Dying for Christmas (15 page)

‘I wouldn’t say model. I was too odd for that. I never quite got the hang of class participation. I’d be mute when asked a question and then suddenly start spouting when something occurred to me. The teachers didn’t like that. They thought I was being rude.’

Dominic was nodding. Encouraging, desperate to add an anecdote of his own.

‘My teachers didn’t much like me either.
Dominic is a bright boy, but perhaps not as bright as he thinks he is.
All except Miss Fullerton. She was my English teacher in my last year at primary school. I wrote a story about a boy with magical powers. He could make people disappear just by looking at them. She got me to read it out in assembly and gave me this prize.’ He held up the book. ‘Miss Fullerton had only just graduated as a teacher. She was very small and youthful. One of the parents actually thought she was one of the children. When I told her I’d decided to make my story into a book, she was ecstatic. She gave up a lunchtime every week to help me. I think she thought this was what teaching was all about, unlocking a child’s potential.’

‘And did you finish your book?’

‘What do you think, Jessica? I was eleven years old. I’d only said that thing about the book because I’d decided I was in love with her. I thought we were soulmates. I lived for Thursdays, scribbling stuff down in a big notebook ready to bring in to show her at lunchtime. I would have gone on indefinitely if it wasn’t for him.’

‘Him?’

‘Mr Paphides, the deputy head. One time I saw them kissing in the car park after school. I was so shocked I threw up all over the tarmac. Remember those potato cakes with smiley faces on they used to serve for school lunches? What a mess they make coming back up. The next Thursday she cancelled our writing session, saying she had too much work to do, but when I crept past her classroom window, she was in there with him. Laughing. And the time after that, she had a big flashy engagement ring on her finger.

‘After that my book changed direction. Now the boy with the magical powers wasn’t using them entirely for good. In fact he became quite violent. Miss Fullerton stopped being quite so encouraging. The boy in the story turned blatantly evil. He pulled the legs off insects and tortured kittens. Clichéd sadism. Miss Fullerton called a halt to the writing sessions.’

I could picture her in my head. The young, newly minted teacher, burning with idealistic zeal, gradually sensing her pet project wasn’t quite what she’d thought it was.

‘What happened to your Miss Fullerton?’

‘Oh, it was a shame. She left teaching.’

I knew I didn’t really want to know, but I was sure I was about to find out anyway.

‘You see, Miss Fullerton really had unlocked something in me, just as she’d hoped. After the lunchtime sessions stopped, I still had all these stories buzzing around my head. Only they weren’t quite the stories she had in mind. She’d always said to me, “By all means, use your imagination, but also observe what goes on around you. If you write what you know, your writing will feel believable and authentic.” So I wrote what I knew. Starting with Dad and Mrs Meadowbank and what I’d seen while I sat on my little stool. I didn’t name them, of course, I just incorporated it into my stories. And my mother and how I felt about Bella. A lot of quite unpleasant things happened to the boy in my book. And he did lots of quite unpleasant things back.’

‘But she’d stopped the sessions.’

‘Yes, but I used to leave chapters for her in her classroom, or tucked under the wipers of her car. She didn’t like it. The head teacher had to be involved.’

‘You got into trouble.’

‘A counsellor was called in. There were meetings with my parents. Everybody shook their heads a lot.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I left school to go to secondary, and the counsellor got to cross my name out of her book, and the head teacher was quietly relieved and everything went back to normal.

Except …’

Dominic broke off, gazing into the distance.

‘Except?’

‘You see, Jessica, once the creative process is unleashed, you can’t just switch it off like a tap. The words kept coming. The book almost wrote itself, as they say. So I posted chapters to her at my old school and when the head got in touch with my parents, I found out where she lived and started dropping them off at her house. By that time, the storyline had changed in that I’d introduced a new character, a young female teacher.

‘Like I say, Miss Fullerton left teaching quite soon after that development. It was probably for the best. She became an estate agent in the end.

‘Coincidentally, she showed me round a house a few years later. I’d made the appointment over the phone. You should have seen her face when I turned up.’

I pictured her again, this fresh-faced teacher from my imagination. How she’d have looked when Dominic arrived – the face of her youthful failure.

‘You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that estate agencies would be more careful these days about sending lone females out on viewings. I’d given them a whole load of misinformation when I registered, but they never checked it.’

My stomach, still distended from its long stretch without food, contracted painfully, as if it had been punched.

He’s playing with you, I told myself. It’s another story he’s making up. But I couldn’t stop staring at that handwritten inscription, with the hopeful, open loopy writing. My head was aching, and the rash on my front seemed to have spread to the backs of my knees and elbows, and was itching like mad. When I looked over at Dominic, my vision was blurred, so he seemed to be shimmering like a mirage in the heat.

* * *

The talk of Miss Fullerton had clearly affected Dominic and he spent the next couple of hours reading in complete silence. I tried hard to make out what was keeping him so engrossed and was nonplussed to discover it was a cookery book by a well-known female celebrity chef.

I won’t say the name. She doesn’t need the publicity.

While he read I gazed out of the window. Whenever a boat passed, I willed someone to turn their heads up this way, but I knew it was futile. Every now and then faint screams from the condemned men wafted in from the site of Execution Dock and pattered against the glass of the window like so much rain, but I ignored them. When it grew late, he finally looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. He didn’t seem happy to see me.

‘I don’t know what I expected when I invited you here, Jessica,’ he said, his voice varnished hard. ‘But it certainly wasn’t this. I have to tell you I feel cheated. Must my whole life be about coping with disappointment?’

That night I was once again relegated to the dog kennel. I lay in the dark, rigid with cold, and wondered what had happened to Bella and to Natalie, and what was going to happen to me. In my head I composed messages to the people I loved. The aching in my gut had returned and now there was a new feeling as well, a sharp tingling as if my nerve ends were on fire.

It occurred to me suddenly that I might die there in that flat, not through an act of violence, but through a hundred tiny acts of neglect. Not through the things that were done, but the things that weren’t.

* * *

Sean was working his way methodically through the wardrobe, pausing every few minutes to assess some item of clothing before tossing it into the suitcase on the bed.

‘It doesn’t have to be like this,’ Kim said for the hundredth time.

‘No. It doesn’t. You can stop this right now. You just have to prioritize your family, that’s all.’

‘You mean, give up work.’

‘I mean, give up that work.
That job.
Train as a teacher or do a conversion course to become a lawyer. Or stay in the force but accept you’re not going to have a meteoric rise through the ranks – or at least not until the kids are older. Do your set hours. No overtime.’

‘I can’t. All the work I’ve put into this. How would you like it if I told you to chuck in your job?’

‘My job is not destroying our family life.’

Kim watched him moving around the bedroom.

‘But I don’t want to go.’

Later, she stood at the bottom of the stairs with her case, looking around the hall they’d painted together, running her fingers over the stair banister she’d lovingly sanded by hand. Surely he couldn’t really be asking her to leave all this?

‘We’ve been through this, Kim. Either you go, or I’ll go. And if I go, who will look after the kids while you’re doing your sodding job every minute of every day?’

‘But what about us, Sean? You and me?’

He looked at her with a face full of regret.

‘There is no you and me any more, Kim. There hasn’t been for years.’

Later, she sat on the bed in her best friend Heather’s spare room and sobbed into the photo of Rory and Katy that she’d brought from home.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Heather, from the doorway. ‘No job is worth losing your family over. Quit. Do something else.’

Heather had never understood what made her join the police in the first place, or the stomach-churning thrill she got from knowing she was good at her job, or the secret ambition to go right to the top that sometimes burned so much it kept her awake. She could never tell Heather that even while her heart was breaking over leaving her children behind at home, her head was already calculating how much more she’d be able to cram into her working day, and how much faster she could advance.

‘You can’t have it all,’ she told Heather. ‘You think you can, people tell you you can, but you can’t.’

Her voice sounded whiny even to her own ears.

Chapter Twenty-One

Shower day again. Our shower in the Wood Green flat is barely functional. The head is blocked with limescale so the water dribbles out of random holes. The one in the Wapping apartment with its blast of pressure and multilevel jets should have been a treat.

As it was I stood curled in on myself while the water pummelled me, hot then cold, until I couldn’t tell the difference between the two. Whenever I looked down, I was shocked first by the rash that seemed to have spread now all over my right side, and then by the tattoo with the pink and sore-looking ridged outline.

Then he wanted to wash my hair. He brought the shampoo and beckoned me over to him. I hung my head and he rubbed the white, coconut-smelling stuff brusquely into my hair, keeping the shower running. Then abruptly he stopped, switching off the water.

I opened my eyes to look up at him, blinking the soapy water away.

He was standing by the shower looking down at his hands. I followed his eyes and saw there was black stuff all over his fingers.

I recognized what it was. My hair.

Afterwards, he treated me like a baby. Again wrapping me in a big towel and drying me almost tenderly. He let me stand in front of the mirror and run my fingers through my hair, and made tutting noises when they came away with long dark strands wrapped around them.

As I stood gazing at my reflection where the scalp shone obscenely pink through the hair at my temples, Dominic put his arm around me.

‘Sometimes hair loss is stress-related,’ he told me. ‘Do you think you could be stressed, sweetie?’

I met his eyes in the mirror. There was not a flicker of a smile.

All through that sixth day I obsessed about my hair and what it could mean. I’ve never been a vain sort of person. But there are some bits of me I like more than others. These are the bits that give me my identity, my sense of being me.

One of those is my hair.

Dark, thick, tending to frizz. My hair has been at or near the centre of my life ever since I can remember. There were the years when I tried in vain to grow it into a thick glossy sheet that hung down across my eyes, to hide me from the world. Long straight dark hair would make me look French and mysterious. But it refused to do what it was told, frizzing out at the bottom into a kind of triangle until my mother would beg me to go to the hairdresser. ‘Just a couple of inches,’ she’d beseech me. ‘Just to give it some shape.’ But I wouldn’t countenance it. My power was in my hair. Thick and monstrous as it was.

When I grew older, it was my search for the magic product that would bring my hair under control that took over my life. My hair exerted almost as big an influence over my life as my work and my love life. If my hair was looking good, there was nothing I couldn’t do. If it looked shit I dissolved into self-loathing.

And now it was all falling out. I knew that Dominic was right. Hair loss came along with stress. At university I’d known a man whose hair had fallen out overnight after his girlfriend dumped him. Not only on his head, but all over his body – on his face, arms, legs.

Would that be me? I thought about Travis and how he’d liked to grab on to my hair when we had sex, and wondered if anyone would ever want to have sex with me again.

Then I remembered where I was, and that having sex and being bald were the least of my problems.

* * *

‘And you’re sure it was her?’

The girl shot a nervous look at Martin, and Kim briefly closed her eyes, trying to control her annoyance. He had a way of talking to people that came across as aggressive. This girl couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen and, though her English was pretty good, it was obviously not her first language and she was clearly finding Martin intimidating. It wouldn’t be the first time a witness had clammed up entirely under questioning from him.

That was another reason the bosses would be crazy to recommend him over her. He rubbed people up the wrong way.

‘You’re doing really well, love,’ said Kim, cringing at her own sudden switch into TV-policewoman-speak. She never called people ‘love’ in her normal life, but stick her in front of an anxious witness and out it tumbled every time. ‘Just take a really good look. To be sure.’