Twenty-seven

My hands were oily and stained. I couldn’t go back to the office, not like this, and I wanted to go home and scrub everything about this experience off my body, out of my hair, out of my brain. I couldn’t take this bag of sodden paper back to the flat. I had to find a place to sit down where I could straighten out my thoughts. I had fabricated so much, concealed so much from Adam, that it was now impossible for me to go spontaneously to him. Always I had to think what it was that I had previously told him, what my story had to be in order to fit in with previous lies. That was the advantage of telling the truth. You didn’t have to concentrate all the time. True things fitted together automatically. The thought of this gap I had created between myself and Adam suddenly made the grey day seem even greyer and less bearable.
I walked aimlessly through residential streets looking for a café or anywhere I could rest and think, plan what to do. I saw nothing but an occasional corner shop but eventually I came to a small patch of grass next to a school with a drinking fountain and a climbing frame. Some young mothers were there with babies in prams and raucous toddlers teetering on the apparatus. I went over to the fountain, drank from it then rinsed my foul hands in the dribble of water and dried them on the inside of my jacket.
One bench was free and I sat on it. It must have been Tara who had made the phone calls and left the messages and tampered with the milk, all out of some sick infatuation with Adam that was a hangover from his relationship with her sister. I might once have thought that such behaviour was inconceivable, out of all proportion to the emotion, but now I had become something of an expert in obsession. I tried to calm myself down. For a time I hardly dared to look into the bag.
When I was at school, one of my boyfriends had had a cousin who was in a punk band which became famous for a year or two. Every so often I would notice a mention of his name, or even a picture of him in a magazine and sometimes I would tear it out to show to a couple of my friends. What could be more natural than that Tara should be interested in newspaper articles about Adam? That she should tear them out? After all, almost everybody I knew in any capacity had been fascinated by the Adam they read about in the press. Tara had actually known him. I lifted my fingers to my nose. There was still a sweet, rancid reek to them. I considered the image of myself secretly rummaging in the dustbin belonging to the dead sister of an ex-girlfriend of my husband’s. I thought of how I had deceived Adam over and over again. Was this any different from my earlier betrayal of Jake?
The thought came to me that the right thing would be to stuff this bag into the nearest bin and go home to Adam, tell him everything I had done and had discovered, admit everything and ask for his understanding. If I was too cowardly to own up to what I had done, then at least I could draw a line under it and allow us to get on with our lives. I dared myself. I actually stood up, looked around for a bin and saw one. But I couldn’t get rid of it.

On the way home I went into a stationer’s and bought some cardboard folders. As soon as I was out of the shop I unwrapped them and wrote on one: ‘Drakloop. Conf: Apr 1995, notes.’ That sounded boring enough to repel anybody’s interest. I gingerly extracted Tara’s sad little clippings from the shopping bag, trying to avoid spilling grease on my clothes. I put them in the file and tossed away the bag. Then I got paranoid and wrote some more meaningless words on three of the other files. When I got them home I had them casually in my hand. They looked just like work stuff.

‘You look tense,’ said Adam. He had come up behind me and touched my shoulders. ‘There’s a stiff muscle just there.’ He began to knead the area in a way that made me groan with pleasure. ‘What is there to make you tense?’
What was there to make me tense? A thought occurred to me. ‘I don’t know, Adam. It may be those calls and messages, they were getting me down.’ I turned and took him in my arms. ‘But I’m actually feeling better now. They’ve stopped.’
‘They have, haven’t they?’ Adam frowned.
‘Yes. There’s been nothing for more than a week.’
‘You’re right. Were you really worried about them?’
‘They were escalating. But I wonder why they stopped like that.’
‘It all comes from getting your name in the papers.’
I kissed him. ‘Adam, I’ve a suggestion.’
‘What?’
‘A year of boredom. Not completely, of course. But below eight thousand metres or whatever it is. I want everything involving me to be completely dull.’
Then I gave a scream. I couldn’t help it, because Adam had picked me up in a sort of fireman’s lift. He carried me across the flat and then tossed me on to the bed. He looked down at me, grinning. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘And as for you,’ he picked up Sherpa and kissed him on the nose, ‘this is not going to be a suitable sight for a cat of tender years.’ He set him gently down outside the bedroom and closed the door.
‘What about me?’ I said. ‘Should I leave as well?’
He shook his head.

The next morning we left at the same time and went on the tube together. Adam was taking the train out of town. He wouldn’t be back until eight. I had a frantic day of meetings at work, which occupied my entire attention. When I emerged, blinking, out of Drakon into the shock of unfiltered air I felt as if there was a swarm of bees inside my head. On the way home I bought a bottle of wine and a prepared meal that needed nothing more than heating up and prising out of a foil container.
When I arrived back home the outside door was unlocked but there was nothing unusual about that. A music teacher lived on the first floor and she unlocked the front door on the days when she had lessons. But when I reached the front door of our flat everything was wrong and I let the shopping fall. The flimsy door had been forced open. There was something taped to it. It was the familiar brown envelope. My mouth was dry, my fingers trembling, as I pulled it away and roughly tore it open. There was a message in crude black capital letters:




HARD DAY, ADAM? TAKE A BATH
I pushed the door gently inwards and listened. There was no sound.
‘Adam?’ I said feebly, pointlessly. There was no reply. I wondered if I should just go away, call the police, wait for Adam, anything but go in. I waited and listened some more and evidently nobody was there. Out of some curious, automatic sense of neatness I picked up the shopping from the floor and walked into the flat. I put the bag on the kitchen table. I almost tried to pretend to myself for a moment that I didn’t know what I had to do. The bathroom. I had to go and look in the bathroom. The person had now gone further and had come and played some joke, left something, just to show that they could get in if they wanted. That they could make us see what they wanted us to see.
I looked around. Nothing had been disturbed. So, inevitably, numbly, I went to the bathroom. I paused outside. Could it be a trap? I pushed at the door. Nothing. I pushed it open and jumped back. Still nothing. I went in. It was probably stupid, nothing at all, and then I looked in the bath. At first, I thought that somebody must have taken a fur hat and splashed it in deep crimson paint for a joke and tossed it into the bath. But I leaned forward and saw it was Sherpa, our cat. He had been difficult to recognize because he hadn’t only been slit open right down his torso but it was almost as if an attempt had been made to turn the little thing inside out. He was a horrid disgusting bundle of blood, but still I bent down and touched the top of his stained head, to say goodbye.
When Adam found me I had been lying in the bed, fully dressed, my head under the pillow, for an hour, two hours, I had lost count. I saw his face, puzzled. ‘Bathroom,’ I said. ‘The note’s on the floor.’
I heard him go and come back. His face was icy but when he lay beside me and held me I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, my darling Alice,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I sobbed. ‘I mean, don’t be.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I mean… I…’ His voice faltered and he hugged me. ‘I didn’t listen to you, I was… Police. Can I just dial 999?’
I shrugged, tears running down my face at an angle. I couldn’t speak. I dimly heard quite a long conversation on the phone, Adam insistent. By the time two police officers arrived, an hour and a half later, I had sorted myself out. They were large, or they made the flat look small, and they stepped inside awkwardly as if they were concerned they might knock something over. Adam led them into the bathroom. One of them swore. Then they came back out, both were shaking their heads.
‘Bloody hell,’ said one of them. ‘Bastards.’
‘Do you think there was more than one of them?’
‘Kids,’ the other one said. ‘Out of their heads.’
So it hadn’t been Tara, after all. I didn’t understand anything any more. I had been so very sure it had been her. I looked up at Adam.
‘Look,’ he said, giving them the last note. ‘We’ve been getting these over the last couple of weeks. And phone calls as well.’
The officers looked at it without much interest.
‘Are you going to be taking fingerprints?’ I asked.
They exchanged glances.
‘We’ll take a statement,’ one of them said, extracting a small notebook from his bulky jacket. I told him that I had found our cat cut up in our bath. That our door had been forced open. That we had received anonymous phone calls and notes, which we hadn’t bothered to report or keep, but then they seemed to have stopped. He wrote it down laboriously. Half-way his pen ran out and I gave him one from my pocket.
‘It’s kids,’ he said, when I had finished.
On the way out, the two of them looked critically at the door.
‘You want something more solid,’ one of them said reflectively. ‘My three-year-old could kick this open.’ And they were gone.

Two days later Adam received a letter from the police. ‘Dear Mr Tallis’ was handwritten at the top but the text was a blurry photocopy. It continued: ‘You have reported a crime. No arrest has been made, but we will keep the case on file. If you have any further information, please contact the duty officer at Wingate Road Police Station. If you require assistance from a Victim Support Group, contact the duty officer at Wingate Road Police Station. Yours sincerely.’ The signature was a squiggle. A photocopied squiggle.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29