The Girlfriend

by Sarah Naughton

  I know she can’t see me through the spyhole. I made Tabby test it out with me when we first got here, but even so, I can’t move or breathe until the fourth-floor light clicks off and the landing is plunged into darkness.

  I hear her letting herself into your flat and the door closing, then she turns on the hall light.

  It still lifts my heart to see that line of yellow beneath your door.

  I go into my bedroom and put on the rain dress, tying my hair up the way you like it. I even put makeup on, and when I look in the mirror, another face looks back at me. A face I can hide behind.

  11.

  Mags

  The pasta is bland and gritty. I have to add far too much of Abe’s rock salt to make it palatable, and I grate half a packet of Parmesan over it and leave it covered with a plate to keep warm while I heat up the garlic bread. I haven’t eaten like this since university. At home, I mostly get takeout or else I’m dining out. Sushi, usually, or Thai. My tongue pricks at the thought of wasabi and Szechwan pepper. I wonder if Jackson’s out with a client or one of the other partners. His favorite restaurant is an Aussie fusion place on the Strip. Last time we went, I had tuna tartare with yuzu dashi and a bottle of sake. We laughed so much that the next day, I felt like I’d done fifty sit-ups. The sudden longing I feel to be beside him takes me by surprise. Could I be a bit in love with him? Or is it just homesickness? I should be careful. He’s made no secret of his attraction to me, but he’s married, with two adult kids from his last marriage and twin seven-year-old boys from this one. Plus, I’m not in the least attracted to him. He’s wiry and muscular from his daily sessions with the personal trainer, he works on his tan, and I’m pretty sure he’s had a brow lift. I like my men more natural, a little less prissy about their clothes and weight and “skin regime.” Like Daniel, I suppose. Poor old Daniel. He just caught me at a bad time. I knock back my first glass of wine. Poor old me.

  There’s a Bose speaker on the kitchen window, so I go in search of an MP3 player and eventually find one in a drawer. Some of the bands I don’t even recognize—British ones, I assume, who haven’t made it over the Atlantic. But there’s one female singer who’s as big back home as she is here. Her voice is low and smoky, and if you listen too closely to the lyrics when you’ve had too much to drink, they’ll make you cry. Abe’s got all her albums. I program them to run on a loop and plug the player into the speaker. The voice washes over me, warm and rich as melted chocolate, and I’m just tipsy enough to sway my hips.

  According to the microwave, it’s 8:00 p.m. on the dot when Jody rings the buzzer. The echoes reverberate through the flat and, I imagine, all my neighbors’ flats.

  She is wearing a gray tea dress sprinkled with clear plastic beads. Its ruffled sleeves are starting to fray where the overlocking has unraveled. Her hair is tied up, with curling locks left to dangle by her ears, and her frosted-pink lipstick suits her pallid coloring. For the first time, I can see that she is pretty. My sour brain adds, if you like that “feminine” look.

  “You look lovely,” I say, feeling absurdly as if I’m on a date.

  “I brought you this.” She hands me a tiny velvet pouch and stands in the hall, watching me expectantly.

  I tip it out onto my palm. It is a tiny silver fairy for a charm bracelet.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “It’s a guardian angel,” she says.

  I smile. “Sweet. Come on through.”

  I put the charm in my pocket and forget about it immediately.

  As well as a couple of wine boxes, I’ve splashed out on some Veuve Clicquot—for myself more than Jody. The diminutive Indian shop assistant had to get a set of stepladders to reach it on top of the soft drinks fridge where it must have been gathering dust and grease for years. Jody ducks as I pop the cork, and it pings off the metal lampshade over the table.

  “Happy birthday.” I clink her glass. “To absent friends.”

  Surprisingly enough, it’s drinkable. I close my eyes and think of the warm crush of gallery openings and awards ceremonies. Abe would have fit in perfectly back home; he could have been personal assistant to a producer or, if caregiving really was his vocation, some ancient celebrity. He might have been left a house down in Malibu. We could have stood by the ocean sharing a bottle of bubbly, toasting our astonishing survival, our success despite the odds.

  But only one of us survived.

  I moved the flowers from the bedside table to the dining table, and now I thank Jody for them.

  “Where on earth did you get them?”

  “I…Abe did. He picked them from a client’s garden.”

  “Oh, right. They’ve survived well, haven’t they, since the accident? They look so fresh. Thanks for topping up the water.”

  Another beat, then a smile. “That’s OK.”

  I pour the remains of the champagne into my glass, then go to the kitchen for a box of white. I like to have alcohol close at hand, like a security blanket.

  “So you were talking to Mira earlier,” she says when I come back to the table. Her face is open and guileless; does she know I was checking out her story?

  “I just wanted to introduce myself.”

  “When that baby arrives, it’s going to keep the whole place awake.” Jody smiles wistfully. Her baby dreams have been dashed along with the marriage ones.

  “They’re Albanian, aren’t they? How come they got to live here?”

  “I think they’re Roma. Roma people get persecuted in some of those countries, don’t they?”

  “I thought Roma didn’t like to stay in one place. Aren’t there supposed to be special sites set aside for them?”

  Jody shrugs. “I don’t really know. They’re pretty quiet.”

  “What’s he like?”

  A look of distaste twists her mouth. “I stay out of his way, and he’s never around much anyway. He’s a builder, I think. Never speaks. I don’t even know if either of them speak English.”

  “She does,” I say. “Quite well, actually. She understood words like depressed and feminist.” I don’t add that I still can’t work out what possible reason she would have to pretend not to speak English.

  Jody’s staring at the flowers. She doesn’t seem interested in her next-door neighbors, or perhaps she’s jealous that I’m meeting new people.

  Feeling my gaze, she gives an almost imperceptible start.

  “Sorry. It’s the flowers. It’s funny, but I remembered them being yellow.”

  I shrug. “Maybe they change the longer they bloom or something.”

  I have no idea what I’m talking about. The only living thing to grace my terrace in Vegas is a small and boring-looking cactus that was there when I moved in and has never been watered.

  Hoping the conversation will become less stilted by a change of subject, I ask whether there’s a park nearby for jogging. Any weight I put on here will be trebled when I get back to the land of size-zero gym bunnies, and I must be sinking several thousand extra calories a day on booze. But I daren’t go to bed sober, for fear of what my brain will throw up for me.

  “There’s a square at the end of the main street, but it can be dodgy after dark. I think men use it—gay men—for, uh…”

  “I’ll be careful not to slip.” I smile.

  In the time it takes Jody to finish her champagne, I’ve sunk two more glasses of white. When I try to refill her glass, she puts her hand over the top, but I talk her into a wine and orange juice. It’ll be good for her to get drunk. Already, I can see her loosening up. Her cheeks are pink, and there’s a sheen of sweat on her top lip. I’ve turned the heating up to eighty-six degrees so that I can walk around in my camisole and bare feet like I do at home.

  “So, tell me how you met,” I say. “You and Abe.”

  She twists the ring on her finger and smiles coyly. “Oh, you know, we were neighbors, so we used
to run into one another.”

  “Come on,” I say. “Give me the whole story. Who made the first move?”

  “Well, he actually saved my life.”

  It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. Apparently, Abe came and put out a fire she’d managed to start while cooking sausages.

  “Wow,” I say when she’s done. “I never took Abe for an action hero.”

  She doesn’t reply to this, and I fear I might have offended her by sounding dismissive of her big love scene.

  “I left home very young,” I say quickly. “We didn’t really get the chance to know one another as adults. He must be different now.”

  “That’s so sad,” she murmurs. Then she says, “I grew up in a foster home, actually.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “My dad was in the military. He was killed when I was seven, and then my mum killed herself a year later.”

  I am riven with shame at my own self-pity. “Jody…I’m so, so sorry.”

  “It’s OK. They loved me, and they loved each other.”

  “Too much, maybe.”

  She frowns again. “You can’t love someone too much.”

  “Your mother owed it to you to carry on after his death,” I say. “It wasn’t fair to you to do what she did.”

  Jody shakes her head. “She was sick.”

  I wonder how much of that sickness Jody has inherited. She must be here because of the upbringing in foster care, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some mental illness at play too. She seems so fragile, though given what has happened to the man she loves, I suppose it must take formidable strength of character even to get up in the morning. Unbidden, Daniel pops into my head. The way he looked when he said goodbye at the hotel, the expression of bewildered hurt. I wish I had been kinder. I find that I’m glad his number is now on my phone.

  “What was it like?” I ask. “Growing up in foster care?” Looking back, Abe and I would have been better off, but no one would ever have believed us if we’d asked for help. We were on our own, and we knew it.

  “I was happy enough.”

  She sips her wine with the delicacy of a bird dipping its beak into a flower. I reassess my assumptions about her again. To have survived the death of both parents and an upbringing in foster care, she must be pretty resilient. I wonder if it was his depression that drew her to my brother, the bird with a broken wing. Classic white-knight syndrome. She wanted to save him because she couldn’t save her mother.

  She lays her glass down. “My aunt, Helen, was supposed to be my legal guardian. It was in my parents’ will. After they died, I moved in with her and her husband for a while, but then they changed their minds. Their son was a drug addict, and she said it would be too difficult.”

  “Shit.” The wine has slowed my thoughts, and I can’t think of anything else to say.

  She smiles. “But let’s not talk about sad things. You wanted to know about Abe and me. Shall I tell you about our first night together?” Her face is flushed. Christ, she really is wasted.

  “Well, only if you’re…umm…”

  “It was here. On the roof.”

  Automatically, I glance up at the ceiling. “You can get up there?”

  “There’s a door at the end of the landing. Abe took us up to watch the sunset. It was…it was beautiful.”

  “Enough,” I say, holding up my hand. “I think you might be about to give me too much information.”

  She giggles. “No, I meant the sunset was beautiful. If he…” She inhales. “If he dies, I’ll go back up there and wait for him.”

  I swallow my mouthful too fast and cough. “You mean his ghost?”

  She nods guilelessly. “If you were going to come back, wouldn’t you come back to the place you were happiest?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t know how that sort of thing works. I thought it was all about unfinished business or…whatever.”

  There’s an awkward silence as she gazes down into her wine glass, a half smile on her lips, presumably remembering things I don’t want to imagine.

  “’Scuse me. Need to pee.” Getting up from the table, I stagger a little and rebound off the sofa on my way to the bathroom.

  It’s cooler in here, and resting my head against the back wall, I close my eyes to test whether the room’s spinning. Not yet. I’m good for another bottle or so. There’s an unpleasant crawling sensation at the back of my head as the condensation dribbling down the wall creeps into my hair, so I get up and flush.

  As I’m washing my hands, my eyes are drawn to the shelf of toiletries—there was something important I needed to ask Jody.

  She’s staring at the flowers when I emerge, as the smoky-voiced singer croons about lost love.

  “Do you know the name of the antidepressants Abe was on? I haven’t been able to find any.”

  If he ran out, that could have been the problem. If so, Jody must take some of the blame herself. She could have spotted the signs.

  She shakes her head, blinking.

  “Had he been on them long? Some SSRIs have been known to cause suicidal thoughts in young men when they first start taking them.”

  Blink. Blink.

  “And have you spoken to his doctor since it all happened? I mean, the guy should have been on top of this. Suicide is the biggest killer of young men. We might be able to make a case for medical negligence and get some compensation. I know it doesn’t make up for what happened, but these bastards shouldn’t be allowed to—oh!”

  Jody has spilled her wine all over her dress.

  I jump to my feet. “Quick, take it off, and I’ll rinse it.”

  She gets up too, gathering the sopping hem into a ball around her thighs. “It’s OK. I’ll go home and do it.”

  “Just get changed and then head back over.”

  But she’s already halfway across the room. “No, no. It’s getting late. I should go to bed.” She stumbles then, like she’s walking across the deck of a listing ship, and falls against the bookcase by the inner door. I smile—it’s a feeling I know well—but then my smile slips. As her hands jerked up to save herself, the dress rode up and I saw, just for a moment, the unmistakable white scars of a self-harmer.

  I look away quickly as she rights herself and weaves off down the hall to the door. “Thanks for dinner,” she calls back over her shoulder. “It was lovely.”

  “That’s OK. Happy birthday!”

  She closes the door behind her, and her footsteps recede across the landing. Then her door closes, and there’s just silence but for the lilting voice of the bereft lover.

  Perhaps it’s not such a big deal. Self-harming is pretty common among teenagers, especially, I imagine, those who have lost both parents and grew up in a foster home. Ah well, like she says, she’s over it all now. Abe saved her.

  I sigh and rub my face. See, this is why I don’t have relationships. Even if you’re lucky enough to meet someone you genuinely care about, someone who feels the same and isn’t a complete asshole, as soon as you let your guard down and start to rely on them, bang! Out of the blue comes some shitty tumor or terrorist attack or a fall down a stairwell. It’s not worth it. You can’t miss it if it was never there.

  Then I remember I’d meant to ask her for his doctor’s name. I’ve got friends in medicolegal. If someone’s fucked up, they will pay. I’ll give the money to a charity or something.

  I write a note to remind myself in the morning, then set about getting comatose drunk. I know I’ll have a shitty hangover, but it’s not as if Abe’s going to notice, and I stocked up with painkillers at the Food and Wine for just that contingency.

  At midnight, I decide to call it a day and stagger to the bathroom to clean the black stains off my teeth before bed. There are two faces in the mirror, the second fainter, revolving around the first. I try to hold the gaze of the ghostly pair
of brown eyes looking back at me, but it keeps sliding away from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, my voice close in the cramped room. “I’m sorry that I left you there. I’m sorry that you ended up with another broken person. I’m sorry you’re going to die.”

  I stumble to bed, relieved I had the foresight to put the sheets back on before Jody arrived, and sink heavily onto the mattress. My limbs are leaden, my brain punch-drunk, and sleep hurtles toward me like a freight train.

  Friday, November 11

  12.

  Mags

  I wake up, completely alert.

  Isn’t it great the way alcohol kicks you unconscious at midnight only to kick you awake a couple of hours later? A glance at my watch reveals it’s barely 3:00 a.m. Urgh. Turning onto my back, I prepare for the tedious slog to dawn. The radio will help numb my brain, but as I reach for my phone to hit the Radio 4 app, my hand stops midair.

  A noise, close by.

  Next door going to the bathroom? Kids messing around outside?

  I hear it again. A soft rustle.

  Someone’s in the flat.

  Jody must have a second key. Jesus Christ, she can’t keep away. Has she come to dry her tears with his towel or curl up on the sofa they fucked on just to be close to him? I’m seriously not in the mood.

  I get out of bed and stride to the bedroom door. Fortunately, it doesn’t creak as I yank it open to give her a piece of my mind.

  Because standing by the table, his broad shape silhouetted against the window, is a man.

  My sharp intake of breath is like paper tearing in the silence.

  But he doesn’t turn.

  I am suddenly aware how short my T-shirt is, how skimpy my underwear. My eyes flick to the hall door. Could I make it before he had the chance to cross the room? But then I would somehow have to get to safety inside one of the other flats or else run downstairs and out into the night in just my underwear, which doesn’t seem any less dangerous.