“It’s here,” I said, walking back toward him. “I’d better go. I’ll see you in a week or so. I’ll get back as soon as I can, I promise.”
I turned to go.
“Oh, Adam,” said Crace.
“Yes?”
I looked back at his thin, wasted form standing there silhouetted by the heavy wooden door.
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
I walked toward the speedboat, and Crace closed the door.
Arriving back in England was like coming across an old scar to find the wound reopened, the flesh festering underneath. I had blocked Britain out of my mind and refused to think about Eliza and the situation. After all, I had a new life in Italy. I had plans, grand ambitions. I had my book to write.
But as the plane circled the gray skies, tipping on its side to give an occasional glimpse of the patchwork of fields below, I began to feel more and more nauseous. My mouth was dry and bitter. I closed my eyes and saw Eliza, remembered running my fingers through her glossy, sloe-black hair, and tracing the vein running down her neck with my tongue. Her eyes opened—a flash of ice blue. Another image. We were in bed. It was early morning and the weak light filtered into the room. I reached out to her, but she stiffened at my touch. I listened to her breathing, shallow, tense little breaths. She switched on the light beside the bed and turned toward me, serious-faced. There was something wrong. It wasn’t going that well between us, was it? Surely I had to agree.
What was she talking about? I thought we were just fine, no, better than that. I thought we were unique, that we would be together for—I couldn’t see a time when we would be apart. That’s how close I thought we were.
She had felt a gap between us recently, a distance that she thought would only grow with time. She knew it wasn’t my fault, that I couldn’t help it, that those kind of problems, the difficulties I had communicating and—what was it she said?—empathizing with people were really hard to overcome. It probably went back to something in my childhood. Or perhaps I would never understand the root of it all. Maybe it was just the way I was.
She had found me vaguely amusing to begin with. My disconnection with the world around me. It was endearing, she said. But after a while it had become ever so slightly annoying. And now she was beginning to have doubts about the future of our relationship. No, she hadn’t met anyone else, she said. No, she really hadn’t, she maintained.
I remember her lying there, naked. Her flesh almost translucent, pearl-white. Her red lips beginning to tremble, her hands shaking. She told me I was hurting her, really hurting her. Stop it, she said, but I had to make her see that what she was saying was nonsensical. She wasn’t talking about us, I told her. She was telling me a story, relating the problems of another couple she had met.
I think I pinned her wrists down. I know she couldn’t move. She was rigid. She looked like a painting, ever so beautiful, almost dead. I felt incredibly aroused. I pushed into her, but she tried to fight me. She started to scream—thin, weak little childlike shrieks—but there was a portable CD by the bed and I simply switched it on and turned up the volume.
By the end of it, I was sure she would change her mind. She couldn’t live without me. She got off the bed and went into the bathroom. I heard the shower gush water and I heard her sobs.
She would never leave me now, I was certain.
When she came out of the bathroom, her eyes looked glazed over, strange somehow. I told her how much I loved her. Her head jerked forward and she clasped her hand over her mouth. I couldn’t hear what she said—her words were all muffled—but I think it was something about how much she loved me too. She walked across the room and put on her clothes. She had to go out, she said. Just to get some milk. She’d be back in a couple of minutes. It was Friday, and I was looking forward to spending the weekend with her.
I waited for Eliza to come back, naked and immobile on the edge of the bed, thinking that not moving would stop time or at the very least slow it down. Goose bumps covered my skin, turning my legs and arms into chicken flesh. With each creak of the stairs or slam of the flats’ front doors, I raised my head in anticipation, confident that it was her. She had met a friend and gone for coffee. She had gone to a lecture and then made a trip to the library. She had fallen down and cut her knee and had to go to casualty. Wild surmises ran through my head like a series of hallucinations, each more believable than the last.
But Eliza did not come back that day. Sunlight faded from the room, and I was left sitting in the dark, listening to the sounds of the city.
I had to see her before doing anything else. Just to convince myself that she had actually existed, that I hadn’t manufactured the whole thing inside my head.
After picking up another mobile phone at Stansted and changing my euros into sterling, I took a train to Liverpool Street and then a tube to North London. I emerged from the suffocating heat of the underground at Kentish Town. Drizzle fell from a greasy, yellow-black sky. Outside the station, a drunk sat in a puddle of his own piss, smiling. A woman with the face of an angelic child and the body of a prepubescent girl held out her hand for money. When I placed a pound coin into one of her tiny hands, her remarkably unlined face lit up with delight.
The route from the station to the flat was one I had taken so many times that it was indelibly marked in my brain: right at the first junction, left just after the pub, straight on past the pastel-colored houses and the corner shop, and second on the right. As I walked the last few steps down our street, my hand automatically searched my jeans pocket for the key. But, of course, I no longer had it. Things had changed since then.
I stopped by one of the trees in the road and moved into the shadows. A light was on in what used to be our bedroom in the rented flat at the top of the house. Was she there now, inside that room? Was she with him? What was he doing to her? He must have brainwashed her. Why else would Eliza want to go off with a man old enough to be her father? His tawny beard nuzzling her neck, his flabby body rubbing up against her—I still couldn’t believe that she could prefer him to me.
I’m not sure exactly when I realized what was going on. Certainly not that day when Eliza walked out. I called her mobile repeatedly, but it automatically switched to answer mode. I dialed her parents’ number, woke up her father who told me never to contact Eliza again. Stay away from her, he said. She doesn’t want you—doesn’t want you anywhere near her. If it had been up to him, he would have called the police. Had she been in trouble, I asked. He told me to fuck off and slammed the phone down.
On the Monday we were due at a lecture together, Tarquin and Lucretia: Representations of Power and Gender in Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting. I would see her there and ask her what was wrong. Obviously I had done something to upset her, but surely we could patch it up and sort it out—behave like adults, for goodness’ sake. I washed and dressed, carefully combed my hair, and took the bus into college. I arrived at the lecture hall early and had something like fifteen minutes to kill, so I went to the coffee bar where I thought I might spot her. As I walked, I saw people eye me with suspicion. Jackie, a close friend of hers, was sitting on a low sofa with another friend, whose name I could never remember. Had she seen Eliza anywhere? She looked at me with undisguised contempt. How on earth could I show my face around here, she said, after what I’d done? If it were up to her, she’d have me locked up for life. She’d have my balls cut off as well.
I don’t know what Eliza must have said, but everyone made it pretty clear that I was not their favorite person. I sat through the lecture, even took a few notes, but I couldn’t really concentrate. Perhaps I had been a little rough with her. It wasn’t right, I’d admit that, but that didn’t mean we were through, did it? If only I could talk to her, to make her see sense.
No matter where I looked or who I asked, I couldn’t find Eliza. I wandered through the corridors of the college and out into the street feeling lost, abandoned. I tried to convince myself that everything was fine, that we had jus
t had a silly row, but deep down I think I realized it was more serious.
Memories flashed into my mind, stinging my consciousness with associations of past happiness. The first time we talked: I passed a note to her in a lecture saying how much I liked her skirt, a colorful Mexican design with little circular mirrors sewn into its seams. To frighten the devil away, she said, and then she laughed, her pale blue eyes glinting like sunlight on ice. The first time we kissed: We had been for a drink and were wandering through Covent Garden. We stopped by an old, wooden market barrow. I was nervous, but she reached out her hand and touched me. Later that night, the first time we made love. My first time with anyone. My hesitancy and her warmth and confidence.
I couldn’t accept there would be no more of her.
That day when everything altered forever, I raced back to the flat, secure in the knowledge that she would be there. As I walked toward it, I rang the number. From the other side of the street, I looked up and saw a shadow move across the living room. But the phone carried on ringing and no one answered. I took out my keys, pushed the Yale into the top lock, but as I tried to turn it, something jammed. I forced it out and made sure I had the right one. As I fumbled with the keys, I noticed that green wood shavings littered the ground, slim slivers of curled wood, a nest of snakes on the doorstep. Eliza had changed the locks.
I banged on the door, desperate to see her. I called out her name. I rang her mobile again and again, but still she would not answer. I told her that I wasn’t going to move until I had seen her. I waited and waited and finally I heard footsteps move down the hallway. She had changed her mind. She was going to let me in. Everything would be back to normal. She would tell me how silly and how sorry she had been, and she would plead with me to have her back.
The letter box opened, a white envelope nosed itself out. I tried to reach her, grasping through the thin aperture of the door, but her footsteps faded away and I was left with just the letter.
She wasn’t going to press charges, she said. If I would leave her alone, that’s all she wanted. If I tried to contact her, speak to her in any way, she would tell the authorities at the college and even ring the police. All she was asking was that I stay away, stay away for good. Finals were not far off—we only had a couple of months to go—and she didn’t really plan on coming into college. She would do most of her revision at home. She would give my belongings, together with the presents I had bought her, the occasional CD and old film on video, the sweet but inexpensive gold chain, to one of her friends, who would arrange a meeting at college. After the term ended, we would probably never see one another ever again.
She really had thought of everything—efficient and as single-minded as ever.
I remember that those words seemed to fly into my eyes like shrapnel. After finishing it, I half-expected to see the letter splattered with gobs of squid-ink black blood from the backs of my eyes. The reading left me reeling, and I staggered back down the street unbalanced as if the magnetic poles of the earth had shifted under my feet. At some point on the way back to the tube, I think I vomited into someone’s front garden.
As I recalled that scene from a few months ago, I stood and stared at the flat. I didn’t want to hurt her—not at all. Just a glimpse of her would be enough. I was over her, of course, but it would be silly to travel all this way and not see her. I shifted the weight from foot to foot and wedged my rucksack up against the tree. Occasionally a person walked down the street, spotted me and, no doubt thinking I was a potential mugger, crossed the road and carried on walking. After I had been waiting for about a half hour (by which point I felt as much a natural part of the scene as one of the trees that lined the street), the front door to one of the houses nearest to me opened. A man—glasses, early fifties, blue V-neck jumper—walked in my direction; as I didn’t recognize him, I assumed he must have moved into the street relatively recently.
“Excuse me.” His voice was clipped, upper-crust. “But are you all right?”
He wasn’t interested in my welfare at all; he just wanted to check out whether I was going to break into one of the houses.
“Yes. Sorry to worry you. It’s just I’ve just come from the airport and my friend who lives over there,” I said, pointing to Eliza’s flat, “didn’t realize what time my flight arrived. I’m just waiting for her to come back.”
“Oh, I see. Well, good luck,” he said, smiling, relief relaxing the muscles in his face. “Good night, then.”
“Good night.”
I hadn’t given much thought to where I would spend the night, but as it was getting late I thought it would be best to go back to my parents’. They didn’t know of my return, but I was sure that they would like to be surprised. Just as I squinted at my watch to calculate how long it would take me to get back to Hertfordshire on the Thameslink line, I heard the click of a door opening.
A chink of light slashed into the night, illuminating the area around Eliza’s front door. A woman with dark hair cradling a batch of newspapers in her arms stood in the entrance. She paused for a moment, gazing into the dark as if she could almost sense my presence. I took another step back into the shadows, hoping the dark spot by the tree shielded me from her sight. She licked her pale, thin, beautiful lips, bent down and eased the lid off the green recycling box that lay outside in the front garden. She slid the papers into the plastic container, straightened up again and turned away. I wanted to call out to her, perhaps just shout her name so I could see her reaction. I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat was paralyzed. As she closed the door and the entrance returned to darkness, I said her name to myself, silently.
I couldn’t waste anymore time on her. I had moved on. I had a job to do, certain things to find out.
As I walked away from the flat and down to the station, I imagined Eliza’s reaction to my biography. I saw her walking into the bookshop on the high street, browsing through the paperbacks, and then suddenly stopping as she sees my name emblazoned across the cover and spine of a big, fat book. She picks it up and turns it over and over in her hands, not quite believing what she sees. She flicks to the inside back cover, presuming that it must be some other, older Adam Woods. But she would be wrong. Her eyes widen slightly as she reads the words: “Adam Woods studied art history at London University before moving to Venice, where he met the reclusive novelist Gordon Crace. This is his first book; his novel is due out next year.”
It would be the best revenge. The infliction of pain—physical violence—would be nothing compared to that sensation.
On the platform, a couple of young teenagers, their faces hidden by their hoods, kicked a plastic takeaway box. A middle-aged, besuited man nodded his head in time to a beat only he could hear. A slapper in a tight white skirt shouted into a mobile as I walked passed her.
I suddenly felt weak and unbearably tired. I knew where my parents kept their spare key—under a large cardboard box at the left-hand side of their garage—but thought I should ring them to tell them I was back. After all, it was late.
I dialed their number using my new mobile.
“Hello?” It was my mum, her voice deep, groggy.
“Hi, Mum. It’s me.”
“Adam? Where have you been? It’s been so—”
“I’m fine, Mum. Listen, I’m home. I’m in London.”
“Are you all right? What about your teaching job? What about Venice?”
“I’ll tell you everything when I get home. I’m about to get a train. I’ll be there in about half an hour. Is that okay?”
There was a pause. I heard a shuffling noise and then a series of muffled, unintelligible words, as if Mum had put her hand over the receiver.
“Yes, that’s fine, darling. We’re… I’m looking forward to seeing you. It’s too late to go through everything when you come in. You’ll be tired. But we’ll have a chat tomorrow. There’s an envelope for you—it looks like it’s from college, your exam results.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. I couldn’t really c
are less how I had done in my degree. I had a new life now. “I’ll look at it when I get in.”
“I hope you’ve done well, you deserve it.” She paused. “But, Adam, I’ve got to tell you that your father is still very upset and angry. Just so you know. We were hoping you’d send us a forwarding address. Not knowing how you’ve been, you can’t imagine how—”
“Okay, okay, Mum. Got to go—the train’s about to come any minute.”
It wasn’t quite true. I had at least five or seven minutes to spare, but I didn’t want to hear it. Not those words, not again.
“Jake? Hi. It’s Adam.”
“Adam…hi there. Where are you? Where’ve you been? It’s like you…you disappeared, man.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been in Venice—writing. But I’m back in London—for a couple of days anyhow. Listen, I was going to go back to my folks, but things are still a bit difficult with them, you know?”
“Yeah, right. You can always crash here if you want. There’s only a mangy sofa, but it’s yours if you’d like it.”
“Really? That’s great. I’m in North London at the moment, so I’ll be there in…what…half an hour?”
I rang my mum back and said that I’d changed my plans. I could hear the disappointment in her voice, but told her she could call me and gave her my new number. She had probably thought Dad and me could thrash out our differences once and for all and we could start behaving like a happy family, as if that was ever going to happen. I heard my father in the background snarling about how I never thought about anyone else except myself. But she made me promise that I would at least go and see them in the next couple of days so I could pick up my post and find out about my degree.
On the Tube down to Brixton, I suddenly felt the possibility of happiness. Of course, I would have to keep my plans to myself. There was no point in boasting to friends about the Crace book, the biography of a literary murderer. Instead, I would maintain that I was still writing the novel, which was, in a way, true. Nobody would know what I was really working on. And then people would be amazed. By the time I emerged from the escalator at Brixton and smelt the mix of burning incense, pot and beer, I felt almost indestructible, like the events of the previous few months had never happened.
The Lying Tongue Page 10
