Love Story, With Murders (19 page)

The two dancers have finished with the Salesman of the Month, but he hasn’t finished with them. He tucks twenty-pound notes into their bikini bottoms and pulls a fifty-pound note from his
wallet. He’s on his feet. His mates are clapping him.
The place has got more crowded since I’ve been here, and there’s a din behind me.

The two girls are leaning in close to his mouth. He’s saying something. Half-shouting, half-miming over the music. But the deal is pretty clear. There’s a competition for the fifty
pounds. The guy’s mates cheer. One is sent over to get champagne. Or rather, non-label fizz that sells for forty-five pounds the
bottle. The pole dancers rest on their poles as the spots are
trained on Salesman Guy and the two girls. It’s a striptease. Sexiest stripper gets to go to a private booth with Salesman Guy, the fifty-pound note, and the champagne.

The two girls do their stuff. They’re good. Not easy to tease with so little to strip. One girl is prettier. Blonder, skinnier, better features. But the other
one, the brunette, responds
with all-out technological warfare. Hair extensions. Pumped-up boobs. Lips so full they must have been collagened.

Blondie seems too casual. Like she assumes her looks will win, no matter what.

There’s nothing relaxed in the brunette. She’s like me. If there’s a fight on, she’ll fight it.
Der totale Krieg
. The doctrine of Ludendorff and Clausewitz. War
without
limits.

I watch keenly. Brunette’s gestures are big, her miming blatant. For a while I think she’s overdone it, but she knows her market. Salesman Guy makes a big show of awarding the prize
to Blondie, only to pull it away at the last minute. It’s not her, it’s you, he tells Brunette.

The two of them walk past me with the booze. Salesman Guy is living in the moment. This is the highlight
of his fucked-up car-selling month. Brunette isn’t like that. She’s still
selling cars. Her face is still doing the spreadsheet, the maths, figuring out those cash-in/rent-out sums that will tell her if she has enough money over to feed her habit.

The sight clarifies everything.

I realise Khalifi knew Langton. That’s not a definite fact, but a highly probable one. Khalifi came to these
clubs often enough that he’d have seen himself as a connoisseur.
He’d have wanted to know the talent, so he could appraise it. Langton’s plump white hips might or might not have been his thing, but he’d have known her. When they’re back
at work on Monday, Salesman Guy and his buddies will talk about and dissect every dancer here.

That’s not the main thing, though. The main thing was the
transaction I’ve just witnessed. I’d thought lap-dancing clubs were about sex and it turns out they’re not.
They’re about cash and addiction and status and anxiety. Khalifi’s status. His anxiety.

He was a lecturer – good, diligent, and well respected – but on a lecturer’s salary, a lecturer’s perks. No Lecturer of the Month bonus for him. No bottles of no-label
fizz and crowds of mates
hooting him on. He had his private-sector consultancy money, but how far does that go when bad-quality fizz is forty-five pounds a bottle?

What this place tells you has to do with Khalifi’s yearnings. He was a British-Moroccan guy. No amazing looks, no inherited wealth. One talent, which had to do with engineering savvy. Or
two talents, really: engineering know-how combined with a flair
for a certain sort of networking. He had parlayed those talents into his position at Cardiff University, where he acted both as
lecturer and honeybee. Buzzing around. Making connections. Fertilizing projects.

But he wanted so much more. He had a half-million-pound apartment and wanted a million-pound one. Had a low-end BMW, wanted a high-end one. Fooled around with lap dancers and pubs and
clubs, but
wanted more. The same thing, but classier. He wanted the stick-thin model girlfriend, the yacht in the bay, the supercar in the garage. He went out with pretty, skinny Jenny from the office, hoping
that she could be his trophy girlfriend, but she let him down. She didn’t want to snort coke from his kitchen worktops and bought her clothes in the sale at Dorothy Perkins. The harsh
truth
is that Khalifi didn’t have enough to attract the kind of girl he wanted. Not enough of anything. Looks. Class. Glamour. Cash. The only part of that he could change was the cash.

I spend another hour in the club.

My feelings are returning to me. I can hear the music as music, not just as relentless aural pressure. When I go to the loo and wash my hands, I can tell the difference
between hot and cold. If
I press my forearm hard against the side of the basin, I can sense the pressure, or almost can. I can’t feel my feet at all – I have to look down at them to even be sure they’re
there – but feeling my legs and feet is the hardest thing for me anyway.

The face in the mirror is the face of a stranger. Gold dress, red lips. Lips that move in sync with mine. I don’t
even try to join up with that face. It’s not mine.

Back in the club, I spend enough time to be sure I’m not missing anything. To make certain I’m leaving on my own terms. Mostly, though, it’s a good discipline for me. Training.
Learning to reverse that grey, upward draining. Bringing myself down from the snow line, toward the trees, and through them down to the valley floor.

No drugs.
No doctors. No dramas.

Just me.

It helps that Khalifi is here too. His energy. His dead presence. That makes it easier. I don’t know why.

I buy another drink. Go crazy. Order a white wine spritzer, which is mostly spritz and only a splash of wine. I’m even feeling confident enough to risk a few sips.

To the barman, I say, ‘If the punters want to spend time with the girls – you
know, get to know them, have a kiss and a cuddle, a proper chat –’

He interrupts me. ‘Not here. Strictly
verboten
.’

‘But then where? Is there a place where people go after?’

‘Yeah, well, maybe. Different places.’

He feels uncomfortable saying what he’s said and I don’t push it.

I spend my hour in the club, then leave.

Taxi home.

By sheer chance, it’s the same taxi driver
as before. He says, ‘Did you have a nice evening?’

I say, ‘I did.’ And before we even get as far as Croescadarn Road, I find that if I drive the end of my house key hard into the upper part of my foot, I can feel it bruising muscle,
injuring bone.

It hurts. I can feel it hurting.

I stay that way, pushing with the key, feeling the pain, until the taxi’s headlights wash up against
my own front door.

Undress. Wash a bit. Brush my teeth. Put Kay’s dresses back on hangers that they’ll probably never leave again.

It’s long gone midnight. On Planet Buzz, we’d have had sex and fallen asleep by now. On my planet, things aren’t so simple.

I think vaguely about having a joint, but only because I think about them quite often. But I had
one earlier, a big one, and a non-emergency smoke now would be a serious violation of my own
house rules. The only rules I never break.

Go down into the kitchen. Leave the lights off. I like the dark.

The streetlights outside and that friendly green oven clock give enough light for me to find my way around.

Swing open the fridge. Have I actually eaten anything today? I can’t remember.

My fridge is more interesting than Buzz’s. Less food, yes, but more going on at the microbiological level. There is a half-eaten nut yogurt, whose mould has now grown higher than the
carton itself. Long filaments of moss-brown hair. I drink a bit of orange juice, then swing the door shut.

I’m barefoot and I can feel the floor.

I’m not tired.

Other people get tired predictably.
Buzz is wired up like some old-fashioned bomb. When the hands of the clock reach a certain point, something triggers unstoppably. By ten, he’s yawning.
By eleven or eleven thirty, he’s in bed and fast asleep.

I sleep okay most of the time, but I don’t have those rhythms. That predictability.

I slept better when I kept a gun in the bedroom.

For no particular reason, except to do something,
I make a cup of peppermint tea. Take it upstairs.

Get into bed.

No lights inside the house. The glow of streetlights through gaps in the curtains. I imagine lying here with a gun in my hands, a firing grip, barrel pointing straight at the bedroom door. Chest
height. Lethal, at this range.

The thought game relaxes me. I don’t know why.

It’s half past one in the morning.

I
reach for the phone and call Ed Saunders. A clinical psychologist who once cared for me when I was a teenage nutcase. Who became my lover – not then, but later. Professional boundaries
all very much respected. And who is now my friend.

The phone rings and is answered.

‘Yes?’

The voice of a sleepy man.

‘I just wondered whether you’ve checked your smoke alarm recently? Did you
know that a working smoke alarm halves your risk of death by fire?’

‘Oh God, Fi.’

‘In a strikingly high proportion of households, smoke alarms are present but nonfunctional, because the batteries have either been removed or are dead.’

‘Look, is this about something or did you just want to chat?’

‘Um, we could just chat, if you liked. Since we’re both awake.’

There’s some grunting
on the other end of the line, then, ‘Look, I’ll call you back.’

A few minutes go by.

I try pointing my pretend gun at a pretend person behind the bedroom door again, but this time it doesn’t do much for me. Then Ed calls back. He’ll have slapped cold water on his
face, rinsed his mouth, got himself something to drink.

‘Is it tea or whiskey?’ I ask.

‘Tea.’

‘Good.’ Whiskey
indicates that he’s having a rough time or I’m being extra awful. Tea is good. ‘How was your day?’ I say. After one o’clock, people are
bad conversationalists, I find. They need warming up.

Ed sort of answers, but doesn’t say anything interesting. I try again, but Ed’s not Mr Sparky no matter how much I try.

Eventually, he gives up and says, ‘How was your day?’

‘I went to a lap-dancing
club and bought a dance for twenty quid.’

‘You did what?’

‘She had her bum in my face. She told me I could touch her.’

‘Well, for twenty quid –’

‘And when I was there, I was completely dissociated. When I ran a bath beforehand, I couldn’t tell if the water was hot or cold. I couldn’t feel a single thing.’

‘Bloody hell, Fi.’ He’s awake now. I can see him sitting up in bed, gripping
the phone.

He comes over all Clinical Psychologist. How long was I dissociated for? How completely? Do I have anyone with me? Have I remembered my Survival Plan?

Survival Plan: one of the things that idiots with clipboards get you to do when you’re locked up in their care. But Ed wasn’t an idiot. And I needed all the help I could get.

I answer his questions. Degree of dissociation:
very complete. Duration: very short, a few hours. Presence of Buzz: negative. Survival Plan: don’t need it.

Then he asks the Big One, the question he’s most worried about. ‘Negative affect? How was your mood?’

‘Negative affect, Ed? Fuck’s sake.’

‘You know what I mean. Were you depressed? Did it go dark?’

‘Not really.’ I try to explain how it felt, but it’s like describing red to
a blind man. Or a blind man describing a watermelon to the sighted. You can shuffle partway across
the bridge of meaning, do your very best to link hands through the darkness – but in the end, the effort only serves to prove that you’re you, they’re them. You might brush
fingertips, but you’ll never merge, never join.

I know what he’s asking, though, and why he’s asking it. My
thing
, my
Cotard’s, arises when two lethal forces come together. Dissociation plus depression. Dissociation
removes me from my feelings. It numbs me. Depression paints the entire world in charcoal greys. Put the two together and you have the teenage me. A girl who couldn’t feel herself existing. A
girl who saw the worst, assumed the worst. In herself. In everything.

For two years, I believed myself,
quite literally, to be dead.

And because I know what Ed is asking, I know what he needs to hear. I say it.

Yes, I dissociate a fair bit still. But I’m not depressed these days. I stay positive. It’s very rare that I creep even up to the edge of full-blown Cotard’s. When I lose touch
with my feelings, I remain okay. I remember my exercises. I stay close to Buzz. I keep it together.

I also grow marijuana in my potting shed and have an illegal handgun stashed in a Pembrokeshire sheepfold.

I don’t say that last bit, though.

I do say, ‘Ed, why do you think it happened? I mean, I was okay. I was having a nice day. My version of nice. A bit crazy, but no crazier than normal. Then I realised that the logic of my
investigation would take me to a lap-dancing club. Dad’s
club, in fact. For some reason, that did it. I drained away. Emptied out. I haven’t been that nuts since I was at
Cambridge.’

Ed doesn’t like it when I call myself nuts but, yah-boo, it’s allowed. Like when gay people call themselves faggots.

Ed doesn’t rehash that argument, just says, ‘Do you think it was the sexual aspect? Or the fact that your father owned the club?’

‘I don’t
know.’

‘What was it like when you were there? Did seeing the lap dancers bring up anything for you?’

‘No.’

‘Did it get worse once you were inside?’

‘No.’

There’s a pause. I don’t know who started it, Ed or me. But I know why it’s there. Cotard’s Syndrome, my illness, is the big, ugly mother of all psychological conditions.
It’s usually lethal. A large majority of those who
suffer from it attempt suicide. Many succeed. I came very close, not once but often. Forget the logic of it – why do people who think
they’re dead need to kill themselves? – just stay with the fact. Cotard’s is generally lethal. And I had Cotard’s. And the condition is almost always associated with early
childhood trauma. And the first two and a half years of my life are a total mystery.