She was unzipping me. ‘So what’s he going to do? Stop the thing and zipwire along to arrest us?’
There ended my pathetic words of caution – I was powerless to her by then, if that’s not already self-evident. It was the weirdest feeling, a stomach-dropping arousal, the city diminished and out of reach, until the towers and the Dome and the docks, the airport runway and the ribbon of river all lost their meaning entirely and I closed my eyes and succumbed.
Then, a sudden, aching removal, Melia’s voice in interruption: ‘Don’t freak, but I think we’ve stopped.’
She struggled up to sit next to me and brushed the dust from her knees. I zipped myself up. The gondola was still. In the next car along, a man stood and looked back at us. I had no idea if he’d been able to see what we were doing. None of us made any sign.
‘I’m sure it’s okay,’ Melia said. Her arms encircled me. ‘Is it because of us?’ she whispered, as if there were microphones in the car.
‘I don’t know.’ Oh, the solipsism of us, as if a couple enjoying each other could cause an entire transport link to grind to a halt. It took a moment to realize I was holding my breath, as if to hold the silence, hold us safe. I thought, If the winds were stronger, would we sway and creak? What would it feel like to know you were about to plunge three hundred feet to the river? Would the doors spring open on impact or would we be sealed, figures in a snow globe?
‘We’re moving again,’ Melia breathed.
And we sat side by side, backs straight, fingers entwined, for the rest of the ride, neither speaking; it seemed to me our breathing was synchronized. When we disembarked, I avoided the eyes of staff, but Melia thanked them, gleefully innocent. ‘See? No arrest. No one’s interested in us, Jamie.’ She led me back through the station and out onto the concourse. ‘The point is, did you feel claustrophobic?’
‘Not claustrophobia, exactly, no. It was more a fear of falling.’ I steered her into the shadows. ‘How about you?’
‘The same. Like it was going to come loose and we’d just drop like a stone. I’m calling that progress: we replaced our phobias with a new one!’ She punched the air, her exhilaration contagious. ‘I feel something else new,’ she whispered, and her face was close to mine, her eyes wide and confessional. ‘I won’t say it, though. It’s too soon. Too crazy.’
‘Say what?’
‘You know.’ Kissing my cheek, exactly as if we were friends saying goodbye after a chance meeting, she turned and walked away from me, past the ticket office, in the direction of the Tube.
I remained where I was. What was going on here? Living a lie was one thing, forging a secret subplot, but this was becoming the main plot, the truth. For the first time, we’d taken our affair outside. Our aborted sex act might have been high above the city but it was still public transport, with cameras, possibly even with another passenger watching. It had been an appalling risk, an act of lunacy, unless . . .
Unless we were edging now towards wanting to be caught. Wanting to be asked to choose.
And, if we were, would we make the same choice?
I walked the short distance to the ferry pier in a fugue, glad that there was no one on the boat to St Mary’s for me to have to talk to, to ask me what I was doing getting on here, or even just if I’d had a good day because theirs had been terrible. I could taste the gin in the warm cabin air, hear the chimes of bottles as the assistant restocked the fridge with beers.
As we docked at St Mary’s, I looked back to the peninsula and Canary Wharf beyond, the towers silhouetted against the late dusk sky; in the foreground, the red-eyed sentinels of the Thames Barrier. I realized I felt as happy as I’d ever felt. I felt elated.
Then, moments later, I got a shock. Not far from the pier, a few steps down Artillery Passage past Mariners, I saw Kit. He was with a tall, bony guy in jeans and trainers, a pair of oversized headphones around his long neck like a scarf. I assumed he was a mate, though by the time I’d reached Prospect Square, I’d convinced myself he was Kit’s dealer.
Head down, I hurried past before he could see me, before he could summon me close enough to smell his wife’s saliva dry on my skin.
*
The next morning, Kit arrived on the boat eating a doughnut oozing peanut butter and jam, scoffing it in that way people did when their body has been starved of nutrients the night before.
‘I thought I saw you outside Mariners last night,’ I said. ‘About ten o’clock?’
As I kicked myself – what if we’d in fact been on the same boat and he’d half-noticed me get on at the peninsula and only now had his memory jogged? – he merely shrugged.
‘You were with some guy,’ I added.
‘Give me a break, Jay, it’s not like we’re exclusive.’ This he said in a theatrically camp tone, his breath smelling of peanut butter. His eyes were rimmed red, pink lines patterned the white.
‘I just thought he looked a bit dodgy, that’s all.’
‘Maybe dodgy by your standards.’ But he didn’t say who the guy was and, next thing, Steve had boarded and was drawing our attention to a black figure crawling like a monster insect on the slanted roof of one of the waterside towers.
‘Suicide?’ Kit said, without concern.
Steve chuckled at his heartlessness. ‘No, you Good Samaritan, you. He’s a cleaner.’
‘Or a technician of some sort,’ I said, ‘fixing something on the exterior.’
‘How the hell is he attached?’ asked Kit.
‘Ropes,’ Steve said. ‘I read about it the other day. They work on skyscrapers and bridges, crazy places. I bet they get danger money.’
‘I bet they don’t,’ Kit said glumly. ‘I bet they get paid a fucking pittance.’
‘Don’t get him started on money,’ I told Steve.
‘Don’t get him started on being a twat,’ Kit said, his expression clouding.
Admittedly, I’d been a little thoughtless, but I didn’t think I deserved that. What was his problem? When Gretchen arrived, he moved away from us, throwing me an unfriendly look.
‘What’s eating Gilbert Grape?’ I said to the others. ‘Hangover?’
‘It must be because he didn’t get that promotion,’ Gretchen said.
‘What promotion?’
‘Oh, Jamie, he told us all about it yesterday.’ ‘I got a different boat home,’ I reminded her.
‘I’ll see if he wants to come out for a smoke,’ Steve said and Gretchen said she’d come too.
‘Make sure you stand one on either side, you don’t want him jumping in,’ I joked, but neither of them cracked a smile. I sighed. I knew Kit better than they did and even though he’d made that reference just now to suicide, he would never attempt it himself, especially not over some work setback. Some other commuter might, though. Any one of them could board alone one night after a work disaster, wait for the boat to reach a stretch of particularly evil-looking currents, then stroll out onto the deck and find a spot to do it. Just drop overboard without a word, never to be heard of again.
But, no, the crew kept count. I’d been aware of them using those handheld clicker devices every time I crossed the gangway: it was maritime law probably. If the numbers didn’t tally, they’d know soon enough.
17
27 December 2019
My phone buzzes and, ignoring the detectives’ scrutiny, I read Clare’s reply to my earlier text:
Yes, Melia told Richard about K. So strange!
I hope he’s OK.
I judge from her use of ‘strange’, as opposed to tragic or horrific, that she is sceptical about Kit’s being in any real danger.
‘Not him, is it?’ Merchison says.
‘No.’ It strikes me that I haven’t tried Kit’s phone myself since that text on Monday. ‘His phone is off, is it? You haven’t found it abandoned somewhere? Come on, you can tell me that, surely?’
‘No. It may be on his person, but it’s out of service,’ Parry says.
‘That’s definitely unusual.’
/>
They don’t dignify this with the response it warrants – Gee, thank you for confirming we’ve done the right thing to launch an investigation! – and I feel foolish.
‘Were you aware of anyone in his life who might have a grievance against him?’ Merchison asks. ‘What about his colleagues?’
I think. When you and your fellow commuters all work in different industries, you discuss your work very little. Gripes about bad bosses notwithstanding, who wants to start the day sharing their dread of the meetings and deadlines ahead? ‘No,’ I say. ‘Sorry. He’s pretty popular. I imagine his colleagues like him a lot.’
‘What about family?’
‘Hasn’t Melia filled you in on that? She’s fallen out with hers. His are mostly dead.’
‘“Mostly” dead?’
‘His mum died young, when he was ten or eleven. Not suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
There’s a short, frozen moment when I realize that in trying to deny a theory I’ve only gone and proposed it. I strongly doubt Melia has introduced the notion. ‘His mum died of cancer and his dad sold their house and spent the proceeds on the horses. Kit hasn’t had much to do with him since, from what I can gather. He was pretty much raised by his grandmother.’ It occurs to me that this summarizes quite neatly Kit and his bitter aspirations. ‘But I’m sure Melia’s told you all about it,’ I add.
‘So there’s no one he argued with recently, even over something small?’
‘No, I met some of his friends at the wedding and they all seemed nice enough. Some were from his drama school days, a couple from work.’
My answers are intentionally bland: my aim is to neutralize my interrogators, regain some of the power I lost with that blurted error about suicide.
‘You and your partner were witnesses at the wedding, I gather,’ Merchison says. ‘That must have been a bit awkward.’
‘Melia told you that?’
‘Must have made you feel a bit, what’s the word they use?’ He pauses. ‘Conflicted.’
‘I was happy for them.’ I have a sudden unprompted image of Melia spinning herself in that length of diaphanous fabric in the first of our borrowed bedrooms. Come back, Melia, I say in a sing-song voice, the yearning only half-mocking. You’re like Cleopatra.
God, have we been too caught up in self-mythology? Have we cared too much about what our feelings mean?
Merchison is watching me, reading me. ‘Come on, Jamie, you’re only human. You must have felt a bit envious seeing him marry the woman you were . . .’ He pauses for the right word, but this time it feels as if he’s withholding it as a taunt. ‘In love with,’ he supplies, at last, and I’m unsettled to see that he’s grinning at me. For the first time I see his teeth, perfectly straightened, as they always are in the mouths of men younger than me (if you want to see the famed British dental neglect you have to go to the forty-plus age group).
I sigh. ‘Look, I’m not in therapy here. What’s your point in relation to the investigation?’
‘Our point is it all seems to lead back to you,’ Parry says. ‘You’re the one who was there on Monday night. You’re the one with the history of emotional outbursts. You’re the one Kit trusted to be a witness at his wedding, even though you were in fact betraying him in the worst possible way.’
It sounds bad when he lists it all like that. You could say indefensible.
‘He’s right, you know,’ Merchison says. And he looks almost saddened, as if he’s tried to defend me, he really has, but he simply cannot find a way through to a truth that might serve me better.
‘You’re his only known enemy, Jamie.’
18
August 2019
The wedding, on a Saturday in late summer, struck me as an act of insanity the moment I heard about it, still buried by pillows in our bedroom, black-out blinds drawn.
‘Jamie! You need to get up!’ Clare was in the doorway, waiting for me to raise my head before crossing to the windows to snap open the blinds and flood the room with daylight.
I shielded my eyes with my arm. Kids shrieked in the square out front and dogs barked in reply. ‘Why?’
‘Seriously, get up now.’ Her voice was alive with emergency. ‘You’re not going to believe this: Kit and Melia are getting married!’
She was right, I didn’t believe it. I sat up, seized by a forceful jabbing in my chest, my heart protesting the news before my brain could formulate a spoken response. ‘That is news. I doubt it will actually happen, though.’ I gave a grudging little laugh before sinking against the headboard. ‘You know what they’re like.’
Clare was at the wardrobe, moving the hangers along the rail with a horrible metallic scraping that shredded my nerves. ‘No, you don’t get it, it’s happening now. Today at twelve o’clock! They want us to be their witnesses. We need to get ready, it’s already past ten.’
Immobilized and gaping, I found it all too easy to put myself at the centre of this development: Kit must have found out about Melia and me and proposed in order to reclaim her, lock her in. But no, who invites their new wife’s lover to be a witness? That was perverse, even for Kit. More to the point, how the hell were they going to pay for a wedding? It could only create deeper debt, tighter knots. I remembered my advice to her, much too recent for her to have forgotten: Don’t marry Kit . . . You’ll only be liable for his debts, as well as your own.
Clare tossed me her phone. ‘Look at Melia’s text. Can we meet them at the register office at eleven thirty. I said yes.’
It was unnerving seeing my lover’s name on my partner’s phone screen, the long string of messages between them, evidence of firm ongoing friendship. My relations with Kit had conveniently been camouflaged by the group, our last night out alone an all-nighter in June at a club on the peninsula that had taken me a week to recover from and seen me dispatched to the spare room for days afterwards for ‘breathing alcohol through your pores’. Please say you can do it? Melia had pleaded. Exciting! She’d added an emoji of a veiled, blushing bride.
I swung my legs to the floor. ‘Kit didn’t breathe a word on the boat last night.’ There’d been the usual onboard beers and he’d asked what everyone was up to the next day, but there’d been no secret smile that I remembered, no conspiratorial wink. ‘Don’t you have to give notice when you get married?’
Clare, who’d selected a dress, was now assembling underwear and accessories. ‘Yes, twenty-eight days, isn’t it? But I suppose you can spring it on your guests as last-minute as you like!’
My heart renewed its ghastly thumping. So Melia had known about this morning for four weeks. Four assignations with me – including the cable-car excursion – and not a word breathed. What was she playing at, expecting me to be a witness at her wedding when she’d told me she loved me?
Not told. Implied. I felt myself deflate: what kind of a middle-aged sap was I to be thinking in terms of love? In the shower, I turned the water to the most savage cold in an attempt to extinguish my smouldering thoughts. Melia and I were over. It had only been five months and yet there’d been times, when I woke in the morning and the fragments hadn’t yet pieced together, that I couldn’t begin to fathom the double life I’d been leading. How had we survived as long as we had without detection? Kit, I’d understood to lack sensitivity to altered cues, but Clare was something else. If this marked the end of Melia and me, which surely it did, then I had to consider my exit as having been made by the skin of my teeth.
Easier said than done.
Scrubbed, shaved and dressed halfway smartly, I dashed down to join Clare, who looked delightful in a poppy red dress, her hair in a big blow-dry, a chunky chain-link necklace sitting on her collarbone. Next thing we were in the taxi and pulling up at Woolwich Town Hall, a grand edifice with domed roof and a clock tower.
‘I forget what a nice building this is,’ I said.
‘Edwardian Baroque. Wait till you see inside. There’s got to be a waiting list as long as your arm for this venue. Melia must have got
a cancellation.’
She automatically assumed Melia had driven this and I didn’t challenge her.
She was right about the interior, a surreal sight for eyes accustomed to gazing into a coffee cup at this hour on a weekend: a vast domed ceiling with chequered flooring, stained glass, a staircase worthy of a sultan, all presided over by a marble Queen Victoria.
We found the happy couple in a waiting area on the upper level. Perhaps because of the opulence of the venue, they both looked slight and innocent, particularly Melia, who was in a simple dove-grey sundress and sandals that were little more than flip flops. Long earrings made of dangling silver strands threatened to get tangled in her hair, which she wore loose and natural on uncovered shoulders. Other than lipstick and mascara, she presented herself to her husband-to-be bare-faced. Kit was in tailored dog-tooth check trousers and black shirt – a young mod – but the sharpness of his dress seemed only to accentuate his lack of life experience. He’d never looked so out of his depth as he did now.
‘Is this Mum and Dad?’ the official said to Melia and I pretended not to hear. I had a very strong feeling that no good was going to come of this for any of those present and accepted Kit’s handshake with such reluctance he began laughing.
‘I know you don’t believe in marriage, Jamie, but you can do better than that.’
Embarrassed, I pulled him into a hug. ‘Sorry, mate, I’m just a bit thrown. Had no idea this was on the cards.’
Clare kissed them both. For a self-proclaimed wedding cynic, she was exuberant, even joyful. ‘Hang on, do you not have flowers, Melia? You have to have flowers. I’ll nip out and get some for you.’
No sooner had she departed than Kit was asking for directions to the loo and Melia and I were left alone. Her cheeks were the exact soft pink you’d apply with a brush to a bride’s skin, only natural. Her eyes, when turned towards me, were ardent, radiating devotion – a highly disconcerting sight, given the circumstances.
‘Jamie,’ she murmured, ‘thank you for this.’
The Other Passenger Page 11
