Because She Loves Me (27 page)

‘Bingo,’ I said.

Thirty-one

Charlie’s building was not at all what I expected. I thought, like me, she would live in a converted Victorian house, although I wasn’t sure where that impression had come from. Instead, the address I’d found on the envelope was of a large 1960s building, a former local authority block housing thirty or forty small flats. It sat just off a busy main road near the Arts College and, in the dying light, looked foreboding and depressing, the England flags that were draped from several windows making the place appear even more unwelcoming.

I went up three flights of steps and found Charlie’s door. There was no one around. Apart from the smell of lunch being prepared and the muffled bark of a dog inside one of the flats, the whole block could have been deserted, ready for demolition. I looked around nervously before I knocked.

I waited by the door. From inside I could hear the faint sound of a TV. I still couldn’t picture Charlie living here. I had an image of her coming to the door, a couple of kids round her ankles, a shocked expression on her face. But that was impossible, of course. She had spent far too many nights at mine to be leading a double life.

I knocked again and heard a toilet flush. A male voice called out, ‘Hang on.’

The door opened.

I don’t know who was more shocked: me or him.

It was the guy who had been watching me in the cafe in Hoxton the day before. He was tall, maybe six-foot-four, the absence of his hat revealing a mop of curly blond hair.

I must have been more shocked than him because he recovered first, saying, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m . . . looking for Charlie.’

‘Go away.’ He tried to close the door but I stepped forward, blocking it with my foot.

‘If you don’t let me in I’ll call the police, tell them you’ve been following me.’

‘What?’

‘I saw you yesterday.’

He sneered. ‘That was a coincidence.’

‘But you were looking at me like you knew me. I’ve never seen you before, so . . .’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake. You’d better come in.’

I followed him into the living room. He picked up the remote and turned off the TV. A half-full ashtray and can of beer sat on the coffee table. Apart from the TV and an iPod dock, a few magazines and books stuffed untidily onto a bookcase, the room was bare. No pictures on the wall, nothing to make it look like a proper home.

‘Charlie’s stuff is all in her room. Boxed up. Ready for when she moves in with you.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m Fraser. I’m having a beer. Want one?’

It was only noon. I shook my head.

‘Suit yourself. I’m having one.’

He came back and handed me a dirty glass containing tepid tap water, then gestured for me to sit down.

‘So, are you Charlie’s flatmate?’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’

I decided to come back to that one. ‘Why have you been following me?’

He seemed wired, his left leg twitching up and down like it wanted to detach itself and make a run for it. He stared at me, his eyes wide and unblinking, and I wondered if he was on drugs. Was
he
a smackhead? He was wearing a thick jumper so I couldn’t see his arms, couldn’t tell if they were covered with track marks. He was chewing gum, even while drinking his beer, and his jaw jerked in time with his leg.

‘I told you, I wasn’t.’

‘Then why were you staring at me?’

‘Because I recognised you, didn’t I?’

‘You mean . . . Charlie showed you a photo of me?’

He barked out a laugh. ‘Yeah. Something like that.’

‘What are you smirking at?’

‘I’ve seen you in the flesh before, too.’ I didn’t like the way he said it. It was hot in the room but I felt cold inside. ‘The first time I saw you was back in December. That night you and Charlie hooked up.’

So that was where I had originally recognised him from. That night, coming out of the nightclub. He had seen us and crossed the road. I’d hardly thought anything of it at the time.

He picked up his beer can but fumbled it, knocking it over. Beer gushed onto the carpet between his feet.

‘Oh, bollocks!’ he shouted, springing up and running to the kitchen, coming back with a cloth. ‘Charlie will be well pissed—’ He stopped himself. ‘Ha. Force of habit. I don’t need to worry about all that shit anymore, do I? She’s your problem now.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

He impersonated me, using a whiny voice. ‘
What do you mean, what do you mean?
You ask a lot of questions. I mean, you’ve got her now, haven’t you? You’re the one who has to deal with her issues.’

I stared at him. ‘Were you and Charlie . . . together?’

Fraser snorted. ‘Yeah, we were. For nine months. We moved in here together after we’d been with each other for about a month.’ He looked around the empty room. ‘Good times.’

‘I had no idea she still lived with her ex.’ At least I knew now why she hadn’t wanted me to visit her place.

He picked up the almost-empty can, raised it and sucked out the dregs. ‘Likes her secrets, does Charlotte.’

I almost said
What do you mean?
but stopped myself.

‘When did the two of you split up?’ I asked.

He frowned. ‘Do you really expect me to just sit here and answer all your stupid fucking questions?’

He stood up and I shrank back, suddenly fearful of him. He was bigger than me, though he didn’t look particularly strong. His face twisted into a snarl of hatred, then suddenly relaxed, and he flopped back onto the sofa. He put his face in his hands.

‘I thought we were going to be together forever,’ he whimpered. I realised, with horror, that he was crying. I shrank back in my seat, wishing it would swallow me up. Eventually, he wiped his face on his sleeve and groped on the table for a cigarette.

‘We split up just after Christmas. That was—’ He gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘That was the worst week.’ I could see him picturing it, like he was reliving a nightmare. Just after Christmas. That meant they were still together when Charlie and I had gone out that night.

He gathered himself. ‘I don’t want to talk about that week. It’s too . . .’ He trailed off.

That first night, Charlie had told me she was going to stay with a friend. ‘Did she stay here? That first night I saw you?’

‘Yeah.’ He smiled with one corner of his mouth. ‘She was really turned on that night. Horny as hell. I suppose I should thank you for that.’

My insides went cold.

‘And now
you
get to fuck her. Amazing, isn’t she? Unbelievable. That girl . . . I’d give anything, everything, to spend another night with her.’ He stared at me as he sucked his cigarette.

‘You haven’t . . . slept with her since I was with her?’

He laughed coldly. ‘No. I’ve hardly seen her. She’s never here. And now she’s moving in with you and I’ll probably never see her again. But that’s good, it’s for the best. I mean, I’ll be able to move on. Get my life back on track.’

I waited for him to say more but he changed the subject. ‘Why are you here?’

I trotted out the lie I’d prepared. ‘I want to surprise Charlie by arranging to move her stuff. I wanted to see how much there is.’

He swept an arm towards the hallway. ‘Feel free. Second door along.’

I left the room, leaving him curled into a ball on the sofa. I wanted to go, to get the hell out of here, but I had come here looking for information. This could be my only chance. I had already found out why Charlie had taken so long to contact me after that first night. She had been with this loser. I had taken an instant dislike to him, but I wasn’t sure if I believed him about yesterday. Had he already been in the cafe when I went in? I couldn’t remember. On balance, he was probably telling the truth about it being a coincidence.

Charlie’s bedroom was almost as empty as the living room. Half a dozen boxes were piled up in the corner, along with a few carrier bags stuffed full of clothes. The bed was stripped to the mattress, the walls bare. The room smelled stale, musty.

Then I spotted half a dozen canvases leaning against the wall, one against the other. I crouched and studied them. A
couple
were abstract: jagged lines and swirls, blood reds and blacks. They looked angry. Another was a charcoal sketch of a man, but he had no face. Was it supposed to be me? The canvas at the back startled me. It was a collage of photographs arranged in the shape of a female body. The photos had been cut out of a book: my Rankin book, to be precise. Various models, either naked or nearly nude. Charlie had painted sharp, jagged lines in red across their flesh. It was a powerful picture. But why hadn’t she asked if she could take the book if she wanted to cut pictures ou
t o
f it?

‘Not much, is there?’ Fraser said, startling me. He was leaning in the doorway. ‘You could probably take it home on the bus.’

‘She never had much stuff,’ he continued, swaying in the doorway, his eyes pink and unfocused. ‘I used to joke that she always acted like she was preparing to go on the run.’

‘How did the two of you meet?’ I asked.

‘I was working at King’s.’ Kings College Hospital was just up the road from this flat. ‘I’m in IT and she was on a temp contract there, just before she started at Moorfields.’

‘And do you know where she lived before that?’

He stared at me and a sly smile crept on to his face. ‘She’s as secretive with you as she was with me, isn’t she? It used to drive me crazy. Trying to get any info out of her about her past was like trying to get a cat to go walkies. Her line was that it didn’t matter, that it was all about the here and now.’

He walked into the room, came up close. His breath stank of warm lager and I shrank away as he grabbed my arm and leaned in close, his nose inches from mine. ‘Do yourself a favour, mate. Don’t let her move in. Get away while you can.’

I pulled my arm free. ‘Why are you saying that? A minute ago you were saying you’d do anything to spend another night with her.’

‘Yeah. A night. Not a
day.
’ He pulled up the sleeve of his jumper and I gasped. The skin was criss-crossed with slashes, most of them scars but some fresh, scabbed over, the skin between the knife-marks looking like it was going to peel off.

‘See this. This is what Charlie did to me. She fucked me up.’ A noise came out of his mouth that was half laugh, half sob. ‘She really fucked me up.’

I waited for him to calm down.

‘What did she do?’ I asked quietly, dreading the answer.

He sat down on the edge of the mattress, picked at one of the long scabs on his arm. ‘It’s hard . . . it’s hard for me to talk about. But you know her. You must have seen it. Signs, at least.’

I didn’t want to give anything away. I had no idea if I could trust him. And with the conflict raging inside me, the internal war between virus and antibodies, I didn’t want to say anything negative about Charlie. I was still hoping that, any minute, the lights would come on and the truth would be illuminated – the truth being that Charlie was innocent of everything but being jealous, that this guy was a liar or a nutter or both, and that my girlfriend and I could get on with our lives. Walk into our bright future together.

‘I’m talking about how possessive she is,’ he said. ‘How jealous. Even though I never did anything to make her jealous. Christ, why would I want to look at other women when I had her? It didn’t make sense. I used to tell her, it’s irrational, illogical. Stupid.’

‘What was her reply?’ My throat was so dry I could barely get the words out.

‘That love isn’t rational or logical. That it’s meant to be like this: like a tropical storm, a hurricane. Exciting and destructive and unpredictable. She said that when two people love each other they have to give themselves completely. It has to be all or nothing. No one else is allowed in.’

I wondered if this conversation was awaiting me in the future.

‘She hated me seeing other women. Being in IT, I mainly work with a load of greasy blokes, but I have female friends, acquaintances. Charlie went mental if I so much as went for a coffee with them.’

‘How long had you been together when she started being like that?’ I asked.

‘I dunno. Three months? Everything kind of snowballed after that. I mean, it just went crazy. Intense. Her temp contract ended and she persuaded me to quit my job so we could be together all the time. She wouldn’t let me go out. We got all our shopping delivered. I mean, we became hermits. We stayed in
all
the time. I lost contact with everyone: my mates, my family. My mum would ring me every day, worried sick, and Charlie wouldn’t let me answer it, said that I shouldn’t need anyone else, even my mum. And I was so scared of her leaving me that I gave in. She had a violent temper too. She smashed up loads of my stuff, all my old vinyl, because she said I’d listened to the music with other women so it was tainted.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I had one album, an old Pixies album, with a picture of a topless woman on the cover. When Charlie saw it she went mental. Accused me of fancying this picture more than I fancied her. She burned it, right there in the middle of the living room. I thought she was going to burn the fucking flat down. She was screaming at me. I’m amazed the neighbours didn’t call the police. But afterwards, the sex . . . That’s why I stayed.’ He hung his head.