by Alex Marwood
Outside, ‘More Than A Woman’ starts up on the record player. She barks out a laugh. Did he put this on purposely? Is this his special music for doing whatever he was doing in that bathroom? Is this why those drains got blocked up? He’s probably been putting stuff down the bog for months, flushing away the stuff he’s taken out of these women, clogging up… oh, God, Roy Preece drowned in Nikki.
The door handle turns and he pushes against it. She sees the door crack open, catch on the corpse behind it. It won’t hold for any time at all. He’s already bracing, jiggling it back and forth, and she’s jumping on the floor.
Cher jumps on to the bed and dives through the open window.
She hits the tiles, and finds herself sliding. Four floors up, and she’s heading down, at speed. Months of dust and pollen and traffic smuts that have settled on surfaces in the dry heat have formed a slick in the rain, a slick as unpredictable as ice, and just as deadly. Her cheap flip-flops skate over the surface, her legs wheeling as she hunts for traction. Her right hand, flat on the roof, catches on something that drives itself deep into her palm. She shrieks in pain as she jerks to a halt, feels something snap at the base of her neck, rolls on to her face and digs her knees in to the tiles.
She’s two feet from the edge. A mass of blackened leaves in the gutter, and beyond that, somewhere far away, the pavement. Her hand is snagged on a nail: three inches of rusty iron between herself and the long drop. She can hear him in the bedroom, now. Has no idea where she’s going to go from here. But she pulls her knees in underneath her and worms her way upwards until her hand is no longer taking her weight. Something’s happened to her arm. It seems to have lost all its strength, and there’s a grinding, searing pain at the top of her chest, as though two snapped ends of something are rubbing together. A wave of giddiness breaks over her. She shakes her soaking rat-tail hair like a dog and the screech of protest that shoots through her body brings her back to the world.
The nail is deeply embedded in her heartline. Cher kneels up, stares at the ragged tear that starts at her wrist and runs the length of her palm, where it dragged through and formed a brake. It’s missed the big vein in her wrist by nothing more than a miracle. There’s blood spreading over the lichen on the tiles, but it’s spreading, not pumping.
A sound at the window, five feet from her face. She jerks her head up and sees Thomas, leaning on the windowsill, blinking from behind his tinted specs.
‘Oh, Cher,’ he says.
‘Keep the fuck away from me,’ she says.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asks.
She doesn’t know how to answer. The question is so unexpected, his benign smile so calm, that she’s completely thrown. She looks down at her hand again. Can’t stay like this, whatever I do, she thinks. Takes hold of the hand with her left, grits her teeth, counts to three and yanks it upwards before she can lose her nerve. Feels the world swim away from her, gasps, and is free.
She starts to edge away from the window. Her flip-flops slip and slick on the rain, throw her feet out in front of her, and she flails, slides, sees the gutter heading fast towards her, gasps again at the pain. A tile snaps and breaks free, skitters downwards, over the edge. Cher freezes. Counts one, two, three before she hears it shatter on the concrete below.
‘You should come in from there,’ says Thomas. ‘It’s not safe.’
‘Fuck off!’ she snaps. Remembers that she’s in the middle of a city, in the late afternoon. Starts yelling. ‘Help! Somebody! Help me!’
Come on. Come on. Somebody’s got to hear me.
Another tile breaks off. The roof is old and decrepit, like everything else about this house.
Thomas puts a finger to his mouth and hushes her. What is wrong with this man? He seems to think this is some kind of party game. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Come inside.’
Yeah, right. So you can turn me into a stick doll. ‘Help!’ she shouts again. ‘Christ, please! Somebody help me!’
Thomas shrugs and puts his hands on the windowsill. He’s coming out after her.
She kicks off her useless flip-flops and scrambles upwards, tiles flying out from beneath her grip. It’s hard going, one-handed, the injured arm flopping like someone’s cut its strings, but desperation lends her strength. If he gets to me, I don’t stand a chance. He’s twice my size, and this hand is useless. Where is everybody? Where are they? They can’t all be taking a nap and sleeping. Not through this.
She reaches the ridge and straddles it. Peers down into the street, looking for a sign that someone, anyone, has heard her. The Poshes’ SUV is gone from the driveway, and all the kids’ toys have been taken inside. Don’t say they’ve gone away. That bloody woman.
From up here, Northbourne looks beautiful: all tiles and treetops, elegant chimneys whose brickwork embellishments you never see in among the riot of plastic fascias and sandwich boards. Nothing moves in the street below. She can see the roof of the station, but if there’s anyone there they’re under cover, waiting out the rain. In the far distance, between the tree trunks, she can see a few lonely figures walking on the common. They’ll never hear her. And if they look up, all they’ll see is leaves.
Thomas stands up. Teeters for a moment as he finds his balance, then folds his arms and grins at her like a death-head.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ says Cher, and can hear how pathetic she sounds. Like some girl in a teen movie who’s about to have her head cut off. Oh, fuck, she thinks, but that’s what I am. That’s exactly what I am. ‘I mean it,’ she adds, tentatively, but it doesn’t sound convincing.
‘Cher,’ he says, ‘you don’t have a lot of choice, you know.’
‘Get to fuck, you loony bastard.’
To her surprise, he looks hurt. It’s as though he doesn’t realise that there’s anything odd about what she’s seen. As though, in his mind, she’s the one in the wrong, the interloper.
‘I’m going to come up,’ he says. ‘I think you could do with a hand.’
Cher runs her hands over the tiles. Manages to get her fingers under one and prise it loose. Waves it at him.
‘Oh, come on.’
‘I will. You come one step closer, and I will.’
He takes a step closer. Cher throws the tile at his head. He ducks sideways and it sails past, misses him by miles. He comes upright, a beatific smile on his face. ‘Well,’ he says. Looks down at his feet for a moment, then hurls himself up the roof with a speed that shocks her. She only has a moment to throw herself backwards, gripping the roof flashing between her thighs like a circus rider, howling as her dead arm flops back and opens out her collarbone with its weight.
Thomas snatches at thin air where her face used to be and lurches to a stop, his centre of gravity far over the other side of the roof beam. He staggers. Rocks at the hips like a comedy drunk, drops of rainwater flying from his windmilling arms.
She takes the only chance she’ll have, and kicks his legs out from under him.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Collette dreams she is on the banks of the Ganges, among the funeral pyres, surrounded by wailing mourners. She has covered herself in ash, matted her hair with mud, and is weeping, weeping, weeping. She picks up a stone and chips at her hairline, feels blood trickle down her forehead, digs cracked fingernails into dirty wrists. All around her, figures in white, blurred by smoke, howl out their sorrow in family groups. I’m the only one who’s alone, she thinks. I’m the only one.
A man in a coarse linen dhoti shalwar stops to look at her. His feet are bare and he wears big gold rings. ‘You’re crying, madam,’ he says. ‘Have you come to the funeral?’
‘Yes,’ she replies, and the howl in her head grows louder. ‘My mother. She’s died. I wanted to say goodbye.’
‘And which one is she?’ he asks, and sweeps an elegant hand across the burning landscape. She follows his gesture with her eyes, and sees a hundred burning ghats placed down the water’s edge, black smoke boiling from crimson flames and blotting out the sky.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t know which one.’
‘Well, you’d better hurry,’ he says, ‘you don’t want to miss it.’
And then she’s on her feet, tripping on the hem of her overlong lehenga choli, pulling her scarf across her body because she feels wrong, with so much of her torso on show, when people have died. And she’s running from pyre to pyre, slipping in mud stamped out by a hundred generations, and weeping, clutching passers-by by the arm and begging: ‘I’ve lost Janine! Which one is Janine? I can’t find her! Oh, God, where’s Janine?’
And then she’s awake, and her grief is choking her. Her throat has closed up and she struggles for a moment to breathe. She breaks through the barrier of tears and inhales. It’s not true, she tells herself. It was just a dream. And then she remembers, and it’s as if it’s happened all over again.
She stares at the ceiling and listens to the insistent shush of the rain through the open window, feels tears prickle in her eyes. This is no good. I can’t afford this. I must get up, get on with something. Be busy. She checks the time on her phone. Nearly five. She’s been asleep for four hours. Hossein should be home from his Home Office signing-in duties soon. If she lets herself sleep any longer, she’ll be awake all night.
She slides out from the bed and runs herself a glass of water. Coppery lukewarm London tap water, but it tastes delicious. She must be dehydrated, not surprisingly. She remembers a couple of plastic cups of tea in the night, Vesta going off to the vending machine in the ground-floor lobby, sugaring them up for energy, but she didn’t drink much from either. She runs another glass, drinks half of it down and goes to the window. It’s amazing how different the back gardens of Northbourne look in the rain. The greens are greener already, and brickwork she’s thought of as faded terracotta turns out to be dark rust now that the dust has washed off it. She pulls the curtain back and watches the world; wonders at the way people can simply vanish as if they’d never been.
Someone’s crying. She thinks they’ve been crying all along, since she woke. The desolate sobs of someone young, lost, vulnerable.
Collette squints out of the window. The crying sounds as though it’s coming from outside, but it’s so hard to tell. Though the heat has broken, everyone has left their windows open to let the cool air in. The crying could be coming from anywhere.
Is it Cher? It sounds as if it could be. She leans out of the window and looks up, but the girl’s window is firmly closed. As she ducks back in under the sash, she looks down and sees that a number of roof tiles have fallen into the basement area and shattered. Thank God I’m moving on, she thinks. This place will come down round our ears in the winter, if this is what a little shower of rain will do.
The sobbing continues, low, miserable and despairing. The occasional ‘ow’ breaking in to the rhythm. They sound like they’re in trouble, she thinks. It sounds like somebody’s hurt.
Am I still dreaming? Am I having one of those dreams where you think you’re awake? Am I hearing myself cry in my sleep, and thinking it’s coming from outside me? I am so tired. Maybe I’ve never woken up at all.
She drifts across the room and slips through the door. In the corridor, the faint sound of Gerard Bright’s music lulls her, makes her feel safe. If I were awake it would be a hundred decibels louder, she thinks. I’m hearing it through the fog of sleep, registering it because it’s there. She stands at the foot of the stairs, looking up, for a long time. All is silent up on the landing: just the ticketty-ticketty-tick of rain on glass. Something’s changed about the light up there. Despite the overcast skies, the landing looks brighter that she’s ever seen it. She’s halfway up the stairs before she sees that it’s because Thomas’s door stands wide open.
The sound of sobbing has disappeared. She pauses on the landing and listens at Cher’s door, but hears no sound within. She taps, calls her name, but hears no response.
Something draws her to Thomas’s door. It’s so odd to see it open. She’s never seen it so before, never even glimpsed in to the stairwell. A terrible smell rolls down the stairs, a smell of rot and chemicals that fills her with dread. And yet she finds herself walking up. This must still be a dream, she thinks, as she runs her hand up the plasterboard wall of the stairwell. In real life this smell would be enough to send me back down the stairs to look for one of the others. So I might as well go with it. At least I know it’s not real, not like when I was on the banks of the Ganges. That felt so real I thought I was going to die.
She reaches the door at the top of the stairs and finds that it, too, is open. She calls, tentatively, into the room: ‘Hello? Thomas? Hello?’ And steps inside. Sloped ceilings, a generalised grime, and an extraordinary and pungent collection of cardboard air fresheners drawing-pinned to the sloping ceiling as though they are a decorative flourish, a television on a stand and a record player on which the arm goes back and forth, back and forth, in the centre of an old LP. She goes over and takes it off. Can’t bear to watch old things damage themselves.
Cher’s black cat shoots out from under the stained and sagging sofa, trots towards her then moves to a gallop as he gets near. ‘Hey, Psycho,’ she says, and stretches out a hand. He ducks, slips past her legs and hurtles off into the house. She shakes her head. He’s never been a friendly cat, though he’s devoted to Cher and follows her wherever she goes.
And now she can hear the sobbing again. It’s muffled, as if the voice’s owner is shut behind a door. She calls out, once more, more loudly this time. Wherever Thomas is, he’s not here in among his stinking artefacts. ‘Hello?’
The sobbing stops. A shout in response. ‘Hello? Hello? Oh my God! Is someone there?’
It’s Cher. Somewhere in this flat, sounding weak and scared and desperate. ‘Cher?’ she calls.
A noise on the sloped ceiling; someone shifting, up on the roof, the sound of a tile loosening itself, sliding over her head and smashing on the flags below. ‘Oh, God! Collette! Oh, God, I’m here!’
‘Where?’
‘On the roof!’
She almost asks what she’s doing there, but thinks better of it. ‘Where?’
‘On the roof! I can’t get down. Please. Help!’
She’s beginning to realise that she’s awake; fully awake and in a place that makes her very uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to wait for Thomas to come back – he’s not the sort who would take kindly to uninvited guests.
‘How did you get up there?’
‘Bedroom window. Oh, no, Collette, don’t…’
‘Hold on,’ she calls, and goes to the bedroom.
No, I am dreaming. I must be. That looks like…
She stops in the doorway and gapes. Her scalp crawls. Oh, my God, those are women. One on a chair, an Egyptian queen made of leather, one on the floor behind the door, one arm contorted beneath her and the other thrown full-length over her head, flaking into the carpet like a resident of Pompeii. Bags of salts, bottles of oil, a rail of dresses. What is this? What is this?
Cher’s voice brings her back to herself. ‘Collette? Collette!’
She does as she always does, as she’d trained herself. Thinks: I won’t think about this now, I’ll think about it later. Action always trumps thinking in an emergency. She steps gingerly over the wizened brown legs of the woman on the floor and climbs on to the bed. Leans her arms along the windowsill and puts her face out into the rain.
Cher is above her, huddled against the chimney, her clothes clinging to her body and her hair poodled around her face. She’s shivering, barefoot, only wearing a light top over her jeans and it’s soaked through. She’s holding her right arm with her left, her hand dangling between her legs, and black circles ring her eyes. Collette looks closer, and sees that her jeans are stained with blood. It drips from the tips of her useless fingers, mingles with the water and trickles away across the roof.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks, redundantly.
‘Peachy,’ says Cher, and grinds her teeth.
Her head is fogged
with confusion. ‘What the hell’s going on? What are those…?’ She points back into the room.
‘Do you mind if we talk about that later?’ says Cher, in a small voice, her tone surprisingly humble. Her body is rattling with cold and shock and she is beginning to sway on her perch. ‘I could do with some help. I’ve done something to my shoulder.’
‘How did you – where’s Thomas?’
‘He…’ Cher shakes her head. ‘He’s gone.’
‘Gone? Gone where?’
‘He…’ She seems confused, dazed, rests her head against the brickwork. ‘I think I killed the fucker. He was coming after me, so I pushed him.’ She jerks her head behind her, then hisses and clutches her shoulder. ‘Collette,’ she says, ‘it’s nice to chat and all, but…’
Collette slaps herself internally to wake herself up. ‘Okay. Yes. Hold on.’
She hoists herself on to the window frame, lurches forward, saves herself by grabbing the open pane. Sees the trees on the other side of the road seesaw towards and away from her. ‘Careful,’ calls Cher.
‘Yes, thanks, I’ll try.’
There are dead bodies in the bedroom, she thinks. All this time, we’ve been living downstairs from a bunch of dead bodies. It looks like he’s been mummifying them. They can’t have got that way naturally, can they? And, oh, God, I hope Vesta doesn’t wake up. One more cracked skull outside her bedroom window and I think she’ll tip over the edge.
‘Oh, Collette?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry. About your mum.’
She looks up in surprise. It seems like such a startlingly normal thing for someone to say under the circumstances. She’s such an odd kid. ‘That’s okay,’ she says, because she can’t really work out what the appropriate response would be.
She hooks a leg over the windowsill and lowers herself slowly down. Heights have never been her thing. Looking over edges has always made the inside of her head ring hollow, like a bell, the muscles behind her ears contract. Well, don’t look down, she tells herself. Just look at where you’re treading, and look at Cher. Once you’re up there, you’ll have no choice but to keep your cool. Just don’t think about what you’re doing now, or you might not be able to do it at all.
