by Phil Ford
He could hear the shower still running, and slipped quickly through the sliding door into the clothes-lined dressing room.
And found Toshiko in there, naked.
She gasped and pulled the outfit she had been considering across her body.
Owen spun around, putting his back to her. ‘Sorry.’
‘You could have knocked,’ she said.
‘I thought you were still in the shower. It’s still running.’
‘Don’t you leave the shower running after you get out, to wash it down?’
‘No.’
‘I wouldn’t want to take a shower at your place, Owen.’
Behind him he could hear the rustle of fabric as naked Toshiko hurriedly got less naked. Trouble was, it was the naked Toshiko that he was going to be seeing all night. And, Christ, what he wouldn’t do for an erection right now.
She pressed past him in the doorway. She was wearing a satin blouse that clung to her like a silvery membranous skin and a dark skirt that hugged her shape. He only remembered seeing her in a skirt once before – that had been Gwen’s wedding: she had looked good then; she looked good now. Her hair was still wet. He felt an urge to push his fingers through it.
She was looking for a hairbrush among the things that she hadn’t yet unpacked – the search helped cover her embarrassment. When she looked up he was still watching her. She thought that he probably didn’t realise that he was staring. There were still droplets of water glowing on his skin under the bedroom’s recessed halogen lights.
She looked away abruptly.
‘Sorry,’ Owen repeated, and sounded like a schoolboy caught thinking things he shouldn’t have. ‘I’ll get some clothes.’
And he disappeared into the dressing area, closing the door after him.
Toshiko found the hairbrush and dragged it through her wet hair and thought about Owen standing in her bedroom, wet and all but naked. There hadn’t been many men in her bedroom like that. There hadn’t been many men, full stop. She had never been particularly good at building that kind of relationship. The lovers in her life could be counted on one hand; just a couple of fingers, if one-night stands didn’t count – and she knew that they didn’t. That wasn’t love, it was just lust, no matter how they tried to dress it up. And lust was OK, it was passionate and it took you some place that was all exploding physical sensation, and you could lose yourself there for a while. But Toshiko wanted love. As she’d looked at Owen standing all but naked in her room, she had tried not to look at the hole that had been blown in his chest by Aaron Copley’s gun, but her eyes were drawn to it as inevitably as the droplets of shower water on Owen’s shoulders travelled over his biceps and down his arms. The bullet hole was dark, ringed by livid ragged flesh. And as she looked at it she knew that she might probably love Owen until the day she died, but he could never love her.
She realised that she was crying when she heard the dressing-room door open, and she quickly wiped the tears away. She heard Owen clear his throat, uncharacteristically nervous.
‘How do I look?’ he asked.
Toshiko turned to look at him. ‘You look fine.’
‘Don’t want to let the missus down,’ he shrugged and gave her a smile.
Toshiko felt a crack in her heart deepen a little more.
‘You won’t,’ she said, and told him she wouldn’t be long. Owen nodded, hoping they were over the awkwardness, and told her he would be waiting in the lounge.
A few minutes later they were together outside Wendy and Ewan Lloyd’s apartment, the secrets of their sham marriage hidden from view.
‘Come on in! Come on!’
Wendy had appeared at the door the second time Owen pushed the bell. She had tied back all that blonde hair and was wearing jeans now and a white shirt with the sleeves turned back. She was the kind of woman you could take anywhere dressed like that. Toshiko thought she would probably have made sackcloth look classy. And she wondered if Wendy Lloyd was also a shapeshifting wall-walker that could render you to a pulp of cellular matter.
‘Come on,’ Wendy said again, as she opened the door wide on the apartment beyond. Toshiko and Owen saw that they weren’t the only guests.
‘I thought we’d make a party of it,’ Wendy explained as she closed the door behind them. ‘Seemed like a good opportunity to meet everyone. To welcome you into the SkyPoint family.’
Toshiko exchanged a glance with Owen: if Wendy Lloyd wasn’t the creature that came through the SkyPoint walls, chances were that someone here was.
And silk blouses were all very well, but they didn’t hide the bulk of an automatic pistol shoved down your skirt waistband too well. She wore a small purse over her shoulder, but that wasn’t big enough for a gun, either.
Toshiko regretted her choice of wardrobe. And wished for the gun.
Owen counted twelve people in the apartment lounge. One of them, a balding man with a beer belly came towards them with an extended hand.
‘I’m Ewan,’ he said. ‘Wendy’s husband.’
Owen had failed to make the connection and hoped his surprise didn’t show. Had he stopped to imagine the kind of man that Wendy was married to, it wouldn’t have been the guy pumping Owen’s good hand right now.
‘Owen Harper,’ he said. ‘This is my wife, Toshiko.’
Ewan turned towards Toshiko, and beamed, dipping his head. ‘Ha Ji Me Ma Shi Te.’
Toshiko smiled, surprised and delighted. ‘You speak Japanese?’
Ewan shrugged. ‘Speak is probably a bit of an exaggeration. I worked there for a while.’
‘Ewan is an accountant,’ explained Wendy. ‘And believe me, what they say is completely true. Boring as hell.’
As she spoke she slid an arm around her husband’s wide waist. Whatever she said, Owen could see that Wendy Lloyd loved her man, beer gut and all. He also noted that Ewan had orange juice in his hand. Maybe he was cutting down for his wife. Maybe it was three-quarters vodka.
‘Get you a drink?’ Ewan offered, maybe seeing Owen checking out his own glass.
‘Yeah,’ said Owen. ‘You got a lager?’
‘You got it,’ Ewan grinned, and shifted to Toshiko.
‘White wine spritzer, please,’ she said.
‘On its way. Wendy will do the introductions.’
And Ewan moved off towards the kitchen as Owen realised the other guests had been closing on them. He resisted the urge to back away, and came up with a smile to share among them.
‘Hi. Owen Harper. This is my wife, Toshiko.’
He found that he was getting strangely used to saying that.
For all their hunting-pack circling, the assembled SkyPoint residents seemed to be a pretty friendly, if mixed, bunch. As Ewan had promised, Wendy led the way with the introductions.
Mark and Roslyn Bridges were a middle-aged couple who lived on the eighteenth floor. They were both lawyers who worked for the Welsh Assembly. He was tall and lean with hair that had turned iron grey and probably made him look a few years older than her really was. She was a lot shorter, slightly built, but somehow looked the tougher. She was wearing a black dress right now, but Owen got the feeling that back in their apartment she wore the trousers.
There was a younger couple who lived on the nineteenth and, apparently, right on top of the Bridges. This was Alun Griffiths and his girlfriend Julie Jones. Alun was a photographer who worked in fashion and his girlfriend was a model who – he said – didn’t.
‘Too short,’ Julie explained. ‘But who wants to be a clothes horse when you’ve got bloody melons like these,’ she laughed, clutching at them playfully with scarlet-tipped fingers. She laughed like a noisy flushing toilet, and her boyfriend sounded like a busted boiler kicking into life when he joined her. Toshiko caught the look between Mark and Roslyn and got the impression that the soundproofing between floors maybe left something to be desired.
Andrew and Simon Taylor were a gay couple who had moved into SkyPoint after exchanging their civil ceremony vows a few weeks ag
o and were more delighted than anyone to welcome Toshiko and Owen to the building.
‘They’ll stop calling us the newlyweds now,’ Andrew told them with a smile that was so wide it threatened to dislodge the big red-framed glasses he wore. Andrew and Simon were both writers. Simon wrote travel guides – it was work that took him all over the world, but when it came down to the word-punching he sat back-to-back with his partner overlooking their panoramic Bay view while Andrew worked on the latest in a series of novels featuring his gay Cardiff private eye detective hero and played Bowie loud enough to shake the foundations.
By this time Ewan had delivered Toshiko’s spritzer and pressed a glass of lager into Owen’s hand.
‘Cheers,’ said Ewan and raised his glass.
Owen raised his own glass and pretended that something across the room had taken his attention, so that he turned and only wet his lips and didn’t actually drink any of the beer. Drinking the beer would not be a good idea, nor would eating any of the food Ewan and Wendy offered. He and Toshiko had earlier agreed that Owen would claim to be a little off-colour and excuse himself from the meal – but with the apartment full of guests it looked like it was going to be easier than expected to get around the problem. When he got the chance he would also put his beer down and by the time everyone else had drunk a few glasses they wouldn’t notice that the level of Owen’s glass never seemed to fall.
Now they were being introduced to a starched woman who was probably in her thirties but dressed and acted like she was twenty years older. Marion Blake wore her hair in coiled braids that made Owen think of Carrie Fisher in Star Wars, only he got the feeling he was never going to see Marion in a bronze-ribbed bikini. He wasn’t sure that he would want to. She was skinny, with lips that seemed permanently pinched into a disapproving pout. She looked like the kind of woman who would have lived behind flickering net curtains and filled her nights behind them writing letters of complaint, if she hadn’t been living in a tower block. She was PA to the chairman of a Cardiff-based export company, she said. When she moved on, Andrew and Simon told them that from what they had seen of their neighbour, and her frequent visits by the man who had to be her boss, they suspected that her personal assistance extended to more than keeping his diary straight.
Owen was sure the two writers were winding them up, but, hell, he should know better than anyone that things could take on a pretty skewed reality when no one was looking. He glanced at his watch and wondered briefly what time they would get out of there, and how long it would take Toshiko to drift off to sleep afterwards. He had a regular appointment with some pretty skewed reality of his own later tonight and he didn’t intend to miss it – and he didn’t want Toshiko asking him awkward questions about where he was going, either.
‘You probably know everyone in SkyPoint, then,’ Toshiko was saying to Andrew and Simon. ‘I mean, if you work from the flat. You’re probably around more than anyone else.’
‘Well, it doesn’t take a lot to know everyone,’ Simon told her. ‘There’s hardly anyone else in the place.’ He waved at the dozen-or-so people in the apartment. ‘The place is like a bloody ghost town in the sky.’
‘They built all these apartment buildings in Cardiff and forgot to work out how many people there were that could actually afford to live in them,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s the same right across the city. There are apartment blocks with no more than a handful of people living in them. It’s crazy.’
‘I heard that some people moved in here, then just took off,’ Toshiko said, and sipped her spritzer.
Andrew’s eyes narrowed behind their red frames. Owen wondered if it was the kind of suspicious gaze the gay ’tec in his novels gave the killer when they let something slip.
‘You’re very well informed,’ he said with a smile.
‘Our lawyer had heard some rumour,’ Owen said quickly, though he didn’t think Andrew was doing anything more than playing with Toshiko. And he didn’t think Andrew was probably the shapeshifting wall-walker, either. He didn’t see a creature like that morphing into anything quite as camp as Andrew.
‘Well, we heard the same,’ he confided, taking a step closer to Toshiko and Owen. ‘It’s happened twice, apparently. All very mysterious.’
‘They probably realised they couldn’t afford it and did a moonlight,’ Simon offered. ‘But Columbo here reckons there’s more to it.’
‘Oh?’ asked Owen, trying to make his interest sound casual.
‘It’s fiction writers’ dementia,’ Simon explained. ‘They always have to see a story in the simplest of situations.’
Andrew waved his partner’s dismissal away with an extravagant motion of his hand. ‘And some people are all too happy to swallow what they’re given.’
Simon raised an eyebrow and shook his head. ‘Sorry, did you just mistake me for Frankie Howerd then, or what?’
Owen saw Wendy having trouble pulling a wine cork and left Toshiko to find out if Andrew actually knew anything useful he could tell them (which he doubted).
‘Can I help?’ he asked her.
‘Oh. Thank you,’ she said and passed him the bottle. Owen suddenly realised he hadn’t actually tried to open a bottle of wine since snapping his finger, but he decided he was too deep in now to pull out. Luckily, he managed it OK.
‘Alison in bed?’ he asked.
Wendy nodded. ‘She’s not keen on crowds.’
‘So, you moved to SkyPoint because of the accident?’
‘That’s right.’
He could sense already that she didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Was it really bad?’ he asked.
Wendy put the bottle down on the work surface and looked at him. ‘Why are you so interested?’
‘I’m a doctor,’ he said.
‘I see. Well, Alison’s fine now.’
Owen leaned against the counter and folded his arms as best he could with his busted hand; he was trying to make this look informal. ‘It’s not Alison I’m so worried about.’
Wendy shook her head, genuinely didn’t get it. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Look, Wendy, I just moved in over the hall today. I don’t want to walk in and start telling you how to live your life, or how to run your family.’
‘Then don’t.’
Trouble was, that was exactly what he was going to do.
‘Why don’t you talk about Alison’s accident?’
Wendy closed her eyes for a couple of seconds, and he wasn’t sure if she was reliving the horror of what had happened that day or counting numbers as she tried to control her rage.
When she opened her eyes again she spoke quietly and quickly, like the faster she said it and the less noise she made with the words, the less chance there was of damaging the new life they were trying to make for themselves up here.
‘We don’t talk about it because two years ago some bastard got into his car after knocking back six pints of lager and ploughed into the side of my car as I picked my daughter up from playschool. I got scratched, but I watched my daughter, covered in blood, die in my arms.’
‘But the medics brought her back, Wendy. They saved her life. You’ve still got her.’
‘And I thanked God for that. I got down on my knees in the road, in the middle of the carnage, the twisted metal and the blood, and I cried out to God, and thanked him. I’d been a Christian all my life, Owen. That was how my parents brought me up and I Believed. With a Capital B. But I never prayed to God the way I did that day – while the paramedics worked on my little girl to bring her back; then to thank Him for sparing her.’
Owen looked at her. He didn’t speak, he didn’t need to ask anything, now he knew what had happened. He just waited for her to tell him.
‘But, do you know what, Owen? My life had been a lie. My parents’ lives were a lie. They died last year – my mum had cancer, my dad died exactly two weeks later of a broken heart – they died still believing the lie. But I don’t know where they went because there is no heaven, and
there is no God. Do you know how I know that?’
Wendy tipped the opened wine bottle up into a glass and drank down a couple of gulps.
‘Because my daughter told me,’ she said.
Owen didn’t need to ask what Alison had told her mother. He knew what lay on the other side of death – real death, the kind that reduced your body to dust. And there was nothing but darkness. There were no long tunnels lit by distant lights, there were no endlessly sunlit gardens where birds sang and loved ones from the past waited, there wasn’t even a cloud.
There was just cold darkness. And fear.
Alison had told her mother and she had no option but to believe her. And the lie that kept the human race sane had been exposed.
She didn’t refuse to talk about Alison’s accident because she was traumatised by the past. She was terrified of the future.
‘So now you know,’ she said. She flashed him a harsh, humourless smile.
Hope was what kept the world going. Hope that one day you would find somebody you could love and trust, hope that you would never lose them; hope that your team won the cup this year; hope that you found that dream job; hope that you would find the money to pay the mortgage. But most of all, hope that one day – whatever you have told yourself over the years – you will find that life really does go on beyond the deathbed.
‘There is no salvation,’ she told him. ‘This is all there is. I don’t mind that so much. You know, I’ve actually learned to value life more. Every day counts, you don’t get it again.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with seeing life like that,’ Owen told her. ‘The trouble with God is people think they get a second chance. They don’t.’
Wendy drank from her glass. ‘If this is all there is, we should make the most of it? Absolutely. Where’s your glass?’
‘Oh, I’ve put it down somewhere.’
‘Have another. While you can,’ and she started to pour wine into another glass.
Owen hoped that she wouldn’t want to toast living life for today, or something.
