Land of the Living

by Nicci French

  A pair of black gloves, balled up into each other. My address book, coming apart at the spine. Four black pens, one leaking. Mascara. Two tampons. Half a packet of Polo mints I put one into my mouth absentmindedly, which at least covered up the taste of the wine. A pack of tissues. One sucking sweet. One bead bangle. Three thin hair bands which I didn't need any longer. A comb and a tiny mirror. And a bit of tin-foil that had fallen on the floor. I picked it up and it wasn't tin-foil after all, but a stiff silver strip, holding two pills, except one pill had been pressed out. I tilted it up to the light to make out the words printed on the back of the strip. Levonelle, 750 microgram tablets, levo norgestrel I had an absurd impulse just to pop the other round white tablet into my mouth, just to see what would happen.

  I didn't, of course. I made myself a cup of tea, then called Sheila and Guy's number and got the answering-machine. I told them I wouldn't be back tonight, but thanks so much for everything and I'd be in touch very soon. I put on my leather jacket, put the key and the tablet into the inside pocket, and went outside. My car was still there, except now it had a ticket wrapped in polythene, tucked under its iced-up windscreen wipers.

  I'd deal with that later. I jogged in the darkness on to Camden high street and kept going until I came to a chemist's. It was about to close. I went up to the prescription counter, where a young Asian man asked me if he could help me.

  "I hope so. I just wondered if you could tell me what this is for." I produced the silver strip and passed it across to him.

  He glanced at it briefly and frowned at me. "Does it belong to you?"

  "Yes," I said. "That is, no, no, it doesn't. Because if it was mine I'd know, wouldn't I? I found it. I found it in my my little sister's room and I just wanted to make sure it was safe. Because, you see, one's gone."

  "How old is your sister?"

  "Nine," I said wildly.

  "I see." He laid the strip down on the counter and took off his glasses. "This is emergency contraception."

  "What?"

  "The morning-after pill'

  "Oh," I said.

  "And you say your sister is only nine?"

  "Oh, God."

  "She ought to see a doctor."

  "Well, as a matter of fact.. ." I petered out nervously. Another customer was standing behind us, listening eagerly.

  "When do you think she took it?"

  "Ages ago. Ten days, something like that."

  He looked very disapproving and then a rather ironic expression appeared on his face. I think he knew.

  "Normally," he said, 'you should take two pills. The first no later than seventy-two hours after intercourse has taken place, preferably earlier than that, and the second twelve hours after that. So your sister could be pregnant."

  I grabbed the strip and waved it. "I'll deal with it, I promise, thank you, but I'll make sure it's all right. Thank you." I made for the street. The cold rain felt wonderful on my burning cheeks.

  Nine

  I knew what had happened. I bloody knew. It was one of those ludicrous things that I'd heard of other people doing. Even friends. How pathetic. As soon as I got back to the flat, I phoned Terry. He sounded as if he had been asleep. I asked him if any mail had arrived for me that morning. He mumbled that there were a couple of things.

  "They might have sent my new credit card. They said they'd try to."

  "I'll send it on, if you'd prefer."

  "It's desperately urgent. And I'm just in the neighbourhood, so is it all right if I drop by?"

  "Well, all right but-'

  "I'll be there in half an hour."

  "I thought you were in the neighbourhood."

  I tried to think of a clever explanation but couldn't.

  "Look, the longer we talk the longer it will be until I get there."

  When I arrived, he had a bottle of wine open. He offered me a glass and I accepted. I had to be subtle about this. I had to work my way round to it. He looked at me with the appraising expression I knew so well, as if I was a slightly dodgy antique and he was putting a value on me.

  "You've found your clothes," he said.

  "Yes."

  "Where were they?"

  I didn't want to tell him. This wasn't just bloody-mindedness. I thought that, just for these few days, it would be good to create the maximum amount of confusion. If the people who knew who I was didn't know where I was and the people who knew where I

  was didn't know who I was, then maybe I'd be safer for a while. At least I'd be more of a moving target.

  "I'd left them with someone," I said.

  "Who?"

  "It's no one you know. Have you got my mail?"

  "I put it on the table."

  I wandered over and looked at the two envelopes there. One was a questionnaire about shopping habits, which I chucked immediately into the bin, the other an envelope marked 'special delivery'. I picked it up and it felt promisingly firm. I ripped it open. A brand new shiny credit card. A. E. Devereaux. I had a place to sleep, my clothes, some CDs and now a credit card. I was really coming back to life. I looked around.

  "Of course, some of my stuff is still here, bits and pieces," I said.

  I sipped at my wine and Terry gulped at his. I was going to say something about his drinking and then I remembered with relief that I didn't have to do that any more. That was Sally's job now. But maybe he didn't drink with her.

  "You can collect it any time you want," he said.

  "I haven't exactly got anywhere to put it," I said. "Is there a rush? Is Sally moving in?"

  "I've only known her a couple of weeks. She's just'

  "You know, Terry, if there's one thing I don't want to get into it's a discussion about how she really doesn't mean anything to you."

  "That's not what I meant. I was talking about you. I just wanted to say that I wasn't happy about what happened when you left." He tried to take a sip from an empty glass. He looked down at the floor, then up at me. "I'm sorry, Abbie. I'm sorry I hit you. Really. I've got no excuse to offer at all. It was my fault completely and I hate myself for it."

  I knew this Terry very well. This was the apologetic Terry. The one who admitted everything and said he would never do it again and from now on it would all be different. I'd believed that Terry too often but, then, he always believed himself too.

  "It's OK," I said at last. "You don't need to hate yourself."

  "I was terrible to live with."

  "Oh, well, I was probably difficult too, in my own way."

  He shook his head ruefully. "That's the thing, you weren't difficult at all. You were happy and generous and fun. Except for the first few minutes after your alarm went off in the morning. All my mates thought I was the luckiest man in the world. And you didn't give up on me."

  "Oh, well.. ." I said uncomfortably.

  "Except you are now, aren't you? Giving up on me."

  "It's over, Terry."

  "Abbie

  "Don't," I said. "Please. Listen, Terry, I wanted to ask you something."

  "Anything." He was on his second glass of wine now.

  "For some reason, my own sanity mainly, I'm trying to reconstruct this period that I can't remember. I'm investigating myself as if I were someone else. Now, from what I understand we had a massive row on the Saturday and I walked out."

  "As I've said, it wasn't really a row. It was all my fault. I don't know what came over me."

  "Terry, I'm completely uninterested in that. I just want to know where I was. And various other things. So I left, and went to stay with Sadie. But if I stormed out, I presumably wasn't carrying my CD player and my TV with me."

  Terry shook his head.

  "No," he said. "You walked out with nothing except your bag. I thought you'd be back later that evening. The next day you rang and I tried to talk you out of it but I couldn't. You wouldn't tell me where you were. Then a couple of days later, you rang again. You said you'd be over to collect some things. You came on Wednesday and you took quite a lot of stuff."<
br />
  Now I was getting to the difficult bit. "Was there anything else?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, when we talked .. . when we rowed, you know, did we also, um .. . ?" "We didn't really talk, as such. We had a row. You left. I asked if you wanted to come back. You refused. You wouldn't tell me where you were. I tried to reach you on the phone but I couldn't."

  "What about when I came round here to collect my stuff ? What about then?"

  "We didn't meet. You came when I was out."

  I felt a lurch in my stomach.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I know I'm being stupid about this, but you're saying that we didn't have any contact after I walked out?"

  "We talked on the phone."

  "I don't mean that. We didn't meet?"

  "No. You wouldn't let me."

  "So who the fuck .. . ?"

  I'd begun a sentence that I couldn't possibly finish.

  "Look, Abbie, I really want to .. ."

  At that moment the doorbell rang so I never learnt what it was that Terry really wanted, although I could make a fair guess at it. I saw Terry clench his teeth and I saw that he knew who was at the door, so I knew as well.

  "This is a bit awkward," he said, as he moved across to the door.

  I wasn't in a condition to deal with anything at all. I could hardly speak.

  "It's not at all awkward. Go and let her in. I'll come down with you. I'm going now."

  We trooped down the stairs in single file. "I'm just on my way," I said to Sally, on the doorstep. "I was collecting my mail." I waved the single envelope.

  "It's fine," Sally said.

  "I won't make a habit of this," I said.

  "It doesn't matter at all," she said.

  "That's fantastic," I said, as I moved past her. "I can honestly say, with complete sincerity, that you and Terry make a better couple than Terry and I ever did."

  Her expression turned frosty. "What are you talking about? You don't know me at all."

  "No," I said. "But I know me."

  I stopped off on the way home at one of those mini-supermarkets that compensate for the wrinkled fruit and veg they keep out on the pavement by never closing. I got milk, a bottle of white wine and the ingredients for a basic salad. Back in Jo's flat I locked the door with the chain then threw the salad together. I was so tired that I'd gone beyond the desire to sleep. My eyes felt sore, my head buzzed, my limbs ached. I swallowed a couple of pills and washed them down with a gulp of cold white wine, then I ate the salad alone and in silence, trying to clarify my thoughts. I looked at the small pyramid of Jo's mail. There was nothing necessarily sinister about that. She might have invited me to flat sit while she was on holiday or working abroad or almost anything. I flicked through her letters. There were a few red letters. I didn't know if that meant anything. Jo might be the sort of person who always leaves bills until the last minute. Or she might just have forgotten. Or she might be arriving back from her holiday at any second. I decided to give it a couple of days and then I would start to find out about Jo. First I had to find out about myself.

  I sat cross-legged on Jo's pine floor and arranged things around me. There was the Avalanche file, the mail I'd collected from Terry out of the bag. There were the phone messages from Carol, the receipts I'd found in the glove compartment of my car. I went to the bureau in the corner of the room and pulled it open. I took a pen from a mug with a London Underground map on in it. From a drawer I took a handful of white A4 paper.

  What did I know about the days that I couldn't remember? I took one of the pieces of white paper and wrote "Lost Days' at the top. At the far right-hand side I wrote Tuesday 22 January. Right at the end of the day, just before midnight, I had collapsed on the doorstep of Tony Russell. How many days had I been held captive? Three? No, it must have been more than that. Four, five, six, maybe more. The last piece of information I was absolutely sure of was the evening of Tuesday 15 January when I had ordered a take away to be delivered to this very flat. I needed to fill in the days. What had I been doing? I knew I hadn't been seeing my friends.

  A thought occurred to me. I went to the kitchen. I had to open a number of cupboard doors before I found the rubbish bin. An awful smell, sweet and rotting, hit me as I leant over it. But I forced myself to look into it. There were horrible things down there, mouldy, rancid, slimy, but no tin-foil containers left over from a take away meal. Which meant that the bin had been emptied at least once and then there had been enough time for more rubbish to be thrown into it. Which meant that Jo or I, or Jo and I, or someone else had been here for at least some time after the Tuesday. Unless the take away meal had been thrown directly into an outside bin. How likely was that?

  My head hurt. Hadn't Robin said something about me phoning her to cancel our evening drink? I scribbled "Wednesday' in the margin of the page and put a question mark beside it.

  I began with Carol's list of telephone messages. More than anything those scrawled reminders took me back to my old life, those urgent communications, brief responses. One by one, I crossed out the ones I recognized. At the end I was left with three I couldn't remember. One with no name beside it, but a phone number. One saying, "Pat called." Pat? I knew about twelve people called Pat, male and female. One of them I'd been at nursery school with. She had the loudest scream I've ever heard. The other message was 'a guy called'. Thanks, Carol.

  I sat down again and selected another blank sheet of paper. I wrote "Things To Do' at the top of the page. My general motto in life was, when in doubt write a list. First I wrote, 'phone the numbers'. Under that I wrote: "Avalanche'. Laurence had said that after I had stormed out of Jay and Joiner's I had used up my own time to go and speak to people involved in the project, and encouraged them to complain. It was one of the only real clues I had to what I'd been doing during the lost days.

  I opened the Avalanche file and took out the contact sheet on top. They were all familiar names, the people I'd been dealing with during those frenetic days at the beginning of January. I flicked through the file. I wrote down names, put some in brackets and underlined others. It made me tired just to think about the work I'd done.

  I came to the accounts at the back of the file. I stared at the figures until they blurred. As if shapes were sliding out of a thick fog, I remembered some of the arguments I'd had with Laurence. Or, at least, I remembered why I would have had them: the shoddy behaviour of our company towards its sub-contractors, the creative accounting that had gone on under my nose. And then I remembered Todd.

  Actually, Todd was a part of my life that I'd never forgotten, just pushed to the back of my mind. I had wondered afterwards if I should have seen the signs earlier. He had been running the Avalanche project. It was a hugely complicated task that needed a mixture of finesse and banging heads together. I had learnt very quickly that everybody on a job has a grievance against someone else and everybody has an excuse for their own failings. If you step too far in one direction, you provoke a revolt. Too far in the other direction and nothing gets done. Because Todd and I were using some of the same people I started to hear that the work was going slowly. Work always goes slowly. But if the builders say it's going slowly, they mean it's going backwards. I mentioned this a couple of times to Todd and he said it was all coming along fine. I started to feel something was seriously wrong and mentioned it to Laurence.

  The next I heard was that Todd had been fired and that I was in charge of the Avalanche job. Laurence told me that Todd had apparently had a breakdown without telling anybody and that part of this meant that he had done absolutely nothing and that Jay and Joiner's was facing the prospect of litigation. I was appalled and said that I hadn't meant to betray Todd. Laurence said that Todd was a psychotic, that he needed medical help, but that the immediate problem was to save the company. So I walked into Todd's office and I worked solidly for forty hours. For a week after that I never slept for more than four hours a night. So if I was partly responsible for what had happened to Todd, then To
dd was partly responsible for what had happened to me.

  I wrote his name on the sheet of paper. I thought, then added a question mark. I'd consider that one. I drew a square around the question mark. I added more lines to make it look as if the question mark were inside a cube. I shaded the sides of the cube. I drew lines radiating from the cube to make it look as if the cube were shining or exploding.

  Another thought occurred. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. Underneath Todd' I wrote 'pregnancy test' and underlined it. I had had sex with someone and I clearly hadn't taken any precautions. Who with? I started to think of writing another list of potential candidates, but I had nobody to put on it. Which men had I definitely met during my lost week? Guy. Unlikely. The person who delivered the take away was probably a man. And, of course, there was him.

  Next I started to write "What' and then stopped. I'd been thinking: What are you doing? And I'd started to write it automatically. But what was I doing? The idea of these forgotten dark days was horrible and it was somewhere in my brain tormenting me every second of the day and night. Sometimes I fantasized that that was what was causing the pain in my head. If I could fill in all the blanks, discover everything I had been doing, the pain would go. Was it worth putting myself at risk for that? And was I even at risk? Was he out there somewhere in London looking for me? He might have found me already. He might be outside Jo's flat right now, waiting for me to come out. Or I could be wrong about all this. The man might have vanished. He knew that I didn't remember how he'd first met me. I didn't know what he looked like. If he sat tight, he would be safe. He would be safe to go off and kill other women and forget about me. But could he feel sure?

  I drew a large question mark around "What'. I turned it into a three-dimensional question mark, then shaded it. If I could prove that I really had been kidnapped .. . That was the best I could hope for. If I could find some piece of evidence, then the police would believe me and they would protect me and go and find the man and I could have a life again.