The policeman nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I understand why you went over in the first place. But then what? Why did you go into the flat? Did you have any reason to think something was wrong?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So why enter? You said the door was closed.’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘He wasn’t expecting you.’
‘No.’
‘And you weren’t in the habit of dropping in unannounced?’
‘No.’ I decided not to mention that this was the first time I’d ever been in Simon’s flat, that I hardly knew the guy. This was quite hard to explain already. ‘I tried the door on an impulse,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t really expecting it to open. I presumed it would be locked.’
‘But it wasn’t, so you entered.’
‘Yes.’
‘Another impulse?’
‘Right. More or less. I mean, the TV was very loud, so I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me at the door.’
‘Quite a coincidence,’ PC Something pointed out. ‘That you happened to go over today.’
‘Yes, that occurred to me too.’
What else could I say?
I sipped my wine and waited to see if there was more.
‘Jesus, Abby! “Our domestic situation is a good one”?’
‘Did it sound insane?’
‘Yes – entirely!’
‘Oh.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘No.’ After two glasses of wine, I was a little light-headed, but Beck didn’t need to know this. It wasn’t relevant. ‘It was just the way they kept looking at each other. You must’ve seen. It put me on edge.’
‘They were looking at each other because you’d just revealed you sat and had a cigarette – sorry, one and a half cigarettes – with a corpse. That’s not the most normal thing to do.’
I shrugged. What part of this evening had been normal?
‘I wonder what happened,’ I said later on, not for the first time. We were back on the two-seater, having emptied one bottle of wine and started on another.
‘God knows,’ Beck replied. ‘How old was he, anyway? Forty, forty-five?’
‘Yeah, about that. No age to be dead.’
This was a fairly ridiculous thing to say, but Beck didn’t seem to notice. He was stroking the nape of my neck with two fingers.
‘Presumably it couldn’t have been a natural death,’ I said. ‘I mean, it didn’t look like a crime scene, but still . . .’
‘Hmm.’
‘Healthy people don’t just drop dead in their early forties, do they? There must be more to it – suicide or something. Although . . . well, you do hear about these sudden, unexpected deaths sometimes: blood clots, haemorrhages, aneurysms – things like that.’
Beck’s fingers were now massaging my left shoulder below the bra strap, and seemed to be migrating south with each passing second. What was it about men’s brains? If there was a topic of conversation that could divert their attention away from sex, I had yet to discover it. I shifted my position and leaned back to reorientate his hand, a manoeuvre that was somehow misinterpreted.
‘You know, I’m not feeling in a particularly sexy mood right now,’ I told him.
‘Oh.’ The look on his face was confusion tinged with disappointment and a hint of resentment, as if I’d been making come-to-bed eyes for the past hour. ‘Because of Simon?’
‘Well, yes, that might be part of it,’ I lied.
‘I thought you were fine?’
I hesitated, for just a moment.
‘No, of course you’re not fine. You’re—’
‘I am fine,’ I reaffirmed. ‘That’s not the point.’
What was the point? I didn’t know. It wasn’t as if sex was such an outlandish suggestion. We’d both been drinking, after all, and it was a Wednesday. Not that we’d got to the stage where sex needed to be timetabled, or anything like that. But nor was it purely spontaneous any more. It was just that Wednesday tended to provide the most convenient mid-week option. I think we both agreed, tacitly, that we didn’t want to have all our sex at the weekend.
‘I’m a little lost here,’ Beck admitted. ‘Simon’s dead and that’s . . . put you off sex? It didn’t put you off his tomatoes.’
I didn’t say anything.
Beck looked at me very earnestly for a few seconds, then took my hand and said, ‘Look: if it makes you feel any better, we can have a two-minute silence before we start.’
I was smiling, despite myself – which I suppose was his intention. He was trying to help me deal with this on my own terms, however baffling those terms might have been.
‘Or after. Or during. Take your pick.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Well, of course we’d be silent during. We’re English.’
‘I’ll let you smoke a cigarette afterwards. In bed. Suppress all my weird, controlling instincts.’
I hate to admit it, but that was definitely the clincher.
Sex turned out to be surprisingly good, if a little strange. Not that the sex itself was strange – that was entirely regular: fifteen minutes of foreplay followed by five of missionary. It was more my reaction to the sex that was strange. At first, my head was all over the place. I was thinking about the outfit I’d picked out for tomorrow, for the Miranda Frost interview, checking the impression I made in my mental mirror. Cool, calm, incisive. Then I was thinking about Simon, about how his flesh had felt – tepid and spongy – under my forefinger. And it was at this point that something shifted. I started to feel curiously detached from reality. I was disembodied, floating somewhere above myself, as if watching some artily shot, though otherwise rather matter-of-fact, pornographic film.
When I returned, everything had changed, though I’ve little idea why. It might have been that I’d somehow managed to ingest the optimum amount of alcohol – enough to relax, but not enough to numb. It might have been that my libido was finally enjoying a renaissance, after so many months in free-fall. It might even have been thinking about Simon; there was something, I felt in that instant, quite pleasant about being alive and warm and motile. Whatever the case, I came very quickly, and after such a long period of so-so sex, it felt like an overdue release.
‘I’m glad you talked me into that,’ I told Beck afterwards, as I lay with my head on his chest. He ran his hand over my lower back and bottom, but made no other reply; and when I tried to speak to him again, he had inevitably fallen asleep.
But I felt wide, wide awake.
I rolled onto my back and smoked a cigarette, then another. Then I simply lay in the dark waiting for my mind to shut down, wishing, more and more, that I’d not switched off the bedside light. At least, then, I’d be able to read.
Our bedroom, I found, was a rather in-between sort of room. The curtains weren’t quite thick enough to block out the light from the streetlamps, and the double glazing wasn’t well sealed enough to cut out the London traffic. It got pretty stuffy in the summer, too. If I were ever to design a bedroom, I decided, it would be as cool and dark and quiet as the bottom of the sea.
It was 1.37 when I finally admitted defeat and got up. I eased the bedroom door open and closed with a burglar’s stealth, and then put on the reception room light and got myself a glass of water. I felt like a coffee, but was, at this point, still nurturing the small hope that I’d start to feel sleepy some time before dawn.
Despite everything, despite the fact that I had to be in a rested, presentable state to interview Miranda Frost in not much more than seven hours, there was something oddly interesting about being up in the middle of the night, alone and for no particular reason. The flat felt unfamiliar – the way home feels after you take down the Christmas decorations, or return from a long holiday. It didn’t feel at all like the flat I’d left earlier, when I’d gone to get the tomatoes. It was as if Simon’s death had opened a portal on a subtly altered reality. I realized that what I wanted, more than anything, was to be next door again, just to sit quietly in that empty
flat. But when I crept out and tried the door, it was locked.
So, instead, I opened the window in our reception room, leaned out as far as I could, and smoked. There was the odd taxi passing in the street below, but nothing else. None of the house lights opposite was on. It was a solid mass of anonymous brick, each building melting into the next. I drew the warm smoke and cool night air into my lungs and wondered how many lonely deaths occurred in London on the average Wednesday night. And how many of those deaths were sudden and unexplained? Several, I was sure. Certainly enough to make Simon’s death a mere statistic. Not the sort of thing that would warrant even a paragraph in the Evening Standard. Things would be different, of course, if I didn’t live in London. In other parts of the country, where people weren’t crammed one on top of the other like battery hens, it would be easier to grieve when a neighbour died. In other parts of the world, the simple action of going next door to borrow food would not be met with raised eyebrows and sidelong glances. But here, in a city of eight million, I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was this action that had caused Simon’s unlikely death. It was as if I’d broken one of the cardinal rules of modern urban living, and had to suffer the consequences. Maybe that was what I should have told PC Something: that there was nothing coincidental about my going over to Simon’s flat today. It was just cause and effect.
My thoughts were spinning, so I left the window and tried to read for a bit. Then, when I couldn’t concentrate on that, I flipped open my laptop and checked my emails. There was only one new message, from my sister. She wanted to make sure I wasn’t planning to pull out of the ‘family meal’ at the end of the month. I sent a reply saying that I was still shortlisting excuses. After that I read my Google homepage for a while. Quote of the day was from Einstein: ‘The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.’ Tomorrow’s weather was grey, grey, grey. On a whim, I typed lack of emotion death into the search bar, and spent the next fifteen minutes completing a psychopath test, then started reading a forum post about a man who had felt no emotion when his mother died in a car crash. I clicked on link after link, following an erratic trail through cyberspace, with no destination in mind.
And this was how I first stumbled on the Monkeysphere.
2
THE TEMPEST
I awoke slumped across one arm of the two-seater, my spine twisted like a corkscrew. I couldn’t have been asleep for more than two hours, but the muscles in my lower back felt taut as piano strings, and my head was full of thick, numbing fog – through which dim figures paraded like sarcastic wraiths: Simon, laid flat on a trolley; the policemen, casting conspiratorial glances; Miranda Frost, awaiting me in a faceless house in Highbury.
Shit.
I lurched into a sitting position, my eyes darting for the clock: 7.48. Why hadn’t Beck woken me? The impulse to cast blame was hamstrung, a heartbeat later, by the inconvenient and obvious truth. Beck always slept like a corpse, and due to the ridiculously short amount of time it took him to get ready in the mornings, his alarm wouldn’t be going off until eight. Mine should have gone off at six forty-five. I fumbled for my mobile. It had gone off at six forty-five; and my phone was set to silent.
How long would it take to traverse central London? Ten minutes speed-walking to Shepherd’s Bush Market, twenty-five to King’s Cross, then another five to Highbury and Islington. Add on fifteen, at least, to battle through the tunnels and wait for trains. Plus ten to find the house. Numbers tumbled through my mind like drunken acrobats, until I realized it was much too early for maths. Call it an hour, flat-out. That left less than twelve minutes to be washed, dressed and out the front door.
A shower was out, obviously, as was breakfast, as was coffee – despite the fact I’d never needed it more. There was a little bit of speed at the bottom of the freezer, but I was loath to take it on an empty stomach because of the ulcer I’d developed last year. Nevertheless, I was halfway to the kitchen before I’d talked myself out of it. Speed for breakfast; Dr Barbara would have kittens! Twenty milligrams of fluoxetine and a cigarette on the way to the Tube station would have to suffice.
Clothes, hair, teeth, make-up, toilet: my priorities arranged themselves before me like a row of dominoes already in motion. Fortunately, my clothes had been pre-selected days ago. The only thing I had to change was the footwear, replacing heels with ballet flats. Of course, I could have done with the extra inches – I can always do with the extra inches – but at this time of day, with so little sleep, heels were a visit to A&E waiting to happen.
After my own rude awakening, I had no thought of allowing Beck to wake gracefully. I flung the bedroom door open – he shot bolt upright – grabbed an armful of clothing from the wardrobe, and was back out and heading for the shower room in a matter of moments. Once I’d managed to wriggle into my tights, the rest of the outfit proved less of a challenge. Half a can of Batiste Dry Shampoo and a headband gave my hair the illusion of order and cleanliness, and then I gargled mouthwash while I peed to save myself thirty valuable seconds. I applied eyeliner and volumizing mascara with the deftness of a cartoonist creating features, then flirted with the idea of contacts before deciding that my big, black-framed glasses were a far better choice. Beck always said they made me look sexy and studious – and I hoped that Miranda Frost would appreciate at least half of this duality.
I sprang from the shower room in a cloud of body spray, with Beck saying something long-winded and, so far as I could tell, pointless through the open bedroom door. I couldn’t wait for the end; I had to cut him off with a swift synopsis of the facts.
‘Darling, I’m horribly late. I overslept, on the sofa – don’t ask! I’m leaving in the next minute. Please don’t get up or try to talk to me. You’ll only slow me down.’
‘Oh. Right. Okay. I hope it . . .’
The rest was lost as I gathered up my bag and phone and cigarettes. A fleeting glance out of the window confirmed that it was drizzling, but there was no time to be messing about with an umbrella. I descended the stairs three at a time and stepped out into the rush-hour rain.
By the time I reached the bottleneck of Shepherd’s Bush Market, I was wet right down to my underwear. It was that damn stealth rain that feels like nothing more than a morning mist but saturates by attrition. Smoking was a logistical nightmare, and the Tube itself, needless to say, was Dante’s Fifth Circle of Hell – the one reserved for the wrathful and sullen. My carriage was full when I got on, and got progressively fuller over the next eleven stops. For half an hour I steamed in my own tights. Then, when I changed at King’s Cross, Marie Martin was everywhere – on the platforms and in the tunnels, occupying every third space on the escalators. She looked amazing, of course, shot in soft-focus black and white, with hair as dark as death and a pout to make men melt. More specifically, she looked as if she smelled amazing, by some indefinable photographic alchemy. Maybe it was those tiny, glittering beads of moisture on her upper lip. Maybe it was just a negative association on my part. I was certain that I didn’t smell particularly great at that moment. A mixture of cheap body spray and wet nylon.
Marie Martin: Séduction
Abigail Williams: Hot and Humid
My best hope was that I smelled inoffensively damp, like the Amazon rainforest.
I wanted to text my sister to vent my spleen. I wanted to text my father to tell him he was a superficial prick. I had time for neither.
I emerged from Highbury and Islington at 9.07 and ran the rest of the way to Miranda Frost’s house, a cigarette in one hand and my phone, switched to Google Maps, in the other. When I arrived, at 9.14, the hollow throb of hunger in my stomach had been replaced by a stitch.
‘Ah, Miss Williams.’ Miranda Frost glanced theatrically at the watch she wasn’t wearing. ‘I’m so pleased you could make it. It is Miss Williams, isn’t it?’
‘Uh, yes. Abby. Hello. Sorry – I had some trouble getting here.’ I waved vaguely at the sky, as if for corroboration. My mind was a sinking s
hip. ‘I would have rung, but . . . well, I didn’t have your number.’
‘I didn’t give you my number.’
‘No.’
‘So the fault lies with me?’
Never back down; not once you’ve committed to an excuse. ‘Yes. Incontrovertibly.’
Miranda Frost did not smile. ‘Well, you’d better come in. We haven’t got all morning. I intend to be working by ten. Shoes off, please.’
It was technically a flat, I supposed, but bore nothing in common with the shoebox I called home. It was spread across the bottom two floors of a Georgian town house overlooking Highbury Fields. It had a private rear garden and windows larger than the floor space in our kitchen; Miranda Frost’s kitchen, in turn, was larger than our entire flat. Indeed, the notion that our residences fell into the same broad category was patently absurd. Miranda Frost and I were both living in flats in the same sense that John Lennon and Ringo Starr were both respected song-writers.
‘You have a lovely home,’ I ventured.
‘This isn’t my home, Miss Williams. It belongs to a friend. I stay here whenever I’m in London, which is as seldom as possible. I couldn’t afford a place like this. I’m a poet, not a barrister.’
‘Oh.’ There was a leaden silence. ‘What about your friend? What does she do?’
‘She’s a barrister.’
‘Right.’
I busied myself with my bag.
‘Do you mind if I record this conversation? It will save time.’
‘Whatever you find most efficient.’
I delved deeper into the side pocket, spilling half its contents – cigarettes, lipstick, a tampon – over the kitchen table. ‘Shit! Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep. My co-ordination isn’t great this morning.’
‘Evidently. Part of the trouble getting here, perhaps?’
‘Yes.’ With things going as they were, there seemed little point denying it. ‘But it wasn’t entirely my fault,’ I added.
Miranda Frost shrugged. ‘Far be it from me to question your professionalism. You’re young. No doubt you lead a fascinating life. Would it help if I made some strong coffee?’
The Mirror World of Melody Black Page 2
