Normal (11 page)

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

“When’s your birthday?”

“Pardon?”

“Your birthday.” Erica took my empty plate from the table and placed it beside her own on the countertop. “When is it?”

“It was three weeks ago. Why?”

She scraped her leftover beans and bacon rind into the bin. “You didn’t mention it.”

“I didn’t see that it was relevant.”

“What did you get?”

“What?”

“What did you get for your birthday?”

I swallowed the last of my tea, suspicious as to where the question was leading. Specifically, I suspected I was in for another round of abuse. “Nothing springs to mind,” I said.

“What, you mean you can’t remember, or you actually got nothing for your birthday?”

“I didn’t get anything, no.”

She carefully set the plates in the sink, staring morosely in after them. “That’s depressing,” she said.

“Not really, I’m used to it.”

“That’s even more depressing.”

“Is there a point to this?”

Erica shrugged as she turned on the taps. “Not really,” she conceded. “Only that, since you’re the last person I’m ever going to see, I suppose it’d be quite nice to know a bit more about you.” She slashed her hand through the running water, hissed in a breath, opened the cold tap a touch. “I’m sure you can’t blame me for being curious. I mean, it’s just you and me now, right? And I’m pretty sure neither of us knows how long I’ve got to enjoy it.” She looked over at me with an unexpected smile. “I know what the date is, you know. How long I’ve been here. It’s funny, I can remember the hour before I met you like it was this morning, but it feels like I’ve been here years, not weeks.” She laughed at the thought as she squirted detergent into the sink; she watched the bubbles rise for a moment before turning off the taps and flicking the scourer sponge into the water. “And the worst thing is, I literally walked right into that detective yesterday, and I just smiled sweetly at her like I didn’t have a care in the world. And of all the stupid things, I did it entirely for her. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a cage, just so you wouldn’t cut the head off someone I don’t even know.” She chuckled to herself as she savagely scrubbed the plates. “Funny, I suppose I’m better off in here in that case. I’m hardly going to get far in life with survival skills like that, am I?”

“Don’t talk crap,” I said. “There’s no such thing as a selfless act. You did it for yourself, not for her—you did it so you wouldn’t have to take responsibility for what might happen to her. You knew you had no choice and look, you’re still standing here. You never know, maybe the odds’ll be stacked in your favor next time.”

“Is this just a game to you?” She slammed a plate into the drainer and whirled around to face me, spraying suds across the floor. “Because, you know, disappearing back upstairs like a good girl and listening to the only person who’s ever likely to find me just get into her car and drive away really doesn’t feel like a game to me. And let’s just talk about this
next time
, shall we? I don’t think you ever planned for me to be here this long. Is that right?”

I hadn’t realized it was quite that obvious. “What makes you say that?”

“I’m glad you asked me. Since I’ve been here, you’ve made three alterations to my room. You’ve installed a microwave so I can feed myself, a curtain so I can wash myself in private and a camera so you can watch me wee without having to keep walking backward and forward across the drive all day. And more to the point, I’ve just watched Kerry come and go in the space of what, a week? And yet, like you said, I’m not only still standing here but you’ve gone out and bought me a whole new wardrobe. For all I know, I could still be standing here when I’m eighty, and whether that’s preferable to you just wringing my neck and being done with it...well, I really don’t know. Have you finished your tea?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d suggest you bring me your mug if you want it washed. It won’t walk over here on its own.”

I couldn’t be bothered to argue.

Erica went ahead and cleaned the whole kitchen. I watched her from the table as she scrubbed down the cupboards, scoured the oven, swept and mopped the floor. She worked in silence, without so much as a resentful glance in my direction. When she was done, she let her shoulders drop with a satisfied sigh and a muttered, “There.”

I didn’t know what to say. I imagined I should thank her, though I was mildly confused as to why; after all, I hadn’t asked her to do it. Fortunately, she took the burden from me.

“I guess I’ll go back to bed,” she said. “Unless there’s anything else you want me to do.”

I was sure the sensible thing would have been to agree, but I was overtaken by a strange impulse. “Actually,” I replied, “there is. I’d really like you to go through to the sitting room and make yourself comfortable. I’ll be there in a minute.”

She narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “When you say
comfortable
—”

“I mean take a seat, put your feet up, relax.”

She was clearly unconvinced, but did as I’d asked.

When I followed her a moment later, it was with a reasonable Rioja and two crystal glasses. I found her perched precariously at the very edge of the sofa, her hands clasped in her lap. She was perfectly still, following me with her eyes the way a mouse watches a circling hawk. I opened the bottle, habitually leaving the cork on the screw, and filled both glasses before sinking into the armchair at her side.

“What’s this?” She frowned.

I took in her uneasy pose, her look of indignation and uncertainty, and forced a smile. “Erica,” I said, “I’d like to ask you something.”

She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “If you’re about to propose...”

I stifled a laugh. “Well, I was going to, but now we’re sitting here, and you’re giving me icy hostility, I’m thinking I’ll save it for another day.”

“Probably for the best. You know I’m way out of your league.”

I smiled as I watched her sitting there, nervously clacking her nails together, her eyes wandering to the wineglass on the table. Ah, the hell with it. “To answer your question, I don’t have the kind of relationship with anyone that might inspire them to mark my birthday,” I said.

Her perplexity was more than apparent. “I can’t imagine why that might be,” she quipped.

“It doesn’t depress me that I don’t get birthday presents. I’ve got all the material things I want. Although I’d maybe like to have received a card, just to show that someone, somewhere was thinking about me. I don’t care who, just someone whose first name isn’t Detective.”

“Are you serious?” She looked nothing short of stunned.

“Erica, believe it or not, sometimes it’s tiring being the only one who gives me any thought.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m sure
I
was thinking about you on your birthday.”

“Yes,” I said, smiling, “but you were only thinking about whether to go for my eyes first, or start with a kick in the balls.”

“Yeah, that about covers it.” She laughed. “Just so you know, I’ve decided to go with both at once, in a kind of pincer movement.” She took a sip of her wine, cradled the glass in her hands as she tucked her feet under her and settled back into the sofa.

“That’d probably do it,” I agreed. I was instantly certain I’d live to regret that remark, though I immediately trumped myself with my next offer. “Okay,” I said, “what else do you want to know?”

She studied me for several long moments, amusement writ large across her face. “What, anything?” she asked finally, her voice tinged with doubt.

“Yeah, why not? Anything you like.”

“All right, then,” she replied, her smile fading in a heartbeat. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“You know what. Why this? Me, Sarah, Kerry...?”

Perhaps
anything
was too strong a word. “Low self-esteem and an Oedipus complex,” I suggested.

“Oh, come on, you can do better than that.”

“Yes, probably, but you’re missing the point. You said you wanted to get to know me better, not psychoanalyze me.”

“Well, what the hell do you expect me to say? ‘What’s your favorite color?’”

“If I’d known I was going to have to come up with the questions as well as the answers...”

“Fine,” she snapped. “Forget it. I obviously don’t have a right to know what’s going to happen to me or what I’ve done to deserve it...”

“And who does? Think about what you’re saying, Erica. Those are two of mankind’s greatest unanswerables—‘why am I here, and how long for?’ You’re hardly unique in not getting to the bottom of them.”

“No, you’re right, I’m not. But then I’m not out in the big wide world wondering whether I’ll get hit by a bus tomorrow, either. Don’t try telling me this is some potted version of real life in here because it’s exactly the fucking opposite. There’s only one variable here, and that’s you.” She punctuated her point by draining her glass, then reached sternly over to the table and refilled it. “Fuck it,” she concluded. “At least I know I’m
not
going to get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

“That much I can promise you,” I replied.

She took on a certain calmness then, releasing a heavy sigh into her wine and regarding me with dark curiosity. “Can I ask you a question about Sarah?” she said softly.

Absolutely unquestionably no. “Yes.”

She hesitated, furrowed her brow in concentration as though playing the words over in her mind. When she opened her mouth to speak, they tripped on her tongue. Finally, she closed her eyes, took a breath and forced them from her lips. “Did she suffer?”

I flirted with the idea of diverting the question, but quickly surmised that there was no sense in avoiding the issue; after all, Erica was an eyewitness. I was, however, taken roughly by surprise and left more than a little perplexed by the tact of my own response. “No,” I assured her. “She never even knew I was there.”

* * *

As Erica drained glass after glass, so her line of questioning wavered to the point at which she simply wanted to be told something she didn’t already know. As the afternoon progressed, she became increasingly captivated and enthralled by tales of my various adventures across Europe and the Balkans. The abridged versions, naturally.

When she returned to her room at dusk, she was staggering drunk, cackling raucously at each misplaced step and leaving a trail of travel books dropped from the bundle clutched haphazardly to her chest. She was immediately horizontal on the bed, watching the room spin, clawing at her clothes in an aimless attempt to remove them. I saved her hapless fumbling and helped her with the buttons; she graciously and passively accepted my assistance, albeit while giggling her way through such choice phrases as “Fuck off, I hate you,” and “You’re a sick bastard and I hate you,” and “I hate you so much it makes me wet as a fucking otter’s whatever,” and “If you touch my tits, I’ll kill you.” Happily, she was lucid enough to roll herself under the covers, and was asleep before I closed the door on her day.

My mood was briefly light as I strolled back into the house. Once inside, however, I was grateful for the return to peace and quiet, since it afforded me the opportunity to contemplate the first phase of my acquittal.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

I don’t know what I expected from Annie: wariness, probably, or the door slammed in my face, or at the very least some small spark of surprise behind her vodka-frosted eyes. Had I afforded the question anything like careful consideration, then given the early hour I might most reasonably have expected to find her asleep, or perhaps steaming off the scent of some unsuitable suitor. But no.

Annie was on the telephone, a bulky, old-fashioned cordless handset tucked into the crook of her neck, interrupted words fidgeting impatiently on her lips. She was carrying two mugs of tea in one hand, and she passed one to me with barely a glance as she stepped aside to passively invite me in. Then her back was turned, and she was pacing off across her average little living room, as gray as the average ghost in her average leggings and her average cardigan, ruffling up the corner of her average hearth rug with her average furry slippers.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

She wasn’t the only one. I sniffed cautiously at the tea, wondering just how long I’d been procrastinating inside her garden gate before scraping together the courage to knock at the door. Long enough for her neighbors to report me as a prowler? Hopefully not. Long enough for them to register my presence? That could work, I thought, although it did raise the unattractive prospect of having to explain Annie to Rachel should this whole scheme go tits-up. The mug, meanwhile, was hot, and its contents smelled like...well, tea. I dropped my keys onto the tall table beside the door and perched on Annie’s settee. It was plush and welcoming and well-sprung. The last time I’d been in this house, with Annie tucked in her bed and dead to the world, I’d spent all of my willpower fighting the temptation to curl up on these cushions and dream away the dregs of a disastrous evening. In retrospect, not crossing paths with Kerry Farrow would certainly have spared me the stress and inconvenience of this ridiculous situation; an appealing prospect were it not for Rachel, the inevitable price of my good sense. A time machine and a blanket would serve only to erase her from my life, and I wasn’t sure that was an entirely fair trade.

“My niece,” Annie announced, idly waving the phone at me. “She’s fucking high. Listen...” She fumbled with the speaker button, and then set the handset on the coffee table to let her barely adolescent-sounding niece speak for herself while she sipped her tea:

“...it’s just what Amy says, although she doesn’t like foreigners anyway, but then I’m not likely to get eaten by a shark in a swimming pool, either, but I still couldn’t go in one for ten years after I watched
Jaws
, even though no one actually got eaten in a swimming pool in
Jaws
, they were all in the sea, and thinking about it, I
did
go in the sea in Australia, and there was a boy I got off with called Brad who worked at the beach bar, who reckoned his uncle got bitten by a shark while he was
in a boat
, which I didn’t really believe, but
that
happened in
Jaws
, as well, although apparently if they
do
bite you they hardly ever eat you because humans taste fucking horrific to them, which is all well and good, but I’d rather they found that out by biting someone else, like Brad, actually, because he stole all my travelers’ checks, so it was a pretty shit holiday in the end, apart from not getting eaten by a shark, and then so anyway, we were in the McDonald’s, and then I was in a car, I think, or maybe a van, I’m not sure, but it was bumpy, and we were like...kept turning left, because I think we got lost, and then somehow we ended up at the beach and it was three in the morning, and Lucy didn’t have her top on and these two creepy-looking guys were standing in front of her and she was jerking them off in—”

“Jesus Christ.” Annie snatched up the phone from the table and darted away to the kitchen with such startling speed that I expected to see her outline in dust where she’d been standing. I drank my tea, which was lower in sugar and stronger in flavor than I’d normally have brewed for myself, and muffled the cacophony of horror from the kitchen beneath my own dizzying reflections on the terrors of being in any way responsible for the welfare of a vulnerable young woman.

It was the work of a fleeting moment to conclude that I didn’t have anything resembling a long-term plan for Erica, nor was I going to formulate one with Annie making all that noise, and so I gave up trying to think and counted her Wade Whimsies instead.

There was silence for a long minute after the shouting stopped. Finally, Annie stalked out of the kitchen, her jaw set, the corners of her eyes lined and red. She snatched my empty mug from the table and retreated; I listened to the roar and bubble of the kettle, the jangle of the spoon, the dry sniff and the hitch in her breath as she forced a deep sigh and counted to ten. I counted with her. When she reappeared, there was a calmness in her face and a sashay in her walk. She set my tea gently in front of me and folded herself into the armchair opposite, girlishly tucking her legs under her and cradling her mug protectively in her lap.

She regarded me curiously for a long moment. Then, “The police came,” she said, matter-of-factly. “They were asking questions about you—did I know you,
how
did I know you, when had I seen you, had you been here, when did you leave, where did you go...” She paused, gave an expectant shrug; I opened my mouth to respond but she cut me off. “I told them what I knew. I said you were my knight in shining armor, that you saw me being mugged and came running to save me. I said I thought the little cockchops was after my iPhone, not that he’d tried to rape me, ’cause, you know, the last thing I needed was the fucking Spanish inquisition. So I said you drove me home because I was shaken up, we had a couple of drinks and you took me to bed. I told them I didn’t know when you’d left, and I hadn’t heard from you since, and you didn’t make me any promises, either.” She blew across the top of her mug and sipped her tea. “It was the best I could do at short notice,” she said, hoiking herself up to fish in her cardigan pocket for a pack of menthol Marlboro cigarettes. “But honesty’s the best policy anyway, really, isn’t it?”

My tea was sweeter and weaker this time, as I preferred it. “Did they ask you about...Cockchops?”

She was surprised by the question, and she peered suspiciously at me as she lit a cigarette and reached for an ashtray from the coffee table and sipped her tea and thought about how and whether to answer. “I told them I hadn’t seen his face,” she said finally, blowing a long plume of blue smoke up to circle the ceiling fan. “But that’s not really relevant, is it? They tried to be discreet about why they were here, but it was pretty obvious. I’m sure you had nothing to do with that girl disappearing, because if you were Jack the bloody Ripper then you had the perfect opportunity to chop me up that night, didn’t you? You’re in my house in the middle of the night, and I’m passed out drunk and you don’t stab me, rape me or even touch me up as far as I can tell. If all you did was have a good look when you put me in my nightie, those are some pretty poor serial-killing skills.”

“I did peek ever so slightly,” I replied, honesty being the best policy and all.

Annie’s cheeks flushed crimson, and she hid behind her tea again. “Dirty bastard,” she said, but there was a coy grin in her voice now. “I’ll let you off, though. You saved my ass, so I suppose you’re entitled to look at it if you want.”

“Well, it’s a perfectly nice one, so I’m glad,” I assured her. It was, in all fairness, the least average of her attributes.

She chuckled a perfect pair of smoke rings and nodded a theatrical thank-you. Then the humor left her eyes again, her smile thinning until only the dutifully appreciative center remained. “So listen,” she said, “I’ve got to go to work in ten minutes, so whatever favor you came here to ask me for...” She finished with a flourish, whirling a hurry-up hand, her cigarette drawing smoky spirals across the space between us.

The change of pace took me aback. I tried for an indignant gasp, but in my red-handed surprise it came out a guilty laugh. We both knew that a protest would be a waste of our collective time, and she’d given me a tight deadline. I conceded, because honesty’s the best policy. “I need a place to pretend to sleep for a couple of nights,” I said, feeling a sudden pang of anxiety as it occurred to me that I was really rather depending on her to be an agreeable Annie.

She fixed me with a dark stare as she charred the hot half of her cigarette in a single breath. “Yeah.” She sighed smokily, crushing her butt and draining her tea and clattering her ashtray and mug back onto the table. “Well, it’s nice to be needed, I suppose. For future reference, it’s slightly less than flattering when a man only wants to
pretend
to spend the night with you, but well, that’s just the story of my life, isn’t it? ‘Ask Anne-Marie, she won’t mind. Good old Agreeable Annie,’” she trilled. “Accommodating Annie. Annie Fucking Alibi.”

Good, we were on the same page.