‘They have to just get the CID sorted,’ she is saying.
‘CID?’ I say absent-mindedly.
‘Criminal Investigations Department. And you can’t be interviewed until you’re sober.’
‘I am very sober,’ I say.
‘Best wait until the morning. Be there as soon as I can,’ she says.
I like her brevity. Reuben would like her.
‘You have twenty-four hours – anything more than that and they need the superintendent to sign it off. Do you have everything you need – are they feeding you?’ she says.
‘Okay. Yes,’ I say, my voice small, imagining all night in that horrible blue room.
‘You won’t know it,’ she says, ‘but I am doing all I can for you. Here. Promise.’
‘Okay,’ I say. It is almost the only word I have said during our call. She must think me an idiot.
She rings off. The receiver feels heavy in my hand without her on the other end of it. I put the phone down, then stand aimlessly for a second, hanging on to the mild freedom. The different smells out here.
Sergeant Morris arrives again and I consider what the solicitor has said: they were listening. I shiver in the foyer, glancing at her. Not my ally. An enemy.
I am led back to cell thirteen. Soon, the police will go home to their families, and I’ll be here alone. Others will take over. Sergeant Morris will go home to her husband who’ll complain about her hours while he stirs baked beans, cooking on the hob. Her pyjama-clad children will already be in bed.
I tilt my head back and look at the Mecca arrow. Anything could have happened outside – a world event, a death – and I would not know.
I sit still for a while and engage in one of my favourite games: imagining my future babies. Perhaps they might inherit Wilf’s long nose. I play with one baby, in my mind’s eye. She has Reuben’s ginger hair but my imagination. We’re playing with a glockenspiel together. Oh, why have we waited this long? I am ready now, Reuben, I think.
I am checked every half an hour. I can tell by counting. It’s useful to know how much time is passing.
They shout at me through the hatch, their hands closing it before they’ve finished properly looking. It’s perfunctory. They call my name and then, when I look up, they leave.
I wish they would just open the door and I could glimpse the outside; look at a new light or furnishing, or even the flight of stairs I ascended a few hours previously, unknowingly walking to my confinement.
At what must be two thirty in the morning, I ask why they keep checking. An embarrassing hangover is beginning to set in. A sensitivity to the light as the hatch is drawn back. A tightness across my head. A dry mouth. Shaking hands. ‘Why won’t you let me sleep?’ I say, sounding pathetic.
‘You were inebriated, so you’re a category-two check,’ the woman says. She’s new to me, but no less brusque than Sergeant Morris.
‘Category two?’ I say.
‘One: keep an eye on, routine only. Two: check every half an hour. Three: constant watch. You’re in the drunk cell. Mattress on the floor instead of a raised bed.’
‘Wow,’ I say, craving a chat, some reassurance, a kind word, but she closes the hatch. I call out, involuntarily. ‘Has my husband been?’ I say, and the hatch is drawn back, just an inch. I see an eye, the side of her mouth. It’s not smiling. She clicks the hatch shut, and that’s that.
Something must have happened, once, for them to check people like that. I reach my hand out and touch the wall again, next to my head. Perhaps it was in this cell. The person they didn’t check.
I tidy up my three belongings. I straighten the pillow. Make sure the mattress is right up against the wall. Put the empty meal box in the corner of the room, next to the toilet.
I will look back on this and smile, I think to myself. It will be added to the list of feckless things I have done, which my family and occasionally Reuben roll their eyes at. Remember the night you left the bath running and flooded the flat? Reuben will say, tipping his head back and laughing. And I will say, I think I topped that by going to jail for the night.
I lie on my side, waiting for the three o’clock check. I imagine him next to me, his long arms drawn right across my body and around my shoulders in an X-shape. I look at the wall and wonder if he’s doing the same at home.
When a new police officer brings me some more water, through the hatch, I ask him about visitors.
‘When can I see anybody?’ I say. ‘Do you have visiting hours?’
‘This isn’t a hospital,’ he says.
He’s older, with white hair and a pink complexion. I can’t see anything else: his mannerisms, his height. It’s a strange, contextless interaction.
‘I thought it was like a prison,’ I say, swallowing hard. I can feel myself sitting forward, eager, like a dog waiting for its owner to return. Please don’t close the hatch. Please don’t leave me here.
‘Get real.’
7
Conceal
I stand idly on the scales. Then get off, and then step on to them again. Nine stone two. I was always, always nine stone seven.
I pull my pyjamas on, and I see that they are loose. I must start eating.
We have just climbed into bed when my phone goes off.
‘You haven’t read in months,’ Reuben says, pointedly looking at my phone.
I sleep better and read more books when I charge it in another room, but for every time I learn this lesson, I forget it again, sneaking it back into the bedroom, scrolling and scrolling for hours until my eyelids are slowly closing. I can’t deal with any of that tonight. Personal improvement goes out of the window when you’re dealing with something like this.
Reuben shifts in bed next to me, sliding a foot to cover mine. His feet are always icy cold. I call them dead man’s feet. The thought now makes me wince. I wonder if Sadiq is … no. I stop myself there. I can’t think about him, though images flash through my mind. His feet. Trainerless, now, in a morgue. Bloodless and cold.
The message on my phone is from Laura. I am holding it with both hands – my left hand is working better, but it still aches. Laura’s WhatsApp avatar is a close-up selfie. Her hair styled upwards, in an almost-Mohican. She’s grinning at me through the phone’s screen, her eyes squinting attractively into the sun.
Heh – a non-uniformed police officer (not sexy; really weird) just came to my door asking me about Friday. WTF?
She’s sent a string of emojis, ending with a man in police uniform, and I blink at the phone, my heart beating in my ears.
She sends a photograph, after that. It’s a new painting she’s done. She often sends them over to me for my opinion before they’re finished. It’s a photographic-quality portrait of a woman with armpit hair. For the first time, I ignore her art.
What do you mean? What about Friday? I send back.
One grey tick. Sending.
Two grey ticks. Delivered.
Two blue ticks. Read.
I fight the urge to delete myself from WhatsApp, Facebook, everything. To disappear.
Reuben shifts next to me. Our mattress is cheap, the bed an IKEA double. It feels small, and I bob like I’m at sea as he moves. He’s reading something highbrow. One of the classics. There are too many great books in the world to read shit, he will say, and I will feel guilty when I sneak a romcom into the bath.
Instinctively, I hold my phone away from him. A sharp pain radiates up from my wrist.
The police are coming. No doubt. Surely, I have to tell him. To pave the way for the lies I will soon tell.
‘Look at this,’ I say, surprised by how shocked my voice sounds.
I would never have said I was an actor, but perhaps I am. I was always changing. Reuben’s the only person I’ve ever been myself with. I’m a free spirit with Laura. A naughty younger sister with Wilf. My opinions become those of the people I’m with, as if the fabric those people are made of rubs off on to me. And, underneath it all, who am I? Who is Joanna? I am opinion-less
, formless, smoke.
But here I am, forced into a starring role I never asked for.
‘Not up for chatting,’ Reuben says.
And, despite myself, I smile. People think he is gentle, shy, but there it is: that steely core. There is nothing people-pleasing about Reuben. It is one of the very first things that attracted me to him. His autonomy. That he can say to me: no thanks, and not mean it offensively. It makes it all the better when he asks to join me in the bath, or sits up all night chatting with me, like we did just a few weeks previously, playing old indie songs we loved. Because I know he truly wants to.
‘No, look.’ I hand him my phone.
And then, after a second – he is an exceptionally fast reader – he drops it on the duvet, face down, still lit up, so it tinges the edges of the quilt a bright, lit-up white.
‘What about Friday?’ he says.
‘No idea.’
He rolls over, away from me, withdrawing his cold foot. ‘That bloke,’ he says sleepily.
‘Oh, yes. Must be that,’ I say. ‘The follower.’
‘No. The one from the news. You should tell them. That something suspicious happened to you.’
I close my eyes. How wrong he is. But how could he know?
‘Maybe,’ I manage to say, feeling the blood moving around my head. It thunders past my forehead. I have to tell the police. I have to approach them. But how could I?
I need to let Reuben think I have.
He rolls over fully now, right on to his side. And he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t ask me whether I saw anything. Whether I know anything. He believes me, implicitly.
I lie awake, fizzing, watching the top of the WhatsApp screen that says: typing.
Laura replies.
So he arrives and says there’s a man found by the edge of the canal, believed that he hit his head and died that night (on the news? IDK). He says he saw from the CCTV that I walked nearby – did I see anything? How bizarre?
CCTV. CCTV. CCTV.
I bet it’s everywhere. CCTV. I have never thought about it. Perhaps they cover the entirety of London. Maybe it is a matter of time, for me. Perhaps they’re producing a photofit as we speak. Perhaps, as I was dithering, I turned and looked right at a camera. Staring into its eye, unknowingly. They will be here at any moment.
Was it accusatory? I type.
And then I delete that. I am unconsciously preparing my own evidence.
How strange, I type instead. I’ll let you know if they come calling here … shame he’s weird and not hot.
The banter comes easily to me. The lies.
I put my phone on the bedside table and make a list of evidence in my mind, the light off. I am ostensibly sleeping, and Reuben’s breathing becomes even.
I try to reason with myself. CCTV might not have found me. And I can’t do anything about it. What could I do – sneak into buildings and wipe it? I almost laugh. I wouldn’t even know how. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to get away with it. I want it to never have happened.
What else? I try to think. A hair at the scene. My hair is forever falling out, clogging drains and brushes. But – would they know it’s mine? My mind isn’t clear. No. Not unless they suspect me, and test me. They wouldn’t know. I don’t think.
What else?
No fingerprints. But fibres from my glove on his chest.
The tread of my heels. Was there mud, or just concrete? I can’t remember. It stacks up against me, the evidence. There is no point trying to stop it. They are coming. I lie, rigid, listening for sirens, for the knock at the door.
The anxiety seems to bloom across my body, as if an elephant has taken up residence on my chest. It shifts around as I think, harder and harder, about what I’ve done. I’ve ruined my life, and ended another’s, with that push. That reckless push. I will surely never be the same again. I’ve killed a man. It feels so abstract to me, here in my bedroom.
The right time is now, isn’t it? Before they find me, and after I realize that it’s over for me. That there is too much evidence. That I am too unskilled to pull it off. That the stakes – murder – are too bloody high.
I sigh, trying to shift the elephant, and I roll on to my side. Instinctively, Reuben reaches out for me, scooping me up and pulling me close to him. The duvet’s too hot and his arm’s too heavy. I can’t take it, and so I shift away from him. He makes a disgruntled, disappointed noise; a sort of ohh. But I ignore him.
And then it is morning and Reuben is cooking downstairs like everything is normal. But in the bedroom, I am a prisoner, inside myself.
I can’t believe I’ve gone back to work, but I have, and I’ve managed a day.
Ed often drops me home, then takes the bus back to the garage to fill it up with petrol and park it, safely under cover, for the night. That’s how it works. He is nice like that.
I used to find the library bus comforting, being surrounded by the pages and pages of other people’s thoughts: whatever you’re going through, I would think, somebody has been there before you. I don’t think that today.
I have gone to tell Ed three times today, during our proximity together on the bus. He has always brought out a confessional quality in me, like a priest. He would be less judgemental than Reuben – of course – but he has almost too much perspective sometimes. If we’re not in war-torn Syria, if we have a roof over our heads, there can be no problems in his world.
We met six years ago, when he hired me. He never asked once about Oxford, and never has since, even though I mention it often. It’s one of the things I like most about him. He observes me dispassionately. He brings me in a cake on most Mondays – he bakes on Sunday night, to stave off the pre-work feelings, he says. We eat it and peruse the new books that have come in. I have become used to always having a copy of the latest bestseller, for free. A few years ago, that would have been all I wanted from a job.
We pull up outside my flat. It’s in darkness. Reuben’s at his youth club’s Monday meeting.
Ed has left the engine running, is waiting for me to collect my bag and go. It’s just after five thirty, and pitch black outside.
‘You have guests,’ he says mildly, gesturing with a liver-spotted hand to my door. His glasses glint as he turns to look at me.
And that’s when I see them. Two figures at my door. I can only see the tops of their heads, one dark, one blond, lit up by the street lamp above them. They’re at the bottom of the stairs to our basement flat, their legs disappearing into the shadows. It’s the police. It must be.
I wonder how they have walked down past all the plants I bought recently on a whim.
And then the panic sets in.
The sweating is back. The late-night animal is sitting heavily on my chest again.
I can’t make Ed drive me back now. I can’t raise his suspicions. I try to think of a story, a reason to go back, but my mouth is parched, the well of lies dried out.
‘Oh, I know what that is,’ I gabble.
‘The pigs,’ Ed says mildly. He looks at me, his eyes moon-like in the darkness.
‘The what?’
‘Police,’ he says, gesturing down at the men.
They’re not moving.
‘How do you know that?’ I say.
‘Oh, two blokes. A Vauxhall Insignia. A second rear-view mirror. Pretty obvious,’ he says.
His voice is toneless, no judgement, no suspicion – and no derision that I didn’t know myself. That’s Ed’s way. Once again, I am struck by how much the people in my life trust me.
‘You’re expecting them?’ he adds, looking closely at me.
I realize I have already shown my hand, already said I knew who they were. I try to think of benign offences, but my mind is blank.
‘Three,’ I spit out, after an embarrassing silence. ‘Three burglaries in two weeks on our street. Must’ve been another.’
‘Oh, Jo,’ Ed says, his eyes full of compassion. ‘How scary for you, in the basement.’
My eyes fill with tears at
how much he cares about me.
I grab the door handle with my good hand and leave without saying goodbye, walking towards our flat. I can’t speak to them. I must hide.
I hear Ed pull away, the engine fading as he disappears down the road, leaving me alone, trusting that I am not trying to dodge the police who wish to speak to me, that I am not – whether I intended to be or not – on the run. How slippery that slope really is.
I don’t want to walk past them, and Ed dropped me almost at my door, so I have no choice but to ascend the steps two doors down from mine, not looking at the police, looking only straight ahead. I don’t press a buzzer. I don’t try the door. I merely stand in the alcove, hoping I am in complete darkness, an anonymous figure the police don’t want to speak to. I can hear them murmuring, two doors along, beneath me at my basement door, but can’t make out their words.
My back is flat against the blue door, and my heart is thudding heavily in my chest. I close my eyes and pray for them to leave. To give up. That nobody comes out of this door, expresses surprise, calls me by my name. I stand there in silence, hoping I haven’t been seen, and wait.
It is ten minutes before they leave.
It is a further five before I come out, my knees trembling.
They have left me a note. Please call them, it says.
8
Reveal
The solicitor arrives at nine o’clock in the morning. Sergeant Morris is back – I don’t understand her shift patterns – and she comes to get me from my cell. I leave my cell in my prison-issue wear and meet the solicitor in a large interviewing room.
I am hung-over. I have had half-hourly wakings for seven hours. The one time I didn’t acknowledge my name being called, the police officer came into my cell and shook me awake. Every time I fell asleep it was time for the next one.
Sarah is not how I imagined her, but she’s not far off either. Long, dark fluffy hair. Tall and willowy; perhaps as tall as Reuben. There is an air of chicness about her. Red lipstick to start the day. Crooked teeth, but very white.
Anything You Do Say Page 7
