An extraordinary energy flooded through her, mind, body and soul. She pulled her suitcases down from the top shelves, and when they were all stuffed full she pulled his down and filled them as well. There were still mountains of clothes and accessories out on the bed and floor. She sensed her nerve beginning to fail, and she ran downstairs for a roll of dustbin liners and stuffed everything into them, before she could change her mind.
When all the discards were safely out of sight, she looked carefully through the yard or so of remaining garments, huddled nervously in the left-hand corner. Each one got a measured inspection, but the one she lingered over longest was the little black skirt. It ought to go. It made her uneasy and belonged to a phase she wanted to leave behind. But she was afraid that she still needed it, or that he would miss it, and read a meaning into its absence that she didn’t intend. Or perhaps, a meaning that she did.
She dreamed that she had been robbed by a mysterious older woman. In the morning, she booked a taxi while she drank her coffee. It came at ten, one of those large ones with a sliding door. The driver helped her to load up and took her to the Sue Ryder shop a few streets away. He helped her unload as well, and she tipped him a tenner. He was delighted, but she got the impression that the volunteers in the shop were not so pleased.
‘It’s all designer stuff,’ she told them. ‘It has all been dry-cleaned.’
They looked slightly less beleaguered when they heard this, and one of them said, ‘It’s very good of you. Thank you.’
She hung around for a couple of beats, expecting some- thing else to happen, some act of closure or finality. There was none. She shrugged and smiled, slightly embarrassed, and left the shop. But as soon as she was on the street she realised she had forgotten about the suitcases, which she didn’t intend to give away. She apologised and the same assistant, slightly disdainful, asked her if she’d like to come back for them or wait while they unpacked them, there and then. She knew how hard it would be to find the time to come back, so she said she’d wait, and while the volunteers rummaged around in the back room she wandered idly through the shop.
On the bric-a-brac shelves a small jug caught her eye. It was beautifully shaped with a delicate spout and a lovely round swell of belly. The glaze was a deep, rich, natural green. It didn’t fit with anything in her kitchen, which was nouveau-minimalist – all black and white and stainless steel – but she couldn’t quite bring herself to put it down, so she kept it in her hand as she moved on round the shop. There were shelves full of videos and a few DVDs, all cheaper than the cost of renting one. She picked out a couple that she thought he might like and tucked them under her arm.
The assistant returned with two of the cases. She looked a lot less disdainful now.
‘Won’t keep you much longer,’ she said, returning to the back room.
There was nothing left to look at now except for the racks and bins of clothes, so she began, almost despite herself, to browse through them. Just out of curiosity, that was all. There was something mildly distasteful about touching things that strangers had worn, and the smell in the place was of an unspecific but distinctly human origin which the air-fresheners failed to disguise. But as she looked she began to forget about it, and became fascinated by the kinds of things that other people bought, presumably wore, and then passed on. Most of the clothes were hideous, but there were some interesting things among the trash. A white granddad shirt in some ultra-soft fabric, maybe cotton mixed with silk. A pair of straight black jeans, hardly worn, which looked well made. She had both these things in her hand when the assistant came out with another empty suitcase.
‘Changing room is just there if you want to try anything on,’ she said.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, thrusting the jeans back onto the rail as if they were toxic waste. She had no intention of wearing someone else’s cast-offs. But when the volunteer disappeared again she found her attention returning to the jeans. Where was the harm in trying them on? She wasn’t going to catch anything from them, and they might give her some clues about the new style she was looking for and how she might replace some of the things she had just brought in. The jeans, it turned out, fitted perfectly, and as she was inspecting herself in front of the mirror the woman came back again.
‘They’re perfect on you,’ she said. ‘You can have them if you want. The stuff you brought in is brilliant. It’ll make a lot of money for us.’
‘No, no,’ she said again, but she knew, even then, that she was protesting too much.
‘Where did it all come from, anyway?’ the assistant asked. ‘Has someone died?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all mine. I’m just having a clear-out. Nobody died.’
But it occurred to her that maybe she was wrong. Some- body had died, suffocated by Elsinore. And somebody else, a new and unknown being, was in the process of being born.
{26}
She left the Sue Ryder shop with the black jeans, the granddad shirt and a dusty-blue raw silk jacket with a Nehru collar. She put all the clothes on when she got home and liked what she saw in the mirror, and became aware again of that sense of energy released. At last, for no reason that she could see, her life was unstuck and moving again. Where to she didn’t know, but for the moment at least she would keep going with the flow and see where she would wash up.
He was still in Berlin. The next morning she phoned No Riffraff and put the new maître d’ in charge. As soon as the shops opened she dropped the Sue Ryder clothes into the drycleaner’s and, with a soaring sense of liberation, set out to trawl through every charity shop between Upper Street and Seven Sisters Road. She didn’t go nuts – she walked out of most of them empty-handed – but she did collect a few more things, and she exchanged them with the first lot in the drycleaner’s on her way home. Back at the house she pottered around, restless and excited. She was used to having energy like this but not at all used to having nowhere to channel it. She checked in with the staff in Elsinore, then phoned an old friend and told her what she had done.
‘It’s feng shui,’ the friend said. ‘It’s a guaranteed way to change your life and get out of a rut. You just wait and see what happens. You’ll be amazed.’
She didn’t believe a word of it, but her friend turned out to be right. Tectonic plates were shifting. She had seen nothing yet.
She had an appointment with her hairdresser on her way to work that afternoon. For years he had been trying to persuade her to cut it short and spiky and, still possessed by the changes sweeping through her life, she allowed him to do it. She was thrilled by the way it looked, and left work as soon as high tea was over, so as to be there when he arrived home from Berlin. She put on the granddad shirt and a short Bulgarian waistcoat, and some heavy black trousers in hemp or coarse cotton that she had not had dry-cleaned because it was clear they had never been worn. She was afraid that he would be dismissive and pull the rug out from under her feet, but he didn’t. He held her at arms-length and looked her up and down and said, ‘Hmm. That old Ralph Lauren trash again, isn’t it?’
But she could tell he liked the new look. When he went upstairs to take a shower she told him to look in the wardrobe. He came haring back down and burst in upon her, clutching his head in both hands and saying, ‘She’s left me! What am I going to do? She’s taken everything and left me!’
She laughed and he took her in a great bear hug and lifted her off her feet.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘What are you so pleased about? Why should it matter so much?’
She asked him because she really didn’t know, and she wanted to. He put her down and rubbed at her spiky hair and grinned. ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he said.
But it was important. It was a thing of huge significance. That night they both discovered a new depth of passion for each other, and the little black skirt hung, unused and unwanted, in all that new, dark emptiness.
{27}
She should have put it out with the rest, she sees that now. She hasn’t worn it since. S
he will never wear it again, either, because it is the image of a woman with grey hair posing as a schoolgirl which has brought her to this state of mortification. Not just how she would look now if she was to wear it, but of the lie it has been on all those other occasions. Because she has been grey since she met him, and it is only that simple chemical artifice that has stopped them both from seeing the absurdity of it all along. It is the stuff of horror films, a man’s worst nightmare, a piece of witchcraft that has made fools of them both with its spell.
She drops on to the bed, overwhelmed by a humiliation so deep and so bitter it feels like death. The final layer of her mask has been stripped away and all that is left is thirty years of unacknowledged exhaustion. No, not thirty. Forty. Because this act began way back then, when she was a teenager struggling to be accepted, and it has never once stopped since. She has worked on her mask with relentless energy, painting and powdering and dying, researching her materials, making it ever more sophisticated. And it is not just the make-up and colourants, not just the clothes and the boots and the earrings and the bags. She has masked her whole being for the benefit of how she appears to others. She has smiled and flirted and flattered and pampered and pleasured. She has prostituted herself for this fictional creation, the impossible person she has presented throughout her life. Now she has finally shaken it off, and it has taken her vitality with it and left her empty; the victim of vampires; bled dry.
She has no means left to combat this exhaustion. She claws her way beneath the duvet and falls into oblivion.
{28}
His lights go out, and when they come back on again they aren’t working properly. His head is full of bright darkness or black light. There is a weight on his back. He can’t breathe. The sky has fallen on him. But it moves. It is someone’s knees, and there are hands all over him, in his pockets, front and back.
His face is in gritty mud and his nose is blocked. He gasps through his mouth and says, ‘Don’t take my cigarettes.’
One of the knees digs in and it feels as though it has found his heart and is squashing it against his breastbone. Fingers in his front trouser pocket are moving beside his balls, and he feels a momentary panic, but they close around his loose change and pull it free. Then the pressure lifts and they are gone, but not as silently as they came. He hears their running footsteps, two sets, hitting the tarmac hard, powering away like sprinters. The sound is full of youth and strength. He tries to lift his head, and is assailed by the sense that he is falling. He cannot be falling because he is flat on the ground, and yet he is, dropping from a height towards a hard, hard land- ing. He keeps still, terrified by the sensation, and he feels hot fluid running down the sides of his head and pooling around his ears. He knows what it is. It’s a trick his father used to use to stop horses from rearing. A bottle filled with hot water, which the rider smashes between its ears as its front feet leave the ground. The blow shocks the horse. The hot liquid cures it of rearing forever because it thinks it’s blood.
It is blood. It comes away hot and sticky on his hand. He sits up carefully, feels broken glass on the ground around him. He has been hit with a bottle. What is blocking his nose is blood as well; it has that metallic smell. He feels in his coat pocket for his handkerchief and finds his glasses in there. He puts them on, as though they could help him to see through the darkness, but he makes another discovery and it’s the worst one yet. The central field of vision in his right eye has been closed down by the blow to the head. There is a black vacancy, a hole in his vision. He panics. It is a detached retina. It is brain damage. He must get help and quickly.
But he is still falling. He has to move carefully. He puts out both hands, feeling around for the shards of glass, trying to find a clear patch of ground to lean on while he pushes himself up. He feels a familiar shape, a cigarette lighter dis- carded or dropped by the muggers. His hand is sticky with blood but he gets it to light and is doubly panic-stricken by the discovery that the hole in his vision is blood-red. Something has spiked him in the eye. The eye is lost completely. He reaches up to examine it with his fingers, takes off the glasses and finds that it has miraculously healed. The flame blows out. He sparks it again and, with vision that is only normally deficient, sees the thick red bloody thumbprint on the lens. For an instant he can’t imagine how it got there and he still thinks his eyes must be injured, but then he sees the state of his hands and he understands what has happened. As he looks at them and wonders how to clean them, a drop of blood from his nose splashes on to the other lens.
The lighter goes out again and he is totally blinded, deprived of even the limited night vision he had acquired before the attack. He is trembling as well, and still suffering from the vertiginous sensation of falling, which frightens him even more than the blood. He looks for his phone so that he can call an ambulance, but it isn’t in the pocket where he normally keeps it and of course, he finally realises, they have taken everything. His wallet, his cash, his cigarettes, his phone. He is surprised they left him his glasses, for all the use the damn things are to him now.
He stands unsteadily and fingers the wound on his head. It is tender but not too painful, and it doesn’t feel very big or deep. A bump is growing underneath it. The dramatic blood flow has slowed, leaving gouts and sticky trails across his smooth scalp. He looks around on the ground but there is no white splash which might be a handkerchief. Why would they take a handkerchief, the sadists?
He finds that he can walk, if he takes it carefully. The impression that he is falling is alarming, but it doesn’t appear to affect his balance and it is the trembling and the weakness in his knees that keep his steps slow and small. He feels his way with his feet until he comes to the tarmac, and then he is more comfortable. The way is clear now and, provided he meets no unexpected obstacles, he can make it to the gates and find someone to help him.
Halfway down the hill he discovers there is something in his mouth. It feels like a piece of grit or a tiny, rough pebble, and although it doesn’t surprise him that it could have got into his mouth while his face was pushed into the mud, he can’t understand why he didn’t feel it before now. It is during the act of spitting it out that he realises his front tooth is missing, and that the thing that has just vanished into the vast darkness of Hampstead Heath is a crown that cost him nearly seven hundred pounds.
By the time he emerges from the park he is walking almost normally, but he doesn’t feel at all well. His head is beginning to ache and the wound is throbbing and he is unaccountably cold. His knees have regained their strength, and he no longer feels in danger of collapsing, but the falling thing is still there, and it worries him more than anything else, because it doesn’t make any sense at all. It is not a feeling of dizziness, nor of light-headedness or nausea. It is like falling from a wall and being trapped in that midair point, with the support no longer there and the ground rushing up to meet him. Except that it isn’t a wall he has fallen from. It is something else.
But he has made it to light and safety, that is the most important thing. Soon he will be looked after by someone who will be able to explain it to him, this strange sensation, and make it go away. A car approaches. He steps up to the kerb and tries to flag it down, but it goes straight past. He can make out the gist of everything around him without his glasses, but he can’t see well enough to know whether the driver saw him or not. Another car comes, but it is speeding along and has a noisy, hot-rod engine, and he lets it go. He tries the third one and he hears the changes in the engine tone as the driver first takes their foot off the accelerator, then firmly presses it back down.
He stares at the car’s tail-lights and notices, when they have gone, how quiet the road is. He has never seen it bumper-to-bumper, even in the rush hour. It’s a road he has rarely had to wait long to cross. All the same, he is surprised now to see it so empty. He walks over to the other side, to the row of genteel houses that face the park. A car comes from the other direction, but it indicates and turns left before it reac
hes him. There is another one behind it, but he has by now settled upon a door to knock on, and he lets it go by.
The front garden of the house has been turned into a concrete pad with space for two cars, but there is only one on it now. It’s a narrow house, only one room wide, but there are three floors and an attic, and all the windows at the front are lit. So is the shallow glass porch, outside which he pushes on the single doorbell. Almost immediately he hears the thunder of feet on the stairs within, and heavy, confident steps approaching the door. But it doesn’t open, and he hears the footsteps recede again, less rapidly. He looks at the door in bewilderment and sees that it has a spy-hole in the middle, a tiny fish eye staring straight at him. Only then does it occur to him how he must look. A tall, bald man with his head, face and hands covered in blood. He doubts he would open the door himself to a man who looked like that. But he has no way to clean himself up, not even a handkerchief. That soft rain is still falling, or drifting, preventing the blood from drying, thinning it and making everything look worse.
{29}
She wakes and lies still for a minute or two, remembering the horrors that preceded her sleep and expecting them to return. But they don’t, and she is amazed to discover that her mind and her heart are both clear and unencumbered. She feels as though she has been dragged deep underwater, only to discover that she has gills. She is at home in this new element, and she is quite clear about what she has to do.
She gets up and straightens the bed and sits on the edge to put on her shoes. Then she opens the wardrobe and takes out the black skirt. She would like to burn it and leave no trace of its existence, but the fireplaces in the house are all dummies and the chimneys are blocked off. So she takes it out into the street and up to the litter bin beside the corner shop, and pushes it down as deep as it will go. While she is out she buys a litre of milk and a packet of a kind of stodgy marshmallow biscuit that she hasn’t eaten since she was a child.
Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 Page 10
