Signs of Life (19 page)

The fat-faced builder keeps popping up at the window, usually with a phone pressed to his ear. He may have good reason to be on the phone, perhaps he’s the foreman or
something, but there are other places he could talk, it doesn’t have to be the window opposite me. I think the phone is an alibi.

(Usually I object to the use of the word ‘pop’ unless it refers to bread in the toaster, or bubbles. I can’t stand it when people say they are going to
‘pop’ to a shop, for example. Toast pops. Bubbles pop. People do not. And yet I can’t think of a better way of describing how the fat-faced builder appears at the window; he
really does pop up – like a Jack-in-the-box. Or toast.)

The bottle of whiskey on Carl’s desk was the excuse they finally used to sack him. I don’t know where the whiskey came from. I have a feeling that Sheryl/Michelle
gave it to him, though she could barely have been old enough to purchase alcohol. In any case, the whiskey was important to him. It sat on his desk, an open gesture of defiance. The bottle had been
opened, some of the whiskey had been drunk, but the level never seemed to go down. And yet Carl would arrive, late, unwashed and unshaven for days at a time, with puffed shadows under his eyes. He
wouldn’t make eye contact. He was definitely drinking something hard, but not from this bottle.

The whiskey reminded me of the perfume that Carl gave me at the very beginning of our affair: same square bottle only larger, our affair book-ended by these two bottles of amber liquid, with the
end much bigger than the beginning. Like the perfume on my shelf, which signalled Carl’s entry into my life, the whiskey on his desk became largely symbolic, something to do with his exit. He
was sacked for a symbolic reason, and he accepted that. I see now there was a certain dignity in how he played that.

I was slowly merging back in with my people – management, the rule-makers – and as I re-joined my group, he struck out on his own. Without a job, or some sort of structure to
undermine, what does a rule-breaker do? Carl had more time for brooding. Perhaps he also spent a lot of time at the climbing wall, or climbing random buildings, I don’t know, but certainly
his obsession darkened and deepened. I used to think that I was the object of his obsession but now I am not so sure that obsession
has
an object – I think there are vehicles that the
obsessive locks onto, thinking they will carry the weight of it, take some of the unbearable heavy pain away, but of course they don’t – can’t, even if they are willing to.

Last night I was woken by horrible shrill screams that went on and on. They came from the street outside. When I looked out of the window I saw a fox in the street. Perhaps it
had been chasing or fighting something but now it stood silent by a parked car, looking down the dark street, and then leapt onto a high wall and padded softly away. I was surprised how small and
thin it was – not much bigger than an adult cat – and how nimble. This morning I saw muddy paw prints on the skylight in my room, I wondered if they were made by the fox, but I
didn’t hear anything on my roof last night. I suppose they could have been there before and I just didn’t notice them. I can’t tell by the size of the paw prints if they belong to
a fox or a cat. Now it is raining heavily and they are being washed away.

The crane is like a weather vane for a different stratum: when idle, the lifting hook hangs so very high that it sways even when the air is breathless down here. I like to
watch the crane turn sedately and I like to see what comes up on the hook (earlier it was a great bundle of dripping blue net that looked like it had been dredged up from the bottom of the sea).
Often the crane doesn’t move at all for quite long periods of time and the man waits alone up there in his bubble.

Today he’s wearing blue jeans and a red T-shirt. At the moment he is out of sight because the cab has swung right round. Then back he slowly comes, with tons of blocks wrapped in a blue
plastic sheet that flutters in the breeze like washing on a line. I am beginning to understand why people watch sports like cricket or darts or golf.

There seems to be much more traffic in the sky. Or maybe I am simply seeing what is already there because I am looking at the crane so much.

I didn’t want to let Molly go, especially to this crazed freak, but I wanted the calls and threats to stop and she was, after all, his. He wanted his cat back. He had
just moved into a flat on the fifth floor. A friend of his at work gave me the address and a key. The plan was that I would take Molly and all her things to this flat. Carl would be out. I wanted
to see Molly into her new home, and maybe I was curious as to what sort of life that would be, what sort of place Carl was in now.

The morning I was due to deliver Molly, I dug out her lead from the dusty box and took my shoes out of her cat basket. I washed the red and white gingham cushion by hand, cleaned the food and
water bowls, and wiped the inside of the basket with a hot cloth. The litter tray had long gone and I had asked Carl via his friend to buy a new one. I folded over the top of the bag of cat food
and sealed in its pungent, salty smell with tape. I had bought some single cream for Molly, as a treat, and imagined basking in the sun with her or having her paddle my lap and then sleep on me for
one last time, but of course that didn’t happen – it was a grey day and Molly was nowhere to be seen. This made me anxious and I began thinking I should have kept her in the night
before. But she’s going to be a prisoner again soon enough, I thought, damning Carl for choosing a high rise flat. Anyway. Molly came back and the taxi came. There wasn’t time to give
Molly the cream.

I carried her and all her things up five flights of stairs and didn’t stop until I got to the door – blue, with a frayed, dusty doormat and some take-away menus and a free local
newspaper sticking out of the letterbox. I reached into my back pocket for the key and went in. I wasn’t sure how to say goodbye. I was sweating and out of breath and now I started to cry.
The flat was horrible, as I knew it would be. Molly jumped down from my shoulder. Her weight leaving mine was a physical wrench. I suppressed the tears; the journey here had taken longer because of
traffic and Carl would be back soon. No time for crying. A state-of-the-art television dominated the room, a huge thing, silver, like my car.

So much of it happened in cars. With Carl, the parallel lines arrangement of driving soon suited me; sitting next to someone in a car does not require intimacy. When things were bad between us,
in the period when I was trying to break up with him but before I really had, we barely spoke for a four-hour journey. I was driving. It was dark. I was thirsty. A small bottle of water lay at his
feet, I kept looking at it, wondering if I could lean down and reach it myself but I was scared to in case he kicked me. He probably wouldn’t have kicked me, but that is how the atmosphere
was. As we approached the outskirts of the city, I broke the silence: Could I have a drink of water?

You want a drink of water?

Yes, please, I said.

Right.

Carl wound down the passenger window and threw the bottle out. He wound the window back up. He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I.

Carl’s apartment – Molly’s new home – was filled with stale air. There was a full ashtray on the floor beside the big television and a few empty beer
bottles. The gingham cushion that went inside Molly’s basket was still damp; it would absorb the smell thoroughly and I chided myself for not having made time to dry it in my garden. There
was nothing green or alive in this place and from this side of the room, not even a tree was visible. I went to the sash window and opened it as far as it would go. It slid up easily and banged at
the top. There was a pedestrian square immediately below, some bushes and litterbins around it and, a street or two away, the tops of trees swaying in the breeze. I looked for the highest leaf,
which took some time because the branches were moving, found it and then realized how much it bothered me that I couldn’t see the trunks of these trees: This is all wrong, I thought –
to keep a cat in a room higher than the trees she should be climbing – it’s all upside down.

I folded up the plastic carrier bag and put it next to the basket. I would have to say goodbye now. The last clear thing I remember from that afternoon is the sharp relief with which I noticed
her empty water bowl: I couldn’t leave her without water! I took the bowl into the kitchen to fill. When I came back into the sitting room, with the full bowl of water, Molly was crouching on
the windowsill, looking out of the open window, attentive. Misgiving shot through me but it was too late. A bird flew past; she leapt.

Yesterday evening I went out and, at the end of my street, by the church, I walked through the smell of a fox. There was a definite edge to it – I walked in and out of it
a few times, to check – and then tried to pinpoint the source; I went up close to some shrubbery by the church door but it only smelt of greenery, and so I put my nose to the walls and they
only smelt of brick and dust. I couldn’t locate the smell on something concrete (I wasn’t going to get down and sniff the pavement) and yet it was such a strong presence, hanging in the
air like an invisible cloud.

I don’t remember what I did with the water bowl. I don’t remember getting out of the flat and down the stairs and out onto the concrete where Molly lay. There was
no need to check whether she had survived the drop and yet there was no blood, at least I don’t remember any. I don’t think I touched her. I have no idea how long I knelt by her side. I
don’t remember Carl showing up; he was suddenly there. Words may have been spoken, but not many were necessary. It was obviously an accident; animals don’t commit suicide, although
another way of looking at it is that I gave Molly a way out and she took it. Carl dropped down and placed both his hands very gently on Molly’s soft body. His own body juddered with soundless
sobbing. We were kneeling together like this, for a moment. Then something shifted – I am almost certain that my fear took hold just before his anger arrived and that I got to my feet before
he lunged at me, otherwise I don’t know how I would have got away from him. I ran into the apartment block, up five flights of stairs, back into the flat and slammed the door shut. Carl was
behind me for some of it, I heard his footsteps landing heavy on the staircase and heard him curse me, but by the time I shut the door he was not there. I cut my hand on the latch when I locked the
door behind me, so now there was my blood, none of Molly’s and none, yet, of Carl’s. Strange that mine should be the first blood on the floor. I held the bleeding hand with the other
hand but I couldn’t feel the cut. I was shaking hard now; fear and adrenalin chased the breath out of my body and it felt like drowning.

I saw a painting by Jasper Johns in the New York Museum of Modern Art, or it might have been the Met. The painting is called ‘Diver’ and is about the death of the
poet Hart Crane, who committed suicide by jumping off the back of a boat into the Gulf of Mexico, off the Florida coast. I hadn’t known this about Hart Crane until I saw the painting. As I
remembered it, the painting featured his two dark brown footprints on a dark red background, but when I looked it up again recently it wasn’t like that at all – it’s more watery.
I actually prefer the version I have in my head to the real painting but anyhow, it shows Hart Crane’s dive, as a suspended moment between life and death; just a moment between the two. I
think that’s terrifying, and a little bit thrilling. It reminds me of Johnny telling me to let myself fall into the pool below the waterfall.

I would have been better off running away from Carl in the streets. Running into his building and up to his apartment and slamming the door was like running away from him by
running towards him.

The time I locked the office door after Carl without thinking not only kept him away from me but also stopped me from going after him. This time was different. On neither occasion was reasoning
involved and yet both times a choice was made, my body decided and my head wondered about my real intention afterwards.

Apparently I called the police from Carl’s flat. They have my name and the time of the call on record and have shown me this and yet I have no memory whatsoever of
speaking to them. Apparently I said that Molly was dead and that Carl was coming to get me. I didn’t mention that Molly was a cat, which would be another reason they came so quickly. The fact
that I called the police helped me later; it cast me more as a victim than a perpetrator.

At Carl’s funeral, I begin to cry and as I do, I realize that I haven’t yet done so, about Carl or about Johnny, which only seems like another failure and so I cry
all the way through the funeral. I am genuinely crying but I am also aware that this looks good, or better than being completely dry-eyed, especially since the two police officers who were first on
the scene attend the funeral. The detectives who visited and questioned me in hospital were not present, but I figured that the two police officers would tell the two detectives that I was
inconsolable.

Our Kid wore a black suit, which he managed to make look like a pair of pyjamas, just the way they hung, loosely, off him. Perhaps he made everything he wore look like pyjamas, or perhaps it
wasn’t his suit. Our Kid was forlorn. I couldn’t help feeling that he had been orphaned again by Carl’s death and I cried about this too. My sister, who accompanied me and looked
incredible in a tight black dress and hair in a sober ponytail, said: It’s not your responsibility,
he’s
not your responsibility. But he has
nobody
, I wept. Well then,
who’s that? she riposted, gesturing to a portly older woman sitting next to Our Kid. An
aunt
, I wailed. Aunts are great, said my sister crisply, and we left.

My sister came to stay after Carl was killed, but I didn’t want a nursemaid. What I wanted was not to have been there and since this could not be achieved I set out to
de-wire that part of my brain so I literally couldn’t go there again.