Transgressions (18 page)

Downstairs the kitchen was ordinary, with even Millie consenting to be there, albeit equally ravenous and complaining. She fed the cat, then herself, going for a full breakfast of eggs, bacon, and two chunky pieces of toast, all to the accompaniment of Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey,” a love song from a time in his life when it seemed as if love came easily and brought with it guaranteed redemption. Dusk came in as he sang, and she felt happy.

Afterward she lay long in a hot bath, then went in search of some clothes. In the bedroom she found last night’s wardrobe storm-tossed around the room, the sweet evidence of someone’s lust for her. Even the smell of them was different. She picked them up, put them into the laundry basket, and went to the closet.

Getting dressed had assumed an unthinking monotony for her over the last months, always going for the same sort of garment, loose-fitting, enveloping, hiding rather than exposing or exploring. Now she found herself in search of something else, something tighter, something that she could feel, that showed her who she was.

She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a woman with a body—with curves and plumpness and hidden places—and it brought back a sudden longing for him. Or if not him then his touch. She imagined him standing behind her, slipping one of his hands inside the top of her T-shirt, cupping his palm under her breast, feeling its weight, teasing the nipple, bringing it to obedient erection. In the mirror her eyes sparked with reawakened desire. She felt a sudden confidence, almost a sense of happiness. Thanks, Malcolm, she said, allowing the rush of feeling toward him precisely because she knew she would never see him again, and because they had absolutely nothing between them but a night that was already gone.

The feeling gave way to one of contentment. It sat more easily with her. She had never been someone who had counted on or even anticipated happiness, was never one of those radiant young women who assumed that life would deliver what they asked of it as long as they wore the right shoes and reapplied mascara regularly enough. On the contrary, she had never really known what she wanted, had certainly never understood how to fit men into the landscape.

Instead she had simply treated them as sex. To her surprise she had found herself rather good at that, though some would have diagnosed it as a defense against feeling. She was adept at asking only for what they could give and she didn’t feel diminished by what they couldn’t. Rather she felt relieved. She had certainly never been interested in falling in love.

Tom had been the first one to call her bluff. He had needed to be adored, and in order for that to happen he had had to awaken that capacity in her. The trouble was once she’d been won, he wasn’t that interested in adoring her back. By the time she realized the depths of his narcissism it was already too late. By then she was hooked, and the sex had become emotion, which, of course, meant that it no longer offered any defense at all.

In the end her loyalty could only be eroded gradually, death by a thousand careless moments and unthinking remarks, a steady trawl of missed opportunities. And so, gradu-ally, she withdrew. Only by that time his ego had grown so monstrous with the feeding that he didn’t even notice she was no longer there to nourish it. No wonder their relationship took such an unconscionably long time to die.

But all of that was over now. And nine months down the line she was, finally, more like herself again. Last night, for all its traumas, had helped her realize that. She ran her finger lightly along the line of her breast and returned to the mundane task of brushing her teeth. Then she made herself a cappuccino and went up to her study to work.

And because she was feeling so steadied and so sure, it never occurred to her to wonder what she might find there as she pushed open the door and turned on the light.

twelve

I
f you counted the English version as well as the Czech there were probably something near to five hundred pages of manuscript scattered around the room. A snowstorm of huge white leaves, so wild it was almost beautiful, as if someone had held the sheaf under a fan and then let go. But white was not the only color. There was also red: great dark trails of it, smeared down the walls, running over the desk, flowing down the computer screen onto the keys, thick and glutinous.

She let out a long moan, a physical pain in the sound, the coffee cup falling from her fingers, adding its own streaks of dark color to the walls and floor. When, finally, she got her wits back she moved slowly across the room to the computer screen, her feet crunching on irregular verbs and images of violence. As she got closer she realized the machine was on, humming quietly, the screen so smeared with gunk that you could barely see what it showed. She put a finger out to touch the stuff. It was sticky. She pulled back and smelled it. There was a tangy, spicy quality to its scent. When she brought it to her lips the taste was unmistakable: ketchup—one of the world’s great fake bloods.

She used the palm of her hand to wipe it off the screen, leaving a dirty smear but uncovering what was written below. It was an extract from the book, an early test draft, English rather than Czech, with the letters big—blown up to three or four times their normal size. It read:

 

The door opened and the man walked in. Hurriedly, Mirka got up from the makeshift bed and turned to face him. “I want to—“

“Just shut the fuck up,” he interrupted, in coarse dialect. “No one gives a fuck what you want, d’you understand?”

She stopped, but still she held his gaze. The man stood watching her for a moment, then his face relaxed, and he grinned. “So, New York lady, what do you think we should do to that lovely body of yours, eh?”

And he moved toward her.

For a while she could do nothing. The sense of violation, the sheer magnitude of the intrusion, was so great that she couldn’t even think straight. She sat heavily on the computer chair staring at the screen and at the keyboard, where droplets of ketchup had sunk in between the letters, already dried and flaky. Like old blood. The viciousness behind the intention shook her into action. She reached for the phone and dialed a number. A man answered.

“Hello. Is Catherine Baker there?”

“No. I’m sorry. She’s away at a conference in Southampton.” A man’s voice, nice, husbandy. “She won’t be back until Friday. Can I take a message?”

She didn’t bother to reply and hung up the phone.

“Did you know that, too?” she said out loud to the room around her. No one answered. She dialed another number. Three digits. But before the voice could reply, “Emergency, which service do you require?” she pressed the disconnecting button, suddenly as scared of their scorn and disbelief as she was of the echo of violence around her.

And then, because there was nothing else that she could do, she started to think.

If Catherine Baker’s analysis was correct, and this latest act of vandalism was one more reflection of a psychic disturbance in her, then the only conclusion she could come to was that she was, in some way, clinically insane. There could surely be no other explanation for the chasm between her newly felt sense of calm and the room’s anarchistic violence. Yet how could anyone be that mad and not know it?

But if that was not the explanation, then there was only one other. That sometime between six
P.M.
last night, when she had gone out to meet Malcolm, and an hour ago, when she had woken up for the second time, some
body
rather than some
thing
had been in her house. Like all the other times, presumably, they had got in somehow through the French windows, then this time, having found the kitchen door open, they had climbed the stairs up to the attic and created havoc with a ketchup bottle.

A ketchup bottle? Theirs or hers? Suddenly such an absurd question seemed desperately important. She ran downstairs to the kitchen and wrenched open the fridge. Sure enough, the place in the door where the ketchup customarily sat alongside the lemon juice was now empty. She checked the bin for an empty bottle, but there was nothing there.

She was still standing staring into the garbage as if it might deliver an answer when Millie smashed her way through the cat flap and came yowling across the floor, all semblance of dignity lost in flight. The flap banged again, this time admitting the black tom in wild pursuit. She picked up the first thing she could find, a fork on the sideboard, and flung it at him. It missed, but he swerved and turned, ears back, hissing, a raw violence in his fury, before making a run for it, dodg-ing past her, back out through the flap and across the garden and over the wall. She watched him go, her heart pounding against the side of her rib cage.

It’s just a cat. It’s just a cat, she said to herself. But the thought of its malevolence persisted. Ever since it had arrived in the garden both she and Millie had been living under a regime of terror. She stared down at the cat flap. Maybe she should block it up. Keep out the outside world.

Block it up. . . . Keep out the outside world. . . . The two thoughts moved around in her brain. The outside world—the cat flap.

She moved over to the French windows and stared down at the lock above the handle. Then she looked at the cat flap. It was swinging slightly, still settling on its moorings. The distance between the two was about four or five feet. She put her hand on the catch of the lock and as she did her fingers encountered a kind of roughness at the base of the catch, disturbing its smooth metal surface.

She played with it further, then squatted down to examine it more carefully. Yes, the steel underneath was definitely scored as if something had been scraping persistently at it. Once again she looked from it to the cat flap. And this time something slowly began to make sense in her brain. She moved around the kitchen, intent suddenly, searching through the drawers. She found a skewer—the kind used for barbecues, when she and Tom had been sociable enough to have them. She took it over to the door and slid the tip of it into the gap between the top of the handle and the catch of the lock. Then she wiggled it up and down until the leverage of the skewer had enough force and it pushed the catch upward. She turned the handle of the door. It opened, the lock released.

Her heart beating faster she went outside, closing the door behind her. She squatted down by the cat flap and, holding the skewer at arm’s length, pushed her arm through, until she could bend it at the elbow. With her forearm extended and the skewer at the end of it she could now reach almost to the handle of the door. Almost, but not quite.

She withdrew her hand and went inside, locking the door behind her. In the living room she found a poker, long and thick, tapering off at the end to a thinner tip of metal. She went back and repeated the exercise. This time the poker reached to the catch. It was hard to keep her hand steady enough, but she managed it. The tip of the poker slipped in and under the catch. Of course the door was already open. She could have tried locking it that way, but if she succeeded then she might never get back in again. Someone else could have done it though. Because somebody already had. She now knew that with absolute certainty, knew that somebody had crouched where she was crouching now and teased and prodded the lock until it released itself and let them into her house.

And then, of course, everything was suddenly explained. How they had got in only to find themselves confined to the kitchen because the door kept them out of the rest of the house, but how, with a little imagination, there had been enough mischief to be done there—from the casual appropriation of a couple of CDs to more sinister play with music, moving on to the repositioning of furniture and the laying of the table. Each act a little bigger, taking a little longer, exhibiting a greater confidence in the intrusion, almost some kind of game plan.

Until this last one, when fate had left the kitchen door open and given them the whole house to play in.

Them? But who? And where from?

The first two questions she still couldn’t answer. But the last one she at least had some idea of. She looked out across the garden. She must have stood out here a hundred times since Tom left, on each occasion feeling utterly safe, the anonymity of all those back windows staring down at her. She remembered the mornings in the summer when she had breakfasted out here, comforted by the nearness of the world yet protected by her sense of privacy within it. And all the time somebody, somewhere, had been watching her.

Night was coming in fast. She walked to the end of the garden and looked around at the semicircle of houses that backed onto the end of hers. Her garden wall was high, maybe as tall as she was, but it was hardly impenetrable. Any one of the connecting gardens could have led into it, and in turn have connected back onto others. She counted the windows around her. There were dozens of them.

She turned and looked back at her house. The kitchen was lit up, the counters, even the table, clearly visible. She had no blinds, no curtains. She had never felt the need for them. Above the kitchen was a small bathroom window and then, to the right, her bedroom. It was just a dark shadow now, but with the light on, or even the light from the hall, the area around the window itself would also be seen clearly. She sometimes stood there, too. And last night it hadn’t just been her. Last night she had been there with a man’s arms around her, the two of them silhouetted in the frame in that parody of an act of love, which now, it seemed, had led directly to an act of violence.