Bojana was boiling a kettle to my right, asking me if I’d come back to work? Miras would be glad to see me. But had I made things right with Tamerlan? Was that all settled? She was addressing me in Serbian because she was from Sarajevo and I was a Kosovan Serb from Novo Brdo.
She pressed a mug into my hand and then led me next door into #371, the room I used to work, where the chairs were comfier. Polina, she muttered, was out getting her breakfast at McDonald’s.
She had directed me to sit, like a child, and I did feel some benefit from the armchair’s soft support – until a rap at the door, whereupon she hastened outside, and low muttering crept in from the hallway. I craned my neck from seated, saw a pale, balding man staring at me, most directly and charmlessly. Bojana was telling him I was her ‘friend’, not available, not for him.
I squirmed in the chair, out of his sight, so caught sight of my reflection in a full-length mirror stood in the corner of the room. In my inky, crumpled clothes, alarmingly whey-faced, I saw all my desperation still. Then the revived memories were erupting in my head, like a physical sensation, a blow falling down on my head with each.
I was Senka Boskovic, yes, daughter of Luka, farmer from Novo Brdo. I left from Pristina wanting a life beyond the fourteenth century, beyond the blighted everyday. London was my goal, my ambition to find work as a manicurist. But I do believe I knew full well in due course I would work as a prostitute.
My boyfriend Dragan was my accomplice for the journey, and Dragan did love me, we suffered together our awful shared lodging, tried to carry out plans we’d made together. But London is nothing but money, and the plain fact was that we owed three thousand pounds to the smuggler, the fixer. When all else failed, Dragan pimped me. His first efforts in this line, done in pubs and clubs, were miserable for both of us. A couple of ‘successes’, my leading strangers back to our shared mattress, sordid humiliation for £40 and £50. Then we tried a pitch in Soho. I was picked up for soliciting, but given a second chance. Dragan believed we needed a partner, tried to sell an ‘interest’ in me – a terrible error. I suffered more, he suffered worse. I never saw him again.
Bojana was back, reaching awkwardly up to a locked cupboard over the fitted wardrobes, bringing down a cardboard box and hefting it into my lap. I picked up the items strewn therein, pathetic things – a cloth scarf, black plastic sandals, tangled hairbrush and hair-bands, No 7 lipstick, pay-as-you-go phone. I held them and turned them, one by one, as my old life ebbed back into me. Bojana pressed a thick, grubby roll of banknotes into my hand, £300, my last day’s wages, that day I disappeared … I was too stunned to show gratitude.
Tamerlan the Kazakh, master of whores, told me Dragan had crossed him, accrued a heavy debt, and now that debt was on me: Dragan was history, like the fourteenth century, and now I worked for Tamerlan – was installed in his Berwick Street walk-up. That first day I simply refused to work. Indeed no man cared to touch me, since I couldn’t stop crying. Tamerlan came round personally to resolve that situation, ‘break me in’, in the manner I knew was his hallmark. I was told briskly and in detail how my family would be made to pay, after I was done paying. He put the fear of God in me. I had no resort to the law, Tamerlan revelled in my helpless illegality.
My ‘dates’ were made through the internet. I received summons by text. Bojana ushered callers in and out. I was Aneta, I was Lucia, Natasha or Valera, Douschka or Veronika, Eva or Maria – like all the other girls I had a hundred names, multiple ages, numerous countries of origin. Our operations moved house more than once to avoid detection. But Keppel House came to seem solid, anonymous, ‘high-end’ …
Bojana, her crumpled face all superstitious fret, was extending to me two ibuprofen tablets and a beaker of water. Another rap at the door and there was Miras, burly in his black leather windbreaker, hardly ‘pleased to see me’. Bojana waddled over to intercept him, an argument in antic tones began. Miras believed I was trouble, that Tamerlan would be having strong words. All this had redounded on him too, for he had been my guard, twenty-four hours a day.
Sexually, in myself, I had always been demure, reserved. Now my work was so fetid I wanted to scrub out my skull. Some men resisted paying, others demanded what they hadn’t paid for, violent and unsafe practices, of a piece with what they thought fitting from a whore. I got familiar with male sexual failure, male infantilism, the casual and pathetic brutality that commonly accompanied these. My working day started at 11am, my hourly rate £150, of which I kept two twenties and a ten. I did seven or eight dates daily, and there wasn’t a day went by when I didn’t either wish myself dead or feel myself already buried, under rocks.
Miras was on the phone now, and making it his job to obstruct my path to the door. I was impotently aware of just how dreadful things were looking for me. I contemplated trampling a way over the bed, stood and walked to the mirror. At closer quarters I saw the slap I as Leon had given this face was still discernibly ruddy on my left cheekbone. And then I saw my dark eyes, widening starkly, as a sense-memory as sharp as a jagged shard sliced right into me …
… standing before this mirror, I had waited for a man to come, hoping he’d never show – a man who came when I didn’t expect him, noiselessly and fast, behind my back like a shadow falling over me … A blur of darkness, an evil vapour, filled with malediction. And then I fell, into the black.
Dizzily I felt a sensation of draining from my face, staggered a little, toppled backward into the armchair. My heart was pounding as if down to the last, an odious sickness rising.
Miras had seen the money in my hand, was stood over me now, barking at me, grasping my hand and shaking it. I loosed some notes onto the floor, he cursed me, bent down, and I knew there’d be no other chance – I lashed out a foot, knocked him over, leapt up and stamped on his chest and head with all the force I had in me. Bojana’s mouth hung open slack, in horror, as if I were her errant child. I dashed clear and into the corridor, thumped the elevator buttons, got it just as I saw Miras dragging himself out of the door, bloodied, a gun in his hand.
In the foyer, running for the double doors, I could see out into the daylight, see striding up the path the squat jowly man I knew as Tamerlan, flanked by two lieutenants. I turned tail down the corridor, concealed myself as I heard Miras and Tamerlan in heated exchanges, then edged my way out of this ‘respectable place’ through a fire door. I didn’t stop until I was riding an underground train out of Baker Street. I stumbled off at Waterloo, vomited my guts onto the platform, wiped my mouth and dragged myself onward.
This because I was animated, felt myself febrile, by an idea, a vision of a place of greater safety – the Hartford family cottage, where Steven had once encouraged me to hole up and knock out my original paper on immunosuppressants in facial transplant. The place had seemed to me then just as austere as Steven himself, but I was certain it would be currently unoccupied; more certain still that I remembered where Steven secreted his spare key; certain beyond doubt that no one would look for me there. I headed up to the Waterloo overground station, bought a ticket to Sawford, and from there connected with the small line from Hythe out to Dungeness.
* * *
My business with Steven over those days – my conduct, the lengths to which I was forced – even now stir up a perishing sense of disgrace in me even now. Having trekked so far only to find the clapboard cottage evidently occupied, I changed my plan in haste – had now to engineer a meeting with Steven, carry off some sort of convincing role-play. He proved harder to track down than one would have imagined, yet I found him by loitering round the local watering hole, for all that I narrowly escaped a sort of molestation out of which Steven, implausibly, emerged as my white knight.
I found him changed, though – deeply changed, fundamentally unstable – my handiwork, I’m sure, the poisoning of his life and prospects. Will it be believed if I say I felt some sympathy for him still? I did wish to offer him some comfort. But I was myself struggling to function, had to hide myself away
for hours while loathsome sensations wormed their way through me. Under the skin I felt myself to be decaying matter, food for maggots and moths. My ‘impersonation’ was hard to keep to. And when I sensed Steven had begun to think fondly of some kind of extended domesticity for the two of us, the warning sounds in my head became a clamour once more. For a moment, as we walked in some shaded woodland, I contemplated an invasion of him … but baulked at the last. Instead I resolved only to buy time. I used what I had to hand – I took him to bed. And I think in that moment I became conscious of a rot that was irreversible.
When we were done … he lifted himself off of me, off of the bed, with the haunted look of one whose core had been cracked beyond repair. He belted himself into a robe, stumbled out of the room, I heard him moving around. I tried to succumb to sleep but couldn’t. There were sounds in my head, the flitting and twitching of moths, bellicose croaking of frogs, the odour of the marsh in my nose. But after a while I didn’t know any more what was sleep and what was waking.
Then I was conscious, sat up in the gloom of dawn. My face was alive with pain, lips twitching, my tongue a parched worm incapable of forming words. I thrust my hand up in front of me and found it a ghastly stone-grey, the fingertips blackened and striated. Spidery black lines crept down my nails like cracks in a frozen river.
I groped out of bed toward the wardrobe, pushed away the clothes that hung over the mirror, knowing what I would see – something dreadful – those same spidery lines webbing the left side of my face, like intimations of gangrenous decay, my wild eyes in the glass drawn to them like a magnet to iron filings. At my shoulders, between my breasts, on my thighs – patchy purplish stains mottled the skin.
In sheer derangement I pulled on the clothes I’d discarded, snatched at whatever I thought I could use from any surface, focused wholly on immediate flight. Until I grew conscious of the silence that had seemed to have settled beyond the bedroom threshold – and my momentum slowed.
I tiptoed through the door to the living space, detecting instantly a dry, stale, rancid feel to the air. Underneath the living room table, on which Steven’s laptop glowed still, he was lying on the floor, beneath a thick woollen rug, in a foetal curl. Uneasily I trod nearer – whereupon the completeness of that silence sent a shudder through me. I knew it, then – before I laid a hand on his head, turned him to me, saw his sightless eyes, tongue semi-protruded through bluish lips. The pill-jar stood by a mug on the table-top. I knew he would have measured and imbibed his dose meticulously, with small sips of water.
I pressed fingers to my brow to stop the images coming to me unbidden, of the boy, ‘the brave Stevie’, with whom I’d laughed and cavorted and chattered excitedly of all the grand things we’d do out in the big world. Disgraced far beyond tears, I held his head to my chest, sat with him in a pitiful dog-like observance of mourning for my old classmate – until finally the cold in the room, the stinging pains inside me and all they portended, were intolerable.
I erased his computer files, emptied his wallet, ransacked Tessa’s wardrobe and drawers for accessories that could cover me more completely than my long coat and scarf. I found gloves, boots, outsized black sunglasses, a wide-brimmed floppy hat in black straw. Fully swathed, I had a sick sense of looking much more conspicuous than invisible. But there was no more time. I scuttled out and away, left Steven and the cottage behind me in grey light and morning mist.
It was not until a pair of women sat down opposite me in the train carriage, both clad in full, enveloping burqas, that I felt I had at least adequate protection from prying eyes as I retraced my journey back to London. But in my hard seat, the brim of my hat pulled low, hugging myself as if that might make me smaller, I was wondering all the way if it wasn’t sheer moral hideousness that had begun to rot this body.
I holed up in the cheapest lodging I knew of, a guesthouse on a Victorian terrace in Crouch End. There, with the door locked and curtains closed, I passed a night stretched out like grim death and trying to suppress my groans, until I was insensible. Still I awoke, my blood still pumping, pain still acute, my skin’s disease visibly worse.
The more that death seemed to own me, the harder I fought, unready to lie down and be done. But I wish … I truly wish instead I’d found a hole down which to throw myself, put an end on it all as I deserved. What happened next I never, ever intended or wished for – but should, after all, have foreseen.
* * *
The palliative I had in mind seemed obtainable in this body, for as long as something of it remained. I wanted access to hydromorphone, the strongest possible pain-killing injection. And I knew of a place that held a copious supply, albeit behind glass, under lock and key – the renowned Forrest Clinic of St John’s Wood. I knew, moreover, that a full replica set of keys and security fobs lay in a drawer in the home office of my ex-friend Dr Grey Lochran. Burglary, though, was not an option, not in my wracked state. And yet it seemed to me I might still call on one ally within the Lochran household – someone who had kept faith in me, in whose eyes I was surely still untarnished. My plan was immediately clear, obvious, irrevocable. With Senka Boskovic’s phone I dialled the number of my godson.
Calder remembered me well – ‘Dijana’, that is – I could hear excitement kindle in his voice. My own was low, controlled only with difficulty, yet I tried to replicate the come-hither she had worked on him once at my place. I knew within moments that he was convinced, willing to believe all I was saying – that Robert and I had endeavoured to vanish, ‘go underground’ together, but that Rab now had urgent need of some resources from his workplace, and no means to achieve entry without arousing suspicion.
‘He’s relying on you, Cal, I don’t think there’s anyone else he has the same regard for. So you must, must keep our secret, tell no one, above all not your father, he could never understand as you do …’
I heard the pull in my throat, my urgency wholly unfeigned – indeed I had to temper it. But I heard in return the boy’s keenness, his sense of being called, the staunch readiness to do what was needful for ‘Rab’. My instructions were precise as to where in his father’s office he would have to forage. I warned him, though, to step with care.
Come the evening I stood in the shade of the tall, shimmering Scotch pines hemming the driveway of the Forrest Clinic – that so elegantly landscaped site, set back from its smugly prosperous residential street. In the London dusk my Clinic looked like a fortress of forbidding panels in glass and burnt-sienna concrete. But I had to penetrate those defences: every nerve in me was alive with pain.
Gazing heavy-heartedly at the familiar façade, it seemed to me fated that I should be seeing the old place, surely for the last time, in fading light. Its design and construction had meant the world to me. Kuwabara, my architect, a genius of sorts, enlightened me to the theory of how a structure’s façade ought, like a ‘smooth skin’, wrap round its steel skeleton of pillars and beams. Nonetheless I had directed him sternly in turn: my Clinic was to be monastic, a place of privacy, a sanctuary in the city. Hence those glass panels were opaque – veils, not windows – and each one etched with an abstract pattern of entwined snakes that Kuwabara thought utterly vile, but in which I had exulted.
Meaningless now, as nothing, those prissy, aesthetic cares … The whole structure, which I’d planned as some dynamic mirror of self, was already a mausoleum, its flawlessness mournful. And this had been so, I understood, long before I made my ‘bargain’. Whenever the courts ruled finally that Robert Forrest was dead then it would be sold, probably razed or gutted and re-converted by some property developer just as rapacious as my father, the proceeds of the sale minus death duties duly conveyed to my brave godson …
I heard Grey’s powerful black Audi A8 growling up the street at speed before I saw it, and I hastened to hide myself between the pines. But I observed Cal climbing out, lean and robust in leather jacket and faded jeans, that angular imperious tilt to his head, eyes watchful. I had told him to follow the course of the
moat-like water trough that flowed round the front of the Clinic to the back. And as he went I followed, ten wary yards between us, to the courtyard where the water burbled into boxed ponds between wooden decks, overlooked by the blank windows of the day-care suites.
I watched Cal unlock the rear door and enter, keeping the lights out as we’d agreed, swiping the wand that disabled the blinking alarm. At which point I hastened across the deck to join him within. Instantly I read his disquiet in the face of my outlandish black-clad state.
‘Dijana …?’ he said uneasily. ‘Where’s Rab?’
‘I will take you to him, Cal, but please, first, what we need …’
Passing him, I punched in the code that released the inner door. Poor Cal followed my steps faithfully through the darkened interior, past the warm-shaded leather-upholstered comfort of reception and consulting, into the immaculate clean-lined white world of Theatre. My steps were shambling, sickness coursing through me – my whole presence palpably fraudulent, I was sure. But I staggered onward, however stricken, because, now, once more, I had hope against hope.
I found the hydromorphone on the shelves in stores, but my trembling fingers caused me to drop and smash two ampoules onto the floor. I was forced to ask Cal if he would administer the injection, by no means sure of his consent as the laden hands I held out to him shook like an addict’s, my eyes unreadable behind those black glasses. Possibly, in that moment, he was persuaded by the severity of the groan that issued involuntarily from my chest, and the fearsome dosage I was requesting, as would tranquillise a panther.
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 34
