0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (28 page)

I had given up a successful career as a graphic artist to do this. There was no way I could keep my clients from my new overseas base, and I couldn't start afresh without contacts. Besides, Michael didn't like me working. We separated because he wanted more children, and I wasn't crazy about the ones he already had.

I had no intention of returning to Phoenix and subjecting myself to my father's barbed remarks about the failure-rate of modern marriages; I decided to stay on in England so long as I could move to London. My divorce papers came through and suddenly I was on my own in a city I hardly knew. Most people would have been thrilled at the prospect of independence, but I was scared. Michael had spent four years bullying the confidence out of me. As I walked down an impossibly crowded Regent Street, I realised just how much I had distanced myself from the world outside.

When my mother died she left me a little money, and as there wasn't much forthcoming from the divorce settlement, I used her bequest to fulfil a dream. I bought my own property. Not the kind of place Michael or my father would ever have approved of - that was part of the charm - a town apartment, cosmopolitan and chic and central to everything. The third floor of a renovated two-hundred-year-old building with polished hardwood floors and large airy rooms, in Great Titchfield Street, part of the area they call Fitzrovia (I loved those names), where the sidewalk cafes and corner pubs and late night stores steeped with trays of exotic vegetables make it the closest you can get in Central London to a New York neighbourhood.

This was the first time I had a place I could truly call my own, and I spent every last penny fixing it up. I thought I could use part of the lounge as a studio and resume my interrupted career. Got myself a deal with an illustration agency, made a few contacts, but the industry had changed while I'd been away - computers had replaced illustration work with photo-composites. I didn't get downhearted. At the start of that hot, thundery summer I leaned out of my window watching the world pass below, convinced that somebody somewhere would still need watercolours, gouaches and pencil sketches, and that I could produce them from my penthouse eyrie.

There were others in the building; a woman in the apartment below, and an old Greek couple in the first-floor flat with its ground-level grocery. There was one more apartment, opposite mine, separated by a small dark landing. The brass sign on the door read Midas Blake, but I never saw him. Maria, the Greek lady, told me he was strange. 'What kind of strange?' I asked her.

'Very quiet,' she explained, 'keeps his door closed. Comes and goes late at night. Doesn't have a job, but always has money.' That didn't sound so bad. 'A nice man, though?' I asked.

'Oh yes,' she said, smiling with her big white false teeth, 'very nice.'

And then one night there he was, rattling his key at the lock as I arrived, looking over his shoulder at me. I didn't introduce myself. We just nodded to each other and turned our backs. He closed his door and I closed mine. I didn't see him again for an age. Never heard his latch click, or any sound from his apartment. For a big man he had to be very light on his feet.

Then one hot Monday morning in June I had my bag snatched on the tube platform by this -
child
- no more than fourteen I swear, but strong and fast enough to break my shoulder strap and hightail it out of the station. The policeman I complained to at Tottenham Court Road took details indifferently, another statistic to be tallied. I cancelled my cards, bought a new wallet, then realised I was missing my spare keys. When I got home, Maria's husband Ari stopped me on the gloomy landing, where he was repairing a junction box. A tiny man, as soft and grey as a waterlogged potato, very gentle. Always giving advice, not all of it good.

He told me I should change my locks just in case.

'More expense,' I complained. I was up to my limit for the month, with still a week to go, so the lock stayed as it was.

The good thing about London is you don't get brownouts. The bad thing is, I didn't know how to fix an English fuse. On the Thursday of that week I came home late to find the stairway in total darkness. I managed to grope my way up to the second floor, then heard someone on the landing above, and there was something about the sound that told me it wasn't right. I felt my heart beating faster and set my shopping bag down, listening. There was an angry shout, a scuffle of boots, the sound of someone being punched or slapped, and suddenly that someone was coming toward me at great speed, stamp stamp stamp, crashing past me and downwards, out of the door at the bottom of the stairwell.

'Are you all right?' asked a deep male voice, cultured, out of breath, and I said yes, and in the flare of a match I found myself being introduced to Mr Midas Blake.

He had long dirty-blonde hair to his shoulders, a stubbled chin scarred at the jawline, pale sensitive eyes. My God. Beautiful, but big and crazy-looking, at least a foot taller than me.

'You sure you're all right?'

'Yes,' I said again, puzzled now.

'Your shopping got knocked over.'

'Did it?' I couldn't see - too dark. How could he tell?

'I'll fix the lights. I'll bring up your purchases.'

And that was it. He showed me to my apartment and waited with another match while I dug around for my key. As soon as I was through the door he pulled it shut behind me. A few moments later I saw the hall lights go on and found my shopping stacked neatly on my doormat. No sign of my neighbour. I nearly crossed the landing and rang his bell, but decided to let it go. In cities it's hard to figure out where privacy begins.

The next morning, just after eight o'clock, there was a knock on my front door. Naturally I was looking as unattractive as I could possibly make myself, face cream, bendi-curlers and old sweatpants, and there he was, a big gold god, smelling of something fresh and citrus, standing awkwardly in faded shorts, a grey T-shirt and Nikes, unsure where to place his great hands.

He explained that someone had tried to burgle my apartment last night, and pointed out scratchmarks on the front door. He'd seen the guy off before he could do any real damage. This morning he had reported the matter to the police.

I offered my thanks, made coffee, told him more about myself than I intended. His size was daunting. The palest eyes stared out beneath a heavy brow, so that he appeared permanently angry. I explained about losing the keys, how the police would blame me for keeping my home address in my purse, how I couldn't afford to change the locks let alone install a proper security system.

'You have to do something,' he said. 'These front doors are as thin as cardboard. You could put a fist through them.' When he asked me to come and see the security set-up in his own apartment, I accepted his offer.

I found myself standing in a mirror image of my own rooms but the decor was radically different. The flat was filled with talismen and mystical paraphernalia, found-art, totems, prayer-wheels, trompe l'oeil wall paintings, mandalas and plants, greenery everywhere, thick green stems bursting from all the corners of the lounge, explosions of red petals, terracotta pots of every size. The kind of place a hippy would have if he was rich and had taste.

I was enchanted by Midas Blake, placed under the spell of a charismatic man. His speech was slow and earnest, his manner accidentally charming, as though he had no idea that he was attractive. He seemed aggressively prepared to protect his privacy. A simple question would crease his brow in fury, as if he would hit you for daring to pry. He was the first man I'd ever met who looked capable of killing. We spent over an hour together. He told me he was good with plants. He enjoyed

'helping people out'. He was Greek by birth, but had been raised in London. I left knowing little more than this.

I returned to my own apartment, to the tiny studio I'd built with its drawing board, racks of pens and - concession to modern technology -

computer, and attempted to immerse myself in work. But with no freelance projects coming in I knew I would soon have to consider a full-time office job. The break came when Daniel Battsek, one of the few friends I'd made during my marriage, called me with a commission. He'd taken over a key position in the marketing department of Buena Vista in Kensington Village, and had some ideas for a movie poster he wished to explore. He was prepared to pay half up front, which would allow me to cover my overdue mortgage repayment. I was off and running.

Much about London puzzled and bothered me. Ari warned me that conmen targeted single women in the nearby flats, and that many of the victims were nurses working at the Middlesex Hospital. He said these men could sense when a woman had been hurt, and gave me a funny look, as though he figured I was especially vulnerable.

Maybe I was. I know I spent too many evenings in with the cable remote and a tub of Marks & Spencer's Chocolate Chunk, which is the ice cream for depressed women who need to move up from Haagen Dazs. The clouds held in the heat all week, and I kept every window in the apartment wide open, the British summer not lasting long enough to require the purchase of an air-conditioning unit. On Saturday night the weather broke, thunder rolled and great fat raindrops began to fall. I was running around shutting the windows when Midas Blake knocked.

'Why close the place up?' he asked, looking around. 'What's a little warm rain on the floor?'

And I thought, he's right. Why do I always act on the instincts my father bred in me? I leave the windows open, it gets a little wet...

He said, 'I've just opened a bottle of very cold Chablis. I shouldn't keep it all to myself.' His eyes stayed on mine as he spoke. I accepted his invitation and followed him across the landing. Shifted from my territory over to his. He poured the wine into glasses that released the faint glissando of evaporating frost. We drank, and he talked in a strange soft way that made me listen to the rhythm of his voice but not the words.

When he went to the open window and leaned out to look at the sky, fat spots of rain stained his shirt. He turned and spoke so quietly that his words just appeared in my head. I remember little of what passed between us, but before we parted he said something odd, something about how we mustn't be scared of going out into the night because there were darker places in our hearts. It sounded familiar, a Robert Frost quote paraphrased. He smiled, and something about his expression chilled me. It was the only time I saw him look helpless, imprisoned by his own image. At the end of the evening - against my better judgement - I kissed him goodnight.

Well, the high heavens didn't fall, but I'm pretty sure the earth moved when my lips brushed his cheek. The trip home across the landing was like stepping between worlds.

Gloria, my agent, warned me against being too cautious with men.

'You wait and they're gone,' she said over lunch the next day, 'and let's face it, you're not getting any younger. What's the worst that could happen?'

'He lives in my building,' I said. 'The worst that could happen is I date him and it goes horribly wrong and I end up regretting it until the very day I die.'

'There is that, I suppose,' she admitted.

Mr Midas Blake sent me flowers. Wild carmine orchids, followed by a tree of fat, petulant roses. He left glistening, leathery plants on my doormat. He invited me to lunch. Lunch. A woman can build dreams around a man who takes her to lunch. Plants and flowers arrived daily.

He called me over to dinner. He was a great cook. He told me he'd learned in the galley of a yacht when he had sailed around Europe.

Pointedly mentioned that he'd settled now because he was tired of being alone. There was something about him that was so foreign, exotic and yet familiar, as if he had always existed in a root-memory. Studying his still eyes gave me heat-stroke.

The dreams started when I began sleeping with him.

This would be around mid-July. I hadn't intended to sleep with him and they weren't normal dreams. The sheets stuck to my body as I tossed and turned beneath the carved headboard of his bed, my mind awhirl with scenes from a heat-drowsed pagan past. In the ruins of a Grecian temple I saw something scamper between vineclad columns, watching me with small red eyes. Little boys, naked and plump, with the legs of brown rats, sat in shadowed corners patiently observing. Panpipes and birdsong filled my head. Fever reveries, I decided, born of hot nights. I would wake to find him raised on one elbow, watching me.

And then there was the sex. My God, the sex. His charm became licentiousness, his energy, violence. He knew he could hurt me, and took pleasure in teasing me across the threshold. But before you think this was some kind of stroke-book fantasy - and I'm the first to admit it was less romantic than pornographic - mitigating his power was something else, another dimension to the experience. While he was inside me my mind became drenched with fantasies, saturated with images of a forgotten tropical paradise. When we were combined the city around us disappeared, the old bursting through the new, flora and fauna reclaiming the streets until all brick and stone had been replaced with dense choking greenery. I felt drugged, transfigured, hauled back to something ancient and dangerous.

He told me his semen contained the power to open my mind. I told him I'd heard that line before, put slightly differently. I wanted to introduce him to jealous girlfriends who would throw him sidelong glances over dinner and whisper behind his back. My agent Gloria, who was so independent everyone assumed she was a lesbian, would be reduced to coy girliness beneath his intense gaze. He was a
new
new man, unashamedly masculine. But when it came to the ordering of a normal social life, Midas remained elusive. One lunchtime he failed to show up when he knew I had specifically invited Gloria to meet him, then called three hours later with a half-hearted apology. He had no interest in civilised conventions.

Was it a coincidence that my artistic ability began to germinate? The Disney designs I'd been commissioned to produce became such a delightful riot of colour and chaos I was hired to develop artwork for an upcoming jungle epic. My confidence grew with my prowess. The drabness of my suburban imprisonment was blasted aside by this new fertility of mind. Thanks to the endless gifts of plants, my apartment grew into a tropical jungle. It seemed that even flowers responded to the Midas touch. Our lives became idyllic; the building took on an oddly Mediterranean atmosphere, becalmed and pleasant, drifting above a summer sea of traffic fumes. Only Ari and Maria failed to notice the change. Midas and I carefully maintained separate apartments, awaiting invitations from each other before crossing thresholds, a matter of territorial privacy. I painted the overgrown cities of my dreams, filling my bedroom with lush acrylic vistas while Midas -