In the early hours of the morning, just before it got light, just as I was about to fall asleep, he pulled himself closer to me, gritting his teeth against the pain.
“Catherine,” he whispered, close to my ear.
“Mm?”
A pause. I opened my eyes, making out the shape of him, close to me. “I lied to you,” he said.
I tried to sit up, but he held me down. “Just listen. I lied to you about what I do. I’m not just working on the door at the River; there’s other stuff I do as well.”
“What other stuff?” I murmured.
“I can’t tell you, not yet. I’m sorry, and I promise I will never lie to you about anything ever again.”
“Why can’t you tell me?”
“Lots of reasons.”
“Will you ever be able to tell me?”
“Probably. Just not yet.”
“Is it something bad?”
“Sometimes.”
There was a pause. I felt his hand stroking my hair, stroking it back from my face, incredibly gently.
“If you ask me about anything else, I’ll answer it,” he said.
“Are you married?” I said.
“No.”
“With someone?”
“No.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Am I going to regret falling for you?”
He gave a small laugh and kissed my cheek, very softly. “Probably. Anything else?”
“Are you a good man or a bad man?”
“That depends on whether you’re a good woman or a bad woman.”
I considered this response and decided it was a clever one.
“Are you going to turn up on my doorstep with injuries on a regular basis?”
“I hope not.”
“What happened to the other guy?”
“What other guy?”
“The one you were fighting with.”
A pause.
“He’s in the hospital.”
“Oh.”
“But he’ll be okay.”
“Am I going to be able to introduce you to my friends?”
“Not yet. Soon, I guess. If you want to.”
His hand ran from my cheek, down the side of my neck and over my naked skin, touching me softly, tenderly. “Any more questions?”
“Do you think you could make love to me again?”
His mouth against mine. “I think I could give it a try.”
The panic attack hit me just before four this morning. I’d been trying to sleep, but of course I hadn’t been able to. I was lying on the bed, thinking about it all and trying not to think about it at the same time. I’d put myself in danger by going out. The flat felt violated just as I did, even though it had happened outside in the street. I could sense his presence everywhere. There was only one thing that could possibly help me feel better, so I got up and started checking.
The first set of checks didn’t alleviate the panic, and I realized it was because I was still contaminated by him, so I stripped all my clothes off and put them into a black garbage bag. I tipped the contents of my handbag out onto the kitchen counter and stuffed the handbag into the bag too. I put it outside on the landing.
I went into the shower and scrubbed myself from head to foot, trying to get the feeling of Robin off me. My skin was red by the time I’d finished. I brushed my teeth until my gums bled, gargled with mouthwash, dressed in a pair of clean jogging pants and a sweatshirt.
After that, I checked the flat again. It was no good. Half an hour later, when I was still standing on the toilet seat, checking the stupid bathroom window that didn’t even open anyway, I realized I still felt dirty. It was the tears, flowing down my cheeks, contaminating my hot skin.
I stripped again. Clothes that had been clean out of the linen cabinet, shoved into the hamper.
Back into the shower. For a full thirty minutes I stood there, letting the water flow over my skin, aware that it stung from the last time I scrubbed it, trying to make myself believe that this meant I was clean.
There’s nothing left, I told myself. He’s gone, there’s no trace of him left. He is
not here
.
Still not clean, I retrieved my nailbrush and the antibacterial soap and started scrubbing again. This time, by the time I was done, the water was running pink down the drain. It brought back memories of something, vague, painful, like an old wound.
I sat on the edge of the bath, wrapped in another clean towel, almost too tired to start again, but knowing I had to.
When at last I’d finished the whole thing, again, still wrapped in the towel, I put on a clean top and a pair of leggings. This was a bad one. I was stuck. The urge to start again, do it properly, just once more, to be certain, to be absolutely sure that the flat was safe, was very strong.
I was cold, shivery, and the feel of the clothes on my skin was scratchy, irritating, not soothing.
I did the only thing I could do: went back to the flat door and started again.
By half-past five I was so tired I physically couldn’t do any more. I held off the panic a while longer by making myself a hot drink. I sat shivering on the couch, cradling my mug of tea, knowing what was coming but trying to keep it at bay. There was nothing at all worth watching on the television at this unearthly time of day, but I found myself watching a repeat of some quiz show with dry eyes, my skin all over my body tight and sore. The sound of the voices was curiously soothing. Maybe this would do the trick.
When the shivering subsided, the tiredness overtook me and I drifted off for a while. The next thing I knew, the sound of sirens jerked me back awake.
The quiz had finished and one of those interminable real-life police shows had taken its place. Sirens everywhere. It’s only the television, I told myself, but it was too late. Somehow I managed to find the remote and turn it off.
I curled into the corner of the sofa, trying not to breathe too loudly, listening out for any noises in the flat. The shaking was worse now, my skin like gooseflesh from my scalp to my feet.
Had I been dreaming about him, or had he really been here? All I could see was him: his whole weight on top of me, pinning me down. I imagined those handcuffs, which had already broken the skin on my wrists, cutting into my swollen flesh. The smell of him; stale alcohol, breathing it into my open mouth.
This isn’t real. He’s not real. . . .
When I opened my eyes, I thought I saw Robin’s face; he was in here somewhere, hiding. Waiting for me to fall asleep again.
It was bright daylight when the trembling and the tears finally began to ease off. I felt shattered, completely exhausted, too afraid to go back to sleep. I forced myself to stand up and stretch. The urge to go and start checking the flat was strong, but I was too tired, too stiff. I could barely move.
I limped to the kitchen, shivering with cold now rather than the effects of the panic attack. I put the central heating on and switched on the kettle.
The view beneath my kitchen window was bare and gray; the grass was the only splash of color. The trees all naked now, brown decaying leaves littered in piles in the corners of the yard. The wind blew the top branches; if I could hear them from here, it would have been a rattling sigh. The kettle roared away in the stillness, my eyes back to feeling dry and sore as if they’d never be able to cry again. It looked cold outside. I yawned.
I took my tea into the bedroom, opening the curtains fully so that I could see the tops of the trees moving in the wind when I lay down on my bed.
I watched the branches swaying, dancing, the gray clouds behind them scudding along at a merry pace. The tops of the branches waving at me, lying wretched and scrubbed to pieces on top of the duvet.
All I have to do is stay alive.
The next morning he was dressed and gone before the alarm clock woke me at seven.
The shower was usually the only thing that really woke me up, and I moved from a state of blissful, dreamy warmth into a kind of queasy discomfort, as though I’d been a bit on the drunk side of tipsy and had somehow misbehaved. I hadn’t, of course, I hadn’t drunk anything at all last night—I could remember every delicious detail of the sex that had taken up much of the dark hours. But even so, in the cleansing warmth of the shower, the familiar scent of my shampoo and soap somehow grounding me back into normal life, I couldn’t escape from the earlier part of the evening. What the fuck was that all about?
I took myself off to work and plowed through a few jobs that had been hanging over my head for a while, trying to clear my head of the tiredness that comes from not much sleep and lots of sex. Just when I’d managed to forget about him, my phone buzzed on my desk with a text.
Sorry about last night. Was not v good impression. Forgive me?
I left the phone on the desk for a while and pondered my reply. If I closed my eyes for a second I could see his face on the pillow next to me, the light from the bedside lamp, his blond hair shining at the edges, those blue eyes dark and regarding me with something I couldn’t fathom. And the dark red bruise around his eye, swelling under his eyebrow, the cut skin. And the fact that despite it all he was smiling.
It’s fine.
I looked at my reply for minutes, thinking about what else I wanted to say. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it, feel free to turn up in whatever state takes your fancy?” “It’s fine, thanks for coming?” “It’s fine, at least the sex part was, not sure about the rest of it?”
In the end I hit the back button, deleted my reply, and left his text unanswered. As my English teacher used to tell me, if you can’t think of the right thing to say, say nothing at all.
I went back to work on Monday the way I always did, one foot in front of the other, so tired I almost couldn’t remember which routes I’d taken last week. The bus stop I wanted was a mile away and I was already late. I tried to hurry but my feet were sluggish. I hadn’t seen or heard Stuart since Saturday night. For all I knew he was still inside his flat and hadn’t been out at all on Sunday. Sometimes I heard noises from upstairs, a soft footfall, a cabinet door, the noise of bathwater draining away. But more often there was no noise at all.
Caroline came to find me at eleven.
“You coming down for a coffee?” she asked chirpily.
I wondered how much sleep
she’d
had this weekend. “Maybe later, I just want to finish this.”
“Christ, you look like death. I didn’t think you’d drunk that much.”
She made me laugh in spite of myself. “Don’t hold back—tell me what you really think.”
“Are you all right, Cathy? One minute you were there on Saturday and then you’d gone. Robin said something about you wanting to have an early night.”
“Yes—I just didn’t feel—I mean . . . I don’t know. I’m not really the going-out type.”
She smiled. “They are a bit loud, aren’t they? The girls, I mean. You’ve got no excuse though. You’re younger than me. How old are you? Thirty-five? No excuse.”
Twenty-eight, I wanted to say, but hell, it didn’t matter how old I was. I might as well be sixty.
“Well, come down and find me later, won’t you? I want to hear more about that sexy young man who lives upstairs.” And with a wink, she was gone.
I’d been dreading bumping into Robin. Fortunately he worked out of another office most of the time. With luck it might be months before he turned up again.
I looked out of the window and thought about the man who lives upstairs.
When I got to the Paradise Café, Sylvia was already waiting for me at the corner table, a pot of tea and a double espresso on the table in front of her. The window where she sat was steamed up and the whole place was warm and damp and fragrant like a freshly showered Sunday morning.
“Am I late?”
“I didn’t order you a muffin,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks with enthusiasm, “I thought you’d like to choose one yourself. They’ve got apple and cinnamon ones.”
“Then I’ll get us a couple of those, shall I?” I said.
The Paradise was like an old friend. Years ago, Sylvia and I, and the three other girls I’d shared a house with at university, used to meet up here once a month, chatting about our lives, wasting an afternoon over coffee and food. Karen and Lesley had both moved away; Karen to Canada, where she’d taken a teaching post at the St. George campus of Toronto University, and Lesley to Dublin, where her family lived. Last year Sylvia had had a big falling out with Sasha, and she didn’t hang out with us anymore. Sometimes I had an e-mail from her, but she’d found a new boyfriend who had become a fiancée, and they’d moved into a new house, and gradually Sasha’s life had diverted away from the life we had shared.
So now it was just me and Sylvia, my best, my dearest friend. She was working as a journalist on Lancaster’s regional newspaper, but was desperate to get out of the boring provinces and move to London. She would suit London, I always thought. Already she was too vivacious and bold for Lancaster, her blonde hair and jewel-bright outfits setting her in bold relief against the sandstone and the concrete.
“You look like you’ve got some news,” I said. Sylvia was fidgeting in her seat, and it wasn’t like her to be first to arrive.
“Not yet,” Sylvia said wickedly. “First, what’s this I hear about a new man? A little magpie told me you were out having dinner with a man in a suit.”
The magpie would have been Maggie, who had been Sylvia’s flatmate when we’d first graduated. She’d gotten her nickname because she only ever wore black, very occasionally with something white, and had a penchant for bling.
I found the smile that had barely left my lips had returned.
“Well?”
“Shit, Sylvia, I can’t keep anything from you, can I?”
Sylvia gave a little squeak of delight. “I knew it! What’s his name, where did you meet him and what’s he like in bed?”
“God, you’re dreadful.”
“You know you want to tell me.”
I took several sips of tea as Sylvia hopped from one bum cheek to the other.
“His name’s Lee, I met him at the River, and it’s none of your damn business.”
“And is he absolutely stunning?”
I fished out my cell phone from my bag and scrolled through the menus until I got to the photo I’d taken of him, the only photo I had. Fresh out of the shower, dressed only in a white towel, hair damp, the bruises on his face and on his side fading. The look on his face lecherous.
“Oh, my God. Catherine. He’s totally hot, isn’t he? Why the fuck didn’t I see him first?”
For once, I thought, allowing myself to feel a tiny bit smug.
A small frown furrowed between Sylvia’s neatly styled eyebrows. “What’s with all the bruises? Is he some sort of cage fighter? Stunt man?”
“You tell me. He’s being all secretive.”
That got Sylvia’s interest piqued. “Really? Secretive how?”
“I don’t know what he does. He turned up at my house one night looking like he’d been in some fight and then jumped out of the car on the way home. He wouldn’t tell me what had happened.”
“Was he pissed?”
“No.”
“Oh, my God, he’s a gangster.”
I laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“A drug dealer?”
I shook my head.
“Well, why won’t he tell you what he’s been up to, then?”
“I’ve no idea. But I trust him.”
“You trust someone who gets into fights and then won’t tell you what happened?”
“He’s been honest with me about everything else.”
“Has he? How do you know?”
Sylvia was entirely right. I knew that if he did have a job, the hours were irregular and he was often away for days at a time. I hadn’t met any of his friends, his family—having them all the way down in Cornwall was convenient, to say the least. I hadn’t even been to his flat.
“If you met him, you’d know. He says everything with his eyes.”
She hooted with laughter and kicked me under the table. “Get a grip on yourself!” She swirled the last of the coffee around in her cup and looked at me from under her eyelashes. “Well, it’s about time I did meet him anyway. Why don’t you bring him along to my farewell party?”
“What farewell party?”
The excitement of holding her news in bubbled over at last and Sylvia’s eyes sparkled with delight.
“I’ve gotten myself a job at the
Daily Mail
. I’m starting in January.”
“Shut up! No way!”
“Yes way. I am getting out of this town. Finally.”
Genuinely thrilled, I gave her a hug as Sylvia squealed and jumped up and down. The other occupants of the Paradise Café, an elderly couple and a few students, watched us warily, while Irene behind the counter gave us an indulgent smile.
That was it, then, I thought. I’d be left here in Lancaster while my oldest friends went off pursuing their lives around the world. If it weren’t for Lee, I’d be looking to escape myself.
“So what’s all this about a party?”