Pleasure and a Calling (33 page)

‘I’m sorry, she left two days ago. Can anyone else help?’

I called Abigail’s mobile but couldn’t get through.

I tried again. I didn’t know what I wanted to say. Perhaps I just needed to know it was over.

Eventually I went through to the back of the house. The key was in the door. I opened it and took the two holdalls out to my car, returning with a tyre lever. Then I locked the door from the outside, wedged the lever into the door crack and leaned hard on it. The wood, rotten round the lock, creaked and splintered, and the door burst open. I slotted the key back in on the other side in the locked position and left the door ajar.

I was almost home when the phone rang. It was her.

She started with a long breath. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’ve been
meaning to call. The truth is … well, I’ve moved back to London. I just felt the whole thing was getting on top of me. And I’m sorry I took the coward’s way out. It was an impulse thing. The truth is I’m really not fit to be in a relationship right now. Also, I’ve decided I can’t face the hassle of selling the house at the moment. I don’t know why … it’s just too difficult, I’m sorry. I know it seemed that we—’

‘No, no, that’s fine,’ I interrupted at last. ‘No problem. Bad timing. Please don’t even think about it. I’ll take the house off our books. And obviously you’re free to take up with another agent – or anyone, really.’

I tried not to sound too cheerful when after a few moments more we exchanged awkward goodbyes. That was what my unbending devotion to Abigail had come to. And yet how could it ever have ended otherwise?

I’
M AFRAID THIS IS
where the real story ends, at the dead of night in a small but ‘gorgeous’ garden flat, a well-managed Victorian conversion with access to the high street and the usual facilities. ‘And with two osteopaths on the premises!’ as Zoe had joked when she’d signed the contract and come skipping back from the solicitors brimming with life. The property had been distressingly out of her reach and yet she had somehow pulled it off, miraculously talked them down by an unbelievable margin.

‘Maybe they just liked me,’ she said.

I cannot say her triumph that day had nothing to do with me, or at least Damato Associates, who have money to burn – more money than one man of frugal habits can reasonably cast to the flames – when the occasion calls for it. That was out of the goodness of my heart, long before my ill-advised romantic dalliance with Zoe. Before all of this.

I stand over her in my absurd mask. My fear was that I would find her lying on the sofa with the TV still blaring, or worse, in some macabre position – on all fours perhaps, in the way of a Pompeian greengrocer or barber – overcome in a surprising,
terrible need for air. But here she is, gone in her sleep, her face radiating a discernible, vivid pinkness in the light of the radio dial. Her killer is still here, of course – unseen and unsmelled – even now seeping into the pores of the room, redoubling and purifying its evil with every minute.

I unroll my toolwrap, position my torch, and set about removing the gags I’d stuffed behind the plastic vents. In the sitting room the congealed leavings and debris from our Indian takeaway on Friday cover the coffee table. Here are our two wine goblets, dark-streaked in the flitting beam. She had opened a second bottle of red after I’d left, and drunk most of it. I take one of the glasses – the one on the right as I faced the TV – and some of the foil containers and packaging and push the whole lot deep into a carrier bag.

It could have been a last supper. The balm of alcohol. She has taken paracetamol, too, in the kitchen. Perhaps she awoke with a headache, thinking she had flu, and then went back to bed. In the bathroom, a half-used blister pack of Prozac sits on the lip of the white basin with another glass to the side, almost full of water. I return to the bedroom. I think of her lying there throughout the night and day, brightness coming and going at the edges of the curtains, and the visiting sounds of local traffic and neighbours. Her face is tilted towards the window as if in some final tragic appeal. It occurs to me, seeing her here now like this, that she has always looked the part.

If I were Marrineau, I would pray for her, commend her to a higher power. But I am stronger than Marrineau. For me, there is no higher power. For me, the buck stops here.

Y
OU MAY REMEMBER THE
small service I performed for the elderly Mrs Wade some time ago. She is still alive and kicking. She still drives her small cherry-red car to church and to the Thursday market and occasional hospital appointments. More and more often now, she takes the train to visit her daughter Rachel in Ely, stays overnight and returns the next day. I am happy to ‘house sit’ during these times. Today I have never needed it more. The day has yet to dawn, with its rosy promise of trouble. I lie with my knees slightly bent on Mrs Wade’s cottage sofa, with its polished wooden arms and ornate, quilted throw, and close my eyes.

Think of it if you will as decompression, a process of returning from a distressing height or depth, though you might equally think of a gentle, power-giving rejuvenation – envisage an advanced alien being, lowering himself at the end of a hard day into a bath of nurturing chemicals or a pulsing cocoon rich with energy waves. That is me.

My mind returns to Abigail, not with yearning but regret. An error every bit as prominent as Zoe, but what have I learned? That I lost love, and the sublime feelings that held me in its
grip, by allowing myself to be sucked into something less real (or more real, I suppose, conventionally speaking). Marrineau was right when he talked about redrawing his parameters, choosing aloneness – or at least the solitary path – as the one way to serve. I too have all I desire within bounds I have myself established – my chosen space with its proximity to life, its sharp, measured rules and control and low, confining ceiling. I already know what works. Stay there, I tell myself. Just stay.

I have to smile when newspapers – so predictable in their attempt to explain the behaviour of those transgressing social norms or the workings of the deviant mind – speak of ‘the double life’ led by this furtive criminal or that. In fact the reverse is true. It is normal people who have a ‘double life’. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had – the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can’t have something the more you desire it, you are never happy.

There is no twoness about me. My life is seamless. I have all my wants in one basket and the daily wherewithal to pursue and enjoy them. I brook no frustration. (Indeed, what could better define frustration than a locked door? And what simpler remedy than a key?) My parameters may seem narrow but the world within them is bounded only by the imagination itself. I am as complicated and susceptible to error as all humans, but in the
ways that matter I am as happy and indifferent as the beast in Abigail’s poem under that dark sky of hers.

My cocoon, rich with energy waves, releases the spore of a distant memory. I think of my father, who died of misadventure – of drowning, like the man in the cemetery, though in deeper water. Was this also what my aunt had protected me from? I had felt nothing, in any case, except a release from a sense of his disappointment. Perhaps, like Mr Stamp, he loved from afar. I refuse to have been shaped by him or her. Whoever I was and still am is all my own work, the result of knowing from an early age that I would have to hollow out a place for myself, the width of myself, and keep myself there. In this I have succeeded. I rarely think of him. My aunt, who never seemed especially happy with my father – as though she had simply inherited him on her sister’s death – always said he was ‘bad with his nerves’. Sleep then, sleep, I urge.

In sleep I feel my father’s hard middle knuckle between my shoulder blades. He prods and loudly barks at me to answer his questions but my lips are sealed. It is days since I fled from Mrs Damato’s house, that fine uproar filling my ears. Now my father, his mind in a frenzy of suspicion, has found a small perfectly white sock jammed between the water pipes in my room. A souvenir, nothing more, though that explanation would hardly soothe this exploding man. My aunt bundles him from the room before things turn to a raging flurry of smacks. But now she grips my shoulders and makes me look into her own wild eyes. Things are going to change around here, she says.

Our street has become a place of sadness and whispered voices.

At night, beneath the dissolving layers of memory, I spy
little Angela again for a worrying instant – lost and tearful, grimy and barefoot, stepping from the green of the railed-off park into the sudden shade of the cul-de-sac before her. Here she pauses, her face distorted by distress. The street is narrow, cobbled and mossy, its length darkened by overarching trees that stand like Grimm’s hideous giants with reaching arms and spindly fingers, fungi protruding from their damp recesses. And now she sees me drop from the sooty wall at the foot of the Damatos’ sloping garden, the kind older boy who showed her the coloured matches. Hope is kindled in her eyes. But I take one look at her and flee. Her concerns are no longer mine. Does she follow in slow pursuit? Perhaps she is herself being pursued. With uncertain shoeless gait she begins the gauntlet of this frightening street towards the gauzy sunlight some endless-seeming distance ahead, her wailing ignored by the unfriendly terrace dwellings along here, their backs turned to her, displaying only high, blackened outhouses.

An ice-cream van sends out a familiar peal of bells, urging her on. Someone will save her. Is that what she thinks? I cannot know how she sees the world. I cannot know how many minutes it takes her to reach the end of the trees – only that the street ends as suddenly as it began, but this time with a road of moderately busy traffic, where little Angela is tossed into the air by a vehicle racing down the hill and struck again by a second racing up.