Come Again, Page 3

  ‘Good advice for any teenager.’

  ‘Whatever’s in that video, he won’t allow it to go public. He’ll hurt you.’

  ‘You just haven’t been listening. I’m already dead.’

  She took out her chewing gum and pressed it into the ‘H’ of Charles Hunt’s silver nameplate, which he claimed had been a gift from Lucian Freud. She started to fashion the gum into a ‘C’. She wasn’t much of an artist but concentrated on doing the neatest job she could manage. She talked quietly and deliberately as she worked.

  ‘You were quite a sweet boy when I met you, you know? At York, we all thought you were redeemable. We pretty much made you our project, remember?’

  She’d never seen Charles so angry. She was pressing a thumb into every bruise and the results were spectacular. His jaw jutted out, baring his lower set of small teeth. ‘You smug fucking witch. I don’t remember a “project”. I remember you and Luke and Amy and Kes and Toby taking the piss out of me in the bar as I got the rounds in. I remember a bunch of freeloading lefties.’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what we were. But then, all your posher mates used to pick on you for not being related to the Third Duke of Arsefordshire. At least we made you laugh, Chuck. That’s why you hung around. And you thought we might be useful to you in the future. In my case, you were dead right. But now you’re dead wrong.’

  Charles searched for the most hurtful idea he could think of. ‘Luke was the worst. Luke was a scumbag.’

  Kate breathed through her mounting fury and put the finishing touches to ‘Charles Cunt’. She placed it back on the desk and turned it to face him. Charles looked at it and snorted with derision.

  His remark about Luke boomeranged in Kate’s head and it was lucky that her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. Mainly it was lucky for Charles because Kate had detailed training in how to break his nose and was already picturing herself leaping over the desk.

  Colin popped his head round the door. ‘Sorry to bother. Problem.’

  ‘Get in here,’ Charles snapped. ‘What is it?’

  Colin Laidlaw, Kate’s IT deputy, was a large and large-breasted man in his early thirties with a long beard and a much-worn black t-shirt reading Because Javascript has feelings too …

  He closed the door behind him, carrying Kate’s computer under his massive arm: the ‘power’ part of her PowerPC.

  ‘Hi, Colin.’

  ‘All right, Kate! How are you getting on?’

  ‘Not too bad, Col. How’s lovely Carly?’

  ‘Aah, she’s seven on Friday, mate. She still talks about Go to Work with Daddy Day. You were bloody lovely with her, Kate. She goes, “When’s Kate coming round for a playdate?”’

  ‘Well … can’t make any promises but give her my love and tell her to keep practising the home keys.’

  Charles shifted in his chair as if a baby scorpion had just climbed up his arsehole. ‘What is it, Colin?’

  ‘Yeah! Thing is, skipper, I can’t actually get the windows open. As you probably know, they’re not manually activated. Some of them are in the rest of the building … I mean, Doug from Aztec on the second floor tells me …’ Colin noticed the white-lipped impatience of his boss. ‘Well, I’m saying that when you guys took the office, Kate made a decision about the regs and put the windows on a circuit. Probably to do with not twatting with the air-con and keeping it all harmonious and ecologically sound, so to speak …’

  Kate said, ‘I regret that, to be honest. People should be able to open their own office window, just in case they want to throw themselves out of it.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Colin agreed. He turned back to Charles. ‘Trouble is, Kate put the override on a PIN so I’m not actually able to throw her computer out of the window as suggested.’

  Charles started to say, ‘For Christ’s sake—’

  Kate interrupted: ‘Colin, it’s 1832.’

  Colin gave her a shrewd look. ‘Great Reform Act?

  ‘Cholera pandemic.’

  ‘Nice.’

  Charles shot to his feet, the paler parts of his face suddenly matching his rosy cheeks. ‘COLIN, you idiot! I don’t literally want you to throw her computer out of the window! I just want it disabled! Hit it with a fucking spanner if you have to!’

  Colin raised his eyebrows and looked down at the machine under his arm. ‘Yeah. The thing is, what we’re dealing with here is what’s known as a fusion drive. So a spanner, even a heavy spanner …’

  ‘Just put it down …’

  ‘… even a monkey wrench …’

  ‘Put the fucking thing on the floor and get out!’

  ‘Right you are, skipper.’ Colin set the machine down respectfully on Charles’s carpet and turned to leave. Over his shoulder: ‘IT drinks tonight, Kate. Don’t suppose we can tempt you? It’s been ages.’

  ‘Sorry, Colin.’

  ‘All right, mate.’ He left.

  Charles stared miserably at Kate’s computer as she got to her feet and headed towards the door. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll leave you to it. You might have more luck with a screwdriver than a spanner. Watch out for residual currents, though – I wouldn’t want you to get a nasty shock.’

  He looked up at her with genuine loathing as she stood at the door. ‘You’ve already taken what you need, haven’t you?’

  She ignored the remark and said, ‘Make the transfers, Charles. Do something good for once. You might even like it.’

  ‘You’ve stolen confidential material.’

  ‘Report me to the police then.’

  ‘We both know it won’t be the police who come looking for what you’ve taken.’

  Kate walked out calmly, leaving the door wide open. Her heart raced with fear as she summoned the lift but no one came after her. Low as Charles had sunk, he hadn’t yet installed a private army of thugs in the building. But she had certainly underestimated his fear of Petrov and began to wonder if all this might have been rather a bad idea.

  ‘I suppose this is what people do when they’re quietly going round the bend,’ she’d thought as she entered the lift.

  They plan a very long sleep and then, just as they’re ready to doze off … they start a war.

  Chapter 3

  Kate replaced the coal-tar soap in its dish and dried her hands on her jumper. Downstairs, she squinted at the clock on the oven: 10.23 a.m. Much earlier than usual – no wonder she felt like shit. Sunshine from the patio window illuminated the kitchen in all its squalid glory.

  Up yours, Charles. Come and get me and see if I care.

  She skidded over the discarded laundry and ready-meal sleeves, nearly retching as she felt the cold contact of an ancient linguine between her toes. She bent and wiped her foot with a stiff tea towel and felt her head ready to explode. The hangover was growing in confidence now, summoning reinforcements of nausea and heartburn to bolster the headache. She opened an eye-level cupboard and reached for the blessed silver box of painkillers. As her fingers made contact with it, she saw a paper bag from the local pharmacy on the shelf above. These were the antidepressants that her GP had prescribed four months ago, after her friends had mounted their only successful intervention. She had gone along with it just to shut them up. The obviously overworked doctor was given the minimum information as neutrally as possible. He asked a few questions over those ten minutes and his expression had turned from a stock performance of concern during which he kept interrupting her to say ‘Mmm’ to an expression of badly concealed alarm. The pills he gave her were of a type and dosage that Kate’s friend Amy – a lifelong handler of anxiety and depression – described in her broad Sheffield as ‘fucking hardcore’.

  ‘Kate, that bloke is an idiot,’ Amy had said. ‘You need to bin those buggers and see someone else. What’s stopping you?’

  Kate had nodded in full agreement and did nothing of the kind. The second doctor’s opinion remained unsought, the pills untouched. Tonight she would do more than touch them. Her eyes lingered on the paper bag.
>
  Not yet. At least not this morning.

  She brought down the Nurofen and closed the cupboard.

  A few moments later she had cleared a space just big enough to nestle her mug of coffee within the mountain of junk that used to be a kitchen table. She flipped a discarded bra from the chair and sat down heavily. The spring sunlight glinted off her house keys, half-stuffed into a dead jade plant.

  The memory stick.

  She reached for the little plant pot. Why had she stuck her keys in it? Some colossally drunken notion of a security measure in case Petrov had sent a bunch of heavies to burgle the place. She surveyed the encircling crap-heap. Maybe they had burgled the place already. It was difficult to tell. She took her keys and inspected the memory stick dangling on the Tiffany keyring Luke had bought her years ago. The drive itself was just a cheap little 16GB she’d picked up somewhere in the office. She extended it the centimetre out of its Union Jack plastic casing and instinctively looked behind her. Just the window onto the tiny urban garden. She was tempted to watch the stolen video again.

  No, not now. Hide it. I’m hiding.

  She tossed the keys into a bowl half-lined with fossilised rice and turned it over as if trapping a wasp. She tapped the space bar of her open laptop.

  Something of a post-sacking session here last night, she surmised. Another evening spent in the tranquillising embrace of Spotify’s Easy 90s playlist. And the photos, of course, some of them old enough to be scans – the latest binge with Luke in 2D. Since literally everything reminded her of Luke, she could at least choose certain times to remind herself deliberately. Better to jump willingly into the vortex than to be sucked in by a TV weather report, or the conkers on the ground outside, or the smell of cinnamon, or any overheard mention of the words ‘cancer’, ‘tumour’, ‘dishwasher’, ‘collapse’, ‘pulse’, ‘panic’, ‘ambulance’, ‘hospital’, ‘DOA’, ‘sorry’ … The deliberate seeking of memories didn’t lessen the frequency of those that came unbidden, but it gave Kate an inkling of control.

  Here he was, then. Luke posing over a huge saucepan of student Bolognese; Luke gesturing with pride to a single string of green tinsel pinned to the ceiling of his room at the end of their first term at York; Kate and Luke in the same room giving a solemn military salute while dressed in each other’s clothes. Who had taken that? Probably Toby.

  Luke in a bandana, the prat, playing his guitar – topless in his parents’ Wiltshire garden, his shoulders absurdly golden in the late afternoon sun. Kate and Luke on their graduation day in 1995; Kate and Luke in Brighton; Kate and Luke in Ibiza. Luke frowning with concentration at an old school textbook of The Tempest, his six-foot-two frame folded awkwardly into the tiny bath of their first flat. A sneaky shot of Luke asleep on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, his wavy dark hair cropped to an Action Man fuzz, his eyelashes (‘Wasted on a boy,’ Kate’s mother had said) quite black against the pillow. Kate and Luke on their wedding day outside St Nicholas Church, Deptford; their friend Toby standing to one side, resplendent in his kilt and velvet jacket.

  Kate closed the laptop gently and sipped her coffee.

  Toby. The shiny sixpence we lost down the back of the sofa.

  A movement interrupted her reverie and she held her breath as a mouse made its way casually through the garbage tip of the table: a house mouse, light brown with a white belly, about two inches long not including its hairless tail. Kate fought down a mild wave of revulsion and formed an ‘ooh’ shape with her lips, breathing out calmly. ‘Who breathing,’ her first karate instructor had called it.

  ‘Hello then, you,’ she said in a soft monotone. ‘Sorry, you won’t find me very good company. I mean, you’ll be nice for a while but you can only spend so much time with depressed people. Eventually we just annoy you and you go away. Or we go batshit and you give us the sack.’ She brought the coffee to her lips but put it down again. ‘I wonder where you came from?’ she asked.

  The mouse had found an upended box of Ritz Crackers and immediately got to work on the spilled crumbs. It emitted a squeak in between mouthfuls.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t place your accent,’ Kate replied. ‘I assume you’re local. Not one of those North London mice. They can be a bit snooty. You’re not from my neck of the woods, are you? Deptford way?’ The mouse ignored her. She dropped an elbow on the table to rest her face in one hand and the movement sent her unbalanced phone clattering to the floor. The mouse vanished in an instant. ‘Bugger, sorry.’ She slowly leant down to reach the phone, groaning and seeing multi-coloured emojis with the effort of putting her head under the table. To her delight she found an unopened bottle of Merlot lying on its side. She heaved herself up and plonked the bottle down on the table, inspecting the time on her phone. The echo of her personal standards had left her with a vague ‘wait until lunchtime’ rule, even though lunchtime would seldom involve any actual lunch. Fuck it, she thought as she unscrewed the cap and took a swig from the bottle.

  The order of business as usual was to get drunk enough to go back to sleep.

  The mouse reappeared, now scrambling onto a dirty plate and sniffing the dusty remains of a microwave risotto.

  ‘Aren’t you a bold one?’ she said and then, glancing at the wine, added, ‘You’ll have to excuse my boozing at this hour. Hair of the dog, you understand.’ She took another swig, tired and inaccurate, the wine spilling down the left side of her chin.

  ‘Of course I’d never say that to a dog. That may well be doggist and we can’t have that.’

  The action of swigging from a red wine bottle and having a one-sided conversation with an animal reminded her of a movie she and Luke both loved. She followed the thought.

  What happened to Withnail after those credits rolled?

  She replaced her elbow on the table more gently this time and palm-settled her face, sighing with the greatest fraction of sadness that she allowed herself these days.

  ‘“I have of late,”’ she recited slowly, ‘“but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory …”’

  She gazed around the room. ‘Actually I know exactly wherefore. It doesn’t mean “where”, by the way, it means “why” as I’m sure you know. Not “Where are you, Romeo?” but “Why are you Romeo?” Like, why do you have to be Romeo? Why couldn’t I fall in love with someone … safer?’ She nodded at the dishwasher. ‘Anyway, it was right there.’

  That’s where the hidden tumour had finally announced itself. A slow-growing meningioma, the pathologist had said. A remarkably slow-growing cancer.

  ‘About this size by the end.’ She made a circle with her thumb and finger about the size of a grape. ‘He’d been dying since before we met. And I didn’t notice. I did nothing.’ She found an empty mug amongst the rubbish on the table, wiped it almost clean with the sleeve of her jumper and then filled it with wine.

  ‘Do you know how many days it is since I met him?’ she asked the mouse, whom she now loved for being incapable of giving the first toss about whether she lived or died. ‘Since the most gorgeous man alive walked into the college bar and we talked for three hours and then I got him to strip his clothes off in a student room that night?’ The mouse was sniffing a hard hillock of chewing gum. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve been counting, obviously, but I could work it out in my head from scratch. I’m quite good at sums, you see. And computers and languages and all sorts. Always have been and I’m afraid it doesn’t make me popular. Certainly didn’t at Deptford Comp. Hate me for being a coward if you like, but don’t hate me for being a freak.’ She took a large sip of wine and closed her eyes as she swallowed, welcoming the acid against the back of her throat. Taking a breath, she resumed. ‘Anyway, it’s exactly ten thousand days. I met him ten thousand days ago today.’

  The mouse scurried to another part of the table but Kate kept talking.

  ‘The dream always goes wrong.
But it didn’t go wrong that night. We were in my room, not his. And he took his top off and then I said, “Sorry, I can’t draw trousers or socks either – you’re really going to have to help me out. Look, there’s a loo just through there.” I think he knew what I was up to by then but went along with it. He came back from the loo wearing just his flags-of-the-world boxer shorts. Bit of tension going diagonally down to the left. Norway, Finland and Denmark taking most of the strain, as I recall.’

  She sipped her wine and found a pack of cigarettes under a lost cardigan. Since the funeral she had gone to considerable trouble to take up smoking again. It had been tough work but she had managed it. She lit a Marlboro Gold and saw with disgust that last night she’d been using one of her old karate trophies as an ashtray. Oh well. What did any of it matter now? There was no ash yet but she rehearsed a flick onto the floor.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind the old lady telling you sexy stories, my young friend. Bit grim, I suppose. I was young too then. I’m only forty-five now. It’s just that I feel a million.’

  She had pretended to ignore the beginnings of Luke’s Scandinavian erection as he shyly padded back into her room and retook his position on the bed. ‘Oh yes, that’ll be much easier,’ she said.

  All men are created equal. It sounds plausible until you’re sharing a small room with Luke Fairbright in just his pants. It wasn’t so much his beauty that staggered her as the fact that he seemed completely unaware of it. Maybe slimmer, a touch less muscular than Michelangelo’s David but Kate didn’t think the comparison ridiculous. And unlike David, Luke breathed. He had a scent and a spirit and an attitude: nervous, golden, diffident. He was alive.

  Kate had made a few swift marks on the A4 pad for form’s sake. ‘So I bet you’ve had loads of girlfriends, right?’

  ‘Yeah, one or two.’

  Kate smiled into her drawing. ‘Is that one … or two?’

  ‘Two,’ he said solemnly. Their eyes met again and they both laughed. ‘Well,’ he added, ‘if you mean “sexual partners”, it’s more than two. But proper girlfriends – yeah, exactly two.’