The Twisted Heart (8 page)

A few minutes of padding along and she was home. She whacked the hall light button with her thumb. After you did this, the bulb remained on for exactly four minutes.

‘Where have you been?' Michaela stepped out of her room and pounced on Kit, successfully exuding an air of blame.

‘Evening, Mum.'

‘Come on.'

‘I went, okay? I went. I
went
.'

‘Seriously?'

‘Yes.'

‘Hey, brilliant. Don't tell me in those trousers. I don't believe it. You're the end. You look so pale. What happened?'

‘If you must know, we ended up back at his place.'

‘You're joking me. Kit! After all the grief you've put me through?'

‘I've put
you
through? Bloody hell.'

‘Kit you—hey, wait a minute. You naughty girl. You didn't just—?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Put that one away! What's he like? Why didn't you stay over? You're a close one. How was it?'

Kit smiled while trying to look arch, hoping by this means to convey sophisticated amusement—after which, feebly, she added, ‘It was great.'

‘Good for you,' cried Michaela.

And because Kit's mood was resistless, this made her grin.

‘What's he like?'

‘It was great,' said Kit wearily.

Michaela narrowed her eyes. ‘Better than a slosh in the mush, I suppose.'

You are, Kit thought, a small and irritating person—infuriating, even.
Infuriating Michaela
, you know nothing. I dislike you, thought Kit.

‘Fancy you!' said Michaela with a wink.

Kit grinned again, absurdly fortified by this second-hand enthusiasm; then, once again, she wilted. In bored tones, she said, ‘I'll give you your dress back tomorrow.'

‘Hey,' called Michaela, ‘remind me in future not to tell you what to do. And, Kit, get some proper shut-eye, for God's sake, you look like you really need it.' As she retreated backwards into her room, Michaela slammed her door shut, thus cutting in half her sign-off, ‘Sleep ti—'

‘Look what the cat dragged in,' said Michaela, swishing.

Kit got to her feet confused, exposed, her open notebook and a saucepan of custard in front of her on the kitchen table.

‘He asked me if you lived here,' said Michaela.

Kit had assumed, without great regret, that she would never see Joe again, or at worst, that they would half acknowledge each other on the street some surprise day in the future. Michaela notwithstanding, she had hardly thought about him since the previous Friday, putting him to the back of her mind if for no other reason than to ward off shame.

She closed the notebook. She had stretched out to it instinctively, wanting something to do, to appear engaged. She wasn't ready for this situation.

‘I knew it had to be one of these buildings,' said Joe, ‘so long as you meant it last week about the other side of the Woodstock Road.'

‘And you just happened to ask Michaela?' Kit delivered her rejoinder with considerable bite, hand arrested on the tabletop.

‘She wasn't the first,' replied Joe evenly. ‘And you left several glass slippers when you ran away.'

‘I just
did
happen to be coming back to this shit hole,' said Michaela, ‘bloody Friday and there he is wandering
around like a lost dog, so we have a little parlez-vous and don't go glaring at me like that, Kit. He found me, I didn't find him. What do you think?'

Of course Michaela hadn't gone and found him. How could she have? As well as feeling confused, Kit now felt daft. Me, I'm the lost dog, she thought.

Almost before Joe had begun, Michaela spoke across him, ‘She would'—as he said to Kit, ‘I was wondering if you'd like to—as it's Friday, it's—'

Both of them stopped.

‘Feel free not to answer on my behalf,' snapped Kit at Michaela, who was already removing herself from the scene. ‘Later, darlings,' she crooned, as she backed merrily out of the kitchen.

‘God,' said Kit. She and Joe, eyes askance, listened until they heard Michaela's door close. ‘What exactly did she say to you?'

‘It's all right,' said Joe.

Kit had been sitting there eating custard off a wooden spoon, reviewing her notes from the morning, which she'd spent in the library. Between the library and home she had gone to the supermarket, where she'd found herself mooching past the section with tins of Bird's custard powder—the shelf-stackers were discussing it, it didn't come in actual tins any more—and had remembered all about Bird's, eating it as a child. There she had stood, remembering how much she'd liked to eat custard off a wooden spoon when her mother made it, because, after her mother decanted the custard into a diamond-pattern
jug, Kit had always been allowed to scrape out the saucepan. All spoons should be made of wood, she thought. She had felt pained for herself as a child, thinking how solitary that character now seemed; which had caused her to buy a container of Bird's and extra milk, and to go home and at once make a pint of custard in a large, flat pan, letting it cool for a while because she also liked puncturing the skin. These days, her mother bought ready-made custard that tasted synthetic, had no skin, and poured over the carton lip in gouts.

‘Did you know, in—' Kit blinked anxiously, unsure how long she'd been standing there failing to communicate, ‘—in the Co-op they put custard powder and Fray Bentos pies, yuk, and coffee sugar and I'm not sure, they put that kind of thing on the lower-down shelves, so that the old folks who like it can reach?'

She hadn't entirely allowed herself to take in that Joe was holding a bunch of freesias. When he handed them to her, she jumped. With a gruff, ‘Thanks, thank you,' she pulled a slender knife from amongst the cutlery in the strainer and took it to the little elastic bands wound at intervals round the stems. Jerkily, as she severed them, they flicked off onto the floor.

‘Flowers!' she said. She sounded almost mocking. Bother, she thought.

Her empty cherry jam jar from the week before was still in the recycling crate, glass and office paper. Kit didn't own a vase, so she retrieved the jar, filled it with water and cut the freesias short—too short, it turned out. She was making a mess of everything. She arranged the twelve
stems in a crude fan shape, aware of being silent again as she did so.

When she had finished, she said, ‘I guess I'll put these in my room.' She didn't want Michaela to enjoy them.

‘Christ,' said Joe, ‘it looks like you've been burgled.'

Kit stared at the scene. ‘This isn't random,' she said, ‘at least, not to me. I'm trying to work out some stuff. This is my mind spread out on the floor. And the laundry pile,' as luck would have it, embarrassingly heaped by the door, ‘—the house washing machine is broken. I was thinking I might just do it all myself in the bath. I was going to go to the laundrette in South Parade,' where she had had visions of meeting a handsome boy reading Kafka by the drying machines or, more obscurely, reading Donald Barthelme.

‘This is all the space you have?'

She pulled a face.

‘Right,' said Joe.

‘Middle of the ballot. It's meant to be a married flat, but the college has hardly any married students this year. And then it was supposed to be being done up because it's in such bad nick, but they fell behind and—I don't know, they chronically lack accommodation, so the domestic bursar just decided to shove another bed into this room and—' Kit put the flowers in the corner on the tiny mantlepiece over the tiny, boarded-up fireplace. ‘It's fine. It's nice being up high—high in the air. I like being on top of everything.'

‘In this one respect, at least?'

‘Thanks,' she said. Had she positively wished him to be there, his feeling free to tease her might have been pleasant. Instead, she felt criticised.

She didn't know what to do. Why had she gone and brought him into her room? She couldn't believe she was entertaining a stranger in her bedroom, and the business of having slept with him only made it worse.

Friday afternoon, time was sloping forwards. She didn't know what to do. By freakish chance he had succeeded in finding her; although it wasn't so much amazing that he'd succeeded as that he'd tried. She attempted to like him for it. It put him in a different light. It almost put
her
in a different light. He'd come and found her, with flowers. She gestured at her desk chair, seating herself stiffly on the bed.

Of course, she hadn't wholly forgotten, Friday, about the Intermediate class, had been passingly conscious that it would occur that evening, up out eastwards, St Christopher's church hall, on the night side of town. But her thoughts about it, all two of them, had been restricted to wondering whether or not Joe would go, and, if he went, who his partner would be.

‘No TV?' he said as he sat down.

‘No,' she said. ‘I sometimes watch things on my computer.'

‘If there's ever a programme you want to catch, come to my place,' he said, ‘if you like.'

She clutched at this thought in a disconnected way; it was such a dull proposition. His washing machine, on the other hand? Perhaps not. Kit got up to move the jar of flowers
again, which, because her arrangement was so inept, refused to appear symmetrical over the fireplace. Their smell was already clouding the room with sweetness. ‘Michaela has a TV in her room,' Kit mumbled, ‘I go and watch rubbish with her. She gets addicted to the most crazy things, I can't even tell you, like strongman races where they totter along carrying real cars, that sort of thing.'

She was feeling more and more claustrophobic. The flowers still looked wrong. She got up yet again, wanting to correct this one detail, if no other.

While she fretted, Joe began to read on the floor, and then picked up, an A3 photocopy she had made from microfilm of a page from an early Victorian copy of
The Times
. Kit turned suddenly around, alert to the rustle of paper and the subsequent depth of Joe's silence. She had highlighted sections of the minute newsprint in yellow, and could see that he was jumping between these lurid sentences, engrossed, until he broke his own spell by reading out loud: ‘Coroner: “One of the wounds was inflicted by stabbing through the stays, and I imagine the murderer seized hold of the top of the stays on the opposite side with his left hand, and with the other hand then—” What is this?'

He held the photocopy away from him, then brought it back close, reading out more. ‘“I have altered my opinion since the first holding of the inquest as to the infliction of the wound at the back of the neck. I at first supposed that the injury was inflicted first, because I considered after the extensive wound in the front of the neck the murderer would have had no object in inflicting the second; but now I am of a different opinion, and I think that the wound in the back
of the neck was perpetrated after that in the throat, for the purpose of severing the head from the body”—Kit,' said Joe, ‘a beheading?'

‘Are you actually asking me about it?' All week she had been struggling to make her thesis introduction sound lofty and judicious, but that morning, unpersuaded by her own efforts, and bored by this self-imposed task, she had fallen off the straight and narrow path, so beguiled by what she'd chosen to do instead that she had managed to miss the day's ‘Best of British' at the Phoenix,
Performance
, not a film she knew.

‘This is to do with your DPhil, is it?' Joe asked.

‘Maybe slightly, a bit. It's a curious case, hugely famous at the time, an unsolved murder. It's pretty interesting, actually. I've just been working on it today.'

‘Yes?'

She sat back down on the bed, freesias abandoned. ‘Okay, well, that piece of paper in your hand gives the details of a second post mortem on the body of a prostitute, Eliza Grimwood, murdered in Waterloo, London, 1838, off the Waterloo Road. The actual terrace doesn't exist any more. It was a slum back then. Basically, she was killed a couple of minutes' walk from where you'd be sitting if you were at a concert in the Festival Hall.'

As Joe seemed perfectly attentive, Kit carried on, though she was mostly now rehearsing these facts for herself. ‘She was found a little before dawn on the floor beside her bed, toppled over backwards from a kneeling position with a blanket half thrown over her. The medical witnesses hedged about a bit, as you were reading, but came to the conclusion that she'd been killed by having her throat slashed
open. She was also stabbed in the breast and the womb area, but not until after she was dead, they thought, you'll see where it—' Kit jumped up and leant over to point at one of the sections she had highlighted, then read it out to confirm what she was saying: ‘“There was no effusion of blood from these wounds, and they were inflicted after death”, equals, I guess, psychotic kind of stuff—I mean, they reckoned these further mutilations were severe enough that they themselves would have done her in if she hadn't been dead already.' As Kit sat down again, she realised that she wasn't feeling quite so awkward, and wondered whether Joe had asked her about her work with this in mind. ‘Added to which,' she said, catching up with herself, ‘as you were just reading, the murderer then attempted to cut her head off.
The Times
said—its first adjective, or rather, adverb, on the case—that she had been killed “inhumanly”, which makes you wonder what “human” means, in a way.'

‘Sounds a bit Jack-the-Ripperish,' said Joe.

‘Absolutely. I quite agree. Although that was decades later. But I mean, yes. And her room was drenched in blood. There was blood all over the floor, and it was splashed across the walls four feet from the corpse, presumably because of how her throat was cut, or so they reckoned.' These were the gruesome details Dickens had judged too sordid for his family journal; and it was in poring over them that Kit had spent many absorbing hours of her day.

‘Where does this fit in with your work?'

It was a fair question. ‘I don't know,' Kit replied gaily, then felt stupid. ‘No, it's just that—' She halted, retrenched, and said, ‘Please tell me what it is you do.'

Joe put the piece of paper back down in its place amidst the chaos on the floor. ‘I work for the university.'

‘I know, you said that last time.'

She watched him as he weighed up whether or not to answer properly.

‘I'm a lecturer,' he said.

‘A lecturer?' She was astonished.

‘Yes.'

‘In?'

‘Maths.'

They both paused now while she took this in. She clasped her hands together, then let go again. ‘You're a
maths
fellow?'

‘Yes.'

‘A
don?
'

‘Yes.

She shook her head, almost indignant at having been so completely misled—even if by her own imagination—admin?—though perhaps it was more accurate to say that she hadn't been led anywhere much at all. Whatever; she felt completely fooled. He was a lecturer? At the university?

‘What did you think I did?'

She couldn't say, so she lifted up her shoulders in a shrug and then just held them like that.

‘Well, now you know.'

Now she knew, yes. ‘Is there any use my asking you what you work on?' she said, trying to control herself. He bore no relation to her image of a mathematician.

‘You can ask,' he replied. ‘My research isn't in good
shape right now. I've got what feels like an unmanageable teaching load this term, which is denting my will to live, frankly, compounded by the fact that I've just started giving a course of Part C lectures on algebraic geometry.'

‘Oh,' said Kit. If only Michaela had still been there. Michaela, who was a physicist, might have understood. ‘What—' Kit rued being so very ignorant, ‘what—what subjects would that cover?'