without exception, buggered to buggery. Well done that chapster.’
Lucas, the Top Story man, was drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He waved when he saw me. Even though I hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, there was something about him that seemed new. Something new but deeply familiar, like seeing your dad wearing a tie that you’d only ever seen him wear before in old photographs. It put me off my guard for a moment, and I wanted to call his name, but although I knew him as Lucas, another name, one I couldn’t articulate, leapt to my lips.
I bought a Top Story from him and he asked me if I wanted to go to a party. I recognised something in the way I was looking at him in his own appreciation of me. Something a little bit desperate. I said, sure. He told me where to meet him and at what time. I said I would see him there. And then I ducked down into the Tube before I realised what I was doing and caught a train home. In the carriage, I suddenly felt safe, aware that my attacker wouldn’t be here. And even if she was, well she couldn’t do anything in front of all these people. At Tufnell Park, I pushed my way through the passengers to the doors and was standing on the platform when I saw two further instances of the logo I had first seen the night Nuala moved in. One was scratched on the glass of the carriage I had just vacated; the other had been painted with green nail polish on to a poster advertising mobile phones.
Back home I retrieved a warm beer from the cupboard and gulped it in front of the window. The slow bleed of light across the rooftops at this hour really was lovely, I decided. The next thing I was aware of was lying under my bed, waking up in the evening, the telephone insistent. I checked my watch, fearful I was late for Lucas’ party, but it was only six. It seemed terribly important that I go, even though it was just a party. Just Lucas. I reached out and pulled the telephone down beside me. It was nice there in the dark.
‘Finally plucked up courage to head back to the nest?’ Nuala asked. Her voice seemed nearer than it ought to be.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t such a great leap though, was it. I’m sorry for being such a pussy.’
‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘It was nice to have you stay.’
‘H. wasn’t, you know?’
‘Jealous? No. I think he gets off on the idea of me and other men. I think it’s all a big effort for him, a distraction, and the more help he gets, the better.’
‘Look, I’m going to a party tonight. Want to come?’ I didn’t really want her there but the question blurted out. I knew I was asking her because she had this kind of charmed effect on me, like some celestial bodyguard. I had the feeling that nothing could happen to me with her around.
‘What? Last night almost dead, tonight let’s have fun?’ There was a mocking tone to her voice.
‘Why not? If you can’t go to a party to celebrate surviving a murder attempt, when can you go?’
She said that if she was going to come along, she’d meet me at the party. She wasn’t promising anything.
I could handle that. I put the phone down and sank my head into the fluff, the Toffo wrappers and the empty cans of Kronenbourg on my carpet for a few minutes. Thoughts of getting sticky with Nuala, nice though it was, even without H.’s periodic insertions, didn’t do anything for me. Everything that had once excited me was losing its sheen. I wanted nothing, looked forward to nothing. Except sleep. And the places I went to when I dreamed. The places everyone else went to seemed so much more brighter than mine.
Somehow I got to Shepherd’s Bush, although every changed Tube train, every wait on a platform found me huddling deeper into myself. It was as if I felt I needed to be anonymous, needing to bury my conscious self as completely as possible before I could function. The light was too great; the babble of voices around me too constant and invasive. Nevertheless, I was recognising a change in me. The Tube no longer repulsed me, scared me as it had once done. Now it seemed to be the safest place around. Its warmth and closeness were something to be embraced, rather than avoided. Suddenly, all the space and choice that span around up top was too great. It seemed ludicrous that small bodies should be allowed to exist in such an expanse. It didn’t seem right. Being down here with the worms now made much more sense.
It took about half an hour to get to the party venue. Lucas was waiting outside, in a dark blue fleece: his eyes glittered like turning shreds of silver inside his hood. ‘Made it then?’ he said, unnecessarily.
‘Looks that way,’ I returned. Equally dumb.
‘Shall we?’ he asked, nodding his head towards the library on the corner of Pennard Road. I cou
ldn’t hear any music.
‘Rude not to.’
He led the way into a street, the houses of which backed on to the market beneath the railway bridge. Halfway down, he slipped through a gate and rang a bell. There were no lights on in the house. I looked around in case Nuala had decided to make an appearance, but the street was filled only with nose to tail parked cars. The small of my back grew cold and sticky. After a long time – I moved, and stopped myself, twice to draw him away in favour of the pub – a figure coalesced in the dimpled frost of the door’s glass panels. It stood there a while, gently seething, and I tried to make out the pattern and sex of its face, then the door was swinging open – a female smiling and beckoning us in.
‘I’m Maureen,’ she said. Her fingernails scored blue-white light in the grainy dark of the hall: stray light catching on the steel hoops shot through each cuticle. She smelled of mint, grass and burnt milk. Or was that the house? I was too intent on following Lucas’ feet to work it out.
At the end of the hallway we turned sharp right. Maureen pulled back a curtain and ushered us through into a cubby hole beneath the stairs. I went, not because I was comfortable with the situation but because the other option, moving into the kitchen, was a no go: three shapes huddled around a table eating very loudly in the dark. All I could hear was the scrape of cutlery on plates and wet, mulchy sounds. I felt faint, but kept it together.
Maureen bent and fiddled with something on the floor and I was jolted out of my queasiness as a large disc of wood swung up, the gap it created immediately filling with a shaft of smoky light. Now, music. Thin, bitter and wintry, skittering out of the hole like a host of spiders. We went through the floor via an aluminium chain link ladder. In the basement, I felt much more comfortable; the mystery was over: it was just a party after all. A ragged sofa spilled sponge and people out of its sagging middle. All eyes turned to us as we moved into the small crowd. There was an equal spread of men and women; every now and then, as we approached the makeshift bar – a plank of wood resting on two beer barrels – I thought I recognised a face or the way someone spoke, or the way a person moved his or her head. Again I searched for Nuala, but half-heartedly. I doubted she’d come in without me, or a direct invitation.
London Revenant Page 15
