What You Make It (26 page)

She walked unsteadily back to her chair and picked up the phone. Pride lost a very brief battle and she pushed the programmed button. After three rings, it picked up.

‘Hello?’ she said, quietly.

‘Yes?’ said a voice. A woman's voice.

‘Oh sorry,’ Jane said, waking up a little and hoping she didn't sound too sniffly, ‘I was trying for Andrew Royle.’

‘Oh no, you've got the right number. He's just popped out to the off-licence. Who's calling?’

Head tight, feeling as if she was watching herself from several yards away, Jane said her name.

‘Ah,’ the voice replied, after a pause.

‘Who's that?’

‘Nikki.’

‘Just passing again, were you?’

‘Yes, as it happens.’

‘And Andrew has popped round the offy.’ It felt like a thing of cold logical beauty, being able to say that. She'd caught the woman out. Let her try to get out of that.

‘Look Jane,’ Nikki replied immediately, and at the tone of her voice Jane felt suddenly bad. ‘He was going out with me more recently than you. Okay, not for very long, but more recently.’

Face creasing with misery, Jane realized her logic had been faulty, that her memory had tricked her again.

‘You don't own him,’ Nikki went on, with a calmness it hurt very much to hear. ‘He's not yours any more.’

‘What is?’ said Jane quietly.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ There was a long pause, in which Jane felt like a balloon that was dropping with eerie slowness towards the earth. She couldn't beat this woman, because things were different now. She wasn't in the right any more. Jane was just another girl, someone Andrew had once known, an entry in an address book that wouldn't be updated. If anyone was history, she was.

‘Do you want to leave a message?’ Nikki asked, eventually.

‘Yeah,’ said Jane, ‘Tell him: “Jane says, fuck you.’”

When she went to bed she checked every lock in the flat, screwing the window locks down as tightly as she could. It was unlikely that anyone would be able to scale three floors, but that wasn't the point. In the hallway she checked the chair was wedged firmly, but didn't bother to check the catch. It was too late now.

Listlessly unbuttoning her jeans, she opened the closet. The owner was inside.

Jane stumbled and fell as she tried to step backwards. The man from the night before was standing bolt upright amongst her clothes, hands folded together at waist height as if he'd been waiting there all day. He was wearing the same dark suit and a patient smile.

Jane scooted backwards, trying to get up and to rebutton her jeans at the same time. The man stepped out of the closet and beamed suddenly.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Jane's head banged into the bed frame and she clutched it and pulled herself up. She backed towards the wall, hands held weakly out in front of her.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘please…’

‘Please what?’ the man said, cocking his head. ‘Hm? Please what?’ Back against the wall, Jane sidled towards the door. ‘Please … and thank you?’ He took a step towards her, blocking the way to the door. ‘Please? Please?’

‘Please, go away.’ Jane shrank back as he took another step, staring at his blank, anonymous face. Her neck spasmed wildly and her mouth opened. Her face wanted to cry but she was too frightened. ‘Please just go away.’

‘Oh I don't think so,’ the man said mildly. ‘I don't have to go away. I'm the owner.’

Jane's teeth crashed together as her face responded to anger from somewhere inside her. She pushed herself from the wall and shouted: ‘Get out! Get out! GET OUT!!’

‘No,’ he said, with a winning pout. He took another step towards her and before he could get any closer Jane lunged to the side and got round him. As she ran to the door he turned elegantly and made a swipe for her, tearing her blouse, but she made it past him and into the hallway.

She was halfway to the living room before realizing that was stupid, and instead swerved towards the door. She grabbed at the chair and yanked at it but it wouldn't budge. The wood
from the chair seemed to have flowed into the wood of the door, jamming it shut.

As she tugged uselessly at it the owner watched her from the bedroom, smiling indulgently. Just as he started to move towards her she realized the chair was merely jammed under the handle. She yanked it aside and pulled at the door but it wouldn't budge. The owner stepped into the hallway and she grabbed the chair and flung it at him. She tugged frenziedly at the door again and then saw that the catch was down. She flicked it and swung it open just as a hand fell towards her shoulder.

She moaned as she stumbled out onto the tiny landing, and leaped straight for the stairs. Her heel caught and she fell most of the way down the flight, banging her face against the railing and tearing the nails out of one hand, but she got up as soon as she hit the bottom and careered out into the street.

She found a phone booth and rang a number. As soon as Klass l's answering machine message started, she began to scream at it.

‘He's in my flat! He's in my flat! He's in my flat!’

She kept screaming until even she couldn't hear the whisper of her voice.

Camilla reached out and took the brochure proofs from the printer. ‘There,’ she said. ‘And it does look better than hers.’

Whitehead nodded and smiled. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now all we need is Jane.’

Camilla looked at her watch. It was ten to four. ‘She's cutting it a bit fine, isn't she?’

‘She'll be here,’ said Whitehead. ‘Whatever her faults, she's reliable.’

Meanwhile, Jane was stepping out of the lift and opening the door to FreeDot. As she walked into reception, she shook her head. Her hearing appeared to be slightly deadened, and there was a buzzing sound. The office seemed very quiet, calm with quiet business. People came and went, passing paper. Egerton plucked a piece of paper from the fax machine and
marched across the room to drop it heartily on someone's desk. People answered the phones though they weren't ringing, and looked as if they were talking into them. She took a step towards the corridor. Egerton plucked a piece of paper from the fax machine and marched across the room to drop it heartily on someone's desk. Jane blinked at him, watching him stop to answer a phone, his whole body declaring buoyant stupidity. Then he was at the fax machine again and she turned away.

Slowly she walked down the corridor. Behind her she thought she heard the ghost of a voice call her name, call it as a question.

When she got to her office Whitehead and Camilla turned to smile at her. There was a new plant on Camilla's desk and a poster for
Les Misérables
on the white wall. Suddenly, the buzzing stopped as their faces dropped.

‘Jane, what's happened?’ Whitehead asked, the lying fuck pretending to be concerned as he stared at the blood under her nose and her torn clothes, the bruise on her cheek and her ragged hair.

She ignored him, and swept her arm along the desk. ‘Get OUT!’ she screamed at Camilla. The plant sailed along the desk and flew straight out of the window.

As Whitehead lunged with a cry to watch it fall, Jane ripped the poster from the wall and began tearing it to pieces, arms flailing.

‘Jane, please,’ Camilla stuttered, cowering.

‘Please WHAT?’ Jane leaned over until her face was right up against hers, until she could see the mascara glistening on her lashes and smell the make-up, and screamed, ‘Please
can I have everything?’

She stuffed a section of the poster into her mouth and hummed while she chewed.

Whitehead stepped warily towards her. ‘Er, Jane…’

‘What?’ she said, blowing the pieces out of her mouth at him.

‘Perhaps you'd better go home.’

She fell towards the door, laughing weakly. ‘Go home? Go HOME?’

Egerton was in the doorway, staring at her with childish surprise.

‘Yes?’ she shouted. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ He stumbled backwards, hands held up, and she turned to look once more at the room, at the shelves, at the machines, at the acres of white wall with so many things in front of it and none of them hers. Before she could cry she ran out into the corridor.

The door to Flat 8 was still ajar. She walked in and shut it behind her. The buzzing in her ears had returned.

The furniture was back where it had been when she moved in, the champagne bottle in position, his pictures back up on the walls. Her things had disappeared from the bathroom, and shaving foam and aftershave had materialized in their place. The fragments of her mug were gone from the kitchen sink. The bedroom seemed least altered because it had been least changed by her, but her clothes and the photo of Andrew were gone.

She walked back into the living room and looked out of the window. It was getting dark outside, and someone had taken the garden furniture and stacked it up so it stood like a sculpture.

When she turned, the owner was behind her, hands behind his back like a solicitous waiter.

‘Yes?’ he smiled.

‘I'm going,’ she said dully.

He looked disappointed with her, and spoke with a slow, mocking kindness. ‘You can't go.’

‘I am,’ she replied, feeling about four years old.

‘Where?’ he asked. ‘Where are you going to go?’

‘I'll find somewhere.’

‘You won't. There isn't anywhere.’ He took a step towards her and suddenly her breath was hitching, uneven, because it hurt and she wanted to cry again. She backed away.

‘Please…’

‘What do you have, Jane?’ he asked quietly, cocking his head
like a robotic dog. ‘Some have, some… haven't.’ Still advancing, he threw his hands out expansively. ‘You haven't. Everywhere's somebody's. There's nowhere to go.’

Then suddenly he shouted terrifyingly loudly, and Jane flinched as she had just before Andrew slapped her the night he left. ‘WHERE's THERE TO GO, JANE?’

She broke and tried to run for the door, but he intercepted her. She darted the other way along the wall, but he got there first. As she slid back and forth along the wall he tracked her and backed her into the corner.

‘WHAT DO YOU HAVE, JANE?’

He slammed her against the wall and she dropped to the floor, her lungs suddenly empty. He grabbed at her and she rolled and tried to stand, but he slammed her over again and leaned down towards her, mouth hanging open as he reached to choke her. She fumbled out with her hand and found something and swung it round to smash it on his head.

The champagne bottle didn't break, but bounced out of her hand as he fell with a grunt on top of her. She squirmed away and stumbled towards the door but his hand whipped out and grabbed her ankle, tripping her so that she fell onto the sofa. She tried to pull free but his hand was too strong and snatched up her leg, tugging at her. Scrabbling out with her hand she found the bookcase. The old lock was on it and she grabbed it as his hand wrenched her thigh, turning her round to face him. Blood was seeping out of his matted hair and down his neck but he wasn't going to lie down.

‘Mine,’ he said.

She smashed the lock down into his face, feeling his nose momentarily resist and then spread like butter. For a second his head remained upright, and then he toppled over onto his front.

Jane staggered up, using the wall for leverage, watching him. His hands were flapping up and down, like a pair of damaged birds. She stared round the room and could see nothing that was hers, so she grabbed a picture off the wall and threw it at
him. The owner's hands started flapping more wildly, beating against the carpet, and he began to make a humming sound that got louder and louder as his whole body began to vibrate.

He wasn't going to die. People like him never did.

She pulled out her lighter and held it next to the curtain. She spun the wheel.

‘Own this,’ she said.

The cheap curtains caught quickly, flames licking up towards the ceiling. Jane limped towards the door, coughing, stumbling round the owner whose whole body was whipping back and forth with an insectile violence.

She ran out into the hallway and as she wrenched the door open she heard his voice shouting from the depths of the fire.

‘Where, Jane?’

Victor and Alex leaped straight out of the doors of the car, but Mr Gillack beat them to it. They'd been inclined to treat the whole thing as a joke, but to be on the safe side Mr Gillack had come back from Belgium. Suddenly, it didn't seem very funny any more.

‘That's our commission down the pan,’ muttered Alex, as they trotted after Mr Gillack towards the blaze.

A policeman brusquely stopped them from getting too close. His manner softened when he heard Mr Gillack was the owner, but he still wouldn't let them go any nearer. Mr Gillack just stood and stared, running his hands wildly through his long blond hair, watching his flat burn down.

Jane sat in the back of a police car, her legs outside. She felt cold, even though a blanket was wrapped around her. The inspector snapped his pad shut. ‘We're going to have to ask you a few more questions later,’ he said, ‘but for now …’

He stopped then, and glanced at a constable who'd just returned from talking to the fireman. Out of sight of Jane, the constable mouthed the news. There was no one else in the flat.

‘Ah,’ said the inspector, very slowly nodding and turning
to look warily at the woman in the back of his car. ‘But for now,’ he concluded, ‘I think we'd better get you down to the station.’

He gently lifted Jane's legs and swung them round into the car. Quietly shutting the door, he looked at the constable over the roof of the car and they both breathed out heavily.

Jane stared at nothing as they pulled away past the knots of bystanders. She still felt cold, but it was nice to have the blanket.

She looked out at the pavement. Standing there neatly, smiling and waving like a child as they passed, was the owner. He was on fire.

She turned back and looked down at the blanket for a while. The pattern was unfamiliar. It didn't look like one of hers.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘Well what?’

‘You know very well. What happened last night?’

Steve laughed. I groaned loudly, enjoying every minute. ‘You did it again, didn't you.’

‘Yes.’

‘She stayed round yours.’

‘Yes.’

‘You berk. You utter spanner.’

‘It wasn't my fault.’

‘Yeah. Try telling her that. Another scratched fixture, was it?’

‘Nope. Reached the finishing post.’

‘You idiot.’

‘Twice.’

I sighed theatrically, and Steve laughed again, slightly embarrassed. He knew what I was going to say, not least because he agreed with me. ‘You've been a
very silly boy
, haven't you?’

‘I know, I know,’ he said happily.

‘What
happened?
We spoke, what, three hours before? I thought you'd told her it was just going to be a meal’

‘I did.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Well we were there, mid-evening, in this restaurant I wanted to try. That Bolivian place.’

‘How was it?’

‘Fucking terrible.’

‘What, worse than that Korean?’

‘No, not that bad, obviously. But still bad.’

‘Anyway.’

‘There we were, it was all going fine, and then suddenly she looked at me and said: “You know what I suggested last time?” and I said “Yes …”’

‘What, about why don't the two of you just do it anyway?’

‘Exactly. And so she said, “Well, how about it?”’

‘And you said yes.’

‘Well what
could
I say?’

The answer, of course, was nothing. I knew this, to my cost, but I continued giving him a hard time for a while, and then we signed off the phone and got on with our jobs. Steve didn't mind me giving him the third degree – it was the equivalent of doing a penance. Talking to me after an Ill-advised Sexual Encounter was the nearest thing he was going to get to saying ten Hail Marys.

There are men who will go out, see a woman they fancy, and chat her up. I know it happens because I've heard about it, seen it, marvelled at it. I've never done it myself. In all the time I've been meandering around the planet, I can honestly say I have
never
had the courage, confidence or whatever it is that it takes to be as proactive as that. But, on the other hand, if you're a reasonable-looking bloke, keeping half an eye open but never really trying very hard, there's a certain kind of situation you're going to find yourself in. While not especially charming, I can string coherent sentences together. While not handsome, I don't inspire outright terror when I hove into view. More importantly, I can listen. Boy, am I good at listening. And therein lies the problem, because there is a certain type of woman out there for whom I, and men like me, appear to be the answer. These women are intelligent and attractive, interesting and sophisticated. They are also, unfortunately, all as mad as snakes. In the two years I was a single variable, I spent time with four women of this type. They were either people I worked with or met through friends, and I didn't approach a single one of them. They started it. I'm not boasting or gloating here, completely the opposite. Think about
it. In my circles women don't approach men. They don't need to. They spend enough time fending off members of the opposite sex without starting trouble for themselves. So what does that say about the women who do such a thing? It says they come with problems. It's different in some other countries, America for example, where perfectly sane women will sometimes make the running. In London it doesn't work like that. Or it doesn't for me, anyway. I was approached by four women, of widely differing ages, appearances and personalities, and I ended up spending time with them purely because I didn't realize that's what I was doing until it was too late.

And the simple fact was, each of these women was mad.

That sounds sexist. It's not. Not deliberately, anyway. There are a vast number of disastrous men out there, too. I'm probably one of them. I'm not characterizing the female sex as in any way unstable. If anything, I'm taking the blame back, because I can't understand how some women get the way they are unless it's through a long-term, recurrent, almost
concerted
campaign of subtle mistreatment by men.

My point is, I'm the guy they latch onto when someone else has brought them to that state. These other men sow the seeds through years of desertion, mixed messages and callous indifference, and then they trade up to a younger model and abandon these women to the world. The women regroup, do their jobs, live their lives and carry on, all the time keeping an eye out for someone who looks nice. Someone who looks like they're not going to hurt them, who looks as though they'll listen. In other words, looking for someone like me. The sad punchline of the story is that, despite appearances, I'm just as bad as everyone else, and I'm the last thing that they need. I'm just another of the guys they've met before, but with a slightly kinder smile and an even colder heart.

Or was, anyway. After two years of sexual hit-and-run accidents, each of which left me feeling more damaged and damaging than before, I simply gave up. I gave up right at the start of another one, finally having the experience and bloody-mindedness to
spot it for what it could become. I backed out, pulled down the shutters, and resolved to sit tight for a while. If I wanted company I had my memories, and if I wanted sex I'd hotwire my imagination or buy a bloody video. Sounds pathetic, but it's not. There are advantages to virtual relationships. They don't leave you with someone you don't know to talk to in the morning, someone's calls you have to take when you've got nothing to say. They don't present you with someone's faith to destroy when you never promised them anything in the first place.

And then, out of the blue, I met Monica. I made the effort for once, and she reciprocated sanely and slowly, and suddenly everything was different.

Steve was still in the position I'd been in a year before, and although I'd never met her, this girl Tamsin fitted the mould perfectly. She was supposed to have temporarily split up from someone else, someone who was bigger than Steve, had a flasher job, but who happened to be out of the country. Steve had met her through the usual splatter of coincidence that in retrospect looks too dark and foreboding to be the result of pure chance. He had, to give him credit, pegged her as an ‘unusual person’ from the very first date.

At first fairly subtly, and then with surprising persistence, Tamsin had suggested a period of casual acquaintance, to include excursions into the sexual arena. This period would end with no strings, it was proposed, when her boyfriend returned from abroad. She would return to him, Steve could get back to his life, and everything would be neatly tidied away.

Though this was the sort of suggestion which is supposed to send male hormones ricocheting round their glands in a frenzy of joy, it had struck Steve as rather odd. In my capacity as a scarred foot soldier in similar campaigns, he chewed it over with me. My advice had been simple.

Don't even fucking
think
about it.

Why? Because.

Because it wouldn't work that way. Because the sex wouldn't
be as good as he hoped, and wouldn't make him any happier. And because when you've slept with someone once, there's no good reason for it not to happen again – and once it's happened twice you're in a relationship, never mind what it says in your contract.

I could picture, almost as though it was happening in front of me, what would take place the evening before Tamsin's boyfriend returned. She'd meet Steve for a drink, in some pub that meant something to both of them. The stage would be carefully set. Steve would be nervous, but relieved that the strange interlude was over. You don't get anything for free, and few things make you more nervous than an apparent gift from the Gods. Steve would buy a couple of drinks and sit down, ready to be hearty and make the usual promises of friendship, and then Tamsin would speak.

‘Well,’ she'd say, and pause, and smile brightly, ‘what are we going to do?’

Steve would cough, and stare, and ask what she meant, and then it would all come out. She'd changed her mind. After all, there was something between them, wasn't there? Something
important.
She was going to tell her boyfriend she'd fallen in love with someone else. He'd be angry, of course, and she'd have to move out of his flat, and she'd have nowhere to stay… but between her and Steve, and the love that they shared, she was sure they'd be able to work it out.

When someone says something like that to you, you're not allowed to just run yelping out of the bar, although that's much the best thing you could do. There are rules of human engagement. And so Steve would swallow, try not to pass out, and settle down to having one of the worst evenings of his life. There would be tears, brave smiles, and a horrendous scene in a public place. Possibly screaming. I've seen it happen. After four hours he'd think he'd got away with it, and would limp sweating back to his flat.

Then the next day the calls would start, and the letters, and the visits. Steve would spend a month looking like a hunted animal,
and would eventually emerge bewildered, frightened, and feeling absolutely terrible about something he'd never done.

And if he was anything like me, in four months he'd end up doing exactly the same thing again.

I knew Steve well enough to be able to plot all this with absolute confidence, and so I told him to stay well clear. He was my friend, so he listened, and thought about it, and realized I was speaking not with forked tongue.

And then, being a man, he'd gone ahead and done it anyway.

Two days later I was sitting at my desk again. I spend a lot of time sitting there. Working at it, rather less.

I was staring out of the window, and I was smoking. I am a keen, dedicated, probably almost
professional
smoker, and recognize a period of time I call ‘a cigarette's-worth’. It's about five or six minutes, the length of time it takes to smoke a fag, but the actual duration isn't really the point.

Thus when I'm supposed to be working, I'll take a break to do a cigarette's-worth of reading, a cigarette's-worth of leafing pointlessly through magazines, or a cigarette's-worth of staring into space. This is different from the usual reading, leafing through magazines and staring into space which I do when I'm supposed to be working – though I'll almost certainly be smoking when I do those too – in that it's a conscious decision, a marked-off period of time during which I am deliberately, instead of merely effectively, not working.

I sighed and turned my intellect to the task of staring at the computer and randomly spiralling the cursor round the screen. This, I find, can keep me occupied for hours. Sometimes, as that afternoon, I dally with a variant of the technique, which involves clicking the mouse at intervals while I'm spiralling. This is both pointless and silly, as sometimes it accidentally moves some of my folders around on the computer desktop. But that's all right, because I can then do a cigarette's-worth of moving them all back so they're neat and tidy again.

When I finally started to resurface from my reverie, I noticed
that I was whirling the cursor over the folder which holds my letters. I could tell that at a glance because I'd once spent most of an afternoon – on a client's time, naturally – making its icon look like a little letter coming out of an envelope. I work for a number of people in a variety of capacities, but I can't honestly say I represent value for money to any of them.

I double-clicked on the folder to open it, and stared vaguely at the sub-folders inside, each labelled with the name of the person to whom the contents had been sent. The names on some of them were enough to make me wince, without even exploring the terrible stuff inside. Like I said, I advised Steve on the basis of my own experience. Ginny's folder was there, as was Jackie's, Yvonne's and Mel's, amongst less frightening ones holding letters to various other ex's, friends and the tax office. There was also, I noticed, a folder which didn't appear to have a name. I was about to investigate when the phone rang.

It was Steve, and he'd done it again.

I should stress here that, despite appearances, Steve and I are not a couple of typical lads who can't wait to swop tales of sexual derring-do with each other. Over a long and arduous period we've earned our Politically Correct badges, and are in any event both fairly private people. I would never discuss Monica with him even if he asked, which he simply wouldn't. Reports on random sex are different, though – it's more like a sports news update. And don't try telling me that women don't do it too.

The last time we'd spoken Steve had sworn curiosity had now been satisfied, and that he wasn't going to end up in bed with Tamsin again. I'd been sceptical. If someone wants to do it again, how are you going to avoid it? Turning down a man is one thing: women have a right not to sleep with someone if they don't want to, and many men will respect that, intellectually if not in practice. It's the way of the world. Being denied sex is a key feature of being a male earthling, and it's only the grace with which you accept it that determines how you're perceived.

Turning down a woman is something completely different.
Turning down a woman, when she has taken that step and made that offer, comes across as such a wholesale rejection, such a spine-chillingly loud slap in the face, that it's almost impossible to do, however much you want to.

Steve had gone out to dinner with Tamsin, armed no doubt with the best of intentions, and it had happened again.

Sighing heavily, I got down to the task of telling Steve yet again that he was making a mistake. I see it as my role in life, discouraging other people from having fun. We knocked it back and forth for a while, and then there was a pause.

‘There's something else,’ he said, eventually.

‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘What? She doesn't believe you've got someone else?’ Steve had told Tamsin that he too was loosely attached to someone abroad, and that she was coming back soon. I'd liked the way he was thinking, but hadn't held out much hope that it would make a difference.