Remember Me This Way (36 page)

Lizzie will sort it. She’ll know what to do.

The house looked deserted as I got close, looming out of the darkness like a rock in the fog. I scrambled over the flower beds to the front windows easily enough, and managed to fit the credit card in and under – the latch swung to one side. I was worried the joints might have been painted in since the first time I was here, but the window pushed up smoothly. My boots were thick with mud from hiking up the hill, so I sat on the window sill and winkled them off, chucked them on to the grass before climbing over.

Through the air they flew. There they lay. An abandoned pair of Hunter wellies.

It was just as I remembered it. Not a chintz apron or a carriage clock had shifted since I was last here. Insipid sea-scene watercolours. Mahogany drinks tray along one wall. Decanters and glasses, sherry, Dubonnet. A half-empty bottle of distillery-only ten-year-old Glengoyne, my whisky – though of course it isn’t actually mine, it was Murphy’s before it was mine. The first time I tasted it was in this room. I poured myself a finger and sat down in the wing chair. I put my feet up on the coffee table, dislodging a copy of
Country Life
. I knocked it back and felt the fire turn my throat amber. I closed my eyes for a second. What happened to Vic? I think idly. What a great girl she’d been. Those parties on the Isle of Wight, those naked midnight swims. When did she change? I felt the room spin.

‘So you came.’

I opened my eyes. Onnie was standing in the doorway. I don’t know how long she’d been watching me. She was wearing a fleece all-in-one catsuit-type garment and her hair was scraped back. For a second, I was confused. I’d seen her going into Kulon’s flat at the Blue Lagoon. She wouldn’t have had time to get here – unless it was later than I thought, unless I had lost a chunk of time. Luckily, I’m a good actor.

I got to my feet with a leisurely stretch. ‘There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.’

She stared. ‘Were you just pretending down at the bar?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Were you jealous?’

‘I’m always jealous.’

I thought I might have to fight her off, but she started behaving like her mother in recent years, all Tory airs and graces – pouring me a drink and fetching nuts from the kitchen. Little upper-class madam at heart, of course, despite the rebellion. I was acting, too, playing up the role of ancient roué, gasping for some excitement in this
godforsaken hellhole
,
and after a while she went to get her ‘stash’ – enough for a couple of joints. When I asked if she had anything else to make an old man happy, she produced benzphetamine, a diet pill. She said it would have us flying like the best E.

It’s a bit of a blur after that. Music played loudly from an iPod in one of the rooms upstairs, and we cooked up food in the kitchen, though I can’t remember eating it. She found me another bottle of Glengoyne (eighteen years old) in the larder. Those five or six times we met in London, we’d had mechanical sex. I wasn’t going there again. Keep it cerebral, I remember thinking that. I told her my philosophy of design, the importance of simple lines, how a house should be a blank canvas for a busy mind. She told me I was brilliant, that she’d remember it for ever. She danced for a bit, careering off the sofas. I lay on the floor and watched. She played the piano. I sang: ‘Alison’ from
My Aim is True.
Elvis Costello, I told her: the greatest singer who ever walked this earth. I told her never to forget that either. At one point, we ran frantically from room to room, chasing a wild dog that got in. Or perhaps I imagined that. Perhaps it was the ghost of Howard, haunting my narcotic dreams.

At one point, exhausted, we collapsed in the sitting room. She began to dance again, more slowly. I tore a blank page out of a book on the coffee table and told her to stay still for me. She pushed her all-in-one outfit off her shoulder, let it slip and slide down until her breast was exposed, lay down on the floor with her neck thrown back. I drew her, half-naked, and when the drawing was finished, I put it aside and knelt next to her, pulled the catsuit off her, yanked it down over her knees.

It was light when I fell asleep. Or rather, I remember still being awake when it turned light.

The sound of screaming woke me. Opening my eyes, Onnie’s hair was all I could see, spread across the pillow. It was like netting. I could distinguish the shaft of each individual criss-crossed strand. Her mouth was half open, the bottom lip slightly cracked. For a moment, I thought the screams had come from her, that she was dead. But then more screaming, deep downstairs, the slamming of an internal door. ‘Onnie!’ A screech. ‘Where are you? What the hell has been going on?’

I leaped up, banging my shin. We were in her bedroom. I had no idea what time it was. Gloomy outside. Early morning? No, late afternoon. The thud of rain. A dressing table, strewn with make-up. Pink cherry wallpaper. Onnie’s eyes opened. She lifted her head. She was lying across a white sleigh bed, next to the dip where I had just been, naked. ‘My mother,’ she said. A smile curled her lips and langorously she got to her feet. ‘That’s weird.’

I think I said I didn’t think it was funny and it seemed to click her into action. The door was already wide open, and she peered out, listened. Victoria was just outside the front door, in the porch, talking on her mobile phone. Onnie was throwing on clothes and she grabbed me by the arm and we ran down the backstairs, through the scullery and out the kitchen door, across the sopping wet grass into the copse of trees. Neither of us was wearing shoes. My wellies were still on the front lawn. I was in socks. The ‘feet’ of Onnie’s outfit were black and sodden.

We paused as soon as we were hidden in the semi-shelter of a tree. The wind took the branches and shook water down on us. She was laughing. I was angry. Cold and wet and furious. We argued. She said, ‘It’s, like, really raining.’ I said it’s not ‘like’ really raining. It is really raining. She’d never get anywhere in life if she didn’t learn to speak. I told her to go home and she said she wouldn’t go without me. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her until she began to cry. I walked off and she followed, stumbling behind, through the wood and out into the field on the other side. Heavy mud where the cows had trodden. We needed each other to get through the worst of it. We’d waded to the stile on the other side, and I was halfway across it when my phone rang. It was Lizzie. I remembered, like a knife in my chest, that I was supposed to have been in Exeter today. What had I been thinking, going down to the Blue Lagoon? I glared at Onnie. I shouldn’t have slept with her. It was all her fault.

Lizzie asked where I was. I told her I was on Dartmoor, painting. The scenery, I said, was glorious – not a person as far as the eye could see. Onnie made a noise, as if she found it funny, or was so stupid she wanted to put me right. I almost put my hand over her mouth. Luckily, from my position astride the stile, I couldn’t reach. I might have suffocated her. Lizzie was worried about it being dark. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just setting off back to the car now.’

It took a good forty minutes to reach the bungalow. My feet were scratched and sore, trousers filthy, socks stuck to the skin like black bandages. Onnie was limping. The rain continued to stream. We didn’t talk. I was too busy trying to think through the thumping in my head.

I didn’t want to let her into the house, but I didn’t know what else to do. The lantern was glittering in the porch of the bungalow opposite; their car, a grey Hyundai, was parked outside. I pushed her up the path, opened the front door and shut it behind us. It was dark in here even then. Onnie stood on the mat, bedraggled, dripping on today’s post. I found her a towel and we felt our way towards the shower. She could put the light on in there, I told her, but she had to switch it off before she came out. I locked her in just to be on the safe side. Then I peeled off my socks and trousers, picked up the post, including the letter from Lizzie, and sat down here in the dark.

My phone rang. A number I didn’t recognise. A furious voice. ‘Do you have my daughter?’

‘Who is this?’

‘I know she’s with you. You’ve been up at my house. Don’t even try to deny it. She’s half your age. You filthy, disgusting man.’

Oh, Victoria. Bloody hell. I hung up.

It rang again. And again. And then a text: I hope you feel proud of yourself.

I could still hear the shower, the gurgle of the pipes. I stood up. Beyond the glass, dark shrubs writhed. Rain streaked. I pulled down the blinds, sat on the edge of a chair.

It felt like seconds later when the car slammed into the verge at the bottom. Victoria running, knocking over planters, banging on the door, shouting. ‘Onnie. I know you’re in there. Come out.’

Her voice right up at the window, under the streaming gutter. ‘Jack. I know she’s with you. I found the drawing. And your boots.’ She was talking under her breath, hissing. She moved away from the window and her voice got louder. She was losing control. ‘You sad fuck, Jack, Zach, whatever you call yourself, you talentless arsehole.’

Her footsteps moved around the bungalow and back down the path. I watched her through a crack in the blinds. The old woman came out of the house opposite with an umbrella. Rain glanced off Victoria’s coat; her hair stuck to her face. They talked. The old woman looked back up at Gulls and shrugged. Victoria clapped her hand to her head and got back into her car.

A text. Where are you?

I left my boots; of course I did. Annoying, as they were absurdly expensive and I can’t see a way of getting them back – not that she’ll ever know for sure they’re mine. But ‘the drawing’: that was stupid. Did I sign my name? A stupid slip. I’ll have to bluff it out.

On the road from Dartmoor, I wrote. Who is this? Pressed ‘Send’.

A banging from the bathroom door. ‘I’m ready to come out.’

‘Give me a few minutes,’ I said.

Next text: You’re lying, you fucker. I know it was you. I’m not stupid. Where is my daughter, you pathetic man?

My blood pressure rose at that. I stood to try to recover my composure. I peered through the slats. There she was, mistress of the universe, sitting out there, in that smooth sleek black BMW, with her slew of inherited houses, her politician husband, her stuck-up face and her vile mouth. She thinks she knows everything. She knows
nothing
. I might have followed her down here all those years ago, not for love, of course – though it was satisfying to seduce her that once – but for social admiration, a sense that she was living a life that could belong to me. But it’s empty, all that, I realise it now. All that education. She doesn’t even know how to look after her own child. It’s impossible to state how irritated I felt by her superiority, her sense of entitlement. She thinks she’s better than me. Her horror that I had spent time with her offspring. Her noxious combination of snobbery and hypocrisy.

I couldn’t stop myself. I wrote, What a lovely girl Onnie is. What a treat to spend the night with her. Oh, the sweet joy of youthful flesh.

The phone rang again almost immediately. I watched it skittle across the table. I realised I was smiling. It rang off finally. And then several texts all at once.

You fucker.

You don’t know what you’ve done.

She’s 17.

I was beginning to enjoy myself. If I’d wanted to wait two decades to serve my revenge, I couldn’t have planned it better.

Young enough to be my daughter, I replied.

A moment. A pause. And then her last text pinged in. I stared at it, aware of the BMW outside roaring into life and driving off. She’d gone. It was still a few seconds – five or six maybe – before the text reached my brain.

Even then. The words jerked, in and out of focus. They made no sense. A bad joke. A clumsy reiteration of how young Onnie was. A predictive mistake.

They made no sense
. What did they need to make sense? The synapses in my brain fired, connections were made. A night years ago. A party at the hotel, gatecrashing some arsehole’s twenty-first, flirting with Vic because it was fun to see Murphy, little round tummy in a stiff suit, the youngest MP in the history of the Tory Party, scowling across the room at me. And Vic, not yet bitter, but flexing against the bonds of early motherhood and Important Wifedom, desperate to flirt and be found desirable, dragging me on to the beach. Drunk with the night and the attention, completely off her head with it, letting me fuck her down on the rocks, under the overhang of the cliff.

When was it? Sixteen, seventeen years ago? Maybe. Probably. 1994. The maths could work. It was before I bought Gulls. The next time I saw her, after my mother died and left me the money, Onnie was a toddler, up on the headland, kicking her legs on Murphy’s shoulders. It had never occurred to me even to wonder.

I read it again, letting the content settle.

She IS your daughter.

‘Let me out!’ Banging from the bathroom door.

‘Wait,’ I said.

My daughter. Her eyes, I suppose, could be said to be like mine, perhaps the shape of our faces. Her restlessness. Her interest in the more obscure aspects of pharmaceutical production. But what else? Nothing. Murphy’s large hands clamped those kicking legs, her fleshy knees under his hairy knuckles.

Guilt? Remorse? No, not me. I threw back my head, and laughed. I poured myself another malt, dipped my finger in Kulon’s plastic bag.

The delicious position in which I found myself finally dawned. Victoria would never denounce me now. What sweet agony. Having to watch me carry on as if nothing had happened. Never to be able to tell, for the sake of her own daughter’s sanity. And Lizzie would never find out.

I opened the bathroom door and released Onnie, the fruit of my loins, from the bathroom. I gave her some dry clothes to wear, some shorts that she secured with one of my belts, a sweatshirt. She told me she loved me and wanted to be with me. Did I love her? she asked. I prodded around to see if I could find an emotion – a paternal instinct perhaps – but the probe came up clean. ‘Yes I do,’ I said, wishing the words were true. But it’s not in my make-up. Am I to be blamed for that?