What You Make It (32 page)

I was standing behind the door when she walked in, and brought a brick down on her head as hard as I could. It took a couple more blows to finish the job, but I got there in the end. I cut off part of her pointing finger to prove to myself that I was free, put it in my pocket and then hid her body under the boards.

I wrote the first of the letters in my head as I stayed with her that afternoon, a letter that I needed to write. In these years since Katy I've had someone in my mind, someone I will be able to care about, someone I will come back to life for. Yvonne hadn't been that woman, and neither was Mel or Jackie or Ginny. That woman had no name, no address. She was the best of all of them, the opposite of their worst, all of that and more. She was me, I suppose, transposed and set apart, an idea to comfort me across cold evenings and grey years. Sometimes I'd thought I could almost picture her, almost smell her skin.

But she was everyone, and no one, and I never found her.

In my head I wrote a letter to that woman, pretending she really existed. Maybe, for a while, I even believed she did. I went home and typed it, and then posted it to Tamsin Road. I didn't know where else to send it.

A few weeks later I came back, picked up the letter in the hallway and read it out to what was under the floorboards. As a punishment, I suppose. To show her what I would have written if she had been the one, if she hadn't got a name.

I wrote seven more letters, but on the last occasion I didn't come to read. By then it didn't seem so important, because I'd given up. The letters had started to follow their own course, to replicate the only kind I was capable of writing. I could
make up dreams like going to Bourbon Street, but I couldn't carry them through. Without the nameless woman to hold me, I couldn't keep them alive. Soon afterwards I must have blanked it altogether.

I didn't kill Mel or Ginny or Jackie, in case you're wondering. They didn't kill my cat. I'm not a violent man. I was just trying to find someone who was never really there.

After I'd looked at the remains for long enough, I opened the bottle and tipped the finger joint out onto the floorboards. I picked it up and placed it as close as I could to what was left of her right hand. Then I took a pen from my pocket, wrote her name at the top of each of the letters and on the envelopes, and placed those in there with her. The letters had never been to Yvonne, or to anyone who'd really existed. But they had confused what was left of her, and until she knew her name, she wouldn't be able to go.

I kissed the tip of my finger and touched it to where her lips used to be, remembering for a moment how much fun she'd been in the beginning, how often she'd made me laugh. Then I replaced the floorboards one by one and moved the carpet back over them. I ground the bottle to fragments under my foot, took a last look round, and then left. The key I dropped down a gutter as I got into the car.

I spent two hours driving, but have no idea where I went. Round and round the backstreets, not paying attention, just trying to find my way back to the present. When I'd come far enough I pulled over at a public phone box and called Steve.

Tamsin had already called him. Her boyfriend had returned, and she'd decided to stay with him. She felt it was for the best that they never saw each other again. Steve sounded both relieved and mildly put out by the news. I said I'd call him soon.

I went home, changed my clothes, and then sat at my desk watching the clouds. After a while Monica came home, and I stood up to give her a hug. I could see in her face when we
parted that it hadn't been tight enough, but it was the best that I could do.

People always have names. Yvonne, or Monica, in the end it doesn't make much difference.

Not tight enough is the best that I can do.

Alright. Here it is.

Friday night – lads' night out. Down ‘Club Bastard’; owner's a big fan, what can I say. Beautiful. Everything on tap. Something to drink. Something to snort. Something to shag.

Sorted.

Roll up about ten; fucking photographers outside. No, love them, actually. You got to. Helped put us where we are, know what I mean? Stand outside, with the lads – in our top Armani coats. Flash Flash Flash.

Questions; what about that penalty, eh? What about the ref? Are we going to win the Cup?

Course we fucking are.

Inside, rows of shag; take your pick. Bottle blonde, extra tits, legs up to their arses. Lovely. Stand at the bar, lads together – like fucking kings. Free bubbly? Yeah, I should think so mate – just give us the fucking bottle.

Who've we got? Ted Stupid. Man in goal – safe. Top lad. Kevin Legg – out on the left. Goes like the clappers – excellent. Paul Tosser; solid at the back. Try to get past him – seven types of shit kicked out of your shins. Ha ha ha ha ha. No, seriously; great little player, great skills.

And me. Gavin Mate. Fucking midfield general, innit.

Do we dance? Do we fuck. No need mate. Stand there in a circle and the club fucking dances around us. Big laughs – Ted sticks his hand down some shag's top. Lobs her tit out – signs it. Excellent. Some cunt tries to muscle in – boyfriend. Paul elbows the twat in the face; end of problem. Great skills. Great little player.

Go behind the bar; help ourselves. Barman gets shirty; bunch
of arse. You don't understand:
we can do what we fucking like.
Owner comes down – I pour him a drink. He's fucking loving it. Flash flash, more pictures. Great on the back page. Nice little advert. No fucking problem.

One o'clock, Kev's pissed as a twat – Paul's chewing face with some top black shag. I'm caning it with Ted at a table in the corner. Hundred notes of charlie up each nostril by then – fucking flying. Then:

See this shag, other side of the room. Red mini, no top to speak of. Gypsy skin, Bambi eyes. And an arse to fucking die for. Suzy all over again: I'm thinking – right. That's me fucking sorted.

Go over, bit of chat. She's loving it. Put in half an hour's worth – time to go. Give the nod to the lads; later – yeah, cheers.

Flash flash out the front so slip out the back; I'm Gavin Mate, I am. Shag's wetting itself – ten seconds of fame, innit. Limo pulls up, pile in. More charlie, obviously. Roll up the fifty, cut the rocks. Show her how it's done. Excellent. Tweak a nipple, just for a giggle. She's going to go off like a fucking rocket.

Back to the flat. Get more bubbly down her then think why fucking bother. It's in the bag. Get on the pitch, black satin sheets. She's wriggling like a pig in a tin. Another line, I dump the Paul Smith and then it's game on.

Fuck her. Fuck her again. And then;

Hang on. Start again.

Gavin Mate. Midfield supremo. But not always, obviously.

Eighteen. Tipped up at the gate. You going to give me an apprenticeship, or what? Guy takes the piss until I show him what I've got.

Silky skills.

Team's going nowhere – the whole fucking point. They said that one man can't make a team; proved what a bunch of twats they are. Straight in the A's: slow start – playing with wankers, aren't I. Couple of games, goals slotted in. Crowd loves it. Owner goes ‘Hang on – could have a winner here’: stumps up for some decent players. Kevin Legg. Ted Stupid. Suddenly we're a fucking
team. End of first season – promotion, thanks very much. Gavin Mate, hero of the hour. Course I fucking am.

Meanwhile, outside world; it's a performance, innit. Got the lads out on the prowl – flash flash, people talking. Bought top suits. And bearing – made old Eubanks look like a twat. Not difficult, of course. Joking – Chris and I are mates. Serious. He's the only loser I go round with. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Couple of seasons, build the rep and up the ladder. Receipts through the roof; owner's like a pig in shit. Going lovely. Manager knows I'm top lad. Royalty. Paul Tosser joins the back – World War Three on a stick. Night life. Shag on tap. Fun to be had; up the nose and up the arse. Money in buckets. Respect.

Dodgy moment; some slag from the
Sun
starts nosing into where Gavin Mate comes from. Can't have that; had a word. Slag never works again. Sorted. Manager's not going to let anyone piss off Gavin Mate – too fucking important. Gets the goals. Gets the press. Gets the sponsorship.

Meet the untouchables.

Now. This season. Premiership's in the bag. Just the Cup to play for. We going to win it?

Course we fucking are. I'm Gavin Mate, I am.

Leave the shag in the bedroom; go for some bubbly. Thirsty now. She's saying come back; begging for it. Course you got to oblige.

Give Ted a call first; getting his knob polished by a couple of teenies. Hear the girls laughing in the background – he's fucking sorted. They're sisters, innit.

Shame about mine. Suzy was good value. Shame she had to go.

Back in the bedroom, give one to the shag again. She falls asleep after. Finish the bubbly, go for some more. Sit in the kitchen a while. Know it's going to happen. Nothing I can do about it. Artist, I am. Artist of the pitch. Got to do what I fucking feel like.

Top plan: find a way of getting away with it. Stop being poney Nigel Smith, lose the accent, fuck the past; find a way of being untouchable. Off the parents – car crash – shame Suzy had to go too. Probably her fault though, if you think about it; shouldn't have let me watch her. I'd give her one now, if she was alive. Slag. But she isn't. Probably give her one anyway.

Disappeared for a while – Middle East. No one's going to find the ones out there. Then back, become Gavin Mate, and a knock on the right door. Goals. Welcome to the untouchables.

Finish the bottle, raring to go. Pissed as a twat, good news; more blood and guts that way. Back in the bedroom, tape the shag's mouth up. Then break the bubbly bottle and have some fun. Manager'll sort it during the game tomorrow: get back here, be like it never happened.

Are we going to win? Course we are.

Nice one.

It started with the bed.

After three years at college I'd come back home, returning to the bedroom I'd grown up in. It was going to be a while before I could afford to move out for good, and so in the intervening month I'd redecorated the room: covering the very 1970s orange with a more soothing shade, and badgering my mother into getting some new curtains that didn't look like they had been designed on drugs by someone who liked the colour brown a great deal. I'd also moved most of the furniture around, trying to breath new life into a space I'd known since I was ten. It hadn't worked. It still felt as if I should be doing French verbs or preparing conkers, musing on what girls might be like. I knew it was largely an excuse for not doing anything more constructive – like filling out the pile of job applications which sat on the desk – but that afternoon I decided to move the bed away from its traditional place by the wall and try it in another couple of positions. It was hard work. One of the legs was rather fragile and the bed had to be virtually lifted off the floor rather than dragged around – which is why I hadn't tried moving it before, I remembered. After half an hour I was hot and irritated and developing a stoop. I had also become convinced that the original position had been not only the optimal but in fact the
only
place the bed could go.

It was as I struggled to shove it back up against the wall that I began to feel a bit strange. Light-headed, nauseous. Out of breath, I assumed. When the bed was finally back in place I lay back on it for a moment, feeling rather ill – and I suppose I just fell asleep.

I woke up about half an hour later, half-remembering a dream
in which I had been doing nothing more than lying on my bed and remembering that my parents had said that they were going to extend the wood panelling in the downstairs hallway. For a moment I was disorientated, confused by being in the same place in reality as I had been in the dream, and then I drifted off again.

Some time later I woke up again. I found it very difficult to fight my way up out of sleep, but eventually managed to haul myself sluggishly upright. After a while I lurched to my feet and across to the sink to get a glass of water. Drinking it made the inside of my mouth a little less dry, but no more appealing. I decided that a cup of tea would be a good idea, and headed out of the bedroom to go downstairs.

As I reached the top of the staircase I remembered the dream about the panelling, and wondered where a strange notion like that could have come from. I'd worked hard for my psychology paper at college, and was confident that Freud hadn't felt that wood panelling was even worth a mention. I trudged downstairs, still feeling odd, my thoughts dislocated and fragmented.

When I reached the halfway landing I ground to a halt, and stared around me, astonished. They
had
extended the panelling.

When you enter my parents' house you come into a two-storey hallway, with a staircase that climbs up three walls to the second floor. The panelling used to only go about eight feet up the wall of the front hall, but now it soared right up to the ceiling. And they'd done it in exactly the same wood as the original. There wasn't a join to be seen. How had they managed that? Come to that,
when
had they managed it? It hadn't been like that this morning, but both my parents were at work and would be for hours and … well, it was just impossible. I reached out and touched the wood, bewildered at how even the grain matched, and that the new wood looked just as aged as the original, which had been there fifty years.

Then: Wait a minute, I thought. That isn't right. There hadn't used to be
any
panelling in the hall. Just simple white walls.
The stairs themselves had been panelled in wood, but the walls were just plain white plaster. How could I have forgotten that? What had made me think that the front hall had been panelled, and think it so unquestioningly? I remembered that I'd recently noticed, sensitized to these things by having repainted my room, that the white in the hall was a little grubby, especially round the light switches. So what was all this panelling doing here? Where had it come from? And why had I been so sure that at least some of it had always been there?

Something wasn't right. I walked into the kitchen, casting bewildered glances back into the hall. I absently-mindedly registered a soft clinking sound outside, and automatically headed to the back door – too puzzled about the panelling to realize that it was rather late in the day for a milk delivery.

Both the front and back doors of the house open onto the driveway, the back door from a little corridor full of muddy shoes and rusting tools which connects the kitchen to the garage. I threaded my way through the gardening implements and wrenched the stiff door open. It was late afternoon by then, but the light outside seemed very intense, the colours rich as they are before a storm.

I looked down and saw the milk bottle holder, with four bottles of milk in it. They weren't normal milk bottles, however, but large American-style quart containers somehow jammed into slots meant to take pints. Someone had taken the silver tops off.

A movement at the periphery of my vision caught my attention, and I glanced up towards the top of the driveway. There, about thirty yards away, were two children. One was fat and sitting on a bike, the other slim and standing by his side. I was seized with sudden irritation, and started quickly up the drive towards them, convinced that the clinking sound I'd heard was them stealing the tops off the milk.

I had covered scarcely five yards when someone who'd been at my school appeared from behind me, and walked quickly past me up the drive, staring straight ahead. I couldn't remember
his name, had barely known him. He'd been two or three years older than me, and I'd completely forgotten that he'd existed, but as I stared after him I remembered he'd been one of the more amiable seniors. I could recall being proud of having some small kind of communication with one of the big boys, how it had made me feel a bit older myself, more a man of the world. And I remembered the way he used to greet my yelling his nickname, with a half-smile and a coolly raised eyebrow. All this came back with the instantaneous impact of memory, but something was wrong. The man didn't seem to register that I was there. I felt disturbed, not by the genuinely strange fact that he was in the driveway – or that he was wearing school athletic gear – but merely because he didn't smile and tilt his head back the way he used to. It was so bizarre that I wondered briefly if I was dreaming, but if you can ask yourself the question you always know the answer. I wasn't.

My attention was distracted by a reflection in the glass of the window in the back hallway. A man seemed to be standing behind me. He wore glasses, had a chubby face and basin-cut blond hair, and was carrying a bicycle. I whirled round to face where he should have been, but he wasn't there.

Then I remembered the kids at the top of the driveway, and turned to shout at them again, needing something to take my bewilderment out on. Almost immediately a tall slim man in a dark suit came walking down the drive; briskly, as if slightly late. Maybe it was a trick of the light in the gathering dusk, but I couldn't seem to fix on his face. My eyes just seemed to slide off it, as if it were slippery, or made of ice.

‘Stop shouting at them,’ he snapped. He strode past me, towards the back door. I stared at him open-mouthed. ‘They're not doing anything wrong,’ he said. ‘Leave them alone.’

The kids took off, one on the bike, the other walking alongside, and I turned to the suited man. For some reason I felt anxious to placate him, and yet at the same time I was outraged at his invasion of our property.

‘I'm sorry,’ I said. ‘It's just, well, I'm a bit confused. I thought
I saw someone I knew in the drive. Did you see him? Wavy brown hair, athletics kit?’

For some reason I thought the man would say that he had, and that that would make me feel better. All I got was a curt ‘No’ as he entered the back hallway.

Then another voice spoke. ‘Well then. Shall we go into your old house?’

I realized that someone else was already standing in the back hall. The man with the blond hair and glasses. And he really was carrying a bicycle. He wasn't talking to me, but to the man in the suit.

‘What?’
I said, and hurried after them, catching a glimpse of the suited man's face. ‘But it's
you
…’ I stopped again, baffled, as I realized that the man in the suit was the same man who had been in athletics gear.

The two men marched straight into the kitchen. I followed them, impotently enraged.
Was
this his old house? Even so, wasn't it customary to ask the current occupants' permission if you wanted to visit? The suited man was peering round the kitchen, which looked very messy. He poked at some fried rice I'd left cooling in a pan on the stove. At least, I
seemed
to have left it there, though I wasn't sure when I would have done so. I don't just cook up rice in the afternoon for the pure hell of it. I still felt the urge to placate the man, however, and hoped he would eat some of the rice.

He merely grimaced with distaste and joined his colleague at the window, looking out onto the drive, hands on hips. ‘Dear God,’ he muttered. The other man grunted in agreement.

I noticed that I'd picked up the milk from outside the back door, and appeared to have spilt some of it on the floor. I tried to clean it up with a piece of kitchen roll which seemed very dirty and yellowed as if with age. I was trying to buy time. I felt very strongly that there must be some sense to the situation somewhere, some logic I was missing. Even if the man had lived here once he had no right to just march in here with his friend, but as I continued trying to swab up the milk before he noticed
it –
why? –
I realized that there was something far more wrong than a mere breach of protocol at stake.

The suited man looked about thirty-five, much older than he should have been if he was indeed the guy I'd been to school with. Yet that would still leave him far too young to ever have lived here. Between our family and the previous occupants, I knew who'd lived in the house for the last forty years. So how could it be his old house? It didn't make sense. And was it actually him? The boy from my school? Apart from being too old, it looked like him, but was it actually
him?.

I did the best I could with the milk, and then straightened up, staggering slightly. My perception seemed to have become both heightened and jumbled, as if I was very drunk. Everything pulsed with an unusual intensity and exaggerated emotional charge, yet there also seemed to be gaps in what I was perceiving, as if I was receiving an edited version of what was going on. Things began to flick from one state to another – with the bits in between, the becoming, missing like a series of jump cuts. I felt hot and dizzy and the kitchen looked small and indescribably messy, the orange of the walls, the same colour my bedroom had once been painted, seeming to push in at me beneath a low and unsteady ceiling. I wondered if I was seeing the kitchen as
they
saw it, and then immediately wondered what I meant.

Meanwhile, they stood at the window, occasionally turning to stare balefully at me, radiating distaste and impatience. They were evidently waiting for something. But what? Noticing that I still had the piece of kitchen roll in my hand, I stepped over all the rubbish on the floor –
what the hell had been going on in this kitchen? –
to put it in the overflowing bin. I squeezed my temples with my fingers, struggling to stand upright against the weight of the air, and squared up to the men.

‘L-look’, I stuttered, leaning on the fridge for support, ‘what exactly is going on?’

I immediately wished I'd kept quiet. The suited man slowly turned his head. It kept turning and turning, until it was looking directly at me – while his body remained facing the other way.
Like an owl, though he wasn't blinking. I could feel my stomach trying to crawl away and fought the need to gag. I sensed he'd done it deliberately, done it because he knew it would make me want to throw up, and I thought he might well be right.

‘Why don't you just
shut up?’
he said. Then he twisted his head slowly back round until he was looking out onto the drive once more.

I decided not to ask any more questions.

Meanwhile, the mess in the kitchen seemed to be getting worse. Every time I looked there were more dirty pans and bits of rubbish and old food on the floor. My head felt thicker and heavier, as if everything was slipping away from me. I slumped against the fridge and clung to it, almost pulling it away from the wall. I began to cry too, my tears cutting channels in the thick grime on the fridge door. I dimly remembered that my parents had bought a brand new one only a few weeks before, but they must have changed it again. This one looked like something out of the 1950s. Very retro. Or original. To be honest it was hard to tell, because it was swimming back and forth and there was a lot of white in my eyes. Both the men were watching me now, as if mildly interested to see when I'd fall.

Suddenly, there was a terrible jangling impact in my head. I flapped hysterically at my ears, as if to stop someone hammering pencils into them. Then the pain happened again, and I recognized first that it was a sound rather than a blow, and then that it was the doorbell.

Someone was at the front door.

The two men glanced at each other, and the blond one nodded wearily. The suited man turned to me.

‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked.

‘It's the front door’ I said quickly, still trying to please him.

‘So you'd better answer it, hadn't you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Answer the
door.’

‘Should I answer it?’ I queried, stupidly. I couldn't seem to remember what words meant anymore.

‘Yes,’
he shouted, and picked up a mug – my mug, the mug I'd come downstairs, I remembered, to put tea in – and hurled it straight at me. It smashed into the fridge door by my face. I struggled to pull myself upright, head aching and ears ringing, aware of a soft crump as a fragment of the mug broke under my foot. The doorbell jangled again, the harshness of the noise making me realize how muted all other sounds had become. I fell towards the kitchen door, sliding across the front of the fridge, my feet tangling in the boxes and cartons that now covered the filthy floor. I could feel the orange of the walls seeping in through my ears and mouth, and kept missing whole seconds of time – as if I was blacking out and coming to like a stroboscope.