Dying for Christmas (2 page)

‘I do all right. I’m comfortable, as they say.’

I wished I was comfortable. I was too hot in the overheated café. I wished I’d washed my hair that morning, or worn some make-up or smarter clothes. The temperature had just dropped below zero for the first time this winter and consequently I was hopelessly overdressed. Beneath my thick cable-knit jumper I was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that had come in a tiny pouch from a Japanese clothing chain and boasted heat-conserving technology. My jeans were clammy around my legs.

‘We’re being glared at,’ I said, noticing the queue of people standing by the cash till.

‘But I want to go on talking to you,’ he said, and his eyes were a sky you could fall into and float there. ‘How about we go for a drink somewhere?’

‘It’s Christmas Eve. All the pubs will be packed, and I’ve got all these bags.’

‘But I haven’t found out enough about you. I want to hear more, and about how you got that little scar.’ He reached out and touched my wrist, and a bolt of electricity shot up my arm through my veins.

I shrugged without speaking, in case I opened my mouth and my thumping heart flip-flopped right out on to the table. He kept his hand on my wrist like a cuff.

‘My car is right here – in the underground car park. I don’t live far away. Will you come round? Just for a festive glass of wine? I don’t normally invite strange women round, but you seem so familiar, like I’ve known you for ever. And anyway, it
is
Christmas.’

He examined my face, his attention like a warm flannel dabbing at the crumbs of uncertainty until they were picked off one by one.

‘You can text someone if it makes you feel safer, to tell them where you’re going.’

‘Oh, I’m sure that’s not necessary,’ I said.

* * *

A woman’s laugh whooshed past my ear like a Frisbee, leaving the air vibrating. I tuned it out.

What on earth was I thinking? What would possess an educated young woman, well versed in the perils of stranger danger – a young woman
with a long-term boyfriend
– to get in a car with a man she’d only just met? And if you have to ask, you’re probably too clear-headed, too normal, not lonely enough, to understand.

I didn’t think he was going to be my boyfriend and this was going to be the start of a beautiful romance. I knew men like him didn’t fall in love with women like me. What I was after was an experience, a memory I could store in tissue paper and take out every now and then in years to come when no one was around. The next day Travis and I would go to my parents’ house for Christmas dinner. His own parents usually spend the winter months at their house in Florida, so we tend to go to my family unless Travis is working which, as a junior doctor, isn’t unusual. My brothers would also come for lunch, bringing their efficient, multi-tasking wives and their Renaissance children, whose timetables are bursting with ballet and gym and Kumon Maths. James and Jonathan would both, separately, give me the quizzical look they’ve been giving me since childhood, the look that says, ‘Who are you? And
where
did you come from?’

‘Why does she have to be so weird?’ they used to ask my parents as we were growing up, as if weirdness was an eccentric jacket I’d perversely chosen to wear.

And that’s how it happened. I pulled on my parka with the fur around the hood, and gathered up my bags, though he insisted on carrying the one with the wok, and I followed him out of the shop much as he must have followed me in.

I suppressed my qualms and shut out my mother’s voice in my head asking what I thought I was doing. I focused on his broad shoulders in the navy-blue wool coat with the velvet lapels, and his brown hair curling slightly over the collar.

It was the 24th of December. I’d spent all year trapped inside myself with only me for company. I wanted a break. I wanted to be someone else for a bit, with someone else’s life.

You’re a long time dead, I told myself.

Funny, that thought isn’t so comforting now.

Chapter Two

The car was black and quite low to the ground. I couldn’t tell you the make or model, but it had leather seats and a musky smell like whisky. When we’d loaded the shopping bags on to the back seat and belted ourselves in, he looked at me and a smile cracked his face right open.

‘I’m very, very glad you didn’t listen to your mother when she told you not to get into cars with strange men,’ he said. ‘You are a very enlightened person, Jessica Gold.’

And for that moment, I believed him. ‘Where exactly do you live?’

Once I’d asked, I realized I should have asked sooner. Isn’t it the sort of thing you’re supposed to want to know, where you’re going? Sonia Rubenstein thought that could be the root of my problem (until I went to see her I hadn’t even known I had a problem). She said, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of reacting to events instead of driving them?’ And, ‘Don’t you think the journey would be easier if you had an end point in mind?’ That’s the thing about Sonia Rubenstein, she asks a lot of leading questions.

‘It’s not far,’ he said. ‘Wapping.’

Disappointment slid down my throat like a bad oyster. Until that moment I hadn’t been aware of building any fantasy about him, but hearing that he lived in the once-industrial, now gentrified East End rather than somewhere like Hampstead or Notting Hill left me unreasonably deflated. For the first time I started to entertain doubts.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, glancing at my face. ‘I’ll give you a lift home later. Wherever that is.’

‘Aberdeen,’ I said.

‘Ha! You’re funny, Jessica Gold. I like that. Where do you live really?’

‘Wood Green,’ I said.

Dominic arched his eyebrows over those ridiculously blue eyes.

‘It’s rented,’ I told him. ‘It’s a stopgap.’

I wouldn’t tell him that the ‘stopgap’ had so far lasted for two years with no possibility of change.

‘I won’t be able to stay long,’ I told him. ‘I’m supposed to be having a drink with some people later.’

Some people.
A different person might be able to call them ‘friends’, although more accurately they were friends of Travis.

There was an exclamation then. An explosion of sound in my head, rather than just a voice. I cursed myself for letting my guard down because that’s when they get in, crawling under the wire, messing with my head, until I manage to tune them out.

Everyone has secrets, don’t they?

‘Any plans for tomorrow?’ I asked him, shaking the sound off. ‘What do you normally do for Christmas?’

‘Oh, I used to do the whole family thing.’

By this time we were driving through the City and though it couldn’t have been much more than four o’clock, the streets were filling up with smartly dressed office workers rushing to get home. Above street level many of the windows were already in darkness.

‘And now?’

‘Now I do what I want. It’s very liberating.’

‘I can imagine. No, actually, scratch that. I can’t imagine it at all.’

‘I thoroughly recommend it. You should try it some time.’

All through this exchange, I was wondering if the vibrations of my heart thudding against my ribcage were travelling from my seat through to his.

As we got out of the hub of the City, the crowds thinned out and the streets took on a semi-deserted air. The shabby Christmas illuminations strung across the roads wobbled in the cold wind, throwing half-hearted light on the pavements. Many of the shops had already closed, their metal shutters resolutely unfestive. We stopped at a red light, and I noticed that an artificial Christmas tree outside a convenience store had been chained to the metal framework of the shop awning – someone had wedged a polystyrene burger box and a lager can in between the plastic branches.

‘Some people are scum,’ observed Dominic.

Something cold prickled on the back of my neck.

‘Do you know,’ I said, making a show of pulling my phone out of my handbag, ‘I think I will send a text.

Just in case my body ends up in a shallow grave somewhere.’

I laughed then, a silly artificial giggle.

Who’s laughing now?

I typed a message into the phone.
Gone to Wapping with man I met out shopping. His name is Dominic Lacey
.

Then I pressed Delete, instead of Send.

Who would I have sent it to? My parents? My brothers? Travis? No, I wrote it so he’d know there was someone who would worry if I didn’t come home. I wanted him to see I was someone who mattered.

‘Sensible girl, Jessica Gold.’ Dominic smiled and I was sure he knew exactly what I’d just done.

By this point we were negotiating the backstreets of Wapping lined with newbuild flats with mean windows set into garish yellow brick, where the only hint of festivity was the odd flicker of a Christmas-tree light. The Thames wasn’t visible yet but I could feel its presence, black and brooding between the buildings on the right, the voices of its dead screaming out through the gaps. Unease rose up in goosebumps on my skin.

‘Not far now,’ said Dominic. When he turned to me, the street light cut right across him so it looked like he had only half a face.

And then we were driving down a road flanked by industrial warehouses that were considered cutting edge when they were first turned into flats back in the 1980s, but now seem oppressive, all dark brick and steel girders. Nearing the end, Dominic suddenly swung sharply to the right, while at the same time pressing something on top of the driver’s-side sunshade. A door slid open and the car dipped steeply down into a small underground car park full of pillars. He squeezed into a seemingly impossible space towards the back.

His was the only car.

‘Most of the people who own these places only use them during the week,’ he explained. ‘This place is a graveyard at weekends and holidays.’

We got out of the car and I felt alarmed when Dominic started gathering up my bags.

‘Not worth risking it,’ he replied, lifting out the carrier with the wok. ‘This place is locked but you can’t be too careful.’

Waiting for the lift, I was frozen with a kind of nauseous anticipation. Too late, I wondered what exactly I expected to happen here. I remembered the feel of his hand on my wrist, my skin burning where he touched it.

‘We’re right at the top,’ he said when the lift arrived. He pressed a button to the sixth floor.

The lift seemed to take for ever, probably because I was holding my breath.

Suddenly his hand was on my face, gently stroking my cheek.

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘No need to look so alarmed.’

His thumb traced the line of my nose and I wondered if he could see the fine hairs that grew there. I wanted him to kiss me, but at the same time I thought I’d die if he did.

When the lift stopped and he moved away my face still bore the imprint of his hand.

Chapter Three

The flat I share with Travis is in Wood Green. If you’re not familiar with London you might imagine somewhere verdant and leafy. You’d be wrong. The place is dominated by a gigantic monolithic shopping centre and overrun with fast-food outlets. If you are what you eat, the people of Wood Green are giant walking fried chicken wings.

We live on the top floor of a Victorian terrace in the shadow of Wood Green Shopping City. That flat sees direct sunlight only between 11.30 and 3 p.m. at certain times of the year. And then only if you sit in a particular area of the living room where the television is. Downstairs is occupied by a family from Poland who have screeching rows at all hours of the night and boil meat all day long so that the whole house smells constantly of simmering fat. In a shed in the garden live three Romanians who must sleep in shifts on the two bare mattresses I’ve glimpsed through their open door. In the face of such ugliness, it’s little wonder that what Travis and I share now is less of a relationship than a holding pattern.

I was thinking about that as Dominic opened the only door on the sixth floor, a huge, chunky, metal thing with creaking hinges, and led me inside what would once have been a warehouse space, but was now the biggest open-plan apartment I’ve ever seen. I’m looking around it now – a vast football stadium of wood floors and exposed brick punctuated by thick steel columns painted electric blue. The far wall is studded with full-length windows, two of them leading out on to a long and narrow industrial-style balcony made from metal is actually red, but appeared grey in the twilight of that winter’s late afternoon. And there, just beyond the windows, was the black void that was the River Thames. From the doorway I could make out the buildings on the other side and, in the distance, the spike of the Shard thrusting up into the dark sky. Would Travis and I have been happier, I wondered, if we’d lived somewhere like this?

‘Wow,’ I said, because I had to say something.

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ said Dominic, looking around. ‘I had it all redone when I moved in here a couple of years back. Stripped and gutted.’

‘It’s lovely.’

But it wasn’t lovely. There was something intimidating about the unbroken expanse of space, the unnatural clusters of furniture – an L-shaped sofa floating by the windows on the far left, a long zinc dining table lost in the middle, a free-standing kitchen to my right, its high-gloss cupboards reflecting the light back from the row of spots strung on thick wire above. On closer inspection, one bank of the kitchen was set against a low dividing wall that didn’t quite meet the ceiling, with a space behind the partition that I assumed must lead to the bedrooms.

‘Come and see,’ said Dominic, setting the shopping bags down by the door. He took my hand to lead me across that forbidding expanse of floorboards.

‘A lot of trees must have died for this,’ I said to distract myself from how his fingers felt wrapped around mine.

He looked down and smiled.

‘Yes, but their sacrifice was worthwhile. I had this put in when I moved in, complete with under-floor heating. It’s solid concrete below that. You can’t imagine how cold it used to be.’

As we crossed the floor, my eyes focused on the one homely spot in that whole industrial space – a Christmas tree, at least ten feet tall, with a heap of beautifully wrapped presents underneath. Dominic let go of my hand in order to unlock one of the wide glass doors that led on to the metal balcony. Immediately a freezing wind flew off the river into my face, pecking at my nose, cheeks, eyeballs even. I gasped, but not just at the cold, at the whole sheer spectacle.