To Kill For (11 page)

After we ate, we wandered along Regent Street and Bond Street, Brenda stopping every five feet to gasp at a dress or piece of jewellery in some posh shop window, dragging me by the arm and saying things like ‘Look, Joe, isn't it beautiful' and ‘Look how expensive it is' and stuff like that.

When she saw Liberty's, she pulled me towards it.

‘I came here once, years ago. They have such lovely cloth. You should see it.'

I saw it. It was cloth, alright. The place was still open so we went inside. It smelled sweet with all the soaps and scents. It made my nose itch. Brenda was wide-eyed with it all, stroking silks, sniffing candles, hefting cotton, and showing it all to me.

‘Isn't it beautiful?' she kept saying.

She saw some handbags and went off to look at them. My back was bad by this time, so I found one of their small chairs and took a seat. After a while I couldn't see Brenda and I knew I was in for the long haul. It didn't matter. I sat and watched the people, tourists gaping at the colourful cloth and looking awkwardly about, city blokes buying silk ties, dusty old women trying on scarves, thin women dabbing perfume on their wrists, all of them like they were in some kind of wonderland. I suppose it was an escape for them, for Brenda too.

Every now and then, one of the security guards would walk slowly past, looking at me directly. I got the message. After a while, I had an idea. I remembered all the cheap creams that Brenda had bought at the market that time.

I got up and wandered over to the cosmetics section. The woman at the counter was polite, but I could see she wanted to be rid of me as quickly as possible. I couldn't blame her for that. I must have been a bad advertisement for them. I asked her for a gift box of some kind, something a beautician might like. She brought out a few. I paid eighty quid for some purple thing with an Italian name. I got the woman to wrap it up for me.

I went back to my seat and waited. A half hour later, the lift doors opened and Brenda came out. She stopped short when she saw me. She looked at the bag at my feet. She said, ‘What on earth have you got there?'

‘Beauty stuff.'

She looked from the bag to my face and burst out laughing.

‘You're gonna to need a bigger bag,' she said.

Then she burst out laughing again.

I stood and gave her the bag and she said she'd open it when we got back. She reached up and kissed my cheek. I think she was happy then, at that exact moment. We went home.

She was quiet on the tube back, gazing at nothing, thinking, I thought, about those dresses and necklaces and handbags, dreaming, like people do, about how one day she'd buy one of them for herself. Every now and then she'd look down at the bag or lift it up and weigh it.

It was when we were walking down the Caledonian Road, back towards her flat, she tottering by my side in her high heels, one arm in mine, the other swinging the Liberty bag, that she asked me if I believed in a god. I said, ‘No.'

She said, ‘I mean, don't you think it's even slightly possible?'

She'd asked me all this before. I'd told her I thought it was all bollocks and she'd told me the same thing. Now she was asking me again and I wondered why. What did she want me to say?

‘You didn't go to church when you were young?' she said.

‘I went sometimes, while I was too small to do anything about it.'

‘Why did you go?'

‘My parents took me.'

‘But they didn't give you religion.'

‘They gave it to me till I was black and blue.'

‘They beat you?'

‘My old man did. My mum didn't do anything to stop him.'

‘Why'd he hit you?'

‘Drunk,' I said, ‘or full of hatred for everything. Himself, mostly.'

‘But he was a Christian.'

‘He said he was. Lots of people do.'

‘And your brothers and sisters?'

‘They got it too, not so bad.'

She was quiet for a while. She'd stopped swinging the bag. It was stupid of me, I knew, to talk of these things. I wanted her to stay happy. I should have lied, I suppose.

‘That doesn't make any sense,' she said, ‘Beating a child.'

‘You think it should make sense?'

‘Christianity's about mercy and tolerance.'

‘Yeah, well, my old man tried to beat mercy and tolerance into me.'

We were silent after that, walking along in the cool of the dusk, the low sun spreading light over everything and giving it all a glow. When we neared a pub called the Winston Churchill, Brenda pulled me in.

‘I need a drink,' she said.

We'd been in there before. Brenda seemed to like it. It was a sixties building, too new to have any character, too old to look new. The red carpet had worn away in places, the tables and chairs looked like they'd been bought second hand.

It was mostly empty. A few people sat in groups of two or three. It was a long way from Bond Street jewellers and the rich mob we'd seen in Liberty's. Nobody here had anything to prove, or maybe they'd given up trying. They had their own problems. I think that's why Brenda wanted to go there. She wanted to try and push the rest of it out of her mind. She wanted to get back to the real world. She wanted to stab the dream to death before she could start believing it. Anyway, she hadn't dragged me in there for the booze; she had plenty of that at her flat.

I bought a couple of drinks and we took a seat at a corner table. Music was crackling out from battered speakers. The light was dim. There was laughter and chatter. There was a smell of crisps and beer and mildew and furniture polish.

Brenda was quiet. We sat there, her stirring her gin and tonic with her finger, me looking at her, waiting, looking around at others. I wondered if she was going to tell me we were over. I suppose I always half expected that, anyway. I tried to tell myself it didn't matter, but I felt a coldness grip my stomach when I thought of it.

Finally, she pulled her finger from the gin and sucked on it a moment. Then she looked at me and saw that I was looking at her. She smiled, but she couldn't make it look real. It was just too hard for her to do.

‘I've got to work tomorrow,' she said.

She tried to make it sound casual. I said, ‘Uh-huh.'

It was something in the way she said it, the way she looked away from me, the way she went back to stirring her gin with her finger. There was something else about the job, something wrong. Or, rather, something worse than normal, something beyond lonely old men who only wanted a fumble because they couldn't get it up, or drunk businessmen who wanted to display a bit of their power by buying a tart for an hour, or married men who wanted someone else, anyone else.

‘What is it?' I said.

She'd stopped stirring the gin, now, and just watched it, like she was looking at something she'd lost and could never have again. After a minute, she looked up and around at the other people in the pub. Finally she looked at me and forced a shrug.

‘A film.'

She'd made films before for Marriot.

‘What about it?' I said.

‘It's a special.'

That was how she said it. ‘A special.'

Something inside me went cold.

I didn't push it. I suppose I should have. I didn't have the words. I didn't have whatever I should have had. I was just a lump.

I don't know what I would have done anyway. I don't know if I could've changed anything. I might have done nothing, I might have done everything. I would have tried to help her, maybe, for what that was worth. I'd tried to get her to leave the business before but she'd fought me. I hadn't understood it at the time.

I suppose I might have saved her. I might have killed her, like I later killed Kid. I touch something, it dies.

I think, then, sitting there in the Winston Churchill, Brenda was caught between telling me the whole of it, spilling everything, wondering, probably, if I could help her. Maybe she knew better than me what my reaction would've been. Maybe that's why she didn't say anything. Or maybe she wanted me to ask her, take the responsibility out of her hands.

Anyway, we sat there and listened to the crackling music and the tar-filled laughter and throaty chatter of the people around, and at the silence of our thoughts. We smelled the crisps and the beer and the mildew and the furniture polish and the dankness that came with it all. We looked at faded prints on faded walls and at the people, the old, young, empty, faded people, clinging to this moment of escape, more real for them than all that bollocks up the West End. We looked at all that and, sometimes, we would look at each other.

We walked back to her block of flats. The lift was working for once, so we took it up. She pushed herself close to me. It was warm in that metal box. She shivered and I put my arm around her.

‘I feel safe with you,' she said.

‘Good.'

When we got into her flat, she didn't bother turning on the light. She kicked her shoes off and turned the fan on and fell onto the sofa. She hugged the Liberty's bag and closed her eyes. I went and made us a coffee. When I brought it back, she hadn't moved, and her eyes were shut. I put her mug down by her foot and took mine over to the window and looked out over North London. It was dark now and from Brenda's place you could see the reservoirs up by Chingford and Edmonton, lights reflected in them. You could see Ally Pally up high and White Hart Lane and all the roads with bright insects crawling along them. It wasn't something for the tourists, it wasn't for those dusty old birds in Liberty's or the young thin ones who'd be dusty in thirty years or the fat white men with fat white bank accounts who these women wanted to please. It wasn't anything you could care about, but in the dark you could forget all the concrete and crowds and endless exhaust fumes and for a moment, if you were with your bird in a flat up high, you could think it wasn't so bad.

I felt Brenda's arm curl around my waist.

‘Thank you,' she said.

‘For what?'

‘For everything.'

She held me. We looked at the view.

Later, we were sitting in front of the TV. She was curled up next to me, holding me. The smoke from her cigarette was floating like a cloud in the middle of the room, just hanging there, as if time had stopped.

She said, ‘Tell me something, Joe.'

‘About what?'

‘I don't know. Anything. Tell me something about you. Tell me something nobody else knows.'

‘Why?'

She let her cigarette burn. The sound of the TV muttered into the silence.

‘I don't know why,' she said finally. ‘I just want you to tell me something.'

I started to tell her about my time in the Paras, about the slog of the Falklands, tabbing in that ankle-breaking terrain, the weight of the packs. I was going to tell her about the Argentine conscript, about how he still came to me, all these years later, in dreams or in dark moments, but she stopped me.

‘Not that,' she said. ‘Tell me something else. Tell me a story.'

I thought about that a while. I said, ‘There was this fight once—'

She put a hand on my stomach.

‘No.'

She looked up and put her hand onto my cheek and turned my face to her so that she could look at me in the eyes. She said, ‘Not that.'

I understood then. I nodded. I tried to think what to tell her. I couldn't think of anything. I felt clumsy, my mind breaking down, words not coming to me. I looked around her flat. I saw the print she had of Turner's Fighting Temeraire. I said, ‘When I was fifteen I made a boat. Out of wood. I stole some bits of pine from the woodwork class and I whittled a hull and sanded it. I made the masts out of a wooden coat hanger I found in a skip. This old bloke lived in a flat near us and he used to say hello to me when he saw me. I gave it to him.'

When I finished, she nodded.

‘That's good,' she said. ‘That's a good story. Now I'm gonna open my present.'

She sat up and grabbed the package and ripped the wrapping off.

‘Blimey. This musta cost a bloody fortune.'

She took the lid off and picked out the bottles and tubes. She looked at them and read the labels. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Thank you.'

She got up and went to a corner of the room, near the drinks cabinet. There she knelt and lifted a corner of the carpet away from the skirting board. She turned to me.

‘My secret hideaway.'

She fiddled about a bit and prised up a large white tile. There was a hole underneath, chiselled out of the concrete. She put the box I'd given her in there, then she peeled off the dress and folded that up and put it in. Her skin was like the night, endlessly dark, the darkness lighting the white strap of her bra. Her ribs rippled, her spine pushed at her skin. She looked so thin, so breakable.

She put the tile back and laid the carpet back on top. She made a drink then came back and curled herself up on the sofa, folding into me.

‘Only you know about that place,' she said into my chest.

‘What do you keep in there?'

‘Oh, this and that. Stuff. You know. Nothing worth much to anyone else but worth a lot to me.'

‘So why hide it?'

She thought about that for a while.

‘That story you told me, about making that ship and giving it to that old man, you never told anyone else?'

‘No.'

‘But it's not something you should be ashamed of, is it? I mean, there's no reason why you shouldn't tell anyone.'

‘No. No reason.'

‘I think it's like that, Joe. I think I need to keep something secret from everyone, something away from everything else. In a way, I think it's something I need to keep away from me. If you see what I mean. But I want you to know where I keep it.'

She turned her eyes up to me so that when I looked down at her, she looked like she was pleading with me.