Exposure

by Aga Lesiewicz

  This is where they would’ve brought Anton’s body.

  This is where I refused to come when they asked me to identify him.

  This is where he lay on a stainless-steel table, waiting for someone to claim him.

  And I never did.

  A wave of grief knocks me off my feet. I slide down along the railings to the ground. Sobbing comes as a relief. I cry for us, Anton and myself, for what we could’ve had, but somehow never bothered to really try. I miss you, the larger-than-life, outrageous, beautiful giant of a man that you were. OK, a lying cheat who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, too.

  I wipe the tears off my face with the sleeve of my T-shirt. Oh, Anton, none of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t decided to go on some stupid recce at a building site. I would’ve forgiven you, like I always did. Your death has deprived me of the chance of making that generous gesture. Of feeling good about us again. They say death is supposed to bring resolution. Yours hasn’t. It’s brought chaos and pain.

  But I have to go on. And now I have to deal with a friend whom I’ve betrayed. Sophie knows about me and Marcus. She knows about his double life. But does she know he’s been hounding me for days, poisoning every bit of my life? Does she know he’s the ‘Exposure’ man?

  I check the time on my phone. It’s 1 p.m. exactly. I force myself to get up and walk towards the church, passing John Soane’s telephone-box-like tomb on the way. This is such a strange location to choose as a meeting place. What was Sophie thinking?

  The heavy wooden door to the church is open, but the quaint parish room is empty. With its mock-Tudor ceiling, a busy noticeboard and cosy table lamps, it looks more like an entrance to a pub than to a place of worship. It’s my second church in the last week and the irony of it doesn’t escape me. For a firm non-believer I seem to be spending a lot of time in places of worship. But as I go through the second pair of doors into the church, I’m struck by how simple and intimate it seems. There is no one inside. I take one of the plain wooden chairs at the back and let the peaceful atmosphere sink in. I’m beginning to understand why Sophie wanted to meet here. The place exudes calm and dignity. A handful of votive candles flicker in the small rack below the shrine of St Pancras, a strapping young lad, holding a model of a church in his right hand and a palm branch in his left. I must find out what his story was.

  Through the middle of the church, all the way to the altar, runs a path made of old headstones, worn by hundreds of years of foot traffic. I lean over, trying to decipher the one closest to me.

  Here lyeth þ body of

  Katherine daughter of þ above

  Who departed þ life

  þ 21 August. 1716

  Aged 34

  She died exactly three hundred years ago. And she was exactly my age. A shiver runs through me.

  Suddenly the church turns chilly and dark, as if someone pulled heavy curtains around it. My sweat-dampened T-shirt sticks to my back like a wet rag. I can hear the desperate buzzing of a fly somewhere above. I’m not enjoying the moment any more.

  Where the hell is Sophie anyway? Why isn’t she here?

  I jump at the sound of the door opening with a creak behind me.

  Sophie sits down next to me and puts a slim black briefcase on the chair in front of us. She’s wearing a tailored trouser suit with a white blouse underneath. I’ve never seen her looking so, I don’t know, official.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’ No hug, no kiss, none of the usual displays of affection.

  ‘That’s all right . . . How is Marcus?’

  ‘Oh.’ She seems surprised by my question. ‘He’ll be fine, I think. They are keeping him in a drug-induced coma to protect his brain. So the next few days will be touch and go, but the prognosis is moderately good, considering.’

  ‘What happened?’

  She shrugs. ‘It seems he had a little run-in with a train.’

  ‘A run-in?’

  ‘He met it head-on, apparently.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I’m beginning to suspect she’s lost her mind.

  ‘Oh, I’m serious.’ She looks at me without a smile. ‘I’ve never been so serious in my life.’

  ‘What’s going on, Sophie?’

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘You’re leaving Marcus . . . ?’

  ‘No, I’m leaving all this.’ She makes a sweeping gesture with her hand.

  I stare at her, unsure what to say.

  ‘I’ve sold my business. I’m moving to France. I’ve just signed a promesse de vente on a property in Dordogne, not far from Bergerac.’ She nods at her briefcase. ‘A nineteenth-century chateau. Two towers, south-facing gardens, its own pigeonnier and all. It needs a bit of work, new kitchen and bathrooms, but it’s purely cosmetic. I’ve always wanted to have my own vineyard and this one has nine hectares of well-maintained vines that produce an excellent AOC Bordeaux wine. It’s perfect.’

  I listen to her, hardly recognizing my friend. She exudes confidence, contentment and something else I can’t quite put my finger on.

  ‘What about your house?’

  ‘It’s on the market. Open day is next Saturday. The agent tells me it should go like hot cakes. And I’ll still have some change left after I buy the chateau.’

  ‘And Marcus?’

  ‘Marcus?’ She looks at me, unblinking. ‘You can have him, if he ever wakes up.’

  Speechless, I realize what the third new quality is I’ve noticed about her. She’s as cold as ice.

  ‘Well, must dash.’ She picks up her briefcase. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot.’ She opens it and takes out a set of keys. ‘Your keys.’ She throws them on the chair in front. ‘By the way, don’t try to reach me.’

  She gets up and brushes a speck of dust off the sleeve of her jacket.

  ‘Sophie?’ I can only think of one pitifully unimportant question. ‘Why here? Why did you ask me to come here?’

  ‘Here?’ She looks around as if seeing the church for the first time. ‘Oh, I had a meeting up the road at the Renaissance. It was convenient. Ta-ra.’

  She turns and leaves, her high heels clicking on the stone floor.

  I sit in my chair staring at the simple altar, unable to form a single coherent thought. It’s as if all the energy has been drained out of me. I have no strength to move or think, or to be shocked.

  When I eventually get up, the church’s interior spins around me and I have to grab hold of a chair in order not to fall. I slowly make my way into the brightness outside, shuffling like an old woman.

  Who was that cold, hard person I’ve just met? Where is my Sophie?

  The sunlight hits me and I stop, shading my eyes with my arm, unsure where to go, what to do next.

  ‘Excuse me?’ A voice behind me. I ignore it.

  ‘Excuse me? Are these your keys?’

  I slowly turn round and see a man, Sophie’s set of my house keys in his outstretched hand.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ I reach out to get them and the world around me spins again.

  ‘Whoa!’ The man catches my arm and steadies me. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ll be fine . . .’

  He leads me to a wooden bench and sits down next to me. He takes a small bottle of water out of his bag and hands it to me.

  ‘Have a sip.’

  I do as I’m told. The water is cool and has a faint metallic taste. I gulp it down greedily.

  ‘There, that’s better.’ He smiles at me.

  I am beginning to feel better.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I take in his black trousers, plain black long-sleeved top, neatly cropped hair with a few specks of grey.

  ‘Are you a priest?’

  ‘Who, me?’ He grins. ‘Did you think it was my franchise?’ He gestures at the church. ‘For all I know they have a lady vicar here.’

  ‘Sorry, I thought . . .’

  ‘It’s fine. Although no one has ever taken me for a man of the cloth before. Perhaps I should reconsider my vocation.’

>   I can’t help but laugh at the way he says it. He joins in with a wholehearted chuckle. Now I notice a discreet HBA logo on his plain jersey top. A priest wearing a Hood By Air top at £280 a pop? What was I thinking? I know how much they are because I splashed out on one for Anton in a moment of amorous generosity.

  ‘Welcome back to the land of the living.’

  ‘Did I look that bad?’ I give him back his bottle.

  ‘As if you’d seen a ghost in there.’ He points at the church with his thumb.

  I take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  ‘I did, of sorts . . .’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Haven’t you heard of the stranger-on-a-train phenomenon?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘We are wired to disclose deeply personal information to people we don’t know and won’t see again. It’s been documented by psychologists.’

  ‘Are you a psychologist?’

  ‘I’m a writer. I’m writing a book about ghosts.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I’d like you to tell me about your ghost.’

  ‘You’re not really a writer.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Sorry.’ The mischievous glint in his eyes has been replaced by something more sincere. ‘But I still would like to hear about your ghost.’

  I’m tempted. Wouldn’t it be liberating, almost cathartic, to spill my guts to a complete stranger? A complete stranger who seems interested and, well, let’s admit it, quite hot?

  ‘Tell me who you are first.’ I’m playing for time, trying to make my mind up.

  ‘Ahh . . . but that would destroy the beauty of us being complete strangers, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Not if we promise never to see each other again.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to make that promise?’

  Here we go. I feel a familiar flutter of excitement in my stomach. And to think I was bawling my eyes out for Anton a few minutes ago. I know I shouldn’t be feeling like this. But it’s so refreshing, exhilarating.

  He has kind eyes and a self-effacing Ryan Gosling smile. I can’t take my eyes off his lips, full and claret red, and I realize I want to kiss him. God, I’ve forgotten how much fun this can be. I smile back at him, a non-committal but gently testing kind of a smile. Almost imperceptibly, he shifts towards me and his hand casually resting on the bench touches mine. I start at the unexpected contact and something inside me snaps. The buzz of attraction turns into panic.

  ‘My boyfriend’s dead,’ I blurt out, almost involuntarily.

  A tiny part of me expects him to take me in his arms now, console me. But he flinches as if slapped across the face, then tries to cover his reaction with fake concern.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ He’s searching for something to say. ‘Is that why you’ve come here?’

  ‘No. I was meeting a friend. An ex-friend, actually. She’s just un-friended me.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘That’s after I slept with her husband and he fell under a train.’

  The guy is staring at me, obviously trying to figure out if I’m serious or not.

  ‘He may have jumped, but it’s possible he was pushed.’ I’m on a roll now. ‘My boyfriend was pushed too, I’m pretty sure of that, although the police think it was misadventure. Misadventure, huh?’

  ‘Have you tried to get help?’ he says quietly.

  ‘What kind of help?’

  He thinks I’m crazy.

  ‘I mean . . . the police, for instance, they have that nonemergency number . . .’

  ‘But this is an emergency! It’s been an emergency for days. And I can’t take it any more!’

  I jump up from the bench. He gets up too, keeping his distance.

  ‘Look –’ I turn to him – ‘I’m sorry. I’m not in the right headspace at the moment . . . Thank you for the keys, and the water, but I have to go now.’

  ‘Will you be OK?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Take care of yourself, won’t you?’ He doesn’t insist on helping me, in fact he’s relieved I’m going and I can’t blame him.

  ‘I will.’

  I turn and run away from him because I’m convinced something bad will happen if I stay here even a minute longer.

  It’s the noisy chaos of Euston Road that slows me down eventually. To escape the din I dive into the British Library courtyard and perch on the stone stairs. My whole body is shaking. I take a deep breath and hold it, one, two, three, four, then slowly release it, one, two, three, four. Then I hold my breath for another count of four and repeat the cycle once more. ‘Tactical breathing’ – Anton taught me the trick he learnt from his ‘special forces’ mate. It helps. My heartbeat slows down and my grey cells regain their grip on reality.

  What the hell happened back there, outside the church? Why did the encounter with that man freak me out so much? He was nothing but sweet and considerate. Should I go back and apologize? Even if he’s still there, which I doubt, he probably thinks I’ve slipped out from St Pancras Hospital’s mental ward.

  What is wrong with me?

  Have I turned into a paranoid recluse scared of even the most innocuous emotional connection with another human being? A twitchy weirdo jumping at someone else’s touch? I stare at the people milling around in the courtyard. They don’t scare me. What is it then? Had the shock of Sophie’s revelation shaken me so badly I rejected a genuine offer of help from a kind stranger? It was genuine, wasn’t it?

  My heart begins to beat faster again. What was he doing there? Oh my God. Perhaps he’s a journalist. One of Mindy’s minions. And I just spilled my guts to him . . . I replay the encounter in my mind. He found my keys. It means he was inside the church. But I didn’t see anyone there when I was talking to Sophie. No, it is possible he walked in as I was rushing out, noticed the keys, guessed they might be mine, grabbed them and followed me out. It’s the most likely scenario and there is nothing suspicious about it. I could’ve just thanked him and walked away. But I didn’t. He noticed I wasn’t feeling well, sat me down on a bench and gave me some water. The water. I drank it from a bottle offered to me by a total stranger. I remember its strange metallic taste.

  My heart is pounding now. My legs feel heavy and my hands have gone numb. I try to force my breathing back to a slow, ‘tactical’ rhythm, but end up gasping for air. Rohypnol. He’d spiked the water with Rohypnol.

  I lean forward and put my head between my knees. Any minute now I’m going to pass out. But at least I’m in a public place and not a deserted churchyard. I’m safe with strangers around me. But what if he’s followed me here? I need to run. But I can’t move. I sit motionlessly waiting for the darkness to fall.

  33

  The darkness hasn’t fallen. I feel the warmth of sunshine on my neck. I raise my head cautiously, blinking in the bright light. The courtyard looks the same, full of movement and noise. No one has taken any notice of me and I’m glad of the invisibility. It was just water, you silly-billy.

  I push myself up and slowly walk towards Euston Road. There is no one following me. Everything seems to have gone back to normal. Everything except my life.

  Absent-mindedly, I join a queue at the bus stop. I need time to think. I board a bus going towards Angel and go straight upstairs. The seat at the front is empty and I automatically make a beeline for it, squeezing myself in next to a teenager engrossed in something on her mobile phone. Old habits die hard – I used to love the front seat when I was her age, a bit of a freak even then, an arty loner with blue hair and no friends. Not much has changed then.

  My thoughts go back to St Pancras Church. Sophie. She must really hate me. I know, she has every reason to be pissed off with me. But it was the intensity of her hostility that shocked me. The pure, cold fury, which is much worse than someone throwing a tantrum. I’d much rather she called me a slut and spat in my face. But that icy detachment, the cool contempt, it hurt. How is it possible that the
Sophie I’ve known for nearly twenty years, the affable, delightful, dependable Sophie, has turned into an unrecognizable monster? The way she discarded Marcus, you can have him, if he ever wakes up, that was brutal. Yes, his Lust Junction antics were disgusting, he did betray her in the most nauseating way, but to throw him under the bus like this . . . Oh God. Did she have something to do with his accident?

  ‘No, no, no,’ I say out loud and the teenager next to me throws me a quizzical glance.

  Sophie attempting murder? Absolutely and categorically not. She may have turned into a cold bitch, but she is not capable of killing anyone. Though how can I be sure of it? As it turns out I don’t know her at all. She had my keys. She had access to my loft. What if she was my stalker, not Marcus? But why? And more to the point, when? Sophie’s always been so busy with the running of her business that I don’t think she’d have the time or the inclination to stalk anyone. Stalking is a lonely business, it’s a loser’s pastime. Sophie is not my stalker, she is just furious with me. And I can’t blame her. I can’t blame her for leaving London, Marcus and myself.

  Marcus. What will happen to him? I realize my anger towards him has dissipated. I think of him as a grotesque troll now, pitiful rather than menacing. He must’ve been a very unhappy man. If he pulls through, he’ll be a very lonely, unhappy man. With Sophie gone, I’ll be lonely too. But not lonely enough to ever want to see him again.

  The bus feels claustrophobic all of a sudden. It rocks to a stop and I dash down the stairs and jump out of the closing door to the driver’s irritated ‘Oi!’. It takes me a while to get my bearings. I’m in Angel. I turn left off the main road and reach the entrance to the Regent’s Canal towpath. It’s a relief to descend into this haven of tranquillity after the urban ruckus of King’s Cross.

  The path along the water is almost deserted, with just an occasional dog owner strolling at the sedate dog-walking pace. I walk briskly, unable to shake off the feeling that someone’s following me. You’re paranoid, I try to reason with myself. Your life’s a mess. You’ve lost a lover, your best friend and a job. No wonder you’re overreacting.

  But my amygdala knows better. I’m scared and I want to run.