The Red Room

by Nicci French

  Sometimes I can see what they are wearing underneath. The woman with a sleeveless white shirt and the bra strap that keeps slipping onto her shoulder. It is gray-colored, stained by wear. She put on a clean shirt but didn’t bother about her bra. She thought no one would notice. I notice these things. The slip under the hem. The chipped nail varnish. The spot they try to cover with makeup. The button that doesn’t match. The smudge of dirt, the grimy rim of the collar. The ring that’s got too tight with years, so the finger swells around it.

  They walk past me. I see them through a window, when they think they’re alone. The one that is sleeping, in the afternoon, in her kitchen, in the house down the quiet street I sometimes visit. Her head hangs at an awkward angle— in a minute she will jerk awake, wonder where she is—and her mouth is slack and open. There is a thin line of spittle on her cheek, like a snail’s trail.

  Getting in a car, the dress hitched up, a flash of underwear. Dimpled thighs.

  The love bite under the carefully arranged scarf.

  Pregnant, and I can see the tummy button through the thin material of the dress.

  With a baby, and there are milk stains on the blouse, a tiny patch of vomit where the baby’s head lolls on her shoulder.

  The smile that shows the swollen, receding gums; the chipped front tooth; the porcelain cap.

  The track of brown down the parting in the blond hair, where the dye is growing out.

  The thick, yellowing toenails that betray her age.

  The first sign of varicose veins on the white leg, like a purple worm under the skin.

  In the park, they are lying on the grass while the sun beats down on them. They sit outside pubs, froth from the head of beer on their lips. Sometimes I stand among them in the underground; the press of hot flesh in the stale air. Sometimes I sit beside them, my thigh just touching theirs. Sometimes I open a door for them, and follow them into the cool interior of a library, a gallery, a shop, watching the way they walk, the way they turn their heads or push their hair behind their ears. The way they smile and look away. Sometimes they do not look away.

  For a few weeks more, it is summer in the city.

  PART ONE

  Zoe

  ONE

  I wouldn’t have become famous if it hadn’t been for the watermelon. And I wouldn’t have been in possession of the watermelon if it hadn’t been for the heat. So I’d better start with the heat.

  It was hot. But that may give you the wrong impression. It may make you think of the Mediterranean and deserted beaches and long drinks with colorful paper parasols dangling out of them. Nothing like that. The heat was like a big old fat smelly mangy greasy farty dying dog that had settled down on London at the beginning of June and hadn’t moved for three horrible weeks. It had got sweatier and slimier and the sky had changed day by day from blue to a sort of industrial mixture of yellow and gray. Holloway Road now felt like a giant exhaust pipe, the car fumes held down at street level by a weight of even more harmful pollutants somewhere above. We pedestrians would cough at each other like beagles released from a tobacco laboratory. At the beginning of June it had felt good to put on a summer dress and feel it light against my skin. But my dresses were grimy and stained by the end of each day and I had to wash my hair in the sink every morning.

  Normally the choice of books that I read to my class is dictated according to fascist totalitarian principles imposed by the government, but this morning I’d rebelled just for once and read them a Brer Rabbit story I’d found in a cardboard box of battered childhood books when I’d cleared out my dad’s flat. I’d lingered over old school reports, letters written before I’d been born, tacky china ornaments that brought with them a flood of sentimental memories. I kept all the books because I thought one day I might have children myself, and then I could read them the books that Mum had read to me before she died and left it to Dad to tuck me into bed each night, and reading aloud became just another of those things that were lost, and so in my memory became something precious and wonderful. Whenever I read aloud to kids, there’s a bit of me that feels as if I’ve turned into a soft, blurred version of my mother; that I’m reading to the child I once was.

  I wish I could say that the class was held enthralled by this classic old-fashioned piece of storytelling. Maybe there was just a bit less wailing, nose-picking, staring at the ceiling, or nudging than usual. But what mainly emerged as I asked them about the story afterward was that nobody knew what a watermelon was. I drew one on the blackboard for them with red and green chalk. A watermelon is so like a cartoon anyway that even I can draw them. A complete blank.

  So I said that if they were good—and for the last hour of the afternoon they were alarmingly well behaved—I’d bring in a watermelon for them the next day. On the way home I got off the bus a stop later than usual, after it had turned up Seven Sisters Road. I walked back down the road past the greengrocers and stalls. In the very first one I bought a pound of golden nap cherries and ate them greedily. They were tart, juicy, clean; they made me think of being in the countryside where I grew up, of sitting under the green shade as the sun goes down. It was just after five o’clock, so the traffic was already starting to grind to a halt. The fumes were hot against my face, but I was feeling almost cheerful. I was fighting my way through crowds of people as usual, but many of them seemed in good spirits. They were wearing bright colors. My urban claustrophobia meter was down from its usual eleven to a more manageable six or seven or so.

  I bought a watermelon the size of a basketball and the weight of a bowling ball. The man needed four carrier bags one inside the other, and there was virtually no practical way of carrying it. Very gingerly I swung the bag over my shoulder, almost spinning myself into the traffic as I did so, and carried the melon like a man with a sack of coal on his back. It was only about three hundred yards to the flat. I’d probably make it.

  As I crossed Seven Sisters Road and turned into Holloway Road, people stared at me. God knows what they thought I was up to, a skimpily dressed young blonde hunched over and carrying what must have looked like her own weight in iron ore in a shopping bag.

  Then it happened. What did it feel like at the time? It was a moment, an impulse, a blow, and then it was in the past. I only really reconstructed what had taken place through the action replays in my mind, by telling people about it, by what people told me about it. A bus was coming toward me on the inside lane of the road. It had almost reached me when a person jumped off the platform at the back. The bus was going as close to full speed as anything ever gets on Holloway Road during rush hour. Normal people don’t jump off buses like that, even Londoners, so at first I thought he may have been recklessly crossing the road behind the bus. It was the speed at which he hit the pavement, almost losing his balance, that showed he must have come off the bus.

  Then I saw there were two of them, apparently joined together by straps. The one behind was a woman, older than him. But not really old. She really did lose her footing, horribly, when she hit the ground, and rolled over. I saw her feet crazily high in the air and she crashed against a bin. I saw her head hit the pavement; heard it. The man wrenched himself free. He was holding a bag. Her bag. He held it in two hands, chest high. Somebody shouted. He ran away at full speed. He had a strange, tight smile on his face and his eyes were glassy. He was running straight for me, so I had to step out of the way. But I didn’t just step out of the way. I let the watermelon slip off my shoulder. I leaned back and swung it. I had to lean back or else it would have fallen vertically, taking me down with it. If it had continued on its circular progress around me I would quickly have lost control of it, but its progress was very suddenly halted as it hit the man full in the stomach.

  They talk about the sweet spot. When I used to play rounders at primary school and I swung at the ball, mostly it would hit the edge of the bat and dribble off pathetically to the side. But every so often, the ball would hit the right place and with almost no effort, it would just fly. Cricket bats
have sweet spots too, except that it’s called the “Meat.” And tennis rackets have sweet spots. So do baseball bats. And this bag-snatcher caught my watermelon right in its sweet spot, right at the perfect point of its arc. There was the most amazing thud as it struck him in the stomach. There was a whoosh of ejecting air and he just went down as drastically as if there were no body inside his clothes and they were attempting to fold themselves up on the pavement. He didn’t go down like a falling tree. He went like a tall building being demolished by explosives around the base. One minute it’s there and then there’s just dust and rubble.

  I hadn’t made any plan of what to do next if the man was going to get up and come at me. My watermelon was only good for one shot. But he wasn’t able to get up. He clawed at the pavement a bit, and then we were all surrounded by a crowd. I couldn’t see him any longer, and I remembered the woman. Some people got in my way, tried to talk to me, but I pushed my way past them. I was light-headed, exhilarated. I felt like laughing or talking wildly. But there was nothing funny about the woman. She was slumped and twisted on the pavement, her face down. There was quite a lot of blood on the stone, very dark and thick. I thought she must be dead but there were odd twitches from her leg. She was smartly dressed, a business suit with quite a short gray skirt. Suddenly I thought of her having breakfast this morning and going to work, and then heading home thinking of what she was going to do this evening, making mundane and comforting plans for herself, and then this suddenly happening and her life being changed. Why hadn’t she just let go of the stupid bag? Maybe it had been caught round her arm.

  People were standing around her looking uncomfortable. We all wanted somebody official—a doctor or a policeman or anybody in a uniform—to step forward and take charge and make this a regular event that was being dealt with through proper channels. But there was nobody.

  “Is there a doctor?” an old woman next to me said.

  Oh fuck. I’d done a two-day first-aid course in the second term of my teacher-training. I stepped forward and knelt down next to her. I could sense an air of reassurance around me. I knew about administering medicines to toddlers, but I couldn’t think of anything relevant here except for one of the key maxims: “When in doubt, do nothing.” She was unconscious. There was lots of blood around the face and mouth. Another phrase came into my mind: “the recovery position.” As gently as I could, I turned her face toward me. There were gasps and expressions of disgust from behind me.

  “Has anybody called an ambulance?” I said.

  “I done it on my mobile,” a voice said.

  I took a deep breath and pushed my fingers into the woman’s mouth. She had red hair and very pale skin. She was younger than I’d thought at first, and probably rather beautiful. I wondered what color her eyes were, behind the closed lids. Perhaps she had green eyes: red hair and green eyes. I scooped thick blood out of her mouth. I looked at my red hand and saw a tooth or a bit of a tooth. A groan came from somewhere inside her. There was a cough. A good sign probably. Very loud and close by I heard a siren. I looked up. I was pushed aside by a man in uniform. Fine by me.

  With my left hand I found a tissue in my pocket and carefully wiped the blood and other stuff off my fingers. My melon. I didn’t have my melon. I wandered back in search of it. The man was sitting up now, with two police officers, a man and a woman, looking down at him. I saw my blue plastic bag.

  “Mine,” I said, picking it up. “I dropped it.”

  “She did it,” a voice said. “She stopped him.”

  “Fucking KO’d him,” someone else said, and close by a woman laughed.

  The man stared up at me. Maybe I expected him to look vengeful but he just seemed blankly puzzled.

  “That right?” asked the female officer, looking a bit suspicious.

  “Yeah,” I said warily. “But I’d better be getting on.”

  The male police officer stepped forward.

  “We’ll need some details, my darling.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  He took out a notebook.

  “We’ll start with your name and address.”

  That was another funny thing. I turned out to be more shocked than I realized. I could remember my name, though even that was a bit of an effort. But I just couldn’t think of my address even though I own the bloody place and I’ve been living there for eighteen months. I had to get my appointment book out of my pocket and read the address out to them, with my hand trembling so much I could hardly make out the words. They must have thought I was mad.

  LAND OF THE LIVING

  DARKNESS. DARKNESS FOR A LONG TIME. OPEN MY EYES and close, open and close. The same. Darkness inside, darkness outside.

  I’d been dreaming. Tossed around in a black dark sea. Staked out on a mountain in the night. An animal I couldn’t see sniffed and snuffled around me. I felt a wet nose on my skin. When you know you’re dreaming you wake up. Sometimes you wake into another dream. But when you wake and nothing changes, that must be reality.

  Darkness and things out there in the darkness. Pain. It was far away from her and then closer to her and then part of her. Part of me. I was filled to the brim with hot liquid pain. Although the darkness remained, I could see the pain. Flashes of yellow and red and blue, fireworks exploding silently behind my eyes.

  I started to search for something without really knowing what it was. I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t know what it was. Nightingale. Farthingale. It took an effort, like hauling a package out of the water of a deep dark lake. That was it. Abigail. I recognized that. My name was Abigail. Abbie. Tabbie. Abbie the Tabbie. The other name was harder. There were bits missing from my head and it seemed to have got lost among the missing bits. I remembered a class register. Auster, Bishop, Brown, Byrne, Cassini, Cole, Daley, Devereaux, Eve, Finch, Fry. No, stop. Go back. Finch. No. Devereaux. Yes, that was it. A rhyme came to me. A rhyme from long, long ago. Not Deverox like box. Nor Deveroo like shoe. But Devereaux like show. Abbie Devereaux. I clung to the name as if it was a life ring that had been thrown to me in a stormy sea. The stormy sea was in my head mostly. Wave after wave of pain rolling in and dashing itself against the inside of my skull.

  I closed my eyes again. I let my name go.

  EVERYTHING WAS PART OF EVERYTHING ELSE. Everything existed at the same time as everything else. How long was it like that for? Minutes. Hours. And then, like figures emerging from a fog, things resolved and separated. There was a taste of metal in my mouth and a smell of metal stinging my nostrils but the smell became a mustiness that made me think of garden sheds, tunnels, basements, cellars, damp dirty forgotten places.

  I listened. Just the sound of my own breathing, unnaturally loud. I held my breath. No sound. Just the beating of my heart. Was that a noise or just the blood pumping inside my body, pushing against my ears?

  I was uncomfortable. There was an ache down my back, my pelvis, my legs. I turned over. No. I didn’t turn over. I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. I pulled up my arms as if to fend something off. No. The arms didn’t move. I couldn’t turn. Was I paralyzed? I couldn’t feel my legs. My toes. I concentrated everything on my toes. Left big toe rubbing against the toe beside. Right big toe rubbing against the toe beside. No problem. I could do it. Inside a sock. No shoe. I wasn’t wearing shoes.

  My fingers. I drummed them. The tips touched something rough. Cement or brick. Was this a hospital? Injured. An accident. Lying somewhere, waiting to be found. A railway accident. The wreckage of a train. Machinery on top of me. Wreckage. In a tunnel. Help coming. Heat-seeking equipment. I tried to remember the train. Couldn’t remember. Or a plane. Or a car. Car more likely. Driving late at night, headlights on the windscreen, falling asleep. I knew the feeling, pinching myself to stay awake, slapping my cheeks, shouting, opening the window so the cold air hit my eyeballs. Maybe this time I failed. Veered off the road, down an embankment, rolled over, the car lost in undergrowth. When would I be reported missing? How do you look for a lost car?
>
  I mustn’t wait to be rescued. I might die of dehydration or blood loss just yards from people driving to work. I would have to move. If only I could see the way. No moon. No stars. It might only be twenty yards to safety. Up an embankment. If I could feel my toes, then I could move. Turn over first. Ignore the pain. I turned but this time I felt something hold me back. I flexed my legs and arms, tightened and loosened the muscles. There were restraints. Over my forearms and just above my elbows. My ankles and thighs. My chest. I could lift my head, as if in the feeble beginning of an attempt at a sit-up. Something else. Not just dark. It was dark but not just that. My head was covered.

  Think clearly. There must be a reason for this. Think. People in prison were restrained. Not relevant. What else? Patients in hospitals can have restraints placed on them in order to prevent them harming themselves. Lying on a stretcher. Restrained on a stretcher prior to being wheeled in for an operation. I’ve been in an accident. Say, a car accident, which is most likely. Statistically. Severe but not life-threatening. Any sudden movement could cause, and the phrase came to me out of nowhere, severe internal bleeding. The patient could fall off the stretcher. It’s just a matter of waiting for the nurse or the anesthetist. Perhaps I had been given the anesthetic already. Or a pre-anesthetic. Hence the vacancies in my brain. Strange quiet, but you do hear of people in hospitals lying around on stretchers for hours waiting for a free operating room.

  Problems with the theory. I didn’t seem to be lying on a stretcher. The smell was of dankness, mildew, things that were old and decaying. All I could feel with my fingers was concrete or stone. My body was lying on something hard. I tried to think of other possibilities. After famous disasters bodies were stored in improvised morgues. School gymnasiums. Church halls. I could have been in a disaster. The injured could have been placed wherever there was room. Restrained to prevent them injuring themselves. Would they be hooded as well? Surgeons were hooded. But not their eyes. Perhaps to prevent infection.