Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  Everywhere I went in that house, I smelled cigar smoke.

  Two months since I had discovered her body. A month since they picked up the scumbag who had killed her. Graeme Tann, his name was, and he worked as a cleaner and handyman at the gym where Rebecca attended her Pilates classes. When they opened up his locker, they found about a thousand Polaroid photographs of Rebecca, some of which he’d taken through a vent that opened into the female changing rooms. He’d been stalking her for the best part of two years, it transpired. I’d even seen him a couple of times when I picked Rebecca up from the gym, standing out on the steps, smoking his cheap, Nicaraguan cigars, enjoying the evening air.

  He had attacked Rebecca in a sexual way, that much was obvious, but there were no semen deposits, no signs of his having introduced any part of his body to hers. At his flat in Oval they found stoppered test tubes containing his sperm, dozens of them, with the names of girls he’d masturbated over and the dates of his ejaculation written on the labels in jagged handwriting. He’d been at it for years, collecting his fantasies in this way, but Rebecca had been the first one he had visited physical harm upon. When they asked him about this, he had said that she reminded him of a kitten he owned as a child. It had been such a cute, attractive kitten that he had felt the compulsion to batter it to death. He didn’t feel that anything so comely should be allowed to exist, to highlight the ugliness in others. When he hit Rebecca, and caused her nose to bleed, he felt better, but he couldn’t stop until he had removed her attractiveness completely. He needed to ruin her, to dehumanise her, before he could feel normal again.

  I remember feeling utterly emasculated in terms of being a husband, a father, a law enforcer, a man. In any or all of those guises, I had failed my wife and my daughter. They asked me, the guys down at the nick where he was being held, if I wanted to spend some time with him, one night. I did, I did so very much want that. And I went along, too. But I grew so weak with rage and loss, and the need to do something to him to try to correct the balance again, that I couldn’t go through with it. I could barely even walk, never mind clench my hands into fists. I was a foal, ten minutes old. I was water. In this way, I also failed myself.

  So that day, a month later, I had gone up to Sarah’s room to see if she wanted to go out for breakfast. I went out for breakfast quite a lot, and I spent as much time out of that house as possible. I found myself stopping outside estate agents with increasing regularity. Maybe if I’d put the house on the market immediately, Sarah wouldn’t have run away.

  Her bed hadn’t been slept in. There was no note. Some of her clothes were gone, as was her school rucksack and the savings from her cashbox, about twenty-five pounds. She had been supportive to me in the days after Rebecca’s murder. She had greeted the stony cold of shock with remarkable stoicism. She had stroked my hair as I lay trembling in bed. I had leaned hard on her, and she’d seemed able to bear my weight. I didn’t for one moment consider that she was only thirteen and that I ought to be doing more for her. I told her to stay at her friends’ houses as much as she wanted, so I myself could spend more time in the pub looking for Rebecca’s reflection in my vodka glasses.

  I almost slapped her across the face one night, when I came home drunk, and she was sitting on the stairs in her nightie, looking shockingly like her mother with that sad, soft expression on her face. She asked me: ‘Dad, did you kill her?’

  I almost slapped her because there was some truth in what she said. I almost slapped her because, in a small way, I did kill her. I killed her by failing to see. The fact that there were no clues, no prior warning of what was to happen, didn’t mean anything to me. For two years he had been watching her, taking his fetid little pictures, wanking himself stupid over her naked body. Little eyes burning into her, tracing the curves of her flesh, drawing a map for his knife to follow. His hungry eyes, I should have noticed them, at least. But I didn’t. All I saw when I picked her up from the leisure centre was the paperwork I had to get through, the jobs that were lined up. I saw everything but his intent, little eyes.

  Instead of slapping Sarah, I screamed at her until we were both crying, holding each other so tightly, so closely that for a lunatic moment I was certain we had fused, and would never be able to pull ourselves free again.

  Sarah’s room smelled of her, nothing else. That baby-woman smell that drives you wild with compassion and love. Her skin, her scalp, her sex. These days, I remember only the cigar smoke. Sarah’s smell has become lost to me. Sometimes I question whether I had a daughter, at all. Maybe she was never anything more than a dream. But that hug we shared, that violent, desperate hug, I remember well. It’s as if I still bear the imprint of her body on my tender, pathetic flesh. It’s what keeps me going.

  The carriage jolted and swayed as the train picked up speed. As we came through the busy convergence of crisscrossed lines at the mouth of the great train shed at St Pancras, I was rattled out of sleep for good. My eyes were reflected, red and swollen, in the window. A hangover was sucking the core out of me, making me feel hollow, spineless, like a cheap tin of pink salmon with its crumbling grey backbone removed. When the train came to a halt, I found it difficult to peel myself out of the seat. I waited till everyone else had shifted, and the platform was clear, before levering myself upright and shuffling down the aisle. I rescued a half-empty Coke can from the magazine holder behind one seat, and took the warm syrup down in a single gulp. The sugar rush hit me as I stepped on to the platform, dragging my eyes all the way open. A guard leaning against the ticket barrier stared pointedly at his watch and tapped a foot against its mate, waiting for me to show him my ticket. I heard a slumping noise and looked up to see a shape move across an opaque section of the shed roof, a hundred feet or so above me. Then the flare of the floodlights stung so hard that I had to bend over and blink that sting away.

  St Pancras? There was no point in going round to Melanie’s, as she was still in Devon. And, anyway, how attractive would I have appeared to her, hungover, dirty, my breath as iffy as a cadaver’s cock? I flicked through the stained, tattered pages of the address book in my mind, came up with Lorraine Tokuzo, and reckoned I could do a lot worse. Lorraine lived in a place called Ice Wharf, on New Wharf Road. She ran a modest business out of the Essex Road, an antiques-dealing partnership concentrating on old doors and chimney pots. She was something of an expert on them and could charge a fair whack for a house visit, to assess joists and flues and offer advice about how to jazz up a roof. She’d checked my own stack out for free, years ago, but that’s between her and me.

  I hurried through the streets, chicaning round the arguing hookers, suddenly busting for a piss, and buzzed her number.

  ‘Tizzit?’

  ‘Lorraine? It’s Joel. Joel Sorrell.’

  I pressed my hand against the grille, managing to cut off most of the profanities, and when she had finished I asked her if she was going to let me in, or was I going to have to piss all over her nice, clean entrance.

  ‘When did you ever do otherwise?’ she yelled, but the lock released and I went in, wondering what the hell did I do to cheese this one off?

  I was still mulling it over when the lift doors opened and there she was, hanging out of her doorway like a fantastic Christmas decoration that someone forgot to put away. She hadn’t fastened her pyjamas up too well and too many bits of her were lounging out of the fabric, throwing darts into the bullseye of my memory, saying, hey, look at what you gave up, Bucko.

  ‘I thought I read about you in the papers,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I read you were killed somewhere?’

  ‘I’d hazard a guess that it was probably someone else,’ I replied.

  ‘Pity,’ she said, inevitably. ‘Come in, then. You know where the lav is.’

  While I was relieving myself, I glanced around the bathroom, trying to remember. She must have redecorated, because there were no lightbulbs that lit up in my mind. I looked in the cabinet for a couple of Anadin, but there was nothing there but some contracep
tive pessaries and a couple of jars containing stuff for parts of the body that just didn’t exist on people who didn’t read Cosmopolitan or Vogue.

  She had put on a pale-blue towelling bathrobe and was now making coffee. The bathrobe, like her PJs, was undone, spilling her everywhere. It didn’t look as though she was doing this on purpose, but with Lorraine you could never tell. Fragments of our relationship – our three-month fling – seeped through to me from the fog of memory. She had been the first woman I’d gone out with after Rebecca was murdered. I was bruised and moody, not too attentive, drinking too much, perhaps a little snappy – hell, pretty much what I was like the whole time, anyway. I’d asked her out while in a hotel bar in Russell Square. She was there with some antiques convention, and I was there to get caned. I had started laying on the charm with a trowel, but decided that wasn’t enough and nipped out to the plant-hire place for a cement mixer. Lorraine had found my ceaseless pursuit of her rather amusing. If she’d recognised it for what it was – desperation, the need to know if I was still attractive to the opposite sex, a need to eclipse the ashes that used to be Rebecca’s eyes with something else, something alive – she’d have probably given me a jagged piece of her mind, and that would have been it. But she agreed to go for a drink with me, and then we went back to her room and we fucked every which way and then some, and soon on most nights I was sitting on the edge of a bed, nursing something on the rocks, while I watched her dunking herself into her bra and putting on her make-up. For weeks I had a mantra repeating in my head, and it was only towards the end that I decided to pay some attention to it and listen to what it was chanting at me, and it was this: This isn’t right, this isn’t right.

  It could have been, of course, at a different time. But I was still in recovery, and not doing very well at it. I was laid out in a bed, on a drip, gradually coming back from the edge in a ward where there should have been no visitors allowed. The sign at the end of my bed said Do Not Resuscitate.

  One night, watching her steer her tight, white bum into a tight, white thong, she said: ‘Malc and Jenny want us to go round for dinner on Saturday – is that all right, babe?’

  I tossed my glass at the wall and picked up my coat. ‘I’ve had enough,’ I said. ‘I’m getting out.’

  That’s what I’d done to cheese this one off: saved her from messing her life up. But they never see it that way, do they?

  And, anyway, Malc was a twat.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ she said now. ‘You look like you’ve been doubling for Droopy.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said.

  ‘How do you have your coffee?’ she said, knowing full well. ‘Milk, no sugar, two drops of strychnine?’

  ‘On the button,’ I said.

  She still looked good, five years on, better than I must have looked to her. Her hair was longer but it was as black and glossy as ever, the kind of hair, thick hair, that never gets tangled. Sly hazel eyes. A cute, slightly jutting lower jaw, a bit Reese Witherspoon-ish. She had recently been on holiday, or was putting in the hours on a sunbed, because her body was a deep, even brown. The tops of her breasts had the kind of healthy gleam to them that made your mouth go dry. She smelled good, her flat was sumptuous, she made a mean cup of coffee and, as I remembered, she gave remarkable blowjobs. Pretty shallow plus points, I grant you, but enough to start me wondering whether I was destined only to keep stepping on the dog shit all my life.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck off,’ she said. ‘Drink your coffee and then fuck right off.’

  ‘I was wondering if I could kip here.’

  ‘No,’ she said, and her voice sounded just the right side of Dalek.

  ‘I don’t want to get in with you. I’ll take the sofa.’

  ‘Joel!’

  ‘Please,’ I said. Everything was descending, the crap of my past tumbling down on me, and the death that had dogged me these last few days was capering just beyond her front door, looking for a way in so that it might wrap itself around my throat and draw tight. ‘Just a couple of hours. I’ll be gone before you get up. I need… I really need…’ But I couldn’t finish the sentence, because there were too many different ways to end it.

  Maybe she recognised that manifold need behind my eyes, because her face softened. She left me for a few minutes and came back with a couple of blankets and a pillow.

  ‘Do you want to tell me what’s up?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. If I started now, I might never stop.

  ‘Okay. Go to sleep. Help yourself to what’s in the fridge when you wake up.’ Her voice soft, warm. ‘You fucking bastard.’

  16

  I could hardly afford it, but I needed the tonic it provided. I booked myself in for a day’s membership at One Aldwych, and took the lift down to the basement. There I picked up my robe and slippers and went through to the changing rooms. I handed my clothes over in a bag and asked that they be washed, dried and pressed, then I put my wallet and watch in a locker and went for a swim.

  They’ve got a cracking pool here: lots of blue tiles, soft music and underwater lighting; cascades of H2O pouring down the walls. No bugger comes here during the week, so, if you’re lucky, you can get it all to yourself, especially if you come in the morning just as most of the desk jockeys are sitting down to their voice messages, a cup of tea made by someone who can’t make tea, and their first Rennie of the day.

  I did a few laps then got out and had a shower, before stepping into the sauna. A couple of ladles of water on the coals, five minutes on the hourglass, and I tried to relax with the morning’s newspaper.

  But the words wouldn’t settle.

  I had tried calling Melanie when I rose that morning, but she had been right about the signal: I couldn’t get through. A call to the vet’s was no good either; the place didn’t open for another hour and, anyway, they wouldn’t be able to help me at all. I was impatient to see her, and I was jealous of the entire county of Devon. She was breathing its air, somewhere. Walking its streets. Eating its cream teas.

  Mawker wasn’t answering his mobile, either. I had taken a pot of yogurt from Lorraine’s fridge, and left her a note saying thanks and sorry. I thought about leaving her my phone number, in the vain hope she might want to be friends again, but decided against it. You can’t just be friends if you’ve had a passionate past that burnt itself out so completely. There’s nothing but ash to build it on. So I left.

  Sweat poured off me, speckling the front page. I put the paper down and closed my eyes but images of Melanie swam out of the darkness. I saw her face for an instant, dangling amid the sea of masks from my dream, and snatched at breath. Fuck this treatment, sometimes it’s impossible to relax. It’s especially difficult to relax when you’ve actually got the time to do it. It’s even more difficult to relax when you don’t deserve it, or haven’t earned it, or your head is too freshly stained with the kind of things that make relaxation something that might never be achieved again.

  I had to leave.

  I walked out of the sauna and straight into a man, a big man with a chest about as wide as I was long. He pushed me into the steam room next-door, and sat me down. He sat next to me, near the door. I could hardly make out his face through the clouds, but I could tell he was ugly. Maybe even ugly enough to scare pigs from a shit pit.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘can I not have an hour to myself?’

  ‘Nice here, isn’t it?’ the big man said. He inhaled deeply. ‘Good for my sinuses, this menthol stuff they pump in here. I broke my nose playing rugby five years ago. I ought to have an op but I’m scared of the anaesthetic. They want to put a drill up there, and dig through all this bone and tissue that’s built up over the years, but I couldn’t face it.’ He looked like a horror film star who’s forgotten to have his make-up removed.

  ‘Go and tell it to your prop forward while he rims you off,’ I said. ‘Do I look like I give a shit?’

  He slapped me, almost casually, across the back of
the head and I folded over on to the floor.

  ‘Mawker wants a word with you.’

  ‘Tell Mawker to crawl back inside the rat that shat him out.’

  ‘You’ve got a dirty mouth,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no big secret about it,’ I said. ‘You can have one too, if you try hard enough.’

  ‘You should show a little respect to your fellow human beings,’ he said.

  ‘Is that what you are?’ I said, getting to my feet. Dark shapes were assembling beyond the glass door. ‘A human being? You’re having me on.’

  ‘I’ll have you mashed into my dog’s dinner bowl if you carry on lipping me,’ he said. ‘Now get outside.’

  I considered legging it, but I wasn’t going to get far down the Strand in my fluffy little slippers. Mawker was standing by the pool with two more heavies at his shoulder, trying to look like Pacino in Godfather III, and looking more like Kermit from Sesame Street.

  ‘At ease,’ I said.

  ‘Sorrell,’ he said, ‘you’re coming down to the nick with us, for questioning.’

  ‘Don’t be a cunt all your life,’ I said, and Boris Karloff gave me another tap round the ear. ‘Mawker,’ I said, ‘if you want a chat, fair enough, but call off your girlfriend here. And Bert and Ernie, too, while you’re at it.’

  Mawker said, ‘I could do you, Sorrell. I could be on you like a horny teenager on the school bike. You’re no different from the scum we collar every day of the week. Private investigator… bloody hell, a bit of flat-footing and you think that gives you the right to play Inch High.’

  ‘You’ve just reminded me,’ I said. ‘We had a bike at Bruche, do you remember? Phyllis, her name was, but everyone called her Syph. ’Cept you, of course. Weren’t you the sad, Bambi-eyed fuck whenever she walked in? It was like watching a peckish lioness who suddenly finds a calf come wandering into her manor.’