Deep Desires (6 page)

‘Was he your lover?’

I just blurt it out, breathlessly, running on instinct and adrenaline.

‘That’s a rather provincial question, don’t you think?’

I barely even care about his response, because, oh God, I can hear he has an accent. I couldn’t hear it before but I hear it now, buried beneath his words. He sounds almost American, until he gets to the ends of his sentences. Until his glassy tone rises, at the hint of a question mark.

And then I come back to reality, and focus on the words he actually used.

‘Provincial?’

‘Well, what you’re really asking me is: am I gay?’

Shit. I didn’t intend it that way at all. But when he frames my question like that, that’s how I sound. I’m a small-minded prude, shocked by his ability to take a cock up his ass.

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I wasn’t … I just … I just wondered if you paid him at the end.’

‘And that put you off?’

I can’t even hate him for dogging me like this. He sounds too genuinely curious about someone as simple as me.

‘No.’

‘What could put you off then?’ he asks, and I get that same feeling I got when I first saw the question mark, only stronger. He just seems so full of this odd sort of tease, suddenly, so eager to hear.

I didn’t expect that. Aren’t things supposed to be going the other way, into the land of closed-off-ness? He’s meant to be as silent as the grave, maybe a little resentful that I made him call me up. Though really, when I think about it, I didn’t force his hand.

He called me all on his own, and now he’s asking me all on his own.

‘I think you already know.’

He makes a little sighing sound, half contented, half not.

‘Probably. But we’re not talking about my keen powers of observation now. We’re talking about what you’d actually like to share.’

‘Keen powers of observation? What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean I took photos of you with a long-range lens and then made a giant shrine-like collage of your entire life.’

I think it says something about me that I believe him. I stare wide-eyed at nothing for a long moment, utterly paralysed.

Until he adds: ‘I’m joking, Abbie. That was a joke.’

It’s so hard to tell with him.

‘I only use binoculars and a notepad.’

See? He’s fucking stone cold deadpan. His pan is so dead he could lay it in a casket and bury it at Bellevue. They made a movie about him once:
Dawn of Ivan’s Pan
.

‘You birdwatched me?’

He laughs, and I swear to God my heart jumps in my chest. I didn’t know he was capable of something as basic and human as laughter.

‘I didn’t really do that either.’

‘Then what did you do?’

‘I did this thing called seeing you around occasionally.’

By this point, he’s so different to what I expected I hardly know how to get words out. I definitely don’t know what I’m saying. Stuff just spills out of me in a rush, most of it blindly groping for the Ivan he really is.

‘And that’s all it takes? That’s all it takes for you to … know things about me?’

He pauses then, and I find myself doing something very embarrassing. I’m straining, it seems, to hear every little detail of what he might be doing. It sounds like he’s removing an item of clothing as he talks, clenching the phone between jaw and shoulder as he does so, but how can I be sure?

And more importantly:

Does this make me the same as him? Haven’t I watched him, wheedled details out of him? Aren’t I on the edge of my seat right now for more of this almost human contact? I am, I am, and yet …

Nothing can match what he then says to me.

‘On Thursdays, you pick up dumplings from the Red Dragon. I know this, because you can never resist eating one before you get into the building. You walk by my window licking your fingers, or, if I’m really lucky, you’re still eating one.

‘You wear the same sorts of clothes no matter what the weather, come rain or shine, sleet or snow. Jumpers that trail over your hands as though you’re afraid to let anyone know you have the ability to touch, take, hold. Skirts that graze the floor, because even that much would be too much, right, Abbie? Showing an ankle would be too much.

‘You cut your own hair, because a salon would be vanity; you don’t look anyone in the eyes, because that would be inviting someone in, wouldn’t it? See, I know that last one because it’s the way I am, too. Carefully judging people in tiny stages, through snatched glances … just waiting … waiting for someone to look up and make me look too.’

I think of that time in the hallway when we’d locked gazes. That feeling like a gun going off, like a hand squeezing in my chest. And then he speaks, and the gun goes off again.

‘You know, nobody ever leaves their curtains open, except for you? I used to tell myself I wouldn’t look, but sometimes I do. Just to see if you’re looking, too.’

‘I’m looking. I have looked, I mean. I did … before.’

Before I saw you touching yourself.

‘Yeah? And what did you see?’

‘I’m not as good at it as you are.’

‘As good at what?’

‘Seeing.’

He pauses then, but not for long.

‘Give me your best guess.’

I swallow hard, thinking. I can’t say
Serial Killer
, because that was Mrs Hoffman’s term. It’s not mine. Or at least, it’s not mine anymore. I’m disowning it before it makes me feel any worse about all the assumptions I had, while he was busy admiring my dumpling eating from afar.

‘You like routine, like me. Oranges on Thursdays. Mail at the same time every two days. I managed to see …’ I stop there, embarrassed. But he urges me to go on. ‘I managed to run into you by working out when you’d be there, and being there too.’

Lord, how do I sound like more of a stalker than he does? My face heats just thinking of my little plots and schemes, of my dreams of seeing his amazing eyes and how many times I’ve played him helping me up in my head.

But I plunge on, regardless. If he can share, I can too.

‘You wear the same outfit every day … but more rigorously than I do.’ The image of a dozen identical jackets swinging silently in his closet comes to me, and I voice it. ‘I think you have several of the exact same uniform: the duffel coat, the leather boots, the white shirt underneath.’

There’s a silence then, taut as a bowstring. And when he speaks again, his voice is rough.

‘Very good. That’s very good.’

‘Is it?’ I ask, because in truth he sounds more pissed than anything else. I’ve said the wrong thing, and now he’s going to tell me off or hang up the phone – only he doesn’t. I should have known; of course he doesn’t.

‘I’ve never known anyone remember so much about me. I’m not particularly memorable,’ he says, and my response just jerks right out of me, too hot and too giddy.

‘Are you kidding?’ I ask, because seriously … those
eyes
of his – almost navy blue and thick with feelings he won’t tell you. Those cheekbones, that mouth like a kiss he’s just waiting to give, his
manner
for God’s sake. I don’t understand anyone who wouldn’t want to prise him open with a crowbar.

‘What do you think is memorable about me, then, Abbie?’

I can’t say the eye thing. Or the manner thing. And I’m definitely not going to say the thing that occurs to me a second after all that head-swooning over him:
Your cock,your incredible, delicious cock
.

Because that just sounds like I want to eat him. So I go with this, all tremulous and silly:

‘Everything,’ I say, only it doesn’t seem like enough all on its own. There’s no weight to
everything
, it doesn’t mean anything on its own. But then again, nor does: ‘I think you’re so beautiful.’

Oh God. I’m getting into such a mess of emotion here. Whereas he … he probably doesn’t even know what emotion
is
. I’m wiping my feelings all over him, like a kid discovering finger painting for the first time.

‘Despite the way I am?’ he asks, after a moment, which at least mitigates that sense of making a mess on him. I mean, he clearly wants to know about this whole
beautiful
thing … and I can let him know, too. I’m capable of clarifying.

‘
Because
of the way you are.’

‘And how am I, Abbie? Do you know? Have you figured me out?’

I think of the swinging jackets again. Of his boots, beneath, and of course I realise then what it reminds me of. It’s how I used to have to do things, back at the redbrick house – as though there’s some invisible presence always with him, constantly telling him to.

Though I don’t say it.

‘No.’

‘I know why you are the way you are, Abbie. I know that you’re scared, even now, that he’ll find you.’

My stomach clenches, but it’s not for myself this time. It’s for him, and the invisible weight on his shoulders. What did someone do to him to make him this way? Who could have hurt him to the point where he still follows the same routine, without anyone there to impose the rules?

‘I am,’ I say, and then I gather the courage and just ask: ‘Are you scared too?’

I’m afraid for the answer, though. I’m so afraid I’m squeezing my eyes tight shut, waiting for some horrible, inescapable sentence. It can’t be just some person who abused him, I know. It’s got to be something worse, something I can’t even imagine.

‘All the time.’

‘Tell me what you’re afraid of.’

‘It doesn’t have a name. It’s just there; it’s with me all the time. Feels like a big blackbird on your shoulders, doesn’t it?’

Or an invisible hand, I think, but it’s the same thing.

‘Yes,’ I say.

I’m crying. I’m crying.

‘But you trust me when I say I can see things so clearly, right? You know I can see you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then listen to me. Listen to me: the bird has gone now. It flew away when you weren’t looking, I swear.’ It’s like he’s reaching through the phone – just as he did through the glass – to stroke a hand over my back. ‘Go to sleep now, Abbie. I’ll go to sleep with you, and dream my blackbird is gone, too. You looked up at me, and it went away. For a little while, I swear, it went away.’

I try the search terms ‘Ivan Orlinsky’ and ‘murder’, now that I’m not afraid to. But nothing comes up. His wife wasn’t found floating in a pool of blood. He didn’t kill his own son in a terrible car accident.

He’s left no trace, like me. There’s no sign of his blackbird, though I know it’s there. I can tell it’s there, because, when I go round to his apartment in a rush of fuck-knows-what, this is the response I get through the door:

‘I can’t come out now, Abbie.’

I feel like the biggest idiot on the planet for baking a goddamn pie. Apparently I know so little about intimacy I imagine it happens during a thirty-minute phone call. Now I’m just a fool stood on the wrong side of the door, holding baked goods. I don’t even get a chance to say,
It’s me, Abbie
. He probably saw me coming across the courtyard in a haze of adolescent love-feelings, and flipped his shit. He could probably tell it was me by the way I knocked – hell, who else is going to?

‘I’m sorry, Abbie. I can’t come out,’ he says again, while I struggle around in this mire of uncertainty. What does he mean, exactly, by ‘can’t come out’? He doesn’t even know that’s what I want. Maybe I just want to go in, though I don’t see how that would be any less problematic here.

It’s pretty clear. It’s not that he can’t come out. It’s that he can’t even open the door. He’s forgotten how, because of that time thugs broke in and almost beat him to death. Or did he once answer the door to a real serial killer, and this is the result? The frustrated sound of his voice, the dull thud of his body against the wood.

He wants to, I think. He just can’t.

Though I can’t help remembering that he did for some burly guy he paid. He let him, all right. Why not me? I probably said too much, seemed too needy. After all, he’s technically a stranger, and I started crying on the phone.

I’ve probably got attachment syndrome, to match his detached version of the same thing. We’re so fucked up we could convince Freud to analyse us from beyond the grave. I’m sure he’d have lots of undead things to say about the barriers we’ve built up, the things we can’t say, the fact that I’m actually ludicrously excited when he calls me later on.

Despite the way he starts the conversation.

‘That was fucked up, right?’

He sounds as certain as I am.

‘I don’t know. I probably would have done the same thing,’ I say, but I’m lying. I’ve got the image of him coming to my door in my head, right now. I’d open it and glue my body to his, let him lift me off the ground. Kiss him, kiss him, kiss him. I can even see the clothes we would be wearing in this imaginary fantasyland: me in something less baggy and formless, something pale blue and clingy so I can see the shape of our bodies sandwiched together; him without that coat. Barely anything between us.

‘So you don’t trust me.’

‘You started this. I should ask you first – don’t
you
trust
me
?’

‘It’s not about trust.’