Killing Me Softly (4 page)

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Adam. He took the cup of coffee out of my hands. ‘No, it isn’t all. You’ve got blonde hair and deep grey eyes and a turned-up nose, and when you smile your face crinkles up. I saw you and I couldn’t look away. You’re a witch, you cast a spell on me. You don’t know what you’re doing here. You spent the weekend deciding you must never see me again. But I spent the whole weekend knowing we have to be together. And what you want to do is to take off your clothes in front of me, right now.’

‘But my whole life…’ I started. I couldn’t go on because I no longer knew what my whole life was meant to be. Here we were, in a little room in Soho, and the past had been erased and the future too, and it was just me and him and I had no idea of what I should do.

I spent the whole day there. We made love, and we talked, although later I couldn’t remember what about, just little things, odd memories. At eleven he put on jeans and a sweatshirt and trainers and went to the market. He came back and fed me melon, cold and juicy. At one, he made us omelettes and chopped up tomatoes and opened a bottle of champagne. It was real champagne, not just sparkling white wine. He held the glass while I drank. He drank himself and fed me from his mouth. He laid me down and told me about my body, listing its virtues as if cataloguing them. He listened to every word I said, really listened, as if he were storing it all up to remember later. Sex and talk and food blurred into each other. We ate food as if we were eating each other, and touched each other while we talked. We fucked in the shower and on the bed and on the floor. I wanted the day to go on for ever. I felt so happy I ached with it; so renewed I hardly recognized myself. Whenever he took his hands off me I felt cold, abandoned.

‘I have to go,’ I said at last. It was dark outside.

‘I want to give you something,’ he said, and untied the leather thong with its silver spiral from his neck.

‘But I can’t wear it.’

‘Touch it sometimes. Put it in your bra, in your knickers.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘Crazy for you.’

I took the necklace, and promised I would ring him and this time he knew it was true. Then I headed for home. For Jake.

Five

The following days were a blur of lunch-times, early evenings, one whole night when Jake was away at a conference, a blur of sex and of food that could be easily bought and easily eaten: bread, fruit, cheese, tomatoes, wine. And I lied and lied and lied, as I had never done before in my life, to Jake and to friends and to people at work. I was forced to fabricate a series of alternative fictional worlds of appointments and meetings and visits behind which I could live my secret life with Adam. The effort of making sure that the lies were consistent, of remembering what I had said to which person, was enormous. Is it a defence that I was drunk with something I barely understood?

One time Adam had pulled on some clothes to buy something for us to eat. When he had clattered down the stairs, I wrapped the duvet around me, went to the window and watched him head across the road, dodging through the traffic, towards the Berwick Street market. After he had vanished from view, I looked at other people walking along the street, in a hurry to get somewhere, or dawdling, looking in windows. How could they get through their lives without the passion that I was feeling? How could they think it was important to get on at work or to plan their holiday or buy something when what mattered in life was this, the way I was feeling?

Everything in my life outside that Soho room seemed a matter of indifference. Work was a charade I was putting on for my colleagues. I was impersonating a busy, ambitious manager. I still cared about my friends, I just didn’t want to see them. My home felt like an office or a launderette, somewhere I had to pass through occasionally in order to fulfil an obligation. And Jake. And Jake. That was the bad bit. I felt like somebody on a runaway train. Somewhere ahead, a mile or five thousand miles ahead, were the terminus, buffers and disaster, but for the moment all I could feel was delirious speed. Adam reappeared around the corner. He looked up at the window and saw me. He didn’t smile or wave, but he quickened his pace. I was his magnet; he mine.

When we had finished eating I licked the tomato pulp off his fingers.

‘You know what I love about you?’

‘What?’

‘
One
of the things. Everybody else I know has a sort of uniform they wear and things to go with it – keys, wallets, credit cards. You look as if you’ve just dropped naked from another planet and found odd bits of clothes and just put them on.’

‘Do you want me to put them on?’

‘No, but…’

‘But what?’

‘When you went outside just now, I watched you as you went. And I mainly thought that this was wonderful.’

‘That’s right,’ said Adam.

‘Yes, but I suppose I was also secretly thinking that one day we’re going to have to go out there, into the world. I mean both of us, together, in some way. Meet people, do things, you know.’ As I spoke the words, they sounded strange as if I were talking about Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. I became alarmed. ‘It depends what you want, of course.’

Adam frowned. ‘I want you,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, not knowing what ‘yes’ meant. We were silent for a long time and then I said, ‘You know so little about me, and I know so little about you. We come from different worlds.’ Adam shrugged. He didn’t believe any of this mattered at all – not my circumstances, my job, my friends, my political beliefs, my moral landscape, my past – nothing. There was some essence-of-Alice that he had recognized. In my other life, I would have argued vehemently with him over his mystical sense of absolute love, for I have always thought that love is biological, Darwinian, pragmatic, circumstantial, effortful, fragile. Now, besotted and reckless, I could no longer remember what I believed and it was as if I had returned to my childish sense of love as something that rescued you from the real world. So now I just said, ‘I can’t believe it. I mean, I don’t even know what to ask you.’

Adam stroked my hair and made me shiver. ‘Why ask me anything?’ he said.

‘Don’t you want to know about me? Don’t you want to know the details of what my work involves?’

‘Tell me the details of what your work involves.’

‘You don’t really want to know.’

‘I do. If you think what you do is important, then I want to know.’

‘I told you already that I work for a large pharmaceutical company. For the last year I’ve been seconded to a group who are developing a new model intrauterine device. There.’

‘You haven’t told me about you,’ Adam said. ‘Are you designing it?’

‘No.’

‘Are you doing the scientific research?’

‘No.’

‘Are you marketing it?’

‘No.’

‘Well, what the fuck
are
you doing?’

I laughed. ‘It reminds me of a lesson I had at Sunday School when I was a child. I put up my hand and I said that I knew that the Father was God, and that the Son was Jesus, but what did the Holy Spirit do?’

‘What did the teacher say?’

‘He had a word with my mother. But in the development of the Drakloop III, I’m like the Holy Spirit. I interface, arrange, drift around, go to meetings. In short, I’m a manager.’

Adam smiled and then looked serious. ‘Do you like that?’

I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve said this clearly, even to myself. The problem is that I used to like the routine part of being a scientist that other people find boring. I liked working on the protocols, setting up the equipment, making the observations, doing the figures, writing up the results.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I suppose I was too good at it. I got promoted. But I shouldn’t be saying all of this. If I’m not careful you’ll discover what a boring woman you’ve inveigled into your bed.’ Adam didn’t laugh or say anything, so I got embarrassed and clumsily tried to change the subject. ‘I’ve never done much outdoors. Have you climbed big mountains?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Really big ones? Like Everest?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘That’s amazing.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not amazing. Everest isn’t…’ he searched for the right word ‘… a
technically
interesting challenge.’

‘Are you saying it’s
easy?’

‘No, nothing above eight thousand metres is easy. But if you’re not too unlucky with the weather then Everest is a walk-in. People are led up there who aren’t real climbers. They’re just rich enough to hire people who
are
real climbers.’

‘But you’ve been to the top?’

Adam looked uncomfortable, as if it was difficult to explain to someone who couldn’t possibly understand. ‘I’ve been on the mountain several times. I guided a commercial expedition in ’ninety-four and I went to the summit.’

‘What was it like?’

‘I hated it. I was on the summit with ten people taking pictures. And the mountain… Everest should be something holy. When I went there it was like a tourist site that was turning into a rubbish dump – old oxygen cylinders, bits of tent, frozen turds all over the place, flapping ropes, dead bodies. Kilimanjaro’s even worse.’

‘Have you just been climbing now?’

‘Not since last spring.’

‘Was that Everest?’

‘No. I was one of the guides for hire on a mountain called Chungawat.’

‘I’ve never heard of it. Is it near Everest?’

‘Pretty near.’

‘Is it more dangerous than Everest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you get to the top?’

‘No.’

Adam’s mood had darkened. His eyes were narrow, uncommunicative. ‘What is it, Adam?’ He didn’t reply.

‘Is it… ?’ I ran my fingers down his leg to his foot and to the mutilated toes.

‘Yes,’ he said.

I kissed them. ‘Was it very terrible?’

‘You mean the toes? Not really.’

‘I mean the whole thing.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Will you tell me all about it some day?’

‘Some day. Not now.’

I kissed his foot, his ankle and worked my way up. Some day, I promised myself.

‘You look tired.’

‘Pressure of work,’ I lied.

There was one person I hadn’t felt able to put off. I used to meet Pauline almost every week for lunch and usually we’d wander into a shop or two together, where she would watch indulgently as I tried on impractical garments: summer dresses in winter; velvet and wool in summer; clothes for a different life. Today I was walking along with her while she did some shopping. We bought a couple of sandwiches from a bar on the edge of Covent Garden then queued at a coffee shop and then at a cheese shop.

I immediately knew I’d said the wrong thing. We never said things like ‘pressure of work’ to each other. I suddenly felt like a double agent.

‘How’s Jake?’ she asked.

‘Very fine,’ I said. ‘The tunnel thing is almost… Jake is lovely. He’s absolutely lovely.’

Pauline looked at me with a new concern. ‘Is everything all right, Alice? Remember, this is my big brother you’re talking about. If anybody describes Jake as absolutely lovely, there must be some kind of a problem.’

I laughed and she laughed and the moment passed. She bought her large bag of coffee beans and two takeaway polystyrene cups of coffee and we walked slowly towards Covent Garden and found a bench. This was a bit better. It was a sunny, clear, very cold day, and the coffee burned my lips pleasantly.

‘How’s married life?’ I asked.

Pauline looked at me very seriously. She was a striking woman whose straight dark hair could suggest severity, if you didn’t know better. ‘I’ve stopped taking the Pill,’ she said.

‘Because of the scares?’ I asked. ‘It’s not really…’

‘No,’ she laughed, ‘I’ve just stopped. I haven’t changed to anything.’

‘Oh, my God,’ I said, with a half-scream, and hugged her. ‘Are you ready for this? Isn’t it a bit too soon?’

‘It’s always too soon, I think,’ Pauline said. ‘Anyway, nothing’s happened yet.’

‘So you haven’t started standing on your head after sex, or whatever it is you’re meant to do.’

So we chattered about fertility and pregnancy and maternity leave and the more we talked the worse I felt. Up to this moment, I had thought of Adam as a dark, strictly private betrayal. I knew I was doing something awful to Jake but now, looking at Pauline, her cheeks flushed red in the cold but also with the excitement, maybe, of impending pregnancy, and her hands clutched round the coffee, and the mist from between her narrow lips, I had a sudden mad sense that all of it was operating under a misapprehension. The world wasn’t as she thought it was and it was my fault.

We both looked at our empty coffee cups, laughed and stood up. I gave her a close hug and pushed my face against hers.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘What for?’

‘Most people don’t tell you about trying for a baby until they’re into their second trimester.’

‘Oh, Alice,’ she said reprovingly. ‘I couldn’t not tell you
that.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said suddenly. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’

‘Where?’

‘Oh,’ I said taken aback. ‘In, er, Soho.’

‘I’ll walk along with you. It’s on my way.’

‘That would be lovely,’ I said, in anguish.

On the way Pauline talked about Guy, who had broken off with her suddenly and brutally not much more than eighteen months earlier.

‘Do you remember the way I was then?’ she asked, with a little grimace and looking, for the moment, just like her brother. I nodded, thinking frantically about how I was to handle this. Should I pretend to go into an office? That wouldn’t work. Should I say I had forgotten the address? ‘Of course you do. You saved my life. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay you for all you did for me then.’ She held up her bag of coffee. ‘I probably drank about that much coffee in your old flat while crying into your whisky. God, I thought I would never be able to cross the road again on my own, let alone function and be happy.’

I squeezed her hand. They say that the best friends are those who can simply listen and if that’s true then I was the best of all friends during that terrible walk. This was it, I said to myself, the terrible punishment for all my deceptions. As we turned into Old Compton Street, I saw a familiar figure walking in front of us. Adam. My brain dulled and I thought I might even be going to faint. I turned, saw an open shop door. I couldn’t speak but I seized Pauline’s hand and pulled her inside.

‘What?’ she asked in alarm.

‘I need some…’ I looked into the glass case on the counter. ‘Some…’

The word wouldn’t come.

‘Parmesan,’ said Pauline.

‘Parmesan,’ I agreed. ‘And other things.’

Pauline looked around. ‘But there’s such a long queue. It’s Friday.’

‘I’ve go to.’

Pauline looked indecisive, shifting from one foot to another. She looked at her watch. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’d better get back.’

‘Yes,’ I said, in relief.

‘What?’

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Just go. I’ll phone you.’

We kissed and she left. I counted to ten, then looked out into the street. She had gone. I looked down at my hands. They were steady, but my mind reeled.

That night, I dreamed that someone was cutting off my legs with a kitchen knife, and I was letting them. I knew I mustn’t scream, or complain, because I had deserved it. I woke in the early hours, sweating and confused, and for a moment I couldn’t tell who it was I was lying next to. I put out my hand and felt warm flesh. Jake’s eyes flickered open. ‘Hello, Alice,’ he said, and returned to sleep, so peaceful.

I couldn’t go on like this. I had always thought of myself as an honest person.