The Unblemished (24 page)

Homemade signs were starting to go up on the streets.
Missing.
Not seen since . . . Can you help? Urgent. Desperate. Beloved.
Please. Please.
Dozens of them fought for space on lamp posts, the
windows of dead shops, fences, bus shelters, public phone booths.

Rita Maybury had taped up thirty copies of her own appeal before
8 a.m., swallowing hard against the conviction that it was already too
late, that her husband's disappearance just over a week ago was the
line drawn under their time together. She knew that Simon was gone,
dead. Murdered. Yet she carried on with her task, because to not do
it was to somehow negate who he was, and the link that she had to
him. This, she supposed, as she trudged along Edgware Road looking
for gaps among the other entreaties, was a way of letting go, of saying
good-bye.

As the pages had been excruciatingly ejected into the feeder tray of
her inkjet printer, she'd sipped her usual morning cup of camomile
tea and tried to ease the knots of tension that were already hunching
her shoulders, drawing a frown into the centre of her face. It was a
tension that could not be relieved because it was present in anticipation
of a familiar knock at the door, or a key in the lock that would
never come. It was a tension that grew in her as she recognised a
change in these streets she'd known all her life.

She didn't really believe in the effectiveness of this kind of aimless
reaching out, and not just because it was like casting a hook into a
river that had dried up in the hope of catching a fish. London was a
cold city, she felt, even in the depths of summer. She had lived in the
same flat in the same building on Homer Street, Marylebone, for the
best part of fifteen years and still did not know her next-door neigh-bours'
names. London was unfriendly, aloof. It was a city that seemed
only interested in projecting its glimmer and glare, its shiny coat. It
was a surface city. The people who moved through its streets, in the
main, were tired of being charged ludicrous prices for houses, meals,
ale. London was a vampire feeding on itself, she decided, only, unlike
true vampires, this one didn't need inviting over the threshold first. It
sat, corpulent and drowsy, in an armchair in every house within those
eight hundred square miles, beckoning its inhabitants over every now
and then for another drag at their weak, irritated veins.

It didn't help that it made you feel like you were dying on your feet,
most of the time. She had been shocked to see her reflection in one of
the windows, as she reached up to fix another poster to the glass. It
had been her mother she saw, in the tired cross-hatching of wrinkles
across the soft skin beneath her eyes, the wide, slightly froggy mouth,
the beginnings of dewlaps and crows' feet. Age found you so quickly
in this city; it gathered subtly, like the mantling of snow on a ledge,
without you noticing. Without Simon, she was alone and lonely, and
the city just loved that. It collected loners like it did pollution and
violence. She had another thirty, forty years in her, foraging in
London's relationship bins, if she was unlucky. Simon, at least, would
always be young in her memory. He had that.

Finding the right photograph was a most distressing job. She
wanted to put up the picture that showed him in his best light: happy,
well groomed, handsome, something from the days when she had
fallen in love, when he was striking, funny, the reason for the stitch
in her chest. But nobody would recognise that man now. You had to
be true to the present, if you wanted a chance to find the person who
was lost. So she had pulled out his passport photograph, which he
had renewed only the previous month. He was old, she saw now, like
her. Old, tired, resentful. It was a knife in her stomach to think that
she might also appear that way to him, or that she was why he wore
that look. It shocked her to see him as a stranger already. She was
studying him properly for the first time since they had married, two
decades before. His hair seemed greyer, his eyes underlined with
bluish skin, pouches of fatigue. His mouth was turned down at the
corners where she had once believed it did little more than laugh all
the time. Staring at him, at this new image, was like reciting a name
you knew well; after a while it lost its meaning, its sense. Everything
became alien the longer you studied it. The things we take for granted
are usually the most remarkable. Ears had always given her pause.
Ears and elephants. You didn't get weirder, for her money.

She giggled a little, at the way she could mull over trifles such as
these when the city was sucking its people into black holes from
Hammersmith to Homerton. What were the police doing? Screaming
around in their cars like blue-arsed flies, sirens going, lights flashing,
and little else as far as she could tell. It was the same those days after
7/7. She'd seen a car with the word BLOOD on the side of it. She'd seen
men wearing bulletproof vests running with walkie-talkies. There had
been figures on the roofs of tall buildings with binoculars. It didn't
make you feel any safer. Quite the reverse.

She took the last few of her sheets down the ramp outside the
Odeon Marble Arch, into the labyrinth that was the subway network
feeding Oxford Street, Hyde Park, Park Lane, and Bayswater Road.
The colour grey had been discovered in these alleys, she suspected.
The tiles, the people, the smell, all of it was grey. There used to be
music, at least, to improve the squalor, played by apt guitarists and
violinists and saxophonists looking to make a few coins out of the
day, but even that was absent now as she taped her husband, her
man, this two-dimensional representation she no longer recognised or
understood, to the drab walls that used to tremble under the weight
of all the traffic that surged above and below.

She moved deeper into the tunnels, flinching, as she always did, to
find a crumpled figure under a mess of cardboard and old blankets,
about forty metres further along this stretch, which led to an open
section where the public toilets were located, before leading to the
ramps that rose to the walkways surrounding Hyde Park. He was
doing his best to squirm away from the cold into a tight mass of illfitting
clothes and blankets. His head was partially buried in the hood
of a sleeping bag; it twitched and jerked like something independent
of the rest of him. An odd, muffled popping noise accompanied each
tic. A crumpled cardboard sign in front of him read:
No food.
Hungry. Please help.

She dug in her pocket for some loose change but dropped it before
she had a chance to place it in his white plastic cup.

'Simon?' she said, her voice startling her as it bounced back, hollow
and cold, in the dampening tunnel. But how could it be? Her husband
was tall and fair; this man, although lying down, was undoubtedly
shorter, and in possession of long dark curls. Her husband wore jackets
and black jeans; this man was wrapped in a tatty grey fleece and
tracksuit bottoms. Then why was he wearing Simon's necklace? She
knew it was his. It was a unique thing, something that had grown over
the years they spent together, a black thong that was threaded with
mementoes of holidays to Hawaii, Bali, Mexico. The twist of polished
lava chinked against the blue-green glass bead and the steel ingot.

It was his. It was her Simon's necklace.

'Why have you got that?' she said. 'That necklace. Where did you
get it?'

The pale man shifted on his blanket. He stopped trying to burrow
his head into the sleeping bag. The muffled popping noise ended. He
withdrew slowly, and she was horrified to see a brown, crusty ring of
what could only be dried blood flake away from the open throat of
his shirt. Tiny white fragments, like chalk, clung to the corners of his
mouth, which was further decorated with gummy black deposits. She
caught a whiff of something that reminded her of childhood,
something mealy that she forever linked with kitchens and dogs.
Marrow, that was it. The dogs gnawing at the ends of bone, trying to
get at the jelly within. The dull cracks and pops of their teeth as they
tried to gain purchase.

He murmured something incoherent and she wondered if he was
high; his pupils contained a blissed-out dilation, a sense of somebody
being somewhere else. His hand moved free of the sleeping bag and
she saw, before a lip of worn fabric flopped over and concealed it,
something that looked like the bare curve of a collarbone. She was
shocked to stone, but more by his beauty than anything else. His face
carried an unholy symmetry; she found herself mesmerised by his
perfectly level eyes, and the deep sweep of his cheekbones. Under all
the grime and gristle, here was an angel, she felt.

'Simon,' she whispered. 'Do you know where he is?'

The pale man was trying to stand up, but his foot was caught
inside a coil of blanket. The sleeping bag gaped again and this time
something else slithered free. A large black eye socket gazed up at her,
a grinning white bar of teeth punctuated by a single gold crown.
Simon has one in exactly the same place
, she thought. And then, as
the insane danger of the situation slammed into her,
at least I won't
have to carry on with these stupid posters.

She hiccupped laughter and vomit into a cupped hand, a gesture
that managed to retain the feminine elegance that Simon used to tease
her about.
You could make unblocking a drain look attractive
, he had
once said to her. She stepped away, conscious that if she fainted now,
she was dead, and unable to back up that compulsion with any hard
evidence. It was just a man on his uppers, eating something ...
exotic. Something he'd found in a restaurant skip, or a fast-food
binliner. Or on a hospital gurney.

Something he'd hunted and slaughtered with his own hands.

She turned and fled, feeling the handful of hot black bile slide from
her skin as easily as her grip on reality seemed to be doing. She
clattered around the corner and almost immediately saw his shadow
jag after her, rising and rippling into the apex of the tunnel's curve
like a Halloween trick made from torchlight and inventive fingers.
She was on the ramp now, in view of open air. She started screaming
for the police, for help, for God. She looked back and the figure had
stopped, was pacing back and forth in the shadow just beyond the
threshold like a panther in a cage. She reached the top of the ramp
and Edgware Road stretched away ahead of her. A strange silence fell
and she became aware that everyone on the pavement had stopped
walking and was looking at her. Nobody made any motion of assistance.
They stared at her in the vacuous yet flinty way that the pale
man had done. Suddenly, the spaces of London yawning around her
were too small, too restrictive. Everywhere she looked was a dead
end, a trap, despite the expansiveness. She suffered a clear, crisp hit
of pure panic, a weird mix of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, a
conviction that she was being pulled inside out, and then she was
running, hysterical, eyes wide, mouth agape, making as much noise as
she could.

She veered this way and that, like an eland on the veldt,
surrounded by lions. The people around her moved slowly in, closing
off any escape route. She tipped out into the road and a car clipped
her left leg, lifting her, propelling her and twisting her body over.
Her forehead hit the kerb and snapped her neck like a handful of
kindling. But she was dead before she landed, her heart having
arrested. They moved in quickly as her throat filled with blood,
cooing at the beautiful blue bruise that it created.

Although what happened directly after the collision was anything
but, Rita Maybury's demise was one of only a handful of deaths in
the city that day that could be described as something approaching
natural.

'Did you see that?'

'No. What was it?'

'I think there's been an accident. A crowd of people. We should go
and look.'

Nick looked at her as if she had suddenly expressed a desire to
grow a beard. 'There's what looks like an accident on every street
corner. The place is a fucking nightmare. Smashed cars all over the
place. Something's seriously fucked here. We, at least, need to relax a
little bit. No more dramas for a while, yes?'

'My daughter is ill, Nick.
You
relax. I'm going to get her well
again.'

'Well, you'll have a better chance if you try not to get involved
with every incident that occurs.'

Nick sighed and concentrated on the road. Sarah found that her
blood was up; she could do with a fight. She had an impulse to start
screaming and not stop until she had forced all of the panic and fear
out of her body. The gaggle of rubbernecking bodies on Edgware
Road began to disperse, even as they guided the car in the direction
of Oxford Street. She thought she saw someone with too many limbs
duck into the subway, but she reasoned that it must have been a bag,
or the stray arm of a coat that had not yet been slipped on.

'We need Harley Street,' she said.

'Later. I have a friend who lives on Percy Street, a little one bedroom
flat on the top floor. Nice place. She'll be happy to put us
up for a day or two. You need a base of operations. We need
somewhere we can come back to. Shelter.'

'You know lots of places to stay,' Sarah said. 'Must be useful to
have a bed in every town.'

'It's hardly
every
town,' he said, and gave her another look. She
knew that look. She had seen it before on previous male friends she
had considered becoming intimate with. They didn't know how to
take her, in general. Didn't know if she was being serious or introducing
a barb in her comments, to test them. She sparred too much,
she knew, but she couldn't help it. After Andrew's death (murder,
Sarah, it was murder, don't forget it), she had been loath to entertain
even the thought of intimacy, let alone the men themselves. And being
with Claire, looking after her, looking out for her, was pretty much a
full-time job, so the most contact she ever enjoyed with men was
occasional flirting. She didn't have the hours in the day, nor the
privacy, nor the energy, for anything more interesting.

Hard tears surprised her now, overwhelmed her, and she bawled
into her hands, grieving for her daughter and for herself, the life that
had been put on hold for such an inordinate stretch that it could no
longer lay claim to the noun. She had been shocked that she did not
feel worse about her daughter's condition. She tried to trick herself
into believing that it was because she was young and strong and
healthy, too beautiful to succumb to anything as invidious as cancer,
and that she herself was so tired it was impossible for any other
feelings to make themselves known. But the fact – the harsh, despicable
truth of the situation – was that she was
relieved.
The development,
the ripening of that strange black fruit in her armpit, had
given her a weirdly euphoric feeling, because if Claire died, she would
be free. The guilt that replaced this was almost a physical crushing,
and she determined to save her daughter as much to keep her safe as
to try to atone for the dreadful, unforgivable happiness that her
deterioration had provoked.

She regretted her spikiness with Nick, and apologised quietly. He
simply shook his head: it wasn't an issue. She closed her eyes against
tears that reminded her of childhood, so eager and hot were they. She
felt a sharp ache in her throat from the pain of her sorrow. The
people she most relied on were the people she most abused; it had
been the song of her life, and she didn't like it any more.

They turned off the main drag and took back roads to Percy Street.
Nick parked the car and fed coins into a meter. He pushed a button
on a plain door. A wine bar spilled music on to the street a couple of
doors further along. She could see people inside sitting around a table.
Sarah found herself craving that sort of simple enjoyment: a bowl of
chips and mayonnaise, somebody laughing at her jokes. A drink too
many and not having to worry about losing a little control. Her life
had been taken over by a constant low-level panic that had fended off
any ability to enjoy herself. All of her laughter had been black and
fearful, infected with insanity. She couldn't remember the last time she
had given herself to a moment – a kiss, an orgasm, any moment of
warmth or affection – that took her out of herself in the same way that
recent bouts of deep anxiety did. She was on call, like a busy nurse, a
slave to her emotions, all of which seemed to be ragged and bruised.
She felt old and unloved. She felt like something peeled out of reality,
a dark decal destined to be stuck to a recently completed model that
would never be picked up or looked at again.

'Maybe her intercom's shafted,' he said, pressing more buttons on
the entrance panel. 'Are you both warm enough?' Sarah shook her
head. He handed her his coat and she draped it around Claire's
shoulders as a resident buzzed them in, identities unchallenged.

They climbed three flights of stairs, all bleached with the light
from naked 100-watt bulbs. At the top, Nick held up a finger and
whispered. 'Take it easy with this woman,' he said. 'She's damaged
goods.'

Before Sarah could ask him what he meant, he tapped a knuckle
against the door. Something moved inside the flat, a sliding sound, of
coats hanging up on a hook being moved to one side. A shadow
flickered across the peephole.

'Are you there, Tina?' Nick called.

'Nick?' A voice that, to Sarah's ears, sounded right on the edge of
what was normal, shivered behind the solid wood. She imagined a
woman clinging to the handle harder than was necessary, and she felt
a thrill of fear. She had always hated top-floor flats, she felt they were
fire disasters waiting to happen. Half a dozen locks and bolts were
shot. The door cracked open an inch. A bright-blue eye surrounded
by damp red blazed from the gap.

'Nick.' The name was spoken half in relief, half in accusation.

'Hello, Tina.'

'What are you doing here?' And, before he could draw breath to
answer: 'Who are they?'

'This is Sarah and her daughter Claire. They're friends. Claire's in
need of some help.'

'
She's
in need of some help?' Tina yanked at the door at this
unexplained indignation, forgetting that the security chain was
attached. The door closed, then reopened. 'Get inside, the lot of you,'
she said. 'Quick.'

They moved past her into the gloomy flat. All of the blinds were
drawn. Nick appeared as concerned as she did. He stood in the centre
of her living room gently clapping his hands together, a dark look on
his face.

'So again,' Tina said, entering the room. She was carrying an eight inch
filleting knife loosely in her hand. 'Who are these people?'

'My name is Sarah Hick man,' Sarah said, brightly, extending a
hand that was not accepted. 'I met Nick in Southward. He drove me
here.'

'Why?'

Nick said, 'Why are you holding a knife, Tina? What –'

'I'm asking the questions. This is my flat.'

'My daughter's unwell,' Sarah continued. 'She needs to see a
specialist.'

'You going to find one of those in my place?' Tina watched as
Claire folded herself into the sofa. She took a step back as if fearful
of some contagion.

'No, Tina,' Nick said, as gently as he could, 'but we need
somewhere to lay our heads.'

'Why would you come to London?' she asked.

Nick turned to Sarah with a pleading look in his eyes. He was lost.

He was scared. It was an innocuous question, a question that
surprised Sarah, but it seemed to have completely floored him.

'Why wouldn't anyone come here, Tina?' he asked. 'This is
London. Everyone comes to London. What's frightening you?'

Tina regarded Sarah with a mixture of contempt and curiosity.

Sarah couldn't work out how old the woman was. She could have
been any age between 25 and 50. Her hair was long and blonde,
streaked with black dye. It reflected the light in broad blades as if it
were metal. She wore a tight black T-shirt and distressed blue jeans.
A scuffed leather jacket and Puma trainers. She looked ready to go
out, but the flat was in the kind of state that suggested nobody had
left it for days, maybe even weeks. Stale air stirred awkwardly around
them like fog in a forest.

Tina's eyes were watery and emotional. She'd been through some
kind of punishing mangle recently. She was staring into the abyss. A
vein of hard iron ran through her, though. Sarah could see it in the
relaxed but determined way she handled the weapon, in the
aggressive posture she was assuming.
I'd have her on my side in a
fight,
Sarah thought.

'Have you been driving with your eyes closed?' she asked now.

'Are you telling me you haven't seen anything strange, something
not
fucking right?
'

'Tina,' Nick said, his hands spread, his voice conciliatory, 'this is
London. You're always going to see odd things.'

But Sarah was thinking:
It was an arm. It was a fucking arm.

'Go down there. Go on. Have a drink. Take a walk around the
block. Come back in twenty minutes and tell me this city isn't up to
its throat in deep shit.'

'All right, Tina,' Nick said, and Sarah could see how he was
itching to be away, that he had made a mistake in coming here, that
a new decision had been reached.

'Come with us,' Sarah said, as he moved past her towards the
door.

'You must be fucking joking,' she replied, her fist tightening on
the knife's handle, as if she had just been challenged. 'I'm here for the
long run.'

'What did you see?' Sarah asked.

She saw Tina snap her lips shut. It couldn't have been more final
a gesture had she used a zip, or sewn them together. Those wet eyes
of hers watched them leave, through the closing door, until, bizarrely,
they were back where they had started: jittery, unsure, on a cold
landing.

'Come on,' Nick said, his decisiveness returned.

'But Claire –'

'Claire will be better off here,' Tina said. 'Trust me.'

Sarah couldn't, but knew she had no choice. She followed Nick
out of the door. The rhythm of the locks followed them down the
stairs.

'Where are we going?'

'I've got friends in Reading we –'

'
Reading?
We're not going to Reading.'

'We can't stay here. Did you see her? I mean, I know you don't
know her, but believe me when I say that she's not normally like
that.'

Sarah closed her eyes against yet another moment that seemed to
be drifting free of her controllable orbit.

'Just hang on, Nick, please.' She held up her hand and licked her
lips. 'She's spooked by something, obviously. Paranoid. And I know
how quickly that can get on top of you. But let's just do what she
suggested. Let's have a beer and talk about it and later we can come
back and set about trying to calm her down.'

'But –'

'I am not leaving. You go, if you want. Thanks for everything, but
I'm coming back here in twenty minutes. With or without you. I'm
sorry.'

'I'm with you,' Nick said, softly, making his own conciliatory
gesture again. 'I'm with you.'

The Jack Horner on Nottingham Court Road was about as good as
any pub on a hugely busy main road in the centre of a big city could
expect to be. It was thick with chattering people, and noisy music
filled in any gaps. Sarah strode up to the bar and ordered two
whiskies, determined to snuff out Nick's wavering with a little
decisiveness of her own. She took the drinks to a large table by the
window already taken by a couple conspiring over their pints but
who were happy to let half of it go. Sarah took a stiff swig of her
scotch and Nick followed suit, although his brief grimace told her
that whiskey was not his drink of choice.

'Never mind,' she said. 'It will wake you up.'

'It's you who looks tired,' he said.

'I am tired. This is what it looks like to fear for your life. This is
what it's been like for the past eighteen months. Claire in her
condition hardly makes a difference, in a terrible way. Was she ever
really there? That's what I keep asking myself.'

'I didn't mean anything by that. I just ... you look as if you could
do with a rest.'

'There'll be time for that,' she said. She had finished her drink,
almost without realising it. She wanted another. She turned to look at
the bar and something funny struck her. She turned back to Nick and
swallowed hard. 'I think Tina has a point.'

'About what?'

'I don't want to be here any more.'

'Why not? It was your idea.'

'I know.' Her voice had turned to shapes of breath. 'Nick.'

He was frowning, but now he looked beyond her at the pub. And
she saw in his face that he had caught it too. She turned her attention
to the oily tears slowly sliding down the side of her glass and tried to
unpick the scene that had met her when she turned around.

She had seen a pub filled with people. They were standing at the
bar, they were sitting on chairs and at tables. They were talking. But
something wasn't right. She edged a little nearer to the couple sitting
on the other half of her table, but the din of the music was too great
for her to be able to pick out any words they were sharing.

Sarah said: 'Nobody's drinking.'

Nick let out a little yapped laugh of incredulity. Drinks were
arranged on the counters and tabletops, but nobody was lifting them
to swig or sip.

'They're like actors at a dress rehearsal,' she whispered. A cold
claw scuttled up her back; sweat turned her forehead to bubble wrap.
It was fascinating to watch, despite her discomfort. The more they
observed, the more they saw how the actions of the people in the pub
were slightly awkward, processed, like the received movements of
animals taught to behave in a certain way.