What You Make It (31 page)

‘Tamsin, I …’

‘Don't call me that!’

‘I don't know what else to call you – ’

I stopped not because I'd run out of things to say, or because I was interrupted, but because I heard the all too familiar tones the handset makes when the battery has run out.

The line went dead, and I was just trying to decide whether to run to get the other line in the bedroom, or just to be thankful that the conversation was finished, when I heard Tamsin's voice again, coming from the phone.

‘Yes you do,’ it said. ‘Yes you do. And you'd better remember, because I need to know.’

‘Can't you just leave me alone?’ I stuttered, not knowing if she'd hear me. The battery indicator light had gone out. The phone should have been dead.

‘Why should I? How can I? If you don't even have the decency to remember my fucking name?’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘please, just go away.’

‘I can't,’ she said, abruptly no longer sounding angry.

Then there was no more sound. I looked at the handset. The battery indicator was still out. Our last couple of sentences couldn't have happened. I put the phone back on the desk. I didn't want it recharged.

Her name wasn't Tamsin. She'd admitted it now. I had to find out what it was, or remember it. Until that happened, it would go on, and from the tone of her last sentence I wondered if it was more than that. Maybe it wasn't just me who was being persecuted. Maybe I was involved. Perhaps she couldn't go until I remembered who she was.

Maybe she really didn't know.

I spent the rest of the morning ignoring my work, thinking until my brain hurt. I couldn't get anything to come. I couldn't think of anyone who I'd shared dreams of New Orleans with. I couldn't remember who the letters were to. In the end I called Steve, from the phone in the bedroom. The first minute or so of conversation was a little stilted, and I wondered how long it would be before our shouting match completely left both our minds. But it relaxed soon enough, and after a while I asked him.

‘Steve, got a weird question for you.’

‘The answer's no, Dave. I like and respect you, but I simply can't do that other thing. I'm just not attracted to you in that way.’

‘Very funny. Since Katy, how many girls have I been out with?’

‘Is this a rhetorical question?’

‘No.’

There was a pause, and all of the light-heartedness went out of Steve's voice. ‘Are you okay, David?’

‘Not really. How many?’

‘Well, there was Ginny, then that one I never met.’

‘Jackie.’

‘Yeah, her, that skinny one – Mel, was it? Oh, Christ, and that complete nutter. Yvonne. Whatever happened to her?’

That was something I'd often wondered. Exactly what had happened to Yvonne, why she had backed off in the end.

‘She went away. Eventually.’

‘Right. So, four.’

‘That's what I thought.’

Back in the living room, I stood and looked out of the window at the drizzle. Outside on the pavement a cat ran past, as if fleeing from something. But they always look like that: probably it was only the rain.

It should have made me feel better to get confirmation from Steve that there couldn't have been anyone else. It didn't. Instead, it opened up a portion of my mind which hadn't really been paying attention. It melted suddenly, as if I was relaxing a muscle which I hadn't realized had been clenched for months, maybe years.

There had only been four. There was no one else.

Tamsin had to be one of them.

I turned and walked back into the bedroom. I opened the cupboard and sat down in front of it. Reaching beyond the hanging tails of coats and shirts I found my box file. For a moment I just let my hands rest on it, sensing that I could
simply leave it there, that its contents could remain half-buried. But half-buried is not enough. You can put rubbish as deep in the bin as you like, and cover it with whatever you can find, but it will still be there. Even when the truck has come to take it away you'll know, know that somewhere the evidence remains. It may be hidden so that no one will ever find it, and it may be destroyed, but you'll still know it's there, or that it existed once.

Once a coin has been thrown in the water, it's always going to be lying at the bottom of some pool or other.

I pulled the box out and opened it on my lap. Unlike the files for my ‘proper’ ex-girlfriends, Katy and her predecessors, the contents were a jumble. Letters, cinema ticket stubs, wine corks and dried-out flowers mixed together so thoroughly that they could have related to just one person. I pulled out a couple of letters and glanced at the writing on them.

Letter from Ginny. Card from Mel. Unwisely, I glanced inside. There, in an untidy biro sprawl, was a message saying that she thought she loved me. Carefully phrased, so as not to go too far out on a limb, but there in black and white all the same. Cringing to the depth of my soul with shame, I put it back in the envelope. I hadn't loved Mel, or any of them. It wasn't that I had taken advantage. I simply hadn't felt anything at all.

Two consecutive postcards from Jackie. The first a tirade. The second a numb acceptance. A CD single of the theme song from a long-forgotten film which I went to see with Mel, a song which would have been ‘our tune’, if we'd stayed together long enough to have one. If I hadn't left, walked out dead into the night, leaving her tearless and bewildered.

Rain spattered against the window suddenly, and I looked up. I caught a glance of a photo of Monica and I which hung on Monica's side of the bed. Her face looked down at me, brown from the holiday she'd been on before we met. It was a pretty face, but it took me a moment to recognize it. Even longer to recognize myself.

I pulled another handful of letters from the box, mostly from Ginny. It was odd I couldn't find anything from Yvonne. I must
have thrown them away. I was still leafing through cards and letters, feeling more and more horrified at myself, when my heart nearly stopped at the sound of the doorbell. Scattering the contents of the box I leapt awkwardly to my feet.

In the hall I paused. We don't have an intercom system, and so I had to go downstairs to answer. I didn't know whether I wanted to. After a pause the bell rang again, and I opened the door to the flat and walked slowly down.

No shape bulked through the glass of the front door, and when I opened it, there was nobody there. On the mat lay a small bundle wrapped in brown paper, and I picked it up and closed the door.

In the bedroom I took the paper off. Inside, damp from the rain, were seven letters. They all bore the same address, written in my handwriting, and none of them had a name.

Sitting suddenly down on the bed, as my legs went from under me, I took the letter out of the first one. It was neatly laser printed, and I recognized the typeface. I recognized the contents too. It was the first letter from the nameless folder. No name at the top, but my initial at the bottom, and a kiss.

Another clatter of rain hit the window, but I barely heard it. Fragments came at first, and then whole scenes, pushing through the cracks like eyeless animals wriggling from the earth. In slow motion, my vision blurred, I reached down and pushed my hand through the articles scattered around the file box on the floor, the remains of what should have been friendships, the debris of shattered people. The person I had thought was me watched as someone else searched for what he knew was there to be found.

A small bottle, and a key.

I found them.

The key fitted a door which I now remembered. The bottle held formaldehyde, and something else. The last joint of a finger, a finger which always used to point. Something which belonged to a woman whose face I could suddenly recall.

* * *

The rain was so furious that I had to lean forward and peer through the windscreen, and I skidded at one junction and nearly totalled a cyclist. On the passenger seat lay the letters, though I didn't need the address any more. The bottle was in my pocket.

The road was in a tangle of dead streets between Finsbury Park and Archway, an area I'd unconsciously avoided for two years. As I drew closer I noticed how many windows were still boarded up, the remnants of some developer's dream which had yet to come to fruition, waiting out the fallow years in a little patch of temporary ghost town. Most of the houses had already been abandoned when I'd last been there, when I'd last visited Tamsin Road.

The closer I got, the slower I drove. It wasn't reluctance. I knew I had to go. It was caution, because of the wetness of the roads, and because I didn't trust myself to drive with so much still flooding into my head. It was like suddenly discovering a new room in a house which has always seemed too small, except that I knew this room from before.

Turning into Tamsin Road was like finding a drawing you did as a child. It's a short street that curves, and on both sides the eyes and mouths of the buildings were boarded over and nailed shut. Dirty fragments of litter scuttled down the gutters, but not as much as you'd expect. No one was coming here to top the level up, and I suspected that if you caught one of the fleeing fragments of newspaper with your foot the date would be from some years ago. From 1993 itself, perhaps, the year I'd last been here.

I pulled up outside number 12 and killed the engine. After gathering up the letters I got out of the car, locked it and walked up towards the door. It was two years older and grubbier, paint peeling a little more than before, but I recognized it. For a brief moment I thought of the people I knew, of Steve and Monica, and realized that they were somewhere in the city now, doing their jobs and – who knows – maybe thinking of me. But I wasn't there anymore.

I was here again.

I felt in my pocket for the key and slipped it into the lock. She gave me the key herself, obtained by some means from the company she helped to run. I don't think they were the people who were planning to redevelop the area, but I can't remember. I hadn't blanked that fact, like all the others, but simply hadn't listened when I was told. I listened to her a lot at first, because she was funny, and clever. But after a while I didn't listen to her at all, like I didn't really listen to Mel or Jackie, or even to Ginny, whom I'd liked.

The lock turned with a little effort, and I let myself in. The hallway was dark, but I saw the letter lying on the mat and picked it up. It was the last one, covered in dust and beginning to discolour, with the address in my writing but no name at the top. I added it to the others and walked quietly to the staircase. After turning for no reason to look at the dirty yellow light which seeped through the boards across the door's thin and filthy window, I went upstairs.

The door was shut. I'd always closed it after me, as if that would make some difference, as if throwing something away and piling rubbish on top would really hide what was at the bottom of the pile. Realizing I was crying, I rubbed the back of my hands across my eyes and turned the handle of the door.

The room was exactly as I now remembered it, though deeper in dust. It was brighter than the rest of the house, more light coming through the windows, which had been papered rather than boarded over. The corkscrew we'd opened our wine with lay by the wall, and the mattress where we'd fucked was still beneath the window, now heavily stained with damp.

I walked to the middle of the room and looked down, and was not surprised to see that the ragged patch of carpet looked as though it had recently been disturbed. Slowly I sat down cross-legged next to it, and took the bottle out of my pocket.

We hadn't needed to come here. I had a flat, and so did she. We'd just done it occasionally to be different, to be sleazy in the way that middle-class yuppies sometimes think is exciting. We
came on autumn afternoons, letting ourselves in separately, then shared a bottle of wine and had sex on the mattress and carpet and floorboards; her eyes flat with lust and hurt, mine with lack of feeling. Rubbed into the walls of the dead room I could almost smell the only two emotions I ever experienced in it: jittery, perfunctory desire, and bored, selfish remorse. The first time I'd said I didn't think our relationship was going anywhere was in this room, but of course we'd come back several times after that. It was as if I deliberately ended up sleeping with women after saying we shouldn't, as if I wanted to hurt them as much as possible. I didn't. I just followed the line of least resistance, lived out my programming like an abandoned automaton.

I smoked a cigarette, ground it out on the floorboards, and then reached out and pulled up the carpet. The boards looked loose, as indeed they were. Not knowing how she'd look, or caring, I pulled the middle one up, and then the two on either side.

She lay there, caved in and empty, body curved a little because she had been too tall to fit in the space. A last faint remnant of the smell I'd buried drifted up, but not much. Not as bad as it had been when I'd come here before, on the seven occasions I'd come and sat with her, watching the body decay, seeing the parts I'd kissed or sucked decomposing into sludge.

It wasn't just that she'd killed my cat. It was what she'd done to me before that, or helped me do to myself. Every time I tried to break loose from her she appeared in front of me, and diverted me to the side. She needed me to say I loved her, and manoeuvred me until I did, standing in the kitchen at her office and blurting it out in the hope that she'd stop crying. That was the only time I've ever lied in a sentence with that word in it, and it was the beginning of the end for me, the last time I could tell the difference between loving and not caring. That was when my feelings finally died, where I lost the battle to keep myself alive.

She was mad, but she was also a little girl who deserved and needed someone better than me. She killed my cat to try to
keep me, and when I realized what she'd done, I killed her back. I rang her up at work and hinted that I wouldn't mind an afternoon behind papered windows, and she'd purred and said she'd be there as soon as she could. I knew she would. Being fucked in the afternoon by someone she knew didn't care about her was exactly the kind of self-inflicted wound she was incapable of rejecting.