What You Make It (17 page)

The printers now had two alternatives for their logo, and concocting another to make up the numbers would only take half an hour or so. As he waited for the file to finish saving Richard gazed contentedly out of the window at the street, where a black cat was sitting in the intermittent sunlight. It was lying down, technically, but something in its demeanour seemed to undermine this, as if it was taking a rest prescribed by protocol rather than need, part of some corporate relaxation regime that even senior managers were encouraged to follow. I'm lying down now, its manner said, but that doesn't alter the fact that what's really important is maintaining an up-to-date stock breakdown, and that's what I'll be going back to just as soon as this is over.

Then suddenly the cat leapt to its feet and scurried under a nearby car. Richard smiled at this, as there was absolutely no apparent cause for it. The computer pinged at him to signify
completion of its task, and he hit the buttons which would quit the program before glancing back out to see if the cat had re-emerged.

A man was standing on the opposite side of the street, looking up at the house. He was in his late fifties and tail, with a lean face and tidy greying hair. His clothes were nondescript but light in colour, and he was wearing a dark coat. As Richard frowned on realizing that the man was not just looking at the house in general, but actually at his window, the man smiled gravely and started to walk away up the crescent. As he turned, he reached into his pocket and pulled something out. Still looking at Richard, he held it up for a moment, the minimal good humour vanishing from his face.

He was holding up two envelopes. One was blue, the other lilac. The man put the letters back in his pocket and held Richard's eyes for a long moment before walking away.

For a second Richard remained absolutely still, too shocked to move. Then he scrambled out of his chair to look through the next window along. He caught a brief glimpse of the back of the man's coat, and then he was out of vision again.

The man had his letters.

Richard turned wildly and stared at his desk for no reason, and then back out of the window. Abruptly, his mind caught up with events and he ran towards the door and slung it open. Feeling angry, bewildered and ashamed he hurtled down the steps and out of the building, leaving the door hanging wide.

There was no sign of him. Richard ran up to the nearest corner and looked down it, but the street was empty and so he sprinted up to the next road. The way to the right led down to the main junction with the Camden Road. It was wide and empty. There was no sign of the man in the other direction either, but that had to be the way he'd gone. Richard jogged up the road, trying to hang on to his anger. It seemed important.

After fifty yards he looked round the next corner, and saw that the man could not have gone that way either. He backtracked quickly and ran down the only side road he'd passed. Though the
road curved he could see to the bottom, and there was nobody there. Then he noticed an alleyway on the left-hand side, and headed towards that.

The alley ran between high buildings, and was surprisingly dark. As he approached a recessed doorway he discovered what the anger had been masking. Fear. He moved carefully over to the opposite side of the alley, hugging the wall so as to see anything that might be in the doorway as soon as possible. Aware that his eyelid was twitching slightly, he peered into the doorway. It was empty, and he was very glad.

Casting occasional glances behind, he walked quickly down the remainder of the alley until he emerged on the side road that led into Torriano Crescent. He paused for a moment outside the door of the house, his heart beating quickly, and then stepped in.

Back inside the flat he walked to the window immediately and looked out, as if he hoped that would give him another chance. The road was still empty, which made him feel both desperate and relieved. He wanted his letters back, but he'd realized something in the alley. He didn't want to see the man again. Ever. There was something very wrong about him.

He grabbed a nearby packet of cigarettes, found it empty and crumpled it into the bin. Fumbling open another packet he paced round the room, barely aware that he was doing so.

He knew that he ought to feel furious. Someone had intercepted his letters, taken them out of the post and then come round to show him they'd done it. That was an outrageous invasion of privacy, and almost certainly illegal too. He ought to feel angry. He had every right to. So why did his anger feel so thin and abstract? Why was he allowing himself to feel as if he'd been caught?

Why did he feel afraid?

Cigarette finally lit, his pacing reached escape velocity and he strode off towards the phone. Someone in the employ of the postal service was going to receive the bollocking of their lives.

The handset was under his ear before he realized the problem with this, and it stayed there while he stared unseeingly out of the window, following the thought to the end.

Who was he going to accuse?

He hadn't described the envelopes to the man at Kentish Town, hadn't even told him there were two of them. Likewise, the voice at King's Cross had told him there was no hope before he'd had time to say what he was after. Neither of them could have known what to look for, and it couldn't have been them even if they had. He knew what the man at Kentish Town looked like, and the voice at King's Cross had been female.

Richard put the phone back down. Suddenly unable to remain in the flat, he grabbed his coat and wallet and left.

As he passed the postbox on the way to the high street he paused and stared at it. It occurred to him that either of the two people he'd spoken to could have got somebody else to come round with the letters. But it still didn't make sense. According to the man at Kentish Town, the letters would never have been there, and by the time he'd spoken to the woman at King's Cross the letters had been beyond reaching. He supposed it was possible that the man could have waited until he'd left and then called straight through. But why would he have done that, and how would they have known what to look for? Nothing he'd said to the man would have made two envelopes to different people an obvious target.

Still worrying the problem in his mind Richard absent-mindedly culled what he needed for the weekend from the shelves of the Pricefighter supermarket. He picked up the low-fat yoghurts and cottage cheeses that Susan would want, together with salad materials and a bottle of wine. At the counter he got an armful of packets of cigarettes too, partly to allay the assistant's probable displeasure at him paying by cheque, and partly because he felt he needed them.

At the bottom of his road he stopped, and moved slowly round until he could see the street opposite his house. There was no one there, and he walked up the crescent. Outside his house
he stood and looked up at the window. From street-level you could see the back of the computer, the edges of the curtains and a patch of ceiling. It wasn't at all clear what he'd demonstrated by establishing this, and he crossed the road and let himself in.

Taking the fact that he had the letters as a given, however inexplicable, the real question was what the man hoped to gain from them. Not blackmail, surely. Richard felt that he'd have to be famous and far richer before that became a serious possibility. So what?

All the man had done was stand outside, and show him he had them. That, and looking unforgiving and stern. So he must have known what was in the letters. What was he going to do about it? Withhold them for purposes of his own, or send them on? If the latter, why take them out in the first place?

Crouched in front of the fridge, tucking yoghurts away, Richard suddenly stood up. This was absolutely ridiculous. What fucking business was it of anyone else's? Richard knew well enough that the situation wasn't ideal, felt guilty enough about it as it was. Okay, he was running two girlfriends at once, but that was no one's business but his. Or his and theirs. Certainly not that of some old shag who went round fishing in mailboxes or sorting offices or wherever the hell he'd got the letters from.

Armed with a coffee he sat down at the desk to work out what to do, beginning at last to feel self-righteously angry. It had taken a while in coming, he thought; too long. Because he'd felt guilty and worried all night, his first reaction had been off-base.

So what now? There didn't seem a lot of point in calling the police. He could imagine both their polite suspicion and complete inability to help without going through the grief of observing it first hand. He thought briefly about trying to get hold of Susan or Isobel, and then realized again the pointlessness of doing so. There didn't seem to be anything he could do. Except wait. Wait and see if the man turned up again. And if he did?

Richard felt his anger falter for a moment. The man was
absolutely in the wrong, however he'd got hold of the letters. Richard had every right to have them back. And yet … the idea of confronting the man was more unappealing than most things he could think of. He reached for the ashtray, feeling unsure.

Then he stopped, staring at the table. On it, by the side of the ashtray, there was a small pile of ash and a warped brown filter. The remains of a cigarette were lying on an intensely black burn about an inch long and a centimetre wide. The position of the debris left no doubt as to what had happened. When he'd gone out he'd left a cigarette burning. It had fallen out and burned the table.

Whimpering quietly, he pointlessly dashed to get a wet cloth. A little of the black smear came off, but not much. The table was scarred for life. It wasn't his table, but worse, what if the butt had rolled onto the carpet, or against the curtain?

Hadn't he checked?

Richard flung the cloth back towards the sink and stood, hands on hips, glaring unhappily at the ashtray. Somehow, and in some way he couldn't closely define, this made things worse. Suddenly he knew with absolute certainty that he'd put the letters in the wrong envelopes. Not because he remembered doing so, but because he'd left a cigarette burning, and the two were the same thing. His mind had been elsewhere, and the robot in charge of envelope filling had made a mistake.

Richard spent the next two hours drinking coffee, sitting on the sofa, leaning forward on his knees and staring out of the window. If the man passed by again, he didn't want to miss him, wanted to be out of the door as soon as he was in sight. He didn't know what he could say to him. He just knew that he had to get the letters back.

He also knew something else. If he didn't get them back, he was going to have to tell Susan and Isobel. The emotional balls he'd been able to keep juggling for five months had fallen out of sequence and landed heavily in his hands. Now they were there he knew, with a terrified relief, that he was going to have to tell.
He tried to dislodge the thought, but it felt as if his centre of gravity had irrevocably shifted, as if the whole thing had shocked him out of his previous equilibrium. It was no longer a case of whether he was going to do it, but simply when, and how.

At six, he shook himself out of a kind of awful reverie in which he'd mulled over different ways of breaking the news to Susan. He had a shower and picked through a joyless meal, and then left the house. He couldn't work, and couldn't face spending the whole evening staring pointlessly out of the window. Instead, he grabbed a book and walked down the road to the Porcupine, the nearest pub where the clientele weren't actively frightening. Not all the time, anyway.

The pub was busy, but Richard was able to get his favoured seat, in the raised area next to the window which looked out onto the main road. He sat with his pint and tried to get into the book, but the increasingly strident levels of noise outside and inside his head made it difficult to concentrate.

He ought to tell them both, as soon as possible. He'd been a bastard to them for too long, and he owed them the truth.

Maybe if he just explained everything, and said he was sorry, he'd get away with it. He hadn't set out to hurt them, after all. It was an accident. It wasn't his fault. Maybe they would see that.

If he was lucky enough to be able to choose, which would he go with? With a changed, sourer Isobel, who rightfully wouldn't trust him an inch, or back to Susan as so many times before, with a new debit in the complex scoring system they tended?

He didn't deserve either of them, and should be left alone, hated by both of them, the bad man in both their pasts whose legacy future boyfriends would have to deal with.

Everything he thought seemed to vacillate, to lurch from one viewpoint to another. It wasn't as if he kept changing his mind, but rather as if he had three or four consistent sets of opinions in his head, and kept ricocheting between them.

At nine there was a new influx of locals into the pub, and the noise leaped in volume. It was crowded now, the ceiling almost
invisible above a pall of cigarette smoke. It was hot too, and the dangerous-looking lads on the big table next to Richard's kept banging into him on the way to the bar. He shook his head to try to stop the constant cycle of thought, and attempted manfully to get into his book.

The noise kept coming, and the room got more and more sweltering until he found himself wiping his hand across his forehead to dry it. The lads next to him got increasingly raucous until they were shouting almost constantly. He felt a self-righteously liberal thread of distaste as their tales of sexual derring-do got more and more frank and degrading, and then realized he wasn't in a position to get self-righteous about anything at all.

‘Whaa fuck s'matter with you?’

Startled, Richard looked up. One of the men on the next table, about his own age, had twisted round in his seat and was staring at him with deeply alarming aggression.

‘I'm sorry?’ Richard replied, before he had time to loosen his accent.

‘I said, what the fuck is the matter with you,
wanker?
’

The pub was now delirious with noise, and the other lads on the table were still merrily shouting at each other. The man stared at him and Richard felt his head run clear with fear.