Alphabet (12 page)

‘Your Home Officer is still sick,' she's pointing out.

‘Bad back,' he says. ‘Carrying all those files, maybe.'

‘Nice try,' she says. ‘But I believe he had a mountain-climbing accident. Well, anyhow, we can continue like this.'

Thank you, Tasmin, and I hope you're doing OK. Thank
you
, even Mr R. F. Grange MSc, for not taking the infernal machine away . . . Simon's fingers dance over the keys and he misses exercise some days, to sit there typing out anything that comes to mind. Talk about a bottomless pit! For years the past has been a no-go zone, has become a kind of dull blur, a dimly lit, dank-smelling corridor in some place no one wants to go to, locked doors all along, like a premonition of where he has actually ended up. But now some lights are going on: memories, good, bad, all kinds. His boyhood bedroom at the Kingswells', the floral pattern of the old wallpaper showing through a meanly applied coat of pale blue. The Kingswells themselves: Iris as she used to be, plump and smooth-faced, always wanting to stop you or move you; John skinny and grey, in his overalls, ghost of the garage that came out intermittently for meals and to find fault; their ‘real' kids, Susan, Elizabeth, Maria; the musty, chemical and tomato smell of the greenhouse out at the back where he sheltered when sent outside until he apologised . . . There are snatches of kids he took up with, odd incidents, places. Playgrounds. Building
sites. Stations. There is the dog which belonged to the Mur-rays, Belinda and Nick, who eventually decided against the adoption: well, the only loss there was the dog, he really liked that dog, and so now he's got Tasmin's typewriter and he writes a whole page about the dog: the way the short brown fur lay smooth or pricked his hand if he stroked against the grain, the good, dirty smell of it, the pricked-up ears, the way it rolled over and over, panting, head flung back, tongue out, tussled with him in the weedless, intensely green grass of the Murray's town house, long before Before – a while to go, even, until they got fed up with him. Maybe Bernadette will like that one, the blond, curly-haired boy with mismatched eyes playing with the big dog, rolled together and parcelled up in a sweet musk of sweat and chlorophyll?

He manages not to mind too much when his appointment is cancelled, twice. He tells himself it's an opportunity to write more. Days pass pretty fast between work and the typing, which now, he is doing for Bernie. He can picture her waiting, with the silver and amber earrings on, her head to one side, her eyes looking without staring, as he types page after page. As for where she is while she waits, he's not quite sure. Some kind of out-of-the-ordinary place he can't quite imagine, a cottage in the woods, a houseboat, a castle on a cliff, a stately home with deer in the park. Not the Portakabin at any rate. He forgets how it began and what is supposed to be the point of it all, until, on a damp afternoon at around five o'clock, the visible scrap of late-afternoon sky dark violet against the electric light, he finds himself back where he does not want to be, the place where he left off.

He is sitting in the leather chair, with Amanda standing right there without her glasses, stark naked in front of him, even though he told her to take the lenses out and go away. She didn't. She still won't. She never will. All right, he tells her, and himself, as he pushes yet another sheet of paper into the roller, clips it down, cranks it up – all right. This is it.

It's December now and the Portakabin is completely in the
shadow of the block wall. Inside there's a fan heater whirring away as well as the radiator. Bernie has had her hair coloured a slightly deeper chestnut than before. She is wearing a thick, brown sweater, with a white pattern of diamond shapes around the yoke, a broad silver bracelet, plain but for the hinge and clasp. Does she buy these things herself? Does someone give them to her?

‘I'm sorry – first the work to rule, then the flu. Well, at least they did give you the message,' she says.

‘I do feel the cold,' she tells him as they move to the chairs.

‘I guessed that,' he says. He's already too warm himself, could do with taking off his sweatshirt, but feels inhibited about doing it. ‘Well, here you are!' he tells her as he hands over a couple of sheets of paper, impeccably typed as ever, the corners folded to keep them together. ‘Mind, you'll want to take it away. It's heavy – more detail.' Bernie considers for a moment or two. DETAILS OF KILLING AMANDA, the header says. Simon's veins tighten up just seeing the shapes of the words. What's it going to do to her, reading this? Why didn't he bring the dog one instead?

‘I do know this territory a little by now,' Bernie says, slowly.
‘And you too. So why don't I read this now, if that's OK?' His heart is going at double its proper pace. He puts his fingers to his pulse and tries to think it down. Remember what happened to Joseph M., he reminds himself. Here, I'm doing different.

‘OK, Bernie,' he says.

It's very quiet, with them just sitting there. He can't look at her while she reads about Amanda. The very end: how she's just given him that speech about not being a prude and is he a weirdo and he's springing out of the armchair. He pushes her onto the floor, gets on top.

‘Gently, Simon!' she says, and opens her legs, getting it all wrong, not fighting back, which helps him to pin her down and get his hands to her neck.

Then she knows. She twists and bucks underneath, tries to get her arms out that he's got gripped with his legs, kicks on the floor with her heels like she thinks someone downstairs might
hear her, but even if they did they wouldn't come.
What the
hell am I doing?
He's started this and he's just too scared to go back. He's going to The End, because what the hell will happen if not? What will she do or say to him if he lets go?
What could be between them? This way, she can't speak, argue, tell on him. He shuts his eyes to her face, his ears to the noise they make, his grunts, her breathing, the thuds and bumps of her struggles, and he keeps on, long after she's stopped moving, gone quiet and soft. His head is empty except for knowing that nothing will undo it now and he has got to open his eyes . . .

Bernadette reads this and she reads how when he did open his eyes, Amanda's face was swollen, her dead eyes looking at the ceiling. The lenses had come out, one of them was on her cheek.

I got to the toilet and threw up, took my jacket and wallet but I
couldn't find the keys so I put the door on the latch and ran out down
the stairs
.

Simon hears Bernie sigh, the thin rustle of the pages as she puts them back together. Again it is hard to look, but when he eventually does, Bernie has changed. Her mouth still curves upwards, but it seems smaller, somehow lost in the spaces of her face. Her eyes are too bright, and her silence is unbearable.

‘What are you thinking of me now, then?'

‘Simon – the fact is, I'm thinking,' she tells him ‘of what it must be like for her mother . . . Hazel?' He has to look away again. He folds up, holding his head in his hands. There's no word for it, this feeling of being unable to look at her, but wanting to stay there with her at the same time . . . In case, somehow, it turns out to be all right? So that she can sentence him afresh? Wipe it away? It's worse, even, than the dreams he's fought so hard not to have, dreams in which Amanda comes to him in his sleep walking down the landing, click-clack in medium heels, smart clothes. Heads turn. It's you, Simon Austen, isn't it? she says and walks right up to where he stands; she has grown older and more sure of herself, he hasn't.
She comes so close that he can smell the real smell of her under
her scent and see the tiny hairs on the top of her lip. Or else she comes to him as she really was at the end, bruised, bloodshot, broken, naked, blundering as she heaves herself up some huge, broad, circling staircase: she doesn't understand and she wants him to explain . . . This is worse than that. It goes on for who knows how long, for ever, and he is asking himself, What did I expect? Didn't I always know it would be like this?

He hears Bernadette get up, the friction of her boot soles on the floor. She squats down next to him. He doesn't look, but he can feel her there, hear her exhale. She touches him lightly on the shoulder.

‘Simon,' she said, ‘Can you sit up?' She keeps her hand on his shoulder until he has done it.

‘There,' she says, and after a moment, resumes her seat.

‘I stayed two nights in a B&B up in Whitby,' he tells her, looking at the wall opposite and remembering that other room: its sloping ceilings and the mansard window looking out onto other slate roofs, streets and courtyards. There was a sepia photograph of fishing boats and a broken barometer on the wall, a collection of old books in a glass-fronted case – not back then a lot of use to him, though he picked a couple up and wished, but not that hard, that he could make sense of them.
There were model aeroplanes hanging on the ceiling, action man dolls propped up between the books and sitting in a row on the sofa. ‘Julian does the decorating,' the man called Stuart said, ‘He likes to have a theme . . . You can watch TV with us downstairs if you want.'

‘I knew they'd find me,' he tells Bernie, ‘but it was a kind of break. I was having a bit of someone else's life before my own came back. I sat up a while in the old leather armchair and listened to the sea churning about and the rain on the roof and despite what had happened I felt just fine. In the morning, they lent me boots and a rain jacket and I looked at the docks and the cliffs and the ruined monastery, had fish and chips. I didn't think of what I'd done to Amanda. I knew it, but I didn't think of it. When it got dark I went to the pub. There were old men with whiskers and a few couples. The beer was thick and bitter,
salty, but that must have been the sea spray on my lips. As I got near the bottom of the glass I came back to being myself again – like I'd been spinning around and then stopped but the spinning went on in my head and then all of a sudden I was still as a stone. I thought: they're bound to come tomorrow, and once I thought that, I hadn't the heart to stay in the pub, and anyhow, I'd run out of cash . . . That's about it,' he says, turning his eyes, one blue, one brown, suddenly to where Bernie is – she's still there. ‘The police turned up next morning. I told them I'd done it and then I was charged and cuffed up and sent in a van back to London. Well, you know it all now,' he tells her. You know more about me than any one else in the world, he thinks, and for a split second it is as if he is actually standing back there in the Portakabin bollock naked, bar the words pricked into his skin.

‘You've really begun something,' Bernadette says, ‘don't you think?'

‘It feels different, all right,' he says. ‘It's OK. But, like –' he gestures with a jerk of his head towards the wing behind them, ‘I really don't want to go back in there. What next? Got any ideas, Bernie?'

‘You need to be in a different, supportive environment, with specialist staff,' she says. ‘I'm just hoping we get an answer to my report sooner rather than later. It's just so frustrating that, like everything else now, there's a queue –'

‘I'm quite happy with this,' he tells her. ‘You do an excellent job.'

‘Thank you. Still – I do feel like I'm just holding the fort.'

She goes over to the desk for her diary. The next date he gets is for after the holidays: no point in whining, it's the first available. And she deserves a break, doesn't she? How, he wonders, does she get rid of the things she's been told about, other people's lives and deaths, everything, all the details? How will she get rid of Amanda? She must be able to somehow, or she'd go crazy. Maybe she has a dog, takes it for a long walk.

But of course, these are not things she's done herself. It's different. Bernadette, Simon thinks suddenly, is the opposite
of him. He looks Bernadette properly in the face, braces himself.

‘So, are you going away at Christmas?' he asks: she told him he could ask things, didn't she? If she didn't mean it, then he doesn't know what he'll do. ‘Are you going home?'

Her mother's house, she says, is in West Cork. A big old place, in beautiful country, but very wet. She has three younger sisters, and two older brothers. They'll all be there.
She'll travel on the ferry – prefers it to the plane, even though it takes twice as long. She will be away for two weeks. Her voice grows more Irish as she talks of it. Then there's a knock on the door, and she glances at her watch.

‘You'll suit one of those waxed jackets,' he says. ‘Have a good time, then. Plenty of R&R.'

‘The holidays must be rough here,' she says. He shrugs, drinking up the last seconds of the time. Drop me a line, he almost says.

Bernadette Nightingale, he thinks, pulling the fresh, chill air into his lungs as he follows the officer across the brief stretch of tarmac, What do you do when you get home of a night? Is there someone there? The wing door swings open, and he steps through.

18

‘Twenty,' Simon says.

‘Forty,' Alex immediately replies, running his hand over his recently shaved bald head, caressing the back of his neck. He sports a stud in one ear, an intricate celtic knot bracelet slithers its way around each well-developed bicep. He's wearing a sleeveless vest, very clean, his fingernails are evenly filed, a ring, to match the bracelets, is tattooed round the third finger of his left hand. ‘Cost you four times that outside,' he points out. ‘I sterilise my needle in bleach,' he adds.

‘Haven't got it,' Simon says.

‘Owe me – or why not say it shorter? What's wrong with
brave
? Nothing,
per se
. But it's just not what she said.

‘I want the whole thing,' Simon tells him.

‘Well, then,' says Alex, ‘you'd better be! Have a good wash, shave the hair off. It'll grow through the scabs and give you hell, and then it'll cover up your big long word, but if that's what you want, I'll go to two-fifty a letter, that's twenty-five up front . . .'