The First Cut

by Knight, Ali

  3

  The doorbell rang as Nicky was sieving hot tomatoes and swearing. She’d decided to cook a meal for Greg’s family and, with hope triumphing over experience, had chosen a complicated recipe that was slowly and painfully turning into a disaster. Everything was taking longer than she’d anticipated, allowing her to drink more and care less about the food.

  ‘Greg, can you get it?’

  She was answered by a chorus of voices advancing on the kitchen. She burned her fingers on the tomatoes as Greg’s mother, Margaret, loomed in for a kiss and a hug. Arthur came over and pinched her cheek and then proceeded to demand the bottle opener. Greg’s sister, Liz, brought up the rear of the party with her son, Dan, who sloped in last. Dan had gelled his hair so that it stood up in stiff peaks. A smell that Nicky assumed was meant to imply mountain freshness but screamed ‘awkward teen approaching’ wafted towards her. She half began to put her hand out to try to ruffle his hair, and then realized he’d get tomato in those peaks.

  ‘Whatever are you doing?’ Liz asked, sniffing with implied disapproval. Nicky gave up sieving and slopped the tomatoes back into the saucepan. How predictable: Liz had begun sniping before she’d even sat down.

  ‘You really don’t have to make such an effort, love,’ Margaret added, peering unconvinced into a pan. Margaret approached any stove as if it was a deeply untrustworthy foreigner that would rob her sooner than it would boil eggs. Her only interactions with such an implement over the years had been to open the oven door and slam in the frozen item before retreating across the room, poised for fight or flight. To see Nicky actually leaning against it with gas rings burning was, for Margaret, as wondrous as watching a pagan ritual.

  ‘I like making an effort . . .’ she began, but was stopped by Greg’s large hand on the back of her neck, massaging.

  ‘You OK, babes?’

  She wanted to shout ‘No!’, but gave a thin smile instead. She wished they had the evening alone, that he hadn’t invited them. The Petersons were a herd, moving like wildebeest over the plain, stampeding over to their house whenever Greg put in an appearance. His trip home was far too short; they’d hardly had any time alone and he was going again in two days. She wanted him to herself, and felt guilty about it.

  She heard Arthur cheer as he pulled a cork from a bottle of red wine.

  She stuck on a smile as Liz eyed them coolly from the corner sofa, taking small slurps of wine. ‘How long you back for, Greg?’

  ‘Four days. It’s a flying visit.’

  ‘Hope you’re not getting too lonely, Nics.’ Nicky slid a knife through the cellophane on a packet of cod fillets and didn’t answer. Liz leaned back into the cushions, her short hair a defiant grey that she refused to dye, even though Margaret was always nagging her to. Nicky watched her narrow her eyes at the garden, as though the trees and shrubs were an advancing enemy. Their kitchen was large, their house in a grand avenue in north London. Liz the divorcee had to make a tortuous journey from a terrace in south London to see them. She was a social worker whose shift pattern gave her this weekend off. Nicky wished she was saving children today. ‘Here in this big fancy house all by yourself.’

  ‘Christ, Liz, give it a rest!’ Greg snapped.

  Liz smiled knowingly at Nicky as she took another slurp. Nicky picked up the fillets and felt the slime spread across her fingertips. Liz liked to pick at scabs, she liked to play dirty – and, looked at a certain way, there was dirt in abundance.

  Nicky thought that having survived Grace’s death, she was strong enough to withstand anything, but other people’s reactions to her altered relationship with Greg were hard to take. Liz had simply given her that awful, secret smile of hers, like a shark about to attack. Grace’s brother had been more straightforward – he came round to the house threatening to hurt Greg and Nicky. Grace’s father no longer spoke to them. That cut to the heart, but it was to be expected. Grief killed relationships; it was death’s last laugh.

  But Nicky never wavered in her belief that Grace would have been happy for them. And Nicky felt it was her duty as Grace’s best friend to quell the rumours, the vicious slurs, the insinuations that Greg was responsible.

  He was the grieving husband, the widower. He might have been thousands of miles away when it happened but, as the husband, Greg was automatically one of the prime suspects. The police had grilled him, of course, over and over again, about his relationship with Grace and about the money. Grace’s death made him a rich man. He’d sold Grace’s gastropub – what else could he do? Yes, he said defensively, he’d made a lot of money from the property boom, but Grace was gone and it wasn’t his line of work. Nicky wondered to what extent his subsequent success as a director of photography on big-budget films, his drive and ambition, his workaholic tendencies, were based on a need to prove the doubters wrong, to show that he wasn’t someone who lived off a dead wife’s money.

  The twists of fate were cruel, Nicky believed – she had not only lost Grace, she had lost Grace’s family too, given them up for Greg. Now, five years down the line, she occasionally wondered if he was worth it. She drummed her fingers on the worktop, the old desire for a calming cigarette nagging at her. She’d quit smoking after Grace’s murder in a desire to try to cleanse herself and start anew, but old habits were hard to break.

  She watched Liz kick her shoes off and yawn, put her stockinged feet on the ottoman and lounge on the sofa in the house Greg had bought with Grace’s fortune.

  She suddenly felt a fire of defensiveness for Greg and anger at the doubters, at those who hadn’t believed him. She was the one who’d been woken night after night by him thrashing this way and that in the bed, gripped by the night terrors. She was the one who’d wiped away the tears of the grieving widower.

  ‘Don’t do any for Dan. He won’t touch it,’ Liz shouted as Nicky began frying the fish.

  Margaret was inviting her out to the house in Essex, telling her she had a new swinging garden seat, perfect for the hot weather. Nicky answered in distracted, half-finished sentences. The cod skin was sticking; it wasn’t going to work well.

  The fish spat angrily at her from the pan. ‘Do you need to turn the heat down?’ Greg asked, moving across to the stove. She felt his hand on her bum. Bit busy now, she thought, irritation beginning to bloom inside. Greg was confusing; some moments he loved her with an intensity that seemed uncontrollable, and at other times he was cold and unresponsive, as if she’d done something wrong but she never knew what. This might happen to all couples forced apart for too long, but truth be told, she felt abandoned.

  Margaret made a fuss of laying the table while Liz argued with Dan about putting his DS away.

  Nicky glanced over at Greg as he started chopping parsley with an ostentatiously large knife.

  ‘Be careful with that knife, Greg,’ Margaret counselled. ‘It looks ever so sharp.’

  Greg speeded up his action and then threw the knife in the air, catching it by the handle on its way back down to the floor. Margaret gave a small scream. ‘Oh, in moments like this I ask myself, what would Bruce Willis do?’

  Liz rolled her eyes. ‘Be serious.’

  ‘Bruce is always deadly serious, fighting for his family.’

  ‘You ever met Bruce Willis?’ Dan asked hopefully, attracted to the glamour of his uncle’s job.

  Greg turned to Dan conspiratorially as he tipped the parsley over the fish fillets and Nicky brought the dish to the table. ‘Mr Willis to you. I’ve met him a couple of times. Know something, Danno? He once said something important to me.’ Greg paused and Nicky saw Dan’s eyes widen in anticipation. ‘He said: “Yippee-ki-yay, Yippee-ki-yay.”’

  ‘Don’t you mean “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!”?’ Dan shouted. Liz gave her son a stare that would have shrivelled spring bulbs.

  ‘Put it there, Danno!’ Greg high-fived his nephew. ‘One day you should come to Hollywood with me. We’ll have fun.’

  Fourteen-year-old Dan turned to his mum. ‘Can I really go one day
?’

  ‘We’ll see.’ Liz gave her brother a look that Nicky couldn’t decipher. Liz sniped at Greg but she adored him, that much was clear. Nicky tuned back into the conversation.

  Margaret was mid-flow as they sat down and began raiding the serving dishes on the table. ‘I’m only your mum, dear, and I’m resigned to never seeing you, but with Nicky it’s a different story. You need to look after your wife, Greg, work out what’s important.’ She waved her fork uneasily.

  ‘Mum, with all due respect, that’s something for Nics and me to talk about.’

  ‘Those that play together, stay together,’ Arthur added.

  ‘Isn’t it pray?’ said Liz.

  ‘You get my point.’

  They were talking about her as if she wasn’t there. It was a Peterson family trait.

  ‘If you’re away too long it just leads to fights—’

  ‘Bruce Willis is always fighting someone,’ Dan interjected as he bit into a huge piece of fish. Nicky hoped with petty pleasure that Liz had noticed.

  ‘No, Danno, he’s fighting for someone,’ added Greg. ‘Usually his family.’ He glanced at Nicky but looked quickly away. Nicky put her hands in her lap as the Petersons chomped in double-quick time through the meal she had spent ages creating. Greg was slippery. If he was put on the spot he tended to revert to irony and jokes to avoid having to confront what was being asked of him. ‘So at this moment I wonder what would Bruce Willis do? In a time of crisis, how would Bruce react?’

  ‘He’d kill someone!’ Dan shouted.

  Nicky heard Liz drop her fork on the floor.

  She put her head in her hands and was hit by a waft of something unpleasant on her fingers. The house would smell of fish for days afterwards as she tried to scrub away the lingering bad smells.

  4

  Nicky should have taken the day off work. Greg was leaving that evening and he wouldn’t be back for ten weeks, but the desk was two down – Bobby was off with stress and Mike had been handed the black bin liner just a week ago – and she needed to show her face. She didn’t want to lose her job.

  She watched a man in overalls carry a dead yukka out of the editor’s office. I should write the obituary for this whole industry, she thought, as Maria plonked a flat white on her desk, from Costa Coffee on the ground floor.

  ‘Good riddance,’ muttered Maria as they watched their former boss’s boxes being stacked on a trolley.

  ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Nicky replied.

  ‘I’ve given up wishing for anything,’ Maria said. ‘That way I can’t be constantly disappointed.’

  ‘You’d think in this job we’d gain a sense of perspective on life – and death,’ Nicky said.

  ‘Perspective is for fools,’ Maria said, leaning forward over the desk. ‘Now, how was your shagathon?’

  Nicky made a face and she caught Maria looking at her. There was a pause.

  ‘You know, whenever I ask you about Greg, you give me this tragic look.’

  ‘He’s leaving tonight.’

  ‘I already know that.’

  Maria was a good journalist: persistent and nobody’s fool. Nicky squirmed. She fiddled uselessly with the corner of a piece of paper. ‘He’s away so much, it pisses me off.’

  ‘So move to LA, go freelance, get knocked up – you’ve got options.’

  Nicky sighed. She loved Maria. She was relentlessly upbeat about other people’s options and pessimistic about her own. What she couldn’t tell Maria was that she was frozen. She suspected that if she announced to Greg she was moving to California, he would suddenly find an excuse to be working in China. It wasn’t the distance, it was the intention. Not for the first time Nicky wondered if theirs was a love that had been born of something that was fundamentally wrong and so wasn’t sustainable.

  Maria reached over the computers and wiped a Post-it down on her desk. ‘This guy’s phoned twice already this morning.’

  It took Nicky a moment to place the name – it was Adam from the plane. She’d forgotten about him. Sort of. ‘Did he say what it was about?’

  ‘No.’

  She felt Maria’s eyes boring into her as she picked up the phone, but there was no connection to the mobile number.

  ‘Another option is to have an affair,’ Maria said slyly.

  Nicky didn’t answer. She felt a blush creeping across her cheeks.

  ‘Well, well, you are a one,’ Maria said quietly to her computer screen and Nicky threw the plastic top of her coffee cup at her.

  She looked up to see Bruton, the news editor, advancing across the office towards them. Advancing was the right word, Nicky thought. It applied to glaciers as they travelled down valleys and perfectly described the speed Bruton adopted in the office. She had never seen him rush, not even when the Twin Towers collapsed, but he was sharp and quick and it was a mistake to equate his physical slowness with a lack of mental agility. Bruton’s movement petered out when he eventually came alongside them.

  ‘What we got today?’ His voice was a truck emptying gravel.

  ‘There’s a former chancellor of Durham Univ—’

  He interrupted Maria. ‘Boring. Don’t lead with that.’

  Nicky picked up the reins. ‘We’ve got an actress in Ealing comedies who had an affair with a former president—’

  ‘Picture?’

  ‘It’s sexy and good enough quality to run big.’ He nodded, then pulled a white plastic tube from his trouser pocket and sucked deeply on it. Nicky continued. ‘There’s a climber who scaled Everest and invented a crampon that—’

  ‘No. The editor’s been sacked. We don’t have to indulge his interests any more.’

  ‘Bruton, it looks like you’re smoking a tampon applicator,’ Maria said.

  Bruton took the piece of white plastic from his lips and stared at it uselessly. He coughed and a sound like stones rattling in a bag hit them. He stared with disappointment at the substitute cigarette; it wasn’t giving him the hit he needed. He pointed the tampon applicator at the empty editor’s office. ‘Word is we’re going downmarket.’ Maria gave a sarcastic hurrah. ‘That means more affairs, more scandal and more dead women.’

  ‘So it’s goodbye to civil servants,’ Nicky added. And at that they all cheered before Bruton was ambushed by a fit of coughing so severe Nicky felt concerned enough to get out of her seat and pat him on the back.

  Nicky loved her job and had happily done it for years. She knew there were journalists who looked down on obituaries, thought of them as pages to flick through on your way to the sport. There was also no opportunity to have your name attached to what you wrote; an obituary belonged to the deceased and no one else. ‘There’ll be no promotion into a column from this desk,’ Maria sometimes said. Nicky wasn’t going to get a colour headshot in the paper any time soon; wasn’t going to get the smallest taste of a low-grade kind of celebrity. That suited her just fine. She did wonder, however, being surrounded by death so much, what would be written in her own obituary. Not much. In that she was just like millions of others, living out her small and inconsequential life. Only a tiny number, Nicky knew, ever made an impact, ever did things important enough to be written about, to have their details stored on electronic files, the story of their lives written before that life was over. For everyone else it was a case of one day you’re here, and then you’re gone; cancer or an accident or finally old age ends it with hardly a ripple. Good and bad deaths, but still a life to sum up. She took a sip of coffee. And then there was Grace, defined not by her life, but by the way she died; remembered for not having been served by justice.

  ‘You look miles away,’ Maria said, twisting a pen around in her hair and poking it into the middle of a makeshift bun.

  Nicky smiled. ‘I’m thinking about death,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t spend too long on it. I think of it like flu – catching.’

  Nicky spent the morning scanning news wires for sudden announcements, spoke to some freelancers and then, since the sun was shin
ing, went for an early lunch. As she was crossing the lobby she came up short. Adam was sitting on a sofa by the door.

  She felt her stomach contract as he stood and walked towards her, his hands in the pockets of his trousers. They shook hands and he didn’t apologize for coming to her work, or seem embarrassed about appearing too keen.

  ‘This is a surprise,’ Nicky began to say.

  ‘Don’t be worried, I’m not after a job,’ he said, flashing that devastating smile.

  She gave him a rueful look. ‘That’s a relief. This isn’t the place to be asking for jobs nowadays.’

  ‘It’s about my aunt. She’s not got long left. I’ve been doing a bit of digging into her life, and I thought she might make a good subject for an obituary.’

  Oh sweet, thought Nicky. She did believe Adam had a crush on her. Well, a mini one at least. She doubted very much that Adam really had anything of any use to her – people tended to overestimate how interesting their own family members were. ‘Is that why you were trying to phone me earlier?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They walked together to the revolving door and out into the summer heat. Nicky yearned for a sandwich and a drink on a bench in the napkin of grass round the corner. ‘So when you couldn’t get hold of me you decided to come and tell me straight away?’

  Adam shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m just a bit excited, that’s all. Can I buy you lunch and tell you about her?’

  Nicky put up a strong protest. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not buying me anything. But you’re very welcome to join me for a sandwich and a Coke. There’s a good café—’

  ‘Let me take you to lunch. Honestly, it’s my pleasure.’

  ‘I simply can’t let you do that.’ But she just couldn’t manage to pack her smile away.

  ‘I’m sure you think my aunt is just a line, but you’re blunt enough to tell it to me straight. Either way, I’m buying you lunch.’

  Nicky could feel the warmth on her back melting away the worries of the office and the blackness at home. She could sit under a tree with Adam by her side. ‘OK, you win.’