by Alex Marwood
And then they’re back out in the sun, and running back to Regent Street. She has no idea where Malik is: whether he’s casting round Carnaby or has spotted their U-turn and followed them. They pound up to the main sweep and Hossein sticks a hand in the air for a taxi. Always cabs on Regent Street. But if you’re being followed you don’t want someone to just jump into the one behind. She throws herself on to the back seat and looks wildly around. No sign. No Malik, no other hard-faced men flagging down black cars. She breathes; lets her head drop back against the headrest.
They pant as the cab swings round and turns up Maddox Street. He’s resting his head too, his face drawn, the lines around his beautiful mouth etched deep.
‘Well,’ she sputters, between breaths, ‘for a man who longs for peace and quiet, you certainly like a challenge, don’t you?’
He turns, leans across the space between them, and kisses her.
Chapter Forty-Three
And now she’s lost, as she knew she would be.
She wakes to the sound of the front door slamming, finds herself in a tumble of limbs and smells his beautiful skin, and wants to cry. I can’t. Oh, no, this can’t have happened. Not now. Before, or never – but not now.
His arms are wrapped round her, one knee between her thighs. Even in the night, in their sleep, they have gravitated towards each other when the heat should have driven them apart. And she feels the bliss of his arm around her shoulder and feels his breath against her hot cheek, and she wants to howl at the moon, to rail at the fates. She’s stiff and pleasurably sore from the zeal of their fucking, the hands, tongues, lips, and skin, the words whispered, the laughing, the fingers intertwined, his beautiful, miraculous cock so hard and ardent, and she wants to weep.
I can’t be with you, Hossein. I can’t.
She picks up his hand and kisses the palm, and he opens his eyes. Smiles sleepily at her, his eyes creasing, and presses his lips against her cheek. Rolls over on to her, and her body gives and opens up to him, because she never, she never knew it could be like this. She’s not lived in a world where sex and love went hand in hand. And now he’s here and he’s beautiful and he’s perfect, her reward and her salvation – and she can’t be with him.
He strokes her hair back from her face and lets out a long, contented sigh. Pressed up against him, she can feel his cock begin to stir, and her body heating up in response. ‘What time is it?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know.’ She turns her head to look for her phone, and he stops her, holds her wrist against the pillow and melts her with his kisses. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘I don’t really care.’
Just once more, she thinks. Just once more before I tell him: something to remember, something to carry into my solitary old age. Can you live a lifetime on a single memory? I’ve never fucked someone before where I felt he even noticed, once he got going, that it was me, not someone else, in the room.
She frees her wrist and buries her fingers in his hair, and he butts against her palm like an attention-seeking cat. Kisses her wrist, enters her and laughs at the pleasure rush. ‘Oh, God, that’s the best feeling,’ he says.
‘I know,’ she gasps, and her head fills with liquid gold.
Their other basic needs drive them from the bed eventually. They both want to wash, and she’s pleased and relieved that he doesn’t suggest that they share a bathroom. She’s always been funny about that. Men who wanted to come in when she was naked and vulnerable in the tub: it always seemed like some deliberate gesture of disrespect, some statement of ownership. Instead, Hossein walks up the corridor with her, kisses her a dozen times at the foot of the stairs, strokes her face and promises to return. She goes into the scruffy bathroom, luxuriates in the hot water from the shower hose and thinks about the night before.
She feels strangely detached from the rest of the world, aware of her skin and her pulse and the heat between her thighs in a way she has no recollection of experiencing before. So this is what the fuss is about, she thinks. I thought I was experienced, but all I was was only someone who’d fucked a lot. She wants to run a long, warm bath and reflect on what’s passed between them, but she doesn’t want to miss it when he comes back, doesn’t want to miss a moment. She runs a hand over her throat where he kissed her, and closes her eyes. Oh, God, Hossein. Why did it have to happen now?
Beyond the door, she hears footsteps approach. Someone tries the bathroom door, and she tenses. She’s seeing a lurker round every corner, now. Knows she won’t feel safe in London again. The footsteps turn and go away, and a door closes. Just Gerard Bright, wanting a leak. Not everyone who tries a door handle wants to do you harm. She heaves herself from the water and wraps herself in Nikki’s old pink towel.
Back in her room, she pulls the rumpled bed back together, puts on eggs to hard boil. She doesn’t have much food – just the eggs and some bread and cheese, a few ripe plums. For the first time, she digs through the sorry collection of previous tenants’ leavings and tries to put together some poor show of hospitality. She has three plates, a couple of bowls, not much else. But she lays her wares out in what she can find and, after thinking for a moment, lays out the bedspread on the floor and puts them there, like a picnic.
He knocks, respectfully, on the door, and she rushes to let him in. He’s clean and shaved, his black hair slicked back and smelling of shampoo, his breath of toothpaste. He smiles at her, and she feels a strange liquid sensation in her guts. Suddenly, she feels shy in front of this man who’s touched every inch of her, who’s been so far inside her she thought they would actually combine. She lets him in and crosses the room in front of him, looking at the floor. Then he comes to her and puts his arms round her, kisses her face, her eyelids, her mouth, and she feels safe, like a child.
‘I brought some things,’ he says. ‘It’s not much, but…’
He hands her a cotton shopping bag with some strange script across the front. Farsi, she assumes, though it could be Arabic for all she knows. Inside are pistachios, halwa, a jar of what looks like home-made amba, little pots of sumac and black paprika, and a container of olives. She smiles at the gift.
‘So funny,’ she says. ‘You say it’s not much, but they’d be paying a score for this lot in Clapham. I can’t believe you’ve got amba, just, you know, in your room.’
‘You know amba?’
‘Of course. I’ve been a few places in the last few years.’
‘Where did you have it?’
‘Israel,’ she tells him.
Hossein hisses in through this teeth, then laughs. ‘I didn’t know they had amba in the Great Satan.’
She looks at him suspiciously for a moment, then sees that he is joking. ‘Well, I didn’t know your lot were so big on Iraqi condiments myself.’
‘You have a point,’ he says, and sits down cross-legged on the bedspread. She sits beside him, so she can press her upper arm against his, so she doesn’t have to look full in his face. She’s not ready for that. Not while she’s longing to feel his hand caressing her breasts.
He taps an egg on the side of a bowl, rolls it between his fingers and peels. She takes a small handful of nuts and cracks them open, one by one. They’re wonderfully fresh, sweet and salty on her tongue. I can’t let this carry on, she thinks. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I have to tell him.
‘Hossein?’
She closes her eyes for a moment and feels a wrench of sadness.
‘We can’t do this.’
He sighs and puts his egg down, uneaten. ‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘But you understand, don’t you? You must see that…’
‘Yeah, I see. But that doesn’t mean I think you’re right.’
‘I can’t stay.’
He rubs his face like a kid, looks like he’s shut his finger in a door.
‘You should, Collette,’ he says. ‘You really should.’
‘Not after yesterday. Come on. You must be able to see that. It’s not safe. It’s just not sa
fe.’
‘He doesn’t know where you are, Collette. We lost him. Don’t you remember?’
‘For now. But look, he’s got so close, I…’
‘Not so close. He was at the home. He must have been. We just weren’t looking. I’m sorry. I should have been a better bodyguard.’
‘It’s not you. It’s not your fault. But you don’t understand. Once they’ve got my scent, it’s only a matter of time. They found me in Paris, and Barca, and Tunis, and Prague… I’m so stupid. I should never have come back.’
‘But what about your mother?’ he asks. ‘Really, Collette. You’re going to leave now?’
A tear forces itself from the corner of her eye and runs down the side of her nose. She dashes it away, impatiently. ‘She doesn’t even know me.’
And now she’s crying and she can’t stop. Puts her hand across her mouth and looks away from him, and is grateful that he has the sense not to touch her. She doesn’t want sympathy. She wants gone.
‘I think about it, sometimes,’ he says. ‘Dying by myself. It’s the sort of thing you do think about, in a foreign country.’
‘I know,’ says Collette. ‘But most people do, you know, in the end. All the widows and the people by themselves, all the people who have accidents or end up in hospital before anyone can get to them.’
‘I was married, you know.’
She throws him a look over her shoulder. ‘No. No, I didn’t.’
‘Roshana.’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I think she died. I assume she died. She went out one day and never came back. That’s what happens. One day she was with me, and the next she was gone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘The awful thing is, I hope she was alone. Wherever she was. Because if she wasn’t, it’s probably worse.’
Now he looks away, and toys with the fringing on the edge of the bedspread, his mouth turned down and his eyes unfocused. That’s the thing, she thinks. I know we feel so close, so loved-up right now, but we don’t know each other. We know nothing about each other. Not really.
‘But I wish every day I had been with her,’ he says, eventually. ‘She was – for a long time I felt like the lights had been turned out.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.
‘And that’s not your fault,’ he says. ‘But what I’m saying – I don’t know what I’m saying, Collette. Just that it’s a terrible thing, to die alone.’
‘I’d rather die alone later than die now.’
He puts an olive between his beautiful lips and chews contemplatively. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘It’s not like I haven’t been there myself. Where do you think you’ll go?’
She shakes her head. ‘I hear Norway’s nice at this time of year.’
‘Bloody dark in the winter, though.’
She laughs. He finally reaches out and caresses the back of her neck. ‘Last night was…’ he says.
‘Oh, don’t,’ she says. ‘Oh, God, it’s not like I want to go.’
‘I know,’ he says, and puts his face close to hers. ‘And in another world, you know? I get it. Me too. I understand.’
His skin smells of cleanness and sandalwood. She looks down at his lips, half open, ready to kiss her, looks up at the golden eyes and the careworn lines beginning to settle around them. I think this is a good man, she thinks. I think the universe is having a laugh with me, showing me that there is such a thing.
‘But not today,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow I’ll help you, if you really mean to leave. And not tonight.’
‘No,’ she says, and takes his face in her hands. Kneels in front of him like Mary Magdalene. Kisses his mouth, breathes in the wonder of him.
Chapter Forty-Four
His disappointment is almost painful. He’s taken her clothes off – the shapeless skirt, the lace-edge shirt, the modest undergarments – and found that it’s hopeless. The God Girl has clearly lost half her bodyweight at some point, and lost it fast. If he were to delve into her viscera, he suspects he’d find a gastric band, or one of those balloons they inflate inside the stomach. There’s very little fat on her, it’s true, but her skin looks like a church candle that’s been left burning all through Lent. Like an altar cloth thrown down in the vestry, waiting for the laundry bag.
She’s hopeless. Useless. Nothing he can do, no ministrations, will ever make her right. She’s just an ugly white sack of blubber, an insult to his dreams.
It’s not even worth preserving her, if all he’ll want to do at the end is throw her away. He stands over the bath and glares at her reproachfully. She’s going off, rapidly, her buttocks and the backs of her thighs black with congealed blood, her pupils gone white. And she’s really starting to smell. He’s emptied the supermarket of Febreze and scent blocks, and stuck duck tape over the airbricks to stop the smell circulating, but he knows it’s only a matter of time before the people downstairs start to wonder where it’s coming from. He has to do something with her, this much he knows, but he’s not wasting his skills and time on preserving an object so uncomely. Why on earth did you attract my attention, he thinks, if you were going to let me down like this? I’m glad I don’t know your name. I don’t want to remember you.
Her rigor has passed, and her forearm is flopped down the outside of the bath, the hand and fingertips blackening almost as he watches. He picks up the hand, lets it drop, watches the loose flaps of skin hanging down from her upper arm wobble horribly in the raw light from the bare bulb above their heads. Whatever I do, I’ll have to do it soon, he thinks. What a waste of time.
He has no experience of taking a fresh corpse apart, but he knows it’s going to be a lot harder than it was with Alice or her predecessors. Fresh, juicy cartilage will be harder to cut through, and it will be nigh on impossible to break up fresh bones with any tools he can reasonably bring into the flat.
‘Piss,’ he says, out loud. Turns to the basin and splashes cold water on his face, puts his specs back on and looks at himself in the mirror. Such a mild face, a lock of hair falling foppishly loose over his forehead, his chest and shoulders slightly pudgy under his open-necked shirt. No one, he thinks, would think that I have a dead girl in my bathroom. They wouldn’t think anything about me, most of them. They’d just look straight through me, not even notice I was there. Which is good, of course, if you’re going to be dropping severed limbs in litter bins. But God, what a hassle. Why can’t she just magically disappear?
He sighs and gets down on his knees with his carving knife. The first and obvious step is the same as it’s always been. Rationally, he needs to get rid of the messy inside parts, the bits that spread, before he can start to think about dividing up that flappy torso.
So close to her face, he is assailed by a horrible feeling of being watched by those eggshell eyes. He grabs a hand towel from one of the suction hooks on the side of the basin, and throws it over her face, to hide it. Then he bends forward and slices into the distending belly, coughs as a gust of fetid air rushes out. There’s no pleasure in this. Other times, he’s been carried through the disgust by the pleasure of experimentation and, in latter times, his pride in his work. This is just a nasty, demanding chore, like doing his taxes.
Chapter Forty-Five
They’ve put her in a side room. Everyone knows what that means. It’s a week – only a few days – since she last saw her, and in that time she seems to have halved in size. She lies among her tubes, swamped in a bed that seems to have been brought in from the set of Land of the Giants. Collette hovers in the doorway, the ward doctor close behind. She wants to turn and walk away, stride off up the ugly hospital corridor with its discarded wheelchairs and its sanitiser stations, as though doing so will make the whole thing not exist. If she crosses the threshold, it becomes part of her life.
Oh, I’m sorry, Janine, she silently tells the stranger-mother on the bed. I should have come. Should have taken one more punt that Malik wouldn’t be there. If I’d known it was the end I wouldn’
t have left you all alone. Wouldn’t have spent the week holed up with a man, pretending I wasn’t going out of fear.
‘She’s not in any pain,’ says the doctor. She’s told Collette her name, but that detail has gone through her head like the rushing of wind, as has much of everything else she’s said. All she knows is that she will soon no longer be a daughter. ‘We’re keeping her comfortable.’
She tries to take the first step, but her foot seems to be stuck to the ground. She throws the doctor an appeal for help with her eyes. Push me forward. Carry me over. The doctor stands, efficiently patient. They must be so used to this, she thinks. These wards are full of the old. Really, how they organise things so that the corridors aren’t crowded with weeping relatives is a miracle in itself.
‘It’s okay,’ she says, in a voice that manages to inject sympathy and encouragement into the need for action. I must move, thinks Collette. Janine’s not the only patient here tonight. All over this hospital there are hundreds of people, and this poor woman’s having to reassure thousands of relatives. Go in, Collette. Just do it.
‘She’s sleeping, at least?’ she asks. ‘That has to be a good sign, doesn’t it?’
The doctor shakes her head. ‘No. I’m sorry. She’s slipped into a coma, I’m afraid.’
The word hits her like a bucket of water. Coma. One of those words you never want to hear. Coma, carcinoma, myocardial: words that suck your breath away.
‘So I’m too late, then,’ she says, desolately. I was right not to let him come in with me, she thinks. It’s not the place for him, too much to ask. But oh, I’m so alone. I don’t know how I’ll get through this.
